PPC: INHOUSE OR OUTSOURCE?

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010 in Adwords by Noleen Pillay

Whether you have been trying your hand at PPC advertising or just considering it, I am sure the question of whether you should keep it in house or to outsource it has arisen. This can be a difficult decision that’s why in my blog article today I am going to discuss the benefits of outsourcing your PPC.

Outsourcing your PPC advertising has many advantages but only if you choose a well established reputable online marketing company. Expertise, a wealth of resources, better results are a few of the advantages I would like to elaborate on. So here goes.

Expertise

Pay Per Click is a method of online marketing that is constantly changing and very specialized. Therefore in order to have successful PPC campaigns you need a professional PPC specialist who is able to keep track of all the changes and updates in the industry. The ever growing and changing environment of PPC requires extensive training and versatile employees. When choosing a PPC agency it is vitally important to select a reputable one as I mentioned earlier as a well established agency should be Google accredited. Most professional PPC specialists write a Google Adwords Exam so you can rest assured that you are in good hands.

Resources

PPC advertising is time consuming especially if you offer more than one product or service and if you choose to do it yourself your existing employees might not have the time to give a PPC campaign the attention it needs, therefore you will end up with a PPC campaign that is not fully optimised and an insufficient keyword list. You should also keep in mind that PPC agencies use highly specialized tools that they have developed which is not available to you should you decide to do PPC yourself. These specialized tools together with their experience enable PPC specialist to obtain good quality scores for keywords and this means that each click will cost less, thereby saving you money.

Results

If you are new to PPC, you may lack the adequate benchmarks that more experienced PPC agencies have to measure performance and success. An external PPC company possesses years of experience working with these campaigns and have a wealth of data related to the industry.

Focus

If you decide to keep your PPC internal, you must also consider the cost of hiring new staff or having existing staff focus elsewhere rather than on the job they were initially hired to perform. This can harm your company as your employees will be “stretched too thin” and you won’t have a successful PPC campaign.

When all is said and done, you are right in thinking that PPC is an excellent advertising platform but it can only be successful if implemented correctly, and enlisting the services of a Google Adwords Qualified company will certainly help you on your way to success. I hope that you will consider these points when making a decision to integrate PPC advertising internally or outsource it to a professional agency.

Happy Marketing!

Quintin van Rooyen

Three reasons I disagree: Pay Per View, Adblockers and Middleman.

Pay per view requires much less expertise, you charge your advertisers per page view. Pageviews are easier to gauge than click-throughs and you can charge less per pageview than clicks. You can even let your advertisers pay in advance and remove their ads once a certain amount of views have been reached.

Adblockers are very effective in blocking ads. You get adblock rules for all the large advertisers out there. For example - some estimate that 65% or more online visitors use AdblockPro and other similar extensions. If your ads are in a blocking list, you are missing out on at least 65% of your click-through revenue.

Middleman. Google analytics does not pay much per click, and most other advertisers (who refer to site owners as "publishers") also do not pay much. There are a few exceptions, with companies like Valueclick claiming 70% of ad revenue being passed on to the advertiser.

If you publish your own ads you have the opportunity to bypass adblockers, manage your adspace better (many ad agencies have set advertising templates to choose from), cut out the middle man and finally - control what is advertised on your site.

Quintin van Rooyen

On edit - I was replying from the publisher (site owner's) point of view as opposed to the advertisers point of view. The article is written from the Advertisers point of interest - and thus makes more sense that you get someone to handle your advertising of your product.

Aren't costs prohibitive when you get a SEO to handle your advertising as opposed to doing it yourself?

I guess you get a better return on advertising when someone does it for you...

sabestmarketing

Thank you for your comment, and yes I have written the article from an advertiser's perspective. Adwords, which is the tool that SEM specialists utilise encompasses both cost per impression (page view) and cost per click and this is merely set to the client's preference. In terms of cutting out the middleman you need to take into consideration that most people are fairly new to SEM as I mentioned in the first line of the article and therefore do not have the experience to maximise their campaign's potential without spending exorbitant amounts of money. My point simply put is that managing SEM is time consuming and difficult if you are new to the arena or if you have other priorities that demand your attention.
Outsourcing to a SEM agency will yield a better ROI