Your PPC campaign - Why is it more lucrative in the hands of professionals?

February 10, 2008 – 10:34 pm

So many times, we come across people who are in a dilemma of whether they should handle a PPC campaign on their own or should they outsource it to some internet marketing agency and leave the job to the professionals. If you ask this question to me, I would say - Unless you are not an ‘Adwords Qualified Professional’, it’s better to outsource it to a specialized agency because of its sheer time and complexity factor. In a PPC campaign, stakes are high and you have to be really spontaneous and have to constantly track your ads to see what’s working and what’s not. PPC is not only about driving traffic to your website, but its about driving ‘qualified’ traffic to your website. Following are more reasons, why it’s advisable to count on professionals:

 

1. Click fraud: Even though Google, Yahoo! & MSN are doing a reasonably good job to detect click frauds so far, but unfortunately fraudulent clicks still effect almost all PPC campaigns. An online marketing agency can work with dedicated PPC professionals equipped with customized PPC tools and third party PPC solutions like click tracks to detect, report and get refunded for any kind of click fraud.
2. Qualiy Score: Quality Score is the basis for search engines to measure the quality and relevance of your ads. Quality score also determines your minimum CPC bid for Google and the search network. Quality score is proportional to your keyword’s click through rate (CTR) on Google, and the relevance of your Google ad, keyword, and yes, landing page too. Quality score directly effects your keywords minimum cost per click and its position in the search results. So if you are just an average internet marketer, you can have a hard time achieving and maintaining good quality score.
3. Keyword research is the main stay of any PPC campaign. Guess work can hurt you a lot. Only an online marketing firm with an in-depth understanding of SEO/SEM will find you the most profitable keywords which will bring you qualified traffic. It’s imoportant to differentiate between keywords that bring ‘only traffic’ and the keywords that bring ‘sales convertible traffic‘.
4. Experience: It’s not easy for a non-professional to understand and profitably implement the concepts of SEO, landing page relevancy and quality score to his PPC campaign. SEO/SEM companies do this every day and can quickly identify problem areas and take corrective measures instantly. And moreover, Google and Yahoo! update their protocols regularly. One has to stay updated all the time.
5. Time: PPC is not a one time implementation but rather an ongoing profitability process. Time is money, and PPC management can be a real time consuming task. Hiring professionals for your PPC requirements will definitely save your time and you will be able to concentrate more on other high ROI activities of your business.
6. PPC ideas tend to cross pollinate within (and sometimes even outside) an industry genre. If one thing works well in case of one company, there is a high probability that it will also work for the other related companies as well. So why not leverage on someone’s experience?

It is quite obvious that PPC is not an alternative to SEO; for real profitability both must go hand in hand. Running a PPC campaign requires a deep knowledge about Search Engines and as I mentioned above - time is money. You should outsource PPC to safer hands and utilize your time in other aspects of your online business.
PS: Please don’t take this blog post as a sales call, infact it is some thing that every smart entrepreneur should do if he understands the difference between traffic and qualified traffic. Generating qualified traffic requires real Internet expertise.