How To Hire An AdWords™ Professional

Hiring the wrong person to manage your AdWords™ campaigns could be very expensive and, in the end, pointless. Save yourself from trouble, and do a little research and evaluation first.

Basically, you have two options: do the job yourself (that is to manage your AdWords™ campaigns), or hire somebody else. There are some differences if you hire somebody inside the company or go for outsourcing. In our opinion, it is more difficult to have somebody employed and trained for PPC management. The job requires both technical and linguistics skills at a high level. It takes at least six month to learn the domain at a satisfactory level, and in the meantime you'd probably need to pay this “trainee” somewhere around US $50,000/year.

How to Decide If You Need an AdWords™ Expert

It very much depends on:

• The size of your business

  If you have a small, start-up business, a shoestring budget and a couple of free hours per day, we think it is equally wise to have in-house PPC management, or hire a small company that you know and trust. The advantage is the fact that it helps you to learn the system yourself. Afterwards, when you have the general idea but you want to improve your results (or just plan to run more campaigns) you could go for whale hunting. At this point you'll already know how to negotiate with AdWords™ experts and how to evaluate their work.

  A midsize/large business might see things a bit differently: definitely hire an expert for a couple of months, and use the expertise to evaluate whether the decision is adequate or necessary. Analyze the potential aid: anchor: ROI at different levels of money invested — and only after that make it a final decision.

• Your own AdWords™ expertise

  Of course, when you know the game, and you really like it, it's just not like you to have someone else doing it. Look for experts only if you think they can do more than you.

• What your future plans are

  If you want to focus on AdWords™ in a long run, having an expert will be a permanent, constant cost. You could choose a middle way: let experts set up your campaign and run it for sometime; in the meantime learn how to do it yourself, or have a person trained for this job inside the company.

Let's see the pros and cons of having an expert managing your AdWords™ campaigns.

Pros

• Use your time for developing other areas of your business
• Better control over your PPC budget
• No more trial and error
• Lower the risk of failure
• You don't have to go through learning anymore
• Could be a win-win situation and very rewarding for your business.

Cons

• You become dependent on the expert
• You have to spend some time on finding the right person
• Pay more on the long run
• Trust. You'll have to give away confidential data.

Are There Any Alternatives?

Yes, there are. You can find automatic tools that do part of the job for you. There are ups and downs in using such a tool.

Automating costs less and works more efficiently on your behalf. But the question is if you have the knowledge to set all the variables of your campaigns right. An automatic process doesn't sense all the things that humans usually react to, like the changes in the system, the competition etc. That is — you are still the one to feed the machinery, and if you don't know how to do it, it will work against you.

The most popular tool of this kind is Atlas One Point (formerly GoToast), a very capable bid manager. You pay a monthly rate, based on the number of keywords you want to bid on and the daily frequency you choose for updates.

It's a good midway option to have Atlas One Point manage your bids and you or the expert master things like keywords research, ad creation and landing pages. These will be the real marketing keys to decide whether you'll be making money or not.

How to Find a Good Expert

Basically, you need to know two things: where to look and how to evaluate.

Where to Look

A simple research on the Internet always helps. Your quiz should say something like “ppc management”, “adwords management” or “adwords google management”. Pay attention to the ads that come out — there are plenty to choose from :)

How to Evaluate

Evaluation should have two equally important parts:

1. Check the background of the experts: who they worked for in the past, what their results were, how their clients describe them. The rule of thumb is: if someone is convincing enough to sell TO you, might be good enough to sell FOR you.
2. Ask the expert to do some kind of evaluation report, over the different ROI levels you should expect at various costs.

What Price Should You Pay?

Your cost can vary quite much from one expert company to another. Some of them charge a percent of your advertising budget, just like any other traditional advertising company. Others have a fixed sum per month. Some charge the campaign set-up separately, others include that in the overall price.

The campaign fee at Mastering AdWords starts from $150 per month, with a high end at $500 per month. They also sell a great e-book about how to optimize your AdWords™ campaigns. Check it out.

Click Through Marketing charges a maximum of 12% of your monthly pay per click budget.

Hire now — charging 10% of your budget, with a $400/month minimum.