Maybe.
Hah! You thought we would say yes! Considering this is our website and we provide an AdWords management service maybe we should have. But no, the answer is maybe.
Why maybe?
Every AdWords campaign can benefit from professional managment, the difference lies with your business and, most importantly, how much you have budgeted for it. Too many AdWords companies suggest you can just ‘have a crack’ at $10 per day or some arbitrary figure. Then they charge you a setup fee and ongoing management.
Let’s break it down.
Say you are spending $10 per day on AdWords and each click costs 50c (those are cheap clicks!). That’s 20 visitors per day. Now, let’s say your website converts 10% of traffic into leads (that’s a helluva lot for website that has not been optimised for conversions). That’s two leads a day. How many of those will you convert into a sale? And there you are paying the same again to have someone manage your $10 per day campaign…?
So I will manage my campaign myself, right?
The answer? Maybe again. If you took that money you are paying your management company and threw it on top of your $10 per day AdWords budget and made it $20 or $30 per day you are going to get 40 or 60 visitors per day (roughly). That’s better, right? Not really, because who’s managing your campaign? Ah-ha! Catch-22!
The unmanaged campaign.
The unmanaged campaign attracts unqualified traffic, does not have enough negative keywords, does not have split-tested ad copy, and costs more per click. You might stay on top of it for the first couple of weeks, but then other aspects of your business will capture your attention, and managing your campaign will fall by the wayside. That’s when you enter the quality score spiral of doom,
Diminishing returns (or the Quality Score spiral of doom).
Because you are not staying on top of your bids or your negative keywords or your ad copy, your quality score drops. A drop in quality score reduces your bidding power in the ‘AdWords auction’ and as a result, your position on the front page drops, which further effects your click-through rates and your quality scores. You might notice this and bid more to get your ads back up, but then you are getting fewer clicks, and less chance to increase your quality score. Before long, you have vanished from the front page.
There is no ‘have a crack’.
Why do we say this? It’s a bit long-winded to explain. But as simply as we can, a low-budget campaign does not produce many results, and if it’s not feasible to pay to get your low-budget campaign managed, then no-one is going to manage it, and! If no-one is managing your low-budget campaign than your quality scores are going to spiral downwards, and if your quality score spiral downwards then your cost per click goes up, and you end up only getting 10 visitors per day, then 5, then off the front page altogether.
The answer?
If you’re serious about running an AdWords campaign, consider allocating a budget appropriate to your industry and professional management that retains accountability. You don’t just want weekly reports on clicks and impressions, you want to know your cost per acquisition and watch it improve over time.