Why You Should Hire an Adwords Pro to Manage Your Account
I know there are a lot of do-it-yourself business owners and marketing coordinators out there who do a reasonably good job of managing Adwords accounts. Ads are running and calls are coming in, so it must be working. How hard can managing your own Adwords account be anyway? Like actually?
Y’all have no idea! I have done some audits of self-managed Adwords accounts over the past few months that have made me cringe so badly I was compelled to write a blog about it. Read on for my top reasons you should hire a pro to manage your Adwords account:
#1. You are literally throwing your money away
I once did an audit of an account that was spending thousands of dollars a month. One of the campaigns was set to accelerated delivery and ran 24 hours a day. This resulted in the campaign exhausting its budget before 8 a.m. almost every day – before their shop was even open. Not only were they spending all their money from midnight to 8 a.m. in one campaign, they had an expensive ad group in another campaign where their ads were being triggered by low converting competitor keyword search terms. Those competitor terms made up 60% of that ad groups spend.
An Adwords pro would have fully tweaked your campaign’s settings to have your ads show at the most opportune times for your specific business as well as be doing negative keyword mining which would save you a bunch of money!
#2. You are guessing as to whether your Adwords campaign is working or not
I recently did an audit of a dentist’s Adwords Express account that was seemingly driving many calls on a small budget and a cost per click of $2. For a dentist, that sounds awesome, right? Totally! In taking a look at the campaign, 12% of the clicks to the campaign were for brand. These clicks tend to drive the most calls to the business. As well, this account had recently doubled their budget and calls recorded by Adwords Express did not increase significantly – what’s the deal?!
We can only guess that calls were mostly probably driven by brand name clicks and, as spend increased, branded clicks did not. But we truly will never know because Adwords Express doesn’t tell us anything. Luckily for Adster, we offer something called session-based call tracking which tells us which keyword triggered the call. Having keyword level call data is amazing, because we can make very informed decisions based on call conversion rates.
#3. Your account has not kept up with the times
Maybe an agency set up your account a while ago, managed your campaigns for a few months or even a year, and then your company decided to bring Adwords management in house to save a few dollars. This is actually fine and can work quite well at least for a little while. But what you may not realize is that as an Adwords pro, I live, eat and breathe Adwords. As a Google Partner, Adster gets all the latest news on the trends and features that you may not.
Google Adwords is constantly rolling out changes. In the summer of 2016, Google rolled out Expanded Text Ads which were up to 47% larger than Standard Text Ads. If you have let your account run unmanaged or managed by someone who may not have known this existed, you could potentially be missing out on ad real estate. This is what happened in a recent Adwords audit! It’s 2017 – we all need to get on those Expanded Text Ads!
Conclusion
If you’re not sure how your Adwords account is faring, ask us about our audits. We’ll do an in-depth analysis of your account and give you some key takeaways that you can implement in right away.
And if you think you’re competent enough with Adwords to manage it yourself, but need help building and optimizing it, you can always ask us about that too! We help with set-ups and optimization and have some great tools for managing data and leads.