- Dealer Marketing Magazine

In the digital marketing space, the two largest advertisement avenues for businesses are SEO and PPC (Pay per Click). Very often however, businesses can easily fall into the trap of attempting to run their own PPC campaigns. This may seem like a more economically viable solution than paying a professional to create and run campaigns for you; however, it may not be what’s best for your PPC efforts in the long run.

If you’re spending several thousand dollars on your PPC advertising per month, it’s likely in your best interest is to work with a paid search professional to make your campaign as efficient as possible.

Several factors to consider when making the choice are:

1. Lack of Management Time

Between running your business effectively, and running your Ad Words campaigns, have you had much time to dedicate to them this month? Paid search is often mistakenly approached with a “set and forget” mentality. The fact is, if you’re unable to check campaigns to monitor keyword performance or to perform landing page A|B testing, your campaigns will suffer.

2. Ability to Follow the Industry

Can you competently discuss new SEM developments or trends? More than just Ad Words as a platform, paid search itself changes pretty frequently. The fact is no one person can be an expert in all things.

You’re already an expert in your business, and it’s unlikely you’ll be able to keep up with new developments in paid search as well as a full time campaign manager can. You and the investment of your PPC marketing dollars may be better off letting a PPC expert who knows the ins and outs of the medium run your campaigns.

3. Recent or Regular Inventory Growth

Depending on the business you run, you may need to advertise a large number of products and/or divide products into a large number of campaigns and ad groups. The bottom line, it can get tough to process all of that information and properly optimize once PPC efforts reach a certain size.

4. PPC Is Growing To Become A Sizeable Portion Of Your Advertising Budget

If you’ve noticed your CPC or your CPA increasing, there are many factors that could be responsible. One of them can unfortunately be the aforementioned fact that you just don’t have time to run a business and PPC campaigns. If costs have been increasing lately, you may be in need of a professional that can take the time to keep all click associated costs under control and help you get the most out of your budget.

I suppose the recurrent theme here is that once your PPC efforts grow beyond a certain point, an expert really is the way to go. Think about it, if you run a factory, you hire engineers to design your products right? Why not hire an expert marketer to market them? Having someone that can keep your campaigns functioning as efficiently as possible is worth the small percentage of spend that agencies typically charge, and can increase overall profitability in the long run.

For more PPC insight, download this free checklist, 7 Things Your Dealership Should Expect From Your PPC Agency Each Month.

As always, good luck, and keep selling!

Dale Harley is a PPC Strategist at Stream Companies, a full-service Philadelphia area advertising agency.