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August 1, 2006 |
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By: Louise Rijk - Bio - Blog |
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Search Engine Marketing:
PPC Search Campaigns for SMB's - Do-It-Your-Self or Outsource?
With more than 5 billion searches a month and paid search advertising spend reaching $5.75 billion annually search engine marketing has become a vast and competitive space. For small-to-medium size businesses (SMB) competing for visibility on the search results pages at major search engines is becoming increasingly difficult.
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising can give you an edge by allowing you to instantly have a presence on search engines based solely on what you are willing to pay to get a visitor to your site. However, as a smaller business, you have an important decision to make as to how much of your marketing budget you are able and willing to commit towards running a PPC search campaign.
Once you've established how much you may be willing to budget out for a PPC campaign, the question becomes how you can best manage such a program. An aggressive PPC campaign could require managing multiple campaigns and keyword groupings across several major search engines. Google, Yahoo, MSN, all major search engines, each now are having their own separate PPC paid search programs, each with their own intricacies. Keeping up with the developments in the PPC world, as well as managing keywords, bids, and writing compelling ad copy, can be a very time consuming task for a business owner or marketing manager. The alternative is going to an outside agency, and paying for consulting and ongoing management of your PPC campaign, which can also be a challenge in terms of cost for a small business on top of what you may already be paying to the search engines for clicks.
Outsourcing a PPC Campaign
While it may cost more money to work with an agency, an agency's guidance may offset that cost with what they can help you save on your PPC advertising budget. Agencies will have access to certain tools that can help you improve your campaign. Using the right keywords can bring down the number of wasted impressions and bring in more qualified clicks, which will save you money and leads to more conversions. Advanced keyword tools can be expensive to purchase, but an agency will have access to these tools. ROI tracking data can help form bidding strategies for keywords that convert well. Again, these tools can be expensive for a smaller business, but will often be offered as part of an agency's service for PPC campaign management.
SEO and PPC
You may also be able to further increase the efficiency of your efforts if you can find an agency that can take on both your organic search engine optimization (SEO) and PPC efforts. Integrating the two is becoming more important, especially with search engines now grading PPC landing pages based on the relevancy to the keyword phrase the web user searched on. Integrating landing page design with keyword optimization can bring down PPC cost by improving your quality score, and can also help increase conversions once you have visitors on your site. Search marketing agencies may also be able to help with the process of adding tracking code to your web site as part of the ROI tracking for your paid search program.
Search Agency Expertise
It's also important to remember that implementation time and resources is a factor as well. It can take a fair amount of training to acquaint an employee with paid search, as well as the regular time that must be spent managing the PPC campaign. Also, sponsored search programs are constantly changing. Google Adwords is constantly adding new features and changing requirements for quality scores. Yahoo is on the verge of completely overhauling their current PPC system. Keeping up with changes in PPC strategy will also take up a lot of time from other business and marketing tasks.
Given an agency's ability to put their tools and expertise to work, the amount of money you have to spend on one may be more than worth the decrease in ad spend and increase in conversion you will most likely achieve. There are many agencies that now cater to the needs of SMB's. With a little effort you will be able to find a search marketing agency that can do both, handle your PPC campaign and fit your marketing budget.
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