Perhaps you chose them because of their abilities in managing Google AdWords campaigns. AdWords fanatics? You can find plenty of us online, discussing techniques, every day. But there are also many ad agencies who only offer this service, reluctantly, because they’ve realised it’s taking over from the stuff they are good at. We think you should let them stick to that.
Jackie West, who looks after BMON’s Insider Programme support service for industrial and scientific companies, finds that a number of our new members are already running Google Adwords campaigns through their existing advertising agencies.
“Once you get to know them”, she says, “it’s clear that although pleased not to have the day-to-day commitment of running their AdWords account, many are unsure if their agency is particularly competent in running pay-per-click advertising. Most clients just seem to get an an automatically generated spreadsheet thrown at them each month, which doesn’t suggest that the agency has been doing too much work.
“Then again, many are just charged a small fee of a couple of hundred pounds by the agency, and how much work can you expect from that?”
Traditional advertising agencies have resisted the growth of Google Adwords ever since it began, usually because it’s outside their comfort zone, and because it doesn’t allow them to make the traditional margins which built their impressive offices. “Over the past few years, however”, says Jackie, “increasing numbers of clients have been ignoring their advice and allocating more budget to AdWords, which is giving them far better return on investment. There comes a point where it makes sense to hand the management of that over to specialists.”
And does outsourcing the Google Adwords campaign to a traditional advertising agency actually save that much time? Many agencies simply don’t have the technical and product knowledge required to generate effective keyword lists, and it ends up being the client who does all of the work! Jackie says: “we find that our clients are genuinely impressed that when they outsource campaigns to BMON, they really get what they’re paying for. Chris Rand has years of experience writing about subjects in engineering and science, and isn’t afraid to call on former editorial colleagues for advice in researching the scope of campaigns.”
How fixed-rate AdWords put you back in control
Advertisers are a lot more comfortable if they know what their next AdWords bill is going to be. However, with most agency management schemes, you either instruct the agency to get you a certain amount of traffic each month (in which case you don’t know how much it’s going to cost), or you instruct them to spend a certain amount of money (in which case you don’t know how much traffic you’re going to get). On top of this, the agency will charge a management fee, which will give you an idea of how long they’re going to spend on your account.
BMON’s unique fixed-rate scheme is far more comfortable to work with. You raise one order, for a certain number of visitors to be generated, at an agreed rate per visitor. We then create the campaign, deliver the promised traffic, and you have one invoice. There’s no management fee, and there are no other charges. Typically you might order 500 visitors a month for £750, or 2,000 visitors for £3,000. It all depends on your budget and the size of your market. Easy. We soak up all of the fluctuations, and (with any luck) keep the cost per click low enough to cover our efforts.
You can see that it’s also in our interest to constantly work on your AdWords account to improve its performance.
The reporting you really need
It’s not uncommon for us to hear the comment: “My ad agency does our AdWords campaign, and they send me a spreadsheet every few weeks which apparently tells me what’s going on, but I’m really not sure what it’s supposed to tell me”. We decided from the outset that this was lazy and unhelpful, and every BMON client gets a short personal summary from Chris every month, as well as detailed charts and tables from Google Analytics which show where the visitors came from, which pages they looked at, and whether they stayed around.
Whether you want to get involved in analysing the campaign results yourself, or need something which can demonstrate the success of the campaign internally, we try to help. Our reports are normally provided in PDF format, but if you need Excel spreadsheet raw data or Powerpoint graphs for a presentation, we’ll do our best to provide what you need.
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