How much does a good Adwords consultant cost? Answer Request

Choosing the Wrong Adwords agency can destroy your Business!

It is business critical task in choosing a Adwords agency to manage your accounts. Search marketing has the huge potential to promote a large portion of your business, and the different between a well-managed account and a badly managed one can mean millions of dollars (if not tens of millions of dollars) in gained or lost revenue.

Finding the Right Adwords agency is Hard

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to hire a company if you don’t understand what to look for. Many people/companies claim they know how to do Adwords well, but actually many cannot do. The Adwords world is constantly innovating, and there are no real training/standards in this space. Salespeople will throw around complex terminology to make you feel like they know what they are talking about, but actually it doesn’t mean they can affect your bottom line.

So Few Questions To Ask A Prospective Adwords Agency

Do you understand my business?

Every business is almost unique .And customers have unique pain points, businesses have specific demographics that they do extremely well with and the purchase paths will vary. In order for your Adwords Company to do well, make sure that they understand your customer, their needs, what the decision process looks like, how you fulfill your business and what factors sets you apart. Ask them to give it back to you, make sure they truly understand it.

What metrics are you going to use which will indicate bottom line revenue for my company?

Talking to a Adwords guy is almost as bad as talking to your technical guys. By the time they complete, you will learn about CTR, Quality Score, RLSA, CPC, Average position and much more. However, the first important thing you want to do is really understand the business metrics that carry meaning – that indicate whether you are profitable or not. Your PPC company should work with you on figuring out what metrics are important, and why.

How are you going to do reporting for me? And how often?

You should either get a report at least once a month or ideally once every two weeks. The reports should be customized so you can see the metrics that have meaning to you. In other words, simple – not too many graphs; but also customized, to estimate your revenue numbers and match your goals.

Can you set up Google Analytics and other tracking/advertising integrations with my Adwords accounts?

Media buying never operate in a vacuum. In order to be successful, you need to have your tracking set up in Google analytics, to dive deeper into consumer behavior. You also should make sure that the company you use is experienced enough in integrating all of the platforms together (e.g. tracking form leads or sales in Google Merchant Center, Google Adwords and Google Analytics together.)

Can you help me make sure my website design is designed to convert the traffic you send?

In order to assure success, your Adwords Agency should be able to give you a spot check on how competitive/compelling your messaging and design on your landing pages is. Since they look at your competitor landing pages (you hope), they will have a good idea of what works and what doesn’t.

What’s the experience of the analyst who is going to handle my account?

Because it is quite hard to ensure that your analyst who works with you is going to be able to drive success in your account. Make sure that they have the basic certifications, as well as see how much experience – and what types of results they have driven effectively.

How often will we be talking?

It depends on how much time you are putting up and how much search impacts your business, you should speak no less than once a month. Ideally is bi-weekly.

How long do you expect it to take until you see results?

If the company provides answers longer than 60-90 days, you should seek another company. Search works quite well and of course, really quickly. If you are doing display, it could take up to 120 days. A quick caveat, if your industry has a long purchase cycle, it will take a bit longer to see success.

What’s your track record of success?

Any decent agency will have several case studies where they’ve at least added 10-20% performance increases. They should be able to explain you how they’ve done it, and what the other client saw.

Do I own my Adwords accounts?

This is absolutely crucial! Some companies will try to hold you hostage to your Adwords accounts. This means even if they perform badly, they can still hold it over you. DO NOT let them to do that. You own the account, they get to work on it. You fire them at will if you are unhappy with performance.

Is your contract month-to-month?

You should insist on only working with a company that will help you to get out of a contract quickly. If the agency is good, they won’t need a contract to lock you in. If the company isn’t good, you should be scared of having to deal with negative results, and still be locked in to them.

Once you are successful, why should I continue paying you on a monthly basis?

As mentioned, you should come from the approach that you own the accounts, and the work. Therefore, it is legitimate to ask why you would consider paying them after 2-3 months, when the majority of the work is complete on or before time.

What are the most common mistakes that you see other Adwords Analysts/Companies make?

This question will allow you to see how the Adwords agency thinks, and what types of things they catch.

Tell us a bit about your secret sauce, what sets you apart?

Once again, this is a place for the agency to “pitch you”, and you can see how well their messaging aligns with your goals.

Do you have direct relationships with the search engines to expedite access to betas/resolve issues?

The better Adwords agencies have good and close relationships
with Google, Microsoft and other engines/networks. This is invaluable in
getting access to features not always available directly to advertisers, as
well as resolving potential issues quicker.

Have you had any experience with choosing a digital marketing agency? Was it difficult? I’d love to hear from you.

How do I choose my keywords for AdWords? Answer Request

Identifying right keywords sometimes can be overwhelming, but it pays off in the long run. If you pick the right keywords for your business, you can possibly get higher click-through rates and a high click-through rate often helps in improving the quality score of the keywords.

There are two possible situations that might be the product of poor choice of keywords.

• If your ads are being displayed for irrelevant searches, your budget can get exhausted without seeing any conversions. This happens because these are not quality clicks. It is very unlikely to get good conversion from these clicks.
• Another possible situation is that there might not be many clicks. Users might just skip your ad as they are not interested in it. Your click-through rate can fall down alarmingly and trigger a fall in quality score. Your cost-per-click will be soaring high following a drop in CTR and QS.

Having established the significance of keywords, let’s move on to a step-by-step process of setting right keywords for your business.

Identifying keywords from your search query report

If you are already advertising in AdWords, Look for patterns in your search query report. You can easily find searches with good impressions which has not yet been targeted via an exact keyword match.

Such a keyword which users are actually searching, can get you a good click-through rate and quality score.

Fishing keywords from open-source resources

You can look on web for some open-source keyword lists, they are available in abundance. But the catch here is that not all these are relevant to your business. I would suggest use these resources to get an idea of how keyword selection is done across various industries and different businesses.

Using Google Keyword Tool

Google’s keyword tool uses historic data, not just across your account, but similar accounts in your domain to suggest you relevant keywords.

Insights from competitor research

Your competitor might have already spent enough time and resources to pick right keywords. Understand what keywords they are ranking for. If they seem relevant to you, try to use them and beat them out.

Intuition

Even though most advertisers start off by using intuition-driven keywords, there is a reason for mentioning this at the bottom of the list. When you are still new, your intuition might not be the best way to go about. But after following the steps above this, you are now better informed that when you just started.

1) Start with your website - make sure that everything (product and/or service) on your site is a keyword in AdWords

2) Add adjectives and Intention keywords - once you have your baseline of keyword, based on your offering, add the different ways people may search for them. for example: “best” “cheapest” “near me” “for sale” etc. Add all these variations that you can think of and make sense. Once you begin, you will likely discover more ideas in the search query report (search terms).

3) Leverage tools - such as Google Keyword planner, or competitor analysis such as SpyFu. I usually do this after the first two steps as a way to check myself and catch anything I may have overlooked.

Don’t be worried about adding “too many” keywords, as long as you have a solid structure - that you can manage effectively - this “long tail” is what will separate you from your competitors, as most just build basic campaigns and try to bid up their way to market share and profitably (spoiler alert: it doens’t usually work!)

If you have any questions feel free to reach out, as I’d be happy to help. Lior