3 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t DIY AdWords Management

As someone who spends a big part of every day optimising AdWords campaigns for clients, I often get asked “why does AdWords need ongoing management?” and if it’s ok for the client to just “have a go” at doing it themselves.

Well, if you’re the type of person who would try to replace your hot water heater when you’re not a plumber, figure out why your computer crashed when you have no IT knowledge or generally take a DIY approach to whatever task needs doing, rather than outsourcing it. then sure, give it a go! But like the examples mentioned, you’ll probably find that a DIY approach ends up taking way more time, or costing more money, or both, that outsourcing would have.

Here are 3 reasons why you shouldn’t DIY AdWords management.

I have several clients who manage their own campaigns and who have taken time to learn about AdWords by reading, watching videos and working with AdWords support. They monitor their campaigns regularly and ask me for help when needed. If you fall into this category, disregard the tips below. They’re intended to help others who take a different approach and don’t give AdWords the same diligence.

1. You don’t have knowledge or experience with AdWords

Good AdWords management involves:

• Logging into your account regularly to monitor your campaign performance
• Making small changes to improve your results including adjusting bids, adding negative keywords, changing keyword match types and optimising ad copy
• Monitoring your Quality Scores and making updates to improve them
• Taking advantage of all the Ad Extensions that are relevant to your campaign
• Having Conversion Tracking set up and tracking correctly
• Optimising your campaigns to get more conversions at lower cost
• Implementing new features as they become available
• Reporting on your results on a monthly basis to see if they are improving
• Keeping an eye on your competitors, as their actions can have a big impact on your ad campaigns
• Linking your AdWords and Analytics accounts and reviewing how your paid traffic behaves in comparison to other traffic sources.

Like many professional services, AdWords Management is a skill that takes time and experience to learn. If you don’t spend time learning how to do all the things listed above, or have experience knowing whether or not your campaign is working, and what changes you can make to improve it, then you’re missing opportunities to get more value from your advertising budget.

Without AdWords skills and experience, how will you know what changes to make if you want to spend more, spend less, get more clicks, get less clicks, get better quality clicks or more conversions at lower cost?

2. You forget to log in

As mentioned in point 1, good AdWords management involves logging in to your account regularly to monitor the performance and make tweaks and changes.

As a Business Owner, there is always more to do in a day than you have time to do. So if logging in to AdWords is one of the things that gets missed, or you forget that you have AdWords running until a charge for ad spend comes up on your credit card, you’re missing opportunities to improve your campaign. And you’re probably spending money on irrelevant clicks that could have been identified earlier.

3. Not outsourcing is a false economy

I wish I had a dollar for every time a business owner tells me “we weren’t getting any return from our ads, so we increased the ad spend and still nothing”.

To know if you’re getting a return from your ads you need to track the results, know what a reasonable return is and know what to do to improve your campaign.

Your role as a Business Owner should be spending your time running the business and providing services to clients.

If you’re currently running your own ads, and fit into the categories of “don’t know what you’re doing” or “forgetting to log in” then you might be spending money without getting an adequate return.

At Click-Winning Content, our aim is always to bring you more value in terms of the return you get from your ads, than the fee you pay us for management.

Think about what a few extra enquiries or sales can mean to your business.

Sometimes these come easily through changes to your account made by an experienced eye.

Personally, I love being able to impact a business by improving their AdWords campaigns. Even after five years of managing campaigns for clients, I get excited every time I hear that “enquiries have increased” “we’re selling more” and “our business has definitely increased since running the ads”.

Tell-tale signs that your AdWords campaign could be improved

The key tell-tale sign, and usually the reason that business owners contact us, is that you’re spending money on AdWords without getting any return.

When we review an account, here are some other tell-tale signs that the campaigns can be improved:

• You don’t know what return you’re getting
• Irrelevant keywords are used
• Only broad match keywords are used
• You have loads of mixed keywords in one ad group
• Negative keywords haven’t been added
• There is only one version of the ad copy
• Keyword quality scores are low
• The landing page doesn’t use similar keywords to the ad copy and ad group keywords
• Mobile optimisation isn’t implemented
• The target area is wrong
• Ad Extensions aren’t added
• Your Click Through Rate is less than 1%
• Conversion tracking isn’t set up
• Conversion tracking is set up but the wrong conversions are being tracked eg views of the landing page, or clicks on a menu item
• Your AdWords and Analytics accounts aren’t linked
• The Bounce Rate for AdWords visitors is too high.

Want an experienced opinion on your Ad Campaigns?

Contact us. Click-Winning Content has been an AdWords Partner for over 5 years, and during that time we’ve improved hundreds, if not thousands, of campaigns.