
Ask HN: What agencies would you recommend to manage PPC and AdWords? - daveambrose
Our startup is looking for an agency to manage our PPC and AdWords strategy and execution. Have you worked with any agencies you'd recommend?
======
il
If you're a startup, don't use an agency. Trust me. Hire someone internally to
manage your PPC campaigns, it will be cheaper and they will do a better job.
You know your customers better than anyone. You know what their interests and
demographics are, what they're searching for, where they go online. Use this
information to inform your campaigns, and hire someone to worry about the
technical details like optimization and quality score.

The entire agency model is geared towards brand advertisers who spend obscene
amounts of money on "branding" without tracking performance or looking at
results.

The problem here is a profound misalignment of incentives. An agency gets paid
a percent of spend, so it's in their best interest to spend as much of your
money as possible testing without thinking about conversions or results.

~~~
daveambrose
This is the OP here. Let me say first that this is all great advice. I used to
work at an advertising agency, and I don't necessarily agree with your
statement of a "profound misalignment of incentives" considering that my
colleagues at the agency and others under the parent company umbrella did look
for performance in their campaigns so it did have a positive result on what
they were looking for.

Some more color into our situation:

\- we've successfully put in place the core metrics for PPC and set up
conversion tracking

\- we're utilizing the Analytics API to track custom goals, in our case,
things like email signups or purchases

\- we've tested different landing pages, choosing one that had 300x better
conversion rate but I feel there's still more room to improve

\- we've run Facebook Ads, AdWords and Display on Google's Content Network and
search has been the most effective at getting what we need (emails)

From my POV: I've done it myself and can continue to teach myself, but there
are too many moving parts (from what I can see) for me to successfully lower
our CPA and manage on a day to day basis while running the company effectively
and efficiently

------
mceachen
I'm an engineer that has been working for > 8 years with advertising or
advertising-related companies. This summer I co-founded AdGrok to help people
do their own internet marketing.

I agree with what others have said, and will throw a couple more assertions
into the mix:

* Start by managing this yourself, or hire someone internally to do it. Agencies (and trada, unless you do cost-per-conversion) aren't necessarily incentivized to spend your money wisely.

* AdWords isn't a magic bullet, and depending on the vertical, can be absurdly competitive. Running Facebook ads, display ads for relevent publishers, and retargeting should be on your marketing radar as well.

* Don't "set and forget" your AdWords campaign. You won't get it right the first time. You'll be surprised by what text ads win and which ones lose. You'll need to "negatively target" certain words, and if you do display ads, really watch what placements work and what don't. None of this is possible without experimentation.

* Don't send all your traffic to your home page. Specific targeting for segments of your customer base will do much better than general messages that don't speak directly to anyone.

* Don't spend money on AdWords without knowing where your money is going. Set up conversion tracking.

<shameless plug> AdGrok's beta program is free right now (in exchange for
feedback on what works for you, and what doesn't), so you can't beat the
price. We'd be happy to help get you started! Just go to beta.adgrok.com say
you're from HN. </shameless plug>

~~~
danilocampos
> Don't send all your traffic to your home page. Specific targeting for
> segments of your customer base will do much better than general messages
> that don't speak directly to anyone.

Can't vote this up enough. We had dramatic conversion success by creating
specially targeted landing pages with a lead form embedded. Tying your
keywords to specific, targeted content is essential to making the most of your
campaign. The less a user has to hunt around to satisfy their search intent,
the more easily you can make the most of their attention.

~~~
paolomaffei
Does this really need to be said to someone that wants to manage a lot of
money on PPC spending?

~~~
mceachen
Absolutely.

Just in the last month we've seen more than a handful of companies that have
non-trivial spend and only send traffic to their home page.

"Best practices" just don't seem to be promulgated very well.

------
patio11
<http://softwarepromotions.com>

Dave Collins is one of my Internet buddies, and he is about as savvy at
AdWords as I am with SEO. People have offered me substantial amounts of money
to do AdWords for them. I always turn it down and recommend they use him
instead, as it would almost certainly be a better use of their money.

------
rantfoil
If you're willing to hire a full time person, Google's AdWords team has
hundreds of very talented optimizers and account specialists who are in
general fairly unhappy with their jobs. They have very deep knowledge of
PPC/Adwords from the inside, and have seen a variety of client accounts.

Google doesn't do a good job of nurturing since they tend to hire highly
intelligent nontechnical people, train them all about Adwords, but then give
them no real way to move up in the organization or challenge themselves.

~~~
daveambrose
Where/how can I find these folks?

We're in direct discussion every week with our dedicated account team at
Google but it's very hands off.

------
dageroth
Another option is to set up an affiliate program and pay for leads / sales.
That way people will start on the one hand to create landingpages or put your
ads on some pages, but they will also try to earn money by bidding on keywords
and sending traffic to your site.

If you are sneaky you can track the sources and adwords with a tracking
software like google analytics to find out which keywords are working well and
then start to bid yourself on those. (But that would drive away those
affiliates doing the research for good keywords... but depending on the
attractiveness of your affiliateprogram there might be others...)

~~~
zackattack
How do you find affiliates once you create an affiliate program?

------
qeorge
We've recently engaged Software Promotions (SoftwarePromotions.com), who were
recommended to us by Patrick (patio11).

Just getting started with them, but so far we've been really impressed.

------
danilocampos
Agree with the do-it-yourself sentiment. I spent a couple of years responsible
for about $2 million in annual search spend. Started off inheriting an agency
relationship. They were sloppy, so I did an RFP for a new agency to take over
the account.

New agency was better, but ultimately didn't offer enough improvement. So I
started managing one segment of the business internally, proved to my company
that it wasn't any Olympian task, and the whole thing came in house. As far as
I know, four years later, they've grown the internal team and still do it in
house.

THe SEM products give you a decent amount of sophistication for planning and
controlling your campaign. Agency people may have an additional software layer
to use on top of that but you can easily beat the results they offer just by
giving a damn about your business. Your rep at an agency Will have many other
clients to worry about and can't provide the same commitment as you or an
employee.

You might even find this is doable on a part-time basis early on, once you
have the campaign dialed in and need to focus on other things. However you
sort it out, there are many better approaches than using an agency.

------
gforst
Lots of good advice. I have worked at a couple of startup some that did
millions in revenue each month and some that bombed out.

I do believe if you can bring it in house do it as there is extra benefit to
the business from understanding what is driving ppc.

If you can't do it in house for financial or lack of time I recommend you go
with an agency that examines both the adwords side and the post click side
(site analytics). Also the agency must commit to understanding you business
and model.

My shameless plug is we see our role as a partner we need to understand you
business and information needs to flow between us and our clients to truly
grow and optimize the business. One other option that we offer some clients is
to train an internal person/team on PPC. This can save you lots of time, money
and headaches early on if you go in house. If you want to chat more give me a
ring Greg 773-517-8449 - www.digitalbaltoro.com - greg@digitalbaltoro.com

------
iuguy
Forget an agency. It's not hard to manage it yourself, you'll know your target
customer base better than an agency will and unless you have massive campaigns
based on PPC and Adwords it shouldn't take up a lot of time. Even if it does,
then you're probably better off hiring someone internally to do it.

------
adamtmca
I don't have any experience with them but Trada's model seems attractive. They
might be worth a look.

www.trada.com

~~~
adamtmca
Why was this down voted? Maybe it read like an ad? I don't work for them.

The OP is asking for an agency and the top voted comment suggests that
agencies aren't a good way to go because they're often paid a percentage of
total spending. Trada is pay per performance and the OP won't need to hire
someone (possibly why they are asking about agencies in the first place).

It seems like it would be worth their while to check them out and I thought I
would let them know about it.

------
rrhyne
DO NOT do it yourself first. Hire a consultant for a few hours to setup a
campaign for you. Work with him to slowly get it dialed in an then take over.

You'll save yourself a ton of cash on wasted clicks.

------
willz
I'm the partner and co-founder a PPC Agency.

The right way is to do it yourself first. But make sure you have conversion
tracking, so that you know the basic metrics. For instance, if you are doing
PPC for sign-ups, how much are you paying per sign-up.

Then you try to improve it, by either cut Cost per acquisition (CPA), and/or
increase your volume of acquisitions.

Increase volume of acquisition is always harder. Most people only know little
bit of Search, but Content and Retarget works great too. A lot of product are
so new that no body is searching for it, so there are challenges.

You should try this yourself until you hit your bottleneck, e.g. can't
increase volume without a much bigger CPA, then you should try find a good
agency that can bring your PPC to a whole new level. And it's better doing it
now, because you already know your basic metrics, and it will be easy to judge
is an agency is doing a good job or not.

Judging by the people who commented there, my feeling is that few of them
really had the experience of spending serious PPC money PROFITABLY.

A good ppc program is a pure profit center.

Do it yourself just means that you as founder won't have time for other stuff.
Do it in-house means you pay a salary of someone doing it. Agency's cost is
most likely lower than a full-time employee, and a good agency knows PPC way
more than an individual who had some years of experience.

p.s.

Another point, I happened to work with a lot of start-ups. People seem to
assume that only big stupid companies spend serious money on line, small smart
start-ups don't. But this is just wrong. Small smart start-ups are spending
very aggressively online, because they know they are making profit, vs big
stupid companies are often too timid to spend anything. So, a small start-up
actually need more PPC expertise than the big companies.

~~~
dotBen
Please forgive me if this is taking things OT, but if you want to go down the
"do it yourself" route but are new to this area, what would be an efficient
way to quickly grok the space?

I'm aware there is a plethora of PPC communities and blog posts, but if you
are a smart geek who just wants to ramp up efficiently is there a
book/ebook/concise set of posts that you(/others) would recommend that covers
the basics and moves through to the tips, tricks, optimizations, etc stage?

Thanks

~~~
mceachen
OMG, are you throwing me a softball here, what with the "grok" reference?

I just posted a longish reply to the root post with some general guidance, but
I also just wrote <http://adgrok.com/getting-started> last week to help total
newbies get going.

What we're hoping to build with AdGrok (and admittedly, we're not completely
there yet) is a tool that lets you act like an "AdWords Certified
Professional" without all the pain and suffering of studying for those tests.

~~~
dotBen
Never heard of adgrok ;) so no softballs there.

I had a look at the Adgrok.com site - it's sadly not what I'm looking for as I
don't think it fits with the situation I'm trying to fill.

My younger brother is a new recruit in the PPC team of a leading retailer - as
he is learning on the job from his colleagues I'm trying to find ways he can
learn all the basics and quickly move onto advanced ideas they may or may not
be using. Sadly AdGrok presumably won't work as he is just an employee who
doesn't have any say or ability to utilize adgrok's statistics collecting into
his workflow as he doesn't have any admin capability within the company.

I was therefore looking for other resources - if you have ideas or suggestions
I'd be grateful! Thanks.

~~~
mceachen
Yeah, if your brother doesn't have the authority to link a google adwords
account, he won't be able to use AdGrok. Know that we can link to MCCs and
that any given account can have 2 links, though. People who already use an
agency also use AdGrok just so they can keep tabs on what's going on easily.

I posted <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1854584> to the original Ask HN
post -- he should read through those bullet points after he reads the first
couple sections of that getting-started link I sent. PPC is all about
targeting _customer_ eyeballs, NOT targeting the "bouncers" or "trolls" that
you won't ever be able to convert into a customer, and giving a message that
is specific enough to someone's needs that it speaks to them.

Google has a certification process that has a horribly dry but thorough -- he
should slog through that and get certified (it'd be good for his CV if he
wants to do PPC at other companies, because many require it):

[http://www.google.com/intl/en/adwords/professionals/individu...](http://www.google.com/intl/en/adwords/professionals/individual.html)

Here's their "learning center":

[http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?hl=en&...](http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=examstudy.cs&ctx=go)

He should also try "AdWords for Dummies" (really!) and/or Brad Geddes' book:
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0470500239>

Good luck to your brother!

------
earl
This guy knows everything there is to know about sem. I also know Brook
personally and he is a very decent human being.

<http://www.linkedin.com/pub/brook-shepard/8/158/b17>

