The Danger of Blindly Trusting your B2B Pay-Per-Click Campaign to the “Experts”

Having been on the client side, agency side, and now the consulting/coaching side of search engine marketing, I’ve seen my fair share of success, and made (and hopefully learned from) plenty of mistakes.

One mistake I think every client could avoid is blindly entrusting a Pay-per-click campaign (like Google AdWords for example) to an agency, or consultant like myself, without ‘checking in on the baby’ once in a while.

Even though we as consultants and agencies hopefully have a wider and deeper understanding of how the search engines work and the pay-per-click landscape is evolving, we typically won’t have an intrinsic understanding of every specific industry. No discovery form or process in the world can catch all the subtleties and nuances for a particular company and their strategic goals.

While we experts are doing the fancy stuff like ad testing, landing page optimization, bid adjusting and keyword expansion, there is likely, somewhere in the madness, some obvious glaring oversight that’s costing the client money or opportunities. It could be a particular search phrase or group of phrases that is active but is just not at all on target with your specific product or service. I’ve inherited campaigns where upon reviewing them with the client they were shocked to see what the ‘previous marketing manager’ had setup. Or it could be a sentence in your ad copy that includes a feature or benefit that isn’t accurate.

You don’t have to have a PhD in AdWords to have the right, dare I say obligation, to periodically peek over your agency’s shoulder and see what’s cookin’.

Here are a couple of things that you should feel comfortable asking for and reviewing with your agency:

#1. A simple report that contains all of your ad creatives. Just scan through them and make sure they are accurate and not misrepresenting your brand or your product/service. Don’t get hung up on whether the ad is the best copy in the world.  If the agency is doing their job, they are split testing many different variations to find out which ad performs the best. What you think is good ad copy may perform horribly in in testing and vice versa.

#2. A simple report that contains all of your search phrases, along with the money that’s been spent on each phrase, and either the conversion rate and/or the time on your site. What you are looking for are glaring standouts where you are spending money on phrases that either aren’t converting or visitors are bailing from your site within a few seconds.

As an example, one of my clients had been running AdWords for 18 months prior to coming to us, and simply by pulling and reviewing this type of report, we were able to quickly identify approximately 30% of their spend that was being wasted. This 30%, mind you, could have bought them extra clicks on those phrases that were valuable, but by the time we identified the waste they ‘didn’t have any more budget dollars’ to buy the additional clicks.

Don’t expect your agency to continually dig into your campaigns and hunt for cost savings and potential waste. The great agencies do, the good ones try, but most are content spending a prudent and responsible number of man hours managing a campaign better than you could, and doing their best to give you good service and overall results.

No one is going to baby your baby like you do. No one is going to pamper your car like you would. Make sure someone in your organization has an eye on whoever is managing your pay-per-click campaigns.

And if you’ve got the opposite challenge, in that you are way too close and deep into your own campaign, get an outside opinion periodically. I always try and enlist one of my mentors, colleagues, or competitors to peek in on my campaigns and would encourage you to do the same. It’s always easy to come in from the outside fresh and be able to quickly spot a few things that have gotten lost in the shuffle.

Anyone got any horror stories or Pay-per-click devotionals? I’d love to hear them!