How To Manage Your Outsourced PPC Search Agency

You’ve decided to run a PPC campaign, and established that you need to hire a marketing agency to manage the campaign.  After meeting with several agencies, you have selected the firm that best fits your needs.  You’re ready to launch the campaign and start generating conversions.  Before you jump into running a campaign, it is important to review strategies to help you manage your PPC agency. Principal and Founder of 360Partners, Jim McKinley has several key strategies to develop a successful partnership.  Jim will be discussing these strategies and more in his upcoming presentation “How to Manage Your PPC Agency” at the LeadsCon Convention in Las Vegas, Nevada February 27, 2012 .

Many companies assume that their work is over once they have selected an agency to manage their PPC campaigns.  However, properly managing your PPC agency is crucial to ensuring success of both your PPC campaigns and your overall marketing goals. 

There are three keys to effectively managing a PPC agency:  setting goals, open and honest communication, and challenging the agency.  If managed properly, the agency should operate as a partner with your company.         

1) Setting Goals

Unachieved goals are one of the biggest causes of friction between the client and agency.  But much like sales forecasting, setting realistic search marketing goals is an essential part of developing successful campaigns.  For example, it is nearly impossible to generate 1,000 leads in a month with a budget of $5,000 if the market dictates a cost-per-click (CPC) greater than $5.00.

You may need to adjust your goals periodically to accurately reflect changes in your business, competition, and search demand. However, changing goals frequently (i.e. more than once per quarter) is not recommended because it is difficult to see important long-term trends when you have a constantly moving target.  The best strategy is to identify a realistic growth strategy ahead of time and build gradual goal changes into a 12-month timeline.

In addition to setting realistic goals, you should avoid giving your agency false deadlines and/or benchmarks.  A common example of this occurs when a company has an internal goal of a $40 cost-per-lead (CPL), but sets the agency’s CPL goal at $25 in order to guarantee a $40 CPL.  In this instance, it is more difficult for the agency to achieve your desired level of clicks because they may be forced to set low keyword bids due to a CPL target set well below the market average. The result may be that the campaign that fails to acquire the target number of leads.            

The final step in setting goals is holding your PPC agency accountable for hitting those goals.  It is impossible to achieve your PPC goals over night, so it is important that you and your agency agree upon a reasonable deadline for hitting those goals.  To ensure that your agency is on pace to meet that deadline, your agency should send you weekly PPC performance reports that will allow you to track long-term trends.  If after several weeks, your PPC trend lines are still not headed in the right direction, speak up.  Talk to your agency about your concerns and be clear about what the consequences are for the agency not meeting your goals.  There is little incentive for improvement without accountability.

2) Communication

We’re all friends during the sales process, but the atmosphere changes once the work begins. A critical aspect of communication is to share concerns early and often.  Any confusion or issues should be discussed as soon as they arise to prevent small miscommunications from turning into large conflicts.  

These kinds of misunderstandings often occur with reporting.  For example, a client may not understand some of the metrics provided in his weekly reports. Rather than asking for an explanation, he simply ignores that metric on the report.  After several weeks, he wants to know his PPC campaigns’ return on investment (ROI).  When the agency explains that ROI data can be found under the heading “ROAS” (return on ad spend), the client becomes upset because those numbers are not what he was expecting.  But because the client never mentioned any concerns about the ROAS numbers, the agency assumed the client was flexible with regards to that specific performance metric.  Unfortunately, a simple miscommunication such as this can lead to critical conflicts that damage the overall relationship.

Another important factor in establishing client-agency communication is to immediately disclose emergencies and other factors that could have a major impact on your business or website.  If you know your website is going to be down to perform site maintenance, you should inform your agency ahead of time so that they can pause your PPC campaigns during that time.  Every dollar spent on a click is wasted if the ad is sending users to a non-functioning website.  Furthermore, sending users to broken landing pages can negatively impact Google quality scores, which in turn can raise your PPC costs.  Avoid unnecessary problems by providing your agency with adequate notice of website repairs, updates, or any A/B tests that will be conducted. 

3) Challenge Your Agency

It is important to challenge your agency to provide insight in addition to reports.  You should discuss with your agency the strategy behind their PPC recommendations to ensure that it aligns with your overall marketing and business objectives. Be sure to follow up with your agency once their recommendations have been implemented to determine whether their efforts resulted in the outcomes expected.  Additionally, challenge your agency to explain the reasons behind any fluctuations or performance trends, rather than just reporting the numbers.

Finally, challenging your agency to provide insight into PPC performance is a great way to identify opportunities for other areas of your business.  PPC can help your sales team identify certain geographies that have strong sales potential.  Additionally, using the wealth of data provided by PPC also helps identify the messaging and value propositions which generate the highest response rates.

Properly managing an outsourced PPC agency should result in a partnership dedicated to constantly improving results.  The best agency/client relationships rely on open and honest communication between both parties and on working together to achieve clearly identified, realistic goals that change infrequently.  When both teams operate as partners, tied to each other’s successes and failures, the result should maximize the return on investment and provide useful insights into other areas of your business.

 

 

What Does "Search+ Your World" Actually Mean for Your World?

Two weeks ago, Google launched “Search+ Your World” (SPYW), a change to its algorithm that integrates results from your social network, powered by Google+, into your search results pages. As with any major algorithm change, there was an almost immediate uproar from the search community. Industry experts claimed that this change degraded the quality of search results by giving preferential ranking to Google+ pages, ultimately having a negative impact on overall user experience. Additionally, many complained that it seemed like another attempt to push Google+, forcing users to take part in the social network that has struggled to gain traction and popularity.

In response, engineers from Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace (which does still exist) have joined together to create the “Don’t Be Evil” bookmarklet tool. When a user performs a search, the tool leverages Google’s own organic search algorithm to find the most relevant results and displays those results in place of the less relevant Google+ listings.

Google’s search chief, Amit Singhal, who oversees all of Google’s search algorithms, has responded to the negative reactions by saying that SPYW has not yet been perfected. He accurately noted that there is usually initial backlash when Google unveils a new update, but he suspects that will likely turn into favorable reviews as the system is perfected. This is a likely scenario, especially given what occurred with Google Caffeine and Google Instant.

So what does SPYW mean for your marketing strategy? Typically, SEO focuses on three basic factors – making your content crawlable, linkable, and usable. Now SPYW essentially dictates that content must also be sociable. It’s no secret that social networks are gaining prominence in search results, but an algorithmic change that places such importance on social media is definitely new for Google because it makes SEO more user-focused. In the past, SEO had been about manipulating a backend algorithm to gain search engine visibility. But now, users will have an unprecedented level of control; what users and their networks talk about online will dictate what shows up in their search results.

As you map out an SEO strategy for 2012, it is crucial that you provide content that is worthy of being shared, liked, tweeted, pinned, and more. 

 

 

LeadsCon in Las Vegas

360Partners is going to Vegas! February 28-29, 360Partners will be in Las Vegas to attend LeadsCon at the Mirage Hotel & Casino.

LeadsCon is the premier conference and expo for the lead generation industry and is dedicated to increasing the effectiveness of those operating in the online lead generation space.  More than 1000 of the industry’s most significant and innovative companies will attend the conference.

This will be the fourth straight year that 360Partners has attended LeadsCon,which presents a great opportunity to learn, network, and collaborate with the top minds in lead generation. 

At the conference, 360Partners principal Jim McKinley will give his presentation Keys to Managing an Outsourced PPC Company from 1 to 1:30pm on Monday, February 27th.  We invite you to join us in Las Vegas for what promises to be an enlightening event and a great time. Stop by booth 308 throughout the tradeshow to speak with Jim and other representatives from 360Partners.