If our headline got your attention, you’re probably going to be disappointed. If, like a lot of businesses, you know you’ve got to start working with PPC management to ensure your enterprise succeeds, but you’re still trying to find a way to get it on the cheap, our article won’t offer you much comfort.

The Levi Strauss experience

Since 1853, Levi Strauss have been making jeans. Their 501s are the most iconic denim garment in the world. But they definitely are the not the cheapest - in fact many people buy Levi’s not because they are cheap but because they are an investment; vintage 501s actually sell for more than their original purchase price. You might be wondering what on earth jeans have to do with PPC and here’s the answer - in the same time frame that an average consumer might buy five or six pairs of inferior jeans, they would probably only buy one pair of Levi’s … and without the Levi’s they wouldn’t be left with a product that had stood the test of time.

So it is with PPC. Cost-effective PPC management is almost never the cheapest. Great PPC work gives organizations a legacy of solid data and tiny adjustments to PPC that reveal a complete landscape. This legacy means there is always scope for improvements and always data on which to make them. Like the Levi’s, it’s a sturdy, business-like and stylish approach - and like the most famous jeans brand in the world, it will stand the test of time.

However, many PPC agencies aren’t interested in creating solid relationships. They base their offering on a bunch of buzzwords and expect to turn over a lot of clients as their current customer base realizes that results aren’t materializing and looks for a different approach. As a result, most cheap and ineffective organizations spend a lot of time hunting down new clients … this means they spend even less time servicing their existing ones and a vicious circle is established in which every current client is sacrificed to the next one to come through the door.

Sound familiar? Then you’ve been the victim of a cheap PPC agency.

Why cheap PPC agencies let you down

Limited management

One of the most common problems with apparently cheap PPC management is that there will be necessary areas of management that aren’t included in your management fee. The result will be one of two outcomes: neither good:

• The first is that you end up paying much more for your add-on management needs and your PPC agency bargain turns out to be a budget black hole into which you’re throwing a fortune. All too often you’re tied into a contract that means you have to continue to pay the extras for way longer than you want to.
• The second is that your PPC agency is actually too limited to be of real service to you - this can happen with boutique agencies where they don’t have the bedrock skills to handle all aspects of PPC and they don’t have the network to bring in genuine expertise when you need it. In other words, they were never enough and they were relying on getting a certain amount of money out of you before you worked it out.

Lack of transparency

An easy way to limit the amount of work a PPC agency needs to put in, is to create systems that allow them to manage your budget without giving you the fine detail of the spend. Amazingly, people do fall for this, mainly because their agency convinces them that it’s a major advantage not to have to ‘spend time looking at your AdWords outgoings’. It’s not an advantage at all. Being able to see your actual spend is a huge advantage because it allows you to easily track progress towards your goals. If your PPC management team can’t give you fine-grained detail of your spend and what it’s achieving, what are they good for? The answer is usually that they’re good for spending your money on non-productive activity.

Creating a fear factor

The tactic of contacting businesses and making vague but threatening pronouncements about their PPC activity is a literal calling card of the cheap-to-hire and bad-to-work-with PPC agency. If you’ve been on the wrong end of this behaviour you’ll recognize the three key stages:

• Fear creation - a perky individual gets in touch to tell you that they can see your account is ‘not delivering’ or that you’re ‘overspending for the results you’re getting’. Hint, ask how they got their information - they won’t be able to tell you.
• Promises, promises - they claim their agency can save you a substantial sum and/or double your conversions. It’s often a huge round sum, like half, which they also claim to have achieved for another client just like you. Hint, ask for that client’s contact details - they won’t be available.
• Instant gratification - the process always ends with them telling you that they can turn things around really quickly but you need to commit today. Hint, ask for a month to think about it - they will push for an immediate decision and if they don’t get it, you probably won’t hear from them again.

What does affordable PPC management look like?

Time will be taken to explore your needs

A good PPC management agency is in it for the long term. They know that they can continue to generate great results year on year for their clients and they take time to be ahead of the curve of new technology and innovative approaches so that they are leading the pack. This gives them the opportunity to really get to understand your business and to define your goals in the short, medium and long term. An investment in partnership working can’t be established overnight, so if your PPC agency is really committed to getting to know you, it’s probably a good sign.

You’ll be offered education rather than fear

As mentioned above, the fear factor can cause a business to not examine what’s being offered with the necessary care and attention. This leads to panic buying. Rather than promises to cut your advertising spend by a ridiculous amount, or to rid you of some kind of problem that is holding your business back, an affordable PPC management approach will be to examine your current PPC strategy, explore where it could be changed and give you a couple of approaches to achieving better results. A great PPC agency wants you to understand the field enough to be able to be completely confident about their approach … so they will give you plenty of information in a form that you can handle, to ensure you’re a full partner in the process.

Technology and tools as standard

Working with a truly effective PPC agency means that they will be constantly and quietly upgrading their offering with the latest technology and with innovative tools that give your organization the edge. For example the TEA software threat analytics offer a substantial improvement on other approaches to click fraud and engagement fraud. A great PPC management team won’t be content to rest on their previous achievements. Instead they will constantly survey the entire landscape of online commerce to give their clients optimum results. And a final point here is that they won’t necessarily want to trumpet the role of a particular tool or technology system - a PPC specialist that expects to move forward with killer tools year after year doesn’t need to tell you the are the best thing on the market. Their results speak for them and they regularly develop newer, even better, technology to allow them to remain in the vanguard.

Goal setting assistance

Your PPC campaign deepens on you having great goals. Knowing how your demographic is changing is important, as is understanding the evolution of e-commerce. The goals you set in the first year or even the first three years, working with a stellar PPC agency will look very different to the ones you set in year seven or ten. Being on hand to help you set the kind of goals that make your PPC strategy effective, and cost-effective, should be part of the armoury of any good PPC management team.

Help with every aspect of e-commerce

There’s no point having a great PPC campaign if you lack effective landing pages. Having the right structure to carry through from ad to sale is vital. While your PPC agency may or may not have experts in every area of your e-commerce venture, a reputable PPC team will be able to introduce you to outsourced expertise that can ensure every dime you spend is multiplying to the utmost.