Should you use a PPC management company? This is a question that many eCommerce businesses ask. PPC marketing can be an effective way of bringing new traffic to your website. If a campaign is managed correctly, it can yield a fairly high ROI. With less care and attention, it can soon end up costing a lot for minimal results. An important decision to make is whether to keep your PPC activity in-house or whether to use a PPC agency or management company to do it for you. There are pros and cons to each, and it largely depends on how confident and capable your existing resources are.

If your business has a small team without the necessary skills to run a successful pay-per-click campaign, you have a couple of choices. The first is to use a traditional PPC management company. As we’ll see however, there are definitely some downsides to this. The second is to use our own TEA Software. To round of this article, we’ll look at some of the benefits of TEA and how it can help your PPC activity.

Using a Traditional PPC Management Company: Pros

PPC is a highly specialized way of marketing. Although the fundamentals may not take too long to grasp, there is a wide knowledge base that is required to successfully run a company’s PPC activity. So, let’s look at some of the reasons why you may want to consider using a traditional PPC management company:

• Expertise and Experience
  One of the main reasons to use a PPC management company is to have access to their collective knowledge. It’s likely that you will not only have an account manager, but also access to a wider team of people. If the agency is of a good quality, this means years of experience in the intricacies of pay-per-click advertising. They will know exactly how paid search works, the strategies you should employ, and the keywords you need to target. An agency can help you plan and execute your strategy to be as effective as it can be.
• Autonomy
  If you have absolutely no clue about how PPC works, you can hand over the entire operation to an agency. Although you can still have close contact with how they run things, you don’t need to worry about the day to day activities of your campaigns. This frees you or your teams up to focus on other marketing channels.
• Cost
  This one is definitely debatable, but hiring a PPC management company could work out to be a lot cheaper than adding an extra full-time employee to the books. You can agree a flat monthly rate for the management company, and you only have to keep them on board as long as they’re useful. However, they’re not an inexpensive choice. Extra costs abound, particularly when you need advice and input above the agreed upon time.
• Focus
  If you’re paying someone else to run your PPC activity, you can guarantee that they will be focusing on this form of marketing for you. It’s rare that companies have the luxury of a dedicated PPC manager, so other marketers usually have to focus on a range of different channels. Using an agency can save time and focus for your marketing team.
• New Trends
  As you’re no doubt aware, the world of eCommerce moves at an exceptionally fast rate. New trends and algorithms are constantly changing the way people interact with online stores. PPC companies have to keep up to date with these trends, and can adapt your activity accordingly. This may not be the case with internal staff.

Using a Traditional PPC Management Company: Cons

On the face of it, it seems like using a PPC management company is a great choice, particularly if you don’t have the in-house capabilities. However, there are some downsides of using them, as we’ll see below:

• They don’t know your business
  An external source will find it hard to fully understand the way your business works. This means that firstly there will have to be a long process of getting up to speed. They’ll need to know how your customers think, what they search for, and what motivates them. Internal relations will also need to be figured out. This all takes time and money. It will mean that someone from the business has to spend time running them through everything, rather than getting on with the work itself.
• Communication
  Using an agency always requires a little extra effort in terms of communication. In the same way that they don’t know your business, they don’t know how the chain of command works. They may feel they can take the initiative when it comes to PPC, but you’ll have to ensure that the wants and needs of the business are effectively conveyed.
• Focus
  It’s very unlikely that you will be the only client of the agency, or even the account manager assigned to you. Generally, PPC management companies will work across a wide client base. This means that their focus won’t be solely on your account. Unless you’re one of the top payers, it’s likely that the needs of other clients will be equally, if not more, important to them.
• Accountability
  In previous articles we’ve mentioned some of the pitfalls of using PPC marketing. One of the main issues that we see involves companies over paying for services such as Google AdWords. Unless you’re close to the agency’s process, or you have a good understanding of the analytics, you could be paying for poor-quality traffic that doesn’t convert. This type of clickfraud and engagement fraud isn’t always spotted by agencies, meaning they won’t hold services such as AdWords accountable for your spend.

The team at TEA Software is well aware of the pros and cons of using a traditional PPC management company. That’s why we’ve developed a means of running the most effective PPC strategy possible.

TEA Software

TEA stands for Threat Engagement and Analytics. It’s a powerful tool that we’ve developed to maximize the effectiveness of your PPC activity. It’s a way of automating your business activities to give you the boost and insight you need in terms of quality traffic and improved bounce rates. Some of the most relevant features of the technology for PPC include:

• Threat Engagement
  One aspect of PPC that is overlooked is the quality of the traffic that your advertisements bring to your website. If the PPC management company you are using knows anything about pay-per-click marketing, they’ll make sure that your ads are targeted at relevant keywords and customers. However, just because it’s relevant to your genuine customers and potential customers, this doesn’t mean that competitors and botnets won’t target your ad. By driving poor-quality traffic through your PPC, it can increase your costs without yielding any benefits. This will also lower your quality score, as systems like AdWords use bounce rate and conversion in their measurements. TEA can detect threats and clickfraud from unwanted sources, saving you up to 20% of your advertising budget.
• In-depth Marketing Analysis
  TEA Software can track user activity on a granular level. This means that you can see how customers are interacting with your site, with information on metrics such as first touch, last touch, linear exposure, ad position, and time decay. It will then give you an in-depth look at the trends on your site, as well as actionable suggestions to improve engagement. This applies not only to PPC, but other digital marketing channels. With this data, you can also get an accurate insight into genuine traffic and your true conversion rate.
• Accountability
  We mentioned before how many traditional PPC management companies don’t always hold PPC services accountable for your spend. With TEA, the reports that you generate in regards to fraudulent traffic can be sent directly to companies such as Google to get a refund on the PPC activity that is generated by clickfraud. Furthermore, you can also block certain IPs that you know come from poor-quality sources. This means you can focus your activity on high-quality traffic and give your true customers a more engaging experience.

A New Kind of PPC Management Company

Traditional methods of PPC marketing can certainly be effective. However, regardless of whether you outsource this marketing to an agency, or keep it in-house, there are still some pitfalls that catch even experienced marketers out. TEA Software gives our customers both the freedom and security they need to get the most out of their PPC advertising. Our powerful algorithms can help you automate much of the activity, continuously making adjustments to your ads based on real-time data. It will also give you a detailed look at the quality of your traffic, excluding sources that are known to be fraudulent. This means that you can get the best ROI on your marketing. We give you the ability to hold Google and other advertising platforms accountable for the traffic that comes to your website. At TEA we want to be your partner, not just your vendor.