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Do I Need active PPC Management
Hi There!
My company does commercial facility automation and entry control. We have been using Logical Position for the past 18 months and so far have been pretty happy with them. Over the last 6 months our CTR averages around 1.9 and our conversions are around 1.0.. They have been changing month to month but have stabilized a bit lately. We spend about 6-7k per month on google and about 2-3k on Bing ads and Logical Position charges me around $1200 per month.
I am just wondering – Do I really still need to have my campaign managed every month? We don’t really change anything on the website right now (planning major SEO updates at the end of the year) so I don’t imagine there is too much actively being done on our account.
I am thinking of stopping the management and then revaluating with the same company and other options in about 8 months. Would this make sense or should I always keep someone actively managing the account?
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1 Reply
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$1,200 on ~10k spend is a pretty fair management fee.
Do you NEED active management? In the long term, the answer is always yes. The ad platforms change, automation options change, consumer behavior changes, and over time you absolutely do need someone in there adjusting as those things change.
In the short term? Maybe a bit less. Sometimes ‘mature’ accounts (i.e. ones that have a tight keyword strategy, long negative keyword list, consistent conversion volume, etc.) can carry on performing for months (sometimes years) without consistent active management. It’s not ideal but it happens.
But invariably you’ll see performance start to slump, then continue to slope downwards as the above changes happen and other advertisers take advantage of it while you don’t. No active management also means you leave money on the table – if volume spikes an active manager can flag that for you and find more budget to win more business. Or if volume drops they can let you know so you can reallocate to another channel or tactic outside of your paid search strategy. That’s something you really only get with active management.
No one in the account also has a bunch of potential issues. Microsoft rolls out a new system and defaults accounts into it – you wouldn’t notice that, and maybe now you are serving in a way you don’t want to. Google changes how the match types interpret search term – if no one is in there, you don’t see that happening in the terms report. So things like that are one of the main reasons you really want someone actively in the account, even if everything seems to be working perfectly without much guidance.
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I wouldn’t drop management altogether. Perhaps you could arrange a smaller set of responsibilities for Logical Position, for example, they make sure nothing insane is happening, such as Google auto-applying any recommendations, and they keep your negative keyword list up to date. Something like that.
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In the long-term, yes. Management entails a bit more than just watching it — even with the simplest and smallest campaigns, most need weekly or daily updates as the market is constantly changing.
The price you’re being charged seems very fair. As long as you are happy with results, everything’s profitable, and it seems stable I wouldn’t change anything. Stopping management & then restarting could cost you, long-term, from a performance perspective.
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I would double check the Bing leads if you have any. Bing has been all robots for my clients.
It’s probably better to have a manager on the account, but you want to make sure you’re getting value. 1% conversion rate could probably be improved with pre click and post click optimizations. Your manager should be working on that
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A campaign needs more TLC early on but usually takes less management overtime with all things remaining the same. With that said, I still think monthly adjustments by a professional PPC manager can still help you lower cost per conversion or increase ROAS, depending on what the KPI is.
It doesn’t matter if you haven’t made any changes to your website, these adjustments are made in the Google Ad Campaign.
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If you or someone at the company is a bit seasoned you could probably pull the levers. This definitely sounds like it’s stable and the agency is more than likely running automated campaigns anyway. You still want someone monthly/quarter to keep up with basic tasks. Negate keywords, pause stuff that’s not working, implement new ad variations… Sounds like you’re paying about an 18% fee.
You could make a viable argument to them to lessen the fee as less work is being done and the account is past the heavy lift that’s typical in the beginning of working with an account of your size.
you could also look at the change history and it would strengthen your cause if you don’t see them doing much.
I’ve seen instances where agencies are being lazy and letting google auto apply all changes so there’s absolutely no reason to charge that much if google automation is doing much of the heavy lifting.
Personally I’d be a bit livid to be paying that much only to find out google is most of the work. I wouldn’t want to rely so heavily on automation.
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