Why Outsourcing Your AdWords Campaign Management Could be Bad for Your Business - and What to Do About it.

Background: I've seen some sharp practices out in the marketplace, so it's of concern to me if what I describe below is already going on.

What's the most precious asset your business owns? The one which has cost the most in time and money, and which you would never give to someone outside of your business?

• Your Customer List.

What's the next most precious asset, the one earning you money right now, but which may be managed by someone who is not even an employee of your company?

• Your AdWords account

Why?

Your AdWords account is a treasure trove of vital information about your marketplace, and valuable intellectual property -

• the keywords they use
• how often they buy
• what they buy
• your cost of sale
• where they're located
• what time of day they buy
• and much more …
• (please note - Google does not allow access to private information like your payment details)

With this information, your AdWords Manager knows what to sell and how to sell it, and could become your next competitor without you even being aware of it.

If he knows how to set up a website or ecommerce store, and optimise it for good rankings in the Search Engines, he could be getting free traffic on your best converting keywords on your AdWords Campaigns, which you are paying for.

I call these your "SEO Money Words".

You'd then have to hope that he became a wholesaler of your products, or that you could drop-ship for him so that you're still getting the sales instead of losing them.

But he could be selling any competitor products to your marketplace and using your AdWords campaigns as the place to do the market research your business needs to stay ahead.

Many AdWords advertisers only use their campaigns to drive one-off sales, some not even bothering to track conversions from clicks to revenue, without realsing that AdWords primary purpose should be to test and track what your marketplace wants and how it interacts with your website once you've paid to get them there.

By harnessing the true power of AdWords, combined with web analytics and optimisation (both Google Analytics and Google Weboptimiser are free tools to do that) you can get more value from your marketplace and start seeing your web pages appearing in the natural Search Results for free traffic if your site is built correctly.

You can dismantle your sales funnel and test each piece of it to test new ways to get more from your visitors.

Here are some of the things your AdWords Campaign Manager can know about your business:

• where your most profitable clients are, down to country, metropolitan area, city, or specific locality
• if you're scheduling your ads, what day and what time of day they buy
• how many buyers are available, and if you're meeting the demand
• which online community they congregate in
• which keywords they're using, and which are the profitable ones
• which ads are the most compelling
• which keywords not to bid on
• how popular your domain name is
• how well your web pages convert vistors to sales
• how much a sale costs you and whether it's profitable
• whether you're condemned to AdWords to get traffic, or whether you stand a chance at good rankings for free traffic
• how authoritative Google considers your website
• how well optimised your web pages are
• which parts of your sales process work well and which are losing sales

 My recommendations (I have no legal background):

• a contract with your AdWords Manager stating your ownership of the account as your Intellectual Property
• get your accounted audited to make sure it really is in good shape (I provide a Free 97-point Audit)
• consider a revenue-share payment model instead of a flat fee - that way it's directly in your Account Manager's financial interest to get the best performance, so he gets more commission
• never pay for your account as a percentage of your budget - I consider it grossly unfair for you to have to pay more simply because you want to buy more traffic; there's no extra effort involved in turning up a daily budget!
• BEST SOLUTION - take your account management back in-house and get trained how to do it yourself! (side benefit - this is a service you can resell)
  

David Rothwell is a Google AdWords Qualified Individual with 3 years experience, with 53 client accounts spending almost $50,000.00 per month.

He provides account audits, training, coaching and consultancy on all aspects of AdWords website marketing.

The views expressed in this article are the personal opinion of the Author.

(C) 2007 David Rothwell | www.AdWordsAnswers.com | david@adwordsanswers.com

Back to AdWords Training home