How to choose a Google Adwords Professional
Before I get on to the how-to, I really ought to explain why you should hire a Google Adwords Professional.First, a quick re-cap. When you do a search on Google you’ll see something like the page below:
The area highlighted to the top of the search results (sponsored links) and to the right, are all paid for links. Note these advertisers don’t pay for page views. You can look at this all day long, and the advertisers won’t pay a penny. When you decide an adword is relevant, and click on the sponsored link, the advertiser pays a small amount (CPC = cost per click). Hence, this kind of advertising is called Pay per click (PPC). The exact amount you pay is determined in a live auction by how much your competitors are paying.It’s a neat system, but if you’ve tried you’ll see it’s very easy to burn cash without gaining actual sales. I’ve seen customers hypnotised by their traffic volumes, without actually yielding sales. Google knows this, and on its founding principle of relevancy, it rewards Adwords with high clickthrough rates, and high conversion rates, by giving higher ranking and lower CPCs.You can definitely learn the skills of Adwords management, but I’d argue that for a larger ecommerce site, Adwords is a whole channel itself, and needs full-time management.So, if you decide you haven’t got the time or the inclination, what should you look for in a specialist Search Engine Marketing agency or Google Adwords Professional? What follows are a few bullet points to ask your agency.1. Take references from existing clients. This is the kind of business where if you yield results, clients love you and stay with you.2. Check out the experience of the person who will be managing your account.3. How often will your campaign be monitored and adjusted (ideally, the agency should use its own software to provide real-time monitoring and bid-price adjustment)?4. What checks are in place to ensure no adspend is wasted (e.g. real-time site testing linked to campaigns)?5. What resources does the agency have to evaluate landing page effectiveness, and to make design changes rapidly?6. Does the contract incentivise bigger AdSpend, or more effective conversion?
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