Personally, I believe the size of your company and budget play a significant role when deciding to manage ads on your own or appoint an agency.
Now, let’s see these 4 facts if you appoint a Google Ads Agency.
#1 - Setup Fee & Maintenance Fee
Most agencies will charge extra fees to manage your ads. Its often charge a fix setup prices onwards (usually ranging from RM 1,500 onwards). Then, there will be a maintenance fee of 20%-30% of your total ad’s expenses.
For example, if you are spending RM 1000 every month, they will charge extra RM 200-300 every month on top of your ads fee.
If you are spending RM 5000 every month, they will charge extra RM 1000-1500 every month on top of your ads fee.
For small local business and SME, this might be a high operating cost.
#2 - Agencies Prefer Clients with Big Budget
If given a choice, most of the agencies prefer to work with a bigger client because the revenue is depending on their ad’s expenses.
And the amount of work to implement a proper Google Ads campaign is not much different from managing a client with RM 1,000 monthly budget to RM 5,000 monthly budget. They might be more efforts on targeting more keywords and prepare more landing page, but the fundamental work is the same.
That explains why many SME with smaller budget failed to get help from the agencies; even they are willing to spend their money.
#3 - You Don’t Own the Ad’s Data
Most agencies own the ad account and campaign while managing your ads. By the end of the month, they will share a report generated from the ad account. Some are willing to add you to read-only rights so that you can view the performance of the ads online.
But once you stop engaging them, you will be lost access to all the data.
Why is the data valuable for you?
Assuming you have run Google ads for years.
Over the year, the campaign should gather a lot of data.
- It shows what keywords bring the most sales and what are the bad keywords.
- It shows what ad’s message brings more traction at a lower cost.
- It shows what the best time to bring leads at a lower cost is.
- It shows what location and device bring more leads or sales.
- And the list can go on more…
If you lost the data, you would need to start over again to test various setting, keywords and message.
#4 - You may get a push by spending more on your ads
If your ads are managed by Google Partner agency, there is an interesting article talking about the changes of Google partner program.
In short, Google implementing new policies as below:
- Google partner need to maintain the minimum campaign optimization score to keep their Google partnership program.
The intention might be good so that Google partner will help to manage their client campaign better.
But if we drill down further, here are some recommendation to increase the optimization score:
- Increase your monthly ad budget
- Raise your Target CPA (cost per action).
- Use call extensions even for off-hour campaigns when nobody is at the office to answer the phone.
If the campaign’s minimum optimization score is not meet, their Google partner badge will be removed.
What’s it means to you?
In order to meet the rules, set by Google partner program, your agency might approach you to increase your budget, help you to bid at a high price for each action and spend more in call ads even after office hour.
Making the Right Decision
Firstly, if the cost is not a big concern, it is totally fine to get an agency to manage your ads campaign.
And assuming you are ok to pay extra 20%-30% of the expenses of the actual ads every month.
You don’t’ need to spend time to learn and manage the Ads campaign.
A good and honest agency will handle everything for you. You can free up more time to focus on your business operations.
But, this means that you might be stuck with the same agency for years because you don’t own any data collected using your monthly ads expenses.
Personally, I think data means a lot to any business nowadays. Even if I appoint an agency, I will negotiate with them to make I own the data and not the agency. If not, I prefer to send my staff to learn and manage the ads for my company.
And if you have a limited budget, you may end up with not getting the right agency to manage your campaign. This is because most agencies prefer clients with a bigger budget.
On the other hand, why not just manage Google ads by yourself? Same as many other business owners who manage their Facebook ads.
The False Belief
Now, you may hear of many shares that…
“Google Ads is difficult to set up and manage.”
“You need a lot of IT technical skillset to launch a Google ads campaign.”
“A non-IT savvy like you will not be able to do this!”
In fact, this is not true at all.
In deed, Google ads have changed over time and make it so easy to use today.
A non-IT savvy guy will able to set up and run a campaign with some guidelines in matters of days.
And once it is set up and running well, the ads can run for years with very minimal maintenance. It will not take-ups a lot of time, like managing Facebook ads.
Are you interested in finding out more about setting up Google ads? Check out my FREE training series here.