3 Reasons Why DIY AdWords Management Isn't A Good Idea

Thinking about taking a DIY approach to your AdWords campaign? Before you do, read on...  

I spend a lot of time every day optimising AdWords campaigns for clients and am often asked whether AdWords needs ongoing management. 

My response to this question?

"If you’re the type of person who would try to replace your hot water heater when you’re not a plumber, figure out why your computer crashed when you have minimal IT knowledge or generally take a DIY approach to whatever task needs doing, rather than outsourcing it. then sure, give it a go!

But like the examples mentioned above, you’ll probably find that a DIY approach to AdWords Management can end up taking way more time, or costing more money, or both, than outsourcing would have.

Here are 3 reasons why you shouldn’t DIY AdWords management.

1. You don’t have knowledge or experience with AdWords  

Good AdWords management involves:

• Logging into your account regularly to monitor your campaign performance,
• Monitoring your Quality Scores and making updates to improve them,
• Making small changes to improve your results including adjusting bids, adding negative keywords, changing keyword match types and optimising ad copy,
• Taking advantage of all the Ad Extensions that are relevant to your campaign,
• Optimising your campaigns to get more conversions at lower cost,
• Having Conversion Tracking set up and tracking correctly,
• Reporting on your results on a monthly basis to see if they are improving,
• Implementing new features as they become available,
• Keeping an eye on your competitors, as their actions can have a big impact on your ad campaigns, and
• Linking your AdWords and Analytics accounts and reviewing how your paid traffic behaves in comparison to other traffic sources.

Like many professional services, AdWords Management is a skill that takes time and experience to learn.

But if you don’t spend time learning how to do all the things listed above, or have experience knowing whether or not your campaign is working, and what changes you can make to improve it, then you’re missing opportunities to get more value from your advertising budget.

And without AdWords skills and experience, you won't be sure about what changes to make if you want to:

• spend more,
• spend less,
• get more clicks,
• get less clicks,
• get better quality clicks, or
• achieve more conversions at lower cost.

2. You forget to log in

As mentioned in point 1, good AdWords management involves logging in to your account regularly to monitor the performance and make tweaks and changes.

As a Business Owner, you know there's always more to do in a day than you've got time for. But if logging into AdWords is one of the things that gets missed, or you forget that you have AdWords running until a charge for ad spend comes up on your credit card, you’re missing opportunities to improve your campaign. 

And even worse? You could be spending money on low quality clicks that could have been identified earlier.

3. Not outsourcing is a false economy 

I wish I had a dollar for every time a business owner tells me “we weren’t getting any return from our ads, so we increased the ad spend and still nothing”.

Your role as a Business Owner should be spending your time running the business and providing services to your clients.

When you're managing your AdWords campaigns yourself, you'll want to know if you’re getting a return from your ads by:

• tracking the results,
• understanding what a reasonable return is, and
• knowing what to do to improve your campaign.

Ask yourself, "do I really have time to build up the knowledge and skills needed to manage my campaigns effectively and to login into to my account and make regular updates?"

What would a few extra enquiries or sales can mean to your business?

Because sometimes these come easily through changes made by an experienced AdWords management eye!

So are there any tell-tale signs that your AdWords campaign could be improved?

A key sign, and one of the reasons that many business owners contact us, is that you’re spending money on AdWords without getting the return you expected.

When we review an account, here are some other tell-tale signs that the campaigns can be improved:

• You don’t know what return you’re getting,
• Irrelevant keywords are used,
• Only broad match keywords are used,
• You have loads of mixed keywords in one ad group,
• Negative keywords haven’t been added,
• There is only one version of the ad copy,
• Keyword quality scores are low,
• The landing page doesn’t use similar keywords to the ad copy and ad group keywords,
• Mobile optimisation isn’t implemented,
• The target area is wrong,
• Ad Extensions aren’t added,
• Your Click Through Rate is less than 1%,
• Conversion tracking isn’t set up,
• Conversion tracking is set up but the wrong conversions are being tracked eg views of the landing page, or clicks on a menu item,
• Your AdWords and Analytics accounts aren’t linked, and
• The Bounce Rate for AdWords visitors is too high.

Want an experienced opinion on your Ad Campaigns?

Contact us. Click-Winning Content has been an AdWords Partner for over 9 years, and during that time we’ve improved hundreds (possibly thousands!) of campaigns.

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This article first appeared on the Click-Winning Content blog.