Question for those of you with experience - is hiring a management company worth it?
What I've seen so far is no online pricing, and limited contact info on the websites of adwords managers - both of which send me a red flag.
[edited by: skibum at 10:26 pm (utc) on Jan. 11, 2004]
The best place to post for commercial services if the decision is made to hire someone to manage an AdWords camapign is in the Commercial Exchange Forum [webmasterworld.com]
It depends on what your time is worth. Most management companies charge a % of your total spend (usually 10-15%)with a minumum amount around $200-500/month. Some won't even take people who don't spend at least $1k-5k/month.
The advantage is that a lot of them (and you can do this yourself) can give you some good ROI tracking (often at an additional fee), which might increase your spend if you find your sales are increasing.
I've seen many people start with budgets in your numbers, and end up spending a lot more after a few months of optimizing campaigns and websites for higher conversion rates.
It depends on what your time is worth. I charge by the hour. (I don't like fees based on % of spend because they incent the agency to spend more than what is optimal for the client). If your time is worth more than what you can farm the work out for, by all means, farm it out. Think also of all the time you have to spend understanding the latest changes. An agency has to build that time into overhead.
Moreover, as eWhisper says, an expert can squeeze a lot more out of a campaign than a good amateur can. Several times home-made campaigns have been turned over to me and I've been able to dramatically -- as in orders of magnitude -- increase performance.
Basically you've just got to pick a few and get quotes.
But in the end here on WebmasterWorld I found an agency called [snip] , that charge from $150 a month. They've been running things for me for about over a month now and I've been fairly impressed with the results.
Regarding whether it's worth it, I think that depends on 2 things:
a) how many income you currently get from Adwords? An good agency should be able to do it better than you can because they have more skill and experience; if they're 10% better than you (conservative) then that's 10% more income for you.
b) how much you value your time? Work out how many hours you spend managing it, and how you value that. (though remember the agency will still need managing).
The thing that clinched it for me was all the algo changes at Adwords and Overture. It just so difficult for a non-expert to keep up with spending masses of time.
[edited by: Shak at 4:43 pm (utc) on Jan. 14, 2004]
[edit reason] no specifics please. [/edit]
