PPC Consultants - Do they exist?

[Sporker]

We do all our pay per click in house and have around 800,000 keywords and a fairly developed campaign over the last 4 years. However we seem to be struggling more and more, costs are up and revenue down, especially since we have taken our products worldwide rather than just the UK. So we were thinking of enlisting the help of a PPC consultant. Do they exist, it seems all PPC agencies want to actually manage your campaigns rather than just review and give advice.

If they do exist how do they work, by the hour, by results?

BTW I'm not asking for recommendations or trying to recruit by posting here, just want some advice.

Thank you in advance.

[netmeg]

Yes. Some work by the hour, some by a percentage of spend. Some of us do both consulting and managing.

(BTW, I'm not soliciting your business; at the moment I'm full)

[RhinoFish]

good ppc work pays dividend for a very long time, so most consultants don't want to give great advice in exchange for short term payment. the value they provide is actually long term, so they short change themselves in your scenario. and the feedback of performance and tuning also means the process isn't just a bunch of work up front (though the upfront is considerable), but ongoing work is needed as well.

that said, there are so many in this field, there's got to be ones who do short term gigs. suggest you look through qualified GAPs to try and find one that suits your needs.

[avalon37]

Ditto what netmeg said. I have never worked on a % of spend...always an hourly rate.

[Sporker]

Great cheers all.

[cyberandroid]

they do exist
we do exist (your out of my league though)

there are differant ways to bill clients
<snip>

[edited by: engine at 10:22 am (utc) on Sep. 18, 2008]
[edit reason] no urls, thanks, see TOS [/edit]

[OddDog]

i charge on a monthly basis.

i have not had a client that dumped me after my initial optimizacion. not one.

if your initial optimization is good, they keep you on.

the constant changes in adwords, and the fact that its an action marketplace facilites maintaining the client.

[tomasvdb]

although, if you have 4 years of experience in running your campaign, you should have a fairly good understanding in-house, not sure if most 'consultants' could add that much value.

[netmeg]

Sometimes it helps to have a fresh pair of eyeballs on things. It's really easy to become so involved in our sites, campaigns and ads from our perspective that we lose site of how it appears to others.

It certainly can't hurt to occasionally try a new 'voice' when writing text ads or creating image ads; specially since you can run them together to test.

[Sporker]

It's a good point we do have a fair bit of knowledge now and to be honest I think we are actually doing things in the right way. However that said because of the results trending downwards and the poor performance of the worldwide campaigns we need someone else to take a look.

I've found a couple of places now so just waiting for some more info before making a decision which to work for.

Thanks again for the help.

[cyberandroid]

now im not allowed to link to an article written by eWhisper (a mod here)

that describes the +/- of each billing method

[cline]

The reason we want to manage campaigns is that there is a long-term consistent revenue stream associated with the work. It would be hard for us to make a living constantly cultivating short-term consulting gigs. The cost of customer acquisition and the time it takes is too high. Any good PPC consultant knows that kind of math!

Keep trying. A few of us do offer an hourly consulting rate and might fill your need if you went to the effort of hunting us down and asking.