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What is the best way to do PPC management for 100s of local clients?

by DelisaCeag
4 replies
  • SEO
    • |
A friend of mine works for an agency that gets contracts to do lead generation for local businesses.

The problem is that they might get several (100s or 1000s) of clients and they need to figure out how to automate most of the work.

What is the best way to do this?

Should they try to develop their own tools using Google API or just use 3rd party tools like wordstream, acquisio, etc.
#100s #clients #local #management #ppc
  • Profile picture of the author dburk
    Hi DelisaCeag,

    When I first started to take on numerous clients, there were not a lot of tools, and most did not do what I needed, so I developed many of my own tools for creating and managing campaigns, However, over the years there have been many new tools developed, and Google has improved the built-in tools for managing campaigns, so there is not much need to develop your own tools. You can probably find several good tools for whatever task you are trying to automate.

    AdWords now has many automated bid management capabilities built into the web interface, and recently expanded the automatic scripting capabilities. So there is no longer a need to develop tools, or purchase 3rd party tools for bid management.

    Having said that, you will still need to invest in human expertise. PPC Advertising is highly a competitive marketing channel and you need human expertise to develop a winning strategy, you will need talented ad copy writers, and you will need expert testers to implement testing and tracking, and you will definitely need analytics experts to develop market insights. Otherwise your clients will get left behind by competitors that are doing all these things.
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    * Get Results - Outsource Your PPC Management |
    *     Don Burk Advertising & Marketing - www.donburk.com

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    • Profile picture of the author DelisaCeag
      1. The problem is that they need a very scalable strategy (or strategies) for doing this.

      They might get 100s of clients each month. How are they going to do this on scale?

      2. When you say automatic scripting capabilities, do you mean, adwords automated rules? or something else?
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      • Profile picture of the author dburk
        Hi DelisaCeag,

        Each of your clients will have different needs and different issues. To best serve your clients' needs, you will need people to communicate with those clients. Each client will likely be in a different niche and have different competitors, and if you have many many clients you may have to deal with clients that are competing against each other (potential conflict of interest issue).

        Developing marketing strategies for a client base on a scale you are considering, may not be as complicated as you think. There are only so many known strategies and highly skilled and intelligent people can be trained to recognize appropriate strategies for a given client.

        While there are many things that can be automated, there will always be some things that are better done by skilled human labor. So you will need humans for some tasks, automated tools for some tasks, and a combination of semi-automated tools operated by skilled labor for other tasks. Successful agencies spend years developing just such capabilities, and continue to improve their systems over time.

        Fortunately, your "friend" is entering the industry at a time where many tools and systems are already developed. Let me point out that there is no single tool that does everything you will need. Think of it more like a craft where the craftsmen must have a toolbox full of different tools, so that he can select the best tool for the task at hand, from his toolbox.

        The challenge is in how to scale the productivity to handle thousands of clients in the most productive fashion. To do this you need to look at some of the principles of economics, namely division of labor (see Adam Smith's work on this topic, Smith saw the importance of matching skills with equipment). How you structure your personnel, specifically the division of labor, will determine the best tools for each of your workers' toolbox.

        Regardless of what technology you go with, you are still going to need skilled labor to operate that technology. So you will need to recruit and train staff, or consider outsourcing it to larger agencies. Perhaps a good approach would be to do what you can in house and outsource your overflow. As you build and improve your internal systems you can gradually bring it all in house.

        In my agency we have teams that focus on specific tasks. One team will do keyword research, another team writes ad text, another does ad group creation, and another team sets up bid management, and so on. Each team member is trained in at least 2 different tasks so that we can shift personnel to teams as needed. This approach has allowed us to scale up to handle very large campaigns for clients with hundreds of thousands of products and millions of keywords.

        Regarding your second question, Scripting is a new feature recently added to the AdWords system. Now in addition to Automated rules, there is the new Scripts feature found under the Automation menu. Those features are great for automating bid management, and automating many other routine campaign management tasks.
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        * Get Results - Outsource Your PPC Management |
        *         Don Burk Advertising & Marketing - www.donburk.com

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  • Profile picture of the author Lucid
    First, you need to get a MCC account. That's the first tool to get whether you have a handful of clients, a dozen or 100s. Frankly, I doubt he'll get 100s quickly but good luck to them. The MCC will save time because you can link all accounts into it. You need to have only one login for all accounts and most important, run reports on all of them. No need to create each report in each account.

    Don is right. The most important is human expertise in ad copy writing and statistical analysts. There's no tool for ad writing, that's totally manual. For the analysis part, you need software tools to crunch the data in all sorts of different ways.

    That's the key to success as a PPC manager: dig into the data to uncover problem areas. For example, some of a client's groups were not doing well in the search partners. My tool (I'm a database programmer too and developed it myself) alerted me to this. Digging deeper, I see that some ads do better in Google but not the search partners and vice versa. I therefore put the best ads for Google in a Google-only campaign and those doing better in the search partners in a campaign just for that purpose. Same keywords, different ads targeting different segments. I therefore am maximizing each segment and the client's ROI is higher. A spreadsheet is a tool but not the proper tool for this sort of thing. You could cut a piece of wood in half with a hammer but a saw is better.

    I'm not aware of tools that would do everything you need. Frankly I haven't looked since I can create my own. There surely are some out there but may be expensive and may not do everything you would want. It may be just as expensive hiring someone to create them but at least you'd have control over what it does. Note that my idea of software tools is not something that will make a decision and implement it. It's to analyze the data and alert a human there's something to be looked at. I roll my eyes each time I see a tool or service that only adjusts bids while ignoring all else. That's not actively optimizing an account.
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