Pay per Click advertising is not voodoo. There isn’t a secret sauce that magically makes it work. What drives success in Pay per Click is a combination of knowledge and experience along with constant attention and optimization.

At PurePPC.com we encounter many businesses that are running a PPC on their own or contracting with a company to run it. As a result, we’ve seen all manner of management tactics and pricing.

Some strategies are in the best interest of the agency, some fall within the best interest of the business and a few are great for both. Some of these include:

1. Creating a basic campaign or two, targeting the broadest keywords, setting them live and letting them run essentially on auto-pilot.
2. Same as Option 1 but a more extensive campaign targeting a wider range of products and/or services.
3. Creating good, extensive campaigns, setting them live and then attending to them only when the client makes a request.
4. Option 3 plus semi-regular optimization along the way.
5. Extensive, meticulous keyword research, competitive review including ad text and landing pages, targeting as many services/products as are offered (budget limited, of course), careful optimization and testing along the way.

If your PPC account falls under Options 1-3 then your scenario most likely benefits the agency, but not you. If you wonder why running a PPC account on auto pilot is bad then next time you drive somewhere just set the car on cruise control and take a nap at the wheel. Let us know how that turns out for you.

Option 4 can work for both agency and business. Option 5 is the best scenario for your business and usually the agency. It’s in an agency’s best interest to keep you as a long-term client and so if the agency is proactive about improving and optimizing a Pay per Click account then both parties should be satisfied and a working business relationship develops.

So how can you determine what is a good price? Every company feels that they have the “best pricing.” The better question to ask is “what do I get for that price?”

Pricing can vary wildly. Some agencies charge a percentage of monthly spend. Others charge a flat rate. Others lump PPC together with a variety of other services like web, SEO, and social media.

If your price is lumped together with the other services I mentioned then most likely it’s a bad setup for you. We’ve rarely (if ever) seen that scenario be in the best interest of a business because you most like get Options 1, 2, or 3 from the agency.

We recently reviewed a company’s PPC account that was spending $50,000 – 75,000 per month. Their agency was charging them $8,000 – $10,000 per month. We found that the agency had performed only 1 or 2 minor optimizations in the previous 6 months while collecting nearly $60,000 from the business during that time. The account was fairly well set up but had been on cruise control for quite some time.

When confronted, the agency offered to reduce their agency fee to $1,000/month. Both of these scenarios are bad for any business. It’s obvious that the agency hadn’t done any work for the business and when push came to shove they offered to reduce their ridiculous high fee to an equally ridiculous low fee. Either way, no work was going to be done to improve the PPC account.

Excellent Pay per Click management is a partnership between an agency and a business. A one-sided arrangement is not a long lasting solution. Transparency between both parties is essential. When an agency is open about their practices and strategies it becomes evident for a business that PPC is not voodoo. Rather, it’s a strategic process that requires experience, constant attention, and optimizing; the very same needs of running a successful business. Funny how that works out.