In-house versus Outsourced Search Engine Advertising

All you need to ‘get your feet wet’ with Pay Per Click advertising campaigns is a credit card and a website. Some companies use an in-house ‘try it and see’ approach to PPC. But the water gets deep rather quickly, and if you expect sustained results, you will need to be realistic about whether you are going to be able to do Search Engine Advertising in-house.

Pay Per Click advertising is still fairly new, and there are relatively few people with in-depth expertise. It’s unlikely that a company will be able to recruit employees with the required skill set. Finding someone with both PPC expertise and an intimate knowledge of your product/service will be very difficult.

In-house Pay per Click (PPC) campaign management

Despite the relative ease of set-up, achieving success with a PPC campaign isn’t easy. A company may choose to direct a key person to learn about PPC and then manage the campaign. But given the steep learning curve involved, many companies choose to outsource. The outsourcing experience can be a learning exercise that can allow a company to eventually moving the activity in-house when enough PPC knowledge and experience is acquired.

When managing a PPC campaign in-house, team members must be prepared for sustained effort, as a campaign may not meet with initial success. But given continued effort, PPC will generally work in the long term. PPC is similar to traditional advertising campaigns where an advertisement may take several months to generate a response and trial-and-error will be needed to develop, adapt and refine an effective campaign.

Smaller businesses generally conduct the PPC campaign in-house. To decide whether it makes sense to outsource, companies need to compare the amount of money they are going to spend on advertising to the amount they would need to spend on a PPC expert. For smaller companies, there will not be an adequate return on investment for outsourcing.

Outsourced PPC campaigns

Unless you have employed a PPC expert in-house (who will require a considerable salary) an outsourced expert will give you immediate access to knowledge and experience of the key
components of PPC, including:

• The relationship between the audience and your website
• Conversion issues
• Results analysis
• Setting up Adgroups and selecting keywords

Most large companies choose to outsource initially. This can save them wasting time and money on what would otherwise be trial and error. It also gives them a chance to recruit or develop in-house expertise.

Medium-sized business that are planning to spend reasonable sums on PPC advertising, benefit greatly from seeking advice from experts rather than incurring the costs of trying to teach themselves how PPC advertising works. New PPC entrants are at a disadvantage when they try to compete against other companies who have already optimised their sites and have successful PPC advertising campaigns in place. Experts can help bridge that gap.

A common adage of traditional advertising is that while only 50% of advertisements work, one can’t really determine which 50% is working. The major benefit of PPC over traditional advertising is that a company will actually be able to determine which advertisement is working. Unlike traditional advertising, PPC provides instant feedback and excellent reporting. However, the flipside to this is that a company needs expertise to understand and analyse the statistical reports. This is another area when an outsourced expert can provide real competitive advantage.

In-house or outsourced, PPC provides high-value customers

Many companies ‘dip their toe’ into the PPC advertising and then stop the campaign, claiming that ‘PPC doesn’t work.’ They fail to realise what experienced PPC advocates have discovered: PPC, like SEO, gives you access to high-value customers and clients, people who are proactively searching for your product or service, not just random punters. Provided the right keywords have been selected, when visitors arrives at your website they have already been to a large extent pre-qualified as the high-value potential customers sought by every company.