Google Ads - can I outsource this to a professional ?

[Peter Reid]

Hi,

I run a family business which does a limited amount of delivery trade to existing clients but there is no real way for prospective new clients to find our services. Effectively, if you already know us then you know what we do or perhaps don't but if you don't know us, then it is unlikely you would ever find out what we could do for you.

I have looked at Google Ads and I am lost. I don't even think I want to get involved in that much work to learn about it in depth so I am asking whether this is something which can be successfully outsourced, where we pay a professional for their expertise in marketing our business via Google Ads.

If this type of B2B service exists and works, then approximately what sort of costs would it require monthly, to run the advertising via Google Ads. I'm not on about the advertising costs as a I assume that is hugely variable but to manage the process, what would that cost ?

Thanks

Peter

 

[AlanJ1]

I'm not on about the advertising costs as a I assume that is hugely variable but to manage the process, what would that cost ?

You are right that the advertising spend can vary so good to keep that out of the cost when looking to pay an agency to manage. But what type of budget do you have to spend? If this is small, most agencies wouldn't be interested as it wouldn't be worth there time.

In terms of retainers, a lot of this depends on who you speak too. I have had retainer costs at £250 up to £3000 for the same project.

 

[Solve My Problem]

David at Adgrow can help https://www.adgrow.com/

He has handled our adverts for over 10 years , as well as numerous clients.

Kind Regards
Darren

 

[Andy Harris]

Hello Peter,

As someone who has spent years with Google Ads, it's good to see you looking externally at what is a quite detailed area because it's a minefield that works in Google's favour (to those who haven't used it before).

I don't know your business but Google Ads works well for some but not so much for others. In some cases, paid ads on LinkedIn can get better results (depending on the target market).

My recommendation for you is this: keep it simple and measurable.

Your recommended starting point would be to do this:

1. Identify one of your website pages that is strong enough to convert clicks to enquiries (this is where most advertisers go wrong - not having a strong converting landing page).

2. Create an extremely small Google Ads campaign focused on one or two keywords (relevant to your market) and just one or two different adverts that trigger when those keywords are searched. For info, there's no more than 30 minutes work for someone to do that.

3. Spend no more than £100 on actual Google clicks initially. Important: ensure the Google Ads spend is from your own account so that you always own that account.

4. Measure closely what's gained from those clicks. For example, if clicks are £2 each then you would be assessing what happened to those 50 website visitors (in terms of enquiries gained).

5. Don't spend anymore budget until a reasonable amount of conversions is gained from the initial traffic.

There are some who would want you to spend loads on a full campaign setup, with numerous keywords and adverts etc. That's all good when you're ready for that. At this stage, I suggest a gentle dipping of a toe in the water and ensuring the landing page converts well.

This page of ours covers ROI from Google Ads in a bit more detail, if that's useful - https://a1webstats.com/what-it-does...-beyond-click-return-investment-basic-method/

 

[Alan]

Google Ads - can I outsource this to a professional ?

Yes

 

[Solve My Problem]

3. Spend no more than £100 on actual Google clicks initially. Important: ensure the Google Ads spend is from your own account so that you always own that account.

I would disagree with that advice all day long, you will never get enough data to make valued decisions. Data is king and data costs money, in the long run it will always pay off to spend more initially and make judgements based on the data nothing else.

Darren

 

[Peter Reid]

Someone asked about how much we wanted to spend. Whilst we would all love endless results for no outlay, I think the real answer would be that we would like any spending to be covered by profitable business.

Clearly, we would rather be spending £2000 a month to generate £20000 of business than spending £1000 a month to generate £5000 of business.

We just don't know how to evaluate the options and I guess we are scared of giving a third party seemingly endless money and not knowing what we are getting for it, just as we are scared of letting Google automate everything and presumably spend whatever advertising budget we give them.

 

[Michael Nguyen]

It's all about working out the metrics backwards first. With your figures, you're happy to spend £2k to get £10k which means your cost of acquisition is 10%.

Other figures to consider like what is your conversion rate ration? Are you 1 in 5 or 1 in 4? Lets say your conversion rate is 1 in 5. This means you need 5 leads to generate 1 deal.

If each deal cost is £2,000, this means you "should" be willing to spend UP TO £400 to get 1 lead (Assuming all leads that come in are of similar quality).

What will your website convert at to get 1 lead? 5% or 10%. Let's say it's 5%, this means you need 20 clicks before you get a lead.

So take £400 / 20 clicks = £20 MAX cpc. You can spend UP TO £20 to get 1 click in your market.

So your "model" to make this works assumes the following:

10x Revenue Goal
5% conversion rate on the website (20 clicks)
1:5 closing ratio (1 sale from 5 leads)
£20 max CPC

Management fees comes in many flavours:

Hourly rates (with agreed hours)
Fixed monthly based on ad spend
% split of revenue

The easiest is to just agree a fixed monthly fee based on your ad spend. If your ad spend is £2k, you might want to pay a management company 10-15% of that. No more. They will generally have a min fee ranging from £150-500pm depending on who you speak to.

Work with someone that can model numbers, life time value of a customer etc.

 

[fisicx]

Consider also that you can’t always scale. If you spend £1000 to get £10,000 then spending £100,000 doesn’t mean you get £1M. You may top out at £500k.

It also possible you get a great return for a couple of months then things die down once all potential customers have seen the adverts and got in contact.

 

[Andy Harris]

Data is king and data costs money, in the long run it will always pay off to spend more initially and make judgements based on the data nothing else

We'll have to agree to disagree. Even if more than £100 on clicks (say £200) that's plenty to determine whether the conversions are happening (assuming they are relatively low £1 or £2 clicks and it's not a long burn sales cycle of course). Who in their right mind will throw lots of budget on something, perhaps to be told "oh well, it didn't work that well - let's try and refine it".


People want some sort of guarantee that they'll get a return. I for one don't spend a penny on anyone (service-based) who isn't in a position to prove their worth via minimal investment.

 

[makeusvisible]

Just a point, as my opinion differs from some above, but no disrespect is meant, purely a different approach.

I work in a small agency environment, where one of my colleagues is our full time PPC manager. All she does, day in, day out is manage Google Ad accounts. Having sat across from her for 10 years, and lived with her for 15, I can tell you first hand that under no circumstance would I feel comfortable managing one of our client's Google Ads accounts.

Google Ads is complex in the nature of its size, the learning curve is not just steep.... it is never ending, because the systems and algorithms are constantly changing.

However, the most dangerous thing about Google Ads, is that by default, some options can leave you to sink budget into completely irrelevant traffic. And that money can disappear frighteningly fast.

What to me is even more worrying, is that Google occasionally add new features, enabled by default, which also can completely wipe-out your spend. You really need to understand the platform, and keep a constant eye on new features and developments. It's a full time job, and IMO someone running a full time business cannot possibly also have time to properly understand and implement a good Google ads campaign strategy.



I think you already drew the above conclusion.

The challenge with outsourcing, is you need to give the chosen 2 things;


1. Enough time on the account to make changes and improvements.

2. Enough data to base their improvements on.

If you are outsourcing, I would strongly advise on getting two things right from the get-go;

Budget - Set a decent budget which allows for enough volume

Targets - Agree a target cost-per-conversion and ensure the chosen provider can work towards it
In terms of budget, imagine your average cost per click is £1.50. That means for every £100 spent, your going to get 66 visitors. Let's say your campaign is split across 2 key goals/campaigns, thats 33 visitors per campaign, per £100.

To be able to make changes to a campaign, you need to understand what is working and what isn't. Without a decent volume of traffic to each campaign, you can't make valid judgments and changes.

Too low a budget will mean you simply dont have enough data to know what's working, and what isn't.

In terms of target. Setting a target cost per conversion allows your chosen provider to estimate at what level your site needs to convert at. If your spend is £1,000, and your target cost per conversion is £10, it means your website needs to convert at 10%. Having a target cost per conversion ensure that you and your provider are on the same page in terms of what you want, and what is achievable.

The last bit of advice I'd give, is ensure that your chosen provider is working with YOUR Google Ads account, and not their own. This will just protect you in the future, should you decide to change provider, you will still own and have access to the associated performance data.

Best of luck.

 

[fisicx]

@makeusvisible - I’ve never found it that complicated. I’ve never seen my budget disappear because of something google does. The hardest part is getting the landing page just right. But there again, I only ever do it for my own campaigns.

 

[Paul Carmen]

@Peter Reid The answer to your question is yes, it's standard industry practice to do this.

The questions however should be; is it worth doing this and how do you pick the right people or person to do it for you.

In reality, no one can answer these questions without further detail from you; e.g.

• what's your marketing plan and customer/market details and demographic - a marketing plan should be part of this process; e.g. what are you trying to achieve, as this will help determine how the campaigns should be built to target the right customers and profitable products/services
• what are the USPs; e.g. why would a customer buy from you, use your services etc - you need to convince people to click on the advert, then to contact you about the service or purchase the products
• what are the services, products etc that you're trying to generate leads/sales for - as this will determine the keyword strategy, CPCs (cost per click) etc
• how well does your site convert currently, you need decent data here from any existing marketing and your organic traffic etc - as this is a key driver of the success, if you don't convert well now then its unlikely that PPC will work that well
• who does the website work and how easy is it to add pages/make changes - a key part of this working and delivering ROI is landing pages quality (both for Google keyword Quality Score and usability/conversion), plus the usability of the site. You'll almost certainly need to add or make changes to landing pages
• do you know where your leads/sales come from now; do you track all points of contact; e.g. phone calls, form fills, emails, sales etc - as this is key to knowing where to put resource and to measure whether the PPC works. If not, you need to budget for putting this in place as part of the PPC programme

The good news is the right person/company should be able to go through the options with you and model the processes based on keyword costs, click through rate (CTR), conversion rates etc, with a reasonable amount of accuracy. This will show you the ROI at various CPCs, CTRs, and conversion rates.

The caveat here is that although any qualified Google Ads professional/company has access to this data, and should be able to say whether this is something that looks like it would work, it needs to be worth their while. They will be unlikely to do this for a small or very short project.

They should be honest with you as part of this process, as if you're trying to sell products/services that are far too dear compared to the market, its unlikely to succeed unless there is a really compelling reason to use you. Equally, if the website doesn't work well, or needs lots of work to ensure you convert and track leads, then they should be clear about that too.

 

[Fagin2021]

Someone asked about how much we wanted to spend. Whilst we would all love endless results for no outlay, I think the real answer would be that we would like any spending to be covered by profitable business.

Clearly, we would rather be spending £2000 a month to generate £20000 of business than spending £1000 a month to generate £5000 of business.

We just don't know how to evaluate the options and I guess we are scared of giving a third party seemingly endless money and not knowing what we are getting for it, just as we are scared of letting Google automate everything and presumably spend whatever advertising budget we give them.

If it helps I've put together an 8 minute video that answers many of your questions. You can find it here
https://www.rossdawson.uk/google-ads.html The video is a bit out-of-date but the principles are valid.

FWIW I'd agree with @Solve My Problem that £100 or £200 isn't nearly enough to generate sufficient clicks or conversions to draw any meaningful conclusions from the data.

Whatever option you choose, don't be talked into a 'Smart' campaign or let Google set it up for you (automatically or via one of their small business advisors). As @makeusvisible has said, you'll end up spending most of your budget on irrelevant keywords and targeting.

 

[aashisk2323]

Hi,

I run a family business which does a limited amount of delivery trade to existing clients but there is no real way for prospective new clients to find our services. Effectively, if you already know us then you know what we do or perhaps don't but if you don't know us, then it is unlikely you would ever find out what we could do for you.

I have looked at Google Ads and I am lost. I don't even think I want to get involved in that much work to learn about it in depth so I am asking whether this is something which can be successfully outsourced, where we pay a professional for their expertise in marketing our business via Google Ads.

If this type of B2B service exists and works, then approximately what sort of costs would it require monthly, to run the advertising via Google Ads. I'm not on about the advertising costs as a I assume that is hugely variable but to manage the process, what would that cost ?

Thanks

Peter

I would advise you to hire your inhouse team but if thats not possible for you at present than hiring a good professional with good experience will help too.

 

[capacitum.com]

Professionals usually charge a % of spend or a minimum fee which ever is greater.

 

[Ditso]

Choosing the right company/person is a real minefield.

Many years ago I "self taught" myself to use AdWords. I was terrible at first but when it's your money you're burning, you learn fast.

That's always my issue with agencies. It's never their money they're setting on fire.

Most ad agencies love to quote the old saying, "Half my advertising spend is wasted; the trouble is, I don't know which half."

It might be funny to them but most business owners don't find it amusing.

If you can find a good one then that's great as I'm a big believer in AdWords generally.

Just make sure every click through and sale is fully tracked to ensure you're getting a good ROI.

Ensure you get regular reports and always be asking about, click through rates, costs per click and conversion rates etc.

They should be continually split testing Ads FOREVER. Most just knock up a few ads and split test a couple then leave it on "set and forget" and expect you to keep paying.

GL with it.

 

[myresellerhome]

If you're not experienced with Google Ads, it can be difficult to know where to start and how to create an effective campaign. This is where a professional Google Ads management service can help. A good management service will help you create a campaign that targets your customers and meets your business goals. They can also help you optimize your campaign for the best results, and provide support and advice if you have any questions or problems. Outsourcing your Google Ads management can be a great way to save time and money, and get the most out of your advertising budget.

 

[UkAppCoder]

I'm a complete novice when it comes to online advertising, so it would be useful if the experts could confirm the following, and perhaps point out any catches. Don't worry, I've got me flame-proof undies on!

If you could manage to start with £400, then Google say they will match it with a further £400:

Reach Customers & Sell More with Online Advertising - Google Ads

Discover how online advertising campaign with Google Ads can help grow your business. Reach customers and sell more with our digital advertising platform.

ads.google.com

There are some terms and conditions.

Like you, @Peter Reid, I don't have time for advertising, so I searched for a super-fast guide on Google Ads. I found this:

How to Set Up a Campaign In Google Ads: 7 Steps to Follow

Read this beginner's guide to getting started with Google Ads. Follow these 7 simple steps to start advertising in Google today!

www.mainstreetroi.com

I now consider myself an experienced expert professional in Google Ads, and I just know that at last I'm on my way to my first million!

However, I expect some spoil-sports will disagree and shortly bring me back down to earth!

Seriously though, I was thinking of spending £100 to start with so that I can learn a little more and gain some experience. After this, I reckon I should be able to make the most of that Google offer, assuming it's still around when I start properly.

 

[Peter Reid]

Well, a baptism of fire this is but thank you for all your comments and advice.

Why do I get the feeling when talking to some of these clever advertising folks that they'd like me to pay for their swanky offices instead of functional work spaces, Apple computers instead of equally but less hip desktop PCs and simply believe all their arguments rather than question their suggestions.

Like someone said, they are very free spending your money but none are willing to gamble any of their own money and give you a service based on results. No, you have to hand them a blank cheque and then take the pain if their expensive suggestions fail to materialise.

I think in the next life I am coming back in advertising as it is a licence to sell the emperor's new clothes and not even have to lie about it.

From the couple of conversations I have had, here seem to be the two options.

Option 1 - pay them a fairly high fixed fee plus a percentage of spend

Option 2 - pay them a fairly high fixed fee

Option 3 - there is no Option 3

There is no PAYG, no upfront cost without ongoing high maintenance costs and no guarantees that they aren't just useless at their job.

Maybe we haven't found the right person yet but perhaps the right person is hiring someone to work for us, or a bright kid at university who can set it up, run it and teach some of us how to do it ?

I'm just not sure handing over cash for magic beans type promises makes sense to me and I guess until I find someone who is willing to back up their claims with some risk for their reward then we're not going to be handing over money for (potentially) nothing.

 

[UkAppCoder]

Well, a baptism of fire this is but thank you for all your comments and advice.

Why do I get the feeling when talking to some of these clever advertising folks that they'd like me to pay for their swanky offices instead of functional work spaces, Apple computers instead of equally but less hip desktop PCs and simply believe all their arguments rather than question their suggestions.

Like someone said, they are very free spending your money but none are willing to gamble any of their own money and give you a service based on results. No, you have to hand them a blank cheque and then take the pain if their expensive suggestions fail to materialise.

I think in the next life I am coming back in advertising as it is a licence to sell the emperor's new clothes and not even have to lie about it.

From the couple of conversations I have had, here seem to be the two options.

Option 1 - pay them a fairly high fixed fee plus a percentage of spend

Option 2 - pay them a fairly high fixed fee

Option 3 - there is no Option 3

There is no PAYG, no upfront cost without ongoing high maintenance costs and no guarantees that they aren't just useless at their job.

Maybe we haven't found the right person yet but perhaps the right person is hiring someone to work for us, or a bright kid at university who can set it up, run it and teach some of us how to do it ?

I'm just not sure handing over cash for magic beans type promises makes sense to me and I guess until I find someone who is willing to back up their claims with some risk for their reward then we're not going to be handing over money for (potentially) nothing.

Never a truer word spoken, @Peter Reid.

I've been through it a couple of times, and have now decided to do it myself. I will come to this forum if/when I get stuck because there are some very good people around here.

If you have some spare time, then I would invest some of it in learning about online advertising. Once the penny starts dropping on some of the main concepts, then it really does start getting easier. For example, matching product features, customer types, landing page copy, etc. was quite difficult for me up until recently, but I think I'm top of it now.

I've chosen Facebook Ads and Google Ads to start with. I won't be starting any campaigns for about another three months anyway, but I'm going to set aside some time for training each week.

I have found the sticky post by @AllUpHere, along with various messages around UKBF by @fisicx and @Paul Carmen particularly helpful, but there are other UKBF members who have also been helpful.

All the best with it!

David

 

[Talay]

I would advise you to think carefully about outsourcing because whilst it undoubtedly takes away the initial pain, there is a significant cost and potentially some difficulty in changing direction later.

My experience is different to your though. I already had Google Ads in place with a company I bought and as Google changed the goalposts, it became harder to just adapt what was already there to the new requirements and I didn't have time to go learn the basics. So we researched and found someone and we've been largely very happy with it and we've done other business with them.

However, there is only so much water you can wring out of a damp cloth. In the beginning, huge gains and improvements are made and your situation improves and sales roll in but over time, the increases in returns fade away but you are still left with a monthly invoice.

Everyone you meet will say that they are constantly refining the adverts, alpha and beta testing etc. but this is not Formula One and my car on the driveway works just as well 3 months after a service as the day after a service. It does not need adjustments made week by week and when it doesn't work as well as it should, then that is time to call the mechanic.

The alternative is to pay a mechanic £100s or £1000s a month to try to get another X% performance from your engine but that extra X% can result in sales below the cost of achieving it.

In the end I think you perhaps have 5 choices.

1. You learn and do it yourself or you have those skills from someone within your company
2. You outsource to a monthly service without control over the incremental returns
3. You outsource setup and buy in help on demand without a monthly contract
4. You outsource setup and buy a low cost maintenance contract (if this exists) with on demand additional help
5. You do nothing

My advice would be to do nothing until you understand how to do it yourself because otherwise, you cannot judge the services you are being offers by third parties and you will not understand how to change direction.

However, it is doubtful you can learn it all yourself to a level to do it at a professional level or have enough time or skill to maintain that level of knowledge.

I would refuse a long term contract as there should be no need. If the supplier is good at their job then why would you want to replace them and if they are not holding up their end, you sure as hell don't want to be tied to a contract. The caveat here is a low cost maintenance contract which keeps the wheels turning, even if performance degrades a little. You then add on professional assistance on demand when required.

In my view, this gives you the best of both worlds. A professional setup which you can understand and where you can stop them overreaching because you know enough to monitor them and qualified help on demand to either retune the engine or to do further development. But no hefty annual contract where the monthly improvements are fractions of the monthly costs.

 

[makeusvisible]

A very good article has been published on this topic here;

https://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/...WklFFWsxcAkccga96McN4mNQRvh9PxJT4lC0-W-cqCKTM