Recommend an Adwords Consultant

[LancashireLad]

Hi,

I recently setup a new website (my second website) and was looking for an adwords expert to cast an eye over it and see if they can suggest improvements on my google adwords account. Just to be clear i don't want someone to run the adwords account (tried this before and it was a disaster).

Whilst i have a fairly good understanding of google adwords i feel a fresh pair of eyes will be a great help in moving forward. My current adwords spend is around £2500 a month which i am looking to grow up to £6000 over the coming months.

However before i invest this money in adwords i want to ensure i can get the best possible return on my funds both from the google adwords account and from my landing pages on the website.

If you can recommend a good adwords consultant or are one for yourself then i would love to hear from you.

Thanks

SK

 

[NirvanaTech]

You do understand the economics behind it all, firstly in most cases Adwords is useless, you have to target the long tail keywords, your competitors, and your own name, going for any mass market is painful, you can read this on reddit bit.ly 2qhbViL

Next, do you understand lifetime customer value vs customer acquisition cost, most don't not even the 'experts'. Amazon is $2,500:$160 or 15:1 for Prime and 6:1 non-Prime, the industry believes you are doing very well if you generate 3:1 to 5:1, the larger the spread the less work for more revenue. Google quote their CPA at around $50 for eCommerce, meaning you need a lifetime customer value of $200 to hit median, just convert to GBP, the ratios are the same.

If you spend £2,500 per month you need to look for £7,000-10,000 revenue, the whole marketing and Adwords arena is very simple when you use the correct stats, unfortunately it's also not pleasant reading so most just ignore it, especially if they're providers.

 

[Chris Ashdown]

What a useless Generalisation, how much do you know about the OP's industry and market

 

[Varun sharma]

I know a guy who is pretty good with Google AdWords and offers paid marketing consultation. Hired him for one of my clients and he did an ace job. Has over 7 years of industry experience. Actually, saved my client a lot of ad spend by sharing unique strategies. His Twitter handle: amitsharma720 . Mention my name and he will give a look to your requirements. Cheers!

 

[fisicx]

You do understand the economics behind it all, firstly in most cases Adwords is useless.

What complete twaddle.

 

[Tin]

If you can recommend a good adwords consultant

Steve Gibson - http://www.bothsidesoftheclick.co.uk/ - been sending him to clients for the last 10 years. Pick up the phone to him, you can't go wrong.

 

[LancashireLad]

@NirvanaTech i have been using adwords for over 3 years now and has been key to my business growth - so i would strongle disagree with it being "useless". It definitely works for my business i am just looking at how i can improve further as whilst i do adwords myself i am sure there are areas i can improve in.

@Varun sharma thanks for your recommendation i will look him up

@Tin again thanks for the recommendation.

 

[Toni Anicic]

Since this is in e-comemrce forum I'll plug a shameless self promotion here as we're really specialized in eCommerce AdWords account set-up, optimization, and management, especially on Magento platforms - http://inchoo.net/services/ecommerce-ppc-management/

 

[Website Design Ltd]

More than happy to help, although I realise I am a little late to the party now! But feel free to check us out: https://www.websitedesign.co.uk/services/marketing/

I am the senior digital marketer here, so happy to answer any questions, and offer any advice.

Do get in touch, and I would love to know what industry it is you are selling in!

 

[antropy]

Drop [email protected] an email, he's AdWords Certified and would be happy to do a review of the account for you.

 

[wevet]

When someone says they are looking to grow their adwords spend from £2500 to £6000 would say you are looking at it quite wrongly. If you spend to date has shown a direct correlation between spend and growth carry on a spend, spend, spend. However, that, in my experience is rarely the case.

Personally I spend about £3k per month (during my quiteter months) on adwords in the winter but in the spring/summer and early autumn I reduce my spend to around £1,500 per month. My target is to spend as little as possible on adwords whilst not impacting on my volume of profitable business.

So, if you have a degree of seasonality or supply constraints manage those by reducing or as I do frequently n the Summer, completely turn off the adwords spend.

Adwords is important but not the be all in marketing my advice is to look and see if that additional marketing spend could not be more profitably used in other types of marketing.

My experience of adwords consultants and I have used 2 or 3 before I came my senses are an expense you can live without. Why should a consultant's fee be geared to a % of your spend. Does it really require so much more time for work a £3k spend rather than a £6k spend?

My advice is spend a long weekend absorbing all you can about adwords and do it yourself. If you do make errors it unlikely to cost you as much as the onging cost of a consultant whose % increases with your spend.

Now, if I had a consultant come to me and say, I will reduce your adwords spend by x% without impacting on your business and I will take x% fee great!

If I had someone say I will increase your sales but I will not increase your level of spend and if I do not I will not charge great!

But that is not what happens. People who cast themselves as "experts" look at your adwords campaigns, sell you on what is wrong with your campaigns, and then tinker. Making a charge no matter what the outcome. I had an "expert" from one of the largest such consultants who peppered my adwords account with so many irrelevant terms that he wrecked my adwords budget within a matter of days.

It is not rocket science to learn and if you miss a couple of bits any slight waste of money or slight loss of business is likely to be substantially less than any "experts" fees.

 

[Chris Ashdown]

My thinking now is that its only you who fully understands your company and how it works.

Adwords gives you a lot of data which both helps and confuses you at the same time

Consultants will seldom understand your business and therefore can spend your money on the wrong keywords, or landing pages and also work based upon average order values, which is a massively wide area, where as your margins will vary with different products in different area's, if for instance they worked upon my High Visibility range this varies from a couple of Pound items, to over one hundred pounds, so a section in this area needs to be broken down into individual product level, whilst others sections may be happily done at section level

How much time will outside help spend on the differences and how much time will they actually spend on your site, if they charge you say £500 a month, I would expect them to spend at least a few days per month working on the site rather than look after 30 accounts and have a glance at your account once a week

 

[mtools]

My thinking now is that its only you who fully understands your company and how it works.

Adwords gives you a lot of data which both helps and confuses you at the same time

Consultants will seldom understand your business and therefore can spend your money on the wrong keywords, or landing pages and also work based upon average order values, which is a massively wide area, where as your margins will vary with different products in different area's, if for instance they worked upon my High Visibility range this varies from a couple of Pound items, to over one hundred pounds, so a section in this area needs to be broken down into individual product level, whilst others sections may be happily done at section level

How much time will outside help spend on the differences and how much time will they actually spend on your site, if they charge you say £500 a month, I would expect them to spend at least a few days per month working on the site rather than look after 30 accounts and have a glance at your account once a week

Totally agree with this. It's good to get a company to set up the campaigns (especially shopping if your products are suitable in an ecommerce setting) and then take over yourself. I have some products which I buy for 60p and sell for £4 and others which I buy for £18 and sell for £65 so the amount I'd be willing to spend on getting a sale is vastly different - so it makes sense for me to run the campaigns myself. I had a company run them for about a year and a half and I was probably getting £2,500 in sales for every £1,000 spend but then also having to pay £300 / month for them to run. In the last month of me running them myself my sales have gone up to 3x ad spend and i'm not paying anyone a management fee. It takes me half an hour once a week to see how my changes have gone and make adjustments accordingly. Appreciate that this is taking the topic off in a tangent so apologies for this!

 

[LancashireLad]

Thanks for all the replies.
Just to clarify i want to run my own adwords account. The only thing i require is if someone can cast an eye over my account to see if i have missed anything obvious or some sort of best practise that i am missing.

I once gave my account to a company to run and it was a complete disaster and it isn't something that i would ever want to do again.

 

[Ecomirl]

There are 2 companies I have worked with previously to optimise my adwords performance - Digital22 and Core Optimisation - give them a call.