PPC Management For 99 Pounds Per Month – Woohoo

PPC Management for £99 per month!

I’m sure you’ll agree that sounds awesome, you pay just £99 and a PPC Management Agency manages your pay per click account for you. We’ve seen other agencies offer ppc management for this super low fee and figured that we could too!

However it turns out that we can’t do that, there’s no way that we can manage an AdWords account properly for a client for just £99 per month, to provide the best ongoing account management for clients a percentage of spend model is best and is more cost effective in the long run as greater ROI is achieved, We could take £99 from businesses and firefight an account for them and by firefight I mean spend a couple of hours in there each month, tidy it up and then keep it from crashing and burning for as long as we could but £99 PPC management allows very little margin for actually managing PPC correctly and growing the account and increasing the ROI of it, with low fixed fee ppc it’s more a case of stopping an account from dying quickly by prolonging the spiral of decline over a longer timescale.

Realistically PPC agencies charging fixed fees like £99 (or less!!) per month for ppc management are probably spending less than 2 hours per month on a campaign or “white labelling” and farming work out to other agencies offshore and taking a fee for doing so, either that or their PPC managers are earning around minimum wage which makes one wonder how good they can be as quality ppc managers earn good money as the industry has a shortage of them.

The Numbers :
A good PPC Manager earns enough that he/she would need to be managing at least sixty £99 accounts for a company to be actually making profit after taking into account 28 days holiday, around 5 training days plus training costs, and a couple of days sick, account management tools fees, office and hardware costs etc. so realistically out of a 225 working days per year that means each month he/she has 17.6 days to work on 60 accounts, which averages just over 2 hours per account per month based on 9am-5pm working (and working non stop at that day in day out!), which includes all time spent on the account, running reports, doing research, competitor analysis, account management, client liaison, strategy etc.

The figures above would keep a ppc agency afloat assuming the ppc manager is a good one on a good salary, but agencies like this wouldn’t keep a good ppc account manager there for long as it’s just too many accounts to run properly, regardless of the salary, for a professional ppc manager as typically the really good ones (and why would you want anyone who isn’t really good working on your account!?) like to work with a smaller number of clients, typically between 5-20, where they can really get to know the client’s business and understand the issues that affect them and how best to achieve their business goals via PPC on AdWords, Yahoo, Bing, Facebook etc.

Consequently whilst there are many good account managers out there and no doubt some currently suffering/serving their time at low fixed price agencies, the really great ones tend to gravitate over time to ppc management agencies where a percentage of spend model is in place meaning that they can work in a more involved way with clients and really make a difference to their ppc results, for the really good ppc account managers the sense of job satisfaction comes from driving an account forward, boosting ROI and exceeding the clients expectations on an ongoing basis.

If you are offered fix fee PPC management for something like £99 or even less, then you need to really think about whether you’d like your ppc ‘managed’ by someone with just 2 hours to spare to do it each month or if a ppc management agency with resources to spend as much time as your account needs to generate the best ROI for your company is a better match.

As with most things in life cost is relative to results, paying £99 to stagnate is more expensive to your business than paying say £299 per month and having your ROI explode and with a percentage of spend payment model you’ll find that your ppc agency always has the time required to dedicate to moving your pay per click accounts forward every step of the way.

Be wary of any agency saying they can properly manage your PPC for low figures, sure a dentist site with 5o keywords and a handful of adgroups won’t take as much managing as a retail store with a thousand product lines but they both need a certain amount of time to do the job right and that doesn’t change according to the budget, it either gets done right or doesn’t as an agency needs enough budget for the time to correctly analyse, refine and make changes to the account, if there’s not enough time built in then it will not be done correctly, simple business maths!