DIY or Outsource: When to Hire a Google Ads Manager

We all know that Google Ads Manager is a powerful tool, but do you know when it’s best to use it? If you are running ads for your own business, should you be doing this in-house or hiring help? This blog post will help answer these questions.

Generally speaking, if your company has been around for more than six months, and you’re seeing at least 10,000 unique visitors per month, it may be time to hire a Google Ads Manager or hire a consultant to provide one-on-one coaching for you.

There are many benefits to hiring an experienced professional from the start. Here are some of the main perks:

1. They will optimize your ads to perform better with less work and frustration on your part.
2. They are already certified by Google to run your ads.
3. They know how to set up proper conversion tracking. This turns your dashboard data into pure gold.
4. They will allow you to give your full attention to the business, instead of splitting it between ads manager and owner.
5. They will free up your time to do what really matters as a business owner. Create more original content and be of service to your customers.
6. They will stay on top of the ever-evolving trends and new innovations on the Google platform.
7. Media buyers work in multiple ad accounts. They can see what is working elsewhere and apply those strategies to your campaigns as well.
8. They can use their prior work experience to avoid wasting ad spending on campaign tactics that don’t deliver ROI.
9. They will know whether any conversion issues that arise are related to your ads versus your website/landing page.

There are also drawbacks to working with an outside freelance ads manager as well. Here is a list of what we’ve seen over time:

1. They don’t know your business and industry as well as you do unless they specialize in that niche. This means there will be a learning curve as they learn more about your business and industry.
2. They are given too much autonomy. Sometimes they activate ads without your approval (depending on the media buyer) and you might end up running ads that are inaccurate.
3. They monitor the negative keyword list and could potentially add a word or phrase to your negative keyword list that you do actually wish to be found for. This translates back to the first point about knowing your business/industry. Often good common sense is all that’s needed, but if you have a complex product/industry, it might be good to be more involved in this part of the campaigns as a weekly/monthly check-in.
4. They are only one person handling all of your marketing roles at one time. It’s important to hire different people for different areas of expertise. Or work with an agency that has multiple people to cover each speciality. 

Why Hire An Agency?

As an agency, when we take over ads management for businesses that have been managing their own ads, we perform an ad account audit and see some tactics that have been overlooked. 

Here are some examples of what we spend time improving for self-managed accounts.

Proper Conversion Tracking

It’s very important to get full visibility into the effectiveness of your ad campaigns. We set up conversion tracking for the end conversion event and we also set up tracking for micro-conversions along the way to the final conversion. 

Micro-conversions are the tiny indicators of conversion intent that website visitors provide that can be recorded. This enriches the marketing feedback loop of how your ads are performing.

Audience Targeting Review

One of the audiences that is often overlooked with self-managed accounts is retargeting audiences. We typically need to jump right in and start populating new audiences based on your recent website visitors that we can use for remarketing campaigns. 

We also review the audiences that are converting and ensure that the ad messaging is tailored effectively for them.

For keyword-based campaigns, we review the campaigns that have been built to determine whether there are any fresh new key phrases or words that have been overlooked. 

Competitive Review – Auction Insights

Who you think your competition is and who Google thinks your competition is, can be two completely different things. Google’s auction insights will tell you this once there is enough data populated. We have other tools we use in the meantime while your data accumulates but revisiting the auction insights once your ads have been running for a while can be very illuminating from a competitive standpoint.

Landing Page Experience and Conversion Rate

Maybe it’s your ads or maybe it’s your landing page that’s contributing to weak ad results. We will know the difference. There are specific benchmarks to follow for ad performance. If your ads meet those criteria, then we start looking at which landing page has been utilized for the campaign and whether it’s converting properly. We might switch the page or optimize the existing page depending on the scenario in order to bring in the best results.

The Final Word

We all know that there are many benefits to hiring an experienced professional from the start. But, what’s not often discussed is when you should hire someone else and when you can do it yourself. 

The truth is, hiring a digital marketing agency will actually save you time and money in the long run by making sure your on-site conversion tracking is properly set up (among many other things). Plus, they will be able to give some fresh advice about how to optimize your website because you’re often too close to the product/service to be completely objective. If that sounds like something worth exploring for your business’s needs, then contact us for a free consultation today.