On Monday, December 7, I will be speaking at Search Engine Strategies Chicago. My session is Point/Counterpoint: DIY SEM - The Pros & Cons, where we will discuss when and if you should bring PPC in-house. Joining me on this panel are two other great minds: Maia Benson with LexisNexis and Ryan Gibson of The Rimm-Kaufman Group.
If you plan on being there please let me know. I would love to catch with as many people as possible while there.
As noted, the 3 of us will be discussing pay-per-click. As in-house search marketer, I often have a different prospective than agencies. Whenever possible, I encourage bringing pay-per-click inside the company.
As posted on eMarketingandCommerce.com in November, below are my top 5 Reasons to Keep SEM In-House
1. Direct relationships with search engines. Monthly or weekly calls with leading search engines can provide your company an inside track into enhancements, news and optimization suggestions. In addition, through close conversation and communication, an in-house team often can let a search giant like Google handle the grunt work while it focuses on strategic and promotional needs.
2. No agency management. Managing an SEM agency requires maintaining hours and costs associated with workloads. To assure your pay-per-click campaigns are running properly, manage your SEM agency. Weekly calls and reporting are often needed. With this time dedication and effort, you might as well put that same effort — and training — into your employees.
3. Ability to make quick changes. To maintain global marketing messages, PPC campaigns should change with the company. That often means featuring seasonal changes or last-minute deals. Working with an agency can make these changes difficult, because you have to work within the constraints of its workload. Agencies, despite what they may say, have other clients. This sharing of agency time often causes delays in execution.
4. You know your company. Many search marketing companies hide behind a cloak of mystery. They want you to think that the PPC world is dangerous, scary and way too complicated for your in-house brain. Yes, paid search is time consuming and often difficult, but it’s not a mysterious black-magic science.
With the right staffing and funding, you can handle PPC in-house. Your employees can be more effective than the most skilled PPC agency. You know your company and industry best. Sure, all this knowledge can be transferred to an agency with frequent conversations. However, those frequent conversations require time and money. That’s time that can be better spent in-house.
5. Access to data. PPC marketing is an accelerated method of gaining customer information. By having this information in-house, you can make educated decisions based on your consumers’ behaviors through PPC marketing. Paid search provides keyword knowledge to target for search engine optimization efforts.
By seeing which keywords your users are typing in and, more importantly, which keywords are converting, you can take those keywords into your SEO campaigns. This eliminates a lot of the guesswork in SEO. It allows you to focus on the converting keywords.
PPC also provides insight into consumer language. Marketers often get caught up in their own industry speak and acronyms. PPC reporting cuts straight through to customers’ mind-sets.
Tags: chicago, in-house, Pay Per Click, PPC, search engine strategies, SES, Speaking
December 8th, 2009 at 1:38 am
Good luck with the presentation John.