The Marketing Sherpa Paid Search Agency Buyer’s Guide, in addition to sharing awesome search engine marketing agency advice, published some tips to help marketers decide about whether or not to even hire a paid search agency. Some nuggets that should be paid attention to, along with some commentary:

• You should not hire an agency if you have a small budget. This is absolutely true, since the agency will take 15% or more of your budget, which leaves you with even less to spend on search clicks themselves. Plus, most agencies typically look for clients spending at least $10K/month in paid search.
• Campaigns not using trackable metrics or measurable goals should not hire an agency. We might even say, companies not doing either of these, shouldn’t necessarily even do paid search! PPC marketing is so trackable, that it is easy to get the biggest bang for your budget by refining your efforts based on results. Why spend money on text ads that will be the equivalent to display advertising and branding, but without the quality visual elements seen in display ads?
• If you can’t build or tweak a landing page, don’t hire an agency. Again, we might go further and say “don’t do paid search.” To fully optimize paid search, you should be testing and making refinements to your landing pages based on the performance of your tested versions. In fact, all online marketing should be tested in this way. But we’re not in a perfect world, so… The problem here is, if you hire an agency to do your search campaign, they will very likely ask you to make changes to your landing page that would help performance. If you can’t make these changes, then what’s the point?

For some marketers an agency is not a consideration because they don’t qualify for the service (due to minimum spend requirements) or because they are themselves a full-time search engine marketer for a company. Those people may not be in the market for hiring an agency, but may want some SEM help by using one of the paid search management tools. (continued in Part 2- coming soon.)

Posted in: Blogroll | SEM Agencies