A good friend of mine, and small business owner, recently informed me he was considering starting an online lead generation business for his brick and mortar financial lending company. Without prior pay-per-click (PPC) advertising experience, he wanted to focus on using Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM) to get his leads. While YSM does provide quality traffic and is a great potential source for online lead generation, a small business owner with no previous internet marketing experience could have considerable difficulty navigating Yahoo!’s advertising platform, optimizing campaigns, maintaining conversion levels, and maximizing ROI.
So when does a business decide to take PPC into its own hands?
In this particular case, I offered my services free of charge to my friend. It’s not that I felt he couldn’t learn PPC management, but with his limited amount of available time combined with the immediate time table in which he wanted to launch his advertising, it would be most effective for him to allow me to help him execute his plans.
PPC is not extremely difficult to learn for an internet savvy individual, someone willing to learn about the industry who is available to conduct the proper market research…not to mention, spend ample amounts of time testing. PPC management is a valuable skill that any interested person could learn, however many business owners don’t have the necessary time to invest in mastering what is a true specialization. Things to think about when considering launching your own PPC campaigns are:
* How much time will it take you to learn PPC management?
* How quickly do you plan to launch your ad campaigns?
* How much time do you feel you’ll need per week to manage your campaigns, and do you have this time available?
* How well do you understand your audience and your competition?
* What main keywords are you competing for?
* What is your monthly PPC budget? What is your expected ROI?
* What are the benefits of managing PPC yourself versus hiring a specialist? And vice versa?
* What is your maximum CPA (cost-per-acquisition) spend per lead?
* How do you plan to minimize ad spend waste?
These are a few questions to weigh when considering adding online advertising to your marketing plan. Our advice on when to take PPC into your own hands is when you are certain you or someone in your business has the available time to invest in learning PPC and all the details of what it takes to manage this type of account. However, just “doing” online advertising by publishing some advertising campaigns isn’t the best strategy and isn’t in the best interest of your company.
Keep in mind that online advertising is similar to any other advertising venture, meaning you do have to spend money to make money. Your decision lies in whether some of the money spent will be invested in your own time or in someone else’s.