How do you adwords?

February 2, 2012 7:09 AM

CALLING ALL SEM SPECIALISTS: How do you scope out a large SEM (google adwords) campaign? How do you anticipate how much it will cost per month and how many hours will be put toward it? This is from an agency perspective.

We're a very small traditional ad agency that is slowly trying to take on more digital work. I have a very rough idea of how to run PPC campaigns - I've successfully run Facebook campaigns and a very small campaign for a family friends small business a long time ago (think 100 dollars per month small), so I'm no pro and am really rusty.

A client has about a 30k budget for the year...I don't even know where to begin. They did it last year with another vendor - do you request their current keyword list? Ask for how much they were spending per month last year? Then what?

Do we offer to work off of their account so we can keep all the current reporting data? Or do we transfer everything to our own account? Do you charge per hour, or take commission? I'm just clueless.

I realize this is no million dollar budget but I've still never worked with a campaign this large. Is there any sort of step-by-step guide to this sort of thing?

I feel confident that I can run the campaign itself (bidding on terms, pausing terms that are too expensive/wasteful, etc) - but the "business" side of it, I'm completely lost. If anyone is a pro at this - or has any good websites that offer really crystal clear guidelines on this sort of thing - I'd be really interested in hearing about it.

posted by windbox to Work & Money (1 answer total)

Wouldn't you want to work out of the current Adwords account in order to maintain your quality score and reduce prices? It's probably a good idea to request the keyword list, and then find out from the client (as opposed to the old agency) what was working and what was not, and then revamp the keywords. You would also need to know what the monthly ad spend was, versus the administrative cost. Ideally, you're going to bring admin costs down (this is probably why they switched vendors).

There's other things to consider as well, such as how competitive they are (what are they selling? how much competition is there?) plus things like how well-designed the landing pages are, and if there are compelling reasons for conversion.

Anyway, this Hubspot blog post has a lot of links to different facets of Adwords. Good luck!
posted by KokuRyu at 9:56 AM on February 2, 2012