You might consider outsourcing the management of your Pay-Per-Click Campaigns if one or more of the following are true for you:

• You expect the monthly cost to be in the thousands of dollars or higher.
• Your product or service is available in a sufficiently large geographic area.
• You have hundreds or thousands of potential keywords.
• You have tried paid search and couldn’t make it profitable.

While I’ve never outsourced the management of my own PPC campaigns, I can certainly see how using this type of service would be incredibly beneficial. Anyone who has used Pay-Per-Click on a large scale knows that it can be quite time consuming to put together and manage a profitable advertising campaign…

From keyword research to keyword grouping and ad-writing, setting up a PPC campaign alone will take a substantial amount of time. Add in the tracking, testing and tweaking and it becomes a full-time job in itself if you have a large campaign.

For smaller campaigns, managing it in-house is definitely the way to go. You can pick up an easy-to-follow guide and set up super-profitable campaigns yourself. Even if you plan to outsource later, it pays to get a feel for the market and the response and to know how the process works.

I have given the bulk of the work on my own campaigns to personal assistants in the past - mainly researching every angle of the market, creating huge keyword lists, sorting that list into relevant groups, etc. But I’ve always wondered if it might not be easier and more profitable on me in the long run to outsource the entire project to a PPC Management Agency, such as Apogee.

Apogee offers a full-featured paid search management service, and they also have a whitepaper on their website titled “Avoid PPC Advertising Agency Malpractice“. This is something I’m looking into, and I’d love to hear from those of you that are familiar with Apogee or that have used similar companies for outsourcing the management of your PPC campaigns.

Do you manage your own campaigns (large or small)? Would you consider outsourcing the task? If so, which solution appeals to you most - a personal assistant or a professional SEM agency? I’d love to hear your thoughts, concerns… and of course your personal experiences.

Tags: ppc, pay-per-click, adwords, outsourcing, ppc management