PPC Agency Vs In-House Management: Which One Is Right For You?

Finding the best way to manage your PPC campaigns can provide amazing results for your business… 


For many businesses, PPC is an essential part of their marketing strategy, often delivering immediate results that work towards increasing revenue. However, to get the best results out of your campaigns, it’s important to ensure your PPC campaigns are managed correctly and efficiently.  

In this blog, we will be looking into the differences between PPC agencies and in–house PPC management to help you make an informed decision on how you would like to progress with your PPC campaigns.  

1. Cost

PPC advertising will always come with a cost to your business. This is due to the nature of this advertising option since you have to pay a certain amount to have your ad appear on different platforms. However, there are also costs associated with the management of your PPC campaigns. 

With in–house PPC management, you often have to invest large amounts. For example, you must pay the salary of your PPC team. Depending on the size of your team or the level of expertise you have, this could equate to a large amount every month. On top of this, you may also need to invest in additional training for your team to ensure they’re equipped with all the knowledge they need to do a great job with your campaigns.  

On the other hand, an agency is often 20% – 30% of in–house costs, depending on the size and scope of the business. To deliver standardised monthly fees, a PPC agency will often use tiered pricing scales. In this situation, the percentage paid to the agency will adjust according to the total budget.  

The cost to implement a system such as this is often less than what it would take for one person to spend half a day per week, every week, on reporting. This helps to save valuable business resources including time and money.  

2. Resources required

There are plenty of business resources that are required when it comes to PPC management. Below are some of the essential resources for PPC managers: 

Training

  • Google Skillshop
  • Microsoft Ads training 
  • Facebook/Instagram Ads training (if targeting consumers)
  • LinkedIn Ads training (if targeting businesses) 

 Tools

  • Google AdWords Ad Preview and diagnostics tool
  • Google AdWords keyword planner
  • SEMrush
  • Google Analytics 

 Community

  • Google AdWords community
  • Google Analytics community 

To successfully manage your PPC campaigns in house, you need a dedicated team with the correct skill sets. 

Regarding in–house teams, if you are able to focus on the items that drive the results instead of just reporting and manual tasks, then you can react faster and do more high–value work. 

PPC agencies have the ability to manage all of this under one retainer, as well as often having access to innovative technologies to ensure the best results for their clients.  

3. Learning curves

There is a steep learning curve involved with grasping the concepts of every single platform and the different types of ads.  

For example, to be an efficient PPC manager, you must fully understand the following platforms: 

  • Google Ads 
  • Bing/Microsoft Ads 
  • Facebook / Instagram and/or LinkedIn 

Each platform presents its own set of rules, as well as different types of advertising options. For example, you can choose from text ads, display ads and shopping ads, to name but a few.

Depending on your business and the type of products or services you’re looking to sell, you need to have a strong understanding of these ad types to ensure you’re picking the most effective one for your business. 

4. Risks

There are some risks that are associated with in–house PPC management. Take a small engineering firm, for example. They may only have around 10/20 employees in their internal department, but they have decided they would like some digital marketing. To do this, they may decide to hire somebody in house. 

Typically, in this scenario, the type of person hired would be just starting out and might not initially have the skills they need to manage the PPC activity effectively. The business may then have to invest in training and development to cater to the learning curve. 

After a year or two, the individual may have increased their skills and understanding and are therefore more effective. What could happen here is that the person then leaves the firm, taking all that knowledge with them. The firm is then left to rehire for that position, having to repeat the process of hiring, training, and developing a PPC specialist all over again.  

In addition to this, managing someone in a field that you may not fully understand yourself is very difficult – it is hard to know what’s a good job and what is not, and this is a big issue associated with in–house management. 

For larger companies using in house, you typically need a more diverse skillset for a bigger budget. Generally, there are three main areas of skillsets in PPC:

  1. Management – deals with statistics, finance management and business logic 
  2. Technical – setting up integrations, making sure data flows, make sure tracking is right (which can get quite involved technically) 
  3. Creative – includes creating ad copy, relying on writing skills and sales psychology
     

It can be very rare that you can find one individual who fits all those boxes, which means you will need an entire team to handle those areas as well as the reporting aspect.  

Working with an agency that has the right technology and tools, such as Diginius Insight, can provide the stability and support you need so that you have transparency with all the data, metrics, and reporting. Also, if you experience internal staff changes, you still have the stability of an external partner. 

If you’re an in–house team that needs tools, you can use software that automates a lot of the reporting function that gives additional tools and automation. 

Finance directors should be aware that you can do this in different ways: 

  • In house with tools 
  • In house manually 
  • With an agency that doesn’t have tools, doesn’t provide transparency, that doesn’t report 
  • Or you can do it with an agency that gives full transparency with dashboards and regularly emailed reporting and a technical solution in addition to this 

Are you looking for the perfect PPC agency?

Diginius is a PPC marketing agency that can provide the necessary skills and expertise to run profitable PPC campaigns for businesses of various shapes and sizes. From medium-sized businesses to larger enterprises, we can apply our years of extensive knowledge and experience to get you the results you need.   

Simply get in touch with us today for more information on how we can take your PPC marketing to the next level.  

Chester Yang is the Microsoft Program Manager at Diginius with a background in economics and quantitative research.  

At Diginius, Chester focuses on nurturing partnerships with PPC agencies and integrating marketing and sales solutions.