Why DIY PPC Management is DTF

If you’re not familiar with the TLAs — that’s Three Letter Acronyms — ‘Why DIY PPC Management is DTF’ means “Why do it yourself pay per click management is doomed to fail.” In even plainer language, what that says is that if you’re trying to use pay-per-click advertising like Google Adwords and you don’t have expert help, you’re basically throwing money down a hole from which it will never return.

Don’t get me wrong – if you do have a solid PPC manager on your side, the instant and permanent first page placement that the “sponsored link” of Adwords gives you is one of the most valuable tools a startup web business can possibly have. With a webpage that converts well and the right PPC keywords under your belt, the profits come rolling in. The PPC management company will watch over your campaigns, seeing what keywords are scoring big and which are losers, continually adjusting your list and your bids so that you stay on top of the game.

And that’s the first big drawback of do-it-yourself PPC management: it takes a lot of time to do right. Pay-per-click requires a mountain of setup, and unlike traditional banner or classified ads, it doesn’t stop once you’re done with the setup. Bids on keywords change constantly, and some keywords can drop out of use quite suddenly with subtle changes in the marketplace. If you have enough time to do your own PPC management correctly, you can be virtually guaranteed that you’re neglecting some other part of your business in the process.

The second drawback is the sheer amount of data to be sorted through. For example, a good list of PPC keywords can be literally three or four hundred items long, and every one of those keywords has several attributes attached to it: searches per day, competing bids, conversions per click, and other numerical attributes as well as some qualitative aspects such as whether or not the phrase has “buying words” in it. The amount of expertise required to correctly interpret the mountain of information involved is extensive to say the least.

In short, if you want to get into the realm of pay-per-click advertising, get a good PPC management team on your side, or suffer the consequences.