The right way is to do it yourself first. But make sure you have conversion tracking, so that you know the basic metrics. For instance, if you are doing PPC for sign-ups, how much are you paying per sign-up.
Then you try to improve it, by either cut Cost per acquisition (CPA), and/or increase your volume of acquisitions.
Increase volume of acquisition is always harder. Most people only know little bit of Search, but Content and Retarget works great too. A lot of product are so new that no body is searching for it, so there are challenges.
You should try this yourself until you hit your bottleneck, e.g. can't increase volume without a much bigger CPA, then you should try find a good agency that can bring your PPC to a whole new level. And it's better doing it now, because you already know your basic metrics, and it will be easy to judge is an agency is doing a good job or not.
Judging by the people who commented there, my feeling is that few of them really had the experience of spending serious PPC money PROFITABLY.
A good ppc program is a pure profit center.
Do it yourself just means that you as founder won't have time for other stuff. Do it in-house means you pay a salary of someone doing it. Agency's cost is most likely lower than a full-time employee, and a good agency knows PPC way more than an individual who had some years of experience.
p.s.
Another point, I happened to work with a lot of start-ups. People seem to assume that only big stupid companies spend serious money on line, small smart start-ups don't. But this is just wrong. Small smart start-ups are spending very aggressively online, because they know they are making profit, vs big stupid companies are often too timid to spend anything. So, a small start-up actually need more PPC expertise than the big companies.
Please forgive me if this is taking things OT, but if you want to go down the "do it yourself" route but are new to this area, what would be an efficient way to quickly grok the space?
I'm aware there is a plethora of PPC communities and blog posts, but if you are a smart geek who just wants to ramp up efficiently is there a book/ebook/concise set of posts that you(/others) would recommend that covers the basics and moves through to the tips, tricks, optimizations, etc stage?
OMG, are you throwing me a softball here, what with the "grok" reference?
I just posted a longish reply to the root post with some general guidance, but I also just wrote http://adgrok.com/getting-started last week to help total newbies get going.
What we're hoping to build with AdGrok (and admittedly, we're not completely there yet) is a tool that lets you act like an "AdWords Certified Professional" without all the pain and suffering of studying for those tests.
I had a look at the Adgrok.com site - it's sadly not what I'm looking for as I don't think it fits with the situation I'm trying to fill.
My younger brother is a new recruit in the PPC team of a leading retailer - as he is learning on the job from his colleagues I'm trying to find ways he can learn all the basics and quickly move onto advanced ideas they may or may not be using. Sadly AdGrok presumably won't work as he is just an employee who doesn't have any say or ability to utilize adgrok's statistics collecting into his workflow as he doesn't have any admin capability within the company.
I was therefore looking for other resources - if you have ideas or suggestions I'd be grateful! Thanks.
Yeah, if your brother doesn't have the authority to link a google adwords account, he won't be able to use AdGrok. Know that we can link to MCCs and that any given account can have 2 links, though. People who already use an agency also use AdGrok just so they can keep tabs on what's going on easily.
I posted http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1854584 to the original Ask HN post -- he should read through those bullet points after he reads the first couple sections of that getting-started link I sent. PPC is all about targeting customer eyeballs, NOT targeting the "bouncers" or "trolls" that you won't ever be able to convert into a customer, and giving a message that is specific enough to someone's needs that it speaks to them.
Google has a certification process that has a horribly dry but thorough -- he should slog through that and get certified (it'd be good for his CV if he wants to do PPC at other companies, because many require it):
We've done it in house, got the core metrics, improved upon the CPA and now need to take it to the next level - particularly, around your point of "profitable ROI" on our advertising spend.
I couldn't find your email address in your profile. Mind connecting off HN? My email is HN handle at gmail dot com
oh, well, I think you and I agree ... The death idea is inspiring, but is an overkill. 99% death are natural death. For people who worry about it, they should add their logins to their will. But then, dead people are supposed to be gone, with most of their stuff.
This is the "smart" guy trying to save the world type of thinking. See what Steve Jobs said in his 1996 interview:
".... When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth. ...."
But a fair system should be that the App owner should decide what ad network to use within its app.
The argument that Google doesn't allow Yahoo ad to show in Google search result is invalid, because Google search is entirely owned by Google, so Google can do whatever.
I don't think Apple will be so stupid as to kill AdMob. A lot of free apps depend on AdMob to make money. Without AdMob, those apps will die, and that will be bad for Apple. So, there is no way Apple will kill AdMob.
The guy's main point is that you should decide which girl you are: the "Consequentialist" (relativist), or the "Categoricalist" (absolutist).
He said: "... I find it helpful, before I consider a dilemma, to at least debate whether I’m in that girl’s situation, and what kind of girl I’m going to be for this particular question..."
This shows that he is the "Consequentialist" girl.
"As our ability to search for media content improves, the economic value of that content will approach zero."
In simple words, he's just saying:
Piracy makes your content worth nothing.
I just don't think this is true. Piracy has been rampant in movies, but movies continue to make money in theaters, pay-per-view, netflix, or just good old TV.
There is pretty much nothing Apple can do to counter Android. Android is free, and doesn't bundle with hardware. So, Android will just grow like Microsoft did, because all the hardware makers will get on Android. So it's basically:
Apple vs Google+World
The only thing Apple can do is to keep improving itself. Or, I am guessing, Apple may want to enter the advertising market.
Apple's hardware can push ads through iAd to make more money. But with Yahoo's property as an extra, iAd all of a sudden has enough advertising value to justify itself. Without Yahoo properties, iAd is a much smaller network.
The right way is to do it yourself first. But make sure you have conversion tracking, so that you know the basic metrics. For instance, if you are doing PPC for sign-ups, how much are you paying per sign-up.
Then you try to improve it, by either cut Cost per acquisition (CPA), and/or increase your volume of acquisitions.
Increase volume of acquisition is always harder. Most people only know little bit of Search, but Content and Retarget works great too. A lot of product are so new that no body is searching for it, so there are challenges.
You should try this yourself until you hit your bottleneck, e.g. can't increase volume without a much bigger CPA, then you should try find a good agency that can bring your PPC to a whole new level. And it's better doing it now, because you already know your basic metrics, and it will be easy to judge is an agency is doing a good job or not.
Judging by the people who commented there, my feeling is that few of them really had the experience of spending serious PPC money PROFITABLY.
A good ppc program is a pure profit center.
Do it yourself just means that you as founder won't have time for other stuff. Do it in-house means you pay a salary of someone doing it. Agency's cost is most likely lower than a full-time employee, and a good agency knows PPC way more than an individual who had some years of experience.
p.s.
Another point, I happened to work with a lot of start-ups. People seem to assume that only big stupid companies spend serious money on line, small smart start-ups don't. But this is just wrong. Small smart start-ups are spending very aggressively online, because they know they are making profit, vs big stupid companies are often too timid to spend anything. So, a small start-up actually need more PPC expertise than the big companies.