Paid Advertising is a great tool to use in conjunction with your Inbound Marketing efforts. But if you are looking to start a campaign (or if you’re already in the middle of one), you could be in danger. While allowing an agency to run a campaign on your behalf, you run the risk of losing important data.
How?
PPC Client-Owned Accounts Versus Agency Owned Accounts
When you start a paid campaign while in partnership with an agency, some agencies take ownership of the account. When you and the agency part ways, the agency will be in full control of your paid account – meaning you no longer have access to the data from your campaigns.
Why is it important to have ownership of your paid accounts?
Adwords and Bing are actively running campaigns, the historical data they accrue not only helps inform strategic decisions, but it also helps the account itself improve over time.
See, Google and Bing want to put the best, most relevant ads in front of their users. If your account has a history of successful paid campaigns, then costs may be lower, and it might be easier to hit your goals in things like search position.
Thus, the loss of data that comes with parting ways with your agency can drive up costs (Ex. cost per click, cost per conversion), and decrease the performance (Ex. search position, conversions, clicks, impressions, etc.), of your future campaigns.
How do you avoid problems with paid advertising?
Well, you could run your own paid campaigns from the get-go, but if working with an agency is a better option for you, you have a couple of choices.
The first is to insist that the agency implement all campaigns using client-owned accounts. We can tell you as an agency ourselves that there is really no downside to this. Any reasonable agency should be fine with giving you ownership of the account. In fact, any reasonable agency should give you ownership of the account without you having to ask. If for some reason the agency MUST take ownership, add a clause to the agreement that states when the partnership ends, ownership of the account will be transferred to your company.
Paid advertising is an amazing tool to use in your digital marketing strategy, but before you dive head first into PPC, make sure you do your research!
If you have any questions about PPC or any other area of digital marketing, you can always use MINDSCAPE as a resource. In fact, you can click the button below to get into contact with us right now!