The Full Question:
What are the benefits of paying an agency to manage your Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing campaigns?
An Attempt at an Unbiased Answer:
A great question.
I’m not an agency but as you can see I do manage Amazon PPC advertising for clients and work as a consultant.
As well as saving you time to focus on other areas of business there are several other advantages…
The Main Advantages of Hiring a PPC Expert
You are benefiting from their expertise and this can easily turn into a competitive advantage for you.
I have been studying the Amazon PPC and organic algorithms religiously for five years. I have discovered some incredible things by researching, testing, analysing with software, and data-mining.
Each year, I have got better at what I do.
I couldn’t possibly have learned what I know if I was managing only my account, and doing it as part of a regular seller’s business.
You cannot be an expert at everything.
Paying a specialist in one field means that for an exchange of cash, you benefit from what they know.
I have audited thousands of Amazon listings and assessed hundreds of Amazon PPC accounts as a consultant, and I am yet to find anyone who has fully optimised either their product page or their advertising.
I can usually find areas of improvement within a few seconds of looking at an account.
This is because I live and breathe Amazon.
Can an Amazon Agency or Consultant Make You Rich?
My whole livelihood and the ability to feed my family depends on my capacity to upscale my customers’ businesses.
In the last two years, I have helped five people to become millionaires and to sell their accounts to aggregators. I have worked to help businesses become more profitable. It has meant that people have managed to change what was once a side hustle into something that changed their lives.
Learning what I know took more time and energy than doing my university degrees.
Is what I know worth something above and beyond saving people time? Sure it is.
What are the Advantages and Disadvantages of Working with an Agency/Consultant?
To get the right person/agency for your needs is important. You must consider exactly what you are looking for.
A big agency will likely have several specialists working on different aspects of your account. There will be those who do reports, contact customers, deal with questions, add new campaigns, bid manage keywords, and market your business to upper and lower-funnel audiences. They can probably reply to emails and questions quickly as they have multiple employees.
They have their weaknesses too. Having more employees means that they are likely to be more expensive than a consultant. They can also experience a regular turnover of staff which means that a different person can suddenly be working on your account without your realising it. I know from experience that even though the agency owners have great strategies for making money, their staff don’t always follow those strategies.
Smaller agencies will likely employ the use of freelancers from sites like Upwork and Fiverr. They will need to make a profit and will likely search for people from the East/Middle East to work on your account. Nothing wrong with that.
I must say though, that before getting involved with PPC, I ran a listing optimisation agency with seventeen freelancers, and I can tell you that it was difficult to find (and keep for the long term) people who were good, dependable, and willing to learn. Also, some freelancers wanted to take what they could learn to then set up their own agencies.
The weaknesses of a consultant might be that their time is split across multiple accounts (as it is with agency employees), and they may take longer to reply to emails or deliver meaningful reports. Their advantage is that you are paying for their expertise and that is what you are getting. I would not be passing your account on to another.
I hope you found that useful and good luck.
Need help running your campaigns?
If you can't stand the stress of managing them anymore, or you simply wish you could get on and focus on what you love about your Amazon work, feel free to get in touch at heath AT amazonalchemist.com. I might be able to help.
If you want to do things yourself but need to understand PPC more then I have a number of courses available: CLICK HERE it will open in a new tab - then click the course image that interests you for a free lesson and further details.
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