Sep 20 2007
Should You Outsource Your Paid Search Program?
The first thing you should understand is that I’m not a shill for the SEM agencies. This is a viewpoint from a Director of Ecommerce who understands that the most important decisions concern where to direct resources. For most ecommerce businesses, the PPC program is the primary driver of new customers and deserves the most attention.
Depending on the scale of your organization, you have 4 options:
- Do it yourself
- Hire a new employee or delegate to an existing employee
- Hire an individual contractor
- Hire an SEM agency
I have previously done all four and am going to recommend the SEM agency with a caveat. The decision of whether or not to run a “long tail” program is your primary consideration. (If you are not running a long tail program for both SEM and SEO you need to do your homework). Long tail programs require effective tools because there are too many dark corners with inefficiencies that can drag down your program when you are managing thousands of phrases on multiple search engines.
These tools have historically been proprietary to the SEM agencies until recently. ChannelAdvisor started as a SEM agency that has redirected its business towards marketing of software and is moving many of their clients to self-management of PPC and other programs by making available it’s formerly proprietary software. Now it’s available to anyone willing to pay the price.
I am not a client of representative of ChannelAdvisor, but have taken a long look at their product and do recommend it. If you are a start-up business, you may not have the economies of scale to get the needed ROI and may benefit from an SEM agency with low minimum fees if you can find one.
Tom, very interesting post. First a quick correction, CA has always been primarily a software provider, not an agency (though we do offer some full service coverage for some of our large enterprise retailers). We’re seeing an increasing number of retailers come to the realisation that paid search is too important not to at least consider running in-house. After all, who knows your product catalogue and economics at the SKU level better than you? Agencies are often a good way to get started (though I’ve heard some pretty high agency minimum fees touted about). Once retailers discover the tech is available to optimise paid search (automated bid management, total long tail coverage, smart keyword harvesting, margin based bidding) they invariably want to find out more. CA offers retailers maximum transparency, and agency (and then some) grade technology to be masters of their own paid search destiny. I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot more of this model going forward.