Inhouse, agency or freelancer

The decision not to dedicate PPC advertising on your own, but to hire someone to do so, is legitimate and usually correct. You probably have more important things to do, in which you are good and probably indispensable for your business success.

There are basically 3 ways to put your campaign creation and management on:

hire employees directly to your business
you hire an agency,
you hire a freelancer – an individual.
Each option has its pros and cons and none is the best solution universally. But they all mean a more or less complex long-term commitment, so it’s a good idea to think through it. A later change will mean unnecessary delays or wasted money for re-setting up collaboration and campaigns.

The size of your project, the competitiveness, the investments you expect, and the performance you expect will determine who you need to a large extent. Small campaigns with a small budget with the need to drive even relevant traffic can be handled in a few hours by a less experienced PPC practitioner. Campaigns with a monthly budget of tens to hundreds of thousands, thousands of advertised products, where it is measurable and profitability must be managed by an experienced pro, for larger and more demanding campaigns you can use the whole team.

Inhouse solutions
Large companies such as Alza or Mall usually have their own PPC team. The moment the campaigns feed and fulltime entertain 3+ people it makes clear sense.

A lot of companies still feed one PPC banker, but beware of the potential risks of leaving the employee – you may be looking for a new one for a long time. You will not teach it to PPC yourself, you have to count on a more expensive variant of external training or learning on the go. And you won’t want to run campaigns at this time without supervision.

An important factor is the motivation of PPCcker why he should want to work with you. A PPC worker who wants to do his job well prefers some form of knowledge sharing (of course, this may not be right in the company, but it is a strong argument to start a company where there are already professionals), prefers interesting campaigns with a challenge and rather larger budgets. It is important to have some freedom, to test, have access to interesting data or work for an interesting brand.

It is common, if you do not have enough big campaigns on the whole PPCčkař, model of the marketer who does more things, even SEO or social networks. The disadvantage is lower specialization in individual fields, but this may not matter much for smaller campaigns.

Benefits of inhouse solutions
You have your Inhouse PPCcookier at hand, usually giving him an easier and faster insight into your internal processes and understanding your industry, specializing in your industry, communicating more quickly with him and the rest of the team. He often has more information about him that can be used around him and “may come in handy” (but you wouldn’t send an email to the agency). He has only you to do, so if something is an absolute priority, he should have time to do it now.

It is usually cheaper (or has more time) than an agency, but beware of comparing gross and net time. Inhouse PPCcooker will not work 160 hours a month if you are to continue to educate and develop and keep up with the news (or even learn the basics), does not work a net time or half. On the other hand, an inhouse can slide to the need to fill up time and dedicate itself to things that already have minimal added value.

Disadvantages
A complex recruitment process, especially if you don’t understand PPC. You need an elderly person to do the campaign alone, which is even worse. You may not even be able to find him.

A costly and time-consuming solution when you leave your inhouse PPC manager.

Agency
The agency is a good solution if you want to hand over PPC fully even if you need campaigns quickly – usually it has the capacity to start doing something right now, the chances of finding a PPC employee who is jobless and can start this month is much lower.

Companies often demand agencies also for fullservice – ie they ask the agency to provide not only PPC, but also social network administration, emailing, display campaigns or copywriting, SEO and UX. The advantage is then communication with one entity, unified approach, reporting, etc.

Ensuring the development and PPC know-how of your advertising manager is entirely up to the agency, it is up to you to transfer the industry knowledge. The disadvantage that PPC at the agency is not only specialized in your field can also be an advantage when it has a broader view or tested functional solutions already on other projects.

Disadvantages of agency administration
Very often you are not sure who you will work with. The less significant a client you are, the more likely you may come across a junior manager. Theoretically, you can find out before the cooperation, but no one will ensure that it will be permanent. You are not sure if your “assigned” main contact will fit you professionally or humanly. Frequent changes of people in campaigns, or. even passing campaigns to increasingly junior employees is one of the most commonly mentioned reasons for agency clients’ dissatisfaction.

Freelancer
There are also several types of freelancers – you can find the industry leaders and beginners after one training. The advantage is definitely that you know who you are dealing with, hiring him to work and it will be so throughout the cooperation.

Disadvantages of a freelancer
The biggest disadvantage is irreplaceability. This is also one reason why freelancers are often not able to work on really big and corporate campaigns. Some Freelancers have some sort of emergency solution provided, but when a freelancer crashes, your clients’ campaigns and information around them won’t be passed on the next day. But again, this would cripple the agency and inhouse, but the readiness to “automatically” solve it is much better.

Manage PPC campaigns by yourself
This is probably the only option I would definitely not recommend. That you can do it yourself. Somehow, yes, but it won’t be much or it will take you too much time. And what will we talk about when building a project or e-shop, your time is probably worth investing in areas other than creating advertising and learning how it works in detail.