Most medical experts agree that patients should take responsibility for their own health. While it’s a doctor’s job to help the patient get well, the patient needs to cooperate. When the doctor and patient don’t work together as a team, the patient’s health can suffer.

An agency/client PPC relationship is a lot like a doctor/patient relationship. Both parties are responsible for the health of the campaign, and they need to work together. Not doing so can lead to less than optimal PPC well-being.

Here are four ways clients and agencies can kill a campaign.

Diagnosing Without an Exam

Consider this scenario: Patient walks into the doctor’s office and says, “Doctor, my chest hurts. I need open heart surgery.” Doctor says “OK, let’s schedule the surgery now.”

What’s wrong with this picture?

You don’t need a medical degree to realize that the doctor in this example isn’t doing his or her job. What if the patient only has indigestion? Or what if they have bronchitis or pneumonia? Is open heart surgery going to fix either of these issues?

Yet in the PPC world, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve met with a client early in an engagement and the client says, “We need to launch a PPC campaign.” And too many PPC agencies say “OK, let’s open an AdWords account.”

The problem with this picture is that you haven’t figured out what marketing problem the client is trying to solve! What are their business goals? What are the pain points in their online marketing? What are the key performance indicators for their yet-to-be-launched PPC campaign? How will those KPIs be measured?

No reputable doctor would prescribe treatment for a patient without a thorough history and exam. Likewise, no reputable PPC company should launch a campaign without first establishing goals, KPIs, and tracking, along with a conversation about how PPC fits into the overall marketing mix.

Seeing Too Many Doctors

Most people would agree that medical specialists serve a necessary purpose. A general practitioner is probably not the best doctor to remove a tricky brain tumor, for example.

However, the doctors need to work together. They all need to understand the patient’s diseases, history, and treatment plans. When a patient runs from one doctor to the next without telling the others, it can have catastrophic results.

The same thing can happen in PPC. If too many people work on the account and don’t talk to one another, usually the campaigns don’t do very well. Or if the client makes changes to the account without telling the agency, performance can suffer.

Clear communication between all responsible parties will go a long way in ensuring that the campaign works as well as it possibly can.

Taking Medicines Because You Always Have

While there is a lot to be said for tried-and-true medications, sometimes they stop working. Either the patient gets better and doesn’t need the medication any more, or their body stops responding to it. Regular checkups are needed to make sure the current medications still make sense.

In PPC, regular meetings between the agency and client will help ensure that the campaign and marketing tactics are still working. For example:

• Don’t bid on the same keywords for years at a time without reviewing them to make sure they still work and make sense.
• Don’t settle for the same ad copy month after month without testing something new.
• Work together as a team to continually question and review the current marketing plan and make sure the prescriptions are still working.

Not Telling the Doctor What Medications & Supplements You’re Taking

This is a common issue in the medical world. Patients either knowingly or unknowingly don’t tell their doctor what medications they’re taking, and this omission can have serious consequences. Medications can work together, or they can work against one another – and some combinations can be deadly!

Similarly, it’s not uncommon for PPC clients to forget to tell their agency about:

• Sales or promotions taking place in other channels that could affect or benefit from PPC.
• Products that are no longer available.
• Website pages that have been changed or removed.
• Shifts in overall marketing strategy.

Usually, the client isn’t being malicious – they really just forget to tell their PPC agency about these things. Yet these omissions can keep their PPC campaigns from achieving optimal health!

If you’re a client, be a good patient. Provide your agency “doctor” with a complete history and marketing picture. Communicate with them regularly.

If you’re an agency, be a good doctor. Ask questions so you understand the client’s marketing goals and KPIs. Communicate with them regularly.

By working as a team, you can ensure that your PPC campaigns stay healthy!

Editor’s Note:  This post originally appeared on Search Engine Watch on February 14, 2012.

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As you probably know, I’ve done PPC in both an in-house and agency setting. One of the things that puzzles me about agency life is the number of clients who seem to put their agency on “ignore” after hiring them.

When you’re an in-house SEM, you can’t delete the emails from your boss asking for a meeting, nor can you let all their calls go to voice mail. Chances are you’re heavily involved in marketing planning and strategy sessions, too. So why do clients blow off their agency’s requests for meetings?

There are a couple of reasons I can think of. First off, I think some clients have the mentality that they hired an agency so they won’t have to think about SEM. The last thing they want is yet another meeting to talk about stuff that they don’t want to be bothered with (i.e. SEM).

Another reason could be that the client’s afraid the agency will try to upsell them in the meeting. This is a valid concern – and for all you agency folks out there who use every conversation with a client to try to sell them on more services or a bigger budget, please stop. Now. You’re doing the rest of us a disservice.

As a client, why should you take time out of your busy day to talk to your agency? Well, I’ll tell you why.

Your agency needs to be in the loop.

Certainly your agency doesn’t need to know every little thing that goes on in your company every day. If that were the case, you’d be better off hiring someone in-house. But when it comes to some things, your agency absolutely does need to know in order to continue to provide services that are of value to your business. Here are just a few things that your agency needs to be aware of:

• Website changes, especially pages that get moved , deleted, or added
• Shifts in marketing strategy and messaging
• New product launches
• Pricing changes
• Other marketing campaigns you may be doing, even if they’re not SEM campaigns

There are many more, but you get the picture. In my experience, agency strategy meetings are a great forum for these conversations to take place. Of course, you can use the phone or email, too – but if you’re holding regular strategy meetings with your agency, they can help you manage the marketing process and make recommendations for improvement that you may not have thought of.

You need to be in the loop.

The PPC world is constantly changing and evolving sometimes faster than even us PPC pros can keep up with. As a client, you don’t need to study up on every last detail of new PPC launches. However, you do need to be aware of some things that could impact your business either positively or negatively – which is where your agency comes in.

In addition, your PPC agency probably has ideas for new things to try in PPC. They also have their finger on the pulse of your customers by way of the queries people are using to find your business. It behooves you to listen to this information, because it can inform not only your PPC campaigns, but other marketing as well.

Your agency has valuable insight that you should look at.

I’ve written about PPC reporting and what should be included in your agency’s reports. While at a minimum you need to take the time to read the reports, it’s even better if you schedule a meeting or call to go over the reports with your agency contact. After all, they’re the professional, and they likely have insight beyond what’s written on the page that they can share with you. I’ve found that report meetings with clients are often the best way to keep each other in the loop and to brainstorm new ideas for taking campaigns to the next level. The meetings don’t have to be long, and it’s really worth your time.

A good PPC manager won’t waste your time. They’ll handle the day to day business of running your campaigns effectively, and will only contact you when they have good information to share, questions, or insight for you. Do me a favor: don’t screen their calls, and don’t send their emails to your spam box. Take the meetings. You’ll be glad you did.

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People hire PPC agencies for a number of reasons: they want to use PPC, but don’t know how; or they’ve tried it but found it too complicated and time consuming. I’ve worked on both sides of the desk, in-house and agency, so I definitely see the advantages of each approach – and there are times where it just makes sense to hire an agency rather than try to do PPC yourself.

Any PPC agency worth its salt will provide some type of reporting on a regular basis. Some reports are more useful than others, but that’s a topic for another post. No matter what type of report you’re getting, there are ways to make use of the information, and ways not to. Here are some ways you should NOT use your agency reports.

Nitpicking over small details.

Ideally, your agency reports will include not only detailed data, but high-level insight and analysis. Even if the analysis is lacking, though, don’t obsess over minutiae. Focusing on one keyword’s stats, or one day’s data, is not a good use of your time – nor of your agency’s time responding to the inevitable questions you’ll have. You’re paying your agency to obsess over these details, precisely so you don’t have to. Don’t waste your time worrying about minor details that really don’t factor in to the big picture.

Ignoring the reports entirely.

Believe it or not, this is more common than you may think. A surprising number of clients receive their weekly or monthly report email and file it away without even opening it. On the one hand, maybe these clients trust their agency so completely that they aren’t worried about their account’s performance at all – sort of like the thousands of people who file away their 401K statements without ever looking at them. But just like a 401K, PPC performance can vary – and a good client will want to be aware of these variations.

Furthermore, a good report will contain not only data, but recommendations for future improvements such as landing page or website changes, shopping cart suggestions, and other information. (If only our 401K statements came with this info!) A good PPC manager can do a lot of great things without client involvement, but website changes often not are on that list. As the client, this is the stuff you’ll need to do – so ignore it at your own peril.

Taking the information and then trying to do things yourself.

I think some clients consciously try to use their agency as a training school, learning as much as they can so they can take everything in-house. Let me be clear – I’m not saying that no one should ever take things in-house. There are many instances where this makes a lot of sense: when the account has grown to the point that it warrants a full-time person managing it, for instance.

I’m also not saying that taking PPC training courses from qualified teachers such as Brad Geddes from Certified Knowledge is bad. Far from it! I’m a huge fan of continuous learning and training, and everyone, from agency managers to in-house PPC’ers, should take advantage of as much training as they can.

What I am saying is that it’s unfair to hire an agency under the guise of a vendor-client relationship, and use them to set up and optimize your account and make a bunch of recommendations – and then take the whole thing in-house in 3 months.

If you need help with initial start-up and optimization, that’s perfectly fine – but be honest about it! Tell the agency that you’re looking for a short-term commitment and you need help getting things off the ground. Some agencies will be fine with this, and some won’t – but in any agency-client relationship, a good fit is key to getting optimal results. Pretending you’re going to be a long-term partner, and then dumping the agency 3 months in, is not the best use of your money or the agency’s time. As the old adage goes, honesty is the best policy – and the best way to get what you really want out of the relationship.

If you’re thinking about hiring an agency, or if you’re already using one, I highly recommend my friend and fellow PPC Chatter Robert Brady’s post on agency reports, It’s Client Reporting, Not Training. It’s a great read, and it helped inspire this post. Thanks, Robert!

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If you celebrate Christmas, you’ve probably at least started your shopping by now. If you’re looking for a gift to give your PPC agency, here are some ideas for you. Best of all, they’re all free!

Tell them everything.

Your agency will have tremendous difficulty running a successful PPC campaign if you don’t tell them what your business goals are. We’ve been surprised many times by our clients when they tell us that their #1 goal is something we’re not even touching with PPC campaigns. While not everything is easy to promote in PPC, nothing is easy if you don’t know what you’re promoting.

Along the same lines, tell your agency when you make changes to your website. It’s not uncommon for PPC managers to discover that the landing pages they’re using for paid traffic all of a sudden don’t exist anymore. Remember, you’re paying for this traffic. If you’re not going to keep your PPC agency in the loop, you may as well use your money to buy lottery tickets instead.

Take their recommendations.

You probably hired a PPC agency because of their knowledge and expertise in the field. You realized that they’re experts in PPC, and you’re not – so you’ve decided to pay them to put their expertise to work for you.

Ignoring your agency’s recommendations is like ignoring doctor’s orders. Sure, no one’s holding a gun to your head to make sure you follow directions, but if you don’t, things aren’t going to get better. Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. So if your PPC agency recommends changes to your campaign or landing pages, you’d be “insane” not to listen to them!

This doesn’t mean you have to blindly do everything your agency says. But at least have a conversation about it. Talking things through and compromising is better than just blowing things off.

Respond to their communications.

Any PPC manager can tell you about the one client who never responds. Emails and reports go unread; voice mail messages go unreturned. We PPC managers are pretty good at keeping things rolling along with little direction – again, that’s probably why you hired us. We pride ourselves on being able to manage your campaigns without needing daily direction from you.

All that said, we’re not contacting you to chit-chat, and we’re not spending hours producing reports to clog your inbox. The most successful PPC campaigns are born out of collaboration – back and forth conversations between agency and client. So if I’ve called you 4 times and you don’t respond, or I send emails that never get a reply, it’s hard for me to get the best results for your campaign.

Trust me – we PPC managers don’t want to add to your workload. We understand that you hired us to take the burden off your shoulders. But success in PPC (or any marketing effort, for that matter) comes from collaboration and communication.

So take the time to share and respond to your PPC manager. Your bottom line will thank you.

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