Michelle Morgan will be speaking on PPC at Engage 2018, which will take place March 8th, 2018 in Portland, Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click here
1) Please give us your background and let us know what you do for a living.
I’m the Director of Client Services at Clix Marketing, a full service PPC agency. I started my career by applying for a very vague job as an “online marketing assistant”. This was my first job out of college and is where I was introduced to PPC. I’ve been doing it ever since. I started in-house then made the jump to agency life a couple of years later to get more diversity in the day to day challenges. Since then, I’ve had the pleasure of working with some amazing companies and amazing people and been able to further my skillset in all things PPC along the way.
2) When some asks you for the business case for using an agency to manage AdWords (as opposed to self-management), how do you respond?
“If you had plumbing issues at your house, would you fix them yourself for hire a plumber?” I’ve found this to be the best representation of the agency/do-it-yourself conundrum. There are loads of completely capable people with the specific skills it takes to deal with plumbing that could do it themselves. There are also people who can barely find their own hot water heater and should never attempt to tackle their own plumbing. Lastly, there are those folks who think they know enough and will start down the DIY path, until they make a big enough mess then will call for professional help. Just like plumbing, PPC requires lots of specific knowledge and skills, mostly gained through experience. If you have the ability to do it yourself and not make a mess, by all means you should do that. But if you can’t, call in the experts.
3) What are some of the most common mistakes you find in accounts where you’ve taken over management?
The most common mistakes are usually centered around one main fact: the person managing the account doesn’t know how to get the most out of the platform. I frequently see accounts with varying degrees of missed opportunity. Some are as basic as missing negative keywords and not using conversion tracking (or using it incorrectly). Others are more advanced like not leveraging account structure to their benefit, either over or under segmenting their campaigns. Each account I see is certainly a unique snowflake of interesting choices, but they all go back to simply not knowing how to best leverage the system.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.