The Big Lie with PPC Management Software
Author: Chris Hickman is the Founder and CEO at Adficient with 14 years of experience in search marketing and conversion optimization. In 2006 he founded Adwords Suspension and Google Penalty recovery service at GetBackonGoogle.com to help businesses and websites to get back on Google.
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To this day, I have yet to find a PPC management software that I can reliably use to make decisions to improve an account. I’ve found that for the price that the software it’s far better to hire a person who can address the human side of PPC. Contrary to what tech lovers will tell you, advertising online isn’t a technology thing. It’s still about persuading humans. Now, you may have had a great experience with PPC software, but I haven’t. And I’ve tried a lot.
I've tested and used most of the PPC management software out there including Acquisio, Marin Click Sweeper, PPC IQ, Wordstream, Clickable (which is not a PPC management software anymore), and PPC Bid Maximizer. I wanted to test Kenshoo, but they don’t have a free trial and after trying all of these others, I didn’t want to pay to be disappointed.
Despite the claims of these vendors, PPC management software will never be a game-changer because of the human element. Buying is a very emotional process. Computer programs don’t do well at analyzing the human side of purchasing decisions. They don’t know how to sway emotion, the fundamental component of selling. In my experience, problems with PPC campaigns are always a people problem, not a software problem. People just aren’t reacting to the ads.
So if you have a struggling account, it's better to focus on the fundamentals such as understanding your customer, their pain points, and the competition rather than hooking software up to your account, flipping a switch, and crossing your fingers hoping it will work.
That said, if you do have a campaign that’s getting results, software can help with a few things. But it has to pull its weight, and some of these packages are, quite frankly, very overpriced.
What to use and not use it for
From my experience, PPC management software is useful for three things:
- Quickly generating reports on your PPC campaign
- Automating monotonous tasks related to the campaign
- Generating alerts when something isn’t going right
Like any piece of business software, PPC management software does its job best at automating and simplifying tasks that could be done by a person but are done faster with a computer. However, PPC management software is poor at situations like these:
- Your conversion rate is too low and you don't know why
- You're not sure where your conversions are actually coming from
- You're losing money in your AdWords account and you're not sure why
- You have a new idea or concept and you want to come up with new ads
- You're trying to figure out what needs to be changed on your landing page to improve conversions
- Launching a brand new website with no historical data
- If you need drastic changes or improvements in your account
These are all, fundamentally, people problems. There’s no technical challenge to overcome. People might not be responding to the ad. You might not understand why they are responding and where they are coming from. If these problems aren’t sorted out, you won’t be able to effectively use the automation that PPC software can provide.
They overcharge you because of the grand slam case study illusion
The way that many of these companies get you to buy their software is providing case studies. You can see claims that show 30%-50% improvement on the account because of the software. Perhaps the claims are correct. But do they hold for all customers?
This is similar to the auto insurance commercials you see where it seems like everyone saves $500 when they switch. If that were the case, you could just switch insurance companies two or three times and end up with free insurance, right?
Your local state lottery could find the last 100 winners and put them in a commercial to say that these 100 people won the lottery and you could be just like them by playing. It looks nice to see it, but in reality you won’t get the result you want.
PPC management software companies are going to find their very best examples, but they’re almost always going to be outliers. I'll provide a real life example of a software company that I was using a few years back. It was a very large company that's on the stock market. We'll just call this PPC management software company X.
I had a Google AdWords account that was spending a little under a million dollars a month. Company X provided me with a free 30-day trial of their software. I wasn’t getting much value from it and I was going to stop. Then Company X asked me if I would like to use the Enterprise version of their software which involves a team of about 5 people who are assigned to help me. I asked company X how much it costs to have these people help me. It was roughly $20,000 a month. During the sales process, Company X was telling me how they typically got about a 30% improvement in accounts which had the Enterprise version with the staff.
I simply asked him if they would stand behind their work and if it did not it make a 30% improvement that they would not charge me the $20,000. Now remember, this was to manage an account with a $1 million monthly ad spend, so the stakes were pretty high. At the end of the day, Company X was not willing to put their money where their mouth was and they said I would have to pay the $20,000 whether it worked or not.I politely declined their offer and did not use that software. While this was an extreme example, similar cases like this happen everywhere.
The software is only as smart as the person programming it
Most software companies will claim to have a rocket scientist or someone of superior intelligence who helps program all of their algorithms. But there are two major problems with this claim:
- The rocket scientist who programs the software may not know anything about your industry, or even about marketing. They might be simply using best practices and creating whiz-bang software to use them. This doesn’t guarantee success.
- Programs are, by definition, fancy math. They can’t factor in the human emotions that go into the buying process. Emotions and behavior can’t be completely boiled down into numbers.
I'll give an example from an e-commerce store that sells an acne removal product. They bought software to try to increase sales over Christmas. It didn’t work. I have a client who's in this industry so I do know some of the trends. Think about it. Who wants to give or receive acne products as a gift for Christmas? Wouldn’t that make you feel uncomfortable? That's just one example of how software can’t account for human emotion.
Another example would be if you have a website generating leads for a water damage company. In this industry, it is all about who calls the person back first. If all of a sudden the number of leads dramatically dropped the software is going to only look at the account. It’s not going to look at the competition. I've experienced many cases where competitors come up with a new offer to gain an advantage over an existing offer. The software is not going to be able to identify this because it's only going to be looking at the account it’s monitoring and not what the competitors are doing. Even if it could look at the online activity of a competitor, it’s still not going to tap the phone lines.
There are many PPC software providers out there and they all sell themselves like it's going to be the greatest game-changer of all for your business. Through my years of experience, I have found that to be almost always the opposite case. All the software I've used has ended up just costing me more money and more time dealing with the software than dealing with the main business of PPC... persuading people to buy.
Since the buying process involves the human element and is very emotional, I don't think software will ever be able to perform the way that it's portrayed by the company’s websites. My advice is to find an exceptional pay-per-click manager who can help you with your account and who knows and understands the human side of buying and selling. They will help you improve your account far more than a piece of software.