Do you really need to pay someone to manage your Google Adwords account? Google makes it pretty easy to create an Adwords campaign, load up your credit card and turn on your ads. So why would you need to hire a company to manage your Adwords campaign if it’s so simple?

Maybe a better question to start with is, how do you determine if Google Adwords is worth spending money on in the first place? Well there are a lot of factors you can analyze, but one simple way of deciding on whether Adwords is worth it or not, is to look at the direct return-on-investment. Meaning, if I spend $1,000 a month, how much money do I make back? Think about it this way, one 12 month lease for an apartment going for $900 a month, provides a life time value of at least $10,800 (12 months x $900 per month). If they renew their lease beyond the first year, the value of that tenant becomes significantly more. In my experience of managing campaigns, one lease per month is a very realistic, or even conservative goal.

So now that you have made up your mind if Adwords is worth your attention and money, back to the original question of whether it is worth paying someone to manage your Adwords campaign. Yes it is true, getting started with Adwords is relatively easy, but the job of a professional Adwords manager is to optimize your campaign results so that you get the maximum return for your advertising dollars. If an Adwords expert manager can get you one extra lease per month, or even year, their management fee should be well worth the investment. If you feel like you can manage your campaign as well as anyone can, and you have the time to dedicate to this ongoing task, than maybe this is in fact a place where you can save money by not hiring someone.

But if you do decide that you are better off hiring an Adwords expert, as a word of warning, make sure they are dedicated to doing a good job. Just because they say they are a marketing or advertising company, and they have Adwords management as an item on their list of services, doesn’t mean they will do any better of a job than you can. The easiest way to tell if your money is being spent well with Adwords, is to see a list of keywords each month that received clicks. You want to make sure the keywords getting the most clicks are very targeted and relevant to what you are offering. For example, if you are located in Downtown Charlotte, getting clicks for “Charlotte Apartments” are probably a waste of money. It’s not about how many clicks you get, each click costs money so make sure that quality of clicks is your main campaign objective.