Pay Per Click Campaigns and The Big Question

Can you do it yourself?

Maybe. If you're a small local business, then it should be fairly easy to set up and manage a PPC on Google Adwords. But - and this is a big but - you may not know how to get the most out of it.

Let's say you have a small budget of maybe $10 a day. And you're a localized service business like a plumbing company, a single franchisee or florist. You can geo-target your ads to a radius around your business, pick some keywords, write a couple of ads and poof! You've got a PPC campaign.

But to really get the most out of your dollars, you need to monitor it constantly, switch out keywords, know how to write ads that Google likes and will serve up and know what to change about ads that don't perform well. It's a time investment, and you'll have to do some reading and research to understand what things like quality scores and click through rates really mean. You'll have to check out what your competition is doing, get your optimization working in your favor, know what needs to be on your landing pages, which landing pages you should really link to and figure out why your cost per click can fluctuate wildly.

If you don't have that kind of time, then the answer to the big question is NO. You can't do it yourself. Or you'll be wasting money and whatever time you do put into it. If your budget is small, choose an independent who knows what he or she is doing. If it's large, choose a company that can handle larger PPC campaigns, web revisions and SEO. It may cost you a bit, but in the end, it will save you money.