You’re swamped. You don’t have time to quickly learn to DIY. Your portfolio of PPC accounts is getting massive and you need a helping hand.

There are many reasons you should hire a PPC agency.

It’s a smart investment if you want to get the most out of your online advertising spend. Here why:

You Can Leave The Data Overload Problem to a PPC Agency

As marketers we love metrics.

But we can easily begin to hate them as soon as we get bombarded by ones we don’t understand.

Too many metrics?

It’s important to know which metrics matter, what they mean and how to use them to adjust and optimize your campaigns.

If you spend a large sum of your budget on online media you’ll run into a lot of numbers. There are traffic metrics (impression, CTR, CPC), conversions metrics (CR, RPC, RPI), and efficiencies metrics (ROAS, ROI, CPL)… lost yet?

Don’t worry. Agencies live data. They breathe data, and they probably eat it for breakfast.

There Are Too Few Chefs In Your Kitchen

Often times, you’ll be the only paid search manager at your company. If you have several different ideas you want to bounce off someone you simply won’t be able to.

B2B requires creativity to make paid search work.

Unlike B2C or e-commerce, the bigger your budget the more business you can generate. In B2C your budget is the only thing holding you back.

However, in B2B the search volumes aren’t as high and you have a longer sales cycle. This means you’ll need to be creative and use content marketing, free trials, free offers, and targeting to make the PPC channel work.

The phrase, “two brains are better than one,” applies here.

Brainstorming is an essential part of all marketing. Paid search ia no exception.

Agencies can have up to 10+ people who are each experts. Teams can be made of experts who specialize in retargeting, mobile, and paid social. This makes it possible to develop a strategy that fits your business.

The Inevitable Time Crunch

The following might make you feel pressed for time.

Successful online media campaigns is all about testing, testing and then more testing. It takes time to collect enough data to understand which keywords, ad content and bidding systems work for your individual case.

Researching keywords, generating negative keywords, creating ad-copy, A/B testing and tracking is all a bit overwhelming.  And once you’ve found what works, it still takes time to scale and manage changes.

Agencies have best-practice knowledge they can apply to your campaigns. If you plan on investing in this channel, it’s wise to invest in someone to manage it well.

You Don’t Have the Right Tools For the Job, But a PPC Agency Does

An agency’s job is to make their clients happy. They use a variety of tools to get this job done.

More and more tools are emerging that help marketers better manage their online media campaigns.

Bid management is a good example. Marin and Kenshoo are bid management software tools that utilize complex algorithms and input from paid search managers to optimize bidding.

These tool require paid search managers to consider and react to the assumptions built into bid management systems. In other words, systems help a lot, but having a paid search expert maintain control and a bird’s eye view of the system helps the most.

Many agencies will specialize in certain tools that fit the needs of specific kinds of clients as well. Think of them as boutique agencies.

ClosedOpp is a good example. They are a paid search agency that specializes in serving clients that use the Salesforce CRM. ClosedOpp adopts tools like Bizible, a B2B marketing attribution tool, which helps marketers link their AdWords and Bing Ads campaigns to revenue through Salesforce.

Agencies have strong knowledge of these tools and can quickly use them to optimize your accounts.

A Good PPC Agency Doesn’t Lack Book Knowledge

As an in-house marketer, you are limited to dealing with and learning from your data only. Agencies, however, deal with numerous clients, meaning numerous accounts. The only way for you to quickly scale and grow is to find out what works by failing and failing fast.

Agencies eliminate these steps all together. They can take the learning from all the accounts they manage and apply them to your account. They know about “big wins” for others and can easily apply these techniques to your managed accounts.

Financial management firms draw on expert experience to manage stock portfolios. The concept applies to PPC portfolios where industry observations and addressing breaking events (ahem, like major changes to Google AdWords, or shiny or new features) will result in PPC success.

Paid Search Managers Pay Attention To The Right News

In the world of PPC, things are constantly changing. Agencies are great at staying up with global search trends, researching the nuances of the industry and responding quickly to updates, especially with AdWords and Bing Ads.

It’s a very fast-paced environment. The only way to keep up is to spend time reading and learning how these changes affect your accounts.

Let’s face it, there are more interesting topics to follow in the news.