Reasonable Cost for Adwords PPC Set Up?

[Kingalan1]

What is a reasonable cost to set up Adwords Campaign? This would include keyword research, set up of Adwords, set up re-marketing banners, creative and coding landing pages using Instapage.

Lets say there are 3 ad groups and two landing pages per add group. Assuming the vendor is highly experienced and located in the United States, what is a fair price? $700, $1,000, $1,500?

How about for the monthly management of the campaign? Let's assume advertising budget is $3,000. Is $500 per month reasonable, $800, $1,000?

I do not want to over pay not under pay and am trying to determine a cost which is fair to both of us. Answers should be based on a US based vendor with native English and extensive experience with PPC.

Thanks,

Alan

[TucsonAZWebDesign]

The more data you have on something the better. You don't necessarily have to get several thousand hits a day to get accurate data in the A/B split testing process by any means, and most people don't. You could just take the stats for the week/month to base your modifications upon. The majority of my websites get less than 100 hits a day, pretty much just that one site does that well and the conversion rate is atrocious, luckily it's all organic traffic.

Sorry for any confusion caused by my old school poker term "Bankroll." I'm not suggesting you invest all that the money into the ppc campaign by any means. What I meant by bankroll is that you have that as a reserved amount to ensure you can keep it up. I doubt anyones going to keep going and not throw in the towel once they've lost half their stack. Especially if they haven't made a single conversion within 5 of your 10 racks of clicks hehe.

[Kingalan1]

Hi Sean:

From what you are saying, there must be several thousand visitors a month in order for a PPC campaign to have sufficient data to adjust bids run a/b tests.

In our situation the average click will probably average between $5-$10. Our monthly budget will not exceed $3,000 (maybe $4,000). So we will probably never get more than 600 visits per month driven by PPC.

Do you think we will have enough data for a successful PPC campaign? Your response talks about several thousand hits per day for a successful campaign.

I am in a very competitive and expensive niche. And if success is not possible I would prefer to save the $10,000-$15,000 that a test will cost.

Thanks, 
Alan

[TucsonAZWebDesign]

Like NgEF said it depends. What I would base it on is how much the cost per click generally is. My first sales funnel and marketing campaign that was successful to some degree I was able to start running good split tests at about 1-2 thousand hits per day.

If you're PPC are 1 dollar a pop i'd say $10,000 USD is a good bankroll to setup shop with.

Also, I highly advise you learn Adwords and how it places bids for you to the fullest. For example you'd assume quotes on multi word queries would lock it in place but "1 2 3" could also be "2 1 3", "3 2 1" "1 3 2" etc.

You actually have to use brackets [1 2 3] if you want an exact specific bid on a term in a specific order. There's several little nuances you should definitely be aware of before you hit the Google Craps table.

[uBreakiFix]

I usually do 1,000 up front assuming you do all of the design yourself, and 20% of the total budget assuming they are spending more than 2K per month.

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi Kingalan

We offer PPC services and it really depends on whether the client signs a monthly contract or not.

In your example, if a client is spending $3000 a month or $100 a day and achieving an ROI of 400% so each $100 generated $500 of revenue, at a decent margin of 50% they will make $200 a day profit ($500-$100) less any taxes. So $6000 a month.

I think it is perfectly reasonable to take 10% of that - so $600/month. You can bet your life that that is the way the client will measure it!

Margin is the biggest driving factor in any online sellers decision making - so pick a figure which is reasonable from a margin point of view. (Ask the client what his or her margin is by product group or service). Google Adwords doesn't have a margin metric but we measure every campaign in margin, not ROI. It gives us a better fix on whether the campaign is working.

Then if you can get a 6 month or 1 year contract from them either swallow the cost - which we sometimes do - or charge 1 month 'set up fee' which is perfectly reasonable.

I hope that helps.

Regards Nigel

[NgEF]

The general answer would be 'Depends on the agency'. 
I've worked with agencies in the past that would charge USD$500 per campaign set up, but this also doesn't include the creatives and coding of landing pages as those would be additional costs. For the monthly management, 15% of the total adspend is the usual fee.