Best Places to Find a Good AdWords Consultant

Question. We are pretty overwhelmed with our marketing, but don’t have an enormous budget. We’d like to find a consultant or company to go through our AdWords accounts, and recommend any upgrades to “best practices.” What do you recommend as a way to find good AdWords consultants?

Answer. OK, I will try not to be totally self-serving here, since I and the do lots of AdWords consulting!  I will, however, make a shameless plug for my own AdWords book, which is featured at the top of Best AdWords Books – a List on Amazon (by yours truly). Here are some ideas on choosing a good AdWords consultant to work with –

1. Ask for recommendations or examples of work that he or she has already done. A really good consultant should have recommendations!  So ask to get some referrals and call up people that he or she has worked with. Everyone struggles with AdWords, but they should be able to say that a job was done well.
2. Clarify your metrics. Before you start, make sure that you define what “success” looks like.  Is it clicks?  Is it click thru rate?  Is it conversions?  It is everything?  A good AdWords consultant should be able to help you with very stable metrics.
3. Choose and AdWords Consultant who has not completely drunk the Google Koolaide.  AdWords has its place in marketing, but usually it is an inferior ROI to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Social Media Marketing (SMM) in some cases.  Be sure that your consultant is open to competitive platforms – whether they be free like SEO, or paid like advertising on Facebook.

How to look for one?  One strategy is to just ‘Google’ them.  A really good AdWords consultants should… have good ads and/or at least show in organic results, proving that they understand how Google works.   Google has an official list of Google partners, and you can use that to identify ‘certified AdWords experts.’  But…. revisit point #3 above.  You want an AdWords consultant who isn’t going to always think everything is a nail, just because he has a hammer!  AdWords is not the solution to every problem! In fact, I am not currently AdWords certified, because I find the exam to be very long on esoteric details and very short on strategy, with what strategy there is… to always find that AdWords is the answer.

So, just as with any choice of an outside vendor: DO YOUR RESEARCH.  Establish METRICS.  Make sure that their work is TRANSPARENT and follows BEST PRACTICES.  Be sure to read my book, AdWords Gotchas (you might give a copy to your AdWords consultant).