You may be a CMO, VP of Marketing, or just a small business owner looking for answers. One question you may have as you analyze PPC agency proposals is: why do I have to keep paying them every month? I mean, if you pay them to set up the account, then do you really need to continue to pay them to...do whatever it is they do? Don't you have the account they built? Isn't that good enough?This is a great question and will be the focus of my post today. I believe there are at least 4 answers to this question.

4 Reasons to Pay Someone to Manage Your Google Ads Account in an Ongoing Fashion

(1) Platforms Change

Did you know Google Ads recently had the first massive UI (User Interface) overhaul in years and even PPC pros spending 8+ hours per day in it are still struggling to find everything?

Did you know Google Ads now has a help page dedicated to detailing the major changes that takes place, and there are 59 announcements listed since May of this year (here is Bing Ads' feature announcements page, it's big too)?Did you know this doesn't begin to touch the hundreds (thousands?) of minor changes that take place in the UI in any given year. Things that impact productivity and efficiency for those who do not remain daily in the UI. I mean, the Search Query report has traded places so many times with other tabs it's about to be featured in an upcoming Eddie Murphy movie.This is just a glimpse of how many things change constantly in the Google and Bing platforms. It's difficult enough to keep up with all the changes for those of us investing their lives in those platforms, much less people who have 1 hour per week to give.The key here, is that these platform changes don't just involve changing tabs to new locations, they involve things that actually impact your accounts in a big way like Automatic Ad Suggestions or Close Variant expansion in Exact Match Keywords.How can you determine the best way to deal with these platform changes, if you don't even know about them? You hire someone to keep up on it for you and make recommendations as to the best actions to take to keep up with platform changes.

(2) Our Understanding of PPC Evolves

Not only do platforms themselves change, but our understanding of PPC actions and strategy evolves over time. I look at accounts I set up 5 years ago and see changes in how I built accounts in 2018. Does that mean those accounts weren't set up well back then? Nope. Back then, those were cutting edge best practices. But as we learn individually and as an industry, we find better ways to present our campaigns.Search Engine changes impact user evolution as well. If you had an account run solely on Google bidding automation a few years ago, you would have been rightfully laughed out of any advanced PPC conference. Now? Both Google and Bing's algorithms are smarter than ever, and using bid automation intelligently is a crucial tool in any PPCer's pocket. Evolution.When you immerse your time, thought process, conversations, and life into something specific, you are bound to make more impactful changes than a Digital Marketing manager also balancing email, content, SEO, banner ads, and PPC hopping into an account briefly to throw a bid change.It never fails to amaze me how many things I can still do in accounts that we have managed for years. Every month, we can find things to do to make them better. We have had one client for the entire life of my agency, 7 years, and I literally just built out a new strategy for Display Dynamic Retargeting that I came up with last week. Evolution, FTW.

(3) User Behavior in PPC Changes

Not only do Search Engines change, and our understanding of Marketing and PPC change over time, but consumer behavior changes over time as well.Why can't you just set up an account right the first time and leave it alone?Because consumers are more likely to buy on their smartphones this year than ever before.Because there are 3.5 Billion searches on Google every day, and they have claimed that upwards of 525,000,000 (15%) of those daily searches are completely new.Because your users have different seasons in which they act differently towards your business and budget.Because your competition changes; becomes more aggressive, less aggressive, leaves, enters...does crazy stuff in the auction!A key to remembering why ongoing PPC management is so important is that you are dealing with real people in a live auction situation. If you don't think that has to be monitored intelligently, then I have a piece of the moon to sell you...

(4) Get More Done Better

The last reason it's worth paying a PPC agency for ongoing management is based on the previous three points. Hopefully I have made a case for *someone* working in the account. Why pay a 3rd party agency to do it?One reason I can think of, besides some of the previous, is that since this is all we do, it allows us to make quicker changes in the account and focus those changes on what is most important.If we look strictly at an hourly equation for auto-work, I could spend 1 hour working on my engine and my mechanic could spend 1 hour working on my engine...but the results would be VASTLY different. I cannot stress how different the results would be. I would end up with something like a half-destroyed lump of metal and 49 random nuts on the ground, while my mechanic would have the oil changed, fluids checked, tires balanced and rotated and probably more!In PPC, this goes even further because it's not just a matter of fixing an entity faster. It's a matter of troubleshooting, of looking at a thousand possibilities and choosing the area of the account to adjust bids on and make optimizations too.A great PPCer can do this well, and more quickly, thus getting what needs to be done, done.I'll close by noting that you may be investigating this and wondering if you can just manage the PPC account by yourself. You may be able to, but there are other things you should consider in this decision, I wrote a post on this topic a couple of years ago, and think it is still worth a read: AdWords DIY (Destroy It Yourself) - 4 Reasons to Hire a PPC Professional.

(BONUS #5) Your Business Can (and Likely Will) Change Over Time

This point was suggested by Nicklaus Edwards on LinkedIn and I thought it was a great one, so added it here!

"I would also add that your business can, and likely will change. If you set up a good PPC campaign that works effectively to grow the business, in the near future products and/or services in the business could evolve because of the success of the business, and expanded business offerings. An example of this is a local sit down pizzeria I worked with that started seeing so many people ordering pizza that they decided to start delivering. Their sit down business grew some, but the delivery business was getting quite a bit larger return. So they opened a new location specifically for delivery only, to a wider geographic area. All of this happened in a year. If we just left alone the first campaign the business wouldn’t have near the same level of success."