Google AdWords

Chapter 13. Agency Topics

Managing AdWords Accounts for Clients

I meet many small marketing agencies and freelancers interested in adding AdWords account management to their list of services. In many cases, managing a client’s pay-per-click campaigns is a natural extension of their existing marketing services.

But how do you get started? There are many ways to manage accounts, from manual edits to sophisticated third-party bid and client management platforms. These decisions will be driven by how many clients you have, the size of their budgets, and your own resources.

If you’re not sure where to begin, just begin. This chapter introduces some to-dos, tools, and programs to help you get started.

The My Client Center

The most common new agency mistake is account structure. Here’s the scenario. An agency decides to offer AdWords consulting, and creates an AdWords account to manage clients. As new clients sign on, the agency creates a campaign for each new client in the account. This makes it efficient for the agency to manage clients, but it creates huge problems down the line. For example:

• Access and confidentiality: if all clients are associated with the same account, the data cannot be kept confidential. If client A logs in to the account, she can see the campaigns for clients B, C, and D.

• Quality Score: each account accrues a quality score based on the overall performance of the campaigns within. Based on performance disparities between campaigns, clients might benefit and some might ...