We have seen it thousands of times, the ability to automate anything can leave agencies and individual managers somewhere between nervous-paralysis and kid-in-a-candy-store. That can result in an undirected implementation and a lack of clarity around what you’re trying to achieve and how to measure if it was successful; leaving gut instinct to drive evaluations. For automation to be effective, you need to come to it with some very clear goals and a laser-like vision on what you want to automate first and for what business outcomes. And you need to make sure the whole team is on the same page.
In addition to profitability, other reasons to implement automation can include:
These agencies want to manage more clients the way they already do and with the team they already have. Their goals are centred on financial profitability and are looking to use automation to create a wider margin between labour costs and revenue. We have seen agencies triple their client to manager ratio through PPC Samurai automation and implementation, which delivers huge bottom-line returns. Of course, this process will deliver some complimentary benefits (like consistency and quality control), but within ‘Bucket One’ the goal is purely to automate the work you’re already doing, to create more time in your workday.
You can then spend this time you’ve banked on scaling your client to manager ratio, or on prospecting for new work, or whatever else will create profitable outcomes for your agency. But first and foremost it’s about creating and banking time for the business. Or, in other words, using your labour costs more effectively to return a better ROI on the wages you’re paying.
These agencies want to free up time to do work they don’t normally have time to do. We define this as not only automating what you are doing, but also the work you “should” be doing but don’t always get time to do at the current staff to client ratios. This is the work that you feel guilty for not completing or that causes you anxiety and introduces competitive risk; eg. another agency could poach your clients by doing this work more effectively, and in the back of your mind you know it and worry about it.
If this balance is what you’re looking for in a tool, you need to be prepared that as you introduce new processes and strategies into your agency, you’ll inevitably have to manage some of the outputs of those new processes. This means you won’t have as much time left in your time-bank to spend as those ‘Bucket One’ agencies as you’re already choosing to spend some of that time on new work. Some of your ROI (time bank) is spent on taming the chaos you’re experiencing within your SEM accounts.
These agencies want to free up time to do the work they’ve always wanted to do but could never justify at the current margins. This is the work you’d “love” to do and is often about pursuing best practice and/or innovation goals or moving upmarket. Of course, many agencies want to get to this place eventually, but BEWARE: this is the most discretionary of all automation goals and should be approached with caution when you’re just starting out. ‘Bucket Three’ is about implementing processes that you want to do but don’t need to do within your current business model.
If you get excited about all the shiny new things you can do with the time-bank you’ve created (Bucket Three) but your initial motivations for implementing automation were to drive profitability through the increased client to manager ratios, then you have a mismatch between motivations and outcomes and that’s going to cause friction and frustration when you try and understand why your implementation isn’t paying dividends the way you’d anticipated. You risk feeling that the implementation wasn’t successful, but that’s not necessarily the case; it’s just that you’re not measuring the right outcomes and or perhaps your team weren’t all adhering to the initial pilot strategy.
Over the years, we’ve worked with thousands of agencies to help them systemize and automate their paid search management.
In addition to starting with a clear scope, here are a few of our learnings:
In addition to a clear scope, here are some other data we’d suggest you have at hand to aid you in accurately measuring the ROI of implementation:
We even built a fancy little ROI calculator here that can help you work out, with that data, what ROI you should expect from implementing PPC Samurai.
Here at PPC Samurai we can help you design and begin a pilot designed to ensure that your implementation of our platform is successful and aligned with your business goals. We can help with edge cases (those you’ve experienced already or those we see coming) and we can help you solve the management pain points that are stopping you from achieving the levels of profitability you’re aiming for. We thrive on it.
In the meantime, until we chat, maybe consider what profitability and ROI should look in your agency. How will you know the implementation was successful?
And we can go from there….
