Hello,

I work for a medium sized company where we currently have our Paid Search Marketing outsourced. One of our long-term goals is to eventually take this in-house. Does anyone have any thoughts/recommendations for good self-service tools as well as things to watch out for when making the transition?

Thanks!

If you really want to do this in-house do NOT expect to be able to do it better using self-service tools. You need to use/find people with good brains and relevant experience (both of which are very hard to come by these days) before you consider switching away from an agency.

Even if you find a tool that seems suitable, you'll still need to understand the process by which the tool itself manages your information, thus essentially eliminating the need for the tool anyway, in my opinion.

Why I'm typically favorable to the expertise that agencies have, I also can appreciate that in-house staff can surpass those abilities (by having someone 40 + hours per week working on understanding your business and managing bids/keywords constantly). But if you aren't planning to have a dedicated staffer, rather a tool, I say don't do it.

I am an in-house SEM and I guess I do have a few select tools that I use to run my accounts. Mostly just the basic keyword suggestion tools and list generators. I mostly use the Search Engine user interfaces themselves along side an in-house database.

I have to admit though that I whole heartedly agree with ExposureTim, in that it is not necessarily the tools you will be using in-house as much as it should be the people. Making the transition from an agency will be very challenging if you don't have the right experience within your company to hand over to. If you get that part right, the rest will follow suit.

Cher

Thanks Cher -

By the way, I'm in-house (now) too. I recommend that most businesses use an agency not because of any bias or self-interest.

Understanding this industry and obtaining the skills to be successful is just not something you can assign to an existing employee and/or rely on a tool for.

Always try to get advice from other clients of any Agencies or PPC bid Management firms. It's not that they are in-capable of doing the job its the poor service that can bite you down the road.