If you decide to do it yourself, you need a few things:

1) Time. If you run a small business that leaves you little time to spare, you won’t be able to optimise your PPC campaign. And you’ll almost certainly lose money.

2) Analytical ability. If you can’t interpret data, and draw conclusions from it, then you can’t do PPC. If you assign someone else to manage the account, make sure that they are qualified to do it.

3) Understanding. Before you start, you need to read up on it – and not just the Adwords exam. Learning as you go along is expensive at best, and there are many things that you just won’t realise. One mistake can be the difference between making money and losing it.

4) A decent product range, with good prices. People will shop around, and there’s no point in paying for clicks if you can’t convert them…

In reality, a lot (most?) small businesses would probably struggle to manage a PPC campaign in-house, but here’s a thought…

When our agency first started out, we were looking for clients, and took on a local restaurant. They only had a £5 per day budget, and paid in free food. But the campaign was highly successful, and they got excellent returns on their spend.

I think you’re exactly right – the biggest risk for an SMB owner is to NOT give PPC a chance! Thanks for your insights.

@ Nick,

That’s what I’m hoping for! SMB owners need to be given the proper expectation about PPC – but they need to give it a shot, too.

@ Justin,

I think your comment could be it’s own blog post… nice! You make a good point with finding the balance between “keyword breadth and effectiveness.” And in regards to phone tracking – there are options for that. The simplest would be to have sales people ask how the customer found the business (archaic, but it works). But there are also more eloquent solutions that work will track phone calls down to the keyword level (i.e. ClickPath, Voicestar, Telecapture, etc.). Thanks for your comment!

We typically focus on service based businesses in relatively small geographic areas, construction contractors, painters, pool cleaners, etc. We take the best practices from larger national and international accounts and tweak them in an abbreviated manner for local accounts.

Usually we find that a certain term or two will yield the most valuable traffic and MAY be all that is needed (balancing keyword breadth and effectiveness can get tricky fast so keep your eyes open = analytics so your ROI is good).

We often use city name modifiers (although Google has suggested against it in geographically limited accounts) we find it works. Example: clients service + city name. Well researched keywords in conjunction with a strong ad (look at the other advertisers on your terms and make yours stand out while retaining quality) will drive qualified traffic to your landing pages. What we have found is that a landing page with a strong offer can convert well.

One of the trickiest things is tracking phone calls. Our estimates are that 65% to 85% just make a call and never fill out a form or any other internet traceable conversion. Key thing to capture the lead here is to put your phone number on the landing page for small local businesses.

We find that Yahoo! and others can supply decent traffic especially on a local level so it might be smart to play with numerous PPC accounts (Google first) even if your budget is tiny.

The summary above is admittedly abbreviated but hopefully can supply a rough outline for anybody thinking of doing some local PPC. Every opportunity to be visible and to sell must be explored and we have found that it can be done in a very profitable manner for even the smallest local businesses. Good luck and thanks for the initial post PPC Hero. We love you guys and read your emails and website daily!

It does take effort and experimentation. When I started I chose one product to advertise, five or six keywords, and 3-4 ads. I didn’t make much money $100 in ads, but I learned a ton. After two months I had the ads and keywords refined so I was making money on them. Then I expanded into other products and tweeked those.

You definitely don’t want to start off with an unlimited budget and thousands of keywords, but starting off focused and small can yield really big results once it is expanded.

I think the big risk for small business is NOT doing PPC ads. More and more customers come from search. Missing out on those customers is a huge lost opportunity.