Just because you can swing a hammer doesn’t mean you should build your own house.

That’s right, we use builders for a reason. Building a house requires knowledge and skill, not to mention time and coordination. To top it off, the State is changing building codes every day to keep you guessing. Ok so maybe every day is bit of an exaggeration and maybe you’re damn good with a structural drawing – but you get my point.

Dear Reader: Note that this is a bit of a rant. As the Director of Business Development I’m always a bit amazed at how agonized some prospects are when deciding whether they should hire an agency or continue to manage SEM on their own.  And so while I get a little worked up about it, hopefully this message resonates enough to be taken to heart. With that said, I contend:

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

If you think about it though, isn’t managing your own Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Campaigns a little like trying to build your own house? Sure, Adwords management is a little cleaner than construction, and you’re not going to live in your Adwords account (or so you think), but you can just as easily end up with a horrible mess and a lot of money up in smoke.

To get right down to it, the problem is accessibility - the same element that’s contributed to Google’s smashing success. It’s so easy to get started with Adwords and see it working that anyone can do it. And before long they’ve convinced you that you’ve got wicked skills. You’re putting up a campaign and your ads are appearing! Upon inspection though, you realize you’ve got all your product keywords in one Ad Group, you’re using Broad Match where Exact should be and the Cost Per Sale is higher than any of your products are worth.

Managing a task that you would have normally thought absurd to take on yourself seems well within your grasp. Would you have thought of producing your own television advertising? But so many organizations have simply tacked SEM Advertising on as another component of an existing job. That was OK when you were spending $2000 per month on Search. But now that you’re spending $20,000 or $200,000 per month, it’s no longer acceptable to treat search campaign management like an afterthought.

So what should you do? The way I see it, you’ve got two choices.

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I recently overcame a design block with a quick, hard smack to my forehead. No, I’m not a freak — let me explain.

There I was, sitting in front of the computer, Adobe Illustrator on one screen, Photoshop on the other — both art board and canvas, completely blank. My task: come up with not one, but several design concepts for a Landing Page. An added twist, the design concepts were for a single element of a 4×4 Multivariate Test (MVT). Being the first round of MVT for this Landing Page, each concept had to be well differentiated in order for the data to be meaningful afterward.

The MVT was set to follow an A/B test that was already live and collecting data. Of course in my head, the growing A/B data was starting to feel more like a countdown to embarrassment. I needed ideas and my creative gears were locked up and starting to smoke. With several iTunes tracks yielding no inspiration I had to make a change — and fast! And so it was out of this desperation that it hit me — or I hit me — as the story goes. You see; I smacked my forehead when I realized I knew better. I just needed to find my sketchpad and pencil.

The Number 2 Pencil Saves the Day

OK, so perhaps I’m giving a little too much credit to an inanimate object. Truthfully, this should have read “Doris Harrison Saves the Day”, but the Number 2 pencil title had a little more edge to it and helps with my point. Doris Harrison was an instructor of mine at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco and she was relentless about following the creative process. Starting on the computer was a cardinal sin according to Doris, and every major assignment had stage-gates where she reviewed each step of the creative process as we progressed.  At the beginning it seemed overkill and felt like a terrible waste of graphite and paper. But as the class progressed and the assignments became more intense, I was converted. My final design project for Doris was selected from more than 3-dozen concept sketches, of which nearly a dozen were solid contenders, each of which was unique in how it communicated the message.

So why should this project be any different?

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