Like Fleetwood Mac says, You can go your own way. But do you really want to?

I manage Google and Yahoo ad accounts for clients, and let me tell you… You might.

Surprised?

I’ll be honest with everyone here, and I doubt you’ll see anyone else admit this simple truth:

A lot of the success of Google’s adwords, or any internet ad program for that matter, boils down to the amount of money you’re willing to spend to see a return on investment.

Also, historically speaking, the more money you’re capable of investing in advertising, the more able and likely you are to turn a campaign over to qualified individuals.

So the less money money you have, the less effectiive your campaign is, right? WRONG. Well, sort of.

The main factors in the success of an online ad campaign are:

• The amount of time dedicated to setting up the campaign properly and (especially) tweaking it as it progresses.
• Your targeting scheme - keywords, geolocation selection
• Your budget choices - how you choose to spend the money you’ve dedicated to the campaign.

Having an adwords professional helping you is NEVER a liability, but by now you can already see that there is an obvious tradeoff between the amount of time you MUST dedicate to your online campaigns and the amount of money you can save by going your own way. This may permit you to dedicate a larger amount of money to your campaign, rather than paying for the assistance of a professional.

The most important downside of managing a campaign entirely by yourself is that you’ll be running your campaign without the dedicated experience an adwords pro can provide. That experience can protect you from bad keywords and overly inflated per click prices and get your campaign moving more quickly - time is money, after all!

Now, what if you do have the necessary budget to launch a significant campaign? Is that budget simply wasted? Is it better to DIY? Of course not!

But perhaps that’s a topic best left for a later date.