Ask HN: What agencies would you recommend to manage PPC and AdWords?

If you're a startup, don't use an agency. Trust me. Hire someone internally to manage your PPC campaigns, it will be cheaper and they will do a better job. You know your customers better than anyone. You know what their interests and demographics are, what they're searching for, where they go online. Use this information to inform your campaigns, and hire someone to worry about the technical details like optimization and quality score.

The entire agency model is geared towards brand advertisers who spend obscene amounts of money on "branding" without tracking performance or looking at results.

The problem here is a profound misalignment of incentives. An agency gets paid a percent of spend, so it's in their best interest to spend as much of your money as possible testing without thinking about conversions or results.

I agree that some agencies are like that but if you look for a good agency that will sit down with you and find all that information out and analyze the results you will get further.

Also don't go for an agency that gets payed a percent of spend or per thousand clicks. You will usually get more conversions off an agency that charges a flat management fee per day.

If you're willing to hire a full time person, Google's AdWords team has hundreds of very talented optimizers and account specialists who are in general fairly unhappy with their jobs. They have very deep knowledge of PPC/Adwords from the inside, and have seen a variety of client accounts.

Google doesn't do a good job of nurturing since they tend to hire highly intelligent nontechnical people, train them all about Adwords, but then give them no real way to move up in the organization or challenge themselves.

Why was this down voted? Maybe it read like an ad? I don't work for them.

The OP is asking for an agency and the top voted comment suggests that agencies aren't a good way to go because they're often paid a percentage of total spending. Trada is pay per performance and the OP won't need to hire someone (possibly why they are asking about agencies in the first place).

It seems like it would be worth their while to check them out and I thought I would let them know about it.

I'm the partner and co-founder a PPC Agency.

The right way is to do it yourself first. But make sure you have conversion tracking, so that you know the basic metrics. For instance, if you are doing PPC for sign-ups, how much are you paying per sign-up.

Then you try to improve it, by either cut Cost per acquisition (CPA), and/or increase your volume of acquisitions.

Increase volume of acquisition is always harder. Most people only know little bit of Search, but Content and Retarget works great too. A lot of product are so new that no body is searching for it, so there are challenges.

You should try this yourself until you hit your bottleneck, e.g. can't increase volume without a much bigger CPA, then you should try find a good agency that can bring your PPC to a whole new level. And it's better doing it now, because you already know your basic metrics, and it will be easy to judge is an agency is doing a good job or not.

Judging by the people who commented there, my feeling is that few of them really had the experience of spending serious PPC money PROFITABLY.

A good ppc program is a pure profit center.

Do it yourself just means that you as founder won't have time for other stuff. Do it in-house means you pay a salary of someone doing it. Agency's cost is most likely lower than a full-time employee, and a good agency knows PPC way more than an individual who had some years of experience.

p.s.

Another point, I happened to work with a lot of start-ups. People seem to assume that only big stupid companies spend serious money on line, small smart start-ups don't. But this is just wrong. Small smart start-ups are spending very aggressively online, because they know they are making profit, vs big stupid companies are often too timid to spend anything. So, a small start-up actually need more PPC expertise than the big companies.