There are three answers to this.
1) The idea of expense should really be thought of as return on investment – do you make money from it, or not? The whole idea is that you should, and if you don’t, then your AdWords manager will know exactly the reasons why and you can then work to improve the problem.
2) Compared to the costs of print advertising, AdWords management and set-ups are actually very cheap! Considering it’s an instant, trackable advertising campaign with many useful features and variables – you get much more bang for your buck.
3) Good AdWords management does require very skilled work, and time. It involves analysis, daily monitoring, and skilled intuition for knowing how to relate the data, context and business needs back into the account.

This is impossible to tell – but there are two important things to realise. Firstly, there are many variables will affect your results – the demand for your service, competition, click prices, account quality, and the landing page on your website. If one of these variables is adversely affected, then results will decrease, at different costs. For example, with no demand, you are unlikely to spend much on clicks unless you have bad keywords in your account. If your landing page is poor, then you could spend a large amount on clicks without getting results (and this is normally what happens). The second thing to realise is that a good AdWords manager will advise you through these variables and have a much better idea about what to do with your marketing. If your landing page is poor, then they may give advice to improve it before wasting money on clicks. If competition and click prices are too high, then they should advise and tread carefully.

The only thing that is relevant is knowing the individual who works on your account. Large agencies may seem attractive, but its a fallacy to think that “bigger means better” – in fact the opposite is more the case. Larger agencies employ staff on salaries – so there isn’t as much motive to impress, excel, or be a useful marketing expert that cares about your situation. They may not even have experience. Freelancers on the other hand are fully invested in their work – so are more reliable sources of expertise, experience and strategy.

Until your account has been assessed and/or managed by an AdWords Certified Partner, its very difficult to know from your own experience what the potential is. Its easy to make very costly mistakes – which then give a false impression about the potential of AdWords, as well as your website. For example, an account focusing on house clearances may be wasting 80% of clicks on keywords based on “houses for sale”. A psychotherapist may pay lots for the keyword “counselling” without realising that it attracts irrelevant clicks from students. Investing in ongoing management drives more out of your account – the whole idea is that it makes you money. If it doesn’t, then a barrier exists somewhere and this in itself is incredibly valuable information to work with. Work with the barrier, and you can release the true potential of your online business.

With natural listings, you have no control. To effectively climb the listings for your given niche, you need to have a good ratio of high content to low competition. The content must be specially optimised to reflect your main keywords – which more often than not leads to poor readability. AdWords is completely controlled, reported, managed and instant. Paying a small price to get on the front page of your search term, in a matter of minutes, is great value IF your website is able to convert. Click here for more information on PPC vs SEO.

These companies are mostly unethical and a poor investment for many reasons. They don’t offer anywhere near the level of thoroughness, detail or complexity that you would get from a dedicated AdWords Certified Partner – meaning that your account will never be pushed to its full potential. Such companies rely on quantity of clients rather than quality of account – they will never get to know you, your business, or your market. You may find yourself locked into a contract which becomes costly because the limited account doesn’t lead to good results. More worryingly, many of the cold-calling companies train their sales staff to unwittingly lie about their promises and abilities.

Google gets the vast majority of search terms, whilst Yahoo and MSN (who have now merged) still only account for about 20% of internet search engine use. Yahoo/MSN can provide cheaper clicks because the competition is less – but the traffic is also much less. Google AdWords is also a far more developed system with plenty of extra features – the ability to merge with Analytics, content/display advertising, search funnels and remarketing to name a few. Facebook may be useful for certain things – high converting products with specific target audiences – but on the whole has very poor performance rates. Facebook is “interruptive” advertising rather than search-based – people just aren’t as interested when they are trying to catch up on updates/photos etc.