3 replies to this topic

[steveorg]

I am considering finding an Online Paid Placement guru, someone who who can assist in developing and managing online ad campaigns for Google AdWords, Overture, etc.

What criteria should I use to evaluating specialists, what kind of guidance should I be expected to give to work with these resources and how do I evaluate the compensation issues?

Also, to what extent should these campaigns be integrated with seo and should I expect the same person to be able to handle both areas. Am I better off with different people or with both rolled into one?

[rohgan03]

will flat monthly fee not based on advertisement budget be imp to you ??

SEO and PPC are different. I'll give to the same person if I know I am in good hands for both..but evaluate for the two factors independently

I wil be looking at this too....will love to hear what others have to say...

[cline]

That's an excellent question!

Based on the client inquiries I get I don't think business managers know how to evaluate PPC management vendors. I think the metric most of them use is based on how much time they think they'd spend doing it and how much they feel they'd need to be paid to do it themselves.

I base this on a few trends I've noticed with my own inquiries. The prospects who are most likely to buy are those who either hate working with computers and would gladly pay to avoid this work, or people who have been running their own accounts for some time and have learned how hard it is to do well and how time consuming it is. The first group knows they hate this stuff and will take almost anyone that on the surface looks okay. The second group has put a lot of time into educating themselves, which allows them to evaluate vendors. The middle ground seems stuck.

One of the factors I use in pricing PPC management is that I do a bunch of searches on a variety of terms I think the client should be advertising on. I'll do a mix of some obvious, not-so obvious, and obscure terms to see how strong the competition looks. The stronger the competition, the more work a PPC campaign is to optimize and manage.

A prospective client could do something similar. Do some searches on terms the PPC consultant is managing campaigns on. Are the ads relatively ubiquitous? Can you make the ads come up on terms they shouldn't come up on but are likely to be searched on? Does the ad copy look good? These are rough indicators.

It's surely difficult to assess how much value there is in a well-optimized PPC program vs. an average one. I've got a case study of one on my site of a situation like this, but it's hard for clients to assess what will happen in their own situations. In this regard I happen to be doing a test with one client who has a large well designed PPC account to see how much of a lift I can achieve, testing just a small portion of the account. Hopefully this will turn out to be another nice case study.

As far as guidence goes, you really need to be open with your consultant about your business economics. Your consultant must have a good understanding of what can be spent to acquire a customer -- or at least as good as what you have. You shouldn't need to tell them what terms to target.

Some people do both SEO and PPC, others specialize in only one area. Either way is fine, however, the PPC consultant collects data that can be tremendously useful to your SEO consultant, so it's a good idea to ensure that the data are shared and that the SEO consultant has some familiarity with these data.

[anthonyparsons.com]

Also, to what extent should these campaigns be integrated with seo and should I expect the same person to be able to handle both areas. Am I better off with different people or with both rolled into one?

That actually reassures me a little Steve. I do offer PPC in my services, though I only offer it as a beginning solution until other marketing efforts take effect, and the second is to keep highly competitive terms running until long waiting SEO techniques can catch up to get that phrase ranked high enough, ie. some competitive phrases can easily take a six months and/or a year or more, so PPC covers the gap until then.

I outsource my PPC campaigns for anything full time with just a referral fee. I know I am not skilled enough to run and manage full time PPC advertisement. You will find some professionals here that do this full time and focus upon it. If PPC is your only advertisement, then IMO, you really want someone with the knowledge and who is extremely dedicated to your account.