Importance Of Choosing A Proper Pay Per Click Management Firm
October 21, 2008
With more and more companies being aware of search engine marketing, this has led to the rise of more companies offering search engine marketing management services. Individuals with some knowhow can now offer their search engine marketing management skills, web design firms can now add to their arsenal of offerings search engine marketing services too.In fact, setting up an account with Google Adwords or Yahoo Search engine marketing is free. The barriers to entry are simply non-existent. However this gives rise to more abuse and mismanagement of pay per click campaigns.
The issue is not with setting up the account, but setting up a proper campaign that is optimized to give the best value for money and return on investment. Without a proper setup, there would be wastage of marketing dollars and increase in advertisement bids which could have been avoided.
Setting up a proper pay per click campaign isn’t rocket science. But there are various steps that need to be implemented to ensure that. For the purpose of this article, I will not go through the various steps as that would be covered in another article. More importantly, I would highly some case examples of pay per click management gone bad and how the company might actually be throwing good money away.
Case Study Example: Adtec Enterprise Pte Ltd
If you noticed the picture above, you will see Adtec.com.sg ranking 1st for the keyword ‘music tapes’. Which is a pretty common keyword and should get a pretty high number of search counts every month. But the company in question is actually selling industrial adhesive tapes, nothing related to music at all.
Here you see them ranking 3rd on the top right hand side for the keyword ‘affirmation tapes’. And we happened to notice this because we were planning a campaign for one of our client which happens to sell these types of products. But I’m definitely sure Adtec.com.sg isn’t selling any of those.
Once again, Adtec.com.sg also ranks 3rd on the top right hand side for the keyword ‘tape recorder’. Something totally irrelevant to their product offerings.
Taking it step further, we decided to conduct some basic keyword digging with the service Keywordspy. And its database showed that Adtec Enterprise Pte Ltd was actually bidding for a massive 24,830 keywords. With bids on generic single keywords like ‘tape’, ‘rivets’ and ‘bolts’.
Now it is not entirely wrong to bid on single keywords, however one must be very careful to include negative keywords in the pay per click campaign so as to prevent the advertisement from appearing where there are searches for irrelevant keywords. I suppose either their company personal or their pay per click management firm just did not bother with this.
Implications? Their advertisements will show up for irrelevant keyword searches, which would cause their click through rate (CTR) to drop and cause them to require higher bids to maintain high rankings for relevant keywords. Or even worse, there might be some stray web surfers that might click on their advertisement for fun or by mistake, hence increasing their ad spend for nothing.
Multiply this error across the 24,830 keywords they are bidding on and you can pretty much deduce that they are running a campaign with negative ROI.
Logically speaking, I doubt their campaign was done inhouse as its unlikely that their own personnel could run up a keyword list this huge. So its probably done by a third party pay per click management firm.
Hence this is a good example of why you should always perform background research whenever you employ a search engine marketing firm to launch your campaign.
Quiz them hard and see whether they are giving you general answers to your questions. Check that they don’t have a reseller or partnership with Google or Yahoo as that might give cause for conflict of interest. Sometimes the person servicing your account might just be interested to jack up your advertisement spent as they are getting rebates back from Google and Yahoo. Hence there is no interest to optimize your campaign to give you value. Or even worse still, they might not have any idea how to go about launching a proper campaign but just launching a sub-par service to ride with the tide.
