Search Engine Marketing Tricks
Is your SEM or PPC Management Company Taking You For a Ride? Probably.
If you’re a business with a large PPC
management contract, I can almost guarantee that you’re being ripped
off. You’re paying too much for conversions, and you’re probably paying
a commission based on “percentage of spend” which encourages your agency
to waste more money every month. In fact (personal experience) there are
some agencies that will spend even more of your money toward the end of
the month just to make their sales numbers. Naturally, they do
this by getting you worse clicks for more money.
What can you do about it? First, make sure you have someone on staff who knows how PPC works. Google Adwords, MSN Adcenter, and Yahoo Search Marketing all have very different platforms, but they are all designed to make sure your ad shows up when people type in keywords. Your SEM agency knows that many keyword searches are very vague, so they work to get clicks to your site which have no chance of turning into conversions.
(Example: someone searches for “car insurance” on a search engine. If you’re selling “used car parts” your ad can show up if you are on a broad match for the word “car” or even “used car.”. If you get clicked, you lose money, and if you don’t get clicked, you get hurt too! This is because non-clicked searches push you ad down further on the list of sponsored links, even if your competitors are paying less!)
Next, ask how conversion data is being tracked. Month over month, the cost per conversion should either stay the same or drop. If new competitors come in, cost per conversion might go up, but still shouldn’t be unreasonable. You may find that some keywords just aren’t profitable, and a good SEM agency should not be afraid to say so. If your agency is improving the account like it should, you should expect to see conversions increase until they hit a ceiling. It the agency is really good, they will help you break through the ceiling by recommending changes to your website.
Third, examine the account, or have a professional third party do it for you. Paying a competing SEM or PPC agency $1000 to look at an account isn’t always a bad idea, especially if you tell your agency that it is part of the auditing process. A true professional should be able to spot obvious flaws including: lack of negative keywords, lack of dynamic ad match, insufficient phrase match, excessive broad match, poor budget allocation, incorrectly applied day parting, and (the biggest sin) bad bidding.
If you’ve been working with the agency for a while, and have access to the account, then you should also be checking on how often they make changes. A little detective work will show if any changes are being made at all, and if people (not robots) are behind the work. In Google, the “my change history “ is a very instructive report which shows whether or not people are logging in and making adjustments. If you’re paying any more than $5000 per month in PPC fees, you should at least expect substantive changes every week, if not every day.
What can you do about it? First, make sure you have someone on staff who knows how PPC works. Google Adwords, MSN Adcenter, and Yahoo Search Marketing all have very different platforms, but they are all designed to make sure your ad shows up when people type in keywords. Your SEM agency knows that many keyword searches are very vague, so they work to get clicks to your site which have no chance of turning into conversions.
(Example: someone searches for “car insurance” on a search engine. If you’re selling “used car parts” your ad can show up if you are on a broad match for the word “car” or even “used car.”. If you get clicked, you lose money, and if you don’t get clicked, you get hurt too! This is because non-clicked searches push you ad down further on the list of sponsored links, even if your competitors are paying less!)
Next, ask how conversion data is being tracked. Month over month, the cost per conversion should either stay the same or drop. If new competitors come in, cost per conversion might go up, but still shouldn’t be unreasonable. You may find that some keywords just aren’t profitable, and a good SEM agency should not be afraid to say so. If your agency is improving the account like it should, you should expect to see conversions increase until they hit a ceiling. It the agency is really good, they will help you break through the ceiling by recommending changes to your website.
Third, examine the account, or have a professional third party do it for you. Paying a competing SEM or PPC agency $1000 to look at an account isn’t always a bad idea, especially if you tell your agency that it is part of the auditing process. A true professional should be able to spot obvious flaws including: lack of negative keywords, lack of dynamic ad match, insufficient phrase match, excessive broad match, poor budget allocation, incorrectly applied day parting, and (the biggest sin) bad bidding.
If you’ve been working with the agency for a while, and have access to the account, then you should also be checking on how often they make changes. A little detective work will show if any changes are being made at all, and if people (not robots) are behind the work. In Google, the “my change history “ is a very instructive report which shows whether or not people are logging in and making adjustments. If you’re paying any more than $5000 per month in PPC fees, you should at least expect substantive changes every week, if not every day.
Signs that your agency may be trying
to pull a fast one:
- They won’t give you access to the accounts. It is one thing for an agency to refuse to let you make changes. It is quite another to have them refuse to show you where the money is going. We (I work with a few people) have seen some agencies that were taking credit for natural search engine traffic in their reports, and pocketing the advertising budget! The fastest way to see gross mismanagement in action, and to do something about it, is to have access to the PPC account. Don’t be afraid to ask questions.
- They rely on robots and software. A human being should be in charge of all your accounts, and it should be the same person, not just an operator, when you have a question. Many agencies use “rules based” bidding programs which are fine when a good person is behind them. The bad agencies use a formula for bid management, and it isn’t smart enough (or is programmed otherwise) to save you money. If you look at the log files and see hundreds of updates happening at the same time and on a frequent basis, then something is up.
- They outsource. Even outsourcing to Canada (or the US if you’re from up there) can have pitfalls. People use different idioms when searching, have a different vocabulary, and may not understand your field of business. Ontario Canada is a very different place than Ontario California. One gets more sun, the other gets more snow. Things get even dicier as you cross the international dateline. Banking and insurance terms have very different meanings in different countries, and this can cost you.
- They don’t use negative keywords. We had one major agency tell us that negatives “weren’t important” even though that the use of negative keywords is one of the most basic ways of channeling relevant traffic. The list of negatives should be increased on a regular basis because news items are always generating exposure in one field or another. Also, if you run a copier repair business in a big city, you don’t want to see your ad next to a news item about a colleague’s infamous actions. The Google Keyword Tool can help anyone find negative keywords, and your agency should be using it. Once again, even if you don’t get junk clicks, you can be worse off because Google, Yahoo, and MSN will downgrade ads with a poor clickthrough rate, so your relevant customers will not see you anywhere near the top of the list.
- They don’t channel the content match. What is content match? Basically it is you ad showing up online next to articles on other websites. Good content match advertising can get affordable results. Bad content match puts money in the pockets of click fraud practitioners. If your agency is getting paid based on spend, this is one of the top tools in their arsenal for wasting your money. Content match can be controlled and channeled so you only show up in places that will make you money. If you can’t see conversion data from content match, make sure it gets turned off.
- They don’t analyze the content match. There are several programs out there, some free, that will tell you how your content traffic behaves. If most of that traffic leaves the site after 30 seconds, you’re getting ripped off.
- They use overkill tactics. An outdated technique is to create hundreds of new campaigns with thousands of keywords. This usually does not work, but makes the account very confusing to manage and track. I once improved the performance of a whole account by deleting 50,000 robot-generated keywords that had not been clicked once in 3 years. If someone is trying to fool you with machine generated quantity, then they probably did not spend a lot of time on your site.
- They require a minimum spend. It is one thing to have a monthly management fee, because this justifies the expense of controlling the account. Making sure you spend a fixed amount on advertising during your slow season may indicate kickbacks or bad dealing.
- Your Cost Per Conversion Goes Up! If you contracted with an agency to help you manage your PPC, and your cost per conversion goes up, you have lost that much money plus the management fee. If you were getting better results by yourself, then it is time to terminate the contract.
Special note about “Pay for Performance” agencies. Quite a few of these are scams. They require you to pay up front, and then can use any number of statistics to say that they did their job afterwards. An honest agency should be able to demonstrate results very quickly and increase the efficiency of your whole account. Worse yet, the “pay for performance” types may be running their own content/click fraud channels, so even if they don’t take a fee, you still have to pay for the clicks, and they get a percentage. If you are paying based on the actual conversion, put some controls in place to make sure the conversion is legitimate.
Notes and Special Information
Special note: in search engine optimization, the rules change every day, and sometimes twice. In the past, a Google update lasted months, but we have seen rankings shift on a daily basis. Therefore, a good site today is imperative despite any other factors, and the time to get started is now!.