The Problems with the current Pay Per Click Management Industry.

The PPC management companies need to start making a change. There is very little relation between amount of spend on a campaign and amount of work needed to run the most efficient and ROI producing search campaign. If this is widely known then why on earth are all of the companies charging this way? Paid search (PPC) adopted the business model from the traditional Ad Agency. Why would we adopt the business model that started 70 years ago? It just makes no sense at all.

The eVisibility difference -

eVisibility has made a bold step to start the migration of how companies pay for PPC Campaign Management. We are now offering flat rate, hourly pricing on all campaigns. Why is this better?

The answer is below:

eVisibility is exposing the Paid Search Industry’s dirty little secret:

Companies who are paid a percentage of ad spend are only motivated to spend as much as possible. They are only motivated to optimize your PPC campaign to the extent that you still spend as much as possible. They let thousands of keywords run and spend millions of dollars with absolutely zero ROI. These poor performing keywords are offset by the 10%-20% of keywords that actually turn a hefty profit. If the compensation structure is flawed, then the whole relationship is flawed. The ideal structure is an agency that is compensated by the hours that they dedicate to your PPC Campaign Management. Their ONE GOAL should be achieving the VERY BEST ROI possible based on your unique business needs. Too many times we have seen clients who came from other Pay Per Click Management Agencies who charge a 15% management fee on a $100K budget, who are throwing $50+K down the drain every month because it would have meant a huge pay cut for the old agency to trim the fat. If you pay a percentage of spend, you are literally paying someone to lie to you.

If we tell you that you can spend more, we are not doing so to get paid more. If we cut your spend in half and provide the same amount of business to you, then we still get paid the same level.

There are two types of advertiser who would benefit from this pricing model:

Large Budget Accounts ($20,000+) - Just because you have a large budget does not necessarily mean that your campaign is going to take longer to manage Why would you have to pay us more every time you wanted to increase your budget? We feel that maintaining a large campaign should simply be broken down into how many hours we work. You will get exactly what you pay for.

Small Budget Accounts – Being veterans in the search marketing industry, we can tell you that you get what you pay for. If you have a $2,000 a month budget and you are paying an agency 15% of your budget ($300), you are going to get 2-3 hours a month dedicated to your account. With the traditional percentage based model, you will not be treated as an equal to a large account. Take the cost of management versus spend out of the equation. I have seen $2,000 campaigns produce $3000 in revenue and I have seen them produce $50,000 in revenue for a business each month. Ask yourself what the opportunity cost of an improperly managed campaign. Managing your Paid search campaign should not be any different from a pricing standpoint in an SEO campaign.

Unique value in eVisibility Hourly Priced Model:

• Know that when we suggest you spend more, it’s not for our benefit
• Know that we will only spend dollars that make you money, not us
• We will shave all the fat from your account instantly, instead of keeping it there to get paid.
• Rest easy knowing that everything that can be done is being done despite budget size.

At eVisibility we are passionate about results. We see a large hole in logic of the majority of Paid Search Agencies. We would rather provide a benefit to both the advertiser and our business. In paid search the money doesn’t have to be in the medicine, it can be in the cure.

A couple months, ago we decided to implement A/B ad testing for one of our clients for their top four performing ad groups. We would have 2 different ad copies per ad group that were optimized based on conversions. Depending on which of those text ads wasn’t converting in comparison to the other, the lower of the two was replaced. The client would send us new text ads, and sometimes landing pages, to test every two weeks. This would eventually become the flaw of the “top performing” ad groups.

A good two months has gone by since we implemented ad testing. As we expected, the testing hurt their quality score as average cost per click and average position both took a hit. Below is the result of one of the four ad groups that we had implemented for ad testing. The results were quite identical for the other three ad groups.

As you can see from above, at the start of the ad testing implementation, average CPC was at $2.01 and average position was at 7.2. When the first rounds of changes were made, average CPC jumped to $2.03 and Avg. position went to 7.3. As changes were being made to text ads and landing pages every two weeks, you can see that the average CPC and average position were steadily increasing every week. During the last week of text ad testing, average CPC hit a high of $2.37 with an average position of 8.3.

Since we have always been a strong believer that it takes at least two weeks to firmly establish a quality score in Google, these types of results only further solidified those beliefs. Once the client saw the evidence of our analysis, we were able to suggest that text ad and landing page changes be done once a month; this way we can establish a better quality score, lower average CPC, and improve ad positioning. This month I hope to stop the bleeding and get back to the good old days.

Recently Google has increased their already robust Change History Reporting. Previously, the feature let you look back a maximum of 3 months to see what changes had been done and by whom. Now the feature shows changes up to 2 years back, starting January 1, 2006.

What does this mean to advertisers?

1. You can retrace your steps and compare analytical data with the changes you have made in order to determine which were good and bad decisions.
2. If you have an agency, you can easily check what they have been doing over the past 2 years.

Here’s how:

1. Go to the campaign management tab
2. Click on the tools sub tab and find the “my change history” link
3. Select the desired date range to start with
4. Select how far back you would like to look
5. Select which types of changes you would like to view
6. View all the changes that have been made

There are many options to play with here. You can filter the changes to see more specific changes:

1. The changes made by certain people
2. Changes made to a certain area of your account

It’s a great way to learn about your past and keep whoever is handling your account honest.

Steven recently posted about map plus boxes showing in organic Google results from addresses off third-party websites. It shouldn’t be surprising that Google has found yet another place to add the little plus boxes, they’ve been tweaking local business listings since its introduction in 2006.

Paid search local business ads got a little plus box lovin’ (officially) just last year. If you’re running a paid search campaign, you know that real estate on Google is a precious (and valuable!) commodity. So when Google offers to add an extra line (and option to expand a map underneath your ad) for free, why not jump on it?

Local Business Ads in the Search Network

Don’t get local business ads confused with free listings in Google’s Local Business Center. Local business ads are essentially enhanced paid text ads, with keywords lists, ad groups, bids, and the whole schebang. They’re eligible to appear in Google’s Search Network and Google Map local business searches, among other places. We’re just going to focus on what happens in the Search Network, however.

Unlike in Google Maps, where local business ads get precedence over regular text ads, local business ads in the Search Network must compete with regular text ads based on Ad Rank.

When local business ads are triggered in the search network, the business address appears below the text ad. If your local business ad shows up in one of the top paid positions, that’s when the little expander plus box appears.

You don’t get charged for people clicking to expand the box, clicking on the actual map, or clicking to get directions to the business location, which is nice.

The extra attention you put into making local business ad campaigns can pay off if location is important to your business, like a hotel or a restaurant. If you’re in these sorts of industries, you might consider making at least an ad group with location terms, branded terms and a local business ad or two to help searchers easily find you.

When working with national and international Fortune 1000 clients, I often observe that their brand is so strong that it provides 80% of the conversions at 20% of the total budget spent (the Pereto principal at its finest). This is where the Internet marketer enjoys the fruits of the traditional marketer’s labor. No, all of those overpriced archaic billboards on the side of the freeway were not a total waste. Those expensive advertising agencies who charge like a battalion of lawyers to come up with a tag line of three simple God-like words (Just Do It) will help your Pay Per Click efforts immensely. First we must see what all the fuss is about, and then we can see when one should abstain from branded terms.

Paid Search for the household name is all about synergy. Headlines in your text ad like “As Seen on TV” and “Found at Your Local Mall” are usually great indicators that your branded terms will successfully carry the weight of the paid search efforts. These branded terms give you an ROI buffer to go after those terms with higher volume and lower return of investment.

Just because your brand logo isn’t more recognizable than the Son of God doesn’t mean you should not be bidding on your own name. Just expect a much lower search volume. Your brand name is arguably still the most qualified bucket of keywords to bid on. It indicates that someone has already heard of you or even done business with you in the past. Even if you are ranked number one in the natural listings, it is a good idea to have a paid search listing. It gives you the chance to say exactly what you want to say to the searcher at a moment’s notice. You could run a special promotion in an instant instead of having to wait for the spiders to re-crawl your site with no guarantee that your Meta description will turn out the way you have planned.

So we have explored when branded terms do a great job; let’s dive into when they may not be your best bet. There is a very specific behavior that is the scourge of paid search marketers. If one of your clients has a service that warrants daily revisiting of your site (once the client is acquired), then branded terms might turn out to be a big waste of money. What the heck am I talking about? To clarify we will start with an example:

A company offers a free email service. Terms like “free email” work very well for this client. They have a high conversion rate because that is exactly what they offer. But their brand name does not lead to a high conversion rate because these people who are visiting the site are actually members, and are just looking to sign into their email account. They happen to click on a paid search ad because they don’t know the difference between the organic listing and the one you just paid for. Yes, there are some people looking for email services with this particular client by name, but this is a case where branded terms do not yield the rewards expected.

It’s rare to come across exceptions to the rules, but I always like to share them with the community who might find them interesting.

**With recent event unfolding on how pagerank sculpting works with the nofollow tag please refer to Google Finally Makes Up Their Mind About PageRank Sculpting With The No Follow Tag **

Learning to implement “nofollow” tags is fairly easy. Learning how to apply them in the proper way does require some skill. This post was created in order to educate the average webmaster, or website owner, on what “nofollow” tags can do for your site.

The use of “nofollow” tags can serve many different purposes. They can be used to limit the amount of link juice that flows out of a page to external pages of different domains, or they can be used to control where the link juice will flow to within a site and its internal pages.

Today, we’ll talk about the use of “nofollow” tags to control the amount of link juice flowing within a site and its internal pages. To better explain this I came up with an illustration that should help the “not so technical” crowd understand this process.

If you would, please visualize your homepage as a bucket, and the subpages as sub-buckets. See the image below:

Your total search engine authority can be represented by what I’m going to call “SEO Juice”.

Now, imagine that every link you have, in every page of your site, is a hole in the bucket. Once the different Search Engines pour their “SEO Juice” into your homepage bucket, the juice leaks out to your sub-pages, and external pages, through every link you have.

The problem is that some of your sub-buckets (sub-pages) don’t need that “SEO Juice” as much, while others need a lot of it. A good example is having those “Privacy Policy”, “Shipping Info” types of pages that really don’t need to rank highly in any SERP. So, instead of spreading your “SEO Juice” thin, you’d direct it to where it is most needed. Your site could have an extremely relevant, and high converting sub-page that you want to boost, this would be a good place to start.

The “nofollow” tags help you plug the holes of different buckets and let most of the juice flow where you want more Search Engine authority. See the image below:

Once you’ve drawn the “nofollow” strategy map for your site, and decide on what pages need more search engine authority, the implementation part is quite simple.

Now that you understand what “nofollow” tags can do for your site, make sure you look into taking advantage of this awesome tool, and take control of where your “SEO Juice” is flowing!

Still confused? Let us help you out! Check out our full list of search engine optimization services.