It is always worth looking at the intent of the search in terms of ROI. Is it an information search of one with intent to buy. It there any confusion in the terms shingles or shutters mean different things to different searches for example. Get your keyword research correct and use your PPC data.

I’m new to the adwords thing, and I think they’ re fooling me. the adcampaign metrics are at 0 impressions and all 0, yet my domain host web-statistics give me 40 hits a day…

Interesting enough… the problem with long tails is though that the time you spend on research trawling through the incoming and working out conversions only gives the client a tiny proportion of sales. In the case of this example I got my client right under the hotel for the NAME search… which surely is more important? no?

I find it interesting that you can rank higher for “dublin hotel” than “hotel dublin”

I didn’t realise that this makes a difference before now.

Overture doesn’t seem to discriminate on which is searched for more.

Did you consider this idea when you ran this campaign?

This makes sense to me, as I am pretty sure they follow a similar approach to reviewing websites, generally automated/spidered and then when something weird or a flagged item pops up they go in and manually review it.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adwords/3383118.htm

Unless something has changed?

Who told you it needs to be approved?

You are right about the partner sites though. Also, ads must be reviewed manually before going live on the content network (for obvious reasons).

But, as you say, trying to rank number one naturally for ‘mobile phones’ or ‘PDAs’ could be ‘challenging’…

On the plus side, it means that there’s really nowhere to hide – if we drop the ball, or even fail to make improvements, they know almost as soon as we do!

Of course, there are clear downsides to this – random (for want of a better word) noise can lead to some interesting phone calls, particularly if my contact isn’t particularly numerate. And it limits the number of adgroups that I can have without losing reporting functionality.

On the whole, it’s a good thing, as it means that we have to keep working on their campaigns (it’s quite easy to spend 99% of your time working on the new campaigns, where improvements are easy to come by), and it means that our clients know that we’re giving them something for their money.

It also depends on their exact requirements. For example, a client may come specifically for search engine optimisation and not require PPC management, or already have a firm grip on their SEO and need some prefessional pay per click campaign management. Then there are those that require a full service online marketing campaign encapsulating everything. Sometimes, all they need is a little advice to send them on the right path.

Search marketing is a service, not a product. And it needs to be treated that way. It needs to be priced differently for each client according to their exact needs and goals and to insure they get the best possible return on their inventment.

Experimenting with pricing at the end of the day is really the only way you can know for sure though. Those who entered the search engine marketing industry early have this to their advantage.

This is changing over time, and perhaps we should consider offering different types of contract to different customers, though it’s not a decision for me to make.

I think that flexibility is probably important in our position, where we have clients with budgets ranging from £10 per day up, and if our competitors offer alternatives that we don’t (or vice-versa), it’s quite important…

We use a very common hybrid pricing model for larger accounts. That being a small % of advertising spend increasing at set milestone ROI increments. This has worked amazingly well as it reduces the risk for the client initially and as I said, incentivises the agency to achieve goals rather than just “Monitor” the account until the end of the contract. This model also insures that the client is NEVER experiencing a ROI smaller than what they had before they hired the agency. Even WITH the agency fees.

Inflating statistics serves neither client or agency and any agency basing their fees or performance on this should be…. well, shut down. It is important for clients to use due diligence and understand this concept.

Regarding trying new ideas with risk to your own agency revenue, that is completely up to you of course. But we all know that those that do not innovate get left behind. Also, if you try something completely new and outside the box and it works well, you can apply the technique to other clients campaigns. If you are working on a performance basis again, everyone wins.

From my perspective, I’d feel more cautious about trying new ideas, if I know that they’re going to cost my business money if they don’t work (I’m happy enough to take risks with other people’s money!).

Also, from the client’s perspective, if we start performing far better than they were expecting, they may start suspecting our original estimates and forecasts. And let’s face it, if it’s a new campaign starting from scratch, they are a bit hit-and-miss to begin with.

Unscrupulous agencies could deliberately overstate the expected cost per click (or conversion) in order to get more money from their clients. We use a fixed fee, and as somebody who used to be a client, I’d be more comfortable with this, particularly if I only had a restrictive budget.

It’s always possible to ‘cheat’ to improve a statistic in isolation – cpc or cpa can be fiddled by reducing the bids, and getting less traffic but more cheaply. Clicks can be inflated with less relevant keywords or vague adverts…

I agree, agencies that deal only in PPC have absolutely no incentive to deal with this. In fact, it is in their best interests not to deal with it. That’s why it’s important to deal with an agency that is not only proficient in both but also works with the client to suggest additional work for the SEO team (Whoever that may be). It is also important for agencies to offer a performance based cap and important for clients to ask for it.