Archive for September, 2008

Like many aspects of modern business, you have two choices when it comes to PPC marketing: inhouse or outsource. Questions you should consider before taking the inhouse route include:

• Have any of our current staff ever used PPC?
• Would we have to hire new staff?
• Do we know what to look for in new staff?
• Do we have enough work for full-time staff?

Depending on the size of your operation, you might consider looking for staff who can fill multiple roles. Regardless, you’ll need to following if you wish to do it all yourself:

• Copywriter - a wordsmith who understands A/B and multivariate testing. Hopefully they are also involved in landing page copy
• Mathematician - not a real mathematician, but someone very good at number-crunching, spreadsheets & data analysis. PPC data can be very convoluted & complicated, and ROI is not necessarily as easy as looking at Google Analytics
• Keyword Engineer - someone who understands what people search for, what converts, what gets clicks, and how to best use available keyword tool-sets
• Maybe a Programmer - we found that the only way to manage our campaigns effectively was to create our own software tools. Even if you outsource this task, you’ll need some programming expertise to be able to communicate your ideas effectively

Oh, and somebody to manage them!

In our experience, it is extremely hard to find one person who can wear multiple of the above hats. They require different types of brains and personalities.

The PPC space is dominated by Google (Adwords), Microsoft (AdCenter), Yahoo (YSM) and to a lesser degree Ask Sponsored Listings. Beyond those there are dozens of much smaller search engines and PPC ad networks, like Findology, ABCSearch and 7Search. You may have come across their offers of free advertising to get you started. Are they worth trying?

Here are 6 reasons why they might be a waste of your time, creating a negative ROE (Return on Effort):

Size

If you used every 2nd/3rd tier PPC service, at best they could only reach the last 5% of search queries that are not made via the Big 4.

Click Fraud

Simply put, the bigger services have bigger and better fraud detection tools.

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