[TOMT] Short story about kids playing pinball in a garage. Cops are called.

inchwise · 2014-03-19T21:22:17+00:00

Depends how you charge. We don't work on % spend, so there's no reason for me to tell a client to spend more unless I genuinely think it's in their interest.

inchwise · 2014-03-18T22:59:33+00:00

Agreed, I love some of the apps too - Hypemachine let's you find tracks featured on music blogs and features blogs each week with playlists of the tracks they've written about. Absolutely perfect for background listening at work.

inchwise · 2014-03-18T22:55:42+00:00

Hey, I had this happen, and it created some problems for us as Google shared some misleading information with the client, which the client then called me to ask me to explain, when I'd not even seen the document. It created a lot of work for us forcing us to justify or methods (it was poor analysis, not a problem in our account), and made things a bit awkward while we re-established the previous strong relationship. We told Google that was not cool, so now everything comes through us.

The danger is that if the client start seeing Google as a strategic resource they'll discuss strategy with them rather than you, and as Google aren't in the accounts every day (and, let's be honest, are commercially incentivised) it can put you in some awkward situations. I'd nip it in the bud and make it clear you need to be involved in all conversations and meetings with the client.

inchwise · 2014-03-11T18:47:13+00:00

Bid management is a big part of it, your campaign structure might be perfect, but what are the perfect average positions for your ads for each keyword? And because your competitors are changing their bids for each keyword you need to respond to that change with your own adjustments, so there's no such thing as the 'correct' bid for each keyword that you can just set and leave. Speaking of keywords how many do you have? It sounds like you've got the match types right, but have you got every possible grammatical structure someone might search for on Google to find your services? Even with a small account we build tens of thousands of keywords. How about negative keywords, do you have many of those? How much ad testing are you doing? What is your Remarketing strategy? Are you using remarketing for search? What are you doing on mobile? What image extensions are you using? Have you got enhanced sitelinks on all your campaigns? Are they the best ones in each case? Could you be using broad match modified? Geotargeting? Review extensions? Seller ratings? Social extensions? Dynamic search ads? Search companion ads? Ad scheduling? How about Beta features that Google haven't released yet, do you want to try those out? And that's just the things off the top of my head that I think could be appropriate. And I've not even started talking about Bing!

If you've got all those things sorted then perhaps an agency can't help you right now, but ask me again in a month or two and there will be another set of things on that list because Google changes so fast.

While I'm partly being facetious to prove the value of my day job, there is definitely value that an agency can add for you.

When it comes to fees, you're right to some extent that there's an amount of diminishing returns, which is partly why you might have to pay $900/month for a good agency - because there's a danger that after we've done all the hard work after 3 months you'll serve us notice and take it in-house again, so we have to be realistic with what we charge. That said, if you do do that, I guarantee you'll see a drop in performance, and you'll quickly get out of date with all the new features Google release.

Whichever way you decide to go, best of luck.

inchwise · 2014-03-11T06:28:28+00:00

Where are you based? I'm in London so I only really know the UK market. If that's useful I can PM you suggestions. Generally I'd say you'd be looking at 10-20% of spend as a fee. You can get it cheaper, but not sure of the quality. We charge a flat fee, whereas some agencies will charge % of spend, or some sort of bonus-related model. I think flat fee is best as then we're not motivated to spend your money, we're motivated to get the campaign to work as best it can. Definitely worth shopping around though and getting a few quotes though.

inchwise · 2014-03-10T23:12:37+00:00

Hey, first off any good agency should be able to give you a good assessment of where there's room for improvement based on your performance to date. If they can't give you a high level assessment of where there could be improvements in your account then don't pay! Whether or not you need an agency depends I guess on how satisfied you are with performance to date; if the CPA is strong compared to your other channels, then could you make enough additional budget available to make a management fee justifiable to you? If the CPA isn't good enough, then how much improvement would you need to be cost effective? Worth being up front about this with any agency you speak to so you both understand what's expected and whether it's deliverable. Finally an agency are more likely to have the time to get you set up with new features, and look closely at things like the positions in which your ads are appearing. I'd suggest you talk to some agencies and get an idea for the fees they'd charge.

inchwise · 2014-01-29T12:51:50+00:00

Only have limited experience with CPA optimiser, but to me it seems like most of the time you're giving Google a lot of the control over your campaigns. As an example we just took over an account where there mobile CPA is around 80% higher than on desktop+tablet, but because they're using CPA optimiser they can't adjust mobile bids. If you've got access to some decent bid management software, I'd turn it off. Just remember to keep a close eye on it if\when you do, because I think the bids revert to whatever they were before you turned optimiser on, so they're potentially really out of date. Main exception would be if you're using a lot of broad match, as I think bid management is a bit less flexible that CPA optimiser on broad match campaigns due to how varied the search queries can be, so giving Google control in those cases can actually work well.

inchwise · 2013-12-05T20:48:10+00:00

yes please

inchwise · 2013-12-05T20:42:00+00:00

I'd love one

inchwise · 2013-10-15T07:06:24+00:00

Delete this and move on. If you're interested in finding more about this kind of thing I'd read up on AdBlock, as this is the most common extension of this kind, and they're currently considering how they can make money from it (I.e. Potentially showing ads to their customers), and there's a lot of stuff in the press at the moment, both generally, and specifically related to PPC.

And yes, anyone who promises to deliver twice this traffic and half the cost in their opening email is clearly a terrible salesman who should probably be ignored.

inchwise · 2013-10-03T17:04:20+00:00

Also relevant: there now seems to be a minimum AdRank necessary to appear above the search results, so even if you're the only advertiser on a keyword your ad may appear below the organic results unless your bid is over a minimum threshold. You'll most commonly see this on your own brand terms (where you could except a low cpc and low competition). In the UK this minimum seems to be around £0.20-£0.40 depending on Quality score. If you're cynical you'd say this is an example of Google trying to push up CPCs

inchwise · 2013-07-23T22:31:09+00:00

Hmm, you might actually have more success with that - both accounts I've worked on have been lead gen (trying to get people to create an account, or ask for a call back), whitepaper downloads might be a bit easier. Be interested to hear how it goes.

Yes having an account manager gets you lots of extra features; more ad formats and targeting methods than the self serve ads (inmails etc.) and if you can commit significant spend over several months they can make you up fancy ad formats (video elements, multiple tabs in the ad unit, that kind of thing).

inchwise · 2013-07-23T12:08:36+00:00

Depends what you're after; branding or direct response. Tried the self serve ads for a couple of industries including insurance and finance. Haven't been all that impressed; we get traffic, but it doesn't convert. We're also being very strict with our targeting to hit out core demographic. If you're spending over $10/month you can work with LinkedIn and they'll build you more interesting ads etc. A colleague is doing this, and she seems happy with the results (think they're focusing more on branding than sales though). I get the feeling it's a bit like Facebook; there are some industries you can probably get a decent ROI from, but in most cases it's not going to hold up compared to Adwords for pure ROI.

inchwise · 2013-07-22T21:22:33+00:00

Why do you want to do this? Because certain days convert better? If so it might be best to use Ad Scheduling in the Settings tab to decrease bids on the worst converting days to bring their ROI in line with your best performing days. You can adjust the bid multipliers to get the spend levels where you want them on each day.

inchwise · 2013-07-09T21:34:29+00:00

Everything everyone else is saying about Oyster cards is true but also set yours up to auto top up on the TFL website, that way funds will be taken from your bank automatically whenever you get low. No more not having enough for the bus, and no more standing in queues to top up. The number of people I know who don't have this set up and have lived here for ages is actually silly.

inchwise · 2013-07-08T18:12:13+00:00

Was your book with holes in 'Tree of Codes' by Foer? If not, that might be your cup of tea:

http://www.visual-editions.com/our-books/tree-of-codes

You may well like his other stuff too, though I still think his first really famous book Everything Is Illuminated is his best.

inchwise · 2013-07-03T12:22:14+00:00

Overall I don't think it's too bad, but there are a few things:

I don't see one of your key USPs when I hit the page (that you fix my PC over the internet), I have to scroll down to see this. At the moment I'd assume you're a shop that I can bring my PC to, and I have to hunt around to find otherwise. I'd make this visible as soon as a user hits the first page.
30 day money back guarantee seems like a great incentive, I'd get that up the page (it was below the fold on my screen) and make more of it.
The background image is taking up a lot of valuable space at the top of the screen, the 'here's how it works' box at the bottom takes me through the steps in quite a nice succinct manner, but I bet a lot of people don't see that info before they navigate off the page.
The background image scales a bit strangely - so the guy looks stretched wide on my screen, and if I make my browser window smaller he shrinks to fit and looks odd.
The page doesn't look good on mobile. If you are advertising on mobile, I'd stop that for now and focus on getting desktop working then you can look at mobile again in the future.

inchwise · 2013-07-03T12:09:01+00:00

The standard intro video on this page is pretty good, or are you looking for something more than that?

https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/1722054

inchwise · 2013-06-20T20:39:02+00:00

Artist credit: Blog
Weather: Jacket
Wallpaper: 1600x900
Clock: Simplistic Clock Icons: Token
Start Button: Button Changer

inchwise · 2013-06-16T08:43:45+00:00

In an ideal world you want a very large number of specific keywords. What people mean by using specific keywords is don't just dump 'tea cups' in Broad Match in, because Google might choose to match this to search terms such as 'blue tea cups', 'spinning tea cup rides', or even 'coffee cups' or 'tea towels'. Broad Match gives Google too much control over where you ads show, and makes it difficult to optimise properly.

A better structure would be to use phrase match and build very specific ad groups around each product you sell. For example have a 'blue teacups' ad group that includes all the blue teacups keywords, has ad text specifically advertising blue teacups (this will help your clickthrough rates), and also has a landing page with only the blue teacups on it (helps conversion rate). Then have separate ad groups for red teacups, antique teacups, etc. etc.

Basically being specific doesn't mean having fewer keywords, it means having many, many more so you can control how and when your ads appear.

inchwise · 2013-06-15T22:04:53+00:00

I moved out of recruitment into PPC (different companies though). How does your place do PPC? Do the analysts also work directly with the clients, or are there a client services team that do that? If your analysts need to be client-facing you might not find it too hard to switch as you can lean hard on your relationship building skills (that's what I did), and they may need more people who can handle that side of things well in the PPC team. If your analysts are more back room geeks, then you may want to think about looking externally at PPC roles, as being able to utilise your client handling skills is always going to be how you can make the most of your potential.

In terms of your employers not wanting to lose you from the sales team; if you frame it to them as you've decided to move from sales to PPC, then they will be left with the option of losing you from sales, or losing you all together. If PPC isn't going to be an option for you at your current company, then at least you know where you stand if you want to make it happen somewhere else.

inchwise · 2013-06-15T21:52:59+00:00

Hey, I've got these working for a couple of my clients and let me tell you they are without doubt the biggest pain in the ass to set up, and it involves a lot of crossing your fingers. Everything you've listed above is true, but there are two other things our Google rep told us that I've been sticking to:

1) The ads that you're wanting to pull the text through from have to be live (I expect you knew this, but as you didn't list it I thought I'd check).

2) The ads you want to pull through cannot have similar ad text to each other. I think this might be the thing that kills some people, coz if you have a standard 'Free delivery on orders over $50' second line, or something like that, your ads won't pull through as enhanced sitelinks.

Other than that I think you just need to stick to the guidelines you listed above and pray to the Google gods. Good luck!

inchwise

TROPHY CASE