The general things to think about are a combination of ‘likeability’ and efficiency. When I speak of nice people, I assume that people, like people, like themselves.

And that being the case you get more done and have more goodwill to help you through any tough times you both may have.

The efficiency stuff:? 

PPC agency requirements

• Cost per hour or day of service
  • How do they account for this
  • If there is more work involved than expected, then how would this be accounted for
• Invoicing terms
  • Monthly?
  • How big is their credit line?
  • Gap between being invoiced and being paid ?€“ making sure cashflow is managed
• Consistency in service standards
  • How will these agreed standards be maintained
    • What are the mechanisms to track this?
• Quality of the people administering the account
  • GAP qualified? (google adwords professional qualified)
  • Years experience
  • Interest in what we do?
• Flexibility of the company
  • Account management structure
    • Do the people between the account expect and us know what they are talking about?
    • Can they translate our wishes properly (We give a brief – do they understand it?))
    • Do we have clear access to the execs?
• Expertise in this sector
  • As a business have they managed accounts this size
  • What case studies can they present
• Assurances on consistency of personnel
  • What contractual elements can we have to make sure the personnel we ?€˜buy?€™ are the ones we keep on the account
  • If these people leave, what arrangements do we have to replace them with appropriate people
• Bid management / general technology they use
  • How do they see this tech working in our circumstances?
  • What will this cost be and what savings has this tech given with other clients
• Reporting
  • Examples of client reporting
    • What analysis
    • How robust is the data
    • Tags ? which ones?
• Access to accounts
  • Can we? ?€“ we don?€™t like ?€˜black box?€™ so access here is important
• Contractual stuff
  • How long?
  • What is its broken by us ?€“ penalties?
  • What liability on their part if they mess up? i.e. they mess up some max cost per click figures and burn a load of money
  • Can some of the things we want be incorporated? I.E. pick of certain execs?

So I have decided to adopt this framework – NEW AIDA. Its worth noting that the Eisenberg brothers are a great source of wisdom on conversion and you should check out their blog here : http://www.grokdotcom.com/

The process:

The ingredients you need to set up a conversion:
This concept has been taken from a really good book called
Does Your Marketing Sell?: The Secret of Effective Marketing …
More on the book here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/

How it works:

One of the main ideas is something called ‘N.E.W. A.I.D.A’ OR NEW AIDA.
As you marketing people will know AIDA is an acronym for Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. But Ian Moore has taken this idea further and added ‘new’ into the mix.

- STEP ONE NAVIGATION ?€“ understanding
o Being told in simple terms what the proposition is
o Knowing where to go next
- STEP TWO EASE ?€“ convenience
o Making the pathway simple and clear
o Simple forms
o Simple offer
- STEP THREE WORDING ?€“ conversation
o Simple clear language
o Friendly
o Professional
o The language of the target audience (mirroring)

What happens when the ingredients are in place:
- STEP FOUR ATTENTION ?€“ serendipity
o You get the attention of the right person
o It is the right kind of attention whicih turns into a conversion
- STEP FIVE INTEREST – persuadability
o You build up their interest in your product or service
o This builds momentum to the next stage of the process
- STEP SIX DESIRE ?€“ knowledge
o Now you build value
o The more value you build in a users mind, the more you can get for your products and services
o Now you have a lot of momentum.
- STEP SEVEN ACTION ?€“ permission
o You get permission from the user to buy
o You make it as easy as possible
o Any obsticles will amplify the negatives (this is why forms have to be well designed)
o You have the sale!

I’m sure this is old news, but I have been talking to a big london PPC agency today and they were moaning about google sqeezing them on commission.. big deal you may say. well yes it is actuallly.

The way it used to work was that a client wold buy media, if they went through to the media provider they would pay X, but an agency would be able to buy media for X – 10% – 15% depending on the size of the spend and the provider.

So when a company takes on a pay per click agency they are ususlly charged a set up fee and then a percentage of the media spend – usally 10 – 15%

So as you see if you get the ‘kickback’ from the media provider, it effectively zero’s out the cost of the agency – so were all happy!

But google dont play this game – they dont give any kickback and so we get stuck with the agency fees. Thats bad, but what makes it worse is the increasing cost of online paid for search (adwords and adsense) why ?

Well the big companies are entering the fray without much online savvy. They think that in terms of broadcast advertising (tv, Radio) and display advertising (newspapers magazines etc) . they assume, within reason, the more money you burn, the bigger the bang (awareness) the bigger the uptake.

But PPC doesnt work like that. there is a ‘sweet spot’ i.e. the amount of money you spend versus the return on investment. and once you hit that – any more money and youre just burning money – but im seeing loads of big spenders overspenind in the vain hope they are going to get a good ROI.

In PPC you generally look at a conversion rate of about 2% so if a click costs a ?£1 then its ?£50 per acquision. and im seeing ?£4 a click on generic competitive keyphrases – thats ?£200 per acquisition !!! and those numbers are consistant

so stupid money is beginning to roll in and….

.. as you probably know google is doing a big push on stamping out ‘inorganic’ link building – this is buying links from 3rd party sites to get a bump up th rankings.

what they want are NO commercial organsiaitons artifically buying their way to the top of the engines – its an ‘anti spam’ drive. This is like saying road speed cameras are not about making money, or that the london congestion charge is about stopping congestion!?!
So the idea is to get the money out of one place in the internet and get it into online advertising. The big idea is to fill the top ranking positions with non commercial information sites and let the commercial organisations fight it out in paid for search.

so as you see with any monopoly, they can squeeze and get away with it.