Search Advisory

Love this article by my friend Brad Geddes: “Google’s New Forced Transparency: Is Your Agency Ready?“  We’ve been watching over the years as “aggregators” selling pay-per-click services get more aggressive.  Think companies like ReachLocal, Network Solutions, AJC Media Solutions, ValPak, AT&T and various Yellow Pages companies.

A couple of times, we’ve lost PPC clients to these types of aggregators, who offer a simple pricing solution (usually a flat per-click fee that covers everything), which appears on the surface to be less expensive than paying an agency (us) as well as the media costs (the per-click amount paid to the search engines).  But, as with most things in life, you get what you pay for.

Each time a client has left, we’ve been able to compare our results in an “apples-to-apples” scenario against theirs, and we’ve overwhelmingly generated more leads at a lower cost per lead than the newcomers to the field.  And our clients have told us that our service and reporting are vastly better.  So, every time, our clients have come back.

I’m glad to have the different methods of handling PPC spelled out so clearly here, and the issue of Google’s transparency explained in a balanced way.  This should be mandatory reading for any business considering using a PPC aggregator.