Some time ago I wrote about my frustrations with AdWords resellers and the crazy CPC mark-ups, poor results and resulting High churn rate in the local space.
The economics and the business model are a challenge. Resellers have to pay sales teams who have to sign up as many advertisers as possible and account managers (if the business has any) have 100′s or 1000′s of accounts to look after. The reseller than has to slap on a massively high mark-up on the Cost per click to drive any revenue at all.
I’ve seen 100% mark-ups ‘out in the wild’.
It’s a low quality, high volume business. and yes, the churn rate is massive because advertisers are not happy with results or service.
Honestly, It’s not a business model I’d touch with a 10 foot pole!
What I have begun to do is share my knowledge on this blog (via the ‘Mind your own PPC’ posts) in the hope that small business readers can start to wrestle control of their marketing back from dodgy resellers and actually get some value for money. Eg don’t pay a 100% mark-up on Click costs if you don’t have to.
However the reality of the situation is that many small business owners simply do not have the time (even a few minutes a day) to devote to managing their own local search campaign, nor the time to devote to learning what they need to learn to get things going properly. Yet they also know that that they are potentially missing out on valuable traffic by not having a presence in the search results or map pages. So they’re forced to find a supplier who can get them there, even if it means paying more than they should for mediocre campaigns…
Enter Google AdWords Express
EO, and all the other acronyms work– nor do they care. For a thousand dollars per client each month, you have to pay for finding clients, educate them on what you do, and yet have enough to spend on PPC, building landing pages, SEO, account management, reporting, call tracking, and so forth. And the venture capital folks want to make a 20x return on their investment. You do the math and see how near impossible it is to succeed in this space.
“Really, you can actually track online sales generated from AdWords Clicks?” Was the question I got from someone who had a bad first time experience with AdWords and Search Marketing after signing up over the phone with a reseller.