SEO London, Edinburgh Internet Marketing Breeze Media

If you’re one of thousands of companies spending crazy sums on Adwords then give us two minutes of your time and we’ll show you how to reduce this dramatically…without reducing your profits.

We all know that getting to the top of Google is the best way to get people to visit your website. The visitors you get from search engines earn you enquiries and if your products meet their needs then you stand to make sales.

In the past 18 months and the recession started to take hold, many companies turned to online advertising like Adwords as a cheap way to boost sales and keep ahead of competitors. Unfortunately, only a small percentage of companies using Adwords are succesful and the remainder end up spending far too much  for very little reward.

Another thing to emerge from the downturn is the sharp rise in PPC agencies preying on unsuspecting businesses. Many companies are still falling victim to extremely aggressive sales tactics and paying grossly inflated fees for their services.

In the next few minutes we’re going to show you how to avoid spending excessively on Adwords, save money and stay profitable. So let’s begin…

In the past year…

• we’ve worked with new clients whose Adwords spend was out of control and rising each month.
• we’ve met clients spending in excess of £100k a year on Adwords when £400 a week would produce the same results.
• we’ve met clients paying 20-30% extra to PPC agencies who have done almost no work at all
• we’ve weened some companies of Adwords entirely

So lets pose a few questions.

Are you…

1. Spending hundreds/thousands every month making sure your ad is on top of Google?
2. Paying 20-30% add on fees to PPC management companies?
3. Seeing no increase in sales from Adwords every month?
4. Paying a set fee of £99 a month? (See the scam section later)

If you fall into any of these categories then we’re going to show you where you can reduce your costs or even stop them altogether.

Here’s how…

Take look at the images below.

These are special images called “heatmaps” that show where people have looked and clicked on Google search pages. The blue areas show where many people have clicked and the red areas show where LOTS of people have clicked.  The red line is called “the fold”. Anything above this line is what you see on your screen before you have to scroll down the page.

Just by looking at the pictures, you can see that about 80% of people click on the free results. This means that you’re 4 times more likely to get a visitor from a free listing than you are from a paid advert.

Let’s illustrate this with an example…

Your company has a web page listed number 3  in the free organic results for the phrase  “blue widgets” and from this you get an average of 120 visitors (clicks) per week.  Not a lot you might think, but imagine if you had to pay for these visitors on Adwords at a cost of £2.50 a click. This equates to £300 a week or £1200 a month (and that’s is just for one phrase).

Now imagine if you had to pay for four or five phrases. Before long you could quite easily be looking at monthly Adwords costs of £4-5000 a month.

But wait…

What if your online advertising is managed by a PPC agency?

You can expect to pay £1500 – £3000 for “setup” plus you will have to pay 20-30% on top of the cost of the ads*.

*PPC agencies don’t make any money from the actual adverts so they have to make their money in other ways hence the setup and management fees.

But are these fees justified?

Based on our new clients Yes (10%) and No(90%)

Let us explain.

THE YES’S – We know of a few dozen very good PPC agencies who will save you money and increase your sales. These companies will setup your campaign, provide reports, analysis and constantly improve your ROI. These same companies will work hand in hand with very good SEO companies to produce the best overall results for the client. You will receive regular reports and updates, be shown what steps they will make for the next month’s spend, do split tests, rinse and repeat.

THE NO’S – we speak with companies almost every day who work with PPC agencies that do almost no work at all, don’t tell the client what they’re doing, charge extremely excessive fees and make no difference to the client’s ROI, and it’s these agencies you should avoid.

Lets take the “£1500 setup fee” that many of them charge for example. This fee should involve discussion with you, ananlysis and research of your market, competition and keywords. However, most will do nothing more than set up your account with Google, create a few campaigns and set your budget. Most often it’s no more than 2-3 hours work which equates to £750 an hour. Note: some PPC agencies charge a setup fee even if your account has already set up.

Next – the monthly management fees. 20-30% on top of your advert costs. The majority of PPC agencies will set your Adwords account on auto pilot and do virtually no work at all other than send a monthly results report that takes a no more than a few minutes to create.

What PPC agencies don’t want you to know

As mentioned above – PPC agencies only make money from the 20-30% add on costs. A very large proportion of PPC agencies are sales companies with monthly sales targets so it’s in their interest to make sure you accrue as many clicks as possible so they can charge you as much fees as possible.

They use a variety of methods such as…

1. Placing your ads in highest cost per click pages
2. Timing your ads to coincide with peak times and accrue higher costs per click. They know you’re not going to watch your ads 24/7
3. Your landing pages are designed so ast to not rank organically. Basically they place pieces of code to tell the search engines not to index them. If the landing pages were indexed and started appearing in the free results then there would be no point in paying for that ad any more.

The £99 a month scam

If you’re running an Adwords campaign then sooner or later you will get calls from PPC agencies offering to manage your campaign for £99 per month. They will offer you keywords that are extremely low competition and no one really likely to click on. They will also place ads on pages that you have free listings on already.  This reduces the chances of somene clicking on your ad – instead prefering the organic ad.

You can read more about adwords scams here