Pay-Per-Click or PPC FAQs

Just the PPC FAQs – Account Management Services

Have questions about Pay-Per-Click or specific PPC FAQs? You can call or email us but this page may have the answers. After all, prospective clients as well as current ones had the same questions regarding our services:

Which Ad Networks Are You Familiar With?

We can manage your campaigns in any ad network you choose. Actually, we’ll advise and recommend certain networks, even those we may never have worked with before just because it makes sense for your business.. It’s about reaching your audience wherever they are and showing them great ads, something we’re very good at. Online ad networks are all very similar and their interfaces are easily learned.

Since you ask, we’ve done Google Ads (formerly Adwords) to death of course, Bing Ads, Yahoo, LinkedIn, a bit of Facebook, Waze, and many others out of the hundreds of ad networks out there. Even Amazon has a paid advertising platform. Quora too which can be good for certain types of businesses. Don’t be afraid to contact us just because your preferred platform is not listed here.

Will You Work With Small Businesses?

Yes, we help businesses of all sizes make their online advertising the best it can be, from a one-man operation to multi-million international companies.

Do I Need a Minimum Spend on My Campaign?

Some agencies will only work with you if you spend a certain amount. Your ad spend doesn’t matter to us. We have had clients spending barely a hundred to thousands per month. Our fee is not dependent on your ad spend.

Which Industries or Verticals Do You Work With?

Pretty much all of them. Some agencies specialize in only one type of business, real estate for example, or chiropractors. While there is some benefit to working with an industry-specific agency, we are not one to pigeonhole ourselves. We believe we can do better than even an industry-specific agency as they become stale over time doing the same things for all their clients.

Will You Do Only a Campaign Setup?

Yes. Although we recommend ongoing management (advertising should evolve and that’s what we excel at), we can set up a campaign for you to manage yourself. Of course, you can always come back and let us manage it, provide analytics or consultation. This option may be more expensive to you rather than long-term management but you could go that route if you wish.

Do You Have Contracts?

No. We don’t tie down clients to long-term contracts. As long as you keep paying your monthly fee, we continue working on campaigns to improve results. This means getting more clicks and sales at a lower cost.

Who Pays for Click Costs?

You do. Unlike some agencies, we manage using your accounts. We don’t manage on our own and then charge you or charge a percentage of your spending. We only charge for our services.

The advantage is that it is your account and everything we do is yours. We’d like a long-term relationship with you – we have a few clients doing so for more than 10 years – this makes it simple for you to opt out of our service. Doing everything within our own accounts, you’d have to recreate your campaigns. You also don’t have to worry if we can pay for your campaigns, a situation we’ve seen with other clients who did not have control of their accounts and seen traffic completely dry up because their agency did not or could not pay, not to mention the problems of switching agencies.

What Are Your Fees?

You’ll notice we don’t specify what we charge for our services anywhere on the site. You won’t see a monthly fee that applies to all clients or even an hourly fee. That’s because every client and every campaign is different. There can’t be a fee that fits all.

Unlike many other agencies, what we don’t do is charge a percentage of your ad spend. Agencies that do that have little incentive to improve your campaigns except to ramp up your spending. Not every agency will do that of course but we believe in a fair system, a fee for honest work that brings value to your business.

We typically charge a fixed monthly fee based on the size and scope of a campaign. What is the size and scope? The number of SKUs you are promoting. The number of ad networks being used. The type of campaigns: search, display, shopping, remarketing. All these affect the size of your campaign and thus the effort required to manage it. As long as the size and scope remain relatively constant, your monthly fee will remain the same. We find clients like this since, unlike an hourly rate where we would charge different amounts each month (and the client wondering why), the client can budget for our service. There are no surprises.

On some occasions, we’ll use a different system where it makes sense. For instance, we have plans for real estate agents where we charge a fixed fee for each property being promoted. We are open to other fee structures and we’ll listen to ideas you have.

What Kind of Reporting Do You Provide?

We believe in the KISS – Keep It Simple, Silly – principle. We also learned over the years what clients want to know but just as importantly, what they need to know.

We’ve seen other agencies provide automatic canned reports of account data that provide no value at all. For instance, a standard report we’ve seen shows the highest-volume keywords. This has no value for the client and they have told us so. For a small client, say a chiropractor, there’s no value in saying that “chiropractor” got the most clicks, it’s a given. Conversely, a large campaign with thousands of keywords provides no information that is relevant or useful for whatever keywords are shown to be the highest volumes. It would just be noise and also a pretext for the agency to say they provide a report.

For most clients, reports are monthly, typically during the first week of a new month. They are written, in two or three paragraphs depending on the size of the campaign with a table comparing before and after results. Any anomaly is explained and improvements (or lack of) are shown.

In short, we’ve found that most clients want to know if we got them more sales (when conversions are being tracked), more traffic how much it cost them if there is an improvement, and what we plan to do to fix problems and to improve the campaigns and reach the goals.

Some clients want more and we can provide it. However, since you have control of your own accounts, you could simply go in there and see for yourself. But it will be easier for us with our tools.

A few clients ask for a weekly report. We’ll do this if there is enough volume and it makes sense, typically a very large account. For others, a quarterly report makes more sense such as a chiropractor where there is little activity due to usually being a localized campaign. In this type of account, there is no statistical significance comparing a few monthly clicks, and trends are best seen when looking at quarterly numbers.

Which PPC Tools Do You Use?

Being in business since 2005 doing PPC, we have developed proprietary tools of our own. The main one is an analysis tool that monitors 17 data points in countless ways to reveal insights and apply strategies that other agencies would simply miss or not even be aware of. Of course, we use other more standard tools to make life easier such as Adwords Editor but the star is our PPC Analysis Tool which continues to evolve as the ad networks also do.

Do You Do SEO?

Our focus is on PPC (pay-per-click) advertising. SEO is also important and should be part of your online marketing strategy.

There are many similarities between PPC and SEO. Our philosophy is to start with PPC since it’s more controllable, learn from it, and apply what is learned to on-page SEO. If you want only SEO services, we can provide this service through trusted partners.

What About Web Development?

As mentioned above, our focus is PPC. However, we do have partners in the web development industry that can help you. If you need to develop a website as well as do PPC and/or SEO, contact us and we can put a package together for you.

I Have More Questions

We’ll be happy to answer them. Contact us by email or phone and let’s talk or simply schedule a consultation right now by clicking the button below.