Five Reasons Why Ad Agencies Hate Search Engine Marketing

Got a question about this.

[HughMungus]

Did a search. Didn't see this article posted on the site.

Five Reasons Why Ad Agencies Hate Search Engine Marketing
[mediapost.com...]

Got a question about the first part: "1. Achieving profitability in managing clients' paid search advertising is extremely difficult"

Why?

[bhartzer]

Most advertisers only want to pay the ad agency about 20 percent of the money they spend on PPC. That's not that much when the agency has to hire someone (or a few people) to manage the accounts. Not to mention the fact that the bidding tools they use aren't leave-it-and-forget-it type of tools. The agency actually has to do something--they just don't have the qualified people on staff to effectively manage PPC accounts.

[Matt Probert]

An interesting article, and one I should concur with.

We trialled search engine marketing, and found it to be a waste of our money and resources - much as the article says you need to have a large budget, and be very aware of linguistics and search engine user behaviour. That said, there will be the few who get lucky and disprove the theory!

If I were an advertising agency, rather than a publisher, I should be very wary of accepting a SEM contract!

Matt