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I find myself in something of a dilemma...
I am a professional Internet Marketing Consultant etc. etc and my business is getting to the stage where I have to get some sensible pricing for running ppc campaigns with G & Y! at the moment my fees are all over the place.
Do any of you great folks have any suggestions or formulas?
I am not a Mickey Mouse SEO service and take my growing biz seriously and thus would listen to any advice that made financial sense.
I have many clients - from Fortune 500 to a local Carpet Cleaner :)
Cheers
David
% of ad spend model - often derided as being based on a model that media buyers in the offline world used to use before they were forced to do differently. Personally I see no problem with this model provided that it is linked to time spent on the clients account and clients financial goals dictate how the account is managed. PPC management is exactly that - management. Media Buying is simply spending.
Billable hours model - a certain fee for a certain time spent on the account.
Pay per action model - client only pays for results. This model has a number of problems for both agency and client as the client can mess things up at any time and the agency can potentially just cherry pick the best and easy to think of keywords and essentially earn lots whilst adding little value.
Another interesting decision is who pays the search engines. Client or Agency?
Percentage of spend:
Advantage: agency has incentive to find more keywords
Disadvantage: agency has incentive to send any traffic (converting or not) to your site (you must trust the agency and watch conversions to use this option).
By Keyword Managed:
Advantage: Pretty fixed (and usually small) costs
Disadvantage: Advertiser misses out on 'long tail traffic'
Per Visitor:
See Percentage of spend. This is a common 'additional fee' for those who are using a 3rd party conversion tracking system.
Time and materials:
Advantage: At high spend amounts, its cheaper for advertisers than a percentage. Goes towards 'professional service' over PPC management, which many companies like.
Disadvantage: For low spends, you won't close any clients on this model as a single hour can be more than their spend per month.
Percentage of Sales:
Similar to the affiliate model. Agency takes a percentage of total sales.
Advantage: Agency has vested interest in doing all they can for an advertiser.
Disadvantage: Agency must trust the tracking system in place AND needs a good contract so that a company can't take their account with them after the initial optimization (often a huge chunk of time).
