Flat rate PPC for small businesses - is this shady?

[webmindsolutions]

A client of mine was contacted by a sales rep who was pitching a flat rate advertising opportunity in Adwords (although he just identified it to her as "Google Search Results".

Being a PPC marketer, I was curious and have done some poking around to see what this company is actually doing.

Apparently this company is telling advertisers that they have a "triple platinum" contract with Yahoo and are "very high up with Google" (I know not what this means- their campaigns have seniority and high quality score?)

Has anyone heard of any advertser / reseller paying a flat rate to Google for sponsored links? I think we may need to discuss these kind of word brokers in light of changes to the SEM landscape!

[edited by: tedster at 11:09 pm (utc) on Mar. 5, 2008]
[edit reason] remove specifics [/edit]

[tedster]

Hello webmindsolutions, and welcome to the forums.

It's certainly possible for a third party to offer a "flat rate" for PPC advertising. But the business model would fall apart for very competitive keywords. Then I assume, the business would either turn down the client, or quickly let them know that their rate needs be higher. The "small print" would be rather interesting, I imagine!

It sounds like this model was put together to appeal to the small niche business owner who can't be bothered with learning the ropes in PPC. At that level, I guess it works OK. Spend more money but save time.

[webmindsolutions]

I'm a little confused on the specifics of how these businesses interact with Google or Yahoo-- do they do some kind of bulk keyword buy?

I was under the impression that Quality Score wasn't attached to the account holder but had more to do with the relevance and quality of ads and keywords and landing pages. How would a vendor hold a top position for certain keywords without having real businesses attached to the words they buy? Or do they just rotate in similar businesses for the same keywords as they gain and lose clientele?

[KaloVast]

Quality Score depends on the CTR of a keyword, how relevant that keyword is to the ad group it lives in, the quality of your landing page, the "reputation" of your account and other factors.

If i decided to contract someone out to handle my PPC, i would prefer that an account is created in the name of MY company so i wasn't tied to the contracting company if i wanted to cancel my service with them. I mean, how bad would it suck if you were working with this company for two years, decided to cancel your contract with them but all your campaigns were on THEIR account? You'd have to start all over, from scratch.

It sounds like the person calling your friend is trying to pull some wool over her eyes. I've never heard of a triple platinum contract, and the only google search results are variations of this post. "very high up with google" means nothing as Google doesn't maintain a relationship based on anything other than your track record.

If they've got a good enough track record to be "very high up" with Google, then why are they making things up?