Forum Moderators: open
Why not charge him/her your hourly rate? And agree on a certain amount of time to spent each week?
Just my thoughts
:)
[edited by: Mike12345 at 3:44 pm (utc) on April 3, 2003]
higher percentage would be appropriate.
But 10% of $5 is 50c. 10% of 10c....
Percentage works well for me.
How much? 15% to 20% if you can get it, but it depends on the click through rate. In the end it is $$ you want isn't it.
George
Nope, you'll need to purchase software to do this properly.
We use flat fees for smaller accounts and percetages for larger ones. We charge extra for ROI tracking (which I would highly recommend if your spending $5/click).
If you left them on auto bid they'd get crucified, if the bids are at $5 you could save or make them thousands of dollars by managing it correctly, but it wouldn't be a hobby account.
One of his friends is talking him into competing? Are they mad? Why don't they act like friends and work together on this.
If you did have to take the work then any number of models could be set up, flat fee, percentage of expenditure, bit of both, upfront costs if you are doing anything, tracking costs, reporting costs, but if you charge by the hour then make sure that you budget for 168 hours a week.
To answer a few questions -
Sorry if this sounds negative, but you don't seem that keen to do it and it's a competitive arena why don't you decline the business altogether?
Because he is my best client and also my favorite client - I fear he will do this on his own if I don't assist and it will not go well. I picked him up from a web designer that took him for quite a bit of money. He's eager and naive when it comes to his website.
One of his friends is talking him into competing? Are they mad?
Yes. They are mad and then some.
We charge extra for ROI tracking (which I would highly recommend if your spending $5/click)
Precisely. And I'm not sure I am prepared to do this - is it very difficult? Do I need more than a brain in my head and an excel spreadsheet to track the ROI?
Thanks for your help on this. I need to propose something to him in the next day or two...perhaps I should find a reliable person to farm this out to...anyone interested?
I recently took on the Overture account for one of my clients. I charge my usual hourly rate, and it does take some time. I spent 30 hours in the month of March on his Overture account. What takes the most time is the Overture Web site itself! It takes an unbearably long time for reports to load, for account information to load, and especially for keywords, titles and descriptions to be approved. If Overture ran better I would enjoy the work. It isn't very difficult; Overture provides all the tools you need to come up with a list of keywords. The satisfying part is writing titles and descriptions that repeat the keywords in ways that result in quality traffic.
Good luck with whatever you decide to do.
AbleBaby
Never used ANY auto bid/ management software. Might have to soon.
(If you plan the landing page names carefully, it is easy to get exel to add .php to the end of a word, and www.site.com/ to the start!)
Hope this helps.
George
My client is an attorney practicing in a very fiercely competitive niche of law. (Keywords are upwords of $5.00) Most of the competition maintain 4-7 websites (that all provide the same content - there's not all that much to say about what they do). Several years ago he virtually had the monopoly on his type of practice. This has changed dramatically over the past several years - attorneys in this location popping up every day who 'specialize' in this type of law.
I'm thinking his money would be better spent on directories...Can I get a quick survey as to whether you think Overture is 'worth it'?
As far as ROI, it has been at the top for us for a while now. Well, except algorithmic SEO.
To track ROI from pay per clicks effectively, you need to be able to track clicks to the point of sale or conversion. Most of your visitors from Overture will probably come from normal Yahoo searches, and so if you're in Google you need to be able to differentiate between a free and paid click. This can involve adding code to his website, or at the very least adding query strings to the destination urls and log analysing.
On PPC management software - it sure beats manual checking, and there are some very good features on some of these tools, although pricing can vary greatly.
I'm thinking his money would be better spent on directories...Can I get a quick survey as to whether you think Overture is 'worth it'?
Nobody can answer that for you. He wants to give that sort of marketing a go. Simply ask him how many clicks he is willing to pay for up front and set the account to run out.
Is he willing to spend- say $1000?
How many searches per month does the overture suggestion tool state there are?
The good thing about having a very niche area to market is that (from my limited experiece) the Top 3 Advertisers will tend to get a fairly high click through rate.
Bad possible thing is how many folks searching are actually looking for a lawyer or doing research on the area he specializes in?
Even if he spends say $1000 but gets one case, could he potentially make many thousands off the case?
Another negative thing about PPC is that it's great to get very target rich visitors, but those visitors have the 'natural' list of 20 sites to click on from yahoo pus the other Overture competiton- just one Page 1.
But ya never know. Could pay off great for him!
For _sure_ I would set up a directory and copy pages to the new overture directory with robots.txt to disallow that directory.
That way, when you check the webstats you can trace the Overture traffic exclusive of the regular traffic.
Somewhat risky hint:
IF he wants to be #1 for sure for a while...
If current Top bid is $5/click. Instead of putting in $5.01 or whatever, go to an ultra high bid like $20. He'd still pay just 1 cent over the current highest bid, and in order for the competitor to go from #2 to #1 they'd need to bid $20.01 and be willing to SPEND that amount.
Had I not made a mistake, this would have saved me money.
After playing "leap frog" with a competitor that just HAD to be #1 and checked like every 15 minutes to always bid over me by 1 cent I got fed up.
I took the high volume term and bid 400% above their current #1 bid. I knew they wouldn't risk getting the clicks at such high prices and I was right. For a solid day I was #1 and the bids stopped going up and I didn't need to check so often.
MISTAKE: I left this bid in overnight. :(
They got wise and the next night I did this around 6AM EST or 3AM their time, they jacked thier bid to $19.99/click then used random computers to click me 7 times. Then dropped their bid right back down.
:(
But I learned. :) Turn the super high bid OFF late evening.
Feel free to sticky mail me if you want more details.
Bottom line...it's his money...he wants to give it a whirl.
AW
