Pay-per-Click Observer

I know, everyone says that. I mean it a little differently.

One of my clients is switching from one analytics package to another. The process of doing so requires that we retag every one of the many thousands of keywords that we maintain for them. This would be impossible by hand, of course, and so we utilize technology– usually Ruby in our case– to do the grunt work.

Unfortunately, we’re a little fringe in our application, and so there’s really no such thing as a support process for people like us. You do searches, call this person, they talk to that guy, and he emails this other woman. Hopefully, we patch up the thing to work enough to accomplish our goal. It’s not going to get shrink-wrapped. It just needs to work.

So, today, I found myself banging my head against the Google AdWords API. It’s great. I love it. It doesn’t always work the way you think it will. Case in point, updating keywords with a new destinationUrl.

Turns out that if I included an ampersand in that URL, my code would, properly, encode it into ‘& amp;’. Then, when I called updateCriteria, which updates the keywords, with that my keywords would all get updated with that ‘& amp;’ in the URL– not reconstituted into a ‘&’. Google said “you don’t have to encode that” when I asked about it.

OK, so I patch soap4r to just ignore that entity. It submits the request with the ‘&’ in its original form. Error– you have to encode those. Actually, that’s the right answer in this case.

Anyway, I decide to explain this situation to the client. Empathetically, she listens and asks me the simple question “Those are so common; don’t you use those in other campaigns?”

D’oh! I do. How come they work, and this doesn’t? It’s because in those cases, I tend to drop everything and replace it to avoid synchronization problems. In this case, I was trying to “update” the keywords in place. Sure enough, replacing them works; updating them doesn’t.

So, I learned two things: one is some geeky tidbit about the AdWords API and the other is a valuable lesson about listening to my clients. Instead of pretending that everything was fine, I explained exactly the problem we were facing. My client used her fresh, but informed, perspective and broke the dam.

The older I get, the more I learn that, if you really want to do a good job, you need to able to admit that you don’t know everything. I’m not saying you need to admit that you don’t know anything. There’s a big difference.

“How much do you charge?”

It’s one of the first things anyone asks me– even before “do you have any idea what you’re doing?”

The cost of hiring a PPC agency varies all over the map. Some charge by percentage of spend, some by the hour, and others charge a flat fee per click or month. To tell the truth, I don’t believe that it matters much. Ultimately, if you understand your business, it’s a little bit like differentiating between a carpenter who charges by the board and one who charges by the hour. Who cares as long as you get your house done for a price that makes sense?

We’re among the first group. We generally charge as a percentage of spend. We do so because we feel that it’s a pretty good estimation of the amount of work that we’re going to be doing on a campaign, and it allows us to scale the engagement without constantly revisiting our fee.

I say “generally” because we often run into a situation where we’re advising on interactive marketing more than managing a PPC campaign. Sometimes, there’s no PPC at all, and we’re reviewing another agency’s work or a site specification. Other times, we’re running a test campaign that has a small budget but requires a disproportionate amount of attention to setup, management, or analysis.

In those cases, I pretty much just pick a number.

“HOW DARE YOU?!”

Really. I just pick a number. I guess it’s based on hours to some degree. More accurately, it’s time required balanced against potential long-term engagement weighted against how much I feel like doing the job divided by how much I like the person asking me the question.

I know what you’re thinking. “I’d NEVER hire that guy.” You wouldn’t be the first. It’s OK. We can still be friends.

I also usually add that you should only pay me that fee if you think what I did was worth it. In ten years of doing this, I’ve been “not paid” my fee exactly zero times.

By now, you probably won’t be surprised to hear that I rarely sign contracts with my clients. I’m perfectly happy to sign them, but it usually doesn’t come up. I’m talking big, name-brand engagements, too. Sometimes not even a handshake if they’re too far away to reach without getting on an airplane. I have sued or been sued exactly zero times as well.

My point is that we’re all very different and you first need to know what it is you really want from the provider. Make a list before you ask anything about fees.

Think about some of these things. Does your prospective provider:

• Make you feel comfortable personally?
• Have experience managing campaigns of your size and/or type?
• Have references from current/recent clients?
• Speak and write in a way that makes you feel confident in their ability to communicate to you and your customers?
• Know how to write custom tools if necessary?
• Understand marketing as a discipline and speak the language?
• Charge by the acquisition? By percentage of spend? By the click? By the hour? Which do you prefer?

Then, ask yourself how much you want to spend. Don’t ask the provider “how much should I spend?” unless you go into car dealers asking how much you should spend on your car. Be realistic about your goals and constraints and share those with your prospective provider.

Do you just need advising to figure that out? There you go, you just started your list of things you need to hire someone for.

What not to do?

“Hi, how much do you charge? OK, that’s pretty cheap, what do you do?”