Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Advertising (PPC)
Executive Summary
DISC has earned Google's certification as an AdWords Certified Company.
DISC has an outstanding track record in PPC that includes ROI reports we can share with you to help you decide whether to engage DISC.
We offer a PPC campaign assessment, which tells you how much more ROI your existing PPC campaigns can achieve, for between $900 and $1800.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) search engine advertising is the most popular form of paid placement in the search engines. (Click the other pages in the left navigation bar
to learn how DISC approaches other effective paid placement methods.)
PPC is not as cost effective as SEO, but if done professionally it is more cost-effective than banner advertising, affiliate marketing, and email marketing. It is
imperative, however, that any PPC campaign be guided by strict ROI metrics and a smart bidding and writing strategy. If not, you can waste a lot of money.
With bids for top placement rising steadily -- especially in highly competitive industries -- achieving rapid, positive ROI requires ever more expertise. Already,
in numerous fields it is not worth paying for top positions for many relevant phrases. On the other hand, every industry has a huge number of variations of relevant phrases that have
not been exploited yet, and some industries remain startlingly under-bid even for their most searched phrases.
At DISC, we always stay focused on our clients' ROI. To ensure you achieve maximum return, we will calculate your site's conversion rates, your gross profit, value
of leads, average yearly and lifetime value of new customers, seasonality, inventory and merchandising issues, competitor's practices, total costs (click costs, our labor, and your
team's time), budgetary constraints, and your goals, to arrive at an accurately predicted and exactly measured PPC campaign.
DISC sets up and manages successful PPC campaigns of all sizes, including "entry-level" jobs that require very little ongoing management, as well as jobs that
entail intensive monthly management. For the latter, our monthly reports will provide rapid feedback to your team about what is working, how well, what to do next, and how this data
clarifies the value of your other web marketing efforts. (A well-tracked PPC campaign yields excellent information on market demand and conversion rates by which to decide on new
products or to assess, say, a banner campaign or affiliate partnership). DISC is happy to show you samples of our monthly PPC ROI reports that show actual results for real
clients.
For options and pricing, please see the yellow table at the bottom of the section on Explanation, Details and Steps below.
Explanation, Details, and Steps
A professionally managed PPC campaign always achieves positive ROI, sometimes only after the first one to three months of data gathering, analysis, and
optimization.
In PPC search advertising, you pay for a title, description, and link to your web site to appear in a "Sponsored" area of a search engine results page. The
higher you bid for a particular search term, and the more often your ad is clicked, and the better designed is your landing page, the higher your ad will be on the results page.
The top PPC networks are Google's AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN. Ask.com is worthwhile only if you can wrangle a deal to exclude all of its partners outside of
Ask.com.
PPC contextual advertising within web site publishers, like About.com or CNN.com, is more problematic than PPC search advertising, but it can be worthwhile.
This section focuses on search advertising.
What has attracted so many marketing executives to PPC is that (1) you pay only for clicks to your site, not for mere impressions of your
ad; and (2) real-time reports track your costs and revenue, allowing you rapidly to adjust your campaigns and budgets accordingly.
A veritable marketing revolution is unfolding in the world of bid and position management software for PPC advertising. Never before has there existed a
system that automatically adjusts your ad placement and expenditures according to immediate feedback on the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing dollars. But this is now
possible, and it's being done more and more, as marketing managers seek swiftly predictable and measurable returns on their marketing investments. It's as though the size and
cost of a highway billboard grew and shrank according to the amount of profit it generates for your business each day. Within several years most marketing managers will be using
this software, reducing its competitive advantage. Until that time, you can achieve rapid, measurable ROI by using PPC management software to semi-automatically optimize
campaigns in Google, Yahoo, and the other top PPC networks. This ROI will be displayed in real-time reports that you (or your boss) can quickly understand and appreciate.
Pioneered by Google, an ever-increasing amount of this software's functionality is offered by the search engines themselves.
How does this revolutionary software work? The software tracks the position and bid amount of each key phrase and follows the click paths from the search
engine through your site and through your shopping cart, contact form, RFP form, or some other valuable action you want prospects to perform at your site. Factoring in your
gross profit or the value of a hot lead, the software lowers bids on phrases that may bring a lot of traffic but few conversions, and reinforces position and bids on phrases
that result in profitable business. Plus, the best software will test variations in bidding strategy and landing pages, respond to sales patterns associated with time of day,
week, or year, and factor in your sales objectives and available budget. With this software set up and managed intelligently, you simply cannot lose.
PPC management software rapidly and generously rewards - but will never replace - talented and dedicated professionals. While this software can easily
prevent you from spending more than is profitable, the person who sets up the technology must have experience and talent in order for you to obtain maximum profits. As time
passes and more people use bid management software, the main factor that will determine your success is in fact the expertise and talent of the PPC manager.
DISC's steps in your successful PPC campaign:
- Assess your business logic. DISC inputs into powerful formula your site's conversion rates, gross profit, value of leads, average yearly and lifetime value of new
customers, seasonality, inventory and merchandising issues, competitor's practices, total costs (click costs, our labor, and your team's time), budgetary constraints, and your
goals, to arrive at an accurately predicted and exactly measured PPC campaign.
- Research various sources, like SEO word lists, past PPC reports, server statistics, intra-site search logs, competitor practices, and more, in order to arrive at a list of
phrases worth bidding on.
- Write winning ad copy.
- Optimize landing pages and site usability to maximize conversion rates and thus ROAS (return on ad spend) and ROI.
- Produce a PPC management plan that will roll out sequential monthly tests of new tactics and responds swiftly to monthly reports on your campaign's successes, problems,
and opportunities.
- Deliver monthly reports on your campaign's successes, problems, and opportunities. These reports have executive summaries for upper management and details which help DISC
continue to optimize and which help you evaluate DISC and allocate all of your future marketing budgets.
DISC's PPC Prices
DISC offers a PPC campaign assessment, which tells you how much more ROI your existing PPC campaigns can achieve, for between $1200 and $1800.
The minimum cost for DISC to implement a PPC campaign is $4500. That covers initial set-up with Google AdWords and Yahoo
Search Marketing, and a summary report after about one month, and then either your team manages the campaign or you engage DISC in monthly management. While these
entry-level campaigns are designed for minimal monthly maintenance, we recommend paying an additional $600 ($5100 total) for DISC to review
and adjust the campaign after one or two months, before your team takes over. Often, the success of our PPC campaigns prompts clients to have DISC continue managing the
campaign, but your doing whatever is most cost effective for your company will help DISC achieve it relentless goal of maximizing our clients' ROI.
On the higher end, DISC's PPC services include: extensive ROI analysis before and during the campaign; use of MSN and perhaps other second-tier PPC
search engines; set-up of third-party PPC management software to report on and semi-automatically adjust bidding tactics; and a precisely planned sequence of monthly
refinements, tests, and written reports for at least six months. Prices for this higher end service typically range from $15,000
to $20,000 per web site for set-up, plus $2000 to $4000 per month for at least six months of optimization. Of course PPC jobs with huge and diverse product
lines can entail much more investment and returns.
Click costs are not paid to DISC but we do include them in the initial ROI planning and in our monthly assessments of your total ROI. You pay the
search engines directly. PPC firms that are paid by a percentage of your click cost are motivated to increase that cost. DISC manages PPC with all of the line-item rigor
of direct marketing. We factor in the small but significant branding value that can be overlooked in direct marketing metrics.
DISC's proposals and phone conversations will provide more details and answer all your questions.
DISC offers rock-solid proof of our years of superb results in all of our services, in the form of detailed ROI reports delivered to actual clients. We need a signed NDA in most cases, so we offer this proof only to people who have received a proposal and remain interested in DISC’s services.
DISC's estimates in our proposals are firm. We do not exceed them unless you add more work. If you have us do work that is not specified in
contracts, it is billed at these hourly rates:
- $75 per hour for HTML programming
- $100 per hour for graphic design
- $150 per hour for database work and non-HTML programming
- $150 per hour for SEO, PPC, and other SEM
- $150 per hour for general consulting and training
- To learn about DISC’s pricing philosophy and practice, and our account management structure and workflow, please see our Prices and Procedures page.
For a list of all of DISC's service prices, without descriptions, please our "Sell Sheet."
Please click here to request a proposal. The RFP form takes less than 3 minutes to fill out. Thank you!
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