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 $4375 to $8750 per web site for set-up, plus $2100 to $6125
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
- $175 per hour for database work and non-HTML programming
- $175 per hour for SEO, PPC, and other SEM
- $175 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." For the client who wishes to invest in search engine marketing on an ongoing basis, DISC offers our premier monthly retainer service.
Please click here to request a proposal. The RFP form takes less than 3 minutes to fill out. Thank you!
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