The dirty secret of PPC is that for every one unit of effort you spend in gathering keywords, you’d probably need to spend 5x that effort in ad copy and 20x that effort in great landing pages. I have NEVER seen a client who only needs PPC, despite what they say. And it’s not about– when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail!
Thus, the $200 a month in PPC will be accompanied by a ton of effort in analytics, SEO, landing pages, etc..
And we can demonstrate an amazing case study showing XXX% ROI from only $200/month. It may be somewhat dishonest, but then again– where does PPC really end? And when do stats not lie?
With distributed campaign management, you divide into functional roles– pure PPC (keywords, ads, bids), landing pages, analytics, engineering. Rare is the person who has the skills to cross all these disciplines– any more than creative people do math well.
For some Fortune 500 clients of ours– for example, Quiznos and Analog– we do have multiple people on PPC, because we divide by product lines and by language. But for these little clients– you basically have to break out your team into functional specialists. And for each client, you designate a SPOC (single point of contact) who serves as a team lead, gatherer of content/requirements— and can make sure that the Unique Selling Proposition (USP) of the client is reflected across the keywords, ads, landing pages, and eventual conversion event.
As to what clients to take on:
- they have a great product/service: great marketing can’t fix a bad product– can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit
- they have the time and energy to assist: you need their content and to be able to clearly reflect the USP to convert.
- no internal nonsense: no protective webmaster who won’t give access, family member who is emotionally tied to the current design, etc…
- growth potential in short run: they currently have horrible marketing and don’t have a long sales cycle or ultra high product value (low data rate).
