Having been recently laughed at by a fellow PPC manager when he found out the budgets we work with I decided I’d write down some of the things that the little voice in my head is telling me.

Small Budget Pay Per Click Management and Google

We have had to diligently “bug” Google to give us some of the support features it reserves for advertisers who spend $200 per day. As a company, Marty and I have fell into the ppc management for small business arena…by choice and by virtue of our model. We love dealing with the owners and getting to know their businesses as well as we can. This is something a bit more personal than a larger company that can do great keyword statistical research but may not have the ability to spend time on the phone with customers. But we have to remind Google that we still end up spending several tens of thousands of dollars each month with Adwords. If that was rolled into one or two clients we’d have the red carpet treatment, but since it’s parsed out amongst many clients, we’re considered small time.

But, as a testament to Google’s business model and virtues, they listened and are working with us to recognize our contribution as a company and they can now see the value in offering some of the same services normally reserved for bigger spend clients. We are excited to see how to work within their guidelines and offer that value to our smaller budgeted clients. Since this is a new feature we can take advantage of we still need to refine our approach as new clients come in, but we gotta start somewhere.

It is interesting that Google has included these types of services in its Adwords business structure. I applaud their forward thinking and willingness to adapt and continue building a better service. But at the same time we keep running into the circumstances where very large businesses get first dibs and preferential treatment, especially in what is essentially an equal playing field. That is why they include quality score and things of that nature.

As an aside, we’ve been sitting on a great Bing service invite…similar in nature. I’m waiting until that area heats up a bit more to try and include as many clients as possible at once in it.

The Pay Per Click Management Industry

It’s obvious to us that fee structure is best suited for small businesses in the ppc management industry. Many in the industry will not take a client unless they plan to spend on management alone $1000 per month. I don’t think that is unwarranted. Adwords management takes time, but as a company we have built out and put into practice a great approach to Adwords that works for us only charging a fraction of that per month. The easiest way for me to connect the disparity is that we find great solutions on a macro to mid level of management. We work on the minutia too but we can’t necessarily offer the intensive reporting and tracking to our customers…on a rigid basis.

But we don’t use a program of ANY sort when in an account. When we sit down with an account, our eyes are on every aspect. The difference is, perhaps one month we will focus on one problem area in detail and then focus in on another the next month. That is the only way we can manage a smaller budget in the more intricate, intensive areas of Adwords. We have many more clients overall and only the same amount of hours in a day.

Our Pay Per Click Management Goals and Objectives

So how do we serve our clients with a smaller budget and perform the work needed to take their campaigns to that next level?

That answer to that is not entirely obvious yet. I think that the ppc management industry has developed to expect that the only way you can charge is based on a handful of mechanisms. The most common is a monthly fee to cover what a company or person expects their pay per click management hours to be. That is why many Adwords professionals won’t touch a budget under $1000 per month. But, I’d submit that maybe not every client is looking for that level of service when a much better optimized account is simply what they want. They may not also know when they want to address their landing pages, etc. Maybe a “better” account is all they want, not the absolute “best” account.

I want to be clear. This doesn’t mean that as a company our smaller budget clients aren’t given the attention they deserve or that we consider their accounts acceptable when half finished. It means that as an industry, and as a company, we need to find ways to resolve the disparity between a very small management fee (by industry standards) and the sheer number of hours keyword research, tracking, performance reporting, etc takes. To that we need to identify goals and set up clearly defined indicators and then develop (perhaps on a case by case basis) mechanisms to make it work.

As a company that spends hours with small accounts; getting to know the owners and their employees we want to take all our campaigns to the next level. As an industry in a whole, I think we need to recognize that small business make up a majority of the space…

…small business are the long tail keywords. If you subscribe to the importance of long tail keywords, then you must also admit that we can’t push out smaller budgets with well-reasoned and justified, but VERY expensive management fees. Google needs to recognize that as well.

So we continue to brainstorm and debate!