Chapter 17 Paying Per Click - Page 353 / Search Engine Optimization for Dummies

You may be using half a dozen systems, too. If you are working with thou-

sands of keywords (one client has 4,000–5,000 keywords to manage), that’s a

huge job.

How do you handle all this without it getting totally out of control. Here are a

few ideas:

Many companies hire a full-time person, even two or three people, just

to manage their PPC campaigns.

Programs are available that help to automate PPC management across

multiple systems; GoToast (www.gotoast.com) is one of the best

known, but various products are available.

Some companies hire a third party to manage their PPC campaigns.

There’s no easy answer. The automation software may be a good idea if you

have a significant PPC campaign — tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars

a month, with thousands of keywords over multiple PPC networks. On the

other hand, having used one of the major automation systems, I have to say it

was complicated, buggy, and expensive — not something you would want to

use for a simple PPC campaign.

Sometimes it’s actually cheaper to hire someone to manage the PPC cam-

paign. One client, spending $150,000 per month on PPC, switched from having

another company manage its PPC campaign to doing it itself. I estimated that

the employee in charge of the PPC program probably spent 2–3 hours a day

managing the program, and after my client realized that it could hire a full-

time person to manage the program for 25 percent of what it was paying for

another company to manage the PPC campaign, switching was easy!

One strategy some companies use is this: They manage Google, Yahoo!, and

perhaps two or three of the other, more-productive Tier 2 systems them-

selves, in-house, perhaps using software if they have a very big keyword list.

Then they use a PPC management company, or software such as GoToast or

BidRank, to buy keywords from the smaller Tier 2 and Tier 3 PPC companies

at a fixed price per click. For instance, you may agree to pay $0.35 per click.

The management company then uses dozens, maybe hundreds, of smaller

systems to get those clicks for you, keeping the difference between what they

actually pay for the clicks (perhaps $0.05) and your $0.35.

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Part IV: After You’ve Submitted Your Site