By: Dave Eckstein

Dave Eckstein — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 20:08:15 +0000

Thanks for your thoughtful comment, David. You make good points, especially where you say “if managed properly.” I believe our goals to be similar — delivering customers and leads at an efficient rate of acquisition. In working with roughly 5,000 local businesses each year, we encounter the good and bad of media and marketing plans. Unfortunately, many out there are pumping excess funds into paid search without equating acquisition costs on an apples-to-apples basis with other media options. This article helps our clients view this medium with a discerning eye, as they should any medium. Improving click-through rates is good news, but our penultimate metric is the ASR, PVR, or other measurement of retail / business advertising efficiency. Trust me, I definitely appreciate the Adwords business model. In fact, it helps more than a few of our clients to fetch highly efficient leads — leads that are underwritten by their competition. We appreciate your post and hope you visit The Catalyst again soon.

By: David (visitor to The Catalyst)

David (visitor to The Catalyst) — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 17:14:20 +0000

I strongly disagree. PPC is extremely effective if managed properly. Many local business owners have tried to do it themselves, hence the “okay” and “unimpressed” responses. As well, having great organic, plus sponsored ad placement can increase click through rates up to 90%. If PPC is suggested as irrelevant within a local business’ media mix, there’s huge opportunities being missed to grow revenues. Google’s Adword business model would be non existent and advertisers would not be staying on board with strong retention rates if this article was true. There are companies out there that provide “conversion-based optimization” management that only focuses on “productive” keywords, more than just clicks.

Comments on: Ten Dirty Secrets of Paid Search, Part 2

By: Dave Eckstein

By: David (visitor to The Catalyst)