original on historyinanhour.com
We have been doing PPC for the past seven years, and after hundreds of account audits we have encountered all kinds of mistakes. By looking at five of the most common, we hope to educate businesses on some easy ways to avoid PPC tragedies.
Everyone wants the best PPC. Mistakes don’t help.
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April was an interesting month this year. It was Vantage’s first month in the new office, and it did not disappoint. We were lucky enough to experience both internet outage and a snow-day equivalent power outage. But neither of those issues has gotten us down. Our new office has so much more space! We’re also exploring the nearby area for lunch spots. Any advice on delicious haunts near 535 Thurlow would be highly appreciated.
The weather was also quite the roller coaster. One day would be warm and lovely and humming with spring, the next would be dreary, grey, and raining with Vancouver spring. We hope May brings flowers. And lots of continued success.
This past month has been, despite a few spots of rain, a beautiful July in Vancouver. The team at Vantage Search Marketing is happy to report that the weather has improved overall company efficiency. We’ve never been working harder or more happily! Okay, maybe we’ve wanted to get out a bit more than usual and the sun-baked lunch’s outside might have slowed us down just a tad, but we’re definitely happier!
A New Hire
With all that happiness, good weather, and very good work being done (yes, very), Vantage has decided to add an additional staff member! Maybe the sun’s doing funny things to our heads, or we’re making progress. Either way, Vantage is jumping with anticipation at the prospect. We’ve already received multiple strong and interesting applicants.
Who will join the prolific sun enthusiasts that make up the Vantage team? If you’re interested and think you’ve got what it takes, then have a look here.
Worthwile Information
In other news, Vantage has also found some worthwhile information to share. We’ve been keeping our arms open to new ideas and, in this case, to the reinforcement of old ones. We read this informative post on the value of the frequency & reach report AdWords offers. It was written on SearchEngineLand.com It’s a good briefing on how to learn when or if you should be setting a frequency cap on your advertising. We thought it was worth a share. 
What Paid Search Should be Aware of This Year
Another important post we’d like to share is this one, also from the aforementioned site – good job Search Engine Land, you’re keeping us coming back for more. This article is a nice informational recap, it provides some insights into the developments of 2014 that paid search advertisers should be aware of. The most interesting, and possibly the most important has been the Shopping Campaign updates that AdWords is replacing PLA campaigns with. This revamp has made product listing advertisements somewhat simpler and easier to handle. It was a bit awkward having to set up everything in the online interface for these bad boys. Thankfully, that’s been solved too and Shopping Campaigns are supported by the Editor now.
Computer Education
And finally, Vantage made sure to share this educational video on the benefits of computers in the modern era. It’s either educational or a representation of our capabilities at the end of a Friday.
Compu-TOR
Vantage hopes everyone enjoys the sun as much as we do, and encourages fellow and aspiring search advertisers to keep on learning and laughing!
Written by Michael Pendreigh.
Wow I can’t believe it is almost March and I have not posted an article in almost 2 months. Ahh well the fact that I don’t have time for blog posts is a good thing…I have been so busy that I have had to train another person to help out. This brings me to the topic of becoming an internet marketing professional. There may not be many formal schools teaching SEO or PPC but the internet and your public library are full resources.
Most people think that just because a book was written 5 years ago on internet marketing that it is completely outdated, but I would have to disagree. Although, the tools may have changed the fundamentals of SEO or PPC have not really changed. To rank well in Google you still need to optimize your onpage factors and get in bound links. For PPC there may be a ton of new tools and ad formats, but the keyword is still king and knowing the difference between exact and broad match keyword is still important. You will always need to know the history of internet marketing before you can really start seeing patterns in new mediums.
I have read all of these internet marketing books. Plus most can be found at your public library.
I would recommend learning PPC because you can master it in a shorter time frame than SEO plus all of the skills you learn in PPC will help you in SEO.
PPC:
SEO:
Web Analytics:
The web is changing daily so you had better stay up to date or risk becoming obsolete by reading blogs. By no means are the following blogs an exhaustive list of internet marketing blogs, but they are my favorites that I follow daily. FYI if you are saying to yourself WOW that is a lot of reading, well not shit it is a lot of reading, but that is what it takes to be a professional internet marketer in today’s economy.
PPC:
SEO:
Web Analytics:
Go work for a web based company’s marketing department for a few years. You will learn a lot and plus it will allow you to get caught up with your internet marketing reading. Furthermore, you need time to apply all the theories you have learned from books, blogs and taking classes.
At this point you can go work freelance, get into the affiliate game or find a higher paying job somewhere else. IMO I would highly recommend staying away from agency’s because the stress might just kill you and the lack of autonomy will hurt your learning…
I may be a pay per click consultant and an expert when it comes to internet marketing. However, I am always looking for ways to refine my consulting skills. I have read a few consulting books that all seem to focus on a similar consulting process.
Here is the consulting process that can be applied to ppc consulting or any consulting for that matter:
Ok so in this blog post I will try to make the case for why you should use a Pay Per Click consultant to manage your account vs going with an one stop shop internet marketing provider. Just to clarify a one-stop shop internet provider will do your website, SEO, PPC, social media and maybe even hosting.
One Stop-Shop
Pros:
Hey you are getting all your internet needs met through one company which makes things a lot more convenient for you. In theory your whole marketing effort should be an integrated marketing machine that should work smoothly together to meet your needs. Finally most people tend to trust bigger internet companies because they have an established reputation and brand name.
Cons:
The one big con (no bun intended) is that most one stop shop internet providers charge you an astronomical amount of money to give you the privilege of even sitting down to get a quote with them in the first place. Secondly they usually charge an extremely high monthly fee or even worse a % of your pay per click spend to manage your accounts. This can be a problem because you can get tied into long contracts that are difficult to get out of.
The biggest thing I have seen is that they try to get you to fork out $10,000 to $15,000 for a new website when in most cases your existing site just needs face lift. That money can go along way towards PPC and SEO initiatives.
PPC consulting is serious business
