PPC Guidance Please

Hi thefsboking,


Yes, indeed, there are many agencies the manage AdWords campaigns for clients. Google has partnerships with approximately 2800 such agencies just in the US and Canada alone.

It is definitely a "major pain" in that it takes time, talent, skills, not in just managing the accounts, learning and utilizing advanced automation tools, marketing strategies and tactics, platform updates, new technologies, etc., but also in managing the client relations, providing detailed reports, billing, collecting payments, etc.

Yes, they do still make money on affiliate offers, however Google considers it a "questionable business model", as evidenced by the number of affiliate marketers that have difficulty complying with AdWords Policy.

Truth is, most affiliate marketers are folks looking for shortcuts and it seems many rarely bother to even read AdWords policies, and when their websites, or ads are disapproved they often do nothing to fix them and end up getting booted from the AdWords program. That is perhaps the main reason you see so many affiliate folks resorting to Bing, they are often refugees from the AdWords program hoping for a second life at the much smaller Bing Ads network.

If you are consulting with someone that will not read and follow rules, you might be better off letting them start out on Bing, then after they get booted from Bing they might wise up and make serious effort on the next platform. Once you see that they are serious about following the rules of the ad platforms, then, and only then you should be safe to move to the AdWords platform. The strategy being to let them make mistakes the unrecoverable mistakes on the smaller platforms so that the biggest ad platform is still available to them once they have the hang of policy compliance.

There are number reasons why it is usually much better to build your own landing pages rather than direct link:

1. Policy compliance - You generally cannot fix a compliance issue if you cannot edit the landing page
2. Double serving restrictions - Most ad networks do not allow double serving of ads, so if you are direct linking, you are competing with every other affiliate that is direct linking for a single ad listing, as well as every other offer that competes with the one you are promoting.
3. Marketing metrics - If you direct link you will have no website user engagement data, and no opportunities for gaining marketing insights, or optimizing your campaigns, based on that data.
4. Loss of Subscriber lists - By direct linking you lose the opportunity to build a list of interested parties or customer contact lists.
5. Loss Prevention - One thing you will learn quickly in affiliate marketing is that there is a lot of "skimming, shaving and scrubbing" that tends to go on. Not having control of your landing page makes all that much more likely, and more difficult to detect.

WOW! You know your stuff when it comes to PPC. So is Perry Marshall's book a good resource for learning? Am I correct in assuming that once I understand Adwords learning Bing won't be too difficult?

My friend is not one to break rules or not read. Unfortunately he like myself in the past tried Adwords without any education. In his case he did ok but had no clue about what was going on (stats, bids, reports, tests, etc.). In my case reading WSO's on getting rcih with Clickbank products. I look today and see the ads never even got shown due to bad landing page.

If you want to make big money I would start your own business. Affiliate programs will normally make someone way more money then the affiliate him self will earn.

Why not outsource work and have a system of your own and upload it to ClinkBank vendors list.

If you hire pros to build your site then people will take you seriously and purchase your offer and affiliates could sell your offer for you.

Not only can you use PPC but you can teach your affiliates to use PPC to promote your business and not someone else s business.

You can up-sell services/products to your customers and out source to the Philippines for phone sales.

You can hire someone for $3.00 per hour to serve your customers with a Virtual chat.

learn to own a business and not work for your business.

Isn't that what every entrepreneur wants? oh and money!!

I hope you find what you are looking for and I wish you success.

sorry just a little off topic here but for managing customers SEO campaigns which software do you use to provide them reports, reports such as competitor competition, backlinks, status, and more. Is there an all in one tool that i can send a customer a pdf?
I know spy glass has something but don't feel like forking over $400.