Posted on August 21st, 2009

By design, in-house and advertising agency clients can successfully take over day to day account basics after working with us to pilot, heal or massively improve missing, average or terribly broken PPC. Agencies & businesses just need reliable support (and intensive training) to fix existing accounts themselves. We’ve witnessed success in as little as 4 intensive weeks. That said, the full heat press is certainly not for wimps.

Though most pedigreed PPC companies are reticent to accept an Advertising Agency’s client’s PPC “trainee-shadow,” confident ones will. Why not? The client’s goal is to internalize their PPC capabilities, so nobody’s sacrificing a potential long term PPC manager engagement. In fact it’s more likely that we’ll earn a fine consulting client, tailor-made for our shop.

We’re willing to share actual production workflow on the clients account, slowed down as training and done right.  Essentially clients shadow the PPC team as we work on THEIR projects.  The results are usually wonderful and transformative.

The economy of scale is easy to see. For about the same cost as having the PPC agency unilaterally execute and deliver badly needed work (buy fish), our model is to offer hands-on training at the same time we do the work (teach to fish). Then our client learns the ability to self-maintain the program or knows when to ask for help. It’s a beautiful and effective model.

Full Heat Press
Light it up baby! Here’s a classic 4 week research, production and crash training/PPC orientation program, which supports in large and small businesses as they strive to internalize best-practices PPC.

We pilot campaigns in AdWords, given Google’s market share and quality of free tools. The second month (not outlined here) is spent teaching how to extend the now-proven campaigns (along with multi-channel conversion tracking) out to other channels including Bing, Yahoo, social PPC platforms (Facebook, MySpace, YouTube), content network, etc…

Week 1
Interview Client for deeper briefing on product, goals and big picture. Determine client’s in-house experience, creative, marketing, PR, human resource and technical capabilities. Deliverable is .doc file with results, recommendations (including any recommended hires) & executive briefing.

Audit any of client’s existing paid search and associated plans in any channel.  Audit paid/organic analytics, landing pages and conversion tracking to understand site’s organic intent. Teach client to perform competitive intelligence and train on associated free and paid tools. Help client select appropriate toolkit. Deliverable is .ppt slides with recommendations to improve or change. Train client as to the state and status of internal programs, strengths, weaknesses and build the PPC production plan.

Week 2
Train in-house team to practice modern keyword research, focused on identifying in market segments, sufficiently subdivided as consensus best PPC practices.  Teach the concept of quality score. Provide overview of various Keyword research tools and how to discern where good values and ROI are likely to be. Orient client as to Google’s Web AdWords UI. Deliverable is a tabbed.xls file of keywords divided by market segments, a list of channels, training and estimated PPC test spend.

Identify mainstream (YouTube, Twitter,) and niche’ social communities potentially susceptible to Client’s products, messages & brand.  Teach client to mine those conversations for insight into other market segments and associated keyword clusters. Deliverable is a tabbed.xls file of communities and their potential paid marketing value and training.

Week 3
Deploy boots on the ground GoogeAdwords PPC campaigns and/or augment existing ones. Implement conversion tracking to the extent client is technically capable.  Teach AdWord Editor; determine most appropriate API management bid and/or ROI based management tool(s) for what the client needs to accomplish. Purchase tools on behalf of client.

Week 4
Conduct multi-variate ad-message/landing page testing clinic. The objectives are: Determine best grid of keywords, text ads and landing pages, which AIMCLEAR creates and hosts (brandedSubdomain.Client.com. (If Client has qualified technology, they may move our the landing pages we create in-house, however AIMCLEAR is not responsible for technical reliability.

Landing pages can either be Client.aimclear.com or keyword.Client.com. The keyword.Client.com option is contingent on Client having capability to configure their DNS or we get administrative rights to do so. (The reason we do it this way is because the most common bottleneck is landing pages delayed for client resources we don’t control.)

Continue testing. Determine cost & ROI of ongoing program including recommendations for scaling the program to Yahoo, Bing and other channels.

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