After converting one of their extremely confused, annoyed, and down right pissed off PPC clients into one of ours, I had some info gathering to do. What was the service, what was their pitch, and how did they talk potential clients into their pay per click campaign? So I actually called yellowpages and told them that I needed help running one of my campaigns cause I was just too busy and yellowpages sent out a sales rep and a Search Engine Marketing Manager. This is what transpired:

Service Highlights:

• onypc.com (yellowpages) manages your campaign in Atlanta
• PPC Campaign is spread among many major search engines; Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com, etc..
• Choose a comfortable monthly budget
• Cool Online Portal for Transparency
• onypc Landing Page
• 12 month contract (NO OUT)

Major Onypc.com (Yellowpages) Flaws:

• With onypc.com (yellowpages) you don’t actually get to speak with the campaign manager, you work with a Search Engine Marketing “Manager” that probably has never managed a PPC account.
• I had the rebuttal, that if I knew Google converted at twice the rate of the other search engines, and was the same relative Cost per Click (CPC), why would I be forced to display ads on less effective search engines. The response was, “We have you covered on 92% of the Search Engines, why would you only want to be covered on 72% of the searches!” Really, who was this guy kidding? I have been managing $100,000+  monthly PPC campaigns for over 3 years. It’s common advertising sense to appropriate your spend to the medium that converts at the highest rate and lowest cost.
• Cool Backend Portal; this was the biggest selling point for them (very sad.) Apparently this offers transparency, which is very important to someone investing money in advertising. With the portal you can see how many clicks you had and how much you spent, with one very important metric excluded, the cost that yellowpages paid for that click.
• How much Does yellowpages make? We all know that there is an inherent cost for a click. There are various models out there for pay per click but typically there is a one time setup fee and then a monthly management fee relative to the monthly PPC spend. Only yellowpages has a far different model, for this example you (Painting Professional) would give yellowpages $2500 and they would show you 80 clicks in the report on your cool back-end portal. Doing simple math you know you spent just over $31 per click, seems ok right?  Absolutely not!!! Only If you are a personal injury lawyer specializing in Mesothelioma.
• Obviously you have to get paid for services rendered, but if you are only paying $3 a click on Google and charging them $31 per click, that’s strong armed robbery. I asked how do I know that I’m not getting ripped off? Response. “We’re Yellowpages.” hahahah, riiiiiight!
• A Landing Page? check this out  S & J Roofing. From an Analytics standpoint you are dealing with a limited # of page views and time on site, why would you want another obstacle up to keep you from securing a client? I have no clue either. It is no wonder that their clients hate them.
• Agreement Length = 12 Months. So after everything is said and done, we have ripped you off, stolen your money, landed the potential clients that you over paid for on our site, and now we are locking you in for 12 months!

My fellow readers! I scream SCAMMMMMM. Please do yourselves a favor, do not spend your money with onypc.com (yellowpages) they are giving the SEM and more specifically PPC world a bad name. If you are interested in a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign where we land your potential clients on  your website,  show you what the clicks cost on Google, and then focus on increasing your conversions overtime please contact Digital Footprint Media.

Having effective Google AdWords is meaningless unless they are targeted to the appropriate audience. I went ahead and Googled the phrase “traffic ticket attorney,” and to my surprise I noticed an ad for a law firm located in Virginia. I am from South Florida. This ad therefore is not relevant to me, and if I were to accidently click on the link looking for a lawyer and found that it was located in Virginia, I would quickly leave the site. I therefore just cost the site money that it wouldn’t have had to spend if it had targeted only relevant areas. For this reason it is important to identify a concentrated area in which to advertise your campaign. By focusing the Adwords, the click-through rate of your site will increase and the overall quality score will increase as well.

With geographic keywords, whocanisue.com was able to increase its conversion rate from 20% to over 40% in a matter of 2 days.  Not only did the conversions increase, but also the average cost per conversion decreased by half.

In the case of our Criminal campaign, within the 2 day period in which the localized campaign was created, the localized campaign received over 6 times the amount of clicks. The Bankruptcy local campaign saw a decrease of cost per conversion from $9.37 to $8.23 with an increased click through rate from 1.12% to 2.61% when compared to the un-localized Bankruptcy campaign.

It is still important, however, to maintain the un-localized campaigns. Although they may be less efficient, they still receive traffic and conversions that might not be picked up by localized keyword campaigns.