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The client is intrigued by the clal only campaigns. You mentioned that you had success with them. Can you please give me any tips for success? Cornelius

I would love to get some tips. It is both a physical showroom and an e-commerce site. Cornelius

Hi EGOL, I see that you have quite the opinion on SEM! I think you have some really great tidbits in your response (like not trusting published recommendations because it can be coming from someone like Google who just wants your money, recommending to do the math before new advertisers dive in, and that there are too many variables to determine if you will be profitable your first go). However, there are a few areas that I think are necessary to provide an alternative opinion on for the sake of discussion and public information. I was completely in agreeance with you until you mentioned that people who run SEM accounts don't care about profit margins and business owners barely know their own profit margins. I've been working in paid search for 5+ years and never once have I ever met a business owner or dedicated paid search specialist who wasn't concerned about their profits and overall business impact. I'm glad that you've done the math and have decided that it isn't going to work out for your business, but there is a lot about PPC that doesn't fit well with the math - unless you assumed a 10 QS for every KW and your product still doesn't sell in that atmosphere. As you gain positive account history, you essentially get "discounts" on your bids. From my experience, the Keyword Planner is only a tool to give you a general idea of what you will need to bid and rarely have I seen my actual bids match exactly what the planner suggested - they've been both up & down on the suggested CPC. It's very difficult to assume profit or volume of conversions in a system that is very fluid. As you've already mentioned, when working in PPC it's very possible the target market can be quite competitive. If you're in a competitive niche it will be harder to turn a profit on a per-product basis. And even that has conditional standards against it, like how large your orders are, how many times you have return customers, how optimized your PLAs are, if you're driving the right traffic to the right pages, your conversion funnel. If you make it difficult at any piece of the process then PPC is going to be costly because the experience is poor and competitor experiences are likely much higher quality. I agree that there are many opportunities for failure, however there are just as many times PPC succeeds - or else companies wouldn't continue paying for traffic or putting $500,000+ a month into Google AdWords. This is also a question from someone who is interested in experimenting and seeking generalized recommendations for how much to spend with no inclination to their intended market or vertical. Things that may not work for one company might work incredibly well for another. I appreciate the comprehensiveness of your response on the aspects of what make PPC hard, but I definitely challenge the notion that it's not worth investigating.

Hi Corn, I'm so sorry you've not received a reply from the community on this. Could be we have more Moz Local customers here than Bright Local customers I've never used their service, but do hear good things about the company's owner, Myles Anderson. A similar service is also offered by Whitespark, owned by Darren Shaw who is another nice fellow. You might look at past threads here in the forum regarding both companies. I'm sorry I can't offer a personal assessment of either service.