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Thanks for being patient while I did some digging.

First, I think because you aren't a huge spender you need a flat rate.  This is going to make payments predictable and you can really start to value the work being done and trust the manager of the account. Your money will go toward working for you, rather than being micromanaged at the bid level.

Second, when you are calling around and making decisions about who to work with be aware of their internal structure. If you were my client at Distilled, I would be your point of contact and I would be the one working on your account. I think you should look for a company with an internal structure where you will also have this direct path for communication because you know you are getting pure, unadulterated information on your account.

Recommendations::
The moment you've been waiting for!

Because I think it's so important that you have a flat rate, I'd suggest GetSquare.co.uk, I spoke with a trusted, knowledgeable friend here who said "for small spend accounts we generally charge a fixed monthly management fee that covers optimisation, management & reporting." They're located up in Edinburgh, if location matters to you.

Another alternative to Anicca would be Boom-Online.co.uk. I also know first hand that there are knowledgeable people here who you can trust. They are located in Nottingham. They do a review, then off the back of the review price a one time set up fee, then it's a flat fee based on spend & number of campaigns.

Whatever you do, be sure you feel you are getting the most out of your preliminary conversations with any agency you are working with.

Let me know if this information has been helpful, or if you have any lingering questions!

I'm not aware of any guides specifically discussing what you are looking for, I'm sorry.

However, I am a little concerned about the approach you are taking with your sites. Of course everyone wants to make money from their site with quick turn around, but Moz and the majority of the Moz community are focused on creating audiences and gratifying, consumable content that keeps people coming back for more. I guess you could say we're less Transaction focused and more Lifetime Customer focused. At Distilled, we call this "Making the Internet Awesome".

Regarding your last question concerning the types of tactics people here use, we design and implement strategies that will build relationships with our customer base. The majority of people here are representing their company and their company's services, so they are most likely selling a product. It doesn't sound like your site has a service or product, so it may be difficult to glean the type of information you are seeking.

I would suggest you have a look through the YouMoz & Moz blogs as well as look through the already answered questions here in the topic area that you are interested in researching.

Might be a bit off base with your questions, Cole. Just wanted to make sure you aren't planning on using the GFN (Google Fowarding Number) as an offline means of call attribution. (more info below, but if you aren't then just ignore it )

Each call will be calculated as a conversion after you specify that you want that. In the Tools> Conversions tab, you will need to add a new conversion type and mark calls as a conversion. Here, you can set the call length by seconds to determine when you want to register a call length as a conversion. For instance, I was working with a company that saw conversions happen around 8 minutes on the phone, so we set the time to the equivalent of 8 minutes and filtered for just these conversions within the UI.

Why you shouldn't use Google Fowarding Numbers outside of AdWords
It's a bad idea to use google forwarding numbers because they are only intended for SEM use. If you start plugging them around elsewhere you're not going to have proper conversion attribution to your campaigns. Google has numerous numbers that it's going to use to properly attribute the calls to specific keywords. If you pull a number that actually is associated to a very poor performing keyword (ie, it still doesn't get you calls, you just stole the number and applied it to a mailer) then Google is going to start optimizing for that keyword's conversion performance even though it's actually a bad KW.

Also, there's a science involved to call tracking. I would highly suggest you speak with Call Tracking Metrics, Mongoose Metrics, or If By Phone for the technical understanding of how call tracking works and why you can't just plug numbers around.

I would do it like this:

AdGroup - Keyword

• Keywords

AdGroup Location

• Keyword Location
• Keywords Location

You really just need to make sure that if you do it this way, you turn off the "Keyword Variance" in the Campaign Settings or it will F up your data.

Don't forget to NOT use broad match and only use modified broad match.

And always always use Phrase & Exact matches for every keyword type!

Hey Garth,

These are all great options listed, and I'm sure there are more that you can explore (don't forget Gemini, Yahoo's native advertising platform).

I would like to briefly touch though on the part of your post where you mentioned that Google is too expensive. Do you have an experienced person managing your PPC efforts? There are many things that could be contributing to the expense of your Google campaign. If you haven't looked into having a third party review your campaigns, I would highly recommend it. (but don't have Google look, they just want you to spend more money.)

I don't know if you heard but you can start tracking conversions on your site from Facebook within Facebook instead of tagging the crap out of it your URLs and tracking in GA. Pixel Tracking FTW!

Hey

Apologies that your question wasn't answered sooner. I've read over all the information that you provided, watched the video, and reviewed several Advertising Policies from AdWords.

I don't believe that the promotion of this video, in the way the content is presented from 00:00 to 02:09, is in violation of any policy. Political issues will forever be sensitive, but they are still political. International affairs is political in context so this would fall under the Political Advertising Policy. As I'm sure you agree, political ads aren't always accurate, positive or appreciated, but this video still fits this portion of policy.

After Sandy Hook, Google created the Sensitive Issues clause that keeps advertisers without the capabilities for real aid from promoting their agenda after disasters. Unfortunately, it does not apply to this.

AdWords for Video Policy states that all videos must be suitable for a Family audience. While I personally don't believe that politics is always family friendly, this clause is only purposed to cover videos of questionable sexual content.

The only clause I think this could POSSIBLY, REMOTELY fit under, if not the Political Policy, would be the "Anti" and Violence Policy. This is specifically calling out one group of people who have been the brunt of a lot of racism in our country, even more so since 9/11. But, I agree with whoever it was in that AdWords Help thread that said the last seconds of this video changes the entire meaning of the message. This is a political awareness campaign and it's going to get a little ugly.

Re: Block Ads

Did you go to the site first, then immediately bounce back? That's most normally when that message will appear.

I'm currently seeing EXTREME failures, even on branded terms. It optimizes for CTR rather than Conversion Rate. Or at least that's what I've seen. I don't understand the rational behind it. I would suggest testing it on a lesser converting campaign but one still with more than 15 conversions/mo. I agree that lower-volume terms & conversion optimizer don't work well together.

I'd suggest instead coming up with a bid management strategy to execute for some of the mid volume keywords and managing them on a more individual level.

When you get the account strategists, on a completely unrelated topic, you should ask for a list of betas that your account qualifies for! I'm sure you already do that, but they aren't much good at anything else.

Hrm, then maybe this was just some sort of Google test based on your search history. Most normally, you see the "block this" text after immediately bouncing back to Google. I've seen this a lot with ads as well as serps.

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.

I agree, that from a structural perspective you shouldn't include other brands, but also from a Click Through Rate (CTR) perspective, when someone is searching for a brand they are likely to be searching for a major, already trusted site. You need to make sure you can differentiate this change from your other non-branded keywords. Negative keywords are your friend! Make sure your ad copy is strong.

Here's how I would suggest you structure this at the campaign level

Guitars
Drums
Guitar Brands
Drum Brands
Brand (your brand)
Competitors (if you have the money, don't start here)

Be sure you have a clear Call to Action in your ad, and at least 1 keyword in the Headline. Also, send specific traffic to the most useful page on your site. DO NOT send this traffic to your home page. That won't be useful for your spend.

A few things to add to this great response, ad type will make a huge impact in your overall performance. Some sites have better CTRs on different ad sizes or types - image v text. It's very important to run all sizes throughout your test.

I agree that display campaigns will suck up your budget, if you can spend the time to manage them well, then they can really turn a great profit for you - branding/remarketing or not. I didn't believe that was possible until I started working under a manager with 10 years of experience in both SEM & Media buys. It takes longer to crack the Display nut than it does to make a profit on Search, but I highly recommend it. There's a significant learning curve but stick with it and keep testing.

When you are setting up your columns in the Keywords tab, there should be an addtional "Destination URL" option. You can pull this column to the top of the list (for ease of sight) and assign a specific URL to the keyword.

You can also do this in the AdWords Editor which for me is easier than dealing with the interface.

Yes to what David & Dave have said.

To add, I think you should also not be targeting the term "widget" so generally. "buy" probably isn't the best modifier you could use, or the best use of your time if you have a lengthy list of one word keywords.

I would hope that you are advertising on more keywords than just broad head terms, like "HP" "Windows" "Widget" "Tech" "Money" "word" -- i went a little off topic there, but I'm sure you get the point.

You should rely minimally on big, broad terms like these but instead,  target longer 2-4 word phrases more frequently. It will improve your CPC and overall ROI.

Hello!

Phil just flagged this up to me. Great Question. The keyword level targeting for video is no where near as specific as Search advertising. I would say even Display Network keywords have more accuracy (which is saying quite a bit about how horrible the YouTube keyword lists are).

Phil's suggestion is excellent. I would do that in addition to taking these steps:

I would first start with a retargeting campaign with video. You can make the list in Analytics and bring it into AdWords.

Then I would make a target group based on Topic & Interest (topic being the content of the video, and interest being interest of the user). You can always go in and see where your ads are appearing and exclude, like the Display Network.

But, the first half of your question was referring to ROI and tracking. It's tricky. You have to override the system. Here's how:

Step 1. Create a mirrored landing page...a version of an existing page which you can direct all video traffic to with an unique URL. eg www.DOMAIN.com/NewLandingPageStep 2. Tweak the GA code (ONLY on the mirrored landing page) to something like this http://www.youtube.com?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=VideoAdsFull example below

var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-123456789-1']);
_gaq.push(['_setDomainName', 'Domain.com']);
_gaq.push(['_setReferrerOverride','http://www.youtube.com?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Video']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

(function() {
var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);

})();

(no matter how hard I try, this won't format the way I want it to. I'm sorry that looks so shitty)

Regular video traffic from the GDN should be tracked normally but if not then creating a second page and having a different dummy referrer should be easy enough.

This is the hack that one of our Google Reps provided us. I don't have much information on ROI. I haven't dedicated a great amount of time to it (which is something I need to do and figure out this month).

Hope this has helped!

Matthew, Joram & Branden have all provided really great answers, and it looks like you're on the right track.

Have you connected your analytics account with your adwords account? Here's how if you haven't yet. I know there's been some redesigning going on insight Analytics, but it should still be the majority of the same information. Might take a bit of trial & error though.

IF you've already set up GA & AW then you should be able to see AdWords conversions filtering into your current goals. Go to the Conversions section, then go to Overview. In the refreshed screen, select by Source / Medium. This will give you a decent idea of how AdWords has been helping.

Generally, I would say that if you don't know how AdWords has been contributing to your bottom line, then I wouldn't increase budget. Are you managing all online marketing for your company?

I agree with Martijn. There isn't really one PPC resource but the two he listed are great. The only problem I have with Certified Knowledge is they don't date stamp their blog entries. So the information could be from yesterday, or 8 years ago.

I collaborated on this project and still think that it's a great way to get started understanding how to build & manage PPC campaigns, even though the landscape is changing quite rapidly. It's a step by step guide for small businesses on how to navigate AdWords campaigns and management. Each section links out to a relevant articles so it takes the guesswork out of figuring out where there are valuable resources.

Distilled is also working on creating PPC modules for DistilledU, however that won't help you out right now. I wish I were superwoman and I could have it completely finished for you tomorrow! However, Keep asking PPC questions here. There are several people who manage accounts answering questions and several other people willing to correct them if they are wrong. Moz is still the place to learn from peers.

If you are trying to determine whether or not you should use the Accelerated setting, I would take it off for now - ESPECIALLY while you are learning and understanding subtle nuances. You will see a difference, but set your manager's expectations: You're new and starting out and traffic will fluctuate while you are learning. It's only to be expected.

Here's the setup I would do::

Enhanced Campaign: Target Virginia (assuming you service that Richmond)

Adgroup: Richmond Removalists
Keywords: "Richmond" specific keywords (you should use broad modified as well as Phrase & Exact, so:: +Richmond +Removalists, "Richmond Removalists" and [Richmond Removalists])
Ad Copy: Richmond Specific heandline

Adgroup: New Suburb Name
Keywords: New Suburb specific keywords
Ad Copy: New Suburb specific headline

Adgroup: Non Brand, non-suburb specific location
Keywords: nonbrand, no location qualifier
Ad Copy: "Removalists Local to You" or something similar

However, I also see a benefit with city-level targeting at the campaign level. But for ease of time, this way may be best and less complicated to manage if it's not going to be your primary focus in life.

Hey, sorry for not getting back to you quickly!

I currently use {keyword} instead of {querystring} in my bing parameters because I'm sending the information to Google, and I know that Keyword works already from using it in AdWords. Try this and let me know if you see anything change!