Charging for PPC

[Web Diversity]

Hi all,

Was wondering if I could get some feedback on charging for PPC.

I'm finding that more and more companies are waking up to PPC as a means of generating traffic. The reasons are quite compelling.

What I've noticed though is that there are a lot of companies that are bidding way over the odds for keywords and I've pinpointed it to either lack of knowledge on the part of the employee tasked with managing it, or lack of time to check on a regular basis. Certainly, they don't use any software to manage it.

I've managed to secure customers with different monthly budgets for PPC and was curious as to how others charge for this.

With one I've agreed to charge a % of the budget, another a flat fee and another on a consultancy basis, it's getting a bit confusing.

My jigsaw pieces are :


Number of keywords (0-10, 11-20, 21-50, 50+)
Frequency of updates (Hourly, daily, weekly)
Weekends/time of day (working hours only ?)
Minimum charge ? (At least an hour ?)
Can I prove cost savings by managing campaign ?


Look forward to getting some "out of the box" ideas.

Jim Banks

[Kal]

Hey WebD :hi:

What I do is charge an initial campaign set up fee (for keyword research and bid description creation) and then a monthly maintenance fee which covers :

- keyword cost effectiveness tracking
- bid tweaking and position maintenance
- monthly performance report

The maintenance fees are reduced for longer contract periods (6 months is cheaper per mth than 3 mths and so on). Fees are set per keyword ranges in increments such as 0-50, 51-100, 101-200 and so on. On top of that the client pays the monthly keyword spend, determined by their budget.

I use BidRight to monitor and tweak bids once a day and forward an Overture keyword click-thru report each month. It is still quite time consuming (esp the initial keyword research and the bid description submissions to Overture), so make sure you set a generous maintenance fee.

Regarding proving cost savings by managing the campaign, just point out the fact that PPC is not your client's core business, show them how much time it would take them per day to monitor it, tell them the cost of bid monitoring software they'd need to purchase to do it in-house and explain how it requires PPC experience to create effective bid descriptions.

Nine times out of ten, you'll find clients recognize it would be more cost-effective to outsource PPC to an expert than to do it themselves.