I read an article yesterday in AdAge (printed version) that was discussing how MSN is trying to unload Avenue A Razorfish (AARF). I won’t go into detail on the article, because it wasn’t as interesting as the article about Sanjaya (American Idol’s popular black sheep) being spotted in AdAge’s Manhattan offices.

The article, however, did spark a severe issue with me and a colleague.  If AARF is managing PPC accounts and so is Google – but yet they are actually the ad venue, isnt’ this a conflict of interest? It’s like going to your car dealer and asking them to finance your loan.  You might as well club yourself over the head.

I’ve heard so many times how easy it is to setup a Google Adwords Account, and well, yes it is.  You just need 5 minutes and a credit card because Google will select your 20 keywords for you. And into the lions den you go.  Consider this, why would Google only say you need 20 keywords? Well, because they are making $600 million dollars a year off of their keyword advertising. So naturally any smart ad venue is going to tell you that you should be bidding on the most broad and expensive keywords available.  Do they mention anything about conversion rate or conversion tracking? No. But, they do tell you how important click-through (CTR) is.  That’s because they get paid when someone clicks on your ads.

My point really is – I can’t believe there aren’t any regulations around Google managing client PPC accounts, in addition to MSN having purchased an agency as a part of a bigger collective but also manages their accounts.  How can this be good?

Hire us to manage your pay-per-click campaigns.

Tags: Pay-Per-Click, pay-per-click management, ppc search engine management

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 8:15 pm and is filed under Pay-Per-Click. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.