Josh Kerbel

Now don’t be sad
‘Cause two out of three ain’t bad
Now don’t be sad (Cause)
‘Cause two out of three ain’t bad

-Meatloaf – Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad

Two out of Three Ain’t So Bad, but how about Two out of Eight?   That is pretty bad, but that is just how many online marketing agencies attempting to serve the Toronto market actually demonstrate their own competencies in PPC marketing strategies with their own PPC ad campaign……..

Shall we waste some more time on this subject?  Well, obviously you think so, because you are reading this post……..

The best way to tell if your online marketing agency is worth the money is to examine how you found them in the first place or if they were a word of mouth referral, you should take a look at how they use the Internet to find themselves  new clients.

Let’s do a specific search for something like…………….online marketing agency toronto

This brings up something that looks like this:

Let’s dissect some of the PPC ads……start by thinking, if I am looking to for an online marketing agency, I’m looking for a solution to a marketing problem I am having.  So what I want to see is an ad that is written so it speaks to my problem – personally, I have become really attached to the whole Problem – Benefits – Features type of ad.  Let’s get a little deeper and look to see if any of the ads do this

And now the ones on the side:

Its pretty safe to say that most of these ads don’t really follow the whole problem-benefit-solution model.  But what is more important here is how they handle the post click process.  They have my attention, now lets see what they do with it.  And behind link #1…..

Crappy PPC ad not withstanding, this page isn’t too bad. I would make sure the information capture fields were a little higher.  Now on to link #2 from Mindshape.  Well they have the info capture set up, but  they seem to want to do a few things with this page.  At least its not bowing down at the alter of blatant self indulgence.  They are set up to pull in leads with this page, just like the guys behind link #1………these guys have a clue.

I threw the rest of the ads in to a little poster.  Most of them are fails.   The one I am most surprised about here is PAGE ZERO…….considering they claim to have written the book on paid search, you would think they would know not to just throw PPC traffic a their home page.  Andrew, the owner of the company, has been around the net for ages.  Someone may want to give him a spanking for this poor set up.

So, 8 ads and 2 passes………from people who are supposed to be experts on this area. Um, ouch?

Otherwise known as “Why you should not use automated software to build keyword lists and PPC Ads”

I was going to do a little round up post of what people were talking about on direct marketing blogs this past week, kind of a lay of the land if you will.  I really wasn’t focusing on how people were using PPC ads………………

Until I saw these.

My search term was – direct marketing blogs

Why these ads were showing for this term means a few things:

- People are still building generic keyword lists based on broad searches

- These same people don’t know the value of a negative keyword list.

You would think a digital marketing firm, like “Digital Cement” would understand how to use PPC and keywords in order to design a sales process that gets at the thought process in a searchers head.  Funny enough, the ad above the one for Digital Cement is from Pitney Bowes, the company that owns Digital Cement.  Different PPC ad,  same mistake.

Don’t even get me started on the poor quality PPC ad copy.

Digital Cement’s landing page is pretty poor as well.  They offer the ability to download the landing page as a PDF, but don’t bother to capture any user information in return for the download.  Great prospecting system ya got going there!

Can you build one for me too?

What’s even more ironic………and in the interest of full disclosure, is that I had a meeting with this firm for SEM opportunity about a month ago and never heard back.  Looks like they found a more qualified candidate…….

Kinda like this.

This is an email asking me if I want to put some advertising on a site that I run.

No big deal, right?

Wrong!!!!

Read the email.   It’s not worth the electrons it was written with.  I actually feel bad for the client who is paying for this work.  You know why?

Its boiler plate garbage.

How can I tell?

Well, first of all there is no addressee on the email, so they didn’t bother to research who to actually talk to about this query.

Second of all, they are asking to put a paid ad on one of my e-commerce sites.  Had they taken 4 1/2 minutes to look at the URL, they would clearly be able to tell that I would not put an ad on that site.  It’s a branded e-commerce site, not a content site.  Why should they know this?  Because it is their business to know how to differentiate between the two.

I wonder how much time and money they wasted sending out these emails………….

Spam email courtesy…..More Digital………….where we know how to waste More client  Money.