Here is a list of frequently asked questions. Please use the "Quick Question" form to the left if you can't find the answer to your question, or if you want us to reply to you directly.

What is paid search?

Paid search also called PPC (Pay Per Click) or paid placement, is when you purchase advertisements that show up in a search engine’s results page. Paid search often involves assigning bids to specific keywords. These bids are one of the many factors that determines how high on the search engine results page that your advertisement appears. The quality of campaign management often dictates to overall profitability of a paid search account and can be the determining factor of success in this medium.

Why should my business use search engine marketing?

Search engine marketing works. A recent study conducted by Forrester Research entitled “The State of Retailing Online” concludes that 90% of online retailers say search engine marketing is the most effective form of customer acquisition. Another research study by Webvisible and Nielsen found that 82% of consumers use search engines for finding local information on products and services from local businesses. Whether your business is online exclusively or is a local brick and mortar with a small presence online, search engine marketing can help you profitably acquire new costumers.

How much of our budget should be allocated towards search engine marketing?

How much you spend on search engine marketing depends on a few factors including: campaign effectiveness, business goals (branding and awareness or transactional), product or service margins, and how competitive the industry is. There is often a good business case to allocate anywhere from 10% – 35% of top line revenue on online marketing, and depending on the above factors, 50 – 75% of that should go towards search marketing.

Why should I use Effective Spend to manage our paid advertising campaigns?

At Effective Spend we combine an “in-house” style of management and communication, industry leading technology, and comprehensive research and analysis that allow us to create measurable performance increases in customer acquisition, top line revenue, and most importantly, ROI. Our strategies, although sometimes complex, are always shared with our clients and we value as much feedback and input as we can get. The one-size-fits-all approach does not apply to online marketing and our ability to adapt and customize the way we manage campaigns separates us from our competitors. To ensure a profitable, long-lasting partnership, we do an extensive amount of research before taking on new clients. Because of this in-depth analysis, and the confidence in our ability to outperform previous managers, we are able to greatly reduce the risk for the client by structuring month to month agreements. Although there is often a great amount of resources required in the initial phase of optimization and build out, we are confident that you will be very happy with the partnership and continue working with us.

I do not want to pay for media shown outside my local market; can we set it up so that our online advertising only appears to buyers in our area?

Yes, most search engines allow for geographical targeting based on city, zip code or radius. Our experience is that geographically targeted campaigns should be utilized whenever possible and are great ways to increase exposure to higher value customers and reduce spend elsewhere.

How do I determine the right budget mix for search engine advertising versus online display advertising?

Effective budget allocation across multiple online marketing mediums is largely dependent on the ability to measure visitor interactions with each advertisement to determine which ads are responsible for the conversion. There are several industry tools that can help in tracking multiple channel marketing and a select few will apply that information effectively for optimization. At Effective Spend, we employ leading technology that tracks how customers interact with your different online advertisements and are able to assign credit based on which one actually produced the sale. This type of in-depth analysis can lead to significant ROI increases and additional sales.

What is the client’s role when working with Effective Spend?

At Effective Spend we take an “in-house” approach to managing online marketing campaigns. This means that we value on-going communication and set up regular information sharing session in addition to our weekly and monthly comprehensive reporting and marketing calls. This type of information sharing allows us to gain a competitive advantage in marketing and customer acquisition, as well as allow us to be flexible and agile enough to prepare for product promotions and industry specific seasonality. Although we value a close connection to key stake holders and thrive off of the insights we gain from our clients, we understand that a client’s time is very valuable and often very limited. We therefore utilize several automatic data sharing processes and make sure that we are integrated tightly with the overall website analytics, so that we can tap directly into what is going on across the entire website and industry on a regular basis without having to take up a client’s time. In fact we often find that the information we gather from these processes are of great value when shared with key business stakeholders and we make it a priority to do so whenever applicable.

Will I continue to own the pay per click campaigns?

Yes. This is a very important factor that most companies overlook when reviewing search engine marketing agencies. All online marketing accounts will be setup in the client’s name, with the client’s credit card. Therefore the client will always have access to this account at any time, be able to make any changes immediately, and will not lose their current account representative. This also means that if for some reason the client chooses to bring certain accounts in-house, they will not have to start from scratch. The client will be able to continually utilize the structure and optimization that we have created for them.

Will I be able to make changes to my pay per click campaigns?

Yes. The client will always have direct access to their accounts and although we prefer to implement all changes through our proprietary software in methods consistent with our overall strategy for the account, if need be the client can login directly to their account and process any changes needed.

How long will it take to optimize my account?

There are several phases of optimization inherent in a sound online marketing management strategy, and the duration of which we will be able to implement the initial optimization strategy can vary depending on the amount of data we have to base the optimization on. Factors that can greatly affect the speed at which we are able to see significant increases in performance are

• The amount of historical data the account has already gathered.
• The duration of time in which the website has been integrated into a web analytics platform such as Google Analytics.
• The amount of successful events that occur on a regular basis (for example a website that pulls in 1000 visitors per day that purchase 100 times will have more data in which to optimize off of than one that pulls in 100 visitors with 1 purchase or conversion.)