Online Marketing Services

By Sylvia Rosen

If your business is like most online businesses, paid ads at the top of a search engine results page are a major method for bringing interested buyers to your site. To pay for ad placement, companies bid for ideal search engine "keywords" by paying the search engine for every "click-through" their advertisement gets.

Since well-placed advertisements over search results for popular keywords can generate significant increased profits, there is a lot of strategy that goes into finding the right keywords to bid for and the optimal amount to pay the search engine per click-through.

This is where PPC management comes in: PPC management is available through many internet marketing providers. Driven by clicks, keyword quality, and profit data analysis, PPC management can take care of the difficult process of choosing ideal keywords and bidding for the search results. Rather than bidding on keywords (and potentially "betting" on the wrong ones), a PPC manager can employ experts to increase your online sales effectively.

How to Pay for PPC

Most PPC management companies use the following factors to determine billing structure:

1. Type of PPC service provided, which may include management, consulting, or both.
2. Complexity of PPC campaign: is the company setting up your first PPC account or will they be managing your existing account?
3. Your business' profit and click-through ad goals.
4. Duration of client service agreement.

Keep in mind, a popular PPC management company may charge a higher service rate simply because they are in-demand. Therefore, a popular company with limited availability may charge more than a smaller firm that is ready and willing to take on new clients.

To determine which price structure will work best for your company, consider these common methods used for billing from PPC management firms.

Small, Niche Businesses: Try Flat Rate ($1,000-$3,000 Traffic Budget)

Consider finding a PPC management firm that has a flat rate. Many companies will manage your PPC budget for a fee of $400 or up if you have a total business traffic budget of less than $3000. Flat rates go up as companies have larger ad budgets.

For a company that already has a PPC system in place, they will manage your account for flat, monthly rate. If you don't have any PPC method in place, they'll set up your Google AdWords and Bing accounts for an additional one-time fee.

Large, Established Company ($10,000+ Traffic Budget): Try Pay For Performance

A client with an existing Google AdWords or PPC account that has been active for over a year with a large ad spend (about a minimum of $10,000 per month) may be offered pay for performance pricing. This is an ideal payment option for a larger business with more experience in PPC marketing; most PPC management companies require that a business has solid web analytics reporting already implemented before offering this pricing method when managing their account.

Smaller companies that are new to PPC marketing won't be eligible for this type of billing structure. A business should be comfortable spending thousands of dollars a month on PPC ads before considering pay for performance pricing. Companies vary the metrics they use to determine "performance" so make sure to ask your provider how they interpret click results to measure performance.

New, Small Businesses (Very low Traffic Budget): Consider Pay Per Hour

For smaller businesses that are new to PPC marketing, paying by the hour may feel much more comfortable as a starting point. A PPC management company will bill for hours spent managing an account with a set rate. Consider outsourcing PPC to freelance managers and you can cut your management fee way down (less than $400) to meet your new company's budget.

Additionally, taking this step will let you measure your own company's progress in sales and profit and set traffic goals and budgets for the future. Still, businesses do need to take caution that some PPC management companies may use hourly billing to overcharge or inaccurately charge a client. Larger companies may not benefit from this billing structure since hourly billing could cost more than pay for performance pricing, listed above.