Look how old this is!
I post at SearchCommander.com now, and this post was published 18 years 11 months 5 days ago. This industry changes FAST, so blindly following the advice here *may not* be a good idea! If you're at all unsure, feel free to hit me up on Twitter and ask.

My ongoing review of Reach Local bid management and PPC advertising program…

These days, managing a Google or Yahoo Pay Per Click advertising account for your local small business can be a pain in the neck. When you were the only advertiser for “Portland mortgages” or “Oregon real estate agent” you could spend $20 to $40 a week and get 250 visitors. The ROI, (return on investment) was so far out of this world, you could afford not to pay attention.

Today, with competition so high, spending $1000 may get you less than half the customers it used to. With click costs skyrocketing, the only way to protect yourself is to set a daily budget, but that will lead to fewer clicks.

Analyzing the keywords and impressions to determine which phrases are worth bidding high on and adjusting your bids daily can become an obsession. That’s where using PPC bid management software can be absolutely essential.

There are a number of Pay Per Click management strategies to choose from, and they all have their ups and downs, but for a small business owner spending in a local market, there’s something new I really like called Reach Local.

I manage about 20 different PPC accounts, some manually, and some with PPC management software, and Reach Local seems to be earning it’s keep so far with instant value being readily apparent to my clients.

In a nutshell, with Reach Local, we set a monthly budget, and the bid management software and computer analysis splits that money between Google, Yahoo, and Verizon Superpages (or your local telphone company directory). Each day you can get a lead report that says (for example)…

December 22, 2005
8 clicks
Spent $4.19
1 email generated
1 online product sale
1 phone call – at 11:10 AM that lasted for 8 min 41 sec

Wow! How’s that for knowing your immediate benefit and value of your advertising dollar?

They do this tracking trick by making a “shadow copy” of your website, having their graphic artists change your phone number to one they can track. Then they clone the rest of your site so all end user activity is trackable. There’s nothing wrong with that at all, in fact it’s great, but it does have the side effect of removing those visitors from your website statistics, so keep that in mind when looking at your own server side stats.

What I dislike…
There’s not much control over the process beyond increasing or decreasing your budget. For a stats person, used to analyzing the traffic and testing ads it’s a bit frustrating.

The reporting functions don’t show you anything beyond clicks dollars spent and leads generated. There’s nothing about the impression counts, which keywords were clicked or anything else that you might want to know, but then again, that’s what makes it so nice for advertisers in the end. You immediately get the bottom line, and can make an intelligent decision regarding your return on investment.

RL says that they have more detailed reporting scheduled for January 2006.

The exact cost for this service is difficult to pin down, since Reach Local doesn’t show you the stats beyond your visitors. That may sound frustrating, and it was for me too at first, but I’m now satisfied that it’s doing a better job of managing the spend than I was by doing it manually.

In other words, I’m getting more customers for a lower overall CPC (Cost Per Click) than I was getting before, without exceeding the budget I wanted.

My final judgement won’t come until after I see their detailed stats, but the value was apparent the first time I got a daily report, and that’s why I became an affiliate…

If you’re an end user advertiser, you can visit their site and go through their daily tutorial phone call and online screen sharing presentation.

If you’re an internet marketer, and you have clients running local campaigns, then this is obviously worth a try. My referral link is http://www.pdxtc.com/reach

When you try it out, please leave me some feedback here!

**update 1/23/2006
I’m sold. Try it out. You have nothing to lose but your high CPC!

** Update 1/28/2006

I guess i’m a control freak. I’ve taken to doing my own keyword research and adding the chosen ones to my campaigns. I’m now managing 5 different domain campaigns, and the reporting is great. It’s easy enough that customers can immediately see the benefit, as long as they know what a website visitor is worth to them.

That’s important to know, because if you average one sale for every 100 visitors, and you make $100 on a sale, then you can’t pay more than $1 a visitor to break even.

You might want to read another short article about how to determine your ROI (Return on Investment)…

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