Just yesterday I took a call from a marketing manager who had been using the pay per click services of another UK marketing agency for 3 years, focusing mostly on Adwords . This guy was close to having a breakdown! The company had spent over £80k on Adwords alone in this time and were confident that it was producing sales via their ecommerce site. Having had a quick look at his Adwords campaign and Analytics reports I could see that 1) they had no conversion tracking in place so most of the £80 has been spent probably on keywords that dont convert or convert at too high a cpa and 2) Analytics revealed that the vast majority of sales were coming from organic traffic!

The lesson really is that the client should of made clear from the start that he'd need access to detailed traffic and sales reporting and also that the majority of pay per click campaigns are run by people who dont really know what they are doing be they in-house Adwords 'have a goers' or other marketing agencies.

Of course im biased and Open Eye Marketing is great! However an impartial list of what you should be asking any pay per click services uk provider is:

- Can you meet or beat my desired CPA of x?

- How will you try to do this? 

- What experience do you have of running similar campaigns?

- Can I expect regular reporting? 

If they cant answer 1 or more of these questions walk away. Other pay per click questions you may have could be answered here . It does seem that as more and more businesses divert traditonal advertising spend towards the internet and pay per click, inevitably more and more cowboys are appearing to capitalise on prospective clients naivity. Also something I am encountering more and more is that broad, traditional marketing and advertising agencies are having a go at upselling pay per click management to their clients, despite for the most part not having or employing any expericed pay per click campaign managers.

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