Dan will be speaking about “PPC” at Searchfest 2009 which will be held March 10th in Portland, Oregon. Get your tickets now.
1) Please give me your background and tell us what you do for a living.
I suppose the best thing to do is take a look at my LinkedIn profile found here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sundgren
Also, here’s my brief bio and philosophy from PubCon:
https://www.pubcon.com/bios/dan_sundgren.htm
2) How can a business maximize ROI on an enterprise-level PPC campaign?
I assume you are labeling “enterprise” as a big spender with large PPC accounts? In a mature marketplace with several years of frothy competition there are really only TWO ways to expand and grow your spend and ROI, improving position (getting head terms closer to position #1) and KW expansion. Not all companies look at search the same, maximizing ROI means different things to different business models. Some companies have periods where they need to forego return for volume and others want to spend the least amount with the highest return. That said, as a basic best practice I look at account structure, spend and market share, what prior work has gone into the accounts and by whom, internal tracking methodology is a key factor to evaluate, a LOT of large spenders still dont have a good handle on customer LTV nor do they all track KW level ROI through their systems. Taking those large pieces into account and sitting down with the company and their goals can help you build the right PPC strategy. There are a pile of useful tools in the marketplace you can then use to build out a better PPC framework.
3) What criteria would you use to evaluate a prospective PPC consultant / agency?
Having gone through many RFP and evaluations with the above I can say that the most important things are:
- History in the market
- How they look at bid mgmt
- Strength of the team (bench strength is the key, not just the CEO talking a good game)
- Real world success examples
- AT LEAST 3 SOLID references, people at companies that would dive in front of a bus for the firm/consultant
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.