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Terms of Service / MOU

Introduction

Terms of Service is a generally recognized way of explaining what the prospect can expect if they chose to do business with a company. Because we would have no formal contract, I prefer the term MOU or Memorandum of Understanding.

The purpose of this document is to promote good communications and properly set expectations. It is not a marketing document so you might be surprised by my frankness. Actually, I hope you find it a bit refreshing.

Because we will have no formal contract, you may cancel my service whenever you like, if you are not completely satisfied, and any unused consulting fee will be returned without question. I believe this minimizes your risk, gives you more flexibility and insures that I continually deliver value.

If you have questions about anything in this document, please don’t hesitate to ask. I don't want you to send me any money until you are comfortable. My objective here is not to teach you the art and science of Google AdWords, but I feel most people like to know what to expect, and there will be occasions where I need your input. Therefore, the more you know about what I’m doing and the reasons why, the better prepared you will be to answer important questions that materially affect the campaign and the more you will know about how your money is being spent.

By now, you have probably come to realize that Google AdWords is deceptively simple, yet devilishly complex. Many business owners or managers enter this marketing channel with no idea what they are getting into and when it doesn't go the way they expect, they look for others to hold accountable for their expectations, whether that’s Google, a consultant or an agency. This document is my attempt to be as honest and up-front as I can about what you can expect from me and how the process will unfold. This is a “living document” and it can change at any time without notice. If you do decide to retain my services and you have questions along the way, chances are I will be referring you back to this document. So please take the time to read and understand my business model now, before we begin. We will both be better off for it.

I offer several articles, which you will find in the footer of every page on my website to help you appreciate the complexities we will be dealing with. Please review these articles and see where you stand with your knowledge of search engine marketing and PPC in general.

Whether you will be creating your first internet marketing campaign, looking for ways to improve your existing campaign or you would like to be mentored in the finer points of the Google AdWords program, it makes no difference to me. I will spend the time in whatever way is most beneficial to you. Getting your campaign to the point you want it is a journey and you decide how quickly we get there. If you want me to do all the work, I will. If you want me to coach you on how to do it, that's fine also.

While I will do my best to provide the help you need in a way that works best for you, I describe my service as coaching, consulting and campaign management. Here is how I define them:

Coaching >> I show you what needs to be done and you do most of the work. (less of my time and more of your time)
Consulting >> I do most of the work, but explain what I'm doing so you might be able to manage the account someday yourself. (more of your time and more of my time)
Campaign Management >> I do all the work and only contact you if needed. (less of your time and less of my time)

What is the process?

No two campaigns are exactly alike, but all campaigns go through several distinct phases. Each phase requires different tools, skills and level of effort. Like most professionals, I have developed a repeatable process over time that works. Other agencies that offer similar services may have a different process. There is no one way to achieve success. For a better understanding of the different phases and the associated tasks, please read my article titled PPC campaign lifecycle.

Cost and work This is important!!!

Please understand that my business is a consulting practice and the only way I have to generate revenue, is my time. I do not receive any commissions, incentives, referral fees or kick-backs from other companies.

The amount of time I spend working on your account depends on several factors like; the amount of interaction we have, the number of keywords, ad groups, campaigns, geographic markets and the amount of traffic you get. In addition, you may want to get my input on other related topics such as website design, landing page optimization or how to improving conversions.

It is important for you to appreciate that I have a constant backlog of work. Any time I spend working on your account is time I'm not working on another client's account or my own business. Whether I'm reviewing your campaign data, visiting your website, visiting your competitor's website, adjusting bid prices, analyzing reports, reading or composing emails, preparing for a call, talking with you on the phone, following up on a call, it is all billable time.

If you have used up the time on the retainer, I stop working on your account! This is why I typically send an invoice for additional work when I have about one hour remaining on the current retainer or I am not confident in being able to complete the next task with the remaining time. If you would like to spend the remaining time reviewing what has been accomplished or how I plan to proceed, this is the time to do it. Please don't wait until there is nothing left on the retainer.

Once the payment has been confirmed, I generally begin working on your account within a few days. Typically, we have a mutually agreed upon work plan and you will have a good understanding of where we are in the process. It is normal to expect that I will pause what I'm doing on your account while I'm waiting for you to make a decision or have work done to your website.

Work and traffic

Some of my clients are small businesses who don’t rely on search engine marketing as their primary source of leads or sales. They are simply performing an experiment to determine if PPC will produce an acceptable ROI. In these situations, the amount of traffic to their website from PPC can be relatively low. This is important because the work I do is all based on receiving data that only comes when a searcher clicks on the client’s ad and is taken to their website. If we have not collected enough statistically significant data, I won’t have enough information to make an informed decision about what to do next. In this scenario, it will take longer for the campaign to “mature”.

If your daily Google AdWords budget is significantly limiting the amount of traffic, I may recommend increasing your daily budget so we get the traffic necessary to develop the campaign. When you have enough traffic, the advantage of allowing me to spend more time on your account means you will be that much closer to realizing 1) savings through better campaign efficiency and 2) increased business through new keyword placements.

The dynamics of PPC

During campaign lifecycle, there are elements that need to be created, developed, monitored and adjusted, if optimal performance is to be achieved. The following topics are presented to help explain the major factors that contribute to the need for proper research and on-going management or what I refer to as "fine-tuning". It's unreasonable to expect that anyone should implement a new campaign without making adjustments after it is launched.

Keyword selection & website design

The harsh reality of search engine marketing is that you must know what your prospects are searching for (the search vocabulary of your market) and how it relates to what you offer. For example, if you describe your product as a “tissue” and prospects are searching for “kleenex”, you won’t be successful with search engine marketing! Also, you may offer the greatest product or service every conceived, but if no one is searching for it, you won’t be successful with search engine marketing. The point is that creating a successful campaign requires research, testing and adjusting, based on the data you have collected.

In a perfect world, the words you use to describe your product or service are exactly what prospects would be searching for. Your landing pages and website would be optimized for those terms and you would structure the visitor experience to accommodate visitors who were delivered to your website from your AdWords ad based on the search query they used. As you know, that isn’t the real world, but unfortunately, that is what Google demands if you are playing by their rules. Therefore, don't be surprised if I suggest changes to your website to comply with this reality.

If you had the benefit of hindsight, you would first perform the necessary research to know what people were searching for. Then you would describe your product or service using those words and then you would build your website and landing pages all around those terms, both from an SEO perspective as well as a selling or conversion optimization perspective.

Unfortunately, what actually happens is just the opposite. You build your website and then you decide to use search engine marketing (AdWords) to advertise your business. It’s then you discover that Google’s quality score algorithm gives you a low grade for “landing page relevance” and your CPC is higher than you like. In addition, your landing pages are not optimized for what your best prospects were searching for. Your landing page is all about "fruit", when your prospect was searching for "apples". This results in a sub-optimal visitor experience and will be reflected in your conversion rate.

At this point you have two options, either live with this sub-optimal situation with regard to CPC and conversion rates or do something to improve your landing pages. See the page on my website titled AdWords optimized website design.

Traffic volume

I discussed earlier, that the amount of traffic to your web site affects my ability to make intelligent decisions. The data that is generated when someone visits your site helps me in; making adjustments to bid prices, testing ad copy, keyword selection and many other aspects of campaign management. If the traffic to your site is low, there is only so much I can do in a given amount of time.

The Google quality score

Actually both major search providers have implemented a quality factor; it’s just that everyone is following Google’s lead. Google sets the standard and others follow. The quality score assigned to every keyword is not static. Google collects history on how well that keyword performs in your campaign as well as in your competitor’s campaigns. The quality score is also based on the “quality” of your web site, your campaign and your overall account history. There are over 100 elements that go into the quality score and Google only provides hints as to what they are and how to improve them.

If Google doesn’t like what they see, they will begin raising the minimum bid you must pay to keep the keyword active. I will be making most of the decisions about bidding, but it’s possible I will need your input if the minimum bid for a particular keyword that I feel you want in your campaign, is exorbitant relative to your budget.

Some aspects of the quality score I can control, but not all. The quality of your landing page, the depth and relevance of your website and here is an important one; how well that keyword performs across the entire Google network. These are all out of my control. However, I have a great deal of knowledge about how to improve these factors and this could be the basis for how we spend time on your account. Remember that advertising is all about ROI. Generally speaking, the average conversion rate is about 1-3%, where the conversion is taking the action you want. That means you will need to buy 30-100 clicks before you get a conversion. And in most cases, that’s just an inquiry, not a sale!

Conversions

A conversion happens when a visitor to your web site takes the desired action or said another way; they do what you want them to do. When it comes to PPC, your web site has only one purpose, get the visitor to do what you want them to do! This could be signing up for your newsletter or a special report, requesting more information, calling you on the phone or best of all, buying your product! If you have the ability to track conversions, you probably know how important they are, but you may not know what you can do to improve the conversion rate.

I may be able to make some suggestions, but if you are serious about improving your conversion rate, it requires a concerted effort, including extensive testing. This is usually beyond the scope of traditional "campaign management" because it usually requires modification of your website.

What you should expect?

My availability

I consider one of my strong points to be my availability. I use a service called Google Voice. When I get a call it rings my home office, mobile phone, vacation home or any other number I specify. In addition, any voice message is automatically transcribed and sent to me as a email. That said, I rarely encounter an emergency. Most things can wait to be handled in a 24-48 hours.

Reports

I don’t include any reports as part of my service because they tend to create more questions than answers. However, I may use a report to bring focus to a particular area if I need to make a point. That said, you can always log into your AdWords account and run any one of a number of reports yourself or we could allocate some time to discuss which reports you would like to receive from Google automatically.

I do not provide a detailed accounting of my time and work. I believe it is counter-productive, creates more questions than answers and threatens the basic assumption of trust. Instead I rely on our regular dialog to convey an understanding of the major work products and the progress made. I keep a journal of how much time I spend on a clients account with some shorthand notes. These notes are not intended to be shared with clients. If you want a detailed understanding of what I do, study this (TOS/MOU) document carefully.

Campaign performance

In most cases what you want are conversions, which could be a lead or a sale. But there is only so much a campaign manager can do to achieve this goal. What lies between a search query and a conversion is:

The right set of keywords
The right keyword matching options
Relevant and compelling ad copy
An engaging landing page
A call to action which is measurable
A well designed website
An easy fulfillment process

Even the very best "campaign manager" can only get you half-way to a conversion, yet you will probably judge the success of the campaign based on conversions. Assuming I am not asked to provide additional consulting services to enhance your website, here is how I will manage your campaign.

If there is conversion tracking in place and it is meaningful, accurate and reliable, I will manage the campaign to produce the right cost/conversion based on your targets. If conversion tracking is not in place or is not providing reliable data, I will manage the campaign to produce the most number of qualified visitors for the daily budget you establish. In other words, I will be managing to CPC targets and ad ranking. I will be making assumptions based on my understanding of your business, but we should have a discussion about how I can prioritize certain search terms in the account. Not all search terms have the same value in terms of achieving your objective.

Think of this project as if you owned a professional race car organization. In this analogy, I am the race car driver and your web site is the car. Even the best race car driver can't win a race if the car doesn't perform well. Your landing page and website must convince the visitor to take the desired action.

Google AdWords is perhaps the best direct-response marketing tool ever invented. However, it works best when you are able to correlate a query phrase or keyword, to a prospects response. Responses or “conversions” are actions visitors take when they come to your website. If your website does not have meaningful and measurable actions visitors can take or the action you are looking for is something which cannot be tracked back to a query phrase, such as a phone call, then it will be more difficult and take longer to show tangible results.

If your expectations are to simply get more telephone inquires or the response you are looking for is more than an impulse for a first-time visitor, then you should have a longer time horizon before seeing tangible results. I recommend at least three months and a minimum of 20-30 hours of my time, but that's a very rough estimate.

Things you should know:

PPC marketing is a game of supply and demand. Click charges are increasing at a rate of about 20%/year and competitors are getting smarter and more aggressive. The average cost-per-click has doubled in less than three years. It’s becoming more and more difficult to compete, especially if you are not experienced, don’t have the right tools or don’t have the time. Google is systematically forcing advertisers to all compete for a first-page spot.
Having a successful campaign means getting a lot of things right, including: keywords, ad copy, landing pages and your entire website. Everything is inter-connected. It is like a chain that is only as strong as its weakest link. It is a continuous thought process that begins in the mind of the prospect, and then translated to a search query phrase, which is triggered by the keywords in your account. These keywords should be consistent with your ad copy and carried through to the landing page and on to the rest of your web site. Any break in that process or failure to empathize with the prospect at any point along the way, will result in fall-out.
Creating a successful PPC campaign is not a single task; it is an iterative process that is on-going. In order for the process to work, you must have traffic or clicks. This traffic to your website generates data and you must be willing to have me spend the time necessary to perform the process.
A search query or keyword phrase is really a question. Therefore your web site and more specifically, your landing page must provide the best answer, if you are to be successful at search marketing. If you are only sending traffic to your home page, you almost certainly have a problem / opportunity.
Having the best set of keywords will only allow a prospect see your ad. Having the best ad copy only allows the prospect to see your landing page. Once a prospect reaches your web site, the website must do the selling! It must convince the visitor to take the action you want, whether that means filling out a form, sending a message, calling you on the phone or perhaps making a purchase. By limiting your selling to the written word, you lose 93% of your communications muscle. You give up body language, touch and gesture, facial expressions, and tone of voice. And that leaves you with only the meaning of the words themselves, which is 7% of the impact of a full human communication.
If an average campaign (and there is no such thing) has 1,000 keywords, only about 25 keywords account for 80% of the quality traffic. Finding those 25 keywords is a process that may take weeks and months, not one hour.
Even when you think you have all the keywords for the initial campaign, bidding them into the appropriate position can take days, weeks or even months, depending on the amount of traffic and the number of keywords.
In real estate, it’s location, location, location. With PPC marketing, it’s test, test, test.
You can’t be afraid to take chances. We learn by making mistakes. Yes, I will make mistakes. It’s called “testing”. Testing takes time. You don't know when or how the next breakthrough will come. Maybe it's a new keyword, a new ad, a content targeted campaign or an "image ad" or taking your campaign to Yahoo and Bing. We won't know unless we try.
Once we enter the Development phase, please do not allow anyone but me to make any changes to the campaign(s) I am managing. I will be following a proven process and if anyone else makes any modifications, it will create confusion and cause me to spend time on activities I didn’t plan on. Remember, you are paying for my time.
Many experienced AdWords advertisers have learned to appreciate the significance of the keyword quality score, but did you know that it is made up of over 100 different elements, many of which have nothing to do with your AdWords campaign? They have to with things such as your website and how that same keyword performs across the entire Google network.

Are you comfortable knowing that:

I can’t say that search engine marketing will work for you, your product/service and your business.
I can’t guarantee "results" beyond making tangible improvements to your AdWords account based on Google’s best practices, only that I will try my best to make it work given the history of your account, condition of your website, the strength of your offer and relevant market conditions. Even the best PPC consultant can only do so much. Once the prospect is delivered to your website, it is out of my hands. Your website must do the selling and your product or service must offer compelling value to the visitor. My job is to bring you the most number of qualified visitors possible, given your budget and other relevant factors.
The amount of time I spend each month is completely up to you, but the amount of time I spend will determine how quickly we reach your goals. I generally work on a clients account anywhere from 15 minutes to three hours at a time. Therefore, as we approach the end of the retainer period, I will be asking you to authorize payment for the next ten hours of consulting ($1,000). This insures that I will be able to complete the next segment of the project without having to stop in the middle. If I have to shut down a project due to lack of funding and then pick back up several days later, there will be inherent inefficiencies which ultimately cost you time and money.

Did you know?

Viewing your ad on Google.com - The amount of information Google knows about searchers and what they are able to control is almost scary sometimes and here is a good example. If you are like most business owners or managers, you will be tempted to see if your ad will display for a particular keyword, what position it is in and what your ad looks like for a particular keyword phrase. So you perform a search on Google.com. Then, when you don’t see your ad or it is in a much lower position than you think it should be, you are upset. Well, guess what? Here is information straight from Google….

Due to the dynamic nature of our ads system, you may be unable to see your ad, even though your ad is serving normally to most users. In our ongoing effort to provide an optimal user and advertiser experience, our system may sometimes show your ads in a lower or higher position for different users. For this reason, what you see may sometimes not be representative of what most other users are seeing.

If you have trouble seeing your ad, we recommend searching for your ad using Google's ad preview page. The Ad Preview tool enables you to view ads and search results as they would appear on a regular Google search results page, without accruing extra impressions for your ad.

To use the Ad Preview tool:

Visit http://www.google.com/adpreview.
Enter a keyword.
Enter a Google domain, such as google.com or google.fr.
Select a display language.
Select a location. You can choose a location from the drop-down menus, or you can enter specific latitude and longitude coordinates.
Click 'Preview ads.'

Learn more about the ad preview page at:

http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=46454&hl=en_US.

Budgeting - Most advertisers set a daily budget and in many cases their budget is smaller than the traffic would allow. Therefore, not all your prospects are seeing your ad. Google monitors your daily budget very closely and will intermittently display your ad throughout the day based on the ratio of your budget to the available traffic, unless you have chosen the campaign setting "Accelerated", in which case your ads will be displayed as much as possible until your daily budget is exhausted.

Why some small businesses fail at PPC?

As much as I’d like to say that all my clients have been stunning successes, I can’t. However, I have learned why some of them fail. In many cases despite knowing what it takes to be successful.

1. Understanding the internet marketing sales process - Having a successful PPC campaign means we have to get a lot of things right. We have to make sure we understand and address all the steps in the buying cycle and don’t leave anything to chance or the ROI will suffer. After all, search engine marketing is really salesmanship in print.

Most advertisers I come in contact with struggle knowingly or unknowingly with one important principle of advertising, understanding and empathizing with the prospect from search engines. Visitors from search, organic or PPC, are different from other visitors and your website must take this into account if you are going to have a successful PPC campaign.

When we meet someone in person we can size up the situation by looking for body signals, listening to conversation, appearance, etc. But with direct marketing, we have to rely on technology and copy (ad text, web site text, graphics, etc.). I like to think of the process as a chain, and this chain is only as strong as its weakest link. If any link breaks, we lose the prospect and the resources we spent getting them to this point are wasted.

Here is how I describe the chain and the links within the chain:

What the prospect is thinking
What they actually type, i.e. the search query
The linkage between the search query and the advertiser’s keyword (keyword matching options)
The ad copy; headline, description and display URL
Your landing page priorities:
- Capturing the visitor attention
- Generating interest
- Creating desire
- Taking action
- Tracking the action(s)
Your follow up
Making adjustments to improve performance

Ideally, everything is tied together into one continuous thought. If it isn’t, if you have left out a step or taken too big a leap in the process or failed to anticipate what they are thinking, you will lose them.

The trap that we as advertisers often fall into is knowing too much about our own business and not enough about our prospect or our competition. The choices our prospects have besides our own view of the problem they are trying to solve. We focus too much on things like features and not enough on benefits. For example, we see a keyword or query phrase and don’t realize how broad the term is.

This is perhaps the single biggest problem or opportunity I see when I first look at a client’s account and website. This is especially true when it comes to clients who offer a service. Here is a test you can do yourself. Take some of your most popular keywords and use the AdWords Preview Tool to see who else is bidding for those same keywords. Do all the advertisers you see sell a product or service that is a direct competitor to you? If not, then your keyword is probably too broad.

The other problem has to do with using and understanding how powerful and yet dangerous broad-matched keywords can be when it comes to synonyms.

2. Understanding the search visitor - Search visitors have certain characteristics you should be aware of. Unlike someone who comes to your web site after being referred by a friend or colleague or having read a brochure or an article, search visitors know nothing about you or your company.

They have very little patience. When they click on your ad they want to see exactly what they were looking for. If they don't see it or can't get to it very quickly or get turned off by what they see, they will "bounce" or leave your site. Quickly! But you may have paid a heavy price for that visit that only lasted five seconds.
They are skeptical, cynical and have very high expectations. The quality of your site directly reflects on you and your company. If the graphics are not of the highest quality, if the text isn't clear and compelling, if the navigation isn't intuitive, their interest will wane and they won't be coming back ever again!
If they don't know exactly what they want, then they need to see a selection so they can further refine their search. If your product or service has a selection, then you should display it as images if possible. Remember that web site visitors, especially from search engines, don't read web pages, they scan them. From the time a visitor lands on your website from your ad, you have 3-5 seconds to make a positive impression. If you don't they will bounce.
Internet search prospects are inherently price shoppers. If you are not prepared to compete on price, you need to have a very compelling landing page and value proposition. Even then, you should be prepared for a lower conversion rate.

3. Understanding the cost model – By having a PPC campaign, you have now entered the world of "direct online marketing". And while PPC is the fastest and most flexible form of direct-response marketing ever invented, it still conforms too many of the statistical averages that have proven out over the last 100 years.

Unless you have very little competition or have invested heavily in your website and sales process, you should expect a "conversion rate" of around 1-3%. That means about 2% of the visitors to your site will take "the desired action". The desired action can be any one of a number of things such as; signing up for your newsletter, downloading a special report, calling you on the phone or perhaps buying something. The conversion I’m talking about is an action that a first-time visitor to your website will take.

Now you can do the math. If your average CPC (Cost-Per-Click) is $1.00, you are paying about $50 for each conversion. Is that acceptable? Only you can determine that. My job is to get the average CPC down as low as I can while still getting qualified visitors. How I do that is by having lots of relevant keyword phrases with lower CPCs, having compelling, yet qualifying ad text and using techniques to filter out unwanted visitors. There is a lot more to it, but these are the basics. If you want to get an idea of what the average CPC is for some of your most popular keywords, go to SpyFu.com.

The life-time value of a customer - Once you have acquired a customer, what is the likelihood of them buying from you again? How extensive is your offering? Really successful internet marketers can afford to lose money on the first sale because they have an extensive back-end. Meaning they have many other, more profitable products or services they can sell, once they have acquired the customer. If you don’t, then you can’t effectively compete with these advertisers.

4. Commitment and patience – PPC is a form of direct marketing, but it’s not like a flyer you send out and hope for the best. It’s like a flyer you send out thousands of times a day (ad impressions) and modify continually based on the feedback you get in the form of campaign performance data and web analytics. PPC is not a one-time task or an event, it is an iterative process. An overly simplified description of the process is; test, track, adjust. This process gets executed over and over and over until you are satisfied with the results. All successful direct marketers never stop executing this process.

Sometimes clients expect that once a new campaign is launched, it should be performing great, right from the beginning. This is rarely the case. It’s only the beginning of the next phase. The fine-tuning phase. In many cases, the launch of the new campaign is about the same time we reach the end of the first retainer and they decide to hold off on moving forward until they see how the campaign performs. This is a big mistake because there is still work to be done and the performance could change dramatically over time.

There is no guarantee that PPC will work for every product and every business, but if you are serious about knowing if it will work for you, then you need to be prepared to make a commitment to perform an adequate test. I recommend at least three months from the time we launch the initial campaign. During those three months, you need a daily budget that is large enough to bring the necessary traffic in order to make statistically significant decisions for tuning. If a typical conversion rate is 2% and your average CPC is $1.00 and you only have a daily budget of $10 with hundreds of keywords, you won't be collecting enough data. In order to manage the campaign there needs to be data that only comes from visitor traffic and time for the campaign manager to work on the campaign.

I hope you have found this to be helpful and informative.

Thank you for your business. I look forward to a mutually beneficial relationship.

To your success.

John