Note: Advertising space is available on the Rank for $ales newsletter. Currently, we have over 18,000 weekly subscribers. Enquiries: advertising@rankforsales.com

(Continued)

According to these traditional ad agencies, achieving profitability in managing clients' paid search advertising is extremely difficult: If you don't use a bid management tool, and if each of your customers doesn't spend in excess of $50K per month on paid search advertising, you won't make money. Period.

Trouble is, even many of the large client companies who employ agencies cannot justify spending more than $3K to $10K per month. The conversions aren't there; the keyword query frequency is not there. Charging a service fee of 20 percent (a typical pricing model for PPC management) on top of a monthly PPC spend of $3K is peanuts for the time necessary to do a good job.

But ad agency clients are clamoring for search marketing: they know it works; they know they have to be in the game; and they want their agencies' help. But trying to do SEM is breaking the agencies and they know it. In other news, on Thursday, Sun Microsystems licensed search software called "Watson" that's used to find information from the Internet. Sun licensed the software from a small company in Alameda, Calif., called Karelia, which worked for years on a version of Watson for Apple computers.

<<< Previous page      Next: Sun Microsystems creates Alameda >>>

Pages: 1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10   11   12   13   14

Bookmark the Rank for $ales website by simply clicking here.

Legal Notice
If you find this newsletter interesting and of value to you, you are encouraged to link to it, using a normal H REF text link. The Rank for $ales Weekly newsletter is Copyright © Serge Thibodeau, 2004. Any reproduction, full or partial is prohibited without my prior written consent. Address all enquiries for the proper and acceptable procedures regarding certain limited reprint permissions to sthibodeau@rankforsales.com

You can link to the Rank for Sales web site as much as you like. Read our section on how your company can participate in our reciprocal link exchange program and increase your rankings in the major search engines.