Client Personas – Handle With Care!

Friday, October 3rd, 2008 Chris Rowett Comments

It’s great for any PPC Company, when a new client comes in with a huge monthly spend and little expertise in PPC advertising.  We can really show off our knowledge, achieve great results and have a shiny happy client.  But what about the other clients we get:

1.     Those With Minimal Monthly Spend

As an agency, we often appraise PPC campaigns for companies who seemingly spend enough to justify our management fee.  When appraising these accounts though, it’s not uncommon to find that they are haemorrhaging money on bad keywords, terrible bid strategy and poor advert grouping.

By applying our expertise we can stop the campaign wasting money, but then the monthly spend is so little that our management fee looks monstrous in comparison.

The usual practice is to take on the campaign for one month, fix the major issues, and hand back the campaign in a position where it can run itself fairly well (at least for a little while).  After that, we can do the occasional 1 month management, in which time we will re-evaluate the bidding, test new keywords and adverts etc, so that the campaign is running efficiently again.

2.    Those Experienced In PPC

Some clients come to us with a very good understanding of PPC.  This is not a bad thing, but often if they have little experience to go with the knowledge, it can cause problems.  Some of these clients will try to “help” by making changes to the account themselves, which can cause serious problems.  Others will try to analyse the campaign each day - asking why sales have fallen one day compared to the last.  The main problem is that they don’t trust you to do as good a job as they could and don’t believe you will care about the campaign doing well.

From the beginning, a clear communication channel should be established, with the client feeling comfortable to raise any questions and confident that you will respond quickly.  This is the best way to quickly build trust and afford the time necessary to start delivering results.

3.    The Overly Enthusiastic

Another type of client is those who get very excited about the possibilities a PPC Campaign is going to bring to their business.  Usually they’ve never done PPC before, or have never got involved.  Now, all of a sudden, they want everyone in the world to see every product on their website.  At the same time they want the site to be redeveloped and website optimiser on every page!  That’s an extreme example, but the point is there has to be a gradual building process.

It’s best to outline a plan of action and time scales.  Even if you are unsure exactly how long things will take, produce a preliminary plan of action, such as:

Week 1 - Build campaign for products 1-10.  Target UK
Week 2 - Introduce products 11-20
Weeks 3-5 Advert Testing, bid optimisation, keyword research…
Week 6 - Target US
Week 8 - Begin website optimiser on home page
Etc…

At least this way the client will understand how the process will work and not be complaining that the advert is not appearing in Australia after day 2.

It’s important to remember that every client just wants their business to do well, and many of them are unfamiliar with, or sceptical about the wonders of PPC.  Just keep the communication levels high, be honest and open about what is achievable and how quickly and everything should be dandy!

Page last updated by Chris Rowett on October 3, 2008 at 4:14 pm

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