PPC Associates – The Un-SEM Agency

After spending eight years on the “client side” of agency relationships, David Rodnitzky is not a fan of the typical online marketing agency. If you’ve worked with a lot of agencies, you’ve no doubt encountered some of these common problems:

•    Over-worked account reps working on way too many accounts to possibly do a good job for any individual client;
•    Pretty reports and presentations, but zero strategic insight;
•    Long, unbreakable contracts;
•    Lots of “additional costs” for things that you thought were included in the contract;

David created PPC Associates to turn the traditional agency model on its head.  He believes a good SEM agency needs to do five things:

1.    Be a profit center, not a cost center. SEM is the perfect customer acquisition medium. But that doesn’t mean you should spend money blindly without regard to the actual profit your campaigns are making for your business. Your SEM should be focused on driving profit dollars, not just clicks or even just leads. Incorporating shopping cart revenue, offline sales (like phone calls), and then managing your SEM campaign to your margin objectives is essential.  At PPC Associates, all of the contracts come with a 48 hour out clause – if the client isn’t happy, they can terminate the contract in two business days. So if PPC Associates does not continually improve a client’s profit, they can be fired!
2.    Be proactive and strategic. Client suggestions are welcome and encouraged, but the true leader of the SEM strategy should be the SEM agency. Clients hire agencies so that they can spend their time doing something else, not babysitting the agency. An agency that is simply an “order taker” is not doing its job. At PPC Associates, they expect the account managers to develop a roadmap of deliverables for their clients and then actually hit the milestones on the roadmap!
3.    Do one thing well, not a lot of things poorly. Online marketing has become highly specialized. David believes that it’s impossible to be an expert at SEM, SEO, Display, and Social Media. An expert at everything is really an expert at nothing. This is why, as an agency, PPC Associates regularly rejects business outside of their core competency – SEM. SEM changes daily and it’s a virtually a full-time job just keeping up with all the changes to AdWords. David questions any agency that claims that they can provide expert service across the entire continuum of online marketing disciplines.
4.    Provide complete transparency. PPC Associates believes that clients should have complete access to all aspects of their SEM campaigns. This means owning their own SEM accounts (as opposed to having the accounts hosted by the agency), getting weekly reports, and scheduling weekly or bi-weekly check-in calls. They also create a custom online portal for every client where their team posts an update every time they do anything on the account. This enables the client to see exactly how much (or how little) work PPC Associates is doing, as well as provide feedback to help them improve.
5.    Go beyond basic SEM. Some people still believe that SEM management is simply a matter of choosing the right keywords and then applying bid management rules. This might have worked five years ago, but today the basics by themselves no longer work. To succeed today, you need landing page optimization, ad text testing, proper tracking, geographic and demographic segmentation, negative keywords, and so on. PPC Associates believes in this point so much that they have actually hired a full-time Web designer who provides free landing pages to our clients! In the short term, this costs us money, but in the long term, this improves client performance and thus client retention.

These radical concepts – win on performance, provide transparency and flexibility, and provide strategic and holistic leadership – have worked for PPC Associates. Since starting in 2008, they have grown from one consultant working out of a coffee shop to a team of nearly 20 in three offices with 40 clients and $30 million of annual SEM spend under management. Their most recent anonymous “Net Promoter Score” survey they sent to clients got them a score of 8.1 out of 10 on the question “how likely would you be to refer PPC Associates to your friends?”

PPC Associates is currently taking on new clients with a minimum monthly SEM spend of at least $25,000/month. If you’d like to learn more about how they operate, you can visit their Web site (www.ppcassociates.com) and download our free white paper. Or feel free to contact David at david@ppcassociates.com.