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Has anybody tried this company.
we have tried them after using yodle. In my opinion they are garbage. I went back to yodle and having better sucess than with wsi. If you are good with a computer google has a feee course you can take on adwords and you will be certified. Basically like all these companies that tell u they are so-called “partners” with google. We are gonna go throught the google training which is free and start managing our own adwords.
Heavensbestlv, I was going to call you directly today. Then I read this post. I was searching the term heavens best and you showed up with Yahoo. It was a paid sponsor listing. If wsi or yodel is the one who put this up then shame, shame, shame, on them. You need to do Geo-targeted advertising only in the areas you serve. It does you no good having a person clicking on your site in California. Give me a call and I can probably help you focus your pay per click campaign. I will never charge you for my help, but you might have to take me out for a beer next time I am in Vegas. I would check to see how many times the keyword heavens best has been clicked. 95% of them probably came from other operators going to our site to place an order. They see your add for HB and click. Next thing you know you just spent 4-5 dollars.
We had our annual seminar in orlando thursday 2/28 & My son & I came away pretty excited about dealing with wsi. We’re going to give them a chance to help us grow our buisness, the one thing Mitch (the sales rep.& part owner) stressed is you have to give it a fair chance to work for you, he said about 3 months. I’ll let you know how we make out once we get up & running.
I think it’s fair to say with Ad words or any other form of advertising that each person needs to keep tabs on it and monitor the situation as it develops, otherwise you can burn thru a fair bit of money with very little to show for it. whether it’s google or yellow pages or whoever, they are happy to have your money. No one will look after your money better than you.
I totally agree with Dirtbag. I was with Yes Local and ended up dropping them. One thing with internet advertising is that you will get a lot of calls that do you no good (whether it is calling about a service you don’t offer like reupholstering furniture, calling about an area you don’t/can’t service, or just calling a wrong number in general) but still cost you money. I got a lot of these. You need to really stay on top of it and it can be time consuming if the campaign is not run properly.
I currently am working with WSI.
After trying a company called Yes Local, then Yodle I switched to WSI.
The first 2 got fired for under performance and I’m not pleased with the results from WSI yet.
I look at Internet advertising as a series of doors.
First door is the impression or getting listed on the page from the customers search.
Second is getting them to click on you.
Third is getting them to contact you because they are encouraged to do so by the results of how your website impacted them.
Forth being the holy grail is to book the job.
The pay per click company is responsible for doors 1 & 2.
We are responsible for doors 3 & 4.
Now, where am I going with all this.
Well I feel that that if the website doesn’t grab em, you can pay per click and do all the SEO you want, but you will have below average performance.
I’ve tried to be patient with these pay per click companies but it seems that it is not worth it.
How much is a new customer worth?????
After all is said and done I do not like paying $80 to get a $150 job.
If I spend $350 a month and get only a few calls and and book lets say 50% of the calls then it can quickly annoy me.
But maybe the pay per click company concept is not the problem, maybe my website is not grabbing the customer enough.
Please let me know what you think about my site.
http://www.heavensbestbergencounty.com
As dirtbag stated, you can really burn through money with these pay per clicks, and I agree. They sell themselves as the new form of yellow pages since the internet is so popular. Problem is, you don’t get charged when a customer opens up to your page in the yellow pages and decides not to call you (or anyone for that matter). These pay per click campaigns need to be monitored weekly, if not daily. I lost money on mine, so I’m not a fan of them. I didn’t monitor mine enough, so I take partial blame on it. Most of the calls I received were similar to the ones I get from the yellow pages in type of customer.
Kurt, thought you’re website looked good. One thing I did notice is that on your stain guard page you refer to it once as scotch guard. Don’t know if you meant to do this or not, as the rest of the time it is referred to as stain guard. This is pretty trivial, but thought I’d mention it.
Thanks Dave
Dave, Wilson and all,
I’m not trying to say Ad words are a terrible idea or yellow pages are bad or advertising of any kind is a waste. I’m just saying to watch carefully.
Don’t make assunptions, Don’t be lazy! always ask anyone that calls or contacts you, “How did you find out about us?”
Otherwise you are Guessing,I agree that any advertising is an investment. As with all investments you have to do your research and stay on top of it. Internet advertising is a big deal in some areas, and it is not in others. Take a look at my area. We have both a large metro of Sacramento, and small country towns like Placerville. Metro does very good online, but I never get clicks on the web. Small town gets most from small local yellow pages. We try to track the all of the Internet as best as possible. It makes it very hard to do with the web. I thought the different phonebooks was a pain. When you ask where they say online. What did you type and they say google or searched carpet cleaning. We have so many avenues of advertising on the web like in the local google, local yahoo, heavensbest.com, facebook pay-per-click, heavensbestclean.com, folsomliving.com merchantcircle.com, google pay-per-click and so on. The truth is there is so many places that we show up I find myself by accident and did not even know how we got there. I decided that it is way to hard to track. If they say the Internet then we write Internet on the invoice on the bottom. I spend a lot of money on pay-per-click and other sites. From now on I just want to see my return on Internet spent vs. dollars spent. Pay-per-click is very intimidating. It is hard to get started, and you have to watch it everyday. I am currently looking after 12 different campaigns for other operators on google. They are doing very well so far, but at some point I will have to let them take the control and monitor it themselves. I knew nothing about the Internet a year ago, but I taught myself and learned as much as possible. Same thing about carpet cleaning before I started nine years ago. Whether you are doing online advertising now or not it is a good time to learn as much as possible, because the shift is heading that way. Wsi or yodel is good if you no nothing, but just like with your business know one runs it like you do.
Does anybody do Yellowpages.com or something similar,
Sometimes it can be difficult to give credit where credit is due on internet advertising.
I always ask a customer how they found out about us and if it’s not a referral or the such the answer is usually “the internet” or I “googled” you.
Now when that is the answer I first look at my pay per click log and see if it came in through WSI.
I also have a paid ad with yellowpages.com so it the customer goes there directly and call me I credit yellowpages.
If it is neither of these then it’s organic and free…..maybe.
I noticed recently that when I Google CC’s in my area a link comes up on the first page and takes me to my yellowpages.com ad
I would definately give credit to yellowpages for that, however as far as the customer knows they found me on google.
Point being it can be difficult to nail down sometimes where the credit should be given
Any thoughts?We use yellowpages.com & have good success with it. But just like the phone book ad we have: position,content & how the ad looks on our web-site give us the best chance to sell the job. Thank you for all the posts on this topic, the information is great to have.
When tracking the internet advertising, I just need to know if it came from a paid source such as pay per click and yellowpages.com or unpaid source such as organic internet listings which come in time though the hard work of making sure your site is posted on search engines as well as directories.
As far I’m concerned, any paid advertising should be looked at as a commissioned sales person.
Give it a little grace period to prove itself and then send it to the unemployment line if it does not work.
Back to my original question…..How many dollars or percent of a job is a new customer worth….without taking the future value of that customer into consideration (just to keep things simple).
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