Success Stories

Managing Multiple Clients for Less

Overview
Nik Froehlich is a freelance pay-per-click (PPC) manager who manages the online marketing activities of numerous clients. He has significant online and offline marketing experience, going back to 2001 when he first started generating traffic for Web sites.

Nik started his interactive agency, ClickBrand, in 2004 to assist small businesses with their Web presence and online customer acquisition efforts. In addition to PPC management, he also provides his clients help with analytics, search engine optimization, and site design.

Situation
Nik is a pro at managing PPC campaigns, but he was spending a bulk of each week analyzing PPC performance data for 19 of his clients. Downloading reports from the search engines, he used Excel spreadsheets to methodically analyze the report data and decide where to update the accounts. When changes were needed, he made manual bid and keyword changes directly in the Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing account management interface.

While he and his clients were satisfied with the results of the PPC marketing, he felt he needed to take his service up to the next level by further improving his clients' results. Additionally, Nik was interested in finding a way to save time by improving his own PPC campaign management efficiency so that he could service more small-business clients in need of help (new client prospects were contacting him weekly for his Web marketing services). Nik had considered hiring and training more staff so he could devote more time to his clients, but the idea of the additional overhead and loss of control with these clients prevented him from making this move.

Solution
Nik began testing WebVisible Enterprise to manage the PPC campaign for one of his e-commerce clients. He provided account data from the historical search campaign performance reports, and then selected his target cost-per-acquisition (CPA, or the maximum amount he was willing to spend to acquire a sale) goal based on his client's average shopping cart values. WebVisible Enterprise compared his campaign's performance against his CPA goal to provide all the campaign optimization recommendations. This was the same method Nik used when he manually reviewed the data on a weekly basis.

Following the daily optimization recommendations from WebVisible Enterprise , Nik weeded out the nonperforming keywords, and added new keywords related to other high-performing keywords in the account. Nik also refined his bid strategy. Utilizing the software?s automated bid update feature to implement recommended bid changes to improve campaign performance vs. his CPA, he eliminated the tedious and time-consuming task of manually updating bids for his client.

As the weeks went on, Nik began relying on WebVisible Enterprise to automate campaign data analysis and provide daily campaign optimization recommendations so he no longer needed to spend hours analyzing lengthy spreadsheets and making decisions on bid changes.

As a seasoned PPC pro, Nik was also able to follow the recommendations to optimize Ad Groups and Ads. He further refined the campaign so that only the highest-producing Ads were displayed to customers, increasing efficiency and sales volume. He then removed the lowest-performing ads and wrote alternate versions to try to improve results even more.

Results
Using the automation features in WebVisible Enterprise , Nik was able to maintain - and even improve on - the CPA objectives. Within two months, Nik significantly reduced the time he spent managing this client's account to just 30 minutes per week and reduced his CPA by 17%.

Based on the success of the first test account, Nik now uses WebVisible Enterprise to manage the campaigns of many additional clients. Thanks to the automated data analysis and campaign refinement tools in WebVisible Enterprise , he now has ample time each week to provide more value-added online marketing services to his clients. Plus, he is able to grow his own business by adding more small-business clients to his roster: he estimates that thanks to the time savings from WebVisible Enterprise he has doubled his bandwidth for helping new clients.

Nik Froehlich's services and contact information can be found on his web site at http://www.clickbrand.com.