Mark Zuckerberg, Here’s the Problem with Facebook

Facebook Marketing Managers

If we could chat with Mark Zuckerberg about how he could improve profits for Facebook, We would want to chat about Facebook pay per click advertising.

As professional Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising account managers, who manage over $3.5 million in ad spend for clients, we think we know what we are talking about.

•  It is excruciatingly difficult to connect client advertising accounts to a manager profile. Time typically to connect, if you even can, is over 3 hours. Clients can simply not figure out how to approve our access. It is not a simple process.

•  If you can connect the ad building application does not allow you to easily set up conversion tracking.

•  Once you have a manager account, to add additional employees to help with management is nearly impossible. You have to tunnel through many levels of access. And then once connected, you cannot understand why suddenly they cannot login and review accounts. Impossible!

•  With a manager account, you are barraged by hackers. I will routinely have numerous bogus login attempts to my manager account. I have had to confirm my profile, validate several times with Facebook and then turn on draconian security in addition to 2-step verification. I continue to get hackers trying to access my account. A manager account is rife with attempts to gain control of the account and associated advertisers for nefarious purposes.

•  Clients want to spend on Facebook. We alone have over 6 clients who if we gave the go ahead would start advertising on Facebook, but the problems are so severe that we will not take on new clients.

•  Facebook is not honoring the daily budget/30-day budget. When you set a daily ad spend for $50 and the account is routinely spending over $120 a day without a look to adhere to a 30-day ad spend, it puts our reputation on the line. We stopped taking new clients when this happened to one key account.

•  Clean up the system and improve ad quality. We had one client with a low ad spend generate $14K in revenue monthly on Facebook for his industrial supply store. But, suddenly out of the blue he has no revenue and is spending more on clicks than he is generating. Why? What happened. Facebook has no answers and there is no one really to call to ask a question why. The drop was sudden and mysterious. When Google has conversion tracking issues – we account managers know and understand that the data will catch up. For Facebook, we simply cut the budget to a very small daily number hoping to get answers sometime in the future. What a bad way to manage business Facebook!

Mark Zuckerberg, if you don’t know how Google Ads works for account managers, you need to find out. Make Facebook advertising easy to use and allow managers easy set up and management and your pay per click business can grow and generate real profits for Facebook.

We would definitely move clients into Facebook, it is not a hard sell, but with problems like this, you can count on your profits continuing to decrease.

For information about McCord Web Services and our Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising account management services, visit our website www.McCordWeb.com.

What to Consider Before Doing Search Engine Optimization

Get Your Advertising on Target

Search engine optimization is not for every website. Although search engine optimization can really improve the organic search results for some websites, there are a couple of considerations when search engine optimization should not be considered and maybe a full site redesign may be a better investment of money and time.

When not to do search engine optimization:

  1. If your site is created in a template and the site layout becomes broken when new content is added.
  2. Your site looks funny in browsers other than Chrome and Firefox.
  3. You have a site designed using Flash or tables for your layout.
  4. Your website looks dated or non-professional.

As search engine optimization is not inexpensive, in some cases the money that would have been spent on search engine optimization would be better spent on a new search engine friendly design with built-in optimization features.

New Twitter Advertising Set Up Services

We are rolling out this week our new services on Twitter advertising set up. You can view all the details on our Twitter Advertising page.

For $100 here’s what we do:

  1. Consult briefly with you to identify your selected service or products you would like to promote.
  2. Create a series of ten 140 character tweets on your Twitter account that link to a variety of your services or products.
  3. Monitor your account over the next week and select these specially created marketing tweets to be shown as your sponsored tweets in the Twitter advertising control panel as they appear online.
  4. Send you an executive snap shot report of Twitter activity at the end of your first month of activity that will show your all time click activity and new followers.

Please note: We cap our time for all set up services at 1.2 hours. Additional time may be purchased at $80 per hour.

Additional Twitter Services

Additional services such as landing page creation, creation of special white papers and downloads to be used in sponsored tweets are available at an extra charge. Please contact us for details.

Account updates after set up are billed at our hourly rate of $80 and can be scheduled or done on demand.

Our Recommendations to Get The Most Out of Twitter Advertising

  • Periodically update your promoted tweets to show new services and products as old updates will get stale and generate less activity over time.
  • Consider trying local metro regional markets if you don’t sell nationally. You’ll only get one targeting selection in your advertising account so consider trying several over time to see which give you the best results.
  • Consider driving traffic to a special Twitter landing page that contains a special offer or download in order to evaluate the success of your Twitter program beyond new followers and clicks.

Why don’t you contact us today to see if your Twitter account is eligible to show sponsored tweets on Twitter right now. Not all accounts may have this option yet so let us help you to check.

Trends We’re Seeing On Google AdWords

My firm manages many Google AdWords accounts over a very broad range of business sectors. There are a few trends that we have seen lately that we thought we’d share with you.

In December through early March we saw a distinct drop in the cost per click and opportunities to move down the maximum cost per click setting for many accounts. For some we were able to bring them back to a pre-September figure when Google grabbed for cash in a big way with their September “Quality Score Update”.

Starting in mid March we’ve started to see a rise in the cost per click. Impressions are still low for some market sectors and so this is most likely not market pressure, but rather Google making adjustments to account for a loss of income by working to raise the minimum bid on their end to be in the auction. With impressions being for some accounts one third less than pre-February figures, this sudden increase in CPC plus continued low impressions is disconcerting to say the least.

Conversions for many accounts are still strong, but we are seeing in several industries an anomaly where Yahoo is actually now generating more conversions than Google and in some cases at almost half the cost per click.

My recommendation to clients is that now is the time to very carefully review the cost per conversion over a three month period, calculate in phone calls and individual sales history, and consider altering your pay per click budget to make sure that your advertising dollars are an investment and not an expense.

For one client after such a review we dropped the AdWords budget by one third and increased the Yahoo and MSN budget and are closely monitoring organic placement and click activity.

For some clients we are recommending that the extra money that may be found from these efforts be used to fund a local Yellow Page ad to try to expand their reach more deeply into local markets, especially if they sell to a local region and currently have no Yellow Page placement.

I’m sure Yellow Page reps love this recommendation (no they are not paying me), but as Local Search still has challenges, for some businesses the Yellow Pages will still generate nice returns when used in conjunction with a smartly managed  AdWords program.

What trends have you seen on your AdWords account, click comments below and let us know what you’ve seen.