Interview with MaxAudience 2016

Please describe your organization

Maxaudience is an Internet marketing agency that assists medium and large-scale businesses with precise, high ROI, marketing campaigns.

What are the easiest ways to waste money quickly with paid search for small to medium sized businesses (SMBs)?

With paid search it’s easy for smaller businesses to blow their budget early. But there are several strategies SMBs can take to minimize risk and insure a smooth and cost effective entry into the paid search world.

First off, they should start with a small daily budget, 30% or less than they would expect to spend once everything is up and running. They should also get the free help that is so easily available. There are a number of Google Approved Partner Agencies that will offer free consulting up front, just like we do here at Maxaudience. They should just go to the Google Partner Agency site and see if the agency they are looking into offers a free consultation. Every reputable agency has a page on the Google site.

Next, a company should not use a broad keyword match approach. Instead the campaign should be set to the exact match for the company’s products or services. In the beginning, SMBs should target as close as possible to their geographic place of business, since the potential customers in that area will be the most likely people to purchase their products or services.

Customers should always be directed to the most appropriate page on the company’s website based on the search term they enter. If they don’t have a relevant page and have a WordPress site, they should make one. Remember, customers need a reason to click on the add in the first place; they need a reason to call or fill out any forms or take whatever action the company wants them to take. If a company is in doubt about content, it is always a good idea to look at what their competitors are doing.

How can SMBs make the most impact with a small budget, say something under $1,000 a month?

SMBs should stay hyper-local, keep the keyword and ad groups very narrow, and make sure the daily budget averaged over the entire month equals the total desired spend. Of course, the campaign should run only during business hours.

But the most important thing is that the company must respond to every call, follow up at once on every lead. I can’t emphasize this enough—after all, the company is paying for these contacts and simply must not waste them. If the company does the local search work for its Google, Yahoo, and Bing local profiles—well, it’s almost like free money.

What are some of the horror stories that you have heard that scared SMDs away from AdWords.

I have heard so many horror stories, and they almost always start with “AdWords doesn’t work for my industry. . . .” All this just means is that the campaign was mismanaged in some way. Everything has to be in place for AdWords before beginning the campaign. This would include training any of the sales people, deciding what to offer, keyword research on competitors and, of course, doing everything I have already mentioned.

How many keywords do you usually target for smaller clients focusing on a local market?

Depending on the product or service offering we target ten keywords per product or service and keep the geographic distance as tight as possible, certainly less than ten miles.

What industries are the most competitive and difficult to make an impact with pay-per-click?

We find that insurance, mortgage and solar tend to be the most competitive campaigns. There are so many lead aggregators in those spaces that sell each lead to three to five people. Typically the cost to create a lead is more than one of those people would pay to get the lead as a non-exclusive.

How does Maxaudience approach these more difficult projects?

We look at a business’s goals and reverse engineer the campaign to meet those needs. The biggest challenge is doing the setup properly and not jumping the gun on turning on the lead flow. Typically, it takes around a month to put everything in place so the conversion rates can start high and remain high. We do things like create keyword related pages or landing pages on the client’s site, research and optimize the calls to action, create the core offering and make sure everyone who will answer the phone call or respond to a web form is ready to convert these leads effectively.

About the Author

Tim Condon Chief Revenue Officer at Clutch

Tim Condon is the Chief Revenue Officer at Clutch, the leading global marketplace of B2B service providers. Prior to Clutch, Tim served as the Chief Revenue Officer at Homesnap, the top-rated real estate app built for agents, which CoStar Group acquired in 2020. During his tenure, Homesnap grew its paying user base from 0 to over 80,000 clients. In addition, he previously served as the Director of New Ventures at The Washington Post. In this role, he built several new businesses, including The Capitol Deal, which became the third largest deal site in the DC metro area and was known for giving away 100,000 pizzas

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