One of my clients recently received an email from a sales rep for AT&T Interactive.
AT&T has a unique program to help you run a more efficient Google campaign. We can give you the same keywords you are currently using for much less money than if you were to buy them yourself. We do this because we deal in such high volume.
WOW! I read this and I had to smile I was so flabbergasted.
Here’s the deal:
- Google’s all about the level playing field and cares not if you spend $1 a day or $1MM day; your click price is determined by how relevant your ad is and how many other folks are bidding on the keyword in question. There is no “wholesale” discount for AdWords.
- AT&T and Google are currently grumpy at one another as AT&T is trying to get the FCC to treat Google Voice the way it does old-school telecommunications. Even if there were a bulk discount for AdWords — which there is not — there’s no way in h-e-double-hockey-sticks that AT&T would be getting that discount now!
What may be true — albeit misleading — is that when you work with AdWords a lot, the per-campaign operational costs for building and optimizing campaigns decrease. It takes the same amount of time to pivot-table, et cetera one campaign or 500 campaigns. So the operational costs are minimized, and perhaps it becomes easier to spot throughput fix opportunities, but the cost of the keyword click is the same no matter what kind of volume you’re dealing with.
Efficient operations is one reason it may make sense to work with a company like thinking/marketing; we work with client accounts whose monthly spend is around $40K and are relentless process and operations g33ks (that reads “nerd-ball” for all you kids who didn’t have buckteeth growing up). So the operational overhead can be lower if you outsource your AdWords spend — you don’t have to hire an intern to screw up your paid search buys, and you don’t have to jam it on the plate of your marketing person who is already buried up to his or her ears in other campaigns and doesn’t have the time to get a black belt in paid search. If your core competency isn’t paid search it might be best to outsource it.
However, in the sales pitch above, there’s a claim being made that AT&T Interactive can get terms even more cheaply than any other search engine marketing partner. This is patently false. And who do you think has higher overhead — a nimble privately-held SEM partner, or a division of a ginormous publicly-held company? The cost of filing SEC documents and fighting with Google has to get paid for by somebody …
My broader concern is that it’s entirely disheartening to see sales folks using misleading information to land a deal. You’d think that with the economic meltdown — attributable in part to mortgage lenders encouraging people to sign on lines made of smoke and mirrors — that people’d be inclined to be forthright and straight shootin’ when trying to acquire a new customer or account. It’s disappointing to see such blatant proof that the industry of dishonesty and misinformation hasn’t faded.
Boo on you, AT&T Interactive!
You can learn more about thinking/marketing’s paid search solutions by clicking here.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Resellers that sell in bulk get financial kickbacks based on their volumes. While the cost of the keyword is not directly affected (b/c that would futz with the bidding engine) the resellers could apply a portion of the kickback back to the advertiser and therefore lower the cost the customer is paying per click.
A quote from search engine land: “The level of support once one becomes an AdWords Authorized Reseller is fantastic, and there is the ability to earn financial bonuses as well.”
http://searchengineland.com/are-you-endorsed-by-the-search-engines-12564
With that being said, resellers are barely profitable so the likelihood that they return any of that money to the customer is highly unlikely. Furthermore, Google has retracted many reseller agreements and is rumored to be phasing them out entirely with a few exceptions.
Akers, this is great additional context. Thanks for sharing it!