Our company is in the middle stages of transitioning from advertising in traditional print publications to online advertising channels. I was contacted recently by xxx company who’s service was in providing local searches. We decided to try out a national campaign with them the terms of which seemed pretty logical and simple. Basically, we write up a business profile explaining which products & brands/manufacturer’s we offer, our address, phone number and a link to our website. It was a PPC system set up as .15 per click. We paid a $55 per month minimum and with that, we received $15 in free clicks. So after the initial 100 clicks our bill would go up to a max budget of $400 for the month. When someone hit one of our keywords with a search, our 3 line ad copy would show up enticing them to click us. Clicking that link would bring them to our buisines profileand from there they could click to our website.

What actually happened is our campaign was paused after only a week or so into April for maxing out our budget. Our account manager explained to me that what we were actually getting charged for was a little different that what we originally agreed to and he apologized for being so deceptive the first time. ?? Here’s how it broke down: Every time a user clicked our ad copy from a SERP, we were charged … $2.50 (for viewing our profile because it seemed pretty legitimate to them, every time a user clicked to view our phone number (which is on the front page of our site (for free)), we were charged… $2.50 & finally, once the user got around to clicking through to our website, we were once again charged… $2.50. $7.50 per click? I would call it a little more than deceptive, more like, borderline illegal.

So that’s the worst part, but on top of that our minimum $55/month contained a ‘dynamic’ fee which was again actually $20 or %30 of the total spend of your campaign per month, whichever is greater obviously. The icing is that they charged us (probably $2.50 each) for clicks generated through their own Google/YSM ppc extended network campaigns which they so graciously set up for us (even though I had asked them not to repeatedly).

So when it came down to it, we were charged ~$450 for 9 days of happy clicking around in superpag….. er’ - xxx company, and we received ~250 clicks and generated revenue at about a 2% ROI (not including the actual cost of the product + overhead). What’s funny is our rep emailed me once our campaign had paused/maxed out, and congratulated us on the success of our campaign and suggesting we increase our budget to $1,300+ for next month. I’m considering it, it might actually work this time…