I Raised the Flag of PPC Fraud

A client recently contacted me because they were concerned that their former PPC bid management company overcharged them for their services and inflated bid costs. Since I’ve been managing their PPC accounts over the past 6 months, they have reduced costs by over 45%, increased their clickthrough rate by 30%, and increased their conversion rate by over 4 times – all while growing revenue by 37%.

Before I took over the account, I was able to get a keyword report from the company that I stole the business from. Their report was full of over-priced and under-performing keywords. It was a classic case of a PPC management company just paying for position and not worrying about ROI. They carelessly spent 10’s of thousands of dollars of my client’s money on poor keywords.

By focusing on conversion and ROI, I have made such huge improvements to their PPC accounts that my client is actually auditing their former PPC manager. They feel that the company must have been inflating bid cost and passing the cost along to them. I really hope that they don’t find fraud, because the poor bidding job they did in the past was bad enough.

What’s the takeaway? Make sure you hire someone that will care about your profitability. Also make sure they are open with their information. No one should be denying you access to your own AdWords account; that’s where bid inflation can easily be hidden. Finally, the number one easiest way to avoid bid inflation is to use your own credit card and don’t let the company invoice you for the click spend. There is nothing more legit than a charge straight from Google.

Happy bidding!