Good PPC optimization resources

Hello
I've hired a company to manage and optimize my adword account, but the conversion didn't get up that much. Basically they charge me for each sale made on my website + monthly fees.

I'm looking for a good resources for ppc optimization and marketing, such as a book or journal, so i can do it by myself.

your help will be appreciated

Thank you

Control Factors
Did they have complete control of the copy, headlines, and graphics on the landing pages and were they encouraged to do whatever it took to get the number of conversions up?

If you already had a good conversion rate from your ads, you
might should have offered to only pay for extra sales on top of what you were getting before, which might have been a challenge they would not have taken.

After your ads and keywords, the highest leveraged selling tool is pitting different landing pages against another, after you have tweaked ads for a good while. Long copy verses short. Different headlines. Your offer. There are a lot more variables in play that can increase your success.

A Note to Those Hiring AdWords Consultants
Make it completely clear what your primary objective is before hiring because increasing conversions is not mutually exclusive to increasing CTR, Quality Score, or clicks. There is even a distinction between increasing conversion rate (more landing page and website oriented) verses increasing the sheer number of conversions.

Choose Your Strategy
Of course we would like them all to increase, but there are trade offs for each. For example, a high converting ad may be lower on the page, get less traffic, and have a completely different message than one that gets a high CTR, traffic, and even better Quality Score.

AdWords Resources
Read GaryTheScubaGuy's past posts.
Look up Perry Marshall's book (Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords) and Andrew Goodman's Winning Results with Google AdWords (whenever he comes out with a new edition).
Also, use the Google Website Optimizer (not ad optimizer, which isn't very good).
The Google Website Optimizer lets you do multi-variate testing and speeds up the process of knowing what ad/landing page/copy and graphical element combination get the best results.

Thanks mate

waw good post

my greetings to u

Hi feras80,

That kind of revenue sharing doesn't usually work out for a PPC service. Sounds like you hooked up with a bad firm. Were you paying the advertising costs as well? If so, then they had every incentive to waste your money. If they were paying then they probably scrimped too much.

In my opinion, a PPC management firm should be paid based on their work and retained based on their results. You should have control over your own budget and their fees should be a fixed percentage of your ad budget. The amount of work they perform should scale with your budget.

Hello
I got out of them
I've spent with them 3 months; got around 10% more hits in comparison with my own optimization( they claimed it will be 30%), and i had to pay them a percentage of my monthly budget + another fixed fee.
I will try to find someone better.

Thank you

Thanks a lot for posting on such a topic.