Yahoo PPC and PPC managers

Hey everyone,

I think my situation is pretty simple, but hopefully there's some good insight on this forum.

Just recently started a new PPC campaign where we hired someone to manage it. He also manages several others in our same industry. Lately, we noticed another company is always one spot above us whenever we type in our keywords.

Now, if we are bidding the same amount per keyword should they always be ahead by one place?.. whats the determining factor if the bid amounts are the same? And, can't we just bid a little more than they are to get ahead?

-- I'm starting to think this may be a conflict on interest with our PPC guy. It wouldn't be such a big deal if our company and there company traded spots, but they are consistently above us by 1 place.

You know what... the manager of our PPC actually uses the same AD for not only us and the competing company, but to several others as well.

Don't be too quick to discount your PPC guy's work!

PPC management takes time and patience, and tons of testing in terms of bids, ads, and the like.

Two factors in ad positioning are: bids and quality score. You can obviously raise bids, but it may not be a "little" increase, and that can effect the overall account performance if you raise bids too much and blow out your budget.

Quality Score can be effected by landing pages, keywords, and ad text. They should all match as closely as possible to achieve highest quality score. However this is not always feasible, and quality score isn't the most important factor nor is ad position. Conversions should be #1 consideration. Your PPC guy should be tracking conversion data and making decisions based on that.

See my profile if you want to visit my website for more help.

In a recent transaction with Google, they filled me in on PPC ads and quality score and how click through rate was a factor. This was discovered because the ad history (click through rate, conversion rate, etc) is cleared each time you edit an ad/create a variation and you risk a slight decrease in quality score at that time.

This may be why he uses the same ad for multiple products, as it yields a high click through rate for the keyword search terms associated with it.

Sorry I just noticed this was referring to Yahoo! PPC but I know Google is always a good consideration anyway :-)

All the ads are probally the same because Yahoo is a royal pain in the arse to work with... very slow compared to the speed of google.

Wow! I hope you are buying him more wine and dancing girls than your competitors.

Why not do this in house, develop real expertise, understand these things better than him and whip his butt. I would be out the pound my competitors to a pulp rather than get the same guy to apply the same strategy. When every one uses the same stratety everyone loses. The winner is the one who jumps in with a sharper sword.

It will be a really cold day down under when I do that type of outsourcing.

Maybe you will save a lot of money and earn more too.

You know, I completely agree. I just seems like a very difficult task at this moment to work on the content, linking and blogging for our page and to now take on the task of understanding our PPC.

I trust the guy, but I do see the conflict of interest when you have someone managing several companies in the same industry. We're all bidding for the same keywords with the same person controlling that