A Critical Review of Trada PPC Services
Earlier this month, a new startup called Trada launched a new kind of PPC management service. Essentially, they’re crowdsourcing PPC management, connecting advertisers with SEM management needs with PPC experts who are willing to work on the account for the agreed price. It’s an interesting idea, but I’m not totally convinced that it’s workable. After doing some research on their service, here are a few issues I found:
1) PPC Experts Get Paid Only When They Meet Advertiser’s Expectations. Trada has a weird way of paying out their PPC experts. An advertiser either sets a specific click cost they want to target, or chooses a conversion cost they need to stay under. If you get clicks or conversions below this target, you get to keep the difference (minus Trada’s 25% cut, of course). There are a few problems with this. First off, clients don’t always have enough expertise in the PPC space to set a reasonable expectation of performance. Back when I worked at an agency, I remember rolling my eyes as a client told me they wanted 100 conversions a month at a dollar per conversion. All this on an account where the average CPC was upwards of $10. As a PPC manager, you need to set up a reasonable expectation for cost per click (based on average bids in a certain keyword niche) and cost per conversion (based on average CPC and expected conversion rate). Trada takes these factors out of the experts hands, and places the goal squarely in the hands of those who may not know what they’re doing. Secondly, letting the client set the price ignores the environmental and competitive factors that go into how much your click and conversion costs are. I’d be happy with a $5.00 CPC if it converted at 10% and had a good ROI, but maybe Joe Client will only accept an average CPC of $0.50, effectively crippling his account. Maybe you get lucky and get a client with PPC experience, but I’m wary that this kind of system may only be appealing to novice PPC users. And lastly, it doesn’t seem like PPC contractors would be able to break even on this model. Sure, you start getting paid after you get click costs a few cents under the client’s (probably low) expectation, but after Trada takes their 25%, you had better be getting thousands of clicks to justify the hours you spent fixing that click cost.
2) Trada Doesn’t Let PPC Contractors Alter Landing Pages. Seriously? Let me be clear on this: you cannot improve PPC account conversion rates without changing landing pages. Landing pages are critical to whether or not users convert – everything else is just driving traffic. Sure, you may be able to eliminate some bad traffic to lower overall CPA, or find new keyword niches to explore to add more total conversions, but you’re never going to see improvement in existing conversion rates unless you rigorously split-test landing pages. Keeping your PPC contractor off of your landing pages is just setting both the client and the contractor up for failure.
3) More Than One PPC Expert Can Work On A Single Account. I’m all for teamwork in PPC strategy, but I think this is a recipe for disaster. On Trada’s homepage, they boast that accounts have an average of 24 PPC experts working on them. Twenty-four! That’s like having twenty-four chefs in one kitchen to bake one muffin. It seems to me like this could set you up for a lot of miscommunication – experts of different skill levels undoing each other’s changes, making changes too often, not doing enough analysis for good results. Not to mention the fact that if you get five PPC experts to look at a single account, they’ll give you ten overall strategies to improve it. This isn’t like stuffing envelopes at home. You can’t do PPC in assembly-line fashion. I’d much rather have one really good PPC contractor working slowly through an account than 24 cheap freelancers making changes at all hours of the day.
Now, I should end this by saying that I don’t think Trada is all bad. They do a few things that I applaud, like requiring all registered PPC experts to have some sort of certification, whether it’s through AdWords, SEMPO, or through their own in-house certification process. And, I recognize that there’s a real need for qualified people to do a lot of the tedious grunt work that comes along with PPC campaigns. This can be very time consuming and expensive for businesses that don’t have a lot of time to devote to SEM, and Trada seems like a good way for these companies to get things done at a discount price. But, as in all things, you get what you pay for. Good PPC service is not cheap. There are no shortcuts, and no substitutes for experience and analytical ability. You can’t just throw a dozen people at a PPC problem and expect it to be resolved.
Would I use Trada for outsourcing my PPC management? Probably not. Instead, I would find a quality freelancer with a solid background in PPC through LinkedIn, eLance, or personal contacts. But, I should end this with a caveat that I have never used Trada’s service and don’t know anyone who has – I’m merely basing my conclusions on their own explanation of the service. I’d love to hear if anyone out there has any experience (good or bad) with Trada’s PPC management service – let’s hear about it in the comments.
March 29th, 2010
Thanks for your post on Trada. I’d like to offer a few points of clarification:
1. In your first point, you said that an advertiser may have totally unrealistic expectations about what their CPC or CPA should be, and thus takes the control out of the hands of the capable PPC experts. Because Trada is a marketplace, the market dynamics take care of this problem where it exists. If an advertiser says they want a Cost Per Action of $1, but all the PPC experts know that $10 is more realistic, none of the experts will join/work on the campaign. The market will give its feedback to the advertiser, which will require the advertiser to set more reasonable payout rewards. Also, Trada has in-house account managers that have years of paid search experience who help advertisers get their campaigns set-up and where needed consult with the advertiser to help them set bid prices that are realistic and likely to attract PPC experts to the campaign.
Additionally, the Trada application gives constant feedback to the advertiser to tell them whether their bid price is set optimally. For example, the advertiser can see the first page bid estimate relative to keywords running in their campaign. So if they’ve set their click bid price at .50, but they see that there’s a large cluster of keywords running with a .75 first page bid estimate that could be working for them, the advertiser can add a bid price tier that’s above .75 (.90, perhaps) to allow PPC experts to utilize the keywords in that price range. Advertisers can continue adding price tiers until they reach the practical limit of what they’re willing to spend for clicks, based on their ROI. The same type of mechanisms are in place for Pay Per Action campaigns.
2. Trada Doesn’t Let PPC Contractors Alter Landing Pages: This is true for now, but it’s on our product roadmap to address later this year. We’ll give PPC experts the ability to create and propose new landing pages to the advertiser, which the advertiser can either automatically approve, or review and approve/reject based on the landing page content. This is how ad copy is handled in Trada currently, and has worked very effectively for both PPC experts and advertisers. In the meantime, we do provide a communication mechanism in the Trada application that lets PPC experts give feedback to advertisers on landing pages (or anything else, for that matter). We’ve seen that advertisers typically love getting this feedback from PPC experts and implement their suggestions into landing pages. As you astutely pointed out, the PPC experts are the ones with the paid search experience and advertisers know this. They’re as interested in making their paid search program a success as the PPC experts, so are more than willing to implement their feedback.
3. More Than One PPC Expert Can Work On A Single Account: The way you’ve described how PPC experts work together isn’t how it actually works in the Trada application. Rather than everyone “sharing” a Google or Yahoo account, each PPC expert works on the campaign independently of one another. So PPC expert A would create their own ad groups, ads, keywords, bid prices, etc. At the same time, PPC expert B would do the same, with no cognizance of what PPC expert A is doing. Trada then takes the work of all of the PPC experts working on a campaign and sends the ad groups (and their associated ads and keywords) out to a single AdWords/YSM account that Trada runs on behalf of the advertiser (each advertiser has their own dedicated account). Google/Yahoo then decides which keyword/ad combinations will be displayed on a search, just as they do with any other AdWords/YSM account. When a click occurs, Trada can track which PPC expert’s keyword/ad generated the click (and subsequent conversion), and attributes the click/conversion to that PPC expert. Therefore, each PPC expert is responsible for their own work – they don’t see or make changes to the work of other PPC experts.
Again, thanks for your review of the Trada marketplace. I encourage you to join the marketplace and try it out for yourself. I hope it will give you a better understanding of how the marketplace works, and changes your mind about its effectiveness on advertiser campaigns and its earning potential for PPC experts. In the meantime, keep the feedback coming – contrarian views always help us learn and highlights new ways we can improve Trada.
Bill Quinn
Trada
March 29th, 2010
Thanks for the detailed reply, Bill. It’s good to get the Trada side of the story to even out the review.
May 13th, 2010
After reading some articles this morning in reference to Trada, and working in the Search Marketing for the last 6 years, I feel this product will not benefit the Industry at all. Instead it will hurt it. Here is why (sorry if the explanation is drawn out!)
1. The engines only allow one ad with a particular display URL to show per search query (keyword).
2. Every ad’s display URL must match the landing page domain.
3. Google will show the highest Quality Score Ad, the others will not show.
Keeping these three facts in mind here is what will happen…
1. 24 experts bid on a single term relevant to the campaign in hopes of it either providing a low CPL or a low CPC. Each will have the same display URL as they use the same website.
2. Google will use its Quality Score to determine which ad will show. Without differences in landing pages the CTR and MAX CPC will weigh heavily on who has the higher Quality Score.
3. Each expert is now bidding against the other and artificially inflating the CPCs as they want their ad to show instead of one of the other experts.
4. Google (or others) now get more $$$, the expert gets paid, and the client pays a larger “out-of-pocket” costs than necessary….in relation to the CPC model.
Now take that keyword and multiply it by however many cross-over keyword combinations that might exist. Possibly thousands.
Now, I understand that the client is setting the goals, so you might say “who cares if the client is getting what he is asking for” or “what if they use CPL”. Well, if the goal is conversions…how are they tracked?
Most system use “last click” to determine who gets the conversion? If this system does as well, Expert A could have quality top funnel keywords that will eventually lead to a conversion or lead, but will never get credit for it.
Example:If a searcher queried the term “shoes” and that was Expert A’s keyword and and clicked on Zappos ad, then great. But, if he or she came back the next day and searched the brand term “zappos” (after he was aware he or she could get shoes there from the previous days research) and Expert B has the highest CPC bid on that term…now Expert B gets paid but it and Expert A, who generated the original interest, does not. This also eliminates any chance of gaining this insight from the advertiser.
Overall I feel Search Marketing is moving in the right direction and putting the emphasis on Marketing. Without a consistent strategy and a strong understanding of the client’s needs, objectives, competitors, life-time values, etc…search regresses back to simple excel and data junkies.
Granted if you are a client who could not care less about any of the above and you just want a low CPC, then maybe Trada is for you. But, I do not see myself ever becoming a believer in this system and hate what it means for the Search Marketing industry.
August 1st, 2010
I think Trada is a great concept but it’s not lightning in a bottle. Unfortunately, search marketing is no where near as simple as it use to be 5 years ago. It takes a lot more than good keywords and ads to succeed. Just as Nate mentioned above “last click” models make Trada questionable. I currently work with an agency, who specifically has developed their own system for tracking all things SEM. A few of those data points they look at are assists and dependent clicks which will soon be broken into discovery, engagement, and concluding clicks. We find that several keywords assist their selves and therefore a more in depth tracking/reporting is required to effectively analyze the value of a last click. For example, A client in particular has a very low brand CPL though their non brand CPL is twice as high. The client has made it clear they are not happy with their non-brand CPL though with the ability to track assist and dependent clicks were were able to show non-branded driving search for brand keywords and driving conversions. All of a sudden the CPL of non-branded terms wasn’t all that bad.
To get to the point, there are several factors outside of keywords and ads that make a campaign succeed. Perhaps that’s not as important when you’re a small business with a limited budget but it could make a difference.
Obviously this is a start up that has a lot of work ahead of them. Though if the Google Ventures team thinks it’s worthy perhaps we should all give it a second look. I will try it out and after a month I will return and give it a small follow up review.