Practical E-Commerce has launched a “PPC Report Card” in which they’ll review & critique a chosen campaign once a month. I like this idea, because lots of in-house PPC campaign managers don’t have access to a third party who can take an objective look and assess campaign performance and provide insights they may not have considered.

I would like to see more of these offerings for PPC campaign managers. At the Search Engine Strategies shows, they have a session for “site clinics” - which is basically a high-level review of sites from an SEO perspective (e.g. how “friendly” is a given site to a search engine spider). In addition, they have a “landing page clinic” to review & critique landing pages. But as far as I know, there isn’t a full pay-per-click campaign review session offered. Obviously this would be way more time-intensive than a simple site or page review, largely due to all the different components that need to be assessed in an SEM campaign. So, maybe not practical for a session. (However some enterprising online marketing consultants have launched campaign reviews as lead-gen efforts for their own services, going for the upsell after the review!)

I am, however, proud to say that we offer a comprehensive account review service for all our SEM-in-aBox customers - we’ve dubbed it Smart Start. When a subscriber joins us, we perform a full account review, including campaign structure, goals, keyword selection & grouping, and a review of specific account settings in Google & Yahoo. Our goal is to help our clients squeeze even more performance from their campaigns, by making sure their accounts are ready for management & optimization by SEM-in-a-Box. Another the side benefit is, getting a campaign in peak condition for SEM-in-a-Box management is actually applying existing “best practices” for campaigns that typically help performance even if a campaign analysis & optimization tool is not being used.

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