Category: News & Trends

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What Will You Do To Get Your Money?

Man, it seems like the law is on the side of debtors and schemers. I have recently had a situation where a past client passed a credit card to me that was really under the name of someone else as his own. The real account owner disputed my charges and I have been left holding the bag. When I factored how long it would take me to make up the profit loss I was staggered – nearly seven months!

In the meantime the past client has now given me a new credit card to cover the disputed charges but every time I try to transact the card they are over their credit limit. To get my money I am now getting up at midnight every night to transact money on their credit card to cover their debt (with their knowledge). Unfortunately I have to get my payment in $15 to $400 lumps. I never thought that I would have an issue like this, but have found that the credit card company won’t help me, the client won’t help me – so I only have myself to rely upon.

What I have found out from this issue is that I will do anything to legally get my money from a debtor. I used to be afraid of collection agencies – no longer after three bad debts last year, and now I am not afraid of personal inconvenience – with the situation I am currently in. I am also no longer afraid of taking a debtor to small claims court to get a judgment.

What I have found is that with the economy the way that it is, as a small business person, you must be very careful, be sure (with verification) that the client is the actual owner of a credit card you take for services, and be extremely proactive when someone falls behind in payment. Why? Because no one will help you resolve the problem other than yourself. You know it only takes being burned badly once to make some serious changes in what you do to prevent being burned again.

So my question to you is, what would you do to get your money that is owed? Would you sue? Would you get up in the middle of the night to ring their card before another debtor snagged the available cash? Or would you just let the “bad client” move on to the next unsuspecting party and take the hit?

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Are You Holding Google AdWords Accountable?

I cannot begin to tell you how many clients have come to me for AdWords services to find out that they spend several thousands of dollars every month for clicks without holding Google accountable. What do I mean by that?

If you do not have Google AdWords conversion tracking installed and at the minimum Google Analytics installed, you are not holding Google AdWords accountable. You must have metrics in place to be able to identify the success or lack there of of your Google AdWords program.

Without conversion tracking installed you will never know how many leads AdWords actually generated for you. When things get tight financially the first thing you will choose to chop is AdWords. But if you know you got 30 leads from AdWords last month and 5 leads from your website, instead you may choose to increase your AdWords budget to generate more leads and cut back on website services for the time being. With the knowledge of what vehicles are generating a return for you, you can make smart choices in regards to your budget. But if you do not have these metrics in place, you are only guessing at where your business has come from.

Typically we will not take on a new AdWords client until these metrics have been installed by their webmaster, as we want to seriously help our clients get the most from AdWords. We want to have conversations built around historical data not guesswork!

AdWords can bring you leads and sales but you need to do your part to keep the program accountable to match your business objectives.

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What to Do When You Have No Impressions in AdWords

So you set up your Google AdWords account, set it to run, and now it’s been a few days and nothing is happening. What should you do?

First, if you have absolutely no impressions at all, I would contact Google help through the control panel and ask the ad approval powers to take a look at your program. In nearly all cases you will get a response in 24 hours that your program was under review and is running now. It used to be that a program would run in about 15 minutes after set up, but now I have seen some accounts sit there for three to five days in the ad approval process. The contact is like a kick start. So if nothing is happening give Google a push.

If your impressions are very low, the first place to look is your daily budget and cost per click. You may not be in the auction if you settings are too low.

For clients we recommend a minimum budget of $500 to $800 for clicks for a 30 day period and we will typically set up an account to run with a default cost per click of $1.75 to $3.50 depending on the market.

For professional services like legal and medical services your default cost per click may need to be $6.50 to $8.00 to get any action. If you CPC is at this level you really should have a 30 click budget of $1,000 to $1,500 on top of our fees to manage your account to get Google to show your program.

AdWords is an auction so if you have set your account up with a maximum cost per click of $.05 or $.25 and a daily spend of just a few bucks, the reality is that you are just not going to get any action on Google. Businesses are spending big money on Google and to have Google show your ads, you have to compete in this same arena.