Bill Jeppesen

AutoMall.com When we launched the site in 1998 we only intended to sell the domain as we knew nothing about running a website, let alone an automotive one. It is a long and interesting story, but for your interest, I will cut to the chase. We put up one pay-per-click ad ($0.05) and make $35 in one day. That's when the light went on. I figured out the business and eventually began promoting it via AdWords; about from the time Google released AdWords. Unfortunately, as Google changed its algorithms, which essentially killed our ad strategy (it had to do with location-based ads and user intent). Additionally, big players with big dollars pushed us out to where what was profitable at about a $0.25 CPC now costs north of $2.50. The information below is over a four-year period. I'll let the numbers speak for themselves. Private Client ( small business focused on profitability) I took over management of the project and ultimately did a complete overhaul, reigning in the complicated and overly segmented campaigns into a manageable, successful account. I was able to reduce costs by more than 50% ($26,472 vs $10,583) and increase profit by more than 72% ($26,320 vs $45,276) from July through November. Unfortunately, and unbeknownst to me at the time, the owner agency's motivation was to increase spend regardless of profitability for the client, as that was how they billed the client. I passed the work back to the agency and subsequently, costs returned to their previous levels without a relevant increase in profit. The Paper Tube Co. (PTC) (Current Client) I began working with David Molo in late 2016, initially to manage the Shopping campaign and Search Ads. Previously a third party managed the account and was ineffective. Costs were high, return was negative and user behavior was poor (e.g., high bounce rate). I overhauled the existing campaigns to get them, at least, in line with best practices. However, while performance improved, it wasn't a good as was hoped. A month or two following the revamped account, David and I had a long phone meeting to discuss the strategy moving forward. The long and short of it was, we were missing the target market and were too focused on the product. Uline and Office Depot advertise a lot for paper tube products. PTC's tubes are very high end, secondary packaging. So, instead of competing in the obvious market space, we re-did the entire campaign focused almost exclusively on packaging, targeting luxury goods, specialty markets and the like. Once we got all of the tracking in place, it was clear we were on the right track. Today, AdWords pays for itself plus my time, and that is known only via data we can track directly back to AdWords. Any one customer that comes in from AdWords is very likely to become a repeat customer. The latter data is not tracked in AdWords. The business is growing; David is hiring more staff, attributing much of our success to AdWords. You can reach David here:- Sarton Physical Therapy (SPT) (Current Client) SPT recently re-did their entire website and with that, wanted to re-try a paid search campaign to help people find their clinic. Often times, their patients are seeking treatment on their own, having been to multiple doctors. I developed a multi-pronged account, ultimately focusing on the 20% of their services that provide 80% of their revenue. While we cannot measure ROI directly due to HIPAA privacy requirements, we can measure call frequency, which is their number one source of new patients. Julie can give you more insight, but as I understand it, over the last six months call volume has increased from a few per month, to several (4-7) per week. We can only track one number so the actual is probably closer to 5-10 per week when extrapolating to include the other clinic. You can reach Julie here:-