I don’t know about Dave, but I had the pleasure of working alongside Richard recently. The guy really knows his stuff and I’d recommend him to anyone. Unless you rank in the top 5 results for Search Engine Marketing on Google you probably shouldn’t provide it as a service.

“Unless you know and work with online advertising you are not going to be as effective” … Same with everything in life, surely?

But that’s not to say that you can’t quickly understand and learn the basics of running an effective PPC campaign. I don’t buy the whole argument that self-service customers can not be successful unless they are engaged on a daily basis with the ins and outs of this form of advertising. The reality is that most users of PPC come from this bracket!

My bone of contention is with those that think that because they use the web and are read up on IT, that reading terms and conditions from Google will mean they can run an effective campaign. The same types who I see spend a few hundred quid on ads for their own company name or those of competitors and not what customers might be searching for. It’s these clowns that convince their bosses that online advertising does cost this much for such a low conversion rate or say things like “Tried that, doesn’t work, all hype, getting bigger ad in the Yellow Pages instead”

Perhaps I was hasty with the “on a daily basis” bit but I will state again that unless you know and work with online advertising you are not going to be as effective, same way reading the terms and conditions on wordpress will not get you a great readership.

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BTW, for some reason comments here that are mentioning advertising terms are being seen as potential spam, so if comments don’t go through right away, fear not, they will eventually.

If PPC is not your specialist area, this does not preclude you from maximising ROI from your PPC spend. I am particularly passionate about this advertising space and truly believe that paid search can offer so much more than traditional media. Self-education is easy; consider getting accreditation?

Damien - I disagree with “Unless you work in the Search Engine Marketing business on a daily basis, you will save money by outsourcing the work to crowds like Redfly for mid and large campaigns.” How do you qualify this statement? From personal experience of having worked with two media owners, I can categorically state that I know plenty of advertisers who have been hugely successful in managing their ad campaigns on their own, even when SEM does not occupy much of their day to day activities in their roles. Marketing managers across many companies are spread across lots of different media, yet can still be successful in their marketing strategies.

For me, it’s not about knowledge - it’s about scale. For some advertisers, it makes more sense to outsource. For others, signing up with a credit card is more practical and cost efficient.

Can some explain what makes Dave Davis better than a company like like Digino who are never discussed but are present on all search engines when I look up SEO?

Oh by the I am not affiliated wit Digino!

I’m wondering if Dave Davis provides great service or if in fact they have exclusive info on how best to set up SEO or search campaigns?

I could tell them which websites worked for them, which didn’t, and of course I could build up a historical profile of what sites worked for what kind of products based on demographics and the like.

If you just want to deliver traffic to your website, then you can spend a few hundred euro with an adwords campaign (or facebook as I’ve been trying out over the past few days with Politics.ie - weak dollar makes Dave happy).

But the great thing about internet marketing is that you can use tools and software to really track your adspend, much better than you can with any other medium. With the necessary tools, you can work out cost per land per visitor (overall and by source of traffic) and of course when you make a sale (if that’s your objective) you can work out the cost per acquisition. You can then target your adspend, refine your campaign. Well you can, but if you’re doing it right, most likely your digital advertising agency are doing it for you daily.

You simply cannot do that yourself if it’s not an area you specialise in - it’s good to bring in the experts to use their skills and their knowledge to work for you. And it doesn’t need to be hugely expensive, you’ll get better value for money by spending more, but I’ve run hundreds of test campaigns for new clients, and a seriously high percentage of them have come back weeks (sometimes days) later with more budget.

One client of mine - a medium financial services firm, decided they’d try go it alone by using the sites I’d been recommending for them in other campaigns. They could not buy at the rates I could (as I bought a huge amount for various clients) - and they couldn’t track it either - they came back with their tail between theirs legs within three weeks.

Now, I will disclose an interest, whilst I’ve never met Dave and I’ve never chatted to him - i know his company is well regarded by those who have used it. Oh, and his sister and my sister happen to be going out. So there.