Can a PPC (CPC) company I hired only do organic search listings?
I hired a company to handle my search marketing. I was informed that the money I paid them would be used to pay my PPC advertsing, and that I didn’t pay a service fee. They said they make their money by receiving PPC discounts from Google and Yahoo, so they keep the excess. However, I just looked through my website statistics and have noticed that not a single paid click has directed traffic to my site. ONLY organic (unpaid) clicks. Is this legal? I have paid them for PPC and they aren’t doing it.
Please be informed on this type of advertising before answering. I need knowledgeable information as we are considering legal action.
And yes, I will be contacting them as well. I just need some input right now.
Thanks!!
NorthRock….thank you. That was very informative. I did not see anything in the paperwork stating one way or another. It is a phonebook company and the contract is the same as one they would use for a phonebook ad, so it says nothing specifically about SEO or PPC. Only that we signed up for internet search marketing.
I know I got screwed and that I should have been more careful. The company is a big name and the rep we worked with came from a referral. So I let my guard down.
Now I’m trying to figure out if I have any recourse.
So in regards to what you were saying….even though over 6 months I have 5 paid clicks, I can’t prove that they didn’t do this intentionally? Isn’t it obvious? Would a judge not see that this is not just the result of no guarantee, but fraud? 5 paid clicks versus roughly 2800 nonpaid ones seems very obvious to me…
NorthRockSEO
So you paid for what, setting up a PPC campaign or marketing your PPC campaign? Did they guarantee you that x amount of people would use the PPC options or not? These are the questions you need to ask yourself. I am currently helping a client with the same issue however, as with a lot of people, he did not thoroughly read the fine print. What ended up happening was that he got sucked into some company that did the exact same thing yours did. They took his money to setup PPC ads, with the pretense that they would help generate traffic. Well the PPC ads are up but no traffic is coming from them, only organic searches. However once the fine print has been read there was not “Guarantee” that any of the ads were going to be clicked on rather the company very plainly detailed that they were simply there to setup up his PPC campaign and in no way did they guarantee people would follow the PPC ads.
You really need to see EXACTLY what their services supposedly offered. If it does guarantee a certain percentage of traffice from ads, which I have not previously encountered, then by all means you may have recourse for legal action. However I doubt this is the case.
Best of luck.
Kelowna Internet Marketing
Sounds kinda wonky to me.
Most PPC companies charge you a setup fee, a monthly management fee and then you pay for the clicks.
Please note that your web stats might be incorrect. I’ve noticed that some tracking doesn’t distinguish between paid and organic clicks. But if there is a PPC account, there should be a clear record of clicks via paid search. See http://www.ValleyPPC.com for more info.