For any small business looking to use Google Adwords marketing to increase sales or drive traffic to their websites, having a quick look online at Yell PPC reviews and those of other PPC agencies would be a wise first step.
Not to single out Yell here but Yell is a name most people are familiar with and looking at their Trustpilot reviews there are many 1 star reviews that reference the PPC services they sell which offers up a good discussion point about PPC best practice and making sure you choose a provider that it the right fit for you.
Whilst there were many 5 star reviews on Trustpilot they seemed to be for the cross section of Yell’s services and didn’t appear to be for PPC. Furthermore, whilst several negative reviews were made since June 1st through to today about poor service in respect of PPC, not one positive one was found sadly.
Whether you are about to engage with Yell or any other PPC agency some of the issues highlighted by the low scoring Trustpilot Yell PPC reviews should act as a prompt for people to think about how to engage with all PPC agencies (not just Yell) and to get the assurances they need when considering to engage in any pay per click advertising as what has been said to have gone wrong at Yell can go wrong at other Adword agencies.
Whilst consumers are afforded protection under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Law if business practices are deemed unfair, there isn’t the same level of protection available to small business owners and as such more due diligence should be a matter of routine when deciding if you are to engage with a Pay per Click marketeer to manage your Google Adwords campaign for you as a quick search online does yield some horror stories from across the PPC Adwords industry.
Are the Yell PPC reviews accurate?
Yell PPC Reviews – Source: uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.yell.com
As with any online review the context and validity of the review and whether it is 100% accurate is of huge significance.
Whilst the use of online reputation management tools can be employed to tackle any fake bad reviews the truth often has a way of coming out and staying out but nevertheless, the person reading reviews should exercise common sense and assess whether there is a pattern of behaviour, whether this pattern can be apportioned across a wide selection of reviewers and whether these reviews are verified or if the reviewed business has responded to and legitimised those bad reviews via their response?
The reviews included here are a sample of negative reviews made on Trustpilot in the last couple of weeks. In the interest of providing balance we looked at all other reviews in the same sample period of 9th to 14th June but could not locate a positive review about Yell PPC services.
Again, not wanting to be unfair given the argument (whether true or not) that some people are more motivated to give a negative review than a positive one and that perhaps the sample period was too short, we widened the sample period to look for any positive review about Yell’s PPC services and even when looking as far back as Jan 1st 2018 to today [June 25th 2018], we could not find a positive review of Yell that contained a reference to ‘PPC’ but we did sadly find many more negative reviews referencing ‘PPC’.
Yell PPC Reviews – Source: uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.yell.com
DIY Adwords versus Independent Agency / Yell PPC
Whilst we cannot speak for the entire Yell PPC customer experience, nor would it be our place to, looking at the sample reviews that are available on Trustpilot since Jan 2018 through to today there does appear to be a recurring theme in that the main issues are:
- Poor PPC (pay-per-click) Performance
- Lack of Transparency
- 12 Month Contract
The argument many will ask themselves here is that if a PPC agency was good at managing Google Adwords campaigns why would they need to lock you into a 12 month contract?
Whilst we cant speak for those whom engage in such methods and contracts the view of Edible Marketing is that if your PPC agency was doing a good job and you were getting a better return than if you managed the Adwords campaign yourself you would be getting an improved return on your investment and chances are you would therefore wish for that good performance to continue and as such you wouldn’t need to be tied into a contract as the results are all the motivation you would need to keep paying the PPC agency?
Well, thats how many adword agencies (including ourselves) operate so think long and hard about the risks of engaging with anyone whom tips the balance of what should be a fair and equitable commercial arrangement too much in their own favour.
The regular complaint in the Yell PPC reviews of being tied into a contract wouldnt be as much of a complaint if the service was working for the customers yet much of the criticism is that poor Google Adwords performance is combined with poor transparency so that you (as a customer) simply dont have the data to hand to be able to see where your campaign is going wrong, whether you are paying over the odds for irrelevant keywords or worse still that the campaign has no negative keywords.
What are Negative Keywords?
In Google Adwords and PPC campaigns a very basic but invaluable tool is the negative keywords feature and it works by not showing your adverts for keyword searches that are deemed a ‘broad match’.
For example, Edible is an SEO Agency and so we want to rank for keywords like ‘SEO Liverpool‘ as this is what many people would use as a search term to find an SEO agency.
However, whilst the search term ‘seo liverpool’ is highly relevant it could be included in a search for other things like ‘seo liverpool jobs’, ‘seo liverpool or somewhat uniquely ‘seo liverpool university’.
In the above scenarios, if we did have our own PPC campaign we would be wasting money for people searching for ‘seo job’ and seo liverpool university, with stands for the Student Experience Team, and not Search Engine Optimisation so in this scenario the negative keywords would be ‘jobs’, ‘job’ and so on so that we remove the possibility of our ads being shown in broader and irrelevant search terms.
Want a better PPC Return on Investment?
If you are unhappy with your current Adwords campaign, be it self-managed or by an PPC Adwords agency, or worse, you have cause for complaint and think your campaign is being mis-managed and want to talk through your options, simply get in touch for a no obligation discussion.
