FAQS

Paid Search & PPC FAQs

Paid search is the most revolutionary, targeted, and powerful advertising medium in existence. By definition, your ads display only to people who have already expressed interest in your products or services via search query. You only pay once they click on your ad and are delivered to your website. It is a completely fluid marketplace, and with Niche's expertise and technology, we are able to turn on a dime, optimizing your campaign in real time. Simply put, paid search is enormously powerful and extremely profitable when executed with precision and efficiency.

First, you select a list of keywords that will be triggered by users searching in search engines like Google or Bing. For those keywords, we write an ad to market your products or services so that users will see this ad when they search for relevant terms. You will pay each time a user clicks on the ad and is delivered to your website. The amount that you’ll pay is dependent on a preset "maximum bid" determined by what you’re willing to spend. If you take this concept, apply it to thousands of keywords, hundreds of ads, and make changes based on a variety of data factors, you have yourself a paid search campaign.

Ads – otherwise known as sponsored links – will show up on the search results pages of every major search engine, including Google, Yahoo, Bing, AOL, Ask, and many others. On the search results pages in all of these search engines, there are two sets of links. The sponsored links appear on the top and along the right-hand side of the page and the organic links are listed in the main body of the page along the left. Organic links are chosen and ordered by the search engines’ complex algorithms. Improving results in the organic links is known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and managing sponsored link campaigns is known as Paid Search Management. Niche is a full-service, integrated search engine marketing (SEM) firm, excelling in both of these areas.

Immediately. Upon returning our service activation proposal, we will schedule a kick-off phone call with your account management team within one business day. We will take over management of your campaigns at this time and follow up on the action items we outlined in our initial audit of your account. Generally, within seven business days of our initial kick-off call, you will have a newly-revised series of campaigns ready to launch! Data will accrue in real time, and growth and efficiency will continue to develop indefinitely with ongoing optimizations.

With paid search, you get to pick the maximum amount you are willing to pay each time somebody clicks on your ad. This maximum bid, combined with a myriad of other factors – including the relevance of your ad copy, the structure of your campaign, and the historical performance of that keyword – determines exactly what you end up paying and in what position your ad will appear. The more you are able to pay, the higher you will show up in the search results and the more clicks you will receive. Depending on the industry and competition for a given keyword, the cost-per-click can range anywhere from $0.05 to $50+.

Paid search campaigns can be as expensive or inexpensive as you plan them to be. You set your budget, and Niche invests that budget as efficiently as possible with the goal of maximizing your results. The more you invest, the more traffic you can get and the higher your results can be in the search engines. It is important to note, though, that investing more doesn’t always mean a higher return on your investment. Most successful campaigns begin with a budget that is comfortable but not too risky. Your budget should expand if the results achieved are positive enough to justify greater investment.

Niche manages paid search campaigns in Google AdWords and Bing Ads, which cover between them over 99% of the search traffic in the US. These platforms power the paid search advertising in Google, Yahoo, Bing, AOL, Ask, and many other search engines. Niche also manages ads in non-search based paid advertising platforms such as Facebook.

Niche's Paid Search Management fees are based on your total monthly spend, with prices beginning at $699 per month. For larger clients, we are able to structure custom pricing models. Please call 800-432-3002 for more details.

Paid search campaign optimization refers to the process of making incremental changes to a campaign in order to create a higher average return for every dollar spent. These changes include (but are not limited to): keyword segmentation, ad copy testing, bid management, and geographic, demographic, and schedule adjustments. Expertise in maximizing the efficiency and return of all these variables is what Niiche likes to refer to as our strategic difference.

We don’t just write ads, change bids and produce content. We help businesses grow and succeed using a holistic approach combining data, technology, and human marketing expertise.

Absolutely! Your budget is entirely fluid and can be adjusted by your account executive with a simple email. If you work with a catalog of products or services, we will want to build a paid search campaign that parallels this catalog and is constantly updated to reflect changes in pricing, features, and/or inventory. Niche is happy to work out individual arrangements with clients to ensure that product and service listings are kept up to date.

Niche provides completely custom reporting based on your business’s needs. Our reports summarize campaign activity as well as detail exactly how your budget was invested across your accounts. This includes impressions, clicks, cost-per-click, conversions, cost-per-conversion, ROI, revenue generated, and more (all if applicable).

Niche’s managers dedicate themselves entirely to the discipline of customer acquisition. Our thorough understanding of all aspects of the Google AdWords and Bing Ads platforms, our proprietary reporting platform, and our longstanding relationship with the Google and Bing agency teams give our clients a big leg up on the competition. Proper account management and optimization is a full-time job – and not one you should take on alone. Our Paid Search Management services can pay for themselves many times over in increased efficiency and by freeing you up to do what you do best: run your business.

Years ago, it was a snap to run paid search campaigns because the marketplace was so new that even inefficient campaigns could still generate exceptional returns. Today, it can be very difficult, requiring a thorough understanding of the complexities of the paid search landscape to succeed. Since the inception of paid search, Niche has developed the tools, gained the experience, and built the technology necessary to run massive and highly efficient search campaigns. In such a cutthroat environment, Niche leverages these assets to give you a competitive advantage.

There are numerous ways that Niche can make existing campaigns run better, such as expanding keyword lists and match type variations, experimenting with ad copy, improving account structure, testing landing pages, bidding more effectively, engaging negative keywords, and more. Niche Builders is also privy to beta features in AdWords and Bing that aren’t yet available to the general public. We approach every campaign with a broad range of tools at our disposal, identify the areas with the highest degree of need, and begin our search for greater ROI.

This is one of the most common paid search misconceptions. If the question is “How do I simply drive the greatest volume of clicks?” then yes, the answer is to be #1. Achieving this placement is not magic; it is a question of cost. The more you bid, the higher you rank and the more clicks you will inevitably receive. However, being #1 in most markets costs an exceptional amount of money, and this cost should always be justified by the return being generated from the traffic. This can be daunting, especially if the marketplace is very competitive. If you have a set budget, you may find that bidding enough to rank #1 uses up that budget too quickly and that a lower bid — and lower rank on the search results page — will allow you to receive more traffic for the same dollar value.

While it is easy to identify a handful of the most obvious keywords related to your products or services, they compose just a fraction of the total keywords that will drive high-quality traffic to your website. Niche can identify the hundreds or even thousands of variations of your primary keywords that can, in turn, send extremely valuable, high-converting traffic to your site. Some data suggests that as many as 25% of searches each month have never been searched in Google before!

There is no guarantee that the same tagline that has worked in your direct mail or billboard campaign will translate into the best paid search ad copy. We only have 95 characters of text to pitch your product or service to a potential customer viewing a search results page. We make no assumptions that "Fast Shipping" is better than "Huge Selection," or that a "Free Quote" is better than a "Fast Quote." Thus, we approach each campaign differently, using our breadth of experience and endlessly tested best practices to figure out which combination of factors results in the highest performing ad. Ad copy optimization boils down to "test, compare, and repeat."

Paid search advertising gives you the ultimate flexibility of spending exactly what you want on your advertising each day, or each month. But just choosing an amount to spend is not enough. There are really two ways to approach the budget issue. The first is to establish a fixed budget, and our goal is to maximize results given your budget constraint. The second option is to set an ideal cost-per-conversion and maximize your conversions (i.e. spend as much money as you are able to) given that set constraint. Which direction you should go will be dependent on how fluid your budget is, and how rigid – if at all – your conversion cost constraint is. With these variables in mind, you set your budget, and we manage your campaign to maximize your results regardless.

To maximize your results, your campaign needs to be constantly monitored, tested, and improved. Setting and forgetting will eventually and inevitably lead to inefficiencies and wasteful uses of spend. Further, your keyword bids require adjustment in order to adapt to changes in the marketplace, seasonal shifts, and many other factors. Google and Bing are also constantly releasing new beta tools and products to improve the user experience that must be accounted for in your campaign. Expert ongoing optimization is the only way to maintain the highest possible return on your advertising dollar.

Reputation Management FAQs

In addition to Niche.Builders forcing HTTPS using a 256 bit SSL to encrypt all connections to our backend, we also regularly audit the details of our implementation: the certificates we serve, the certificate authorities we use, and the ciphers we support.

Credit card data is never stored on our server. Your data is secured by Stripe, our payment gateway provider. Stripe has been audited by a PCI-certified auditor, and is certified to PCI Service Provider Level 1. This is the most stringent level of certification available.

We're sorry to hear you're not receiving your review alerts. We take email deliverability very seriously and want to make sure to resolve this quickly. There could be a few different scenarios causing this. Let’s run through them below.  

Historical Reviews
First, check to see what date the review was left. Was this review left before we set up your account? 

During the on-boarding process, our system does an initial scan to pull in some of your historical data. We don’t send email alerts for these old reviews because often times there so many that your inbox would unfriend us. So, if the review in question was a historical review, we wouldn’t have sent an email alert. However, you should receive email alerts going forward for any new reviews you receive. 

New Reviews
If this review was posted after our historical scan, let's follow these steps to make sure your notifications are setup correctly.

Check to make sure your email address is correct. 

Check with your Account to make sure they've enabled your alerts. 

Check with your email server/provider to make sure Niche.Builders email address is "white listed."
Our email notifications contain the entire review within the body of the email. It's possible that the review contained words that your email server considered spam and blocked us. Please ask your email provider to "white list" the email address - [email protected] 

Once you've done that, please reach out to [email protected] so that we can make sure to clear you from our unsubscribed/blocked list. 

If none of these troubleshooting steps have resolved the missing review alerts or you have questions, please email [email protected] and we'll be happy to help!

Yes! During the initial onboarding process for a location, our system will perform a historical scan of all the review sites we find. It can take up to 48 hours to collect and display the historical review data of your business locations.

How far back does your historical scan go?
Usually we'll pull data from the first two pages of the review profile, so the timeline of historical reviews collected depends on how far back in time those two pages go.

Will you send me a email notification for my historical reviews?
No,we only alert you each time we pull in a new review, you will receive alerts.

At this time, the only type of Facebook page that can enable reviews (and that Niche.Builders can monitor) is a local business page

If your Facebook page is set up as a personal or brand page, you won’t have the option to enable reviews. 

It’s easy to change the category of your page if you’d like start collecting Facebook reviews.

Click here for a facebook help center article on how to change your category. (Jim, link to FB FAQ about this topic)

Also, if you have multiple locations, be sure that each has its own local business page. They will need to be tracked separately.

Note: We've found that Facebook has begun creating local pages for businesses that don't have one and will eventually do it for all businesses. We highly recommend that you you take control and create your own local business page now instead of having Facebook do it for you. 

If you’re ready to start tracking your Facebook reviews, send over the URL of your local business page to [email protected] and we’ll be happy to add it in!

It’s never good news for us to hear that some of those positive reviews you’ve worked so hard to get are not showing up publicly. {Insert sad face.}

Unfortunately, Yelp filters 1 out of every 4 reviews for a number of reasons.

We wish that we could help you manage this. But Yelp and other review sites maintain complete control over your listing on their site (including the way reviews are filtered).

Once reviews are filtered they will appear in the "Unrecommended" section of your profile towards the bottom. To view these, just click on the gray text that says something like "13 other reviews that are not currently recommended." 

We realize that some of these reviews may have been unrecommended because you flagged it with Yelp. If this occurred, simply email [email protected] and we'll be happy to remove it for you.

Online reviews have a direct impact on your bottom line. According to Harvard Business School, a 1-star rating increase leads to a 9% increase in revenue. Cone Research, meanwhile, revealed that 4 out of 5 customers will reverse a purchase decision after reading a negative online review. Protect your business with Niche.Builders, the complete online review management software.

Niche.Builders monitors over 80+ review sites on a daily basis, ranging from the popular review sites such as Yelp, TripAdvisor, Google, Yahoo Local, Citysearch, and Foursquare to industry-specific sites like UrbanSpoon, OpenTable, Vitals, RateMDs, Cars.com, and Travelocity.
 

If you’d like us track a review site that’s not on the list, suggest it by writing us a note and sending it to [email protected]

Note: We’ll definitely add your suggestion for future consideration. Currently, we determine the list of sites we track by on-demand popularity from our customers. 

If you have any other questions, feel free to reach out to our awesome Customer Success Team at [email protected]

 

General Review Sites

  • BBB Reviews
  • Citysearch
  • Consumer Affairs
  • Customer Lobby
  • Demandforce
  • eKomi
  • Facebook Reviews
  • Foursquare
  • Google+ Local/ Google Maps
  • Insider Pages
  • Judy’s Book
  • Kudzu
  • MerchantCircle
  • PissedConsumer
  • PeopleClaim
  • ResellerRatings
  • SquareMouth
  • SuperPages
  • Trustpilot
  • Yahoo! Local
  • Yellow Pages (US & Canada)
  • Yelp

Medical

Real Estate

  • Apartments.com
  • ApartmentGuide
  • Apartment Ratings* (Additional fee may apply)
  • Caring.com
  • Golden Reviews
  • Our Parents
  • SeniorAdvisor
  • Senior Homes
  • RentersVoice
  • Rent
  • Trulia
  • Zillow

Restaurants

  • Dimmi
  • Eat24
  • Gayot
  • MenuPages
  • OpenTable
  • OpenTell
  • Zomato (previously Urbanspoon)
  • Zagat (now Google+ Local)

Hospitality

Home Improvement

  • Houzz
  • Home Advisor

Apps

  • iOS App Store
  • Google Play Store
  • Amazon App Store
  • Mac App Store

Legal

Automotive

Careers

  • Indeed
  • GlassDoor

Financial

  • Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
  • CardPaymentOptions
  • Credit Karma
  • Lending Tree
  • MerchantMaverick
  • MyBankTracker
  • SuperMoney
  • USBankLocations.com
  • WalletHub