What would you guys do?

[dsm1217]

So I have a question for the board. I hired a company to set up my adwords campaign for me. Was not exactly cheap.

They wrote ads for me that were exceptional at getting click throughs, and made decent sales. the rub comes in that what they failed to take into consideration was product mark up.

I ended up with one month being ok net profit wise, the next month being about $400 negative once profit margins were taken from the overall income.

So I am in a bit of a quandary. I feel a bit of this is my fault, maybe I was not specific enough at the start of the project with regaurds to my profit margins.

Then again I was a raw adwords newbie at the time (still am, btw) and they are the pros. Should that not have been one of the things they asked about up front?

So now I have already paid half of he agreed amount for the service, but still owe another half. Should I broach the subject of refund or renegotiate the contract based on the rather dismal returns from the project (my boss was exceptionally angry with me for the negative month).

Then otoh, I really should have paid more atttention to the spend myself, I just thought that was one of the things they would do. Maybe I misunderstood though.

So what would you guys do? Pay it and move on, or talk to them about adjusting the cost due to the less than happy returns I have received? Thanks all. :)

[NFFC]

Did they do what they said they were going to do?

[rcjordan]

Pay it and then tell them your ROI problems before proceeding. There are those willing to buy marketshare and/or branding and the immediate returns are almost always negative on those campaigns.

[dsm1217]

Well that depends on how you look at it sort of. They said that they would write ads and setup the account to be easy to manage. which they certainly did, and did well. They also asked that I use their prefered conversion tracking package (which I did) rather than use the stats pack I already had installed.

To me if you want me to use your conversion tracking software that says you will monitor the campaigns for effectivness and most surely to be sure it does not result in a net loss. Which they did not do well as evidenced by the negative month.

Now did they say specifically we will monitor ads to be sure you dont lose money, no. However, it was implied. This is the reason I am not sure how to handle the situation.

[dsm1217]

Pay it and then tell them your ROI problems before proceeding. There are those willing to buy marketshare and/or branding and the immediate returns are almost always negative on those campaigns.


I was specific in that I was not after branding. I have already hired someone else to redo the ads so I am not continuing with these guys no matter the outcome.