As promised, there is yet more to the insane call from RelevantAds.com to one of my clients. As the call proceeds the RelevantAds sales rep talks about his company’s qualifications as an authorized reseller. I’ve included the clips from the call recording with about 5 seconds of dead air inserted between each part of interest.
The First Clip: “This is just basically explaining who we are and what we do…”
He talks about how the title of Google Adwords Authorized Reseller is the “highest authorization level that Google provides for Adwords management. ”
I see two problems here.
- He’s been talking mostly about the Maps results. Having an authorization level for paid ads means nothing when it comes to the SEO side of things, but he’s of course trying to piggy-back his qualifications.
- The only things required to get that reseller title is the following:
- Employ a direct sales force that sells to local businesses.
- Have existing relationships with at least five hundred customers.
- Demonstrate experience servicing and supporting local businesses.
- Share Google’s desire to provide a high quality user and advertiser experience.
The Second Clip: “Scroll down to the bottom. One of our actual customers…”
This clip talks about how “someone actually stole his business profile” which is to say that someone was able to hijack his maps listing. This IS a real problem and does happen from time to time, but then he says:
“When I told you about the filtering company part of us, that’s what we do. Someone actually stole his business profile. Stole the name and everything but they changed their number. So it was no telling what the customers were getting when they called that number… Now what we do is we work as a filtering company for Google to scrub out all that misinformation…”
Again, another giant load of B.S. As I’ve stated, Google works alone. In the unlikely event that someone is able to hijack your listing, just go claim it as yours, validate it by postcard and enter the code they send you. You don’t need a two-bit company to do this for you. If they’ve managed to change the address, then just create a new listing with the right info. Either way, problem solved and it only took 10 minutes and $0.
The Third Clip: “Any time a customer goes online and they type in any one of your key phrases…”
“Any time a customer goes online and they type in any one of your key phrases that your business provides, you will come up. Not one time, but three times on the front page.”
Wow, that’s a bold statement. We’ll talk about that and the 4th clip together…
The Fourth Clip: “We have a one-time setup fee…”
“We have a one-time setup fee of $59. And basically what that is is an administrative fee. It gets you posted into the sponsored links section in the next 3 to 5 business days. Now, we have our monthly billing fee which is the lowest on the market which is only $199 per month we don’t lock you into any contracts, we have no cancellation fees. Reason being is we are so confident in our product, it works, and we have to deliver on what we say. M’kay? And, uh, basically what the $199 does is maintain your position in all three categories on the front page. So as long as you make your payments, you will be listed there on the front page, standing firm, in all three categories, top 5. “
“…so even if your competitors were to go buy keywords, because they would have to use our service to get an unlimited amount…”
OK, one at a time:
- Lowest on the market? I know for a fact that eLocal (who is terrible…) and Prospect Genius offer lower rates than that.
- “They would have to use our service”… Really? They can’t just go to adwords.google.com and sign up for an account themselves? Wierd because I know for a fact that it can be done that way. What about signing up with the 10K other vendors that would be happy to manage an Adwords campaign for you?
- He says that as long as you make the payments, you’ll be in the top 5 results in the 10-pack (maps results), paid ads, and organic results. WOW!
Let’s dwell on #3 a bit. It takes significant time and resources to stay top 5 in the organic results for nearly all categories. Unless they are talking about a direct name search, this will take $199/month just to do this. Let’s just say that for some reason they can do it for $1/month, leaving $198/month for the paid ads. Using the Adwords keyword tool I can tell you that Google estimates the most relevant keywords for Locksmiths to average about $6.35 per click. That means you could buy just 31 clicks before running out. Forget the tool, how long does common sense tell you you’ll be able to afford to be on that front page? Certainly not all month so how the heck can you guarantee that a company will come up in the top 5 all the time? Do you think there’s something in the fine print? I sure do!
In summary, this is one of the most appauling conversations I’ve heard and I’m irate aobut it because it’s the epitomy of what ruins the online advertising industry’s reputation. This RelevantAds company will fail this customer, cause him to become jaded toward all online marketing, and make my life harder because of it.