I’ve been in search engine marketing industry for a long time now…and I’ve really come to appreciate excellent client service. For a long time Yahoo has been one of the best client service oriented companies I’ve worked with in the Inernet marketing space. Now, don’t get me wrong…I’m not one to brown nose [trust me it won't get me anywhere] but Yahoo Search Marketing staff are quite good.
I have noticed this with other search engines who offer pay per click services. MSN does a very nice job of communicating with their clients. Their account managers are “johnny-on-the-spot” with most issues. I believe they [MSN] was on the ball pretty early in the CRM game.
I believe that these search engines who work with just about any sized company and any sized search marketing agency make the entire search experience better. If you follow the chain of events I think it becomes apparent why many search engines spend time, resources and money to train and educate their account reps.
Consider the following path…
- Individual enters a search query on Yahoo, MSN, etc…
- Natural\Paid are served
- Excellent SEO and paid results go to battle over the searcher
- The paid placement has about 5 seconds to win or loose…
- When the paid ad wins and all aspects of the keyword, ad copy and landing page jive there is now a win win.
This scenario is a win for the searcher, win for the advertiser [in very general terms] and is a win for the search engine. I must give credit to all of those account managers who have taken their time to work with me on some very difficult pay per click campaigns.
While this may seem like some kind of suck up to the search engines, what would the search landscape look like if they didn’t lend a hand? After all – who knows their APIs, tools and products better than they? No one.
My point in all of this is some type of idealism I guess – the way I would like the world to be. It would be fantastic if all of the AIGs of the world and huge corporate companies decided it would be in the best interest of the users, general public and purveyors of such things if client service were a priority.
Just imagine…IF client service were a priority…search engine marketing would be better, search results would be better and in general we as buyers of bright shiny objects, cars, financial instruments, governmental bureaucracies could be more efficient and we [the buyers and the public] would get exactly what we paid for.
Until that better time, I think we can all be thankful one good company at a time. For those of you who are in client service - please keep it up because there are people like me who are greatful for the work you do.
