They promise to manage your Pay Per Click advertising for you – reduce the time involved in managing the campaigns, increase click through rates and reduce costs.
Their service might* suit a company that is starting from scratch and which does not have anything set up but for us this was a disaster.
* I’m not convinced
We had over time set up a large and relatively efficient campaign, but nonetheless decided that we’d give them a try – our existing campaign covered the areas most likely to return significant numbers of visitors, but there was wide scope for generating more visitors by targeting those areas less in demand .
When we started the account with Broadplace there was one very important stipulation: we knew that there was a finite limit to what we could bid for a keyword if we were to return a profit. Their brief was simple: generate more visitors but do not pay more than PPC threshhold.
The result:
- a massively bulked out and unwieldy campaign, to the point where google adwords put our account on hold for a period of weeks (our existing ads continued to run, but they refused to post the changes Broadplace at put into place).
- the keywords added made no sense: they had added the same keywords with broad matching, exact matching and phrase matching.
- they very quickly started to bid above the threshhold we had stipulated
I called them a few months in to see what was happening with the account and our account manager pretty much admitted that they’d done nothing (they charge on a monthly subscription basis). I decided at that point that we should cancel, so spoke to our finance dept to put a hold on payments only to discover that they hadn’t been charging us (they couldn’t even get that right) so I thought no more of it.
Some months later I got an email from our Broadplace account manager saying how well the campaign we going; I replied that as far as I was concerned the contract had ended and they should not do anything else for us.
At the final revision of our account I discovered that we had maximum bids in for some keywords at TWENTY FIVE TIMES the threshold that we had stipulated! As far as I am concerned we lost money using this service, despite the fact that we didn’t in the end actually pay them anything.
Broadplace’s homepage
thawte revisited
ah! after my last frustrated attempt to renew our thawte security cert I was pleased to receive an email from Thawte saying that I have to update my site seal and that this will remove the need in future to update the seal when renewing the certificate – so that’s good news.
Unfortunately we’re now looking to move hosts from Windows -> Apache and as a part of this I’m having to move the security certificate. Thawte have a ‘knowledge base’ article to help with this but 2 thirds of the way down it says ‘Run the following command using OPENSSL’.
Having been to openssl.org and made little headway I asked a thawte support rep for, well support. His response was that they support the cert but not third party applications. While on the one hand I can understand this, on the other if you are going to direct a customer down a certain route which they have no alternative but to go down you should not just wash your hands of it and say ‘good luck’ – or at least not if you don’t want to piss your customer off!