AT&T Advertising Solutions YP Connect Bait and Switch- sold advertising program for Orange County received advertising in LA County Irvine, California

I have been in the advertising business for 23 years in Orange County and have never had a complaint against me. You do not survive in this business if you are unethical...period. I handle very large Key Accounts for AT&T/YP, so you must be ethical, honest and straightforward and have excellent follow through. Having said that, this is my account of what happened: Rick White, Internet Sales Manager and I met with the customer to do a "very small" ($1000 per month) search engine marketing campaign that was only going to be live for 6 months. An average cost per click for Plumbers in Orange County is $37.82. A click to lead ratio of 10% is the norm, according to Google. At that rate, the customer would expect 3 calls per month.

The 3 things that made this account impossible to be successful was: 1. An inadequate budget- Should have been 5 times the size for the Plumbers category. 2. The customer's website is a one page only site (that was the norm in 2001). This is not a search engine friendly site: see for yourself- www.ppsplumbing.com. It is not going to bring the traffic needed-even with a strong budget. 3. Inadequate trial period-Need at least a 12 month program to be effective and that is if you have an effective site. Ramp up takes a minimum of 90 days, so even with a quality site, this would have been inadequate. 4 Challenging Economy: Not many people during 2010-11 were spending much money on the type of jobs they were going after. They were going for high end jobs that were very fews and far between.

As far as the call returning issue, any of my customer's will attest that I call back within an hour and always address issues immediately. I did return calls and emails immediately, but once the account went to the premise rep, I sent those emails to management to address. The geography was adjusted immediately once it went live. This account immediately went to a premise rep (small accounts) who was on disability at the time. Once this happens, per the union contract, I am not permitted to do anything on this account. This was unfortunate for the customer. I brought this to the attention on Management, who followed through. My suggestion to Pamela (the owner) is to get a new website that is at least 5 pages and search engine friendly. Once she does that, she needs to aggressively market the business. The economy has improved much since then, so she should fair much better if she makes these changes.

(Message from YP)

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