[mikecolella]

I have spent 250K+/month for months in a row and received basically the same service as someone spending 5K/month. They assigned me a a personal rep but it's still not possible to get real answers when problems come up.

I think the real number to get treated noticeably different is probably closer to 1M/month.

[te_chris]

I'm completely mystified by the prospect of spending 250k a month on AdWords. As much as you can, would mind going into a bit of detail like how much coverage that buys? Are you buying super common keywords or heaps and heaps of obscure ones? Conversion and ROI? how many impressions that gets?

Obviously those questions are sensitive so, if you even feel like answering, i think we'll all live if you're a big vague on some stuff!

[patio11]

I'm not him, but I think I can help you on that one. When evaluating the credibility of this, keep in mind that AdWords is not my strongest subject, but I do depend on it for making rent:

Pretend you're a company selling enterprise software. ~$10 will get you a click -- that's right, one click -- for a head keyword in many enterprise-y systems (think, oh, "electronic discovery software"). You try to convert it into an email submission, via offering a whitepaper of some description. Each email is now a lead. Your marketing and sales teams try to sell the leads. The average deal size for successful sales: six figures. Ideally, your best performing sales guys are bringing them in every single month and howling for you to give them more qualified leads.

In those markets, you'd hit over $100k of monthly spend before you eclipsed BCC in AdWords clicks or impressions. (I get mine for about six cents.) You'd probably have a few hundred keywords -- obscure relative to [Justin Bieber], but fairly obvious choices to customers in your problem domain.

You could also hit $250k fairly quickly with a broad campaign as an affiliate aiming to move a consumer product with a high LTV (and hence high CPA). Cell phones, credit cards or other consumer finance, antivirus software (that might be stretching it a bit), etc etc. (On the darker side of the tracks: rebill scams, whatever the latest flavor of fitness snakeoil is, etc.) These guys tend to deal with higher volumes across the keyword tail.

[mikecolella]

That was in the diet market on the Google content network. I'm not sure what conversion and ROI numbers would give you, every market/site is different. In the diet market that spend resulted in 1+ billion impressions, and 1+ million clicks.

[silverbax88]

At that rate you're paying about .25 CPM and would need to be selling a product at $25 with a 1% conversion rate to break even.

[gigantor]

That would be Truth About Abs, paying $28 commission/ebook, netting $3 a pop at high volume.

[prawn]

At least that gives us all a revised target! (Holy crap though - I would've thought even $5k/mo got you service and answers. Are the savings really worth the customer dissatisfaction?)

[omh]

When you have no competitors there is a limit to how much customer dissatisfaction can impact your business.