Complaint Review: Orange Soda OrangeSoda Derek Miner - American Fork Utah

I can't speak to what Ben said. I will say that nearly half of the "set-up" fee went to the sales person. On PPC sales that is how they made money. This did change but for a long time they charged a bid margin. At the time it was common, but the sales people were encouraged not to say anything, and it was buried in the contract / T&C. This was only admitted to if the client found it, however we could never give an exact amount. This lead to a lot of accounts seeing an increased cost per lead, although it is true that clients paying enough would see better results given time. I would say that anyone who did less then a month would have only seen negative results. The response it would have gotten better is accurate, although some key details were left out. Mainly instead of taking over performing ppc accounts and improving them OS would start a brand new campaign under their mcc (if you know how Google ppc works you'll know that campaign age plays into several parts) this was done to hide the bid margin. In most cases clients would have seen faster results if OS had taken over the existing campaign. Another thing was the 15% was never enough to devout enough resources to the campaign to make it suchess foul, unless you were an enterprise level client 10k a month or more. Even then it was iffy. On the SEO side they had a lot of problems completing the tasks. I was once told that only about half of the tasks were completed. I don't know if that is true or if the person was just annoyed. I do know that tasks were regularly missed. Part of the problem was the target market. SMB's just had a really hard time spending the amount needed to do really high quality work. Last thing I will say is that several of the positive reviews were from friends of the company. If you knew a higher up you were more likely to get results. Worse then that OS stooped to writing their own reviews. Worst of all was when some negative reviews were left by employees on the job site glassdoor.com the CEO of the time had a company meeting to fix the problem with threats. OS was a really cool idea that got greedy, and lost sight of helping clients. Hopefully they will see the error in this, and couse correct.

This client was part of OrangeSoda Enterprise, a division that caters to the complex needs of large businesses and national brands. Every client that signs up with OrangeSoda Enterprise gets a dedicated team of marketers, each of which cares a lot about the success and satisfaction of clients assigned to them. We designate one person to manage the relationship and coordinate and communicate the team's work. Each person on the team has years of experience performing PPC and SEO on large/complex accounts. Our Enterprise division is so dedicated to finding success for each client that we have a retention rate far higher than the industry average. On 1-29-09, this client accepted terms and conditions that outline a non-refundable first month deposit and set up fee. PPC is complex, especially on large CPA based campaigns. When we first looked at this campaign after doing a competitive analysis, we identified many key areas that would require restructuring to ensure best long term value for Ben's company. This included extensive keyword and text ad creation. We were confident that it would have performed better than the previous campaign, but we knew and expressed to Ben that it would take a week or two for us to learn the account and ramp up with the new changes and structure. It took 9 days of extensive prep work, researching, and campaign building to set up the account. We launched on Feb 9th, and within just two hours of the campaigns going live, Ben was already calling us with threats to cancel because it wasn't performing to his expectations. We knew immediately that the same realistic expectations we had discussed many times before still needed to be addressed again. It is very typical for a brand new campaign to experience a temporary drop in production, but with a little time we always see significant improvement. Yet even after explaining this to Ben once again, he remained unreasonable and refused to accept what we had to say. He still officially canceled that same day at 5:00 PMwithout ever giving our work the chance to prove itself. After all of our preparation, research, and custom account set up, and despite the contract outlining the non-refundable deposit and first month fee's, we still refunded Ben a significant portion of the billed amount. We felt that this gesture was more than honorable. We worked in good faith with Ben, yet for some reason he chose not to work in good faith with us. We never like to lose a client, but in this case we agreed with Ben that it was best for both parties to part ways. We sincerely wish Ben the best in his continued online marketing efforts.