In the Spring of we were contacted by email from Laura Katona from Dual Ignition Search with some very specific recommendations to better optimize our Pay Per Click campaigns for my e-commerce company. Normally, I dismiss such unsolicited email, but this was a personalized message and the suggestions actually seemed decent.
For several weeks or months, Laura would call or email, asking to discuss our PPC campaigns, but I was busy and overall pretty satisfied with the company we were using for the service, so I brushed her off.in late June of Laura requested to come to our office (in Connecticut) and meet face to face. She arrived and did a nice little presentation for myself and some people in my company, she was a very attractive young women, and she presented a very basic pricing model. $ 500 set up and 10% of our monthly advertising spend.
We don't do contracts she stated, and she sent over a conditions sheet, which was very vague. I went ahead and notified my previous agency managing my AdWords that we would be switching to a different agency, deciding to give Dual Ignition a chance.
They then started asking for hundreds and thousands of dollars do set up Google Analytics, (we already had it set up) but they wanted to set it up for their system, and $ 400 to set up another analytics, but we were assured that it would pay us back because it would save us money in the end.in all over 60 days, they we paid them $7800 in fee's.
Then after two months, they sent me new rates! $ 1500 per month per website, plus 15% of the monthly budget. Essentially a 250% increase! Take it or leave it, no negotiations. They said they wanted to "upgrade our account to a senior advisor"
Obviously I refused as this was clearly a bait and switch. I wish I had been monitoring them more carefully, because after we refused to their 250% price increase, I reviewed their accounts and keywords they set up and it was obviously set up by a computer software, the terms were all generic, and matched our natural search results where we scored well. They really ripped us off.
I refused to pay their last bill of $ 2600, in bogus charges and they say they are going to file a lawsuit in New York City. They send emails from different names at the company to appear larger then they are.
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