Before being contacted by a representative from OrangeSoda our company was running a successful online campaign.
When OrangeSoda contacted us they claimed that their "Marketing Team" would be able to drastically reduce our cost per lead. For their service they wanted a $4,000 "setup fee" and 15% of our overall ad budget.
We ended up agreeing on a $1,000 setup fee (which should have thrown up a red flag right away that they were willing to drop their "setup fee" so drastically) and 15%.
We were told by the sales representative the following things:
1) We would have a whole team working on our campaign.
2) The campaign they setup would perform drastically better then our current campaign. (He was so confident in this that he told us if they didn't we should contact our credit card company and demand a refund.)
After signing up we found out that it would only be one person working on our campaign; this was disappointing but we figured they knew what they were doing.
After the first day our campaign ran with OrangeSoda we knew that this wasn't a company we wanted to work with. We encountered the following problems:
1) OrangeSoda's campaign doubled our normal clicks per lead (performed twice as bad as our existing campaign)
2) Our Cost per lead increased by 25% (40% if you include their 15% fee for "improving" our campaign.)
3) There were misspellings in our Ad text. When we called our Account Manager she informed us that "those ads never went live" however we found the ads in the first place from a live search.
4) OrangeSoda spent double our requested daily budget.
Overall we felt like we were completely misled and asked for a refund of our initial purchase minus the money that was spent on advertising.
They offered a refund of less then half of our initial purchase claiming that a lot of work went into creating our campaign however the keyword list they sent over was almost an exact copy of what we were currently using; and they didn't even take the time to check the spelling of the ad text they created.
We sent over a detailed email of our concerns and said that we were willing to work with them to come to a mutual agreement. Their Vice President Mitch Labrum claimed that their decision had already been made; and gave a mailing address for our attorney to contact them with any disputes.
I would not suggest working with OrangeSoda; we are not pay-per-click (PPC) experts and their campaign performed significantly worse then the campaign we were originally running.
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