Whether you’re a business owner, in a marketing department, or a digital marketing agency, when you run Google Ads there is one cast-iron inevitability – One day an official Google account manager will call you and ask how they can help you with your PPC campaigns.
I’ve just had this conversation with a fellow SEO practitioner – she said she spent thirty minutes on a call with her official Google representative and all they did was talk through a list of recommended tasks that were already lined-up in her console to be auto-applied. She said they completely wasted her time and were of absolutely zero benefit to her.
I Experimented so that You Don’t Have to
About five or so years ago I was running a very successful PPC campaign in Google Ads for a local business. They had a £1,000 a month budget for their ad spend plus my monthly fee for managing their account. It was a great little campaign, it performed well and was good value for money for the client.
During the whole time the PPC account was running, Google representatives called on a weekly basis to see if I needed assistance with optimising the ads. I said no, thank you. They kept calling, for both this ad campaign and many others. I turned them down every single time.
But then one day I decided that I’d test them out – an account manager called and I said “why not?” and listened to their suggestions.
I sat and nodded my head, listening intently whilst they reeled off their suggestions from what sounded like a well-scripted list. I didn’t agree with more than nearly everyting I heard but I executed their instructions to the letter.
I then sat back and watched…
The campaign tanked. It cost more money, it had fewer clicks, and the conversions dropped. It was an unmitigated failure.
So I reverted all the Google Ads campaigns back to exactly how they were running previously and the campaign was successful again.
The Moral of the Story
In complete alignment with my friend, the official Google rep wasted my time, money, and good efforts. But at least I could see the level of expertise of official “expert” and was not impressed.
To this day, five years later and twenty years after I started managing PPC campaigns, they still call – every single week! I’ve had to put someone on the phone as a first line of defence to filter out all the nuisance calls, but Google still insist.
And the moral of the story is that if you’re a small business wanting to run a pay per click campaign, are in a marketing function and already doing well with your PPC, then ignore the calls from Google, and use an experienced Google Ads agency or freelancer to run your advertising. You’ll get much better value for money and your success rates will be far greater.
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