Through live clinics, our own PPC audit offering, and other means, I’ve had the opportunity to assess efforts inside close to 1,000 PPC accounts.
From all this data stretching back years, one starts to see some interesting patterns.
It’s safe to say that going into the audit or live clinic process, I’ve generally expected to dive into weak execution or fuzziness around the details of how Google Ads functions. But sometimes, what we discover is so much more fundamental that it throws you for a bit of a loop. It’s a case of “how can I audit something that’s not really there?”
I’m certain fellow SEM experts have experienced similar rude awakenings. We came, we saw… not very much.
Let’s get into the rundown.
I’d characterize some of the insufficiencies in this realm as follows.
- Nibbling around the edges. Or put less charitably: “not even trying.” Think of the analogy of a promising high school young student who qualifies for a prestigious academy for the best and the brightest, but gets so stressed out the first day, he stops coming to class, doesn’t tell his parents, and spends his days doing heavy drugs. In the context of ad campaigns: weeks, months, and years are spent chasing elaborate theories about how to target people who are unlikely to buy. They approach the task as armchair historians of advertising from days gone by, devoid of measurement discipline, and as a result, achieving no measurable result. The antidote? Focus on core, proven, mid-to-high intent campaign types and targeting methods.
- The next eye-stingingly painful discovery? Fake work. Sad to say, but the trend in agency management in recent years seems to be “play defense.” Agency owners working with a skeleton team realize that some clients might check up on them, so they create elaborate scripts and protocols to flood accounts with random, indiscriminate changes. Sometimes real people do the fake work, seemingly having been instructed to do so. Frankly, it’s awful. The cure to this is simple: kick the frauds to the curb. Find practitioners with scruples.
- Can you imagine no work being done inside an account at all, with elaborate lip service being paid (in the form of gabfest meetings) to mask the lack of actual account effort? We can, because we’ve experience the pattern first-hand! In cases like this, we’ve been flabbergasted to hear faint praise for the “good points” of an account manager who has recently left or been fired. “They were really responsive and spent a lot of time explaining everything to us in our regular calls.” That’s all well and good. But imagine our surprise when we pored through the history and had trouble understanding what “everything” was, given that virtually zero work had been done on the account over 6-12 months. As in, like three total entries in Change History over a protracted period. You know the old saying: “If you’ve been playing poker for half an hour and you still can’t figure out who the patsy is, it’s you.” Now imagine a full year of that.