Module 8 - What Google Ads support calls are actually worth

Why will Google phone you?

Because once you start spending consistently you land on their radar, and you get a booked call. At some point you are going to get a call from the lovely assistants at Google and their ad team.

That call is there, as far as Google is concerned, to give you help and assistance and tell you how to run your campaigns better. From my perspective, and I might get hammered for saying this, they are really there to open your wallet and get you to spend more and more. Which is fair enough. It is Google's job to help you spend your money.

I have had lots of experience of these types of calls, and I have debated long and hard with some of the Google reps as to whether to follow their advice. Many, many times, having followed their advice, I have struggled to see the benefits. Although if you have got massive budgets and you are spending an awful lot, you are going to know what you are doing anyway, and you probably know more than most of these Google reps or salespeople slash support agents do.

Is there anything useful in the call?

Yes. They are always there to give you the latest techniques, and they will tell you bits of where your campaigns are struggling. It is always good to know if there are little things that could be changed and tweaked.

My advice would be that when they do call you, be careful. Be mindful that they are there to try and get you to spend more of yours or your clients' money. It is a challenge, because they will book in regular calls with you.

It is probably better advice to have an agenda of your own and get them to work on the account for you. Get them to solve issues and to suggest improvements around your strategy, based on the ways you want to work having taken this course. A lot of these guys at Google do not really understand Google Ads. They have been working on PPC for donkey's years. The one I spoke to yesterday had been at Google since 2006, and she was lovely. We spent some time debating strategy.

Why is the push to smart bidding a problem?

Because smart bidding needs a budget most testing campaigns do not have. They do push smart all the time, and they will try to get you to move everything to a target cost per acquisition or a smart bidding strategy quite quickly.

The Google Ads exec I spoke to yesterday, I said to her, okay, the campaign I am running has 3,000 placements in it. If I move to a smart bidding target cost of acquisition for that campaign, it has to spend probably 30 or 40 bucks on each placement before it really understands whether that placement is going to work. Yes, once it does start getting conversions it will try to show it into more channels like the ones that are working for me. But as they say, it needs a budget of five times the target cost of acquisition.

She said to me, what is your ideal cost of acquisition? I said, and I advise you to say the same, as little as possible. In reality, the client I was talking about has a target acquisition cost of 20. So if I set my target cost of acquisition at 20, I need a budget of 100, because to make the metrics work it needs to be five times as big as the target acquisition per day to give it a chance. If I have got to run that for two weeks to test, that is 1,400 for testing.

Does that testing budget actually test anything?

No, because it cannot buy enough views on each placement to produce a click. The challenge is, first, do you have that budget, and second, will it then serve that campaign across a lot of those placements? It will serve them, but will it serve them enough on each placement? No.

If you spread 1,400 across a thousand placements and they were all split evenly, you have got 1.4 dollars per placement. If your cost per view, depending on your bidding strategy, is 10 cents, you have got 14 views. What are the chances of getting a click through off 14 views? Let us say you are getting a really good click-through rate of five per cent. Five per cent of 14 is not one yet, or just under one. Do you see what I mean?

So we are not able to test properly like that. When I explained it to her like that, she had to agree that fair enough, what I was talking about in terms of choosing the placements myself and choosing my own bidding strategy worked better. If you are using one of the target cost of acquisition strategies such as cost per lead, you are not necessarily going to hit or achieve those goals within two, three or four weeks, and you are still spending on testing.

What should you watch out for besides smart bidding?

Maximise conversions. Be careful of it, because when you are in your test phase, if you are using that maximise conversions goal, it will spend all of your budget. You are giving Google the signal to go out and spend all my budget to test and find where the conversions are, and they will often try to get you to use that as a strategy.

So be careful when you get a call from the lovely people at Google. They do not necessarily know as much as you do, and having taken this course I hope you know an awful lot more than a lot of them do. It is a difficult one. Use them, but be careful and be mindful that they are there to try and get you to spend money.

The lesson here is that when you get that call, and it will come, and you think, oh great, I am now on Google's radar because I am spending regularly and spending a decent budget, so I am now going to get some assistance, be mindful that their main objective is to get you to spend more money.