Be the expert you claim to be

My Very First “PPC Vlog”

So a couple weeks ago, i was driving (yes I was safe), and there was some stuff I just needed to get off my chest. So i decided to record my thoughts. It is quite “ranty” but it is also I feel something very important to me.

This is going to be something I do at least bi-monthly & would love any feedback, or ideas for future PPC Vlogs.

Without further ado, here it is.

The rant

This was going to be a column called PPC on the Road, about what I ran into that week and what a client, an in-house team or an agency could actually fix.

This one’s a rant.

I’m tired of lazy PPC people who call themselves experts. In-house and agency. Same problem.

The audit that pushed me over the edge

A few days before I recorded this, I audited an account. Not a huge one. About $7,000 a month. Still real money.

An agency was doing their SEO and their PPC.

I don’t open an audit in campaign settings. I start with the ads, the keywords, the conversions. Then I went looking at how the thing was actually set up.

Automated bidding. Google picks the CPC every time the auction runs. The only levers left are how fast you want the budget spent, and what the budget is.

They had left it on.

No max CPC.

Google could bid whatever it wanted. It had been that way since the account started. Seven months.

The advertiser wanted to know why the account was awful. They had already paused Bing. “It just didn’t work.”

The agency set it up. The client never looked.

I checked. I asked if they had turned that on themselves.

No. The agency. “The guys that know AdWords.”

Are you kidding me?

I wanted to yell at the client too. Then I caught myself. You don’t know what you don’t know. And some agencies count on that.

They take the client who hired them because the client doesn’t do PPC. The client expects a specialist.

When the specialist is a charlatan, the client doesn’t blame the charlatan. Not at first.

They blame AdWords. They blame Bing. They blame Facebook. They blame the channel.

If you spend the money, learn the basics

If it’s your budget, you need enough to smell a bad account.

You need a login. The account should be yours, not the agency’s.

You should be able to open it and say, with the little you do know, “this doesn’t make sense.”

Stop hoarding the knowledge

Some agencies, and some in-house people, get scared to explain the work. They think if the client or the boss understands it, the revenue goes away. Or the job.

I call b.s.

Teach them what’s going on and they help you do the job. They know the product. They know the customer. They know the back end you never see.

They’ll also tell you when your clever idea doesn’t fit. “I know these buyers. That won’t land.”

That’s better information than you had.

And when they walk into the CEO or the CMO, they can explain the report. You made them look competent.

You look competent too.

We’re not David Blaine. It shouldn’t be a bag of tricks.

If they can see some of the work, they respect it more. Most people hire an expert because they don’t have the time to be one. Be the expert. Also teach them enough to make the call.

If you say you’re an expert, be one

Nothing bugs me more than “I’m an AdWords expert” from someone who has never opened the account their agency runs.

I look in. Holy crap.

A monkey could have done this. My daughter was 8 months old. She could have clicked around and set it up better.

You’re making the rest of us look bad.

STOP it.

If you say you’re the person who does this, be that person. When enough of us are careless, all of us get the reputation.

Stop being a used car salesman. Start teaching.

Give the client, the boss, the company enough to decide.

Then ask yourself, every time, one question.

If this was my company, and my money, would I do this?

Ask that first and you’ll do better work, skip the stuff you shouldn’t ship and sleep better. So will your client.

That was the rant. I was going to try to do it bi-monthly.