“Pierre, my Google Ads management agency just told me that my conversion tracking hasn’t been working. The thing is, it’s been going on for six months”.
Unfortunately, I hear this sort of thing too often and is just one of the many ways that a PPC manager is failing their client.
The job of a manager is to maximize high quality traffic, which means traffic that will highly convert, and at the lowest possible cost. The ads are just one part of this, the other being the landing page doing most of the heavy lifting on converting that traffic. Do both sides of this coin well and you minimize the cost of that conversion.
The problem is that many managers think managing the ROI is to manage bids to maintain the desired ROI goal. Often this is done by some software and a human rarely goes into the account. No wonder they did not notice anything wrong for six months in my story above.
Paid ads management is not about bid management, a term that should make you run the other way should it be mentioned. Bids are a small, almost insignificant part of managing a campaign. The real work – at least 80% of it – is testing different ads, new ideas or hooks that will get more clicks and more conversions.
Notice I said to maximize clicks and conversions. Has this client’s agency been doing that? Obviously they did not concern themselves with the conversion side of things. Later in the conversation, the client mentioned, “their explanation for missing this is that they were more concerned with bid cost rather than conversions”. No mention of maximizing the number of visitors from the ads so my suspicion was right: all they did was bid management. This was hands off and the client paying for some software to do its job, nothing else.
With nearly 100% automation now possible in Google Ads, many agencies will take advantage of this and “manage” your account by doing very little themselves, and charge you a handsome fee for the privilege.
Ask what in a manager’s mind is the most important aspect of their job and what they spend the most time on. If the answer does not include testing new creatives, they might fail you. In fact, it should be the first answer.
Your business is at stake. Don’t be like this client and waste over a year of the same mediocre ad producing lackluster results, not to mention the six months of conversion data lost which could have helped in the analysis, at the very least provide a base line. Hire an agency such as Lucid Web Marketing that has your best interests in mind.