Jul '23 • General Discussion
A Story & A Lesson
I plan to post more in the coming days, but I've been a bit thrown off with the 4th of July, kids staying up late, and getting sick.
In the meantime, I've got a short one that has been on my mind.
I recently took over management of an account from a previous employer. This employer was the first agency in which I had ever worked with Google Ads and the ad manager working on this account was one of the best in the agency.
I remember talking to her and being impressed by her genius every time we spoke. She just GOT it, you know? She knew Google Ads inside and out and could talk about the intricacies in the same way I talk to my nerd friends about video games.
Needless to say, I was excited to take over the account and learn everything I could about what she was doing in the account, reverse engineering her strategies to level up my GAds game.
Upon gaining access to the account, my excitement came to a screeching halt...
It was... ugly.
It wasn't even following best practices from a few years back, but was just... off.
Ad groups had odd mixes of keywords that had differing search intents.
There were disapproved ads with loads of trademarked words in headlines.
She was optimizing for smart goals.
Headlines were clearly written for ad strength over user resonance.
Negative keywords were jumbled.
Landing pages were not aligned with search intent.
I was flabbergasted.
The ad manager I had put on a pedestal had lept off of that pedestal and belly-flopped into a mud puddle.
In her defense, I'm hoping this was just not a priority account and was neglected, but that's not really a good defense.
At the end of the day, it was yet another case of me assuming someone else was flawless because they had a lot of experience or worked for an agency that made a lot of money.
When I had a year of experience in ads, I had to fire an ad manager with 10 years of experience.
I audited an ad account for a $15MM agency and found it riddled with holes.
I've helped accounts that stumped gurus and authors of esteemed Google Ads books.
And on the flip side...
I've forgotten to set up conversion tracking on a new account (in the last 6 months... 😬)
I've missed monthly account optimizations and left accounts untouched for 30+ days
I've had several clients pay me and see absolutely no success from their ad account
(I could keep going)
The point is that we should never discount ourselves and put others on a pedestal, but we should also never be so arrogant that we believe ourselves to be above reproach.
Everyone has more to learn (especially in an everchanging environment like Google Ads) and everyone can learn from anyone.
To truly be an Ad Master we have to embrace the idea that there is always more to learn, that there is merit in testing (almost) everything, and that we can't win every time.
Hopefully you find it encouraging, like I do, that we're all trying to figure this out together.
It means that we can help each other on our journeys and that asking questions isn't admitting that you're lesser in any way; it's a necessary step as we seek to better serve our clients.
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A Story & A Lesson
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