There’s a lot of negative sentiment towards Google reps, which is on full display on the Reddit PPC and similar Subs.
In this article I’ll offer my opinion about Google reps and why they don’t offer much value for many advertisers and agencies. I’ll also touch on how you can get the most from the relationship with your rep, should you wish to pursue one. But first, I want to discuss the role of reps, how they get assigned to accounts, and what their goals are.
What’s the function of a Google rep?
First and foremost, all Google reps are commissioned salespeople.
By definition, this means their core function is to sell you Google advertising. And, since you’re already a Google customer this falls into the “account manager” category of sales. This is all a fancy way of saying that their goal is to secure your ongoing business and upsell you on more ads.
How do Google reps accomplish their goal?
Fundamentally, reps want you to increase your spending on Google Ads. This can be accomplished a few different ways.
Increasing budgets on your current campaigns
Easy peasy, your rep may ask you to increase the budget on one or more of your ad campaigns. Hopefully this aligns with your own goals to increase sales or lead volume. But often it doesn’t align with your own goals. For example, if you’re running “Max Conversions” bidding on a particular campaign and increase your budget, you may get some more leads, but the cost per lead will often go up.
Adding new campaigns
Google reps will often suggest that you add a new campaign to your account. Currently, Google likes to push Performance-Max campaigns. If you already have one next up is often Demand Gen. There is nothing wrong with either campaign type, providing they meet your business goals to increase sales, leads, or brand awareness, but potentially with less efficiency as above.
Activating features and optimizations that allow Google to spend more money automatically
This is where a lot of reps start because they don’t have to necessarily discuss how doing this is going to increase spending on your account. Instead, they can talk about how these features will simply improve performance, i.e. get you more leads and sales. Here are some examples and how they affect your spending:
Applying various Recommendations to your account
First, quite a few Google Recommendations are excellent. But not all are excellent and quite a few are just downright bad without considering the context for your business. A classic example is “adjusting your bid goal” such as lowering your tROAS to “boost” performance. Yes, boost sales volume at the expense of gross profits. While it’s a possible business goal, e.g. to increase customer acquisition, it’s not a common one. And this is almost never discussed by the rep.
Another example is redistributing unused budget from one campaign to another. This may be okay in some cases, but there’s generally a reason why you wanted to spend more on that campaign in the first place. Note that the benefit to Google is you spending more money regardless if you want to spend it on that budget-capped campaign.
Activating auto-apply Recommendations features
On the surface this sounds great. Quite a few recommendations will be automatically applied to your account saving you from doing it yourself. But did you know that some recommendations can directly increase your campaign budgets? And as above, Google can and will adjust your tCPA and tROAS bids to spend more of your budget. Google can also, automatically swap out all your keywords for 100% broad match, remove negative keywords from your account, and more.
Other suggestions from the rep
Reps will often suggest turning on automatically generated creatives. These will “beef” up your ads which can, in turn, boost the variety and volume of queries you serve ads for. This doesn’t necessarily mean more conversions, just more clicks, which you pay Google for. To be fair, a lot of AI generated copy is rock solid. But, unfortunately, about 10-20% is just plain bad… often way off topic from your offer. At my agency we also still see Google inserting phone numbers into headlines and descriptions. This is directly against Google’s own creative policies and gets ads disapproved. Terrible!
They also love “enabling the display network” on your search campaigns to get “more clicks and conversions.” This almost never leads to getting more conversions, just wasting your money on low quality display clicks.
Different types of reps
Google employs numerous types of reps, all with the same goal. Here are the most common ones that are client or agency facing.
Third party client reps
These reps are outsourced from third party companies. They typically work with smaller budget accounts (<$5,000/month), have very little training and no hands on experience with Google Ads. As an advertiser, you shouldn’t expect them to help you with strategy. Rather, they will simply go through a grocery list of recommended changes in your account, most of which coming directly from the “Recommendations” tab that’s already provided in platform.
I discourage advertisers from working with these reps because the results are typically pretty bad.
General Google client reps
These reps are employed directly by Google and work on somewhat larger accounts. While they have a lot more training than 3rd party reps, I wouldn’t classify them as PPC experts as most do not have any practical knowledge running campaigns. While you may get some good ideas from these reps, I would not blindly implement everything they recommend. This level of rep may be helpful if you’re not that knowledgeable about Google Ads, but these conversations are a complete waste of time for PPC pros.
Google Accelerated Growth Team
These Google employed reps have direct PPC management experience and usually work hands on in your account. The group identifies high potential accounts and pitches a rapid scale up period of 3-months in which they want to double or triple your ad spend.
Agency reps
Also employed by Google, these folks tend to be the most experienced and work directly with agencies on accounts. Importantly, the mandate is the same, however they tend to use a more collaborative and strategic approach. Note that this is additive to other reps, meaning in agency land we end up dealing with both client reps and agency reps on the same account.
Why agencies don’t like reps
There are several reasons why the relationship between agencies and reps has become strained over the years.
First, most of the reps we deal with start out pushing features without considering the client budget or goals, i.e. without any context for the account. If we participate in 2-3 meetings we can sometimes bring the rep up to speed. The problem is that most reps are only assigned to an account for 1-2 quarters. So just by the time the rep is starting to “get it” they are gone and we’re starting over with somebody else. Importantly, there is no real transition between reps, simply here today, gone tomorrow. For example, one of our large clients has been attacked with click fraud any time we’ve tried to run display ads. Yet every new Google rep on the account immediately suggests running P-Max and display remarketing. Why isn’t there a note on the account that says “click fraud, do not recommend P-Max or display ads?”
Second, Google reps end-round us all the time. Reps routinely copy end clients on emails with introductory statements like “you are missing out on conversions from your campaigns” or similar that make it sound like we don’t know what we’re doing. They also reach out directly to clients without contacting us at all. We have had incidents where a rep has gotten on a call with a client and had them make numerous changes without involving us at all. Google does have a “policy” against this sort of thing when there is a Partner “agency of record” but it still happens all the time. The “Google Accelerated Growth Team” and others have done this several times this year to some of our biggest accounts. After we find out they claim they didn’t know there was an AOR assigned. Um, it’s as plain as day as our agency appears there when they log into the account.
Third, the advice from all level of reps even when they fully understand an account is really only meaningful for junior PPC managers. Anybody that has 2-3 years of full-time experience almost certainly answers rep recommendations with “yes, we’re aware of that feature and we’ve decided not to implement that here because…” At my agency, everybody has a minimum of 5-years under their belt, and most of us well over 10-years in the trenches. Somebody that’s been at Google for two months really doesn’t have much to offer us. This means we end up wasting time telling them no over and over again. In fairness, they occasionally “catch” something we’ve missed. But that’s very rare at my shop since we already do internal cross-audits.
Fourth, reps are just a nuisance. Newly assigned Google reps routinely call at virtually any time of day (I’ve received calls a 3 AM on the weekend) without an appointment and often hang up without leaving a voicemail. They’ll then place several follow up calls a day until you answer your phone. They also email, of course, asking for an appointment. When you say “no thank you” they ask why. When you explain how you’ve never received value from reps before they will claim they’ve identified some really unique opportunities… believe me, they haven’t.
Lastly, reps consume a lot of time that could be put to better use. Imagine an agency that has say 50 Google Ads clients. Now imagine that reps demand a 30 minute meeting per client every month. Add correspondence, meeting prep time, and follow up items. Call it an even hour per month. That’s 50 hours a month of time that probably provides no value to advertisers or the agency. Does that sound beneficial?
Why you might want to work with Google reps
Reps can be helpful in certain circumstances. As I touched on above, reps may be helpful if you’re lacking expertise to properly manage your own account. And they can be useful if you are a freelance PPC services provider. As you don’t have anybody else in your organisation to bounce ideas off of a rep can be in your corner.
If you are going to lean on your Google rep to help you optimize your campaigns be sure to ask MANY questions. Whenever they offer you specific advice ask them what exactly that change will do and whether there are any potential downsides. Also clarify whether that change may end up increasing your ad spend or lowering performance in any way.
Outside of this scenario reps can help in a few other ways.
First, reps can provide industry reports that offer insight into your target market. While this sounds great, I have never received any report that was enlightening or helped me to optimize an account. The reason for this is that the reports are generic and cover industries broadly. For example, let’s say you sell automotive paint. You ask your rep for a relevant report on your market niche. The Google rep sends you a report on the entire automotive market without any segmentation.
Second, reps can help you apply tactics or strategies when you’re not sure how to proceed. For example, perhaps you don’t know how exactly the “customer acquisition” campaign setting works. They can, hopefully, explain it to you, or walk you through implementation. However, in my experience I’ve found that a lot of reps really don’t understand less commonly used features. You can almost certainly get an answer faster on the PPC sub. Case in point, I enquired about a month ago about an exotic shopping ads implementation and am still awaiting a response.
Third, if you have trouble getting technical support they might be able to expedite a response. This is hit or miss in practice, though, and tends to only work with senior reps.
By the way, reps used to be the only way you could add exclusions to certain campaign types. For example, you used to have to email your list of negative keywords to your rep so they could apply those to P-Max campaigns. But this is no longer necessary as there is an online form submission tool for this now.
Summary
Google reps are salespeople pure and simple. Once you understand that you will be in a better position to decide whether to interact with them. If you’re fairly inexperienced a rep might be useful as a sounding board or to give you some suggestions for optimizing your campaigns. Always challenge any recommendations they make and understand whether there are any potential pitfalls.
If you’re a seasoned PPC pro there’s almost never any benefit to engaging with reps. They will recommend a bunch of changes to your campaigns that won’t make sense and really just waste your time.
The relationships between reps and agencies have become strained over the years. Reps routinely reach out to advertisers directly and either unintentionally (hopefully) or intentionally make the agency look bad. And reps lack the expertise to offer value to experienced PPC managers. Google has done some work recently to improve the situation, but there is still much to do before they will regain the trust of advertisers and agency partners.
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