How to Maximize Success with PPC Management Vendors

Written by Justin Gross

After working with many organizations over 18 years, some as big as Proctor and Gamble (65 Billion Dollar+ Fortune 100), down to many mom and pops small businesses, I can tell you with confidence that often business owners, and executives get in their own way of success.

And this is not just a personal success issue. We’re talking as leaders, they fail.

When it comes to paid ads, and the like, and this can apply to any marketing category really, business owners and executives get in their own way.

Here are some examples:

Hiring experts who are smarter than them at a certain task/function. It’s good that they made the hire, but then they cannot let go of control long enough to allow result to manifest.

Specifically, they demand turning ads and campaigns on and off in a frantic way, or dictate the technical strategy that the contributor was hired for in the first place.

It’s not that a client can never have a good idea or you never want to test a client idea, but there is a breaking point, and a line where it disrupts the flow of the optimization, and usually hurts results, or even causes the campaign to fail. This is because the client hired us for a reason, but then we are not executing the way we normally do. There are “2 cooks in the kitchen”, and it doesn’t work.

Sometimes the dictation of strategy comes across as “only suggesting”, or “just an idea”, etc. But in reality the trust is just not there. The ongoing questioning, and suggesting changes, leads to some recommendations being adopted, against the better judgement of the agency sometimes. We DO try to say no when we KNOW something won’t work, but there are times where an idea is presented that has an unpredictable outcome. So in the end, the net effect of all of this, is that the agency isn’t really driving strategy fully.

They continually focus on negative outcomes and never acknowledge wins.

Regularly acting passive aggressively to their team members via slack, emails, or zoom calls.

Having no patience. There is a misconception that if you are “Really good” at ads, and know a specific industry, they will automatically just “work” immediately, and that’s not usually how it goes. Does it happen sometimes, yes, but more often than not some level of patience is required before results get to an “exciting” level.

These are obviously non productive behaviors, but for leaders who are overly emotional, they might slide into these toxic patterns, perhaps without even realizing it.

So sometimes a gentle reminder to the client/executive/leader that marketing requires patience, and is a process, is all it takes many times to smooth over a relationship and make it fruitful going forward. Or, if needed, calling out the unwanted behavior and allowing them time to correct it before resorting to more drastic measures (ex: termination of the relationship).

It’s rare that we are forced to terminate a relationship with a client, and in 18 years of managing ads, we’ve only had to do this a small handful of times, but it is a necessary option if the client refuses to adjust the undesired behavior. Because these types of behavior just lead to financial losses in campaigns, and campaign failure. Campaigns that suffer from micro management from clients, unfortunately almost always fail.

Obviously expectation misalignment can happen, and so again, this is where a conversation around expectations and the process can be extremely helpful, and in most cases, set the relationship, and thus the campaigns on a better path.

Author

Justin Gross - PPC and CRO Expert

Justin Gross is the founding principal of Hop2TheTop, a Google Certified PPC agency located in South Florida that specializes in Pay-Per-Click campaign management, website analytics, and landing page optimization. He has served as a speaker for reputable brands such as Comcast and Servpro, and has provided consultation services to industry leaders including Honda, Toyota, and Ortho-McNeil. As Justin articulates, “I am passionate about enhancing the profitability of websites.”