How DO you work with a Google Ads Management Agency?

Well, let’s jump into it.

After managing PPC personally for 18+ years, and working for, and with countless agencies, I can tell you what makes both the agency AND the client successful.  There are as you might imagine, things that need to be done on both sides.

But alas.

One of the key principles which I will reveal here right away, which applies to both parties, is that often times…

LESS IS MORE.

That’s right.  And for those of you who might find it a little difficult to let go of control in life, this might be a hard pill to swallow, but like a good medicine, it’s for your own good.

What exactly do I mean?

Well, here are the examples:

From the agency side, and this CAN apply to the client side as well, if you are often INSTRUCTING the agency what exactly to do/not to do.  (We’ll get to this in a minute…)

Too many changes, too fast, is dangerous.

Why?  When you lose track of the variables you’ve changed, and results drop, then you don’t know what variable led to that drop.

PPC is based on statistically valid data.  And always moving fast sometimes means you are literally ignoring the flashing warnings signs right in front of your face (the data).  Companies have a tendency to equate action with progress.  And that’s not always the case.  Sometimes the best thing to do is “nothing”. (not literally).

So if you are the client, the first thing to do when working with a Google Ads Management Agency is to listen to their advice.  If they are telling you to slow down with the number of changes you are asking for, listen to that advice.  They are not saying this to be LAZY- they are saying it to try to help you from sabotaging your own results.

The second thing to do is to look at your data, and understand that sometimes you need to leave things be.   The most valuable thing is not messing with existing tests whether that is landing page tests, ad tests, etc.  If you are always changing, changing, changing everything, you’ll never have proper tests running or concluded.  You cannot move the needle if you don’t wait for the data to compile to a statistically valid level.

The last area where less is more is communication.  Yes, of course you need communication, and you should have a set meeting cadence with your agency,  But what you don’t want to do is inundate your agency with emails, slacks, phone calls, and so on.  If you have a weekly call, don’t email the agency 17 times between the calls.  If you are going to do that, then don’t ask them to attend a weekly call.  Make it monthly and just say “I prefer email communication”.  Otherwise stick to your meetings.  After all, meetings are a great place to agree on major goals, next steps, etc, and therefore emailing in between just derails the structure/point of a good meeting.

Studies show that it takes a person 23 minutes to refocus on task after a distraction.  So add up those 10 emails you send per week.  The time it takes to ready them, answer the question, and mentally refocus.  You just took nearly 20% of your teams mental and actual bandwidth away for the week with those 10 emails.  That 20% now does not go to analysis, ad updates, landing page analysis, or anything else that needs to be done.

Heck now they might have to skip lunch just to stay on target because they didn’t schedule responding to all of those emails.  This is why micro management generally is considered toxic and non effective.  It just becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.  You don’t trust your team, so you spoon feed them every thing to do.  By spoon feeding them, they are not able to contribute as much actual value, as they are just reacting to your requests.  And you better hope that you DO know better than them, because if what you ask them to change doesn’t work, then what?  Do you blame them for poor performance?  If you micro manage your agency, and then blame them when results go down, you really need to self reflect.

Lesson learned – don’t micro manage your PPC agency.