This past year, in addition to new client onboarding audits, I conducted three high-stakes audits for B2B companies spending six and seven figures per month on ads. Different industries and products. Different marketing teams. Different organizational structures.
But all three had the same underlying problem: overreliance on the wrong things.
(Two of them have already become clients, and we’ve improved their ad programs significantly.)
What stood out to me across all three audits was how much trust was being placed in the wrong areas. The higher the ad spend, the more detrimental these issues became.
Over the next few weeks, I’m breaking down the three biggest issues I found.
Issue #1: Misunderstanding the Role of a Google Rep
When I asked who was managing the account, the answer was: “Our Google rep.”
Why this is not a winning strategy:
Firstly, Google reps are great. We always take the call. They get us into betas, share insights about new features, and help us test what’s next. Some are quite smart, and I genuinely appreciate the relationship.
But Google reps are salespeople, not practitioners. Most have never actually managed a Google Ads account day-to-day. Their goal is to get you to adopt new tools and spend more money. If you don’t know how to use those tools properly — or if things go wrong — they don’t know how to fix it.
While there is literally not a wrong or right way to do things, leaning on a rep can often result in achieving unintended results.
Example 1:
A Google rep had recommended completely reorganizing the account: weekend-specific campaigns, location-specific campaigns, single keyword ad groups — basically a strategy I truly loved 10 years ago. And I’ve seen plenty of unconventional setups work, so who am I to judge if the strategy proved valuable?
But within two months of the reorganization, the numbers were showing something terrible: cost-per-clicks climbed by over $1 per click. This was a high-volume account spending close to seven figures per month. The account went from performing well to bleeding budget fast.
Let’s get real:
More than once, I’ve been tempted to go back to over-segmentation, and sometimes we have done it to prove things out. Clients often make requests or want to push the envelope, and because there’s no clear playbook, we test for them. But you cannot change your whole account strategy, especially if you have significant spend. And let’s get real — what spend isn’t significant to a business? Whether it’s $1,000 or $1 million, don’t risk it. Micro-managing and over-segmentation is no longer necessary when you have significant volume and data to work with.
Do this instead:
- Test a section of the account or a few campaigns. Never go all in. If you work with an agency, lean on their expertise to drive optimizations, not your Google rep’s scorecard.
- Either agency management or managing accounts in-house, make sure the person taking those Google rep calls has a strong understanding of your business, knows how to manage Google Ads accounts, and understands how your campaigns align to your marketing goals.
Example 2:
In another audit, the client had only been advertising for two years. The marketing manager did her best to learn Google Ads with the help of a Google rep. Performance seemed pretty good, but the company wanted to explore if and how to increase reach, spend, and of course revenue. Very quickly into my audit, I realized the Performance Max campaign, while performing well, was not doing what the client thought it was doing. Their Merchant Center had been suspended for over a year, meaning they weren’t serving shopping ads at all. My client was so surprised her Google rep never caught that, especially since the rep helped her set up the Performance Max campaign.
Let’s get real:
The client saw their spend compared to revenue and thought it was a win. They could have stayed in that comfortable position. But why not push for more?
Do this instead:
Having a suspended Merchant Center is not the end of the line. We’ve experienced Merchant Center issues many times, especially within the life science space, and the issues my team uncovered can be corrected. Unfortunately in this case, the dev and IT teams can’t schedule the updates needed to the site until a few months out. Until then, we’re focusing on feeding the account customer data, targeting with product page feeds, and using keyword signals as an alternative until we can get their shopping feed tip-top.
Google reps can be valuable partners in learning what’s new. But they shouldn’t be your strategist.
Next week, I’ll share Issue #2: why obsessing over keywords is a waste of time.