Innocently Dangerous

Written by Bill Thursday, 01 September 2011 09:41

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I’m pretty angry this morning, and I’m going to vent some of that anger in my blog.

Yesterday I encountered, yet again, an Auto Dealer who has been mistreated by their PPC Ad Agency. Actually, forget “mistreated,” they were screwed over, duped, disrespected and robbed.

So, without naming names, I’m going to layout how this happened and continues to happen every day.

 

In this case, I was meeting with Mark (not his real name), the Internet Manager for a prospective client. Mark’s a pretty sharp guy and knows the Auto business well – 25+ years of industry experience is not a common thing for the typical Dealer Internet Manager. I like this gentleman, a lot.

When I began talking to him Mark complained about the unhelpful reports he was receiving from his Agency for their Adwords campaign. But they had a long-standing relationship with the Agency and much trust had been built, so the problem has been tolerated.

In that short meeting yesterday I helped Mark dig into his Google Analytics with the goal of gaining insight into the quantity and quality of website visits coming from Adwords. I truly wanted to help him get to the truth that his Agency reports weren’t sharing, and of course I was hoping to enhance my own company’s value proposition in his eyes.

Within 2 minutes Mark was sitting there stunned, with a sense of being violated, like coming home to find your house ransacked. Google Analytics revealed that the Adwords campaign had delivered essentially zero visitors in the past 6 months. The campaign began a year ago and delivered visits steadily for 6 months, and then rapidly trailed off to nothing.

Now, I should explain that an earlier conversation I had with Mark resulted in Mark making some specific inquiries to his Agency. And after a couple weeks of feet dragging, his sales rep from the Agency showed up at his office offering a huge apology. It seems they had inadvertently dropped his account during a corporate transition and had not been running ads for the past X weeks. “We owe you $5000” the Sales Rep told Mark. “Mea Culpa!”

Note the “$5000” was equal to the ad spend and fees that were paid during those X weeks while the campaign was down. It does not include the Dealer’s cost of lost sales.

So, when I sat down with him yesterday Mark was aware that the campaign hadn’t been running recently. But, Google Analytics showed this wasn’t an X week outage, it was 6 months. Imagine yourself in that situation. How will you explain to your boss that no Google Ads have been running for 6 months, and you weren’t aware?

Mark was bewildered and even a little fearful. I felt sick, like when you're watching a creepy movie.  I pointed out to him that he deserved credit for exposing the problem even though the Agency’s monthly report had misled him. Both he and his boss have a right to be furious.

How did this happen? Was the Agency intentionally pocketing for themselves the ad spend and fees from this Dealer? No, and they’ll probably issue a refund. So how can the Agency’s PPC campaign managers, senior management and Dealer sales rep not realize that the Dealer’s ads aren’t running for 6 months?

The answer lies in a three-pronged strategy that guides how some of these large Ad Agencies operate in the PPC arena. It’s not a conscious strategy, but it works:

• Leverage Complexity – The Internet is a freaking mystery to most people. And that complexity blocks people, include Dealer staff, from accessing the information that reveals the return they are getting from their Internet investments. Ad Agencies can therefore operate with almost zero accountability to their clients, and they take explicit steps to avoid sharing information by which they can be held accountable. Mark knew the reports he was getting weren’t helpful, and he was savvy enough to seek out someone that could help him find the information he needed. But the Agency wasn’t going to help him with that.

• Relational Distance – The Adwords experts running the campaigns in the large Ad Agencies are not customer facing. In fact, even the Agency sales reps don’t talk to them much. The experts are far removed from the clients they are serving. As a result, “client” and “serving” are not words that define how they think about their job. They are technologists, stuck in a “factory,” mass producing Adwords campaigns. This job is not how they envisioned their career turning out, and they have no real sense for how they are making a difference in the world. In short, they aren’t highly motivated to put a client’s needs first, and no one else in the Agency knows enough to call them on it. If a campaign gets inadvertently dropped out of the system, oh well. That was someone else’s fault and he left the company 3 months ago, The staff that remains behind is innocent.

• Culpable Deniability – Ad Agency sale reps are customer facing, and their job is to sell more services and keep clients happy. These sales reps are “people persons” and they need to be that way to be good at their job. They are not technologists, and they do not know their way around the inner workings of Adwords and Analytics. Actually, most technologists make poor sales reps. Having too much information is known to hamper the effectiveness of a sales rep. In short, Ad Agency sales reps don’t know if your campaign is making a positive return on your investment, and they don’t know how to find out. They are innocent.

This Dealer lost the opportunity to make hundreds of sales over the past 6 months. In effect they were robbed. Yet everyone at the Agency is innocent. That’s dangerous.

Google Adwords is one of the most important sources of sales leads for your Dealership. Virtually every Dealer needs to be investing there.

But, if you have hired an insider or an outsider to manage your Adwords, be it Web Lever or any large or small Agency, you should insist that you are routinely shown in-depth information from your website analytics to reveal the quality and quantity of your PPC visitors. Without that you may become the next victim of the three-pronged strategy.

Bill

PS – did I mention that Mark’s inquiry triggered the discovery that it wasn’t just Mark’s campaign that had been dropped, but the campaigns of 50 other Dealers had experienced the same outage? You may be one of them.