← The Paid Search Podcast | A Weekly Podcast About Google Ads and Online Marketing
The Paid Search Podcast | A Weekly Podcast About Google Ads and Online Marketing
The Hidden Lies Of Google Ads Agencies (Episode 510)
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Foreign. Hello and welcome to the Paid Search Podcast. My name is Chris and today I have a pretty heavy topic to talk about. I'm going to tell you about the hidden lies of Google Ads, agencies, things that I see that make me quite upset, things that I see on a regular basis that are told to clients, the agency's clients, the manager's clients, that are not true and are designed to deceive the advertiser so they don't know what's going on or they have false impressions about what is going on in their Google Ads. So that is what I'm talking about today. It's a, it's a heavy topic, but I, I want you to know so that not another person out there falls for these schemes. And that is very important to me. So before I do, I want to tell you about something that is also important, is that you know about my favorite Google Ads management software out there, which is optio. Optio.com PSP is the only URL out there that offers you a sneak peek into the new amazing, powerful tool that Optio has built. They haven't released it to the public yet, but you can get a free preview of this for 28 days to try this new tool that they've launched that takes AI integration and makes their extremely powerful software even more powerful. It's become now a power tool. It's not just a recommendation and optimization tool. It's now a power tool for Google Ads and now moving into Microsoft TikTok, Meta, LinkedIn. So multiple channels and you can chat and learn and tweak and adjust your campaigns using the power of AI. So get quick answers to things, solve solutions, find problems in your Google Ads and in many other channels. With this new Optio tool. You can try it for free 28 day free trial@optio.com PSP use the chat box on their website and tell them you heard about it right here from Chris on the paid search podcast and you'll get that 28 day free offer that is an exclusively longer offer that you get anywhere else. That's optio.com PSP all right, so on to the weighty topics. I am going to talk to you about something that comes from experience. I often take on clients who are very upset, very bothered by an experience that they had with an agency. So I'm not talking about any particular agency and it doesn't even have to be a quote unquote agency. It's just a Google Ads manager. Whether that's a business of a hundred people or that's a business of two people. Some company that's managing their Google Ads has done something that is deceitful in some way. And I'm going to tell you about nine ways about the hidden lies of Google Ads agencies so that you don't get scammed anymore in Google Ads. You know, things to watch out for. And some of you may very well be victims of some of these kind of shady things that I find happen pretty often. So I'm going to go through these nine things starting with number one. And these are not any particular order, but I put some of the ones that I think are more common near the top here. So number one is this cheap cpc. So essentially the lie, the scam that people are pushing is hey, we can get you cheaper clicks, we can get you traffic at a lower cost per click. That's what CPC stands for. So if any agency tells you that they have some way to manipulate or have an advantage or can do something that other advertisers can't on Google Ads and offer you a lower cost per click, be very wary of their promise because the fact is is they can't. No advertiser can get you a cost per click right away, right out of the gate that is lower than you've already been paying. I say that with some caveats because there is a case where you, I mean you can do that a little bit. But, but that's, that's, that's a, that's a different discussion. What's actually happening here, the scam, the lie that's happening is that, is that in the reporting that they provide when they tell you, well, here's, here's after two weeks of doing what we're doing, or here, here's the first month of our data and you'll see that your cost per Click is down 80%. If they're offering massive CPC reductions, it is because they are mixing networks. If you are running on Google Ads and you know you're running exclusively a search campaign, the cost of the click is the cost of the click. You don't get deals Google Ads, you don't get better offers. It is a auction. And auctions determine the price of the market. Now in the reporting that an agency might give you is they might mix a performance max campaign with your search or they might mix a display campaign or remarketing campaign or search partners. Other Networks outside of google.com is essentially. So it's not Google search, it is, it's other things that cost a lot less. A remarketing campaign cost per Click will be much, much, much cheaper than a search campaign, or typically it should be. And so when they mix those networks together and just show you a report that says, this is how much your cost per click is, and they don't break it down and show you, here's how much your search cost per click is, and here's how much your display cost per click is, that can be very deceitful. So a lower cost per click, if that is a draw that you've been pulled into, because they say that they can offer better cost per click for, you know, because they have some special formula. That is not true. That is not true. What they're doing is they're blending networks, okay? So that's the first one. Second one is this. If they are Instead doing just google.com and they say, no, no, we're not going to be blending anything, right? That thing that I talked about, maybe they're not doing that. Maybe they're only running on google.com and it's just a search campaign, and yet they're able to deliver significantly lower traffic. And you say, well, Chris, that is not necessarily true because, you know, this company promised me lower cost per click and sure enough, they turned it on and I get tons of traffic. So much more traffic. My cost per click is so much lower, so much more affordable, you know. So what you said is not true, Chris. Some agencies, some managers are able to provide lower cost per clicks at, you know, 50, 60, 70, 90% lower cost per click. Well, I've got bad news for you because there is a hidden network within the google.com search campaigns called the search Partners. Now, these search partners can be a fraction of the cost per click, and you would never know. It is reported to be the same network. And unless you know where to look, you. You had no, you would have no idea that 80%, 70% of your traffic is instead coming from search partners, which are other search networks that you've never heard about, search engines that you've never heard about. Absolute trash networks. I've, I've talked about the trash of search partners many times before on this podcast, and I still stand by that. It's junk. I never use it, and I don't advise that you do. The agencies that run it do so because it offers a tremendous boost to traffic. And I'll tell you how I can spot it. I see it all the time. I was just working in an account that spends millions on Google Ads, okay? And I was looking through and combing through their search terms, trying to find Some, you know, hidden things, some stuff I can learn from normal kind of research that I usually do. And I came across this like 5 to 8 word search term and it was absolutely beautiful. I couldn't believe it. I saw tons of searches on it, tons of impressions. It was exactly what the client sells. And I was like, how, how are we not advertising on this term? And this is so specific and people are searching for it, this is phenomenal. And then my brain clicked in and I realized, wait a second, this is too good to be true. There's no way a normal human searches this way. It was a really obscure kind of search. And sure enough I went in and looked, separated out my traffic and found out that search partners, that's a bot, those are bots, those are not real searches. It was the same search thousands and thousands of times within a few days and it was clicking on the client's ads and driving tons of traffic. And it was junk, it was absolute junk. You can actually usually spot search partner traffic because it, it's not real, it's not real traffic. It's often derived from bots and you know, that's not done by Google, but instead it's done by third parties that click on these search partner ads. So that is, number two is even if they're just running search, there are other ways to drive unqualified traffic. So you might want to ask, am I getting only google.com traffic? If you're suspicious, ask questions, Ask questions. Alright, so number three, this is one I hear all the time. Dear client, let's say I'm the agency, I'm talking to my client. Well, client, you know, I realize you're not getting enough leads, but what we really need is to double your budget. That's there's just so much volume, there's so much competition out there. We just need more budget. This will fix your issue. More spend will get you more of what you need. You'll get more leads if you spend twice as much. 75%, you know, increase in budget will absolutely increase your conversions, your leads, what you're looking for. This quote unquote fix of just adding more budget is in itself a lie, a scam. Because what's happening is these agencies, these companies are perfectly happy to just throw anything at the wall and you foot the bill. If a lead comes through, great. If it doesn't, well, you just need more spend. They're happy to use broad wide matching of just about any kind of traffic and sometimes that traffic converts, but if it doesn't, well, you should spend more. So broad wide traffic, traffic so that any kind of, you know, potential success is going to come through with volume. It's all about the volume game. And they don't care if you need to spend $30,000. That's your problem. They get a better percentage cut if you spend 30,000 versus 3,000. So more spend is not a solution. More spend is effectively just pouring and wasting more of your budget. The real manager, the real agency who's doing the work that they should, should be finding ways to optimize and thin out the waste in order to make your budget more efficient. So that's the lie, that's the scam, is that more money means more success in Google Ads. That is not always true. In fact, whenever I talk to my clients, as many of you listen to this podcast know, I very rarely ask for more money until I've proven that I can take what you've given me already and make that as efficient as possible. So spending more is the lie. So don't fall for that. So moving on now to number four. Number four, conversion tracking lies. So what's happening in this situation is a agency, a manager, will set up very low bar conversions. These very low bar conversions are tracking clicks, minor actions, not actual leads or sales. So an example of this would be a conversion that tracks clicks on a phone number, or a conversion that tracks add to cart, or a conversion that tracks view to cart, or a conversion that is doubling. Maybe you have a conversion that tracks clicks on a phone number and calls to a phone number. So now it's doubling, maybe potentially tripling your conversions. So these conversions, you know, these inflated conversions make your campaign look like it's doing better than ever. So if you get a promise that, hey, we can, we can improve your cost per conversion by 50%, you know, these wildly, vastly different, you know, promises of spending, you know, spending the same budget and somehow able to vastly improve your cost per conversion. Be aware, define what a conversion is. And here, and here's, here's where the lie comes in, is that a conversion in itself provides no value. The real tie in should be there's a connection between a conversion and your CRM, your, your customer relationship management software, your CRM software should actually have a connection between a lead, a sale, some kind of value that's attached to the conversion itself. So then you have a one to one connection so that when a sale comes in, you get a conversion. And if it doesn't, there's no fluff that's happening, there's no additional Conversions. It's just a sale is a conversion. A lead is a conversion period. So there's a direct CRM tie in. So, all right, we're almost halfway through here. Well, we really are halfway through. We're hitting number five now. Number five is this. And this is one that I'll tell you, makes people more angry than any lie that I've heard anywhere else. This is. No, we cannot give you access to your Google Ads account. We cannot give you access because what we do is proprietary to our process. No one does what we do. Our processes are so far beyond anyone else that we can't let that get out. We can't show people what we're doing because. Because then there'd be no value to our intellectual property if we shared our process. So, no, we can't give you access to the account you pay us. We'll build a campaign and we'll run it, and we'll send you reports. You can talk to the managers, but you just can't see it. We just don't let you log in. We handle everything. This situation is so ripe for lies and fraud and scams that it's it. How. How can you completely blindly manage something and not start to fudge and stretch the truth if. If the person has absolutely no transparency to know where that traffic's coming from or if. Or if that's really happening? You know, when you say, hey, I want to focus more on this, you know, let's get more sales on this widget B over here. Instead of widget A, they say, sure. How can you be sure that that's happening? You can't see the campaign. You can't ask questions. You can't see your keywords. You can't see the integrity of what it is that they're doing. And even more. And here's the part that can be most hurtful and most infuriating. You pay this agency $10,000, and they say they're putting 9,000, maybe 9,500 maybe into the Google Ads account and only keeping 500 for themselves or maybe a thousand for themselves. How can you even be sure of that? How can you be sure that they're not taking half of it or more? I used to work for an agency many years ago. I worked for a Google Ads agency. And that agency would charge $20,000, and they would keep 10,000 of it. They would keep 10,000, and then we would be instructed as managers for that agency to put, you know, 30% into Google, maybe 60% into Google, and then another 40% would be into basically arbitrage type of stuff. You know, campaigns that would drive high clicks at very low CPCs. Basically, you know, absolute spam is junk, provide no value to the client. But what it does, it provides very high click volumes, high traffic volumes that look good on a report. And we were safe. We were safe. Well, they were safe. Wasn't my agency, I'm just working there for a very short time. They were safe because the, the clients had no transparency of their accounts. They could not see their accounts. They could, they never would. They didn't even have a login. They'd never see it. All they would see was our reports. So I can tell you from an internal point of view and as well as a guy who has patted the back of many very upset business owners that have fallen victim to this. So it's very real. All right, number six. Number six is no real management. This one I find to be quite common because of Google's push for performance max and smart campaigns. Essentially just leave it all to the algorithm, leave it all to our system and we'll get you the leads. You just give us an audience and a conversion tracking and we'll figure it out for you. Well, okay, sometimes that works, a lot of times it doesn't. And the problem is, is that agencies won't disclose that that's entirely what they're doing. They will charge you the same management fee to just set up a performance max campaign and then just let it sit, never touch it, never adjust it, never really do anything and just kind of, kind of float around and you know, give pretty reports and fancy talking salesmen that, that don't really, really give true answers. This is, as I said, become quite common because of the use of performance max campaigns which drive high volume and very often really struggle to provide real value. All right, number seven. Number seven is brand traffic. I won't harp on this one too much because I know I've said it a lot, but essentially what an agency will do is they will mix brand traffic with non brand campaigns. So this is something where your business name, let's say your business name is XYZ Motors. And they will have some keywords or allow certain search terms to flow through that is just XYZ Motors or XYZ Motor Company, something like that. And essentially that's just your company name. So someone's searching for your company and guess what? They always call, they always fill out the form, they always convert, they always buy because they're looking for you. They, that's what they're doing, they want to do something on your website so they're searching for your website and then they convert. So that provides better metrics, it makes everything look better. If you're allowing brand to flow through and you don't control it, your reports look phenomenal. So you're, you have a better conversion rate, you have a better click through rate, you have a lower cost per click. Everything looks really nice. And, and if you don't know what questions to ask and if you don't know that this could be a problem, you could be paying 30, 40, 50% of your budget just towards brand traffic that you would have gotten anyway. I have a specific example here. I had a company I was working with for a while. I did a great job for them. I managed their Google Ads and they decided they wanted to take it in house. They brought on someone in house that, you know, I don't know anything about them but you know, I assume they knew what they were doing and they re engaged with me and I said oh hey, you know, how's it going? And they're like yeah, we're having problems. Can you take a look? The Google Ads account says everything is great, right? Everything's up. Since, you know, since this person took came on board, everything has gone up, everything looks much better. But we're experiencing a lot less leads, a lot less sales in our company. And so I took a look and basically they had removed brand campaigns or brand negative keywords. And so instead of this company paying for new sales, they were just paying for returning sales. That's what almost in their, their campaign had entirely become, was just returning sales. It was just the same company name over and over again. And that's what was getting conversions. So essentially they were driving returning sales and paying for those returning sales instead of driving new sales to their website. Major problem happens all the time. And this was an instance of actually an internal employee causing that problem. All right, number eight. Number eight is optimization score. If a company agency manager uses your optimization score to tell you that you need their help, their expertise, because look how bad your optimization score is. I don't want to go into the whole reason why that's a lie, but I promise you it is a lie. I have nothing to gain. Even if you never work with me, maybe you never call me, I have nothing to gain from telling you this, so please trust me, it's a lie. Your optimization score does not reflect the success of your campaign. It does not truly mean whether your account is optimized or not. It is Baloney. It is junk. It's not real. It is a sham to encourage you to make Google's. Take Google's recommendations. So optimization score is not a true measurement of success. And if a agency company says, oh, look, you have a 23% optimization score, we can get that higher for you. Hire us. They are lying to you. Clear as day. Last one. This one might make some of you agencies and some people that are listening. It might make you a little upset. Please don't take this as a personal. A personal attack. Not all of you are doing this, but if you hire a company that is dentist specific, if it is car, car sales specific, it is doctor specific, it is, you know, some kind of specific industry. If it is vertical specific, we just handle psychiatrists or we just handle chiropractors or something like that. Okay, This, I find becomes abused sometimes, not all the time. This is not nearly as common. This is the very last one. So it's not as common, but this can absolutely be abused. Where they just take their templated campaign and then just copy and paste it. They. They take what they do for all the other accounts and they just copy and paste it and then continue on. There's nothing unique. There's no real custom solution built for you. It is just. You're buying their intellectual property and then they're applying it to your account. Sometimes that's great. I'm not pretending like that's always bad. It could be great. But be aware, this is something that I consider to be a bit in the gray area. Specialized agencies, specialized managers that only work in one area, it's absolutely advantageous for them to build. Build something or not. Excuse me. It's not advantageous for them to build something that is unique or new or fresh. It is absolutely better for them to copy and paste the same templated strategy that they've always done. So you make the choice there. If that doesn't matter to you and you don't really care about that, then great. But they should be upfront about that. Ask questions. And that's the whole point. That's the last thing here is ask questions. Ask for an. Ask for a tour of your account. Ask for your actual keywords. Ask to see the search terms. You know, we live in the age of zoom. And ask like, hey, can I get the manager of my account to actually give me a tour of my account? Can I see that? Can I. Is there a way I can actually measure the conversions that you guys say I'm getting against what I'm truly getting you know, I got, I got 30 calls this month, but your report says there were 120 conversions. We need, we need to, we need to figure this out, right? Ask questions, get real answers. And hopefully this discussion will help uplift the PPC community. Make it a little less scammy, spammy, trashy and make it a bit more honest. Which is all what I'm all about. I hope this is useful to you. If you'd like to just. If you've lost hope, if you've lost hope and found. You know what, this has happened to me more times than I can count. I'm so sick of it. You can reach out to me. Chrishaefer.com I offer Google Ads management and you can get more information. Chris Schaefer.com and I can help, perhaps save you from this pit of despair. Also, my sponsor, optio.com PSP is a great solution for you to try and manage the campaign and optimize the campaign, improve the campaign yourself, get real answers. Get a real power tool for managing your Google Ads as well as other other channels out there. You can find that@optio.com PSP and if not, I appreciate you guys listening. I will be here next week.