Google Contacting Clients in an Adwords MCC?!
-
I am curious if this has happened to others and if so if you were able to resolve it.
Today a client forwarded an email that went to a client account and we were in no way copied on it. This is a client that spends in the 6 figures with us and I was shocked to read (Any bold or italics I have added):
Hi *****,
My name is Jimmy Morrow and I am an Account Strategist at Google on our Agency Team. Your account was recently selected for free dedicated support this quarter and I will be your new point of contact at Google for all things AdWords. We can go over a few housekeeping things I noticed, broader strategy, and some betas that would be a good fit. Please let me know when you have time for a 20-30 minute phone call when we can go over the accounts and make a plan for working together this quarter.
Thanks and just let me know a time that works best for you!
Best,
Jimmy
To me, they have essentially gone around us and with the "housekeeping" and "beta" comments sought to make us look either incapable and/or uninformed.
We are Google Partners, etc. and we have clients in our MCC for Adwords. I have never seen an occasion where Google blatantly tried to steal the client as it appears is happening here. This is a client who heretofore had NEVER used Adwords and they have been in business since before there was a Google or an Internet. We brought them to Adwords about 6 - 8 months ago!!! They are spending 6 figures on Adwords and I am ready to pull them out and spend the money elsewhere.
We sent emails from our UK and our Houston office and no response from lil ole Jimmy. Our UK team has tried calling Google and nothing and then Chatting with them and we can get nothing.
This is a client who has a lot of faith in our abilities based on many things we have done for them that worked and they are the kind of client that let's us know when issues arise. So, they are not going to switch and that is not the issue. The issue is Google acted as if they wanted to embrace agencies and if that is so, why then try to back door them?
I hope to hear from others who are handling PPC with Google. Thanks a ton.
Robert
-
Alick,
I did use the Adwords community forum and was pleasantly surprised by the input. One person (level 13) stated this had happened to him and gave some good input. Another did as well. Thanks for taking time to send an answer to me.
All the best,
Robert
-
Our UK office was able to reach the associate adwords strategist's boss finally via phone. He apologized and said it was a mistake, etc. He has agreed to ensure the clients are aware that they work only with agencies and they should not have been contacted, etc. I have to say that once we were able to reach someone it did get handled. But, IMO it does not change the behavior so... wait and see.
The good news is that we believe for our accounts we have a new contact with Google who is feeling he needs to give us a bit more effort due to the issues with our two clients. I will guardedly say... "All is well that ends well."
-
Alick,
Thanks for the Google community suggestion, I hate to waste the time there but will give it a try.
I have been dealing with Google and Adwords for ten years and the email is from Google and the person is _____@Google.com, an Assoc. Account Strategist. AKA junior sales fellow that started there last week (IMO). This has devolved now as the guy sent me an email stating: "It was a mapping issue on our end since there are two primary MCCs linked to the account and previous strategists have worked directly with the end client. It is now updated."
Interestingly, the client has not used Adwords before so we are not quite sure how they can make this statement. BUT, in his response to me he goes on to state he has also contacted another client from our MCC!!!
Edit:(Which would seem to say you were trolling through our MCC.)
And therein lies the problem. I have never been one to knock Google like so many do. I understand they have a business and we and others choose to play on their playground. But, when you go out and make a big display about your desire to Partner with Agencies, etc. and then you turn around and destroy that trust, your hubris is going to cost you. I realize they could care less about our account or us as an agency in terms of a single 6 figure client is literally less valuable than a nickel in my pocket. It is just sad that they once based everything on do no evil. I was truly shocked by the email to our client.
Thanks again for your G community suggestion; I will try it out.
Robert
-
Well put, thanks EGOL
What is interesting is that we are dealing with a lot of clients and have a very difficult time getting even the lowest end response from them. Then, most of those you can talk with recently went through training with the person sitting next to them that arrived a month earlier at best.
But they send this stuff out and make statements that really hurt our reputation. That is the pisser of the deal.
-
Hi Robert,
I have seen few such queries in adwords community where I find those emails not from Google. So if you post your question in Google adwords community you will get response from Google employee soon. There is a Googler name 'Kathleen' she respond very promptly in such case. So post once there I hope you will get reply from 'Kathleen'. You can also contact Kathleen on twitter.
Hope this helps.
Thanks
-
Fear not. This is just Google out doing a little drive-by shooting. They are not going to start building landing pages, writing ads, calculating profit margins and matching them to bid levels, or spending advertiser money. The advertiser is going to be one of six people the Google person talks to on any given day, the Google person isn't going to get his hands dirty or break a sweat, the advertiser isn't going to understand most of the beta stuff that they get nudged towards. After a few calls the googler will move on to fresh meat and the advertiser will be back on his own. He will probably be damn glad that he has someone to do his calculating, sweating, getting dirty and running the account. He didn't really want to do this work anyhow.
Google consultations are more to make you aware of new stuff, rethink your old stuff, and make you think they are offering great customer service. Their main hope is to expose you to new things so you might decide to produce more revenue for them. If you are a reasonably smart person, you will buy into about 1/2 of their advice, decide that 1/2 of it is above your technical level, and 1/2 of it can't find a slot on your "to do list". Overall, about 25% of it will be helpful and for that you should give thanks, but the people at google are not going to do your work for you because that doesn't scale.
-
I disagree with your "shitty practice from Google." I personally think it is blatantly unethical.
Edit: by disagree, I mean that unethical is worse than shitty practice.
-
Well, you aren't the only one. Shared this post with our PPC guy...
yup, they've been doing that to our clients for a few months now.. very annoying. they even did it for CLIENT who wasn't spending that much. for another client, they called with same thing. for many others, when I login to their accounts, i've noticed the alert at the top right saying "you have been selected for agency support, please click here to schedule a call". I mentioned it to our rep and they said the google agency support team that might contact clients isn't to replace us blah blah blah. shitty practice from google.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
When products are discontinued- best way to handle pinned or googled images
What do you lose by deleting a product and it's images from an e-commerce site? We have many product images with pinterest pins and shares or that show up on google images searches. Our site is an active American craft gallery with jewelry, art and handmade gifts from about 300 different artists. Most products are made in small quantities others are 1 of a kind. So we often have products selling out. Most items are organized by artist. Are there good practices to follow that will best keep our social media presence and links? I'd also like to stop buying extra space for all those images on my server Thanks so much Stephen
Branding | | stephenfishman0 -
How Google decide reading time of a page?
Dear friends, I have a question. How google decide bounce rate? For an example- I open a website through organic keyword from Google. Now I have tab of landing page in browser I do not close this tab for 10 minutes and continue doing my other things after some time I come back on that tab and close. Can Google know? This page has been read till 10 minutes. Can Google decide the bounce rate for this session? If I do some click boost for my negative reviews can I do same thing in my website? Is it useful? If I open one tab and come back after one day than what happen? Silly question but confusing me so please help me. I will be very grateful to you! Thanks all
Branding | | docbeans0 -
Google plus reviews and multiple company profiles
We have a Google plus profile for our brand/ organisation which has become quite powerful. We are conscious that we don't want to miss out on local search queries so want a local page but we don't want to get rid of the company page that we have built. We are a nationwide website with one physical shop. Will having a local business Google plus page and a company Google plus page be seen as duplicate or in any way negative- especially if you are posting similar/ the same links and content on both pages. We also want to encourage reviews- is it possible to leave reviews on company pages or is it only though local G+ pages? There is a reviews tab but it does not seem possible to leave reviews. On the main Nike G+ page is it possible to leave reviews or would those companies have to set up local pages for people to review?
Branding | | VUK-SEO0 -
Add Google + button link to google page and not link
Hello SEOOOOOOOOO moz people ! I was wondering if you know how can I add Google + button to my page I tried to set it up in google page http://awesomescreenshot.com/08d1a9hmef https://plus.google.com/b/109790526955470383191/109790526955470383191/posts But i would like to link the button to my google + fan page https://plus.google.com/b/109790526955470383191/109790526955470383191/about and not the url of the page. As our website is indeed 12 websites if you go to http://www.ibremarketing.com you don't have the same +1 than http://www.ibremarketing.com/me or http://www.ibremarketing.com/ma Any idea of how to do it ? It would be amazing 😛
Branding | | AymanH0 -
Google auto-correct affecting one of my keywords
Hi there, I have a keyword "finao montreal" that used to rank 8 or 9 in Google serp. All of a sudden it dropped under the top 50 results, I was wondering why and I found out that Google now auto-corrects "finao montreal" to "final montreal". Finao is a well know brand of custom high-end photo albums and I find it strange that Google corrects it. Anyone has an idea on what to do with this situation? Is there a way to provide Google some feedback about the autocorrect?
Branding | | valadas0 -
How to encourage Google to recognize us as a "brand" in the Organic SERPS
You've probably seen that for some searches (most commonly for specific product types) that Google offers something like the following in the SERPS: Related searches for widgets: | Stores: | Widgetland Widgetworld Widgetbarn Amazon |
Branding | | PathMarketing
| Brands: | Widgetdog Superwidgets Widgey | I'm working with a reputable brand of widgets - they're not just a supplier or a retailer, but a company that designs and builds its own. Does anyone know how Google decides which brands are worthy of being recognized in these related searches, and how I can encourage them to recognize our brand similarly? So far I've done the following: Knowem.com brand protection Add products to Amazon Sell our products on eBay List our products on Google Shopping In other words, do what a popular brand would do - appear in many channels, with a large and diverse footprint. Does anyone have any experience with this sort of thing, and how to help a brand get recognized as a brand?5 -
Creative way to secure local addresses for Google Places?
For those of us that operate business in other areas that we technically dont have an "address" in... are there any creative ideas/ways anyone has run across in securing a physical address that you can use for local listing? I have already tried the virtual office type of companies, and their inventory is limited to major metropolitan areas.
Branding | | rhutchings1