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 [email protected], 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.
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
-
Google Trusted Store
Can a non ecommerce site become a Google Trusted Store, the company sells items but offline. How can we become one?
Branding | | aliciaporrata10090 -
Google Plus for Businesses - Should I add users to Company's Circles (branded page)?
Hi All, I know (or think I know) that one of the easiest ways to gain followers for my brand on G plus is to add people to our company's circles. Naturally, they often add you back. However, what does it mean to people who watch my brand (my G Plus page), the fact that I'm following thousands of people? Should I do it? How does it reflect on us?
Branding | | BeytzNet
Is there a better way to gain followers (specifically for G Plus)? P.S
We obviously have the badge on site but we hardly gain followers that way. Thanks0 -
Tips For Promoting Content & Contacting Journalists
Hey, After months of working hard we have some great content on our website, and now seem to be getting into a flow of releasing content consistently. I think it's now time to shift a bit of focus onto getting more eyes lookng at it, and importantly the right eyes. Has anyone got any tips or advice? Kind Regards
Branding | | JonathanRolande0 -
How To Rebrand A Company In The Eyes of Google?
Greetings, Nearly 6 years ago, our company switched its entire business model from providing customized vitamins to a women's health publisher that offers medical advice, news and health tips. We have actively developed a decent link profile for our new brand around women's health and specific health conditions. Nonetheless the old vitamin-related keyword profile is still very prevalent. We have many hundreds of links with old vitamin-related anchor text scattered across the web linking to our main site and to many vitamin mini-sites that we own. What is the best way to rebrand ourselves and basically eliminate this old link profile? My first thought is to immediately park / take down all our vitamin-related domains, and eventually these links will no longer carry any weight in the eyes of Google. The other strategy is to attempt to contact all the sites with the old anchor text and ask them to take the links down. This is not an exciting option to me as I know that this is tedious and a slow process with many dead-ends. Thanks in advance for any advice. Kind regards, Eric Darby
Branding | | Eric_Lifescript0 -
Do you have to have a Google+ profile page for a person before you can build a Google+ brand page?
There was some debate at MozCon 2012 about this issue. I have my personal Google+ page which I didn't want attached to the brand of one of the sites I manage. I saw no other way to create a new Google+ page for this brand except to create a new profile under a different gmail account. The problem is, I had to put in my personal name to create the profile (you can't put in a business name, Google won't accept it), so now I have two "Dana Tan" author pages in Google+, the second one is where I built the page for this separate business "Celebrate Communion." Unfortunately, this has muddied the waters because people are following me in both places (it's fragmented my circles). I would like to add customers who are already on Google+ to my business pages circles, but the business page won't do it. Is it possible to build a Google+ business page without all of this brand confusion? If so, can you send me directions? I have found nothing online that says you don't need a profile to do a brand page. Also, once the page is built, what is the best way for me to reach out to customers with google accounts? I don't see a good way to do that on businesses pages either. On my profile page I can load all the emails into my contacts list, but then those contacts can only be added to my profile page and not the brand page. Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! Dana
Branding | | danatanseo0 -
Using Multiple Locations for Google Business/Maps
Hey MOZers, I currently work for a company with several other offices in other countries. Is it possible to set-up Google 'Business' and Google 'Maps' pages so when a user in a given country queries 'our business' on either Google 'Search' or Google 'Maps' they will receive the relevant business information for that country. For example, if an internet user in Canada enters a query for 'our business' in Canada (and we have an office in Canada) is there anyway to set up our Google Business page and Google Maps page so that user receives the contact information for the Canada office, rather than the US office? Conversely, if someone in the United States enters a search query for 'our business' is there a way to set it up so that the user receives our address in the states?
Branding | | NiallSmith0 -
How to get Google to link external review sites in Google Places
Hi, I have several company profiles in Google Places and Google Sites, I also have the same profiles for those companies in review sites like Yelp! and so on. I have seen that other sites have links on the bottom where Google points to those external review sites, but that doesn't happen for me yet, is there a way to tell Google that I have profiles on other review sites so they can link them or is it Google whenever they find them that will link them? Here's an example: http://maps.google.com/maps/place?cid=14126341780178539960&hl=en At the bottom you'll see that it says: Reviews from around the web Now this is one of mine: http://maps.google.com/maps/place?cid=12168877126282825032&hl=en Now how do I get that line at the bottom provided that I know there are reviews out there in other sites? Is there something I can do? Or is it all about Google doing it whenever they see fit? Thank you!
Branding | | tass0