The fact that you are on my website reading this page means you realize you need help with your Google Ads account. That’s good, because I am absolutely, positively sure I can help you. However, is my service the best alternative for what you need right now? That is the question I’m trying to help you answer.
My ideal client is someone in a decision making role, typically the business owner or department manager. They have some personal experience with Google Ads, enough to know it is deceptively simple, but devilishly complex. They have come to realize that while it is easy to open an Google Ads account and send visitors to their website, it’s quite another thing to have an account that is truly optimized. They have spent countless hours and thousands of dollars, only to realize they are spending way too much of their valuable time and wasting too much money.
Here are some characteristics of a prospective client I believe will be pleased with my work.
- They have an established, profitable business.
- They are more interested in increasing profits than reducing expenses.
- They want a long-term solution and not a quick fix.
- They like a collaborative model because it means their knowledge of the market and their business goals are designed into the campaign.
- They have worked with other consultants or agencies and appreciate why my skill level and business model deliver the best value.
- They understand that creating an optimal campaign is an iterative process because no one gets it right without testing and fine-tuning.
- They accept ultimate responsibility for their online advertising success, because they know it involves more than the mechanics of Google Ads. Business model, website design, sales process, profit margin and many other factors are all vital to their ultimate success.
Here are examples of situations which I don’t believe will work well for either of us.
- You have no previous Google Ads experience. These people typically do not have an appreciation for how complex and time-consuming Google Ads can be and tend to have unreasonable expectations. When things don’t go as well as they had hoped, they go looking for someone to blame and that would most likely be me. Even if you have used Google Ads before, if you have not attempted to build a campaign to promote the business in question and therefore have no historical data for me to analyze, it means we would need to perform extensive testing. Testing takes time, costs money and reduces your ROI. If the product or service you want to promote is one where there isn’t an established search market, it makes it all that more challenging. Don’t get me wrong, I’m confident I would be able to perform as well and even better than most other consultants. However, charging into the unknown is difficult enough, but then having to manage your expectations, especially if you don’t have extensive hands-on Google Ads experience, is simply more risk than I care to take on. I suggest you hire another consultant or give it a try yourself. If after a few months you are not happy with the results and there is substantial data for me to analyze, I may reconsider my decision. I simply have too many other opportunities where I am sure I can be successful and my clients will be happy.
- You are only interested in spending a few hundred dollars for “on demand” consulting or using me as a form of call center resource. If you believe what stands between where you are today and a significant increase in online leads or sales, are just a few tweaks to your Google Ads account, then we are not a good fit. When I take on a new client, I almost never try to “fix” their existing campaigns because they are fundamentally flawed and it would be like putting lipstick on a pig. For some additional insight, read my article titled PPC essentials.
- If you are shopping for the least expensive monthly account management fee, we might not be a good fit. While my business model can cost you less in the long run, the cost is heavily front-end loaded because that is when most of the work is done.
- Those who expect perfection. I realize that $100/hour may seem like a lot, but there are other consultants that do what I do, who charge $300, $500, $750 and even $1,000 per hour, and even they won’t guarantee perfection. When you hire me you are getting someone who has been creating and managing PPC campaigns, full-time for over 15 years. You are getting the benefit of that experience on an hourly basis. You can turn it on and off at will. Any campaign or ad group I develop, will not be perfect when it is first launched and it will take time, and often a collaborative effort to complete the optimization process.
- Someone who will obsess over the time they think I am spending on their account. If you think you can control what you spend for my service by using a stopwatch during our calls or estimating the amount of time you think I should be spending on a given task, we will not be a good fit. This is not the kind of relationship I want and I have had to terminate more than one client for doing this.
- “Bus Op”, short for Business Opportunity or “get rich quick”. Most of the clients I’ve worked with in this industry are victims who are under the mistaken impression that all they need to do is drive traffic to their website and the money will just roll in. In many cases, their mentor, the person who got them into this get-rich-quick scheme, has even given them the exact keywords to use. When that doesn’t work out, they go looking for a professional who can provide a quick fix.
- I am not a good fit for eCommerce websites or Product Listing Ads / Merchant Center or video ads / Youtube advertising. Primarily because to do this effectively, requires a detailed understanding of the client’s product catalog and would require having my own back-end system to manage the complexity and dynamic nature of ecommerce. These are assets and experience I do not have. In the case of Google Merchant Center and Shopping campaigns, the product catalog needs to be uploaded to the client’s website in the form of a “product feed” file. Then this file needs to be updated on a regular basis. This would require having access to the client’s website to create and manage the product feed file. I am not a web developer and I make it a policy not to touch a client’s website. There are just too many things that can go wrong.
