For this edition, I’ve enlisted the help of one our best Google Ad reps, Ahmed (we’ve got 3 haha, but regardless he’s genuinely awesome).

He’s from Bangladesh, and before you just ignore the rest of the email because he’s overseas, we're an agency, so we must be cutting corners, getting cheap labor, and making crazy margins at the expense of our clients.

That is not the case. We’ve worked with a dozen or so contractors on both the Meta and Google side, and interviewed dozens more, and Ahmed is the person overseas we’ve even considered for a virtual interview, much less hire. We pay him the same rate as all of our US-based reps, and is a native english speaker, so there are no language barriers or misinterpretations of any piece of our clients marketing.

I go to bat for him so hard because I know the general sterotype, especially of those from bangladesh and india, and quite frankly, they are definitely true for a reason, and I’ve delt with my fair share of that, as I’m sure many of you have.

But when you see an A player, you snatch them up, and couldn’t be happier to have him on our team. Not to mention his results speak for themselves.

I’ll probably have another newsletter on overseas hiring and our experience with it, because we’ve definitely seen the good and bad sides of it

Now on to his experience over the last couple month with Google

Here’s a recent win and what is working, from his perspective () have my notes. I’d add more, but then this email might turn into a book, he’s just that good

foundation repair business based in the Pacific Northwest. Even though their ads were somewhat working before he took over, the tracking was sh*tty (potty mouth, but agreed) and it wasn't converting profitably, even though they were spending $20k a month. Cost per converted lead went from $948 to $669. Converted leads went from 16 to 21. Closed work went from $93,000 to $152,000, almost 63% up.

Overall, the account got much healthier just by tweaking and improving the conversion tracking. (I’ll speak about conversion tracking in more detail in future emails, but long story short, this is the easiest win if you get a pro in. track and optimize for revenue, not form fills)

Recently, I have observed that PMX pushed a lot of junk impressions, and apparently the business owner is happy that they are getting a lot of eyeballs, which honestly didn’t mean anything. The work that I did and the stats that I just shared above: during those days, the impressions actually went down about 30% to 40%.

In actuality, all the junk impressions went down from PMX. Meanwhile, the clicks on search increased, ultimately increasing the converted leads and closed work, so nothing clever, just fixed what was counted as a lead before I touched the budget.

And now for the ugly. No reason for me to hide this piece, no one can bat 1.000, and you learn much more from the losses then the wins (most of the time, other times you it’s just a no win situation)

There is this B2B e-commerce auto dealer supply business, and this is one of the weirdest accounts of my life, honestly.

I've been working with them for about three months now. First off, I should give it up to the business owners. They are one of the most patient ones I have ever seen, and we have been trying and testing different things for three months. (be like these guys, the people you work with will work so much harder if you respect their expertise)

At the start, when I audited their ad account and Merchant Center, it was honestly sh*tty (no filter lol). There ROAS below 1 (this is bad), and the account was a mess. I did what I always do to properly structer the account and improve things from the get go and the performance immediately went from below ROAS 1 to ROAS above 2.

That was quite good. The clients were happy, everything was feeling good, and it was going good. Then I viewed their Google Merchant Center, and it was sht. The product titles, literally, were just sht.

so I simply grinded my ass off and cleaned it all of (this is quite tedious work and takes time to do properly, especially when you have an expansive catalog of products).

It actually burned a lot of working hours for me, but I redid all of their product titles how they should be and made the product titles much more promising and stronger. For some weird reason, after that, in just a week, everything went downhill, and the account went quiet.

We would not get any conversions for a week or two, and we are still struggling with ROAS. We are still below ROAS 1. I'm still trying. Honestly, at some point I was hopeless and did not want to work on the account and just tell them nothing could be done, but I honestly don't wanna give it up because the business owners are actually really nice, and I enjoy working with them.

I'm still trying to see what can be done. Just last week was slightly better, where we had some conversions on the search campaign, and let's see how it goes.

one final note on google ads to end it off. August 17th was the deadline for changing over your Google ad accounts target CPA to match your goals. (cost per acqusition)

What alot of google ad managers (including us) have done in the past is to set higher CPA targets than the campaigns actually got, to allowing Google the flexibility to spend it's entire budget while still going after the lowest CPA possible.

Now Google has changed that to focus exclusively on hitting your CPA targets. so if you notice a jump in your CPA, it's because they decided to start spending your money on junk placements to hit the higher CPA that you set, all to give more "consistent" performance

If whoever is managing your ads hasn't already adjusted to this new reality, it may be time to introduce them to reality and find someone else to run your google ads. If you run your own ads, sorry not sorry.

Just keep swimming,
Peterson