Who 'owns' your PPC account? - Blue Snapper Internet Marketing
Who 'owns' your PPC account? - Blue Snapper Internet Marketing |
Who 'owns' your PPC account? - Blue Snapper Internet Marketing Posted: 23 Jun 2020 09:59 AM PDT ![]() So who 'owns' your PPC account if you have an agency or consultant that manages it on your behalf? You or them? I'd never given this much thought until I spoke to someone looking to switch over the management of their Google Ads account from their current agency. Their agency had been managing the account for a couple of years but the client was concerned that the relationship and the performance of the PPC campaign had gone into decline. So time to move on. The client served notice of the termination of the contract and requested that, upon final settlement of any bills, the agency transfer the account over to them – they'd never been given their own login to it. All reasonable and sensible. But then came the rub: the agency demanded £5,000 to 'release' the account even though there was no contractual obligation to make this additional payment. Hopefully this business practise is an isolated instance. Of course, the client could've sought legal advice – a likely expensive process – or walked away and paid somebody else to re-create the PPC campaign. In this instance, that'd certainly be a lot cheaper than £5k, but they would have lost the campaigns' statistics and any optimisation that had been introduced over time. More importantly, they'd also lose the Google Ads Quality Score that the old campaign had accrued so any new campaign they'd create would have a higher overall Cost-Per-Click (CPC), at least initially. |
Posted: 25 Jun 2020 06:52 AM PDT ![]() One thing online businesses need to use as a cornerstone of their business decision making process is their digital analytics data (analytics data from a variety of sources: i.e. web analytics, search console, paid search, paid social, social media, etc.). Yet, according to a MIT Sloan Management Review only 15% of more than 2,400 business people surveyed trust their data. While there is no analytics method available that will guarantee 100% accuracy of your digital analytics data, by auditing your data you can ensure the data is as accurate as possible. This will provide you with the confidence to not only trust your data but to leverage the information provided in making objective business decisions, instead of subjective decisions. It is that lack of trust that explains why a mere 43% (according to the same survey) say "they frequently can leverage the data they need to make decisions." This low confidence in one's data equals failure. As marketing and analytics professionals, we need to work together to not only increase the accuracy of our data, but to educate people about the data and how to leverage it. The first step in this process is auditing your analytics configurations and thereby identifying issues, and correcting them to ensure the integrity of the data. The analytics audit processStep 1: Acknowledge analytics data isn't perfect When you start your analytics process gather together all those who have a stake in the outcome and find out why they don't trust the data. Most likely they have good reasons. Don't make claims that your goals is to make it 100% accurate because that is impossible. Use the opportunity to explain at a high level that analytics data captures a sampling of user activity and for various technical reasons, no system will be perfect and that's why they are most likely seeing data difference between things like their Adwords account and their web analytics data. Use an example of taking a poll. Pollsters take a sample ranging in size of 1,000-2,000 people of a total population of over 350,000 in the USA and then state their data is accurate within a few percentage points 4 out of 5 times. In other words, they are way off 20% of the time. However, businesses, politicians and the general public respond and trust this data. When it comes to web analytic data even at the low end of accuracy, your data is likely still capturing an 80% sample which is far more accurate then the data presented by pollsters, yet it is less trusted. Let the stakeholders know, as a result of the audit and implementing fixes, you could be improving data capture accuracy to 90% or even 95%, and that is data you can trust 100%. Step 2: Identify what needs to be measured One of the biggest issues when it comes to analytics data is, the analytics software isn't configured to collect only the correct data. The software becomes a general catch-all. While on the surface it sounds perfect to just capture everything (all that you can), when you cast a huge net you also capture a lot of garbage. The best way to ensure the right data is being captured and reported on is to review the current marketing and measurement plans. Sadly, too few organizations don't have these, so during your meeting, make sure to ask what the stakeholders' primary items they want measured are. Identify and gather all the "Key Performance Indicators" (KPI) currently being reported on. You'll need this before you start the audit. Verify all KPI are still valuable to your organization and not just legacy bits of data that have been reported for years. Sadly in many organizations, they are still reporting on KPIs that actually hold little to no value to anyone within the organization. Step 3: Review the current analytics configuration Now is the time to roll-up those sleeves and get dirty. You'll need admin level access (where possible) to everything or at a minimum full view rights. Next you'll need a spreadsheet which lists the specific items that you need to review and ensure are configured correctly and if not, a place to note what is wrong and a column to set a priority to get them fix. The spreadsheet I've developed over the years has over 100 standard individual items to review, grouped into specific aspects of a digital analytics implantation plus depending on the specific client additional items may be added. The following eight are some of most critical items that need to be address.
You now have an outline for where to start your analytics audit. Think of your organization's analytics data and reporting systems like a car. It always seems to be working fine until it stops working. You need to take your car in from time to time for a tune-up. This is what an analytics audit is. The audit will identify things that need to be fixed immediately (some small and some big) plus other items that can be fixed over time. If you don't fix the items discovered during the audit your analytics system won't operate optimally and people won't want to use it. How frequently should an analytics audit be conducted after everything has been fixed? Unlike a car, there is no recommended set amount of time between audits. However, every time your digital properties undergo major updates or if there have been a series of minor updates that can easily be viewed together as a major update, it is time to repeat the audit process. Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech Today. Staff authors are listed here. |
You are subscribed to email updates from "google adwords account" - Google News. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States |
Comments
Post a Comment