If you have a Google Ads account, you will be constantly pestered by a ‘Google Ads Specialist’ who will be asking to setup a call to discuss optimising your Google Ads services.
These emails or phone calls will almost always come from ‘Your Dedicated Google Ads Account Strategist’.
Does the following email look familiar?
Note that these guys use @google.com email address and this will be their ‘accreditation’ that they are from Google or appointed by Google.
If someone without an @google.com email address does make contact or calls, then they are likely real fraudsters who will empty your bank account for you while they are at it.
So who are these actual Google Ads people that bombard your inbox and call your phone constantly to offer their free advice?
Well the truth is that the even the real @google.com people are NOT really Google but third parties that are AUTHORISED to call you with Google’s blessing of your personal data (so not technically not illegal scammers) but they have the simple task of making you spend more money (a lot more) otherwise they are not doing their job and won’t get their commission aka salary. Trust me, they are not doing this out of the kindness of their heart and they are specifically told not to tell the ‘client’ (you) how this all works.
The con works like this.. They will tell you that your Google advertising needs ‘optimization’ and usually use the fact that Google themselves makes you think this because they keep lowering your ‘optimization’ score by adding more recommendations and almost force you into thinking that increasing your score is going to get you better advertising but its not always the case.
However, most of the time these ‘specialists’ will actually mess up your perfectly working campaign by doing something that is actually not a good idea. For example by adding ‘automation’ or ‘tweaks’ that will effectively over time create ineffective keywords, increase costs or perform other ad boosting techniques to basically bring in mostly unrelated searches and/or drive up advertising costs which will certainly drive up your hit rate (visually, it looks like an improvement) but its often unqualified uninterested people which in turn makes you waste your money.
But the real ‘trick’ comes near the end of the call when you feel like they have brainwashed you enough that you will fall for their master trick which is to get you to raise your budget because they will show you how you are ‘missing out on clicks’ because your budget is too low. So now they want to know if you are in charge of the account and if you can increase this budget by 25%, 50% or 100%. If you go with the increase they will hound you further in a few weeks to push you even further but if you don’t – another ‘specialist’ will no doubt be in touch once again.
Its literally never ending.
There are also specialist companies in who are based in first world countries that will fleece you by making massive promises and charge you for their skills. The vast majority also use voodoo to trick you into thinking they have done a great job and bewiled you with stats that are quite literally just useless visitors to your website that actually do not end up making an enquiry or purchase. Their favourite is targeting your own company name or product in the ads, so that you essentially pay for clicks that would have come to you for free anyway.
At the end of the day, just doing a simple Google Ads strategy that is well thought out and very targeted is the best but recently I cannot recommend Google Ads for most companies as it has become so expensive due to the ‘bidding’ nature of how it works and it will wind up costing you more than you make. Only very select businesses will work with these ads and if you are marketing something mainstream then its probably not going to work.
Google – How to validate callers : https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2375460?hl=en-GB#check&zippy=%2Cemails%2Cphone-calls
Google – 3rd Party Complaints : https://support.google.com/google-ads/contact/thirdparty_complaint
