Having the leading marketing role in a start-up is hard. Why? Because it involves crucial decisions that can skyrocket the business or burn millions. Should you hire someone to manage your digital advertising budget or work with an agency or should it be a combo for both? If you decide to go with an agency, should they be an all in one shop that can cover most channels or multiple agencies that specialize? What about design, landing page development, branding. Now Google is in the game offering to manage accounts for free and it seems like a no-brainer to use them especially for a startup where every dollar saved is a win, or is it?
Once you join the Google Ads platform, If you are spending enough, someone on their team will call and sell you the opportunity of having them manage your campaigns for free. You will get the know-how (they work at Google for F* sake!) and money you would have spent paying an agency or internal team to manage Google can now be invested in actual marketing. And Google? Google gets more money spent on Google. It’s a win-win.
Experienced CMOs have a sixth sense for when something seems too good to be true, and now I’m asking you to use yours. Before I explain, I want to give you a short, 100-word example of how this endeavor turned out for one of our clients.
Bloomscape Case Study
Bloomscape is a well-known online plant shop that ships healthy, ready-to-go potted plants direct to people’s doors, along with plant care instructions.
They had worked for eight months together with two Google teams, but couldn’t scale due to poor performance and ROI. After their decision to change things and partner with LeanSEM, we managed to increase the ROI by 100% and turned the account ROI positive in just 1 month.
Together, we continued to scale, reaching 2.4 times more revenue while maintaining positive ROI and flat CPA month-over-month, which eventually led to Bloomsape securing its series A investor round last year.
Now that we covered the data, here are the 3 reasons why you shouldn’t let the Google team manage your campaigns:
1. Attention – You will often hear Google reps brag about their expertise and how they work with 30-40 clients at a time. So let’s think about that for a moment. If you do the math, that means your account gets 1-2 hours per week on average. That may be enough time to run a few automated scripts and see what’s happening from a high level. But you can’t get meaningful insights, or out of the box ideas, and you certainly can not focus enough on creatives. Compare that with an agency that will spend 20-60 hours per week on your campaigns. It’s easy to see the difference in speed, initiated experiments and ultimately – growth!
2. Objectives – As I mentioned above, Google benefits from your increased spend and the ability to spend more is closely related to your performance. Objectives on both sides seem aligned, but that doesn’t make them the same. At the end of the day, Google is trying to optimize your spending, not your results. You might think that you are getting decent results, but that’s because you don’t have a proper benchmark. And if that’s the case, your campaigns will end up on autopilot. They don’t have the motivation to push harder and improve month over month because if you go out of business, you will be replaced by another company from the long list of potential money makers for them.
3. Expertise – Google reps know the platform really well, really well, but most of them have insufficient knowledge and experience in performance marketing. Instead of relying on a proven method that delivers results and insights each week, you will be dependent on the account manager you’re assigned to. Feeling lucky?
I am not saying that Google hasn’t helped advertisers get their advertising off the ground, but I hope you see that when it comes to your PPC budget, saving money can potentially end up being very costly. Your business deserves a high level of dedication and LeanSEM was created to raise the bar on the results you can achieve using digital marketing. We believe that by providing expertise and an in-house level of attention, we are the best option for strong businesses to grow to their full potential. We have an excellent track record and would be happy to discuss how we can help you grow your business.
“LeanSEM visits Bloomscape – Detroit, 13 September 2019”
