Google 7-Day Notice For Its Ad Reps to Start Making Changes to Ad Account

[engine]

Some advertisers are getting a 7-day notice email from Google that its own ad reps will start making changes to the ad account if the advertiser doesn't opt out.

Individual advertisers might want that option, of course, but if you're an agency it may be unwelcome. Keep looking out for the email.

Alarm bells ought to ring with this, imho.
[searchengineland.com...]

[Panthro]

Talk about overreach. Maybe welcome overreach in some cases, though.

[Shepherd]

google always looking out for google's best interest...

Every ad rep I ever talked to was a disaster. Every move blatantly designed to increase google's vigorish.

Conflict of interest. Fox and hen-house come to mind. An algorithmic race to zero for advertisers.

Liability. Who is going to be responsible for false advertising and deceptive trade practices?

[tangor]

Reminds me of another truism (dating back to the 1920s, USA...)

"I'm from the government. I am here to help you."

[buckworks]

Every ad rep I ever talked to was a disaster

Yep.

I wouldn't have minded the Google ad reps doing things to boost our ad spend if they had also increased our profits along the way.

But that's not what happened ...

[RhinoFish]

Sort of like a self-driving car, BUT... these cars are in a race with each other, competing against each other. Same computer (or same team, or same AI, or same entity - I mean the driver as a collection of team "beings" that is not each advertiser) drives them all? Smells anti-competitive, just let us use the tools ourselves.

[edited by: RhinoFish at 12:03 am (utc) on Jan 27, 2019]

[RhinoFish]

If you own a site and do Negative Billing, many (like G, FTC, state of Florida) says it's a bad experience for the shopper.
If you do Negative Opt-Out for email subs, not a good experience.
But making us opt-out of account changes?
And the notice comes via email (not reliable)?
Negative opt-out seems overbearing.

If these services are so good for the advertiser, why not pitch them on a positive opt-in basis?

[EditorialGuy]

Simple solution: "Click here."

[tangor]

Ha ha! No click required!

(That's the whole point, right?)

[Marketing Guy]

Had to chat with support a few times re: an Ad Grant account and the front line support staff were pretty poor. I had to correct the information they were giving out several times - it was blatantly wrong stuff - really basic stuff too.

There doesn't seem to be any effective internal account management either. Repeated the same issue to a half dozen different reps over the course of 2 or 3 months. Most of them gave the same scripted response.

I guess some agencies might be concerned that smaller accounts may use the Google-managed option to keep costs down but I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up pushing clients back to 3rd party agencies.

The real problem will be if Google screws up badly and starts alienating SMEs in droves. Lot of lost business for agencies and it's easily done - some of the bigger offline directories used to offer managed PPC / cheap websites / etc and it was so poorly handled their reputation took a dive.

[thecoalman]

I have a site that will primarily be used by people in the northeast US. It's a great site to target local customers within a 20 to 30 mile radius of your business. I cannot tell you how many ads I've blocked over the years from businesses that could only serve local customers on the other side of the country. I've seen them show up when I'm viewing the site so it's not like I'm misinterpreting it. I'd imagine even the ones that may fit the profile of a user are also being served to many that don't.

Clearly this not beneficial to me or the advertiser. If Google fixes that issue I'm all onboard.

[Shepherd]

Clearly this not beneficial to me or the advertiser. If Google fixes that issue I'm all onboard.

Ironically, it was probably an "ad rep" that caused that to happen...

[Shepherd]

Funny, just got an email from Bing letting me know that: "Good news: your Bing Ads account has been chosen for optimization." They gave me an option to "opt out" and a deadline to do so, I opted out and paused the account.

Unimaginable that google and bing believe this is something that should be opt out instead of opt in...

[Stealthkit]

The last time bing sent me that letter, I opted out. They deleted my account shortly afterwards. I agree with everyone, Adwords is a greedy, careless whore.