EP316 - When Good Clients Go Bad Ft Jyll Saskin Gales

 Hello and welcome to PPC Live, the podcast, formerly the PPC Chat Roundup podcast. And yeah, if you are used to hearing advice from PPC experts about how to ensure that we are keeping up to date with the ever changing landscape. Don't worry, you are still in the right place. But instead of me relaying what the PPC experts has seen, I'm gonna bring the experts to you every week.

I am gonna be talking to a different PPC expert about their F Ops. This is a very much a non explicit podcast. So yeah, their F ops and how they have triumph. Based on that, we are gonna share what has. Really being disappointing, how they've recovered from it and how it has led to some amazing triumphs and really turnarounds in their careers.

And the first guest that's going to be on this new format, I'm so delighted to say, is Jill Sask Girls. I've known Jill for a while now. She's such a good friend. She knows. Her staff, she's a Google Ads coach. She does weekly chats on her podcast and for certain demand about just what's going on in the world of paid search to ensure that everybody understand what needs to be done, whether you're a junior or whether you're a senior, and just need to remember some of the basics of paid search.

Again, we talk about her experiences with clients, how they can be like children. We talk about what to do when you're in this kind of same situation. She found herself in, in the. I felt that she discusses with us today, and it's definitely very much a, a true lesson on how to ensure that you don't find yourself in the situation where you're dealing with a bad client and you can't get out of it.

So I hope you enjoy this one.

  📍  📍 So my first guest for this brand new format that we've got, I am beyond delighted to share with you, is my good friend, the Google Ads coach and ex-Googler, Jyll Saskin Gales. Now, hopefully she isn't a brand new name to all of you as she so awesomely co-leads our PPC Live online events. But she's also got a very extremely popular YouTube channel, TikTok channel.

She's on Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads, Blue sky, everywhere. She's everywhere, and I love it. And recently wrote a book she wrote Inside Google Ads - Everything You Need to Know About  Audience Targeting. Yes. Yes. I love that, Jyll and I always just love that every week as well, she shares amazing advice on Search Engine Land, which I get to edit and upload.

Very minimal editing from me. Literally, I just take a copy and paste onto WordPress and publish, this amazing series that she does for Search Engine Land, which is pretty much just everything you need to know about Google Ads and whether you're a beginner, mid-level senior there is something to learn. There's something to understand. There's so many little things in Google that no matter how long you've been doing it, oh there's just something that even though that you learned it when you started, you think to yourself actually I need to figure out how it works now.

And Jyll is too amazing at just breaking that down for all of us. So without further ado, welcome Jyll to the show. 

Thank you so much, Anu. I am thrilled to be your first guest in this new format. Amazing. 

Thank you. So we've done a lot of intros, so i'm not gonna keep our audience much longer from what we are talking about. From the title

you must know that this is a whole, bearing our hearts bare, being transparent, talking about the things that have made us cringe in the past possibly. So let's get to it. Jyll, what is the eff-up that you want to share with us today? 

I had so many to choose from, but what I'm going to share today took place in September, 2021.

About six months after I left Google and was starting my business. I took on a client I shouldn't have. For Google Ads Management. I had to fire this client a month later, refund half of their retainer. Wow. It was a really pivotable. It was a really pivotal moment in my business but definitely it was a big F up on my part.

I should have never taken them on as a client in the first place. I ignored red flags and Woo. Came back to bite me in the butt. 

Oh wow. So when this thing happened, so take us through the journey of when did you discover the issue and what was your feeling during that process?

So I should have known there would be an issue before I even took the client on. And at this time, again, I had just left Google was just starting my business, was doing Google ads management for clients. And this business was referred to me by someone I didn't actually know. Someone hired me to do their Google ads and then said, oh, I have this friend.

And in that first sentence said, "and he's really difficult to work with, just so you know". And to me, now I would listen to that and say - "no, thank you. I like my peace of mind". But at the time I was very much in that proving myself mentality. I think also as a woman, I was like I can handle this. I can handle difficult, man.

That's no problem. No problem at all. And and it was a big opportunity. And so I met with this business owner. And again, when I first met with the business owner directly, there were things I later realized were red flags. Like he didn't want to go through an onboarding process with me. When I asked him, what's the goal?

What's the objective? He was just like. "Make sales, obviously" and then it was a brand new business, although this business owner had experience in a related business, this specific business that they wanted me to run ads for was brand new website, brand new product, brand new brand. And again, now I know that brings a lot of complicated challenges and things that need to be figured out, but at the time great, let's run ads.

So all these things came together. I did not do a very smooth onboarding process. I was not able to get the ads live as quickly as they wanted. When the ads were live, I wasn't given creative, but I don't wanna place the blame on this client. They were operating the way they knew to operate with an ads manager.

I was trying to be super accommodating because this was a very large retainer and I was excited about it. But it did not work out well. Shocker. They were not happy that within three weeks of running ads, I was not able to drive sales for them. And I did not like the tone of the emails they were sending me, the demands for calls at all hours.

So I decided about a month after we started working together to end the contract, I refunded half of what they paid me, and it was hard to give up the money like I had just made my revenue goal at the time, my goal was $30,000 a month, which was matching what I had been making at Google. I got there, but I was so miserable with this one client and then by extension with ads management.

Yeah, so giving that was tough. It took years to hit that revenue level again. Yeah. But it was really also the kick in the butt. I needed to trust my gut, but also to realize, you know what? I don't wanna do Google Ads management anymore. And although that moment sucked it was the pivot I needed and mindset to say Okay.

At that time I'd only had one or two Google coaching client, Google Ads coaching clients. Yeah. And I loved it. And I thought, I want my business to get to the place where I do Google Ads coaching. Where I have courses. At the time, I hadn't launched my inside Google Ads course yet. And so this situation, this mistake of taking on the client, then having to fire them, refund money, really motivated me to completely change my business.

So that by June, 2022, I had no more Google Ads management clients. I had launched my course, I had started writing my book, I was doing audits and teaching and that was exciting as well. Yeah.

That's amazing. I can't say that I had such a, what I'd call a traumatic story that that then led me to going, actually Google Ads Management is not for me.

I want to be the one that is very much strategic. I'll help you with terms of direction , but it being my responsibility for your performance. No, because people are very unpredictable. I think that's the nicest way I'll put it. Very unpredictable. I know you, you mentioned a few of these, but I think this will be nice.

It'll be nice to put it like in one go and say that, like maybe a list of looking back, what were the signs that you missed? What can you say where that specific, like zoom in on that one particularly. 

When people show you who they are, believe them. 

( Oh, that's gonna be quoted) That's something my mother would say. That's something my grandmother would say.

And so before I even met this client, someone who knew them well and liked them, said they will be difficult to work with.

Why didn't I listen to that? And then when I started working with them right away, my interpretation is that they didn't respect me or my capabilities.

You don't have to trust me off the bat. Trust is earned. Yeah. But respect shouldn't have to be earned. Yeah. And so the way they spoke to me on calls refused to follow the process I needed the way they then wrote to me in emails, it just, there was no respect. Yeah, and I thought that was something I could work around, but I couldn't, respect shouldn't have to be, or respect can be lost, but we should always start treating people with respect.

So I'd say those are the two things that should have really stood out to me. And then the third piece that I didn't know at the time, but I know now is when there's a brand new business, you can't expect ads to just magically bring in money from day one. And so again, if I had known that, then I could have tried to set expectations accordingly, and then maybe they wouldn't have hired me.

And this all never would've happened. So I'll take the onus absolutely on me. I'm the one who messed up. I should have never taken on this client, and I never took on a client like that again. 

Oh, wow. That's amazing. Yeah, that's good. That's really good. So let's say someone's listening to this episode and they're thinking, "oh my God, Jyll, I've just done that".

I've just taken a client and so this is a client that someone has warned me. People have warned me, and they're just like, maybe like a week in into this. What's your advice to them right now? Like they're right now in the middle of dealing with this kind of situation. 

I have different advice if you can get out versus if you can't get out.

So if you can get out, it's only a week in, just get out now. Yeah, this relationship will end at some point, right? So it's easier to get out one weekend versus one month in or later. So if you can get out, but sometimes you can't, maybe 'cause of a contract, you can't maybe really need the money, which I totally understand.

There are so many reasons. Reputationally, maybe you don't feel comfortable. So if you have to stay in it, I think it's really important to decide for yourself, what are your boundaries. What will be acceptable to you and not acceptable to you? Yeah. So if, for example, you are not willing to have calls after hours on weekend or on weekends or respond to emails, make that very clear upfront to the client.

These are expectations. If the client speaks to you in a certain way, it's not acceptable to you and there, it's just not a place where you can not work with them anymore. Say - "you cannot speak to me that way". Yeah. "If we are to work together, we need mutual respect". And I'm making these suggestions

I know these things are hard to do, but the goal is maybe the client will then fire you, which does you a favor, or they'll listen. Sometimes bullies don't react well to boundaries, but sometimes they actually react really well and stand down. Yeah. But at the end of the day, you need to focus on

what are you willing to accept and how are you willing to be treated? 'Cause people will treat you how you allow yourself to be treated in business and in life. 

Absolutely agree with you. And especially that whole point about bullies are the kind of people where they'll react differently.

You just never know until you're trying. And I think that there's some clients who, nobody else has stood up to them yet, and because of that they, it's like they've been allowed to just run rampant with their bad behavior and if you are the person. It's almost like how they say yeah, and you'll know this better than me with parents and your kids, and you see a spoiled kid and you're like, actually they want discipline.

It's, they're being, they're spoiled and they're acting spoiled because you in a bad way, maybe let it happen. You maybe got your reasons for it, going through tough times. Kids, once you put the boundary in place and once you stop them and they know that they can't get away with their bad behavior, they'll realign.

So absolutely right. Boundaries help kids feel safe because then they know what the rules are and they'll push against those rules. But it's really important that the rule is there when there are no rules and no boundaries. It actually makes kids feel

less safe because they don't know what's acceptable and what's not. And I do have a child development degree, so that is where this is coming from as well. That's amazing. I did not study marketing. I landed in this industry by accident. 

Oh, we're very glad you did. We are really very glad you did.

Honestly, I, yeah, I was just going to think that, you have to realize some clients, they are like kids. And if you just. If you just treat them that way, it can, if nothing else, it'll help your mental health. If you just approach it, approach that way. I actually say a lot 

with my Google Ads coaching clients.

I like Google Ads is also like a child, right? Yeah. When AI is first starting to learn, it's like a child who can't talk yet, hasn't learned the rules yet, and you have to give it time and patience and guide it in the right direction so that it can grow into an adult that you're proud of, who drives good results for you.

So this is actually an analogy I use quite frequently. Especially when my clients are parents as well, because Google Ads is also like a child. 

Yeah. It very much is. So is there a process, a mindset not even like mindset. I know you don't like manage clients anymore, even dealing with.

Coaching training clients, you never know what you might get yourself involved in. Someone books you and it's oh. Is there a process you go through to avoid this kind of situation? So the way I've written it is to fail better, because mistakes could always happen.

You never know. But how do you do it so that you know how to get back up quicker? 

Yes. A boundary that I've had to put in place in my business to protect me from situations like this again, is I don't do any kind of free introductory calls anymore, (right). So I get asked this frequently, oh, Jyll, I wanna book a call with you.

Can we have a free intro call first? No. Wow. Not 'cause I don't care about you, but it's 'cause my advice is the thing you pay me for more than my advice. My expertise is what you pay me for. And more than 200 people now have booked a call with me, paid the money, then gotten on the call. So I know that works. I know I can deliver value that way. I used to offer free introductory calls, but shocker, most of the people who booked those calls then didn't become clients. They'd say, oh, we wanna hire you to consult for us.

Let's have an intro call first - proposal gets ignored. Oh, we want you to do all this training and this, that, and the other - nothing happens. But the people who book the coaching call, pay for the hour, have time with me, then it can turn into something else. And this actually happens a lot. Now I'm very fortunate that I get a lot of startup founders who will message me on LinkedIn asking for my advice on their new PPC tool or new something.

"Hey Jyll, can I put a quick five minute call and get your advice?" You can pay me for it. Yeah. And then it doesn't happen. Or, oh, I wanna discuss a potential collaboration with you. Okay? Here's my rates for sponsor content. 90% of the time crickets. I'm not saying that all people who are willing to pay money are magically going to be good clients.

But that's a boundary that I've put in place that people try to get me to break all the time. Yeah. Yeah. And unless it's someone I know really well, like someone I worked at Google with for six years, who's now at another company. Okay, I'll talk to 'em without paying, but even friend of a friend, nope, pay for my time.

Yeah, we'll take it from there. And if you don't hire me because of that is a-okay. I can lose that business. That probably wasn't gonna be business anyway. 

Absolutely. That's been some great advice given to us Jyll, we're really grateful and but like now getting into some, let's say, general stuff.

So what's the one thing that you'd like to leave people with? One significant piece of advice if people are distracted, they're listening to this while they're doing the dishes. What's one piece of advice that you want to leave people with today?

One piece of advice I'd love to leave you with in Google Ads and dilemma in general is to trust your gut. It is there for a reason. If something doesn't quite feel right, you can't put your finger on why. Listen to that. It may take months and months down the line till you figure out what that was.

If I look back, this is just one of the many mistakes I've made in my business, and if I look back on these mistakes when I made them, it's because my gut was saying something. It wasn't what I wanted to hear. Turn down that client, don't take that meeting. Don't go after that opportunity.

It wasn't what I wanted to hear. I ignored it and ended up in a pile of crap. So trust your gut. It won't be right a hundred percent of the time. Yeah. But you'll never feel bad about listening to what your body is physically telling you. 

Yeah. Absolutely. Love that advice. Do you think the PPC industry talks enough?

Do we talk about enough about failures and mistakes? Are we transparent enough about it you think? 

Absolutely not. If you look at your LinkedIn feed, it's just look at this amazing results I got from my client. I'm amazing at this. Look how amazing at social media in general, right? We present and curate the best version of ourselves.

So no, I don't think we talk about mistakes enough, but I don't think that's unique to our industry as humans. We're hardwired to. Always present our best face forward. Then maybe if we're lucky behind closed doors, we have people we can talk to about what's really going on and how we're really feeling and what we're really struggling with.

Yeah. Like I have a group chat with a few women in the industry and I'm so grateful for that to have one outlet of okay, this is the real talk, regardless of what happening on the feed. So we don't talk about it enough. I think we should talk about it more. I've started posting more about my mistakes or things I've gotten wrong or client situations that didn't work out because I hope that by doing so, even if other people don't wanna share their stories, it makes them feel less alone with the fact that oh no, I've been through something similar.

Yeah. We all deal with crappy client situations. We all mess up something in a campaign sometimes. Just last week, literally I was helping a client with a campaign set up. And it was only after the fact I realized, oh, we didn't turn off auto apply recommendations. So lo and behold, oh, we put the exact match keywords in and then we had our next call and everything got switched to broad match.

Yes I make mistakes too. My client was very understanding. We fixed the problem, right? My client is not the type client. How dare you yell at me? Green flags all around in that situation, but mistakes are normal. It's how we learn from them and move on from them. 

Fantastic. And would you say, is there like a safe, I feel you've even, man you've mentioned a few, even just there, that's what inspired me to go onto this question.

Is there a safe way to kind make these failings or, making mistakes in digital marketing? One thing I noted there that you said is, which is really nice, you have this small group of your trusted friends that you chat with and you go, you tell the honest truth and oh my God, this is what's happening.

Things like that. Anymore, if I, things like that, that you feel, that's like, how's, what's the safe way you think to fail in digital marketing? What 

is the safe way to fail? I guess I'll put it the other way around. What's the risk? Of not taking those risks. If you can only be perfect and you can never fail, then you can't work in digital marketing.

Our industry is constantly changing. Even with Google Ads specifically, you can have a campaign set up for a roofing client that works beautifully in Ohio, and then you could literally copy and paste the exact same setup for a client in. Florida and it bombs, right? There's no way to know until you try.

So I think the kind of person who enters PPC and stays in PPC is someone, even if you don't have a risk tolerance, you're someone who likes to experiment and try new things and do new things. And so if you run a campaign and the results are not good, I recommend that you remember that's not a failure.

You have learned something, you have gathered data. You can now adjust based on that. And if you have the kind of client who's gonna fire you based on that, they weren't the right kind of client to begin with. And I promise there are good clients that it's not that clients love to waste money, so to speak, but you have to spend money to make money.

You have to learn to do that. Every account is different, every business is different. Yeah. And so working with the right kind of clients who share that learning and experimentation mentality is going to make a huge difference. You need to have that mentality for yourself.

Then having trusted colleagues.

I have quite a few coaching clients who, the main reason they hire me isn't even necessarily because they need help with their Google ad skills. It's just 'cause like they're the one person at their company who works in Google Ads, or they're the one person at the top of their agency who manages the Google Ads team, and they just don't have anyone they can talk to about this stuff.

So whether it's hiring a coach networking with people through PPC chat, for example, at events like PPC live by commenting on LinkedIn, like that's how I've made so many of my friends in the industry, you included, Anu, is just commenting on each other's social media posts, dropping into the dms, hopping on the phone.

Those connections are really powerful. Personally and professionally, so you can learn from other people's mistakes and get advice from people about what to do to recover from some of your own. 

Amazing, amazing advice there. And before the last fun question that I'd really love us to, touch on AI because that could be a whole conversation, but even in the whole, eff-ups and mistakes and issues, I feel like when it comes to automation we can make a lot of them because of our presumptions of what AI will do for us and should do for us. So what's your advice with people who are not, even for those who think AI will do everything? For those who are nervous about using AI and actually a bit nerve scared that, oh Lord, I don't know how to use AI.

I don't want to just give it everything. What would you say to people about being scared? Those who are scared of making mistakes when it comes to implementing AI. 

The first thing I'll say is I can absolutely empathize with that apprehension, and when I worked at Google, I couldn't empathize with that.

When you're at Google in the Google bubble, it's obviously AI's the answer to every problem. Coming outside of Google, getting to know people in the community. That's when I was able to develop that empathy of oh, most people don't trust Google, and I can understand, why that is.

In spite of that, I think the advice I would give is to try to work with the system rather than against the system, because those are really your choices. With AI, you can try to work with AI by giving it conversion data and customer list, giving it sufficient budget time to learn before adding negatives every single day, right?

View it as a partner. As a child, you need to nurture to grow or you can have the mentality of trying to fight the AI, lock things down, scripts to automatically negative out close variant search term matches and manual bidding only. And Scott, I'm not saying that those strategies can't work for you.

I'm right now. But I am saying that over the long term to drive sustainable results for clients and scalable results for clients, you need to be able to work with these systems rather than trying to fight these systems. If Google Ads is like gambling, like Google's the house always wins.

Okay. The house always wins. And you can win too. Like you can also make money with Google Ads or you can be constantly trying to fight against it, but you won't win. Yeah. So I very much advocate, I'm not saying blindly, trust the system, just give it your money. Never check it again. But I'm saying set it up for success by giving it the things that it thrives on.

Data, budget, et cetera. And you will do yourself and your clients and your campaigns a much better job by trying to work with AI rather than against AI. 

Amazing. And if your career were a movie, what would the title of that movie be? Let's end on a nice, fun one. 

The funny thing about my career is every job I've ever had didn't exist

five years prior, oh. Whether it was the job I had at Viacom in a brand new group, the job I had at Google was a brand new role starting my business. Brand new company. So if I had to give it a movie name for my career, I'd probably call it Starting Over Again. Okay. Because I feel like that's what I've had to do a few different times.

It's just starting over again. Starting over again. I studied psychology and child development, started my career in journalism. Okay, wow. Went to business school, like just all these different, very unrelated things. And now I'm a Google ads coach and course creator, which is a sentence I didn't even know was possible to utter when I started my business in 2021.

So the movie of my career would be called Starting Over Again. 

Starting over again. Oh, that's brilliant. Oh, thank you so much, Jyll. That's been such a fantastic chat. I would, I wish that we could just continue, I just talk a lot more about Yeah, Google maybe AI new updates and everything, but this is where we'll leave

you are wonderful listeners. With and yeah, Jyll. Yeah. Thank you so much. If people want to connect more with you or hear more for about what you do where can people hear from you? I hear you may have a podcast out there as well. 

I do. Since you're listening to this podcast, you should just go up to that search bar and search for inside Google Ads.

That's my weekly Google Ads podcast. And you can learn more about me on my website, Jyll.ca. It's Jyll . ca. 

Amazing. And yeah, I'm also we've got for, just a little bit of information about PPC Live as well. 'cause this is now PPC live, The Podcast So I've gotta tell you about what's going on with PPC Live.

  📍 We've got our next event happening June 26th for those who are based in the UK that's in Leeds.  But don't worry, Jyll and I are gonna bring you an online version at some point, so look out for that as well. I'm also starting, inspired by Jyll, this might be even be the first time she's hearing -   📍 I'm gonna start doing some coaching.

So if you go to themarketinganu.com, I've put like little blurb there. There's a booking link.  Also inspired by Jyll, sorry no free can I just chat and pick your brains? My brains are expensive, so sorry. Those are expensive brains, folks. These are very expensive brains you're listening to right now combined.

Yeah, this is as much picking your brains as you guys could get. Sorry guys. So go to themarketinganu.com. I've put off like the the a link for you to book some time with me and I'd love to start doing with that. And you can also find on, all my articles that I write about on Search Engine Land.

So yeah, check Search Engine Land, for all the paid search updates that I write about. But on that note, thank you so much, Jyll, for joining me today. And yeah, we'll leave everyone at that stage. 

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me Anu, and congrats on launching coaching. Folks should definitely get on that while they can.

Appreciate it.