EP322 - When Client Transparency Goes Wrong in PPC

  📍  📍 Hello and welcome to PPC Live, The Podcast, formerly known as PPC Chat Roundup. My name is Anu, the founder of PPC Live, and if you're used to hearing from PPC experts about how to ensure that we are keeping up with the ever changing landscape. Don't worry, you are still in the right place. But instead of relaying what the PPC experts are saying, I'm gonna be bringing the PPC experts to you every week I'm gonna be speaking to a different PPC experts about the biggest f-ups that they have faced and how they've turned it around.

We'll share about what was disappointing, what was surprising, and especially that they learn from it, ensuring that they continue their career in a very successful way. Today I have the immense pleasure of speaking to Susan Richards-Benson, and she's been in the industry for

close to 20 years now. She actually started her own limited company and contracting before it was even cool, for close to 10 years now. And she's got some really, really cool interests outside of paid search as well. She's gonna be sharing some interesting facts for us, but she's also definitely gonna be sharing some really interesting stories about

an experience she faced about dealing with a client that had some downtime over Christmas, how the investigation went, how Google was in that process, how the client was in that process, and how they ultimately fixed that issue. So yes, I hope you enjoyed the story.

Let's go speak to Susan now.

  📍  Hello and welcome to PPC Live the podcast, and I'm so excited to bring on our latest guest on the show to Susan Richards-Benson. Welcome Susan. Hi, Anu i'm so glad to be here. Awesome. Yeah, Susan is someone who I'm so glad that she's on the show because she's been part of the PPC Live community for quite a while, but even more than that, she's been part of the paid search world for like close to 20 years now.

She's got her own, , she's got her, not quite agency you've got your limited company that you do contracting and freelancing work with and that's been going on for 10 years now. And yeah, very much an accomplished digital marketer with extensive experience and loves the analytical side of things a lot.

So really like digging into it. You started off like in journalism, , you said when things were way back and when paid search was such a little thing. Yeah. And, everybody was more on Twitter. Yeah. Tell us more about that like literally how that switch

from journalism to paid search work happened? Yeah as you mentioned I was trying to help the news agents I was working with establish their online presence. And so you set them up on Twitter and you get exposed to the world that way. Started to understand, how hashtags work, how audience building works.

And through that ended up working into Google Ads. Basically looking to increase our brand exposure, and this was, I think it was even pre AdWords days. Yeah. We're talking really nascent platforms at the time. And from there grew my connections, started working with an agency based out of the states (US)

who exposed me to additional accounts and it grew from there. So yeah, it was something I fell into and I wouldn't change it. Amazing. What's I'm sorry, I didn't even know I was gonna ask this question because I, but I do think it's very interesting for those who started so long ago and have seen the industry evolve and change so much.

I almost feel like it's a different kind of digital marketer that needs to be working in 2025 than when you started. Yeah. So what has been like the, the biggest learning curve for you or biggest shift for you in terms of how you, what your mindset needs to be now compared to what your mindset needed to have been back then?

I think the biggest shift is when you first started out, it was all about, keyword stuffing. It wasn't necessarily about the actual audience that you were targeting and about the ultimate, conversion rate optimization and the end journey. And you could very much have siloed thinking, so you could focus entirely onto say, Google Ads as a platform.

And put all your efforts into Google ads and as the digital space has evolved, I think the ability to silo your thinking has increasingly diminished and you actually put yourself at a disadvantage now if you do silo yourself into, say, just Google ads, you have to be able to take a more well-rounded approach to understand how Google works with organic, works with social.

And be able to interpret the analytics off the back of that. So it means you have to be much more collaborative with wider digital teams, the SEO side of things, the social side of things, because user behavior online is not siloed anymore. And with AI it's increasingly changing things as well.

So you have to be able to adapt, adapt quickly. Yeah. Before, with thinking and not be resistant to change, I think is the biggest learning really. Don't be resistant to change. Oh my God. As someone who's writing a new article and writing a new, this is different now, this has gone, this is coming. [If] you are resistant to change leave the industry now.

Just go and go into like construction work or something like that. There is nothing about digital that, that stays the same. And oh my God, removing the silos. I would like to even argue that consumer behavior has never been in silo. We are just learning more about it now.

It's just become more and more part of being very aware of oh, why did I spend budget and Paid Search but it didn't really necessarily come into a conversion or why is it when I pause display my display accounts that I thought was not getting any conversions, why it my paid search that suffered even when I didn't do anything. Why is it, and. No one is in a silo and people are experiencing things everywhere. People are even using word of mouth. Word of mouth is part of the journey as well. How the heck do we measure word of mouth? Impossible. It's all parts of the journey.

But I also want to like, talk about a very fun, interesting fact that we shared earlier on. You love doing puzzles and that's really what got you into Paid search.

You love nerdy documentaries and you shared a really interesting fact about rainbows, and I'm gonna ask you to share it again. When you're looking at a rainbow, if you're lucky enough to see a double rainbow, the double of the rainbow is inverse. So the colors are backwards which is not normally something you'd notice.

No. But we'll all notice that now. Yeah. From now on I'll be thanks to you Susan. And with London being Yeah. Very rainy weather a lot, we will be seeing rainbows and we'll be thinking about you. So thank you for that extremely fun fact. Without further ado, we have kept our audience waiting long enough.

Our listeners waiting long enough. This show is talking about the f-ups that we've experienced and how we've turned it around, how it's become a triumph, and how, we've learned lots from it. Susan, what is the f-up you wanna share with us today? Yeah, so this one, it still haunts me a little bit because it was so frustrating and obviously as PPC marketers, we've all had experiences where we've messed up with the budgets or, had wrong keywords running.

And obviously those are F ups that we're all very familiar with. But this one, it threw me for a curve ball. So we were working with they were children's playground based out of Florida. And we took over the account towards the end of last year and things were running fine for the first couple weeks and then out of nowhere, right around the Christmas period our Google Ads account was suspended for circumventing circumstances.

And that notification come through. Obviously it's Christmas, so everybody's offline. You're hoping that the business itself is really busy at that time and you think, oh my God, what am I gonna do about this? So yeah, not good. Not good. Oh my God. So this was a time where.

You like what kind of business were they? Are you talking like eCom business or B2B business? No, so this was a B2C consumer business. They were an indoor children's playground. So very much focused on those bookings that are almost immediate when someone goes on to search, ultimately sees the location is within, a couple miles of them and then goes to visit with their family.

So being the holiday period, this is obviously a very busy time for them. And not having the Google Ads account running was extremely detrimental and cost them, tens of thousands of dollars during the time that it was suspended, if you will. Oh, gosh. All right, so let's tease out the story a bit more.

Let's get into what happened. Who found the problem first? Who noticed that this was had gone wrong? Yeah, so it was actually our team that, my team that noticed it. And the first thing you do obviously is you go in and you review and you think what's caused the suspension?

Is it something like, is there malware on the site? Is there masking on the site itself, is there something going on with IP addresses? So the first thing you do is obviously what Google recommends and you reach out to support to try and get a little bit more information as to what's happening.

And we sent email after email to the support team and they kept coming back basically with the same canned jargon information saying, you've circumvented systems. Check for malware, check for this, check for that. So we were trying to coordinate with the developer of the business.

But again, because it was Christmas, the developer was off. Oh my God. That whole wrong time for something to go wrong. I know. And in the meantime, the client had obviously noticed that the traffic had massively dropped off. So they were emailing us and texting us constantly saying, what are you doing about this?

How are you fixing this? And we were sat there with our hands tied there's really not much we can do. We need, first of all, we need your developer to see is there something wrong on the site? Is there something in the backend that's causing, this flag for potentially malware or IP masking?

Our ability to see that is, is really limited at the moment. We can only tell you what we're being told by Google. Which unfortunately wasn't a whole lot. Not a lot. Okay. And what was like the emotional rollercoaster that you were going through right now? Because, I imagine Google not telling you, and maybe for a split second you think to yourself, what have you done?

What how did you mess up? How were you just what was your reaction to how did you keep your cool to ensure that you didn't go, oh, I'm just gonna quit on this. Yeah. There were definitely, I'm not gonna lie, there were definitely moments where I was like, I'm ready to throw in the towel on this.

This is ridiculous. This is so stressful. But I think you, you have to remember that at least from Google's perspective, it's not personal. They are trying to protect their consumer base. The issue was obviously on our side something had gone wrong, so we had to get to the bottom of what the issue was and try not to take it.

Personally not take it as a reflection of, we dunno what we're doing or we're terrible at our jobs. And at the same time try and understand from the client's perspective who are getting increasingly aggie and increasingly frustrated in their texts and emails. And, you get to a point where you almost feel like you're on the back foot a little bit and you're trying to defend yourself.

And at the same time, you don't know what you're defending yourself from. No. Yeah. Okay, so going to the crux of the the big question that people are probably asking, who was at fault? So ultimately what ended up happening, and it took us a few months to figure this out when we first identified the issue, obviously the first thing we turned to was, is it malware on the site.

So the developer, once he was back from the holiday season, scanned the site, said, nothing's wrong. So we resubmitted an appeal, came back again with circumventing systems. So by about mid-February so at this point we're talking, it's been ongoing for almost two months, we got the client on a call and we got her business partner on a call and said, we need you to do something for us because we've done everything on our side.

We need you to check that there's not something that you've perhaps overlooked on your end. Can you please go to ads.google.com and log in and tell us what [you see] and it turns out that the client had actually had a original Google Ads account that they had not told us about that had been set up was actually running in overlap with our campaign for a short period of time.

And they had not closed or suspended the account when they moved over to our agency and started running ads with us. In hindsight, Google was totally justified in their suspension because the client had very clearly violated the T's and C's. And it's unfortunate that it took so long to actually establish that despite, repeatedly asking the client, are you sure you've never set up an account before?

Are you sure you've never run campaigns before. And yeah, it was a, oh gosh, nightmare. Oh, that's annoying. Yeah. Yeah. What so what are the signs? Did they give any indication that they were that kind of client? Like what? Are there any signs you'd say that you missed, go looking back, that maybe you could have gone to that conversation earlier or I.

That would due diligence. Yeah. Yeah. I think in hindsight, there definitely were. So when we were onboarding the account, the client was always a little bit cagey about their previous data. And they would say it was who they were working with previously, wasn't releasing the data to them and i'm sure many of the listeners have experienced that where they've had agencies that don't release the data to the clients.

So you think, okay, that's not an unusual scenario. But they didn't wanna share access into, the analytics or anything like that. So we basically had to set everything up from scratch. And this is not a new business. So you think, that's a bit unusual are we sure that there's nothing that's been set up?

And when you went and you looked at the actual code that was on the site, you could see that there was an existing analytics tracker on there. So they obviously had something set up, but they just. Insisted to us that they'd never had access to it. Yeah. They, didn't know if it was still live or anything like that.

So I think the lack of transparency when we were onboarding the account should have been a much bigger red flag to us. Yeah. And in hindsight, again, I think we should have done a bit more due diligence in maybe getting on that initial screen share with the client and saying, can you visit these URLs and let's just see what you've got access to.

Yep. Before we go through and set up all the accounts and end up in the situation that we ended up in. Amazing. Yeah. That's a great process to put in mind. I think we are, we're very much [quick] to pick on agencies who are like not transparent and that's good. Some of them are not, as you said, and some clients have dealt with that, but they can also very much be clients who are not transparent

that puts you in a pickle. It's two ways that kind of, mistake can happen on both both sides of the, agency client relationship. So like someone is going through this kind of process, somebody has, is it's, they're busy periods. Summer is busy periods for a lot of brands as well.

And, yeah, traffic has just plummeted, account has been suspended. They're not sure what to do. What's your advice? Someone is like at the beginning stages, first few weeks of this issue happening. Yes. What's your advice to them? Definitely to start with is to reach out to Google support, obviously.

And even though the information that we got back from them was pretty canned responses, it was still very relevant to the situation at hand. Looking back, I think first of all is obviously make sure that you've got those support cases rolling in. And then the next thing to do is keep

a record of everything. Keep everything in writing. Make sure you've got what you've sent to the client, any communication that you've had with the client, anything like that. Make sure you've got a log of it so that you have not only a record of what your actions have been, but also you can try and use that to isolate the issue down to say it's not this, it's not this, it's not this.

Get people involved. It's not necessarily a burden that you can solve on your own. And ultimately try and be as forthcoming and transparent with your client as possible as to what you're seeing on your end. But equally, don't assume that the issue lies solely with you. Yeah, absolutely.

And so how did that experience change your process? Because you, later on in life, you've now, you've built your own, limited company that you do your contracting work. Did that particular story make you go, okay, this is a process I need to now need to put in place to ensure something like that doesn't happen?

Yeah. Obviously one of the key things is to make sure if we're going into a holiday period, that we have a point of contact, first of all. Because I think in the instance where we were waiting, say for example, for the developer to come back and see if there was malware on the site, we need to make sure that there is going to be someone on both the client side and our side who was able to pick up these issues if they do arise.

Yeah. But the bigger picture is in how we onboard accounts now. And how if there are those red flags from the beginning, you think, is this going to be the right fit for us? Yeah. Because the end result of that relationship is, unfortunately it soured. We no longer work with that client.

Yeah. And it knocks the confidence of me and my wider team. Yeah. And it was unnecessarily. So I think establishing those processes in the beginning where you have a very clear framework of what's been set up previously, get on the client calls if they're not too tech savvy, which a lot of smaller accounts won't be.

Talk them through the process. Guide them through, see, what they may have set up previously, what they haven't set up. Don't just assume and take them for their word that, no, we've never done this before. And treat it as a little bit, more due diligence and that's definitely what we do when we're onboarding now. Amazing. Thank you so much for that fantastic story, Susan. No, just as you were just talking there, like I can't help, but I think I, I just, I love doing this. I love these conversations and because this is where you learn, this is where you get those particular specific, issues like we get a lot of people just complaining and shout out about what's going on in our industry.

But we need to go back to the whole, what are the mistakes that have happened? How do you learn from it? How do you move forward? And that's how you become a better marketer, better digital marketer. And I love that. And, then just swiftly, tangenting on to our exit kind of questions which is just relevant, very relevant to what I've just said.

Why is it that it really, do you feel important that we talk about, you'd say these errors that we make, because imagine you see on LinkedIn all the, I did this and I made this amount of conversions and Yeah. We hit our revenue targets.

Why is it important that we actually talk about when we messed up? Yeah. I think, to your point on LinkedIn, it's so full of success stories. It can be really easy to, first of all, to develop an imposter syndrome where you think I'm not seeing that level of success. What am I doing wrong?

Am I in the wrong job? Am I, making mistakes I shouldn't be making? But also the, humility in paid search. And if you have a big ego in paid search, it is inevitably going to humble you because we will all make mistakes. Yeah. And as the platforms evolve, those mistakes become almost inevitable because you don't know what you don't know.

Yeah. And until you make that mistake then you can learn from it and move forward. So by sharing the mistakes within the community, it gives us all that opportunity to see the potential potholes that you may not be aware of. And instead you get focused on, the noise of all the success.

And I think it's wonderful to shout about your success, but it's equally important to be able to say actually, these are the mistakes that I've made that led me to that success and to see that full journey because then it becomes really more of a journey itself rather than just, a start point and then destination of success.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And what would you say is your advice to folks where I, just thinking that, you know what I wanna do so well in this job and, if I make a mistake, I might get fired. Is there a safe way to fail in digital marketing or to mess up in digital marketing?

Or is it, would you say it's always risky? What kind of mindset should people have if they feel like, okay, I might mess up. I think there's always gonna be an inherent risk in digital. That is the nature of the business especially when you're dealing with clients and you're dealing with clients' budgets.

But the important thing to remember is that mistakes will happen. We're all human. You can't be infallible. And when you do find a mistake, the most important thing is to own up to it. To understand why the mistake happened, to be totally open with the client and explain, the implications, and nine times out of 10 you'll actually find that your client, or your boss, or whoever it may be, is actually very understanding of the situation.

Especially if you go in with, the ownership and processes to say, this is what happened. This is how it won't happen again in the future. And really lay that groundwork out like that. But the important thing to remember is that mistakes will happen. We're all human. So yeah.

Yeah it's, yeah. Don't let it rattle your confidence. Amazing. Don't let it rattle your confidence. That is very true because yeah, it will happen. There is no successful paid type person that can honestly say they've never made a mistake. It's like it's the name of the game and it's about being honest and open in communication.

I always say that when the mistake happens, try not to be like a little bit invisible. Make sure that you're accessible. Don't be then all of a sudden no one can hear from you. You're not responding to emails, you're not responding to calls. Be accessible and let people know that you are working on the problem.

Try not to panic too much. Yeah. And now going into a little bit of talking about, an area of paid search that is very dominant now for us talking about AI, PPC and AI and how we deal with it. Do you have any examples of how people could or have messed up in terms of using AI in terms of working with paid search?

I think there's some potential areas where mistakes could happen. So for me in particular, there's one account that I work with and they're very focused on store visits. So that is driving in-store traffic and we find that p max is the most effective at doing that for us. The challenge with store visits is that there's anywhere from, a five to seven day lag in those being reported back into the platform.

Yeah. So those initial, that initial week of data, you have to fly by the seat of your pants, if you will. And trust that the algorithm is doing what it needs to be doing. Yeah. But recent indications are that Google is going to be changing slightly how they measure store visits and how they optimize towards store visits with one of the key areas being get directions.

Yeah. So for marketers who do rely on a max conversion bidding in a PA situation, for example it's something to be very cautious of because Get Directions is a click-based conversion event, and P max, at least in my experience, has a tendency to go a bit wild. With click-based conversions, you're much likely to attract to relevant clicks

that way. So it's about making sure that if you are going to be optimizing towards some of those more offline, like store visit type conversion goals, to not inherently trust the algorithm and to make sure that you're putting those parameters in place less, you end up, with a thousand get directions, clicks

and the client is saying to you, I've only had 10 store visits. What are you talking about?

Interesting. Yeah, I'm glad you gave that specific example 'cause I think we're all just looking, which is all fine, about the bigger implications of AI and how to help us and how people should use it. That kind of specific answer in terms of specific way, like what it could do and how it could go wrong,

love that answer. Susan, you have been such a delight. This has been such a great conversation. But before we go, I've just a fun question. There's nothing to do with Paid Search, nothing to do with marketing.

If your PPC career was a movie, what would be the title? I think I like the idea of Click, Panic and Optimize. Oh, love it. You've just told people not to panic. Susan, what are you talking about. This is my story though you have to remember and I can be a bit of an A personality, oh, bless.

That is such a brilliant one to leave off. But before we leave you, where can people find you to follow your fantastic insights that you wanna share with the industry? Yeah. They can find me on LinkedIn. So I try to be more active on LinkedIn. I know I should be even more active than I am, but I'll be on LinkedIn.

But I'm also part of the PPC Live community and I'm happy to chat to anybody within PPC Live. So yeah, please feel free to reach out. Fantastic. So lovely to have you on the podcast. Thank you Susan. And yeah, take care. Bye. You too. 

Thank you so much, Susan, for that amazing share and that story and being so honest and transparent about, , yeah, that memory of that story of three months downtime of a client. Although I'd feel that it's not as painful because that's something that a client messed up with. It's more annoying, than I'm painful.

So yeah, remember, make sure that your clients are being transparent as well, as much, not just an agency's job to be transparent about what they're gonna do, how they're running your campaigns, but make sure you're getting the best and the most out of your client and, you feel that you can trust them as

well. So yeah, for all information and the full transcript, and not just the show notes. Yeah, go to podcast.ppc.live and, you'll get all the full details about this fantastic episode. An update about PPC Live, unfortunately, the PPC Live Leeds event that is happening on what's supposed to have happened now, the 26th of June is not gonna happen anymore, that has been canceled.

Everybody who bought a ticket is gonna get a refund back. Unfortunately, we just didn't quite get the interest that we wanted to and, didn't quite manage to secure a sponsor. So, yeah, we are going to put that on hold for a while and, try to come back to that in terms of coming back to Leeds, reassess that, see what's actually the best way to ensure that the people who need to be at the event are fully aware that its going on, and maybe even partner with other companies that are doing events in that area as well.

So yeah, we are now full hog ahead in planning PPC Live still 17, but this time in London and this is gonna be happening on July the 31st. So yes, go to, ppc.live to get your tickets from there. We've got three amazing speakers. Heads of PPCs, paid media leads. The people that you want to be listening to, that who know their stuff, who have made mistakes in the past, who are gonna go through presentations that are really very much learnings about mistakes from the past

so that you don't make the same mistakes as well. So yeah, go to ppc.live to get those tickets. I'm also doing coaching sessions, so if you wanna book an. With me, just go to www.themarketinganu.com for that so that I can help you reignite your love for paid search and just ensure that you are on the right path of your career.

So yeah, I hope you have enjoyed that show and I look forward to bringing you more PPC Fops and Triumphs next week. Thank you. Bye.