Google Contacting Clients in an Adwords MCC?!

[RobertFisher]

I am curious if this has happened to others and if so if you were able to resolve it.

Today a client forwarded an email that went to a client account and we were in no way copied on it. This is a client that spends in the 6 figures with us and I was shocked to read (Any bold or italics I have added):

Hi *****,

My name is Jimmy Morrow and I am an Account Strategist at Google on our Agency Team. Your account was recently selected for free dedicated support this quarter and I will be your new point of contact at Google for all things AdWords. We can go over a few housekeeping things I noticed, broader strategy, and some betas that would be a good fit. Please let me know when you have time for a 20-30 minute phone call when we can go over the accounts and make a plan for working together this quarter.

Thanks and just let me know a time that works best for you!

Best,

Jimmy

To me, they have essentially gone around us and with the "housekeeping" and "beta" comments sought to make us look either incapable and/or uninformed.

We are Google Partners, etc. and we have clients in our MCC for Adwords. I have never seen an occasion where Google blatantly tried to steal the client as it appears is happening here. This is a client who heretofore had NEVER used Adwords and they have been in business since before there was a Google or an Internet. We brought them to Adwords about 6 - 8 months ago!!! They are spending 6 figures on Adwords and I am ready to pull them out and spend the money elsewhere.

We sent emails from our UK and our Houston office and no response from lil ole Jimmy. Our UK team has tried calling Google and nothing and then Chatting with them and we can get nothing.

This is a client who has a lot of faith in our abilities based on many things we have done for them that worked and they are the kind of client that let's us know when issues arise. So, they are not going to switch and that is not the issue. The issue is Google acted as if they wanted to embrace agencies and if that is so, why then try to back door them?

I hope to hear from others who are handling PPC with Google. Thanks a ton.

Robert

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Well, you aren't the only one. Shared this post with our PPC guy...

yup, they've been doing that to our clients for a few months now.. very annoying. they even did it for CLIENT who wasn't spending that much. for another client, they called with same thing. for many others, when I login to their accounts, i've noticed the alert at the top right saying "you have been selected for agency support, please click here to schedule a call". I mentioned it to our rep and they said the google agency support team that might contact clients isn't to replace us blah blah blah. shitty practice from google.

[RobertFisher]

I disagree with your "shitty practice from Google." I personally think it is blatantly unethical.

Edit: by disagree, I mean that unethical is worse than shitty practice.

[EGOL]

Fear not.  This is just Google out doing a little drive-by shooting.  They are not going to start building landing pages, writing ads, calculating profit margins and matching them to bid levels, or spending advertiser money.   The advertiser is going to be one of six people the Google person talks to on any given day, the Google person isn't going to get his hands dirty or break a sweat, the advertiser isn't going to understand most of the beta stuff that they get nudged towards.  After a few calls the googler will move on to fresh meat and the advertiser will be back on his own.  He will probably be damn glad that he has someone to do his calculating, sweating, getting dirty and running the account.  He didn't really want to do this work anyhow.

Google consultations are more to make you aware of new stuff, rethink your old stuff, and make you think they are offering great customer service.  Their main hope is to expose you to new things so you might decide to produce more revenue for them.   If you are a reasonably smart person, you will buy into about 1/2 of their advice, decide that 1/2 of it is above your technical level, and 1/2 of it can't find a slot on your "to do list".  Overall, about 25% of it will be helpful and for that you should give thanks, but the people at google are not going to do your work for you because that doesn't scale.

[Alick300]

Hi Robert,

I have seen few such queries in adwords community where I find those emails not from Google. So if you post your question in Google adwords community you will get response from Google employee soon. There is a Googler name 'Kathleen' she respond very promptly in such case. So post once there I hope you will get reply from 'Kathleen'. You can also contact Kathleen on twitter.

Hope this helps.

Thanks

[RobertFisher]

Well put, thanks EGOL

What is interesting is that we are dealing with a lot of clients and have a very difficult time getting even the lowest end response from them. Then, most of those you can talk with recently went through training with the person sitting next to them that arrived a month earlier at best.

But they send this stuff out and make statements that really hurt our reputation. That is the pisser of the deal.

[RobertFisher]

Alick,

Thanks for the Google community suggestion, I hate to waste the time there but will give it a try.

I have been dealing with Google and Adwords for ten years and the email is from Google and the person is _____@Google.com, an Assoc. Account Strategist. AKA junior sales fellow that started there last week (IMO). This has devolved now as the guy sent me an email stating: "It was a mapping issue on our end since there are two primary MCCs linked to the account and previous strategists have worked directly with the end client. It is now updated."

Interestingly, the client has not used Adwords before so we are not quite sure how they can make this statement. BUT, in his response to me he goes on to state he has also contacted another client from our MCC!!!

Edit:(Which would seem to say you were trolling through our MCC.)

And therein lies the problem. I have never been one to knock Google like so many do. I understand they have a business and we and others choose to play on their playground. But, when you go out and make a big display about your desire to Partner with Agencies, etc. and then you turn around and destroy that trust, your hubris is going to cost you. I realize they could care less about our account or us as an agency in terms of a single 6 figure client is literally less valuable than a nickel in my pocket. It is just sad that they once based everything on do no evil. I was truly shocked by the email to our client.

Thanks again for your G community suggestion; I will try it out.

Robert

[RobertFisher]

Our UK office was able to reach the associate adwords strategist's boss finally via phone. He apologized and said it was a mistake, etc. He has agreed to ensure the clients are aware that they work only with agencies and they should not have been contacted, etc. I have to say that once we were able to reach someone it did get handled. But, IMO it does not change the behavior so... wait and see.

The good news is that we believe for our accounts we have a new contact with Google who is feeling he needs to give us a bit more effort due to the issues with our two clients. I will guardedly say... "All is well that ends well."

[RobertFisher]

Alick,

I did use the Adwords community forum and was pleasantly surprised by the input. One person (level 13) stated this had happened to him and gave some good input. Another did as well. Thanks for taking time to send an answer to me.

All the best,

Robert