I worked with one of the best Google Ads Agencies in the country (US). Frankly, they didn’t practice what they preach and the account manager was actually new to google ads. I wanted access to an expert and got connected with someone who was learning themselves.
I think the agency model is dying because businesses are starting to catch on that the premium they are paying agencies is not worth it especially for the amount of time they work within your account.
Now, don’t get me wrong, you need access to someone who understands how Google works, strategies, and how to set up and optimize the campaign, but because of machine learning it’s more about strategy and analysis then it is about being in the account every day.
Small businesses can actually run their own campaigns. Don’t pay a premium for “expertise” when you are getting connected to an employee that knows less about Google than you.
Also, no agency will care about your business more than you. I had to sign a contract that stated I should not touch the account. And I’m sure this is to prevent headaches for the agency, but in my case we found hundreds of dollars of wasted ad spend and we also found incorrect targeting for our YouTube campaigns. I found myself encouraging my account manager to add negative keywords and add offline conversions. They started to implementing the offline conversions but never touched the search terms. After, I fired our agency, I did a deep audit, added several negative keywords, a slight restructure, and fixed targeting on the YouTube TOF and remarketing campaigns. The agencies best was a 90% ROAS, yes unprofitable. We just hit a 217% ROAS after all of the changes.
Don’t assume agencies have your best interest at heart. As a small business I’d rather keep control of my business and get access to an expert.
If you have doubts about your agency, dig deep into your account and learn to ask the right questions.
What’s your experience with agencies?
This is actually a very fair post, but the unarticulated lesson is this: Agency expertise is incredibly hard to scale. If the individual who sold you on their expertise will not be handling your account or driving the strategy for it on a frequent basis, run away.
When an individual has broad & deep capabilities in a practice area, they are in demand. In order to scale they must hire around them and that usually means that individual gets into a trap: they now have a payroll support and entirely different problems than not having enough time for all the clients that they sold their attention to. Some figure out how to get past that, but most don’t so you as the client are left with a precipitous drop in quality.
When hiring an agency, it’s important to get a verbal commitment on the % of work attributed to each agency team member during the pitch (this isn’t very hard) and then have those exact statements written into the contract with levers to reduce fees or exit altogether if those thresholds are not met by the agency. No one ever does this second part, but with the current bloodbath agencies are experiencing I imagine most will be happy to commit to that kind of expertise guarantee to win new business.
The point of hiring an agency is to access expertise and scale that is too difficult to build & manage in-house. If the agency isn’t regularly providing that kind of value, like OP has described, it’s time to bounce. Don’t throw good money after bad, even though changing or leaving agencies can also be painfully disruptive.