How Does Google Think? An Insider’s Guide for SME Advertisers

Date: May 27, 2021     Time: 2 PM ET | 11 AM PT     Duration: 50 mins

Webinar Description: 

Getting support from Google can be mind-numbingly confusing and seemingly ever-shifting for an SME advertiser to navigate. In this webinar, ex-Googler and Hive Digital expert Jay Patel opens up about his 5 years of experience on the inside, breaking down the different teams and how Google’s thinking and organizational processes have evolved over the years so that you can understand how best to access the support from Google that you need.

In this webinar, you will learn:

• A history of Google’s support for SME advertisers and the evolution of its thinking and processes over time
• A breakdown of current types of support Google offers for the different types of SME advertisers, and which bucket you likely fall into
• Recommendations on how best to leverage Google for your needs

See Additional Resources
Access Presentation Slides (PDF)

Jay Patel:
Awesome, we are live. All right welcome everybody to this live, I don’t know if it’s a training but it is a webinar, it’s part of the Hive Digital’s webinar series. We’ve been running this pretty much monthly for the last year and talking about different topics with the SCO and SCM. So we have some amazing content that you can check out on the hivedigital.com website and of course, as always this will be sent out after the fact to anyone who has recorded. So if you need to drop off, I will not take it personally. So Sheff, did I capture everything correctly?

Sheffield Pulley:
Yeah. Just Q&A towards the end, you may mention this here in a bit and then we’ll be sending out the deck and the resources at the end but yeah I think you covered it otherwise.

Jay Patel:
All right. Well welcome everybody. So we’re going to be talking a little bit about, How Google thinks an insider’s guide for SME advertisers and we are going to be kind of diving deep in because as someone who has worked inside and outside Google I know just how confusing Google support options for SME advertisers can be. So here’s kind of a rundown and you’re going to be getting some pretty secrets SaaS kind of stuff during this that I haven’t seen shared anywhere else so I’m really excited to be able to open up about this and to be able to educate you all on what to do when you need help from Google. So what are we going to learn today? First off, we’re going to talk a little bit, just touch on a history of Google support for SME advertisers over the last decade.

Jay Patel:
We’re going to talk a little bit about the current support offerings for SMEs, and lastly, we’re going to talk about leveraging these learnings to get the support that you need for your business. So who am I, why should you listen to me? So I worked at Google from 2010 to 2015, which was actually a pretty critical time as Google has developed out as SME service offering. Pretty much everything that exists today was developed during those years. In addition to that I have a lot of friends who have continued to work on that team and so everything I’m going to talk about today, I’ve run by them and so to the best of my knowledge everything I’m about to share with you is still accurate as of 2021. I’m also an entrepreneur. After Google I actually ended up moving to East Africa, lived there for four years, started a couple of businesses.

Jay Patel:
And then I moved back to the United States in 2019 and ended up joining the Hive Digital team as a digital marketer. So I work with all our clients on things like Google search YouTube, Google display. So really understanding the Google advertising ecosystem and developing a marketing strategy around that. So my story at Google so when I joined in 2010 on what was then called Google Ad Operations, and it was basically the customer service team. So, when an advertiser called 8662GOOGLE, I was one of those people who were answering the phone being like, “Thanks for calling. How can I help you today?” Then in my first few months they ended up starting a small business sales team and then I ended up doing double duty on both customer service and sales and then eventually we became solely focused on the sales team.

Jay Patel:
From 2012 to 2015, I was working on the agency team. So I worked with over 30 ad agencies, maybe even more, ranging from some of your big players like WPP Omnicom type agencies, all the way down to performance marketing agencies run out of Central America and anywhere in between. So a wide range of different types of clients but all focusing on small and medium size businesses. I also helped run a online marketing challenge that Google has for college students, engaging tens of thousands of students around the world who are taking marketing courses. They’ve shifted the program a bit but for college students through your professor are still able to get access to participate in the competition to help advertise a NGO using real advertising money.

Jay Patel:
So it’s a pretty cool thing. I also helped develop a pilot program which has now been scaled out since I’ve left Google that has helped provide a higher level of services support to top agencies and top advertisers within the SME space to provide a more integrated solution for them and then lastly I’ve been working with Hive Digital for the last couple of years and continuing to focus on our clients. So the story of Google, learning to love the SME market. So two things about how Google thinks that’s really really important for you to understand in terms of what guides our decisions. The first is scalability. I mean, Google not only has one but five or six products with over a billion users so everything they think about comes down to well, yeah but how can we scale this?

Jay Patel:
And so whenever they’re designing support options, they’re always thinking, “Yes, but how could we scale this up to a million plus advertisers?” So that’s really really important to understand. So there are similar to Amazon in that way. How they’re a little bit different than Amazon is automation and by that, I mean that Google is historically been run by engineers who like to think you can remove the human element as much as possible from everything and so unlike Amazon which really invested early in providing top tier customer service, Google historically has thought that, “Hey, if you just automate everything, you don’t need customer service at all.” And I think as we all know that has proved to be an incorrect assumption. So, but even today as Google has invested in building out the customer service offering, they’re still thinking about how are ways that we can scale, how are ways we can automate.

Jay Patel:
So this is how Google thinks, how does Google act according to employees? So this leaked onto BuzzFeed back in 2012, the internal meme board for Google employees, I remember as an employee seen this very exact meme and I thought it was one of the most accurate things we’ve ever seen. From the outside Google seems like a sleek operation but inside it’s a collection of fiefdoms and almost medieval like structure in terms of getting teams to work together that otherwise want to do their own thing and so a lot of the issues that you might face with Google don’t take it personally because Google has some really messy internal dynamics and unfortunately that means that sometimes advertisers pay the price in terms of a lot more confusing responses and longer tier response times. That’s just kind of how Google is kind of set up and operated historically.

Jay Patel:
So in 2010, and this is actually what the Google search engine looked like in 2010, it’s changed a bit. Desktop search was still the really big thing. So mobile smartphones were still starting to move out. We still hadn’t seen the launch of a lot of platforms that we use today, like Snapchat, like TikTok, at that time Google was kind of still focused on trying to snatch big customers. We’re talking to the Nike’s of the world. So you had those, you had like mid tier clients, clients who might spend on TV but are not major major brands and then you had everybody else and the everybody else market was pretty much ignored. There wasn’t a sales team that was really focused on small and medium businesses. In fact, if anything they were actually losing clients year after year.

Jay Patel:
And the focus was how can we lose less? How can we reduce our turn rate as they call it? The number of clients who ended up leaving, and then agencies were really seen as unhelpful middleman, again a bunch of engineers thinking, “Hey, agencies shouldn’t exist if you have the perfect UI.” And so agencies were actively seen as antagonistic and created a lot of difficulties in the early years working with these agencies. So what changed over the last 10 years? We have a much more complex user interface, through the AdWords interface, which is still just one platform you have to run advertising on mobile apps, video, display, shopping, it has gotten so incredibly complex and it has to be designed for so many use cases that it is really impossible to have one very simple user interface that everyone understands completely well for everything.

Jay Patel:
So kind of acknowledging that more support is needed to navigate this. Number two, you see Facebook and Amazon emerging as key competitors in certain spaces, Amazon of course dominating the shopping and Facebook in terms of all sorts of advertising and so Google really had to up their game in terms of customer service. SMB came to be seen as the biggest growth market once they tapped out of Fortune 500 companies to go after to nab this big clients, small and medium businesses are really the future and now we’re penetrating even deeper, so maybe six or seven years ago, it was the US market now we’re looking at the SME market in Brazil, India, emerging markets. So this is still going to be considered the growth driver of Google for the decade to come. They built up an entire sprawling sales team that they split out from the services team, as I mentioned before and the SMB team has expanded to take on more and more mid tier clients.

Jay Patel:
So they’ve actually eliminated that mid tier. So now you either fall into large customer sales or you fall into the SMB sales, which is now called Google Customer Solutions but it’s still basically is responsible for probably half of Google’s ad spend and the vast majority of Google’s advertisers clients and lastly agencies are seen as helpful partners and Google has developed an entire team and ecosystem structure focused around working with agencies and supporting them and there’s also been an arms race there too, because all the other social media platforms are also trying to work very closely with agencies. So everybody’s trying to grab a bigger and bigger slice of this advertising pie. The agencies have a lot of sway in.

Jay Patel:
So where are things today? So this is a little slide I put together in terms of the Google business organization. The names probably changed already by the time I delivered this to all of you and they’re constantly reorging. So this is really just more like a high level way for you really to understand the basic dynamics and we’re going to dive into a few of these areas. So as you can see, you have large customer sales, which gets divided into direct client sales or traditional account pods, multiple people, you got a whole team in India of customer service reps providing 24 hour service. Then you also have a media agency team and they work with the Omnicoms, the WPPs. So for example if Volkswagen wants to run a global advertising campaign, well they’re going to have different teams for every market and how does the Volkswagen UK team coordinating with the Volkswagen US team that’s probably going to come through their agency that they’re working with and so there’s a team that’s really focused on synchronizing all of that.

Jay Patel:
And then on the small and medium business side, you have the services team, you have the sales team and then there are a few teams on the backend that kind of support both of these, billing, ad policy, technical because for example, landing page policy has to be coordinated across both the big players and the small players and so this is what, we’ll talk a little bit more about the here, but when you get delays in some of the policy issues, it’s really going to come back down to these scenes on the backend that have to coordinate across all of these use cases across all of these countries.

Jay Patel:
So we’ll come back to this slide, so don’t worry. You don’t have to memorize it. First we’re going to talk about SMB service. So the SMB service team, on the first layer, what you have is direct customer service reps so when you chat in, email in, or call 8662GOOGLE, you are going to get a customer service rep. This person is likely to be a vendor. So it’s not likely to be a Google employee unless you put in a customer ID that is an agency level ID or you are a top tier SME advertiser, you’re going to get access to this customer service rep. It’s actually funny because large customer sales team clients are not allowed to call the 866 support line. We used to have cases where somebody from, again, I’ll just use example of Volkswagen or Ford would call in and they’d be like, “No sorry, you actually have to go through your account rep.

Jay Patel:
So this team is specifically for the SME market and what’s going to happen is that they’re going to take your issue, they’re going to try to troubleshoot over the phone but likely if they have to do anything, they’re going to have to escalate it internally to the customer service specialists. These are the people on the backend who actually can go into the backend of the system and actually change things. So review it, if your landing page was not approved before and now it’s approved or the ad needs to be approved the customer service specialist will handle it. So for most issues it’s going to take a couple of days of back and forth between these two reps where the direct customer service rep is essentially your lawyer representing you to the customer service specialist to try to get whatever issue that you have resolved fully.

Jay Patel:
But sometimes you can have a case where maybe it’s a use case where there is a fundamental disagreement because at the end of the day, the customer service specialists are just following a playbook, they can’t change the playbook. The only ones who can change the playbook are these specialist teams that I talked about and each of these specialist teams are their own fiefdom, they don’t fall under the SMB sales organization so basically they are not obligated to listen to the SMB managers. So they kind of do their own thing and through the kindness of their hearts, they sometimes will go above and beyond but if you talk about issues that might last a couple of weeks, it’s going to be because that customer service specialist has to escalate to the specialist team and then say, “Hey, the playbook’s incorrect actually this use case doesn’t fall under what your policy prescription is.”

Jay Patel:
And then they’re saying yes, but okay if we change the playbook now we have to look at how might this affect everything else and every other policy not just within the United States, for example but globally and so that’s what leads to some of these, like multi-month issues, lots of back and forth, super frustrating for the advertiser and so understanding this may not help you solve it faster but at least we’ll give you a little bit of understanding so that you’re not constantly wondering, what’s going on behind the scenes, and again I can answer some more questions about this if you’d like.

Jay Patel:
So next off, we’re going to talk about direct client sales and so this team is basically for advertisers who are spending at least a few tens of thousands of dollars a quarter. So there’s basically three tiers to this direct client sales, one is managed accounts, so if you are an independent advertiser who is not part of an agency but you’re spending say, I don’t know, $500,000 a year, $1 million a year, you are going to get assigned to a pod, where you’re going to get ongoing account management by Google employees, and these pods might change over every six or 12 months but you will continue to have an ongoing rep guaranteed and they will work with you. There are some exceptions if you fall into certain controversial subverticals, like if you’re selling sex toys, there may not be a pod for you but generally if you spend that much money, you will get an ongoing account rep. They might even come visit you.

Jay Patel:
The next tier is those who might be spending tens maybe up to a $100,000 or $200,000 a year probably less complex needs. You’re going to have a Google employee and this was again, was the team that I served on where every six months you might get an email from a Google rep or a phone call like a cold call from Google rep saying, “Hey, I’m your account rep, let me work with you this quarter to help you.” And that’s called Top Spenders and still if you’re talking about the entire SMB sales marketplace, Managed Accounts, probably only accounts for like 1% and Top Spenders probably looks at the next 5% to 10%.

Jay Patel:
And so you’re going to get this rep every three to six months, and we’ll go into a little bit more detail later on about what they actually do with you and then of course you have certain pilots. So for example, back in the day I was part of this pilot where we were scaling out remarketing or retargeting the ads that kind of follow you around after you visit a website and we were getting clients to help adopt this product. So we had a specialty pilot going for six months on that and then there are other pilots that continue to crop up as some VP or some manager gets an idea of how can we provide additional support to some niche or for some product offering. So you might get into one of those pilots.

Jay Patel:
But this still covers only about maybe the top 10% of SMBs. I’ll talk about the Agency and then we’ll go into the Long tail as well. So on the agency side, the agency breakdown is kind of similar to direct sales. So basically if you work with an advertising agency what’s going to happen is that, that agency, if they have a lot of Google clients will have an agency wide rep that works with senior management and works with them on business development training so that when you’re working with an agency rep they are actually getting support from Google and that could lead to some goodies down the road. For example, if you suddenly get $1 million and you want to do a cool day at Google to talk about how to spend on YouTube that agency wide rep can facilitate that.

Jay Patel:
Account reps on the agency team, again this is what I was, are assigned high value accounts within that agency, so clients who are spending at least a few thousand dollars, maybe $10,000 $20,000 a month, those thresholds change and those are the accounts that are basically part of my book and we’ll come back to this later. Smaller accounts, maybe those are only spending $1,000 or $2,000 or $3,000 a month, or just a few hundred dollars a month, they’re not going to get assigned a Google rep but they still will get support from the Google rep as needed. One of the things about the Google agency team is that their first point of contact will always be the agency and building that relationship with the agency is really important. So if the agency comes and says, “Hey, we just have this new tiny client. Can you help us on this?” The account rep will probably still help even if it won’t count towards their targets or their revenue goals.

Jay Patel:
How do you know if you’re a part of the agency team? If you are linked to that agency’s account last quarter, you’re going to get roped into the agency team. I know sometimes we would have issues where the person would say, “Yeah but I don’t work with that agency anymore. I would just want my own account rep, that’s not part of that agency.” We say, “Well, you need to de-link from that agency’s account and then next quarter hopefully you’ll get unaffiliated with that agency and then you can be eligible to be assigned your own direct rep.” The main difference between this and non-agency sales is that the Google rep will work through the agency rep, and what’s really important to maintain the relationship with the agency is not going around the agency to work directly with the client.

Jay Patel:
So actually the Google rep, even though they’re going to be assigned to your account will not work with you directly without the agency being present on the call or having the explicit approval for them to talk to you directly and that’s really really important to understand but that being said that Google rep will still be in your account, they’ll still be looking at ways to optimize it but they will be working with the agency.

Jay Patel:
Second, there is no top spenders, so there is no rotation kind of thing. If a Google rep is assigned to your account, they will stay with your account for as long as they keep working with the agency. So you do get that advantage that if you’re a mid tier account though it would otherwise be assigned a Google rep every six months or 12 months because you don’t qualify for that mid tier management. If you work with an agency, you probably will get that Google rep who will keep working on your account and will be very familiar with your account and then again, the agency-wide rep focuses on upleveling agency staff and providing business development support. So again, there are some cool initiatives that can come through that which is why it always helps when you’re working with an advertising agency to work with one that does have a Google rep or has that qualification.

Jay Patel:
And then lastly, we’re just going to touch on Long tail. So this is like most advertisers in the world are going to fall into this. What you’re going to get is you might get a rotating contractor. They’re going to say they’re a representative of Google but there’ll be very clear not to explicitly state that they’re a Google employee but they will still have access to your account and they will still be able to help you and honestly for most SMEs we are still trying to figure out the very basics of setting up keywords, these contractors, even if they may not have the same level of training as like a Google employee are still pretty good and they can still offer a lot of value with implementing certain recommendations but basically these contractors are essentially going to be going by the playbook and be helping you to implement which you can already see in your account either through the optimization score or through automated emails. So these contractors are more like navigators to kind of help you implement what the Google’s automated system has already noticed that you should be doing.

Jay Patel:
And that’s the long tail. What service bucket do you fall into? So just as a kind of a recap, if you’re spending, and again I talked to my friend right now around $6 million and up, you’re going to fall into large client sales, which means you will get an account rep, a team actually, they will do the whole wining and dining, very traditional account management. If you’re spending more than let’s say $300,000 a year, and you’re not part of an agency probably will have an ongoing direct rep who’s working with you to optimize your account. If you’re part of a Google supported agency, you will have an ongoing indirect rep through the agency. If you’re spending tens of thousands up to $300,000 a year, if you’re not part of the agency, you’ll probably get a rotating Google employee rep and if you’re part of a Google support agency, you’ll either have that indirect rep or you’ll get support as needed through that agency representative.

Jay Patel:
And then everybody else you’re going to get either again, this rotating vendor rep and you’re going to get email and in-account optimization tips. So that’s kind of the breakdown. Again, there are exceptions to this. If you’re a startup, there is a team, for example that identifies, “Hey, you just got funded through Y Combinator or one of these Silicon Valley accelerators, you probably will be spending a lot of money soon. We’re going to assign you a particular team.” Teams called Project Sand Hill and that’s named for Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto where a lot of the VCs are based. So again, there are exceptions to this. You also get advertisers again, if you’re in sensitive categories, you may not get the support you’re looking for, even if you do spend that amount of money but this is just a general guide.

Jay Patel:
So, what does this mean for you? What do you do with it? What should you know and what should you be thinking about? So, one thing to think about when you’re working with a rep that’s really helpful to understand if you’re assigned a sales rep, basically these reps they may, you hear about, they’re probably getting jacuzzi massages, et cetera but the truth is that they don’t have time for this because at least during the day they are slammed busy with phone calls. So a rep might get assigned up to 300 accounts a quarter and they have a revenue target that’s across all the accounts. So it’s not at the individual account level. That’s not actually how they’re incentivized to work on a day-to-day basis. How they are is that there is a series of tasks across your account that each has own points value based on long-term revenue.

Jay Patel:
So some of these tasks are quite obvious, like raising your budgets or raising your bids and they will have a higher points value. However, there are certain tasks that may not on the surface seem like it leads to increased revenue for example, adding negative keywords or enabling conversion tracking. These sorts of things might actually reduce spend in the short term but they reduce wasted spend and Google’s data shows that if you reduce wasted spend advertisers see more results and they’re happier, therefore they spend a lot more money in the long-term and so the reps are incentivized to get you to spend more money but more money in the long-term not necessarily in the short term and that’s something I’ll keep telling my clients, as a rep, I could tell you something that could get you to spend an extra $500 but then if you don’t see the results, you’re going to turn off your ads because as you know there are no long-term contracts with Google, you can turn off your ads at any point.

Jay Patel:
And so that provides that positive incentive of, “Hey, we’d rather you spend slightly less money but keep doing it for years and years and years and be happy with the results and that will also lead them to go from, “Hey, you’re spending on Google search, how can you go into display? How do you get into YouTube?” And you’re not going to get into those things if you’re not happy with Google search but at the end of the day for the rep, the rep is assigned a points target. I got to hit like 5,000 points by the end of the quarter and I have to do this across the least 100 accounts. So it’s depth and scale. They can’t hit their targets just by focusing on getting one rep to spend, let’s say one account goes from $100 a day to $1,000,000 a day.

Jay Patel:
Like it’s the next Tesla. Great. The rep is still not going to hit their target because they got to do it across their entire portfolio. So what that really means is that every quarter is a race against time. They’re going to have at least one or two phone calls maybe more over the course of the quarter but they really have to be thinking about how they spread out their time throughout the course and are they able to do so, like for example, I didn’t take a lot of vacation while I was at Google because every day that I took off, I was one less day that I could be working my accounts.

Jay Patel:
So as an advertiser, just understanding that it’s not quite a quid pro quo but it is a little bit of a sense of like, “Okay if I’m going to take up your time I’m going to do things in the account and the more that I do in my account, the more that we can work together, the more time you’ll give to me and the more that I take advantage of your time, the more that I can, for example, as an advertiser asks for special requests from the Google rep and the more incentivized they are able to do it.”

Jay Patel:
Like can you get me into this fancy beta? Or can you get me this special report? And so understanding that, yeah it’s kind of like you’re helping them, they’re helping you, it’s going to help you build a really positive relationship with your Google rep rather than one where I was like, “Oh my gosh, why is this person keeping annoying me? I don’t want to talk to them.” And that’s not going to be helpful for either party because they can’t offer value. So is a Google rep worth it? What can they actually do for you on the positive side, they can pull in specialists in areas like video, mobile, display.

Jay Patel:
So for example, if you have a new mobile app and you’re like, “Well, we want to advertise it on the mobile app store for Android, I don’t know where to begin that rep can pull in a mobile app specialist to help you design a campaign and be like, “Hey, you want to hit these audience targets, the segments, et cetera.” It can help you in things like video. If you want to run a YouTube campaign and provide advice on how should I structure the videos and how do I storyboard it and areas like display, how do all these things work together? How do I attribute? How do I use Google Analytics to figure out how to track these different conversions that I might have so they can provide a lot of value in terms of helping you to scope out how much you could be spending and again, the more money you’re willing to spend, the more they can pull in and really get some top tier support for you.

Jay Patel:
They can help with the media buying. Sometimes we’ve had advertisers say, “Hey, I want to buy out the YouTube homepage.” And that’s a flat $100,000 buy or I want to spend $300,000 for this new product line, they can actually connect you with a team that can help you with traditional media buying that goes outside of the ad auction system. They can sometimes get you additional reports. There are some industry trend reports that you don’t get access to do the interface, although the interface is continuing to get better and better all the time. So as time goes on, this value become less and less because again, Google’s trying to automate and scale everything.

Jay Patel:
And so it’s just a matter of the engineer’s time in terms of, is this report worth building into the interface or not but there are some additional ports that can get you access to that you can’t get on your own. They can facilitate entry to betas any beta. So for example, one that’s popular right now is image extensions, which is where on your search ad. You can actually get images that appear next to your ad and that is something that is a beta that you have to apply for and has to be manually approved by whoever’s running that beta and so you can still request it, even if you don’t have a rep but the rep will probably be more proactive about telling you, “Hey, you have this image ad beta that you can get into, would you like me to facilitate and follow up and make sure that it’s getting looked at?” So they can really help you there.

Jay Patel:
And they can also follow up with support tickets particularly around policy issues because they’re incentivized to keep your ads running. So if a policy issue is preventing your ad from your ad from running they can really be practical about following up with the support team to make sure that’s getting resolved and so you kind of have that person helping you, and of course they can provide all the tips and advice in terms of what to run and what not to run. On the downside, what the downsides of working with them are is they are going to refer you to the 866 support line for most support issues. I actually found myself pretty lucky that I served on the support team in the very beginning of my Google days because I got a level of training around troubleshooting issues that the average sales rep is not going to have anymore.

Jay Patel:
And this is almost by design. They really do not want sales reps spending time helping you figure out why is your ad not running. They want you to call the 866 support line and get that resolved and so that is frustrating sometimes, why can’t they just tell you and do it but again, going back to that slide on in terms of how sales reps spend their time these troubleshooting issues can take up a lot of time, a lot of time especially if you’re not 100% sure of what to do and which channels to go through and so that’s why the end of the day, you are best off calling the support line even if it might be a bit frustrating that you got to do something slightly different or work with someone slightly different.

Jay Patel:
Second, they only understand Google products and maybe 10 years ago when every advertising platform was still super isolated that might not have been a huge challenge but today in a world where everything’s getting integrated, where you’re running similar creatives across Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube they’re not going to be able to help you understand any of those other things. They’re only going to really understand Google products, and lastly, at the end of the day, their goal is to get you to spend more money and so while they might give you short term things to help you spend more efficiently, they’re incentivized that how much you spend on Google’s platform should always go up and so they’re not going to necessarily help you figure out how much should I allocate to Google versus Facebook given my particular product line or seasonality needs.

Jay Patel:
So at the end of the day, reps can be a strong supplement but cannot replace the role of an agency or an in-house digital marketing manager. So just kind of keep that in mind. So I feel like I qualify, how do I get it? Something to understand is books are final as halfway through a quarter for next quarter. So let’s say in February you start spending a ton of money or January, you start spending a ton of money and be like, where’s my Google rep. I’ve been spending tens of thousands of dollars every week for the last two months. Well, they’re not going to pick that up until you spend the money and then they put you into the next quarter but the things is that books are finalized halfway through a quarter, so sometimes you might start spending money in say, January or February, then the system will pick it up in mid April that, “Hey, this client’s been spending a lot of money this past quarter, we should probably assign them a rep.”

Jay Patel:
And then starting July 1st is when you will be put in the book for a rep. So it might be three to six months before you get access to a Google rep and so there is going to be that delay and that’s just a function of internal allocations because this determines headcount, this determines hiring needs within Google in terms of how they’re assigning reps between teams. So there’s a lot of approval processes and revenue targets setting that are there based on this because this is such a dynamic market. Second, you can escalate requests that might help push the bucket. There is a manual review process internally where if you’re not spending a lot of money but you’re like, “I promise I’m spending $500,000 next quarter, give me somebody,” they can get something assigned.

Jay Patel:
This will be easy. You can call 8662GOOGLE, they may or may not know how to help you. Through an agency, they will know exactly who to talk to, and that agency rep will be clued in to who needs to be looped in to get you somebody soon. So that’s where working through an agency will give you an advantage compared to kind of interacting with Google directly on your own. Again, advertises in sensitive or stagnant verticals may not qualify for various reasons, and again, smaller accounts can still leverage many of the benefits through your agency. So even if you don’t have somebody assigned through your agency, that agency rep can still provide support one-off requests, et cetera. So you still have that advantage.

Jay Patel:
So to summarize, Google reps generally are nice to have and I think if you’re somebody who is really keen to explore Google’s offering and you’re committed to spending money but you want to do so in the right way, Google reps can be a great great great resource. I don’t think they’re 100% necessary most of the time. I think that if you have a savvy agency or you have a savvy in-house rep, you can probably do most of what a Google rep will offer but the Google rep is just an extra set of free eyes that can help look through your account and spot opportunities you might’ve missed and again, it’s all about, can you make it worth the reps time to spend more time on your account. Again, if you just want, like, “Okay, I got a list of recommendations, cool. Talk to you in six months,” that’s fine.

Jay Patel:
But if you’re somebody who’s like, “Hey, while I have you, let me leverage you as much as possible. Can you be transactional like that?” And the second thing no matter what, you still need an in-house point of contact to manage. What’s your overall marketing strategy? Who are the audiences you’re trying to target and how are you attributing all this back to whatever marketing management CRM platform that you’re using, whether it’s HubSpot or SharpSpring or something else. The development of the creatives is pretty much going to be on you. Google has some tools to help you create a YouTube ad or a responsive display ad but generally, especially on the video side, you’re pretty much responsible for your own content.

Jay Patel:
And this tech stack, Google has call tracking but there’s also other call tracking platforms like CallRail that may be a better fit for you and how do you integrate CallRail with HubSpot, with Google Analytics, with your Facebook, with your Google, I mean that’s something that a Google rep is not going to be able to help you with, you’re going to need an agency to help you with that. So it all comes back down to if you’re hoping that the answer is, “Hey, a Google rep can really cut out the role of somebody to help you.” The answer is probably not, although you can try it and see how it works for you but at the end of the day they can be great and for the record at Hive, we have our own Google rep and he’s been fantastic at helping us escalate different requests and just do a better job of serving our clients. So that is everything.

Jay Patel:
Next steps and resources, just a little bit about Hive. We’ve been around for close to two decades and we’re a fantastic team, mostly based in North Carolina, although myself and several other members of the team are based around the country. We do website analytics, we do search engine optimization, we do paid advertising and we do social media marketing. So we can be a one-stop shop for your digital marketing needs and basically now is just a Q&A. So I think I see in the chat that there’s been a few questions that I’ll take a look at now, and if you have any others feel free to drop them in. So we’re in the education field and have between $500,000 but don’t have access for pod rep.

Jay Patel:
Great question. There could be a number of reasons for this. One could be that you might be linked to some old agency and maybe because you let go of the agency but you didn’t let go of the agency rep linkage, they may still count you in that person’s book and so they’re not assigning you somebody directly but nobody’s outreaching to you. So that’s a very common reason why somebody might be spending a lot of money but they haven’t heard from Google. There might be other reasons as well but again, that’s something where we could have a chat about it later on and see whether there’s something we can do about that. Let’s see, what other questions do we have? I’m trying to click on the Q&A. Sheff, do you have any other questions you can see?

Sheffield Pulley:
Yeah. We have one here. We’ve been dealing with a trademark issue for years, haven’t been able to get any traction for our Google support. We’re unable to use a term that many of our competitors are able to use in their ads. Do you have any advice on how we can get in touch with the right person to help?

Jay Patel:
Yeah, there is a completely, so when I talked about separate teams, the trademark team literally sits on the other side of Google under the legal department, so it is completely separate from the advertising team and so there is a separate escalations process for trademark approval. So generally Google’s policy is that if you are a reseller of the product, an authorized reseller of the product you should be able to use the term. If you are not an authorized reseller or you don’t have the explicit authorization then you need to request it and if you do so there’s a specific form you need to fill out that goes straight to the trademarks team and then they analyze and they approve or deny your request and sometimes that might involve, that team has to directly reach out to the trademark holder, who might themselves be an advertiser and be like, “Hey, are you cool with this person?”

Jay Patel:
Or they might give you the form and you got to go and get that person to approve it and particularly if you’re dealing with a trademark from a very big brand and it’s an industry where there’s a lot of resellers and not everyone has explicit authorization, that can get quite messy, that can get quite quite messy and the automated systems don’t always catch up on that. So if you have been dealing with the trademark issue, you’re not alone but there is a form that you should be able to submit that goes straight to that team, somewhere in the help center. And again if you’re interested in chatting further we can always have a chat on that and talk about that a bit more. Any other questions Sheff? Because I can’t see the Q&A.

Sheffield Pulley:
Don’t see any anymore. Kristen said, “Thank you,” don’t know if you saw that.

Jay Patel:
Yeah. I did.

Sheffield Pulley:
No, I don’t think so. If anyone else has any additional questions, they can obviously reach out to either Jay or I and I’ll pass it on to Jay and I’m sure he’ll be able to offer some insights and either one of us are available to chat for a free consultation, if you think it would be helpful as well.

Jay Patel:
Yeah. And I think that about wraps it up. We’ll send out this recording, so if you’d like to replay it, you can do so and other than that, I think enjoy the rest of your week everybody. Have a lovely Memorial Day weekend and enjoy the summer that has just arrived.

Sheffield Pulley:
Thanks so much Jay, I really appreciate you bud.

Jay Patel:
Take care everybody have a great Thursday.

Sheffield Pulley:
Bye everyone.

Webinar Host

Jay Patel
Hive Digital Paid Ads Expert, Former Googler

From 2010-2015 Jay worked at Google in various roles on the Small and Medium Business team, during which he directly worked with over 1,000 advertisers and supported several dozen of the top SEM agencies on their clients. Jay is a 2018 Comcast NBCUniversal Leadership Awardee and graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with a BA in Economics and Political Science.

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