VW Let down by Mediocre Digital Agency
How mediocre handling of your Google Ads is costing you thousands in lost business
A month ago, sat in Birmingham UK, surfing the net for car prices, I used the search box and typed “VW cars” and clicked on the first link that came up which took me straight to the VW car dealership in Amman, Jordan.
It doesn’t take a genius to know, that no-one, not a single person is going to buy a VW car from Amman, Jordan and import it to the UK. Why am I then being served this advert? Why is VW paying for me to see this advert?
In this instance, like many companies big and small (especially those in the developing world), VW Amman seems to have little appreciation of the depth and breadth of digital marketing as a professional discipline falling under the sciences. Furthermore, marketing managers seem to be able to keep their jobs with no up-skilling. This ensures that marketing managers are not qualified to hold digital agencies to account as they are not asking the right questions and looking for the telltale signs of rigged reports. Lack of understanding is also a hindrance to effectively evaluating the level of success and hence ROI.
Google and other platforms do make it easy for the average Jo to set-up an account and start serving ads. However, being ill-equipped and having no appreciation for the platform’s limits and strengths through a proper understanding of Google Ads can indeed lead businesses to haemorrhage money on ill-performing advertising.
Management can often be presented with reports that show “good performance” and they normally just accept the reports at face value.
Look Out For The Rigged Reports
One of the most convincing tactics that some agencies/individuals use to increase the performance charts is bidding on your brand name and giving you a total conversion number without discriminating between branded and none branded search.
Bidding on brand names is highly debated, there needs to be a good reason, outlined to the client, it needs to be tested and it needs to be clearly outlined in reports individually so not to over inflate performance.
We have seen many reports, where the search agency claims huge wins, while the business owner claims no increase in business. That is to do with brand bidding (deemed ineffective, i.e. the business level showed no increase because the business was coming with or without google ads), spam that is counting as conversions and mainly lack of on-ground presence by the agency if not just lack of competence.
In the VW case, this is a pure case of someone serving ads as a novice. There is a hidden tab for targeting that needs to be switched off for the ads to indeed serve only in your targeted area. The tab is automatically on to serve to anyone in the world who has been or EVER showed interest in your targeted region. I was in Jordan one year before I was served the ad, that is why I was served it. The agency/individual has obviously little knowledge of the platform to switch this option off.
Businesses should start challenging agencies that claim huge wins and yet real performance is weak. The chances are they are playing at the management’s lack of skill in digital marketing.