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Understanding, strategizing & managing are the natural aspect of all managed Adwords Campaigns. Something that gets missed and can lead to poor client relationships, is the art of setting clients expectations right and managing them.. This can make or break a relationship when it come effective PPC campaign management.

The process of managing client expectations inadvertently leads to a lot of learning for both the client and the Adwords Campaign Manager. Let me give some relevant examples which will help Adwords professionals and those who chose to advertise on Google.

1. Client Query – ” I am receiving irrelevant or out of geography enquiries? Please block them ”

Imagine this enquiry forwarded to you by your client with screenshot & big red circle over it. You have installed captcha & have configured spam bot plug-in too, but still it’s not possible to block this always. So how can we handle this?

Remember standard copy-cat servicing replies don’t work here, your personal & professional pitch addressing the problem and follow-ups to understand if the situation has improved is of utmost importance. In the above case we probed the problem, looked at various solutions, interacted with Google teams and arrived at some solutions. We shared these with the client with a clear explanation on what we felt would be the impact on the campaign. And then we revised all campaign ads, changed the methods of geo targeting and added a few landing pages with fresh copy and geo focus and viola! The leads relevancy improved and over time is almost negligible. We also learnt how IP’s can be a major problem with targeting for campaigns and how to resolve this issue successfully.

2) Client Query – “My sales have increased over last month, but my adwords budget/spend has increased too?”

Ok, this tricky & difficult because you will have to explain to the client the workings of adwords campaigns and optimisation properly. Rule no.1 share knowledge so the client can take informed decisions.

Today though branding is a need for almost all growing companies, a typical Client will say, we can increase the budget if there is increase in sales and that is really a client who wants to grow and someone who needs to be explained the medium, its efficacies and boundaries properly. When a clients sales from adwords campaigns went up by 64% & budget went up by 24% he asked us the same question. Now, firstly does the increase in leads and budget really disqualify performance or qualifies as a essential improvement in cost per lead and also share of impressions? Each adwords advertiser would weigh this in his own way and rightfully so, it is an agencys job as custodian of the clients monies to ensure that he understands the right way to look at data, analysis and implementation plans. Data and analysis are at the heart of campaign success – we need to look at search query reports, ad performance reports, adding negative keywords daily, search impression share reports etc.

Ok, so how did we tackle this ? Yes, data crunching, explaining to the client why, along with reasons why we should continue with the existing strategy. Make sure the client & you are on the same page at the end of the discussion, which would be only possible if you have successfully explained them to granularly look at the data rather than just numbers.

The best piece of advice I ever received during my learning days years ago was “whatever you can track, you can optimize“, that fits exactly these situations.

Hope you enjoyed this piece, do stay tuned for more.