“Ask me Why I’m Not a Google Partner”
Google’s ‘Optimization Score’ and ‘Recommendations’ are heavily geared towards pushing increased levels of automation and increased spend. Sometimes they are a useful check-in, but often they recommend things that simply aren’t appropriate for a particular Account.
Beware of dealing with any advertising agencies that have the Google Partner badge of recognition which is supposed to be an official endorsement from Google. These agencies are achieve this badge by having a very high optimzation score for the accounts that they manage.
Optimization score pushes you towards tactics that are often far more wasteful than a skillfully managed manual bidding strategy. That said, it’s worth integrating the tool into your optimization routine, there are some suggestions that are sensible.
I would avoid hiring any partner badged agency as they’ll be working for Google’s benefit rather than the goals and aims of my business.
I’m not even really sure if being a Google Partner really means much anymore. Our rep can’t answer basic questions and just pushes us to utilize methods that wouldn’t work for the industry we advertise for. They don’t understand the nuisances of our accounts and have become borderline aggressive when it comes to applying recommendations.
Google reps have been pushing agencies more and more to start using this tab and the suggestions because of the eventual move to judging agency performance by how ‘optimized’ an account is according to these metrics.
Premier Partner agencies are going to be expected to have a minimum 70% aggregate score to keep their Google Partner Badge status.
The annoying thing about this is that anyone experienced enough to have earned their Partner badge, shouldn’t need to follow a machine’s dictates. Google is forcing experienced users, to implement recommendations meant for beginners.
I almost always ignore their recommendations because they’re a robot, and I can see things they don’t.
For me, the badge is no longer a sign of quality and is now a black mark that shows their loss of independent status.
Clients hire us to manage their accounts based on our experience and knowledge. They expect us to test different things to improve performance. Once we’ve tested something, and it’s proven not to work better than what we already had set up, then we need to get credit for that.
Having a certification or badge doesn’t mean as much as providing legitimate case studies and having the skills to achieve desired results.
You have to keep on applying the optimization recommendations to make sure you are spending the client’s money exactly the way Google tells you to, or they’ll try to cut you out by implying that you’re not competent enough to have a Partners badge.
The system I have in place works for my clients, and the automated strategies have been tested to not work as well.
I’d rather lose the partner badge, than tank my client’s results with poorly optimized AI bidding.
It is clear that Google is trying to use Artificial Intelligence to manage all of your ads automatically and eventually cut out the middleman of advertising agencies. They are even going so far as removing keyword reports based on your advertising [INSERT LINK HERE]
