Accept These Phone Calls At Your Peril ...

If your business uses Google Ads, you’ve probably received phone calls from ‘specialists’ at Google who want to get you booked on a longer meeting to run through their free advice for account optimisation, unused features etc.

These calls can be frequent, and somewhat unrelenting (and - because they are all outsourced in the cheapest possible manner - nobody at the outbound end has the gumption to look up timezone conversion or public holidays, so you wind up getting calls at dinner time on Labour Day or whatever).

Meta/Facebook and LinkedIn are also increasingly using this tactic, but Google is still the “OG” based on my experience.

I frequently talk to business owners, internal marketers etc who are besieged by these calls and eventually give in … if only to make the calls stop (protip - they don’t stop, they just start again the next time the account specialist changes, as their goal is to connect with as many of their targets as possible).

The main thing to bear in mind is that these “pressure sellers” from Google/Meta/LinkedIn don’t have your best interests at heart.

The advice they give will SOMETIMES benefit your business but will ALWAYS benefit Google (or Meta or LinkedIn).

Trying to discern where that overlap is (where you actually benefit rather than acting as a vessel by which the caller can achieve meet KPIs) when you’re under pressure to implement the recommended changes because they need you to do it then and there … this is not a recipe for success.

Don’t feel bad about ignoring these calls, hanging up on them, blocking their numbers (although that is a total game of whack-a-mole anyway) - ignorance, frankly, is bliss when it comes to this pressure selling tactic from ad networks … as all it really amounts to is pressure selling you new features and other changes that are definitely beneficial to the ad platform but only possibly beneficial to you.

If you must take one of the calls/meetings, don’t feel obliged to implement anything there and then. In fact, I’d go so far as to say don’t consider doing that at all - see what advice is being given and then try to independently sense check it.

I’m obviously biased in saying it, but you’d be better off talking to me (or any other digital marketing consultant) - yes, you will pay for advice, but it will be with your best interests at heart.