Having worked in account management for nearly three years at Reprise Media, I’ve had my fair share of experiences with the often mysterious account management specialists at Google (i.e., the Creative Maximizers).
Unfortunately, many of these experiences were negative due to a number of factors:
First, the media managers at Reprise Media are often ahead of the game when it comes to testing both new keyword terms as well as creative suggestions and the Maximizers were simply duplicating our efforts.
Secondly, Google often requests client’s goals and metrics to better optimize campaigns. While this makes sense on the surface, responsible SEMs are often prohibited from sharing a client’s information.
Finally, long turn-around times of up to two and three weeks are simply unacceptable in an industry where campaign performance changes hourly and client’s mentality focuses around ‘we need this yesterday’.
Recently, our media managers have been a little more flexible and accommodating when it comes to sharing performance data to increase optimization efforts. Being deep into Q4 and managing a handful of retail accounts, it’s paramount that these campaigns are maxing out and capturing all ‘highly convertible’ traffic during the season. To that end, we’ve been more flexible with sharing ‘top performing’ keywords, campaign architecture and creative copy suggestions with the Maximizers.
What we’ve seen has been very impressive.
Production sheets are no longer the same old ‘blah’ list of generic keywords and copy which performed ‘lukewarm’. They have been replaced with expansive lists of ‘performing’ keywords which have increased ROI as well as opened the door to more inventory.
We’ve also seen up to five samples of copy which we can now ‘tweak’ and rotate into our campaigns. Many times, a combination of the maximizer’s suggestions along with our media manger’s ideas will blend into the ‘perfect copy’ driving exceptionally strong click-through rates as well as high ROI.
Long turnaround times are now a thing of the past. While Q4 is a busy time for both advertiser and publisher, Google has done a remarkable job turning around maximization requests with 72 hours.
While no one is holding a gun to our head to implement these suggestions, it’s great to know our media managers have ‘secondary’ choices to lean back on to constantly tweak and optimize these campaigns.
These suggestions are nowhere close to a ‘magic bullet’ ensuring a successful campaign, but it could still be said that the Google ‘Maximizers’ provide a valuable service to our account team.
Dan Brough is an Account Director at Reprise Media.
