So how are those “Google Ads Expert” emails treating you?
You know, the ones who today send you more useless bullshit emails than all of your aunts and uncles combined sent you during the AOL years? They always seem to have exactly the solution you and your clients need for big ol’ honkin’ bang up success that you, you lowly bread-crust of an account manager, could only dream of figuring out on your own.
If your back hurts while you’re reading this for no good reason at all, you may have been doing this for as long as I have and remember a time when these communications were actually welcome. When an actual Google employee, sitting in Mountain View or maybe Ann Arbor, would reach out with some great options. Sure, they were hoping you’d spend more and more money with Google, but at the end of the day they were there to help. They understood the platform and they spoke the language of the industry because it actually WAS their industry. They weren’t always perfect, but they were colleagues.
I had my first child during those days, and when she was born, my reps sent her a Google onesie. Really! Like, hand-written envelope and everything. It was awesome.
But yeah, those days are over, of course.
Gradual Decline, Then Freefall
The decline was gradual at first, then accelerated into a freefall. First, the local reps were replaced by an army of offshore workers whose primary qualification seemed to be an ability to read a script. A good command of English (or whatever language you read them in, mon frere) became optional, as did any realistic understanding of how ROI works.
Every “recommendation” they offered followed the same predictable money shot — you setting aside a bunch of new money to try an ad product you weren’t already using. Did your KPIs immediately crater? Client ripping you a new one every 48 hours asking what the hell you’re even doing in there? Tough shit, buddy — you’ve got new bidding strategies to try! New campaign types to dig your fingers into.
The answer is always do more, try more, spend more. Turn on broad match, no negatives. Like, hard. Smash the mouse button so hard your knuckle hurts tomorrow. Sneer at the screen while you do it. Go straight to your client’s website, about us, find your client contact. Sneer even harder at them.
Increase the daily cap, spend cap, bid cap. Cap? We don’t need no mothercappin caps in here. Do you smell that smoke? It’s because I just shot a cap gun. Because I shoot caps. I bust caps.
Enable every automated “improvement” that Google offers, AI or no? Fuckin’ A, buddy. Where do I sign. Push hard with the pen, too.
We put up with it for a while because they still used those @google.com email addresses. We assumed they were still part of the family, even if they were the distant, less talented cousins. Then the mask started to slip.
Googler, Temp Worker, What’s The Diff?
The truth eventually surfaced: these weren’t Google employees. They were temps. Staffing agencies were hiring people by the thousands, giving them a crash course in Google’s sales goals, and handing them a prestigious email address to fool the unsuspecting. Google was essentially catfishing its agency partners. They wanted the authority of their brand to back up the aggressive sales tactics of a third-party contractor.
It took years and probably a few legal threats for Google to start being honest. First, the signatures changed. You started seeing the names of the staffing firms in the fine print. Maybe a little animated gif in the sig there to draw your attention, since that’s the only thing animated gifs have ever been good for.
After a decade plus of masquerading as in-house ad strategists, they’ve finally been forced to admit they’re just here to move the needle on Google’s quarterly earnings. In the current era of forced transparency (by a new set of more demanding lawyers, I suspect), you see the explicit admission that these people are “Sales Representatives” and the explicit clarification that if your email sender’s domain ends in xwf.google.com, then that’s what they are, even as previous sentences in the EXACT SAME EMAIL refer to them as “Google Ads Experts.”
To use the erudite language of yesteryear’s preeminent business philosopher Sebastian Bach, Google says it’s rainin’ while it’s pissin’ down our back, and has spent years hoping we were too dumb to notice. They yield only what they are forced to yield. They only admitted these people were sales reps when the lie became impossible to maintain.
And the midway is still going strong in this particular circus. I still get these approaches daily. They want to “align on goals” or “review account health.” Or they already have great needle-moving ideas that you just need to say yes to (somehow, without knowing the first thing about your client, their budget, their long-term goals, their environment, etc.)
No. This is a performance. They don’t care about your goals and they couldn’t even passably define “account health” to save their mama tied to the railroad tracks. They have quotas for how many times they can get a manager to click “Apply” on a recommendation that drives up the cost-per-click. Or “auto-apply recommendations” or plenty more, IYKYK.
No, You Don’t Have To Play Along
If you are tired of the nuisance, you have options. You don’t have to pretend their emails have value. You don’t have to kiss someone’s ass who is actively trying to sabotage your client’s performance for a sales commission.
We use a very simple, very effective way of handling this. When a new “expert” hits our inbox, we send one specific reply and then we move on with our lives. Here is the text:
“Greetings, [Worker Name]. Due to their history of aggressive behavior and ignorance of both the Google Ads system as well as our clients’ goals, no one at our agency replies to unsolicited calls or emails from account strategists, whether from Google or its many subcontractors and staffing agencies. This is a one-time courtesy response to inform you of our policies; there will be no future replies to unsolicited communication, and if you’re reading this, you’ve already been blocked. Do not contact any of our clients directly. Do not initiate contact with me or any of my team. If we would like future communication with you, we’ll initiate it. Good luck to you.”
Once that is sent, we block the address and we never hear from them again.
That handles the individual. To handle the system, you can make a bigger move; go to your email server and set up a filter so that any email ending in xwf.google.com goes straight to spam, or the trash, or hell itself. It’s your filter, you do you.
No notification. No distraction. Just a clean inbox.
Google isn’t going to stop this garbage; they’ve done it forever now, so clearly it’s working. They know that for every old hand who spots them a mile away, there are ten newbies who will follow a “Google Ads Expert” off a cliff. Let’s pause again here to put a fine point on Google’s choice in how they’ve chosen, year after year, to treat you: Aggressively target all advertisers with sales reps disguised as “system experts” who will only irritate your most astute advertisers, but will successfully siphon monies out of their least sophisticated advertisers. “We can, and will, keep wringing money out of the advertisers who don’t know the truth about where these emails come from.”
I mean, “Don’t Be Evil” was so long ago that it’s almost goofy to mention, but just as a cap-tip to the elder statesfolk among us: Damn, so much for “Don’t Be Evil,” eh?
But brass tacks here, friends: we can’t change the practice, but we can change how it affects us. Refuse to participate — liberally copy and paste our agency brush-off, or investigate the email server solution. Filter out the temps and get back to work.
Next time, we’ll talk about the true depth of this Google absurdity — more evidence that Google actually does think we’re all morons.
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