Some years ago I worked for one digital marketing agency as a PPC specialist. I was earning a pretty good salary and was surrounded by cheerful folks. Everything was OK. Except for one thing.

Some of my clients were from HELL.

If you know what I mean. Or just google the phrase “the expert 7 red lines” and watch this video.

There were days when I was afraid to turn on my smartphone because of calls from agency clients. Moreover, I got sick every time when relationships with clients caused a high-level of stress lasting one week or more.

Luckily, I got a good job offer from an international company and I jumped to them as an in-house PPC manager. It was one of the happiest moment of my professional life.

In addition to my full-time job, I kept working with my own clients as a freelancer. And these relationships have been successful for years. I and my clients both were satisfied. Also, I was seeing that lots of my friends were happy to work for marketing agencies. These aspects compelled me to analyze why my experience was different and so unpleasant.

So I tried to define the most memorable things that made me nervous:

Clients expected and demanded from me more than I was able to deliver.

They wanted to control everything I was working on. Clients tried to find and check their ads in Google or bombarded me with dozens of emails with urgent questions.

Complained that we did nothing but wanted them to pay.

Perhaps, I’ve forgotten something, but I was sure that 90% of issues could be put in these categories. That time I thought that such clients were stupid or uppity. In fact, they weren’t (okay-okay, in some cases they were). I realized that a root of those problems is misunderstanding and mistrust.

If I had understood it a few years earlier, I would have had much more free time and earned more money than I did.

How I see the ideal working place

To sum up, I had to know 2 things.

Empathy develops trust

The ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

Clients ask “ Why don’t I see my ad” not with the aim to distract you from important tasks you are working on. The real reason is that they don’t know how this complex tool works. Moreover, they don’t know why they should trust you.

The greatest thing you can do is to try to understand your clients. Instead of a short answer with a quotation from Google help website, offer them to find the reason together.

Schedule a Skype call to ask your client to share his screen or share yours.

Ask to show what your client exactly is doing to find the ad. Listen, watch and do not interrupt.

Show him how to do it better.

Show how Google explains possible reasons and enrich it with your comments.

Luckily, Google has lots of great articles that can help you to deal with client’s questions. Here is one example: https://support.google.com/adwords/troubleshooter/1711301?hl=en

In the very beginning of your cooperation, it would be good to show your new client how Google Ad Preview Tool works and what Google Analytics reports they can use to take a look at ads performance at any time.

In most cases, they won’t use this preview tool or dive into GA reports. But they will know that you don’t hide anything, and they can check it if they have any doubts.

I’d like to recommend 2 good books that are extremely useful for folks who work with clients.

1) Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ by Daniel Goleman

2) Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing by Harry Beckwith

Systems approach

At any moment a client pings you, it is better to be ready to answer what is the actual situation with his project and what are you planning to do next.

I found next things are really helpful for this:

1. Having a schedule for all routine tasks (bid management, adding negative keywords, adding new ad copies, etc)

It can be a simple solution made by using Google Spreadsheet or an online calendar. It depends on a number of tasks you would like to have in it.

When you have sets of routine tasks, you can create a simple table to schedule account workouts

Another way is to use special tools for this, like Optmyzr PPC Workouts

A set of actions based on an actual goal

2. Task-list in a task manager or simply in Google Sheets

Trello board with PPC tasks

3. Having actual stats that you can easily access even from your mobile phone

It can be Google Analytics app for your phone if you set up tracking correctly

4. Annotations about important changes

Daily stats in Google Sheets with comments column.

Annotations in Google Analytics reports

5. Alerts for anomalies

Custom alert in Google Analytics for unusual sessions drop from the US.

6. List of planned experiments and documentation for finished

Planning tests in Trello

7. Project logbook

It might be a table to record all important changes.

Also, it is good to have a weekly updated logbook with written explanations and thoughts related to the actual situation.

8. Troubleshooting guide.

We often meet different issues with our ad campaigns. When a problem looks complex and makes you disoriented, it might grab lots of energy and time to start doing anything effective to resolve it.

“I don’t know what to do with it” is the last thing your client wants to hear from you at this moment.

In such cases, it is important to have an instruction on how to pick out the reason for common issues and what actions need to be taken.

Optmyzr has PPC investigator tool that helps to understand relationships between different indicators.

PPC experts do lots of great things to develop businesses of their clients. System approach makes your service different from PPC services of low-skilled guys. So you get your money because of your professionalism and you don’t have to prove each dollar you get from a client. You have a plan, you know what to do and everything revolves around that.

Does it make sense?

First of all, it is comfortable to work with a person who understands the value you bring to his business and who trusts you. It’s just cool. It turns clients to friends.

On the other hand, following this path and having such kind of a toolbox is profitable. When you work for fixed prices, in general, you spend tons of time at the beginning of a project and then it doesn’t require much of your attention and manual work.

For example, I calculated revenue per working hour I was getting from one my client in the past. I can’t say that it will be correct for all cases, but this correlation is common for many people I know.

As for me, this is pretty good to have $150/hour regularly. Moreover, friendly conversations with the client take up half of these hours.

I know that there a lot of PPC experts whose PPC rocks and who like providing services to clients. Are you one of them? What hacks do you use?