The date was July 5th, 2014.
The night had been warm and sweaty, and I just had my first cup of coffee.
The phone rang.
“Nils! We’ve been without any leads last five days. What’s going on?!”
“Uhhh, uhm, I don’t really know Jeff. Let me have a quick look. I’ll get back to you in a bit.”
It turned out the Adwords account had not been serving any ads for five days due to declined credit card payments.
And I hadn’t noticed. For FIVE days.
To me, that was unacceptable. Jeff was paying a fair amount of coins for me to handle his ads.
For Jeff, it was more than unacceptable. It was a matter of staying alive. He was in the roofing business and just got started.
You can imagine how I felt when I needed to pick up the phone and explain to him what happened.
Jeff took it lightly and finished our second call:
“It’s all good. I can feel you understand the importance of this issue for my business. I am confident you will not make the same mistake again.”
We all need more Jeffs in our lives.
Now, here’s the thing: I’ve always been obsessed with preventing my clients from noticing any issue before I notice them myself.
And no surprise here, scripts are my go-to tools for that.
Check out this great script from our friends at Optmyzr: https://bitbucket.org/snippets/fvallaeys/nLEoj/check-if-account-is-offline
What it does:
It checks whether a Google Ads account has gone offline, possibly due to a declined credit card, accidentally pausing all campaigns, or suspensions, among other things.
Why you’d care:
Accounts go offline for many reasons. Billing issues are a well-known problem in managing Google Ads accounts, especially for advertisers with smaller budgets. When this happens, you want to be alerted straight away so your client does not unnecessarily miss any leads and/or revenue.
– Nils
PS: What’s the worst PPC nightmare you want to prevent from happening at any cost? Hit reply, I’d love to know.