#31 - The Google Disaster: When Data Lies

In this episode of Over The Bull, Ken shares a cautionary tale about a client whose digital marketing was a ticking time bomb. Multiple Google Analytics accounts, unvetted conversions, toxic backlinks, and AI-generated content without any real E-E-A-T left her data useless — and her ad spend wasted. What started as a “smooth” agency pitch ended in a complete reboot. Ken breaks down what went wrong, how to spot the red flags, and why charisma should never replace competence.

Transcript

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You're listening to Over the Bull, where we cut through marketing noise. Here's your host, Ken Carroll.

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A Google disaster on this episode of Over the Bull. Thank you so much for attending. My name is Ken Carroll, and I am co-founder of Integris Design based out of Asheville. And I want to share a story with you this week about a new client we've gotten and the absolute disaster that we're trying to untangle. I really don't like having to deal with stuff like this because you kind of have to report the truth in order to move forward and set the proper expectation. From a five-mile view, here's what happened. They were working with another local entity to manage their SEO and their Google Ads and I'm guessing some of the website stuff. And the problem is that none of it, and I mean none of it, was run correctly. So first, the client is an amazing person. Uh absolutely loved all communications. Uh I've already seen a ton of grace from this particular uh person, and it's just been an exceptional beginning. Um so that's our client. Now, our client, this client, found us because her current plan was not working. A matter of fact, she had fallen off on a lot of organic placement, her traffic had fallen off, and the number of leads that she was getting was also falling off. Now, she came to us, she found us, you know, on the internet, and so that's her. Now, the person she was working with, I've had run-ins with this person, and I'm gonna tell you, nice charismatic guy. I mean, really, really nice charismatic guy. Um, I have no reason not to, you know, like the guy personally. Uh now I don't know him a lot. I ran into him probably every bit of, you know, three or four times in eight years. And um, when I first met him, years and years ago, I remember talking to him, and I don't remember how he got connected, but we met at a little restaurant off Westgate, and we were talking about search engine optimization, and I remember some of the comments he made, and it kind of made me cringe, to be honest. He talked about how he shortcutted search engine optimization, and I never really like it when someone says they can do a little bit of work and keep charging people money every month. Um, that just don't set well with me. Um, but I remember him doing that, but it was not really a thing where I don't I don't get in other agencies' business. I may ask them questions and try to plant a seed that maybe they should do things different, but uh I normally don't dive that deep with them. Um then what happened was I was invited to a uh one of these one of these little groups, you know, where businesses get together and it's got, you know, one plumber, one electrician, one roofer, one inspector, you know, stuff like that. And I was invited to go there, and uh, of course I flubbed it up. I mean, you get there, you don't know anybody, and they say, okay, stand up and give a 30-second presentation about what you do. And all I could do is think about the guy who was leading the meeting, which was this guy I met eight years ago, and thinking, oh my gosh, our whole business is built on the idea of not doing the things that he was doing. And uh, so I flubbed through it and uh, you know, I managed to get you know halfway through it. But the guy came across really smooth in there. He he it was really well done. And afterwards, you know, I said, Well, I'm I'm not gonna join the group because we overlap. Um, but I really appreciate you letting me, you know, come in and sit in one time. And he invited me to go part of some kind of little thing he's organizing and uh all these other things, which I really wasn't that interested in it. We're just too busy. I don't have time for that stuff. And um anyway, I left, and that was pretty much that. But I remember thinking, wow, I I bet he's really evolved, you know, between now and then. And yeah, I just thought it was nice. Now he did give me a flag, another flag, when I left, and I just kind of brushed it off. But one thing he talked about was how he was running behind on all of his work, and he had six or seven search engine optimization clients, and he was going to rattle off some automated blogs, and he kind of laughed about it, about getting back and doing that in a relatively short period of time. And I remember going, okay, well, I, you know, he's a competitor too, so obviously I'm not going to correct him on his poor practices, but he was doing it because it was an easy way for him to generate blog articles and make it look like he was doing more work than he wasn't. Okay, let's let's just call it what it is. Uh, but again, really nice guy. So, you know, you can kind of see where you know, I don't want no harm to come to him. Well, this person came from him, and after her business is starting to tank, her ads aren't working, and I really didn't know that that was him until after um we got to a certain point with this person. And, you know, the one thing she emphasized was working with local people. She's your local, right? And I'm like, yeah, local. And and I'm a little still a little fuzzy because she is a new client as far as what was what was going on that wasn't local. Like this guy's local. And I did notice that there was a a user inside the website, and he was not local. You could tell by the name, this guy wasn't local. So that got me kind of thinking, okay, this particular guy who comes across really smooth is probably subcontracting a lot of work out overseas. Of course, that's a bad flag, too. Um, because when you're working in SEO, you gotta understand that your business is trying to build credibility. You're not trying to trick search engines. And a lot of these services, when you buy them wholesale, their goal is to trick search engines, to trick things like Google into thinking that you're more valuable than you are. And that is absolutely one way to have your marketing effort blow up in your face. Period. There's no questions. Uh, it's not funny, it's not something you need to joke about or you know, flippantly brush off. This is a very serious situation if you own a business. And um, so a lot of these, a lot of these outsourcing companies, what they'll do are do things like build links to websites, and they use toxic links, or they use low-value links, or they use things like private blog networks to build links to artificially inflate the credibility of a company. And then the problem is, is search engines like Google are incredibly intelligent. And when they catch that, they can tank your business instantly. It just takes a simple algorithm adjustment. And and so I saw that, and so my job obviously is to create a plan and untangle everything that is going on that's wrong and try to figure things out. So I spent, you know, um, I don't know, probably eight to ten hours building a custom marketing uh proposal, and I wanted to really go into detail. So I look at competitors, I look at independent data, I look at what I can extract from what they've given me to build like a plan. And I remembered we had a conversation at one point, and it was about her Google ads. Okay, so let's let's break things up into multiple pieces, and let's talk about how this perfect storm happened with this really charismatic marketing guy who's local, uh, his outsource uh procedure, his blog writing procedure, and his strategy absolutely just blew up, okay. So let's take each one of these Google Ads. Okay, but he was running Google Ads. Now, the thing about a Google ad is you need to understand that conversions are the biggest thing you could track in Google Ads. So the first thing you want to do is, well, what conversions are important? Phone calls, completing forms, booking online, uh signing up for something, buying something. What are we trying to accomplish? Now, once you determine those conversions, you go through a series of technical steps to get them implemented, and then you test them to make sure that they're working. If you don't do those steps, then what you run into is you typically run into a situation where the data is skewed, and it may tell you that a hundred meaningful actions happened, and maybe it was only 10 meaningful actions that happened, or maybe no meaningful actions, or maybe more than that. Unless you set it up correctly technically, you simply don't know how many meaningful conversions you get. And so any adjustments that you make on those campaigns is all skewed, messed up, and not going the way that it should go. So when I first looked at her Google Ads campaign, I saw some stuff that was just not right. The way the campaigns were set up within the Google Ads account, the way the locations were set up, the lack of maintenance that was set up, um, just so many flags going on, except for one thing. It had a great conversion rate. And I was going, well, that that's interesting. And I thought, well, maybe it's not a very competitive field. Um, maybe whatever. And so I looked at it because the first time I looked at it, I was still in the preliminary evaluation phase, and I didn't ask for all the assets yet. And so we had a conversation, and I said, well, the conversions look really good, but the rest of this looks odd. And I said, you know, some of this works and some of it's not, but you know, we want to be careful how we kind of break this thing down given the conversion rates and how they look. And, you know, so we had several conversations, and I went back and, you know, really started digging into it after she signed up. And I asked for her uh Google Analytics account. Now, the reason that I did was the conversions, those meaningful actions that have to be set up technically correct, were pinned in a Google Analytics account. Well, she shared an account with me, and this account had none of those things set up, which means uh something's amiss somewhere because it's recording some conversion somehow, somehow. So I cross-reference account numbers, and Google Ads was running one account and she had access to another account. Now, if you if you get into the idea of running multiple Google Ads accounts on one website, you'll see that this can be extremely problematic. So immediately a flag went off, and I'm like, oh man, how do I untangle this? Because I normally don't see that kind of mistake perpetuated for a long period of time, especially if someone's a digital marketing uh person who really digs into that stuff. And uh so I was like, well, let me let me go see if I can figure out what's going on here. So I asked a client if she had another Google Analytics account, and she didn't. So then I reached out to the charismatic guy. And I told her, I said, you know, I like the guy, I don't mind reaching out. He seems like an upright, you know, uh an upright guy. Um I said, let me just reach out. So I reached out to him and I asked him if he had access to another Google Analytics account, the one that's attached to Google Ads that he's been running for quite some time. And uh he said that I had access to everything he had access to. And I'm like, okay, so you never quantified that those conversions were actually working. And, you know, he told me he didn't. And then I said, well, you know, I can't really use any of your data because I can't really that this is bad. You know, I can't use any of the data that this client has been spending with you forever how long, because we don't know if we can trust the information that Google is reporting, especially given there are multiple analytics accounts, and now we don't even know if the conversions are even set up correctly to begin with. And so keep in mind that if you're spending, you know, uh any amount of money in a month and you're not understanding the data and the conversions, well, you're just kind of throwing part of your money away, if not all of your money away. So I wrote him and he wrote me back, and it was kind of this cryptic email. And it's so strange because some people, when they present themselves publicly, but then you know, you ask a question, you can kind of see a response and you kind of can see into it a little bit. And his response was that he was bartering part of the work. Um, it wasn't um something that he was doing, he was kind of doing it as a favor. And I just I didn't like that answer because she's still spending money, regardless, with you. And if you're taking it on, then you got to kind of shoot straight with where that's at. Uh, not that people don't make mistakes. They do. People make mistakes. It's not that that doesn't happen, but it's like when it's, you know, on this scale for this length of time, the client's business is hurting that much. Um I just found that very disappointing, I guess. So I told him uh back and forth in emails I'd have to uh let the client know the truth. And I said, I gotta, I'm gonna include you on it so you know what I tell the client, because I felt that was the ethical thing to do. And so I wrote them both and basically said it's not a technical error. It was a user error by your previous management company who was running your Google Ads. And um the next day, uh, which is today, I spent about two and a half hours compositing a plan, determining what would work and what wouldn't work. And I'm scrapping it. I'm scrapping the Google Ads account, I'm scrapping the analytics accounts, um, and I'm gonna boot up a brand new one and just keep those for historical reference. I don't trust what's been done. And that's really sad when you take an account and you pick something up like that because you know how much time or how much money that client put into it. And uh to break the news like that's uh really tough. But then you've got the idea of two analytics accounts. Now, keep in mind, I talked to her because one thing that I had said was because he he didn't write me immediately on at one occasion. And uh I had one client that came to me prior to her, and it was also one of his previous clients. And I told her, I said, well, maybe he thinks I'm trying to take his clients because I did see him again, you know, a couple months ago, blah, blah, blah. And uh she said, no, she goes, I've been telling him some time that our our our leads and everything have been going the wrong way, and I'm probably gonna have to look in other directions for some help. And so that was even a little more disturbing because the idea that, you know, there's complaints going on, but yet it wasn't like starting at square one. Are the conversions tracking correctly? Are they set up? You know, um, what's going on with the with the actual maintenance of these ads? You know, do we need to do a little more diving and and kind of really look into it? And then maybe we need to check it. And if you check your tracking code on a website, it'll tell you if there's multiple analytics accounts attached. So that part didn't set well with me. Um, but it it was part of the equation. Um, and you know, obviously, you know, uh our job is to just try to fix things and not not really uh police the uh the world, uh, but is to help the client get on the right track as quick as we can. So we're dumping all that. Well, the other part of the equation is the SEO. She said that her visibility has dropped off, and she said that there were a lot of issues with that part of her campaign. Well, when you go back and look at it, and she she had already picked up on this, I really like her investigative and her intelligence. Really, it's just awesome. Um but what what I saw was that there were a lot of what we call toxic backlinks. So remember, when you do search engine optimization, it's all about building credibility. That's that's the whole idea of doing search engine optimization. Again, it's not to trick search engines. Well, when you see a high volume of toxic links going into a website, typically what that is, is you are, as a company, if you're a marketing company, you're paying someone to build these links. And then what happens is they go the more the better. You don't know what you're getting into when you hire uh these uh offshore companies, and then they just start piling up backlinks because they think the more the better. Or they run something called a private blog network where they try to hide from Google the fact that they own a bunch of high-ranking websites, and then they use that to artificially bolster a business's business up. By the way, all these things have really potentially bad consequences when you do it, or you get caught up in it. You know, uh just saying you didn't know is sometimes not going to be good enough because it's kind of like you're caught at the scene of a crime and uh you know you're you're gonna be questioned, and you may just get you know uh picked up in the in the uh insanity of the situation or whatever. So all these things can happen uh when you start offshoring some of this work or shortcutting it or trying to trick Google or things like that. It's just horrible. So there are these toxic backlinks. Okay, so toxic backlinks um can have an opposite effect on your search engine optimization, just like trying to use um uh over AI, uh overly created AI content. So using like things like um Chat GPT or some of these other AI models to generate blog content and just chuck it up on a website negates what we know as EEAT principles, which I've given a lot of information on that in previous podcasts. And so it's not really authoritative original content, and Google really doesn't like people doing that. And so the problem that you have when that kind of content's created, so now you've got kind of this um blather content that doesn't that doesn't have enough authority to do well, combined with a bunch of bad backlinks, combined with multiple Google Analytics accounts, combined with a lot of other factors, and so now you've got the perfect storm where organically the website is suffering, paid ads, the website is suffering, and then the website itself is in disrepair, and so technically it's suffering too. And so it's kind of like um, if if you don't take care of your health and all of a sudden all your numbers are going in the wrong direction, they'll cascade. You know, that's why you see someone who has one thing, they'll get something else, and then they'll have something else. It's because they didn't maintain their health um uh over a period of time. And so that's exactly what happened in this situation. So when it comes to your business, you can learn a lot of valuable lessons from this situation. Number one is my goodness, be careful who you trust. I mean, that's the biggest thing I could say. After listening to this person kind of on the room in this small business group, and the way that he talked and presented himself, you would have thought this guy was incredible. Um, but then when you look at the work, you go, wow, that's not that incredible. And um, you know, we all have, all of us agencies, we have a desire to want to please the client. But if you try to shortcut it and you and you try to use hyperbole to sell services, or you oversell what can be done, or you don't know what can be done, or you try to sell services, you don't have a business selling, um, all those things can hurt you as the owner of a business. And unfortunately, even though I like the guy, just evaluating this website, I have some serious question marks. Now, um, I think um, you know, as far as you go, you that just means you've got to be careful. Okay, you obviously don't want to outsource to other countries. You don't want to build a website yourself. We've covered that time and time again. Do not do these things. They're tempting, but do not do them. Um you need to hire a professional and someone that you can trust and someone that you can sit down with and talk to, and someone that's going to give you good answers. Now, unfortunately, in his case, I believe this guy could own the room. I believe that he could, I believe he could handle it. And I believe that he could lead on situations a lot longer than they need to be let on. And so how to get around that, I I don't know other than to just say, be careful. Um, the other thing is is keep in mind that if your data is not accurate and you're not triple checking your data or validating or have someone validate your data data from uh Google Ads, then you can run into problems where the data that you're paying good money for on a regular basis is so skewed that once someone who picks it up who knows what they're doing, they're going to tell you they don't want to use that data because it can't be trusted. Or we have to make a decision where we're kind of throwing darts on a dartboard guessing which parts of the data we can trust or not trust. The other thing that's important is you want to make sure that you do have access to the analytics account, you know, whatever your tracking mechanisms are, you want to make sure that you do have access to it. And then you can kind of see that's right or wrong. Now, if you if you get all that stuff in place, then you're going to be a lot better off because I would have loved to have had, you know, years of data to go back through to parse it. I'd love to have years of data, even if it wasn't well maintained, but it was accurate, that would have still been something. But I got poorly maintained uh environment combined with a poorly set up campaign with data that's abstract and nothing is useful. And you don't want to find yourself in that position. So you want you want to make sure that you're you are working with people that um know what they're doing. Um, fortunately, I feel really good about this client's campaign. I feel really good about her. I'm really sorry she's she's gone through the situation that she's gone through. Um now, well, I guess one more point. Let me talk about this for a second. I don't like being the person between or the tattletale. I don't want to be that guy. But here was where I was in my position. When I was looking at the data and I saw it was wrong, and I told him that I had to communicate that to the client. You could imagine that if the client had certain belief systems around what was being done and they were not true, you can imagine how bad that would hurt a new relationship with that client. And so it left me in a position where I had to be honest and objective with the client to state the facts as they are, while at the same time being prepared to take on this task and being able to make adjustments in the proposal that I gave in order to make sure that I can do the best job possible for this particular client. And so that's uh that's you know, the hard part is getting in the middle of that, because I don't want to be in the middle of it. Um, but at the same time, I don't want to adopt a program that is out there based on misconceptions. So uh that's a challenge, that's a real challenge to get in between that. And if you think about it, as the owner of a business, if you have certain people that you believe are telling you one thing and you have somebody else telling you something different, and then you've got to figure out which person's telling you the truth. Now, luckily, I come with data, I just come with numbers, and that normally solves the problem. But sometimes you get into these he said, she said things, and you may lean toward a person that you may like more or you have more history with, but they could be absolutely um in the wrong 100%. And so you've got to be careful how you do this kind of stuff. Okay, um, I think that's all I'm going to talk about today because it's really been uh heavy on my mind this week. And uh I just really hope that uh you take this to heart and hope that you can use this to better yourself, better your business, watch out for the trappings, watch out for the smooth talker, watch out for the stuff that may sound good, but it's not good, and move forward and to the best and the most success to you. Until next time we talk.

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Thanks for tuning in to Over the Bull, brought to you by Integrist Design, a full service design and marketing agency out of Asheville, North Carolina. Until next time.