Live, Undead, and Dead

The situation

At a Fortune 100 industrial manufacturer, paid search grew up without an owner. Divisions opened their own advertising accounts. Agencies opened more on their behalf. The agencies had direct access to the data while the company's own marketers did not, and marketers judged their agencies against benchmarks the agencies wrote themselves.

When we mapped how the accounts connected, the picture looked like the Big Bang: a star with something like 1,700 points, every point an account or a link between accounts.

Then the bills caught up with it. A few unpaid accounts put the whole relationship with Google at risk. Hundreds of accounts shut down for unpaid bills, and every account under the company's master account went dark for more than 30 days.

Underneath it sat a skills gap and a story. Our 2016 survey of roughly 600 marketers put their confidence in creating and managing paid search campaigns at about 5 out of 10, and their main teachers were the agencies selling them the work. Leaders funded advertising because they could see a dollar go in and $1.25 come out. Nobody could see the waste, and the waste fed the story that digital marketing was not working. It was working. We just were not doing it correctly.

The task

Nobody asked me to fix this. It sat outside our team's charter, so I worked it as a 15 percent time project, prioritized against everything else on our plate.

The job I set: count every account. Classify each one. Find out who owed money and who was owed credits. Build a structure where all paid data, budgets, and activity roll up to one master account. Then give accountants and marketing leaders in priority countries, regions, divisions, and business groups a clear view of their own advertising.

The action

We counted first. By November 1, 2017, we had found 908 accounts and manager accounts under the master account alone. That count excluded every account agencies and vendors had opened on the company's behalf, which nobody could count at all.

We gave every account a status. Live meant running ads right now. Undead meant it had run ads in the last 12 months but was not running them now. Dead meant nothing in 12 months or more. The undead accounts were the dangerous ones: still carrying budgets, credits, debts, and user access, with nobody watching.

We piloted on one small slice. We started with 32 US accounts in one division, about 3.5 percent of the total, and ran a 12-step method on each one. Add an accountable marketer to every account. Classify its status. Check for linked video channels with the corporate social team before unlinking anything. Document payment terms, credits, and debts. Pause and archive the dead accounts. Rename the live ones to a new standard instead of moving them, so no history or running campaign was lost. Then report back the findings and the time it took.

We priced the rest. The pilot took 10 hours, about 19 minutes per account. At that pace, the remaining 876 accounts needed about 278 hours, roughly seven weeks of full-time work. Outsourced to an agency at $175 to $250 an hour, that came to $48,650 to $69,500 just to document the accounts. We ran a second pilot with another business group in April 2018 to confirm the method held.

We wrote one naming convention for the whole company. Country, business group, division, then brand and purpose. Every account name told you whose it was and what it was for.

We designed the hierarchy and the access model. A master account at the top. Regional accounts under the regional digital resource centers. Then country, business group, and division accounts, with each division able to see only itself and grant limited access to outside partners. One super user group, limited to US corporate, held full admin and kept every invoice on file, while divisions kept paying their own bills.

We phased the remediation. Phase one covered US company-owned accounts. Phase two covered agency and vendor accounts, bringing campaign history into company-owned accounts so the company kept its own advertising data. Phase three replicated the process outside the US with the regional digital resource centers, starting with one that had already asked for it.

We rebuilt the relationship with Google. We went from no access to Google's own resources to a working partnership, worked through new payment terms with sourcing, accounting, and the other stakeholders, and got the shutdown lifted.

The result

Google lifted the shutdown, and new payment terms kept the accounts from going dark again. Ad credits recovered from undead accounts paid down a large share of the outstanding debt. The account structure now held only active accounts. Other digital marketing and analytics teams adopted the naming convention, and the structure and access levels became the foundation for the paid search governance that followed.

Before

• No structure; nobody could pull a business group report

• Unknown third parties with account access

• Agencies controlling the company's advertising data

• Inconsistent invoicing and repeated shutdowns

• No access to Google's own resources

After

• A governed hierarchy that reports at any level

• Only current employees and approved partners

• The company owning all of its marketing data

• Consistent invoicing and payment

• A working partnership with Google

The lesson

Sprawl is what happens when nobody owns the inventory. When nobody can see the waste, it turns into a story that the channel doesn’t work. Paid search was working. We were not running it correctly.