How TrueClicks Helped Stellar Search Deliver “Bulletproof” PPC services
TrueClicks empowers everybody in the company to spend more time thinking about the strategy and gathering insights that could be used to support the clients. We are actually thinking about how we are going to grow the client, and not just focusing on ticking boxes.”
Nicole Inacio,
Head of Paid Media Operations, Stellar Search
The Client
Stellar Search
RESULTS
265
Trueclicks recommendations applied each month
66
Hours of analysis time saved per month
SOLUTION
Faster account monitoring and more time for strategic planning
Industry
Digital Search Marketing Agency
Location
London
Founded back in 2008, Stellar Search is a London-based digital marketing agency that is all about delivering highly personalized services to its clients.
With a strong history in paid and organic search, their areas of expertise also include paid social, display, and conversion rate optimization.
This enables Stellar Search to offer a holistic digital strategy to their clients, bearing in mind their needs and business objectives.
Challenge
Manual account monitoring that’s time-consuming and error-prone
Nicole Inacio is used to working in a fast-paced agency environment: as the Head of Paid Media Operations for Stellar Search, she and her team have many different client Google Ads accounts to monitor and optimize on any given day.
- Manual, time-consuming account monitoring
- No established process for monitoring account health
- Risk of issues falling through the cracks, especially during busy periods
- Account audits from competitors
It takes quite a lot of time to go into detail for over 10 accounts each week,” Nicole says. “Bear in mind, there’s always going to be other tasks to work on that week as well.”
Nicole’s paid media team would spend hours each week monitoring their clients’ Google Ad accounts. The process was manual and tedious.
“It was so time-consuming, and we didn’t really have a process for it,” Nicole remembers. “We just considered it to be part of optimization.”
Plus, there was always the risk that issues wouldn’t be flagged immediately, especially during busier periods around Black Friday and the holidays—which could lead to some awkward conversations with their clients.
“We often aren’t given notice when an account is being suspended,” she says. “So sometimes we would look at an account, and we wouldn’t realize the account wasn’t actually running that day because something had happened. We were not able to see those massive drops in performance quickly enough. And obviously, that’s a really difficult conversation to have with clients.”
Of course, Stellar Search had scripts in place to alert them to issues and prevent this from happening. But they found that the scripts often flagged problems at midnight, much too late to be helpful.
Luckily, Stellar Search was very diligent about monitoring and optimizing their client accounts: even when clients requested an outside audit from another agency, they only ever found small issues that didn’t impact overall performance.
“Clients would ask other agencies to audit their account, to make sure we are actually providing a good service,” Nicole says. “Nothing came of the audits, but they would find small annoying things, like a URL or an extension being disapproved. Things that wouldn’t have a massive impact on performance, but that we still obviously wanted to avoid.”
Stellar Search wanted to make sure they were delivering the best possible results for their clients, every time.
Nicole and the paid media team needed a better way to monitor their Google Ads, so they could react to any issues immediately. That way, they could spend less time manually monitoring their accounts, and more time on strategic planning.
“We were not able to see those massive drops in performance quickly enough. And obviously, that’s a really difficult conversation to have with clients.”
Solution
An automatic analysis and recommendation tool for paid search
When Stellar Search started working with TrueClicks, Nicole loved how fast and easy it became to monitor client accounts.
Plus, she appreciates how user-friendly TrueClicks is.
“It’s very clear what you need to address right away and what can be addressed later in the week,” she says. “With other platforms, they either have way too many things and it becomes too overwhelming, or there are massive lags in data coming through.”
Stellar Search integrated TrueClicks with Google’s Merchant Center, so they now get immediate updates if an item is disapproved.
They especially appreciate the query mining feature to find powerful negatives, and how TrueClicks monitors the correct audience targeting setting. Both features help them save time and keep their client accounts healthy.
Nicole also loves that TrueClicks is always adding new features: recently, she’s been making use of the ability to add tasks and assign them to team member
“TrueClicks constantly adding new features gives me the confidence that they are thinking ahead to what our needs are,” she says. “With this new feature, there’s a peace of mind that comes with ensuring we are delivering the same quality of service across all of our clients, regardless of whether they’re big or small.”
TrueClicks also gives each account a score, which makes it easy to quickly assess their overall health.
“I established a goal for everybody at the company, that all of the accounts should have a score between at least 75% and 80%,” she says. “That way, I can just go into the platform and check which accounts are not getting those 75%, and quickly analyze why.”
Finally, Nicole found that TrueClicks allows them to foster better, more proactive relationships with their clients, by flagging accounts that haven’t seen any changes in 14 days.
“TrueClicks flags when nothing has been done in the last 14 days, apart from changing bids or changing budgets,” she says. “And that really helps the managers, because then they can raise it with their execs and ask for updates, or a new campaign. It also improves the relationship with the client, because it forces us to be proactive.”
“TrueClicks has become part of our daily routine. In the morning, first thing, we go there and we can see all of our accounts. Any important or urgent issues are immediately flagged, so we can address them very quickly.”
Results
Faster account monitoring and more time for strategic planning
Thanks to TrueClicks, Nicole’s team spends less time on manual monitoring, and more time on strategy: she estimates that TrueClicks saves them 66 hours of analysis time each month.
“It empowers everybody in the company to spend more time thinking about the strategy and gathering insights that could be used to support the clients,” she says. “We are actually thinking about how we are going to grow the client, and not just focusing on ticking boxes.”
Stellar Search uses TrueClicks to perform 265 checks and optimizations each month on average. The increased visibility into client accounts is invaluable, Nicole says.
And if a client ever conducts an outside audit, Stellar Search has nothing to worry about.
“Now, we are almost bulletproof, because TrueClicks allows us to be on top of these things more than we were before,” she says. “So if anyone from outside comes in and checks, they have nothing to complain about and nothing to point out.”
Stellar Search can use the time they save to build stronger partnerships with their clients.
“Our managers can act more as partners to our clients, and not just someone who spends their time on optimizing and going into the accounts and checking if everything is running smoothly,” she says. “They can utilize that time to actually start having conversations with the clients about other things that matter. Can we expand from PPC? Can we do more videos? Can we do more on paid social?”
Perhaps most importantly, TrueClicks empowers Nicole’s team to do more for their accounts.
“You want your team members to be able to step up more, and give them ownership of the accounts as well,” she says. “That goes beyond just checking numbers and making sure that nothing is going wrong. TrueClicks allows you to do that, because it just saves you so much time.”
“It gives me peace of mind, just knowing that the accounts are well, and they are healthy.”
