I’ll
never forget the first AdWords account that I lost. It happened when I was working for a
small agency in Salt Lake City that couldn’t get enough AdWords
clients to satisfy my deep thirst for optimizing ad spend. When I left that agency to start adMind, they were
kind enough to white label my services and let me start
out with a couple of their clients. The total spend was around $12,000 per month and I was
pumped.

Our
initial agreement was that I would receive $500/month to spend about 2 hours per day managing the largest spending account. For the non-math geniuses out there that’s 40 hours per month and equals $12.50 per
hour…not sustainable to start and grow a business. But hey, it was better than
$0/hr.

As
I began increasing my time spent hunting down and acquiring new
clients, existing accounts slowly collected dust. 2 hours per
day turned into 2 hours per week which turned into 2 hours every other
week which turned into 2 hours per month just to build reports. Not a
bad ROI at that point…$250/hr.

One day I got a phone call from my old agency owner who said he just got a
call from the client – and they were pissed. Their account was severely
under spending and the end they were experiencing a lack of business. I
quickly opened the account to verify and saw that for the past six weeks
they were only spending about 50% of their daily budget. I told him
that their CPA was lower than ever and that they were generating the
same number of conversions they always have. Needless to say, he didn’t care because the client is always right.

He
told me he was switching over all of his white labeled spend to another
agency that had “tons of employees”
and “managed about $300,000 a month in spend.” I couldn’t fathom managing that much alone. If $12,000 took me nearly 40 hours a month to
effectively manage then how many people would I need to employ to achieve my goal of $1 million dollars in managed AdWords spend per month?

Fast
forward 2 years to May 2016. I’ve grown my adMind team to five
people…but none of them are AdWords account managers. My partner Mike
Query is our lead developer and manages two Junior Developers. My cousin
Trevor Whittingham is our jack of all trades and master of everything
creative. We manage over 45 active AdWords accounts and with nearly $1 million
dollars a month in ad spend… and we haven’t lost an AdWords client (that we
didn’t want to lose 🙂 in over 9 months.

So
what’s the secret to becoming a one-man AdWords Army? Automation. If
you want to manage large volumes of spend without employing teams of
people then you need to become an expert at every automation tool that
Google has offer. Bidding strategies, scripts, dynamic ads, alerts,
shared budgets, automated rules, that’s all just the beginning. You can
essentially program an AdWords account to check the same things that you
would check on a daily basis and make the same adjustments that you
would make if you were in the account yourself. This not only provides
more efficient management, but helps your clients spend their hard
earned advertising dollars on advertising, not high management fees.

Now,
there’s still plenty of grunt work outside the in-account tasks when managing $1,000,000 in AdWords spend every month,
but that’s a story for another post.

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