We've all gotten the email — “Hi, it's your Google ad rep, and I saw some things in your account I think you can improve. We should get on a call and I can help!”
You only have to be on one of those calls to realize they're not consultants, they're salespeople. And their advice will probably be less about your specific account, and more about having you spend more, or blindly accept the platform's AI-based recommendations.
It's not just Google, of course. DTC marketer Barry Hott last week posted this on LinkedIn:
Some questions those reps won't answer are things like how many other accounts are you managing? Where are you located? Are you paid an incentive if I increase my spend?
Well now, we know some of those answers — at least, those for reps hired by one company Google subcontracts this work to: Teleperformance. The very name sounds like sales call centre from the 80s.
Freelance ad consultant Boris Beceric also wondered about this, so he decided to apply for a job there. Not for the job, but for information. And last week he told me they were pretty uninterested in his experience with, you know, ad campaigns.
BORIS: Most of the questions were around prior sales experience. If I had ever worked in an environment where I had to make outbound sales calls.
TOD: And you got an offer.
BORIS: I have the offer in front of me and it says annual gross salary: €24,310
Just for comparison, that's a little over $27,000 US a year — which is just over $13 an hour. That's below the minimum wage in some U.S. states like New York and New Jersey.
And in case you've had one of these calls, they might have felt a little rushed. Or, at the very least, only surface-deep — like they didn't really look at your account. Turns out, there's a reason for that.
BORIS: I confirmed with the team lead who interviewed me. He said I would start with 330 accounts.
TOD: 330?!
BORIS: Yeah, that's a lot of accounts, isn't it?
TOD: Oh, my God. Yes.
BORIS: And you also have to implement 35% to 40% the recommendations of the day. So that's autoplay recommendation, check all the boxes, remove redundant keywords, use bidding strategy, stuff like that. That's the day to day job of [a Teleperformance worker].
There's no time to look at the account. There is no time to get to know the client. There's no time for any of that. There's only time to get them on the phone and read from the script.
Boris Beceric is a freelance Google Ads consultant. You can reach him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/borisbeceric/
We asked Google for comment about the workload and wages, and they provided this statement:
Google partners with companies, like Teleperformance, to provide certain advertising account services. These companies are solely responsible for determining the employment conditions for their workers and must comply with our global Supplier Code of Conduct, which outlines requirements related to wages, fair treatment and more.
We reviewed that Code of Conduct. It doesn't actually reference low wages or workload, so we asked for clarification last Friday, and did not hear back by deadline.
