I was approached by a company (via their design agency) to help with a Google Merchant Center emergency – their account had been suspended, which in turn had meant their Google Shopping Ads campaigns weren’t running, which was the main source of their revenue. What I uncovered was perhaps one of the most extreme examples of poor client-freelancer relationships I’ve ever seen. The client had, a year earlier, decided that their PPC freelancer wasn’t worth the cost and he could manage the campaigns himself, so he let the freelancer go. But, he didn’t fully understand the complex campaign structure that the freelancer had set up (a combination of Performance Max and Shopping campaigns), and had ignored the warnings from Google Merchant Center regarding data quality, which resulted in the suspension – prices and delivery costs (which were based on a complex combination of dozens of delivery options) were wrong. As I investigated further, more problems cropped up. I discovered that the XML product feed that had been sending data to Merchant Center was an old version and never updated product data (a legacy not from the previous freelancer, but an agency years before him) – neither the client, the recent freelancer nor the current agency had noticed this issue persisting for years! Worse still, this all coincided with the deadline for Google Analytics retiring Universal Analytics – something else the client hadn’t actioned. And, to compound the problem, when I reviewed the old Google Analytics data and compared it to actual sales data, it turned out the old setup had been misreporting conversions for years (showing 40–60% fewer sales than the underlying data showed). As a consequence of believing he could do it himself, the client ended up losing months of revenue, had no reliable legacy data to base decisions on, hadn’t retained expertise within his organisation to fix these problems and basically had to start a lot of things again from scratch. It’s possibly one of the most extreme “own goals” I’ve seen a business make – entirely down to poor decisions made by a single individual. It hampered growth for years, lost valuable expertise and data and cost months of revenue as the many problems that were hidden became apparent and had to be resolved. Get in touch with me to chat about the value a freelance PPC consultant can bring to your company.