Zombie Accounts & Reestablishing Paid Search Company-wide

Not Waiting for Permission to Bring Real Value

Actions:

·      Instituted global naming convention that's been adopted in other areas of digital marketing and analytics [company> regional> BG> division]

·      Instituted new roles, responsibilities, and account access governance.

·      Established a fresh relationship with Google to lift the suspension and work through the project.

Results:

·      Identified over 900 accounts globally across five business groups and 24 divisions and implemented a new account structure for only the active add accounts to remain.

·      Able to get the ads account suspension lifted while negotiating new payment terms between the two company’s sourcing, accountants, and other stakeholders.

·      Able to pay off a large portion of outstanding debts with ad credits found in the zombie accounts.

Situation: The company had a better relationship with Google Collections rather than Google's advertising teams. Years of outsourcing to agencies and a laissez faire approach to governance led to an overwhelming number of ad accounts, gaps of performance data, and zombie accounts that were never shut down and continued to run and spend without oversight it got bad enough that Google suspended all ad accounts globally.

Tasks:

·      Identify how many accounts were associated with the organization globally.

·      Identify how many accounts were active, zombie, or dead accounts.

·      Identify who is responsible for any outstanding debits or credits across the global organizations.

·      Establish new account hierarchy so all paid data, budgets, and activities ladder up into one master account.

·      Increase visibility of digital advertising activities to accountants and marketing leaders in the priority countries, regions, divisions, and business groups.