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If you’ve managed Google Ads professionally for any length of time, you know the email. It shows up from a rep you’ve never met, all warmth and enthusiasm, wanting to find a time to “unlock growth opportunities in your account.” Most of the time you already know how the call is going to go before you’ve even replied. Now and then, though, you get a rep who genuinely wants to understand the account, and those calls are a completely different experience. This piece is mostly about the other kind.

I’ve spent about two decades in paid media. I’ve watched Google Ads evolve from a scrappy keyword auction into the sprawling, AI-drenched machine it is today. And through all of it, one constant has held as reliable as gravity: the Google Ads rep experience is a slot machine, and you almost never hit the jackpot.

Let me be clear up front. This isn’t a knock on Google Ads, the platform. The tools are powerful. The reach is unmatched. The experiments feature alone is worth its weight in gold (more on that later). This is about the people Google sends to “help” us, and the strange theater we’re all forced to perform together.

Pull up a chair. Let’s talk about the reps.

The 99% Who Never Learn the Brand

Here’s the ratio, in my experience: roughly 99% of the time, you get a rep who never once tries to understand the actual business.

To be fair, they do look at the campaigns. They have to, because that’s where the recommendations come from. That’s how you get the greatest hits: “Why isn’t this enabled?” “Why aren’t you running Demand Gen?” “I see you’ve got Final URL Expansion turned off.” They’ve scanned your settings. They’ve run the account through whatever internal checklist got handed to them that morning. What they have not done, and will not do, is ask a single question about the business those settings exist to serve.

They don’t know that half the “conversions” they want to optimize toward are junk leads the client already complained about. They don’t know the real margin on the products they’re pushing you to bid harder on, or that the high-volume campaign they love is the one quietly losing money. They don’t know the account’s true CPA ceiling, the seasonality that makes this month look soft on purpose, or which “underperforming” campaign is actually doing exactly what the client asked it to do. They don’t know why that campaign is capped, or why you paused the thing they’re now urging you to turn back on. They see a toggle in the off position and treat it like a smoking gun, never once considering that a professional turned it off on purpose, for a reason, backed by data.

The settings are not the strategy. But to the 99%, the settings are the entire conversation.

And then, once in a very great while, so rarely you’ll remember their name years later, you get the good one. A rep who asks about the business model before the first recommendation ever leaves their mouth. Who says, “Huh, that’s a weird conversion pattern, let’s dig into it.” Who treats you like a partner instead of a checklist. You start to think maybe the system works after all.

Which brings us to the cruelest part.

They Rotate the Unicorns Out on a Schedule

I want to be honest about how rare the good ones are, because “rare” undersells it. In twenty years, I can count the genuinely excellent reps on one hand and still have fingers left over. They are unicorns. Not “good day at the office” unicorns. Actual, mythical, once-in-a-blue-moon unicorns.

So of course Google rotates them out.

Reps cycle roughly every quarter, which means the moment you finally find a partner who understands your client’s goals, roadblocks, and budget caps, a countdown clock starts ticking. And you know exactly when it runs out, because the rep tells you themselves. A breezy “I’m rotating off your account, but I’m handing you to someone great!” email that reads like a breakup letter with a forwarding address.

Sometimes the good rep even does the responsible thing on the way out. They brief the replacement, they loop you in, they assure you the new person is fully up to speed on the account and its history. And you believe it, right up until the first meeting, when it becomes obvious the new rep retained exactly none of it. Whatever got handed off went in one ear and straight out the other.

So in practice you’re starting from zero anyway, with someone who behaves as though their mere presence will transform the account. They don’t know the goals. They don’t know the constraints. They don’t know about the two years of testing that got you here. But they are eager. They are pushy. They have a list of boxes they’ll be graded on come review time, and by God, they are going to check them on your dime.

This is the rep who lectures you, you with your years of hands-on experience, about how you’re “missing out” on Final URL Expansion. About how you really need to turn on AI Max, today, immediately, no we can’t wait for a test. About how you simply have to be running Demand Gen, the campaign type every single rep on the planet is currently trying to jam down our throats like it’s the cure for something.

They will preach at you about “best practices” as though they invented the concept and you’ve been asleep at the wheel since 2009.

Which brings us to the phrase itself.

There Is No Such Thing as “Best Practices”

Let’s retire this term together, right now.

“Best practices” is not a real thing. It’s a buzzword, a rhetorical Trojan horse designed to make a one-size-fits-all recommendation sound like settled science. I once worked at an agency that banned the phrase outright, because we all understood the truth: it’s marketing dressed up as expertise. Internally, we called them “proven methods” instead, because at least that implied someone, somewhere, had actually tested the thing and watched it perform.

Here’s the question no rep wants you to ask out loud. Do these recommendations actually work, or do they just move more money into Google’s pocket? Most of the time, it’s the latter. And the thing they conveniently leave out of every deck is the single most important truth in all of paid media:

Google Ads is not one-size-fits-all.

Read that again, because every pushy rep on earth is betting that you’ll forget it.

Every company has different goals. A lead-gen client and an e-commerce client are not playing the same sport. Every company has a different budget. What’s pocket change for one account is the entire quarter for another. Every company has a different competitive landscape, a different margin structure, a different definition of what a “win” even looks like. What crushes it for one account can quietly hemorrhage money for the next, and the rep pushing the recommendation has zero skin in that outcome. If it tanks, they’ve already rotated off. You’re the one left explaining the spend to a client.

So a recommendation isn’t a fact. It’s a hypothesis. And a good strategist doesn’t take hypotheses on faith, no matter how confidently they’re delivered or how many times the word “proven” gets attached to them. A good strategist tests them, using one of the genuinely excellent tools Google built right into the platform: the experiments feature.

This is the part I wish more reps understood, because it would make all of us allies instead of adversaries. I am not anti-recommendation. I am pro-evidence. So run the experiment. Split the traffic. Let the data settle the argument the way arguments in this industry are supposed to be settled. If Final URL Expansion is the magic bullet the rep swears it is, the numbers will say so, and I will happily eat my words with a spoon. But nine times out of ten, when you actually put “best practice” to the test, it turns out to mean “best for Google.”

The Rep Who Goes Around You

Now we arrive at the truly special one. Every so often you get a rep who does not appreciate the word “no.” And rather than accept it like a professional, they get creative.

They go around you. They email your client directly, quietly leaving you off the thread, apparently convinced that a little backchannel maneuvering will override your expertise, the very expertise your client is paying good money for you to provide.

Let me spell out why this is such a bad move, for any rep who might be reading.

It’s divisive. It’s manipulative. It doesn’t win over the person overseeing the account, the person who was hired specifically for their judgment, and who functions, frankly, as a guard against exactly this kind of maneuvering. Going around the strategist doesn’t build a relationship. It torches one. It makes zero friends, and it’s plainly disrespectful to everyone involved, the strategist and the client both, because now the client has to referee a fight they never asked to be in.

Nobody at that table walks away thinking, “Wow, what a compelling rep.” They walk away thinking, “Why is the Google Ads rep trying to manage around the expert we hired?”

So Here’s How to Actually Be a Good Rep

I don’t want to leave this on a pile of complaints, because I have met the good ones, and they prove it’s possible. So here’s the whole playbook, free of charge.

Listen. Not “wait for your turn to pitch.” Actually listen.

Care about the business. Learn what the client sells, who they’re up against, and what winning looks like for them, not for your quarterly scorecard.

Ease up on the box-checking. We can tell. We can always tell. The blatant scramble to hit your internal metrics is the least persuasive thing you can do in a meeting.

Stop acting like a used car salesman. Cheap sales tactics don’t move accounts. They just make you, and by extension Google, look cheap. And the strategists on the other end of the call have very long memories.

The best reps I’ve ever worked with understood something the pushy ones never will. Our goals aren’t actually opposed. When the account performs, everybody wins: the client, the strategist, and yes, Google too. You don’t have to strong-arm us into that outcome. You just have to be a real partner in getting there.

The unicorns already know this. Here’s hoping Google figures out how to keep a few of them around longer than a quarter.

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What’s your worst Google Ads rep story? I know you have one. Drop it in the comments. Misery loves a well-optimized company.