We sat down with PPC Specialist Tom Mulli and Digital Paid Media Manager Carl Atterbury - our newly-qualified Digital Champions - to get the full picture.
Because ClickThrough are a Premier Google Partner, we were asked to join a select group of agencies and join their brand-new Digital Champions program. The program is designed to help agencies develop battle-ready experts within their business in specific areas related to Google Ads - in this case: Smart Bidding.
Two of our ghoulishly impressive digital heroes, Tom and Carl, strapped on their proton packs ready to receive exclusive access to the first of a series of Digital Champions events at Google's London HQ.
The event focused on Smart Bidding, and included areas such as how best to implement it, how to optimise it and how to ensure client goals are satisfied.
So, what is the Digital Champions Programme?
Carl explained: “Digital Champions is the first in what Google expects to be a series of initiatives where it's effectively like a ‘Train the Trainer’ system. They're empowering their key agencies, people they have good relationships with, to become experts in particular fields or product offerings and then translate that to the rest of the agency through resources and training that can be applied across ClickThrough and other agencies.”
So that the ClickThrough team could become deep experts in their new technology, Google provided six hours of intensive 1-2-1 training to both Tom and Carl, sending them back to ClickThrough HQ armed with everything they needed to share their new knowledge with their teams (and fight greedy green blobs).
Carl has always been passionate about smart technology; "This session was specifically about Google's smart technology, its algorithmic learning, machine learning...all of those things."
Tom is also a keen follower and early implementer of smart technology;
"I recognised that Smart Bidding is going to be a key tool in the future, and Google are going to be rolling it out across all of their different platforms. For that reason, I was keen to learn more, and use this investment within the agency and of course, to benefit our clients."
During the training, Google went to great lengths to empower Tom and Carl with the information and resources they needed to train the rest of the ClickThrough digital whizzes. The initial session was led by a Google Product Specialist and Carl talked us through the additional support they received:
“After the training, there were two or three follow-up conference calls with smaller teams and webinars, just to check in on progress towards the sessions that we ran for the team our side. They also gave us little extra titbits and snippets and provided additional insights”.
Tom added: “They gave us a PowerPoint to use, but a lot of it was based on how you can flow with the training. The resources are there for you to run through, but importantly; ‘You guys are in charge’.”
Our certified Digital Champions are now more equipped than ever to implement, manage and optimise the conversion-based Smart Bidding technology Google offers. They both now feel even more confident (and these are confident chaps - we train them well!) in setting up and maintaining clients' Digital Paid Media accounts to maximise efficiency and conversions, using the methodology they learned, with the full support of Google.
So if your account has cobwebs running through it, and your buyers have ghosted, why not contact us for an account review (including a Smart Bidding check-up). Who you gonna call?
(No ghosts were harmed in the writing of this blog post).