How To Streamline PPC Operations In ClickUp
Gray and Justin walk through how PPC agencies use ClickUp to manage client campaigns, team workflows, and onboarding. They cover agency structure, task management, and recurring campaign processes to cut down on manual work and keep teams aligned.
Welcome to how to streamline PPC Agency Operations in ClickUp. I'm excited for this webinar. This has been a fun one to plan and prepare for with Justin and Pullman. So we're going to do quick intros and then we're going to get right into things. So first up, I wrote this for Justin so I'm not going to let him defend himself. He can defend himself afterwards. But Justin runs Invisible PPC and IPPC has an awesome service helping agencies grow well maintaining wide margins they did by providing best in class white label PPC management for their clients. We're obviously talking about ClickUp today. Justin is a recovering I put teamwork user but actually a team member at Teamwork as well. And I just grabbed a couple of the highlights. From what I know about IPPC, you guys have scaled results in over 60 niches served agencies. We're kind of in the same boat in terms of we've both been serving agencies for 10 plus years. Justin, I'll let you add anything else though to introduce yourself other than just my silly bullet points.
No, I got a good chuckle out of that one, especially the first one. But in general I've been working in the agency space for almost 15 years now, whether it be on the education side of things when I was working at and running digitalmarketer.com to trying to build specific product management software and market that to agencies at Teamwork and then kind of found my way home to working more directly with agencies as a white label PPC management solution and running that that show so love agencies, love what everybody does. They're the connectors of the people that do the work boots on the ground and just really excited like really excited to you know, connect with with more of y' all here and share just what we've learned like over the last 10 years of how we can you know, product like pro set the process for PBC management because the there's a lot that has to go on with that and I think anybody that's done the work is well as acutely aware of that.
Yeah, that's awesome. I didn't ask you if it was okay to put your email in here. I just assumed anyone wants to spam Justin or Adam to your email list, feel free.
Here's your chance. No, I love it when people reach out in general. I used to make the joke when I worked for smaller orgs that it gets lonely. When that was before everybody was remote but now everything's remote and it's like hey anybody please just shoot Me an email. I get bored. Uh, but yeah, like, like, please make sure to connect on LinkedIn. Shoot me an email if you have any questions or you want to chat. Love, love talking with everybody.
Cool, that's awesome. And Jeff, who's here just from the Zen Pilot team, he is emceeing in the chat today, so if you got questions, he'll be kind of the point person on fielding those initially. And, uh, he just shared it in chat here. Justin's LinkedIn as well. All right. On my end, I'm Gray. I'm one of the co founders of Zen Pilot. We help digital marketing agencies build more productive, profitable and healthy teams. Just like Justin, been in the agency space for a little over the last 10 years. Zenpilot, we're ClickUp's largest implementation partner. We Gabriel, who's our ClickUp Solutions Manager and our whole ClickUp Solutions team. One of my favorite things to say is if we can't do it on ClickUp, it can't be done. So we've gotten to see just by.
Not.
Not because we're necessarily rocket scientists, but by way of seeing patterns a ton of times. We've worked a little over 2,600 agencies, so we've gotten to see a ton of the common agency challenges and we're going to share some of that stuff here today. Also run a podcast called Agency Journey, and if anyone's got any questions or wants to reach out, you can grab me via email or via LinkedIn here with the links that Jeff throw in the chat as well. And as we're diving in, I'd love to hear from all of you. That's kind of the super quick intro on us. I love to hear two things. The first one is, what are you guys using for project management right now? If you're on ClickUp or if you're considering ClickUp, that's helpful to know. We'll do our best to customize the content here as we go through based on where folks are at. Just throw that in the chat. And then the second one that I'd ask you to put there as well is, are you currently offering PPC services or is that something that you're considering adding? I would assume a lot of folks are already running it and want to figure out how to do that better. And then we've got other folks probably who are looking at adding more.
Cool.
All right, well, chat's blowing up, so helpful to see from that. And the last thing before we dive in here, we need the little present icons here. Justin and I put together a couple things to give you all for free at the end of this. There's no, this isn't a sales webinar, obviously we're both running businesses. So folks want to talk with us. That's great. And that's a common outcome from these calls. But there's no pitch to a product or we haven't put together the 997 course.
There's not so super value stack of this thing's worth $26,000 and it's just.
997 today for the next five people.
No.
But we do have some templates and some training to give you all here at the end as well. And with that let's dive right into the good stuff. So we're going to talk about what does running a gold standard PPC agency look like. And the first thing I'd point out is that for everybody, all of the top, the truly world class agencies who are offering PPC services, who are running on top of ClickUp or on top of anything, it's all a combination of these three things, Tools, process and people. So on the ClickUp front we're going to be talking about ClickUp and how do we build a single source of truth. And like this is the place, this is our operations hub and where our agency operating system is. And Justin's going to be going deep into inside the tool. He's going to be sharing the process that they go through and hey, here's the workflow so that regardless of who you're working with on the IPPC team, it gets done the right way every time, regardless of who's doing it. But that the people side is, is equally huge. I think this is the one that so many people underrate is like what's our behavioral system for how the teams can all operate as one cohesive unit together. So the world class gold standard agencies, they've got a cohesive plan that binds those three things together. People know how to use the tool and follow like get the process into the tool and follow that process consistently every time, report on that and then make the, make the process better over time. So we're gonna look at what that looks like inside of ClickUp. We'll talk a little bit about what the kind of the path to getting that right. But I just want to start with kind of that, that caveat that hey, ClickUp by itself doesn't solve all your problems. Just the process by itself doesn't solve all those problems. Like it's the combination of all three of these things. And Jeff, if you want to throw in the chat, if anyone's interested, you haven't yet seen our agency, PM Health benchmark. This would be something that you can go through. You don't even have to put in your email to get your score at the end of it, but to go through kind of what's the where are we at as an agency in terms of our combination of those three things and then see kind of how do you stack up versus thousands of other agencies? So that's one resource that's there as well. All right, Justin, anything else you'd add before we jump into ClickUp?
No, I think, I think you nailed the overall just kind of like breakdown of where we're going to be going. So yeah, let's dive into the kind of like the 10,000 foot view and then we'll dive real deep into PPC.
We'll get deep into it.
Cool.
All right, so let's start inside ClickUp. I've got it pulled up. I'm normally a dark mode person, but flipped it over to light mode in case any of you all are not into ClickUp and aren't the nerds yet. So first thing we're going to talk about is just the structure and how agencies are built. We break agencies into three main categories or three main kind of areas of the business. And there's certainly subsets of that. But every agency effectively has growth, delivery and operations. So our language here is growth is your sales and marketing. That's your client acquisition. That is the promise made. Delivery is our language for your fulfillment. That's the promise kept. This is how do we actually deliver work to our clients or client services. And then operations is our catch all bucket for the rest of the things that happen. Your people, culture, hr, legal, finance, like all the stuff that it takes to keep the lights on at the firm. And we can talk more about these other areas as we get a little bit later. But that's the first thing is if we're trying to truly build ClickUp as our single source of truth and our one operating hub for the agency, we've got to have a place to house all the work. So we'll focus today specifically on, on the delivery side and we'll talk about, hey, how do we actually manage clients here? But, but all three of those areas are important to be able to house everything that you do as a firm.
So.
Inside growth, delivery and operations. If we look inside the delivery space we're going to have for most agencies, they'll have a list with each of their clients. Beneath that, they'll have, or, I'm sorry, folder for each of their clients. They'll have a list for each of their services. If you're new to ClickUp, it's the parlance here. And then if we look at like a, I don't know, a client onboarding example, we've got kind of, you know, high level, hey, what's our, what are our deliverables? And then inside our client onboarding milestone or deliverable, what are each of the individually owned steps in that process to accomplish that? So that should look the same whether it's, you know, Aldi's onboarding or Walmart onboarding or Trader Joe's onboarding. There may be some distinctions, but we've got the same repeated steps and then we'll build our processes directly into that kind of next layer here. So when I say, hey, I need you to reply to the welcome email you get from the sales team, like, how do I actually do that? You know, our documentation, this is what we're talking about, where we make the process live, where the work gets done. So the team follows the process as they're working through tasks and we got our checklists and whatever the custom fields or other data we might need from a task management perspective. So I just want to kind of set the stage with like high level, hey, what's the architecture of a gold standard agency? How do we take the complex work of what we've sold to a client and agreed to deliver to them and then how do we actually deliver that on that in the day to day? So it's kind of where work gets planned into the system, where it gets done. You know, an individual team member is typically looking at a totally separate view. They're looking at like a, when I'm in individual contributor mode internally at Zen Pilot, I've got my, my task view and I'm looking at all my work globally because in ClickUp, everything flows uphill. I'm working kind of my global workload and then working through my tasks with obviously the process embedded there. And then from a management perspective or where am I looking at this kind of high level to look down on? Like, hey, where are we at with each of these projects? That's going to bring us back to dashboards or client portals or some of the other stuff that we'll talk about here in a little bit. But before we get to that, let's dig into how we're actually delivering PPC work. So, Justin, I'll pause here. I'll flip off my screen and I'll let you pull it up and then you can walk us through how IPPC is delivering.
Yeah, absolutely. So I feel pretty good actually now that you said like, hey, here's the breakdown of what a gold standard agency looks like. And so I'm like, all right, we have some differences in our naming, but we have our delivery which is our IPVC clients where all of these like what I'm about to show you would live for each individual one. We do have like our ipvc growth and then our operations like, hey, like we'll all be like we're pretty well consistent there, which is fantastic. So I saw in the chat already that people had brought up like there's a decent number of people that are currently offering PBC services and then there's a smaller percentage that are, that are considering it. One of the biggest issues I see a lot when people onboard a new client is one it's inconsistent and it's not something you can pass around to new employees or new hires. It gets too tribal in a way. It's tribal knowledge and things fall through the cracks and then you start losing the overall quality and then your reputation can go down and that's what having a process like this is going to help you, is going to help mitigate against. So does anybody else who's working currently with PPC clients, do you, do you get feedback of like what do you actually do here? So, and so not to say that you're not doing the work, but do people I've seen over my, over my tenure in PPC that people tend to forget like what goes into overall management. Could anybody like in the chat, like do you run into that of kind of almost having to prove like, yeah, we're actually still doing work and ads don't run themselves after onboarding, if anybody's run into that too. It's, it's, it's a, it's a wild thing to see. So pretty much I'll go through our, you know, extremely in depth process here. And so how it starts is right when we on and so this is gonna be our onboarding for just PPC search. I mean just for search. So not including any sort of retargeting or anything else. This is strictly Google, Google search. When we have additional services that we need to add in, we have like different templates for those that we copy into the individual client. We also have different processes for canceling, pausing, reactivating and those types of things. I didn't want to go super crazy into that because I Think that's outside of the realm of overall search. But this is just for getting a client on board and then maintaining them and doing the recurring work. So tends to come down like this. We start with and obviously we rename the sample PPC template to a format of agency name and client name and then the smart niche or niche that it's in. So you want to make sure that even at the beginning that you're giving instructions in terms of naming conventions. Naming conventions will make or break you. I know that and that sounds, you know, really, really dramatic for processes but it will and I'm consistently inconsistent when it comes to naming things. And like our COO and other folks will be like nope, Justin, it's gotta be like this, everybody will do it. And it comes down to what Gray was talking about with people making sure you're training people up to follow these processes because that will make or break whether you're going to be, you know, being consistent within your onboarding and your maintenance or not. We also have a end client folder link. So what we do when we onboard anybody is we have our onboarding survey and onboarding meeting that will link to everything in there so that people are able to say hey, like they can refer, the client manager can refer back to that at any given time. Then we make sure we have front and center goal and target cpa. And so after all that sorted we get into the to dos. So again this is something that you can just copy. We throw in, get started and there's mainly this is the highest level that you can look at this where we have ad hoc tasks, major change log onboarding which is a one time thing. So that just happens once account creation and go live additionally that's another one time. Then you get into the recurring tasks of roadmap account management tasks and then finally you have like kind of communication options and that's for how we work. That might be less necessary for some of you, but yeah, so ad hoc tasks, pretty self explanatory. These are the things that just kind of come in and so we have you know the, the subset in there that you can. Then we have the tag in place where as they're coming in they'll assign set due dates, priority and all that fun stuff. But this is just a simple like am just needs to relay information of new newly added keywords to the client. Like that's an example one. So what are other things they'd have to do like one off. So anything that's outside of the scope falls in like Falls in here just to kind of catch all for anything. You don't want to be putting too much in there. If you're seeing things come up consistently, then you might need to start looking at your overall flow and add that in as a, as a new step. So this is a good area if you're seeing something like, hey, like we're not having enough. Like if in this case, if this is the real one that came up, where they need to relay information for newly added keywords that needs to go into the overall process. If you're seeing that come up more often and more often. So ad hoc tasks are a good way to, to monitor and measure what needs to be added or removed from your tasks here. Then the next one major change log, we can click into it. Whoopsie. I didn't mean to do that, but that's fine. This is just really making sure that if there's anything substantial that changed to the account. So did you change out the account manager? Have specialists shifted? Is there a new type of campaign that's launching? Like did you start doing performance max versus just strict search or whatever you're doing? This is just to kind of get an overall change log. And again that's just purely for more informational type things here. So the real like meat and potatoes is kind of getting into the onboarding account creation and those. So I'll drop down onboarding here and so. Excuse me, I need some water. One second.
Because I love seeing other people's processes. Like this is always fun to dig in with folks who set it up. Like even things like change logs, like the pros and cons of that as a task versus a doc, like we can. There's so many things for the Q.
And A. I would love to get, get perspective on that too because I mean we're by no means perfect on this. It's. It's everything. And I think that's a good thing to call out for everybody here when you're putting processes together. Like things change. Like there's a reason this isn't done like in stone.
Right.
Things will change and things will shift. And we've been changing and shifting things for the last 10 years, whether it's, you know, the process itself, where it lives. We were in Asana before, moved over to ClickUp and got everything in here. But yeah, I think that's a, that's a, that's a good call out though, Greg, for sure. Cool. So in onboarding, these are all these tasks we have to be done one to one and Then we'll be adding in the relevant details like for each one we normally. And so you can go into the individual task. You'll see here we have in the template of everything they need to do to get started. So is this new agent send welcome email from Gmail. Like, we take out all the guesswork. So every single task that we have, we want to make sure we have a brief underneath that. And then we tag like, who should be doing it. Like this should be done by the account manager and that's what that tag is set for there. And as you look through here, we have different call outs for who should be focused on these. So this is account manager and account specialist for updating the system. This is purely account manager, purely account specialists. And so how we structure the team is we use an overall pod structure. So our account managers, they work with several account specialists. So they have like auditors, specialists, designers and those folks and those people will be tagged in here to then, you know, make sure that each thing is going to be delivered upon. So if we're kind of to go through our entire onboarding process here, it's kind of really breaking down, you know, and asking very granular questions of is this a new agency, are they a medical agency? We have to send them something different at that point. So we have to have all of these things in place here. Then, hey, account manager, make sure to review form and follow up, review onboard form and follow up. And this is like everything down to, you know, to a specific degree. Everything needs to be done like. And we are again taking out all of the guesswork when it comes to this. So checking invoice numbers, making sure those things are put in place, we get down to the very, very granular levels. One thing that we try to avoid is nesting too much with subtasks. It's easy to get lost in there. So we generally recommend to nest, like to kind of stop at that fourth level, like any kind of like I think when you add in the. What's it called? It's the. What do they name it? It's the. Yeah, the, the nested subtasks and click apps. When you put that in there, you can go down to like I think seven or eight levels. Gray, is that right?
Yeah, seven.
Yep. Yeah, that's, that's a lot of subtasks and I don't know about you and maybe you can speak, speak to this a little bit more. It's easy to get lost in those things because they kind of just keep going and there's not like they do have like breadcrumbs a little bit but it's still might be difficult to navigate too so you want to avoid those. But subtasks I think are a game changer for sure. But yeah, can you, can you talk a little bit more about maybe you went on the subtask side of things and like best practices you see there.
Yeah, I would normally recommend that people actually don't use nested subtasks until they get really comfortable with it. There's a handful of reasons but one is like you're like you're talking about when we get down into something deep down, even with breadcrumbs like inside ClickUp we've got nested subtasks here. When I see that task show up in my to do list or I'm looking at breadcrumbs, you know, I'm seeing like oh here's the parent task that like it's assigned to ClickUp. But what's the parent of that and then what's the parent of that? That's part of onboarding which is then part of this specific client. It just be hard to understand where we are and what, what that looks like. So we can, that might be a good one to dig in a little bit deeper on. And what's the workaround for that in Q and A?
Yeah, absolutely. And so kind of going into the more specifics like we have individual tasks here and then we also have some major milestone tasks like for us we've identified in onboarding like some of the key areas for our making sure on the end client side of things that like we have the landing page creation milestone sorted. Before we can consider onboarding to be complete and before anybody can even get into onboarding we have to make sure that they've submitted their onboarding form and that they've paid. So all of these are, they're relational. So like some of these can't occur especially when we get into the recurring tasks. They can't occur until there's been something checked off prior. And that's actually to show real quick before we go into there our board view. So we have, in board view we have kind of these three or not 3, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, I can't count. We have these six columns, one's info only. That's just kind of like a catch all piece. There's just here's some more information pieces. We have the to DOS then making sure everybody, you know, once they're starting to work on us has to get moved into work in Progress. Everybody needs to make sure they're following these. And that comes back to the people side. Waiting on client is a pretty important one for us. Cause it shows we've done everything that we need to on our side. We've completed up to that level and then now we're in that wait mode versus something being stuck in a work in progress. And you're not sure if it's something we need to do or if it's something the client needs to do. And then we have a stalled. And then we have complete.
Great.
How would you see these kind of broken out, like, do you see anything here that you're like, ooh, we can. We might have something controversial in this one too. Or what do you think?
We'll often use a little bit more granularity in what is in progress mean. So is that like, hey, this is, this is just in progress, someone's working on it right now. Or it's waiting on internal review, it's in revision, depending on what, what info we need. Um, and then the only other piece that I would say here is just like a CRM stage pipeline. You want everything to be like what action is the, you know, what's, what's the next piece that we need here. So instead of saying like, hey, this is in follow up activities. Well, it's like, hey, now we've sent the contract, we just, what did we just complete? We just presented the solution. Now it's in contract, sent the same thing here. Like I just sent it for revision. It's waiting on review, it's pending revision. It's like, here's the thing that we just sent back.
Nice.
But yeah, that'll depend on workflow too. And this is one of the things with going up a layer like where you guys are, you're pulled down a layer where we have to use nested subtasks because we don't have onboarding as its own kind of list or whatever. And so that like WIP is kind of covering a lot of different. A lot of stuff that's happening there.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Cool.
So to kind of talk through a little bit more on just the pure onboarding side of stuff here. That's where we kind of like all of this stuff has to occur before we can even do the onboarding call. And the onboarding call is going to be dictating, you know, what happens with landing page creation and then finally the next one once it's created and we've had the back and forth. That's when we say, all right, Go live.
Right.
And so once the landing page is live, that's where we can start getting to. Okay, let's make sure we're getting everything set up in the Google account, whether it's a new build or a, or we're building on that, making sure. And this one's a pretty big one for us. Even though this is just for standard, standard ppc. We always, we, we do retargeting with Adroll, we want to make sure that we get that on the site immediately even if they're not ready to do retargeting yet because there's going to be like a 30 day lag time, especially if you have a lower traffic client to season that pixel. So anytime if you don't have this in your onboarding of getting like retargeting sorted, have that, add that to your SOP because you'll be kicking yourself later because you can't sell it yet.
Right.
Make sure it's there. Obviously they need to be cool with you doing that too, but make sure you're all good to go there. In most cases they'll have that already. But if you're working and actually that's the question I should ask everybody if you can keep an eye on this. Jeff, how many people like what type of clients do y' all work with in here? Are you work like, are you working with larger SaaS companies or are you working with like local services? Or if you could just put in the chat what you're looking at there. Because if you're working with local services, not a lot of them can retarget yet because if you're starting to drive more traffic then they can begin to do that. So you'd be really kicking yourself there in a potential opportunity to expand that client. If you don't do that out the gate and then from there during the onboarding call, that's where we get all of our access to things, which is why we can start publishing a new Google tag manager container, making sure that all the tracking sorted out then going into the account structure build which this is a pretty. We have the overarching tasks in there as well. So again with each one of these I could go grant. I mean I could spend an entire day going through everything here. So I'm trying to catch the big ones. If you see anything that you're like, I want to know what's deeper in, say it in the chat and if you can give me a shout, I'm happy to do that again. I'm opening the kimono this is our exact process we use to manage all of our clients. So hopefully you're not competing with me, but if you are, I don't think you'll be able to do it as well as us. I'm sorry, this is, this is kind of our process here. And then. Yep. Then it goes to the account structure build out for everything that we need to do in place there. Building out positive and negative list most for us, like one of our secret sauces is that we have a database of positive and negative. So we're able to apply that there. Then start building out the client facing data studio dashboard, making sure we're doing tracking qa. Then we have actually a second one that's brought in. So the account manager does it first. Then one of their specialists has to do it as well before we can go live. Then final verification of the landing page and tracking verified by the client and then we do a day 12 billing check for like. So we're just making sure that like now that we're live, let's make sure we have our billing cadence set up and ready to roll. And then that's going to work between the specialist as well as the. As our operations folks. So in terms of onboarding, there's a lot to do here. But this is one of those one time things. So if you're selling ppc, especially when you're doing initial setup and onboarding and then we haven't even gotten to like the go live for the full account yet. That's why it caught like you need to be charging like setup fees. If you're not charging setup fees like this, this alone, you could show this to a client. Like we have to do all of this. That's why. And that's why it costs thousands of dollars to do this. Like if you're not charging enough for setup fees, in most cases you should be charging more for setup fees because there's so much that has to happen there. But in terms of onboarding, this happens once and this is the larger side of things because it is getting your account in order and doing all that extra work there. Then you have account creation and go live which is just actually doing the creation of AdWords campaigns. And so we also have this tag here that I think it's fun. It's me first. That's. Those are the things that like prioritize those. I'm sure there's a better way to do it than the way we're doing that there. Great. But it's a good call out to the team for them to be able to see that there and then yeah, it kind of it breaks down like there's seven subtasks in here for you know, the GA accounts account structure build. You have to follow again we're bringing up. Oh gosh, I dropped some. We have to follow the naming conventions for campaigns, ad groups and ads making sure that we're reminding people. So we're using this process as also a reminder to make sure that people are following the process and giving kind of like check ins. Like hey, make sure you do this. Check the names. Are you building the actual account in the way that we've set it going where it's like brand brand plus which is your high value keywords plus brand and then non brand. Are you building it that way? If you're not, that's a problem.
Right.
And then we use different tools like review PPC ad labs data for strategy and ad copy notes, complete keyword ad groups and all this fun stuff. So this is where the real work starts happening and this is the initial kickoff.
Real work. Right.
This one's if you're in the US and you have and it's like if you're expanding an account for Google like it's a brand new Google account, they give you coupon codes so you can get some money off spend for them. That's always a win win. Then we go into QA the account. So make sure to check the review and but that's a big one. Check review budget for remaining month. Always do that. Assigned a team member to carry out qa. Assigned a carryout QA making notes in.
The.
ECFS if you're seeing that is our end client folder link. So making sure that we're referring back to other parts in the overall process to make sure like hey what are the notes in there saying? Are we in line with those? And then you can go set account to go live and that's going to be check if the monthly management is paid. That's an important one. You don't want to be running it anymore if they're not paying you. Set campaign live. Take screenshots for go live email. So we want to make sure that we're saying hey we have all these things in place. Here you go. And then yeah then you're off to the races there. And then you finally get into invoice monthly management fee only if client has to set up fee invoiced. So that's a lot of the build there for the additional so the jump on for the account creation and go Live post onboarding. So onboarding is kind of making sure everything's in place and that the, that you have client approval then it's finally getting into okay, now we can turn this, this bad boy on. And so just like onboarding this is a one time task and then this is similar to. You'll see this is similar to a marriage between creation and onboarding when you get into roadmap account management tasks and this one is the biggie. But before I get into that, would love to see if there's any questions or anything that that's coming in that they or something like hey, like don't talk about that. Like I'd rather hear if you talk about this or you know, kind of going that route.
Yeah, I've got a couple of things Jeff, if you have anything else we can, you can jump in as well. But some people have asked about what all are we talking about with PPC here? Is it just on the Google side? Is it on Facebook too? So today we're just tackling the Google side. Happy to. During Q and A we can show some of the Facebook process. I'm happy to pull some stuff up there on the. Kelly had a good question about sharing some of this work with clients because you guys are doing it white label. I'm not sure how much of this. Obviously agencies need to know what's happening behind the scenes but how do you manage that piece right now? Is that through ClickUp or is that.
Separately with clients that isn't done through ClickUp right now? They don't need to get into this nitty gritty. I think when I'm talking about sharing with clients and those things you want, especially somebody who's new to the PPC space or they're new to selling ppc, they almost feel like they have to justify their existence which you know, you have to do that in most cases talking to clients and like showing them the amount of work and having them understand. So for us clients talking to the agency like this is the stuff that's going on in the account and them being aware of like the work to be done allows them to better price and better and have a better conversation with their end clients. So if you're using a fulfillment partner like so if you were to work with ipbc like we would have an account manager that's working directly with you, the agency to make sure that you know one everything that's going in the account and that you can speak to it with the client.
Right.
Because the reason you'd be using A fulfillment partner in most cases other than, you know, better margins is you don't have the internal expertise, so you don't need to be the expert. And genuinely you don't want to be the expert. And so that's why you'd end up working with these folks or with folks like us. So we don't have them in ClickUp for this. We keep them out of there because they don't need to see a bunch of the stuff in the onboarding and those things. This is I think, probably the stuff that they'd be most interested in because this is the recurring work, this is the work to be done that they're getting paid the big bucks for.
Right.
That's awesome.
Cool.
We'll get some other ones here. We can talk more about managing work with clients for the folks who are working directly with clients. Some options for that in Q and A, but I'll let you keep going here, Justin.
Yeah, and so that this, this should probably answer a lot of those. Like this is how we, this is how we run the account. So like if you were working directly with a client and you were to kind of like just completely like swipe this, this is how, this is how we do it. So all of these are recurring tasks again. And so especially when they're coming on board, these ones are, are important. Like you don't do these, you don't do day one, day three, day five checks anymore because it's impossible to one, it's never day one, day three or day five anymore. So those only happen once they're the recurrings come down here. But you want to make sure every month you're looking at the budget review and reset like where are we at? What's going on there? So that's kind of like day one of the month or prior to that, then when you're bringing somebody on just a campaign day one check. So our business model is made to be lower touch.
Right.
That's the only way that we can scale to the level we have with our providers.
So.
But when they're coming on board, that's when you need to be fairly high touch in any case. So what's the day one checking looking like? Like, and then you digging into the account, like is everything kind of like running like we're expecting? Did we run into any, any snags? Do it at day three, do it at day five. And then you send, then you send a one week review, right? And you do an overall week review that's going to break down. So you're going to dig into the following, like run keyword diagnostics. After a week is the time to apply a bid strategy. If not, set task for later. And so anything that isn't that you can't complete, like when we have like set tasks for later, that's when you set a later due date.
Right.
Or when we have like some tasks in here that are like you have to make a decision and if the decision is to not start running a landing page test, it's to hold off. Then you go, what date should I check this again?
Right.
So we make sure to kick the can in a good way. And then asking the question, is there anything we should communicate to the agency in the one week review, we also include tracking. Are we getting any submissions? The two scariest numbers for me are 0% and 100%. Are we getting lead form submissions? If we're not, we should be looking at that. Are we getting calls? Are we getting calls from the ads? Then we take a look at our Google Data Studio just to make sure. So the report we give, is it looking right? Is it reflective? Are all the things connected? And then we have the if statements here. Like if we're not getting calls or leads, do this. So then go. Is tracking set up for Google Ads correctly? Is the tracking number coded on the landing page correctly? Our call extensions done correctly? Yeah. So then we have the if thens there to break that down. And then finally we lead into escalations if there's any issues with tracking. Assigned AM for troubleshooting. If AM cannot troubleshoot, assigned a team lead for troubleshooting. So where to go next during that review? So on week one that you're with an account, you have to run this playbook to make sure everything's working because last thing you'd want to do is set it up like hey, we're live and like hey, it's been a month. We have no leads.
Right.
You want to make sure that you're being respectful there. Then like I said here you want to make sure you have remarketing set up. That's just to make a verification of that. Then we move into the two week review which again you want to we, we do a shift here because one of the things we like to train our specialists to do and we like to train the kind of our clients do is using our Google Data Studio dashboard to look at the 14 day performance rather than having them go into AdWords or Google Ads. I'll never not call it AdWords. It's impossible going into Google Data Studio and training, training the client. Like this is where you look.
Right.
Then we download that as a PDF, send with notes again getting very granular. So change file name to client name. 2 week update, compile notes. And then we have like where we send it out from and then send email from the KZU template. And then that's where they pull it from and paste notes at the bottom.
Done.
So that's how they can just do a quick two week review. And then. Okay, so that's that. Let me close these out because this is getting a little intense. One second. One week review. Remarketing. Two week review.
You're gone. Cool.
And so then, so then we go into it. We run a tactical audit after go live. So two weeks after go live we start getting to. We have an audit checklist. Let's see, is it in here?
Should be.
I'll ask Shane about that later. And so we conduct an audit by checking against our audit checklist, post action items for the AM and the account specialist to implement and then kind of go wild from there. So that's just a quick tactical audit to make sure we're in line. And then we run into monthly strategy planning.
Right.
So then. Cool. We're going into this weekly doing these reviews. We are looking at the tactical audits like two weeks after go live. And then we go into a monthly strategy planning. So then we start looking at. This is what we do each and every week of a new month after account spend with us for a month. And that's where we break down. All right, week one optimizations, Week two optimizations, tactical audit, Week three optimizations, week four. And each one of these are a different flow, essentially like looking at performance review for the previous month. Send any optimization suggestions to am.
There you go.
Budget, pace and review. So like how did we do? Did we do we spend too much in the beginning of the month and had to slow it down. What do we do differently in the future?
Right.
Search, query, review and then check for all possible items. You know, just do a quick sanity check on those. If any new keywords added, the campaigns inform ams. So that's for the account specialist. And then then yeah. So moving into week two, optimizations. This is when we go review performance compared to goal. If you see in week one we're looking at previous month, how are we tracking a goal? Right, Tracking a goal for the month. And then again always review budget pacing. You want to make sure that you're always looking at that because it's a bummer when you run out of cash. Especially like when people at the end of the month, if they're trying to hit particular goals, they're going to be looking towards the things that are the best lever pullers. And paid search tends to be that. Not much changes in terms of optimization, score suggestions implemented as needed and all that. That all stays about the same. So it's a similar thing just kind of changing the context from how did we do last month and work towards that to how are we pacing this month? So that's the seismic shift in mentality for the user when they're there. Then it goes into we have a tactical audit same as above. Then this is all you know, review performance to goal. So not too much changes there. But we just have these set as a. And yeah we have some, there's some changes why and that's why we just don't recur these as an individual one each week because there are some other things that we want to be keeping an eye on. Like if we're spending too high, what are our costly keywords at this point.
And then going there.
But you do see some things that are coming in again and again like for check all possible items and whatnot. And then week four then you get into review performance compared to goal like so you're looking at month end performance. And then we do break things down for like regular search query reviews for clients spend at particular levels. And then then you get into the overall, you know, closeout for the month where it goes into hey, here's, here's your review for the month which we saw previously above which then what happens after like a 60 day period we try to you know, build case studies. That's one of the things we do. So we have a case study task. Hey, if we're getting great performance, follow this reach out to client, get that information. We ask them would they benefit from using a one of our cross sells. So that that triggers the AMS to start looking at like hey, like you could probably be getting XYZ things more if you start re doing retargeting that turns into a cross sell opportunity. And then once we get into month three that's when we start doing more like ad creatives landing page tests and those types of things in place. So that's kind of the whole shebang there. And then we dig into again making sure that we're completing that loop of anytime we can get a case study we're going to be doing it the 90 day and the 180 day as well. And then the last thing is how we communicate when someone's onboarded with us. We know what their communication preferences, whether it's a written report or with or 5 minute video or recurring catch up call. Which one is it? What are you doing? And we just get that out of the gate. But that's to say that's it. There's, there's a lot in here and I know I skimmed over a decent amount, but I went way longer than I expected to on this one, I think. But, but yeah, cool. Like I'll, I'll pass it over to you.
Justin. That's great. Um, it's fun to just see like all this stuff kind of broken down and you're like, hey, here's the brain dub. There is a ton of here to run through it. Let's take it up a layer and talk about kind of managing across clients. And then I want to get into. We've got a bunch of really good questions here. So I can pull up my screen here and let's talk about like now, if we're looking at cross clients, how do we manage that? So we're going to talk about dashboards. I want to come back to some of the questions that people had around like, hey, how do, how are we going to share this stuff with individual users? This setup will look a little bit different from that. But let's go to this, what I'm going to call the account dashboard here. This is the overview of basically, where are all of our clients? Right now we're looking at a view. These are basically tasks, repurposed tasks inside ClickUp to align with each of those accounts. A new client comes on board. They get a new task on the account dashboard assigned to them. And they're also going to get a new folder created from a template, kind of what you're talking about and what Justin just showed us. So here we've got who the account is, who's responsible for it. This would be equivalent, Justin, in your model to the account manager when, if we have a weekly call or you know, we'll probably use due dates to kind of represent, hey, here's the next touch point. Or the. It might just be a consistent recurring cadence of communication with them. What's the health of the account, what services they have, what's their goal? You know, all these goals is a CPA below $51, like, okay, that's. We know what we're, what we're running against and we might have a million other, you know, who, who's the, who are the team members assigned to Them are they a retainer or project, you know all, all kinds of information. So we can then take this and what we're trying to do is track like how are our clients performing as a whole and then break those down into individual segments. So I might want to see just as an example, like let's look at our active client accounts by lead and say hey, when Gray has them, go figure, they do super well because he's a rock star. But when Andrew has them, yeah, these are more difficult clients or whatever's going on. Yeah, right. He's, he's got some, some worst client performance and this is really just a leading indicator like we want to know hey, where are their turn opportunities or where, where might we need to jump in? If I'm sitting in like that director of client services or director of Client success type role, I might want to take advantage of some of the other ways to visualize this inside ClickUp and say hey, if I look at our client meetings as a whole, what's coming up here over the next month? So we're on Wednesday right now, what's left this week? I'll get these color coded by health of that account. So I know, hey, I might need to jump in with Rush tomorrow and help out on that call or I've got to figure out what's going on before we get get into that call. So this account dashboard is one thing that's been super helpful for, for agencies is just like hey, give me one overview of where everything is in terms of what's going on and then I want to come back to the services and what it looks like to add PPC if you're not currently doing PPC or looking at doing PPC differently. But before we get there, just because a number of people had the same question around how do we kind of share this work with clients? And we talked about the my task too, but we didn't really talk about managing that high level work. There's a couple different ways. One of the most common ways to do it or easiest ways to do it would be to take basically a public view of each of these lists. We might say hey, here's the stuff that we've completed so far and now I don't need to show all the subtasks, I'm just trying to show what are those actual things that we got done and create a public link and people can go see that. Another common way, it wouldn't necessarily have to be completed ones. It could be what's up next. So I'll show you a dashboard in just a second. But we could even create a portal basically where clients have a public view to this and it's a set of docs with embedded public views. So now they're seeing like, hey, here's your handy link to schedule a meeting or submit a request or whatever. Like okay, I want, if that's a form then I have access to that. Or you want to see specific progress reports or analytics or whatever else is there. So you might want meeting notes. There's a bunch of different stuff that we could do there in terms of interfacing with clients. Or in your case, I would imagine this is probably closer. Justin, for a lot of times we not actually going to get out on call. We're just going to send a 5 minute loom video or a real quick overview back to the communication preferences side. So really, you know what we'd be looking for in any of your client updates, it doesn't really matter what service you provide, is basically what did we do? What were the results from that? What are we working, you know, what do we learn? And then what are we working on next? What's the, what's the plan moving forward? So kind of the, hey, here's the activity that we did. If we're using, I think you guys are using Data Studio, but whether you're using Data Studio or Data Box, like hey, here's the results from that. We'll just pull that up a little bit so you guys can see that a little bit easier. You know, here's the results that came from that and then I'll take them through. Here's the stuff that, you know, maybe our learnings down below. If we scroll down a little bit, you might have a learning section with hey, what are our big notes? And then this might be what's in progress right now, what's coming up next? Maybe this one is, you know, up next or planned work instead of. So clients have that quick view at those. Those are really the four main buckets. What do we do? What were the results? What do we learn? What are we doing next? From that is what every client wants to hear. So whether that's done through dashboards or done through, you know, portal or done on looms or like however you want to share that, there's gotta be some systematic way to go communicate that back. So before we jump into Q and A, let me toss it back to you here. And I know we got 10 minutes left before the top of the hour, but let's say folks are looking at it and saying, hey, like there's an opportunity to upsell from our current service lines into paid search. What does that, what's the, what are some of the ways you've seen agencies add PPC in as a service?
Well, yeah, so in a lot of the cases, if you're not, if you're not offering PPC now and you have clients that are, that you're succeeding with on like, like the search side of things or like on like SEO or you're doing more content strategy work with. It's, it's a fairly like it turns into a fairly easy pitch after, after the fact because it's just, hey, you know, we've done like, we've, we've seen success here, here and here. And you do you go into a consultative sale or like if you want to start getting, you know, getting outside of your, if you want to have a more predictable way to bring on, bring on clients or to, you know, what, whatever the end result is turns into a night. An easy, an easy pitch there. So if you're not currently offering it and looking to, it's, it's just as simple as like pinging, pinging folks that, pinging folks on your list essentially or excuse me, on your client side list. But yeah, I think the people that have the most success with it are going to be if you're a generalist or like a strategic agency. So if like you're doing more marketing strategy, like fractional CMO stuff or doing anything along those lines, you're generally the prescriber and they want to work with you in most cases to tell them what to do to be the doctor. I was on a podcast yesterday and I was like, man, do I have an inflated sense of self that I'm comparing marketing to doctoring, if doctoring is the right word to medical, to the medical world. But if you're in that space where you're like that fractional CMO or doing that type of work, you can't possibly be the expert in all the, the place is there. Where I've seen people really, really succeed is in what I call hybrid specialist agencies. So you're a generalist in that you're doing the fractional CMO work. But one of those areas in the customer journey you're obscenely good at. I see this a lot with content marketers who is at 10 speed. So Nate Turner at 10 speed, Alex Burkett at Omniscient. They are great strategists, but what they're known for and what they can do better than Most people is content, but guess what? They can't do paid media. They don't do that that well or account based marketing or anything like that. Where there are other levers to pull, but they can't pull them yet. In order for them to grow their agency, they'd either have to hire people for a service they don't know they can fulfill or they need to find.
A partner to work with.
So if they were to add in ppc, which most people know that they need to be paying for advertising if they're not doing it already, it's just a matter of kind of bringing them along for the ride there. But yeah, so that's where I'd say if you're, if you're in that like more fractional CMO or very focused on a particular, just particular type of service, it's really, really easy to expand after the fact.
That's awesome.
Cool.
Well, let me share. I mentioned we've got some stuff to give folks. So we're gonna put some stuff in your hands here as we're wrapping up and then we're gonna get into Q and A. And I don't know how you're doing on time, Justin. I'm okay to go a little bit long if we need to in the Q and A side.
Yeah, I'm good. I think you were strategic in how you set this thing up where I think we had an additional half hour.
The calendar block, I try to force that on people. If I've got a guest coming on for, for a webinar like, hey, just plan on blocking just in case we need it. And then if we, most of the time that gets pulled through. Okay, so let me pull up a couple things to shoot you, Jeff. If you can throw some links in the chat, that'd be great. The first piece is exactly to Justin's point about adding paid media in. IPPC has an awesome course on how to sell PPC management to your clients. And so if you go to this link, Jeff will put it in the, in the chat here you can get that's, that's a free course from them. So they've been really generous in putting that together and sharing that with the community. On our side, I mentioned kind of the client onboarding process if you're already using ClickUp or interested in using ClickUp and you want to be able to get that. Like an example of hey, what, here's what I think goes into a, you know, a gold standard agency process and we can walk through that in Q and A. If that's helpful to anybody. This whole thing email templates like links, everything that's in there. If you go to zenpilot.com ot for onboarding template, you can go get that free right now as well. So that is kind of.
Someone's getting a 404 on that one for the zenpilot.com ot oh, interesting.
Well, maybe. There you go. Jeff just put the long link in there, which is great.
Cool.
So those are things for today that you can go grab. The other place I'd point you is if you want to have a conversation with our team about streamlining ClickUp you can go to zenpilot.com call and you can book a time to meet with us. We'll kind of run through an operations assessment of where things are now, what your goals are and then help you map the plan to move there. And same thing, if you want to talk to Invisible PPC about adding PPC services, book a discovery call with Justin and his team through the through the link here that Jeff will put in as well. And then the last one because we had to do today, tomorrow and coming up in the future, both of us. These are competing ones, but they're both pretty short. You can certainly subscribe to both. Invisible PPC has a cool weekly newsletter called the Blink that is a quick value packed newsletter. Invisiblepvc.com the blink and then we run one called the Dispatch which is our weekly focused on agency operators who are trying to build gold standard agency operations. And that's just zenpilot.com dispatch to get you there as well.
