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I overspent on a clients google ads account by $104,000- what’s going to happen to me?
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First, they have to catch up to you! Can you run fast?
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I overspent on a YouTube campaign by roughly $300k, kept my job, built systems & processes in response to ensure it never happens again with me or anyone on the team.
Best course of action is to be forthright & fully accountable. Show ownership, leave room for people to be pissed (statistically speaking, they will be), and when the time feels right tell them how you’re going to ensure it never happens again.
Whatever its worth, i have since been promoted several times. I am now leading the team. Fired or not, grow from it. Mistakes happen- some are more costly than others, unfortunately.
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I know a white male who overspent $200k+ for his agency and nothing happened. Don’t beat yourself up.
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I understand this is a big mistake and the client has every right to be upset, but the fact that it generated additional revenue should make the situation more palatable for everyone, including the client. He wanted to increase spend anyway. You delivered that and generated extra revenue, so what’s really the issue here? Yes, it was a mistake, and yes, it wasn’t planned, but the outcome ultimately wasn’t negative.
Asking for a full refund feels excessive and somewhat self-serving from the client’s side. Requesting a 50% discount on management fees for the next 3 or 6 months would be much more reasonable, but a full refund makes little sense.
As for you, just move on with your life. Mistakes happen, and you shouldn’t dwell on this too much. You’ll have other projects and deliver great results for them as well. One mistake in a sea of successful projects is nothing. We’ve all made this mistake at some point anyway.
(Aided with AI)
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Sounds like they overloaded one person with too much work. Don’t automatically take all of the blame, the agency absolutely has their part in this by not being adequately staffed.
Plus as you stated, the law firm took a W on it, so they are welcome!! This is a great time to suggest a budget increase clearly.
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If overspend was profitable for a client and they tried to demand compensation anyway, I would fire their ass immediately. Of course if they suffered a loss, they deserve compensation, but paying for a mistake that resulted in them *making more money*? Like yeah go fuck yourself dude
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When I first started PPC I forgot that you enter a daily budget instead of a monthly budget. I went on vacation the next day. When I got back I found out one of our biggest clients had spent their entire monthly budget in one day, and they did that for 5 days. They weren’t happy, but it did bring in some additional money. We told them we would run their ads for free for the next few months. So they still paid for the overcharge, but we didn’t charge them our monthly management fee for a while.
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A lot of good feedback here alread, but I would just like to touch on one specific point here, which is that your manager and your agencies leadership is just as culpable as you here, if not more so, as they were the ones who decided to put an inexperienced person in charge of literally all of their client’s PPC accounts with no additional support or guard rails in place.
This is absolutely your mistake and you should own it in a way that clearly demonstrates how you have learned from the mistake and won’t *ever” do it again, but it is also a pretty galling failure of leadership and something they also need to own and be accountable for, so for your own sake don’t let them heap *all* the blame here on your shoulders.
You were setup to fail, and the people who made the decisions that put you in a place where failure could become so costly also need to take responsibility / accountability for their actions.
Hell I personally ate a huge bowl of shit for a very *VERY* green PPC specialist at a post secondary institution where I was the manager of an 8 person in house digital team when she made a mistake where we *under spent* an internal clients budget by about $10k, but I as her manager took full responsibility for her mistake despite the fact my VP railroaded me into hiring her against my better judgement. The way I see things a (good) mangers job is to not just set their people up for success but to also be accountable for their failures.
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Tell the lawyer “sorry I made you more money, don’t sue me, bro.”
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If you overspent by 150%, the agency leadership needs to own it. They should be looking at budget pacing reports in whatever weekly meeting(s) they’re having, and they should have called out the overspend in one of those meetings.
Unless the overspend happened over the course of a few days, this is a management failure as much as it is anything else.
Also, once you have some distance from it, it will be a great story. 😄
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