Ad agency veteran turned client-side here. I am blown away at how complicated tools like Google Ads are. It’s ridiculous. I am new to digital advertising hands on but an experienced programmer, web developer, know database tools, salesforce, etc. I am just shocked at how complicated and poorly documented these products are. Linkedin and Facebook are definitely ahead of Google from that aspect. All the copy / pasting IDs and codes around, it’s really shocking that this is what the biggest, baddest software company in the world could come up with.

Small and medium sized businesses simply don’t have the time or energy to figure out how to use these products. So whether it’s an agency or a freelancer or an employee, any business that wants to use these tools is going to spend a lot of money on people and technology to get value from it. Otherwise they end up with things like “smart” campaigns that scraped our site and created links to an image in the sitelink but cannot be removed at all.