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If you self-manage your Adwords account you may get a call that opens like this“May I speak with [insert your name here]. Hi I am a Google Adwords Professional account representative.” Right here is where you should be getting a little suspicious. Yes the person on the other end may be what is known as a Google Advertising Professional. Google has encouraged a certain group of individuals and companies who are not Google employees to call themselves this if they manage more than a certain dollar amount of Google Adwords pay per clicks. This gives them a cover to sound like they are actually a Google employee and as if you’re getting a call from Google when your not. In the two calls I’ve received recently from “Hi I am a Google Advertising Professional account representative” it was not until they were very pointedly put on the spot that they admitted they were not from Google. The conversation goes something like this, “But you’re not with Google right?” “Well, I am actually a Google Advertising Professional account representative.” Of course, this is not a yes or no, but is designed to sound as if they have said yes when they’ve said neither.

Now the funny thing is that after I declined the offer to have them take over and manage my Adwords account and before they gave away their company name 1upadwords.com (take a look at that site it’s a real winner and leaves a lot of doubt as to the legitimacy of the claim that they are even a certified Google Advertising Professional) they moved on to trying to sell me a link package where they would spread a link to my website across hundreds of directories. That just about made me burst out laughing. The rep was still pretending to be with Google and offering a service that Google would disapprove of.

Google has made it easy for these people to run this routine with the creation of its Google Advertising Professionals program, but that doesn’t mean you should fall for it. So far, to the best of my knowledge, if you’re a small time advertiser using Adwords you don’t need to expect anyone from Google Inc., to be giving you a call so think hard about the kind of person who is on the other end of the line misrepresenting themselves.

If you want someone else to manage your Adwords account, get online and do some research about companies who manage Adwords campaigns, then talk to several of their clients and only after that think about signing up with them.