The Google Ads Nightmare Every Maker Should Hear About

Welcome to Make Good Things Happen, a podcast for Makers in Business, presented to
you by Angela D’Alton and Renee Baker.
Welcome to Make Good Things Happen, the podcast for Makers in Business. I am Renee
Baker, and joining me is Angela D’Alton, my incredible co -host,
producer, editor and everything of the podcast. And here we are with another episode.

$96 .5 million. The funny part of it for me was that I used to work for Arthur
Anderson. Arthur Anderson is the original business that Accenture is now known as.
It’s had a few iterations and split. There was Arthur Anderson and then there was
Anderson consulting and then there was Accenture. But Accenture are responsible for
this particular audit and build all right so they sort of project managed it well
they would have done an audit they so it’s this is what these companies do they
audit big business and they spend a lot of time and money working out what’s wrong
was anything wrong this is i think a good question to ask when they first released
the new website the bomb or bureau of meteorology originally said it was full point.
app and people everywhere were saying it was appalling. One of the key things in
this, I don’t know if you saw this particular item within this story, Renee, but
one of the main complaints was that the suburbs or the towns that were on the map
when storms were happening, et cetera, and the radars moving through in those, you
know, graphics that we’ve all come to know. They were not accessible. They were
almost the same colour as the radars. You literally just couldn’t read the cities
and towns that were being displayed on the map. Handy. Yeah. And when that happened,
they said it costs $4 .1 million, but they’ve since come out and said it was
actually sorry, more like $96 .5 million. It blows my mind.
My favourite headline was from the Saturday paper that referred to it as a fiasco
because it’s been our word of 2025. We just love, love a fiasco.
But in this case, very necessary use of the word. The best thing that I took away
from all of this was that I’ll forever, never feel uncomfortable quoting for website
projects. Because I know I will never come anywhere near that price.
So if you’re looking for an affordable website. But also how many people had to
sign off on that and think that was a good idea? Or is it just that it blew out?
Or I think a lot of it was mismanagement and also on the statement.
I saw some screenshots on the article and obviously I’ll share that in the show
notes. It didn’t look good. And it was really just the fact that the user base
complained about it being worse. It frightens me,
what a lack of empathy that shows in general and how this is a service for human
beings and they were the last consideration. And it just blows my mind. One thing
that I think falls under our segment from scroll to cart and it sort of loosely
ties in but we felt like we wanted to talk about it because it’s it’s quite
significant be Bellingham the artist and maker who creates or who created I believe
they’re actually phasing them out at this point in time but created those incredible
ceramic mugs in pastel colors with all sorts of hilarious quotes on them now I
think they’re working more predominantly in hair clips and other bits and pieces I’m
sorry if I’m not fully across.
added a whole bunch of ads into her account that directed to other websites,
so obviously not to Bea. Bea Bellingham’s website, and put on a budget of,
I think it was actually close to a million dollars, speaking of millions of dollars,
just put on the maximum budget I think they possibly could in Google. This all
happened overnight. And so when Bea woke up in the morning, she had this horrific
bill in her, or noticed in her internet banking or on her credit card that all of
this money was coming out because if you’re not familiar with Google Ads, basically
you set a limit for your billing. And once you hit that limit, you get billed
automatically. You have to have a credit card loaded into the system. And so I
think her limit was like $1 ,000 or something like that because she’s obviously not
spending millions of dollars on ads. But overnight, she was just getting $1 ,000, $1
,000, $1 ,000, $1 ,000, $1 ,000 being hit on her card. And of course, you know, woke
up to this horror situation that it unfolded. I haven’t actually caught up with the
latest, so you can let me know what happened there. But one thing that I think was
very interesting that Bea pointed out because, of course, once she shared this story
on her Instagram account, I’m sure she got inundated with people saying, oh, well,
why didn’t you have two -factor authentication on or why was you count so easily
accessible. She did have this. She had two -factor authentication and strong.
it was thousands and thousands of dollars that she lost access to needed obviously
just to live off and to pay rent and all that sort of stuff and it seemed like
there was no kind of legal protections from anyone her bank couldn’t help her you’re
not really covered by any consumer laws in that context it’s an international company
it’s such an awkward tricky gray area believe there is more to the story so angela
if you can update because I’ve been offline today. So I saw this afternoon
that due to be having that contact that you mentioned, the friend that worked at
Google and she had a friend of another friend who knew the small business team at
Google in Australia. She was fortunate enough to find human beings to talk to.
She said once she got through to human beings, you know, Australian -based people and
they heard her plight, they started making things happen. And as a result,
she’s now been credited the amount. Wow. In her Google account,
not back onto her credit card yet. So now she’s had to open a dispute with the
bank about the actual payment, the validity of the payment overall. And then once
Google gets okay or has the instruction, I think, from the bank. You know,
it will go from there. She still doesn’t have the money back. Yeah, that’s not
guaranteed. She felt like she’d gotten to another step, but she also was aware of
the, you know, the hard slog that remains ahead for her to have to manage this in
the middle of, I mean, I get teary thinking about it. Yeah. She’s had so many
things go wrong as well elsewhere and I’m not going to bring them up here because
if you follow her on Instagram you’ll know she’s been having a bit of a hard time
so I also feel like it’s worthwhile giving her a shout out if you feel like buying
someone a hair clip or something really cool like Bea makes really cool stuff yeah it
would be really helping her out a lot if you could purchase a gift from her to
give to someone that you care about this season broke my heart like i said you
feel helpless and then you kind of start to think well what can be done and then
you realize more and more that nothing can and the feeling of just being completely
alone and isolated with no certainty about what laws apply here or she’d called
everybody by the way and done all the right things in my opinion alerted all
authorities and what i call sweat her network gone about it in a really smart way.
I just really felt for her. And I wish that we had some advice for anyone who does
have a Google Ads account or a meta business suite account in order to prevent this
sort of thing happening. We don’t really because obviously we said that the two
factor and the strong passwords didn’t really work. If you’ve ever had an agency or
a third party or a contractor have access to any of your accounts, make sure you
change the password after they stop working for you we can only do the best we can
the knowledge that we have I really really do reinforce what Renee says they’re
about removing access from businesses or other people that have ever managed your
social media in the past and no longer do they don’t need to be there anymore and
it’s just another possible pipeline that you just want to remove especially when
people have their own accounts with their own logins that’s that’s another one that
you should check or you could consider
from them as much as we can.
Moving on to our next segment, Gruen Lite. I saw via Media Week. I followed their
newsletter and I think I’ve probably brought that up before. This week, a story came
to my awareness that eBay’s new campaign focuses on the sense of FOMO.
They’ve got a new campaign around eBay live. So people will be able to shop and
stream at the same time. It’s a content -based shopping experience, what I would
consider a shopping channel, which we’ve had for a long time. It’s just that this
one will be on the internet. Speaking of cutting out the meta -middleman, they’ve
kind of done that because those live stream shopping events have been huge for about
five years now where people jump on a live on Facebook or Instagram and just
promote stuff and sell them. I think it’s really interesting that they’ve built into
the infrastructure of eBay, the technology that social media has been providing for
five, ten years, or maybe not quite ten for live streaming. I’m not exactly sure.
But yeah, that’s very interesting and obviously must require a lot more technology on
that site as well to be able to support that kind of thing. I guess, or they just
use the existing infrastructure of things like YouTube. But the thing that I also
found interesting about this story in Media Week was that the eBay research showed
almost half of Australian surveyed. So 48 % feel pressure to buy rare or limited
edition items before they sell out and one in two say they’ve missed out entirely
and the fear of missing out is apparently
feel so it’s not a surprising stat for me at all. While maybe some of the ethics
around that FOMO driven element is a bit questionable, I am pleased to see the idea
of them getting back to the roots of the rare and collectible items because for a
while there, I feel like eBay lost their way with their identity. It was kind of
like, who are you trying to be? Like are you trying to be Kogan? Are you trying
to be a marketplace for brand new products. It’s not where I’m going to buy a
PlayStation, but I keep seeing them on the ads. Like, what is going on here?
Because it was borrowing Amazon flavoured stuff, marketplace stuff. Yeah. There was
still the auctions, but no one was auctioning. No. Well, no one was bidding.
Whereas, like, back in the day for me, I mean, eBay was one of the, probably was
the first online shop that I ever shop at. And I used to be bidding on vintage
pieces and rare collectible items. And to see that Thank you.
And, you know, now they’re seeing it with people that they admire. Like there’s an
upcoming event hosted by Chloe Hayden, well -known young actress, and she’s obviously
extremely popular. And so I think they’re doing that sort of thing where they have
a guest host to theme to the actual streaming event. I think she herself is known
as a Pokemon collector. So I think they’re trying to tie in this niche angle as as
well and identifying that it’s what their niche always was and they’re trying to get
back to that. It looks like that’s what they’re trying to achieve and I think that
they’re going about it the right way, particularly for the kids, if you like. The
younger audience who they wouldn’t have really had. Riching the younger audience.
Yeah. Who are weirdly nostalgic for stuff and don’t know where to get it from.
Yeah. This feels on brand.
In this week’s Making News, there was a story that came to my attention. I follow
the European Crafts Alliance through their newsletter. One of the stories that they
were reporting on in the European craft community, that it will now be regulated by
what it called geographical indications, often shortened to GI, recognizing origin
-based productions, which is a term once reserved for agricultural things,
you know, outputs from dairy such as cheese, where, you know, think of Parmigiano
-Rigiano, and, you know, that’s being from a specific region or wines, champagne. We
now know, you know, how that nomenclature works. We went through the phase of,
no, you can’t say it’s champagne anymore. It’s sparkling wine. And so we know that
this can be something that’s, I guess, applied retrospectively in order to reclaim
the source of where this particular craft comes from as being implicit to the craft
itself, that this craft can only truly exist here because it is from this land and
it is from this community. It is from the people here that it originated and I
just found this quite an inspiring story to be honest. I thought it’s things like
this that allow the crafts to continue to exist in the regions that they were born.
But I guess on the flip side, I wonder what sort of impact that’s going to have
globally on nomenclature or medium or the style of what you do.
I’m very curious to know how granular this is going to become. Yeah,
I’m really intrigued.
sorts of programs are sometimes the way to do that is to give awareness that this
is the origin and this is what this is. And I think that happened and I remember
hearing that it helped the champagne region become revitalised. Given that the
European cultures are now global, like they’re spread all around the world from a
variety of reasons. I just am curious to know how that’s going to affect things.
I have no idea how my thing. It’s very interesting, isn’t it? Yeah, very,
especially at the moment, I just feel like there’s such a pullback to making things
by hand actually started that portrait of the year artist, portrait artist of the
year on the ABC. And that’s probably something we would talk about in this week. I,
but that’s okay. We can cross lines. But I was watching artists paint and make
things. And after sort of being a little bit removed from that world for the last
little while. It just had me thinking, oh, wow, like, there is always going to be
a place for making things with your hands. You know, you can’t take that away. And
I think the only way that we can preserve and continue that is, let’s keep making,
let’s keep doing things. Again, it’s all very interesting. Some making news that I
saw this week that piqued my interest was a story related to HBO releasing Mad
Men’s new remastered edition, which very clearly shows the behind -the -scenes special
effects crew on screen in a very iconic scene, actually,
when Roger is vomiting in the office. And in the remastered version, you can
actually see crew members in just everyday regular clothes. I guess context. If you
haven’t seen Mad Men, it’s very much period set in the 60s. And so it stands out
if you’re in modern day clothing. But yeah, there’s just crude dudes on the
background. Yeah, wearing their sneakers and baseball caps, holding pipes that are
pumping the vomit, the special effects vomit coming out of Roger’s mouth. And I just
found this fascinating because it was the article in which I saw it originally, and
there’s been a few stories about it since, obviously, was talking about the
importance of aspect ratios, how obviously when Mad Men first was released,
it was over 10 years ago. And we didn’t all have like big wide screens. We might
have been watching things on a more standard older format. And so this remastered
version is that more cinema length and a wider screen. And so there’s more seen on
the edges of the of the frame, which means that these little behind the scenes
behind the curtain moments that shouldn’t have been shown are actually appearing. But
I think that was kind of that first initial read of it. And then you, Angela sent
me an article that actually pointed out that it wasn’t just the aspect ratio that
was causing those issues. It was actually the files that had been provided to the
remastering team or company or whoever were actually unedited files to begin with.
And so they’ve gone in and polished and hyperdefinite.
we used to just have a square there. Now we’ve got long, wide, short, in between,
but also what you used to see on your grid crop is different to what you would
see in the feed crop. They’ve since made that uniform. But if you didn’t know that
the ratios and the trim lines and the borders and all of these things, you would
end up with badly cropped and badly framed images. So I used to always spend time
and still do making templates with don’t put anything here and keep things in this
space to prevent those sorts of things happening. So I guess when I see these sorts
of fails on a very, very high -level, high -stakes scale like this. I’m like, wow,
okay, so this is why this attention to detail is actually worthwhile. You brought
this to my attention and I was horrified because sometimes seeing behind the veil of
shows like that can just destroy all magic forever.
Oh, it ruined it. It ruined it. I don’t even know if I’ll be able to watch it
again. I’m just going to pretend I never saw it. Yeah, yeah, yep. For people like
you and I as well who have worked on film sets and photo shoots and we know
there’s all this other stuff going on that isn’t visible in the final edit of
what’s presented as a consumable product, if you like. And I still watch things and
think about what’s going on in the background. For example, when you and I worked
on the Sally Seltman Interflora photo shoot at Camden, it was about 45 degrees,
but you can’t see it out anywhere.
No, you can’t see that there. The only giveaway is that for the fleeting moment
that you see the toddler in the advertisement, the Interflora advertisement, it’s
sweating profusely. Its hair’s all stuck to it. Yeah. If you just fancy yourself a
bit of a, I guess,
So you may already be too late if you’re not listening to this as soon as we drop
it. But there are other events that are open for applications a little like they’re
staggered throughout the next couple of weeks and months. And also don’t forget that
Handmade Canberra applications are indeed always open, but they have just announced
the 2026 date. So if you’ve been waiting for those to apply, it’s a good time to
have a look at those applications as well. And if you ever need to find
applications for markets and market dates, we do have a market events calendar on
make good things happen .com .aU. We do our best to update it. But that is something
that we obviously are just managing in our spare time as a gift to you. So please
check it out if you haven’t already.
This week I, as part from watching the TV show that I have already mentioned,
we both launched the new Ross Creek Gallery website,
which is very, very exciting and a very fun project that we have been chipping away
at for the last couple of weeks slash months. It’s always a big deal to launch a
website into the wild. It feels a little bit vulnerable slash exciting, especially
because it’s always done with this huge momentum and then very big kind of silence
because there’s no party. But we actually worked with Ruby Pilven, who is one of
the gallery owners and managers alongside Janine, her mum,
and they run that gallery together and it’s in Ballarat. I don’t know specifically
Angela can jump in there. It’s probably about 10 to 15 minutes in bushland outside
of Ballarat. And I should have known that because I designed the contact.
ceramics business. She wanted to have a new online identity and presence for Ross
Creek Gallery in and of itself. In addition to that, she also manages the Infuse
Art Prize, which is this huge program that she does every two years where people
submit collaborative works. She also wanted to have application form for that and
also to be able to sell things that were sitting in the gallery, either hers or a
mum’s or potentially things that were being exhibited there or other stock that she
might have. She also wanted to keep a portfolio of the back catalogue of the
exhibitions that she’s had since it opened in January 24. So we had a portfolio.
We wanted to sort of manage the exhibition events. She wanted some newsletter stuff,
but massive props to you, Renee, I think it looks stunning. And honestly,
educational content or make good things happen, but also when we’re working with
mentees and clients through D’Alton Baker Productions is that, yes, of course, we can
build you a beautiful website. But what actually makes your website look amazing is
the content that goes into it. So the imagery, the logo, the graphics. And the text
as well plays a part in the visual communication and also aesthetic of the site as
well. That’s why I need all of that information up front. Because even words, the
size of the word the paragraph the size of the paragraph determines what kind of
spacing i put on the page so it’s not something that i can ever retrofit because
you’re effectively it’s like making a collage but using letters that’s the only way
i can describe it and so yes of course thank you i will take credit for a bit of
the brand and the layout and the colors and so forth but again we did have really
great content to work with so thank you as well to ruby for that for that. And
congratulations on a new website. Yay, how good. And we’ll put a link to
Rosscreekgallery.com.au in our show notes as well. Also in this last week,
I began the professional development program for Ballarat Craft and Design Week.
We have six collaborative groups in the 2026 cohort and we started the workshop
series during the week at the Rare Trade Centre. It was a good session. Talked
about, you know, the importance of communication in collaborations and began looking
at, you know, mapping out the project since they’ve got six months until the event
itself. Yeah, a bit of concept development creatively, how to, you know, work
creatively with another person. And it only occurred to me, I think, the day before
that the majority of what I’ve learned about being a good collaborator is from you
being a good collaborator as well. Like I think it’s one of those things I said to
them is be trustworthy. Do what you say you’re going to do when you say you’re
going to do it and it will just keep working or manage that up front if you
can’t. Don’t just go silent and not do it and then feel guilty. Manage expectations
was one of my other big ones. I brought manage expectations out bags and You’d need
that one in there. I know.
But also, yeah, I had a few other key learnings. Brene Brown got a bit of mention
with the clear is kind. Unclear is unkind. It’s one of my favourites.
I really enjoyed, you know, getting to know the people in the group a little bit
better and just, I think it’s going to be really, really cool when the event comes
around. And I think people are going I want to be in Ballarat for the week to see
this.
make and what? Thank you for joining us once again for Make Good Things Happen,
the podcast for makers in business. On behalf of Renee and myself, thanks for
listening. Before we do go, just a quick reminder that we are entirely self
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This has been a D’Alton Baker production.

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