Ken Waks

Google, Local Services Ads, 2017 to 2019

I joined in July 2017 as the first Operations Analyst on what was then called Home Service Ads. The product was still in beta and live in three minor California cities. Over the next two years we rolled it out in batches to every major metro in America, the areas in between, and parts of Canada.

I left once it had launched everywhere and officially became a Google Ads product. At that point the interesting problem stopped being "how does this work" and became "how do we grow revenue", which is a sales question rather than an operations or product one.

What that means practically: I have seen the failure modes from the inside. Why a profile stops serving, what verification actually checks, how categories and service areas interact with ranking, and which of the things people worry about do not matter at all.

Yelp, 2015 to 2017

Before Google I was an account executive at Yelp, doing high-volume outbound to local businesses in my territories. That is where I learned what reviews genuinely do to a business: how much a single bad one can follow an owner for years, how differently owners react to them, and what can and cannot be done about them.

It is why 5for5 does review management alongside ads rather than treating it as a separate product. On Local Services Ads in particular, your reviews are not adjacent to your ad performance. They are an input to it.

Walmart Connect, now

I am an API Technical Manager at Walmart Connect, Walmart’s retail media business. The work is advertising APIs: how large advertisers and partners plug into an ad platform programmatically, and what breaks when they do.

That is not a detour from this business, it is the reason 5for5 builds its own tools instead of clicking through dashboards. The system we use to pull every unanswered review across every client location, sort them by how risky they are to answer, and draft the replies is not something bought off a shelf. It was written here, against Google’s own APIs, because knowing how those APIs actually behave is my day job.

Most agencies at this size are limited to what a platform’s interface will let them do. We are not.

At 5for5

I co-founded 5for5 with Alice Trellakis. I handle Local Services Ads strategy, account structure, verification problems, and the tooling we use to manage reviews at scale across client locations.

Recognition

Audience Choice Award, 2018 Q1 GLS Hackathon. The entry was Project Iris, a streamlined onboarding and self-serve support model that let providers do far more for themselves than the product allowed at the time. Onboarding was the bottleneck: every provider joining Local Services Ads needed hand-holding through verification and setup, and that did not scale to a national rollout. Iris was an argument that it should not have to. Winning Audience Choice meant the room of people building the product agreed.

It is also the reason a 5for5 client is walked through verification by someone who has seen the process from both ends.