€100M GOOGLE ADS LEARNINGS | Bob Meijer, Co-Founder @ PPC Mastery | #5

00:00:00: So, hi everyone, and thanks for joining the Masters of Search talk.

00:00:04: This is not just another podcast, but an exclusive series of talks.

00:00:07: Invite Only, where we host interesting guests from the search marketing space.

00:00:12: Topics will range from SEO to paid search and AI search, obviously.

00:00:16: We will kick off the interview now and after that go into Q&A, so everyone has the chance to get their questions answered.

00:00:23: if I don't have the right questions prepared, in your opinion.

00:00:27: Please mute yourself now if you haven't done already and if you have a question along the way, just click on the nine dots in the bottom right corner of your screen.

00:00:36: It's in the Google Meet UI, then on Q&A and then enter your question so nothing gets lost.

00:00:41: You can also unmute yourself in the Q&A at the end and expand your question if you like.

00:00:47: But without further ado, I'm super happy to introduce today's guest, which is Bob Meyer, who is the two times top fifty most inferential PPC expert actually in twenty twenty four and in twenty twenty five.

00:01:01: So congrats again, Bob on that.

00:01:04: Thanks so much.

00:01:04: Always always great to be in there.

00:01:07: Yeah.

00:01:09: And he's also the founder of PPC Mastery and the PPC Hub, one of the largest.

00:01:15: If not the largest, maybe we will learn today.

00:01:18: Google Ads Community is in the world.

00:01:21: To give you some quick context, Bob manages over two million euros a month in ad spend and has built an incredible track record, including scaling one account from two hundred K a year to almost fifteen million a year.

00:01:34: And this is not a typo, so it's actually fifteen million.

00:01:38: Yeah,

00:01:40: I mean.

00:01:41: Everybody should have this headliner case study and increasing conversions by like more than three acts with a sixty percent drop in CPA.

00:01:51: So he has basically done stuff that a lot of people will tell you it's not possible to do.

00:01:58: So Bob, some people joining us today will probably know you from LinkedIn, very probable, where you share daily Google Ads tips or from the PPC Edge newsletter that you're doing with Miles.

00:02:09: But for the rest of us, can you just give us a quick intro about yourself and what the PPC Mastery and also the PPC Hub is all about?

00:02:18: Thank you so much for the great introduction.

00:02:21: Yeah.

00:02:22: Great to be here.

00:02:22: Thank you for the invitation and also great to do this live.

00:02:26: I didn't know this was going to be a live session.

00:02:28: I thought it was just going to be you and me.

00:02:30: But that's indeed going to be way more fun also with the questions that people can ask.

00:02:37: Well,

00:02:38: at the end or in between, that's going to be a little bit more dynamic.

00:02:41: So that's cool and different.

00:02:43: So that's nice.

00:02:44: Yeah, my name is Bob.

00:02:46: I'm thirty.

00:02:48: Two

00:02:48: years old, I always have to think correctly.

00:02:50: I'm together with my wife Tara.

00:02:54: We've been together for fifteen years now.

00:02:57: We have a dog called Jep, which is seven, a golden retriever.

00:03:02: Some days I have her lying into my office, which is really nice to have.

00:03:07: I've been working in PPC for a long time already.

00:03:12: This year is going to be my tenth year in PPC and especially in Google Ads.

00:03:18: And prior to that, I was well messing around with my own projects late in the evenings and before that just studying.

00:03:27: So yeah, been doing what I love for a long, long time.

00:03:31: Started working at an agency as a Google Ads specialist, worked at two agencies with different sizes, different knowledge levels.

00:03:40: After three years, I thought like, hey, I can do this myself.

00:03:43: So I started freelancing, been freelancing for seven years-ish right now, and started building PPC Mastery two years after I started freelancing, where it was focused on the Dutch market, where I was only doing physical Google Ads trainings in the center of the Netherlands, somewhere around Utrecht.

00:04:05: I'm not sure if you know where Utrecht is.

00:04:06: I think you do.

00:04:08: because that was central for Dutchies.

00:04:13: And then, well, I started doing stuff online here and there, started to recreate the physical course online, filmed for two months straight every single day, and started selling my course online.

00:04:29: And not short thereafter, I met Miles, and I've been teaming up with Miles for a couple of years now ever since.

00:04:38: Yeah, it's a great business partner to have.

00:04:40: And we basically got the name PPC Mastery.

00:04:44: We already got it registered.

00:04:46: We got a good domain name.

00:04:48: I thought the name was catchy, so we just went on with that.

00:04:51: And yeah, we now have, I think, one of the largest communities in the world, close to two thousand members inside of the PPC Hub.

00:05:01: I have no idea about what other competitors are doing, but I think the market is big enough for everybody so we don't really care.

00:05:10: We just do whatever we need to do every single day in order to give as much value as possible.

00:05:16: Very nice.

00:05:17: Full disclaimer, I'm obviously also a member of the PPC Hub because I don't get a buck for what I'm saying now, but because I generally feel like that.

00:05:29: it has already brought me a lot of value.

00:05:33: and I can just recommend for everybody, no matter if you're a freelancer, if you are an agency owner, or even if you are an in-house PPC manager, to also join the PPC Hub if they open doors again, so I know that you guys are...

00:05:51: It's open, it's open.

00:05:51: It's open, no, okay, because obviously there are plenty of times where you close the doors, which in my opinion makes sense because you want to keep the community exclusive.

00:06:02: But there's one thing that I'm really intrigued to understand, like your reasoning better, because when it comes to sharing knowledge, obviously as a freelancer, you have built up a lot of expertise that you, in which way ever, you sell to clients.

00:06:19: So either in fixed arrangements, in consulting, built by the hour, whatever you do, we will come to that in a second.

00:06:29: But you also share a lot of the knowledge for free.

00:06:31: So you basically give free tips on LinkedIn.

00:06:35: You've done also free webinars and all of that.

00:06:39: Also the PPC Edge newsletter, which you're doing with Miles together.

00:06:44: But why do you share so much knowledge?

00:06:46: Don't you fear that then nobody will book you anymore as a freelancer?

00:06:51: No,

00:06:51: it never happened to me.

00:06:53: It never happened to me.

00:06:54: So I think since the very first day I started, I started posting on LinkedIn every now and then sharing tactics, sharing results, sharing what worked for me, what didn't work for me.

00:07:08: And that really worked for me in terms of attracting customers, in terms of attracting freelance clients, but also later for the courses that I've sold.

00:07:18: And I think it's one of the better ways to find customers and to find leads.

00:07:24: Because if you don't share knowledge, if you don't share your results, anything that works for you, or maybe don't work for you, people won't hear about you.

00:07:35: And I think by doing that proactively and really in a large-scale way, I managed to build a personal brand for myself.

00:07:46: And managed to also build out peeps in mastery together with miles.

00:07:49: What it is today And yeah, we are inside of the knowledge business you are as well.

00:07:56: We are both selling our services to customers to help them better To help them with better results within Google ads.

00:08:04: you do some other stuff as well.

00:08:07: So that is knowledge in its sense already, but obviously we also sell courses, knowledge products, we have a community, which is essentially based on knowledge itself.

00:08:17: So if we're not going to give that away in any sense as well, people won't know about the stuff we have them, that we can offer them.

00:08:27: People won't know about the quality standards that we have for ourselves.

00:08:32: So I think it is a must to do that.

00:08:36: Yeah.

00:08:38: Makes a lot of sense.

00:08:40: You already mentioned, and I think everybody in the audience also got a good idea that you basically do a lot of stuff.

00:08:46: So the freelance business, your record courses, you're also active in the PPC Hub.

00:08:54: Like in a way, you have this two-sided work relationship with the PPC Hub.

00:09:01: A member of it in a way because you also engage in the community, but you're also building it in a way.

00:09:06: So it's it's quite meta.

00:09:08: But what I think and like this is not a Particularly ppc related topic, but how is your week structured?

00:09:16: Like how do you balance all of that?

00:09:18: How do you approach it because?

00:09:21: Like I mean deep work all that stuff.

00:09:24: How do you focus?

00:09:25: How do you prioritize?

00:09:26: I think it's something that is relevant for everybody.

00:09:29: So I'd like to get your and your thoughts on that.

00:09:33: Yeah, really cool question.

00:09:34: So I struggled with that for a long, long time.

00:09:37: Ever since I began freelancing, my days were kind of messy, my weeks were kind of messy, and all over the place.

00:09:45: I still make long hours, long days, and I also tend to work in my weekends because I love what I do, and I love working.

00:09:54: It isn't a punishment for me.

00:09:56: I love building, but I do it in a way more structured way than compared to two, three years ago.

00:10:03: So two, three years ago, I basically had a really big bucket of freelancing clients that I needed to work for.

00:10:11: I think peak moment, I had eighteen, nineteen freelancing clients ranging from three hundred euros per month in terms of budget all the way to, well, one million.

00:10:21: that grew even more nowadays.

00:10:25: And it was a tough, tough thing to manage all of that by myself, because customers mail, they call you, they WhatsApp you, you have meetings, you have reporting days, you need to do the actual work.

00:10:37: And that can be quite challenging to manage.

00:10:39: I almost got burned out at a moment where I was like, ooh, now I have to slow down a bit because I was doing it all in a way too fast-paced.

00:10:50: Then I began to structure my... days in a better way.

00:10:55: We are basically created blocks for myself.

00:10:59: And I started to become really strict for my freelancing clients.

00:11:03: Like I told them, hey, this is how I'm going to work for you.

00:11:07: Starting from next month, I'm going to work for you every single Monday afternoon from two to five.

00:11:15: If it was like a customer doing Twelve ish hours per month because you can easily divide that by four.

00:11:21: You have a nice block in your Morning or afternoons and then I told my customer.

00:11:26: Hey if you need me I'm there At that very moment I can pick up the I can pick up the phone We can schedule calls, but in any other days in different hours that isn't going to be possible.

00:11:41: I lost a client from the eighteen ish I had by doing that but It gave me so much more clarity and focus throughout the days because people knew that when I was going to work for them, I was only available at a particular time slot.

00:11:58: And my days were very much structured in a very, very structured way.

00:12:02: So that was essentially a lot of deep work that I was able to do without getting distracted a lot.

00:12:09: Well, moving forward to now-ish and maybe a year or two ago, I had to slow down on a lot of freelancing clients because it simply wasn't able possible for me to do anymore to do it all.

00:12:26: If you can recall our first Google S Masterclass that we did maybe two and a half years ago or something, maybe even three years ago right now, I made that together with Miles when it was full time freelancing and was very much packed with client hours every single day in a week.

00:12:44: And I did that.

00:12:45: did all of that in the evening hours, but it isn't sustainable to do.

00:12:49: So we only were able to do that for a short amount of period of time.

00:12:53: And then it began slowly going back in the amount of freelancing clients.

00:12:58: And right now I have a handful of freelancing clients that I love to work for with lots of budgets, lots of freedom, amazing people to work for.

00:13:07: I'm still getting paid quite well from those freelancing clients and I can still Well, do my practice.

00:13:16: Walk the talk, essentially.

00:13:18: And I have a lot of time to work on the PPC Hub and PPC Mastery related stuff.

00:13:25: Because if you want to make great content, not only for the front end, which is free, but also in the back end, in terms of everything people need to know from fundamentals all the way to advanced stuff, you need to have time for that in order to create well-structured knowledge products.

00:13:43: So I now try to combine that in a very structured way, which is giving me a lot of clarity and a lot of rest.

00:13:51: And I think I can still do a lot of great work for my freelancing clients.

00:13:56: On the other side, I have complete freedom and empty calendar to focus on stuff that really matters for the PPC Hub.

00:14:04: Very cool.

00:14:06: It resonates so much with me and I just want to add one note to that.

00:14:10: I remember as a kid, I had like one or two like basically not friends but basically friends from my parents and they were in my opinion as a kid they were successful and they were basically doing a lot of calls or they always had appointments or like being on the phone a lot and I always felt like oh man this is what success looks like and I think it's something that is programmed into the minds of a lot of people that basically successful people have Booked calendar and it's something that so exactly being busy because being busy basically makes you a successful business person whatever and I feel like your approach is so refreshing and I felt the same I can just give the perspective from like an agency founder.

00:15:00: that sometimes you have to solve hard problems and for hard problems you need time to think and to dive into them and sometimes you need three hours to do a deep dive into a topic and if you have calls lined up.

00:15:11: so today this afternoon is a very bad example.

00:15:14: so I've broken my own rules because I had these two meetings and now our obviously great meeting.

00:15:20: but you need this free time and I think that most clients also are generally like they understand that if you explain to them the benefit for them.

00:15:32: So if you explain to them, hey, if I'm stretched thin all the time, I will do worse work for you.

00:15:38: I can do better work for you if I have a clear mind and I have time to dive into that.

00:15:43: So yeah, I just want to give a big plus one on your thoughts also from my experience.

00:15:50: Yeah, great addition.

00:15:51: And I think you can also play the Uno reverse card.

00:15:55: So for example, if people still call you on a time slot where you aren't working for them, then you can tell them, hey, you're now interrupting me within somebody else's slot, so to say, you wouldn't want that to happen with your own slot as well.

00:16:12: Because if I'm working for you, I want to have a very clear focus mindset and I want to be as efficient as possible and I always use the term return on efficiency, return on effort instead of ROI to do as effective work as possible within the time that you have available and you can only do that if you aren't getting distracted by anybody and clients understand that and they can only try it two times, three times, and then after that they will gradually learn, at least from my perspective.

00:16:50: Yeah, nice.

00:16:51: Very, very well put.

00:16:53: I think that probably a lot of people in the audience like me to transition the conversation over to a little bit more of the Google ads, PPC, paid search, nerdy stuff.

00:17:05: So I'm happy to do that for you guys.

00:17:10: So yeah, there was a lot of talk in the last month, especially about, I think it was more in the SEO bubble.

00:17:19: but about AI overviews, chat, GPT, perplexity, the claim Google is that nobody really using Google anymore, which at least in my opinion is just wrong.

00:17:33: So it's not, it's factually inaccurate.

00:17:35: So it's something I heard that quote, which I liked.

00:17:38: It's factually inaccurate, although it might be emotionally correct.

00:17:43: So some people might feel that it's this way.

00:17:46: because their mother or their grandmother even is starting to use Chatshipity, but the facts tell a different story.

00:17:52: But that put aside, as someone who is deeply involved in that, that you are, and on two perspectives, so you basically are in the weeds, like hands-on in accounts, doing that stuff, and then you also have this great overview of the market with all the people in the PPC, how people you're talking to, etc.

00:18:16: So how do you see AI search engines, chat GPT perplexity potentially impacting Google ads and PPC in general?

00:18:26: Yeah, I think there was a lot of panic in the past couple of months, past couple of years since chat GPT essentially launched.

00:18:34: And we had suddenly LLMs that we could talk to that basically know everything and have an answer to every single thing on the world.

00:18:44: But I think a lot of it is really overrated and we have a lot of data to back that up.

00:18:51: Not so long ago.

00:18:52: We had an event in the Netherlands called friends of search.

00:18:55: It's always a great event to be at And they had rent fiskin on the stage.

00:19:01: I guess you know the guy, right?

00:19:02: Of course I've

00:19:03: been following his whiteboard Friday since I started in all their marketing.

00:19:07: really epic really epic YouTube channel he had.

00:19:10: I think it was on Vimeo, but It doesn't matter.

00:19:13: The guy did a really incredible detailed analysis about market shares of LLMs like OpenAI, Chatchapati versus Google.

00:19:26: And I think only the real market share of Chatchapati in that case was only one point, something, something percent.

00:19:36: So it was this small, this small.

00:19:38: So all of the panic where Google Ads is going to die, Google itself is going to die, and we will be out of a job as a Google Ads specialist, and we have to transition to LLM Ads specialist or whatever.

00:19:55: That was way, way overreacted.

00:19:58: Obviously, there is a shift going on.

00:20:02: We can see that ourselves, I'm using LLMs every single day, but I'm still using Google to purchase... products.

00:20:10: I'm still using Google to search local businesses to help me out.

00:20:15: If you just look at me as an individual, I use LLMs, Clawed, Chat Upt for knowledge related stuff.

00:20:24: Like, hey, I want to know XYZ.

00:20:27: Please give me the answer or I want to brainstorm about that particular topic.

00:20:31: I'm not using it for commercial or transactional intent.

00:20:36: yet that might change in the future.

00:20:39: I still use Google for that and I still think a lot of people do the same because Google is still as big as they were in the past.

00:20:47: Besides that, Google was a bit late in my personal opinion with transitioning to the new AI trends.

00:20:57: It took them, for example, I think it took them a year before they started rolling out the first couple of experiments.

00:21:04: But now they are making a real comeback, so to say.

00:21:10: We now have AIO views.

00:21:12: We have AI mode.

00:21:13: We have all sort of Gemini-related tools that we can leverage in order to do the same as what ChatGPT could do, for example.

00:21:23: Plus, Google has a huge edge, a huge mode.

00:21:27: that others do not have.

00:21:31: And I think a lot of people forget that the whole internet is essentially being scraped and built by Google, so to say.

00:21:38: And I think OpenAI doesn't have that data.

00:21:41: They only have data that we are sharing with the system.

00:21:45: And they're using Google's index, I think, as far as I know, to scrape all of their knowledge.

00:21:53: So over here, they are still Not the owner of the data and Google has everything.

00:21:59: they have The web they have Android they have Google Chrome.

00:22:06: They have all sorts of different Platforms ecosystems that we use on a daily basis where they know everything about us as individuals.

00:22:17: So I have a hard time believing that chat GPT or open AI or any competitor will just steal their market share in a blink.

00:22:27: And if they do, then I think Google needs to really, really f up their strategy in the couple of years.

00:22:32: But I'm really curious to hear your thought about that as well, because you're somewhat more involved in the geo side of things than I am.

00:22:41: So.

00:22:42: Yeah.

00:22:43: Yeah, I just did a post yesterday.

00:22:46: So where I basically had the take that Google will win AI search against chat.

00:22:54: And I wrote out seven reasons.

00:22:58: I don't want to bore the audience with it.

00:23:00: You can go to my LinkedIn profile and check it out.

00:23:03: But the key part, in my opinion, is that people are underestimating the importance of a search index.

00:23:12: And I can just recommend to everybody.

00:23:15: So if you draw the majority of your knowledge about that stuff from people posting on LinkedIn, you have to dig deeper because it's very valuable to look at primary research or do your primary research.

00:23:33: And one thing that basically came out is the CHEDGBT first half of the twenty twenty five strategy.

00:23:39: It's an internal document that had to be brought in as evidence in the Google Department of Justice trial in the US.

00:23:50: And there's a lot of the information that is basically blacked out.

00:23:55: But this document basically describes the vision that OpenAI has for Chatchapiti as becoming the super assistant of our lives, which makes a lot of sense and which is also like which is in line with their public comments.

00:24:09: So I think this document is authentic.

00:24:14: And that they basically say on one, like it's two sentences where they say, ChatGPT is a super assistant that deeply understands you and serves as your interface to the internet.

00:24:25: And then I think this is the most important part.

00:24:27: To fully be that interface, we need a search index and the ability to take actions on the web.

00:24:34: And this is something that Google obviously has, and ChatGPT does not.

00:24:39: And we saw a lot of reports about ChatGPT now using Google.

00:24:45: as their basically web index or like the search backend, because they had like in the in the trial hearing, Nick Turley, which is actually a guy from Germany, who's now Chatchapiti product lead or however they call it, like the product guy for Chatchapiti.

00:25:03: He basically said that they have issues with provider number one, which is probably Bing.

00:25:08: So and I think it's like it makes a lot of sense because obviously Bing is our like less quality search results than Google.

00:25:17: And you just have to ask yourself, so what do people generally value when they search for information?

00:25:25: The most important part is not like the UI of the search and all of that, but it's accuracy.

00:25:32: Like the information has to be accurate.

00:25:34: And the problem with JGBT, although they are doing model grounding, et cetera, but if the information is hallucinated, like, it's always a bad user experience.

00:25:45: And the model can be trained on five trillion parameters.

00:25:48: And obviously, I'm super impressed by the progress.

00:25:52: But you have to have a good basis of factually accurate information.

00:25:58: And the Google search index, with all the core updates, the quality, rate, your guidelines, and all that stuff that Google has developed over twenty years, it's something where there's no shortcut to it.

00:26:07: And obviously, Chatchapati and OpenAI are acknowledging it themselves.

00:26:12: So, yeah, but I think the problem, the key problem is that there are a lot of startups that have a commercial interest in their notion of Google going down and Chatchity being the next super.

00:26:26: Google being true because it's VC money pouring in like, ten million seed rounds, forty million serious bees and like,

00:26:36: like it's nothing.

00:26:37: Yeah, and I really hope for them to succeed but obviously like everybody just has to keep in mind every VC knows that there might be just two or one successful startup from ten investments they do.

00:26:51: but it's their bet and this is why a lot of people are putting out research and I don't want to blame anyone.

00:26:58: but there's a tool AI search visibility monitoring tool from the US.

00:27:03: They just did a series B, you can draw your own conclusions.

00:27:06: And they are putting out a research, which if you put a critical thought on it, it's basically just, it's advertising, but in the put as research.

00:27:21: And this is something that... people have to just think more critically about it.

00:27:26: And I just want to advise everybody to draw your own conclusions and try to... It's also what I tell my team.

00:27:31: I tell my team, hey, you have to get an own idea and an own perspective about how this will play out.

00:27:39: And it doesn't have to be true.

00:27:41: It's just if you ask yourself, hey, what do I believe?

00:27:45: Then you ask different questions.

00:27:47: And your opinion should not be... basically the sum of the last ten LinkedIn posts you've read.

00:27:57: This is my take.

00:27:59: How long do you think about these kinds of things, Niklas?

00:28:03: Because we both have a full calendar and we need some time to think.

00:28:08: When are your thinking moments?

00:28:11: Bob, you're capturing the interview.

00:28:13: I just want to point that out to the audience.

00:28:16: Don't blame me, guys, if you feel like I should ask questions to Bob.

00:28:22: He is to blame.

00:28:23: No, but I think it's a constant thing.

00:28:25: And it's something, as you said, you basically said you're also working on the weekends.

00:28:30: And I, so I obviously have a small kid, I try to reduce the time I work.

00:28:35: But I felt like to be, so I'm completely honest here.

00:28:40: I'm sharing stuff that I'm not always sharing.

00:28:43: I was actually a little bit bored.

00:28:46: a few months ago, because I felt like, yeah, it's going well in the agencies and we have good plans, whatever, but the ecosystem hasn't substantially changed.

00:28:54: Like there are Google core updates and obviously there's performance max and all that stuff.

00:28:59: But let's be honest, there hasn't been this substantial change.

00:29:03: And I think I was just like, for me, it was this new awakening where I felt like, hey, this is a moment again.

00:29:13: Where you where you have to decide if you want to stand on the sidelines or if you want to be in the weeds.

00:29:19: and if you want to be and I don't want to over exaggerate my position here, but if you want to be one of the people that think about how this will go and this is just a decision I made and Everything I read so it's it's a constant forming of opinions.

00:29:37: So If I if I see something on LinkedIn and somebody has an interesting take Like if like if I if I read this for one minute I try to invest at least fifteen or twenty minutes to understand it better to do something like checking this Court documents or to find there was an internal leak from an open AI where they basically Forecasted a billion in revenue from what they call free user monetization from twenty twenty six which led to me thinking and obviously also a lot of other people, what can it be?

00:30:14: Will it be affiliate deals they do based on their new product grids they have and the Shopify checkout integration they're potentially doing?

00:30:23: Will it be ads?

00:30:25: Because obviously like I'm hoping for a moment where we can have a competitive edge against others and also where we just maybe understand stuff better fundamentally, not just based on some geo playbook that someone is sharing for a comment on LinkedIn, where we just understand it fundamentally better to bring better results for our clients.

00:30:51: And obviously, in the end, it's marketing.

00:30:54: So help them be more successful in their business to also be more successful in our business.

00:31:00: And so I can't really say the amount of time I put into this.

00:31:04: I think it's something that just I see it as my role in the company to constantly just stretch out my hand in the market and to understand what's valuable for us, what is relevant, what are signals that I should dive deeper into.

00:31:23: So it's embedded in my day-to-day, basically.

00:31:27: Efficientary kind of role for yourself and your company as well.

00:31:31: I think everybody needs one like those.

00:31:34: How do you do it?

00:31:38: Are you reading certain stuff?

00:31:41: So you obviously said you're following Rand Fischkin from SparkToro, who has very interesting texts all the time.

00:31:46: He's, for example, very, very skeptic of a lot of things, and I find it refreshing.

00:31:50: It's a balance to all the hype.

00:31:54: But yeah, what do you read?

00:31:55: Who do you follow?

00:31:56: How do you participate in that discussion?

00:31:59: My core new source is generally the source where it comes from, the official source.

00:32:07: So if Google is announcing certain features, certain important steps, I always go through their Google marketing blogs, for example.

00:32:18: I try to understand what they're really saying and what nudges they are giving away, besides all of the official stuff.

00:32:27: I like to follow a couple of really solid LinkedIn profiles that I like to follow with different noises, different sounds.

00:32:36: There's something different than the top ten lists that a lot of people make nowadays, but post with actual value.

00:32:45: that makes you think.

00:32:47: And I try to form an opinion based on all of them combined.

00:32:52: What I rarely do is reading online marketing related books because most of them are outdated and they can keep up with the fast-pacing the fast-paced that we have right now and also news related sites like search engine journal search engine lands.

00:33:11: all of those were really solid in my opinion in the past but I don't go over them as much anymore.

00:33:19: if there's something newsworthy you will see it everywhere and then you're able to find the actual source and then dive deeper, combine it with people's opinion and then also try to form your own.

00:33:32: That's how I go about it.

00:33:34: Yeah.

00:33:35: Very good.

00:33:35: I think it also makes a lot of sense because nothing great has ever come from something that is easy and just scrolling through LinkedIn and then thinking that you potentially got like crazy insights that nobody else has doesn't make any sense.

00:33:50: So obviously if you want to, at least I think if If you want to have a competitive edge against others, you have to either dig through stuff that ninety percent of the people don't want to put the time into dig through it to test stuff that ninety percent of the people are not willing to test.

00:34:11: And it's always this matter of like you have to.

00:34:14: you have to do your or like draw your own conclusions.

00:34:20: i also for example i don't like the term best practices because i think best practice like some people feel like hey adhering to best practices makes a lot of sense.

00:34:29: in my opinion it doesn't because it's a commodity like everybody can do it.

00:34:33: the only thing that is really valuable are tested practices.

00:34:36: so stuff that you have actually tried out where you know how it works the nuances behind it.

00:34:42: Ideally, you've done it across a portfolio of accounts, for example.

00:34:46: So maybe to go back a little bit into the Google Ads deep dive, can you give away any nugget about tested practices that you've done in the past?

00:34:59: Or maybe also that you're working on right now.

00:35:01: Like, I mean, take us with you into the Bob Meyer machine room.

00:35:08: and stuff that you've learned that maybe a lot of people don't know and that you kept a secret but that you want to share with the audience today.

00:35:19: I don't have many secrets.

00:35:20: I'm an open book and I try to teach people the stuff that I know and I think that's what makes our products, my products valuable is.

00:35:30: I don't keep stuff for myself.

00:35:34: I understand if people do that.

00:35:36: if they have an agency and they want to create an edge, but I'm in a different kind of business.

00:35:40: So I want to give people as much valuable as possible where they pay for.

00:35:46: So therefore, I always send out all of the knowledge that I know and try to make it consumable in a way that makes sense.

00:35:57: But yeah, the Bob Meyer machine room, it's low on caffeine right now.

00:36:05: The thing that I think a lot of people are hungry for, and it's also a core thing that we hammer on with PPC Mastery are shiny objects.

00:36:16: And it sounds really, really boring because we've repeated that for so long.

00:36:21: But I still see people falling back on tactics they saw online, stuff they want to try out for themselves because it sounds cool.

00:36:34: I found out the hard way in a lot of cases that it just doesn't work.

00:36:39: And if it works, it only adds a couple of percentages in terms of incremental revenue or profit.

00:36:46: But you've got like this extra humongous load of management complexity to your accounts.

00:36:53: So the stuff that I really adhere to and swear by are sticking to fundamentals.

00:36:58: And there's also a core messaging that we use for everything that we do.

00:37:03: We don't call them best practices, we call them fundamentals.

00:37:06: And I think best practices are in fact the same for a lot of accounts and a lot of customers, but they can differ from case by case.

00:37:16: And therefore a really frequent word that we drop a lot is it depends because it really depends if a best practice is a best practice for your unique situation.

00:37:27: But yeah, there are a couple of fundamental areas that makes a Google Ads account succeed.

00:37:34: And a lot is, I think, basic knowledge.

00:37:39: In Dutch we have a really simple word for that.

00:37:43: It's called boerenverstand.

00:37:45: Maybe it sounds like a little bit German.

00:37:48: It's like thinking logically.

00:37:51: Like is the thing that I'm doing right now the best possible thing that I can do for the user that is searching for a particular problem.

00:38:01: Am I sending out the correct ad?

00:38:04: Am I sending them over to a optimized Lenny page that has just one core offer with one core call to action?

00:38:14: And is there like a really solid message match between all of that combined?

00:38:19: And is somebody like, hey, this is exactly what I'm looking for right now?

00:38:24: I'm about to go ahead and take action, whatever it may be.

00:38:28: And I think with everything, with regards to Google Ads or just marketing in general, it's about thinking logically what does your user want.

00:38:38: And if you start there and start fabricating that whole journey backwards from that foundation on, I think advertising and marketing is incredibly easy.

00:38:51: And I don't think you need a lot of complex stuff going on in order to have great success with Google Ads in this particular sense.

00:39:01: So yeah, that's basically my core fundamental take is that I see that a lot of people are over-complicating stuff and they might win that additional one percent like I just mentioned, but for what cost?

00:39:14: If you need to have an extra one day a week of work to manage all of that complexity.

00:39:21: For that one percent extra incremental revenue, well, you might be better off taking a better look at your offer, your landing pages, the way your pages are structured, the way you are placing your call to action on your landing pages and pulling people through the funnel, which is really generic in a way, but you will get the idea.

00:39:44: And with everything, I try to remember myself, okay, what is the return on effort over here?

00:39:50: And that really helps for me.

00:39:53: And nine out of ten times, it comes back to the fundamentals.

00:39:58: And yeah, we basically created a nine step framework for ourselves, but also the PPC Hub members that we like to go over and teach.

00:40:09: that touches on every single one of those fundamental areas.

00:40:12: And if you do them right, if you score like a eight plus out of ten in every single area, you're almost guaranteed to have a solid running Google Ads account.

00:40:25: So long answer maybe, but I don't want to, I never overcomplicate things.

00:40:33: And I'm not planning to do so.

00:40:36: I mean, there's also a value in this train of thought already, because a lot of people, I think, feel like the simple answer sometimes can't be the last answer, because sometimes a lot of people think, hey, to have great success, it has to feel complicated, but I generally like your approach.

00:40:59: I also think what you mentioned with basically looking at the search intent and basically working back from the customer's intent.

00:41:06: This is something that sounds so simple, but I want to emphasize it again for the audience because a lot of people, especially if you're working with clients, a lot of them will tend to speak from their internal perspective.

00:41:21: They will speak from Yeah, but there's this competitor.

00:41:25: We should do competitor targeting on them because I also want to hear you taking competitor targeting in the second.

00:41:32: But if they search for whatever, search for this company, we should have ads there because this is where we get the customers and we tell them, hey, but what's their intent?

00:41:44: Their intent is not to search for you.

00:41:46: Their intent is to search for your competitor and your chances of winning them over might be very low.

00:41:51: unless you have a very, very strong USP or competitive edge.

00:41:55: Competitor

00:41:56: pages, yeah.

00:41:57: Exactly.

00:41:57: But this is something that I feel like too few people understand really on this deep level, where they also stand up to their clients and say, not only in the context of competitor targeting, but in the context of we have to understand the user's intent on a deep level.

00:42:16: And if we feel like it's not working, And if we check the setup and everything looks fine, then it might not be their intent to the thing that we are actually offering.

00:42:29: But yeah, what's your take basically around this whole competitor targeting and trying to, yeah, maybe broaden how you approach users, broaden keyword sets, et cetera, and maybe losing a little bit of the feeling for the intent?

00:42:47: Like, what's your experience with that?

00:42:50: Yeah, just to go back real quick to those client conversations.

00:42:56: I recently had a coaching call with somebody that told me, yeah, my customer initially said, hey, this program will sell itself.

00:43:07: Like those kinds of things are really, really, really red flags that you as a specialist need to need to overstep and need to ignore.

00:43:15: Because if you're going to get influenced by your customers in those kinds of way, you're going to go the wrong route real quick.

00:43:23: So I think that comes with experience.

00:43:26: And if you know what you're doing, you can easily give them a different take in order to talk them away from, well, not optimizing many pages because it will sell itself, but just to add on that little part that you just mentioned.

00:43:41: Stuff like competitor targeting.

00:43:43: It can work.

00:43:44: It can backfire.

00:43:46: It really depends on how good or bad your competitors in the industry are or

00:43:54: how more supreme

00:43:55: and superior your own offer is.

00:43:59: Generally speaking, the better your offer the better you are an alternative to the competitor, the more easier it is to bid on a competitor keyword or keyword set, bring them in and have them convert against a reasonable cost per action or a ROAS, whatever you're tracking in terms of efficiency.

00:44:20: But it doesn't come real simple.

00:44:24: So if you're just going to start bidding on competitors and you're using your your regular landing page that you're using for your generic commercial transactional focus keywords, then nobody is going to convert.

00:44:38: At least not a lot of people will convert.

00:44:40: It will be suboptimal.

00:44:42: Because in terms of intent, quite logical, like you managed already, people are searching for a competitor of yours.

00:44:50: And if you're actively bidding on those kinds of keywords, you might want to explain why you are a better alternative.

00:44:58: And I always refer to the intensely competitive niche, which is project marketing.

00:45:09: Sorry.

00:45:10: Project management software.

00:45:11: Project management, thank you so much.

00:45:13: I'm low on caffeine, like I managed to say.

00:45:16: That really intends a niche.

00:45:19: they do it all in a really, really good way.

00:45:21: So if you search for monday.com, you will see a epic comparison page of Asana comparing Asana versus Monday and explaining to the user why they are a better alternative and why you should give them a try and choose a trial.

00:45:43: Also the other way around, they're doing it vice versa.

00:45:45: And I think if you're going to do that, from that particular angle, trying to understand what people are looking for and how you can get them interested in what you can offer them and why you are in fact a better alternative, then it starts to make sense.

00:46:01: But there's a lot of work involved because not a lot of companies want to start creating really extensive, well thought through competitor comparison pages because it takes a lot of effort, takes a lot of work.

00:46:18: There might be some money involved because the page needs to get designed.

00:46:23: You need to think about copy hierarchy stuff like that.

00:46:26: So it isn't easily done, but if everything was easy Everybody would have would have had the same great results.

00:46:35: and I think that only That's only applicable for the ones that are willing to put in the hard work.

00:46:42: So that with regards to competitor targeting I use it for some of my clients where it works and where they have an edge, where other clients, well, it just doesn't work, even with focusing on competitor pages and stuff like that.

00:47:00: Makes a lot of sense.

00:47:01: I also think a lot of people think they can just direct traffic, like someone is searching for their competitor, they can just direct it to their homepage and it will just magically work.

00:47:13: And I saw the same and I just recommend everybody that wants to get an idea about that to look at the project management examples you've just mentioned.

00:47:21: I think Monday.com, for example, is doing it really well.

00:47:23: And also companies like Ramp, for example.

00:47:26: So it's an expense management, finance management company from the US.

00:47:31: In the US, a very well-known startup.

00:47:37: You have to always take it with a pinch of salt because in the EU, so depending from country to country, there might be different regulations about what you are allowed to say about a competitor.

00:47:51: In Germany, for example, it's quite restrictive.

00:47:53: You have to back every fact in third-party research.

00:47:59: if you want to do it i recommend you looking at us clients to work with them because then you can say stuff like that.

00:48:05: your competitor has a slow and outdated system which for example ramp is saying about bill and i found this like to be.

00:48:15: Wow, very aggressive.

00:48:16: Yeah,

00:48:17: the difference between the US and the EU is that they will probably get sued over there by saying that and over here, nobody is able to say that due to regulations and therefore don't get sued.

00:48:27: Yeah, yeah.

00:48:28: Yeah, but in the end, they will.

00:48:29: probably they will calculate the ROI, including the legal fees.

00:48:38: It

00:48:39: might still make sense.

00:48:43: We have already talked about AI.

00:48:44: We have talked about it from a perspective of distribution, like people using chat, GPT, and companies thinking about how will this change, how users discover me, etc.

00:48:59: But I also want to... turn the conversation on how you use AI and how you use AI in the Google ads and in the PPC landscape from an operational perspective because like at Radiant I think we try to do a lot to enable our colleagues to use AI in the best way possible and we try to really push the boundaries.

00:49:25: but I speak to a lot of people and I feel like there are still Like.

00:49:30: there are a lot of people talking about it, but not really knowing how to do it beyond like, hey, is this response to this email good or is it too aggressive?

00:49:42: And can you help me rewrite it?

00:49:44: So and I just I just like to understand a little bit more how you use it and how you recommend to use it in the best possible way.

00:49:54: Yeah.

00:49:55: Yeah, a lot of changed in the past couple of years with the introduction of all of these new tools, and also how I work on a day-to-day basis, not only for my freelancing clients, but also for the PPC Hub and PPC Mastery related projects.

00:50:12: And I use it on a daily basis.

00:50:16: It's really embedded in how I work also way more efficiently nowadays.

00:50:21: So when we're going to look at how I use AI to manage and optimize, for example, freelance accounts, Google Ads accounts that I do as a freelancer.

00:50:32: I try to do everything that is related to reporting, analysis, understanding data connections, understanding impacts, how metrics impacts each other.

00:50:47: I try to leverage AI for all of that.

00:50:50: I may use proponent of using Cloud, for example.

00:50:55: A lot of people don't use Clot or have never used Clot, but I just love the tool, especially for doing visualizations and creating these fancy, cool, interactive, Archi, how do you call it?

00:51:12: Artifact.

00:51:13: That's the word they call, they use.

00:51:16: And you can create the most in-depth... eye-opening visualizations over there by just inputting structured data over there, telling the system what you're looking for, what patterns you're looking after, and it does all of the heavy lifting for you.

00:51:37: So I recently completed a really extensive Google Ads audit for a US brand.

00:51:43: They're spending, I think, three hundred K per month in the USA.

00:51:50: And they also have a rest of world account.

00:51:51: Well, I focused on the USA account.

00:51:55: But I tried to understand how budgets were allocated across different states and also what kind of destinations because it was active in a travel industry.

00:52:06: What kind of destinations were.

00:52:10: good performers, bad performers in terms of volume, in terms of conversions, but also in terms of booking value, and how can you plot that on a scale in terms of efficiency, in terms of, well, ROI, in terms of ROAS, and it just prepared a very extensive organized dataset in Google Sheets.

00:52:33: Make sure it is privacy-friendly, obviously, because you don't want to send over all of the client details, in the tool, but make sure that is privacy-friendly.

00:52:42: And then, have a do, you have a lifting.

00:52:44: And it came back with the most epic visualizations with the BCSG kind of graphs, where you have cache cows, stars, dogs, question marks, where all the destinations were plotted inside the graph.

00:53:00: It was interactive.

00:53:02: So you could also send it over to the customer where they could have a look.

00:53:06: They had filters baked in.

00:53:09: So for all these kinds of things, I really, really leverage AI to its max, to the fullest, at least what I'm capable of and what I know about.

00:53:23: I don't trust AI outside of the Google... products like smart bidding and stuff like that for doing the work for me just yet.

00:53:36: So I'm really skeptical still of just giving the machine a couple of instructions like, okay, these are my frameworks.

00:53:46: These are my SOPs.

00:53:48: Now do the work for me because I think they're still hallucinating a lot of times.

00:53:54: They're inconsistent.

00:53:56: in a way that do not match with your SOPs, for example.

00:54:01: But I think there will be a time where that is going to be way different than now, because obviously it's going to evolve, evolve, evolve at light speeds.

00:54:11: But for now, I'm not trusting that to happen.

00:54:14: So I really focus it on the analytics side and reporting side as of now.

00:54:19: But it's already incredibly helpful.

00:54:22: Another example, recently I created a client-specific dashboard in their branding with all of the metrics that are relevant for them.

00:54:33: So not just a template that you can use for SaaS, for example, but really looking at, okay, what are we looking at for a day-to-day basis?

00:54:42: And I also included, for example, competitive metrics.

00:54:46: through the incredibly stupid workaround, we have to extract them from the US interface, save them in the Google Drive folder, et cetera, et cetera.

00:54:55: But they're inside of the dashboard, and I then linked the OpenAI API to it to have it analyze the week-on-week auction data.

00:55:04: to just give me a summary per account because they have fifty-three accounts with a lot of different competitor behavior on the country level.

00:55:14: On the market level to properly understand in a really simple overview.

00:55:18: Okay, what is what are the biggest anomalies that you see over here?

00:55:22: And where do I need to?

00:55:25: Focus my energy and time on before I have my next week's client meeting and I can immediately tell them, okay This is what happening.

00:55:34: Last week this particular customer took over and they had a wild increase in absolute top of page rate share where we dropped immensely by not having to look to the visualizations myself.

00:55:49: So those are just really simple applications in my opinion, but they save you a lot of time and they give you a lot of insights at the very same moment.

00:56:01: So yeah, with everything with regards to analytics, reporting, I try to understand, okay, what am I doing repetitively over here and how can I use AI?

00:56:13: third-party AI to make this way easier for myself, but also for my clients.

00:56:17: Cool.

00:56:19: Very nice.

00:56:21: I would say that also because we've already reached five p.m.

00:56:26: and I want to give the audience the option to bring in some questions, we also already have two questions here in the Q&A that we... Yeah, time flies by.

00:56:39: Yeah, exactly.

00:56:40: That we turn it over to the Q&A part.

00:56:44: So just for everybody that's in the call, you can click on the three dots, the nine dots, sorry, at the bottom right corner.

00:56:54: And then you have to click on Q&A, and then you can just enter your questions.

00:56:58: We have already also two questions there.

00:57:01: In addition to some questions I got beforehand from LinkedIn.

00:57:05: So the first question we have Bob, and I think this is something that we have also discussed internally at Radiant is what are your first experiences with AI Max for search campaigns?

00:57:22: Honestly,

00:57:23: I still try to stay away from it.

00:57:26: I still try to stay away from it because I think it isn't groundbreaking.

00:57:31: I think it isn't new in any way.

00:57:35: And everything that AI Max is right now was already inside of Google Ads for a long, long, long time.

00:57:43: It is just being repackaged right now.

00:57:46: And most of the features of AI Max I've already either implemented or tested before.

00:57:54: So I do not expect any groundbreaking new results by just enabling it.

00:58:00: So yeah, I haven't tested it.

00:58:03: in a lot of accounts, I think in just one.

00:58:06: Yeah, I think it just one account.

00:58:09: And it was like, okay, it isn't bringing me any difference, any new insights, new data at all.

00:58:17: So yeah, I'm not really a huge fan of it as of now.

00:58:22: I'm curious to hear your opinion.

00:58:23: But when I read it, I was like, okay, this is looks like proper marketing.

00:58:30: Yeah, like it sounds like broad match.

00:58:33: uh plus broad match enhanced or something like that.

00:58:37: so basically

00:58:38: plus dynamic targeting plus dsa.

00:58:40: but

00:58:40: yes for a lot

00:58:41: of customers they're either we're running on broad match already and they have a dsa ad group in most of the times.

00:58:47: um uh running already.

00:58:49: uh so what is ai max going to bring me additionally um while still giving me the same amount of control?

00:58:56: well in most cases you're giving away control by enabling ai max.

00:59:00: um while it isn't going to bring you any new insights, any new incremental conversions or revenue, it's just simply a checkbox with existing features in my opinion.

00:59:15: Gives you the feeling of being really cutting edge.

00:59:21: Yeah, this

00:59:22: is, this is the, this is the main value prop, I think.

00:59:25: Yeah, we've also like, um, uh, Mario's, he's, um, COO at radiant.

00:59:30: Uh, he's basically doing an A B test.

00:59:33: And so far it's, it, it looked quite well from the conversion, um, perspective.

00:59:41: Nothing like, uh, super, uh, like.

00:59:46: significantly high increases.

00:59:49: But to be defined like the last basically insight he shared about it is already two weeks old.

00:59:59: So we are waiting for this experiment to end and then we will share it on LinkedIn.

01:00:04: But what you saw is also the same behavior with BroadMatch where you have completely irrelevant search terms being added to the delivery, which is Yeah, I mean, in the end, sometimes you just have to keep in mind that every automated system will be like a scale will always come at the expense of precision.

01:00:29: And sometimes it might be OK in the tradeoff pace off.

01:00:32: But here we are not sure yet if this really makes

01:00:36: our testing IMAX, because I see a lot of people testing IMAX in different ways.

01:00:41: And I also have my remarks on testing.

01:00:45: AI Max, if you want to, how are you doing that currently?

01:00:47: Yeah.

01:00:49: Marius, if you are in the audience, if you are in any state of being able to unmute yourself and tell us how we're testing it would be great.

01:00:59: If not, then sure, I can.

01:01:02: Nice.

01:01:03: Thank you,

01:01:03: Marius.

01:01:04: So you mean how we're testing the AI search, AI Max?

01:01:08: Yeah.

01:01:09: Is it before or after?

01:01:10: Is it a campaign experiment?

01:01:12: How are you testing

01:01:13: it?

01:01:13: set it up as a campaign experiment because I was very well aware of the fact that if I'd do like a before-after test, it would not be an actual A-B test.

01:01:23: And also I was worried, like I even didn't put a fifty-fifty budget distribution, but seventy-thirty, because I was afraid that it might fuck up performance.

01:01:34: So a little bit cautious over there.

01:01:35: Yeah.

01:01:36: And so far it's actually performing a little better than the base version.

01:01:39: But I'm still kind of suspicious, to be honest, because most of the performance increase probably came from not like the AI Max keyword type, because only very few search terms are related to AI Max as keyword type, but to the automatically created assets, I guess.

01:02:01: But the thing is, the base campaign already had a DSA ad group and also broad match keywords.

01:02:07: I'm a bit suspicious in how much there really is for Google to further optimize.

01:02:15: Yeah, I'm also really curious what the internal cannibalization rate would be, because if you look at the official documentation by Google, I'm not sure if you saw that white paper of them explaining how AI makes should be tested.

01:02:30: They recommend you to do a before-after test, which is... I think a really suboptimal way of testing, but I understand at the same time why they're doing that instead of telling us to tell it to test it with a fifty fifty campaign experiment, for example, because I think if you're going to enable AI max, then there's also a big form of internal cannibalization that is going to going to be happening.

01:03:00: That might happen, especially if you haven't enabled broad match.

01:03:04: If you haven't.

01:03:05: if you aren't running a dynamic targeting DSA ad group within the same campaign.

01:03:11: So I'm really curious with these kinds of experiments as well, how the campaign experiment impacts other campaigns in the same account as well.

01:03:22: And in fact, bottom line, what the new queries are that are in fact being brought in in terms of impressions, clicks, but also conversions.

01:03:34: by just looking at the new queries that weren't part of the account previously.

01:03:40: So really curious to hear your thought about that as well.

01:03:45: Yeah, so at least the search terms that I was able to see were like.

01:03:50: some of them were fine, but those were ones that I know that could have also been covered by Prodmage so far.

01:03:56: And there were some that were basically like not related at all.

01:04:01: to what the client is offering.

01:04:03: They were, let's say, similar in terms of the words that have been used, but the theme was a totally different one.

01:04:10: So I don't know which kind of AI they are using, but it's not

01:04:14: as nice.

01:04:16: I mean, you could take the example.

01:04:19: It's completely different niche, but if you think about project management software, you just exchange project with maintenance, maintenance management software, obviously two of three words.

01:04:31: are the same but it's a completely different topic.

01:04:32: It's not that niche but in that way it worked a little bit.

01:04:36: so it's different terms and the one term is one word but where the first part of the word is a different one.

01:04:44: So syntax wise it is relevant but it's semantic it doesn't make any sense.

01:04:50: Syntax is similar but the actual meaning is totally different.

01:04:55: But as I said actually it just generated a few clicks For those search terms, so in the end it did not have a huge impact so far and I mean I did exclude those terms.

01:05:06: So

01:05:08: I think it's going to be somewhat similar with the smart bidding exploration feature that we have right now as well Which is also telling us Google specialists like hey if you enable this feature we will go beyond broad match.

01:05:20: and I'm like We are on broad match and DSA already.

01:05:24: What are you going to?

01:05:25: What are you going to do extra beyond this?

01:05:28: like just logical thinking like it's already the broadest way how you can target.

01:05:33: so yeah

01:05:36: it's a campaign that has five to six hundred conversions per month.

01:05:40: so I think the the base that the algorithm can work from is quite good.

01:05:45: that's

01:05:46: probably probably keep it activated because even if there's not a statistically significant increase which that probably will be in like one or two weeks I don't see a downside so far, and it's good to have at least one campaign where this new feature is activated to keep learning from it.

01:06:03: But in general, I'm suspicious.

01:06:06: Curious to see your results, black and white.

01:06:09: Yes, you will.

01:06:12: But always good to be testing.

01:06:13: Yeah.

01:06:14: Exactly.

01:06:14: On that note, also for everybody, of course, follow Bob on LinkedIn, of course, follow me on LinkedIn, but also follow Marius because he has just started.

01:06:25: to become more active and is sharing more of the thoughts we also have and also the learnings we have from working with a wide range of clients with Google Ads, also with the significant budgets.

01:06:43: So there are clients in there with almost a million in monthly ad spend.

01:06:48: So I think there's some interesting stuff.

01:06:52: to learn there and we try to not do like

01:06:56: generic

01:06:57: whatever but try to share as much of the actual reasoning how we do stuff to make it actionable and Really really have some some value in there.

01:07:10: So, yeah, I want to Advertise for Morris here on that note.

01:07:16: Yes, exactly.

01:07:17: Yeah, if

01:07:19: we if we take ten minutes for every question Which for me is is is fine but Let's go to the next question because there are a lot of questions.

01:07:33: people want to extract a lot of knowledge from you.

01:07:36: now in this in this format, which I understand I will.

01:07:40: just I will pick one question where feel like it's interesting.

01:07:44: Why does P max for lead gen work some?

01:07:48: work for some service-based businesses after just two to three days.

01:07:52: While for similar businesses, it spends seven plus dates without generating any conversions.

01:07:58: Okay,

01:07:59: so learning time.

01:08:01: I think it really depends on the data you have in place within your account.

01:08:07: So if you have a really solid data foundation, where I mean that you have a lot of historical conversions on the account level available, tied to specific conversion actions in your account already Pmax will already take that into consideration because your account already knows and learned from learned from well query level auctions what worked and Didn't work and what Pmax is going to be also bidding in search most heavily if you're doing if you're doing Legion especially if you're utilizing similar targets as your search campaigns and therefore it will probably also go into target the same queries that you have targeted prior to that within search as well.

01:08:53: So if you have a proper data set, you can already bring that to the table where your learning period will be way, way quicker.

01:09:04: Learning period is also a word that I think it can be can be used in the wrong format as well, because Google is telling us that they don't really have a learning period, but they in fact do, but they basically look at your conversion cycle.

01:09:24: And that is a order.

01:09:26: a variable.

01:09:27: So if you have lots of conversion data going through your account, you have relatively short conversion cycles within your Legion account.

01:09:36: For example, a lot of conversions will happen between today and two days.

01:09:41: Then it will also quickly learn based on those short time spans.

01:09:48: If you have a B to B Legion account, for example, where it takes on average, thirty two days for a click to convert and you do not have as sufficient conversion volume Compared to a B to C Legion account for example, then it will take way more time before it actually learns and understands What is going to work in what context?

01:10:11: So therefore in some accounts Pmax Goes away and runs immediately with solid efficiency metrics like CPA, ROAS, whatever you're reporting on or staring on, whereas others might take two weeks, three weeks before you have something like, hey, okay, now we're getting somewhere.

01:10:35: So I think those are the core two components over here.

01:10:39: Nice.

01:10:40: Since you've already warmed up with PMAX now, Bob, here's another question.

01:10:44: I know that you focus on lead gen.

01:10:49: This is an e-com question, but I think you can maybe still share some ideas about how to approach this.

01:10:56: So the question is, a PMAX for e-com was getting two to four sales per day.

01:11:03: I accidentally added a to cart and begin checkout as gold for one day and passed it.

01:11:10: After reverting six days now with no sales at current target CPA, do I need to wait or change the bidding back to conversion max?

01:11:23: Did you pause the conversion actions or the campaign?

01:11:28: I think the question means the person paused the campaign.

01:11:32: Pause the campaign.

01:11:32: Okay.

01:11:33: Well, in that case, four to six conversions per day.

01:11:36: I don't assume you have a lot more conversion volumes in other campaigns if those are the historical PMAX numbers.

01:11:45: In that case, if you made a big error and you have already excluded your data period, if you haven't, you should do that immediately.

01:11:53: Go to tools, make sure to go to data exclusions, enter your faulty data period so you can tell the algorithm like, hey, everything that happened over here.

01:12:03: Don't look at that or please don't factor it in too much in your decision making.

01:12:08: But nine out of ten times stuff like this won't be resolved with data exclusions, especially not with these kinds of volumes.

01:12:18: So I would recommend you to go back to maximize conversions for a bit, ramp up again, and then go back to your target ROAS, I guess, in this environment.

01:12:32: Then I would start with maximize conversion value to speed it up again.

01:12:37: But yeah, you're going to pay for your mistake.

01:12:41: And that's unfortunate.

01:12:43: But if you want to get out of that soon, I would rather be a little bit more aggressive.

01:12:50: when you have referred everything and you're good to go to to then get your consistent metrics and conversion volumes on a day-to-day basis back again, then you're trying to be, well, too conservative because that might end up leaving you in this situation for the coming weeks, maybe even months, and that's not what you want.

01:13:13: So that's my first take.

01:13:14: It

01:13:15: makes a lot of sense, I think, let alone the take that you have to look at this data exclusion stuff.

01:13:21: So I felt like a lot of people don't know that.

01:13:23: So thanks so much for pointing that out.

01:13:26: That is really valuable, I think.

01:13:28: There's another question we have.

01:13:32: It's a more generic question, but I think you have a very good understanding of this, too.

01:13:37: The question is, how do you approach landing page optimization?

01:13:42: Optimization?

01:13:44: Or how do you approach landing pages?

01:13:46: I mean, just okay.

01:13:47: Yeah, those are different different things.

01:13:49: Yeah, I like to tell you like

01:13:51: Thanks, I see them as two different things.

01:13:53: I Once heard somebody Tell the difference between conversion design and conversion optimization and I am more in the camp of conversion design Instead of conversion optimization because with conversion optimization you're more so in the camp of zero doing all sorts of experiments on a daily basis, A-B testing, et cetera, et cetera.

01:14:19: So I like to focus on conversion design first, which is also logical, because in that particular part, you can already increase your conversion rate by a lot if you're doing that correctly.

01:14:33: A couple of months ago, I launched my course, landing page mastery.

01:14:38: after years of being on the on the Kanban board of to do and I'm really happy with the result and within the course I teach a particular Lennipage creation framework that I call the conversion amplifier framework.

01:14:54: that basically consists of a couple of steps.

01:14:59: A lot of people go into Lennipages too quickly.

01:15:04: in my opinion.

01:15:05: So they go with the offer that is currently existing, the existing offer of the customer.

01:15:12: They go with the existing copy and they try to make it more fancy.

01:15:16: They try to rearrange stuff with all of the information available at hand.

01:15:21: But I think if you want to do proper landing page optimization, landing page design, then you should take a step back.

01:15:30: And once again, look at the foundation.

01:15:33: So what's the offer like?

01:15:36: Does it resonate?

01:15:37: How is it more competitive and more appealing than your direct competitors that you have a really big overlap rate with in the Google Ads auctions?

01:15:48: So if you are always besides competitor B and C, then those are your biggest competitors to compare your offer to and also see how you can make yours better and smarter to outsmart them.

01:16:02: and to hopefully increase your conversion rate.

01:16:05: So begin there.

01:16:07: Then you want to think about, well, unique selling points.

01:16:11: What makes you unique?

01:16:13: What makes you different?

01:16:14: Based on that, you want to start crafting copy.

01:16:18: So you want to think about, okay, how can I convince my... My potential customer or my potential lead to do business with me to basically.

01:16:34: What completely call to action that you're going to be putting on your landing page and that is a core core fundamental thing that you want to do first before then going to the next step which is thinking about okay how am I going to go about the pages?

01:16:51: hierarchy in terms of what I am.

01:16:54: What am I going to tell?

01:16:55: In what order?

01:16:57: How?

01:16:59: At what point on the page?

01:17:01: So you basically got your copy in place.

01:17:04: You've got your hierarchy in place.

01:17:07: From that point, I like to go to the next step, which is conversion design.

01:17:13: We're going to a wireframing tool.

01:17:16: At least that's what I like to do.

01:17:18: I like to use Balsamic.

01:17:20: which is relatively old school, but it does wonders for me.

01:17:23: It's like a sketch tool.

01:17:27: It looks really stupid on paper, but since it doesn't have all sorts of fancy elements, you are only thinking about the hierarchy of the page and the copy of the page, and then how you're going to convince that potential lead or customer to do business with you.

01:17:45: Once that is done, you can go to the, well, potential last step.

01:17:48: You can either design that yourself, you can build it yourself in landing page tools like Unbound, Instapage, you can do it in whatever platform that you're using.

01:17:58: But I like to send it over to my core designer that I like to work with to have it professionally designed.

01:18:06: So it really looks really epic as well.

01:18:09: And then I like to build it.

01:18:12: In either a landing page tool or in the platform of the customer itself depending on what the technologies are.

01:18:18: So there are a lot of steps involved But a lot of people have them mixed or skip essential parts and that's where Shit hits the fan or a sub optimal landing pages page arise Essentially, so if you always use that particular order and framework, I think you're going to have the best results possible.

01:18:44: And once again, this isn't rocket science, it's just putting in the work, also leveraging LLMs and AI in the full process because you don't have to type out every single word yourself to come up with really solid conversion copy.

01:18:59: Use LLMs for that because they're really good at doing that if you feed them correctly step by step.

01:19:05: So, yeah, that's basically a lot of words, but that's how I go about landing pages.

01:19:11: Just a really solid structure, really simple step-by-step framework, and it always does wonders for me.

01:19:18: Very nice.

01:19:19: Thanks so much for sharing that, Bob.

01:19:20: I also, so I have shared something about that quite some time ago, but I want to put a plus one on the use LLM part because What we also found to be very helpful is starting with copy at some points and not starting with design, because starting with copy forces you to think more about the story you want to tell, where you don't actually lose hold of that because of, hey, how do I do this layout?

01:19:58: Do I do one column, two columns, three columns, whatever?

01:20:02: In the end, this is just a question of how can I basically convey my story in the best way possible.

01:20:11: But what we found is if we have a good understanding of the offer, the actual frustrations of the users, the pain points that we are addressing, also how we held the story of this bridge that we are building.

01:20:29: from the status quo, the user is into the potentially bright future they could be in when they are working

01:20:37: with.

01:20:37: The dream outcome, so to say.

01:20:38: Exactly, the dream outcome.

01:20:39: So the hero journey in a way, so multiple names for this concept, a gap selling, whatever, but basically always manifesting status quo and showing how to come to a better world.

01:20:56: We actually did stuff like taking transcripts from sales calls, taking questionnaires from our clients that we gave them, where they give us their input.

01:21:09: Competing all that.

01:21:11: Exactly.

01:21:12: All that stuff, putting it together with a very sophisticated prompt of our approach to how to structure landing pages, et cetera.

01:21:23: It resonates a lot what you were telling about your approach.

01:21:27: But then basically, so I think the prompt actually is something like with all the context is something like a hundred thousand characters.

01:21:36: So it's something like.

01:21:38: Twenty pages of content that goes into the LLM to get like, yeah.

01:21:44: five pages or four pages of content.

01:21:46: I think I just want to, I mean, I don't know how many people will hear this idea.

01:21:51: I will try to share it also on LinkedIn again.

01:21:54: But in my head, using LLMs has also been more like this.

01:22:01: a synthesizer.

01:22:03: So you have to have a lot of context to get something valuable out of it, but you can't expect to get a good output from a three line prompt.

01:22:14: So this is just something that I want to want to test that.

01:22:19: Basically, you want to leverage your knowledge to the max.

01:22:23: try to structure that in a really, really good way.

01:22:26: Because most of the time it's uniquely your knowledge based on what you know, what worked for your clients in the past.

01:22:32: And if you work on your prompts, if you work on your knowledge documents that you can include your custom GPTs, if you're going to do that extensively, oh man, you're going to have really epic, consistently good output of LLMs.

01:22:47: It's also how I create my custom GPTs.

01:22:49: I have several custom GPTs for every part inside of the landing page.

01:22:56: Headline, secondary headline writing, call to action writing, micro copy, hierarchy, conversion copy based on different frameworks.

01:23:06: And then I try to feed it, okay, this is all the context, but we have five different frameworks that are really, really solid.

01:23:16: And I want to see how this resonates and feels on the Lenny page in terms of copy.

01:23:21: For example, the Hero Story, the problem solution, offer types of frameworks before, after kinds of frameworks.

01:23:34: Well, you can just tell it to create all of that for you.

01:23:38: And then you're the one in control, getting a nice cup of... fresh cappuccino.

01:23:44: Then you come back to like a great output to compare epic output with.

01:23:50: Yeah.

01:23:51: Yeah.

01:23:51: And I think that's wildly underused still.

01:23:54: And I don't, I don't know why because it's all, it's all there to be used.

01:23:59: I think it comes down to a better fundamental understanding of how to use this technology and also to go beyond initial frustration because I see a lot of people that use an LLM for example in this approach where they put in a quite short prompt and they expect it to write a whole landing pitch for them and it doesn't satisfy them because they feel like the output is not really great and then they basically draw the wrong conclusion that the technology is not as mature as it needs to be to fulfill that task.

01:24:35: Whereas they do the, so it's a misconception that just the, they don't know how to use it.

01:24:43: It gets the same with a computer.

01:24:45: So people might be frustrated by any given software.

01:24:51: And they say, yeah, I. I don't know, I can't find that stuff.

01:24:56: I don't know how to accomplish that task, whatever.

01:24:59: And then there's another user that basically just has a better understanding of how to do the things, maybe use some shortcuts, whatever.

01:25:08: You just had to transform the ideas like shortcuts on a computer can be like a certain way of prompting with the LLM.

01:25:17: So it's using a computer or a machine just in a verbal and written way.

01:25:24: but if you know how to do it and if you better understand I mean it comes down to just hours and hours and hours of testing and then you can hopefully learn something from people that have put in hours and hours of testing and that use it every day and that can give you some tips and you can use it.

01:25:44: but I think in the end

01:25:46: just do it yourself.

01:25:47: exactly it's do it yourself and it's something you have to have.

01:25:51: You have to have the confidence and the vision of what is possible.

01:25:56: And I think this is a

01:25:57: lot as possible, a lot as possible, but you need to be curious and also persistent.

01:26:02: And I agree with you that a lot of people just like one or two outputs are like meh, this isn't going to work.

01:26:09: And we're going back to how we, how we did this.

01:26:13: The last couple of years.

01:26:15: Yeah, I think that's the biggest error that people can make.

01:26:18: I think one of the the things that really help for me is to have it ask questions upfront.

01:26:24: Yeah, so instead of just hey make me this enter I Prompt it and I try to Have it ask questions to me to basically enhance my initial prompt to have an even better understanding.

01:26:40: It's also how the Lennipage mastery custom GPTs work, they go through a series of questions first, and then you've got this beautiful, crafted, contextually relevant output, where you're like, hey, yes, indeed, this is what I need, and this is what I was looking for, because the LLM itself doesn't know everything from the first prompt.

01:27:05: So a lot of times it helps by asking questions, and then going back and forth, before just expecting a really extensive output straight away.

01:27:19: Great addition.

01:27:20: So we have one question that I want to just quickly answer here.

01:27:23: Somebody said, can you again explain shortly where to find the data exclusion for a specific period?

01:27:29: I just quickly looked at the Google Ads UI.

01:27:31: So you basically have to go to tools, then you go to the budgets and bidding tab, then you go to adjustments, then you go to exclusions, and then you say new data exclusion, and then you basically give it a name, a description, a start and end time, and scope.

01:27:47: I hope that helps.

01:27:49: So then next question we have, I hope you still have maybe five more minutes, Bob, but then I guess we should slowly wrap it up.

01:28:00: Someone said, speaking about the Google Ads machine, if everyone hands over more and more control to Google and the AI black box keeps growing, how can advertisers be confident they are not being taken advantage of in the future.

01:28:19: That's an excellent question.

01:28:21: That's an excellent question.

01:28:24: Yeah, I think shocking take.

01:28:27: You are already being taken advantage of.

01:28:31: Google is already squeezing every last center is out of our advertisers pockets.

01:28:40: So yeah, the more control we get away.

01:28:45: the more extreme that will become.

01:28:47: It's as easy as that.

01:28:49: And we do have some controls to limit that part and to make it less negative and negatively impactful.

01:28:58: But yeah, it's the name of the game.

01:29:01: Google is here to make lots and lots, truckloads of money for their investors and their shareholders.

01:29:10: Yeah, and they are going to take advantage of every single advertiser there is.

01:29:16: Yeah, yeah, I cannot sure

01:29:18: what it is.

01:29:20: Yeah, no, I think there's also no sugarcoating of that.

01:29:23: Also here drawing a little bit or circling back to what we were speaking about in terms of research, going to the sources, etc.

01:29:32: So I can really recommend everyone.

01:29:35: And I know, like, I don't want you to take this as me being arrogant, but I know that ninety percent of the people won't do it.

01:29:43: But if you look at this Department of Justice against Google trial documents and the whole accusations and also some things that are proven or that at least in the first instance of a court deciding for the judge felt proven.

01:30:05: Let's put it like this.

01:30:06: I hope I don't get sued for that.

01:30:11: That's why I put this in the disclaimer.

01:30:17: It seems to give clear evidence of CPC manipulation.

01:30:22: We all know about the search terms being hidden, other search terms, we all are frustrated with it.

01:30:28: There are people also stressing legal action in the hue against it.

01:30:35: for some people might feel naive, but there are still people that have success in that.

01:30:41: So there has been this one guy, I think his name is Schrems.

01:30:47: He basically turned over this privacy shield agreement between the EU and the US.

01:30:55: It was him that was seeking legal action at the European courts.

01:31:03: Like you just have to keep in mind that what Bob has said Google prioritizes shareholder value.

01:31:10: That means is extracting more add-dollars from us and there is a lot of evidence potential evidence that Google is using its monopoly to its own advantage.

01:31:25: Yeah floor prices etc.

01:31:27: etc.

01:31:28: exactly exactly.

01:31:30: so Let's do one last question, which is something that I got beforehand from LinkedIn, which is actually, what tools do you use for managing big Google Ads accounts?

01:31:49: Yeah, I've got a limited amount of tools that I am a huge fan of, that I'm not affiliated with, unfortunately.

01:31:58: But I like to use TrueClicks and Delasys for most of my accounts, basically all of my accounts.

01:32:06: So TrueClicks, I'm using the tool for monitoring, auditing my accounts on an autopilot.

01:32:14: You can also build your own scripts if you want to.

01:32:17: So TrueClicks really helps flagging big anomalies, flagging if certain accounts are down, flagging if certain We have things happening in your accounts.

01:32:27: You're immediately aware of that.

01:32:29: on the same day.

01:32:31: And the next day you will get like a summary every single morning of urgent tasks that you need to check that you obviously need to do.

01:32:39: That really helps in not missing really important stuff going on in your accounts.

01:32:46: Besides that, they also have a cool analysis part.

01:32:52: I'm a huge fan of their Ngram.

01:32:55: optimization reports where you can look for inefficient and also non-converting n-grams.

01:33:02: It's also the way that I like to exclude not per se by irrelevancy but mainly looking at inefficient n-grams or non-converting n-grams if they are proven to be inefficient.

01:33:14: non-converting by decent amount of click volumes or cost tiers, cost thresholds.

01:33:21: So that's really a good part that I use.

01:33:24: Adelysis basically follows TrueClicks a bit in what they do right now.

01:33:31: They started as an ad testing tool in the ETA, Expanded Text Ad era.

01:33:39: We don't have those anymore, and we have Smart Bidding messing with, well, rotation of our RSAs, et cetera.

01:33:48: So ad testing.

01:33:50: became a little bit more tough and hard to do.

01:33:52: Therefore, I think they pivoted to also a more analytics, monitoring, optimization-alike tool.

01:34:00: But they are mainly analytics-focused.

01:34:03: So that's what I like about both of the tools.

01:34:06: They're not there to tell you and tell me, hey, we're going to run Google Ads for you.

01:34:11: Trust us because we know it better than Google Smart bidding algorithms and stuff like that.

01:34:18: I rarely believe those claims, but I do really like them saying us or telling me, okay, these are the parts that are flagged as inefficient.

01:34:30: There are the optimization opportunities and they give you so many insights that you can bring to the table when you have your Block in your agenda when you need to start working on your clients straight away.

01:34:44: It really does does help me being more efficient.

01:34:48: So yeah, that's basically the two tools that I use the most frequent.

01:34:53: and then Managing big accounts.

01:34:55: I also like to use a I related tools big shocker in order to to do all sort of analysis visualizations crane reports stuff like that data crunching.

01:35:06: But yeah, that's more generic

01:35:08: Nice.

01:35:08: So to both of these tools, Bob has made it clear if you read through the lines or between the lines, reach out to him.

01:35:20: He would like to be compensated for these recommendations.

01:35:25: No, just kidding.

01:35:25: Just kidding.

01:35:27: It's always a problem if you want to give genuine advice that is authentic.

01:35:34: if you're compensated for it, then obviously some people might feel like there's commercial interest involved.

01:35:41: Yeah, it's at exactly.

01:35:43: These are the tools that I really, really love and I use on a daily basis.

01:35:49: So they're really, really solid tools.

01:35:52: Also great founders, by the way, but that's a different story.

01:35:55: Nice.

01:35:57: Bob, you have shared So much insight, so much of your super valuable time.

01:36:04: I am incredibly grateful for you sharing all of that.

01:36:10: It was a really fun conversation.

01:36:12: I think that the time tells that we can fill a lot of minutes with this talk.

01:36:24: So I generally enjoyed it so much.

01:36:26: And thanks so much.

01:36:27: I also think that there's so much value in it, what you shared.

01:36:31: I would like to give you the quick chance to leave a little of an ad, but a recommendation maybe for the people either watching this on YouTube, obviously afterwards.

01:36:50: For the PPC hub also for yourself for your freelance business.

01:36:54: So how if anybody feels like what you shared makes a lot of sense and they want to work with you or they want to learn from you How can they do it?

01:37:04: First of all, thank you so much for bringing me on.

01:37:07: Like I mentioned, I don't do a lot of these interviews anymore because of time constraints, et cetera, et cetera.

01:37:15: But I really love talking to you and brainstorming about, well, the stuff that we talked about in this session.

01:37:22: And I would love to do it again.

01:37:24: So if I need to take a seat in the future, feel free to call because I always like these kinds of conversations.

01:37:31: And I can easily go on for another hour.

01:37:34: So there's no problem at all.

01:37:36: But we won't do that today.

01:37:40: So thank you.

01:37:41: So if you want to know more or you want to follow everything that I publish on the web, there's basically three things that you can do.

01:37:51: You can head over to LinkedIn, look for Bob Mayer.

01:37:55: Hopefully you will find my profile.

01:37:57: I like to share value on LinkedIn.

01:38:02: I try to stay away from filler content.

01:38:06: So if I share something, either I hope it's valuable or it's funny.

01:38:13: So I don't share things on a daily basis, but kind of irregular when I'm feeling for it and have the time to do so.

01:38:21: If you want to know more about the community.

01:38:24: and the stuff that we offer, you can go to ppsemastery.com where you can find more information about the PPC Hub, the community that we have, everything that is inside of the community, because it's not just a community, it's way more than that.

01:38:40: You can also subscribe to our newsletter, the PPC Edge, which Miles writes every single week.

01:38:47: He has an issue on Monday, an issue on Friday, and I think they are... really great to to read with a lot of information.

01:38:54: And also down to earth, not so complex and well, etc.

01:39:00: So yeah, if you want to know more, head over that space.

01:39:04: And Nicolas, I'm so looking forward to see you speak on our first conference in Copenhagen.

01:39:11: I'm really looking forward to your presentation and your talk.

01:39:14: So I hope to see you there as well.

01:39:16: Of course, I'm also super happy to be there.

01:39:20: I will also bring my colleague Mario Smith with me.

01:39:24: Thanks so much for giving me the chance to share some ideas about the future of agencies there.

01:39:31: Yeah, with that on that note, Bob, it was a great conversation.

01:39:36: I wish you a great day, a great week.

01:39:40: I'm super happy to see you in Copenhagen in just a few weeks time.

01:39:47: Yeah, I have to finish up my first draft of the keynote.

01:39:54: Yeah, I know,

01:39:55: I know.

01:39:56: Yeah, but I just came back from holidays with a lot of fresh energy.

01:39:59: So that's a good timing.

01:40:02: Yeah, so with that, let's wrap it up.

01:40:06: And everybody follow Bob because everything he's doing is great.

01:40:12: And Bob, thanks so much again and speak soon.

01:40:15: Thank you too.

01:40:16: See ya, have a nice day.

01:40:18: Bye bye.