How Agencies Can Thrive in the Age of AI

Episode Description

Kirk Williams (Founder of ZATO Marketing) joins Frederick Vallaeys to explore how digital marketing agencies can not only survive but thrive in the new AI-powered world of advertising. As AI changes everything from campaign management to creative production, Kirk shares what it takes for agencies to stay relevant, profitable, and valuable to clients. What you’ll learn:

• Why AI isn’t the death of agencies and how it can become their superpower
• How to rethink your agency’s pricing and service models
• The importance of strategy, consulting, and creative in the AI era
• How small-budget clients can be profitable (thanks to automation)
• Real examples of using AI for ad copy, feed optimization, and more
• The future of PMax campaigns, data visibility, and performance insights

Episode Takeaways

Kirk shares real-world examples from his agency’s daily operations, including specific AI prompts for feed optimization that leverage user review data, and explains how automation is making small-budget clients profitable for the first time.

The conversation also dives into the evolving world of Google’s Performance Max campaigns. With new channel reporting features finally giving advertisers visibility into where their ad spend is going, Kirk explains how agencies can use these insights to make strategic decisions about expanding into YouTube, display, and other channels – turning PMax data into actionable business intelligence.

Why AI isn’t the death of agencies and how it can become their superpower

Kirk Williams sees AI creating two distinct paths for agencies. One is low cost, AI-powered services and the other would be be high-end experts who solve tough problems and give strategic advice.

AI will take over the routine execution, meaning that the real value lies in human expertise, especially when things go wrong. AI-driven systems like PMax often work well, but when they break, they’re harder to diagnose. This creates demand for professionals who understand both the technology and the business context.

Essentially, AI will empower agencies to do more with less, letting small teams offer high-level creative, automation, and insights that used to require massive resources. In fact, it opens doors to serve smaller-budget clients profitably, something that wasn’t scalable before.

“I almost see this going in two different directions like dramatically different directions almost towards that you kind of have this commoditized people just utilize AI and maybe they get more clients have lower fees and they’re just doing their thing. They’re basically driving the traffic, that sort of thing. I almost think then there’s this second side as well.” shares Kirk

How to rethink your agency’s pricing and service models

There’s a growing distinction between simply running ads and offering broader business value like conversion strategy or offer development. These are fundamentally different services and they shouldn’t be priced the same.

Kirk emphasizes the importance of being clear with clients about what your agency is and isn’t responsible for, especially when ad performance is being dragged down by problems further down the funnel that aren’t marketing-related.

AI also changes the math: with automation taking over many day-to-day tasks, flat retainers may give way to hybrid models—like project-based pricing, fractional support, audits, or layered consulting fees. This allows agencies to stay profitable while delivering high value, especially as clients’ expectations shift in an AI-assisted world. The key is to be transparent, flexible, and open to reinventing the way value is delivered and billed.

The importance of strategy, consulting, and creative in the AI era

AI can automate tasks, but when campaigns go off track, humans are needed to interpret, adjust, and realign strategy. The more complex automation becomes, the more valuable strategic oversight becomes. AI can target and serve ads, but it can’t interpret a client’s business model, pricing strategy, or product-market fit. That’s where consulting comes in—offering human judgment on what’s working and why.

Agencies that combine generative creative tools + deep strategy will deliver a full-stack experience that AI alone can’t replicate. These services will be non-commoditized and in high demand.

“One other thought on the AI side we would be remiss not to mention is the word creative. Give it another few years and even us real smaller niche agencies just have this insane access to tools that increasingly are just going to allow us to, I think, develop and push out various creative resources on YouTube and things like that that we just never had before as part of our services.” Kirk explains

How small-budget clients can be profitable (thanks to automation)

Small-budget clients have traditionally been hard for agencies to serve profitably—but that’s changing fast thanks to automation and AI.

Kirk Williams saw this shift coming and created a lower-priced offering tailored to small budgets, built on efficiency and clarity around what is and isn’t included. With generative AI and automated campaign types like PMax, many of the tasks that used to consume hours of manual work like ad creation, bidding, and reporting, can now be handled swiftly by machines. This reduces overhead and makes it viable to support smaller clients without burning out the team or shrinking margins.

“So like 2 or 3 years ago, I saw some of this coming and one of the things that I identified and I don’t know if this is the greatest idea ever or not, but just seeing, hey, there’s a whole lot of opportunity, especially on the smaller budget side where especially as AI does help us in a lot of this stuff, let’s just offer a lower priced product for small budgets where we try to be real efficient. We try to be very clear this is what it’s not including that sort of thing.” said Kirk.

Kirk sees this as a new agency model, where AI scales human expertise to serve a segment of the market that was previously too costly to touch.

Real examples of using AI for ad copy, feed optimization, and more

Kirk Williams shares several practical, real-world ways his agency uses AI to streamline PPC workflows and enhance client performance.

One of the standout examples is in feed optimization for Google Shopping. is team developed a prompt workflow where AI scans a product’s landing page along with user reviews and generates new product descriptions that incorporate both technical details and customer language. This often surfaces insights brands miss themselves and leads to more compelling, conversion-friendly copy.

“The one thing I really do use it often though is feed optimization still though. Especially with titles and descriptions. We have a fairly great prompt that we utilize for let’s say description where we just basically say go to this landing page, get all this information.

 

I usually ask it to prompt with keywords or important things to bring out based upon user reviews as well. Just because that tends to be different information than a lot of times what the stores have on their actual product description and then that’s what we’ll send in like our Google Shopping product descriptions.” explains Kirk.

He also uses AI on a daily basis for internal productivity, such as rewriting long-winded emails or synthesizing multiple competing ideas into a clear plan of action.

The future of PMax campaigns, data visibility, and performance insights

As Kirk Williams explains, Google’s early vision for PMax was centered on simplicity—“push button” automation with minimal transparency. But for experienced marketers, the lack of visibility into where ads were running (e.g., YouTube vs. Search vs. Display) made it hard to trust or optimize the system.

That’s now changing.

With the rollout of channel-level reporting, advertisers can finally see how much spend is going to each surface.

Kirk sees this as a breakthrough not just for control, but for strategic planning.

“So they’ve started to roll out allowing us to actually see where ad dollars are being spent and for me there’s just some interesting things that could come about that and the most simplistic way to utilize that would just be to say, hey, if PMax is identifying opportunity in a channel, say YouTube.

 

Let’s say that we can see now all of a sudden YouTube is actually converting better than we expected and that’s just from some quick PMax thing. Maybe even an autogenerated video. If you see that, that’s information going back to that broader business point, that’s information that you could use to say, YouTube actually seems to be working.

 

Okay, why don’t we allocate money for a test and then use that information to actually invest more marketing dollars into that in that example.” shares Kirk.

With new features like negative keyword controls, ad rank prioritization, and campaign layering, success increasingly depends on marketers understanding what PMax is actually built to do and how to guide it rather than fight it

Episode Transcript

Frederick Vallaeys: Hello and welcome to another episode of PPC Town Hall. My name is Fred Vallaeys. I’m your host. I’m also the CEO and co-founder at Optmyzr, the PPC management software. For today’s episode, we’re bringing back one of our favorite guests and good friend of the show, Kirk Williams. We are approaching Q4, which is a huge time for a lot of retailers in e-commerce. So of course, who better to talk to than Kirk Williams about what strategies are going to make sense to get ready for BFCM 2025.

Now, there are a lot of changes that Google has recently introduced around measurement. So we wanted to broach some of these topics and of course, we also want to hear how Kirk is using generative AI to be more effective as a marketer. So with that, let’s get rolling with this episode of PPC Town Hall. Kirk, welcome back to the show. Good to see you.

Kirk Williams: Thank you. Good as always to see you as well. I even wore this hat in honor of our last time we saw each other in person at SMX Advanced in Boston.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, that’s right. I was going to ask you about the Boston hat. So you picked that one up at SMX Advanced.

Kirk Williams: Yeah. That was my second time to Boston. I’m not necessarily a baseball guy, but I like the style. My kids’ names are all B, so I thought that was fitting, and yeah, so I grabbed one. Probably everyone in Montana’s like, “Oh, a Red Sox fan.” I’m like, “No, just a B fan.”

Frederick Vallaeys: Just a nice hat. Hey, and besides the hat with the B, I see a new piece of decor behind you. Obviously there’s a lot of Lego for people listening to the podcast, not seeing this. So Kirk always has a huge display of Lego, a lot of Star Wars behind him. But there is one new thing. There’s a Mercedes-Benz parking only sign that’s been added. What’s that about?

Kirk Williams: Well, I think you and I have talked about our shared love of AMGs. That’s Mercedes’ performance line, right? You’ve been driving the AMG longer than I have. I picked up a C-43 last year. Loved it. And I just happened into a pretty good deal on an old G55, the G Wagon, and I am in love. Those two could not be more opposite in every way.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, they’re so fun. And it’s really old. It’s got quirks, but it’s in really good condition. So it’s this fun thing where I almost like the fact that there are quirks like the back door doesn’t unlock unless you crawl back there. I’ll have to figure that out. It’s stuff like that, but it looks and sounds amazing.

Kirk Williams: Yeah, it sounds like an amazing second car. I’ve looked into the G Wagon, but just the way that the trunk opens, if you ever go grocery shopping, it’s like good luck getting your groceries into that thing.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, not practical, but a very cool car and maybe actually practical for someone who lives in Montana where it snows once in a while.

Kirk Williams: Yeah, I mean, it’s going to be great in the snow. The people I bought it from even had studded snow tires because we’re allowed to have those here. Not every state allows studded snow tires where they actually put metal studs in them just because they can wreck the roads, but up here they allow it. So I should be unstoppable. I’ll be a tank this winter, drive through anything.

Frederick Vallaeys: Well, very fun. So you adding an AMG to the collection, I guess, means you’re doing well, and I guess you figured out how to make PPC work. And the other testament you have for people who maybe haven’t seen you on the show before, but you are currently ranked number three, I think, on the PPC most influential list.

Kirk Williams: I think so.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, you stop counting. But anyway, so you’re very well regarded in the industry. You’re very active on social, share a lot of your advice, you speak at a lot of conferences. So let’s get into that a little bit. Some of the recent work that I’ve seen you do is around KPI measurement and maybe stop focusing so single-mindedly on just conversions. Let’s talk about that. What KPI should people think about as we approach another holiday shopping season and what should people be ready to measure?

Kirk Williams: Yeah. So anyone who’s seen me talk on anything probably over the years has known that I try to walk this line of on one side basically everything is an “it depends” answer. There’s just a whole lot where there’s not anything real clear. But also at some point you need to get to a place where you’re saying here’s some actual information that’s actionable you can do.

So this is one of those times I start with that long precursor. This is one of those times where KPIs and conversions do matter and then they don’t matter. And kind of what I mean by that is there’s a lot more knowledge growing in the industry, especially in ecom, of being aware that what you see directly tracked in attribution to the actual source that sent that sale is not always a direct indicator of where you should put your marketing dollars.

So that’s where I’m looking at this and I’ve actually talked about this for years. But sometimes things make a recurring appearance. At the end of the day I fall into the line of thinking with marketing and advertising that we are one part, we are one cog in a wheel of business complexity, which means we are unable to drive sales themselves. This is my opinion, but we drive like we identify targeted audience. We show them targeted ads, targeted creative. There’s some control we’re going to have over targeted landing pages or things like that.

But at the end of the day, all we can do is identify a person, say, “Hey, as much as we know about them for efficiently bidding on what we believe they cost to our business and all that, we think that is a good person to send to the website at some level. We just can’t do more than that.” And so that’s where I’ve pushed into that a lot in my book and things like that of just being aware as a business owner of the limitations of advertising and how scaling and all of this other stuff actually oftentimes is not just from fixing your marketing.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. No, that makes total sense and I definitely do want to unpack that and go a little bit deeper. So three angles I see here. First of all, to be able to do what you’re saying, you have to understand your client’s business. And now you run an agency, Zato Marketing. So we’ll talk about how you get more ingrained into your customers’ businesses.

I also want to understand what are you seeing in terms of AI because you’re speaking about like we’re just one part of the machine that drives ultimately sales and profits and there’s sort of the upper end of that. How do you get people to even know you exist? And I think that may be changing when AI becomes more of an entry point rather than search for people and then we think about answer engines as opposed to search engines. So that’s question number two.

And then number three that I want to go into is when you think about the bottom of that funnel, okay, you’ve presented that hot lead on a platter and now what does your client, what does the business ultimately do with that? How can they be more effective? And is that something that you play a role in as well as an agency or how do you hand that off to the client?

Kirk Williams: So three topics. Which one do you want to jump into first with that?

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, why don’t we hit the last one first actually, just because that’s pretty relevant to just continuing this conversation. So basically, okay, so based on what you were saying, you hand this targeted customer, it’s the right person, they’ve seen the right ad, they are interested in your product, right?

By the way, you know, you and I have talked a lot about this. This is one of the reasons why I’ve just always loved the idea of keywords and search terms because oftentimes you are seeing them specifically communicate, hey, right now I’m interested in XYZ and there’s a whole lot of that that it almost doesn’t matter what all has happened in their past history or whatever. If they’re saying actually right now I do want to buy that bike or I’m considering that, that’s a significant signal of interest, right?

And so if you identify that person and you say, “Hey, this person wants to buy what my client is selling, I’m going to connect these two at some level.” If those people who are expressing direct interest in what your client or what you are selling, if they’re just never purchasing from you, I think again that’s one of those times to step back and say like, why is that? What is the problem to solve not do we somehow need to find better people who are searching for exactly what I’m selling.

And I think that’s where then it gets more and more into that business solutions thing which to answer your question like okay how do we as an agency think of that I think that depends heavily on what are we offering like what am I offering to my client and then like how do I price that according to that because to me if all of a sudden you are doing like significant offer consulting and business consulting and you’re trying to help them solve a lot of those like even more on the conversion rate optimization side or that, that is an additional value that you’re offering that’s different than just utilizing Google ads well to try to drive solid customers.

I think that those two things are separate. Helping a client know should we target these people or determining okay these targeted people are coming and they’re not buying. So let’s consider different offers. Let’s think through all that. Those are two very different services.

Frederick Vallaeys: So stepping on that for a second. So I think listeners are always fascinated by agency pricing models. So you saying that these are two completely fundamentally different services. How do you position that when you sell it to the customer?

Kirk Williams: So some of that for me is I try to distinguish personally and some of this is because I know here’s what we offer and here’s what it costs. I try to position that sort of thing as it’s a very different thing to get into someone’s business and do that’s almost more business consulting like fractional COO. There might be a fractional CFO aspect to all of that because you can’t rethink offers without actually trying to then think through the finances, right?

So to me if we’re thinking about it I’m just like hey what we do and again this is where I try to really define what are we talking about here with Google ads and for me it is personally it is hey we are going to help you think through some of this stuff but overall we’re taking what you have in your business and we’re going to basically find the right people for that as much as possible. And if that’s not working, that’s when I might step in and not try to solve their problems because I don’t know if I can, but at least start helping point them towards I don’t think this is a marketing problem anymore. I think maybe you need to take experts who are good in all that stuff and pursue better learnings on changing up your offer, revamping your landing page, that sort of thing.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right, and that’s super important because at the end of the day, if they don’t understand what is the problem that’s stopping them from achieving the goals that they have, they will blame you, the agency that’s doing the marketing, and they’ll say, “You’re not delivering me the leads. You’re not helping me close the business.” But like you said, you may be delivering fantastic leads. It’s just they’re very bad at closing them. They don’t have the right offer. They don’t follow up in the right way. So it helps protect your business.

Now that said, there’s a lot of buzz in the industry that agencies are basically being run out of business by AI and by Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg saying all of this should be automated. Sam Altman is saying 95% of marketers will lose their jobs in the next 5 years or they will no longer do what they do today. So you as an agency owner, what’s your stance and how do you get ready to not be a victim in this case?

Kirk Williams: Yeah. I’m still thinking through all that. So like 2 or 3 years ago, I saw some of this coming and one of the things that I identified and I don’t know if this is the greatest idea ever or not, but just seeing, hey, there’s a whole lot of opportunity, especially on the smaller budget side where especially as AI does help us in a lot of this stuff, let’s just offer a lower priced product for small budgets where we try to be real efficient. We try to be very clear this is what it’s not including that sort of thing.

So some of that idea was hey probably what this looks like is in some companies it’s going to lower agency costs and fees. So I think that’s probably going to be some level of what happens is just like people are not doing the same amount of work they used to do.

The flip side though and here’s I could be wrong. I almost see this going in two different directions like dramatically different directions almost towards that you kind of have this commoditized people just utilize AI and maybe they get more clients have lower fees and they’re just doing their thing. They’re basically driving the traffic, that sort of thing.

I almost think then there’s this second side as well. And this is where AI, the problem with AI, especially as it gets more obfuscated is that it’s just harder to troubleshoot. It’s harder to know what’s going on. When things go wrong, it’s like way worse. And so I think in terms of setting things up and troubleshooting with AI, those two things, so kind of that strategy piece are so crucial that I can actually see those services being a premium charged with the right people.

And so I almost suspect too that there may be more maybe there’s going to be less like overall of these massive retainers you hear about of someone charging $70,000 a month for their PPC agency sort of deal. Maybe there’s going to be more involved with project based fees and smaller retainers. I don’t know. Those are just some of where my brain’s at with some of this stuff. What I’d be curious too is what do you see because you’re the AI guy.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. The example that you just gave made me think back of analytics. So when I was at Google and we bought Urchin, and basically gave Urchin, which sorry, we bought Urchin, we then called it Google Analytics and we basically gave it away for free, which was unheard of in the market. And so there was this massive outcry and then people who had been doing analytics said, “You’re going to put us out of a job.”

But the exact opposite happened and it actually grew an entire industry around experts who knew how to set it up, who knew how to troubleshoot it. And that’s exactly what you’re saying, right? As an agency, as a PPC practitioner, maybe you won’t practice PPC anymore, but you will have to be the one who services the machines, who troubleshoots the machines.

And so that makes total sense. And so I think it’s dangerous for all of us to just want to hold on to the job and the exact role specification as we’ve known it for the past couple of years. But we can certainly continue within the industry and be useful in many new ways that maybe we don’t even know what all of those new ways are. But there’s going to be stuff for us to do.

Kirk Williams: I love that and I agree completely. I think that’s where my suggestion, my advice for those listening would be to stop thinking of it only in this framework of here is what PPC looks like. Here are the changes we do. Here’s the retainer. And begin leaning more into yeah, what are some of those newer areas? And does even just how the industry needs to think about pricing and fees and things like that, does that need to totally change around? I don’t necessarily know. But there may be some of that.

One other thing too is I’m just continually aware of the fact that I just feel like in the last couple years I’ve had way more leads from just in-house people or even other agencies who are needing experts to come alongside again in more of an audit capacity or just a consulting capacity or things like that too. So perhaps that’s also another part of it is that retainers are part of your fee services as an agency but then also maybe you’re doing others more on the supporting way with doing this as well. So just be open-minded I guess.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. I think that makes sense, right? Because if you’re an in-house team, you tend to go very deep and you understand the business and you touch everything and when I see in-house companies, they tend to push the envelope a little bit more when it comes to offline conversion integration and novel ways of doing attribution and measurement.

And they will try new projects where they connect new data sources to figuring out okay, who are the audiences that we need to build? What’s day parting, what’s the scheduling based on seasonality and trends and patterns that we see in our business? And so it goes very deep within that but I think what agencies can bring is that broader perspective. You’ve worked on a number of accounts and what has happened when we deployed this automation or that automation and even bringing that insight that’s valuable because it’s basically either the in-house team experiments with that themselves and then gets the learnings after spending $100,000 or they hire an expert who’s done this a number of times before, who’s talked to a lot of companies and they avoid wasting the $100,000 on an experiment, they would have gone nowhere because you can already point them in the right direction.

And so for that reason, I also think it’s interesting if you have an agency where you work mostly in the same vertical and so you have an expertise in e-commerce and shopping ads. And so that brings a lot of value because you know all the nuance of these systems and you can probably tell people how many conversions do you need before it really starts to work really well? That’s valuable insight in terms of then maybe how do you structure your campaigns to make sure we are hitting those conversion thresholds. So I think that’s valuable to make money.

Kirk Williams: Yeah. One and then one other thought on just that AI side in general would be we would be remiss not to mention the word creative and I just really do think that is where this is going. Give it another few years and even us real smaller niche agencies just have this insane access to tools that increasingly are just going to allow us to, I think, develop and push out various creative resources on YouTube and things like that that we just never had before as part of our services.

And again, with that idea of not necessarily how do we think about that? How do we shift around thinking about our value add? I’ve just never been a creative agency because there’s such a significant difference and skill and that sort of thing that goes into that. It’s way easier to consider that if all of a sudden you’re just adding on maybe a creative person to deploy I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but to deploy more of this AI at scale that is just already there. So you can more add that seamlessly into your services rather than right now almost develop a new part of your business. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see that happen more as well as just almost a value add for agencies.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right? AI raises capabilities. And so you’ve explained how that means for really small customers that previously you could not have taken on because the fees would have been excessive and those fees would have been excessive because the human power you would have had to put behind doing the things you know you need to do to make them successful that wouldn’t have scaled. But now that you have technology, you have generative AI, you have new campaign types from Google, all of a sudden it becomes possible to support these smaller clients in a way that still makes your agency a profit and pays your bills.

And then at the same time for those who are already agency customers, what they can expect sort of up levels as well, right? And if you think about it in terms of humans, it’s like nowadays if someone joins a law firm thanks to all the generative AI, you can expect that person to perform at the level of someone who’s been with the law firm three years because they can look up all the cases in generative AI, they can do more work. They can be faster, right?

Nobody who comes into jobs nowadays should be expected to be at that very novice level. And of course, they’re on novice level day one, but they have their own generative assistants, which are basically one-on-one teachers that help them upskill very quickly. And so everybody’s expectation of what they should get can go up. And I think in an agency world, that just means no matter what level of customer you are, you can expect many levels of service greater than what you would have gotten two years ago.

Kirk Williams: Yeah. And I mean, it’s interesting. So you bring up lawyers. That’s a very interesting one for me because I’ve thought through this the usage of LLMs, AI, all that is one of these interesting things where I’m more and more going down this path of thinking in order to maximize to me the potential of it. It is when true experts utilize it in an assistant type way.

So like, hey, I can get to seven out of 10 and maybe AI helps me even more quickly get to like nine and a half out of 10 in terms of value or efficiency or whatever that might be where it’s almost interesting where it is possible to figure certain things out with LLMs. Like I had some SEO question of what to do in search console and ChatGPT I think helped me walk through it and I tried something. And it was kind of cool and I implemented this technical fix and I got it approved and all that and I was like wow that was kind of cool. I had no idea what I was doing.

But at some point that kind of fails because you’re starting from zero knowledge on it and especially if the LLM starts to go off base math especially, right? And so in some ways again we as agency we as PPC agency people let’s just ponder how do we utilize the expertise we have so not necessarily replacing that but to enhance and increase that.

One thought on the lawyer side of in terms of what I’m describing would be I just think more and more people are starting to go to LLM ChatGPT and Gemini for basic legal things. Here’s a will I’d like you to write up this stuff. The problem being of course that at some point it is a legal matter and you are entrusting that to an AI. So you also kind of want to make sure that it’s not just that it’s not totally messed up and it’ll get thrown out in court.

So it’s almost like there’s this potential service where maybe some law firm out there advertises themselves as here’s our really low fee and we’re the LLM legal checker. You submit maybe they have this whole system where you submit your documents. We just make sure that there’s nothing crazy off for a low fee of $150 or whatever. So it makes sense.

So it kind of bridges the gap like you’re no longer paying $700 or whatever for a basic will. But also you’re not totally entrusting LLMs. I think that’s a sign of what you said earlier, which is almost what new opportunities will just come out of nowhere of roles and jobs and things that have just never been made before and there’s got to be that stuff in PPC of similar type things and I think we’ll just watch for that stuff and build into that.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. And maybe your value lies in the fact that you’ve built these prompts that are really nuanced and even things like how do you tell the LLM not to hallucinate and how do you maybe add a RAG element where you’re doing retrieval of some trusted documents and that becomes the grounding for any generation that happens.

And so these are things as an agency you can certainly focus on and that becomes your secret sauce and ultimately you’re still delivering very similar work. So you’re still going to do an audit, but the audit that you now do has been AI assisted that’s enabled you to do it faster. Maybe you’ve built a different GPT, custom GPT that checks whether the audit suggestions that come out actually make sense.

And then one point that I’ve made in terms of how humans use this, if you’re already an expert and you do PPC for a living, it’s very easy for you to look at an audit report and very quickly see, okay, this makes no sense. This recommendation just completely doesn’t fit because you’ve done it a million times. You know, you wouldn’t have put that into a report that you’d manually written. And what’s nice too is because you’re the expert, if the GPT has failed you, you can just go and tweak it because you’ve done it a million times before. So it’s not that difficult for you to fix that one thing, but ultimately it’s made you faster because the things that the GPT does get right that’s been done very quickly. And so you just plug the holes of what hasn’t been done correctly.

And then there’s sort of that second level, second layer of how humans use generative AI and this is about learning new things. So for your SEO example where you didn’t know the solution but GPT became a teacher to you. Now there I think it’s really important to ask the right questions and not just trust it at face value.

Kirk Williams: Mm-hmm.

Frederick Vallaeys: And so if you have a genuine interest in solving these problems for your clients and putting some work in and maybe repeating this, then great because you’re going to ask the right questions, you’re going to validate some of the answers it’s giving you by doing a Google search and maybe deploying some other ways to look into it. But it does enable you to add skills that would have been very difficult to achieve in the past.

And if I personally think about learning, I mean, you either go to Udemy where you have a structured course, but Udemy doesn’t know what I already know. So it’s like, oh, here’s a course on SEO, but why am I spending two hours going through the basics where I know the basics, but it’s the advanced stuff that I could use some help with. And that’s where GPT is such a fantastic teacher, right? It just drops you in based on the level that you already have. It customizes the course for you. And then if you’re a smart person and you fact check and you see it as a teacher but you still learn on the side I think you can achieve some great things.

Kirk Williams: Yeah. No, I love it and I think that’s again that’s the answer to the overall big question and fear of will AI take all the jobs sort of a deal. And it in some ways what you’ve described already, let’s say that audit idea at some point, at least right now, there are so many complexities to the various prompts and things like that that that alone is a friction point that could be sold. Like someone developing all of that in terms of a really great way to audit an account or whatever turn that into a product and sell that. I just think there’s so many ways and opportunities for utilizing that and one of the best things is just look around and find where is a friction point because friction points are when people are willing to part with money that’s the basic laws of entrepreneurship.

If you do something and that’s such a big thing for people who run businesses in that is it’s not that you’re the only one ever who can do this job. It’s not like ChatGPT can’t or whatever. It is that you’ve identified this friction point. Someone else sure they could do it but if what you charge is more valuable to them than their time or their desire to do it they’ll pay you to do that instead. It’s not because they can’t. It’s because that’s more valuable. So just being able to be aware of that, look into that, solve for those sort of things. I don’t think humans are going to be okay.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. No, that’s some basic economics lessons and keep those in mind. And that’s the other benefit I think too as an agency. If you do a good job and you talk to a lot of clients, you understand their pain points, you understand what they’re frustrated about. In fact, I was reading one of your recent LinkedIn posts, I think about the frustration that Microsoft ads only has six months of change history data. I was like, oh, light bulb went off. That’s a friction point. Optmyzr, we already have the API. Why don’t we do the same thing we do with Amazon and we store a longer historical data set of that and now if you go back two years, three years, whatever, if we have the data, we have the data.

Kirk Williams: So yeah, solve problems. There you go. Yeah, I love it.

Frederick Vallaeys: Hey, but let’s talk about some of the new stuff in Google. So there’s the PMAX channel reporting and you’ve talked a little bit about specifically the breakdown. So talk first about what PMAX channel reporting is, but then let’s go deeper as well in how it helps you break down what is a shopping ad versus a non-shopping ad within those channels because I think that’s really interesting.

Kirk Williams: Yeah. So some of this I’m going on memory here because we talked about this I think it was right after SMX Advanced. So Google has rolled out PMAX channel reporting in the past the PMAX channel was some nebulous thing it was other channels or something like that.

And so by channel we mean hey where are your ad dollars being allocated? YouTube, search, shopping, display, Gmail, right? All of the various places that you can appear in Google. There’s just no insight into that with PMAX. Some of that, maybe not some of it, maybe the majority or all of it was just by Google’s own admission, it was they’ve basically told me this if you can’t change it, why should you be able to see it? Kind of this idea of for them the whole idea of PMAX was a simplicity push button thing and therefore they wanted the control to deploy your ad dollars across all those channels however their algorithm saw fit.

So they’ve started to roll out allowing us to actually see where ad dollars are being spent and for me there’s just some interesting things that could come about that and some of that maybe the most simplistic way to utilize that would just be to say, hey, if PMAX is identifying opportunity in a channel, let’s just say real simplistically, YouTube. Let’s say that we can just see now all of a sudden YouTube is actually converting better than we expected and that’s just from some quick PMAX thing. Maybe even an autogenerated video. If you see that, that’s information going back to that broader business point, that’s information that you could use to say, gosh, YouTube actually seems to be working. Okay, why don’t we allocate money for a test and then use that information to actually invest more marketing dollars into that in that example. So just an example of why I just like that data. I like being able to see that and getting more information to make decisions based on that. So I’m glad they’re doing it.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. No, really interesting stuff. And I see this almost virtuous cycle from Google where they release a new product PMAX and it solves some of the problems that existed. So the problem was advertising is pretty hard if you’re a small advertiser, if you’re novice, if you don’t have the budget to hire an agency, if you don’t have an in-house marketing team. And it’s especially hard when you consider that there’s so many places where you can put an ad through Google. So you can go on Gmail, on YouTube, discover, search, etc. display network. So it’s a lot of things to think about. So PMAX comes in and it’s like the easy button. Just tell us what your goal is. Tell us what your website is and we’ll figure it out.

But then, of course, for the experts like us listening here and Kirk and myself, it’s frustrating because we don’t have insight. And so we start clamoring for insight because we’re like, well, we’re not going to use this PMAX thing if we can’t guarantee that you’re not just claiming amazing results by spending all my money on remarketing, which you know, why are you just capturing the thing that my SEO team basically put all the work in getting and you’re claiming credit for it at the end.

Okay, so now we get some insights and then we’re like, oh, well, now we have these insights. We need controls to actually tweak it and optimize it. And so now we start seeing that too, right? Google is adding some more control levers. And eventually this new campaign type becomes just as complicated. I was talking to him on a recent episode and he was like, “Yeah, you know, PMAX is not that simple anymore. It actually takes expertise now and you can still get good results by setting it up in a basic way, but if you want to get the most out of it, yeah, there’s all these other things you need to do, right? And that’s where you look to an agency to help you with it.

But when it comes to these channel insights, the risk now is that if you are not really thinking about this and you look at the numbers and you say, “Oh, well, YouTube isn’t performing as well from a ROAS perspective as a search ad. So let me turn off YouTube.” Wrong thing to do, right? I mean, you cannot expect something upper funnel like YouTube to really play at the same level as down the funnel like search. So but like you are saying, take it as an insight. There is an opportunity on YouTube. Maybe we’re not making the most of it because maybe we haven’t actually produced creative for YouTube, but now you have generative AI. So it is possible to do that and really capture that opportunity more fully.

Kirk Williams: Well, and that’s one of the limitations of just people need to understand about a campaign tool really like PMAX is that it often does exactly what it’s trying to do. It’s trying to get you as many sales and if you’ve set some sort of efficiency, it’s going to try to hit that efficiency, as many sales as possible with all of the things that you’re guiding it in. So things like your daily budget, the products you upload, all that stuff.

And so a lot of times, let’s say it’s just like, hey, if we just hammer on these 15 products and these people bidding on the brand term and showing these 15 products, they buy. Some people that just really bugs them. And some of it to me is just like, man, that’s why the campaign type was made. So how can we actually utilize it to maximize how it was made? But that’s where sometimes you’re just asking PMAX to do something it’s not supposed to.

And like let’s say with the YouTube example of course it’s not going to run after YouTube aggressively if based on the budget it has and the targets if it can get those sales more purposefully by just running after those easier shopping ads. And so again, that’s where a good PPC marketer really has to see what are some ways that I could actually think through expanding this sort of thing. And sometimes that’s just why being able to see information like that. It’s not like PMAX is this all knowing thing that’s like, hey, we really don’t think YouTube will work as well. It could just be that because of the limitations. Maybe it just has never even really aggressively tested that or whatever. And so you can get a little bit of insight here and then you can run that test separately in conjunction with what PMAX is trying to do. But just I think it’s important to me for people to really understand better what PMAX is and what it’s supposed to do so then they can actually use that better and then actually run after different campaign types differently.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And where do you fall on the spectrum of using PMAX versus traditional shopping campaigns?

Kirk Williams: Yeah. So we use both in pretty much every account, especially since they changed the way they rank. I don’t remember what that was, like 6 months ago or something. So as a quick reminder to the audience listening, PMAX with search ads has always been relatively it’s been according to ad rank. We’ll there’s more that can be said there, but we’ll just kind of pause there. So ad rank based on the exactly matching term, not exact match term, but exactly matching term. So if you were targeting a specific term in a search campaign, then it would go I think it would be preferred for that search term.

Frederick Vallaeys: That’s right is that you don’t have the keywords, right? It’s always implied.

Kirk Williams: Yeah. So with the bad rank. Yeah. So with shopping PMAX though on the other hand in the old days always cannibalized. It did not matter it wasn’t about priority PMAX won. So about 6 months ago they changed it. So it is about ad rank in the shopping results now which means if you do have shopping campaigns where you have you just have a little bit more control. You can see search terms that sort of thing running you might be eligible and we’ve seen that in some of ours perform better. So we’d prefer to have that control and do that. So that’s typically why we run both at this point just to kind of feed it more successfully whatever happens.

And there are different ways too that we’re just always trying to test different ways to kind of think creatively about utilizing PMAX as its own campaign type and standard shopping especially now PMAX. So PMAX now also has negative keywords that you can very easily add in, right? And so now there’s different ways to think through, hey, are there ways that we can almost query filter PMAX campaigns a little bit and trying to think through that stuff. So I don’t know, we’re just always kind of trying to mess around with something and see if we can figure something out a little better.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. No, that’s what agencies do. That’s what PPC experts do, right? Figure out how to take all of these existing systems and there’s also Google publishes how it’s supposed to work and then there’s how it actually works in reality and by the way we have a new PMAX cannibalization study that you’ll find on our blog so that also shows like previous studies there’s quite a bit of cannibalization that happens even when Google says it shouldn’t and so that’s where you then get those new controls to say well Google if you’re not going to automatically do what you said you will do we’ll put some exclusions in place and then get the traffic to go where you think it performs better.

So great advice on that, Kirk. Now, would like to wrap it up with a question on how you use generative AI. Have you used any novel, innovative ways, cool tricks that you can share with the audience? What have you been doing?

Kirk Williams: I will. So, here’s what I would suggest would be if someone really wants to know some really cool tricks to go follow David Melameed is the guy’s name. Melameed, I think, on LinkedIn. And then, oh, shoot, my mind just blinked. Amy, she spoke at SMX events.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. Yeah, thank you. Sorry. I know Amy. We’ve known each other for years. Amy Hebdon.

Kirk Williams: She also does stuff with this where they’re it just seems like they have these cool ways where they’re doing exactly what you’re saying. I tend to use stuff that other people have already innovated and trying to figure that out. So maybe that’s what I’ll say is go follow them if you really want to be on the cutting edge.

Some of how I’m so that being said, I use it daily, multiple times daily. At this point, a lot of that is for my own job. So what I mean by that is I am just constantly asking LLMs to make my long-winded emails a little more succinct. I’m constantly saying, “Here are three or four different things. Can you help me think through this?” I really do use it like a virtual assistant, frankly, where I’m just asking it to help me get a little bit further and that’s how I use it all the time.

The one thing with PPC, well, I mean, I’m sure we use it a bunch and then my team uses it more directly in accounts and campaigns, but the one thing I really do use it often though is feed optimization still though. Especially with titles and descriptions. We have a fairly great prompt that we utilize for let’s say description where we just basically say hey go to this go to this landing page get all this information include this include I typically say because there’s usually user reviews here might be a helpful tip there’s usually user reviews on those pages product pages so I usually ask it to prompt with keywords or important things to bring out based upon user reviews as well. Just because that tends to be different information than a lot of times what the stores have on their actual product description and then that’s what we’ll send in like our Google Shopping product descriptions.

Frederick Vallaeys: Very cool. All right, Kirk Williams, people can follow you on LinkedIn at PPC Kirk on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Kirk Williams: Yeah. Yeah.

Frederick Vallaeys: Where else?

Kirk Williams: I’m trying to do more on threads and blue sky just to show up there. So pretty much PPC Kirk everywhere really.

Frederick Vallaeys: Okay. Where are you going to be speaking next?

Kirk Williams: London. SMX London in September. I think you’re there, right?

Frederick Vallaeys: Yep.

Kirk Williams: SMX London in September. And then, shortly thereafter, Hero Conf in San Diego.

Frederick Vallaeys: Well, yes. Although I made a last minute decision not to go because of the connection because it’s so close to London. I was like I’m going to stay home.

Kirk Williams: It’s pretty tough.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yep. It’s not great for the family stuff but Hero Conf is a good one. So I’ll go.

Kirk Williams: It is a good one. Yeah.

Frederick Vallaeys: But anyway, you’re very active on social media. So if people can’t make it all the way to London, connect online. Zato Marketing. Great agency if you’re looking for some help with shopping ads. Anything else that you want to share before we wrap up, Kirk?

Kirk Williams: Let’s make sure to get a cortado in London together.

Frederick Vallaeys: Sounds good. Okay. Well, thank you everyone for watching this episode. If you’ve enjoyed it, please hit the subscribe button and we’ll let you know when the next one comes out. If you have something interesting to say and would like to be a guest, also put that in the comments. We love to find new people to talk to. And with that, thank you Kirk for being on the show. Thank you everyone for watching. I will see you for the next one.