How Can PPC, Paid Social, & SEO Teams Unlock Higher Revenue by Working Together

Episode Description

Most businesses use PPC, SEO, and paid social to grow their revenues. But here’s where it goes wrong: while they have a common goal, they work in silos—which is ineffective from a business perspective.

But when working together, they can share each other’s learnings and insights that can influence their business revenues down the line.

In this episode, I spoke to Danny Gavin who runs Optidge, an agency that helps businesses grow using PPC, SEO, paid social, and more.

Danny talked about how those multiple departments can collaborate and share insights to drive more effective results.

Watch this episode to learn:

- How to bring in those teams to work together

- What insights can each team share with each other

- How does working with first-party data fit into the dynamics between these teams

- What are some struggles they can face when sharing data between platforms

and more

Episode Takeaways

1. Bringing Teams to Work Together:
   • Effective collaboration between PPC, SEO, and social media teams enhances overall campaign effectiveness by leveraging insights across channels.
   • Encourage interdepartmental communication to ensure strategies across channels are cohesive and mutually reinforcing.
2. Insights Sharing Between Teams:
   • Paid social insights can inform SEO and PPC strategies with current trends and audience engagement data, aiding keyword and content strategies.
   • PPC data on high-converting keywords can refine SEO efforts, ensuring content optimization is data-driven.
3. Working with First-Party Data:
   • Utilizing first-party data across teams enhances targeting accuracy and complies with privacy regulations by reducing reliance on third-party data.
   • Helps navigate privacy challenges, ensuring marketing efforts are both effective and compliant.
4. Struggles with Sharing Data Between Platforms:
   • Discrepancies in platform reporting can lead to confusion; unified attribution models or third-party assessments can help align these metrics.
   • Overcoming data-sharing challenges requires clear, common understanding and alignment on performance assessments across teams.

Additional Takeaways:

• Cross-Channel Marketing Efficiency: Integration of strategies across SEO, PPC, and social media optimizes the marketing funnel from awareness to conversion.
• Impact of Privacy Regulations: Adaptation to privacy regulations is crucial, necessitating a shift towards first-party data usage.
• Future of Digital Marketing with AI: The integration of AI tools will shift the focus to strategic creativity, demanding higher-level strategy involvement from digital marketers.

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.com, a PPC management tool. For today’s episode, we’ve got Danny Gavin and he runs Optidge Agency, and he works on PPC, SEO, social media marketing. So we thought it’d be a really good chance to talk about sort of this cross channel marketing that you could do.

We often talk just about PPC, but obviously if you have SEO efforts going on, if you have social media efforts, helping you with the upper funnel, all of that influences what happens down the line in PPC, what do you learn from one channel that you can apply to another channel, how do changes in privacy regulation, but for example, First party and third party cookies change the things that you can and cannot do.

How do you set up reporting to learn from one system and bring it to another system? So these are all questions we wanted to talk about. And so we’re going to get running here with another episode of PPC town hall. All right, Danny, welcome to the show.

DANNY GAVIN: Thank you. So excited to be here.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

You’re calling in from Houston today, right? Yeah. Houston, Texas. So I was actually born in South Africa and my parents immigrated to America when I was a baby. And you know, why Texas out of all places, I have no clue. It was to basically meet my wife many years later. But I think we had a, an aunt here and you know, for any of those people have immigrated.

DANNY GAVIN: You know, you ideally want to go to a place where you have a little bit of family to make it a little bit easier. So, you know grew up in the world of digital. I built my school’s website when I was in seventh grade and hold one second, just

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: your school’s website in seventh grade.

DANNY GAVIN: Yeah. In seventh grade, I was about 98.

I built my school’s website using geo cities and HTML. And about a year later, my. Parents launched their first e commerce website back in 99. So I really grew up in like this environment. You know, a couple of years, if we kind of go past that I, in 2010, I got my MBA at the university of Houston and that’s really where I started.

Doing digital marketing professionally, took a lot of courses that touched upon there, did the Google online marketing challenge, had a really good internship at a company called blinds. com, which years later was bought up by Home Depot. And that really brought me into the professional world. When I left there, I, I consulted for digital marketing and then in 2017 decided, okay, let’s.

Try to turn this thing into an agency. And about seven, eight years later, we’re about a team of 30. And like you mentioned, I’m focusing on SEO, paid social and paid search. And then in my spare time, I also teach at the university, Houston digital marketing. I’ve been doing that for nine years. A little secret.

It’s a great way to recruit is to teach and then find the best people in your class and get them over. And that’s kind of how we got quite a few of our rock stars at Optidge. And, you know, I do a podcast and a couple other things as well.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, and it’s interesting. So you you built that website for your school.

That was my first foray into digital as well. I was in high school. It was just come to America. I was in 1990. Or 95 and I bought a domain name and then we decided and one of my friends had a scanner And we would scan in the daily like physics homework And post it on the website so that if people forgot their sheet at school They could they could grab it from there And we thought it would be really cool to make a background on the website, which was basically a tiled photo of the professor or the teacher but yeah sort of the look and feel back then it was Pretty crazy when you look back on it now.

But that was fun. That that was and the teachers, like nobody knew what was going on. And it’s a little bit the same, I think today, right. But GPT being used by students and teachers trying to catch up to what are students really doing here? How does that fit in? So you’ve

DANNY GAVIN: been on the cutting edge for a while

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: now?

DANNY GAVIN: Yeah, I think that’s a great comparison. It’s funny, because when you think about it, yeah, back then, building that website, they didn’t even know what a website was. I remember, like, speaking to the principal, and they didn’t even know what it was talking about. So, yeah, I think that ChachiBT comparison is great.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: So yeah, let’s talk a little bit then about the agency, right? So you said you do SEO, paid digital, paid social. Did you start in one area and then sort of layer in the others or how did that come to be like, why did you decide that all three were necessary?

DANNY GAVIN: So I’m an SEO by heart. So I would think that’s where I started personally.

So I think I basically started in the world of SEO and then naturally paid search came along. And then when I started the agency, one of my first hires Was very passionate. And I think really how the agency fell into paid social was because we started, you know, I had a friend who knew this company that was doing a lot of Kickstarter campaigns and in order to do Kickstarter successfully, you really had to create an audience ahead of time so that when you launch the product, you actually get sales and getting those sales, you 24 hours is a big deal.

So that’s kind of our first foray into paid social was like, Ooh, let’s start doing this. Let’s see how we can help these Kickstarter campaigns. So we naturally. You know, started doing paid social as well.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: And then, so that’s really interesting because what you figured out was and you didn’t quite say, but I think you alluded to it was in a Kickstarter.

There’s an algorithm that probably boosts the projects that have momentum and those first 24 hours. You figured out what that algorithm was, what you needed to do, but then if you used a different channel to, to sort of boost that up so, so are there other synergies there that you you see between social paid and and SEO?

DANNY GAVIN: Yeah. So delving in, so like when we were focusing on Kickstarter, that was back in 2017, so obviously the, a lot of years have gone under the bridge, you know, I think looking from that perspective, you know, with SEO in particular, a lot of the keyword tools that one uses. And you’re kind of figuring out and doing your topic research.

Often those tools are only going to show keywords and things that have a lot of volume. And we know the whole concept of like zero. Search key, you know, volume keywords. Those are really important because 70 percent of searches every single day are unique and new. So part of the question is. You know, how do I know which keywords to use?

What topics are trending? If the actual search volume is not necessarily there. So actually looking into the world of paid social or even just social media in general, but looking at tags, looking at trending topics, what’s important a lot of SEOs don’t necessarily look at paid social to do their sort of keyword and topic research, but it’s a really, it’s a like important tool that one should include as well that the traditional SEO tools don’t really pick up on that, on those trends and on that data.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: And so it sounds a little bit like sequencing, right? So social is where things become buzzy, becomes, become trending. And then I guess you use. Paid so I mean obviously there’s paid social where you can boost some posts around that There’s also ppc and paid search where you can very quickly do something with it and then seo sort of like that last step where you make the The content that’s now trending.

Hopefully eventually will become evergreen How do you think about sort of the sequencing of things?

DANNY GAVIN: So I’ll take a little different perspective on the SEO and paid search. The way I like to compare it, you know, at least to my clients is about like the difference between investing in real estate versus investing in the stock market.

You know, SEO and PPC in a sense cover the same ground, but a lot of it is based on time. So SEO we know takes time, kind of like a real estate investment. Yeah. There are those people who buy those houses and flip them right away, but most people are in it for the long game. Yeah. And over time, they’re going to see larger turns.

So getting into SEO, it’s sort of that longterm with, with PPC, right? You can see results a lot quicker. And therefore, so now when we look at both of them, Ideally, if someone has the right budget, they should be focusing on both. So what does PPC give to SEO a heck of a lot? And that’s why it’s interesting.

I think the way I sell, let’s say if someone comes along and they’re very You know, they’re apprehensive of digital marketing. Like I’m not talking about those companies that have done it, but especially new ones. Like, what do I focus on? And usually you’re going to push paid search first because that’s kind of like the proving ground.

I’m able to see is digital marketing going to work? Will we see conversions? What are the keywords that are going to work? So once you can sort of prove it in that kind of biosphere and they have faith both in you as the agency, but also in digital marketing general, then you can get some, okay, I’m Now let’s work on that long term investment as well.

We also know the, you know, the, the important factor of when you’re doing SEO, there are a lot of metrics we have, but we don’t necessarily have, what are the. Terms that are going to convert. So when you have that PPC data and you know, okay, interesting, these are the terms that are converting. It makes it a lot easier to know what should you focus on an SEO besides for like difficulty score and volume.

But if you have that third metric of, Ooh, these are the terms I should convert. It’s going to make it a lot easier in your SEO plan of what to focus on.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, I mean, and back to the housing analogy, I suppose you buy a house, your website, and you need to know, should I remodel my kitchen or my bathroom, which, which is going to have the biggest bang for the buck and PPC is that immediate data, right?

So not only will it tell you if I renovate the kitchen, this many people are going to come and want to look at it versus if I renovate the living room. But you also kind of get some understanding about CPAs, return on ad spend, return on investment. And now you start investing into that website.

But because the PPC, while it is the short game, sometimes if you have a crappy website or a crappy house, like nobody’s going to buy it, right? Like you can drive a ton of volume, but you’re not necessarily going to get the return on ad spend. It’s going to make you happy. So you have to do that renovation effort on the website.

Now, now talk a little bit about when you go into a website. You do these renovations and you make it better. How much do you think about CRO conversion rate optimization and user experience versus SEO efforts? Or are these one in the same?

DANNY GAVIN: I think that’s where we talk about like bringing in the cross channel, right?

It’s funny, but naturally. Different departments or different service lines. The way that I look at, like, look at things differently, right? So like a paid search person, you know, we’re developing a landing page and that landing page needs to have a call to action button, let’s say like every, you know, a couple frames, and we’re really thinking about that.

We’ve got this opportunity with this individual there, how we’re going to make it very easy for them to contact us. And that’s kind of how they’re built and driven everything they’re doing. In an SEO world, we’re not always thinking about that, right? We’re just thinking about, okay, how do I get this?

You know, how is this page really clear? Does it solve the questions that people have and they don’t have, but sometimes they forget, right? Okay, that’s great, but what are they going to do next? So that’s where it’s kind of like, it’s good to put like that PBC mindset and then SEO mindset together where it’s like, yes, we have to make sure that this ranks, but what’s going to happen next.

And therefore really When you are doing SEO, there has to be that like CRO. There has to be that perspective of it’s not just about getting people here. But then we got to move them to the next level.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, exactly. And you have to make a usable, right. And that’s ultimately what Google says they want is they want to have a great experience.

They want you to answer questions, help consumers get what it is they want to get. I mean, do you believe in that framework or like with the whole EAT thing from Google? How do you go about that? Do you follow the Google guidelines or do you sort of like push it in a different direction?

DANNY GAVIN: I think it’s important.

It’s definitely important to follow the Google guidelines, especially when it comes to EAT certain industries, right? It’s, it’s important that the content that you have is authoritative. It’s true. It’s got backing. So yeah, there’s no reason that you wouldn’t do that. I think what we’re talking here is more about you know, is, is thinking in a conversion focused mindset.

And therefore, with that, you’re still going to have authoritative content, but you also have to find a way to push people. And this

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: is cool, right? Because it’s saying like what SEO’s objectives are can be the same or can be very much in line with the PPC mindset. And so they’re not mutually exclusive.

And so I think you as an integrated agency, you kind of have that unified approach to it. Now, did you ever have clients who come in and have maybe had different agencies or different teams working on social and paid and organic? What struggles do you think they often have had that you can help them with?

DANNY GAVIN: I have a wonderful example. So I were just finished an eight week consulting project with a very large e commerce slash retailer. They have like 32 locations across the U S and they worked with one agency on paid search, one agency on paid social, and they were extremely frustrated. Because let’s like paint the picture.

They know that they made 10 million in revenue, let’s say last month. But when they get the Google report, it says that they made six. And then when they get the Facebook report, it says that they made seven. And then when you add it together, it’s like, what? This doesn’t make sense. We, you know, we all know we only made 10, what do we look?

And then when I go into Google analytics, you know, Facebook reports, you know, let’s say 600, 000, but in Google analytics, there’s only 50, 000. You know, how do we, how do we solve this? And, you know, when we speak to the one agency there, Like you know, we’re focusing on Google and this is what we do, you know, and there’s no one really to come in.

So they were like, okay, Danny, we need you to come in like a third party perspective, we’re not asking you to trash anyone, but really what’s a model that we can use to run our business when we getting these things that we don’t even know what the source of truth is. So if you think about it, that’s something that every large company that’s working on multiple channels has to deal with that issue.

And either. Let’s say one of, if they’re working with multiple agencies, there needs to be an agency that grabs it by the horn and says, I know I’m not doing paid social, but let’s work together to try to come up with a model. That’s going to work great for the business, or there should hopefully be someone inside the company in the firm who can do that, like synthesis or.

You know, or create that multi attribution model, or in this case, they hired like a third party person, but this is a real problem that a lot of people have. And now, even if you have an agency that does everything, it’s still not easy to figure out these attribution models, but for sure, when you’re working with multiple agencies, it makes it even more difficult because everyone has their own benefit in mind, right?

Like I want Google to be the best, and I don’t want to see how maybe some of it is really coming from Facebook and vice versa.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah and one thing that i’ve recently heard is any brand search that google takes credit for no matter what your attribution model you should give google no credit for that, right?

Because basically the only reason people know about your brand is not being present in search. It’s your seo efforts. It’s your social efforts It’s your outdoor campaigns your radio ads your tv or whatever you do speaking at events That’s what builds your brand and then when people go and like search for that brand on google You They deserve absolutely no credit for it.

And do you think that’s a dangerous approach if you take that or what would you recommend here? So I recently, I was speaking to one of my senior paid search strategists, and I think it’s like two perspectives, you know, on one hand. A lot of clients expect that they’re like, I don’t want to give credit to brand when you’re running a paid search campaign.

DANNY GAVIN: And we know that like the return on ad spend or your cost per leads or whatever that’s going to be often is very different on the brand. Right. So you could spend like 500 a month on brand and get, you know, a hundred thousand dollars in sales, you know, and spend multiple hundred thousands and the row has is totally different.

So whether you’re So some agencies have the goal of really separating this out really, really clearly. So even if you’re running PMAX campaigns, your search campaigns, having it clearly demarcated. So you’re clearly able to say, what is our ROAS or, you know, what is our return on branded? And what’s non branded.

The other side of the table says it’s hard to do that, right? Here’s PMAX, which You want to add as many assets and levers so that Google can figure things out. So by you taking out brand, you’re kind of taking out one of the ingredients. Now, as we know, there’s some cool scripts out there that can help you, you know, further define PMAX and figure out the brand or the non brand, but this is a real issue.

I want to add one other thing to think about. I know we’re talking from a paid search perspective, but let’s talk on the SEO side. You know, I had a client in the past couple of months who they didn’t want to give us any credit on any branded SEO search, which is crazy. Right? So it’s kind of like, you know, the Google guys, we can’t get credit on the branded on the SEO guys that can’t get branded.

And therefore we had to, we had to come up with a whole reporting method in SEO. Because. I’ll step back a second. As you know, many years ago from an SEO, we could go into Google analytics and see our actual keywords, right? What were the keywords that we were ranking for over time? Because of privacy, those keywords went away and therefore it’s not easy to necessarily know what traffic I got from which keywords, but we’ve come up with a cool reporting method where we can estimate like for every page, potentially what’s the percentage of branded traffic and non branded traffic.

And the reason I had to. Like sort of come up with this model was specifically for these types of clients, because they’re like, how can you get value on my branded search when we’re running all these Google ads and we’re running all these PR campaigns and, you know, and therefore I don’t want to give you any credit for that only show me non branded.

So it’s just, it’s funny. It’s just funny how this works.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: And that speaks to the fact that there’s not one right answer of how you do attribution, because clearly it’s just it’s how the company thinks about the value that’s being created. And then there’s also the piece of how do you actually put the measurements in place?

Now I was at a fascinating keynote that Ryan Fishkin did at SMX Munich a couple of weeks ago, and he basically said attribution is dead because all the privacy regulations make it incredibly hard To look across platforms and so Google takes credit for the Google portion. Facebook takes credit for the Facebook portion and it’s just you have these wild gardens and so now you end up in a situation like you said, you got 13 million of supposed revenue and your books and your bank account only says you made 10 million in revenue.

So any tips or tricks, like how. Do you the agency deal with building those different attribution models based on what the customer wants and based on what data is still available?

DANNY GAVIN: Sure. So I think, you know, the model that I’m currently using now that there are tools out there, you know, that you can buy for like multiplied attribution and complicated attribution models.

But for now, you know, I’m always a big believer in showing best case, worst case, medium case scenarios, right? Let’s say I’m doing a. Forecast you know, yes, we have experience, but in the end of the day, I don’t know exactly. So it’s important that when we present something, we see what are the different options.

So I think what’s cool now with Google Analytics 4 is that we do have the ability to look at different attribution models from first user perspective, from the session perspective, from the data driven perspective. We know that the data that’s going into Google Analytics 4, it’s not necessarily all a hundred percent, like, exactly what it is.

We know that let’s say 75 percent is accurate. 25 percent is modeled. So I think anyway, Google is kind of preparing us for this world where, you know, Google analytics used to be the Bible and everything that was true, even if it wasn’t, but that’s what people thought. And it’s kind of getting us used to this concept where Rand is saying, like, eventually these are, you know, it’s going to be less truth, but more kind of signals.

But the point is with these sort of different data points and attribution points, I can create this sort of blended model. Where you know, you know, I have like my own recipe, like, look at this attribution model, you know, take a certain percentage you know, and then anything over the top will give a different percentage, kind of just creating these sort of system where it’s a little bit more realistic, and it’s not giving that full credit a tool like Google Analytics 4 can help you do that And that’s something that what I’m currently using in combination with the reporting of the platform itself.

And one other interesting point just to, to think about is that we shouldn’t, even though we have these attribution models, it’s difficult to put that on the PPC team on the paid social team, because what they have. is their platform that they use and they’re optimizing based on the data that’s inside of there.

Now we might have a separate model to help us make our business decisions on what to do, but it’s difficult to expect people to kind of like use your, your attribution model when what they’re using day to day is the data, which is inside the platform.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Do you think that’s a restriction and a limitation of the tools and the platform, or if you had a way to bring that data back to that team and make it actionable?

Would they actually make better decisions?

DANNY GAVIN: I love that question. I, I think it’s a limitation to the tool, right? And that’s why Mr. Optmyzr, right? If, if there’s a way that we But that’s the idea, right? So the point is Is if I just have the Google ads platform or the meta platform, and I’m just seeing the data that it’s giving me, it’s difficult to make those decisions.

But if in my platform or tool that I’m using, I’ve got the pure, you know, the pure data, I’ve got the data from GA4, maybe multiple attribution models, maybe there’s a custom model that I’m able to add, because I know that this is what it is. And then I can see the data in that format. Yeah, for sure. I would be able to make better decisions.

I’ll give you an example of what it’s like in a simple way, but we know in the world of Google ads, especially in lead generation you know, I can optimize based on cost per lead, but really it’s, that’s a bad idea because it’s possible that the leads that are cheaper are bringing. You know, bad quality, actual customers.

So it’s the same concept. It’s like, you know, and then what’s the solution for that is, you know, bringing back the sales data, but we know that in Google ads, there’s like a 90 day period. So, but the same concept is the more data we can bring in one spot and I can see, it’s going to allow me to make better decisions.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah. Okay. And so your team GA4 is sort of the unifying data solution. Now generally speaking, you think GA4 is better than universal analytics? I got to be careful. I think my answer to that is there’s certainly more data and it’s, it’s more it’s certainly more advanced, but it also means that more people probably use it incorrectly, set it up incorrectly, haven’t set it up.

And so. It’s kind of like, what’s the best camera, right? It’s, I’ve got a beautiful Nikon digital SLR higher quality than my iPhone, but my iPhone is my better camera because it’s the one that I have in my pocket. And I can use at any moment notice, I would say potentially with universal analytics, right?

It was better in the fact that it was just more accessible.

DANNY GAVIN: I will say the gift that it’s given us is this concept of, I like universal had multi attribution reports, but I feel like it’s. It’s making it a little bit more mainstream and it’s going to open up the mind of like the average user and maybe the average business owner who didn’t understand that concept.

I feel like it makes it a lot more accessible and, and that’s a good thing for where we’re heading.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah. And I suppose. Analytics in the beginning, many people didn’t understand how it worked, what it was tracking, and it took us a decade plus. And then, and then we got there and then here’s GA4 kind of changing it all up again.

And a lot of that is honestly driven by privacy regulations and measurement restrictions, deprecation of third party cookies European privacy law. So it’s, it’s quite complicated. Another interesting point that I mean, Rand Fishkin made at that keynote that I watched was towards the end of the presentation.

He said, well, attributions dead, measurement still works, but honestly, none of it matters. And he was making some points around the lines of just be useful. To your perspective customer, but whatever you do specifically doesn’t really matter that much. Now, I think a lot of people were arguing with that.

I would argue with that. I think you still need to measure and bring an attribution. But let’s maybe shift the discussion on top of this. Like social, why do we do social? Like we haven’t talked about that much, but where does that fit into all of this?

DANNY GAVIN: So I think you alluded to the beginning paid social is one of the largest ways to increase that top of funnel traffic.

Now we know even in Google ads itself, there are more top of funnel. I think we S we see from a page social perspective, it’s really about increasing that interest when people don’t know about it. And we know how powerful meta is. And then for, for, we know how powerful LinkedIn ads are. We’re doing a little bit of experimentation with Reddit and even next door.

I know that sounds kind of weird next door ads, but I mean, it’s amazing. What, what these platforms can do in order to inspire people and let them know that these, that products is this, and certain platforms are better to get the actual sale when it comes to paid social. But, but that’s a really important, but that’s why paid social is an important part.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Well, and I think it’s sort of what’s the awareness level of the prospective customer and they have to be problem aware to even go to, I think, Reddit and Google, right? Because when you think about upper funnel on Google, somebody is expressing some needs, so they are aware of a problem or the same on Reddit.

You’re probably part of a conversation because they have some problem where I think social is particularly interesting. And honestly, a bit scary to myself is it makes me think I have problems that had never even occurred to me. Or it shows me stuff that’s like, yeah, that’s, that’s a really cool gadget.

I’m like, do I need it? No, but do I want it? Yes. And so it’s it’s really driving consumerism in a massive way. And then in other ways, it’s it is good because it makes you think about, well, You know, at work, maybe I struggle with cross channel reporting and maybe it’s something that I was fundamentally aware about, but I hadn’t expressed it.

And now, by seeing that there are some solutions, it does push you down that path of, oh, yeah, let me go on Reddit. Let me read about it. Let me go and do a Google search. And then eventually. Come down to that branded search and and buy the product.

DANNY GAVIN: And I’ll tell, I’ll tell you the beautiful thing about paid social in the sense for the agency.

You know, a lot of marketing has turned more into like, tactical, right? Like creating the Google ad campaigns and, and you know, optimizations and things like that. And kind of the, the heart of the marketer. Of like, who’s the persona we’re targeting? What are their problems? You know, in the world of SEO and paid search, some of that has been lost.

I think Google’s kind of pushing us more to that, but in the world of paid social where, right, there is no awareness. And a lot of what we do in the time we spend is understanding who is the customer, what are their problems? What are the pain points? How can we answer those building out those strong personas and really So that perspective of approaching someone with like more of a true marketing perspective, that’s something that’s kind of built in the paid social department.

And it’s something that can really be shared with other departments to kind of bring that marketing perspective. Even when you’re doing an SEO, are you looking at a true persona and the same thing with paid search as well?

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: You’re right. At the end of the day, we are digital marketers, but that marketer often gets lost because SEO is so tactical in terms of like, Hey, I got to reach out.

I got to do my link building in PPC. It’s so tactical because I got to look at my budget. I got to make sure my keywords are in order. But you’re right. I mean, the platforms and especially on the paid search side. It is becoming more automated, and I think the technology and the day to day becomes more of a monitoring function and making sure that the automated systems are doing or following the strategies that you want them to follow.

So you know, that kind of brings us to maybe automation, but like, where does generative AI and automation fit into how your agency operates?

DANNY GAVIN: Ooh, well, I love, I love it. I love it. It is a big topic, you know, I, I think as we see it’s coming and, you know, there’s a lot of posts that I’ve been seeing on LinkedIn, like, you know, it’s going to be here in 10 years.

And if you, you know, if 95 percent of what you did. It’s not there anymore. You know, what is the 5 percent you can focus on and how can you start focusing on now? So we know that

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: because Sam Altman basically as founder of open AI said specifically about marketers that 95 percent of marketers would be out of a job due to generative AI and open AI specifically doing the tasks they do, which is writing ads, figuring out audiences, generating keywords.

And so nowadays when we talk, it’s like, You, my audience, you are the chosen 5 percent because you’re here listening to like the great insights, you’re not going to be the ones out of a job because you’re going to take it to the next level. But I think that’s what everybody’s trying to push. Right? So, so how do you think about how do you stay in that?

Do you want to be in that 5 percent first of all, or are you okay with being the 95%? And if you want to be the 5%, how do you stay there? So I think that. So I think the, the agencies or the marketers where strategy is key, right? If, if we can have strategic minds, if we’re able to look at a perspective from a high level and like, you know, have that comprehensive marketing strategy where you’re looking at multiple platforms and how they work together and what to do.

DANNY GAVIN: I think that those are the people who are going to survive. If you’re too specific in what you’re doing it’s possible that certain things are gonna be automated and, and we’ll go out. I think what the challenge is when you’re running an agency, and I think this is for a lot of agency owners, is we’re so busy with our day to day of just managing our accounts and putting on new clients.

And. We really have to create that space and time to be like, Ooh, AI is coming. How can we, let’s look at what are the new tools that are out there or what are some of the strategies that we can take in order to better automate what we’re doing, you know, if, if a general setup time for an account took 40 hours, can we take AI and maybe cut it down by 25 percent so that we can be more efficient?

And, you know, eventually maybe we have to lower our prices a bit. So I think the thing is, how can agencies create that time to Think through that when everyone is so busy and we kind of have to force our people and make incentives in order to create that space so that they can learn and do more because otherwise we just get lost in the rut of the day to day.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: And just a value proposition is changing then, right? Like you, like you said, the lower your prices You may have to do that, but so you, you lower your prices for your existing capabilities and services, but hopefully you figure out with that extra time that your team has, what’s the higher value at, what’s the more strategic thing that the computer and the automation is going to have a tough time.

And I think that’s where you’re teaching, right? So you’re again on the cutting edge and sort of looking at the future and the future generation of marketers. But, but how do you inspire them to, or what is it you think they should. Learn today to be relevant five years from now when generative AI is that much further along.

DANNY GAVIN: So I think one of the ways that we do it is in our curriculum, typically, you know, we teach a certain marketing concept whether it’s SEO, PPC, paid social, and then they get like an in depth homework, which kind of allows them to learn the steps. Let’s take an example, like keyword research. You know, what are the 12 steps that you should do in order to really come up Comprehensive keyword research document.

So we have that set up and the students have to go through it. You know, it could take them many hours to do it. And then a week later, after they’re ready to submit it, I then hand them a page and say, Hey, this is how you do it on chat to PT. And they basically do the same thing and they kind of freak out like what, why did you make me take four 30 seconds?

But it’s cool. Because number one, we’re teaching them the soul of the matter, but then now that they really understand it, how can we now use a tool to better, you know, to, to, to, to make that output faster and quicker. And, and also part of like the questions in there is I want them actually critically look at the results and say, did the results actually, are they better or would you still have to tweak?

So I think what I’m trying to do, and I think hopefully a lot of educators are, we, instead of being afraid of these tools. I know in a lot of a lot of classrooms specifically where essays are a big part of the grading system. Professors, because they don’t know how to test their, you know, their students, they’re kind of pushing it away.

But we have to incorporate these tools in our classrooms and show our students how to use it. And the more that we do that, they’re not going to be afraid and it’s going to get them ready. So I think that’s it. That’s what education has to go to.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, exactly. I mean, you’re not competing against AI.

You’re competing against people who know how to use the AI better than yourself. So that’s the right way to teach. And then I also love the whole thing about knowing the fundamentals. If you just get dropped in and it’s like, here’s GPT generate keywords, but you don’t even know the fundamentals of why do we have keywords?

What does a keyword look like? Then you can’t be critical of the GPT system and you can’t put in place your own layers of protection to make sure you don’t mess up your client’s account. Great. Hey, well this has been some fantastic stuff, but we love to end with a set of rapid fire questions. So are you ready for those?

I’m

DANNY GAVIN: ready.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Okay. So number one, what’s something you wished you had known before you got into PPC and digital marketing?

DANNY GAVIN: Ooh, how quickly everything changes.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yep. That can be a challenge. So our next question, what’s one common PPC myth that you would like to debunk or it could be an SEO or a social myth.

DANNY GAVIN: Ooh. Yeah. I think that, that more traffic equals more conversions. It’s really about the quality, not just the quantity.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah. Well said. What’s your favorite AI tool and how do you use it?

DANNY GAVIN: I love chat GPT for, and I use it every single day from helping with emails a little, I’ll tell a little secret you know, award submissions.

That’s a really great way to synthesize data and get that. That’s a kind of a little bit of a hack code, but it works really well. But yeah, I mean, you know, just using it as much as I can for things that, you know, that might take me an hour and now it can take me five, 10 minutes.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Nice. With the pivot towards more privacy focused marketing, what is one important skill that marketers should develop to stand out in 2024 and beyond?

DANNY GAVIN: Ooh, I’m going to get a little tactical on this one specifically for Google ads. There’s enhanced conversions, which are really important. And I think that’s a skill that we have to start implementing. So, you know, knowing how to use Google tag manager and being able to implement enhanced conversions in an, in an, in an easy way, I think is going to be important, especially for the PPC marketers out there.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Great. All right, Danny Gavin, thank you for coming on PPC Town Hall. If people want to know more about you or Optidge, where can they where should they look?

DANNY GAVIN: Sure. So I’m, I’m active on LinkedIn. You can follow me there. And then Optidge, you can find us at optidege.com and my podcast is the Digital Marketing Mentor Podcast.

And we’re available wherever you see your podcasts.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Great. Check it out. Yeah. Well, thanks again. Thanks everyone for watching. If you enjoyed the show, be sure to hit the button below to subscribe and we’ll notify you about the next one coming up. Danny, thank you again, and we’ll see you next time.

DANNY GAVIN: Thank you.