How Search Generative Experience Could Change How You Run Google Ads

May 8, 2024

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Episode Description

Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) is a big change from how searches usually work.

For decades we’ve been used to seeing 10 blue links for our searches—and clicking on them took us to web pages.

With SGE, the process changes. We’re seeing answers to our queries directly in the search results, removing the need to click on links. And we’re also seeing changes in ad placements, which significantly impact our organic search and paid search performance.

In this episode, I spoke to Ashley Fletcher - CMO at Adthena, a paid search intelligence platform.

Ashley talked about how SGE can impact search performance and how advertisers can adapt to those changes. He also touched on the implications of privacy regulations on Google Ads and more.

Watch this episode to learn:

- How SGE is changing paid and organic search performance

- How privacy regulations can impact your Google Ads

- How generative AI helps scale the execution of marketing strategy

Episode Takeaways

Prepare Your YouTube Campaigns for Q4

Starting promotions early before peak purchasing periods can build essential audience awareness.
Dedicated campaigns for promotions help control budget and focus marketing efforts effectively.

Use Generative AI for YouTube Campaigns

Generative AI can rapidly create engaging content and help in content strategy by providing quick adaptations and variations.
It’s crucial to explore using generative AI for scriptwriting and content creation to streamline campaign processes.

Protect Your Video Campaigns from Brand Safety Mishaps

Regular monitoring and adjusting of placement reports is necessary to ensure ads appear in appropriate contexts and avoid brand safety issues.
Proactive strategies are needed in video placement to maintain control over where ads are displayed, especially with complex platforms like YouTube’s Performance Max.

Additional Insights

The integration of video content across different platforms maximizes reach and effectiveness, emphasizing the need for consistent video strategy.
Advertisers should focus on creating a strong synergy between paid and organic efforts on platforms like YouTube to enhance overall engagement and conversion rates.

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 CEO and co founder at Optimizr, the PPC management tool. For today’s episode, we’ve got Ashley Fletcher, who’s the CMO at Adthena , the search intelligence tool. that will also tell you how you’re doing on organic, how you’re doing on PPC and how you can use that information to make better decisions about your investments.

We’re going to talk quite a bit about the generative search experience and how that’s changing the way advertisers think about where their ads and their listings should appear. So with that, let’s get rolling with another episode of PPC Town Hall. Hey, Ashley, thanks for joining us today.

ASHLEY FLETCHER: Hey Fred, good to see you.

Thank you for inviting me.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, we’ve done a couple of sessions together, but glad to have you on PPC Town Hall. So, but for people who haven’t met you before, even though you’re at conferences all over the world, tell them a bit about who you are and what you do. Yeah, so my

ASHLEY FLETCHER: name’s Ashley Fletcher, CMO here at Adthena .

How many years have I been in search now? Quite a few. Not as many as you, though, Fred, but my backgrounds in product marketing was at Google for five years leading product marketing on search ads. So here at Adthena , leading our marketing team, we’re a search intelligence platform, so we provide competitive analysis, actionable insights, and a team of experts that helps brands, marketers, and agencies dominate their competitive landscape.

So looking forward to talking through some of those scenarios and learnings today with you.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, let’s do it. And of course, the last time we met each other was, I think at SMX six years ago to the day.

ASHLEY FLETCHER: To the day. So true story came up on my phone today with a reminder of San Jose and us talking at SMX West.

So, no, it’s

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Reminders you know, he has memories. Those were good memories when we still did events in person and they’ve come back a little bit more so in Europe, I think, than in the United States. But but yeah, it’s great to have you on the show today. So what’s top of mind for you these days, actually?

ASHLEY FLETCHER: Yeah, there’s it’s it’s been a great Yeah, really good positive start to the year. I think we’ve had a few events ourselves. So I think you get a bit of a shot in the arm, seeing customers and prospects out, you know, events as well. And we’ve been hosting dinners and and what not. So I think one of them coming through at the moment probably is brand incrementality.

So, so where, you know, brand is the last thing to be cut. Yeah. In paid search or search generally or advertising. I think the pressure, particularly what we’re seeing speaking to some of the senior executives is, you know, the pressure of an investment and that coming through and proving, you know, incrementality and return on investment.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: That’s a big question, right? Because if people come to search for your brand, clearly you must have done something to get them to know about your brand, which was maybe in social media. It made the thought leadership. So why wouldn’t brand be the first thing that you cut? Because Hey, if they know about you anyway, like even if you don’t show up in ads, like they’ll still find you.

Right. They know to type in the mail.

ASHLEY FLETCHER: Yeah, I don’t think you know with things like automation and the overlay there It’s it’s made it a little bit murky for google ads advertisers. I think particularly with with pmax I don’t think there’s a straight road to your brand as such. I think you you’re having to trust if you are opted into PMAX on your brand that, you know, the right ad is going to appear, or if you are even got negatives there, are they going to honor that as well?

And we’re seeing a real kind of mixed bag. I think that the positive that is coming out of it in particular, I heard this a lot last year is paid and organic working as two different functions in an organization is really hard to align where this is really squeezing them together. So I think where there is

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: more of a case now because of all the privacy regulations and the March 6th updates in Europe around permissioning, is that causing this murkiness and this issue or what’s what’s leading to this?

ASHLEY FLETCHER: Yeah, I think so. And yeah, our product development is uncovering more challenges there, but I think on the privacy side for sure. In our EMEA markets, it’s front and center, particularly when, you know, you work with a third party like ours, but well and truly in the observed data piece, so there’s no, no privacy concerns there with what you use from Adthena , but I think it’s It’s in now kind of front of mind the privacy pieces, particularly moving across and cookie less on the horizon again this year, but just sticking back onto the brand pieces just seeing people get getting quite obsessed with the click and where they go and we see instances where if you don’t have a really clear user journey through both paid and organic, then you know, tactics like, okay, we could save you a lot of money on your, your brand spend won’t work if those two channels aren’t aligned.

So it’s kind of it’s bringing a lot of the search ecosystem together. But the, the murkiness from, from P max, like I said, just recently, we’ve, we’re seeing accounts where. Adding negatives, even via Google reps, just hasn’t been honored. And we’re still finding evidence in the SERP where ads are still appearing where they shouldn’t.

And it’s not as clean as what ad managers want really.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: And so in those scenarios, is there a solution or basically complain to Google? Maybe get some credits. And that’s the extent of what you can do. Or have you found anything else?

ASHLEY FLETCHER: Yeah. So not to kind of blow our own trumpet too much, but I think there’s the product advancements there.

A lot of our roadmap is supporting that through brand activator, but our own experience with our own Google reps and no, we’re not the largest. Spender by any means, I think there was recent coverage where the, the customer support levels have dropped. Right. And there’s a whole bucket of us that have gone into, you know, a lower level customer support team.

And, you know, we’d be lucky if we do have, you know, fast response or insight as to why were these ads appearing when we clearly said that they weren’t. So I can only imagine the stress enterprise level, large spenders when When things go to do you go bad with with spend the sentiment. I don’t know if you’ve found this as well.

You know, I don’t think it’s too great to continually look back and things like that. You should try and look forward and be positive. But the launch of P max, I think, had everyone on on a back foot a little bit, and it just felt like it was a product launch that wasn’t enabled particularly well with, with our industry and it damaged trust somewhat.

And I know it has regained

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: our industry. Are you talking about e commerce, lead gen, or just like PPC more broadly?

ASHLEY FLETCHER: PPC more broadly. Okay. So you

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: think it was, I suppose that’s the thing, right? Google has these big, massive product launches and P max was one of them. And of course, it’s not going to be perfect.

It’s going to be full of holes. And and so some of the data we all wanted was certainly missing. And then like you’re saying, there’s bugs and it doesn’t seem to respect negative keyword decisions. But even it was only last week that we finally started getting the search terms data through the APO reports up until before.

Supposedly the fields were in the API, but they would never return anything.

So now it opens up all this insight. It’s like, Oh my God, yeah, they are actually showing these ads for these keywords that are cannibalizing our search campaigns and could be a brain campaign. So it opens up that next level of frustration, which now means like, Oh, we need to have better negative keyword management of some sort.

So what we do, right. It’s never going to be at that. Endpoint, but at least they seem to be evolving the products as a have you seen it gotten better to this point? Are you still frustrated with the level of pmax?

ASHLEY FLETCHER: No, I think what it’s done to the industry as a whole and there’s there’s some great you know advocates that follow your channel and comment on your pieces as well But the the innovation around scripts, I think has really helped You know a lot of people that you know, they don’t invest in at all like ours But they still need that level of transparency.

I think You It’s prompted the search industry just to find a way and navigate around this. And I think there are hacks if you like out there and, you know, there seems to be a new script every week that shines a light in a new area. Even that we quite enjoy, you know, our head to heads on. What we can see from search term reports versus what we index from Google as well.

And then mirror the two and there’s still a difference. But again, I think, you know, what have we got? We’ve got the Google live event coming up in May. I think, haven’t we?

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Google marketing live. Yes, exactly.

ASHLEY FLETCHER: Yeah, I do anticipate like a bit, a bit more transparency to go. I think that’s just my gut feel on it.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, I mean I think we’re going to be talking about Gemini.

ASHLEY FLETCHER: Yeah. Yeah.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah.

ASHLEY FLETCHER: Yeah. That’s been really interesting. To see that evolve. It feels like the, the major beneficiary of it at the moment, just from the evolution of the ad unit seems to be retail because it has some really awesome real estate.

When it does trigger but it seems like with, you know, search advertisers still. Okay. So what is the impact on CTR? You know, how’s it impacting my organic strategy? It seems to be a ton of questions around that still as well from So

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: I think generative ai has been helpful in terms of Data analysis, perhaps, and code and code interpreter capability of open AI doing some sort of the statistical analysis that may have been difficult for organizations to do.

So that’s where it could start to answer some questions and shine light, like you said, on, on some areas that might’ve been pretty dark in the past. How have, how has your organization deployed some of the degenerative AI to help advertisers or to even help your own organization?

ASHLEY FLETCHER: Yeah. So internally at the moment you know, our, our platform does show a lot of insights and I think where our users might be time poor, I think overlaying what we call Arlo to read or tell you insights as to what is happening in your market as, as resonated really well.

And that’s an area of generative AI that we’re continuing to invest in. I think that the other piece,

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Sorry to interrupt, but it shines light on the competitive landscape. So is it Is it a narration of the data that was already there, like flagging the highlights? How because that’s what your company does, right?

Is sort of search intelligence. So what is generative adding that maybe wasn’t there before? I

ASHLEY FLETCHER: think it’s a stronger narrative. And I think when we see usage on, you know, which days perhaps an executive might log into the application or a search manager, you know, People now want that content very quickly and distilled into five bullets that go into a deck along with the chart.

So even the simplicity in boiling down what might be, let’s say, you know, the last six week trends and just tell me what is going on with that and what my action should be is actually incredibly powerful. I think That’s the first instance. I think the other piece with chat GPT, again, it is just a real big efficiency push for us in, in the marketing team, where it comes to creating content, understanding ad groups or expansion of terms, et cetera.

So, you know, there’s, there’s lots of efficiency gains there, but the application I think will. Show really great advancements this year as we overlay more. I think the other piece with the secret sauce, if you like, is the learning models. If you sit on this much data as to what is happening, you and your competitive landscape, then it’s likely that you could predict that in the next 2 weeks, lawnmowers, let’s say.

Will grow by X amount and just trying to be ahead of the curve because when you’re relying on auction insights and those types of insights That types of data it might be quite segmented to a very very core group That’s that all you care about at the moment, but actually your relative market is much bigger than that So yeah, it’s finding a way of delivering all that in a concise way that captures your whole market is actually

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: And it’s interesting because sort of the prediction about lawnmowers, that’s more the statistical machine learning, the stuff that we’ve basically been doing for the last, I think, 20 years, almost but it’s like surfacing it in a way that, like, you’re saying the CMO.

The marketing manager can sort of make sense of it and building that narrative and framing and content of everything else that’s happening. And I find it very fascinating too. So within our product evolution, it used to be tables of campaign data and keyword data and people were like, wow, give us reports, give us visuals.

Okay. So that we’ve come up with a pretty chart and now it’s like, wow, you know, I see the chart, but like, what are the bullet points for that chart? And now it’s like the narration. Because you, you put that visual, the graph goes on the slide, the bullet points go into speaker notes.

ASHLEY FLETCHER: Yeah.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: That’s saying, you know, like Sam Altman is saying like 5 percent of digital marketers is all we need to keep the other 95 percent are going to be redundant thanks to a GPT.

So what do you think people should do to not be that 95%?

ASHLEY FLETCHER: Yeah, I think first off, I think it could be quite risky to, to hide from this stuff and, and, and just keep your head down. I think certainly what I’ve seen with my team, particularly the product team and tech team, I think we’ve, we’ve baked in a level of.

Time committed to innovation. So, so we’re actually comfortable with team members, whether that be on the marketing team, sales product or dev to, to say, right, okay, if you are doing a hackathon or you are understanding this technology, just work with it to understand how it could help you basically. And, and when we’re all stretched and we’re all trying to do 101 things at a time, as well as our day jobs, I think it’s really It’s a simple thing, but carving out that time to understand this is, is really key.

So yeah, so we’ve done it with a lot of the, the messaging frameworks that we use, that we try to resonate with the audience. So, so what is it that people really care about and, and using chat GPT to expand boiler plates or messaging frameworks is saved a lot of time, but it also uncovers. more angles that perhaps we didn’t think about in the first place or things to test.

So, so yeah, so my point would be sort of suck it up and try and try and learn to work with it because yeah, it will handle a lot of insights. I mean, probably the other example is, you know, messaging moves at a breakneck speed as well and understanding what the sentiment might be on the search results page.

To some people, they might think it doesn’t change, but actually it does an incredible amount, whether that be in the, you know, charity sector or retail discount codes, you know, those types of trends move a lot and you need this to understand it basically.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: So that’s interesting. So where do you use that?

In your marketing strategy.

ASHLEY FLETCHER: So the marketing strategy, Adthena , we would use it. For, you know, outbound and when I mean outbound, I mean, a lot of kind of email nurture as well. So we would scale that up more than one individual could, you know, send thousands of emails a day, let’s say. So AI has helped scale that.

An incredible amount from a search advertisers perspective, our solution would index more ads from paid and organic than any other solution. So if you think on a daily basis, we’re bringing back like 10, 000 ad copies in your sector, let’s say it’s running shoes or something like that, feeding that to chat GPT for, and telling us the themes, what’s coming through some of the lowest prices what are the price trends, what are the trends in discount codes.

That is the stuff that’s really, Right. So

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: the innovation here is that rather than you getting 10, 000 ads from competitors and having to find time somehow to find signal in that noise, the AI is grounded in the reality of these are the 10, 000 ads, find me things like, Hey, the price has changed or, or you were talking about sentiment, right?

So, and then. Explain that a little bit more when you see sentiment. Is that going beyond ads? Because I would assume that the sentiment of ads is generally like positive. Hey, buy my stuff.

ASHLEY FLETCHER: Yeah, yeah,

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: but on the organic, you probably have less control over your own brand. Other people are talking about it.

So is that where sentiment comes in? Yeah,

ASHLEY FLETCHER: I would give it a go. I mean, you know, the categorization you can steer, but if let’s say there’s a sentiment around discount or free, the word free featuring more in ads more prominently or curbside pickup is starting to come through as well. I think yeah, it really does skew by industry.

And I know, you know, a lot of the conversation is going down the retail route, but Yeah, I think there’s certainly different buckets that you can create for each of them, whether that be travel and, you know, reviews or what are coming, what’s coming through the ads there as well.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Now Sheriff search, that’s something you talk about, right?

ASHLEY FLETCHER: It is. Yeah. And yeah, that has been an area of interest for us for sure.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: So talk a little bit about where that fits into the strategy.

ASHLEY FLETCHER: Yeah. So share a search for us. I think it was a key topic probably early last year coming through. And I think it’s just understanding from a marketer’s perspective and it’s, it’s beyond just paid searches when you can get that incremental returns on your investment and market share coming through.

So you’re looking kind of for the The bell curve effect, I think what it’s kind of morphed into a little bit in the last six months in particular, is just understanding kind of your true market share. I think the best way that we can articulate that for advertisers is if you had a footprint. Across let’s say athletics and again, running shoes, the first bit is setting those foundations correctly for what, what could be your share.

So the first bit is like capture all of the relevant market. And that’s the first, I think, mistake that when people look for this benchmark and it is also, you know, I would say quite a senior level, because when you’re talking benchmarks, you want to assign budget to that and growth as well. I think the first mistake with that, when you’re looking to benchmark share of search is what are you benchmarking against?

Have you caught all of the relevant market? I think that’s where we’ve kind of excelled because you know, the solution would find gaps that you’re currently not appearing in, in your Google ads campaign, even with PMAX as well, and finding those opportunities for you. And then benchmarking that as well.

We’re looking actually to morph the, the share of search into kind of a basic market share model and the scoring. So later this year, we’ve got the search performance score coming out. And again, you’ll be able to see a score as to how effective you are in your relevant market there. I think, yeah, the benchmarks, again, the trick is to, to find an easy translation, I find.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: And then now. You got the results page to search results page. You’ve got your organic, you got your ads. Now generative is sort of that new portion of it. And it’s, I don’t think it’s in a lot of European countries, but in the United States, certainly I think in the UK you’re seeing that. But how, how is that changing things and how you measure share of search?

Is that now like. I mean, obviously you want to be number one in organic. You want to have an ad. You also want to be that generative response. How do you measure that and how do you make sure that you’re actually in that section?

ASHLEY FLETCHER: Yeah. I think honestly we’re, we’re the same as a lot of search advertisers at the moment and still trying to understand the impact of it, particularly on CTR because early assumptions is that it’s going to hurt organic quite a lot.

Yeah. But in the space of the last four months, we’ve seen SG ad units changing size quite considerably. So, for the time being, the way that we’re indexing the search results page, we’re still monitoring that with our data science team. I think the key trigger for us, and I’d wonder whether this will be announced in May as well at the the Google event is, you know, when are we going to be able to report on that in, in Google ads?

Thanks. Cause at the moment it is quite an unknown. I know. Yeah. In the U S market is triggering on, in, on an awful lot here in Europe less. So so yeah, so, so we’ll, we’re still learning the same as the rest of the industry at the moment, really.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: But the good news, I suppose, is that search is expensive.

So ads need to pay the bill. So I don’t think Google is going to reduce the number of ads, but I think advertisers would just have to maybe come to terms with the fact that The way we’ve been measuring things in terms of impressions and CTR. There might be fewer interactions with our own websites. But if that highly qualified traffic that’s clearly looking to purchase something, like they’re still going to have to come to the advertiser in the end.

Yeah that transaction if that still goes through google then great I mean like maybe some of these older metrics don’t matter anymore and they shouldn’t matter anymore What matters is how many sales did we get and how much did we pay to achieve that? So it’s it’s about profits, right? Yeah

ASHLEY FLETCHER: They don’t disrupt the model too much with that you wouldn’t think right you wouldn’t want to disrupt say the google shopping rail too much with this solution, but But

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: we’ll see.

That’s quite fascinating because I think when you look at Microsoft, they’ve been much less disruptive in terms of the inclusion of generative on the search results page. Google, I mean, I get search results pages now where like literally half the page is taken up by generative. And I like generative.

It’s oftentimes, it saves me from having to click on 10 links and do a bunch of research. It just gets me to where I need to be faster.

ASHLEY FLETCHER: Yeah.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: But that’s the end of the day, like. The consumer myself in that case, I’m still looking for a solution to my problem. I’m still going to buy something. Yeah. So I think universe of conversions of total conversions that exist that are out there to be gotten, that’s not going to shrink.

In fact, that’s going to increase, but how we get there. I think it’ll be fewer clicks. I think it’ll be fewer impressions and that’s okay. I think for advertisers, it’s really important to think about How do you help generative AI do the conversion and the transaction? And I’ve mentioned this a few times, but it’s building functions for open AI.

So if you have a system that allows someone to convert and buy something or submit a lead, make sure that the generative AI system has a function, do that natively, or. As opposed to having to drop you off and be like, okay, well, here’s the answer. But now if you actually want to do anything, now you have to go and like find a link and click on it and like fill in your information.

No, I think we need to think further. We need to be like, oh, the gen AI can do that. It knows who I am. It can fill out the forms for me, like me as an organization trying to sell something, whether that’s a, you know, service or a product, give the gen AI a function that taps directly into my API. So that the consumer can do the transaction through the generative experience.

ASHLEY FLETCHER: Yeah, but it just creates, well, I agree. I don’t think we’re too far away from that experience because the first point is even when you said your experience, you’re trapped in the SERP. In in that box initially rather than doing however many queries in the top bar and going and going and going again You’re kind of stuck in the sg experience But I think that’s gonna put a lot of pressure on You know your positioning And the content that you put in front of the user to do the job faster and shorter Span on the serve if that makes sense Where previously they might have ducked onto your kind of landing page seen that experience But for now, they’re doing a lot of that research and a lot of that journey in the SERP instead of opening up windows perhaps Because it seems to be front loading a lot of that sales funnel before you get to purchase, you know, further up onto the SERP and keeping you onto that real estate longer.

It seems, but again, right.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: There’s a whole notion of the zero click, right? Where the, the, the SERP itself answer so many of your questions through the various components on it that you don’t need to click out until you’re really ready to make that final decision. And my only argument there is that take that one step further.

Like me as a human. And so there’s a, if I need to buy new toilet paper, like, why do I need to go into an app or, I mean, I buy my toilet paper online, so I don’t go to the store. Why do I need to go into an app to click the button when I buy the same one every time? Like, why can’t I? Have a generative voice experience.

That’s like, hey, purchase this thing for me. And I think when we looked at Alexa in the past and voice assistants, it was like this one channel, right? You go down the Amazon path, but now generative, you layer that on top of Google and you can have a conversation and you can actually choose. Like, I’d like to buy my toilet paper.

From target and I like to buy these things from walmart. And if I need running shoes, I prefer my adidas ones and so it knows these preferences, but then hey, maybe nike just came out with a new shoe and in generative I can ask it across and i’ll be like what are the newest running shoes and like what people said about them gives me the narrated answer which is like A summary basically of me doing that research across 10 links on the on the search results page And then when I come to the end i’m like hey You Go and buy it.

And it says that we have it in three colors. What’s your size? I think all of that can be done through voice. Like, I’m so sick and tired myself of clicking on links and pulling up my phone to do things. And generative AI is like having a virtual assistant that’s always there for you.

ASHLEY FLETCHER: Yeah.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: But I mean, put it this way though

ASHLEY FLETCHER: though, Fred would, would you untangle the auction in that change?

Because, because that’s at the foundation of this. Because you would, you would bypass that and stay where you selected.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: But, and, and I hear you, right. So, and that’s kind of the big struggle for Google and the big question for advertisers. But right now, the way that organic is ranked and the way that the ads are ranked and the auction.

That fundamentally still feeds into the AI. And so maybe the question today is more, are you in the top 10 results that are fed into the generative component? But whether you’re number one or number 10 within that, that matters less than how the generative system is going to put it together. Now, you could very well assume that if answers one, two, and three in organic are basically saying the same thing, but it’s it’s not.

three different websites, the generative is going to pick up on that and say, that seems to be a more key point than that one thing. And number 10, that was only said one time. And so that that’s, that’s fundamentally going to shift how we think about what information do we even put in there and then how it comes back at us is going to change.

So, yeah, I mean, I think there is going to be disentanglement of the auction, but at the end of the day, we’re still Our mission is still provide relevant and useful information that Google in the past would have put on a page with 10 blue links and now maybe puts into a generative summarization that’s narrated to someone.

ASHLEY FLETCHER: Yeah. No, I think with that framing in, with my search advertisers, how, and I think there’s, there’d be clear signposts. If it went back to that and said, look, these are the slots that you need to get into. Then again, we’re going back 20 years, right? We’ve, we can see. That we want position 1, we want position 2, we can manage our positions there.

I think that That clarity is probably needed, but at the moment, I think it feels like a black box and to, to where we are now, we’re just getting out of that period where, okay, we kind of trust PMAX. We’re trying to find ways of working around it. We’re waiting to see how SGE is, is reported to us and how we engage with it.

We can kind of see the benefits. I don’t know. It just feels like it, it might’ve gone or is going slower than perhaps Google anticipated. Because I still see the pushback even to your point when you see an audience in person and the great question to start with, it’s like, Oh, what do you think about your brand CPCs?

And everyone like just goes mental and hate it because there’s just so much pain around there. It’s just yeah, it’s I still feel there’s some trust issues and Solutions to solve just basic Google ads at the moment as well.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah. And listen, that’s why tools like Optmyzr and Adthenaexist is to try to shed some light and give some clarity and give back some control when a lot of this is black box and a little bit.

It’s very algorithmic driven. I’m also excited. I mean, so there’s news that Apple is looking at replacing Siri with the Gemini and Google. Generative assistance. I mean, that’s going to open up so many more searches from a whole perspective. And again, that’s where I think we all need to be looking at the future, right?

Like how do we get to be that answer, that advertiser, that sort of the dominant one, or, or at the right time, right place, right question for iPhone device and kind of asking the question as opposed to typing it in.

ASHLEY FLETCHER: But that’s, yeah, probably intentional. The timing of that it’s like, right, we’ve got an opportunity.

Now we’re getting into what has been a very high walled garden with Apple and their browsing ecosystem. We’ve got an opportunity now and it probably will if you if you lead with Gemini grow adoption through that channel So right we’ll give it a go because behind there there is hundreds of thousands of new search queries that we can add and Yeah to the brand increment incrementality point that that would be brand new traffic as well.

So yeah exciting

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: All right. This has been awesome. We also have a couple of rapid fire questions. So you ready for that?

ASHLEY FLETCHER: I’m ready. Yep.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: All right. Number one. What’s something you wished you had known before you started in digital marketing?

ASHLEY FLETCHER: I didn’t know i’d be Best mates with the cfo because i’m terrible at maths But digital marketing i’m now actually good at numbers And good mates with the CFA.

So there you go.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: What’s one common marketing myth that you would like to dispel?

ASHLEY FLETCHER: Can I go with more of a truth? I think marketing, and everyone has a view on it, gets more feedback than any other function in an organization. And I think based on what I see with my team, the team is excellent at taking feedback and always improving.

So, and that takes a skill, I think. So yeah, I would go with that.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: What is one skill that marketers should develop to be ready for 2024 and beyond?

ASHLEY FLETCHER: So yeah, I think linked to your question earlier on chat GPT and AI, I think it’s just the hunger to learn. If you don’t have that and can’t find a spark in wanting to learn, then I think that’s the red flag. So I just get ready to, to learn these new techniques and, and keep up with the pace of the industry because it’s, it’s moving quick.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: It is moving quick. Generative AI, what’s the coolest application that you’ve seen?

ASHLEY FLETCHER: Anthony, no. Arlo. No, no, no. Good question.

So actually, I’ll use an example from a leader’s dinner that I hosted the other evening. So it was from a food delivery service, a CMO there. So he created a prompt, to self test his ability and how well he read. a thesis or you know, a chapter of a particular topic. So it wasn’t only you know, testing your ability to read well and understand it’s like, right, how, you know, how qualified are you now at this subject?

So to me, it was just, The use of prompts to enable better because that was, that was one topic as well as to how all of our teams continue to train, evolve the pressure to learn new techniques. It’s all enablement training as well. And so that example there, we created a prompt to self test him on a particular topic was was awesome.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: That’s really innovative.

ASHLEY FLETCHER: Yeah.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Great. Well, Ashley Fletcher, CMO at Adthena , thank you so much for being on the show. If people want to learn more about you, stay in touch or find more, find out more about Adthena , where should they go? Go

ASHLEY FLETCHER: to Adthena . com or find me on, on LinkedIn and I can get back to you.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Great.

And if you enjoyed this episode and you want to get notified when we have the next one, please hit the subscribe button, listen to us on podcast or watch us on YouTube or LinkedIn. Thank you again, Ashley, and we’ll see you for the next episode. Thank you.

Hello and welcome to another episode of PPC Town Hall. My name is Fred Valles. I’m your host. I’m also CEO and co founder at Optimizr, the PPC management tool. For today’s episode, we’ve got Ashley Fletcher, who’s the CMO at Adthena , the search intelligence tool. that will also tell you how you’re doing on organic, how you’re doing on PPC and how you can use that information to make better decisions about your investments.