--- title: "What Do You Optimize for When the Sale Happens 2 Years Later?" serpTitle: "What Do You Optimize for When the Sale Happens 2 Years Later?" description: "David Newson, founder of XNW Atelier, joins Fred Vallaeys to discuss the challenges of PPC in wealth management, from broken feedback loops to AI lead generation." date: "2026-08-12" url: "https://www.optmyzr.com/ppctownhall/optimize-ppc-long-sales-cycles/" --- # What Do You Optimize for When the Sale Happens 2 Years Later? > PPC Town Hall 129 David Newson, founder of XNW Atelier, joins Fred Vallaeys to discuss the challenges of PPC in wealth management, from broken feedback loops to AI lead generation. **Published:** August 12, 2026 **Watch:** [YouTube Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUBPljvk5Ws) **Apple Podcasts:** [Listen](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-do-you-optimize-for-when-the-sale-happens-2/id1508399985?i=1000786066884) **Spotify:** [Listen](https://open.spotify.com/episode/6dYxW95GekT0IZFeMafEnR) ---   ## Episode Description Fred Vallaeys, CEO & Co-Founder of Optmyzr and author of *The AI Amplified Marketer*, sits down with David Newson, Founder and CEO of XNW Atelier, an agency that works exclusively with wealth management and independent advisory firms. Before running his own shop, David spent years in-house at wealth management firms in San Francisco, including running marketing for a firm managing $6 billion in client assets, so he's seen this industry's marketing problems from both sides of the table. The conversation covers a lot of ground: what happened when David's clients got talked into PMax, why a 24-month sales cycle breaks most of Google's feedback loops, and why one of his clients now gets 65% of its qualified leads out of ChatGPT and Claude instead of a search results page. Here's what was discussed in this chat: * Why Performance Max was, in David's words, a complete nightmare for his wealth management clients * How a 24-month sales cycle breaks the feedback loop Google Ads relies on, and what to do instead * Why so many wealth management CRMs are locked-down, custom Salesforce instances with no open API * Using local AI models to get signal out of a CRM without ever sending client data to the cloud * Explaining hashing to a compliance team, and why "is client PII going to Google" is the wrong question * Why David optimizes for a six-minute on-site visit as an intent signal, even in 2026 * The case against using fear in wealth management marketing, and what to do instead * Why there's only a finite set of keywords that actually matter in this industry * Moving from SEO to AEO, and why chasing FAQ schema on every page misses the point * Why one client now gets 65% of its leads pre-qualified by an LLM before they ever reach the website --- ## Episode Takeaways David Newson runs XNW Atelier, an agency that works only with wealth management and independent advisory firms. He's not new to this world either. Before starting his own shop, he spent years in-house at wealth management firms in San Francisco, at one point running marketing for a firm managing $6 billion in client assets. When he talks about what breaks in this industry's marketing, he's talking about problems he's lived on both sides of. ### Why Performance Max was a nightmare for wealth management > "We had an experience last fall where we were urged to set up and get on board with PMax, like it's going to eat the world," David said. "And all it did was eat a ton of budget and we didn't learn much other than to unplug it." Leads went up. Quality went off the charts, in the wrong direction. David had to get ahead of it with every client from a relationship standpoint, because the calls coming in were bad enough that clients were asking if his team was asleep at the wheel. > "As the founder of the agency, I had to get ahead of it with every client," David said. This isn't a complaint unique to David. PMax has drawn criticism across PPC circles for years for the same underlying reason: it's a black box. Advertisers hand Google a budget and a goal, and Google decides how to spend it, with limited visibility into which placements or audiences actually drove the result. For a lot of verticals, that trade-off is tolerable. But for an industry built on trust and precision, it's a much harder sell. David isn't dismissive of the product entirely. > "They've got the best intentions," David said, "but even the best intentions have to start with something that maybe isn't all that great." ### The 24-month sales cycle problem This is the structural issue underneath everything else. Google's offline conversion import system runs on GCLIDs, the click IDs that tie an ad click to whatever happens after it. Those IDs expire 90 days after the click. Past that window, there's no way to tell Google Ads that a click ever turned into a customer. Ninety days is fine for most industries. Wealth management doesn't work on that timeline. > "You're not even dealing with a 90-day problem," Fred said. "You're dealing with a 24-month problem." A prospect might browse a firm's site and sign up for a newsletter, then not become a client for two years. By the time that deal closes, the click that started it is long gone from Google's memory, and Smart Bidding never learns the click was worth anything. David's workaround doesn't try to fix attribution. It substitutes prediction for it. His team scores leads early using signals like blog engagement or a newsletter signup, estimating who's likely to convert eventually, then feeds that probability back to Google as a stand-in for the real outcome. > Fred's addition is about speed, not precision: "If you can get within two weeks something to give back to Google, it starts to steer the ship in the direction that you want it." A rough signal delivered fast beats a perfect one delivered too late to matter. ### Working around locked-down CRM systems Most of David's clients aren't improvising a tech stack. They're on Salesforce, heavily customized, often locked down to the point where even the agency can't get an open API. > "Then they're on customized versions of Salesforce that don't even have open APIs," David said. The usual workaround, standing up HubSpot alongside it or retraining a sales team to log leads in a second system, is the kind of fix nobody's proud of but everyone eventually accepts. Fred's suggestion skips the API question entirely. If an AI agent can read a page the way a person would, it doesn't need a sanctioned data feed. It's the same idea that lets a small restaurant with no product feed still run shopping ads, by having AI construct one on the fly. For firms whose compliance teams won't let client data anywhere near a cloud AI, there's a second option: an open-weight model, downloaded and run entirely on a laptop, surfacing patterns in CRM data without a single record leaving the building. ### Earning trust with a skeptical audience > "We optimized for six minutes on-site," David said, describing something his team discovered a decade ago running lead gen in-house. A visitor who stuck around a wealth management site for six minutes was, with better than 80% confidence, actually in-market for services. That was unusual at the time. Most independent firms weren't running digital ads at all, on the theory that rich people don't click on ads. David has never bought that. "Everyone is influenced by advertising," he said. The same skepticism shows up with compliance teams, not just end clients. Fred described a familiar scene: a 30-minute walkthrough of how hashing works, delivered to a firm's legal and compliance team, that ended with one question anyway: "So is the client's PII going to Google?" What was actually being tested was trust, and trust doesn't move at the speed of a technical explanation. It moves one patient conversation at a time. ### Keyword strategy, fear-based messaging, and giving away expertise Three separate pieces of advice from David, all pointing at the same underlying discipline. **On fear:** > "You can push the fear button, but it's kind of like the boy who cried wolf," David said. "You can only push the fear button so many times before you create complacency in your audience." Volatility campaigns are close to unavoidable in this business. Markets crash, wars break out, portfolios wobble. David runs those campaigns. He just won't run them on fear. His actual approach is almost anticlimactic: ask a question, and let the moment supply its own urgency. **On keywords:** > "There is a finite set of keywords that are relevant to this consumer," David said. "So don't get cute." Estate planning, tax planning, investment management, wealth management is the Pareto rule playing out directly. He's watched clients test outside that list plenty of times. The data always pulls them back. **On expertise:** > "Your value is not in what you know,"David he said. "The value is how you execute against the knowledge on behalf of a client." A wealthy client isn't short on information. They're short on time. Publishing everything for free doesn't threaten the business, in his experience. It's what makes hiring someone to actually execute feel worth paying for. ### How one client gets 65% of its leads from AI tools Financial services firms are watching AI answer engines become a genuine referral channel, not a novelty. Leads that arrive after being pre-vetted by an AI assistant tend to convert well above typical organic traffic, since much of the trust-building has already happened before anyone reaches the firm's website. David's client is a case study in that shift, built without any of the current AEO playbook. It's a national wealth management firm that's published thought leadership consistently for over a decade, none of it gated. > "65% of all leads year-to-date came out of LLMs," David said. "They're actual leads." They arrive pre-qualified, because someone has already told ChatGPT or Claude about their finances and gotten a shortlist back. "It's Dr. Claude, Dr. GPT, right?" David said. "So we're going to tell it everything about our finances." What actually built the advantage predates AEO by a decade. Around 2013, on a completely unrelated mission to sound less alienating to clients, the firm built strict style guides: banned jargon, a defined tone, no acronym-speak. Nobody was thinking about training data at the time. But a language model weighs how clearly something is written, and a firm that had spent ten years writing in plain language had unknowingly been training the algorithm to trust it. > "They've really cracked the code on AI," David said, "and yet they don't know how." ### The wealth management firm as a media company David's closing line works as a mission statement more than a prediction, especially given he just became a 50/50 owner in a separate venture, XNW Media Group, alongside a celebrity photographer. > "The wealth management firm of the future is a media company," David said. Given everything before it, the free knowledge, the decade of consistent publishing, a client now pulling two-thirds of its leads from AI tools that reward exactly that kind of consistency, it reads less like a bold claim and more like a description of what's already working for the firms doing this well. --- ## Episode Transcript **Frederick Vallaeys:** Is that working for you, David? **David Newson:** Oh, jeez. Performance Max is a complete nightmare. We had an experience last fall where we were urged to set up and get on board with PMax, like it's going to eat the world. And all it did was eat a ton of budget, and we didn't learn much other than to unplug it. **Frederick Vallaeys:** Sorry to hear that. It's not an uncommon experience though. 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 Optmyzr, a PPC management software. So today we're joined in studio by David Newson, and David is the CEO and co-founder of XNW Atelier, and they work with wealth management advisory firms. David, in that industry, has a lot of lived experience, and so I can't wait to hear what he has to share with us today that can help all of us become better marketers. David, thanks for coming to the studio. It's great to see you again. **David Newson:** Thanks for having me. **Frederick Vallaeys:** So, one thing as a generalist agency would be even things like, what campaign type do you deploy, right? Because if you're in e-commerce and you just say, we're going to go all in on PMax, the results could be pretty awful. **David Newson:** Oh, yeah. You bring up PMax. Last year we deployed PMax at the recommendation of the agency we were working with, and rolled it out. **Frederick Vallaeys:** And did leads go up? **David Newson:** Oh, absolutely. **Frederick Vallaeys:** Was quality down? **David Newson:** Oh, yeah. Off the charts. It was just really, it was awful. So awful. As the founder of the agency, I had to get ahead of it with every client, from a relationship standpoint, because they wanted to know what is happening. There's a deluge of inbound, but this, it's trash. Like, what are you guys doing over there? Are you asleep at the wheel? Was basically the comment from clients. And thankfully we have wonderful clients, where we were like, oh, well, in the world of Google Ads, right, Google's rolling out new products all the time, and they really want advertisers to be using them. **Frederick Vallaeys:** Mhm. **David Newson:** And there was a promise of, oh, it'll do this, and it's got baked-in features that, you know, we're not really going to tell you what all those features are, but it just works. (laughs) **Frederick Vallaeys:** Well, and that's a little bit the evolution of Google tools, right? In the beginning, it's, I don't want to call it half-baked, but yeah, maybe it is half-baked. **David Newson:** Sure. They've got the best intentions, but even the best intentions have to start with something that maybe isn't all that great. **Frederick Vallaeys:** And now PMax, PMax is good, I'll say PMax is good, but you have to give it the right feedback. **David Newson:** I have PTSD. **Frederick Vallaeys:** Exactly. **David Newson:** We haven't, we haven't gone, we haven't gone back into— **Frederick Vallaeys:** Well, and that's the beauty, right? You don't have to go back, especially if you have these capabilities across different platforms and channels. **David Newson:** How would we go back though? **Frederick Vallaeys:** Well, how, so you're in a challenging space, right? Because I think the crux of the problem here, as you pointed out, is the fact that these sales cycles are very long, and they fall outside the windows of when you can give the feedback to Google. So even if you were within the window of when you can tell Google the conversion eventually did happen, start to give me better conversions because of that. Well, now say you're trailing 90 days, that's 90 days of wasted spend. Were your clients pissed at you? Because it's like, "Hey, David, why are these calls, it's the wrong people?" **David Newson:** Totally. That's exactly what happened, by the way. **Frederick Vallaeys:** Exactly. Okay. So, but you're not even dealing with a 90-day problem. You're dealing with a 24-month problem. So after 24 months, you cannot give that data back to Google. The GCLID offline conversion import just doesn't go that far back. So then the only thing you can do is start running some prediction models, and look at all the traits and signals that you have, and say, okay, we had some interaction with this customer, and maybe they engaged with a piece of blog content, or they signed up for a newsletter, or they did this or that. And we looked at all these other things about this person, this audience, and here's what we think it correlates to, this one's probably going to make it over the finish line two years from now, whereas this one, we think the probability is only 10%. And so now, if you can start feeding that back into Google, that gives them a signal of what is actual value, and it also does it quickly, because how quickly you feed that back does matter. So even waiting 90 days is often the wrong thing to do. If you can get within two weeks something to give back to Google, it starts to steer the ship in the direction that you want it. **David Newson:** Agree with all of that, and we are putting some of those things into place. Now let me, let me enhance my description of how these firms are generally set up. Okay, most of our clients, well, some are enterprise-level clients, and meaning, what do I mean by that? In the wealth management space, firms are generally discussed based on how much, what level of assets they're managing on behalf of their clients, right? So when I was living in San Francisco, running a firm, we were managing $6 billion of assets, right, on behalf of all of our clients. So we have some clients that are like $200 billion firms. But then most of our clients are these firms that want to remain independent, and really need to have around a billion dollars of assets in order to afford what we bring to bear on their behalf, just from a cash-flow standpoint. But the way that they're set up is very interesting, so many of them are on Salesforce. **Frederick Vallaeys:** Okay. **David Newson:** Ouch. **Frederick Vallaeys:** Ouch. **David Newson:** And it gets worse. Then they're on customized versions of Salesforce that don't even have open APIs. **Frederick Vallaeys:** Oh, great. **David Newson:** In the day of AI managing most things like that, it is really unbelievable, right? It's really unbelievable that there are actual products out there, or they have a limited, you know, openness to their API, where it's like, oh, we only have open API for these partners, right? And then you don't have any control over those partners. You're really relying on, are they going to build the thing I need to get the data I need, so I can get it back to Google, so Google can make better decisions on campaigns. And so what we wind up with, many times, okay, I'll describe the enterprise players, they wind up with enterprise versions of Salesforce, so you can do whatever you want with it, right? So you have an open API there. But because Salesforce is being used primarily as a client service tool in these organizations, not really for the sales side, like they are being used, but the day-to-day work is actually client service, client service. Like the business of wealth management, investing, financial planning, all of those various things, estate planning, all of that is actually being run inside of Salesforce. And then it's like, oh, can we connect to this thing? And clients are usually like, yeah, compliance gets, is like, no. Right, third parties, no. So what do we do? We set up HubSpot. **Frederick Vallaeys:** Mhm. Okay. **David Newson:** And then we ask them, like, can we connect HubSpot and have two-way sync on only these fields? Some say yes. **Frederick Vallaeys:** Great. **David Newson:** At least we're getting some data in and out of Salesforce, which is where the sales teams are going to be working. Or for some of our other clients, we have them retrain the sales teams, like, we know you love Salesforce, but there's this thing called HubSpot, and we really need all of the lead data happening inside of the HubSpot CRM, so we can get it to the places it needs to go, so we can make better decisions. So I would say just that alone, with compliance and legal and trying to connect all of these systems together in order to get better data back, so, offline conversions, for example, what we were trying to do is, okay, folks, we need these fields updated in HubSpot, so we can then feed that offline conversion data. One of the challenges with that though, is in the wealth management business, we're not dealing with large volumes, so it's sometimes really hard. **Frederick Vallaeys:** Yeah. You never get to the list sizes you need. Well, okay, so that's really interesting. You brought up a couple of points here, right? And let me weigh in, and maybe some advice or thoughts on how to fix some of these things. But when it comes to these highly custom CRMs that you don't have API access into, that really is one of the beauties of modern AI, is that it can use the browser. And the problem with that has been that a lot of, if you think about small restaurants or small businesses, they don't have APIs, so they don't really get to play in having feeds and running shopping ads. **David Newson:** Yeah. **Frederick Vallaeys:** But I think the same thing could be applied here. So have the AI go and crawl that page, put together a quote-unquote API, get whatever data, move it to the place it needs to be, but do it through a browser, right? So you don't need an API in the first place. And something like Claude, through computer use, or GPT or Codex, it can do these things. So that's one area where I think AI can solve some of these problems. **David Newson:** Cool. So I don't fully understand, so when you look at the data privacy issues— **Frederick Vallaeys:** Well, okay, so let's, the data privacy is real, right? If you cannot put your data through an AI, then that's fine, it is what it is. But one thing is open-source models and local models. So everybody thinks about AI as, like, I go to Claude, I go to OpenAI, I go to Perplexity, I put my stuff in, it goes into the cloud. And yes, there's privacy settings around that, where you can say don't use it for training a new model. But at the end of the day, there's still a hesitancy around that, and especially in Europe, that's even a bigger thing. It's about data sovereignty, and okay, is my data leaving the continent, where is it going, GDPR— **David Newson:** GDPR, that's all a real thing. **Frederick Vallaeys:** But so now you can go and download a 40-billion-parameter model and put it on your Mac, and the data never leaves your computer. So you have your CRM and all the data that's in there, you can feed it through that local model on your Mac, right, and say, find me the signal, find me the custom groupings of audiences, or even figure out, who are these audiences potentially, what are the commonalities in the signals, and what can we do that maybe communicates this back into an ad platform in a completely anonymized fashion. So it's not about saying, here's my list of customers, but it's about, okay, here are some commonalities that we've identified, and we have these other data sources that may have some of these data points. So you put that all together, and you could actually build some audiences without running into privacy issues. **David Newson:** Okay, I love that. It's interesting, you know, agency life is a real thing, right? And I think I borrowed this from one of your books, actually, and modified it a little bit, like, at any given time, we're wearing one of four hats, right? One of them is the educator, we're teaching you about things that you may or may not know about, but so you can understand on some level what we're doing. The other is the pilot, we're flying the plane. We're looking at the instrumentation. You're sitting in first class, but seat belts fastened. We're the, basically, you know, we're the experts in the room here. We're the ones that are going to get this plane off the ground safely and keep it flying. The other one is like the doctor, the diagnostician, and we need to show up when things aren't going according to plan, and figure out what's going wrong or not as planned, and get a treatment plan in place to get it back on track. And then the last one, that I made up, is, you know, kind of this, they used to call me this at my old firm in San Francisco, the wealth management firm I was in-house at, the mad scientist. And, you know, 'cause I would go in my office, close the door sometimes for weeks at a time, have a whiteboard, and just start, you know, that's where I was kind of creating. And a lot of it was, some of it was technical, some of it was really artful, creative stuff. But a lot of it was technical, 'cause I grew up programming my Commodore 64, and then when the 386s were coming out, I was there, HTML 1.0, I was there, cascading style sheets, CSS, doing that, and then at some point, my career was taking off, and I just did not have time to keep up that tinkering stuff. So, those four hats, and then the mad scientist, that's what I bring to every client now. **Frederick Vallaeys:** But like what you just described, there's times where I've had to go in front of the executive committee of a firm and actually explain to them what hashing is, how it actually works, with a legal team and compliance team. And it's interesting, not everyone gets it. They're like, so, after my 30-minute session on what is hashing, how does it work, this whole thing, so is the client's PII going to Google? **David Newson:** (laughs) Yeah. After you just explained hashing. **Frederick Vallaeys:** Yeah. No, no, no. Right, right. So, what's so interesting is there's a lot of technology in play to be able to do a lot of legally compliant things. Hashing is compliant. Right now, every firm gets to decide its privacy policies and how it uses that type of data. **David Newson:** Yeah, exactly. Because I think where you're coming from is, there's compliance, and there's the potential ick factor and perception, and for sure, the richer you are, the more you're going to have a say in, okay, I don't want you to do these things, even if nothing about me is leaking out in that manner. And how we position that as an agency, you're right, it is a teaching role. It's about getting the clients comfortable, and ultimately they have no benefit in this, right? Like, why would they say yes? Because, sure, they say yes for you to be able to get more clients, but that's nothing in it for them. **Frederick Vallaeys:** Right, right, right. **David Newson:** So, what's so interesting at my old firm, where I was in-house at a wealth management firm in San Francisco, this goes back like 10 years, when we first started building this lead-gen machine for the wealth management space, and what was interesting at that time, one of the markers that we discovered, and this is going to sound crazy today because it's 2026 and attention spans just aren't there, but we optimized to a six-minute on-site. **Frederick Vallaeys:** Uh-huh. **David Newson:** And we knew when we optimized for six minutes on-site of a wealth management site, intent signals were, we had more than 80% confidence that they were in-market for wealth management services at that time. And it was also a different era, most wealth management firms were not running digital. Most independent wealth management firms were not running digital at all. They were just like, yeah, this is what I used to hear, but rich people don't click on ads. **Frederick Vallaeys:** And it's like, they don't click on ads. But what you're also saying is advertising doesn't work for a certain part of the population. And I know that's not true. **David Newson:** (laughs) Everybody can be influenced, right? Everyone is influenced by advertising. It's almost like saying, you know, I'm going out into the world and I'm going to blindfold my eyes and cover my ears, so I'm not going to experience certain things. When you experience something, it's recorded, right, in your mind, in your body, which is why, for example, a lot of our types of campaigns are around emotions, right? What emotion do we want to evoke in the human being that's experiencing this asset? And what's interesting is there are some folks that love to press the fear button, right, and this is where taste comes in. Well, yeah, you can push the fear button, but it's kind of like the boy who cried wolf, you can only push the fear button so many times before you create complacency in your audience, right? So careful what you press the fear button for, right? So is it okay to run a volatility campaign when markets are doing terribly, or there's a new war, and markets are not doing so great, and people are hyper-focused on what's happening in their portfolios during those turbulent times? Is it okay to run volatility campaigns but not the fear button? I don't like the fear button. It's like, gosh, all you have to do is ask a question, right, without pushing the fear button. **Frederick Vallaeys:** I think you're absolutely right about that. **David Newson:** One of the challenges that I see, or headwinds that we see, is, you know, the wealth management space, these are, in our case, our clients, master craftsmen of the spreadsheet. **Frederick Vallaeys:** Mhm. Right. Like the clients, or— **Frederick Vallaeys:** Yeah. And so I mean, like, I get the whole thing about spreadsheets, right? And a lot of, we've talked about being creative versus marketer, and a lot of marketers these days are really just spreadsheet gurus. **David Newson:** Sure. Especially in PPC. **Frederick Vallaeys:** But there's two elements to advertising, just like there is to financial advising, which is, okay, historically, here's what's happened, like, we should be able to put that in a spreadsheet with absolute certainty as to some of the key metrics, like how many clicks, what was the cost, what was the CPC, right? Totally, even the conversions, we can put in there reliably, as far as what we measured. **David Newson:** We may have been measuring the wrong thing. **Frederick Vallaeys:** That's right, but that goes on the spreadsheet. Like, where the uncertainty comes in for the financial adviser is, should I be buying SpaceX or should I be buying Tesla, right? **David Newson:** I don't know. But I can probably make a probabilistic decision that one might be better than the other. **Frederick Vallaeys:** Right, and that's kind of what we do in marketing too, right? We don't have the absolute, and that's maybe how we can connect with them, and say, okay, well, that's a good point, it's not that dissimilar. **David Newson:** Time, it used to be, how can we be creative with keywords? And the one thing I've learned over time is, it doesn't matter in the wealth management business. There is a finite set of keywords that are relevant to this consumer. So don't get cute, right? You can't, if you have an unlimited budget, get cute, by all means, set up an experiment, figure it out. But it's all going to come back at the end of the day. The data is going to tell you, it's all going to revert back to a finite set, and when I say finite, there's just not that many. I mean, think about it. **Frederick Vallaeys:** Yeah. 80/20 rule, right? The Pareto rule, estate planning, tax planning, investment management, wealth management. **David Newson:** They do. But what's also interesting about the independent wealth management space, historically speaking, is they've done a really, many, not all, but many have done a really nice job of putting out thought leadership. **Frederick Vallaeys:** Yeah. **David Newson:** Like really thinking through the lens of their client base and producing content and sharing it with them. Like, oh gosh, when things are happening, volatility in the marketplace, the chief investment officer writes something and gets it out into the world. My view for clients has always been, your knowledge, you should give away for free, because a lot of firms would say, David, that's the secret sauce. It's not, you don't have the corner on knowledge, right? There's plenty of smart people in the world, and believe it or not, wealth management is not rocket science. It's pretty simple. Now, are there complexities, moving to another country while maintaining one, yes, there's obvious complexity in the world. But what's also interesting about these firms is, initially, I have this conversation with almost every client, just publish it all away. **Frederick Vallaeys:** Mhm. **David Newson:** Your value is not in what you know. The value is how you execute against the knowledge on behalf of a client. That is your value, right? Because execution takes time, and time is the most valuable asset that a rich person has. **Frederick Vallaeys:** That's right. **David Newson:** So if I'm walking around the world and I have $10 million in a portfolio, okay, I have a choice, do I want to manage that in a spreadsheet, or have a set-it-and-forget-it philosophy, or set my calendar to, oh, I need to rebalance my portfolio because that's best practice and hygiene, blah blah blah. Yeah, you can do all of that, but that's your time, right? **Frederick Vallaeys:** That time better be spent— **David Newson:** Totally, or go to your kids' softball event, or their tinkering class after school, or, there's other things you could be doing. And I think wealth management, the value there is really the sense of relief that one gets, knowing— **Frederick Vallaeys:** Can we talk about AEO? **David Newson:** Yeah. I think every single client we have has asked us, how are we optimizing for AEO? So we came up with a paper on how, it's more of a philosophical view for me, anyway, only because I've been around for a long time, I've been on the planet for half a century. Once upon a time there was this thing called SEO, right? And it was the early days of the internet, and keyword stuffing was a thing. (laughs) And Google responded well to keyword stuffing once upon a time, right? And then the algorithm got smarter and smarter and smarter. And so the various types, and I'm not, this is not an anti-SEO thing, it's not, it's an anti-, you know, certain types of optimizations. Like, you're trying to game the system, if you're trying to game an algorithm, you shouldn't. And I remember saying this, a decade ago, to people, because they would say, well, we need the best SEO on our site now, David, we need to have this, and I hear we need to have that. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, just, time out, time out. We need to have, and this is the one time I will say, we need to have trust and faith in Google. Their entire business is predicated on getting search better. The whole model is built on that. **Frederick Vallaeys:** So what do we need to do? **David Newson:** What do we need to do? It's, you're only, if you are trying to game the SEO system, you're only one algorithm update away from becoming irrelevant. **Frederick Vallaeys:** Okay. So how do you do that, right? **David Newson:** It's human-centered design thinking. You develop deep empathy for your consumer. You build and rapid-prototype, get things out there, right, and then you adapt them over time. And as that relates to this business, which is a knowledge-based business, give all of that away for free. Publish it on your site. Actually have a really nice website. Googlebot cares how that code's written, believe it or not. Like, how long did it take, right, how deep is it actually going, it's making decisions that someone in a marketing job, potentially at a wealth management firm, doesn't quite understand, but these were things that I was obsessed with, because I've been kind of close to machines my whole life. And so when I would talk to clients, I would say, publish it all for free, like literally give away all your knowledge. And then on the SEO side, make sure your technical SEO is amazing. Make sure everything is there, make sure you really go nuts on describing what's in that photo and the alt-text field. When I would arrive and actually see what was happening, I would just see, on the back end, all of these, it's just empty, and people wondering why it's not working. **Frederick Vallaeys:** Yeah. **David Newson:** So now it's another era, and now it's AEO. **Frederick Vallaeys:** Yep. **David Newson:** And if I hear one more person say we need FAQ schema on every page of the website, I'm going to lose it. And the reason I'm going to lose it is, we have to get back to, is that what the consumer wants and needs, and we have to make a decision whether or not that AEO tradeoff of doing these things is the right one. Experience, I don't think it's either-or, I think it's a matter of, it's a balance, it's a taste. **Frederick Vallaeys:** Exactly. So I suppose what you're saying is, have some FAQ schema on the pages where it makes sense, but not literally every page. **David Newson:** Correct. Yeah. Correct. **Frederick Vallaeys:** Some data? **David Newson:** Correct. We have one client, national wealth management firm, 65% of all leads year-to-date came out of LLMs. **Frederick Vallaeys:** Mhm. **David Newson:** They're actual leads. And what they're coming in, they're coming in pre-qualified, because they've gone through this iterative process and had Claude or ChatGPT, pick your flavor, help them decide which firm, based on what I've just shared with you, which, believe it or not, people are incredibly willing to share personal information with the large language models. **Frederick Vallaeys:** Absolutely. Yeah. **David Newson:** And then it spits out a recommendation, and then they literally go down the list and talk to all those firms. I mean, listen, it's Dr. Claude, Dr. GPT, right? So we're going to tell it, if we tell it everything about that, we're going to tell it about our finances. **Frederick Vallaeys:** Of course, because there's also the promise that it's going to actually help us be correct, better, in these spaces, right? **David Newson:** So, but now for your client who you've done such a great job with, with the 65% of leads coming from the generative experiences, right, where does the website and the thing that needs taste, where did that fit in? **David Newson:** Was that, so, you want to know what's interesting about them relative to my other clients? **Frederick Vallaeys:** Mhm. **David Newson:** I know more about this client 'cause I actually used to work there, a long time ago. And they were thought-leadership forward. They lived the, we will publish our insights all the time. And so they have historic, on the historical record on the internet, they have been publishing about the same things over and over and over again, updating them through time, and I think that matters. There's a huge corpus of knowledge sitting on that website that is ungated. **Frederick Vallaeys:** Right. **David Newson:** And this is an interesting question, and I'm also seeking the answer on this, but, so, as an author, one of the things one struggles with is, we are given, say, between 200 and 300 pages that we can reasonably write. Do you really want to put out a 700-page book where you've included the Smart Bidding example for literally every vertical under the sun? (laughs) **Frederick Vallaeys:** No, people don't need that. **David Newson:** But some people would benefit from it. Like, listen, if I'm a wealth management firm, I don't have examples in my book about that sort of industry, but I could probably come up with a few that would be helpful, but that's not the place for it, right? But that knowledge does live in my brain. **Frederick Vallaeys:** Sure. **David Newson:** So where do I put it? And where do I put it so that you maintain, because if I just overload my website, then you might say, well, that's in poor taste, there's too much, why are you making people look for all these things? And I think that's the balance we have to strike, and where it's really tricky right now, because the AI bots, they would benefit from this tremendously, but the human might get confused by it, might be overwhelmed by it. And so where is that perfect balance? Where I see the perfect balance is, like, this firm, for example, has a very clear view of who their ideal client is. Very clear, right? So when they're publishing, they're not publishing on the esoteric wealth management stuff that doesn't apply to their target audience, and they're very clear about that. And I remember being at this firm, we brought in an outside agency that really helped us at the time. One of their mantras was, we need to, in financial services, strip out the jargon. Consumers do not talk like this, you guys. Like, everything's an acronym. It can be really overwhelming, especially for, you know, these are relationships, and typically you go meet with your wealth manager, it's you and your spouse, right? It's not just one person, there's a whole, and you can't walk into those, they discovered, you can't walk into those meetings and only be talking to one person, you're going to lose the relationship potentially if you do that. Like, my husband and I, some folks would be like, oh, David works in wealth management, he's the decision maker. Absolutely not. If my husband is not on board, you're not going anywhere. **Frederick Vallaeys:** Correct. **David Newson:** So one of the things they learned very early on, and they tried really hard, was to strip out all the jargon, so they built style guides, and how we write, and the tone, and the words we use, and the words we do not use, the banned-word list. We don't talk in this way. They put that in place, call it, I don't know, 2013, a long time ago. And so when I think about what a large language model is caring about, it cares about how words are used a lot, in fact. And so, and this is a standout client of ours, we don't have any other client that's getting qualified leads, 65% of all, you know, from LLMs. It's insane, relative to others. They've really cracked the code on AI, and yet they don't know how. **Frederick Vallaeys:** Right. But it does kind of make sense, right? They've just been helpful. They've shared knowledge. They've been authoritative in doing this. **David Newson:** Yes. Expertise. So basically it's all E-A-T. It's all of that. They've just done it really, really well. And consistency just started with a celebrity photographer. I signed, you know, we're 50/50 owners in XNW Media Group. **Frederick Vallaeys:** Okay. **David Newson:** I have a thesis for the wealth management firms, that the wealth management firm of the future is a media company. **Frederick Vallaeys:** Hey, well, David, this has been fascinating stuff. Definitely very interesting background, and I love how you bring that to bear on marketing, and across all its various elements. So thank you, thanks for sharing that. Now, people who are watching, you can find David and XNW Atelier at xnwatelier.com . Atelier is a bit of a French word, but if you don't know how to spell it, I'm sure Google can help you with that. And with that, if you've enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, so you know when the next one's coming out. And if you have any comments, we'd love to see those, and follow up on anything that piqued your interest. Thanks again for watching, and we'll see you for the next one. --- *Source: [What Do You Optimize for When the Sale Happens 2 Years Later?](https://www.optmyzr.com/ppctownhall/optimize-ppc-long-sales-cycles/)* *© Optmyzr. All rights reserved.*