Revamping outdated PPC strategies

Episode Description

One of the most exciting things about PPC is also highly frustrating: change is constant.

Taking our guests from among PPC Hero’s list of the most influential experts of 2020, we’re talking about ways to update or work around outdated search marketing strategies.

This panel covers:

• Optimizing with data restrictions from Google
• How PPC pros automate and what they still do manually
• Kirk’s new book, “Ponderings of a PPC Professional”

Episode Takeaways

Optimizing with Data Restrictions from Google:

• Advertisers discussed challenges and strategies for adapting to Google’s restrictions on search term visibility.
• Emphasis on the importance of using available tools and insights to infer user behavior and potential keyword opportunities.
• Need for Google to provide more aggregate data to help advertisers optimize without compromising user privacy.

How PPC Pros Automate and What They Still Do Manually:

• Discussion on the balance between automation and manual intervention in PPC campaigns.
• Insights on using automated bidding strategies effectively while retaining control over critical aspects like targeting and budget allocation.
• Emphasis on the importance of understanding the underlying mechanisms of automation to better guide and tweak them for optimal performance.

Kirk’s New Book, “Ponderings of a PPC Professional”:

• Kirk Williams introduces his new book, which offers a philosophical take on PPC management and the digital advertising industry.
• The book is described as a collection of thoughtful essays on topics ranging from attribution to agency-client dynamics.
• It encourages PPC professionals to think critically about industry practices and their personal approaches to digital marketing.

Episode Transcript

Frederick Vallaeys: Hello and welcome to another episode of PPC town hall. My name is Fred Vallaeys and I’m your host. I’m also the co founder of Optmyzr . And this is our second to last episode of 2020 and 2020 is the year when we started doing these town halls. So we wanted to make it one of the best ones yet and hopefully actually the best one yet.

So to do that, we brought in some of our favorite speakers and we’re going to talk about automation. You know, we all love the topic of automation, but but really we wanted to frame the conversation today. In terms of let’s take some of the smartest people in PPC and let’s just hear how they’re dealing with all the automation that’s coming from Google, whether it’s smart shopping, smart bidding seasonality, but adjustments, let’s see what they’re doing, what’s working, what’s not working, and let’s get really tactical here.

So we have three great guests and let’s get rolling with another episode of PPC town hall.

All right. And we’re back here with our guests and many of these guests that we have reading a good book that’s out there right now, Joe. But they’re also on the top 25 PPC expert lists that comes out every year. So we got Kirk Williams, Joe Martinez and Aaron Levy guys. Welcome to the show again.

Thanks for having us. All right. Where’s everybody calling in from Kirk? Let’s start with you. What’s what’s new in Billings?

Kirk Williams: Yeah, definitely. I’m calling in from my basement in Billings, Montana. And it is cold here. Bundle up the kids as we send them off to school. Cause they do go in and out of school with quarantines and such.

So. We’re doing that, figuring that out and doing PPC as well.

Frederick Vallaeys: Very nice. Does anyone have their bingo cards ready for when one of Kirk’s children walks in on the show?

Kirk Williams: There’s only, believe it or not, there’s only one. Here and the gate is locked upstairs. So we have a gate. He can’t get down.

Frederick Vallaeys: So odds are heavily reduced.

Oh

Kirk Williams: yeah.

Frederick Vallaeys: Joe, what basements are you in?

Joe Martinez: I am also in my basement. You are very true. I’m in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Frederick Vallaeys: Thanks for joining us. And Joe, of course clicks marketing, but also has a very popular YouTube channel. So let’s show that real quick. So Joe is part of paid media pros, puts out videos.

How many times a week, Joe? Twice, twice a week. And they’re usually pretty funny, right? So you try to have fun with it. So definitely check it out and also really good advice. What’s the last one you did there?

Joe Martinez: Last one I did was about Reddit pixel retargeting, which was kind of released more universal just in October.

So I just kind of go over if you just want to do basic site wide visit, you know, remarketing on Reddit, that’s fine, but they also go into the individual conversion events that you can create. And do retargeting off of those or exclusions off of those as well.

Frederick Vallaeys: Nice, we don’t talk much about reddit here.

So, who is on reddit? What kind of ads are you running on there

Joe Martinez: for when i’ve done it in the past? I don’t have any currently right now, but it’s been very high level branding Type ads because it the industries I were in People didn’t want to be marketed to and that that crowd can really go behind you or they could I’ve said it before they could rip you apart pretty easily So it could be you really have to research your audience before really diving in but we use it for really just Brand building.

No, no ask at all. Just, Hey, we’re, we’re fun. And people engage with that better.

Frederick Vallaeys: Alright, so check out that video if you want to learn how to get on Reddit. Aaron it doesn’t look like you’re in the basement. You got some natural light in there?

Aaron Levy: I’m above the ground. What’s funny though is that this room only has one window and it’s about like six inches wide and it’s over there.

So in the fall, I’m getting used to looking like Two Face because this side of my face is really well lit and this side is pitch black.

Frederick Vallaeys: And wait, you’re calling from Philadelphia?

Aaron Levy: Yep. It’s Kirk, like you, it’s a little chilly here. I had to pull out the stuff from the sweater drawer, but our version of chilly is probably a little bit different than Billings version or Milwaukee’s version of chilly. So it’s still golf season for me.

Frederick Vallaeys: Hey, it’s pretty damn cold here in California too.

Joe Martinez: What’s cold? What’s California cold? 68,

Frederick Vallaeys: you know, 70. No, it’s actually colder than that in the Bay area. It’s like

Kirk Williams: puffer jacket weather.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. So Hey everyone, thanks for watching. So tell us where you’re calling in from. We’d love to hear where you’re at today.

And then yeah, let’s jump into some of the topics while we see where folks are from. So Pedro is calling us saying that these are in fact top guys. Okay, so great vote of confidence. Pedro also likes Kirk’s book. Good. And so we’ll have some more people chiming in here where they’re coming from.

But topics wise, I think we, we should talk about Black Friday, right? So that’s just behind us. We all just did Thanksgiving here in the United States. Store visits generally seem to have dropped off. For retailers not exactly surprising given the circumstances of the year, but what did we see in online?

What have you guys seen?

Aaron Levy: I mean at least from our side we saw Can I jump ahead and talk about the whole cyber weekend?

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, let’s do it.

Aaron Levy: Okay black friday was bigger than usual cyber monday was slower than usual It logically makes sense because Black Friday, everyone sort of has their, their need to go bargain hunting and door busting and camp outside in a parking lot for whatever reason.

So in theory, it’s kind of pent up demand that everyone just took that online. And I think I won’t speak for the group. Yes, I will. But you guys chime in too. So everyone’s outside where my day is kind of quiet. Because. It’s the same as it’s always been. So it wasn’t necessarily exciting. So in theory, the weekend when people weren’t trying to ignore their families, pacing out shopping a little bit more, but Joe Kirk, I’m curious what you guys,

Frederick Vallaeys: it’s interesting because the last episode we did we pulled in some research from Microsoft and they had said that black Friday would actually have slower growth than expected.

And cyber Monday was going to be the one that would pop then. So now in the reports, like some people are saying that didn’t actually happen, but then other reports, it did happen. But I think all in all online has just grown and whether it was on Friday or Monday or now in cyber week, I mean, it’s basically this whole notion that there are no more one day events.

They all keep going on and on until people have hit their sales quotas. I suppose.

Kirk Williams: Sorry, Fred, didn’t mean to interrupt you. We saw the same thing pretty much as Aaron, although I’ve heard of others saying differently, but to me it makes a lot of sense, right? Because a lot of people were running sales earlier than normal.

They had a black Friday week or even month long sales. I think people honestly are bored. There’s early sales. I think people were buying earlier this year. We were seeing that in clients as well. And so in some ways what we kind of saw in our numbers was black Friday was almost like the capstone, like, And then it started to come down from there.

We saw a little bit of a dip on cyber Monday, but really it seemed this year that it was kind of a big earlier sales season, really spiked in black Friday. Everyone was excited. And then they were kind of.

Frederick Vallaeys: And what was that driven by people fearing stuff wouldn’t get to their houses in time, or was it like discounts based?

Kirk Williams: That, that’s a good, that’s a good point. That might be some of it, you know, I don’t, I don’t know exactly all the reasoning, right. But definitely there, there is a concern of mail delivery and all that we have, I don’t know, it’s like everyone else, but in billions and we’re not that big, right. But we’ll see.

We’ll see like a UPS truck backed up to like a U Haul truck on the road and they’re, they’re shoving packages in and using U Hauls and stuff to deliver. So, you know, they’re doing a great job, but definitely people are probably a little concerned this year of what that’s going to be like. And then, yeah, so shipping, shipping days, shipping delays, and all that as well.

And then we even saw because of. More of the earlier extended sales season. We, I feel like we saw more out of stock products, more sales that went quicker this year, products that went quicker and then head. So a little bit of fear buying that. Right.

Frederick Vallaeys: So people were like, well, the discount’s pretty good and it might get bigger, but stuff might also run out.

Joe Martinez: Yeah, we, I think definitely fear based for sure, because I know I bought stuff from target. I know I didn’t do small business. I’m sorry. But like target on black Friday, sent out an email saying there’s already delays. And shipping still going to get there by Christmas, but it’s already delayed. There’s two other things I wanted to get for my kids.

And it said it’d be eight weeks to ship. So I’m not going to get it. So, and that was just this past week. And I know some of that was starting earlier to copy what both Aaron and Kirk was saying it was black Friday was definitely much bigger than cyber Monday. But what Kirk was saying, we definitely saw it earlier.

So for us, it was more of like Black Friday in general was lower than expected, but the entire month of November was higher than expected. So it’s almost like Black November. Some stuff was reactionary to competitors starting early and their reaction would be like, Oh shoot, now, now we got to do it too early.

And it kind of kicked off like first, second week of November for a few of ours.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. And I think, I mean, we’ve all been to the stores and I don’t know what it’s like where you are, but toilet paper is gone again. And I think it’s like a trigger and people are like, wait, if that’s gone again, what else is going to be gone?

Joe Martinez: Yeah.

Frederick Vallaeys: And so they’re making those commitments earlier in there. And then with the very generous return policies, like why wouldn’t you just stock up early? Right.

Aaron Levy: We’ve been we’ve been calling it kind of kind of the locust effect that it’s it’s like an interesting so I’m like kind of anthropological and like I like watching human behavior like this and it’s combined with the virality of Social and stuff like that.

The second stock starts to deplete on something people are like, oh my goodness. Oh my goodness Oh my goodness. I gotta go to the next one. Oh, no. Oh, no, there’s no toilet paper on the shelves So I must buy all of it because it must be a problem but it’s been weird to watch, and it’s certainly been hard to predict inventory spikes, especially if you, you work on like a marketplace or something.

Target, for example, I’m, don’t, or, or Kohl’s or whoever it may be, I don’t envy their merch team or their marketing team, because I’m sure that they’re like, okay, we’re fine on toilet paper, where’d it go?

Kirk Williams: And then you have random distribution places that are shut down, maybe with COVID you know, things virus sweeps through, they got to shut it down.

My wife every year for Thanksgiving makes this specific like tapioca salad. It’s like the thing, you know, that she ate as a kid growing up, it’s like strawberry and all that. And she could not find tapioca. It was, it was nowhere in buildings and they, they said it had something to do with that. You know, sometimes they’ll see that where.

Something happens with the distributor or, or maybe for some reason, people were stockpiling tapioca, I don’t know, with their toilet paper, go together. I don’t know. Everybody

Joe Martinez: was

Frederick Vallaeys: celebrating separately. Right. So they all had to buy the big pockets. Yeah. Yeah, her salad

Kirk Williams: got out. The secret of her salad got out and everyone’s buying it up.

Frederick Vallaeys: So I’d love to share some numbers here from the tenuity blog. So I’m going to put that full screen. Aaron, I don’t know if you want to walk us through it, but some, some really good research there, right? On exactly what happened on black Friday in terms of CPCs across different Channels on different days.

Aaron Levy: Yeah. So the enemy decided to make all the charts, the same colors that to see which one you’re looking at.

Is that the, that’s the Google one, right? Yeah. Okay. No, I mean, we, we did see a lot of that. I mean, shopping inventory and shopping spend went up across most of our clients, which again, pretty logical. People aren’t going to the stores to buy stuff. So in turn advertisers aren’t doing their big black Friday push.

So in turn there’s leftover money because they have to spend all their money on circulars and information like that. So it goes over to Google or Amazon. But the, the post is really worth a read. For those of you who don’t know Andy Taylor, he’s a wizard. And is the smartest math person.

Frederick Vallaeys: I’m still trying to get him onto the show.

So can you put in a good word for us?

Aaron Levy: I’ll try to think of ways to bribe him But no, I mean this this information reflects largely what we just discussed I mean again It’s it’s a bit different from what a lot of the big appetite or big engines like google and microsoft were forecasting But it also logically makes sense as you start thinking about it You know, Black Friday is usually a time where everyone, most people, aside from us who work in retail are off work.

So they’re looking for something to do. They’re not with their families. So in turn they spent a lot more time shopping and it was much less of a Open the floodgates at seven in the morning when everyone’s emails go out There was less of reminder emails since a lot of the sales were longer term as kirk and joe mentioned And everyone shipping cutoffs are really early so it seems like everyone tried to get all or most of their shopping done really fast and Mobile didn’t spike up as much as it usually does because people were at their houses with their computers It was less of, oh, no, I’m in my mom’s house and like, I just broke her favorite things.

I buy a new thing. It’s, again, it’s been interesting to watch.

Frederick Vallaeys: So let’s bring this home to the topic of automation, right? So this has been an unusual year with things stretched out happening at different times. Like, are any of you guys using automation, automated bidding, and has it worked well in context of this year?

Aaron Levy: Yeah, I mean, what, what I’ll say, and you know, we work with, we tend to work with larger data sets to maybe tends to focus on larger enterprise clients. So smart bidding in general tended to work. Pretty well for us. This is one of those scenarios where it’s a little bit, one of, one of the things that I always pick on smart bidding for is that it has too short of a memory.

This holiday season has been one of those scenarios where that’s really valuable because it didn’t try to base itself off of what happened last year. So in turn, at least, at least for us it kept up pretty well. And, and responded pretty well.

Frederick Vallaeys: And did you do any tricks in terms of like using seasonality, bid adjustments or other things?

We

Aaron Levy: did we use seasonality adjustments pretty religiously for most of our, our larger clients. So say we would start seeing some velocity, or we have seen in the past couple of weeks that noon was really popular. We’d seasonality adjustments up or down to say expected conversion rate is and it, and again, it moved pretty quick.

I tended to react and did what we wanted it to do.

Kirk Williams: Kirk, what did you see? We saw the same thing. I regret to inform you that smart bidding did really well for us. So we, we tried both seasonality adjustments and not seasonal adjustments. We ran it, tried it some counts Smart bidding worked well with our seasonality smart

Frederick Vallaeys: bidding inside smart shopping campaigns or smart bidding on text ads?

Kirk Williams: I would say, I would say across the board, at least from what we were seeing. We saw smart shopping do really well in handling the the, the Black Friday, you know, the, the craziness. We had smart bidding on our text ads. And our text campaign is doing real well. more

Frederick Vallaeys: advanced guys, right? So I’m assuming you’re not just like flipping the switch on smart bidding and smart and have like one smart shopping campaign, like it worked for you, but what was the trick here?

Kirk Williams: Yeah, we try, we try to have a little bit of a combination of both standard and smart, as well as some of that is just kind of constantly testing them, seeing what’s working, what’s not. But then some of that is. Trying to, I’m still trying to really figure out an awesome strategy of trying to think through both because with standard, you get more of that control of saying here are the specific search terms we’re focused on, which sometimes even if they’re not always directly converting is still valuable, especially for brands.

As just one example, it might be a brand who really wants to position themselves in a certain area. With what people are talking about or seeking out where they don’t have a history of sales, or maybe even people aren’t quite ready to buy yet, but the brand wants to position there. That’s

Frederick Vallaeys: not like the last click attribution and the final keyword right before the sale, but sort of like building the funnel and being aggressively going

Kirk Williams: after a new market segment.

And so that might be an instance where a standard is a better fit. Cause we’re really able to. Target those specific terms. Especially with like a search term strategy where you’re utilizing different priority structures and all that, but smart.

Frederick Vallaeys: I say, sorry. I’m, I love asking questions. So I’m sorry to interrupt, but in terms of smart shopping, right.

So Google figures out the keywords and the targeting. Do you ever like mess around with the feed and duplicate products or have other tricks up your sleeve to kind of like get stuff in the upper funnel queries that might not be quite as specific to that one product

Kirk Williams: with. With smart shopping or just, yeah,

Frederick Vallaeys: I guess it kind of applies to both, right?

Because they both use the Google merchant feed as their basement.

Kirk Williams: We do. It’s funny because about a year or two ago we were even chatting with like a Googler who was telling us, yeah, dupe basically he told us straight up, Hey, dupe the products put black Friday in the front of the title, right? That’s a new, it’s a new product, change the ID, all that.

And we had. A few months back, we had a product where our client, where we had some, some dupe things going on. This was actually an accidental thing, long story that we will save for another time that their team had done clicked a button on Shopify. All of a sudden they have dupe products, right? They were actually disapproved.

So, and, and by the way, I’ve been seeing Google Merchant Center filters far more aggressive than in the past. So I, I actually think that Google’s really kind of Starting to watch that, all that stuff a little bit more. But, but definitely to answer your question in the sense of definitely trying to figure out ways with the feed.

And, and, and like you said, and that’s one of the things, those things where we’re really trying to think through creatively, okay, so smart shopping, it’s not just search, it’s on display, it’s on YouTube, it’s on all that. Hey let’s let rather than be frustrated that we can’t just control the search terms, like really, how can we use that to our benefit to get in front all those people that.

For some reason, Google wants to buy from us. Cool. And one of the things that I don’t hear a lot of people talking about that I think there’s opportunity with smart shopping more is figuring out ways in your campaigns. Cause, and I would love for Google to change this, but you have one ad basically per campaign that you can set up really with smart shopping.

So I, I’d love them to have some sort of either different ads or different ad groups or whatever, but. We’ll, we’ll, we’re trying more and more to figure out, Hey, how can we group products around that ad creative? Because it really is more of a creative aspect to shopping than has ever been before, even arguably showcase.

And so kind of experimenting with, with that as well. So really using the power of like, Hey, Google’s going to show this thing on YouTube ads and all that. It’s going to have ads. It has the image. You can put a video in there, really kind of orchestrate it now around the ad creative Choosing your products wisely, things like that.

We’ve seen that begin to work really well. So.

Frederick Vallaeys: And sort of one of my thoughts around this is that, you know, we used to have like this AdWords system and we would optimize little pieces within that, whether they be bids or ads or targeting, but Google is automating within that sphere of what AdWords or Google ads is.

So to us, like we’re being pushed to the periphery of that system. But it’s interesting. And that’s where the whole new best practices come in, because now you can sort of. Manage things, but at the periphery of the ad system, but that still feeds into the ad system and modifies what the ads look like.

So I think that’s a little bit what you’re talking about, right? Is, is use that feed to figure out how you actually manipulate the ads, even though technically you might think, well, we don’t get to control the ads from, from shopping or smart shopping. Right. So that’s one concept that I’m thinking more and more about.

Like, and I think the other point that you made, which is really interesting is You know, you could be happy with the results that you’re getting from the smart shopping campaign, right? But if you’re watching this and if you’re, you know, one of us, you’re not happy with average results. Like we get paid to deliver more than average, right?

So it’s like, what are those new best practices? Joe, I’d love to hear from you, like anything in your world that’s like dramatically shifted and we’re seeing a brand new opportunity that a lot of people might not realize yet. We just, in terms of how it shifted, I know I mentioned when you know, Our kind of Black Friday started earlier than than possible.

Joe Martinez: Our seasonality bidding kind of was thrown out the window of what we expected to do. I, I’m unlike Aaron. Aaron looks with more enterprise, you know, larger data sets. Mine are mostly smaller clients, very niche products. Sometimes Higher ticket item type products. So we understand that those really aren’t necessarily the impulse buys.

So we’re looking at more of the time of day, understanding that it’s going to take multiple touch points for a user to buy this product. And we hit them enough with discovery on social and Google and everything initially, but then we’re seeing that they later go back on, on their phones at night and, you know, if they’re higher ticket items, you know, sometimes when the parents have to wait to do their things after the kids go to bed, it the late night hours that we’re seeing.

the better performance. So it’s just readjusting the different schedules because last year’s schedule doesn’t apply to us this year and then just updating how we wanted to boost our bidding and performance on aspect. Sorry, I hit my mic thing.

Aaron Levy: Joe, you just triggered a question for me, Fred. I’m taking your job.

I’m gonna ask a question. I

Frederick Vallaeys: mean, there’s four people like I actually I’m I’m off. You guys handle

Aaron Levy: it. It’s just like it’s just like when they say manage up, I’m interviewing up. What about demographics? Did you guys see any change in demographics in the seed that I’m, that is, is pulling this? Honestly, I haven’t looked at our accounts yet.

But the concept of digital newbies there’s a lot of people that historically were store only or store only. Obviously skews older, some seniors who normally would go to the store are now trying to figure out this internet computer machine thing. Did you see any changes in your ad demographics and performance conversion rate, things like that?

Joe Martinez: Yeah. Yeah. The one I just mentioned, like their goal, I mean, it’s, it’s an item that their, their goal is ideally would be like top 10, top 5%, it’s a high ticket price item that people would want in their house. That it was usually like a go to demographic that we would see. And then the actually like the unknown category just skyrocketed like within this past six months.

It’s, it’s, it’s not really affecting anything more in terms of like. Is it something that we really try to push more? Do we update any bids towards on this one because it’s still converting? Not as well as the top 10 percent, but they got to be in there somewhere. You know, it’s, there’s still have to be more in there.

It’s, it’s that type of calculation that we’re trying to work through as well. Gender demographic. No difference at all age range a little bit on the older one But also I think just in general we saw a boost from like the 18 to 24 age range And that’s definitely not who they want because most of them don’t have the money to buy some of these products but it’s some of those that we’ve seen.

It’s just the household income one. That was the biggest Change than what we’ve seen and that was That was six months. That wasn’t just like recently because of holiday stuff.

Frederick Vallaeys: And I want to show something that’s interesting on that topic. So this is the search engine land article and I’ve highlighted that sentence.

But as far as like digital newbies, so How do you convert them? Right. So if they’re not that used to shopping online, so it looks here to like Retailers that we’re offering curbside pickup had a strong increase in conversion rate So that seems to be like one of the things bridging that divide And getting the digital newbies who are used to going to the store maybe to like do a bit of a hybrid approach

Aaron Levy: Once I mean, it’s interesting something that we’ve seen Joe much like you over the last six or seven months This is going to sound rudimentary, but I returned it to basics.

To be blunt, I’ve somewhat abandoned calls to action over time. Like if you’re showing people a picture of a product, they know that you want them to buy it. But returning back to some of that stuff and almost giving turn by turn directions to these people that aren’t digitally native. Seems like it works.

Like, okay, you click here, you enter this, this is what’s going to happen. You buy it. This is when it’s going to come to you or you can come get it. Do any of you guys, I personally don’t do any of you guys have any e com clients that also have brick and mortar? Yeah. They be, if you looked at anything in terms of like store visits and in correlation with that, like when they count like the store visit column, I’m literally asking, cause I don’t have any sense of familiar with it as that factored in at all in terms of Those metrics within Google?

Frederick Vallaeys: I mean, I’d let you answer that too, right? But I would think that’s kind of a weird metric at this point to look at, because in so many places, store capacity is limited to 10 percent because of what’s going on. But would it count in terms of curbside pickup? Is that close enough proximity to even I’m

Aaron Levy: going to do the thing we all hate.

It probably depends. It depends how precise of a location they could get. Like if it’s, if it’s in a mall, which realistically wouldn’t be getting stuff anyway, no, if it’s in the back pickup area of a mall, maybe if it’s in a strip mall, probably would count. If it’s a standalone store, yeah, it should track them all.

But that’s an interesting data set. I feel like that’s a good question. You’re welcome. Assuming that you have that data. Yeah. Somebody please do answer, but assuming that you have the data, how would you use it? Would you actually factor it into quote unquote conversions, which then feeds into the automated bidding, or would you just sort of treat that as a separate thing that you just monitor for now?

It varies a lot depending on clients, because like all things, it also depends on cost and revenue centers. So maybe the digital team isn’t incentivized to drive people to the store. So we want to discourage it, even though these are kind of contrary to what we might want to do as a business. That’s how the world works sometimes, but those that are a little bit more holistic, what we might do is look in, and this feeds into a topic on just how we look at search as a whole now, but coach the bid tool to do what we want.

So if we see that like this demographic, this set of terms, this set of ads, whatever tends to convert better as you know, an in store pickup than it would be as a standard e com thing. Okay, let’s take that group, pivot it, tell Smart Bidding that we want more store visits for this, that group can go, and then we’ll keep the other stuff towards the more conventional.

And

Frederick Vallaeys: how, okay, so that makes sense, right? So you want to prioritize the audience that you care about, whether it’s store visitors or new customers who haven’t shopped from you before, or whatever it is that you care about the most. So, so practically, how do you get that in place?

Aaron Levy: So I’m gonna jump ahead again.

This is gonna kind of answer the how do we structure our campaigns right now in general? Like what’s new? What have we been in? So the way that we look at it is essentially conversion runways. What if you think about smart bidding on its most practical level, it largely looks at expected conversion rate.

So the way that we think about it is, okay, what do we expect this group of? Frankly, people to do you know, talking about skags and keywords. If intent is fundamentally different. Yeah, we’ll split them out. If not, we’ll compress. We all know that, that Google and frankly, every engine is. Pushing towards consolidation.

And so are we. It’s a little bit more of establishing runways for the automation to make the right decisions and

Frederick Vallaeys: runways like it. Sorry to interrupt, but like if you have these more granular structures, right? So you might break out one group if you think it’s different. Like, is that done for the purpose of setting a different T row s for that?

Okay.

Aaron Levy: Correct. Correct. So we split this group out and sometimes it’s audience based, sometimes it’s keyword based, sometimes it’s interaction based, sometimes demographic or

Frederick Vallaeys: global audience based. In the back of your head you’re also doing a lifetime value calculation, like what’s the probable? Yeah,

Aaron Levy: I mean somewhat.

You don’t want to shrink data too much to the point that you’re making bad assumptions. So it’s one of those things where the way that we look at it is, is performance different? Is value to the business different? Correct. Does messaging need to be different? If the answer is no, then don’t split them out because marketing will work better with more inputs and more information.

If any of those things do need to be different, that’s where you start looking at new campaigns, new ad groups, new ad sets, whatever it

Frederick Vallaeys: may be. Yeah. And with messaging being different, and I want to hear from Joe, because I know you’re a big messaging guy, but like one frustration that we sometimes face is like, we have these responsive search ads that we put in all these components.

The next thing, you know, it’s like literally every. Piece of like description that we’ve put in there. It’s in the ad and the ad just this complete nonsense, but it’s got a gajillion calls to action and it looks like junk, right? Google’s doing these things.

Joe Martinez: Oh yeah. There’s ones that we will utilize the pin option on them to just to make sure that certain elements of them show it’s something that we’ve.

We definitely consider as we’re mapping it out. That’s something that we will honestly show in front of clients too. We get up to this many headlines. These are the ones that they show. Would it make sense if this came before this? And would it be a good ad if these three even shown up? Okay. If so, if you really don’t want that combination, which one of these can we remove?

You know, does it really make sense to add all these variations? If four of them pretty much say the same thing Google is gonna flag it, they’re gonna say you should add more keywords in your headlines. I don’t want six headlines in there that are all just keyword focus. It looks like junk. But it’s, it’s want to say that we’ve honestly just, just played around with what makes sense.

You know what? And that’s where we kind of focus on value prop. Maybe I’ll pin a first one that’s made more sense to the product type thing. And then just look at testing the other ones. We. More and more slowly, I have liked RSAs, they didn’t really work for me that well in the beginning, but more and more I see them working.

better. And when we’ve seen them, I know this probably isn’t really applicable to most people, but on our a few accounts that we have that are grant accounts, which are limited anyway, the moment you add RSAs to a grant account, impressions and clicks go up. So if you’re really trying to milk that free money with a grants accounts, RSA that one up completely.

Frederick Vallaeys: And that’s interesting because there’s probably less focus on conversions in those accounts. So Google can sort of get you maybe the junkier traffic and still get a good enough quality. Yeah. And you’re okay

Joe Martinez: with it. Absolutely.

Frederick Vallaeys: Because all you care about is that brand exposure, but if you actually cared about conversions, then, then that gets into some other topics we could talk about here, but like broad match and like, how willing are we to take just any.

Query that comes in and by the way, we don’t know what the queries are anymore. So, yeah,

Joe Martinez: well, it’s all, it’s all just match now. It’s all the same, right?

Frederick Vallaeys: Basically. Yeah. So if our lives easier, if they got rid of match types.

Aaron Levy: Yeah. Can we agree? Can we agree? The keywords are gone. Like they’re there, but they’re not

Frederick Vallaeys: what you said last time too.

Right. So they’re

Aaron Levy: gone. I just want more people to get on my keyword list boat with me.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, no, you weren’t the first one to say it. So

Kirk Williams: and that’s where, I mean, we’re looking more and more into automation with stuff like that. I, I think you had shared previously, Fred the search engine land article by Ginny Marvin about broad match.

I had, I had commented on that, you know, so we’re, we’re just really trying to think through. This whole idea of Google leaning hard into automation. Those of us who’ve been running things for a while, you know, it can be frustrating. Sometimes it’s just the fact that it’s changed. I, I mean, I fully admit to there being a frustrating level of, Learning something for a decade and then having that change.

So I know as much as an intern on this one specific thing, right? There’s a frustration to that. The flip side of that is unfortunately there’s an evolution of that that needs to happen too. And with automation, you know, we’re trying to really think, how do we. How do we, in some ways reinvent the way we think about structure and these sorts of things.

And so on that broad match idea, we’ve started testing things like, okay, Google, like let’s, let’s give this a try. You get target row as bidding. You get a few very tightly controlled broad match keywords where everything else is excluded. So we are making sure that if we’re targeting things that are in their thing, and we’re treating this less as a.

Specific. We know what we want to get from this campaign and a little bit more of a, here you go, Google. I want to reach upper funnel type stuff that I never would have thought of. That might even be more bottom funnel that I didn’t know of. Let’s see what you can do. And treating it a little bit like in some ways I mentioned a smart shopping I’ve seen others do that with things like DSA as well.

Maybe later on remarketing or even trying DSA with T ROAS and really trying to limit some things with negatives and all that, and trying to think through different aspects of the account in terms of here are the really locked down things that we target, these specific keywords, these, like it is more controlled and then also here is, is giving Google’s automation the chance to go out and find us stuff that we never would have found when we’re just Mining a couple of search term reports in that.

And overall, I’ve, I’ve been surprised overall by the results and it has us leaning into trying to rethink some of that stuff more than we did a year ago. And I think that makes total sense because you said, I mean, like, Hey, should we focus on upper funnel and blah, blah, blah. But at the end of the day, like the goal is to probably increase revenue, increase profits and upper funnel is one way to get that.

Frederick Vallaeys: But like, why do we have to control that? Right. If Google can. Can explore it. I mean, does upper funnel works within the bounds of the ROAS targets and the profitability targets that we’ve sat. And so I think the key point that you made in the article too, or in your tweet response to Google’s changes, if you’re going to run broad match with manual bidding, And manual attacks.

Well, that’s when the problems arise because now you’re bidding the same price for a junkie search term that comes off of that broad match as for a good one. But if you let smart bidding, figure it out, it knows that that’s probably not as good of a query. And if it doesn’t know right away, I mean, it’ll figure it out in two or three clicks, right?

And then, and then the price starts going down and eventually it’s still giving you the results within the bounds of romance, whatever you said. And, and

Kirk Williams: it really is dependent on. It is almost 2021 with Google’s machine and not 2019, 2018, 2017. Like what we see Google being able to figure out in our audiences, the keywords that we’re trying to find what they’re able to figure out is better now than it used to be.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. And here’s the scary one about them being able to figure stuff out. So I heard that in smart shopping campaigns. Which are by default sort of conversion driven, you no longer have to have a conversion pixel installed to be able to start them. So it used to be had to have a minimum number of conversions.

Never like we don’t even care if you have conversion tracking, right? So what does that mean? That means that the machine learning system is basically able to look at your products and figure out similarities to other advertisers and the whole ads ecosystem and basically knows at what rate that’s going to convert and can still do smart shopping for you.

Right. So that’s, that’s to the point that you’re making, it’s not 2017 anymore. Like technology since 2017. I mean, Moore’s law has doubled computing power two times. So that’s a four X better than what we had four years ago.

Aaron Levy: Yeah. I mean, Fred, I’m glad that you started this talking is about 10 minutes in you mentioned.

Talking about keywords in the system and you call it a system. I’m glad that you call it a system because that’s, I think we’re all discussing the same thing. And again, I’m going to get back on my keyword boat because I want friends on here. But it’s, it’s searches less about words now and it’s more about inputs.

So what that means is we’re feeding all this information to the system. Where you live is an input. How old you are is an input. How many children you have is an input. All this information is what feeds the Google system, then it takes all these things together into maps. How much do I want this click?

So, when we’re stuck on, again, something like really precise words, or like, we must set our manual bids. It’s kind of like buying a Roomba and then shoving it around your living room.

I get it. And like, don’t get me wrong. The system has its flaws, but as long as you give it guardrails where you’re okay with it being wrong and let it do what it’s great at, Kirk is, as you were just saying, if you feed it information and feed it information that tells it what’s important to you and you let it do what it’s good at usually works.

Joe Martinez: Yeah. And I think we’re totally on board with that. It’s at the same time. It’s. Depending on how much time it needs to get it right. I think that’s where Us seeing the search queries will help guide it Towards towards that right and I I know when this whole search query thing was announced Kirk and I had a discussion Aaron.

I actually think he might have been in on that one, too Saying like I didn’t think it was a big deal as much and then you realize how much was taken away And then one of my coworkers, Tim Jensen was sharing his search career reports and literally Google’s charting the exact opposite of what the product is not like chocolate milk, milk, chocolate.

It was a close variant, the complete opposite of what the product was. And it’s like, That’s dangerous if we can’t see it. And then that’s what they’re optimizing towards. I think that’s what people are afraid of. And now rightfully so.

Kirk Williams: And, and if, if I sounded too pro Google, now I can sound anti Google in a sense, so I can contradict myself here a little bit, which I think sometimes it’s healthy and that is so hopefully Googlers are listening and hearing like, yeah, they’re pro automation.

We are, but then we’re also as Aaron and Joe are, well, as all three of you are We’re, we’re pro automation, but we’re pro human guided automation. And so there still is absolutely a place for us not just throwing a broad match term with, with TRO as bidding and just being happy with that. Cause there are other elements of things that we can pull out.

And then to me, a really, really crucial aspect of this is there’s, there’s still a marketing aspect to this that goes beyond just system defined inputs. That they can bid according to, and I do think that’s an important step that is still a little bit difficult, maybe even still impossible to automate at this point, which is part of managing a PPC account, which is why it’s, it is more complex than just throwing a few broad match things in there with TROs.

Cause now there are other things we’re trying to do with that. Losing 90 percent in some of these accounts of search terms, we use those search terms. For other things than just putting, you know, then just excluding or not excluding, there were other ways we use those in our marketing efforts. That’s gone now.

And so I think there’s kind of both sides of that.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And so, and I think you said it perfectly, but one thing that we could all ask Google for is we understand that there’s privacy concerns and you had to remove search terms, but what about thinking about Ngrams? Right. Unigrams, bigrams, like pairs of words that frequently appear throughout that, where we don’t necessarily can connect it to one user, but give us that data because we still want to use it for other things that we want, we want to have some insight, right?

So I think there’s a happy medium that could be achieved. And right now they just had to completely pull it away from us. But I’m hoping that they sort of figure out a way to bring the insight portion back, even if not like the individual user what did they search for?

Joe Martinez: They just want to pull it.

So then they’ll have another cool feature for the opportunities.

Aaron Levy: I mean, it’s, it’s not that different from not provided for the SEO folks. However many moons that ago that was it’s, I’m not sure how many of you follow me on Twitter, but if any, do any of any of you four use Google opinion rewards, the little survey things for those of you who haven’t used it, it’s effectively an app on your phone and it used to historically primarily.

Target you when you went to a hotel or something and it would be like, Hey, did you actually go to this hotel? Talking about store visits. But of late I started getting a bunch that are asking me if effectively if a broad match would be correct. So obviously it was cyber Monday this week. So I was searching for a bunch of coupons cause I’m not cheat, but I want to get a good deal.

And so in turn I’ve been getting a whole bunch of stuff where it’s like, Hey, does this word sound good for you? And they’re like, Iceland coupons, and I’m like, what the? You’re like, am I buying a discount country? But so It seems like they’re trying to learn it a little bit more and get more human input to figure out if it works which makes me think that they’re making a lot of tweaks to the algorithm trying to make it better so that the Things like search terms going away In a year, which might happen, frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if it did.

But they’re trying to make that better and more tolerable. I mean, at least what we’re doing is that what we’re doing for a good number of clients is that we’re throwing everything in the keyword tool on broad match and getting all the keyword suggestions and then it’ll, okay, like now we know what the algorithm is going to match it to, here’s our negative list.

That’s

Frederick Vallaeys: a good strategy. So you use the keyword tools to figure out what search terms might come out. Any third party tools that you love? Not asking for Optmyzr because we don’t really do keyword suggestions that much. But how else do you find search terms now that Google doesn’t give them to you?

Aaron Levy: For us using, again, it’s a little bit of a return to old, but in a new way, it’s using things like search suggest. It’s looking at the sort of similar suggestions or tools like answer the public or a suitable again, just figuring out, Just like Google’s trying to steer its steer its own ship.

It’s kind of steering people’s minds too. So like whatever shows have been suggest, like that’s where the volume is going to go. So doing that with different VPNs to represent different locations and figure out neighborhoods and stuff like that that stuff that we used religiously in like 2011 and then went away from.

We’re now going back to it, but in a little bit of a different way.

Frederick Vallaeys: Hey, let’s all hold this up and talk about this.

Aaron Levy: Mine’s over there.

Frederick Vallaeys: Aaron, Aaron, go get it.

Yes. I want a bobblehead. That’s right. Anyone who wants to send Kirk a bobblehead, ping him later for his address. All right. So yeah, Kirk, congratulations. You got your book out. I know it’s a big effort. It’s got good reviews on Amazon. So tell us a bit about the process and like what are some of the key takeaways that you put in there?

Kirk Williams: Yes, definitely. I always think of Seinfeld if, if we have any Seinfeld fans listening, what is it a show about? It’s a show about nothing. And I, and I feel like that’s my PPC book. What does the PPC book about? It’s kind of about nothing but everything. It’s, it’s a, it’s a very random. of, I use the word philosophical maybe a little bit loosely, but it’s a, it’s a set of philosophical kind of ponderings of stuff related to PPC.

So stuff like attribution, stuff like automation and data and. Are there any data rights that advertisers have? If so, what could they be? Things like that. We talk about agency stuff, marks of marks of bad clients to avoid that you can see beforehand on your calls with prospects PPC pricing for agencies, things like that.

So just, just kind of had this itch to sit down and a lot of the kind of individual things that I just have thought about. Over the years, I wanted to write on those, get them in, compiled into a book and push that out.

Frederick Vallaeys: Well, what I like about it is that you’re not necessarily like going at it with the goal of like, Hey, I’m going to tell you exactly what the answer is, but it’s more like what’s been the thought process over the many years of running an agency and considering the pros and cons of everything.

And so then sharing with people where you landed at this point, but also the thought process that went into getting there. So I thought that was really valuable.

Joe Martinez: And there’s one part. No, I’ll kick in. I jumped around a little bit, reading sections. I saved, I’m saving the agency stuff to the end.

Cause I don’t own an agency, but the part I liked about it was kind of towards the end, there’s a, there’s a little personal part about the end and kind of Kirk thanking people for you process through writing is what you said. And it’s kind of like reading this book is kind of like being in another town hall like this.

And I think that’s been the most enjoyable part like this. It seems like it’s an open discussion. You know, all thoughts are welcome. And you say that multiple times too. It’s just, but it’s And the moment you’re just hearing one perspective, but still having an open mind to everything. So it really kind of feels like an open discussion while reading the book.

Kirk Williams: That’s, that’s cool. I appreciate that. It is, it’s intimidating to get your thoughts out there, whether, you know, people who are, who like blogging or whatever, because especially when you have certain opinions on things, you might be wrong. And it’s that, that is intimidating. And so but at some point that conversation, I think is what helps us.

Cause there might be a level where I might look back on this and think, Oh, Hey, some of the thoughts that I said in this town hall two years ago, wow, I was off. Right. But in some ways it’s that conversation that’s getting us all thinking that’s moving us along. And so in some ways that’s what the book is.

It’s just. Kind of a conversation that is not intended to lead you to my place, but intended to get you to think about it. So then maybe you get to a better place. I do. Then you can tweet me, tell me about it. And then, then I’ll be smarter too. Thanks to you. There’s

Aaron Levy: this quote that I found a couple of couple of weeks ago, and it’s a really, really old quote.

And it’s from Paul Graham venture capital guy, and. Kirk, I’m going to correct you twice. So first of all, and this is funny because I’m doing what I’m correcting you on. Opinions cannot be wrong. Opinions can be disagreed with. So the other, the, the, the quote is paraphrasing of course, cause memory is not that good.

But when an expert is wrong, they’re not usually wrong. They’re simply applying their expertise to an earlier version of the world. And I think I find that a lot. Part of what I enjoyed about the book is it’s sort of a stream of consciousness combined with a memoir. It’s a journey through your learning process that you shared with all of us, which is, it’s fun to see and not enough people are willing to share that.

So it was, it was enjoyable to read, it was enjoyable to, for lack of a better word, to Can watch you learn and share everything that you adopted with the rest of the world.

Kirk Williams: Cool. I feel like we should all have this big hug. We’re not,

Aaron Levy: we’re not supposed to right now. Like that’s not

Kirk Williams: even on screen.

Frederick Vallaeys: Nice. So yeah, lots of people weighing in here who’ve read the book already.

So People really love it. So thanks for putting that out there. And just in general, I mean, one thing I love about this industry is that we do share and we learn together and and this session today is really about like we have all these old best practices, but Google keeps changing things on us.

So we got to figure it out again. We don’t have the answers, right. But it’s only by sharing what we’ve seen and new techniques that we can all get there together, because we’re all trying to basically achieve the same thing. And what’s nice too, is that given all this automation, I think a lot of our competitors are basically going to fall off and just be like, Hey, fine, we’re I’ll use smart bidding and I’m going to let it do what it does.

But then for us, we can still have that little bit of an edge by actually figuring out how to not necessarily game the system, but, you know, take it to its limits.

Aaron Levy: Yeah. I mean, what we’ve seen for, from our, from my, my employees, my team and The people who are most successful are the ones who understand the change and don’t try to hold on to best practices.

They, they have a good read of what, when something is a big deal, when they do need to change, when they need to completely change, when they just need a different tone. I think that’s the value in, in these sorts of town halls and talking with all of you is it’s less about what’s broken and it’s more of what are we going to upgrade a little bit.

Kirk Williams: I’ll say one thing on that too, though. And so I’ve heard people, I’ve written a few posts that say things like, Hey, Google, here, here are some reasons I think you should reconsider some of this automation or, or think through, right. Or, or in some ways almost concerning. Of what is Google trying to accomplish?

Right? So sometimes I’ll hear pushback kind of like a why even care? Why even write that stuff? Just just jump on board with it and move on with Google, right? I know that’s not exactly what you’re saying here, because you and I have talked before, but I also think there is. Needed and helpful industry pushback while we evolve, because there are certain things I still maintain and believe that a fully closed private system like a smart shopping system is actually ultimately dangerous.

Overall, it’s, it’s too closed off. It’s too easy for someone at Google someday, if they’re not to game it for their own, their own purposes, even if not nefarious. And so I think that, and that’s again, why these conversations are so good. But I think that, I think there is a healthy and I would encourage people to still engage in, in healthy and positive debate and push back to Google.

And I would encourage if there’s any Googlers listening, I would encourage Googlers, I almost feel lately that like, I’ll see them talking, you know, And at times, you know, inviting maybe someone who agrees with them in terms of fully on board with automation, things like that, inviting them to talk, things like that, there doesn’t maybe seem to be as much of a willingness, at least that I’ve observed, I could be wrong to say, Hey, this person disagrees.

Let’s really understand what’s going on with search terms. There almost seems to be more of this, this, this. This cat, this Canyon being created of between advertisers and engineers where almost this like, well, of course, advertisers are going to hate it, they hate change and advertisers, well, of course, Google’s going to do that because they hate us.

Right. And I think there’s, there’s helpful things on both sides and like the conversation needs to happen. And I am a little concerned that maybe that’s not, that’s not happening. So while we evolve, let’s have that conversation and also keep Google.

Joe Martinez: That content is valuable because if you’re young and you’re very new to this industry, you will run into that boss.

You will run into that client who sees that one article or that one thing from Google and says, how come we’re not doing this? You need to be able to have some sort of leeways, if it makes sense to push back, but then have the knowledge in your head to back up why you’re pushing it back. So that stuff needs to be.

out there. One just for educational purposes that you don’t have to do this all the time. You don’t have to just cancel all your ETAs and implement RSAs right away. You don’t have to do this stuff right away until they pull the carpet out. If they do, you know, it’s one of those things where just educate yourself and be aware of all the options and figure out what’s best for you.

Two similar accounts can approach things totally differently.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. When you see these posts that RSAs work better than ETAs, I mean, that’s for one account, right? And by the way I don’t know if you guys are doing sessions at SMX this year but that’s coming up here in like next week, I think it is. So I’m doing like one of these other big battles, me versus Brad Geddes, RSA versus ETA. I’m going to lean on the RSAs a bit. He’s going to lean on the ETAs, but we have some really interesting data. And so totally makes sense, right? You got to look account by account. And even if in general, one thing tends to work better, like it still depends on every advertiser.

And it also really largely depends on your implementation of that specific feature. Are you guys speaking at SMX?

Joe Martinez: No.

Frederick Vallaeys: None

Joe Martinez: of us. Thanks, 2020. Yeah.

Aaron Levy: No, no, no, no. We’re not blaming 2020. We’re going to make fun of Fred for making us all feel bad.

Frederick Vallaeys: Ah, it was easier to search that website.

Aaron Levy: No, Kirk, to your, to your point before. First of all, that was a great impression of Joe whining about Google. But second of all, it’s, it’s an interesting point. I think it’s one of those challenges. I’m not going to take the Google side of it, but it’s one of those operational challenges where it’s product versus engineers versus sales.

And effectively, I mean, no beating around the bush. A lot of our Google reps are sales, their sales. They’re not supporting people anymore. That’s okay. I don’t think Google will deny it, but that’s one of the challenges that, that all of us face, particularly as agency owners, we can get fired. Google kind of can’t.

which raises a really big challenge. But we’ve actually most of my team knows this, but it hasn’t formally been rolled out. We’re putting the word best, the phrase best practices in a swear jar. You’re not allowed to say it anymore. You have to say recommendations because if you say, Best practices, like this is a Google best practice.

Yeah, a Google average recommended thing. We recommend doing something different. So it’s all, it’s all about framing and it’s all about looking at motivations and goals and incentives and figuring out how you can get the most out of the system for, for our clients, which It’s never easy, but that’s why we have jobs.

Frederick Vallaeys: And I’ll put my Google evangelist hat on again for a second to bring in the counterpoint here, but I think what you’re saying, Kirk is really important about the education that we have to do and Aaron about, you know, it’s recommendations, it’s not best practices, but it’s, there’s so many people who work at Google, and many of them are much younger than we are.

And they’ve been in PPC for far less time yet. They are the ones tasked with fixing like this tiny little portion of something that’s part of a much bigger thing for us. And so they don’t necessarily have the context. I mean, and I remember, and I think you guys had the same experience, but at Google marketing life, two years ago, we go and talk to one of the product managers on Google shopping and we’re like, Hey, we don’t love the fact that you’re hiding how much of my results come from remarketing and YouTube versus like straight up new customers.

And like, The reaction was, Oh, wait, you guys care about that? I’m like, well, duh. Yeah, we do care about that.

Kirk Williams: Do you think they’re not, are they not doing enough? Like user inquiries and panels in that? Or cause I know they do some on that sort of thing, but

Frederick Vallaeys: you, but it’s so limited, right? And so, and I think that’s why it’s so, because I know they read search engine line, I know they look at these videos.

So the more that we talk about it and the more that we’re, If we’re just complaining, like, you know, like there’s that whiner again, right? But if we complain and we explain why and how we would have used that data and what we’re missing now, they can at least start to frame maybe a solution to it, right?

They might not be able to bring back what we used to have, but at least they’ll understand why. And I kind of equate it to, to like, and Aaron, I don’t know, maybe you see this a lot, but. If somebody on your team who’s a bit more junior goes in and sets like a target ROAS or a target CPA, like, can most of them even tell you how to calculate a CPC with conversion rate?

Right. I mean, so some fundamental things that we used to do on spreadsheets before we had TCPA bidding, right? The average PPC marketer nowadays probably can’t do that anymore. So if you’re going to them and saying, Hey, how do you make the most of this automation? Well, if they don’t know how to, what that automation is based on, like what’s below under the hood, then how are they going to fix it?

Right. And I think that’s part of our job too, is just putting it out there and making sure that people remember how things work and why we got here and, you know, how, how it could still be pushed further and be better.

Aaron Levy: Well, my team doesn’t have that problem because they know everything.

Joe Martinez: No,

Aaron Levy: I mean I’m going to date myself a little bit, raise, raise your little hand here.

If you’ve seen hackers and love it and can quote it, what is wrong with all of you? Amazing. But well, you should go see it, but there’s the old adage of hack the planet. And the idea is that the planet is the system and that you have all these things and you can take advantage of the system. So we’re taking more of a hack the planet approach to our training system.

Again, it’s less about, you know, Keywords. It’s less about this. It’s less about CPCs bidding. And it’s more about what is in the system and how can you take best advantage of it to be a good advertiser. And since we’re a more holistic do everything agency, it’s also a lot of where

So we’ve historically kind of been typecast to the bottom of the funnel. Like we need conversions. We need sales right now. There’s a lot more stuff we can do. So trying to figure out how to deploy the system in these different elements of a marketing is trying to pivot our training a little bit more that way versus here’s why you segment match types.

Joe Martinez: It’s a challenge. Talk about that in the book. Well, not in my book.

Kirk Williams: Now Aaron needs to write a book. We all know

Aaron Levy: I’m way too lazy to do that. Train

Kirk Williams: PPC teams. That would be, that would be a solid Aaron book.

Aaron Levy: Honestly, if I could, if I could frame it in one quick sentence, we’re doing our best to institutionalize curiosity.

Like asking why six times, like, Oh, smart bidding works. Great. Why did it work? Okay. Why did it look at conversion rate correctly? Okay. Why did it index really high on guys with Mohawks that have purple sound damping and live in a Milwaukee basement for some reason?

Joe Martinez: So the algorithm is spot on. That’s why

Aaron Levy: I’m trying to, trying to understand those things. Like,

Joe Martinez: Hmm,

Aaron Levy: I wonder what’s going on here. And then instead of looking at. We deployed smart bidding on our campaigns. It’s more of, okay, how do we optimize within the system to make sure the system is doing everything it best can, which is really hard to train.

And we’re working on it.

Frederick Vallaeys: All right. I don’t think we could wrap this up any better than this. It’s about curiosity. Ask why and ask how to make it better. All right. Corey says this has been a panel of legends. Corey, thank you. Corey, you’re back as well. You’re one of our favorite speakers too. So thanks everyone for watching.

We want to continue this conversation. So in two weeks from now, we’re going to continue. Joe’s actually going to be back. He was going to be on the next one, but he’s like. He really wants to be on today as well.

Joe Martinez: I was supposed to be on today just to be like in the background. I was going to just be heckling this guys, but then I just, I guess invited to the whole thing.

So it could be the sound effects guy next time.

Frederick Vallaeys: All right. So thanks for watching. Check out Kirk’s book. It’s on Amazon. Great book. Check out the tenuity blog for some great data on black Friday and reach out if you want to talk to Aaron’s team and then check out Joe’s channel. The videos so great and then we’ll see you back in two weeks.

So thanks guys. It was great having you. Thank you Everyone. Thanks everyone