Scaling PPC: How to Grow Revenue, Teams & Success

Episode Description

Growing your PPC business can be tough if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Fortunately, these guys are proven experts at the operational side of paid search, and bring to the table technical strategies to remain resilient in the face of industry changes.

This panel covers:

• What roles people take on with so much automation from the engines
• How to build a scalable agency process for sales and onboarding
• How to build efficiency into PPC management
• The role software plays in successfully scaling
• Automation killing the match types we rely on
• Privacy killing the 3rd party cookie

Episode Takeaways

Role of Automation in Modern PPC Agencies

• Shifting Focus: Automation allows agencies to shift focus from manual bid management to strategic activities like audience targeting and creative messaging.
• Enhanced Capabilities: Both guests discuss how automation tools enhance their capabilities by handling repetitive tasks, allowing their teams to concentrate on higher-value strategic work.

Training for Technological Proficiency

• Adapting Training Programs: The need to continually adapt training programs to keep pace with technological changes in the PPC industry is emphasized.
• Skill Development: Agencies are focusing on developing new skill sets among their teams, particularly in areas like data analysis and strategic planning to better utilize automation.

Strategies for Scaling PPC Operations

• Leveraging Technology: Discusses the use of technology to scale operations efficiently, such as using automated bidding and optimization tools.
• Client Relationships and Customization: Importance of maintaining strong client relationships and customizing strategies to client needs as a part of scaling operations effectively.

Integration of PPC with Other Marketing Channels

• Cross-Channel Synergies: Importance of integrating PPC with other marketing channels to create cohesive strategies that enhance overall marketing effectiveness.
• Data Utilization: How integrating data across channels can provide deeper insights, leading to more informed strategic decisions and improved campaign performance.

Episode Transcript

Frederick Vallaeys: Hello and welcome to another episode of PPC Town Hall. My name is Fred Vallaeys. I’m going to be your host today. I’m also one of the co founders at Optmyzr. Thanks for joining. I know we took quite a break here. We had our big user conference for Optmyzr. I was also very fortunate. I took a vacation.

I was in Hawaii. So we missed an episode because of that, but we plan to continue doing these PPC town halls. So we’re really stoked for everyone to be back here and joining us live for another episode. So in today’s episode, we’ve brought together two experts from really successful agencies, and we’re going to ask them questions about what it takes to really run and scale an agency and a PPC operation, right?

We all know that. In today’s world, we’re all asked to do more with less resources. We’re all adding clients. We’re all trying to sell more. But how do we do that efficiently without scaling up the team necessarily to thousands of people? Right? How do we use technology and efficiency? To help us achieve those things.

So that’s the topic for today’s session. And we’ll introduce our guests in just a minute, but welcome to another episode of panel.

All right. Welcome to my two guests. We have Josh and Francisco and guys, thank you for being on. Thanks for having us.

Francisco Lacayo: Thank you for having us, Fred.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And and all the viewers. So before we introduce the guests properly here, I want to We do take comments on the YouTube live stream. So one thing we do love to ask is if you can tell us where you’re calling in or viewing from today and then we’ll say hello back.

So so tell us where you’re coming in from now, Josh where are you calling us from today?

Josh Tan: I’m calling in from Chicago, Illinois for windy city.

Frederick Vallaeys: And is it windy today?

Josh Tan: It is not. It’s been rather pleasant with just a little hint of tornado warnings.

Frederick Vallaeys: Oh no, tornadoes. That’s no good. Josh,

Josh Tan: you work for

Frederick Vallaeys: Rise Interactive, right?

So tell us a little bit about what you do there.

Josh Tan: Yeah, so I’m director of media strategy at Rise Interactive. We’re a full service agency. My role is to really look at PPC, SEO, programmatic, affiliate social media marketplaces, really all of our different channel offerings and make sure that we have the best.

for all of our clients. And although my title is media strategy, I grew up with paid search. So this is a channel that I’m very passionate about.

Frederick Vallaeys: Great. And Francisco, what about you? Where are you calling us from? And what do you do day to day?

Francisco Lacayo: So I’m located in our Nicaragua headquarters here in central America.

We have our U S headquarters in Miami, but I’m located in the product office. VP of partnerships here at white shark media. marketing agency as well. We focus on helping other agencies successfully scale and manage and sell PPC. So, so we have a pretty, pretty large white label program and we also work with some advertisers as well to help them out with their paid efforts.

So, so we’ve been, we’ve been here for a while and I joined here about five or almost six years ago and I started as a, as a strategist and I’ve been moving around the company, but PPC has always been my passion. Now with partnerships, I spend more time talking to partners and working on the relationship, but I do manage accounts from time to time and, and I enjoy learning new things about the digital marketing industry as well.

I think you’re beautiful, right?

Frederick Vallaeys: I always do it at least once. No, I was saying, I love the logo you have in the background. Now white shark media, I love diving. And one of my life goals, I guess, is to dive with a great white shark at some point, but where did that name come from?

Francisco Lacayo: Yes, that’s a, that’s a question we get a lot. So the founders and the company was founded, I think, in 2010, if I’m not wrong.

I think the founders were brainstorming with a catchy name and then they came up with a couple of animals. The shark came, came as one of them, but in reality it’s, it’s more about what the shark represents, the drive to push forward. It’s the king of the ocean, right? It’s one of the strongest animals out there.

Fun fact is back in the day when white shark media started. The, we had animals per area. So the sharks were mostly the sales area because, you know, they were out there, they were going after the clients, but PPC, they were the octopuses because, you know, it’s an octopus doing 10 things at the same time.

Right. So, but that’s kind of how it started with that theme. And then we just stuck to it and, and And now we’re, we’re here in the PPC ocean. It’s a good name for all the content we put out there as well. We have under the surface, we have a lot of good stuff that goes with it. So

Frederick Vallaeys: no, and then look at the white shark media website.

It’s true. It’s I like had the whole nautical theme is tied in, but you, you teed us up perfectly here, right? With saying PPC is sort of the the octopus with the eight tentacles. And we’re always having to do a. A gajillion things, it seems. How do we do that more efficiently? So that’s really the topic of today’s session, right? So, but one of the first questions that we promised people we would talk about is what roles do the humans on your team take on given all this automation that’s happening from the ad engines? Right, so it sort of feels sometimes that Google is doing more of the work that we as PPC managers used to do.

So what do we do instead? What do we transition to? And Josh, maybe we’ll hear from you first, but what does that look like at Rise?

Josh Tan: Sure, yeah. Our, our roles have definitely changed especially in the last 12 months. We have quite embraced automation not just on the Google side, but in the tech platforms that we use.

And our roles now are really not about, you know, the manual tasks of, you know, Looking at search term reports or you know, trying to, to change bids at every, you know, point in time, what we’re doing is thinking about the ways that we can target to reach the right users. Cause a lot of the industry changes right now speak to you know, just different abilities.

And so the roles that we’re taking on is being more thought leaders and thoughtful about what kind of targeting we’re putting in our campaign.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. So you’re basically saying all this automation from Google is facilitating targeting and lookalike audiences. So the question becomes more about who do we even talk to?

And then I think that’s like one of these fundamental shifts in PPC, right? So in the old days we had a keyword and if you had a generic keyword like sneakers. You’d have to have sort of a generic text ad because you didn’t know if it was a man or a woman or a runner or a weightlifter, right? So sneakers could mean so many things to so many different people.

But nowadays, even with a generic search like that, we may know a whole lot more about who’s doing that search. So is that kind of what it looks like for you guys?

Josh Tan: Yeah. And if you just think about, you know, RSAs and how Google’s making a big push for it cause they say that they can better match you know, the ad with with the user.

There, there’s a lot of thought that you need to put into the type of messaging that you could put out there. You know, do you talk about specifications of your product? Do you talk about utility? And that part has not been automated yet. And the best people to think about those things is the brand itself.

You know, you know your products the best. And so, you know, the type of messaging that you want to put out there. So our roles are really, you know, geared toward putting the best messaging for the users that we’re trying to reach.

Frederick Vallaeys: And we’ll open this up to Francisco as well. But like, does that mean you’ve kind of changed the types of people you hire?

Josh Tan: Not, not exactly. We hire a wide range of expertise. So, you know, we have those that are starting their careers all the way to those that, that have had quite a bit of experience. So we already have a nice mix of, of people at Rise. But it’s really more so the shift in mentality and the way that we think about things.

We’re trained, we have a very good training program internally. So I don’t think it’s really a push to change individual people, but really a change in mentality so that we’re thinking about the way things properly.

Frederick Vallaeys: Francisco, what does it look like for you guys?

Francisco Lacayo: Yeah, I mean, and following up on what Josh said, what this has done for us and as technology continues to, I would say penetrate the PPC world, what we’re trying to do is find the balance because we like to embrace automation.

So we’re big on finding the right tools that will help you be more efficient and we’ll get you better results. There are still core components of any PPC strategy that, that you need the human touch, right? In our case, and we start this with training as well, and that’s how we trade, we change our internal training as well as we’re now focusing more on the storytelling.

We’re focusing more on the strategical view of the brand on how you put the brand out there a lot more in ad copy and messaging and digging deeper into audiences and buyer persona instead of focusing too much on the technical aspect because the technical aspect is gradually being replaced by a tool.

So, you know, when I came in to White Shark, my training consisted a lot on choosing the right match type and how, you know, adding negative keywords and, and, and reviewing search terms and cleaning that up. If you come in now, you know, you’re not going to spend that much time training that because there’s a lot of automation into that that will take care of most of it.

So now we’re, we’re doing more on how do you identify the right market? So how do you position the right unique selling proposition if you have a customer? I think that, so I think storytelling is, is taking a bigger role in the advertising world which I think is good because if, if you know, you’ve been in PPC for a while, you’re probably very techie, you’re probably very technical, we have very technical mind.

And this kind of pushes us to be a bit more creative and go outside that box. So, so that’s kind of how we’re navigating it. And we’ve changed our training to focus more on, on that and understanding the market behind it and more of the theory. And then the technical aspect, we try to rely on, on automation when we can, and when it makes sense to be as efficient as possible.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, it makes sense. So going back to marketing fundamentals right now, I think both of you are economists by training.

Francisco Lacayo: Yeah, that is great.

Frederick Vallaeys: So more of the, the spreadsheet folks, I would assume, and looking at numbers. So that’s a pretty big shift then, right? I mean, all of a sudden you go from being an economist to being a storyteller.

You guys are doing a great job here, by the way, like telling stories to our audience. Right, but, but you kind of touched on training a little bit, like, so, do you put retraining efforts in place? I mean, what does that look like? Is it internal? Have you found some great resources? How do you get the team to make that shift from having been so deep into Excel and tweaking the levers and doing the math on bids to all of a sudden figuring out things like personas, which, which honestly, when I started at Google, nobody talked about personas.

Right. It wasn’t even a thing because it’s just, it wasn’t possible.

Francisco Lacayo: Yeah, I think, I think that that, that ties into our first topic, which is basically scaling and this particular case, scaling a PPC team. We have a pretty, pretty large training department is one of the teams that we’ve invested on the most.

We have, I think, five or six full time trainers. Two or three focus on new hires, but then we have half of the team focusing on the existing team. And we do ongoing training. I mean, it’s, it’s kind of a necessity. We don’t really see it as an option because things are changing so much and their profile, the people that we hired has to change somehow as well.

So, so we have a team in place that allows us to do that. And they basically spent all day reviewing changes, testing things out, making sure that we’re rolling out the right changes. And then once we know that that formula works. We put it to the team. And we roll it out. We also rely on a lot of great resources out there.

I mean, I think if you’re in the PPC community, you know, all of them, all the, all the blogs, all the experts, events like this one, of course, I’ve learned a lot through PPC Town Hall as well myself. So we always tune in. But we make sure we have a training team that’s active on it because it’s I think saying this is a changing world, it’s an understatement, right?

This is, this is going 300 miles an hour and, and it feels like it’s going to get faster as well in the next six to 12 months. So, so for us, it’s kind of a necessity to have that training team in house.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, and then with that accelerating change maybe that’s a good segue here to briefly talk about third party cookies and audiences, right?

So it’s interesting because you just kind of said it’s all about personas and messaging to the right person. But I think a lot of that capability has come off of the back of. The existence of third party cookies and Google have been given us audiences and in market audiences and life event Stages, but that might go away, right?

So many of you probably know what we’re talking about here, but this is flock, right? So so basically third party cookies are not Privacy safe. GDPR has happened in Europe, CCPA in California, there’s privacy initiatives across the world. And so Safari and Firefox have already taken away, to a large degree, the third party cookie.

Now Google Chrome, the largest browser in the world, is saying we’re also going to deprecate the third party cookie by 2022. However, if that happens, That was really the technology that made all this audience targeting possible. So you know, are we assuming this is going to continue? And how are you preparing for that sort of a different world where we, where we, we still want to target personas and different audiences, but we might not be able to in exactly the way we have.

Josh Tan: Yeah. So, you know, I think you said it very well. Like, we’ve been rattled by targeting changes in the past ITP, GDPR, CCPA. But I think when we look at it, the ability to target users is not going away. Chrome is moving from cookies to cohorts. But they will still pass back information that they’re getting to Google Ads.

And as users of Google Ads, we will still be able to find in market audiences, affinity audiences, and so on for us to target our accounts. What is being heightened is the emphasis to protect privacy and how we need to be respectful of user data. And so we need to put more focus into the first party data that we do have, you know, information that our users have provided us.

They are expecting us to communicate with them. They’re ready to hear our message. So it’s really about heightening, you know, With a personalization that we have within our accounts so that we can reach these users who are ready to listen to us. So I think it’s all about creativity and targeting. So if you think about your CRM data, it’s not just, you know, the staples of the past where you go to your site visitors or.

Labs, customers, active users, active rewards members within those buckets. How can you segment them further in ways that Google doesn’t see, but only you see so that you can carry your campaigns with them? So I think we need to, you know, we need to recognize that there is change happening, but how we adapt with that is really going to be with the data that we do already have and how we’re gonna be using that for our campaigns.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. That’s interesting. So you’re basically saying shift to first party data, bring your own company data to bear to like even further segment within that. Now it’s interesting. We’re talking about that in the session on scalability, because to me that feels like it almost would be a custom project for every big client we have.

So it’s kind of like the opposite of scaling. I mean, it’s absolutely necessary and it’s totally doing the right thing. But like in a, in a way is that shifted technology, putting a lot more work on us. And how do you. I mean, does that lead to pricing changes with your clients? How do you talk to clients?

Right? Because what has been easy for you guys to do in the past, all of a sudden it’s being thrown on its head. You got to shift your methodologies around it, maybe becoming more expensive. So how do you have those conversations and how internally within the company, do you even, make that scale.

Josh Tan: I think right now what we’re trying to do is encourage our brands to be more open with using their data.

There’s a lot of brands that just collect newsletter sign ups and they haven’t been activating that with So right now we’re trying to paint a picture of the power that they have with the data that they that they’re sitting on and use that to target the campaigns. I think a lot of our work, you know, to reach users are going to be on the site as well.

You know, the more that, the more information that we can collect from users, the better our campaigns would be. So it’s really more of an education piece right now to shift our mindset to include first market data in our targeting. And there may be impact down the road in terms of pricing and all of that.

But right now it’s really just about having the right strategy. And you know, using the data that is available

Francisco Lacayo: in our case, in our case for us has been a gradual process as well. We’re taking it slow because We think that this is going to continue to move forward. I mean, for us, it’s clear that privacy is going to continue to rise. And the sense of keeping data safe is going to be a priority basically for all advertisers and all channels.

Well, we, the conversations we’re having with our customers right now is, Like Josh mentioned, embrace the first party data that you have, and also change the mindset on how you go about collecting this data. And we did that exercise here at White Shark. We, we used to do a lot of outbound sales in the past.

And then, you know, we were selling a lot, but. That wasn’t really working out. The type of sales that we were getting weren’t really there because we’re really going after people we thought could potentially be interested, but they weren’t necessarily interested in what we had to offer. We took a step back and said, let’s focus fully on content and let’s try to generate inbound data, inbound people that are more interested in our brand.

And that they’re willing to share the data with us. And then we know we’re targeting people with a higher intent. So even though you’re going to be getting potentially maybe a smaller crowd or a smaller potential in terms of targeting, if you’re putting the right content strategy, if you shift your website towards, you know, being more user friendly and collecting data as well on a first party level, then you’re more likely to at least get, you know, a smaller audience, but with a higher intent that is more likely to use your product.

Right. With COVID we saw it with a lot of clients where we said, You know, a lot of clients wanted to pause their campaigns because they felt that they weren’t going to get much because of restrictions or anything. So we said, okay, we can lower the budget. We can even pause it, but just focus on creating content that adds value to your potential customers.

You might not get the leads right now, but the more content you put out there, You’re adding value to people. You’re going to get as a reference, as a brand that, you know, within your segment or your market makes sense to them. And that strategy worked in the longterm as well. So I think for advertisers, it’s going to be the same.

It’s going to be more of put more content out there, be more proactive about sharing information, try to put useful content in the hand of potential users. And eventually they’ll give you their data and you’ll be able to target them, and it should be a more efficient flow. Right? Either way, I mean, I think we can all share this vision, right?

No matter what Google does Google is not going to kill their their pay advertising market, right? So if there is something going down, or if we see a decrease in revenue and elite volume because of this change, I am 300 percent confident that Google will figure out a way of replacing, you know, the data collection process or following along the guidelines, specifically, Still making the platform work.

It’s going to be more on us on how we tell that story to customers and how we embrace that without having to do, you know, 10 times more work and not being able to be as efficient as we were in the past.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, makes sense. So you’re talking about blog content, Josh, you were talking about newsletters. and activating customers in those ways.

Right. So there’s email, there’s content, there’s PPC. It feels like a lot of these areas are starting to interact a lot more and there’s an expectation, I think, that your PPC person at least knows what’s happening in those other realms. So I wanted to ask, like, what does that look like from a team structure perspective?

So when you work with a client, Do they have like a dedicated PPC account manager or is there like a browser specialist or how do you make sure that you know, all the disparate or the things that used to be disparate pieces in the past now talk to each other? And actually you get the full leverage from all the efforts you do.

Josh Tan: Yeah, so at Rise, we’ve done a little bit of restructuring to position ourselves to to, like you said, be able to look at all these components. So when we support. Specific accounts. We have both our account management side and client delivery side operate as one plug that are really focused on the clients business and to, you know, they’ll learn everything about the business everything that’s related, but in the background, what we do have is stronger teams that are managing our technology and managing the business.

Our partnerships. We created media strategy, which is where I sit to look at, you know, different ways that we can manage media. And so what you have is you know, client focused teams, and then you have very dedicated teams that are looking at kind of a large industry pieces. So there’s a lot of conversation that we have internally so that we can have this kind of thought leadership process.

We can bounce ideas off of each other and really have you know, great ideas spring to life. We’ve so it’s it’s really about the client first, but also about our ability to, to, you know, grow within all of these changes in the industry right now,

Francisco Lacayo: in our case, what we do is we have our account managers.

They basically lead the strategy across the board, at least for the products that we manage. We’re very pushy and proactive to be in communication with the rest of the client’s team, if there is a team involved in managing other channels. So. We like to be in the marketing meetings. We like to be in the strategy meetings, obviously for alignment.

But our account managers also have available a market research team. The market research team is basically in charge of going at the higher level and reviewing the market, understanding the synergy between different channels, understanding what can be done outside of the box. Spending more time doing competitor research.

So all that information is fed back to the account managers who are focusing on the technical side and the basic strategy. And then that’s how we try to connect them. But but the way we preach with our partners is we want to make sure we do become that extension of their team. Because in times like these, when you’re going to have multi channel strategies, if you don’t have all your channels centralized in one single agency or one person, you’re going to have to communicate a lot.

You’re probably going to have to over communicate a lot of things if you want to make sure you’re, you’re targeting the right audience. Right? And nowadays, I mean, if you look at basically any lead generation process or any revenue generating process for any customer out there. I can’t really think of an industry that’s just one touch point and then it converts, right?

There is four, five, six, seven, eight, twelve touch points in most, in most industries. And PPC can usually play a role in two or three. But if you’re not really involved in the other four or five touch points, You’re likely not going to be as efficient, right? And we’re only going to have so much information of all the side points.

We can only see so many things on Google analytics or any other tracking system. But there’s going to be information that we’re going to have to be fed by the customer and the partners to make sure that we’re, we’re also going down in the same lane and we’re aligned on the strategy.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. It feels like if you just do PPC by itself and that’s the only thing you look at.

And obviously it’s going to be just too expensive, honestly, right? You have to have these other touch points working well to help you drive the lead down the funnel. But then it comes into questions of attribution, right? And so Francisco, you said you have a seat at the table in marketing meetings. So hopefully everybody’s sort of aligned and splitting the value correctly.

Not saying, Hey, it’s PPC. We drove all the value, even though. The SEO folks brought the customer to the site and we just started remarketing to them. But how do you, how do you think about attribution and sort of assign almost like when you build a team, like how do you put the right number of people in the right spot based on how much value is being driven and how do you make all those dots connected?

And maybe that’s for you, Josh.

Josh Tan: So the way that we approach it is how much we support each client. And so the pods that I was alluding to earlier would support a book of business. And we. staff that book so that there is the right expertise for that team. So if the mix is, you know, paid search, social media, then we will hire more to staff against those.

But if you have clients that are involved with much more channels, then we will look at You know, expertise for all those different channels. But the way that we do it is how much support do we need? You know, what is the scope of the business that we do? And so that’s really what guides us when, when we put staffing class

Frederick Vallaeys: together.

So I think we’re kind of talking about Olivia’s question, but I want to make sure we definitely like fully answer it. So Francisco, any thoughts on this? So analysts we have their hands in multiple channels for the given clients. Have you found that educating channel experts has helped scale?

Francisco Lacayo: Yeah, in our case the way we manage it, account managers are trained on all paid channels and they take full ownership of all paid channels.

The advantage you have there is you have the central mind behind this strategy being able to apply You know, the right changes and the right budget distribution to different channels. I think for paid, that’s, that’s usually the best strategy because it gives you a, an unbiased view of, of the performance, right?

If you have a display team and you have a search team, and then, you know, if you just look at raw conversion numbers and you see that this place not converting, you know, the search team is going to vouch for getting maybe more budget or shifting resources. But then this place is going to come talk about attribution and that kind of doesn’t paint the right picture in terms of performance.

If you centralize paid, I think you have a better vision overall, but outside of paid I do think that there is a certain sense of having a division with other channels. So, for instance, An SEO specialist should probably think and focus on SEO because that’s a pretty hefty product and then just be in the right communication channel and the right alignment with the, with the paid team.

So for us, it’s a mix paid is centralized. So our, our paid strategists, they manage everything under Google, Microsoft, Facebook umbrellas to search marketing, display, shopping, paid ads, anything of the sort. But if we’re talking about SEO or email marketing or other types of marketing that we do leave to other teams.

And we try to work on the alignment to make sure things work out.

Frederick Vallaeys: Great. Let’s talk about technology a bit then. So obviously software can help with the scaling and keeping the process in line. And I’m curious, what sort of technology do you use and decisions about building in house versus buying a tool?

And we can talk about tools, anything from like workflow management and how does the client submit their requests and how does the team make sure those requests you know, the to do list basically gets handled all the way to what sort of analytics programs are you using?

Josh Tan: Yeah, on our end, what was key to really having a good relationship is transparency.

And so one of the Technology that we built in house and that we’re very proud of is connects. It’s our media optimization platform. To be crystal clear, this is technology that we use ourselves. We don’t license this out, but we really wanted a platform where we could see all of our different data sets in one view.

And we also wanted our clients to see the same thing. We wanted you know, to be on the same page. We didn’t want to have, we didn’t want our clients coming to us saying, you know, we’re seeing one thing and then we’re seeing another thing. And that’s just when you come and have this sort of back and forth.

So we put a lot of effort into building that technology out, which increases your visibility into the media that you’re running. We also built out proactive intelligence, where there are some triggers that happen in your account. We have alerts that tell us of these things that are happening.

And then we also have the automated optimization piece. So this is really where You know, you are allowing the technology to act on your behalf, but trusting it enough so that you can think about your account in ways that you haven’t thought of before. So when we think about our technology, it’s really about those three elements, you know, increased visibility, proactive strategies and, and automation.

Frederick Vallaeys: And so it sounds a little bit like you guys have an in house first strategy.

Josh Tan: It’s it was built you know, to, to really streamline our, our media optimization. But it’s grown to really be a tool that both clients and ourselves can use together. So it’s, it’s not just meant for in house, it’s really meant for that relationship piece.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. But, but I, what I mean is that you guys built it, right? And so you saw a problem and you started. Kind of customizing the pieces, and it sounds like that’s worked really well.

Josh Tan: Yeah it’s, it’s grown so much, you know, when we first started thinking about this, it was just to put all data together and then it went from, you know, there are so many things that we do on paid search that we can automate.

And so we did that and now with all of this data, we’re thinking, well, we can, you know, outsource information to this technology and let it tell us when we need to make decisions. So it’s been it’s helped us quite a bit, but this also doesn’t mean that we’re only relying on our internal technology.

There’s going to be, you know, we’re, we’re also using you know, platforms such as search engine 60 where, you know, a lot of our clients are using ga, Adobe, so there are these platforms that we’re still using and we still need to be well versed with, but it’s really you know, putting things together and having more visibility.

So we know how to use each of these technology

Frederick Vallaeys: and with that and shifting a little bit before we come back to Francisco. But with that technology that makes decisions and tells you what to do smart bidding, yes or no. There’s a question for both of you.

Josh Tan: I am going to go out on a limb and say yes.

You know, there’s a lot of paid search personalities out there who will say you got to test. And I completely agree that you need to be testing, but I think it’s less so whether smart bidding will work and more so how do you get it to work the way that you want it to. So it all goes, it all goes to your basics, right?

The keywords that you put in any audiences that you put in the targets you have for your automation. So that, that’s kind of the approach that we’re taking. How do we make garbage for us?

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. I mean, like people would say, garbage in garbage out. So if you feed the machine learning model, bad data, or you don’t really tell it your goals, then.

You can’t have too high of an expectation of what’s going to come out of it. And I can’t remember who but one of you made the point earlier It’s really about taking the client’s data and bringing that to bear on the ppc account and I fundamentally believe too that if you take the right business data you communicate that to google That smart bidding can work extremely well.

But what I love about what you were saying is it’s basically you guys have layers of technology, right? So there’s this whole notion of automation layering. You don’t have to pick just one thing, but you can make multiple pieces. And that’s how engineering works, right? It’s like there’s all these little boxes with inputs and outputs and these boxes talk to each other.

So you don’t have to have the one perfect solution or the one perfect tool that does everything. And so it’s totally possible to use smart bidding from Google, but bring your own automation layer on top of that to to make it do even better. Francisco, for you, smart bidding, yes or no?

Francisco Lacayo: I would also agree that, that it’s a yes for most scenarios.

I think smart bidding is getting smarter and it’s getting better. And if you’ve been using it for a while, you’ve probably changed your style of account management to make sure that you’re not feeding it garbage. So in most cases, I think it can do a good job as long as long as you have the right structure, as long as you understand what that means and what you’re giving up.

It can, it can help you perform, especially if you’re talking again, in the same subject, right? Scalability. If you have a client that’s spending 300, 000 and they’re running 80 campaigns, You’re probably going to have to rely on some smart bidding if you want to stay on top of everything, right? So I think that the bigger you are, the more likely you are to stick to it.

I still do manual bidding for some accounts in some industries, no matter how restrictive you are with keywords, what approach you take, I still feel is not getting it a hundred percent right. But, but I do embrace it. I don’t, I don’t have anything against that particular side of automation. And I think that, that all the channels that have smart bidding within their channel are getting it better, you know, they’re doing a better job at making it work.

Frederick Vallaeys: And one thing I find fascinating is so in the Google recommendations and the opportunities tab, they will tell you if your account is ready to upgrade from manual bidding to smart bidding. But it’s a one way street in those recommendations. So it’ll only recommend to go into smart bidding. But if all of a sudden that campaign starts having too little data.

And it basically gets stuck in a learning phase where it’s not able to perform. Google will never recommend you bring it back out, manually take control over those bids, and then bring it back to smart bidding. Or the other one, like, say that you start with smart bidding, but you’ve never reported values, right?

So it’s maybe lead gen, right? And you say we’re going to put it into TCPA bidding. Right, but later on you add value data. So tROAS would have actually worked much better. But once you’re in TCPA, Google will never recommend for you to go to tROAS. And I think that’s like the whole dynamic nature of the beast, where we can take, we can really push it much further, and we can tell people, okay, move up and down, move between bit management systems.

As the environment changes, as your conditions change, and that’s going to give you the best results. So I think it’s oftentimes not an answer of smart bidding, yes or no. It’s like at the right time, yes, absolutely, with the right inputs.

Francisco Lacayo: Yeah, I mean, I think you touched on Google recommendations. That one is a different story for me.

So smart bidding, I can stand behind for most accounts, the recommendations. That’s that’s a bit different. I feel that that that needs some work. I mean, and you probably have enough material to do about 10 people see town halls. If you want to talk about that and go recommendations, right? And the Google partner program and all of that mess.

So that I think at least we found other tools out there that help us. either spot better areas of opportunities, or they just give us better recommendations overall, right? And that’s kind of the, I think the whole journey of finding the right tech stack for PPC management. If you talk about PPC alone you can mix tools around, right?

You don’t have to fully rely on just Google automation or, you know, just fully using Optmyzr or Kenshi or anything out there, but You can mix them around and get the best out of all the tools and find the right strategy for a client. So in recommendations, we usually don’t pay too much attention to those because we feel they’re missing the human component and understanding context and that that’s still not there, but we do have other tools, you know, Optmyzr we use a lot.

And I’ll give you the, the breakdown here is a great tool for everyone watching. So if you haven’t tried it, you should try it out, but we use it a lot for decision making and we get much better recommendations as well as sometimes the engines do because. I think Optmyzr and you could talk about the tech behind it.

But I think you guys have a different way of approaching data and understanding what’s behind it. So for us, it’s about that. It’s about finding the right alternative and finding how to spot these opportunities. We built in house an audit tool that we started using ourselves to find opportunities within accounts.

Now we give it to partners as well, so they can use with potential prospects or clients. But we did it based on our product methodology and how we go about finding opportunities. So our audit tool is not going to tell us to automatically switch to smart bidding if the results are well, or, you know, if you don’t need to switch to smart bidding, right?

The train of thought behind the audit tool is different than some of the recommendations that we see from Google. So, so for me, it’s about that finding the right mix. And once you find the right mix, you’re likely going to be optimizing performance and, and also you’re going to keep efficiency as well in check.

Frederick Vallaeys: And I love the notion that an audit tool was built in house based on the methodology that you have. So Optmyzr has an audit tool as well, but, but we originally called it the policy and audit tool. And it was really built on the notion that as an agency, you have your methodology. But it’s so difficult to make sure that your new account managers and every team is following those best practices and whatever it is Like we need to have Five etas that we’re testing all the time or we can never have more than 20 keywords in an ad group, right?

Whatever the numbers are, however, you like to structure it like keeping a team Of even more than five people on the same page can be difficult So you need a tool that checks on that But because the worst thing you can do is your sales team goes out there and says hey client We We’re awesome because we do these things for your account and then the team that actually does execute on it completely does it differently That’s like what happens so I like that whole idea of you having your internal audit tool also for full disclosure So thank you.

You guys are a customer Really appreciate that josh and Rise are not customers. So this is not just a customer session And we we did want to talk to francisco regardless of whether he was a customer or not All right, good. Let’s maybe do a final topic here on software, but in terms of efficiency, right?

So do you guys have any tools to look at how much time is spent on clients? And you know, the dog that barks the loudest gets the most attention and making sure that that is not the case with your clients, that everybody gets their fair share. Of management time.

Francisco Lacayo: Yeah, I mean, in our case, we this has taken us some time to perfect and we feel we still have a long way to go.

Right. But about three or four years ago, we sat down and we put our own client journey on a big wall. We said, let’s review all the points that you know, all the steps that our clients go through in their lifetime with us. Then let’s check every single step that we’re taking internally for each one of these touch points.

And then let’s assess does it make sense? Can we do it faster? Can we automate it? Can we remove it? We did that process And then we came across a lot of things that we needed to change and then we came across a lot of tools that could Help us make things more efficient, right? So for client management We don’t measure, Time per se.

So we don’t, we don’t actually bring it down to the minute and how many minutes we’re spending on an account. But we do have particular projects and we pay a lot of attention to project management to make sure that each client is getting around the same amount of work each month, especially if we’re starting out with a client or we need to make sure that we improve performance and they’re not getting bored.

Obviously for the bigger client. So if you have an enterprise client. We do a lot of custom work. You know, we have clients that requires basically to optimize on a daily basis and report almost daily basis. That’s a different story. With enterprise clients, you can probably afford it because it’s a big project, but our average client, you know, any standard client out there, what we’ve built is, is a methodology based on budgets.

The budgets give us an idea of how big the account should be. So we don’t have limits there on the amount of campaigns or ad groups. But internally, we’re trying to say if you have a client spending 1000, you’re not going to have 20 campaigns running, right? So everyone should have a notion of how to spread budget without wearing a thin and then based on that, we have an idea of the amount of work that each client gets.

They get a set number of optimizations per month, and we have a system in place that tracks that. You know how many optimizations supposed to do, making sure they’re done, making sure the client is aware of the work that’s being done. All of that is fairly automated. So most of the work in terms of communication And project management is fairly automated, which allows us basically to scale the client count pretty quick, which has been, I think that’s the biggest challenge for agencies starting up.

Once you go over the 20, 30, 40 client mark, or if you have that one month, when instead of selling five or 10 clients, you sell 30 or 40, that that’s really when you hit the challenge of how do I abort these clients? Like, how do I make sure that they all come on board at the same time? Things don’t fall through the cracks.

How do I get the team ready? How do I make sure we get all the phone calls done? They all get their own email. They’ll get the reports, et cetera. That’s really the challenge. And that’s a big part. I think that’s where tech plays a big part in a big role is what can you automate out of that process? And not just the PPC management, but.

What can you automate on the onboarding of the client? So when you send the welcome email, can you automate that? Can you automate a call being scheduled? Can you automate the first weekly report? Can you automate the optimization highlights being sent? And if you get to work on that and you find the right tools, then your account manager has a lot more time to work with the account and focus on the strategy and technical part.

And then the, the, the communication and the day to day business management or relationship management, you can automate it. The client will usually have the info that they need. So it’s, it’s a, it’s a extremely interesting topic and, and it’s a lengthy one as well, so this is another one that we can have a, a second PPC down home, but but it’s one that I think it takes time to get right and again, it relies on a mix of tools and humans making sure that the processes make sense and that they’re being efficient.

Frederick Vallaeys: In fact, we’re not going to do another PPC town hall on this right away, but I am speaking on a webinar that you guys are hosting next week. And it’s a little bit about that same topic, right? So scalability and automation and agencies. So it’s a great, go to the white shark media website and you’ll find it right there.

You can sign up for it next Wednesday. Josh, what about on on your end?

Josh Tan: Pretty similar that we have a project management or within our client services team to, to really know what needs to be done at what point in time and make sure that we’re operating you know, within kind of the scope that we have with the client.

So, but, you know, We’ve really moved away from kind of looking at number of projects that we do for an account and really more so a solutions oriented approach to if this is something that that account needs, then we’re going to find a way to do that. And so we’ll allocate resources to do so. But I think fundamentally, if you have the right strategy, it’s not going to be difficult for you to say, I’m going to do this because it’ll, you know, Please the client.

As opposed to if you’re not on the same page with a client, that’s when you have them coming to you and saying, you know, you’re not focused on this thing and not looking at that thing. And that’s generally where, at least in my experience that we’ve had more client interaction that kind of rattles your process flow.

So I completely agree with, you know, all the automation and the team behind it. But I think the relationship, the relationship part is also important that that our clients need to what we’re doing for them. And we need to be on the same page. So no one is going back and forth about like spend time here and there.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. Set the right expectations at the beginning so you don’t end up on that slippery slope of scope basically going out of control. Great. Well, some great insights guys on how to scale PPC agency and obviously both of your agencies are very successful. So love hearing from the people who’ve done it. Any other things that are top of mind for you that we haven’t covered that you’d like to talk about?

Francisco Lacayo: I mean, I think one, one topic that still resonates and it’s part of what we covered today is. How to determine where automation comes into play and where it doesn’t. So if you’re gonna, you know, we’re talking about using tools for scalability, so that’s great. But, you know, what can tools actually do and what should I trust the tools to do?

I think it’s important for people to understand that tools are a means to an end, and they’re, they’re there to help you make decisions, and in a lot of cases, the tools are not going to make the decisions for you. So it’s not about fully giving out an entire process to a tool, but rather getting the tool to help you be more efficient with the process and make better decisions.

What tools do for us is they give us back a lot of time. To be more efficient with everything. So if we’re able to automate part of the technical communication with a customer, we get time back to talk to the customer about more relevant things. So instead of talking about the optimization, we talk about the results of the strategy instead.

And I think that that’s how agencies should approach technology. not expect technology to take over the entire process or to be the magic solution to a lot of the problems. But understand that the tools are just going to be your friends that will help you, but you’re still going to be driving the machine and you still have to invest time in yourself and your training and your capabilities to make sure that you can drive that machine forward regardless of how good the machine is.

So for me, that’s, that’s very important because sometimes a lot of people, we see a lot of agencies that are starting up. They’re scared of going, you know, and hiring a tool because they feel that they’re going to lose control of what they do, or they’re not aligned with how the tool works, that they’re scared that.

You know, it’s going to make things that they wouldn’t do on their end. But, but it’s, for us, it’s not really about that. It’s about the tool giving you more info, more signals and doing something faster for you so you can still make the right decisions and get the results. Yeah,

Frederick Vallaeys: that makes total sense. So I think this is Jim from us.

Marketing is saying that. He uses maximized conversion sometimes, but then it tends to drop really expensive CPC keywords to page two, even though they converted well. And that’s sort of the risk, right? If you didn’t understand how a bidding strategy converts into a CPC bid and how that determines whether you’re on page one or page two, you’d be like, Oh my God, it’s broken.

Like, what do I do now? And then you can’t do anything. But, you know, Jim and you guys, you all know that. Well, okay, then maybe let’s put it on manual bidding for a while. Let’s fix those CPCs. Or let’s shift to a different bid, automated bid strategy that does respect these these high converting keywords.

And that’s always my fear is that You know, with that, the younger generation who comes into PPC management now, where so much is automated, do they still understand the fundamentals? Do they still understand how quality score relates to your rank the auction? And, and, and if your quality is low, quality score is low.

How do you boost that so that you don’t have to just pay more money to regain your position, but you actually regain that position cheaply through a different effort. So yeah, Francisco, everything you said there totally resonates with me. Josh, any any final thoughts from you?

Josh Tan: I think just going back to to the question that we got you know, max conversions, inflating your CPCs, the, to me, the main takeaway about about automation, bid automation, and smart bidding and all these things is you need to have the right segmentation within your account.

And if you’re going to follow the recommendation of just grouping all of your campaigns into one big strategy, having one goal, that’s when you’re going to see a lot of disparity between your CPCs and conversion rates across different keywords. But if you carefully choose the right campaigns and have a specific strategy toward those segments, that’s when we see the most success.

And we know that some campaigns will have higher CPCs but they might have higher conversion rates as well. And then if you have campaigns that are geared toward your more kind of upper funnel or, you know, consideration sets of users, that’s when you’ll see a lot more CPCs that are in line with what you’re expecting.

So it’s really about structuring your campaign so that you’re, you have the right levers to pull so that you see the results that you want. Yeah. And

Frederick Vallaeys: that resonates totally too. I mean, so when Google comes out there and says, Hey, everybody just turn on automation, people and then they say flattened the structure, right?

So have fewer campaigns, don’t have too many different keywords. Just like put everything in broad match. I think that’s good advice. For the average non expert PPC advertiser, right? That’s the easy way. And the results will be good enough, but for us as experts, where we hopefully aspire to more than average, we still have those controls.

You can actually have multiple campaigns. And so oftentimes like when Google says don’t have multiple campaigns, when you’re doing smart bidding, people take that to be the gospel and like the absolute truth, but Google says it because some people get confused when you have. Like too many campaigns. And so now you have, you know, say one keyword where one day it has a 50 percent conversion rate and the next day it has a 75 percent conversion rate.

And that’s a huge change in conversion rate, right? And you see that at the campaign level, because it’s a really small campaign. If you put that campaign in with every other campaign and that those numbers get absorbed into the averages, you see much smaller changes. And so. Advertisers don’t freak out.

They’re not like, Oh my God, smart bidding is broken because it had 25 percent change from one day to the next. Right. That’s kind of the reason why Google says don’t do these things. When in fact they were completely fine in the way that Josh is saying with, you know, lots of structure and structure needs to be decided based on the levers that you want to pull.

So yeah, absolutely agree with everything you said. Well, good. If people want to learn more. Josh, they can follow you on Twitter.

Josh Tan: Yes, exactly. You can follow me on Twitter. I’m always putting out the latest that we do at RISE. We share a lot of our case studies and just things that are happening.

So it’s a good place to kind of scroll through and see everything that’s happening.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. Well thank you for joining us and Francisco. So if people wanna learn more, white Shark media has lots of shark themed blog posts, a lot of

Francisco Lacayo: ocean themed content. Yes, we have. We try to put a, a, as much content as possible as we can.

So you go to our website, you’ll have our blog. We have a pretty cool YouTube channel as well. We put a lot of videos out there. I try to be as active as I can there, so I, if I can write some blogs, I’ll do it. I’m also on LinkedIn, but, but hopefully you’ll catch some of our content in one of our channels.

Yeah,

Frederick Vallaeys: great. Well, hey, I appreciate both of you being willing to share everything that you did to help others grow. I think that’s one of the hallmarks of our industry. Everybody’s like, it’s such a big pie that we’re willing to share some of the secrets and help everybody get better. So really appreciate you being two of those those folks who shared so much.

So thank you. PPC Town Hall, we will be back in three weeks. So we’re trying to do it twice a month now, so we’ll be doing it July 14th. The topic is going to be about offline conversion import and three specific techniques you can use to better inform Google about what’s happening conversions wise, and then obviously that leads to smart bidding working much better.

We will probably have someone from Google on that call to to share some of the secrets and some of the latest betas and techniques they’re using. So that should be a really good tactical session. And then we’ll be back again as well on July 28th, two weeks after that. So subscribe to the YouTube channel.

You can also subscribe to emails on ppctownhall. com. And then be sure to look at Rise and White Shark Media through Twitter and our website. So thanks everyone for watching. We’ll see you in three weeks. Thank you for your time. Thanks everyone.