Succeeding as an Agency in an Automated PPC World

Episode Description

As the shift towards automation accelerates, agencies must constantly evolve.

Are your strategies useful to their clients? What tactics will you deploy to remain competitive? What can you realistically expect from today’s automation tools? This video answers these questions and offers a roadmap to possible solutions.

This panel covers:

• What agency work to automate and what to do manually
• What are the biggest profit centers of modern agencies
• How to have great agency culture to find and retain talent
• What skills a successful agency needs to have
• How to explain the agency value to clients
• How pricing models have changed

Episode Takeaways

Agency Automation and Manual Work: Emphasize automating repetitive tasks to free up resources for creative and strategic activities. Utilize scripts and other automated solutions to enhance efficiency without compromising quality.

Profit Centers of Modern Agencies: Focus on knowledge and expertise in specific industry niches or customer segments to differentiate from competitors and add value. Specialized knowledge can command premium pricing and drive agency profitability.

Agency Culture for Talent Retention: Foster a culture of innovation and continuous learning to attract and retain top talent. Encourage team members to pursue new ideas and solutions, supporting them with resources and opportunities to experiment.

Skills for Agency Success: Develop skills in data analysis, client relationship management, and strategic planning. Stay adaptable to industry changes and be open to adopting new technologies and methods.

Communicating Agency Value to Clients: Clearly articulate the benefits of specialized agency expertise over generic automated solutions. Demonstrate the added value of human insight and strategic oversight in achieving superior outcomes.

Changes in Pricing Models: Transition towards value-based pricing models that reflect the strategic input and customized solutions provided by the agency. This approach aligns agency compensation with client success, enhancing long-term relationships.

Episode Transcript

Frederick Vallaeys: Hello and welcome to another episode of PPC Town Hall. My name is Fred Vallaeys. I’m your host. I’m also the co founder and CEO at Optmyzr. So today we have another great session. We did a couple of great ones already this year, so we’re going to try to make this the best one yet. And the topic for today is how to succeed as an agency in an ever more automated PPC world.

So a common theme that we’ve been talking about for the last year or so and even before then, of course, before PPC Townhall started, but is the fact that Google keeps automating more and more of the things that we as PPC practitioners have tended to do. And so if you’re an in house team, Maybe that’s a godsend.

Maybe you can do more work with with less effort because you have access to some of these Google tools. Now, if you’re an agency, it’s sort of a different question because maybe your client comes to you and says, why is it that I’m paying you money to do the things that Google claims they can do for me as well?

Now I’ve got a pretty strong opinion on that. And I’ve written a book on it. And basically the point is you’re going to get average results. If you just let the machines from Google do the work for you. I think a lot of people on this call today are going to agree with me, but I brought in a great set of panelists to talk through this and many of the other issues and sort of learn from each other about how to make a great living, great career, and a great agency, despite all this automation that’s going on.

So welcome to PPC Town Hall. In a minute, I’m going to ask you to use the comments to tell us where you’re coming from. And we’ll be right back with our guests.

All right. So here we are for PPC Town Hall and agencies, and we’ve got some of the best agency leaders in the world on the call today. We got Wil from Sear. Wil, how are you doing? Doing pretty good. I’m doing pretty good. How are you? Good, good. Are

Wil Reynolds: you pretty warm there? I’m, I’m pretty warm. I have a, I have a heater under my desk.

One of the great things about everybody working from home is that I don’t have to hear about how cold the office is from like five people a day.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, we’re kind of talking about outside. Where are you calling us from today? I’m calling you from philly And anu, where are you calling us from today?

Anu Adegbola: Hi i’m coming from london from nice cold snowy london, but it’s very warm in my house right now So there’s zero complaints. So i’m not i’m not too bugged down about the fact that we’re on lockdown It’s nice to be in indoors and warm

Frederick Vallaeys: nice and when you’re not in lockdown now, what office do you tend to go to?

Anu Adegbola: Yeah, it’s a we will work out from old streets all street station. Everyone, anyone knows that still in London. And luckily for me, it’s about half an hour. I ride a motorbike. That’s, that’s a neat, people find it quite interested about me. So I love doing that because I’ve always hated like London transport.

So when I could. Just stopped dealing with all of that. I was I was excited. So I got my my motorbike that I ride in there So I missed that massively to be honest

Frederick Vallaeys: And I knew of course you’re with brain labs. So, one of the the agency that was started by But Dan Dan Gilbert, and he’s very well known for his scripts.

I feel like we had sort of a competition going there and like who could write the most for a while. But obviously I, I think you’ll have a great perspective of course, on automation, because I think you guys have really leveraged it

Anu Adegbola: in

Frederick Vallaeys: great ways. And then we have Max as a guest as well. So Max doesn’t run an agency, but he’s written a book and Max show us your book and tell us where you’re calling from.

Max Traylor: Yeah, so I I’ve been drinking beer with the smartest people I can find for six years, and I, I finally put the best of the best into a, a book, Agency Survival Guide, and I didn’t think anybody would read it, but turns out they are, so I had to read it myself and make sure it was factual, I drew some fun pictures.

It’s not, it’s a beer and a half read by the way. It’s not like a, it’s not, it’s not, I don’t put you through it, but Colin from Boston and you know, the big thing going on here is I got 20 days until my second child is born. I got a little girl on the way. And so if I have to, you know, if I have to go, there’s only one, there’s only one thing that means.

So wish me luck. And I’ve never been a father twice. I’ve only done it once. So I’m really in

Frederick Vallaeys: territory. Well, congratulations on that. So so sort of to tee up this conversation, most of you watching the call today, you’ve probably seen the news from Google, but they decided to make Broadmatch Modified behave differently.

And in fact, Broadmatch Modified, they said, will be retired and it will be absorbed into the PhraseMatch keyword type. Now, the changes to keyword match types, I mean, that’s been a frustration for a number of years, ever since about 2016. When Google introduced close variants. And this is one of these things that’s driven by machine learning by automation, and it’s really changing the game for all of us.

Right. So any thoughts on, on the BMM change? First of all

Anu Adegbola: should I start?

Frederick Vallaeys: Who’s

Anu Adegbola: the

Frederick Vallaeys: most pissed about it? Right.

Anu Adegbola: Yeah. I’d be surprised if there was anyone more pissed. Although I, I, I chastise myself every time I’m pissed with Google because. You know, the only thing constant about Google is change, really, is what we’re, what we’re really developing.

We’re realizing the, the longer the relationship with, with Google keeps, keeps going, you know, from when they started moving for adding close, Variants to exact match and exact match was not exact match anymore. It was an automating, you know, our copies with RSAs and smart campaigns and smart shopping, smart bid.

It’s, it’s a sign of the time. It’s, they weren’t going to stop anytime soon. I wish they gave us a few more months in, in January. I mean, in 2021 to hit us with, with a new update, but Hey, it was, it was a matter of time. And But it’s actually

Frederick Vallaeys: bring up an interesting point there. You said, like when you work it with Google, it’s like constant change that you have to expect.

And to what degree is that constant change actually a positive for agencies? Because I sort of figure if you’re not doing this for a living, just the fact that you need to keep up with that much change is just draining, right? And at some point you’re like, just have an agency do this work for me. Like, let them worry about it.

Like, because I don’t care about keyword match types. I care about making profits. Right. And how I get to those profits, that’s the job of an agency. So Wil, any thoughts on that?

Wil Reynolds: No, I tend to get, I tend to get a little bit upset from time to time. You know I’m the victim of a close variant that cost me money.

You know, I was going after the word on exact match GA 360 for Google analytics 360 and Google started matching me to Georgia words. And I was not very happy about the hat. So, and I’m paying, you know, you’re paying 20 bucks a click for that. So you know, when I get angry about what Google’s doing, you know, I think being an SEO Something that I realized early on when I started as an SEO is when Google did not provide it and took away all the search terms, you know, SEO has gotten mad and they spent two or three years talking about it.

And then when I started spending more and more time with paid teams, they’re like, we have all that data. And you’re like, Oh, wait. So. There’s thousands of people angry about this thing talking about it, but we could just talk to the people on paid who actually get search terms down to the conversion level and like nobody in SEO came up with that.

And that’s when I started getting more into paid because I started realizing I can use these two tools against each other to validate one another. So now I’m able to catch what Google’s up to when they match me for Georgia because a map result shows an organic. Whereas typically a paid search person’s never going to say like, Oh, am I bringing in that map result to offset whether or not I’m off of intent?

So what we’re trying to do is use the organic side of Google to help us understand intent to police the paid side to make sure that us and our clients budgets are protected.

Frederick Vallaeys: Nice. So leveraging data sources, you can even leverage data sources within the paid site too, right? So you could look at your shopping campaign results and.

Look at the queries from that map those to the keyword

Wil Reynolds: shopping shopping stuff because of this is where I’m outside of my swim lane, you know, but it’s like smart shopping, you know, a lot of those, those results like you don’t get your search terms like it’s like a different, it’s a whole different ballgame.

So a lot of what we’ve built is on search terms. So now we’re trying to find other ways to back into what’s the word I’m looking for? Yeah. Back into intent. So yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s just been interesting. We’ve been, it’s interesting when you use Google’s organic to police, Google’s paid, let’s just put it that way.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And so I think the point you’re making too, is if you’re using like smart shopping, then you do have the limitation of not getting quite as much data and not having quite as many controls. But luckily with the regular campaigns, you still get that right. But yeah,

Wil Reynolds: but then you don’t get the same performance.

So, you know, it’s, it’s a constant

Frederick Vallaeys: constant balance. Exactly. Max, where do you sit on this? I know you’re probably not quite as into weeds with match type and everything.

Max Traylor: Well, this is going to be perfect because I, I only understood like two words out of everything that just happened. And one is constant change, which is, I guess, two words.

Okay, so maybe three words. One is constant change and one is complexity. And in a market of constant change and complexity, the value of knowledge goes up. You’re talking about how to survive, how to be profitable. This is it getting smart people together and selling your knowledge and saying, look, everybody’s pissed.

Everybody’s losing money. You’re going to have people that are trying to make a margin on doing the work. Those people are going to suffer. And then you’re going to have people that monetize their knowledge and monetize their expertise and say, Hey, we’re going to help your organization develop a culture of constant change and help you tap into the leaders that are on the front lines.

That’s where I think not, not just paid and SEO is going. That’s, that’s everything.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, exactly. Leveraging the knowledge that you have. So that’s exactly what Bill was talking about. Right. So now, Wil, you came from an SEO background and you sort of made that mental connection between the two and the queries.

How do people, I mean, there’s so much happening in this industry, like what do you guys read to keep up and maybe have those innovative thoughts when, when maybe you haven’t come from SEO or some other area before? You know, I, I was recently chatting about this with someone. And I said, the way that I tend to come up with, so I’ve been lucky in a few times where I’ve kind of come up with a concept that has affected a good chunk of the industry and I’m like, they always came from me not reading the things that everybody else in our industry reads.

Wil Reynolds: So for a while, I decided to only read books about marketing pre 1940 because people back then had to go door to door connecting to people, right? And understanding people’s problems. So when you start reading books from that far back, You start finding ways of looking at the same problems today. It’s just that we’re so entrenched in, you know, I’m going to be on this PPC thing or this SEO thing or this or that.

And you’re like, all that is, is solving the exact same things that happened when people were selling things a hundred years ago. So for me, I tend, I love looking at old ads. Like one of my favorite ads, and we’ll get into this when we talk about automation later. One of my favorite ads is an ad by Volkswagen. And the ad just says, how does the man who drives the snow plow drive to the snow plow? And you’re like, man, like that comes from understanding a customer. Right. That comes from an understanding of how people buy things and that headline, the way that our world is going is everything is so like, Oh, it’s algorithmic.

So you need this word on the page. You need this word in the headline. And when everybody’s running that way, I’ve been studying like different types of, of different types of ads that just connected to people at a different way. And I’m going to try to incorporate that back into the way that we do our thing on the day to day.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, and I love that. And I knew I want to hear your perspective, too. But basically, you’re saying, like, up level it, right? Like, we’ve kind of built a slippery slope here. We had Google ads for the past couple of years where there’s been an expectation that you manage every little detail because if you didn’t manage it, it wouldn’t get managed.

There wasn’t anything to do it for you, right? And so we sort of lost track of what is it we’re actually trying to achieve, which what you’re saying is connect with another human and You know, help them with the solution that our client has. And now, now that we actually are able to step outside of that little bubble of Google ads, a lot of us just don’t know how to take those steps to get out of that bubble anymore.

Right. So, so I love that whole idea that you have to run the other way to differentiate yourself. Honey, what are your thoughts on that?

Anu Adegbola: Yeah, I totally, I’d absolutely agree with that. Like we are, we, we’ve got to be really careful about. Not just being all about the technology and automation and realize that it’s, it’s people at the end of all these clicks, it’s people that are reading our ads.

And we it’s, it’s really important to, to, to think, try to think like a customer. When, when we look at an ad, what attracts us? To click and add what attracts us to, you know, go to a competitor or click on a brand or get affiliated with a brand. It’s, it’s a lot about who they are. And, and that’s why I know in, in, in, in the chats that I have, especially on Twitter with a lot of people in the community is, you know, you know, they say branding is important and, you know, knowing what that brand stands for, knowing like what they believe in, in terms of, you know, let’s say diversity, you know, It’s helping the planet, environmental kind of stuff.

Those are the things, a lot of things that, that ultimately gets people, gets loyal customers. It’s you know, I, I feel like people are losing, we’re moving away from trying to build loyal customers and we’re trying to do too much about just getting the click. We just want that one click. And I’m like, don’t you want to repeat customer?

Don’t you want someone who’s going to be your super fan? Don’t you want someone who is literally. Part of your community. They are the ones that are going to make you the most money. It’s not, it’s not the initial cost. It’s not the initial click that is going to be the most profitable. It’s the one that comes and stays.

Frederick Vallaeys: It’s our, sorry to interrupt. Do you see that with a lot of your clients where they have sort of that short term focus and maybe that’s driven by their companies having a short term vision and not sort of seeing the bigger picture and the long term benefits that you could drive by, by being a good brain, strong brains, by looking at

Anu Adegbola: Yeah, I think some clients do do that.

But we, we are trying to work more with the client and trying to have those discussions about reputation and about making sure that you are, you are a bit consistent with what you’re doing and which is another topic that comes to mind, especially that, that, that, that was triggered by something Wil said is that it’s also about not looking at each channel as a single.

You know, profit platform. It’s all about, you know, pushing businesses goals. You know, some people are like, Oh, we need to be PPC and SEO and social media. We need to be on Facebook and we need to be on Tik TOK just because it’s, you know, it’s the new thing. There’s so many people on it. Where’s your audience on it?

Does it match with what your company? Company’s reputation is, and it doesn’t match with the bigger picture. Will your customers recognize you and expect you to be on this platform? Some, some platforms are for customers to escape. They don’t want to be sold something on that platform, even though they’re your customer.

If they start seeing you on TikTok, I’d be like, what are you doing here targeting me again? I wanted to escape. I don’t want you chasing me on air as well. You know, I feel that we don’t always Think about that level of what is, what are, what are, have our customers come to expect of us, you know, so that we stay in that lane and keep building the loyalty and keep building the reputation.

Frederick Vallaeys: That’s a really good point. So don’t annoy your customer by getting into their free time.

There’s a question from the audience here. It’s directed at Wil, but I’m going to throw it at Max for a second, because people are asking what books should should we read? So Max, you’ve written a book, right? Yeah, I’ve written a book, but

Max Traylor: you know, that that’s, you know, that’s a thing. Agency survival guide.

I mean, that’s me, but I think where you should start is a buddy of mine, David Baker, the business of expertise. I try to be as opinionated as possible in my stuff, but you know, the thing you need to know is that the business of doing, of implementation, of doing these things is going away.

That’s what Google’s doing. They’re saying, everyone that’s out there pushing buttons, we’re going to take your jobs. Now if you want to build a job for yourself, then you do what everyone else knows how to do and you do it a little bit better. If you want to build profit, if you want people to seek you out, then you better invest in, in having knowledge that no one else has.

And that’s what Anu is talking about. That’s that, that comes down to the fundamentals that comes down to focus. Helping customers that have a very specific type of, of client or customer of their own. You invest in understanding who they are, what they want, where they hang out, and people are going to pay you.

A premium for knowing those things and being able to connect with that audience The tools are always going to change and everyone is going to be reading all these articles online about how to use the tools so I would I would not bet on my own ability to understand tools better than anybody else But I would bet on my ability to focus on a particular type of customer segment And learn more about that customer segment than anybody else

Frederick Vallaeys: makes a lot of sense Well, because the question was directed at you Any books that you like?

Wil Reynolds: Well, I like a ton of books, but related to advertising. My favorite ones are written by Claude Hopkins. My life in advertising and scientific advertising. He was literally talking about doing a B test, knocking door to door back in 1900. And like, that was super inspiring to me. Because he was just a B testing.

You know, he talks about it. It’s just a B testing, but he was doing it face to face. You know, we don’t touch our customers anymore. We don’t, we sit behind our tools. We have no idea what’s going on with folks. One of the things that we, that we started doing and we’re slowly scaling, cause it’s not easy. Is videoing our clients, customers going through the search results and having them talk to us about what they see, what, why they’re clicking on what they’re clicking on, what decisions they’re making.

And you know, what’s interesting is you know, a client will say, Oh, I need to rank for this word. You become a very different level of consultant when you say we talked to somebody. Who’s looked at words like these and, you know, she was on a fixed income. So the reason why she was searching her, why behind, why she’s searching for buy now, rent later, rent, you know, buy to rent or rent to buy or whatever the word is, those words for some people that we interviewed were around.

Having gifts for Christmas and they needed to just like budget every single month to make sure they could afford that thing for their child. That’s very different than the woman we talked to who went through a divorce and her and her significant other, you know, harm their credit and she’s trying to use it as a tool to rebuild credit.

So often we just look at keywords and, and, and automations and we don’t even challenge ourselves, try to get to know these people just one level deeper, but I feel like going that one level deeper. If you can find the right things can completely change the way you go to market for a client that someone else will never have, because that why is never showing up in Google AdWords.

So, you know, to Max’s point, like for me, I, when I look to create differentiation, It’s always, where’s everybody accepting this existing set of data to make their decisions off of, and where can I go find another data set that when I plug into that data set makes me come up with different answers. So like, I love looking at things like data.

medicare. gov and thinking like, okay, if hospital complaints are showing up there and I have a national hospital client, like, how can I find out that when the zip codes where people are. Doing a lot of complaints to the top competitor. Like, do I outperform in those zip codes? Because those people are losing their credibility with people.

Oh, they are cool. Maybe I should change my bid strategy in those zip codes. We took Google has in big query right now. They’ve got all the COVID data posted. So one of our folks who works with a client who sells things in office spaces, literally did a an analysis where you looked at all the And what their positivity rates were.

According to this like scientific study, and he just joined it to our existing data in big query from for our paid data. And he was able to see that when positivity rates by each state got over a certain level, it affected our clients ability to sell because most So the times the offices were all shut down, no one was coming back in, but in other states when they dipped, all of a sudden you were, you were eligible to sell more because more people were coming into the office.

And once you build that at scale, you’re able to go to your client and maximize budget and go, okay, positivity rate in this state, once it goes over this percentage, they usually shut down. And that means that we should probably not look at our campaigns this way anymore. So like that kind of stuff is what I’m always looking for.

Frederick Vallaeys: So I love that example because I think it’s almost an extension of the bid by letter script. It’s like everybody. Has heard that example and everybody sort of agrees with the fundamental premise that Business is probably impacted at some level by the temperature by whether it’s raining or sunny you just don’t know Exactly how like is there a cutoff point for temperature?

Is there a certain amount of precipitation at which point people will no longer? Go outside of their house, right? Anu doesn’t want to leave now because there’s snow, but might she leave the house if it had snowed just a little bit less? What if I knew what the answer was on that, right? So what I’m really interested in, Wil, is, I love the idea, right?

You kind of took the whole salesman going door to door, but now you’re doing these things at scale with massive data sets. Like, what sort of background Did that person have to be able to do that research? Were there any tools? Like how, how do you bridge that gap from having the idea to actually implementing it?

Wil Reynolds: They cared,

you know, it’s so funny, right? Is it’s like, it’s funny what you can accomplish if you care enough about solving a problem and it means something to you to solve. If it’s just another script to put in or another thing to put in, well, then that’s fine, and you’ll be great at your job. But like, what usually causes people to innovate is they care about a problem enough to figure out what they have to figure out.

I went to school to be a teacher, like, I’m horrible with code. I’m not good at that stuff. But once Excel started breaking, I went to community college and started learning SQL. Right. I’m a CEO of a massive company. Like I’m in a community college taking SQL classes because I cared enough about solving a problem that Excel kept breaking on me for, you know, I think people figure out what tools they need once they care enough about a problem.

So, you know the person that runs that at seer. She I’m trying to think what tools she uses. It’s just, I forget them all, but it’s like there’s a couple of interview tools, a couple of survey tools for us to find the right kind of folks. But it’s not like I went out and got some crazy like researcher who’s got this deep background.

I just found somebody who cared about saying like, shouldn’t we do a better job at this? And then once I let her go and gave her the budget, she, she’s, she’s taken it further than anything that I could have.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And maybe this leads into a conversation here on hiring. Right. So. Was that person sort of younger, more of a get go getter type person, self starter, I assume is what you really want in an agency.

Maybe because sometimes when I sell the Optmyzr software to folks, I get resistance and I get people who are like, well, you know, but I’ve been doing it this way for the last five to ten years and I’m really happy with using spreadsheets and like, it’s fine if I need to spend two hours doing it this way.

Like, why do I need technology? Like, I’m the human element, right? And so, and that’s fundamentally the fight that we’re looking at is there’s so much automation coming out of Google. Like, how do you transition into it and how do you combine it with the strengths that you have within the agency? So the question is like, what skillsets, how do you hire the type of people that are willing to do that?

Max.

Anu Adegbola: Yeah,

Frederick Vallaeys: I don’t have to raise your hand here. By the way.

Max Traylor: Well, you know, I just want to be, look, it’s my first is my first time with you. So I default to, you know, polite. They always taught me to raise my hand. There you go. Thank you, Wil. Thank you.

Wil Reynolds: Your mama raised you right, Max.

Max Traylor: Yeah. So, so I’m going to get to that, that question.

But I think, I think the first question before thinking about hiring somebody is where’s, where are you going to focus? Because while I agree with Wil, That you have to care. There are limitations to the human mind. If you are trying to care about every problem in the world that every client has in the world, then you’re only going to get so far.

But if you differentiate, if you focus and you say, I’m going to start looking at problems and dedicating myself to this particular industry who goes after this particular client, the more focused you are. The more your brain is on a learning curve that you’re eventually going to figure out some insights that other people haven’t figured out.

So back to your question, Fred, on who you should hire. The first question is what kind of knowledge are you banking on that you’re going to have that no one else is going to have? And when you answer that question, then you go hire people that either have that knowledge or have a particular personality type or skillset to gain that.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And so, and I’ll let the others weigh in too. But when I was at Google, I was interesting because they would sort of hire. Highly overqualified people so I have an electrical engineering degree yet. My first job at google was reviewing ads That people submitted because they hadn’t automated it yet.

And literally I would look at a thousand ads a day and decide if it was like family safe, non family safe, if the keyword was sort of relevant to what the ad was. And it was like, why by the way, it was a, it was a recession. So I couldn’t quite find another engineering job. That was part of the thing, but, but like, why would Google even hire in that way?

Right. And for them, it was all about, listen, we know that. We’re here now as a company, but we want to go here and we want to be much bigger We might we might be in self driving cars I mean obviously they didn’t know it at the time But they knew they had more aspirations than just a search engine And they just wanted to hire people that would be able to grow right and so it wasn’t about specific skill sets as much as It was about like People who’ve proven they can solve tough problems being from, you know, good universities have good degrees are motivated and that was more important to them.

I think than what you actually knew coming into the company

Anu Adegbola: Yeah, and if I may to jump in there yeah, I I definitely I definitely agree with the fact I think about looking at the vision looking at when you how the question wants to grow like when you said that bit about Or is it something that’s not wanting, like all the technology things are, oh yeah.

Sorry to

Frederick Vallaeys: interrupt, but can you come closer to your microphone? You’re a little muffled right now.

Anu Adegbola: Oh, sorry.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, it’s much

Anu Adegbola: better. Yeah, okay. So yeah, it’s, you know, it’s, I think it’s very interesting to, to, to come across someone who is like, I’ve done this, this same way for the past five years. This new thing that I might need to learn and train on.

I’m not interested in. So, yeah, that’s, that’s very close minded way of doing things. And with, you know, a lot of what I think is what’s really important to gauge in an interview process is a person’s attitude, not necessarily their aptitude or their skill level of where they are. what their attitude is to an industry that is ever changing, how future focused they can be, how adaptable they can be to the change that is inevitably going to happen, and and their willingness to learn something new and their willingness to to look, to think, think deeper into a problem than what they’re possibly their, their level, the level that they’ve been hired for.

One thing I’m always talking about, like someone in my team who I, I love, I had a chat with him and I’m like, fighting your time, Jen, you’re still time. Why are you hoping to be? And he’s like, and you don’t be scared, but I want to be CMO one day. And I’m like, I’m not scared about that. I’m glad that you want to be CMO one day.

Yes. Maybe you’ll take over my job one day. And you know, there’ll be something bigger for me down the end of the line. And I want. You know, it’s important that everybody thinks that way of not just the level that they’re on, but you know, so my manager who’s managing me, what’s their problem and what they’re thinking about that will make, you know, my job easier, that will make their job easier.

And just, just thinking those 10 steps ahead, because Like Wil what you’re saying, one would imagine that it’s your job to care. You know, it’s, it’s everybody else’s job to do the tactical stuff. It’s your job to care. But once your staff start caring as well, your, the conversation meetings start becoming a lot shorter because both of you are in the same line.

Both of you are in the same wavelength. You know, you, you’re asking a question and they’re answering it and not having to go, oh, lemme, lemme research that. I’ll get back to you. It’s. Fluid conversations and fluid like interaction and just it just makes for you know better agility and better solving a problem.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yep. raising heads. Guys, I’m following Max’s lead that we’ll go, we’ll go with Wil

Max Traylor: in the headphones. Yes. You’re, why

Wil Reynolds: you with the dreadlocks? . So you know, it’s funny, so I’ve been very disappointed in something that I’ve built that didn’t really get the traction that I hoped it would. And we built a technology that helps us to just find inefficiency and paid accounts in like.

It’s just disgusting how quickly it works and how much we find every time. Without fail. And one of the things I ended up reading was a quote, and I don’t want to get it wrong here. So I want to make sure I get it right. It’s from Upton Sinclair. And he wrote, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

And I was like, Oh, that’s it. When I say, yo, I found all this stuff that you could have never found in like 15 minutes. It’s like, well, that invalidates me and my job because my boss is going to be like, how did you waste all this money? So no, I want nothing to do with what you just showed. Yes. I know it could save my company a bunch of money, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And you’re like, oh my God. So that’s the first thing is I look for people who are very okay saying, if you bring me a better way, I’m not going to fight it. So there’s a book called mistakes were made, but not by me. I have never self reflected on a book harder on myself after reading that book. And it talks about how People in law enforcement will use DNA evidence to convict us for crimes, right?

So if there’s a crime that happens and Fred, you committed it, they’re going to, and they find your DNA on site. They’re saying, we’re using this DNA evidence to prove that you were the person. Fred, if you’re locked in jail, and I do a lot of work on people that have been like like a lot of research and people have been locked in jail and are innocent.

And if you’re locked in jail, And they come along and find DNA evidence that exonerates you. Those exact same people are like, no, no, no, he must’ve done something else. And you’re like, wait, it’s the same science. It’s the same science. So the book mistakes were made, but not by me are full of everything.

Like that. And they give you example after example. So it’s gotten me really in tune to where am I bullshitting myself because I don’t want to believe the truth of what somebody is showing me. And the quicker you can snap out of that, the more innovative you can be. When you hold on to it, then you just die on the ship like everybody else eventually will.

And and for me surrounding yourself with people who wants, it’s a clearly better way. So a lot of the stuff that we’re doing today came from one of my, Co workers saying, Hey, well, people think you’re really good at keyword research. Yes. People fly you all over the world and you speak all these conferences.

Yes. He’s like, I think I can beat you in 15 minutes with a script. And I was like, let’s go head to head. We went head to head and he destroyed me. And the minute I was destroyed with all of my speaking at the conferences and shit, the minute I was destroyed, I changed my approach to how I was going to do keyword research.

And that led me down this path. path of learning SQL and joining paid data and all that other stuff. But it came from me the minute I saw there was a better way for us to help our clients. There was no me digging in with my 18 years of experience at the time and being like, Oh no, I got, I had it right.

So I tend to find your openness to be like, that’s just a better way. It’s actually a big part of innovating and finding those new things. Cause so many folks will just dig in.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. I mean, I get you inside, but, but so you were basically destroyed in that moment, but you had the confidence to say, that is okay.

Like I will come out of this.

Wil Reynolds: It’s not even confidence. I’m trying to win. I’m trying to win for my clients and being like, no, like you just invalidated all the things that like, give me value in the industry. I was like, Screw that because if everybody thinks I’m good at research doing it a way that you just beat me in a Google script In 15 minutes, then yes.

Can I have more of that? Please. I’m thankful that you’re on my team. Right. So I think there’s like a balance between like that, right. You want to be open to that, but then you also don’t want to be crippled by statistical significance on everything either. I also find that you always got that person in the room, like, well, you know, if you look at it this way, it’s like, you need a little bit of that.

Not too much of that, but you need a whole lot of, Hey, this might be a better way. And if it’s obvious that people get on board, I always look for that. And, and people that I’m hiring to run things, right.

Frederick Vallaeys: Max,

Max Traylor: you said it Wil innovation. You, I mean, you’re an innovator. That’s what you’re describing people that look for better, faster, cheaper ways of doing things and don’t hang on to their role.

I mean, there’s only two types of people. There’s innovators and there’s not. And you describe, you describe the good one.

Wil Reynolds: You know what’s interesting? So my role is VP of innovation at Sear. And I’m, I’m reflecting on this thing. So we just took our seventh floor. We have six floors that look just like this one, but they’re empty.

And we took our seventh floor and we turned it into a bounce house for like kids to play. And we got a big screen up there and parents can come and we’re giving people, you know, gift certificates to get like local food and all that stuff. Right. So anybody can come every day and we have it cleaned every day.

If a parent is just like, it’s cold, I got to get out of my house. My kids can’t go to the park. I got to get out. We’re like, we have a bounce house. We got little cars. They can drive around because the space is so big. All that is. Is me being the VP of innovation at Sear it’s innovation is like, how can I take these resources?

I already have that. I’ve already paid for it. I’m already paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a month for my rent, right? I can’t get rid of that. I already have this massive space that we used to put events on that we don’t anymore. So with a couple grand, I can make this place into this fun place for my parents to be able to come and hang out when they’re at their wits end and their kid needs a new place to go.

And it’s like, that’s also innovation, man. It’s just taking those constraints and the existing resources and finding a way to turn them and go, wait a second. Like how many of us are paying for, for office space? We’re not using how many of us have turned it in. How many of our, how many of our companies have parents who are at their wits end because they’re stuck in the cold winter and their kids are jumping around in a circle in the house.

And you’re like, I got to get this kid out of here. Well, I got 6, 000 square feet on the seventh floor. Why wouldn’t I just turn that into something for the future? For the families and the people that see her to just get a break and get somewhere new innovation for a job. And I’m sending my kids over to

yeah, right.

But you know, to Max’s point though, it’s innovation. It’s like that it’s, you got that constraint and you look at the resource, the sunk cost, and you find some way to turn that into value in spite of it being a sunk cost that that other folks may not see through that same lens.

Frederick Vallaeys: So I want to bring in the the person who’s deep in the weeds of PPC here.

So his name is Tim Halloran. Tim, welcome to the show. You work for aimClear. Thank you for joining us. Where are you calling us from today?

Tim Halloran: Yeah. It’s great to be here. Thanks for it. I’m calling from St. Paul, Minnesota. So it is a balmy five degrees. I think this is the highest the temperature has gotten in about five days.

Five degrees Fahrenheit. So that’s fun. But besides that, it’s, it’s going well, busy week. Well, good. Well, thanks for taking some time out to join us as well. So I think a lot of the discussion here is kind of shifted into. The type of people you want to hire for an agency, people who are innovators.

Frederick Vallaeys: And, and you’re one of the people here, probably of all of us on the call, the one who’s most in the weeds in the accounts. How do you think about automation coming in and innovation and like, when, when do you, Like use that new technology. How do you think about all of this?

Tim Halloran: Yeah. I, I guess you could say I’m a reform skeptic and I think a lot of that has to do with a lot of this stuff you’ve written, Fred, a lot of the stuff all of you guys have said on, you know, PPC chat on other things and then just case studies, you know, being able to see when automation actually works and when it doesn’t so I wouldn’t say I’m, I’m, you know, a total believer in automation at every turn.

But I have definitely eased up a little bit and gotten a little more used to using it in my daily life.

Frederick Vallaeys: And so to talk through the skepticism that you had, like, where was that coming from, you think?

Tim Halloran: Yeah You know, I’ve been in PPC for about 10 years now. I started in paid search and then I’ve done a lot of paid social.

And now I’m, I’m I’m kind of, you know, back and forth on, on both. And there wasn’t a whole lot of automation in the industry, especially in the 2012, the 2014. I think we got lookalikes on Facebook and what, 20, end of 2015, beginning of 2016. Definitely wasn’t working great back at that time.

And then and then right around 2017, everyone loved it. You know, it had so many data inputs, it was working really well. And then, and then they pulled back all their third party data you know, for, for the right reasons, you know, in 2018. 17, 2018. And so they stopped working. And so it’s just been a little chaotic.

You go back and forth where, you know, machine learning automation works really well. And then it doesn’t. And then they force it upon you. And then you have to find ways around it. So So yeah, I have a, it’s a, it’s a complex relationship. I mean,

Frederick Vallaeys: it’s sort of like finding what’s the right time to jump into something.

Right. Because Google comes out with an alpha or a beta and they’re really pushing it because the sales team from Google wants you to use it. They have high hopes for it, but then. And it’s kind of like so so or it’s maybe maybe it works quite well, but it takes a tremendous amount of setup and so the benefits you gain from the automation are kind of all sucked up in the amount of work You have to do to get it running in the first place And so I’ve seen them and when I was at Google, I would see a lot of advertisers, they got frustrated by that to the point where they would say like literally any new thing that Google launches, we’re just not even going to look at it because we’ve been down that path before.

But then over time, like you said, it gets better and figuring out what is that right time to jump back in. It’s challenging.

Tim Halloran: Yeah, yeah, it does. And exactly what you said. I, I’ll ignore things at first, and then I’ll start seeing, you know, other people’s case studies about how they used it, or maybe they combined two things that I hadn’t thought of before.

And so Once you start, you know, you expand the box that they gave you a little bit and start thinking of ways that you could you know, manipulate the machine learning to do what you want it to do. So, yeah,

Frederick Vallaeys: that’s like a recombinant innovation. I think they call it where you basically take two fairly obvious things, but then you combine them together and you get this amazing.

technology, this amazing innovation. And and I actually want to shift the conversation here a little bit into scripts, and I’m going to bring the other folks back into the call here as well. And I know I’m going to look to you here a little bit because obviously Dan Gilbert who started brain labs and who you work with was one of the early guys talking quite a bit about scripting and taking some of the, the, the big pain points that existed in the industry and Applying fairly simple technology to solve that.

Also sharing it freely through search engine land. But what was, I mean, I don’t know that you speak directly for him, but what was the thinking behind that? And what did the trip put in today for you guys?

Anu Adegbola: I think the, yeah, it’s hard to be, to know what exactly is always going on within the Dan Gilbert brain.

So I’m not necessarily going to speak from that point of view, but I think one was from our conversation. What’s really clear was, was that even in something, it was very, something very different than nobody else was doing where it’s. It’s you get a lot by giving, and I think that was very much what he wanted to do.

He wanted to start from a point of not just asking for, you know, telling clients, Oh, yeah, come, come and work with us. And he wanted really to be part of developing people already, you know, showing the hand, showing their hand on how intelligence. brain labs are the kind of people that are that we, we, you know, we pride ourselves in, in hiring some, some incredibly smart people who are always thinking about bigger picture solutions.

You know, actually caring about, you know, paid search practitioners on how they can do their, their jobs better. And that was what I’d call easy PR for us. You know, it was, it was loads of You know, paid search execs and managers that were using the BrainLabs scripts and therefore they talk about it.

They talk to their managers who talks to the head of marketing about, you know, how easy their job is because of this BrainLabs scripts that they’re working on. And therefore, yeah, that’s the head of market then wants to say, speak to Dan and, you know, about how they can bring more of that solutions directly to them and create more bespoke, you know, solutions for them.

So it’s, yeah, it was very much about just thinking, you know, what’s the customer stream and it doesn’t just start from, it doesn’t start from like, you know, the head of market or the CMO, it starts from who the CMO is talking to and then how, you know, the, what are CMOs. Big job is for me anyway, is making sure my team works harder, but in a way that is efficient for them and they don’t feel too stressed about their job.

And if they’re coming to me with like, Oh my God, I’ve got, there’s this great solution, this tool we are using. I’m going to want to talk to the owner of that tool to be like, can you do more for us so that you can continue to make our jobs easy? And then, you know, I think that was really the pathway to our success from the beginning.

You know, with Google going more automating a lot of things and blinding us to the A with the, you know, with the API and not us being able to do as much in terms of doing scripts, we still have loads of our scripts available, but in terms of creating new ones. It’s a lot harder. So what we’re doing in terms of technology is now creating better solutions for our clients and better bespoke solutions in terms of more like testing models for them, because that’s what we feel that that is the backbone of doing digital well is, you know, I’ve always believed, you know, test stuff, every new idea might, might look a little bit weird, a little bit, you know, nonsensical, but.

Test it first to see what results you can get out of it. So we’re trying to, you know, do that better, find a way of doing a lot more of that and be a lot more agile in, you know, in testing new solutions and seeing how they work and knowing how to then. Implemented and roll it out to like all for all the budgets roll it out for all the campaigns roll it out for Several clients that’s like really like the the thought process thought lines where we’re going towards

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, and scripts are fascinating and we find that too is that when I started building my scripts they would Address kind of like a fairly generic problem that we saw in the PPC industry.

And then you put it out there and people sort of gravitate towards those scripts. But then everybody wants to do things slightly differently. And the question becomes, well, how do we, how do we get the script to do this and do that and work for bigger accounts and work for more accounts? And you quickly run into those Google limitations. And so at one point we had a script for creating ads from inventory, from spreadsheets, basically. But you had to write your template within the script itself. And so oftentimes that’d be a hundred, 200 lines of quasi code, which was basically how do you construct your keywords? And I was like, Oh my God, like people can’t figure this out anymore.

Right? So you have to build a UI layer on top of it. And then it’s like, well, why don’t we just build it into the API? But from an innovation perspective, I thought it was great because it’s like quick prototyping. It’s basically build a quick solution. See if people want it, like it, What their feedback on the whole thing is.

And then once you get all of that, now let’s build it as a proper API tool. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this too, because you guys have built some great technology, but maybe a little bit less known on the script side. So how do you guys think about scripts and versus SQL and. In house technology.

Wil Reynolds: I’m still learning about that. You know, to be honest, Fred, like I’m still learning. Like I was like, you know, when I knew it was talking, I was like, Oh yeah, right. Like as the API has changed and things of that nature, they might not work as well. And you’re like, Oh, I didn’t think of that. Right. So I’m still learning.

Personally about scripts. I just had somebody send me a video of an interesting script that was built around like timing ads with like TV or something like that. Like, so I’m still very early in learning about the power of, of scripts, but my perspective is as the business owner, you know, it’s like, where can I fund good ideas?

So I tend to start from a place of, I don’t want my team members to have to Or I don’t want them to have to worry when they’re. You know, logging off at the end of the night that they got to check this thing four or five times because then they feel like they’re off, but they’re not off. So I’m constantly more or less focused on, it could be scripts.

It could be sequel. I don’t care. I just want to be a. I want to be a vessel for really good ideas to come in really quickly, direct to the CEO, direct to the owner of the business, because I control what we do with our profits. So therefore it’s very easy for me to be like, wait, you solve that. I don’t want anybody else to have to do that.

Like what if, what would happen if I gave you 10 grand to kind of go solve that? Like in a little bit of time and hire a contractor to come in and take this client off you for a little while. Can we go solve that? And then how many more people would it solve it for? And how many other people are running into that problem?

And I don’t know squat about all the other stuff, but I don’t want people, I want people’s jobs to be as enjoyable as I can. And I think that’s part of my job is to understand where we can automate parts of the job that tend to bring people down and tend to take away their, their, their creativity and try to.

Do my best to automate those outsource those or just find some way to get it off at the team and be more efficient while not well, either not sacrificing quality and keeping it at the same level or actually increasing the quality by by automation.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, exactly. Right. Because scripts, they never sleep.

They always work. They never make a mistake. They do it, but they do make mistakes. If you write the code wrong, they will make big mistakes. It’s the

Wil Reynolds: problem with big data. You know, you do something wrong in one thing and it scales. You know, we always talk about the upside of scale, but we don’t talk as much about like, yo, when you build something at scale.

And it makes a mistake. It makes that mistake for everybody.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And, and that’s sort of one of the principles too, that I think with more and more automation. So our job is shifting much more to putting alerts, putting monitoring systems on top of it. So that, yeah, Google can automate my bits. That’s fine.

And Google can find me new keywords, but I got to know when a keyword is like meaningfully different from what I intended, if it’s a close match variant of an exact. Keyword and the Levenstein distance is like 15. Well, that means 15 characters were changed to go from a to b Like I kind of want to know about that like your example, about georgia versus ga4 analytics Right.

Google doesn’t always get it. Right?

Anu Adegbola: No. No, I think that was one of the biggest issues with yeah, the close bearings and also them removing search terms, not showing us you as many search terms in our search query reports, because if there’s already a lack of trust in, in the search intents that, that, that Google is going to show you, and then you’re not even showing us.

The keywords that we might want to exclude from our campaigns How is that not going to drive us crazy and make us need more wine in our cups? I seriously I it just drives me crazy to think that Nobody has thought of that logical. We are losing trust more trust with these new updates. Yeah

Frederick Vallaeys: For anyone not watching the video, but just listening in Wil was basically jumping up and down on the call

Wil Reynolds: Because it’s it’s just messed up Like it’s, it’s literally messed up.

It’s like, I’m paying for this click. And you’re saying you shouldn’t know what somebody typed in to get it. When I got 10 million in inefficient spend, I’ve looked at that. I’m like, no, no, no, no, no. I need to know these freaking words. So for those of you on the call, you know, I don’t get angry. I, I, I get, I start solving problems.

So we started looking at bang and being like, so, you know, it’s interesting. Right. So like, I don’t know, squat about paid. Right. I’m not really that good of a paid guy. Like, I don’t know that much about it, but I know how to not accept no, that other people accept. So when everyone was like, yo, this sucks, I’m like.

Well, what about Bing stack? And then what’s interesting is being able to show you words that got impressions and no clicks. So we did the math and found out we were getting eight times the amount of data by looking at Bing because Bing would show you impressions, no clicks, whereas at Google, I at least had to get a click on most of those keywords.

So when I’m looking for inefficient spend, if the client is spending enough on Bing, I can run my exact same analysis. data and find out faster than I would have had on Google. So it’s like, all right, Google, go ahead, take the data away over there. I’m going to try to convince if I can, my client to maybe start a little bit on Bing for those words that are marginally like close and be like, now I’m going to find all the words around that word that make no sense.

And then that’s how I’m going to build out my negatives to protect you. So you don’t have to just trust them while they’re taking 28 percent of my keywords or my search terms. I can’t see anymore. So that’s one of the ways that we’re pivoting. To try to find another way to still solve that problem in spite of Google taking away that data, because unlike most people on paid, like I started on SEO, these guys said, Oh, not provided.

So I’m going to be 5 percent of your keywords. And now it’s like, and now it’s like 99%. So I’m like, I’ve seen this before already. I’ve seen this before. They’re going to go to freaking zero. So where else can I go get information? So I use paid data when Google went to zero and now I’m going to use Bing data when Google goes to zero on paid.

Frederick Vallaeys: And ultimately I think this speaks to the value of the human in this equation of the more automated PPC world. We just have to find solutions and work arounds and get creative and innovative. And and so, yeah, Google changes the playing field, but we just reconstruct it a little using little patches and and still make it work for our clients and, and avoid all of that wasted spend.

And one question though, I mean, so does this make sense for clients at any scale? And, and Wil, I think you tend to work with. And correct me if I’m wrong, but larger clients, right? To, to what? Yeah, you’re muted. It depends

Wil Reynolds: on how you define larger. So how do you define larger?

Frederick Vallaeys: No, well, you define it for us.

But, but basically my question is going to you know, do you have to be at a certain scale of clients for this to work? Like we’re going to Bing to find the keyword data make meaningful changes and optimizations to Google. And so it’s both a question of, is there enough data? And then is it worth the effort?

Because I think one question we haven’t addressed, but Jim is asking these are all great points, but ultimately the client does need to pay us to do that work of finding data in one place, moving into another place, doing the analysis and I think it’s an economic equation that’s very easy to convince someone off if you’re spending 10 million, but at what point does it break down or how do you convince that there’s value in that?

Wil Reynolds: So this answer will be a little bit different than Maybe for, for, for others, but like, I just want to solve the problem for my client. It’s my job to figure out how to make it profitable for seer, right? Like, so if I got to build all this technology and it’s not profitable for some of our clients, then I just got to eat that until I figure out a way to bring those costs down.

But that’s not their problem. They shouldn’t have to pay for clicks. They didn’t want. Because Google’s obfuscated our ability to see the data or there’s four and a half million unique search terms of which 3. 8 million of them only got one click all year. And that represents 20 percent of your spend, but nobody can mind that.

That’s not my client’s problem. They trust me with their budgets and I need to be a steward of that. And if I make less money than so fucking be it. But yeah, I just don’t see that as my client’s problem. And the other thing that’s great is when you do this at scale and sequel, you start learning from other industries.

So like right off the bat, like if I’ve had six banking clients, I have a slew of words related to rap music that rappers talk about that other clients before they came to see or spend a bunch of money on and lost money on that. I can start negating before you even see it. The minute you sign the contract, so you start using that other data to make the whole system smarter and you apply it day one for your, for your new clients is one way you can do it.

Max Traylor: Yeah, I’d say it’s not a bad plan to invest in solving problems that other people aren’t solving. Like that’s just a generally good thing to do business wise.

Frederick Vallaeys: Can’t say it better than that. So we’re pretty close to the end of our session here. So I want to thank all of the speakers and give you each a chance to maybe tell folks how to get ahold of you or what you’d like them to do. So Max, why don’t we start off with you?

Max Traylor: Maxtrailer. com. I I interview people way more than I should.

I have a show called beers with Max. I wrote a book. I do beers with Max live, do live interviews at workshops, all Maxtrailer. com and beware. I can be opinionated. And each podcast you said takes about a one and a half beers. Oh, no, that’s the book. That’s the whole book. One and a half. No, no, the whole book.

The interviews I make them like, I don’t, I don’t have time. There’s zero fluff. Like that’s a policy. Like I don’t have time for fluff. So I’ll do a 40 minute interview and produce a two minute snippet and just say that was the point. Let’s move on. Not even

Frederick Vallaeys: enough time

Max Traylor: to open your book. Unless I’m talking to Wil.

Wil, I could just do like a whole, like people should just listen to Wil and pay for it. That’s what I’ve learned.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, I love listening to Wil. Well, thank you for being on what do you want people to do?

Wil Reynolds: Ask somebody you care about if if you’re being the best version of yourself to them. When, when COVID hit, I made it like a thing.

Cause I mean, I’m running a business. It’s freaking nuts. I thought, you know, you don’t know if you’re going to lose everything or whatever, right. It was tough. And I remember like every like three or four weeks, I’d ask my wife, like, yo, like, Am I still living up to my end of the bargain on all the other stuff?

You didn’t ask for all this business stuff to affect me and it’s affecting me. So I would say, you know, find somebody you care, love, and just make sure that you’re still being the best you that you can be for them.

Frederick Vallaeys: Love that. Always big picture. I’m too focused on PPC, I guess.

Anu Adegbola: What

Frederick Vallaeys: about you?

Anu Adegbola: Yeah, I’ll, I’ll, yeah, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll shame it.

They all right to PPC, bring it back to page bring back to digital. Our brain labs we’re doing where, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re growing a lot this year, we are, we’re trying to, you know, focus and target like our senior marketers, CMOS, and really. We really we think that like once years ago, we were talking about scripts with, you know, it focused on practitioners.

We’re trying to go and throw a new avenue of focusing on senior marketers as to what are their problems, what are the solutions, the big thing that’s coming, that everybody should be, it should be, And everyday buddies radar is, you know, date the privacy and, you know, going cookie lists and, you know, how to prepare for that and make, how to use your first party data, but a training for senior marketers are coming up in March, March 18th.

So yeah, get on the website, sign up to that if you’re interested. And yeah. Catch me on LinkedIn, catch me on Twitter, the marketing Anu. I, I love being on the community, especially on Tuesday, we’ve got a PPC chat that goes on. PPC chat is

Frederick Vallaeys: really good. Yeah. If anyone’s not on that, I recommend it.

Anu Adegbola: Yeah.

Frederick Vallaeys: Well, thanks Anu. And then finally, Tim, thanks for being on.

Tim Halloran: Yeah, of course. It was, it, I’m kind of starstruck. I, I’m sorry if I, Didn’t say much, but just, you know, being on here with Wil and Anu and, and you, Fred, and, and everyone, you know, it’s, it’s, obviously, Max, I, I haven’t followed you, but I, I, yeah, I,

Max Traylor: I apologize.

I didn’t, I didn’t mean to

Tim Halloran: no, I’m going to look up that book. It looked really interesting. So.

Max Traylor: Grab a beer. You’re welcome. I’ll send you a copy. Just give me an email. I say I made the book available for free on my website. The book people say that’s a bad idea, but I’m like, well, I just keep doing things that other people say are bad ideas and it’s worked out really well.

Tim Halloran: Nice. Yeah. I’ll take you up on that. Except if it

Max Traylor: involves heights, then don’t do anything that people say is a bad idea.

Frederick Vallaeys: So much love on this call. So thank you all for being on. We’re going to be back with the next episode in two weeks. We’re going to do it on attribution. So we’re going to jump back into the weeds.

And actually, I knew you talked about some of these topics today and cross channel and channel. So that’s going to be next week. And then also with this whole broad match modified change that’s happening. We’re going to do a special learn with Optmyzr next Wednesday. Roughly the same time as this, we’ll be sending out announcements, but we’ll show you exactly how to figure out what is Google changing, what does it look like in your account maybe for as good as well, we’ll, we’ll find like 10 million in wasted spend instantaneously and show you how to fix that.

But thanks everyone for watching, participating, and we’ll see you on the next one. Take care.