Whenever I've seen clients who have worked with agencies who don't actually do the full service thing, they always end up really disappointed with what they get out of it.
That's illustrated by the number of times this year and previous years that we've picked up the pieces where, where a company has trusted perhaps a design agency with a superficial understanding of what's going on under the hood to build them a website. We've got one right now. We look after a recruitment company down in Yorkshire. I think they've kind of said, look, the software that our site's built on has reached end of life. It needs to be upgraded, migrated. And we know that their site was built by somebody who either didn't understand the technology or didn't understand it. Our guess is they built it in the complex, convoluted way because they didn't know what they were doing, but they might have been cleverer than that. But this this happens a lot. And, uh, you know, we kind of like being a rescue agency and we've rescued lots of businesses who are in bad situations, but it sometimes frustrates me. So welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface, where we're going to continue with our new technique of just chatting about the stuff we've been doing this.
Week, a new technique of not preparing an episode. I'm prepared.
I've got notes. You've got no notes. I've got notes.
Oh, that's what you think, mate. I've got pages of notes.
You haven't got any notes. And I scroll down on my on my iPad. And you saw I had copious notes. And now you feel bad. Now you've got your. Let me just turn your screen out. Oh, yeah. There he is. Empty screen.
No, there's three lines of text on there. Don't you besmirch me.
Listen, people are investing their time to listen to us. Well, at least three people. That's a mistake, so. Well, that is a mistake. But the fact that they are means that you owe it to them to provide a little bit more, do a little bit more preparation. You provide a little bit more considered thought. I spend hours preparing for these podcasts. You know, I do. Uh, right. So, um, yeah, if you've missed any of the last two podcasts, um, where were you? But you'll. If you if you miss them. What we're doing now is we're sort of changing tack slightly with the podcast still all about digital marketing predominantly, but because it's called Digital Marketing From The Coalface. And the idea was always that we were going to talk about some of the stuff we were doing at the coalface of digital marketing, i.e. getting stuff done, not just talking about it. Um, that's what we're doing for the next week while we're just going to talk about the week that we've had and the conversations we've had, the stuff we've done.
What it's actually like to work in digital marketing, I guess.
Yeah. But you know, it still is a podcast for people interested in getting more, you know, business leads, etc., from their website, from social media, all that kind of stuff. It's still about that. And that's what we're, you know, we expect people to get from it, but it's going to be less about this podcast is about five ideas of how to use Google Search Console.
ten ways to improve your AdWords ROI. And it's all getting the bin. I don't want to listen to that.
So I have, you know, as the week goes on, I scribble things down that I think, oh yeah, that that might be worth talking about. Played golf podcast.
Played golf again, played golf.
We're talking about golf. We're taking the whole team, aren't we?
On Monday we are having a golf.
You haven't shut up about how much you've played golf in the past. So we're you're expected to be very good compared to everybody else, right?
Just a quick note. Right. My dad is a greenkeeper. I was brought up to play golf. That was why I was gonna do. I was gonna be great at it. I was so bad at it that he completely lost faith and stopped taking me to the course. So you can. You can decide how good I'll be. Yeah.
Be interesting. So basically, we went to the golf, um, for our lunch, didn't we? We took the team over for our lunch at the golf club, uh, which is very nice. Aboyne Golf Club, it was good. If you're in Royal Deeside, which is near the King's house, uh, feel free to drop in.
Are you obliged to call it Royal Deeside? Do they come round and sort of cane you if you don't like?
I like the fact that I live in Royal Deeside, I like that, yeah, quite nice. But um we went over there and then the conversation went round to like uh have you ever tried golf? And I know Amy's dad, for example, plays golf. And anyway, I was quite surprised. There was quite a lot of people turn around and said, oh yeah, I'd like to try that. I'd like to try that. So I had a word with the prawn. We're going over there. We're gonna have our lunch on Monday, and then we're going to go and spend an hour and a half trying to hit golf balls. And I'm looking forward to it. Hopefully the weather will be kind to us because this summer has been dreadful so far.
Miserable.
Um, and we're going to do that.
Um, I will not hit any golf balls.
You will. I'm sure you will. I'm sure you'll whack them.
I'll hit the green stuff, the grass.
So this week, uh, one of the first note, I'm just going to go through some of the notes and, you know, we'll just chat round it. And there's always a danger with this stuff that it sounds like it's us just having a rant and moaning and, and that kind of thing. And it's certainly not intended to be that, but some of the rants are kind. If you if you reverse engineer them.
That's a bit like when people start a conversations with, I don't mean to be offensive, but isn't it? Yeah, that's exactly what this is.
Alex. I don't mean to be offensive, but shut up. Um, clients who second guess right. So we had a thing this week, right? So, um, the client client threw something at us and needed something doing that, um, needs to be implemented on a live website at midnight tonight, Friday.
So is it a spinning logo?
It's not a spinning logo.
Is it confetti that appears?
So what I did was, um, I investigated a way of doing it. In fact, no, I didn't, uh, Dave m did. Dave um, I'm all Dave young Dave, uh, young Dave actually investigated, uh, a tool which will allow us to make some changes within this WordPress website.
Schedule.
Them, and then they will magically auto magically become live at midnight tonight, which was fine. So I went back to the client, said, oh, we can do it with this tool. So the client then came back and said, oh, well, you know, because I showed him the licensing costs for the tool, etcetera, came back straight away. Well, can't we do it with this free tool this way? You know what? Why can't we use this? It's free. It's just like. Yeah, if you actually just spent a nanosecond reading about that tool, you would have seen that the free version of that tool does not work with the technology that your site's built with that they requested, it was built with. And it's a tiny example, right? But I don't mind like being questioned. Of course, I don't mind being questioned. And, you know, clients conversations with clients can lead to some fantastic stuff that can lead to taking you, you know, somewhat out of an area where you might feel quite comfortable and confident and realise that there's some stuff you don't know about and you need to know about it. Or they've, they've genuinely been speaking to someone and they know about some sort of new thing more more about that later that we are not maybe across or we haven't really been talking about with them. And it's fine. But when it comes to like just work a day, trivial stuff like that, why just keep sort of second guessing and thinking, you know, best when you've hired a professional? Who else do we do this with?
Well, there's a this is the thing, isn't it? It's the way you present it as well, because I think that anyone at the top of their field is perfectly aware of the fact that they have knowledge gaps, or that there are things they maybe don't know one hundred percent. When somebody comes to you and they say, oh, I'm not sure, but like, what about this? Or can we do it this way instead? Or, you know, they come to you as if they are proposing a potential alternative solution. I have no problem with that at all. People can do that all day, every day. And if I say we need to do it this way and they say, have you thought about this? I'll say yes or no. What bugs me, and I think what's annoyed you in this sort of context is that when somebody comes to you and says, oh, but actually I know better than you, you know, you're suggesting this, but actually I've done my own research. Was this the answer?
It was the fact that he'd gone, right, okay. And gone like Google Search. Great. Well done. You can use Google.
As if.
We hadn't. Then come. And then just like a cursory glance. Oh, look, there's a free plugin that does this thing. Why can't we use this? And I went and looked at it, okay, maybe we can use it. Flip the.
Page. We can't.
No we can't if you like. If you just look at how where it works and where it doesn't work. You'd have seen. And so and then it was like, all right, okay, we'll just do what you think. Then it's just like, I guess it's just like trivial.
Yeah.
Bullshit like that. Just yeah. It does. It grinds my gears.
Not a.
Rant. I'm not hiding. I'm not hiding from it. And, you know, and I'm genuinely not saying I always know best. Of course I don't. Of course I don't. None of us do.
But and I think if we're going to turn this into useful and actionable advice for people who are listening to this, really the bottom line is that your agency, whoever they are, are probably working quite hard in your best interests. And if you think you found something that they haven't thought of, fine, what? Maybe that's the case, but like, just be a little bit sensitive in the way that you approach those problems. Because if you go for it in the you guys are all idiots. And I know something you don't sort of way that is going to put people's backs up.
Well, I mean, the worst one is like my mate John, my mate John looked at our website and said, why are we not doing X, Y, or Z? You know, I mean, stuff like that. Again, you know, once in a million times it's probably hid there mate. John, as you know, got a genuinely useful insight, but usually it's just.
Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, it's one of those things. I mean, one of the things that, you know, I was working on, um, yesterday with two of the developers, um, was around H1 tags and how you should use them and how big they need to be on a page.
Just explain that in very simple language, like H1, explain it as if it were a word document.
So when you are um, building a page, uh, in, I guess using HTML, right, you are tagging certain elements of it, like titles with tags.
You are building a web page.
Yes. Sorry, I'm quite bad at the plain English thing, apparently. Um, yeah. When you're building a web page, um, you're sort of tagging certain elements like your headings and you use what are called heading tags. And those heading tags have numbers. And the idea is that from Google's perspective, they look at the numbers as hierarchical. So your H1 tag is more important than your H2 tag. And that is more important than your H3 tag. However, sometimes um, people like to develop sheets that basically make the the more important tags smaller. So you might have an H1 tag that's actually smaller than your H2 tag. And what we were discussing is whether or not that's actually the correct thing to do from a UX or user experience point of view. And whether Google likes it or doesn't like it. And this debate went on for quite some time, and we were all reading articles and sending them to each other, and there was disagreement that ended up resolved. And I think, you know, the reason I say that is because that is day to day. We are always learning new things. You know, there is no right answer to any problem. It's just, again, you sort of have to be very careful about the way that you approach these things. Because when you approach them from a, I know I'm right and I know you're wrong point of view. When you inevitably turn out to be wrong, somebody will be very smug about it or very annoyed with you. So yeah, it's just a sort of, you know, everyone's pulling in the same direction. Everybody wants what's best for the website. You just have to get there. Really.
I think that's really worth remembering. I mean, we've we've talked about this before that clients don't see the agency people sweating the big stuff and the small stuff, sweating all the stuff required to help clients be successful. Because ultimately, a successful client is a happy client, is a long standing client. That's, that's what we're all trying to do. We are all pushing in that direction. Um, okay. Another thing that happened this week, which was, um, and you know, this, this was, uh, some, um, information or a request, a question from a fairly long standing and, you know, much valued clients. Um, so they've got a separate project, you know, very entrepreneurial guys and they're, they're this other project, the website went live and then somebody they know had said, oh, when I, when I Google your new business, this is what I find sort of thing. And well, basically this was the day after the website went live. And so.
The index.
So the lesson is, I mean that when you are working on a brand new web project, you know, don't be overly obsessed with the Google side of things. Clearly, you know, you create a new website, you immediately hook it up to Google Search Console, which means Google will now know the website exists and it will go and look at it and eventually, you know, maybe days, weeks, sometimes longer, it will index it. And that website will then start potentially to appear in search results. But it's not a case of, you know, turn the website on on Tuesday. And the website is appearing in search results on Wednesday. It doesn't happen that quickly.
It doesn't happen that quickly. And actually, interestingly enough, this week I saw something that a guy I follow on Twitter called Dan Taylor. He runs a technical SEO agency called SALT, and I saw a thing from him that was actually a really interesting study that he'd done into how long it takes websites to get indexed. And the sort of key takeaway was that it's actually starting to take longer and longer and longer. And the sort of underlying assumption is that because the web is actually getting much larger, like it's literally billions of websites now, Google's actually really stretched and struggling to, to crawl efficiently. So yeah, I think, you know.
And hence the term crawl budget.
Yeah. And I think this is the thing. So like ten years ago, maybe you could put a website live and see it a few days later. Now I think you're talking weeks really.
Once your website's live and has become established and has authority, you can put content on it and literally see that content appear, appear, or rather literally see it's been indexed. Yeah.
So we see that with our.
Blog, for example, to, to appear within hours. Yeah, yeah.
But it does take a while to get to that point because Google does have a sort of internal priority list where it's saying, okay, these websites, I know they publish content regularly. I'll look at them quite frequently and websites that it hasn't got that understanding of yet. It'll just say, well, I'll look at them when I look at them. You know, sometimes that can be a long time, right?
So again, the takeaway from that little conversation is that, you know, new websites take a while to get indexed. Even if Google's crawled them, it doesn't mean that those pages are in the index and, um, have the potential to appear in search results and not to panic about it. It's the same if you make massive changes to websites. You know, it's not always the case that those changes are reflected in the search engine results straight away.
It's not a you don't sit there hitting refresh, do you? That's the thing with SEO. Everything does take a while. And people hear that and they think, oh, but you know, my site will be different or whatever. But no, it does actually take time for all of this stuff to percolate through. Really?
Mhm. Mhm. Okay. Um, had a very, very good conversation on. Well, the conversation started last week with a person from this organisation in London. Um, and then towards the end of last week, it turned into a second conversation with two people from that organisation, which culminated in a chat on Monday with three people from that organisation, including the guy who started the organisation.
Is it just an organisation of Russian nesting dolls?
Slowly, basically. Is that. Yeah. Um, but the interesting thing is, uh, this company, uh, you know, they were looking for an agency to work with who could be a trusted partner so they could say to their customers, because they're at the very hardware end of the internet. Yeah, very much so. And specialised at that. Not kind of you don't go on their website and they advertise like, you know, web hosting for, for thirty quid a month or anything like that. It's, it's special specialised stuff and, you know, work, work, work with some household names as well. Um, but they were looking for an agency that that might be able to help them, um, give a better service if you like, to their clients and you know, that's all well and good, you know, well done. Red evolution. You got contacted by this company and, and you're probably going to get some work out of it and form a relationship with them. Um, but I think, I think where it was, where, where the conversation was interesting to me was, you know, sometimes when you run a business, like we run this agency and sometimes you don't always recognise just what a powerhouse of an agency you've created. Now we're tiny. There's only eleven of us. But within that small team of people. You know, we've got people who understand what's going on at the hardware level for a, for a server. Um, you know, all, all the sites we host, for example, are, you know, what we buy from the data center is something that's plugged into the wall. Mhm. So it's powered up and connected to the internet. And after that we deal with it. Um, but working in a situation like we've got where we've got people who understand that to add an infrastructure level and then at an application level and then at a design and strategic level. Yep. Is it was interesting because like, they've been around for quite a long time. And, you know, and the guy we spoke to, you know, the three people, you know, the guy was the guy who started the business. And to get that recognition from somebody like him who's clearly across his area of expertise, you know, and he said to us, like, you know what you've built, what you've got, where you've got people who actually understand the, you know, the very technical side of this. Of what? Of the internet, if you like, of the stuff that we do and alongside designers, developers and etc. it's, it's fairly, fairly unique and special. And if we, if we marry that with the service they provide.
Yeah, we get the actual sort of full spectrum.
It's, it's, it's.
It's.
Absolutely unique. There's just literally nobody else doing it. I mean, the interesting thing was, and, you know, no detriment to these shiny agencies in London. But, you know, he said, we're basically surrounded by agencies in Soho. We've spoken to a few of them and it's just like, they just don't get it. They're just they're just not understanding the kind of bullshit free can do, get stuff done attitude that you guys have got. Um, and you know, it's nice. It was nice to hear that coming from somebody else who looked at, you know, looked at our, um, stack, if you like, look at the, you know, the tech we use and the people we've got and everything else and, uh, and recognise that we were like them at the bullshit free end of of um internet.
I think it is. I mean, you know, again, you know, to anybody listening, I guess the key takeaway here I think is.
John, the listener is called John.
One of the things that really bugs me, I don't really know how to articulate this in a way that isn't wholly negative. Is that what you're describing now is not dissimilar to some feedback we got from another client this week. We were both in a call together and they were saying that, you know, we've worked with previous agencies that do similar things, but they did. What they did was nothing like what you guys are doing, because we do have that technical expertise. You know, we've helped them build pages in HubSpot. We've helped them set up really complex tracking and analytics. We manage their PPC campaigns, we do their SEO, and they were quite, you know, sort of complimentary about that. But I think it's the thing is, whenever I've seen clients who have worked with agencies who don't actually do the, the full spectrum thing or the full service thing, I guess is the proper way of putting it that don't have the technical expertise and the strategic knowledge is they always end up really disappointed with what they get out of it, because there is always a point in every relationship where you need to get beyond the just sort of shiny tactics, set up an AdWords campaign or like, oh, you know, get me some SEO rankings. There's always a point at which it becomes, oh, actually, now we need to think about what the website looks like, what it's doing, the architecture, it's built on, how it's going to work. And, you know, people always just seem to run into a wall with most of their agencies where they don't actually have that level of expertise and knowledge. And I guess the thing is like when you are looking for an agency partner, I guess the advice I'd always give people is find someone with that range of knowledge. Really?
Yeah. We are, we are something of a rarity. And that's, that's illustrated by the number of times this year and previous years that we've picked up the pieces where, where a company has trusted perhaps a design agency with a superficial understanding of what's going on under the hood to build them a website. We've got one right now where it's a company we looked after. We look after a recruitment company down in Yorkshire, I think. And, you know, they've kind of said, look, you know, we the software that our site's built on has reached end of life. It needs to be upgraded, migrated. Now, we've sort of worked with them for a short while now, and we know that their site was built by somebody who either didn't understand the technology or did or no, no, no, or did understand it and built it in such a way that every time they wanted to make a change, even something simple, like adding a member of staff to a team page, they had to go back to him or her to get it done because they built it in such a complex, convoluted way. Now, our guess is they built it in the complex, convoluted way because they didn't know what they were doing, but they might have been cleverer than that. Yeah, they might have been. Um, but this, this happens a lot. You see it a lot. And, uh, you know, we kind of like being a rescue agency and we've rescued lots of businesses who are in bad situations. But it sometimes frustrates me that, you know, in and around Aberdeen, for example, there are shiny agencies who are always in the papers and like, you know, they speak as if they invented inbound marketing and pay per click and SEO and everything else. You know, they speak as if like, you know, if you if you if you live in a, you know, run a business in Aberdeen and you do this stuff, you really have to come and speak to us because we're the experts and we kind of were at the forefront and like, they're really just Johnny come Latelies who who like follow the tutorials and, and do the stuff that they do because, you know, by rote almost, they don't have the, the kind of deep understanding that people like us who've kind of come the way we've come. That's kind of a bit ranty.
No, no, I don't think so. I mean, I think we're in the unfortunate sort of situation that the industry we work in, it's very easy to just bodge it and to sort of make things work, or at least look like they're working on the surface for a few years. And that's the problem, isn't it? A lot of agencies do genuinely think they're doing a good job because they don't know how it should be done. And then these websites that they build just sort of slowly fall apart over time.
But well, as a former boss of mine, Cliff used to say, you know, in the land of the the blind, the one eyed man is king. Yeah. So, you know, fractionally more, um, than your client and your client sort of, you know, you know, bows down and like, know, because I mean, clients are very good at at, um, you know, oh, I'm not very technical, I don't understand. He's like, mate, you run a, you run an engineering company that puts rockets on, you know, to the moon, like you are technical. So you could understand.
It if you wanted to. Yeah.
That's right. But I mean, what that dovetails into quite nicely is something else I was going to talk about, which was how, um, certainly our clients and even to a certain extent, potential clients will use us as a sounding board. They'll use us to, you know, find out information, test ideas. And that's something that your agency, you know, should be providing, you know, you should be able to have conversations about stuff and get a handle on some, some aspect of your business that you want to, you want to grow or change, or you think there's some technology you could be using that might improve the way you run a certain part of your business. And it might be a web based tool. For example, um, you know, your agency, you know, should be well positioned to help you.
And happy.
To and happy.
To do that. Yeah, that's the thing. I mean, despite the fact we started this off by saying, don't be annoying and go and tell your agency that you know better than them. The honest thing is, yeah, these discussions that you can have with, with an agency is ultimately it's very productive, isn't it? So it.
Is. Um, and yeah, we, you know, not, not only do we enjoy working with customers and helping them, um, understand stuff, helping them maybe start using technology like customer relationship management systems or project management tools or, you know, helping to do, helping them get more, more information, useful information out of data using various analytics tools. We're always delighted to do that. And we're, you know, we're keen to do that. And of course, you know, we make a living doing that as well. But, you know, using your agency to, well, ask the ask questions. If you don't know, if you don't know, um, something, you know, for example, if you're thinking maybe we shouldn't be using a spreadsheet to do this particular business activity. There might be a tool out there. Then your digital agency are probably the kind of people who'll be able to help you find something to solve that problem.
Well, case in point, we're having a conversation with a client just earlier this week, weren't we, who was like, oh, I have these management reports to do every month or whatever. And at the moment I'm just sort of like going into various places and grabbing all this data and making a spreadsheet and some graphs. Can you help me do it with HubSpot? And I'm like, yeah, of course we can. It's technically not our remit. It's not what we're there to do. It's not going to help drive leads or anything. But we have that expertise and we're happy to help people. So yeah.
Mhm. That's right. Um, which in turn as, as kind of dovetail quite nicely with the last item on my list, something, something came up this week. Um, or not, something came up this week, but something I'm very much aware of in the current, um, AI is going to save the world, um, environment in which we live. Yeah. Um, but there are, I think this from a client's perspective, it must be horribly confusing because there is in in a modern business context, a thing whereby people there are lots of people out there who want to talk about something that they know a little bit about, because they read a tweet and try and extol its virtues and kind of sell it in a way that like, if you're not doing this thing, if you're not tapping into this AI tool, or if you're not using this thing, hey, man, you know, you're missing out. You're gonna be like, you're going to be redundant. Your business is going to just wither and die in the next two months. You know, it's kind of like, I don't know, I find it, you know, it's what I guess what I'm trying to say is, you know, if you're running a business, it's very easy to do busy work and become utterly distracted with all of the technology and tools and things that are out there. But the underlying success that people have with digital marketing or the the successes that people have with digital marketing underpinning and underlying that whole thing is quite basic stuff. It's very basic understanding your clients, making sure that when they look for solutions to the problems, they find you speaking to them in a language they understand. Telling a great story about why you might be the people to help them, and they should engage with you. All of that good stuff. You know, there are tools that help you do it. There are tools that help you do all kinds of clever and weird and wonderful things, but it's so noisy and it's noisy for us and we get it. And for non digital marketing people, for people trying to run business, it must be horrendously noisy and confusing.
Yeah. Although I feel like we lurch from thing to thing, don't we? Like it's AI at the moment. I'm trying to remember what it was before that, but I'm sure it will have been something. You know, there's always something that's gonna solve the problem, make it easy for you. Take all the hard work out of X, Y, and Z. It's just never the case, is it? You actually have to sit down and do the hard yards, Um, to get anywhere. And these tools, they look very shiny. They look very fancy. It is ultimately just a distraction. And I'm happy to be on record for saying that.
Yeah. I mean, I, you know, I'm, there's lots of fantastic AI tools and yeah, by all means, use AI in content production and use it to help you when you're writing, help you doing all sorts of things.
Although it's not technically AI, any of it, is it?
It's well, it's yeah, it's kind of like, it's, it's, I guess it's, it's, it's a machine that can process vast amounts of information at scale. Um, and therefore it can reach conclusions, rightly or wrongly. I mean, I, you know, I'm a big fan of, I'm a big fan of Grammarly. So Grammarly's AI helps you write more cohesively, right? In theory, anyway, using, um, using much gooder England than.
I saw you do throwing your laptop out the window earlier in the week.
Just.
Absolutely.
Pissed me off because it was like trying to change a sentence and I said, okay, change it. And, you know, I could see it was bullshit and I let it change it, read it. And it's like, this makes absolutely no sense now. Yeah, it makes sense to it and what it thought I was trying to achieve. But actually to my end user, my, the person I was sending it to, it would have made no sense whatsoever. But, you know, we're certainly not curmudgeons when it comes to this stuff. I mean, we leverage AI every day, probably, and the stuff that we're doing, and it's great, but I'm not just talking about AI. I mean, there's there's always a new SaaS tool which is going to revolutionise everything and change your life for the better or worse. If you don't adopt it, you know, you're going to be left behind. And there's this narrative of like, you know, if you're not doing this, then you're getting left behind. And I just think it's bullshit marketing.
Good marketing is not about chasing tech, is it? Ultimately, it's about doing things properly.
That's right. I mean, leveraging MarTech obviously makes sense, but marketing technology.
But you have to do it intelligently and you have to do it to serve a purpose, not just because it's there and it's shiny. Yeah. That's right.
Um, I'm just trying to think of anything else of note.
Well, the only other.
Thing on this.
Week then the other thing, was that we spent quite a lot of time figuring out that that whole click fraud issue on Google ads, didn't we? That might be worth talking about, potentially.
Tell the boys and girls what happened.
Well, um, so we have a client who runs a PPC ad campaign on Google ads for some very expensive keywords, sort of twenty plus pounds, twenty to forty pounds a click keywords. So obviously we are sort of all across that and looking every day and seeing like, you know, how many clicks have we had where those clicks gone? Have they amounted to anything? Because when you're spending that kind of money, you want to be really careful about it. Um, earlier on in the week, we noticed that they'd had four clicks, four or five clicks on one day. And Google Analytics, the platform that we're using to track those clicks, only showed one user. And the Hotjar, which is like user mapping software that shows where people have gone on a page, only showed one user, and clicky analytics only showed one user. And like, hang on a minute, this doesn't make sense. We've been charged four times for four clicks, and only one user got on the phone chat or whatever it is to Google. And they were like, oh, um, well, that one user had three sessions. So they came back to the website three times and one and three is four. So that's why we've charged you four times. And we were like, hang on a minute. That doesn't make any sense at all. If they've only been three times, there should only be three clicks. And in the end, we had this huge long conversation and Google ended up sort of refunding us for one of the clicks and saying, yeah, you know what? Our bad like, hands up. That was, uh, you know, that was a mistake. Um, but I think it's just really to be really cautious because when you're running PPC campaigns, especially expensive ones where you're paying a lot per click stuff can and does slip through the net. You know, it's not like Google or any other organsation is there to hold your hand and help you. Um, and I think, you know, in fact, the opposite really, I think they were quite sad that we'd sort of sort of figured it out and demanded a refund for that click. But I think it's just one of those things, isn't it? You have to be really across this stuff, and you have to be quite brazen about going to people and saying, actually, these numbers don't add up. This doesn't make any sense. What's going on? Because otherwise you, you know, you can and will lose clients money. Really?
Yeah. And it feeds into that general fear that people have. Um, we've all, we've both spoken to people who are suspicious about PPC, about Google ads. They're suspicious that they think they're paying Google for nothing and chances are they're not. I mean, chances are because without getting into the weeds with PPC, because we've done that plenty of times over recent podcasts, you know, but you a lot of people just think they can set PPC up badly. Well, they don't realise they're doing badly. They think it's very easy to set it up. They'll start getting clicks and none of those clicks turn into business. Therefore, Google's bad and something bad's happening. But it's really, you know, it's just a case of not doing the whole thing properly. And it's, it's way, way more involved. Now, you mentioned this week something about something you'd been reading where like the actual setting up of a PPC campaign contributed something like thirty percent to its overall success, because you're going to tell us about that because.
Well, that's the thing, isn't it? You think AdWords PPC is something that you do through the Google AdWords interface, but it's not at all like, you know, thirty percent of the work is there on the platform, fine tuning and adding negative keywords and whatnot. And the rest of it is figuring out who the right customers are, figuring out what they're searching for when they land on the page. What's the experience like? What can you tweak on the page? But people have this sort of very siloed, very one dimensional view of a lot of our tactics where it's like, oh, I'm doing SEO because I've put H1 tags on all my pages and it's like, no, no, no. The this is about getting people who are browsing Google for something onto your website and selling them something or telling them what you do and that the actual technical stuff that you do to get them onto your website is it opens the door, but it's by no means the end of the process.
No. That's right. That's right. Okay. Um, that's, you know, we've been at this now for thirty odd minutes, I think. You know, most people have turned off by now. So if you haven't turned off, please do get in touch and tell us that you listened to the whole thing. Hopefully this format's working for you as well as it's working for us. We think it's just a.
I think it lets us cover interesting things.
I think so.
In a less formulaic sort of.
Way. And, you know, it is stuff that's happening at the coalface. Um, okay. Um, so if you would like to come on and tell us about your week in digital marketing, so not come on and try and talk about some SaaS thing that you've built or, or try and sell us something. Just, just, you know, want to come on and talk about what your week look like? Um, all obviously anonymised to protect the innocent, then feel free to get in touch. Red evolution dot com. Uh, in the meantime, um, it's, uh, goodbye from me. Very sad news this week about Parky dying. Michael Parkinson. I mean, maybe not huge, uh, influence in your life. But certainly, you know, I'm a good few years older than you. And, you know, as a kid watching Parkinson watching that show was it was always engaging.
It seems to have had a huge impact on a lot of people.
And it's all over Twitter just now. And, you know, like clips of him talking to Muhammad Ali or Frank Sinatra or Buddy Rich or, you know, David Bowie. There was a fantastic David Bowie clip, um, where David Bowie was talking about his, his, um, he was talking about the, the, his band because David Bowie, I think his dad's from Yorkshire. So he talks like that, you know, a bit like me, I suppose. I'm from Lancashire. Um and he was uh, it's worth, it's worth finding. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna read it out. I'm not going to sort of relay it because it's much better if you just go and do a search for David Bowie, Parkinson or something like that. And you'll find it. It's, it's a very, very good clip. Very, very much worth listening to. Anyway, enough of this nonsense. Uh, speak to you next time.