This podcast was originally released on 02/10/2023.
Anybody listening to this podcast, if you're running Google ads, whether you're, you know, writing the checks and you're not sure whether it works or not or if you're actually running it yourself, just make sure you're not just putting money in Google's bank account for no good reason and bidding on the wrong keywords, getting the wrong traffic.
And it's really easy to check as well. I mean, we've talked before about the search term report in AdWords, which actually you can drill down and see what what keywords actually triggered my ads. But also I just think like third party software. I mean, you know, we talk on this show quite a bit about things like Hotjar, for example, and things like that that you can use to look at what people do when they hit your site. And if people are landing on your website and immediately leaving and stuff like that, like they're just red flags, that should tell you that actually it's time to sit down and sort of take a look at what you're doing, the problem you want to have with PPC, if you're going to have a problem, is I'm getting all the right people and I'm getting them onto my website and they're not doing what I want them to do. That is a fixable problem.
Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface on this, the first day of the Ryder Cup. This is the Ryder Cup. This is the Ryder Cup edition.
It's just like.
A religious thing for golfers. Yeah, absolutely. So if you've listened to this podcast before, you know that what we do is we talk about our week at the coalface of digital marketing, various things that we've been doing with customers or for customers or for ourselves, any really, any real aspect of the work that we do that might be remotely interesting. So it's, um, it's been nice to talk to you and, uh, we look forward to speaking to you next time.
And that's the end of that. That's the end of this episode. At least we're honest.
So you've got, uh, you've told me on Slack that you've got a couple of things that you want to talk about. I've got, uh, three things I wanted to talk about. I don't think there might be the same things. If they are, it doesn't matter. Well, then we'll figure it out as we go along, as we just, uh, do this on the hoof. So if you want to lead off. Lead off?
Yeah, well, I guess okay, so we'll try and we'll try and avoid the ranty stuff, I guess. One thing that's.
Yeah. Last week got a bit ranty.
It did. Yeah. This week we.
Were, we were in a bad mood because Google were being dicks.
That's the word. Yeah. Well, and speaking of which. So we'll leave the ranty stuff for later in the episode. But one newsworthy thing, I guess, that has happened this week, um, that I've been trying to sort of puzzle out over the last couple of days is this whole thing with Google's latest update, the helpful content update. Um, which incidentally, we were just talking before we jumped on here about AI, which is a big part of it. So periodically, I guess background for anyone listening who doesn't know, um, periodically Google sort of updates or tweaks its algorithm. Sometimes those updates and tweaks are big enough to warrant Google giving.
Its algorithm without saying algorithm.
Um, search.
The stuff that Google does to spew out the results it spews out when you type in something into the search box.
Yeah, it's the logic that underpins sort of how it looks at pages and decides what's worth ranking and what isn't and that sort of thing. And occasionally they make sort of tweaks or adjustments to it. When they're big tweaks, they give it a special name. So this one was the helpful content update because it's all about, again, sort of the way that Google decides whether content is helpful and useful and interesting to people. And by all accounts, it's been a fairly sizable one. Lots of people reporting that they suddenly lost all their rankings, lost all their traffic.
Did they say why they'd lost all their rankings and all their traffic? Have they been at it?
Uh, a little bit? Yeah. So so that I mean, that's it exactly, isn't it? I mean, most of the time when Google updates things, it is to make the web better. It's because they've figured out a new sort of way of looking at things and deciding, you know what? Actually, this appears useful at face value, but actually it's not very useful to users. So we'll sort of downregulate it. And lots of people often get caught out by that. But interestingly enough, one of the things this time is they've actually adjusted their guidance around artificial intelligence or AI content as well. So previously they were saying that they, they're sort of statement about helpful content was that it was genuinely useful content that was written by humans for humans, and they scrubbed by humans. But now. So it's just genuinely useful content written for humans. Um, which is sort of like a lot of people are saying a fairly significant thing because they're basically admitting that they don't care whether it's AI generated.
They are. I think they're admitting that they can't figure out the difference.
Yeah. Well, yeah, I think probably more likely.
I honestly don't think they, they, they're able anymore to distinguish between human generated words and machine generated words, which originally were human generated.
Generated ones once upon a time before the machine got to them. Well, one of the really interesting stories that's been doing the rounds this week, and I don't know if you've seen any of this, is the the whole thing about melting eggs. Okay. Um, so basically Quora, which is like a big online forum, um, they sort of installed a ChatGPT like thing that tries to answer users questions as soon as they're asked. So before a human has input, Quora will sort of give you a machine generated answer. Somebody asked Quora, can you melt an egg? Um, Quora is sort of very rudimentary. AI said, yes, of course you can melt an egg. Here's how to do it incorrectly. You can't melt eggs. Um, but Google picked that up. Google's algorithm picked that up and ran with it as the featured snippet for the search. Can you melt an egg? So for a while, Google the Machine was sort of regurgitating the lies of another machine, not realising that it was all just sort of machines making things up all the way down. Um, you know, lots of people on the internet have been making a lot out of that this week because obviously it means none of these systems are really particularly good at doing what they claim to be able to do.
Well, here's one you can ask, go and ask ChatGPT if it takes if you wash a towel and put it on the line to dry and one towel takes thirty minutes to dry, how long will it take for forty towels to dry? Go and ask ChatGPT.
What will it say?
Well, it'll be wrong.
Does it just add them all together?
Something like.
That.
You know, going back to the the Google update though, I mean Google use actual people, right? They don't use actual people to decide on search results. That's an.
Individual basis.
It's software, it's logic. It's this sort of thing. However, they do have real people called Google quality checkers or something like that. And what those people do is they carry out searches. They look at the results. And if the results are a bit rubbish, and let's face it, when you do Google.
They often.
Are, they often are a bit.
Rubbish.
But then they don't then go in and manually change things. They report that back to Google and say, when you search for this, this is these are the results and they're a bit rubbish. Then Google have to then go away and figure out how.
To change.
Their algorithm in order to make the results, not rubbish. And I guess they've been doing some of that stuff. And the feedback is, is then directing them on this latest update.
Yeah, absolutely. And I guess there's not really any sort of key takeaways from this, except the other thing that did change about it was their guidance around what to do if you were hit by it. So previously they've always said, just go and make sure your content is good. You know, make sure it's fit for humans. Helpful. Helpful. Now they're saying either make sure it's good or remove it. Okay. Which is again, a fairly significant thing because I think a lot of people labour under the misapprehension still that, you know, more content is better than less. You know, if you've got thousands of blog posts, it's fine. You know, even if they're a bit rubbish, it's still lots of good content. You know, you can, you can write more better blog posts in the future. Just leave them where they are. Whereas I think now the sort of tide is turning on that and people are saying, actually, if you if you've got a website that's sort of full of all these rubbish blog posts, it's actually worth sort of going through and deleting them. Okay.
Um, I like the idea of more better blog posts, more better. Much gooder you meant to say. Okay. That's it.
Pretty much. Yeah. I mean, well, yeah, I guess I guess it's sort of one of those things, isn't it? It's a reminder to be on top of your content. It's a reminder to be reviewing it all the time and make sure it is as good and helpful and genuine as possible.
Okay. As you know, this week I've been working quite a lot on a tender document. I do tender response that we were we were invited to tender for this piece of work.
Um, we don't like tender.
We tend not to tender. Um, we prefer to sit down with people, get to know them, figure out what their problem is, and figure out whether we're the best guys to solve it and, and do it that way. But I get that sometimes that's not well, that's not what they want to do. They need to jump through the hoop as we've talked before, the public sector. So I just wanted to kind of talk a little bit about that and but try and put a positive spin on it as opposed to last week's ranty stuff. MM. Um, well, I guess trying maybe just to communicate what these things feel like from an agency's point of view.
Lightly pressing control V a lot. Yeah.
It might. I mean, it might come across a little tiny bit ranty, but I'm gonna, I mean, I first of all, I understand why why people do it. If we look at the, um, negative connotations, you could go out to five companies, you get five companies giving you loads of good ideas and for free, and you can then cherry pick those ideas and then maybe award the work and say, by the way, we also want you to do this, this and this, that these other companies said, and people are giving away their IP. And that is never a never good if, um, if that's happening. Um, yeah, but I do understand why companies, you know, put together these documents. And to be fair, the document that we received, um, from this organisation was good. It was, it was detailed enough, but it wasn't ridiculous. And the requirements to, to respond to it were reasonable. They weren't looking for, um, you know, a need for us to spend weeks on this thing. Um, but from an agency perspective, I guess the main challenge is you get, you get the invitation. So you look at the organisation, the situation they're in, the problem they're trying to solve. Like, you know, we're not selling enough stuff because people don't find us kind of thing. You know, that kind of thing. And you spend some time, you analyse it and you very quickly realise that you could do a fantastic job for these people. And if you could sit down across a table and have a grown up conversation, that would be enough. And everyone could just get cracking and get on with the work that's needed to be done to move the dial and make a difference. Genuinely believe that. I honestly do. And we know for a fact that companies that use a less formal process, it's kind of how they operate. I mean, if you think about, um, some of the customers that we've been working with on a return basis for the last four or five, maybe even six years.
Mhm.
They were all conversations that were like ended with, yeah, this sounds great. Let's get on with it. And they've gone fantastic. Excuse me. They've gone fantastically well. So I know for a fact it works. Um, and I guess from an agency's perspective, you know, it's a nervous time consuming. Fair enough. But it's also it makes you slightly nervous because you're in this situation where, you know, you can do a fantastic job for the organisation that needs help, but are you able to put forward a persuasive argument and a persuasive response or a persuasive enough response using? Well, from our point of view, we use words and pictures we had. We often put we always put.
Videos in.
Videos into proposals just because it brings them to life and makes them less boring to consume. But, um, yeah, I mean, just, just from an agency's perspective, it's not that we don't like doing them, we don't like doing them, but you know, we don't mind doing them when it looks like a nice piece of work could come out of it. Um, where we don't like doing them is where people go out to tender for a, you know, a website with a five grand budget. I mean, that is just bullshit. I mean, don't do that. If you if you're thinking of doing, don't do it. No, I mean, it's just ridiculous putting loads of people to all that trouble just for the sake of a, you know, a five grand website or something like that. But when it's a big chunk of work, I get it.
But I mean, in I mean, just to play devil's advocate for a second, I mean, I, I, because I've sort of come to the conclusion that actually the entire process is completely pointless. And it goes, I think where I'm thinking is a little bit like this. You cannot put forward a persuasive argument. You can put forward an argument that may persuade. And. But that's a different thing entirely. It reminds me a little bit of, you know, those mating rituals of the birds in like Madagascar, where they have the huge fans of tail feathers and they like wave their fans of tail feathers around. And then the females decide which fan of tail feathers best qualifies the male to raise a child. And it's like those two things are not linked in any way. The things you say in a proposal document without the information from a proper conversation, from a discovery session, from getting to know the client is just sort of waffle really, isn't it? I mean, it's never going to be their solution, the solution they need, because you can't possibly know what the solution they need is until you've you sat down and talked to them. I mean, you said yourself a conversation. It goes both ways. People have to put information in so you can give them the correct outputs.
Could you talk any faster?
The point I'm trying to make is when it's one sided and somebody's saying, tell me how good you are at SEO, not SEO for this industry, not SEO for this problem, not SEO for this set of people, but just SEO in general. Just tell me how good you are. Qualify yourself. That's an impossible ask. It's just nothing sensible is coming out of that. And what you're sort of doing is comparing different pre-canned responses from different agencies for the one that you sort of like the best. And it does all get a little bit sort of like, you know, close to sort of Victorian, um, occultism where you just sort of like reading tea leaves, you know, you don't really know because you haven't sat down and talked to any of these people. So it is all, I think a little bit. Yeah. I don't know, like a mating ritual or something like that. It's a bit pointless really.
It's it's a difficult one. It came up actually, I didn't raise it, but it came up in this month's mastermind group, which anyone who listens to the podcast knows that I'm part of a mastermind group. Agency owners, predominantly in America and and us. And there was a UK agency involved, but they lasted five minutes and said it wasn't for them. I enjoy it, I've been doing it now for a good few years. It's great to learn from other agencies and share problems and, and, you know, discuss problems and come to resolutions and things. And there's pretty much nobody in that mastermind group. And some of these are four, five, six million dollar a year agencies, decent sized agencies, very good agencies in demand agencies, and pretty much all of them just don't do responses to tender. If you get a tender document, they'll contact the person and say, hey, you know, can we sit down, have a conversation? No, no, no, no, just respond to the document.
Just tell us how good you are at marketing.
But the point, the point I'm making is there's always a danger if you're a company and you go out to tender that you are in some instances, not going to get the best agency because the best agencies don't respond to tenders. They want to have a conversation. They want to figure out if they're the right guys to help you, etc. so at least I would say consider if you're thinking of putting a tender document out there, just think, are we only going to get desperate agencies who respond to tenders? You know, and I've just said that we are responding to a tender and we're not desperate and we're not very much not not desperate for work. Uh, we've got plenty of work, but I just liked, I like, I like people they did want to speak to us and we had a good conversation. I like the people. I like what they do. I relate to what they do, and I genuinely believe we can do a fantastic job for them. So there you go. We definitely won't get that gig.
Yeah.
Um, so now and again, we do respond when we get invited. And it's not a huge number of agencies that are being invited. We'll kind of break our own rule and do a response. Um, but in general, I do worry that companies who do that are not always going to get the best people to help them solve their problems and produce work for them, because those people won't respond to its.
Well, yeah, I think in general, I mean, if you just unpack what you've said there, I mean, basically what we're saying is we've spent a lot of time, I don't know how much you could or do Bill an hour technically. But the point is, it's a lot of time and a lot of effort and a lot of money.
We don't sell time.
You know what?
You know what I mean?
Um, you know, a lot of time and a lot of effort and a lot of money went into that. And the kind of companies that can regularly respond to tenders aren't putting that kind of time and effort. It doesn't make any sense. They couldn't. It's not logically possible. They're just sort of copying and pasting junk. And it might sound very convincing, but yeah, it's not really worth the paper it's written on, is it?
No. Uh, staying on the subject of, of, um, of getting gigs, whether it's us getting gigs or other people getting gigs, you can't beat referral business. We all accept that referral business is good and we got some referral, uh, or we got a referral this week. Um, still got to figure out if we're the right guys to help them, but again, had a good conversation. Um, but it was really nice because the referral came in and when we spoke to them, um, they talked about the person who had made the referral and they said, well, we were already speaking to some other people, but we spoke to this person, uh, who's worked with you guys previously and said, quote, they are an absolute dream to work with. Now, all right, we're on our podcast telling the world that somebody said we were we were a dream to work with. But you know what? It's nice to get that kind of feedback because we always, you know, we're always trying to do right by our customers. If we make mistakes, we fess up to those, we fix them. You know, we're very sort of realistic. You know, we're not perfect. Nobody is. Um, but referral business, um, is, is good business to get that's worth spending a bit of time on. If you, if you can think about, you know, how to improve the referrals you get, it's something that we could do a lot better at.
Yeah, it's a tricky one to crack that isn't it? I mean, it's sort of one of those wanky trends that I like to ignore or pretend I'm above, but that's where the whole thing with sort of having customer relationship managers and stuff does sort of come into its own, isn't it? It's like having people that are dedicated to going out and sort of making sure people are happy, asking for recommendations, asking for, you know, um, accolades and testimonials and that sort of thing. I mean, I think we are certainly with a lot of our clients, we do, we do spend quite a lot of time and there's one client in particular in Florida who we spend quite a lot of time going to speak to their clients to sort of gather information for testimonials and case studies. And it's something that I think, you know, in general, marketing teams should do more is go and sort of get the really good stuff because that, that stuff where, like you say, a recommendation from a company or a testimonial or whatever is worth its weight in gold really isn't it for other people in the industry to say this is really good is worth far more than. Yeah. Anything else really?
Right. What else have you got on your, uh.
Well, I.
Mean, is it going to be ranty time?
Uh, not quite yet. Okay. The other the other sort of like, little thing that I, I thought it would be worth sort of bringing up was speaking of, um, our Florida client, they're embarking on some email marketing and they are. We're in the process of basically.
Are they embarking on it or.
We're embarking.
On it for.
Them on their behalf, which is potentially potentially a mistake. But but they're and I'm sure a lot of other companies are in this exact same position. Basically, it went from a, let's switch platforms to find a basically a cost saving efficiency. Let's move to HubSpot so that we're not spending as much money on various different email marketing programs to a sort of enormous body of work, because what we discovered is that they've sort of collected this enormous list of email addresses, and they're not sure where lots of them have come from. Yeah, they've been sort of collecting them from lots of different places over the years, sticking them all in one massive spreadsheet. And it's sort of got a little bit out of control. And they're very much of the opinion that we could just pick that up and drop it into some new email marketing software. And as we know, that's not what we do. It's not a good idea. And I think it's just one of those things where I haven't done any email marketing for quite a while, actually, but it's one of those things where hitting it again, I was reminded of how precarious that can be sometimes. Like you've got a huge list of email addresses, fine, but you have to be very careful nowadays about, you know, whether you've actually got permission to email people. Because I think, you know, I think it's generally true that if you email people who don't want to be on a list and a, a enough, a high enough percentage of them report your email as spam, say they didn't want it, say they shouldn't have been on the list. You do end up blacklisted by a lot of tools. So we're sort of doing a huge data cleanse exercise for them, where we're going through and making sure that we're allowed to email everybody and that sort of thing. Okay.
And is the, the data cleanse that you're doing, is that a painstaking process or are there, are there some sort of flags in there that you can go like write everything that matches this flag, delete it, everything that matches this flag, delete it, that kind of thing?
Sort of. Sometimes. Luckily, I haven't been doing it. It's been Caron that's actually all the messy vlookups and all of that sort of thing. But yeah, sometimes and we're getting the client to go through and sort of help us segment them into different buckets as well. And that sort of thing. So, you know, we're getting there, but it's just one of those things, isn't it? You, you sort of think, oh, this will be quite quick and easy and it turns into a sort of many day ordeal.
Yeah. We, we onboarded a HubSpot client. We were contacted by HubSpot and we, we took on the work and onboarded them. And yeah, I think, um, I didn't really want to, but I think I sat and spent two or even three days literally cleaning some data. I mean, it was just in a.
It is like.
That. It was just an iterative process. That's all I could do. I just had to keep.
Bit by bit.
Like filtering out and filtering out and getting rid of duplicates and then just bringing it into some semblance of order and splitting things up. And it's amazing. I think it's really a real common issue when you I mean, that's, you know, it's kind of what a lot of HubSpot agencies find themselves doing is like bringing people onto the platform and then spending an inordinate amount of time making sure that the data's cleansed and everything's in a good place. So, okay, so, you know, basically all you said then was that, you know, we did some data cleansing and tried to make it sound interesting, but it is Digital Marketing From The Coalface.
Well, yeah.
So, you know, this is what this is what we were doing this week. I was working on an RFP or an ITT, depending on which side of the Atlantic you're on. And, um.
I was thinking about cleaning some data.
You know, it's a real rock star lifestyle.
Scintillating stuff. Yeah. It's, you know, I mean, yeah, well, I think the one wider point I would like to make about it is just that like, for people who are listening, who have these huge email lists, and when you ask for them to be cleansed, don't be don't be inordinately surprised when somebody comes back and says, that's a lot of work. You know, it's not a simple thing. That's right.
Go on. I'm, I'm dying to hear what your ranty thing is.
My ranty thing? No, my ranty thing is about, um. So basically, I sat down to start writing a blog post about threads because, um, threads being Facebook or Meta's answer to Twitter, which was going to sort of knock Elon Musk off his throne or X. Yes, there we go. Um, and sort of.
It's now at x.com isn't it?
It is. Yeah.
It's moved.
And threads was gonna revolutionise everything and everyone was gonna leave X and come to threads, and it was gonna change the way the world worked. And it didn't. Nothing really happened. And seventy five percent of its users dropped off within a month. Is that right? Yeah, that's yeah, that's the actual stat. Yeah.
I mean, I created an account and then it just didn't.
Go you and everybody else.
Because I do like Twitter.
Well, there's a few problems with it. I mean, yeah, part of the model was that like it was trying to replace something that fundamentally is fine and works. And the other thing was that it was using your Instagram contacts. And I follow lots of people on Instagram who are very good at art and tattooing and that sort of thing, and none of them have anything interesting to say. So, you know.
They don't listen to our podcast.
That's the key thing there. But no, I mean, it was really interesting because basically I sat down because clients keep asking me, when are we going to put a thread strategy together? Or should we have a thread strategy? Or do we need to be on threads? And I keep saying to them, no, probably not. It's it's pretty much dead in the water. And I found myself.
Having the kind of. Is that the position most people are taking? Is there an idea that it is absolutely going to just crumble and die?
It pretty much has.
Like everything that Google have done in the social.
Yeah, the sort of the most conciliatory thing you can say is, oh, it might become more popular later, further down the line. So we'll keep an eye.
But there's plenty of others out there. What's the.
Mastodon? And yeah, there's loads.
Of loads of them. Yeah. And they've all just kind of failed to get any traction. Well, any sort of Twitter esque traction.
The biggest thing with social media is traction. Um, but yeah, we ended up, I ended up answering sort of two or three questions about it in the space of about two days. And I was like, right, do you know what? Obviously, people are still very confused about this. Let's write a blog post about it. And then went to go and do the research for this blog post about threads. And in trying to uncover whether or not it was there was any validity to the idea of marketing on it, I found like, what I can only really describe as like acres and acres of absolute horseshit on the internet, just, just, you know, just random people from like marketing blogs, some of them quite respected marketing blogs, just sort of giving their opinion and saying, oh, you know, like threads will be brilliant. Threads is ace. Threads is you know what I mean? It's gonna set the world on fire based on these things. And it sort of got to the strange, a strange place for me where I was reminded of, you know, that Russian propaganda technique, the fire hose of Mistruth, I think they call it. But basically the idea is to just like sort of like spread as much misinformation about something as you can to confuse everybody. There's something about marketing, especially where it sometimes feels a little bit like that. You're looking for information on something that is relatively cut and dry, and you're just getting all of these hundreds of articles giving very conflicting, sort of biased, unconfirmed, unreferenced opinions about stuff. And it's just, it just becomes, it gets to the point where you literally can't trust any of what you're reading. And I don't know, like, I don't really know where I'm going with this.
I get where you're coming from. And if I could just interject briefly, um, I love Twitter and I'm interested in politics and I read a lot of the people I follow and I follow, people I don't agree with as well as people I do agree with. I'm not kind of single minded in that respect, but I just kind of like read something now, even something that somebody who I respect has said. And I just think that might or might not be true. I mean, that's it. That's where we are, isn't it? It is where we are.
People talk about post-truth, and it's not because we've lost sight of what the truth is. It's just because we don't really know what to what to trust or what to believe anymore.
Well, there was something this morning. Rishi Sunak, the UK prime minister, had said something and then an opposition MP had said that is completely untrue. So now we've got the Prime Minister of the UK saying this and then another elected representative saying, no, that's that's not true. Where do you actually start to find the truth? I mean, that's why I, I love full fact, for example, because they'd impartially go and check and, and come back and say, you know, this is untrue or this is neither true nor untrue. There's, there's no kind of right or wrong answer or whatever, But I just don't know where the where the world people get off, where the world gets off just trying to spin their bullshit and, and trick people all the time. It's tiresome.
Well, it was a thing about threads and there's like a verge article about it. And the guy writing the article was saying like, oh, it doesn't matter that its user base has dwindled, it'll still be really relevant. It's still a fantastic place to start conversations with your audience. And I was like, none of those words meant anything. Do you know what I mean? It's just, it's just I want my moment in the sun. I want to say something here, and I don't care whether it's true or not. I just want to say it. And it had to be different to what other people are saying. And then I'll get noticed. And I think that is the core problem. And where I ended up with the threads thing was basically like being the sort of fact checker, you know, and like going through and saying like, is it true? Is it not? But yeah, it's just sort of exhausting. And I feel for people that have to sort of try and decipher all this information to do their job, do you know what I mean? It's just, yeah.
The other thing as well, I suppose you could say where, where threads is concerned. It's like, well, there are people on there Yeah. And it might be worth marketing to them, but like, there are enough people on the established platforms to market to, you might find that you could mark it cheaper on threads because fewer people are in that space trying to buy the eyeballs. Um, but you just think, well, if you've got.
A product.
Or a service, then, you know, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, all the ones that everybody knows and everybody uses, there's probably enough people in those in order to, you know, market your stuff to.
I can't remember the last time we ever, like we've ever spoken to a business where they're like, I'm at complete saturation. I'm reaching everybody that I could possibly reach on Facebook and Instagram, and I desperately need a new channel to reach a different audience. Like it just doesn't happen. There's like so many people out there in the world that you do not need to be sort of sniffing around these weird little sort of niche. Yeah, yeah. But it, you know, it's just one of those things, isn't it? It's just. Yeah, you sort of want to tear your hair out, but you sort of also want to ask the bigger question, which is just. Like, where does all this stuff go? I mean, are we just going to keep filling the internet with with rubbish opinions from people that don't really deserve to have one? Yeah, absolutely.
There are there are servers whirring away the world over full of crap.
Probably the leading cause of global warming. Maybe. Possibly.
I wouldn't be surprised. Um, last one from me. Uh, pay per click. We keep coming back to.
Well, I mean, it's relevant, isn't it?
We've got a new customer, and this week we got access to their PPC dashboard. Oh, and had a look. And again, we never name names. We're not going to go into any detail. But when I went through it with them and just at a very high level and said, so when people type this into Google, you're showing an advert. And in the last week you've spent fifty quid on those clicks. They're like, but that's not what we do.
Yeah.
And so I guess the word of warning is if you are running a PPC campaign, and if you don't know whether it's working, then stop running it or get somebody like us or another decent agency to take a look at it for you, because you do hear a lot of people, a lot of people saying, I tried PPC, Google ads, and it doesn't work or words to that effect. And, um, bottom line is it does work. Uh, it can also not work insofar as you can do it wrong and spend money and nothing good happens. So yeah, that's not it not working. That's you not using it properly. Yes. Really. And that's semantics perhaps. But um, it just brought to my attention having, you know, seeing it and I showed you it and we had a bit of a chortle, didn't we, because it was just so bad. It was.
It's not nice to laugh.
It wasn't just like they were bidding on the wrong keywords. The headlines in the advert just made no sense whatsoever. It was complete bullshit.
It looked like it had been written by a robot.
The worst I've seen. Yeah, if I'm honest, it was. It was dreadful. But it's out there. And you know, anybody listening to this podcast, if you're running Google ads, whether you're, you know, writing the checks and you're not sure whether it works or not or if you're actually running it yourself, just, just, you know, make sure you're not just putting money in Google's bank account for no good reason, and bidding on the wrong keywords, getting the wrong traffic, just, you know, showing people the wrong adverts and just.
Well, it's really.
Easy happening a.
Lot. Yeah. And it's really easy to check as well. I mean, we've talked before about the search term report in AdWords, which actually you can drill down and see what not what keywords am I bidding on, but what keywords actually triggered my ads. And that is like with the client in question, how you can very quickly sort of, you know, show them that they're wasting money because that shows you that actually in real life, people are googling this and you're coming up and yeah, um, but also I just think like third party software, I mean, you know, we talk on this show quite a bit about things like hotjar, for example, um, and things like that that you can use to look at what people do when they hit your site. And if people are landing on your website and immediately leaving and stuff like that, like they're just red flags that should tell you that actually it's time to sit down and sort of take a look at what you're doing.
We do that because you and I are having conversations. We've got, we've got one, um, campaign for ourselves running and, and we're really frustrated because we think, you know, that what we're offering people when they click the advert on the landing page is exactly what they're looking for. And yet, and yet we're seeing we're seeing clicks come in and, you know, yeah, we're getting some work from it, but we're seeing clicks come in and they're there for 10s and they've gone. It's like, no, it's not what they're looking for. It is really frustrating. But the difference is we're monitoring that. We can see we're getting clicks and we're getting clicks for the right search terms, and we're not actually getting those conversions. We're not getting the engagement that we're looking for. So we can work on that and figure it out. What I, you know, with that other client, they were, they were bidding on things that they don't even do and getting traffic for stuff they can't service.
Yeah. The problem you want to have with PPC, if you're going to have a problem, is I'm getting all the right people and I'm getting them onto my website and they're not doing what I want them to do. That is a fixable problem. And all the steps leading up to it are correct and everything is fine. The problem you don't want to have is I don't know who's getting to my website. I don't know where these people are coming from because then, you know, yeah, it's just you're just playing guessing games with a lot of money. It's expensive. Yeah, that's the thing.
Yeah. I mean, you know, some of that we've said this before, but you know, some of our campaigns for ourselves, some clicks are costing thirty quid a click. Um, the ones I'm talking about just now where we're really struggling to figure out why we're not getting the engagement even then, like a tenner, you know what I mean? So yeah, we're spending proper money.
Yeah. I think the thing with AdWords, it's interesting because I was having a conversation with another client of ours, a very long term client who've just started up a new business, um, selling self storage. And I was having a conversation with them and we were talking about the cost of clicks for the keywords they wanted. And I was trying to, and they were very surprised, let's say, because the clicks were fourteen pounds a click and the service they're selling nets them maybe one hundred and fifty pounds a month. Um, and you know, it's one of those month to month things where people can cancel at any time. And they were very surprised. They were saying like, how come these clicks are so expensive? And I was saying, what you've got to understand is that Google Ads has been there for many, many years now. Most organisations that are using it to compete have sort of got things right down to the wire. You know, the margins are razor thin and they're spending most of their profit on the adverts. And if you're not willing to do the same, you will just be sort of out competed. I think the heady days of sort of ten twenty per click, uh, clicks for anything relevant are long gone because people have just spent a lot of time finessing it and working out what's profitable and what's not.
Mind you, I mean, I don't know what the conversion rate would be like with that particular industry, but if you paid fourteen quid for a click and you know, the chances of somebody using that service for one month and paying one hundred and fifty quid is just about zero. So that almost certainly is going to be somebody or who, over the next few years, is going to spend several thousand pounds with you.
Yeah.
So unless your conversion rate is awful, then it's not a bad way to secure business. Cost, cost of acquisition or whatever.
No, I think but I think that's the thing, isn't it? In order to sort of bid confidently, you have to know that, like you say, they are going to spend on average two grand with you over the course of X amount of months. And that's the other thing that a lot of businesses just don't know is that they don't have that data to hand. What is the the lifetime value of a customer? How much is somebody actually worth to my business? I mean, I, you know, I guess sometimes that is quite hard to estimate and sometimes it's massively varied, but it is important to know. Good.
Okay. Um, that wasn't too ranty this week.
It wasn't, it was quite rant free.
It was quite rant free. Um, thanks for listening to Digital Marketing From The Coalface, the podcast where Dave and Alex talk me, Dave, that Alex talk about, uh, the stuff we've been doing at the coalface of digital marketing.
I don't think anyone's confused.
Feel free to contact us and throw subjects at us. We're quite happy to cover other subjects as well. Um, but in the meantime, I'm going to go and check what the Ryder Cup score is.
You're playing golf as well, aren't you?
I am this afternoon. Yeah. Lucky me. Quite a nice day. Um, in the meantime, thanks for listening. Yeah.
See you again.
Soon. Yeah. See them. See you. Can you see them.
In my mind?
Something a bit weird about you.
Psychic.
