You mentioned the word politics. And obviously we've just had a landslide victory for a Labour government here in the UK. In politics, they always talk in absolutes. We will grow the economy, we will fix the NHS because that's what they think people need to hear. And maybe that is what people need to hear. But this idea of telling people what they need to hear in marketing or, you know, this will happen is nonsense.
You know, it sounds better. It makes for better soundbites. But I think most people I'd like to hope that most people, certainly in, in, in business are mature enough to realise that things that sound too good to be true, like nice, neat little soundbites like, yes, we will get you backlinks and then you will get leads. You know, it's just a fantasy. All of that stuff really. This is complicated stuff. It isn't guaranteed to work and there is some sort of finessing involved always in getting the results you want.
And that's and that's why you need to have honest, grown up conversations. Okay, welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface, where me, Dave Robinson and my colleague Alex Bussey talk a lot of rambling nonsense about digital marketing, running businesses, sometimes a bit about politics. Nothing really happening in the world politically is it's all very.
Can't think of anything relevant.
All very calm and normal at the moment. Nothing really to talk about.
No landslides or tsunamis as they call it.
Yeah. That's right. Yeah, absolutely. So I've got a few things I want to talk about, things that have been happening at the coalface, and some stuff that's just popped into my head and I've written it down in a bullet list. Uh, you got.
Yeah, mine are all very coalface things, very coalface.
So let's start with the coalface.
Things based on.
Okay, let's start with a coalface thing.
Yeah, we can do it was quite pertinent. Maybe Rishi Sunak should listen. Uh, I've titled this bit Don't Be Afraid to Lose in my notes, which.
I think I know where you're going with that. And I like it. Do you? Yeah.
Well, hopefully I don't disappoint.
You know, I think I know where you're going, but I'll wait and see. Oh, there's a dog barking outside now.
Well, it's just it was, as you know, obviously, because you work here. But as as most of our listeners know, there are times when we are called on to work with other agencies. Yeah. Um, often for a client who has already got a contract with an agency that's handling their social media or some aspect of the digital marketing puzzle, and we then have to collaborate with them. And I had a.
Choose.
To, we choose to. Yes we are. Well.
We could just say, nah.
We choose to put ourselves in difficult situations. I had a really interesting conversation with one of those agencies recently where basically we had a conversation with the client and we came out of the conversation with the client and this third party agency were like, oh, wow, it was so brave of you in that conversation to admit that something wasn't working, or to talk about the fact that it wasn't.
What you were going with this. That's good. I like it particularly well.
And it struck me as a really odd comment, but I think it sort of speaks to a really big problem in our industry. Yeah. But also just in the way that like even marketing managers sometimes think, which is that if something isn't going particularly well, you should sort of obscure that or try desperately to sort of make it look like it is working or to never admit, you know what? This was a really.
I can see why you've drawn a parallel with politics.
It's just like, admit that you've you've done something bad or it hasn't worked or for whatever reason. And it's never bad, bad.
Done something bad unintentionally. Obviously not. Not actually set out to do something silly, just kind of like thought this would work. It didn't.
Yeah. We're not talking about mistakes. We're talking about.
No, it is a mistake, isn't it?
Yes. I know.
You know, pure definition. It's a mistake. But but it wasn't.
It's not like because something you've done wrong.
This probably won't work or this definitely won't work, but I'm going to do it anyway. We're not talking about that.
No. Absolutely. You know, I think the thing is a lot of the time, something can just not work for many different reasons. You still have to try it. We're in a game where experimentation is the key.
And not just about life in general.
I think so, but I think even in life in general, people go through it really afraid to make mistakes. You know, you're scared of doing something wrong so you don't do things. Sometimes you just have to be very bold. You have to try something. And then when it doesn't go the way that you'd hoped it was, what is it?
People say that like, you know, people even older than me, wise people say like.
There are people older than.
You. Not many, but some. They they regret the things they didn't do, not the things they did do. And it's that kind of sentiment, isn't it?
It is. Yeah. And maybe it's sort of like overplaying it a bit to sort of apply that to marketing, but.
I think it is.
Be bold, try things. And when they go wrong, just own up to it. Just say this didn't work out the way we hoped it would, because you can have that conversation with people. I would say a good sort of eighth, maybe even a fifth of things that you try in marketing just aren't going to go the way that you planned. You know, the, the audience that you think you're tapping into on LinkedIn might just not give a monkeys. Yeah. Um, you know, the really good idea you had to produce YouTube shorts might just fall flat on its face and everyone will make fun of you, but you've still got to try and see what happens.
And yeah, one hundred percent. I couldn't agree more.
Yeah. And this whole mentality, this whole mindset of like, oh, you know, I don't want to admit that it didn't work. So I'll try and find a way of making it look like it sort of did work or it gave us something useful. I mean, anybody intelligent is going to see straight through that for a start.
And how refreshing to say like, we tried this, it didn't work.
Work. Yeah, absolutely.
Right. You know, why did we try it? Well, here was the rationale. All right. That that all makes sense. Yeah. If you're having a grown up conversation, it did make sense. The fact it didn't produce this result that we expected it to is unusual or at least unexpected.
Absolutely. Yeah. There's something else at play there. And sometimes, you know, digging into that, you know, the why it didn't work can reveal really interesting things about your audience or your offering that isn't quite right or, you know, just something that isn't, isn't going well. But again, you lose the opportunity to dig into all that and say, well, actually, you know, if we put this page that lays out what we think is a really compelling offering in front of people that we think are shopping for that product or service. And it didn't work if we pick through that for long enough, will eventually figure out what it is that we did wrong. But you lose the ability to do that when you just sort of pretend it is working and carry on doing it anyway. So yeah.
So by the same token, we've got the way it did work. You could have that same conversation about why something did work and you still don't really know why it worked.
Yeah.
No, because, you know, we we've talked before about, you know, you can't create viral content. Content goes viral. You know, there's, there's one doing the rounds. This is a little bit unsavory, but I'm going to talk about it. There's one doing the rounds on TikTok just now, which has become a bit of a meme. Now, I don't know the context. This guy was interviewing some girls in America, and they looked like they were maybe in their early twenties or something like that. And I don't know if he I don't know what question he asked them. It was something sexual related. And this, this, this girl said, oh yeah, you've got to go hot on that thing. You've seen it. It's going, it's doing. Everybody's seen it. And now she's on TV and she's doing this. And suddenly she's a, she's a she's a superstar.
Yeah.
Why? Because she went on a video being interviewed and talked about going hot to. And that's it. You know what I mean? And so like, who'd have thought somebody saying that about that would have turned them into some sort of celebrity? But it did. Now, I'm not saying that some of the B2B brands that we're that we're working with should try a hot tour approach to, to, to social media success. But it is kind of like stuff that works and stuff that doesn't work is, is kind of mysterious really.
Yeah. And it's well, you back to the whole lightning in a bottle thing, aren't you? Sometimes it just happens, you know, just, you know, guns N roses just recorded appetite for destruction and it was amazing. And it changed music and like whatever. And then everything else they did after that was drivel.
Yeah. I mean, it's like granny singing. It's awful.
It's poor Axl.
I know, but why would he keep going? He could have used some sort of weird technology to make it sound like he can still sing, couldn't he.
AI? Yeah. There's a good application, but, um. Yeah, but I think it's really important as well because there are lots of agencies out there who have, you know, had success with the tactic once and now just peddle that same tactic or that same solution over and over and over again. And that's a really dangerous thing too, I think. Yeah. Being able to admit that you don't know why things have gone wrong, you don't necessarily know why things have gone right, but you'll keep experimenting. That's where the sort of really good stuff lies, I think.
Agreed. Agreed. A great subject, and I think it's something for people to reflect on. Take some risks. Good things might happen. Yeah. You know. Yeah. Something will happen. You'll learn that something isn't a good approach or you'll, you know, have some success.
Yeah. It's the trickiest thing, isn't it? Because I think at the top of any sort of apex of any industry, you end up in a place where you are, you sort of feel like what you're saying is, well, just try shit and see what happens, see what sticks. I think like doctors get a lot of flack for this too, and like scientists and things like that. It's like, well, we don't really know and we're just gonna keep messing about. And people look at it and they say, well, they're not really experts. But in my eyes, that's where real expertise lies. It's in that ability to just sort.
Of it's a, it's a good, it's a good analogy you make. I was listening to the radio yesterday and they were talking about, uh, some research into bees. and they were basically saying that bees are sentient beings. They think. They process, they have a self, they have self-awareness. And he went into some detail. But even then, you know, he said the reason he was still at the research suggests this. They've had them playing with those little wooden balls. Have you seen that exercise? No, they're actually they actually do it and they do it for fun. It's clear that they're just doing it for fun. He's rolling these little wooden balls around. And they keep going back and doing it. And there was another one where he was talking about. They get them to go through this hole. And it's clear the bee has a sense of how big it is because it goes. I can't get through there. Yeah. Whereas another bee would go, oh, I can get through there. And it goes through and it's fascinating. It's really interesting. But that's how science works. It's, you know, science works by saying, we think, you know, you put forward an idea and then that idea is tested. Same in marketing. I mean, not, you know, we're not talking about like scientific discovery around bees and things like that. We're talking about experimentation with different media and different messaging and different approaches and different platforms, different audiences trying to find out what will will excite people because it's, it's an experimental process.
And it is and, and very much like a science experiment, you have an awful lot of variables and you can't control all of them. And I think this is one of the things that I find really interesting when sometimes we are approached by people who are like, well, can you just do you know, can you just market my website? You know, can you just, just grow my digital footprint? I'll give you money and you'll give me leads. And it's like explaining to people that that equation just doesn't hold any water. You know, we can at best hypothesise ways of doing it and then experiment until we find them. But there is no sort of formula for success in marketing at all. And I think that's.
Just to you. You mentioned initially, you mentioned the word politics. And obviously we've just had a landslide victory for a Labour government here in the UK. Um, which I'm kind of ambivalent towards. I mean, I think um there'll be a short honeymoon period. Um, but you know, I certainly, you know, offer Starmer my best wishes. Good luck Keir. Sir. Keir. Sorry. Good luck, Sir Keir. Um, but but in politics, they always talk. In absolutes. We will grow the economy. We will fix the NHS because that's what people they think people need to hear. And maybe that is what people need to hear. But, but this idea of telling people what they need to hear in marketing or, you know, this will happen is, is, is nonsense. And you just make a rod for your own back. If you do it, you do.
And I just think it's more grown up. I mean, it's funny you should say that because yeah, I was listening to the radio on the way into work this morning. Um, after very gallantly stopping to help someone change a tire.
So the tire issue wasn't your car. It was somebody else that wasn't clear from the message.
I passed the lady on the road.
And you just said, I'll be late in, I've got to change a tire. And I thought, goodness me, he's got more car problems, not another one to go back to the political stuff.
But I was listening to the radio on the way in, and they had somebody from Labour on there and she was saying like, yeah, what we really need to realise is that what the Labour Party need to do is promise things they can deliver and then go ahead and deliver them. And I was just like.
But you've just spent six weeks in a campaign basically saying everything that's wrong in the world is because of the useless Tories, and we're going to fix it all by getting it sorted.
Well, it's that same reductive, you know, it sounds better. It makes for better soundbites. But I think most people I'd like to hope that most people, certainly in, in, in business are mature enough to realise that things that sound too good to be true, like nice, neat little soundbites, like, yes, we will get you backlinks and then you will get leads. You know, it's just, you know, it's just a fantasy. All of that stuff really. This is complicated stuff. You know, it isn't guaranteed to work. And there is some sort of finessing involved always in getting the results you want. And that's.
And that's why you, you need to have honest, grown up conversations, which we do with as an agency. I've said before, we've lost work because we've been honest about what's required and what might or might not happen as opposed to, you know, giving give, you know, spinning people some bullshit about what will definitely happen or whatever, you know? Yeah. Um, okay. Good stuff. Good. Um, a quickie on the coal face thing. I don't know if you read that link I sent you from one of the, what do they call Google? Call those things. It's like learn with Google or something like that, whatever it was, uh, it was a case study of, uh, watches of Switzerland, Switzerland group.
Yeah.
Yeah. So basically Watches of Switzerland group, which are a listed company. I have to admit, I did buy some shares in them and they've spectacularly failed. But, um, I think as a business, they're still going quite strong. Um, but basically they were saying in, in migrating across to GA4, which has a different event based model as opposed to a session based model for looking at what people are doing on your website, they've actually reviewed how much stuff they measure, and they're now just measuring stuff that's worth measuring. Yeah. And I think as the takeaway for that for people, anyone listening would be if you're looking at Google Analytics or Clicky analytics. Any of these analytics tools, figure out what you want to know and then figure out how to get that information, you know, out of GA4. If you just sit there staring at it, all you'll see is like lots of things that you can measure, most of which make makes no sense. To measure them, makes no sense to analyse them. You don't need to know. You know, think about what you really want to understand and think about this whole kind of event based approach. So I want to know when people do this, I want to know when people maybe don't do this. I want to know what people did next after they did this, all that kind of stuff.
Yeah. For Christ's sake, think about it as well. Because when you get one of the things I see people do an awful lot is they'll collect all this brilliant data and they'll be like, right, I can see on this page, you know, somebody clicked on the testimonial carousel. So they're reading the testimonials and then they clicked here and then they didn't click the form. Mhm. Okay. And then, you know, it's like, it's like there's a lesson there. There's something useful to glean from that information. Like all of this, like, I almost think like the, the data collection and analysis. Part of our job has become a little bit sort of fetishised in a way. It's like, oh, we do lots of data gathering, but nobody's actually sort of sitting down and using that data to extract meaningful insights. And then.
Well, I think people are, but I think there's still I think there's still a lot of confusion. Yeah, it's used as a bit of a smokescreen. Yeah. Kind of. Oh yeah, look at all this great data we've got. Yeah.
Which what are you doing with it.
Yeah. So just, I mean, just thinking about, um, you can basically develop understandings about pretty much anything that's going on on your website. Um, but spending a bit of time in deciding what would actually help you grow your business, what sort of information would help you grow your business is the key to success with analytics.
Well, we were doing that with a new client quite recently, weren't they? They had a landing page. They were like, what should we be tracking? Like, oh, there's so many things we could track. What should we track? And we just sort of broke it down for them and said, look, these are the four things you actually care about. You know, you care if somebody fills in the form, obviously brilliant. You care if they click on the cordless link. Brilliant conversion. You care if they download a data sheet. Beyond that, they really give a monkeys what they do. The rest of it is all sort of noise. You might be.
Interested to know how much time they spent looking at the page, and.
Maybe how far down.
They got. Yeah, that sort of thing. But yeah, that's absolutely it. Okay. Um, B Corp.
Um.
So we've, we've been invited onto a cohort through the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce. We're members of the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce because we do a lot of business in Edinburgh and we're trying to grow our business in Edinburgh. If you're a business in Edinburgh, listen to this. That's a good conversation.
Try and get Edinburgh in one more time.
I like Edinburgh actually. When I went down for the B Corp thing, it was.
Did you go down to Edinburgh?
I went to Edinburgh on a train from Aberdeen to Edinburgh. Well Stonehaven to Edinburgh, um when I went down, I went down the night before because it was an early ish start. I certainly couldn't be bothered getting a six o'clock train from Stonehaven in order to get there on time. Uh, which might not have got there on time. I'll talk more about trains later. Um, I went down the night before, so I went out for a, it was a kind of balmy ish summer evening and I went for a walk and I don't know my way around Edinburgh as well as I should, so I just do what I normally do in cities. I just go and walk and see where I finish up and see if I can start to build a map in my mind about, you know, which street goes where and where I am. Um, yeah, it's a very multicultural, buzzing kind of place. But anyway, we got on this Bcop. Bcop is something and just Google it. Bcop. Uh, it's something that we've looked at before. I kind of flirted with the idea of trying to get through the whole, you know, rigorous B Corp process. Uh, I think we're very, as an organisation, we're already very B corp in the way that we run, operate, think about the world, understand how we fit into the world, our impact on the world, etc.. Um, but I think it would be nice or it will, it's going to be nice to go through this, this process. So I was delighted to be accepted on the cohort. There was a waiting list or there is a waiting list for the cohort. So it wasn't one of these things. Like if you're interested, you're in because nobody else is interested. Yes, there was a good turnout at the session and there's a lot of companies, I think a lot of people interested. I think it'll be a painful journey for some businesses who don't already do a lot of things that we do and don't operate the way we operate. And I think they'll be painting it for us. It will be things that we kind of maybe are going to get forced to do that don't sit well with us. I don't know, maybe. But I think this idea there's two thousand B Corp in the UK. Um and Edinburgh um Edinburgh Chamber have got this B Corp five hundred. So they want to have five hundred B Corp in Edinburgh by I think twenty thirty. So it's ambitious but they've given themselves a sensible timescale to do it. And it's great to be in the first cohort to hopefully get through and get that B Corp status, whether or not as a business that will help us attract more clients. I think in the future it might, because I think, you know, the way things are moving, the general direction is that people want to do business with people, with other businesses that maybe are a bit more like them. So if they're a B Corp, they might be more inclined to work with other B Corp. Um, but just being a B Corp, I think will, will, will make us a better business and, and a better business to do business with. So I said business along the B.
The B is for better, right?
That's for better. That's right. Yeah. And it comes right down to your memorandum of articles, which you have to amend as part of the process. It's not just like, you know, some things like, you know, become a HubSpot partner, for example, you know, flog some HubSpot and then put a badge on your website. It's not like that. It's, it's a rigorous process that you have to go through and you have to go through the process and then live by the rules. If you like that you've agreed to run your business using.
Are they just rules for you? Is that how it works? It's just like how you conduct yourself. Or is it about like the companies you work with, for example?
There is an element of that. Yeah. I think if you said, oh, you know, we primarily work with companies that make landmines, you're not likely to become a B Corp. Having said that, I mean, there's been some controversy around B Corp because, for example, Nespresso have become B Corp. Yeah. And they put like, you know, a zillion tonnes of aluminium into landfill every year with those little stupid aluminium pods that they make. So, you know, there's been people saying, well, how the hell are they, you know? And so, you know, they always argue we get these billion dollar corpse on board.
We raise awareness.
Movement, more money, and we can help them become better, you know, that kind of thing. And I, you know, being cynical. Yeah.
Being cynical.
Yeah.
That's right. It's it's tricky though, isn't it? Because a lot of people aren't. I mean, we can't control our supply chain and we can't necessarily control, you know, some of the organisations we work with are definitely not environmentally friendly, for example. And to a certain degree, you can't really control that. But no, I guess it's it's one of those things, isn't it, where it is better to be pushing in that direction and trying to.
I'm excited about going through that process. Yeah, I think I think it will help us grow as a business. I mean, we're growing as a business like twenty seven, twenty seven percent in the last twelve months. I mean, it's good. You know, we're very healthy situation such, you know, such as agencies can be. It's not for the faint hearted. Agency, as you know, but um overall I think it's it's a good thing for us to be, to be working towards that.
Yeah.
Definitely go back to the coalface and dig some call it.
Um, the other thing. Well, I have a couple of things. The other thing I really wanted to talk about was, uh, more sort of like mini case study, I guess. But what I, what I've written in my notes is that targeted digital marketing will always be better than the scattergun approach. Um, and that you should spend more time working out. I guess it feeds back into my last point actually, which is spend more time working out what's going wrong when things go wrong. Okay.
So elaborate.
So specifically, we have, um, a client, very long standing client that we've been working with for five or six years now. Um, and their website got hit in one of the many helpful content updates and it didn't get hit particularly badly, but we noticed a little drop off in traffic. Um, and as, as you'll know, when those things happen, your first instinct is always to panic and be like, oh no, like the content on the website is wrong. We should rewrite everything, you know, you know, we've been hit by helpful content update. That means our content is not helpful quickly, you know.
Sort of quickly make it helpful.
Yeah. Um.
Make it helpful button.
Exactly that.
Next to the make it pretty.
Boy. It's like, how much of the website do we have to completely rewrite to, you know, to get there? And what we did in this instance was say, well, hang on a minute. Like, let's work out where we've actually because it was sort of like a, maybe a fifth or so of their traffic that dropped off. And we were like, okay, let's work out where we've actually lost the traffic and work out what's actually happened. And when we drilled down into the search console data, what we found is that it was actually three blog posts that had basically accounted for all of this drop off with three tiny blog posts. Um, and we looked at them and we looked at the, the articles that were now out ranking them that had replaced them. And we basically just had a look at the landscape in general and we said, okay, do you know what these were written sort of five or six years ago. Um, yeah, right back at the beginning. Um, they were very helpful at the time, but I can one hundred percent where Google see where Google is coming from now. You know, they're no longer as helpful as they could be. They're not as in-depth. Things have changed. A lot of the sources were out of date. Um, so we rewrote just those three blog posts. Um, and we didn't spend very long doing it. We spent a couple of days just completely overhauling them and then left it all alone. And two months later they are back. They're actually up twenty percent. Wow. Their organic traffic and all three of those blog posts are now ranking first again. And that's not.
Saying the company name. What line of business are they in?
They make irrigation pumps.
Okay, I know who you're talking about now.
But it's just one of those things, you know, it's not to sort of show off at all. It's to say that when things go wrong, as they often do, if you spend a little bit of time not panicking and actually drilling down, you often find it's a very small amount of effort that you need to expend to, to change whatever. You know, when things suddenly change underneath you and you're like, oh, okay, we were doing really well and now we're doing really badly. It's not going to be a sort of colossal, you know, it's not going to be like a site wide issue really generally. It's going to be something, you know, Google has reassessed something that you're doing and it might not be Google. You know, we're not just talking about search marketing. Something will have changed. And if you can drill down and find that one thing and spend a little bit of effort on it, things will probably be okay. I think that's just, you know, I think I'd extend that to like sort of most of the work we do when you figure out what it is. I mean, we had a thing with our website, right? We think that was impacting our rankings. And it was a tiny little thing that was just yeah, that was sort of like a, it was a site wide problem, but it was like a couple of lines of code on every page, basically. And we spent forever trying to figure out what it was, what was happening. We found it.
We thought once we'd fixed it and then realised a couple of months later we hadn't.
But it's always like, you know, it's always like a piece of grit in the machine, isn't it? Or like a butterfly in your supercomputer. It's, it's never like a sort of like you have to tear everything out and start again. It's just actually sort of pinpoint, I think what, what the problem is, and then work on fixing it rather than.
Was that a reference to the original bug?
It was.
Yeah.
It was a moth.
Wasn't an actual bug.
Yeah. It had flown into the computer and taken everything offline. And then yeah, they found its carcass and yeah.
Yeah.
Good times.
Hourly rates, retainers, etc. the whole hourly rates thing has raised its head recently. There was a couple of things that we were we've been talking to people. One of them is one of the challenger banks that we've been speaking to about potentially offering them some website support, web development support, HubSpot support. Um, and they needed, or we need to know your hourly rates in order to compare you to the other people that we're talking to. Um, so, you know, we don't quote jobs saying X hours at x rate, sorry, x y rate. That's not how we operate. It's most grown up agencies don't operate that way. They'll give you a price for doing a job. Um, uh, but it, um, on the one hand, you know, people I understand want to kind of understand what they're paying, but if they, if they don't like the fact that. Right. Okay. So you need this thing doing, there's the quote, two thousand quid if they're like, well, break that down for me, you know.
And we'll spend three hours on that, and then somebody will go for lunch and we're charging you for that.
So they can then say, well, why is that taking two hours? You know, because when they actually don't even know how to do that thing and or anything else. I just think it's, um, it's a situation where, you know, if all of our customers wanted to pay us an hourly rate and literally just pay for every hour, like we literally just submit time sheets like a contractor does.
Yeah.
We'd probably make more money.
Yeah.
You know, we don't, we don't nickel and dime people. We don't quote hourly rates because it just is a nonsense way of doing it. But by the same token, when companies are on retainer, we don't actually charge them for every minute that we spend working for them because we say, right, you know, in any given month, this is the budget, this is what we're going to deliver for the budget. They agree and we just get on and do it. Um, and, you know, if things change a bit, well, you know, generally speaking, we just kind of go, okay, it's going to take a bit longer. Say what? Say Levy. I mean, I'm not you know, I'm not blind to the fact that, like, for example, we all get effectively paid by the hour because we get a salary, which for a set number of hours per week per year, etc., etc.. So, you know, I understand the importance of understanding what resources cost by the hour, but the idea that then all you do is like add twenty percent onto that and then flog it, you know, add twenty percent on or whatever each person costs and then flog that time is just, I don't know, it's just so out of date.
Well, it's just so it's so oversimplified. I think part of the problem is you feel like, you know, when you press your, your plumber or your marketing agency, but never your lawyer, people will never wrangle with lawyers about hourly rates. But when you press them for, you know.
They do charge.
Exactly.
How they charge you. Accountants, I.
Think when you press them for their hourly rate, you feel like you're doing something good. You know, like you're doing your due diligence, you're being sensible, you're being a savvy businessman. And I think all of that stuff, you know, it feels really grown up in the instance. But I think if you ask yourself, you know, when you have a good plumber or a relationship with a roofer or somebody that, you know, you don't give a monkeys anymore, you don't care what they're charging you per hour, you just know they're going to come and do the job.
I've just done that. I've just paid. I've just paid a roofer, a roofing company, ten thousand quid to, to replace a roof on a property that I've got. And yeah, they were there.
For about the.
Hours for just over a week. But I don't know what all the bits and bobs cost and all the wood they bought or the.
And you don't.
Care because you just care. Because I was happy that they've done a job and I've now, you know, completely reroofed this property, which has taken a massive headache away. It took away all the rotten wood and sick nails and everything else in the process. If anyone's listening who understands how roofs work, and I'm happy I've got a solution to a problem.
And I think also like it's just sort of an oversimplification, the idea of an hourly rate. I mean, I was talking to somebody interesting recently. We love a good car analogy on here.
Yeah, we had one for a while, certainly not in this podcast where if you go.
To do a garage one, I was talking to somebody recently and interestingly enough, they said that they. Whenever their car broke down, they always took it to the dealership like the brand dealership. And I was like, God, you're a maniac. Like, do you not realise they charge like three times as much per hour because they do. You know, if you take your car to Land Rover, they'll charge you ninety quid an hour as opposed.
To ninety, one hundred.
one hundred.
Yeah, it would be literally it'd be one hundred and ninety.
It's astronomical compared to what an average engineer or garage or whatever mechanic will charge you. Um, but he was like, yeah, but, you know, if I take my Land Rover or whatever into the garage and I say, you know, fix this for me, and they say, okay, it'll take about four or five hours. I'm going to pay them, you know, like, say one hundred and ninety pounds an hour. But then if the fix doesn't work or, you know, it takes a bit longer, they swallow it because they are a big corporation. They're grown up, they don't nickel and dime you. And even though you're paying them more per hour, in actual fact, it probably ends up being cheaper over the course of.
The only reason I don't use VW as a service in my golf is because it's thirty miles away. And it's just, it just, I have to basically assign a day to go in and sit there while they service the car and everything else. So, you know, I use, I use a local garage to do a great garage anyway. So I use them instead. But, but I would, I would kind of would use v dub. And just because the other thing, the other thing that these companies do is again, they actually give you fixed prices. They don't necessarily call hours, but so it's a B service, it's four hundred quid. Yeah. That's it. Yeah.
So and you know where you stand. I think the point is that you can you can look at an hourly rate and sort of miss the fact that, you know, grown up organisations will often be bundling a lot of stuff in like that. You know, you get the aftercare. People aren't just going to say, right, well, we've charged you for six hours work, but it hasn't worked. And if you want us to go again, it's going to cost you another six hours work. Like we just we don't do that sort of thing. And I think this is part of the problem, isn't it is it's like at the bottom of the food chain, you get people who are pricing per hour, but they will charge you for literally every hour they work, and then you get people at the top like us who are like, sort of like, like you say, sometimes we're asked to quote per hour. And it's really difficult because actually, you know, if we need three people on something, if we have to go to a specialist and get them to fix a specific problem, we're not going to necessarily just pass that cost straight onto you.
So I think it's the legacy of the of the industry that we're in. Yeah. You know, other other legacies include like, you know, well, we'll need you to do some design work and show us what you what you envisage our new website's going to look like. And then we, then you'll be in the mix with the other five agencies who are doing exactly the same thing. And we might pay you. And, you know, the response to that would be, no, thanks.
Get out.
Yeah. That's right. But that's gradually getting phased out as people wise up. I was going to say something else there, but as they wise up. But I think the hourly rate thing, it's still kind of it kind of feels like an agency norm still and still is a norm for a lot of agencies.
It's also like the, the audits thing. That's my other like favorite pet peeve, isn't it? It's like, you know, when people say, oh, we're gonna audit your website. Some people do it for free. Some people use automated tools. It's all nonsense. You know.
Everyone does it for free. Uses an automated.
Tool.
Well, except us.
But I think in general that all of that stuff, like you say, it's all sort of holdover from when everyone was definitely trying, desperately trying to scramble over each other to get business.
And all.
Yeah.
Okay. Got any more cool stuff?
Only that thing I was talking to you about before. Um, about a client of ours who? They've got three brand new products that they're bringing to market. Yeah. And like so many clients do, they have come to us and said, look, you know, we've got these three products. They're ready to go. We just want to get them on the website now, get them on the website as quickly as you can. Doesn't matter that we don't have any content for them, but.
How can they not have content? They could put their brain on it for an hour and produce five hundred words of content for each of them. And that is, you know, it's not they're too busy.
Too busy. It's urgent, you know, and they're like, get one page up with all three products and that'll be fine. And this is like, you know, with this client in particular, we actually sort of, um, go through something similar fairly regularly where they will come to us and say, we want to add this to the website. Um, and then six months down the line, they'll be like, oh, we need to expand this. We need to build more content around this. Or like the offering has expanded and we have to go back and sort of undo a lot of the work that we've done and sort of re It's just one of those things where if you think long term, like in a year's time, in six months time, even, what do you want this bit of your website to actually look like and build that instead of rushing just to get something over the line because it takes time and it wastes effort to unpick these things? Yeah. Um, and I think, you know, you were pointing out before that, like sometimes we've been guilty of that as well. And I think it's true. I think most people are to some degree, you know, it's like, you really.
Think I've been guilty of it, but not necessarily you or the rest. Well, I.
Think I think it's a mistake everybody makes from time to time. It's like, right, I just want to get this done, you know, I want to get it up. I want people to see it. I don't care. But, you know, ultimately it's more about where you want your website to be in the long run. I think ultimately you should be building for the future, shouldn't you, rather than just trying to get stuff over the line. Um, and you know, with this client in particular, it's like you say, if they took the time now to build the content around those three products, they're three quite different products. They all want to rank for different keywords. You want a different audience for each one. And that means you need a unique page for each one and you need like a thought out content.
I would rather see three new pages with perhaps slightly thin content than one page that talks about all three very different products and stands no chance of ranking particularly well because of that. You know, it's just.
It just goes back to that fundamental thing, like your website is for your audience and you have to think about how your audience want to look at things, how they, you know, if the audience isn't the audience for all three products, if each product has a different type of customer, then for God's sake, you know, have a different page for each one, use different language, talk about it in a different way. Frame the offer in a way that will resonate. Don't half ass it. I think that's the.
That's a really good point. And it's um, well, thankfully, I don't think it happens that often. We come across it, you know, we.
Have to talk people down from it a lot for sure. That's right.
Because doing it right, at least doing it right and creating a good solid foundation isn't hard. Yeah.
Yep. But trying to rebuild that foundation once you've already done something different.
Away. Yeah. That's right.
Well, you also like on it. And we won't get too geeky with this. But one of the things that really frustrates me is whenever you do that, the three hundred and one redirects you end up building because you've changed URLs and URL structures and you've put content under other content. And it's just you just make a minefield for somebody else to unpick, basically.
Yeah. That's right. I mean, we've got one just now where we've started putting some sector pages on our website. At the moment there's only one in there. The other one's nearly ready, but not quite. We could just as easily have said, oh, well, we'll just include all of them. All of them on that one page because it's ready. But you know, we just kind of chew on it and, you know, it doesn't really matter. The other page is only just starting to rank anyway because it's a brand new page. And by the time we get the other one up there, it'll all be good. Yeah, yeah.
But the sectors pages on our website are a really good example of that, because we spent quite a lot of time wrestling with what sector pages we wanted and splitting it into phases and, you know, plotting out the work. And I think that's the thing. You end up in a place where you've got all the pages you need in six months time. It's not as quick, but it's better.
Okay. Basics of PPC. We we were in that situation again this week where we were working, doing part of a piece of work, and somebody else in the States was doing the other part of that piece of work. And, but, but we are in overall, not not so much control, but we need, we need sight of everything that's going on for this, uh, fantastic client. Um, because we're, they're digital partners. So we had a look at the work that had been done on this PPC campaign by, um, it seems a bit like a bit of a have-a-go hero, to be honest, but there's lots of politics involved, so we'll just leave it. Um, they'd made some quite significant mistakes, hadn't they? So I just thought it was worth, and I mean it a very, very high level. Like if you're going to start using paid search, if you're having a go yourself, um, probably you shouldn't, but if you are going to have a go at PPC or if you're getting somebody to do it for you, make sure you are doing these three or four basic things. So what didn't they do?
Well, I think a slight caveat first, because I think the important thing to point out is this is this is largely a device for B2B, right? This is advice for when you are going after a very specific audience and you do not want to attract a load of irrelevant clicks. I think if you're selling shoes or bras or whatever else, you know, B2C stuff, I don't know why I always resort to fashion as the example, but you know, bras an unusual one. Shopping for.
Bras. Are you in the market?
Yeah. Looking for a new one? Um, when you're doing that, you probably can afford the scattergun approach. You know, you just want billions of people on there. A certain percentage of them will convert. It's fine. But when you're trying to get a specific audience or you're trying to tap into a specific audience, I think the four things really are well, the first one is definitely use negative keywords. I think it's absolutely criminal. The amount of PPC campaigns I look at where there are no negative keywords, because if you think of a search term, I guarantee you can think of a word you can add on after it or before it, that completely changes the intent of the search, right? Well, it's like, uh, pressure vessels, right? It's like, you can, you can be in the market for a pressure vessel. You can think, okay, right. I want all the people that, that, um, that are searching for pressure vessel to end up on this page. What if somebody is googling, you know, um, how to.
Build a hot water system?
Yeah, exactly.
You do have pressure.
Domestically.
In your own house. Yeah.
Domestic pressure or like, what is the equation to work out the tensile strength of a pressure vessel? Or like, what material should I build my pressure vessel out of? Or like, you know, I mean, there's like a million and one things that.
Vessels don't have tensile.
Strength. Well, I'm not an engineer, am I?
That's very clear from what you just said. But anyway.
The point I'm making is.
The material they're made out of might.
How, what, why sort of questions that are used by students. There are all the things like cheap, free, there are like examples.
And the bottom line is these negative keywords mean they help to not shore your advert when it's clearly not relevant and they're often omitted.
Yeah, absolutely. So so what you're trying to do is say to Google, okay, I want it when when people search for pressure vessels, generally fine, but if they search for pressure vessels in any way, that implies they're not actually shopping for them. I want to get rid of them. And that's what you're trying to do. And if you don't do that, what you'll get is because most of the searches on the internet, I would say the overwhelming majority are informational. It's people just looking for information. And when you're paying for that traffic, you don't want that. You don't want students and, you know, sort of window shoppers. Um, the other thing is, is just around like account structure.
Yeah, I know that it's something that irks you and you often are seen banging your head against a wall when you see something that you didn't put together that you've been asked to review.
It's like when you drop all of your like, so I don't know how to explain this without getting really geeky about it. Google is going to.
Try not to get.
Geeky.
I don't like you when you're geeky.
When you set up a PPC campaign, when you set up an ad group, specifically, Google looks at it and it says, okay, like how the keywords that you're bidding on, how relevant are they to the ad and to the landing page. Um, and when you drop all of your keywords in one bucket. So like if you, if you own an engineering company that makes like pressure vessels and heat exchangers and a bunch of other equipment and does some welding, and you just think to yourself, right, I'll make an ad group and I'll drop all of the keywords we could possibly appear for. And then you put an advert at the end of it that says, you know, we do everything. Google looks at all of that stuff and it says, well, this is a confused mess, right? And it doesn't there isn't much coherence between what's in the ad group, the keywords you're looking for, the page, the ad, it's all just jumbled up. And really all you need to do is sit down and say, okay, what is the intent? Who is the audience and break everything up according to that?
Okay. Here's a simple analogy then, just to help make and tell me if I'm right. So you you make pressure vessels and you want to advertise them in printed media. You could put an advert in the sun or let's say the times because you're a bit up market, but you're a bit classy. Or you could put an advert in um, process engineer weekly. Yeah. Where would you put it?
Yeah.
That's engineer. Weekly. You'd be very specific about it. And you would you would you know. And then if you provided, um, high tech welding services where you can weld all kinds of weird and wonderful alloys together and do all kinds of stuff, then you might put that in structural engineer weekly because it's a, it's a different audience.
And this is the key. This is the thing to wrap your head around is it's like, who is going to see this and what are they going to care about? And as soon as those, you know, as soon as groups become distinct from each other and you say, okay, for this product, it's these people and for this service, it's these people, you need different ad groups. Um, and when people don't do that, it just yeah, it does drive me nuts because you'll spend more money. That's the thing. You waste money doing that because you end up with low quality scores and Google charges. It's lazy. It's lazy. Yeah, it's quick, but it's lazy. Yeah. And, and bad. Um, I'm trying to think if there's anything else that they've done. I'm not top of mind.
I'm not sure. So I know that the negative keywords thing was, was a, was a nuisance. The badly the badly structured nature of it.
Oh branded keywords.
Okay.
We can have a rant about this. It's just it's it's unbelievably if you if you employ a PPC company and you go and Google.
Like Google ads, etc..
Yeah. And you go and Google your brand name right now and you see one of your ads pop up and you are the first organic listing underneath that ad, you have a problem.
Do you think?
I think so. All right.
Well, people would argue that you're there twice. So you've got two bites of the cherry.
And that's well but and if that's a strategic decision, if you've looked at that in the round and said, you know what, I would actually like to pay money to be on that page twice. Fine. Yeah. But what so many PPC people do, especially freelancers, is they will obscure bad results by bidding on your brand name.
Poacher turned gamekeeper who used to be a PPC freelancer. Now you're. Now you're getting getting onto them.
But I had the same rant then, and I'll have it again now too. Because what's gonna happen is you are going to get really good click through rates. You know, you're going to get really good conversion rates because look, all of those people who were just looking for you because they already knew about you and would have normally clicked on your organic listing and now clicking on your ads and all the good stuff that they're doing is being attributed to the success of the PPC campaign. And it makes it very, very easy to say, look, we're doing a great job for you. You know, five percent of people who saw your ad clicked through and three percent of them converted. And then when you take the branded traffic out of the equation, everything's going really badly. And the branded traffic is just a sort of like it's a sticking plaster you can put on the top of things to make things go. And there are you're right. You're absolutely right to say there are times when bidding on branded search terms one hundred percent makes sense. You know, if the if there's competition, if your competition are bidding on your brand name, which is not unheard of, it's often really wise to do the same thing just to make sure you're still at the top of the pile. But so often you see it and it's just like, well, that's not going to achieve anything. All of those people are already looking for you.
Yeah, I get that. You're paying for a click. You to go anywhere. Yeah, that's a sentiment in simple terms.
And we're trying to use PPC to attract people who don't already know about you, who would have shopped elsewhere if they hadn't come to you. And it sort of completely defeats the purpose, I think. Yeah.
All right. Um, I think Leslie's getting bored. She started yawning and stretching and stuff. So I think we better think about wrapping this one up. Um.
You gotta just blame other people when you're bored. That's not.
I'm not, I'm not bored. I could I could go on for hours.
Sit and witter for hours. Yeah, we probably will. We'll just turn the microphones off.
Yeah. That's right. Probably will. I was going to talk about the train home from Edinburgh. Oh no I'm not. No, no. Yeah. It was.
Rubbish.
Well I went down on Ellie and Eleanor. It was on, it was on time. It was warm. The food was good. It was comfortable. I came back on ScotRail which was nationalised. It was late, it was cold. The food was shit. I'm just saying. I'm just saying I. Eleanor could just have easily have been late and everything else I'm sure. Um, the difference is if Eleanor had done that, I'd have mourned to them and they'd give me my money back. Well, if it weren't for ScotRail, they'd probably just, like, not even reply.
Well, it's interesting that you should have this rant, because I had a bad experience with a train at the weekend, too. Did you? Yeah, I went into Aberdeen from Inverurie. I have a three year old daughter. She likes to get the train. She thinks it's really exciting.
I can imagine.
Why. So instead of driving.
Just to show you how old I am, I can remember getting a train when I was about Vivian's age. So a little toddler. It was a steam train.
Wow.
Yeah. Actual steam train in service. Yeah, that would have been in the sixties. Yeah. Mid. Mid. Mid to late sixties. When he was a toddler.
He still remember it.
Yeah I do yeah.
But yeah no she really likes to get the train. She stands on the seat and looks out the window and shouts at the cows. Um and um the.
Small or far away.
Well they were neither, they were pressed up right close to the um we got the train in. Beautiful. Fantastic. ScotRail got the train back out. Also ScotRail, they were like oh sorry to tell you this should be a five carriage service. It's only a three carriage service today. You might be a bit squeezed.
And will.
You? Oh, yeah. Like sardines. But it's like, you know, they were like, oh, sorry, we can't help it. You know, one of the trains broke down and it's like, if your system is running on like such a shoestring, if there's like so little sort of slack in the system that you can't replace one five carriage chain, God help you. It's absolute farce. It was absolutely terrible.
Interestingly, I was listening to somebody commentating on the football on the euros and they were talking about, oh no, no, it was it was Mark Steel and Geoff Norcott. He'd been there over over gigging comedian Mark steel. He was on Geoff Norco's podcast and he was talking about the trains in Germany, and he said they were awful. They were late, they were cancelled. You know, and we always talk about this, you know, this Teutonic accuracy of the German rail system. Not at.
All.
Not at all. I know in France, generally good rail, but not not infallible. Yeah. Leslie Leslie's doing that thing very French. Um, but you know it. You know, people always think that we've got the worst of everything in the UK for sure. And like, you know, we're talking about going back to politics. You know, there's a, there's a Rassemblement National, which is basically the National Front in, uh, in France. Uh, they've won the first round. They're not going to win a majority in the second round.
Doesn't look like.
It. They won't they won't win a majority in the second round. But they are a force now in French in French politics. And uh, yeah. And there's chaos in Germany and everything else. But we, you know, we all, we always tend to focus on, on our own situation and think that we are uniquely bad. Um, so it's interesting that we finished on trains and had a bit of an international, uh, spin on it as well.
Could be American, couldn't we at least, you know, at least both of the people running for office yesterday were, you know, under the age of eighty. Yeah.
I know, it's, uh, do you not think Biden's going to stand down?
He better. He has to really wisely.
You think? You may think he may. He shrugged again. He shrugged again.
He needs to. I'll say that much.
Well, he's now saying he was jet lagged, and that's why you perform badly.
No no no no no no. What he said is he was jet lagged from a journey that he took two weeks before the debate. And that's not jet lag.
That's even worse than that's like. Yeah. If you're still knackered two weeks after sitting in a, in a luxury plane just with just you and a bed in it and everything.
No. The limits of your ability.
Pardon?
He does have a stutter. The problem in the debate wasn't his stuttering, though. It's that he was rambling and and saying things that were completely off topic and just randomly at one said at one point said we beat Medicaid without any prompting or provocation, which means nothing. Yeah, dude's past it. And I think it's okay to admit that. I think it's okay to just say, you know, I said I'd only run for one term and turns out that's all I'm gonna do. But yeah. Fingers crossed. Okay.
All right. That's good. Um, hopefully we can be as dull and uninspiring next time.
I shall aspire to it.