Google Search Console is Google's own tool, and it looks at your website's search performance. Fantastic. Brilliant. Now I have some useful marketing intelligence. I can go away and make decisions on the basis of that. However, if you ever look at the sort of monthly total visits from search, and then you look at all of the things where it breaks it down into the per search term report, the two numbers don't add up.
They're not even close.
Just have to sort of accept that it's a little bit nebulous and doesn't stop you from experimenting, and it doesn't stop you from measuring the results of your experiment. The things that are very sort of definitive and tangible, like a lead, an enquiry, somebody's email address, those you can track. Last one is just, I think an awful lot of people, when they go out to contact agencies and going out with this sort of idea that they have to have a budget in mind when they haven't really specced out the project properly, either. People need to spec out the project better or come to you and say, this is the problem I have, help me work out what it will take to solve that.
So in case you're not aware, you are listening to Digital Marketing From The Coalface.
In case you accidentally clicked it. Yeah.
That's right. With Robinson, Alex Bussey, um, I know Alex has actually broken with tradition and made copious notes for this podcast, so. Well, you say I've got two lines at the moment when you start spouting the usual nonsense that you spout. I'm sure I'll bet lots of things I can write down.
I'm not quite sure I do.
Correct you on.
Why I do this with you sometimes.
Yeah. You do. You love.
It. Well, I guess the first one on my list is the Google antitrust lawsuit, which is.
I know nothing about this. No, I don't, I absolutely I know nothing about this. Brilliant. I've got a life.
Well. Uh, so yeah, uh, American judge basically found that Google was acting as a monopoly, had an unfair monopoly on search, and has basically ruled.
Well, did the world say to this judge? No shit, Sherlock.
Well, exactly that. Yeah, it's a big deal though, because I mean, Americans, I don't think they take this thing, these things as seriously as we do, but they do when they eventually start acting on them. Um, you know, sort of do quite a lot to make sure that that monopoly then gets ended. Um, so a lot of people are sort of pitching this as is Google going to lose dominance? Is it going to stop being the top search engine?
How are they going to change their behavior?
Well, so basically what the lawsuit is actually about was the fact that Google have made all sorts of deals with all sorts of different people at Apple people, um, Microsoft.
Apple working on a search engine.
Well, this is exactly it. But basically the idea is that Google makes itself the default web browser on, on a lot of different people's devices. Yeah, there we go. That's the word I was looking for. Sorry. And also that its search engine becomes the default search engine for a lot of different web browsers. So they're sort of basically trying to make it so that whenever you go to the web and search for something, it's pretty much always Google. And that's pretty unfair, right? Um, and what. Well, yeah.
It's because it's better than the rest.
And interestingly enough, that's a big part of the lawsuit. So Google's response to the lawsuit has basically been to say, yeah, you know, thanks for saying that. We're the world's best search engine and that we're clearly miles ahead of the competition and that everybody should be using us.
In your experience. Are there other search engines that we should be trying? I mean, DuckDuckGo, Bing, a two that spring to mind. There's obviously others, but what's your experience?
Well, this is the thing that's really interesting, right? So like I was saying, everybody's pitching this as like Google's gonna lose market share. Everybody's going to move away from Google. But the problem is that even if they do a lot of these other search engines, like Bing is a really like clear competitor, right? It's probably one of the only competitors that most people could name, but it's basically just copying Google. It's basically just a couple of years behind. And every time Google makes a change, Bing tries to emulate it. So your search results on Bing.
If you look at their paid search, you can basically just press a button and it'll.
Or you can literally.
Google's Google ads into Bing. And because it's exactly the same.
And they know that everybody prefers to use Google and that Bing's the sort of afterthought. So they're like, oh yeah, please just copy and paste your campaigns in here. And, you know, again, with the search results time and time again, you know, Google changed something Bing lags behind and then makes the same change. So, you know, in terms of like how it affects things for us, I don't really think it's a terribly big deal. We'll keep optimising pages just the same.
For search engines for generic.
Yeah. And Google being the sort of benchmark, the sort of best and biggest search engine.
Because if you do search marketing, well, the there's a very good chance you'll appear near the top or at the top of, of all the major search engines.
Yeah. Except for ones like DuckDuckGo, which if you ever try using it is is weirdly bad. I don't know why it is. I'm not, I'm not really. And I'm sure there'll be somebody listening to this who is very up on the sort of technical details, like what is different about Duckduckgo's algorithm?
Yeah, maybe it's not. It hasn't got the historical data about you. Yeah. Which makes it more challenging to provide good results. Maybe because that's one of their big things is privacy.
Yeah. Yeah. There's that. And then, of course, there's the fact that, as we discovered quite recently, Google are using all sorts of sort of user level signals about how long people spend on pages and where they go on websites to work out how things should rank. And obviously, DuckDuckGo won't have anything, any access to any of that because they don't have an analytics engine or any of that good stuff. So yeah, whatever the case, they're not as good. I think it is interesting because I think we keep having these conversations about Google sort of falling on the wrong side of the law. Google, you know, sort of alienating people, Google annoying people. I do think it starts to build a picture where maybe they're sort of maybe there is a sort of time limit on how long they can be the dominant search engine, I don't know, but yeah.
So you think they've been around since? Well, it's ninety eight, ninety nine. They started. Yeah, ninety eight was the time they were at the conference I was at where they were presenting their ideas. Certainly by ninety eight, ninety nine people were just using it regularly. I mean, there was also, I mean, I guess yahoo kind of was dominant for, for a short period of time before people went, wait a minute, this Google thing is amazing. Well, they just type anything in and it gives you exactly what you're looking for.
And therein lies the problem. And I don't know if like search marketing as a discipline would have existed without Google. I don't know if anybody would have bothered trying to manipulate something like yahoo or whatever. That just seemed to pick websites randomly. Um, I don't know is the answer. Um, I think it is interesting. I think that the door is sort of wide open for somebody very clever like Apple to kind of storm in with a competing technology. I just don't think anybody currently on the market comes close really.
Yeah. I mean, fundamentally they're all link based algorithms. They all rank web pages based on popularity and the popularity of the pages that make the pages popular. Yeah. Kind of thing.
Yeah, yeah, In a roundabout way.
Yeah, yeah, that's that's the kind of bottom line with it. So I don't know. I don't know where I stand on it. I mean, we, you know, we use, um, Google's workspace. Is that what it's called? Workspace. It's like office three hundred sixty five only it's called it's Google's equivalent. It's got all the tools we need. It's got the chat tools, it's got the email tools. I mean, we, we pay not a huge amount of money every month, whatever it is. And we, and we really like it. I mean, it's good. So Google's got other revenue streams, you know, like things like Google Workspace and Looker Studio that you've been playing with quite a lot recently and lots of other enterprise level tools, which eye wateringly expensive. So I still, I still think the lion's share of their revenues coming from PPC paid search, but, um, and so they want to remain dominant in the search space because without a dominant search engine, they've got no PPC, therefore they lose their cash cow. Yeah. But maybe that's why they're putting so much time and energy into all these other products, because they just want to make sure that they're not wholly reliant on search. Yeah, because they see the writing on the wall, potentially.
Yeah. I don't know. I mean, like, like you say, I don't really know this stuff. What I do know is that, um, sort of on the back of it where I ended up was, do you know what, sometimes it's really easy as an agency and as sort of individuals to get really tied up in like Google, Google, Google. One thing that's quite interesting. Sorry, is that quite recently, for example, when we've been advertising on Bing for ourselves and for clients, it's been quite successful, right? And it's not to say like.
Small numbers, but slightly better quality.
Yeah. And it's not to say like, forget about Google or move away from Google, but it's to remember that there are more, you know, and especially things like Bing is important, right? Because a lot of, um, for us in the UK, for example, a lot of big government entities and organisations are really locked into Microsoft. So by default, everybody's using Edge and Bing and those sort of tools. And it's easy to forget that sometimes, you know, just because Google has ninety percent market share doesn't mean that ninety percent of your market are using.
What's his judge saying then is there something going to happen?
Yeah, they'll find them a lot of money and they will force them to. Yeah. And they'll force them to not make.
Google's definition of a lot of money in you. And I's definition of a lot of money are quite different, aren't they? Like how much how many million quid did I just drop? I'm not even bending down to pick that up.
We're going through this at the moment, uh, in the news as well around the whole social media, rioting violence thing. I don't know if you've tuned in to any of this, but on radio four this morning, they were interviewing a couple of government ministers, and they were talking about how social media platforms have this responsibility to clamp down on on.
Talking.
About.
It on LBC at the weekend. And it made me angry.
And they were like, yeah, we're gonna we'll find them. And it's like, but these social media companies and billions of pounds, they don't care whether you find them a few hundred million for, you know.
Where do you stand on that on the whole social media platform owner's responsibility thing?
To me, it feels a little bit like trying to find somebody for having a wall that somebody could spray paint an anarchist message.
Well, how about finding b t because of the nefarious conversations happening over over the phone lines? Exactly like that.
Exactly.
That doesn't seem to me to be rational or sensible or or something that the platform owners can necessarily do anything about.
No, I think you can definitely ask people to moderate things like indecent content and things like that. But like asking somebody to moderate speech is such a tricky area. It's like they provided. Yeah. And ultimately, all these social media platforms are doing is providing a sort of message board, a tool surface on which people can write. So yeah, I don't know really as to how responsible they should be.
Yeah, I just, I find it interesting when people in power in government speak in these simplistic ways about the social media platform, owners will need to moderate. It's like, have you any idea the volume of of information now. All right. You would use automation to moderate it, but, you know, there's a really good chance of getting that horribly wrong.
I don't know, man. It's like if you ever look at how Facebook or Twitter before Elon Musk fired them all, um, how they try to moderate it is literally teams of hundreds, if not thousands of people sitting. And so you can flag a message right on social media and say, this is inappropriate content.
I've done that plenty of times on what was Twitter.
And that has to then be reviewed by a human. So a human being whose job it is to literally sit and pore through all these.
Things and then send the. This is not in violation of our terms and conditions message. Nine times out of ten or ninety nine times out of one hundred.
It's exhausting. And the idea that you could do that in real time, and that you could stop a riot by having some somebody paid, let's be honest, minimum wage to sit in.
They probably could do it in real time, but it would have many false positives. So freedom of speech would be impaired, I would imagine.
Yeah.
Probably.
Yeah.
I know we think this might be bad. So therefore we're banning it.
It's like we again, you're asking people who are probably going to be earning a minimum, if not a very low wage, to make really important judgment calls. And I don't really know. Yeah. I don't really know how that ends up, to be honest.
You'd never be able to tell anyone you were from Scunthorpe ever. I, uh, yeah, I don't know. I mean, like I said, they were rabbiting on on, on LBC at the weekend about it and I, I, I kind of started typing a message out to send in to the, to the phone in talking, texting radio show and then I just er you know what, what I do sometimes I've got quite a good hit rate of getting stuff read out on the radio because I quite like being involved in the conversations. Do you not think it's, it's the case that we are still only learning how to use social media, and I don't mean technically which buttons to press. I mean how this mass communication medium that's been put in everybody's pocket should be used. Could be used. Can be used. How to use it. How not to use it.
I mean even the impacts of it because I mean we were having this debate just before the last general election in this country. If you remember, a load of studies came out and a big report about the damage that social media is doing to kids. And there was all this talk about, you know, banning it for people under thirteen, which ironically, you know, you're already supposed to be over thirteen anyway. So I don't really know how they think they're going to ban it, but, you know, and restricting smartphone use because of the mental health problems that it causes. And I think, yeah, as a society, we sort of, I don't know, like all of this technology is quite new. It's not like brand new. It's like some of it's sort of twenty years old now, but it's new enough that we don't really understand the ramifications of it. And I think certainly when it comes to things like political violence and free speech, one of the things I thought was really interesting was yesterday was one of the first ever convictions for somebody inciting violence using social media. And I thought that was quite interesting, that he did get a prison sentence. Yeah. And it was for posting messages being like, you know, let's go here and riot basically, which is a big step and a big change. And I don't really know how I feel about that. It's, uh.
It's interesting because I was talking to my nephew about going fishing. He's down in Cumbria and, uh, I was saying he works shifts. So I said, when are you, when are you off next? He said, oh, I'm off from tomorrow morning at six o'clock, two for five days. So I said, right, you go back to work on Wednesday next week. Yeah. Okay. I was thinking of going fishing on Tuesday and he was saying, oh, but yeah, but I'm also planning on going for going rioting, you know, just just because he's got a great sense of humor, Jack. And, uh, and I, you know, he just said that to me. I said, well, we could, we could go to a riot, but if we take the rods, we could actually go fishing on the way home. Now that's just us having a laugh. But if you, if you think about like, if we were if that conversation has been monitored, it was in messenger. So it wasn't a public conversation. Somebody might be going, oh, these guys are planning on going rioting and they're going to take a weapon with them, fishing with them sort of thing. And suddenly, like, we're getting our collar felt. It's like I was having a laugh, you know? Yeah. So, you know, the nuance of that could be missed if you had this kind of automated policing. I tell you, I think I remember now what really riled me. Um, and you feel free to shoot me down on this, but they were talking about social media and all the misinformation that's on social media. And I thought, wait a minute, we've just had a general election. And the people who are now in power and kind of just state, for the record, I do not vote Tory. So this will sound like I'm defending the Tories, but I'm not a Tory voter. So the people who are now in power stood up on the TV and are continuing to stand up in Parliament and say the chaos that we currently have is entirely the fault of fourteen years of Tory mismanagement. Now, however mismanaged the economy's been with the Tories and they've. They've made plenty of mistakes, as do all governments. There was no mention made of the twenty fourteen oil price crash. There was no mention made of the fact the Tories in their coalition government came in in twenty ten, two years after the global financial crash. There was no mention made of Covid. There was no mention made of the Ukraine war, so they were being fundamentally dishonest. They were lying to people to get the vote and saying, all of this is entirely the fault of the Tories and its mismanagement. And then in the same breath, they're now standing up saying, we have to stop these this misinformation coming out of the social media platforms. I just thought, you know, f*cking hypocrites. I just I mean, am I wrong about that? I don't know, correct me, please correct me.
You're not wrong.
We may be oversimplifying it.
Well, we have a we have a huge blind spot and a huge problem here, don't we? Because if you think back to Brexit, and I guess this does tie into advertising and marketing a little bit, you remember the bus, you know, slap a message on the side of a bus that says three hundred and fifty million pounds every day for the NHS or whatever. And then you stand in front of the bus and you don't explicitly say what's on the bus, but you stand in front of it. It's framed in camera, it's all over the pictures and and you can get away scot free with telling an outright outrageous lie like that. Um, and I think it's really interesting because if a company does it, if we do it, you know, we have the Advertising Standards Agency just sort of waiting in the wings to spring on you if you make an untrue claim. And, and yet in politics and in certain other arenas of life, it's sort of absolutely fine to just tell these outrageous lies.
But yeah, and we've even got organisations like Fullfact who are there because our leaders stand up in the, the, the holy grail of, of like where you're supposed to tell the truth and run the country and tell blatant lies.
Yeah. Well, it's like Boris lying under oath as well, isn't it? He sort of erode the. Yeah. It is an odd one. It's interesting, I suppose with social media, what they're really worried about is the influence of, of sort of outside parties, people that you can't see, people you don't know who they are, sort of manipulating events, which is probably a real concern. But in general, like you say, I think bleating about the truth is a little bit hypocritical. I think nobody's being entirely honest on social media, are they?
So not in mainstream media. I mean, I, you know, there are if you think about the Watergate scandal and the, the two journalists that unearthed the whole thing and did that, that, you know, just the very, very best, the pinnacle of investigative journalism, unearthing outright corruption. Um, that's fine. But there's also like plenty of mainstream media journalists, whether it's TV, whether it's radio or papers or anything else. And they're all just basically following an agenda and they're just telling you enough to be sort of credible, but actually covering up the stuff that destroys their argument rather than, you know, be completely honest. I mean, I'm, you know, I'm, I'm not a climate denier or anything like that, but you never hear, for example, on the radio. You never say, right, we're going to get this, this renowned expert on, on climate change who believes it's all man made. And we're going to have this other expert coming on who believes it's not man made. They both believe the climate is changing. They never bring them on and have a grown up debate so you can listen to them all. They never do that. It's always only like there's an agenda. And that is that is all we get to hear sort of thing. And I, and I kind of worries me.
They will call you a boomer.
Now for that I don't mind. Yeah that's fine.
Yeah.
And like I say I'm, I'm, you know, I, I do, I can't remember the last time I was on an airplane, you know what I mean. I'm doing my bit for the planet. I don't want the planet to burn. I, I don't, you know, want any of this stuff to happen. But I do like honest, you know, honest debate on these subjects. We don't get.
That. No. And without taking this into into too delicate a territory, you have very much the same thing over the riots over the weekend. Right? It's like plastered all over the front page that, you know, far right rioters are going around and firebombing things. Um, the fact that a bunch of the sort of anti riot, um, sort of protests and stuff that were happening in Birmingham, people got imprisoned for brandishing weapons and that sort of thing goes surprisingly unreported. And it's not to say that, you know, one side is is nearly as bad as the other or anything like that. It's just that with the news media especially, you do have to be very careful. There is very much a bias. And one of the things I think is quite interesting is I remember in A-level history, being taught by my teacher that the important critical thinking skills we were learning needed to be applied outside the classroom and thinking what a load of waffle, what a load of rubbish. And then you get out into the real world and you're like, oh yeah, actually, you do have to be really careful what you're reading and what you're listening to. You do.
And you have to do research. If you listen to somebody and just decide, right, right. He's this person. He she said this, I'm now going to be, I'm going to spout that because that must be true. If you don't go off and do your own research, then you know, you're just an idiot. Yeah, I've kind of gone off the whole digital marketing thing a bit there.
We have a little bit.
Yeah, I don't care.
Do you want to try and apply it to digital marketing?
It's boring to talk about politics. All right. Go on.
Uh, what else have we got?
Tell you what, before you do just a quickie. I sometimes recommend other podcasts and I know I've bleated on about this one. I found this podcast called Raconteurs and I'm Late to the party. It started in twenty twenty, and if you look it up, it's basically Gary Kemp and Guy Pratt talking to a veritable who's who from the rock and pop world. And I've listened to three of them so far. It's fantastic. It's my new best friend, this this podcast Raconteurs, it's called definitely worth a listen. It's not nothing to do with digital marketing, but if you, if you like to hear what's going on behind the scenes, because this is a behind the scenes podcast, talking about digital marketing from the coalface. So if that's that sort of thing interests you and you fancy a different subject, then go for the Raconteurs thing. It's great.
Definitely go. Uh, well, I have another thing that's sort of loosely relates to what we were talking about, which is about being lied to by authority. Um, which is the whole Google search Console thing. Ah, yeah.
Just explain what that is first.
Yeah.
So and why you should be using it.
So Google Search Console is Google's own tool that it's completely free and it looks at your.
Is there a higher end paid version of Google Search Console? No there isn't.
Um, and it looks at your website's search performance. So it shows you, you know.
On.
Google, on Google. Yeah. What pages are being indexed by Google. Um, how they're being served, what keywords your pages are ranking for, how many times people have seen them in search, and ostensibly how many times people have clicked them in search too, which is hugely useful because for example, Google Analytics, which is the other sort of go to free analytics.
There is a paid version of that.
Yeah. For measuring website performance, um, doesn't tell you what search terms people have clicked to find your website or search for. Yeah, it did used to. And then it all got stripped out. And then you had to use Search Console instead. Um, however, interestingly enough, if you.
Search console doesn't do is say that this person on this IP address at this time, type this into Google went to your website and looked at all of these pages.
No, it doesn't tell you anything about what they've done once they found you.
That's right. Whereas you used to be able to do that.
Yeah. And you can sort of, um, marry Search Console and analytics if you're clever. Sometimes we'll try and track a person, you know, they've searched for this and they've landed on this page and oh, we can see what they've done then because we can pick them up in another tool, but it's quite difficult. Um, but for a long time, Google search console was sort of like the gold standard. Right. And it's like, if you want to know how your website is performing in search, you. Um, sorry. You look confused. Something told me straight off my thought track there. Um, if you, um, sort of treat it as the gold standard, you look at it and you say, okay, it says six hundred and fifty people have found my website this month. Fantastic. Through search. Uh, fifty of those people have found me by typing in red evolution. Um, and the other five hundred and fifty families from an assortment of other keywords. Fantastic. Brilliant. Now I have some useful marketing intelligence, I can go and make decisions on the basis of that. However, if you ever look at the sort of monthly total visits from search clicks, and then you look at all of the things where it breaks it down into the per search term report, the two numbers don't add up.
They're not even close, are they?
They're not even close. No. So sometimes it'll be like you've had seven hundred and fifty visitors from search. And then if you export all of the keyword report that tells you, you know, fifteen people came from this search term and sixteen people came from that search term. It will add up to like three hundred. So you're missing like half of your data.
Um, you looked into this, didn't you?
Yeah. Well, I looked into it because it was, it's actually really annoying. And it confuses a lot of people because, you know, you can say to somebody, oh, look, you know, your search performance up, loads of people have found you in search this month. And then they say, okay, great. Where did they come from? And then you're sort of guessing because you can say, oh, well, I, you know, I think about sixty came from branded search and I think about thirty came from this really important key, which was trying to be trying to rank you from. But we're not one hundred percent sure because half the data is missing and that half the data could be attributed to any of the keywords or none of them. It could be a completely different set of keywords we don't have data for. Um, and it gets a million times worse once you start trying to do things like filter by country, um, and filter by a specific page. And one of the things you can do that's really annoying is if you say, okay, show me all the clicks I've had from search terms, including the word marketing, it'll say, oh, that's two hundred. Show me all the search terms I've had that don't include the word marketing. Oh, that's six hundred. But the total is somehow nine hundred and seventy or something like that. So, you know, it all just breaks down really quickly and it becomes really obvious that what you're looking at is like a really sort of unsubstantiated data set. And Google's excuse for this is what they say is for privacy reasons, they strip out anything that could identify an individual users search behavior. So they just obscure lots of the data and give you a sort of estimate instead, which is.
And they say that they say this is an estimate.
Yeah, they say that and they they do tell you that the reports won't be accurate, but only if you go digging. It's not you know, it doesn't tell you at the very beginning at all, which is very confusing for people who use the tool. And also really infuriating for people who are maybe not accustomed to this aspect of digital marketing, where a lot of the data is quite unreliable and people will look at it, look at you like you're a sort of lunatic when you say, well, you can't necessarily trust the data. Uh, it's it's not the full picture, but I think it is a really important point. And it's something that, you know, we do all have to grapple with eventually, which is that all of this stuff is a best guess. And you can't you can make decisions using it. You probably should. You can look at trends, you can look at how clicks have increased over time and decreased, and whether the proportion of searches coming to your website from branded search or from a specific subgroup of keywords have changed over time, but you can't rely on it and say definitively. One hundred people searched for digital marketing services and founders.
The interesting thing there is that, as we've said, we used to have access to the data. We used to have access on a visit by visit basis on what the person typed into Google. Yep. We use a tool called clicky, which we use with most of our clients clicking analytics because it's a nice, simple tool to use and gives you a lot of great headline information. And without getting into the complexities of Google GA4, Google's fourth generation analytics, um, service, and that's what it used to do. It used to be every single visit that came via Google, it used to give you the search term they typed for the page they landed on. You could then watch what they did when they were on the website. I assume Google still got that data. Still still has that.
Well, they claim they don't. They claim they can't collect it anymore. Okay. To protect people's privacy. Whether or not that's true. Don't know. But I think this is only going to get worse. I mean, it was only a few years ago, wasn't it, when Apple started doing a thing where all searches made through Apple devices get pinged through a proxy.
Just retrace your steps a bit. There would be ways of anonymising that data without taking away the the thing we really wanted, which was the keyword. So for example, if they showed us like a visit, type this into Google, landed on this page, then looked at all of these pages, but but didn't tell us their IP address. Their IP address was was masked. Um, I mean.
Well, I think, I think.
Would that not like anonymise the data sufficiently.
The individual potentially. But I think what they're saying is that very clever people will use things like patterns in search behavior to identify people and groups of people. So they don't even collect the exact search terms that people are using to protect, to prevent that. I think it's less about individual users and more about sort of the the macro trend in giving people too much data.
Is it not also very handy that they're a bit vague with this data, because it means we spend more on PPC.
Which, by the way.
Is it not just a commercially motivated and then hiding behind the idea of anonymity?
Well, I don't know. It's an interesting one, because I think the other thing that's really interesting about Google's PPC, which as you pointed out earlier, Google is entirely reliant on its income from PPC. Their PPC data is surprisingly poor as well. And we know this firsthand. You know, you can use Google's keyword tool, which uses Google's own data to estimate search volumes and.
Costs.
And costs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and, you know, it can tell you thirty people search for this a month and you can put an ad up and it'll be seen by seventy people in the first day. So and that's, you know, accounting for all of the, you know, the things it'll try and do to show you to irrelevant searches. Um, and I think in general, an awful lot of stuff in marketing is, is guesswork really. I think people are playing with very small data sets and then just sort of assuming, um, you know, with keyword planner, for example, it's just really bad at low volume stuff. It'll often just default to saying, oh, ten people a month search for that. We know that's not true. We can see that's not true. But you know, that's what they claim. I just I just don't know if the actual sort of data collection is as sophisticated as they like to pretend it is. Mhm. Um, but yeah, I think it's, I think it's an important point simply because, like I say, I think a lot of people go into this, um, assuming that, you know, if somebody says one hundred people click this a month, you can trust that and then get quite surprised and quite upset when they realise that that's not actually the case. It's all a guess. Um, but I don't know where you sit on that really. I mean, for me, you know, just go back to that thing, that marketing is more art than science ultimately, you know, all of this data use experimentation.
I mean, we're, we're better informed arguably than we used to be in terms of how effective and efficient our marketing is being. Um, but yeah, I suppose you're never going to have like absolute traceability. Like you've like, we, we talked today, we were talking about a project for a client. We were talking about attribution. Yep. You know, and when you get like first exposure to a brand was via a pay per click advert three months ago. The chances of attributing that piece of work to that is, you know, it's vanishingly small, isn't it? Unless you can drill into it by asking the person, can you remember how you originally found us? Oh yes. I clicked an advert on Google's search page. Oh, right. Okay. Thank you.
It's really funny, that sort of stuff, because especially if you dive into tools like analytics, um, they make a big song and dance about picking the correct attribution model. HubSpot does this too. It's like if you want to see accurately how people found you and how they were first exposed to your brand, make sure you use the right attribution model. You know, is it last click, first click. Is it linear? And it's like, none of that matters because a decent chunk of your audience have definitely just googled something on their phone and then sat down later on in the evening on their computer. And, and you can't track that.
What did we see recently? We had a couple of nice enquiries come in according to the data, all they've done is gone straight to our contact page. You know our contact page. You know, ranks for Red evolution contact page if you search for it, probably. But that's about it. It doesn't rank for website management.
Nobody just randomly.
Or anything else.
Put w w w dot Reddit dot com slash contact us into their browser and pressed enter, did they? So they've bookmarked the page. They've seen it on another device. For whatever reason, it's not traceable. And again, you know, people are like, oh, you can't attribute the conversion. And it's like, no, especially not in B2B where people will go back and forth from, you know, a website four or five times before they get in touch. You'll often just see like, oh, this enquiry was generated from direct traffic. And everybody knows that's not true.
Yeah, it could be an internal email where somebody basically says, here's the contact page for this company. We've tracked them down. We think they can do what we need them to do. Um, here's a link to the contact page. Drop them a message and ask them if they can get in touch with us or give us a quote for X, Y, or z.
Well, actually, to be fair, now you're saying that there's probably a decent chance that a lot of that is what exactly what's happening, isn't it? Or somebody will email their boss and be like, these guys look like a good shout, and then he'll click it and it'll fill in the form and yeah, but, you know, good luck trying to definitively track or prove any of that stuff. You just have to sort of accept that it's a little bit nebulous. And like you say, it doesn't stop you from experimenting and it doesn't stop you from measuring the results of your experiments. And it doesn't stop you from tracking leads or, you know, the really measurable, the things that are very sort of definitive and tangible, like a lead, an enquiry, somebody's email address, those you can track. It's just the sort of peripheral stuff. Last one is just a little, uh, one based on some things that we've encountered recently with people.
Mine is my one thing on here is something we encountered recently. Is it? But go.
On. Well, my thing is, is about the way that people, um, come and ask for, uh, or the request for proposal, um, sort of process, I suppose. Um, people coming to us. Um and it has happened a few times recently with a sort of, you know, we've got one hundred and fifty thousand pounds to spend on a website, um, pitch for it. And then you spend ages putting together a proposal, going through the pitch process and all of this stuff. And then once you get sort of in the trenches with them and you start talking things through, they're like, oh yeah, we're not actually really sure whether we need one website or two. And, you know, we, we sort of ballpark this figure and we don't really have any clear idea what we're doing. And then the whole thing just sort of becomes incredibly difficult to navigate because somebody came to you with a very definitive request. We have this much money and this is what we want. And then they turn out to want something completely different. And you spend a lot of time sort of telling them what they actually need, or trying to get them to understand what they actually need, trying to get them to understand that the budget they've come with is probably not enough, or that they don't necessarily need that much budget or whatever it is. But the point is, I think an awful lot of people, when they go out to contact agencies, are going out with this sort of idea that they have to have a budget in mind when they haven't really specced out the project properly. Um, and that maybe either people need to spec out the project better or just come to you and say, you know, I'm thinking of doing this thing. I'm not really sure how much it's going to cost. I don't have any definitive ideas. This is the problem. I have, you know, help me work out what it will take to solve that and sort of going at it in a more collaborative way rather than trying to put. And I think I know why people are doing it. I think it's because they don't want to be quoted a ridiculous number. You know, they're a little bit worried. They're a little bit, you know, we don't want this to snowball out of control. So we'll say we've got this much money and somebody will pitch for it, and then we can work with them and it'll all be fine. But I think it's a disingenuous and be quite unhelpful from our end, from our side of the table, to try and pick through that with people.
I, I know the, the opportunity that you're talking about, which we, we didn't proceed with because they decided it just made a note there that we're not big enough. Yes. So on the one hand, I understand that they think we're not big enough. it's it's somewhat irksome that we put a bit of time and energy into it when it's very clear on our website and the very first correspondence we had with them, we said, well, you've sent us a document and said, you're looking for a big agency. There's twelve of us. We're not a big agency. Um, do you still want to have a conversation?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, absolutely. It's not about do you know what I mean? And then and then once we started spelling out the process to them, that made sense, i.e. we will spend time with you and wrestle all this stuff down so that you get what you need, not what you currently think you want. Um, suddenly, you know, oh yeah, we've decided we need a bigger agency now. That's fine. I get this idea that a bigger agency will bring certain things that as a smaller agency, we won't bring. Well, including inefficiency, including having staff who are not interested, including sending the killers to do the pitch and getting Scritti Politti to do the work. See how I've updated.
Yes.
Um, and you know, it, it's a little bit irksome. You know.
It is. I'm not really sure. And I would love to know why. Um, this, uh, thing about big agencies is, is, is so sort of prominent in our industry. Like, what is it that people think they're going to gain by gaining by, because.
They're still only going to work with five or six people in that big. I guess the idea is it feels safer.
Yeah.
Because they'll be more financially stable. Perhaps they know how to deal with bigger customers. You know, it's like the corporate world. The corporate world wants to deal with other corporate types kind of thing. Maybe, I don't know, maybe that's it. And that's that's fine.
I don't know.
Plenty of business to go around, you know.
Bloat and inefficiency. And I think if an awful lot of if if people knew that the majority of large marketing agencies were sort of forty percent account managers who don't actually do the, you know, the actual work and, and sort of ten percent management people who are never going to touch your project, they might be slightly less excited about that. I think it's one of those funny things, you know, size does not equal ability. It certainly doesn't equal agility. Um, and when you're working on projects like this, I'd have thought personally that the last thing you'd want to do is have your sort of very intricate project that does need wrestling down and needs some thought sort of handed to the B team at some massive agency somewhere, which is, let's be honest, what will happen?
Almost certainly.
Yeah. It's an interesting one. But yeah, I don't know. I mean, I don't know whether you think there is a sort of a wider problem with the way that people approach these projects or not, but I just think that an awful lot of people just don't seem to understand.
I tend to have a maybe slightly different view to you in that I, you know, with a lot of the work that we do and I do, I do say this to you and the other guys, like put yourself in the position of the person who's buying what you're selling and try and understand what's making them tick, what's frightening them, what they're afraid might happen. You know, I might well, let's face it, we've got a very real example, and we won't name them of an organisation who spent eighty thousand pounds on a website and didn't get didn't take delivery of a single web page that didn't take delivery of a single line of code. They have basically flushed eighty grand down the toilet because they made some pretty awful decisions, and now they're as nervous as hell as they're trying to decide who to work with to actually rectify this situation. And, you know, because they still need this new website with various bits of functionality and things and things going on with it. So people don't want to be that guy, that girl. They don't want to be that person who, who made that awful decision and chose to work with that agency that basically made a complete ass of everything.
It's interesting, though, isn't it? Because I think I've made this weird sort of tinge of relationship analogy before, but it isn't it interesting that as a society, we generally understand that if you if you have your heart broken in a relationship or whatever, and you go, we've.
All been.
There and you go into your next relationship with a ton of baggage and you're like, I had my heart broken in my last relationship. Prove to me that you won't break my heart again. People will quite rightly be like, oh yeah, but in business.
That's just creepy.
Yeah, in business it's sort of like that. You act that way and it's it's a little odd. Yeah, it's a little strange.
Well, I think when we were a younger agency and as we said at the start of this, we're twenty one now, when we were a younger agency, you know, we were, I guess, very keen to please and very keen to to try and reassure. Now, as a mature agency, of course, we want to please people and do great work. Of course, we want to reassure people, but just like the person who's maybe in their forties, they'll go on a date and they're going to make their mind up pretty quickly. You know, you seem like a nice guy, but Jesus, you've got baggage. And you know what? I can't be arsed with it, so good luck. It was nice to have a meal with you, but let's not let's not take this any further. And that's, you know, that's just like a grown up way of, of like, not wasting everybody's time. Yeah. And so that's where we are as an agency now. You know, we, we, we love getting new customers. We love servicing existing some very long standing customers, as we mentioned, but, you know, we're less concerned now if somebody is really, really nervous. It's sometimes a red flag to us because they'll probably micromanage. They'll probably get in the way. They'll probably just never stop asking questions about where every last penny went. And, you know.
It's a weirdly self-fulfilling prophecy, isn't it? Because what these people are going to do by going into these business relationships with that sort of mentality is make sure that they're only picked by the people who are going to do the same thing to them time and time again. You're never going to get to work with people who take a grown up approach unless you go into it with an open mind. And I know that is is very challenging thing to do. And I get exactly what you're saying. It's probably impossible to just be brave and trust people without getting stung.
That's one of the reasons we do discovery, because what we say to people is like, don't decide whether you're going to work with us based on a response to a request for proposal on it. Whatever you want to call it, actually spend some time with us. You know, we'll come and do that. We'll make that investment. We'll work with you. We'll help you figure out whether what you've asked for is what you really need. Do you know you could also do X, Y, and Z because it's what we do for a living. So we're kind of across it all and you're maybe not. So we can help you with that. And then by the end of that, people can go, yeah, that's thanks for that. But you know, just like the date I mentioned, you know, you're not for us, fine. Or they might, you know, then make a very much an informed decision that, um, that, well, you guys have really helped us understand the problem in a lot more detail outlined what that what the solution is likely to be and, and what it's likely to cost. So why would we not decide to work with you? And so that approach is, I mean, I'm going down to Edinburgh tomorrow. Um, Stu's coming as well. So he's, he's coming up to Edinburgh. I'm going down to Edinburgh. We're meeting a potential new client in Edinburgh. We've pencilled in three hours. We will spend three hours with them. We're about to spend some time this afternoon um on some preliminary work for that. So we'll put some proper time and energy into this. And it's to help us understand whether we think we can help them and to help them understand whether they think we can help them, and can we work together and all the rest of it. And, you know, when it comes to, you know, finding a good agency partner or a good agency provider, because I know you're not keen on the whole partner thing. Um, you know, you just think it's a vendor relationship. I think some of the time, don't you? And that's fair enough, do I? It's fair.
Enough. I'm not sure I agree with that.
Well, I mean, maybe maybe, you know, maybe the, the, the partner thing can be overplayed anyway.
Well, yeah, I think, well, ultimately.
We're providing a service. It's nice to think of it as a partnership because we are in the trenches together to try and solve problems and make good things happen. But you know, we're not that precious. You know, it's like we recognise they're paying us some money to do some work. But it's it's still nice to spend some time with the company first in order to do that. And well, it's just a great way forward.
It's interesting because I think, you know, back to your point about, you know, somebody's response to a proposal, somebody's request, you know, when you put a pitch in, you're always going to put your best foot forward. You're never gonna, you know, you're never gonna, if you're a bad agency that can't execute, you're never gonna say that. But if you have a three hour meeting with somebody. It's very difficult to hide, you know, if your competence or lack thereof, you know, you have to be honest. You have to be honest about your capabilities. You have to be honest about what people can expect. So I think you're right. I think it's just a really good way of sort of cutting through all the bullshit and just laying your cards out on the table. Mhm. Yeah.
Mhm.
I don't hate the partner thing at all, by the way. I'm not you know, I think it's more that I think a lot of companies only want and feel much safer with a vendor relationship. I think it frightens some people to think about partnering up and being sort of vulnerable to.
But the thing is, you can't do what we do well unless you are in an intimate relationship with the customer. You need to understand what's going on under the hood. You need to understand their finances. You need to understand a whole lot of stuff about their business, usually in order to do great work. So it is more of a partnership because of that.
Yeah, I think so. Invariably, all of the relationships we have that are very long running and very successful are ones where people will talk to us as and, and treat us like a partner. I think the ones where people want to keep a wall up and make it very clear that, you know, you're the supplier. I call the shots. They're always the ones that, you know, become quite arduous to work on and, you know, frustrating. So yeah, absolutely.
All right. So we've covered politics. We've covered climate change, we've covered rioting, we've covered a little bit of digital marketing. And Leslie, Leslie, wake up Leslie, go and give her a nudge. Um, you could then, um, assume that we've done enough for now.
I think we probably have.
Okay, we need to do it again soon. We do, because it's not right. Is it? Leaving a big gap? I mean, you know, the two people that download this podcast are, you know, they're unhappy with the with the lack of cadence.
Where's my, where's my fix of these two idiots wittering about digital marketing for half an hour?
Well, it's digital marketing store life, isn't it? These days.
There's probably a small baby somewhere, you know, that someone uses our podcast to lull to sleep.
As opposed to a big baby?
Yes.
Goodbye.