Google Thinks You're A 23 Year Old Mongoose Who Lives In Auchnagatt – Episode 150

The first one is just a little bit about demographic targeting.

I hope you're going to talk about it being wildly inaccurate.

I'm going to talk about the fact that it's broken and doesn't work anymore. Yeah. Exactly that. You know, a lot of Google products, a lot of meta advertising, a lot of LinkedIn advertising sort of relies on, on the gimmick that you can use them to target really specific demographics. And it's like, oh, stop putting your adverts in magazines, magazines, broad brush. You can't tell who picks it up. Instead, you can use our tools to directly target a demographic. And I think for a while it did sort of seem to work, but it was quite interesting because I read three articles that were basically all saying exactly the same thing, which is that ever since people started introducing cookie pop ups, allowing people to sort of not allow tracking, these models have completely broken. But marketers and indeed the businesses that sort of rely on that marketing haven't really cottoned on to this yet.

So here we are at episode one hundred and fifty. Who would have thought.

That is nearly as many episodes as you've had that we would get away with.

Producing this drivel for one hundred and fifty episodes? I just thought I'd have a little walk down memory lane and have a little think about what we've learned or not learned over the last few years as we've been churning out these, um, with, with one or two significant hiatus.

We have had a couple of big breaks. Yeah.

Is it Haitai English person or is it here?

Yeah. Well, I mean, it's a Greek word, so don't ask me.

Oh, it's all Greek to me. What have we learned? So we started off thinking let's have a go at doing a podcast. And to our credit, we've stuck with it, haven't we? Despite vanishingly small numbers of people actually listening to it. We still have persevered with it because fundamentally we've enjoyed doing it. And I think there's a big clue there if you enjoy doing it, whether it's podcasts or videos or writing blog posts, you enjoy doing it. The chances are you'll do a half decent job of it. And if you keep doing it, you know something might happen. And even if it doesn't, well. But even if it doesn't, the things we talk about, I learn from you when we do these podcasts, and I think you maybe learn from me a little bit now and again as well. And, you know, it makes us think about some of the, the bigger questions. And, you know, we've, we've, we stray into politics and all that kind of thing. But I'm just going to do this from memory. I haven't prepared it, but I'm thinking we kind of started off not really knowing what we should do, listening to other sort of digital marketing podcasts and thinking, oh, we're supposed to do a podcast on five ways to make sure your content, blah, blah, blah. And that absolute diatribe, that bullshit type type approach. We did that, didn't we? For quite a while. Yeah, yeah. You know, we maybe had a bit of a spin on it. I think we maybe did a half.

Decent job to make it sort of plain English. Plain English?

Yeah, because that's right. Because that was a thing, wasn't it? When we used to do this thing. You used to used to do the buzzword bingo bullshit thing. And I used to say stop. Explain what SEO means. C r o e p I don't know CRM. You know, I used to say like, explain what all that is so that we tried to demystify it a bit. So we tried to do and then we went down the rabbit hole that was having guests on and we had some great guests. The most downloaded episode, Business Storytelling with Bob Keeler, was a joy to record and went into town and did that with Bob and has been listened to a lot and was was a stonker. It's still well worth listening to if you're sort of wondering about business storytelling and you know, what the hell do you mean business storytelling? Surely you just sell shit and that's all there is to it sort of thing. There's more to it, and it's worth it's worth listening to, to Bob's take on that. And he should know because he grew businesses and did a stellar exit from an engineering company. And he's done very well in business. He's a very successful businessmen. So that was a highlight for me recording that one. Marcus Sheridan I think I recorded that one with Julie. Didn't know Marcus Sheridan on the fantastic book They Ask You Answer, which was kind of almost the start of the whole idea of inbound, like figuring out what what questions your ideal customers are asking and then providing answers to those questions. So that was a great episode worth looking out for that episode of Marcus Sheridan. Then we had, you know, one or two episodes, which probably, you know, retrospectively, no looking back on them. They were basically people trying to sell their shit and well, in fact, Marcus did actually. I mean, we were more than happy, happy for him to, to flog his book. But he also then tried to get us to sign up to some kind of very expensive program to learn how to do what we already do or something like that. I can't remember.

They can't. We were delighted.

That he came on the show. He was a fantastic guest. His book is fantastic. It's well worth a read. I think it's still relevant, still worth a read. Um, we did have other notable guests, none of which I can actually remember at the moment. We worked for quite a while. We were bringing in guesswork. We. Bruce Skinner Ex-client. He did a number of podcasts with us. They were great. I enjoyed doing those with Bruce. I'd be more than happy to have Bruce back on, actually, although we're not, generally speaking, having guests on. We do get approached pretty much every week by, you know, those companies that go out finding opportunities for podcasters or for, for business people to jump on a podcast and flog their shit. And we tend not to do that. And then we kind of had a bit of a hiatus. And then when we came back, we decided that we would get right back to roots, i.e. digital marketing from the coalface and just talk about stuff we were currently working on without naming names, without revealing any client client confidentialities. And we would just use the podcast as an opportunity to chew the fat about stuff. We were working on, things that were going on around us in the world, politics, um, anything really that took our fancy and we just turned it into, you know, a bit of a conversation that you and I have where it's very much kind of unprepared. There's the stuff that's gone on. So if, for example, today there's some stuff that's gone on this week that I'll bring up, whether it's got legs, whether there's any mileage in it, I'm not sure, but I'll bring it up. And no doubt you won't do the same in your in your inimitable fashion.

Well, I have some things, but you know.

I believe it. Is this a special effort being made for episode one hundred and fifty? No, no, of course not. No. Yeah.

I don't believe in anniversaries generally as a rule. So yeah, not a big fan.

Yeah. So I think we learned that cadence. One of our favorite words. You know, keep doing it is important. When we fell out of the habit we had, like I said, we had quite a long break. We fell out the habit of doing it and it was quite difficult to get back into it. Whereas for the last wee while we've been pushing out sometimes two a week because we've just, you know, I put it in the calendar, you and Leslie and Leslie comes in, especially because Leslie works at home quite a lot of the time, but she comes into the office on the days that we do podcasts. So again, probably Thursday. This week I think I've put.

On.

I.

Mean.

I know, I know.

Bless dragging yourself out of bed for this.

Which means that we yeah, that's another thing that we did along the way. We started videoing them, didn't we? Because we thought and then initially we put the whole podcast on video and then decided actually snippets of the podcast for YouTube shorts and TikTok was a better approach. So we started.

Been through quite a few iterations.

It's been through some iterations and we've kind of played around with it some episodes for whatever reason, kind of in a very small way blew up. Yeah. Other episodes, we thought that was a really good one. That's a good, interesting subject. Zero traction. Yeah. Uh, not surprisingly.

It's always.

As is always the case, but I think we learned, you know, keep doing it. Don't sweat the numbers. The numbers really don't matter if this podcast was downloaded once and that resulted in, you know, somebody getting in touch to say, I like what you guys said about so-and-so. Could, could we speak to you about it or something? Then it's been worth doing because it's like, you know, it takes like an hour of our time to record each episode. And then it takes Leslie whatever it takes, you know, an hour less than that sometimes. Um, judging by the quality of the post-production, probably takes about four minutes. I would have thought so. I mean, the highs, I would say there weren't any. And the laws were pretty much every episode, every day. Um, have you any thoughts on the last one hundred and fifty episodes?

Well, just I think that that point.

Neither of us had a podcast experience.

None of us.

I've done, I've done little bits of telly. I'm quite happy. You know, I do, I do.

They've never let you on the telly.

Speaking engagements from time to time. I'm quite I play in a band, you know. I don't mind putting a microphone in front of my gob and speaking or singing or doing any of that. So it wasn't we didn't have that to overcome. And I think a lot of people do like they don't like the sound of their own voice. They don't like, they don't they can't ad lib. They can't just have a conversation like we are based on like looking at a few notes on a, on a, on an iPad or a piece of paper and just, just waffle away. Whereas you and I seem to have had a little bit of a propensity for doing that.

We're just talking shit. Yeah, absolutely. But I mean, Gobshites.

As Dave Marshall upstairs would say.

To your point about repetition, I think that's really the key to that. If you get in front of a microphone and you do it, it'll be crap the first few times, but eventually you'll get into the swing of it. And I think the other thing is just to pick up on that point about authenticity. The reason this went through quite a few iterations is because if we're being honest, it's really hard to sustain it if you don't enjoy it. And if you sort of start to feel like, oh, I'm forcing this, I'm trying to. It got increasingly like trying to come up with subjects for the episodes in the beginning.

Five ways to three, ways to six.

I don't think we ever got that bad.

Maybe not quite. If you look at some of them, there are some five ways to increase blah, blah, blah and stuff like that. Like, like, you know, like a lot of the other very successful digital marketing podcasts.

I mean, that's the thing. And those guys are great at that stuff. I mean, I saw one the other day that was like episode three hundred and fifty seven or something of a podcast and it was like, oh, which attribution model is the best in twenty twenty five? And like, I cannot imagine trying to sustain any sort of energy or momentum doing that sort of drivel. But if you enjoy that, then more power to you. And I think that's really the key. You have to find a format that you enjoy doing, otherwise you're not going to stick with it. I think that's the same for all web content. You know, when people try and force themselves to produce something, it's.

Well, how many times have we heard clients say that they're gonna they're gonna write, you know, nice, chunky, well-researched blog content, and they're going to produce an article every week or two articles a month or whatever. And they just never do. Because if you don't get into the habit of it, if you don't enjoy doing it, you're gonna always going to struggle. You're going to always going to struggle, you're gonna always struggle, you're always going to struggle, you're going to struggle like I just did with that. Definitely.

Yeah. It's a tricky thing, isn't it? I think an awful lot of digital marketing is just down to discipline and habit forming. You know, like once you're in the habit of doing something regularly.

You know, like life in general.

I think so, yeah. And then you do have to be thoughtful. You do have to think a little bit because if you just habitually produce bollocks, then no one's gonna listen to it. But yeah, I think it is sort of ninety percent of it is just getting into the rhythm of it.

And for all the low numbers of listeners that we have, it's fairly consistent. You might say it's consistently low, consistently bad, but the fact that we can put an episode out and immediately see it getting downloaded and, and that kind of suggests that, you know, there is, albeit a small audience, there is an audience for, for the, for this inane bullshit.

Yeah. I don't think it's that bad, actually. Like I said to you before, I've seen, I mean, various stats float around the internet, but the average podcast, one stat that I saw was like, the average podcast gets twenty listens per episode.

And why wouldn't it, you know, why would why would it be any different? That's right. When it's competing, when little old you and me, uh, you know, competing with, you know, teams. Yeah. Teams of people and teams of, of, um, of publicists and, and mainstream media that now, uh, you know, I mean, you look at LBC, uh, a radio station that I listen to quite a lot and they've got a lot of their, um, presenters are producing stellar podcasts and some of them, like Ian Daily produces loads of podcasts, different subjects and they are great. Well, it's like they get publicised on his radio show. Well that's the chance have we got when we, you know, but but that's, that's the whole thing. You know, when I say don't sweat the numbers.

But I think that's another really interesting thing because you're right. I mean, like channel four, um, channel four, radio four constantly plug the whole sort of like BBC sounds, you know, podcasts and all the, you know, all of those presenters go off and do extra little things. I think the thing that's really key is that we have got, I got some feedback a couple of times off, people who are either producers or are in that sort of like, you know, sound engineer space that the production values on our podcast are really good. I think the key is you don't actually need a massive team to produce something good if you're sort of setting out to produce.

Just massive microphones.

Yeah, yeah. Just like genuinely good, interesting content. You need two people who are comfortable in front of a microphone and a couple of microphones. And that is.

one thing that we did was that we did invest in some decent kit. We did. So yeah, that I think makes a difference. I said, I've said this before that if I listen to a podcast, if I'm even if I'm interested in it and I want to listen to it, if the production is really poor, I'll give up on it. Yeah, I really will. And I think people made that mistake. They kind of went down the phoning it in, so they actually sounded like they were on a telephone. To be honest. It was it was dreadful. And, and thought, well, no, it doesn't matter. You know, you don't need the big production and all the rest. You don't. But you know, you're not talking about thousands to buy a couple of decent microphones and a recording unit like that, like that h6 that we use.

I think it was maybe you that said this, but the best way to think about this is that what you're trying to inculcate is the feeling that you're in a room with somebody while they have a conversation, and anything that takes away from that illusion, anything like, you know, sort of popping horrible microphone quality sounds of things going off in the background. You're trying to create the illusion that people are sat in a room with you, listening to your chat, and anything that takes away from that is going to take away from people's ability to sort of get into your podcast. And, and.

The tradition of that goes back decades. Yeah. I mean, for me as a, when I was growing up, it was Michael Parkinson. Even as a really young person, not even ten years old. I would love watching things like Parkinson having conversations. I mean, all right. In his case, having conversations with fascinating people. You know, people that you've never heard of, probably, you know, like people actors like David Niven who've got a story to tell and, and, you know, Marlon Brando. And I mean, I mean, the biggest names were on his show.

I do know Marlon Brando.

Yeah, of course you do. But, you know, it very much felt like there was a conversation going on and you were simply spectating. And I think that's, broadly speaking, why podcasts have become so popular.

Well, look, I mean, yeah, and it's no mistake that it sort of goes hand in hand with that whole loneliness epidemic, is it? You know, like more men listen to podcasts than anybody else, than any other single demographic.

Is that true? Yeah. Okay. Is that by a significant margin?

I don't think it's massively it's sort of like sixty over forty, but it's still sort of.

Yeah, I know Karen, you know, she listens to lots of podcasts, quite different ones than the ones I listen to. Like the rest is history is one of her favourite. And she listened to there was one about the history of the English language, and it was something like one hundred and eighty episodes, and she listened to the whole thing, and now she's listening to it again, and she enjoyed it that much. And she, I mean, she was always wittering on about like, oh, this is fascinating, you know, the origins of this word and where it came from. You know, I mean, it is I mean, I suppose the whole thing with podcasts isn't it, isn't it is there's, there's so much great content out there for people you've never heard of who, who you put the podcast on. And you can be just in that room listening to that stuff. And it's great in the car. Did a couple of longish drives at the weekend and podcasts were were on.

And yeah, Although I have heard some really good. I mean, just on the subject of sort of one hundred and eighty episodes long, I have heard some really good sort of like six or seven episode podcast series. I do think that's a format that works quite well as well.

Short series kind of thing.

Yeah, yeah. Let's listen to a really interesting one with Vivian about dinosaurs. Not so long ago, and it was literally just six episodes where they talked about different.

Was it aimed at adults and kids?

It was aimed at adults, I think. But she was just like, I want to I want to learn about dinosaurs as you do. And I was like, all right, here you go. Dinosaurs and Pokemon.

What is it with kids and dinosaurs?

Animals like, say, pokemons or other one. A big thing at the moment she's obsessed with. And I think it's just anything with sort of cute animals.

I remember my dad, who's no longer with us, and my nephew Jack, who's now thirty. When he was about two or three years old, there was something on the TV or something like that, and he just pointed at it and said, that's a triceratops. Triceratops, granddad. You know, my dad related the story to me. I remember my dad. He was he was just kind of blown away that this, this, this tiny little being was like, that's a of triceratops.

Yeah, they hoard the most weirdly specific knowledge about them as well. That should tell you all sorts of things about what velociraptors like to eat and stuff like that. It's like she can't do letters, but she can do. She can tell you about the dietary habits of carnivorous dinosaurs.

Fascinating, isn't it? So, um, have we exhausted the self-congratulatory?

We've done the seven hundred and fiftieth.

Yeah, it's it's, um, it's a format that I love consuming, and it's a format that I really enjoy creating. Yeah. And I think we're just going to keep doing it, I think. I think I think you're you're feeling the same way.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean the thing for me is as well, just to go back to the whole benefits of doing it thing is just that it reinforces stuff. You know, it's that whole thing about teaching people is the best way to learn, right? Because it's like every time you sort of discuss a topic, you're forced to think about it, consider your opinions, work out what you want to impart. And that's brilliant because you come away from it thinking, yeah, I've got a slightly more refined understanding of that.

So shall we discuss the subject singular that you've brought to the podcast?

Well, I don't know. It feels a bit boring now because they're quite workaday subjects. That's the problem. It's just.

Like subjects. Is it plural?

Yeah. It's plural. It's plural. Um.

Go on then. If it's if it's rubbish, I'll just say no and next or something like that.

Um well the first one is just a little bit about uh demographic targeting.

Okay.

Um, obviously the idea being that for an awful lot of, uh, online advertising, especially things like Google ads.

I hope you're going to talk about it being wildly inaccurate.

I'm going to talk about the fact that it's broken and doesn't work anymore. Yeah, exactly that good. Um, you know, a lot of, uh, Google products, a lot of meta advertising, um, a lot of LinkedIn advertising sort of relies on, on the gimmick that you can use them to target really specific demographics. So if you know.

The big kind of, um, the big deal about digital marketing was the idea that you could, you could identify Twenty four year old males who play Grand Theft Auto and don't like bread and make sure your advert is only seen by them.

What are you trying to sell? Never mind, we won't go there. Um, yeah. Exactly that. Um, and this was the sort of big gimmick. And it's like, oh, stop putting your adverts in magazines, magazines, broad brush. You can't tell who picks it up. Instead, you can use our tools to directly target a demographic. And I think for a while it did sort of seem to work. Certainly, it's certainly become a sort of entrenched part of the marketing mix, and a lot of people are very reliant on it. But it was quite interesting because I read three things last week, um, that were basically three articles that were basically all saying exactly the same thing, which is that ever since people started introducing cookie pop ups, allowing people to sort of not allow tracking, these models have completely broken, but marketers and indeed the businesses that sort of rely on that marketing haven't really cottoned on to this yet. So they're still stuck in a world where you can say, yep, I know for a fact that the people who buy my widgets are all sixty five year old women. I want to limit all of my advertising to those people. Oh, the results are coming in. Sales are down. But it's okay because at least we know we're getting sort of brand awareness, or we're putting ourselves in front of the right demographic and that sort of excuses poor performance, or it validates the idea that what you're doing is useful. Yeah.

Something else is at play. We're getting in front of the right people, but they're not buying it for some other reason.

Yeah.

Kind of reasoning.

It was really interesting. So basically somebody did a survey where they went and asked one thousand three hundred and twenty five people. You know, these are the categories you've been sorted into by various tools, meta, Google. Um, do they fit? And more than three quarters of them said, no, that's nonsense. Like the ages were wrong. The interests were completely out. There was all sorts of stuff wrong with, you know, even things like where people actually lived, um, and that sort of thing. So, you know, there's a huge industry built on the back of sort of flogging this idea that you can target very specific groups of people. And I think it does still work to a degree on things like LinkedIn, where you can target things, that information that people give away themselves, like what's your job title? What company do you work for? Because that information is largely going to be correct. But anything that the platforms are estimating or trying to judge based on your behavior or what sort of things you're interested in is almost entirely wrong, basically. Um, and I can see why because, you know, we live in a world increasingly now where people can just opt out of clicking, you know? Yeah, don't track me. Don't track what I do. So all of those models, I guess, are going to become less and less accurate over time. But I just think it's quite interesting because I think quite a lot of people, certainly that I talk to think it's a really good idea, um, to, to sort of do demographic targeting or are very reliant on the results of demographic targeting to sort of validate what they're doing and to say, oh, well, you know, we've reached this many people in this age bracket or whatever. Um, it's just like all things on the internet, isn't it? When you dig a little bit beneath the surface, you realise it's all pretty much bullshit. Mhm.

Mhm. Is that it?

That's. Yeah. You're mean.

I was, I was. Excuse me. I was waiting for the, um, the the interesting Alex Bussy words of wisdom on that whole subject that you just basically wanted to have a whinge and say that like demographic advertising, demographic targeting, uh, fundamentally doesn't work.

Yeah.

I think that's a good point to make, I think. I don't think everyone necessarily is aware of that.

No, I don't think so. And in terms of like words of wisdom, I don't know. I mean, that's a really interesting point. Why are you supposed to do instead of that? I guess you just back to the old school thing of like, you know, try and produce stuff that's interesting and that sort of reaches out and grabs people. But again, I think part of this falls back to the fact that I have quite a sort of, um, quite a conscious bias against interruption type marketing where you're stuffing ads in front of somebody and you're saying, stop scrolling. Look at this interesting thing that I've got to say. You know, I don't really know whether that's a particularly useful technique anyway, especially in sort of B2B space.

It depends whether you're doing it to signal or whether you're doing it to try and interrupt and get people to do something.

Yeah.

I think there's a, there's not a sort of there's a massive difference between those two things. And I think the signalling signalling aspect, which we talked about in recent episodes, was lost on me until quite recently, to be honest, if I'm being brutally honest, you know, it was like I kind of recognised that those expensive adverts in those expensive magazines, they weren't really designed to make me buy a twenty grand Rolex watch. It was more Rolex, Rolex. This is the rarefied atmosphere in which we operate, and that signals that they are a very huge, credible company sort of thing.

It's like the car adverts, isn't it? People often say about car adverts or like, oh, why aren't you selling me the car? Like, why aren't you even talking about the features? And it's because people fundamentally misunderstand, you know, the purpose of a car advert is actually to, to essentially to try and stop buyer's remorse. Because it's saying, you know, you've just splashed out on this expensive Honda. But look, Honda is a premium marque and we can afford to take up time.

Well you make a good point there because because because because the one of the one of the purposes of advertising is to actually reinforce to people who've already bought something that they made the right choice and made them feel good about themselves, which again, undoubtedly makes.

Them feel.

Very positive about your brand. Yeah. Um, I don't pretend to have, um, you know, figured that out for myself. I mean, a lot of this is coming from that episode of the nudge podcast, which I've mentioned a few times, which is a fantastic podcast, the one with Tom Goodwin. But, um, one of the interesting things that came up in that when they were talking about targeting was people, um, like the, um, have an affair type website. Ashley Madison and the like, you know.

Are you bored of your marriage.

one point five miles from you and is desperate to meet you type adverts They're often targeted at people with zero birthday's coming up. So people who are turning forty, turning fifty, turning sixty. Because when people hit those numbers, they kind of go, what am I doing with my life? Oh, let's have an affair. Oh. Or what am I doing with my life? I need to buy a fast car. Or what am I doing with my life? I need a twenty grand watch. Do you know what I mean? They actually, they are targeting people because people question their lives at those junctures and and can be persuaded to make big purchases as a result.

I wonder if there's also a sort of targeting where they're saying, I want to target people on milestone birthdays who also have just like very poor decision making skills and just say, I'm bored, I'll have an affair.

But going back to that nudge podcast, Tom Goodwin made that point, and it's the one. By the way, the subject is ninety nine point nine percent of adverts are crap. Is the episode worth listening to? Um, to to anyone who hasn't already listened to it, who listens to this podcast. Um, but he was saying that something like fifty one percent of the time, his browser, What people? You people think he's this and he's not. That was a that was a very specific figure. I'm sure he said fifty one percent of the time, which I thought was surprising. I thought it'd be even an even bigger number than that.

Mine are absolutely terrible. Mostly I get advertised the sort of clothes that my wife likes to buy, and I just think, well, you know, yeah, wrong person. Um, or maybe they know something I don't, I don't know. Um, but yeah, I mean, I think the one thing I will say about all of that stuff about signaling as well is that in light of the fact that this demographic targeting is often wrong and that you can't actually target people on milestone birthdays, even though you as an advertiser, make.

People lie about the DOB in order to avoid nonsense online.

Well, that's the classic one. I mean, the classic one is whenever you're asked to fill out your age online on like those whiskey forms and stuff like that, you know, everybody's always exactly eighteen years old because you just literally open the thing and you scroll back first of January, whatever's eighteen years ago. Um, and that's the sort of thing where marketers are just fed rubbish information, buy it at face value, and then do really stupid stuff with it. Um, and the same goes for like sort of display advertising on Google. I mean, the amount of times I will go into somebody's Google ad account and they will have been running display or remarketing adverts and the, the biggest placement, which it tells you exactly where your adverts have been placed and what, what websites they've shown up on is always like a mobile game or, you know, some, some utterly irrelevant trash website and you just think, well, that's, you know, it's just a waste of money.

But and really badly positioned your brand.

Exactly. Yeah. I think you have to be very careful about this stuff.

Yeah I agree. I agree. Okay. Um, rather than exhaust your list, we'll bat a few things around. Um, I, this is something you've spoken about recently and blogged about it. I think, uh, indexing Google indexing still seems to be slow. And we, I wrote a blog post and it's been live now for three weeks, maybe more. And it still hasn't been indexed. Yeah. And it's a reasonable piece of work. It's, it's quite a chunky piece of work. It was well thought out. I, you know, I wrote it, so I'm bound to think it was well written.

No comment.

No comment. But it's actually a reasonable piece of content and reasonably useful and answers a question that people are definitely asking. And, um, yeah, we used to get content indexed the same day pretty much, and it still hasn't been indexed. So now. Pardon.

How long's.

That. At least three weeks. Yeah. Maybe more.

I do have some thoughts on it. I mean, first of all, the obvious point is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to get Google to acknowledge stuff. And I think even one of the things that I've seen is increasingly content that is very useful actually being deliberately not indexed as well. So obviously when you, when you see stuff show up in Search Console, um, it can show up as either, you know, sort of indexed or crawled, but not indexed where Google has found it and sort of decided that it's not useful at all. Um, or.

It decided it's not useful or it's decided it's not useful. It hasn't yet decided it's useful. Which way around?

Well, I think it's more that they've assessed it. They've decided it doesn't really belong in their index, and they may change their mind again in the future. But but that they have at least seen it, know it exists and have sort of made an assessment based on its value. And again, you know, once upon a time, Google crawling and a page deciding not to index it meant that you were doing a terrible job. You know, you'd done something fundamentally wrong or you produced something that wasn't useful. But as the internet just sort of like fills up with crap, I think it's just becoming more and more common that Google.

I wonder if it's something as simple as like, because a new blog post is not linked to, well, from other blog posts. It's kind of almost orphaned content that only really exists on the blog page. And therefore, if we, if I chucked a few links at it from other well-established blog posts, it would then get indexed.

Well, it's interesting that you should say that because the one workaround that we have found for it on a client's website. So we have a client who, unlike the majority of clients in B2B, actually produces decent case studies. They're long, they're informative. They often contain like really sort of granular detail about the project and what happened. And a load of them just weren't being indexed.

Just their name rhyme with bats.

Uh, it does. Yeah. Um, literally just sort of, they were there and somebody was working very hard to produce them and Google was looking at them and saying, nah, you're all right. Sort of thirty five of them that had been crawled and never, never made it onto the index, as it were. Um, and, and sort of in the process of improving their product and service pages, we've been trying to sort of help them demonstrate more credibility by bringing in those case studies and saying, you know, if you want proof of this, go and look over here or here's a fantastic example of the tool in action or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so we'd actually been starting to create links into that content. And low and behold, the pages that are linked to from the product and service pages suddenly get indexed, suddenly start ranking.

Well, let's experiment with that blog post I was talking about on our website. Let's just put two or three links from other blog posts, or maybe from a piece of content and see if it then gets indexed.

Yeah. Because I think what you have to think about, and I think this comes back to whenever you're thinking about Google search in general is you have to think about what signals Google can interpret. Yeah, exactly. And realistically, you know, if, if length of content is no longer a factor because everybody's producing absolute drivel, if, if quality of content is not a factor, because a robot can't really sort of look at a piece of content and say, oh, this is really good quality, or oh, this is shit, then really all it has to look at is how often is it linked to so.

Effectively with that blog post, Google is saying like, why should we think this is important? You don't even think it's absolutely.

Yeah. It's like, well, you know, you're not even talking about it. You've never linked back to it. It's probably rubbish then, you.

Know, I mean, you're right. I mean, because there isn't, there's no body reading this and going, that's poor, you know, it's all basically got it's algorithmically worked out and it, you know, it's got enough content in there. It's using the right words. It's a chunky piece of content. It's, you know, it's, it's on a good platform. It's on a trustworthy, authoritative website. So the only thing that they must be doing is saying, well, there's no other links to it from anywhere else. It can't be important.

Yeah.

They need, you know, given the slightest opportunity to decide. It's not important. They'll take it.

Absolutely.

Because because they don't have the resources to crawl everything the way they used to because of all the shite getting produced by AI.

And I think that's the thing that's flipped. I think back in the days where, you know, when you and I were first working in this industry, the sort of, um, the assumption was that Google was trying to rank as much of the web as it possibly could. The idea was it went out and it found content and it served it to people. And I think that's flipped on its head now. I think Google is like more discerning than it is willing to sort of bring new content on board. I think it's it's now taken the view that the internet is full of rubbish. Um, but.

Surely.

That's a good thing. I think it is. But we come back again to the fact that it's a very brute force thing, you know, in a world where you sort of buy into all the bullshit and Google's really good at discerning what quality content is, and it can actually help users find helpful content that answers their queries, then yes, of course, it's fantastic. And in reality, you know, Google could probably get away with serving up two or three links per query if it could do that, you know, and that would be its model, or we'll find you the most relevant and most useful article. But it knows it can't do that. It knows that that's sort of bollocks. So so it resorts to sort of the sort of shotgun approach. And that's why I'm always very suspicious when people are like, oh, you know, Google's moving in the right direction. You know, SEOs or content creators have to be more discerning about the content they create. And it's like, well, all evidence to the contrary, really. You know, Google's becoming less and less capable of saying this is useful or not. So.

Okay. Go on.

Well, it dovetails neatly with one of the things that I have to talk about actually, which is, uh, I don't know if you saw, but over the last couple of days, Google have announced that Gemini will be able to start using your search history to create more relevant and useful answers for you. So. Cue everyone. Like frantically clear. Clear. Well, I just think it's really interesting.

It's interesting to see what sort of adverts you start seeing.

Gemini can, you know.

Do you have to tell it? Yes you can. Or is it just going to do it?

So at the moment at the moment it's an opt in feature. So you can go into Gemini and you can go into your settings and you can say, oh yes, please personalise my content, which is a coded way of saying please troll through my entire life history and create something that's more relevant for me. And all sorts of creepy stuff happens. Like it's been able to sort of successfully guess people's partners names and stuff like that, which, you know, questionable. Um, and also just sort of like sort of really questionable use because fundamentally Gemini and what all those large language models are doing isn't, isn't still isn't really terribly useful for, for most people. So it, being able to trawl through your search history and try and personalised answers based on your behaviour is a bit weird. But I do think it's, it's really interesting because, you know, on the one hand we're saying, here's a search engine that's increasingly bad at serving up relevant content, you know, Google search and increasingly bad at estimating people's demographics and sort of, you know, macro, um, data about humans. And then on the other hand, Google allowing all this time and resource and energy into building AI that can do all that stuff. And it is quite interesting, I think, to look at Google as a, as a sort of company in transition, maybe even moving away from search engines in that they seem to be increasingly pushing people towards this sort of AI function that can look at your behavior, look at your personalised sort of browsing history, create really relevant content for you, knowing full well that the search engine doesn't even really do any of that anymore. So yeah, I don't know where it really puts us. I just think it's, it's an odd place. And certainly like as a, as a marketer who spends a lot of time doing search marketing for clients, slightly alarming place as well, because you just see it becoming less and less relevant as time goes on. I guess.

Maybe.

Maybe, who knows, but a little creepy. Anyway, I think.

Yeah, and almost certainly will overpromise and under-deliver.

I think so, because, I mean, surely most people's browser history is just random. I googled so much random crap like things my daughters asked me. Cookie recipes the address to some random place.

If you're watching the TV, it's like, you know.

Actors names.

Actors names where, you know, where are they? Are they are they British? Are they American? How old are they? You know, what else have they been? Yeah. All that kind.

Of. Absolutely. IMDb for.

Yeah. All that stuff. And then if there's if there's factual programmes on, then you'll suddenly someone will make a statement. You go, oh, that's interesting. And you go and Google something related to I don't know. Yeah.

The signal to noise ratio is.

Archaeological dig or something. You know what I mean? That's like.

Your metal.

Detector. We know exactly who this person is. He, um, his his name's David, and he's, he's twenty one and he's interested in archaeology and tea bags. You know.

It is interesting. And it's interesting. I guess if you look at it, the sort of signal to noise problem that underpins all this, most people's browsing data is probably roughly identical. You're absolutely right. Most people will have googled the address of something near them at some point. And but you know what? Can you really tell from any of that? Yeah. Humans are ultimately quite predictable and quite samey, I think so, yeah.

Dovetailing on to that quite nicely. We did some work on our own site last week, and I think we did broadly mention it in that dreadfully boring episode one four nine that hasn't gone out yet, but it will have by the time this.

No one's going to go back and listen to it.

Maybe was all right, I don't know, it was just it was just it was just kind of maybe a bit too laid back, I don't know. Well, anyway, we weren't being recorded. We weren't under the spotlight. So we weren't performing, were we? We were sub par.

You need a camera pointed out.

To basically.

Come alive.

Yeah. That's right. Um, we did some work on our own site and we made some quite significant changes. I've noticed some ranking drops. I've noticed some weird stuff happened with traffic last week. And then the opposite happened today where traffic certainly halfway through today, the traffic was double what it normally is, and it seems to be all over the place at the moment. SEMrush was reporting back that, you know, the analysis tool that we use, SEMrush dot com, if you want to go and try it. Um, it was reporting back that it was a big, big drop in your organic rankings and all this kind of stuff, organic traffic. And, uh, and I think the point I'm going to make is like sometimes for, for solid business reasons, you have to pivot. And when you do, there is usually, you know, a ripple in the, um, in the space time continuum. And you have to, you have to just.

Slightly overegging it.

You just have to roll with it a little bit and see what happens over a few weeks rather than go, oh shit, change it back, change it back to the thing that we don't do anymore or that we that doesn't really describe us, but we ranked for it as opposed to like, no, this is we need to pivot. That was wrong. We need to get this right. We need to make sure it's clear what we're about. We do need to delete that page and and three or want it. And we need to make this page about the subject that that page was about, you know, kind of is.

It worth.

Not trying to be.

Cryptic? No, I'm just wondering whether it's worth drilling into that a bit and sort of explaining what we did. Yeah. Because it's quite interesting really. I mean, we basically, I mean, you know, you use the whole sort of cobblers burns analogy a lot, but we basically ended up in a place where we sort of got midway through a transition, I guess, like a niching down into a specific niche. Um, and we'd produced a bunch of pages targeting that niche. And then we'd got sort of sidetracked by client work, as we often do. Um, and forgotten that our home page now wasn't really targeting anything. And we just sort of went back and sat down and said, right, okay, we've got to actually finish what we've started here and sort of work out, you know, what do we want the home page to rank for? What do we actually want these?

Yeah. And that thing that you're referring to, obviously for anyone listening is, is like we've gone all in on being an agency that worked predominantly with with industrial companies. So, you know, engineering companies, tech companies, that's who we're for now and who we want to work with. You know, rather than trying to say we can work with anybody. And all we were saying that on our home page, we hadn't really optimised the home page around that idea. And we'd created a separate page on our website talking about it, which was then.

Sort of competing like sort of the home page of the website.

That's right. So we decided to, um, to sunset that page. Yeah. No, we didn't, we actually.

Just.

Optimised, we optimised it around a specific aspect of industrial marketing, didn't we?

We did. Um, and I can't remember what was going with that. I mean, I think the other thing I would say about this as well is that like, you and I have a slightly different, uh, attitudes to, to data and it always makes me really twitchy because you're quite reactive. I think most people are, I think a lot of people are, they'll look at data sort of day by day. It honestly scares the shit out of me. Looking at data for like a day or a week because it just it's so.

I don't get to. I really don't I'm just interested in seeing.

Yeah, it's so random. And things do take a long time to settle down and the amount of times I've changed something and thought, right, okay, that's moving in that direction. And then you look at it a month later and it's done the opposite and you're like, oh, well, never mind, never mind. Then he just sort of gets to a place where you daren't even look almost. Um, but yeah, it is really interesting. I think, I think with all of that stuff, we change things and then you're sort of very keyed into has it worked? Has it not worked? And it's very easy to sort of, uh, overcompensate, I guess, go the other way and like start unpicking and reversing changes. And I see clients do that quite.

Yeah. I was going to say I've seen clients do that as well.

They'll pick a direction and they're not really sure about it. And then they'll get very twitchy and they'll be like, just, just take it off. Just put it back to how it was before. And it's like you're just doing more damage. Don't pick a course, stick to it. It's hard.

I agree. I think we'll keep keep people posted on how that on that, how that goes. I mean, it was, it was a few pages of our website. We we basically re-optimise the homepage around, you know what? We're now, you know, majoring on, if you like, um, tweaked another page to move it away so it didn't compete with the homepage. We also took a long, hard look at our about page, because I think it's easy to forget how important the about page is. If people find you and think these guys look like they can solve a problem for us, then they start digging a bit deeper and they start wanting to know about the organisation. Are they credible? Who do they work with? How long have they been around? AM I in? AM I going to make a good decision here by choosing to get in touch with them and potentially work with them? And our about page was probably not doing the best job in that respect.

Well, better than most though. I mean, one thing I will say is that I think an awful lot of people completely misunderstand what an About Us page is for. I think just going back to the whole sort of philosophy that underpins what we're doing, you you will always see that the average journey on any of our client's websites is that somebody lands on a specific product or service page. and then from there, if they go anywhere, they will go to the home page and then to the about page. And that is pretty uniform across the board. Those are the pages that people will always hit up first. They will read what you specifically are trying to offer them, and then they'll say, okay, but who are these guys?

And when we get an enquiry, I always go looking for the about page because who.

Are.

These people? Who is this company who've contacted us wanting potentially to work with us?

But look here, I mean, and this is the thing that you sort of expose fundamentally what our behavior says is that before we'll buy off a company, we want to know who's behind it because we don't really buy from companies, we buy from people. And specifically we buy from people that we believe in. And I think this is the massively overlooked thing about about us pages is it's a chance to actually do that thing that everyone says you're not meant to do and talk about yourself, but in a way that humanises you, that tells the story of your business. How did it start? Why did it start? Why does it exist? What are you you know what gets you excited?

Mission, vision, values kind of thing without getting to, you know.

Corporate about it. One of the things that I see increasingly is like about us pages where it's like, here are the here are the pictures of the heads of the leadership team and, and here's like, here's how long our company's been in business, end of story. Please buy from us. It's like, well, you know, it's like, I know less about you than I did five minutes ago. You know what I mean? It's like, let me get under the skin of this and sort of get a feel for who you are and what drives you, because that's ultimately what people are buying. People buy from people. And I think about us page is a massively sort of misunderstood in that respect. Yeah.

Okay. Um, so we'll keep people, keep people listening to this podcast posted on, on how those changes have gone and whether or not it's been, it turns out to be a positive or negative thing from a lead gen point of view. Um, go on. Have you got a.

Well, I mean, weirdly, it's sort of the same point. I mean, I've just written false positives and then the name of a couple of clients, but it's sort of related to what we've just talked about really, which is this whole idea of doing something. Um, and it working in this instance, and it happened twice last week where sort of a client said, yep, I'm happy to sign off on this idea. It's a good idea. Let's try it. Let's see what happens. So changes to messaging. One of them was just like slight tweaks to the design of a page to see if we could make it easier for people to get in touch. Um, and then it worked. They very quickly got an enquiry and they were like, roll out those changes to every page of the website. That's it. That's that worked. It's fantastic. It's brilliant. Let's go and do it. Um, and it's just that whole idea that you can be way too gung ho with this kind of stuff. I think sometimes I feel like I'm very sort of like cautious and reserved person when I'm talking to clients and they're like, right. Yep, that worked really well. We should go and do it everywhere. And I'm like, hang on a minute. You don't you don't actually know that it's worked. But I think it's worth just sort of like stressing really that whole idea that just because something seems to be working or seems not to be working, when you have like five or six data points, you don't get to rush off and be like, I've solved this problem. I know for a fact that this is what's happening now. And there's a real danger in doing that because you end up in a situation where you're like, oh, but it seemed to be working and now it's not. And now I don't trust my ideas. I don't trust the process. I don't know, and I see that quite a lot with clients. You know, they sort of get themselves very excited about something and then sort of come crashing back down to earth. And it's like, it's always slightly more nuanced than you think. It's never like one fix is going to fix everything. Mhm. Um, and I think, I guess more, more largely, I guess that's really my point. Um, sometimes when you're testing ideas around messaging or page designs or whatever on a client's website, people are looking for a fix, as in we're going to change this and then people will inquire and it will be fixed forever. And that's just fundamentally not what we're doing. You know, we're trying to iterate and move towards a place where pages are easier to use, or companies seem more contactable or more trustworthy or whatever. But it's never the case that you're going to like flick a switch, change a button from red to green. And suddenly, you know, people are going to start inquiring and the phone will be off the hook. And you never have to think about this stuff ever again. It's a, it's an ongoing process.

And believe it or not, that connects very nicely with the next subject I would like to To discuss. And you don't you don't just think that this this was planned because false positives and and coming to the wrong conclusions. So we had an enquiry over the weekend and I looked at their website and did some analysis on their website and, um, they used the, we've got a way you can either send, you know, fill a form in or send us an email or you can just book a meeting on, you know, straight from our website. So these, these people had gone ahead and booked a meeting, sounded a bit American there. I'm just going to go ahead and do this. Um, so they booked a meeting and um, I spoke with them this morning, a couple of nice guys. Um, they'd come, they'd found us because they were looking for search engine optimisation that helped with search engine optimisation and were more than a little surprised during the meeting when I said, well, your website's actually quite strong. It's ranking for things that are difficult to rank for. And when I dug around, I figured out that they'd got some links twelve thirteen years ago from the BBC website, from the Guardian newspaper website. One or two other places. So they've got some really strong inbound links, inbound signals, if you like, to their website that give that made their website appear quite authoritative and strong now. Yes, their search rankings are somewhat in decline, but they rank for some really strong search terms that are difficult to rank for. You'll pay quite a lot of money. In fact, I think with them when we worked it out, if you wanted to use Google ads to buy the traffic that they get organically, you'd have to spend four or five five zero zero zero a month to get that traffic, which is not a huge amount of money. But I mean, it's not nothing.

Yeah, absolutely.

And but they were convinced that they weren't getting enquiries because.

They weren't showing up.

Because they weren't showing up in search. And I said, well, you are showing up in search and you're showing up for some, you know.

Relevant.

Commercial intent type keywords that are difficult to rank for. And I said, I think what the problem is, is you're messaging and the messaging is awful. It's really just they're just making a series of category specific statements. You know, we're very professional, we're trustworthy. It's like, oh, okay. So what, you know, like, tell us your story. They're not telling the story. And I think fundamentally that's where the problem is. And but they'd concluded, I also looked at their PPC, they were bidding on a few keywords in PPC. I looked at where they were sending people that were clicking on the advert. It wasn't it wasn't a dedicated landing page. I don't think it was the homepage, but it was an awful page.

Yeah.

And you know, there's like there's a re and what they really need is one of your favorite subjects, conversion rate optimisation. They need somebody to look at what's going on and say, well, you're getting the traffic and all right, we haven't got access to their search console data. But I showed them the search console, which was news to them. They'd never seen it before. And when they looked at the search console, they kind of got why that might be useful. So if you look at the Search console data, it will probably be able to see right. Okay. So in the last three months, you've had two hundred people on your home page looking for exactly what you do. How many enquiries have you had? Three. Right. So where do you think the problem is? Like SEO or possibly the story you're telling, the messaging, the way that you're, the way that you're presenting your story and where that you're making people feel safe. All the other things. And I, and I think, I honestly think that, uh, that if we do get a chance to work with them, that we could have a very positive impact on the leads that they're getting, the enquiries that they're getting without really improving the search engine optimisation at all.

I see, I think you're right, you're spot on is one of my favorite subjects. I mean, one thing I will say is I think the majority of businesses, um, you know, are in a place where they think, oh, I need more traffic. I need more people to see me, you know, I need more people to walk past my shop and therefore business will boom. Almost inevitably, you are getting more than enough traffic that were you better at converting it? You wouldn't care anymore about the people walking past your shop window. And I think this is the point. People are very. And I think it's partly marketers fault because I think we go out and sell this idea that like SEO or PPC or tactic will change the fortune of your business. Very rarely the case.

If you're not getting any eyeballs on your website at all, then a PPC campaign, a paid search campaign could well transform your, your, um.

And let's be honest, you know, if you do, if you do do a fantastic job of sharpening your story and making your website convert better, then you want to be pouring more relevant, relevant being the caveat traffic into it. Absolutely. I'm not for a minute suggesting that, you know, those things aren't very important parts of the machine. I think it's just that people become very sort of fixated on, if I have success with this tactic, everything will change. And they completely forget that the goal of SEO is to get you ranking. So what you know, you know, you can rank first in the world for a really good keyword, but if your website's crap and you're not convincing, then.

And it might not be that your website's crap. I mean, I'd like to think that our website isn't crap. Our own website, right? So like I was looking at, um, over the last seven days, I've looked at some, um, information, some data around a search term, something along the lines of Joomla development. So Joomla is a content management system. We know it inside out. We built hundreds of Joomla websites. We've, we've rescued sites that other people have built badly. Or, you know, people have been in a situation where they needed some help. So yeah, Joomla experts you might say. And I see people say on Bing on on PPC typing, Joomla development company, they land on our web page twenty five seconds. They've gone. And so I'm, I'm not thinking right, oh, I need more of those. I need more of that.

Let's just get more of them.

I'm thinking, well, we they seem to be looking for what we can offer. What was it they didn't like? What's not working and what can we test on that page to get more of the people who look at it getting in touch with us? Those are the questions we would ask, as you would expect, because it's kind of what we do. But I think a lot of businesses, they don't recognise that. They just think, oh, need more, need more, need more.

Well, it's like the sales thing. It's the sales thing is a perfect analogy, isn't it? It's like some sales teams would rather ring a thousand people to get one positive, you know, and some sales teams would say, stop taking a shotgun approach. What you need to do is really spend all the time working out which ten people you're going to contact to get one response. And that that's where the value is. There's just different attitudes. But I think people playing a numbers game online are in an increasingly sticky spot, because the price of traffic and the difficulty of getting those huge numbers of people onto your website is growing over time. And as it becomes sort of increasingly expensive, increasingly competitive, trying to play a game where you sort of win at business by driving ten thousand people to your website and hoping three of them convert is a bit of a fool's errand, really. Mhm.

Okay. Um, last one, uh, for now, in this episode. One fifty um, qualifying people is okay. Yeah. So, um, conversation with prospect. Um, when I have conversations with prospects, I always try and qualify and that's to save them time and to save me time to save us time if you like. Um, the reason I'm saying this is I put down, I put together an outline proposal for an enquiry that came in and Karen proofread it for me and, and she said, um, oh, the way that you've talked about budgets, it's like in the proposal, just in the closing stages piece, you've kind of made it sound like we need to talk about that now before we do, we always do a pro bono discovery session with potential customers to figure out what they need and whether we're the right people to help them, etc. however, that doesn't mean that we don't also do qualifying because, you know, you'd be a bit of a dick if you went to test drive a Porsche when you didn't have enough money to buy a Porsche. I mean, some people would do that, but it's a dick move, isn't it? So all I'm trying to do with this qualifying thing is say to people like, I don't know what you'll need to spend. I don't know what the problem is, but typically when people we work with are rather typically people we work with have budgets that look like this. And all I'm trying to do is set our stall out. And that's all I care to do that because I think what some people do is they almost avoid the subject of money until they've put significant amount of work in and possibly got the prospect really quite excited. Yeah. And then they have to let the prospect down when the prospect says, but I haven't got that kind of money. Yeah. Why didn't you tell me at the start of the process that you would need me to spend, I don't know, ten grand a month or something for the next six months to fix this problem? I can't do that. I haven't got enough money.

It's increasingly frustrating from the marketing end as well, because there are clients that I can think of where, you know, we spend money getting the leads. Um, people don't qualify the leads. Um, they'll go through the sales process right to the sort of final stages. The client will say, oh, how much I can't possibly afford that drop out. And then the feedback we get is, oh, you're sending the wrong type of leads. Yeah. Um, we're not. You just need to qualify them out earlier. I think you do. Everybody in the sort of supply chain, if you like, a disservice by not doing that. You know, just simply making sure that you're on the right wavelength and that people have actually budgeted roughly the right amount. And it doesn't have to be exact. But, you know, like you say, it's like if you walk into a shoe shop and, and you're like, oh yeah, I'm here to buy a pair of high heels. And they're like, well, high heels start at one thousand pounds. Then, you know, to walk back out the shop. But if they don't say that and you spend an hour trying on shoes, they don't get to complain when you say.

The way to get around that is if the shoes in the window don't have prices on them, you can't afford them. Yeah, absolutely. They're for people that don't ask the price. They just they're just trying them on and say, yes, I'll take those, please.

But that's the that's the thing really, isn't it? I mean, price conversations about money. I think you're right. People find them uncomfortable. They avoid them. They think, oh, I don't want to put people off too early. I think actually you do want to put people off as early as possible if they're not the right people. Yeah, yeah.

Anything else on your list?

No, that's pretty much everything from.

Okay. I was going to talk about the rabbit challenge.

The what?

Yeah. Don't worry. This isn't actually one for the ladies. It's a general. It's a general thing that's.

You're allowed to make those jokes.

Uh, it is, it is a general thing that I'm thinking of. Um, it's a little sort of social media media, um, kind of test if you like. Interesting experiment really, but I'll maybe talk about it next time.

I'm a cliffhanger.

I'm still formulating the idea in my head. Um, and it's not what you think it is, that's for sure. Um, okay. I think that's episode one fifty pretty much, uh, pretty much finished. And, um, I can't really think of anything else to say apart from congratulations. Well done for surviving up until episode one fifty. Um, I think on balance, I've probably done more of the one hundred and fifty than you have. I know I'm maybe I think you did one or two in my absence.

Yeah, I've done a couple of interviews and stuff, but I think you've done quite a few without me. Yeah.

Yeah. Just just sometimes with Julie. Sometimes with some of the team. Yeah. Um, have you ever been on the podcast?

I have, once.

Once. Yeah, I remember we need to fix that as in delete it.

We should get more of the team involved, he says hesitantly.

Yeah, I think so. I think I think if we get, um, maybe, maybe not. Maybe no more than a couple of them at a time. Otherwise, it would probably just sound like being in a noisy pub with tinnitus, which is something I experience on a regular basis because I've got tinnitus. Um, you don't really hear anything. Uh, yeah, I think we will. I think going forward, I mean, we're not necessarily planning to change things up dramatically, you know, post episode one fifty, but I think it's, um, you know, it's a, I think maybe, maybe the podcast will, you know, turn one hundred and fifty, maybe it will want to have an affair.

Maybe.

You know, maybe.

The Madison, if you're listening.

Maybe the podcast will go and register still in business. Well, did you watch the, the Netflix?

I didn't.

It's worth watching. It's really quite interesting. I mean, they were kind of conquering the world and then suddenly they got hacked.

Yeah.

And people's lives were ruined because the details were shared and. But somehow they came out, they came out, they rose from the ashes. And it is a thing, although I don't think the original founders, excuse me, are part of it anymore.

I'd be fascinated to know whether it actually had any tangible effect on the number of people signing up for a fair website, because you'd think it would or you, you know, you sort of instinctive response would be, well, everyone would be terrified of signing up and everyone would stop. But actually, on balance, probably not because people are stupid.

There was one or two. I mean, it was it's kind of sad for the people that got outed. Um, yeah, I know, I get it, I get it, but you know, you know, I always think there, but for the grace of God, you know, I think what they were doing was, was, was morally wrong. And, but the way that some lives were ruined as a result of it was, it was probably out of kilter with, with what they were actually up to. I mean, some of them were probably they might have signed up with a site just like, well, I wonder what this is like. I wonder how it works. I wonder what I wonder what kind of person might be interested in me. There might have been that kind of thing. And then suddenly there was one really funny one. I can't remember the guy's name, but he was, um, effectively making money by being like this religious ideal husband, perfect family, you know, and that was their thing. And they were telling people how to live their lives and all the rest of it. And it turns out he was, he was all over Ashley Madison like a rash. And, and then his pleadings, he even got his wife pleading with people to, to forgive him for what he'd done. And it was misguided and all the rest of it. It was really, uh, quite funny. Hi. Um, so we've just had somebody come into the office, so we're going to wrap up this podcast for now anyway. It's okay. No it's fine. Absolutely. Fine. So thanks for listening to, um, well, to those who have listened to one hundred and fifty episodes of the podcast, well done. Because even we haven't listened to that many of them. And, uh, we'll be back for episode one hundred and fifty one quite soon.