We Discuss The Power of NotebookLM & Minimising Clicks For PPC Success - Episode 161

We've often explained the tricky bit, if you like, with PPC, is about how you make sure you don't get many clicks, which sounds almost like oxymoronic. It does because yeah, as you as you rightly said, you know, it's all about the clicks. But in the B2B area, you very rarely have to worry about getting too many clicks unless, you know, you forget some obvious negative keywords and you and you bid on keywords, which are absolutely ridiculous because they're related to something else. And, you know, but for us, targeting PPC is a challenge because the search volumes for the stuff that we're trying to help clients promote is tiny.

Yeah, it's very much a balance between getting some clicks that are probably relevant and getting, you know, nothing at all, but going really relevant. And, you know, a lot of times it's things that people don't really know exist or aren't looking for because they don't know that that's the right solution to their problem.

Yeah. Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. We've prepared an absolutely stellar show this week.

Have we?

No, sorry. You have. You've even got pink writing. Um, yeah, we're just trying to kind of keep the momentum. So yeah, if this if this is a shorter one, that's fine. Um, but, um, I'll tell you an interesting thing. I was like on the subject of podcasts. Okay. I was gonna have a chat with Steve alert eyes in Australia and he and I did a podcast. Yeah, you did.

one.

For a while. I just, for some reason, I went to log into our podcast to check something and I accidentally hit the button because I logged.

In in the same system.

Isn't it logged in as yeah, it's also in libsyn and logged in to that one. Wow. The numbers.

Really.

Like ten times more than us. Oh yeah.

So there's obviously a market for strategy and that sort of thing.

Absolutely.

It's quite again he's got a really specific niche hasn't he.

Yeah.

Third sector strategy.

Those numbers were yeah. They were really quite impressive. but there was nothing like the, uh, the, the, the episodes. I think we finished at twenty, thirty episodes or something.

There was a fairly short two million four hundred and ninety. It just feels like.

It just feels like.

It. Yeah.

Um, okay. Well, Leslie's press buttons and then buggered off, so that's fine. Yeah. Oh, no. She's coming back. Yeah. So we had we had Leslie's French, as people probably know, who listened to the podcast. And, uh, we had a morning this morning, didn't we, of, um, speaking French.

We did. Which was quite fun.

Was for you because you speak French. And Leslie.

Thankfully.

Speaks French because she's French. Yeah. Otherwise she would have had a tough upbringing.

And that would have been really difficult. Yeah. But the best thing about being frenchified this morning was she brought crap. She did, because it was Candlemas. Sean. What's Schindler? Which is Candlemas.

That's a comedy.

Club. Schindler.

Shrove Tuesday. Soon as well.

Yeah. They do that as well because it's Mardi Gras.

At this point, I'd like to apologise to anyone who's tuned in hoping to listen to digital marketing chat.

We've got we've done. that.

We've talked about another podcast, we've talked about we've talked about speaking French.

I'm sorry, but.

I mean, we have to talk about something and I can't really think of anything.

Better. Their own episode.

All good. All right. So sort of steering it back onto onto on course. I can see upside down writing. So.

No, no, it's the right way up, I promise.

Just for you. What what what do you want to talk about?

Well, the report talking of Lesley, that she did a report on our YouTube channel which threw up some really interesting, quite a few different issues. The main one is that, you know, you can apply to, to many different types of marketing, but having more views, more eyeballs isn't actually always a good thing.

We've always preached.

That. Yeah, yeah.

You want to reach a numbers game, not in B2B anyway.

You want to reach the people who count, not just reach loads of people randomly, because actually that can be a lot worse for for many reasons. But um, yeah, our, um, our YouTube videos. So she's been putting them on YouTube and suddenly we got, um, like instead of getting like a few views, we were getting like two thousand views per episode. And um, she was like, that's exciting. You know, I started doing these clips and we got all these views and then she, then she dug into it and, um, we have the Mark Kermode effect, which is just brilliant. So, um, Mark Kermode and Dave both have basically grey hair and dark rimmed glasses. So we think. So basically most of these views that we were getting were people who once they finished watching um Mark Kermode um film review were getting recommended our videos, which are absolutely not relevant to somebody who's just been watching a film review. So, um, we think the only reason we can think that YouTube has been recommending our videos to these people is because Mark Kermode and Dave both have gray hair and black rimmed glasses.

But that's like, you know, ninety percent of middle aged men in Britain.

Actually, I know, it's so weird.

But I mean, is there any efficacy to this? Is have we done it managed to sort of corroborate that if there's a slight likeness between me and him that Google's your Google, same thing. Their algorithm has looked at it and gone, that looks like the same person. Show them this.

I actually analyses.

Okay, so yeah, apparently so you probably can't hear Leslie from here, but, um, yeah, AI like scans the, the images in the videos and I guess matches.

Those up based on irrespective of the subject matter. It just seems so unlikely, doesn't it? Yeah, but there's no other explanation. We haven't yet.

Found another explanation and.

That must be another one maybe.

Yeah. But we could see the traffic was coming from.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Something like ninety five percent of it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But what was even more what actually cemented that theory even more? It was the was what happened next when they clicked through?

Yeah, they were staying for fifteen seconds.

So long enough to realise they'd been duped.

Yeah, they were like, this isn't Mark Kermode. This isn't a film review. What the hell am I doing here? Yeah, and they were just leaving. Um, and then but then there was some videos that were getting twenty five views. Um, and people were staying for like two and a half minutes, which was like nearly the whole video. And like some of them, like thirty percent of them were watching, were watching the whole thing. So that's what I'm saying. The, you know, the twenty five views, watching most of it and presumably being relevant is way better than two thousand views of people looking for, you know, the latest review of a whatever film they've been thinking about.

This reminds me of our of Red evolution's SEO heyday.

Oh yeah.

Yeah. So back in the day we were, we, we'd done a lot of SEO work. We had some amazing rankings, and our website was getting between four and five hundred visits a day. Yeah. Tons of visitors for a for a small digital marketing agency. We're getting hundreds of visitors a day, and it resulted in hardly any worthwhile opportunities because it was all the wrong people looking for, you know, whatever, whatever question was, what is SEO, SEO explaining? You know, it was, it was it had been actually, um, SEO man, we did a cartoon which explained SEO and, and we were even approached by some universities who said like, do you mind if we include this in our, in our, uh, learning materials because it's a nice explanation.

So it was students and people just sort of just the, the very, very informational, what is type searches and any enquiries we did get from that page were absolutely not right for us at all.

I mean, it's common sense most people recognise if you're in B2B, if five people look at your website, but they're all moderately interested in what you do and might have a, you know, potential to become a customer that's better than a thousand people who are there by accident or because you tricked them there or anything else, which is, you know, I know that the model with clickbait is not to get people to really engage with the content. It's to it's to get the click because the, the companies like the newspapers, websites, they're getting paid for the clicks. So they don't care that when the person clicks, they don't stay very long. It's all about trying to get the clicks. But in B2B, you know, they're in madness lies. It's just, it's, there's no point doing it.

No. And, um, it gives the wrong message to Google. It gives you a really, really high bounce rate, which then Google goes, um, well, that website's obviously rubbish because people don't stay. Um, so it affects.

We assume this has been talked about for many, many years about measuring bounce rate. I mean, I can't imagine why they would ignore bounce rate if they were trying to figure out whether something was worth sending traffic to. I agree.

It is. It is commonly thought that that's something. Um, so there's that. And also, um, you know, it can also make the search engines think your website's about something that it really isn't. So then you start getting sort of showing up the wrong kinds of searches and getting the wrong kind of traffic. We used to have a blog post about crushed nuts.

We did that. Go on ice cream.

Yeah, yeah, that kind of crushed nuts. And, um, it got, you know, it was one of our highest performing, um, blog posts. Again, it was, it was making us shop for all sorts of wrong things. And we eventually got rid of it because, um, just having the traffic for the sake of it wasn't helping us at all. That's right. So we did get rid of it.

I mean, one of our most popular blogs is the why do marketers target females? Yeah, yeah. And I it's somewhat sinister, but I think a lot of that traffic is people searching like how to target females or something like that. And it's.

Again, it's, it's all it's referral traffic comes from YouTube.

Mhm.

And it's another one that's, uh, another YouTube effect one. Yeah. Um, haven't quite worked out what video it comes from, but there's some video on YouTube is then referring to that blog post which started off as one of our colleagues basically having a rant and then was rewritten to be actually quite useful. But, um, it, it's something to do with YouTube that one as well. So YouTube, you know, is actually really powerful in terms of, you know, what it can do, but it doesn't seem to get it quite right.

But I think, I think what it highlights to people is, you know, you can have these accidental successes online. Yeah, I've done it on, you know, my own, my accidental successes on, on TikTok have been like, like, well, every, all the things I've been playing around with, I'm not as prolific as on as producing at producing content for TikTok as you are. But, you know, I have had some TikToks that have just completely gone mad, you know? Yeah. And, you know, and for the right reason. I mean, it was like people were were interested in it. But at the same time, um, you know, I think you can get these things like we experienced in Leslie, you know, did, did the, did the digging and did the analysis and figured out, you know, why we were getting all that traffic and it resulted in the square root of not a lot.

Yeah. The other thing is with Google ads, sometimes clients can kind of go, well, you know, we're not getting as many clicks from the Google ads. We're like, yes, that was intentional because the ones you were getting were were nonsense. And that's even worse on Google ads to get lots of clicks that aren't relevant because you're paying for every one of them and sometimes you're paying for quite a lot. So, um, getting more clicks is not a good thing with Google ads, you actually want fewer clicks, but ones that convert. And sometimes it's quite difficult to explain that to clients who are just like, well, I'm paying for clicks. I want lots of clicks. No, no, really, you don't, you don't.

Yeah, yeah. We, we've often explained, um, you know, the tricky bit, if you like, with PPC is about how you make sure you don't get many clicks, which sounds almost like oxymoronic. It does because yeah, as you, as you rightly said, you know, it's all about the clicks, but thankfully or not, it's not actually thankfully, I don't know what the word is I'm looking for, but in the B2B area, you very rarely have to worry about getting too many clicks unless, you know, you forget some obvious negative keywords and you and you bid on keywords, which are absolutely ridiculous because they're related to something else. And, you know, but for us, targeting PPC is a challenge because the search volumes for the stuff that we're trying to help clients promote is tiny.

Yeah, it's very much a balance between getting some clinics that are probably relevant and getting, you know, nothing at all, but, but going really relevant. And, you know, a lot of times it's things that people don't really know exist or aren't looking for because they don't know that that's the right solution to their problem. So then you've got to figure out, well, what are they looking for when this would do the job? But yeah, it's very difficult to to get enough traffic but not waste money on the wrong traffic.

Mhm.

What else do you want to talk about?

Whatever you've got written down.

That's.

It. My, um, my, uh, my last, uh, the last week for me has been a bit of a blur with, um, the whole Aboyne Bridge stuff and public meetings and all that kind of stuff. So I'm just kind of finally finding some equilibrium. So I haven't been making many notes about around, um, digital marketing. So if you've got anything else at all on your list, then we can, we can try and run with that.

We've just had a busy week sort of trying to get our new software sorted for, you know, recording what, what we do and how we operate. So we've been like testing it and trying to break it.

And it's been an interesting exercise because we've, we wrote some software and I think we mentioned this last week, we wrote some software, um, kind of resource management software, but it's a little bit more than that because we work with, on with our customers, most of our customers on retainers then. So every month, you know, every week we meet with our clients, but every month we kind of have an idea what we're going to deliver in that month. And we, I wanted a heads up display that showed what we were doing, how we were getting on with it, all that kind of stuff. So we wrote some software, what, two years ago, even three years ago, two or three.

Years ago, probably a couple of years ago.

Which has served its purpose. But it was it was needing to be expanded and tweaked and reduced in some areas, but we needed to make it something else. So it's been a really interesting exercise because Phil, who's been writing it, has been using extensively using Claude Chord to write it, so much so that when he got it to a certain point, it was it got to the point where all I needed to do was actually post issues in GitHub. Yeah, I know this is a bit geeky, but I'll frame it in another way. Rather than go back to the developer with the issues, the robots, you tell the robot what the issue is and it goes off and fixes it. Yeah. And then the developer came along and said, right, okay. It's that's what your problem was. It looks like it's fixed it. I'll test it. Right. It seems to be okay. We'll deploy it now carry on and decide what you want it to do next.

Yeah, it's a.

Really interesting exercise. And I mentioned, I think I did mention last week that I got it to write a test plan and, and then actually run the tests and all that, which is, which has been great. But, um, yeah, it's been, it's been an interesting journey, isn't it, with it because, you know, I think we've got to a point now, you know, it's quite ironic because we've got to a point now where the software that we've created to help us run our agency more effectively, in some ways more efficiently, I suppose we've probably got a market. I mean, it's a.

Really.

Slick piece of software. I would I would say, you know, for smaller agencies like us, I think, um, you know, we might even go out to some friendly agencies and say, look, you know, how would this work for you to, to help deliver what you do? It doesn't have to be retained as it works fine with projects, and it doesn't have to be necessarily the creative industries either. It could be, it could be any, any service, professional service industry that, you know, wants to say, like, what are we doing this month? How are we delivering it? Who's delivering.

It? A certain number of tasks to deliver before the end of the month. And you want to see how that's going.

And it's not project management as such. No, it's very much around managing the finances of the business and understanding what we're building and what we're delivering for that.

How we're spending clients budgets every month and making sure that we're spending the right amount of budget every month.

That's right.

Yeah. And it is.

Helping. I mean, one of the key things, which the other system did by fudging it, the new system does really well with a retainer model. And we do write about this on and we've got blog posts about retainers because I know that like, you know, some customers, some clients are a bit nervous about retainers because it can. It almost feels like you're writing this sort of check every month and you're not quite sure what's happening.

Yeah, it's a big commitment. It's not.

Just.

Like a one off. It's like over and over again.

Yeah. That's right. But one of the things with retainers is that say you're on a five grand a month retainer, you might do six or seven grand's worth of work in January. Yeah. And then you maybe do a bit less work in February, or you might do six or seven grams of work in February as well. So by the time you get to March, you've already over delivered to the tune of maybe four grand or something like that, you know.

And.

And monitoring that can sometimes be feel.

It was fiddly. It was like you're trying to remember like, okay, hang on a minute. I've spent that. So I'm not gonna do as much there. And yeah, we were trying to sort of put, put my amounts in, but it got confusing.

So I mean, without going into the detail of it, um, but we've, we've come up with a, you know, a way of doing, managing that, which makes a lot more sense. And, um, yeah, and we also like a lot of agencies, I suppose, um, you know, monitoring who's doing what. Um, you know, we don't sell time as such, but we do at the same time because we all provide a certain amount of our certain amount of our time.

Time is the scarce resource, isn't it.

It is. Yeah. So understanding where that's going, I think is, is important. So we've, we've kind of wrapped that in as well. Because although we do quite like Monday dot com and use Monday dot com, it just it doesn't do time management very well. It's, you know, it's fine if you're doing certain tasks where you can just set the timer, go and do the task and then turn the timer off and it goes, oh, great, you spent an hour.

Yeah. And if you're like, not going to get interrupted in the middle and somebody's not going to ask you a question or you're going to get a meeting.

At best it was.

A fudge.

Um, ye old system we use. Basecamp did it brilliantly, but there was other things that Basecamp didn't do. So we had to obviously ditch it. But but yeah, that's been good. I mean, it's been interesting, um, using the, uh, using, you know, having it, Claude could write it. And I think what it allowed us to do, and I think any, anyone listening to this, you know, I encourage you to play with it, even if especially if you've got a developer, because, you know, developers are the people who can get the most out of Claude code.

Yeah. Because any how they want.

Including me can write software using Claude code because you literally just tell it what you want it to do and do it, but it can go and it'll go and do it and sort of garbage in, garbage out, but maybe slightly better than that. But, um, if you've got developers, what it allowed us to do with this was, was wouldn't it be good if it, if it did this and just literally within half an hour it was doing it. And that was like, you can't do that with developers because it takes longer to write code by hand, no matter how good you are. And so it gave us a sort of freedom. It felt like it gave us a sort of freedom.

Yeah. To sort of go, yeah, just try stuff. And it wasn't wasting loads of somebody else's time trying to, trying to figure it out. You could, you could see and they go, actually, that doesn't work. But it was also really good, like trying it out with the rest of the team. And we got some really good suggestions out of that as well, because things, things that we hadn't done. And I think it's even more useful now.

Well, probably before we might have said, right, okay, somebody might have said it'd be quite handy if it did this. And like, you know, as a, as a person running the agency and obviously needing to understand the finances and everything anything else. I might have looked at it and go, oh yeah, but that sounds like it'll take a developer a week to do that, which is going to be X thousand quid. And do we really need it to do that? Whereas like, you know, with, with, with the Claude chord approach. Well, yeah. Okay, let's just run it and see what see what it comes out.

Give it a.

Try. Um, yeah, I mean, it's fascinating. And I know we kind of laboured this last week, but, you know, we do keep coming back to it.

Um, is a game changer in many ways.

I tell you what else is a game changer. And again, I think we've spoken about this a few times is um notebook LM um, yeah. And here's an example.

That was when we were doing the Mark Kermode effect. Leslie actually turned it into a notebook podcast. And I listened to it at the gym and it just brought it to life a lot more than just reading a report.

Yeah, and that's exactly right. I mean, going back to my Aboyne Bridge action Group, um, activity, we've been speaking to a technical specialist structural engineer who produced quite a long. It's like noughts, but it's a bit of a long document. Okay. It'll be three or four sides of A4, maybe more than that going into quite a lot of technical detail. But by feeding that into notebook LM, we've produced this podcast, um, which I'd encourage you to listen to if you're interested in infrastructure, the managed decline of Scottish bridges, which sounds really dry, and it would have been the sort of thing that if you'd shared the document, would people have, maybe they might have.

They might have skimmed it.

I think on YouTube, we turned it into a podcast, stuck it onto YouTube, and it's been listened to, um, four hundred and fifty times so far.

Yeah, yeah. I don't think that many people would have read it.

I don't think so either. And if you can get around the American accents, but they're.

Quite nice voices.

Yeah they are. Um, I think they're all right, but where I'm using it increasingly is almost like sense checking my own work. So, you know, maybe I'm producing some work, like I'm working on a strategy, a digital strategy or something like that. And then I'm producing a document which is five or six pages or whatever it is, feeding it into notebook and asking Notebook Elm to create a little podcast of it, which is usually ten to fifteen minutes. Yeah, it seems to me it.

Doesn't read it out. It's no.

It turns.

It into two people.

Discussing it, you know, and it's.

Really smart.

In a really slick way. Yeah. So if you've if you haven't tried Notebook Elm, give it a try. I think again, I think we spoke about it last week. It's it's basically you give it the sources, be it video. I think you can give it audio, video, PDFs, word documents, websites, whatever you want.

Give it the.

Sources it can use, tell it what you want and let it produce. Um, you know, it's just a nice way of consuming information. It suits me. As I've said before, I'm an audiobook person, right? I'm rubbish at reading. I'll just. My mind will drift off somewhere else. I'll fall asleep. Whatever.

See, I do that with podcasts. My mind drifts off. Yeah, just drift off. I prefer reading, but actually, for I.

Wish.

I did dense reports. I actually really enjoyed that. And that format of listening to it, although I don't I don't spend enough time probably, I don't know, with the opportunity to listen to big chunks of things, maybe in the gym, maybe out running. I'm not listening to something like that out running. I need something to.

See, I do, I listen to the spoken word.

I do listen to podcasts. I listen to podcasts about running.

All right.

I wouldn't listen to something like that running. I don't think that would help me at all. I either need music or something sort of relevant, or something that makes me feel like my pals are with me, making me carry on running and not stop and go home in the rain. Oh God. Looking outside, I am supposed to be running tonight and that is the most revolting weather.

Two minds. But yeah, um, probably not.

Absolutely chucking it down with rain. That's not appealing. But I didn't go last week. Ah! What?

Come on.

Is it a.

Club or something? Yeah, we're in a bind.

Yeah.

The thing is, it depends if you're going off road. I mean, it'll just be horrible.

No. Absolutely not. Off road. I think it would just be on road. But even even that is looking grim. It's um. Oh dear.

I mean, we we talked about the weather last week because it was great.

Any worse. It's not.

It's still great and it's still wet. I mean our office. Bless it is like one hundred and seventy year old building or whatever it is. It's leaking all over the place at the moment. And we can't get people to come and fix it. And that's.

What I really I.

Really feel sorry for it. You know what I mean? But it's like literally nothing you can do. You've just got to sit it out. But it's been so difficult, really.

I don't ever remember this much rain. No. All at once. It has precipitated every single day since the beginning of the year.

It really has. Yeah. Whether it was.

And we're in February now.

Snow or rain. It absolutely has. And I was I had a meeting, um, I had a chat with somebody just before this podcast and they were talking about, well, it's the forecast shows it's raining all this week. Yeah, sure. You're really interested in this, but it's raining all this week and then more snow next week, apparently. So it just seems to be lasting forever.

Yeah.

But anything else on the digital marketing front. We've got um, anything exciting client wise? Um, no, I'm not sure.

No, we haven't got anything exciting. Exciting?

Yeah. Yeah. We're still waiting on a on a nice what will hopefully be a nice chunk of work. Um, but we still haven't heard from them. We don't like to hassle people so they know where we are. Yeah. Um.

But no, I think we're just sort of kind of get, we've got plans in place for people and we're just getting on with them, which is actually quite nice. Just sort of getting.

At the moment. I'm spending quite a lot of my time really digging quite deep to get to the get to the heart of the issues that I want to try and resolve and the work that I want to try and do. And I'm, yeah, it kind of feels like sometimes, you know, when you do stuff like it feels like you're not really achieving very much just like us with this podcast now.

Yeah, you could be right. It might be time to quit while we're behind.

Um. What else? You're off to Florida next week, so.

Yeah, we won't be doing one.

I might do.

You could do one by yourself. You can get someone else or get someone else involved with Leslie.

I could do a podcast with somebody else or one of those little dogs that's got a nice gait. Um, anyway, uh, short one this time because we're clearly running out of anything interesting to say, so we'll leave it there. I'm sure Julie will have lots of interesting things to talk about when she gets back from Miami.

I will do my best. Yes. Yeah.

And, um, hopefully we'll. Excuse me. Squeeze another podcast in next week. You've been listening to digital marketing from the podcast, which is five percent digital marketing from the podcast. I've said that before, Digital Marketing From The Coalface podcast, which is, which is ninety percent drivel and five percent something useful and five percent something else.

That's probably fair. I think so, yeah.

Yeah. Okay.

Bye bye.