Why Google Ads AI is Bleeding Your Niche B2B Budget And The Brand Cost of Hyper-Aggressive Re-marketing – Episode 169

There's so much to get wrong with Google ads and Google ads reps will help you get it wrong as well and spend more money. I'm not saying they're doing it with malice. They're doing it because they are very much focused on the software.

Yeah, they're trying to get people to use the tools.

And if you are running Google ads yourself, you're not using an agency. And that's all well and good. Just make sure when Google phone up that you recognise that they're not not doing, maybe not doing it with any malice, but they may well be trying to get you to use features. And they and they can be quite persuasive about that. Yeah. Because it's clever. It's AI and it's and it'll figure out.

It knows, yes.

Just tell us the page and it'll figure out what traffic you need.

It'll make the best of your budget. It'll figure out who's going to convert. Well, it can if you've got thousands and thousands, but not if you've got small numbers.

Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface.

Good morning.

I, um. It's one of those seat of the pants podcasts because you've got not a lot to talk about.

No, I've.

Got not a lot to talk about.

Oh, well, we'll think of something else to talk about then.

Well, I know that we will. Yeah, no doubt we will. The sun's shining.

Oh, it's so nice. It's lovely. There is not one cloud in the sky. It's absolutely incredible.

Have you managed to see the. Is it lyrids? Is it.

The. Oh, the meteor shower thing? No, it's been too light.

Yeah, the moon's been out a little bit. Yeah.

The sky's been really, really light. And I'm actually not prepared to stand for twenty minutes in the dark.

You kind of need to wait till, like, midnight onwards as well, when.

It's completely.

Dark.

So I wouldn't be actually making any sense whatsoever if I'd been up till midnight last night. And, you know, I make little enough sense as it is, so that's not happening. But yeah, a nice sunny weekend, a bit of gardening, golfing for you. Not me. Running, walking.

Yeah. Yeah. All the above. Looking forward to it. Uh, might go out on my motorbike as well. Speaking of which.

Okay, here we go.

I made the mistake of. There's a thing you can get from motorbikes. It's called a quad lock. So it's a really secure mount for a for a smartphone. So you fasten this thing to your handlebars or other bits of the bike, and then you sort of put the thing on and unlock.

It like a map or whatever.

It shows people going off road and bouncing around.

Oh, it's very secure.

So obviously people use their smartphones on motorbikes for satnavs and things like that.

Yeah. Yeah. Because I was, I was following a bunch of bikers the other day and I'm like, where do they put their maps? How do they know where they're going?

Well, my BMW has got a, it's got a satnav. It's actually sits.

Oh, really?

Just above the speedo and everything else. It sits there and it's got like quite a satnav on it. But you know you can't get a posher satnav than, than a smartphone. They're superb.

Yeah. They're bang up to date.

Well the, the thing, the reason I mentioned it is that I looked at a quad lock. I thought yeah, you know, even though I've got a satnav on the bike, I've got other bikes that haven't got a satnav on, and a quad lock might be a good idea. And it's, you know.

And you could move it from bike to bike.

Potentially. Yeah. Just get a different you know, you could either just move the mount or you could put like multiple mounts. You just lock it onto whichever. And um, everywhere and I mean, everywhere I go now I'm just getting inundated with quad lock adverts.

Oh it's painful.

Facebook has more or less became unusable because like every other thing as I scroll was a quad lock advert. So my question is who decided and maybe it works. This is why I'm asking the question who decided that if somebody shows interest in something, then the best approach from there on in is to completely and utterly pester them by following them around the internet and getting them to, to get them to try and, you know, buy that product even after you've bought the product.

It's the after you've bought the product that drives me crazy. I mean, obviously if you buy it from one company, then all the other companies don't know that you've bought it. But even that company that you bought it from doesn't really know that you've bought it. I think it yeah, it doesn't quite work like that.

But I guess what I'm asking is, does doing that, this remarketing to, to in the extreme so that you literally are bombarding the person that showed even the tiniest bit of interest in your product. And maybe this isn't a big deal in B2B, but you know, it's digital marketing generally.

Absolutely.

It's not this isn't new. No, but I do worry that it's getting worse.

It does seem.

Getting attention online is getting harder. And therefore when you get even the smallest signal, then you know the plan of attack is is attack.

Yeah, it it does. It's very noticeable. The one once as soon as you sort of inquire or sort of click through to something, it is for a few days, you're just completely bombarded until the next thing happens. And it does get to a point where you think that this is just ridiculous. This is this is stuff that is relevant to me. It's like if you're, if you're looking at a course or something, and then you start getting like courses that are miles away, like, you know, the other end of the country and stuff. And it's like, well, I'm not interested in that. That's, that's completely irrelevant. But Facebook does encourage you now instead of being like, really targeted and like homing in on like a very specific audience, it prefers you to go really broad and it works out the audience. So until it's worked, worked out the audience for that particular ad, it's just going to throw it to everybody and see what sticks.

I mean, and that's.

How it learns.

Even more than Google. Meta are basically saying, look, give us your money and, and we've got it from there. Just leave it, leave it, leave it to us. Don't try and interfere. We've got this kind of thing. And yet there, you know, I assume quad lock have done that. Yeah. I said, okay, great. Here's six thousand dollars and one hundred thousand dollars or whatever the hell it is. And, and, you know, I now I might still buy a cod lock. I'm not desperate to buy a cod lock. Um, I might look at other brands, I don't know, but.

Are you not getting other brands as well? Are you just getting you're getting other brands as well.

I'm getting other types of, um, yeah, types of mounts. But you know, you often talk about how marketers ruin everything that they touch. So if you think back to its inception, so we've got this thing called remarketing now. So if somebody shows interest in your business, then we can kind of follow them around the internet and just discretely suggest that they maybe have you remember you were interested.

It was a reminder every now and again.

And that has turned into just absolute magic.

Many times a day. You're just every time you go on the internet, you're seeing this stuff and it does, it does make it so that like, it's utterly pointless, like opening your phone because yeah, everything is just like one thing.

You can click the three dots, can't you? And say.

Yeah, I'm not interested. Yeah.

I think that's quite effective. Yeah. Um, but I understand that these platforms only make money from advertising. Yeah. And, you know, I'm bored of talking about it, but, you know.

They're not skint though, you know. No, they don't need that much. One thing that I always look at if we're running ads is the frequency. Yeah. Because if you can see how many times the average person has actually seen the, the ad, and if that's like edging up beyond like four or five, six, then, you know, don't bother. But then that's for the particular creative. Yeah. I presume you're seeing different variations of the same ad.

Yeah I suppose.

Yeah. So the frequency for each one is maybe like two or three. And then they're showing a different ad and you're seeing different ads, but all for the same thing, which.

Is a signal of signal singles rather, um, quad lock out. But you know, we bought some furniture for the kitchen from Cotswold. Yeah. And they did exactly the same and following us around and all the rest of it, you know? And an interesting one is, you know, we've got Holiday Cottage. I know you have as well. We've got Holiday Cottage and I've seen because I've looked at our holiday cottage on cottages dot com.

Yeah.

Oh yes. It's followed me around the internet. Yeah.

Me too.

Yeah. You know, you, I know you use Airbnb and it's like you sort of going somewhere because you were looking at your listing and suddenly it's like, oh, you want to stay here? It's like, I own it. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't think so.

It's the inaccuracy of it. I mean, the whole thing about digital marketing is, you know, you can tag it, it's really accurate and you can get lots of good data and everything else. And you know, all of that's true. But it's also, um, if you do it badly, and I think a lot of people, possibly even most people do. Yeah. All you're really doing is just, it's digital annoying, annoying.

Little notifications though, like from Amazon. We think you might like such and such. I've had. Right. What does Amazon think of me? I've had balaclavas.

I've had balaclava for you would be a good idea. I'm kind of with Hammerson on that one.

I've had archery equipment.

Oh, shit.

I've had some other weaponry. Like, who does it think I am? And what the hell have I bought that gives it that impression? I have absolutely no idea. I'm absolutely baffled by the things it's showing me. And it also does the you know, if I've just bought something, it tries it shows me more ads for the same thing. You know, if I've just bought a table or whatever it is. It's like we thought you might like a table. But you know, I literally bought a table last week. How many tables do you think I need? Yeah. And Amazon is really bad. It's way, way off track.

I think with Amazon as well, because I am a bit of an Amazon junkie because we live out in the sticks. You know, if I need something, I just reach for the phone and it arrives the next day, more or less.

Otherwise we've got to drive for like eighty mile round trip.

To not get what you needed in the first place.

Because shops.

Are rubbish.

Now, parking and all the hassle and everything else and like it's going to take up a whole day. So yeah.

But I.

Think although the Amazon is really, really handy when you live out here.

Yeah, definitely. And I think what happens is because I buy frequently from Amazon when I haven't bought something for a couple of days, it's like.

It's like, oh, you know.

I think it sees me as a, as an Amazon junkie. It's always buying Amazon stuff. And so like, feed his habit, show him things that he doesn't even know he needs, you know what I mean? And that kind of thing. To be honest, I see the emails come in. We think you might like this. I just, I just swipe and delete them without even opening them.

I just think they're hilarious because.

Because so I don't know, I could be getting like.

Really.

Weird.

Ones as well. Yeah, I, I'm usually quite curious and like what it thinks I want this week because because I don't, I'm yeah, totally not in the market for a balaclava and I can't think why I would be because I'm not planning to rob a bank any time soon with the archery equipment that it's trying to sell me.

What about your other job? You know, the SAS?

Oh, yeah, that one. But we don't talk about that. Amazon doesn't know about that.

No.

Just what he does.

I'll tell you. Here's another example of that. Um. Karen's car. It's a VW up. Great little car. But the infotainment system and it's rubbish. And basically there's the cradle for you to put your smartphone in and and a USB connector, which is all great. But then when you put it in, you can't like say, well, just do Apple CarPlay on the phone and then I can do all the. Yeah, I know that would be too straightforward. It basically the phone just decides when you turn it on its side and it starts showing things. So we're driving along and, um, it starts. There was a picture of two, two women in bikinis like because I plugged my phone in to charge.

My phone.

And driving along and I think it was a face something or Facebook, you know what I mean? Like, you know, like when you scroll through Facebook, you get like the video, you get a video carousel.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. So it was, it was obviously something in there.

Okay. Yeah.

You know what I mean? And like, you know, before anyone says no, I don't go on Facebook to look at scantily clad women.

But why would it show you that while you were driving?

Yeah. No idea.

Because obviously knows you're driving. So why is it showing your face while you think.

It would know I was driving? Yeah, but it's not quite advertising. But it's trying to show me content that it thinks I might be interested in while I'm in the car. And it's like, I'm just thinking, like, you know, driving along, I'm driving along with Karen and it comes up and I just laugh and say, oh yeah, I want to watch next.

If you didn't know each other very well, it could be really weird.

It could be with a complete stranger in the car and you plug your phone in just because you want to charge it up or put the radio on or something, and suddenly it's showing images which are maybe inappropriate. I don't know.

It just.

Yeah, it's just it's like the lunatics are running the asylum. It's absolutely crazy. And, um, you know, and I guess now we haven't mentioned AI yet, but we will now, I guess, you know, the whole beauty of the internet in its infancy, you know, when Google started to become a thing in the late nineties and everything else. It was suddenly it was putting the power back in the hands of the consumers. We had control, we had choice and all that. And yet what's happened now is it feels like that controls gone. Unless you spend a lot of time clicking the three dots to say, don't show me this again. Don't show me this again. It's like algorithms are kind of doing things, which I don't know. It just seems crazy.

It just seems it's out of control. It's over the top. It's just too much.

And you can understand why governments are actually looking at banning under sixteen. I mean, I don't know where I what I think about that you had under sixteen. You would have probably found it quite difficult to keep them off social media.

Uh, at the time, it was still quite new. Well, not, not, not that new, but it wasn't as prevalent. You know, they were never bothered about Facebook. They were that that was sort of dead and gone. I mean, they say they don't use Facebook. They do. They do use it. You see them sort of like commenting on stuff. But, Um, it's not a big deal. They were very much the, the Snapchat generation and they were using that, but mainly for just communicating with a small group of friends. The out of.

Control nature of.

It. Yeah.

Makes me understand why governments, I mean, they've done it in Australia.

For them to be twelve years old right now.

Yeah. Very difficult because they desperately want it. And yet it's difficult to to accurately control.

It's we we worse than than when my kids were that age and um, already.

And it's not that long ago. No, no. Torrens only what twenty twenty two, twenty two.

twenty two last week. Wow. Twenty two last Saturday. Um, so yeah, it was a wee while ago. I mean, I know that they were, you know, they were under thirteen and they should have been thirteen to have Snapchat, but they were very much, you know, well, how do I communicate with my friends otherwise? And again, the thing where we live in the middle of nowhere, they couldn't go to knock some knock on someone's door. So, you know, there was an argument for having that sort of connection. But until they were thirteen, I had their logins and I was checking what they were doing. And that was the deal. Yeah. Okay. You can have it. But, um, in turn, Snapchat was in my name. I think Snapchat wasn't invented until my daughter was a little bit older, but, um, yeah, his Snapchat was, it was my Snapchat account that he was using until he was old enough to have his own one and that was thirteen. But there is definitely scope for a cut down version. So they can, they can speak to their friends, but there's, there's some sort of parental control involved that, that you can see, you know, who they're actually speaking to and delete people off and things. I think, you know, the, that they can communicate is great. I mean, I do, um, during Covid, this is a big thing during Covid, my son was fifteen, sixteen that sort of age and suddenly stuck at home, middle of nowhere with just us and his, his big sister for company and. But he has an Xbox and he was on his Xbox every night chatting to his mates, playing games, communicating, playing together online. And it was

It was a force for good.

an absolute godsend. I was never happier than when I was going to bed, and I could hear him effing and blinding in his bedroom with his friends, and it couldn't have made me happier because he was. He was having a social life.

He was.

He was relating. He was yeah, he was having that interaction with with people that he hadn't had an Xbox. Um, it would have been absolutely dreadful.

Yeah. I'm broadly speaking, you know, broadly, I think the whole, the communication systems that the internet um, has brought brought to us are a force for good are incredible, inevitably used by bad actors, angry people. And I still think we are even now. I think we're learning how to use it effectively. And I don't mean that necessarily in a business context. I mean it in a social context.

Yeah.

And we're still doing bad things with it because we haven't learned like, you know, all the good things. I mean, think about the telephone. The telephone was a wonderful invention, but it was still some people managed to figure out how to use it badly. Yeah. That's true. Heavy breathers and prank calls and all, you know, all that kind of weird shit that went on, on it.

We're all, we're all, we're all in WhatsApp group chats where somebody doesn't quite get it. Yeah.

Absolutely. Yeah.

So yeah, there's, there's always, there's always the.

So anyway, that, that was kind of was broadly, you know, I guess the takeaway from that would be like, you know, by all means, leverage these remarketing opportunities and think about all the clever things you can do that can work, but you can also get on people's nerves. Yeah. Big time.

Yeah.

Right. What have you got?

Um, yeah, it's a kind of interesting one. And it was, was something we.

Were because that wasn't, that was it was actually.

Something we were talking about when we were looking at our own website and we were looking at menu and things. And, you know, the, the general kind of conversation was, well, people don't really use the menu because if they're looking for something, they'll, they'll land on the landing page, they'll land on the page of the product they're looking for. But then I read something, obviously with AI overviews, they're not necessarily landing on the landing page. So, um, people are, are looking at asking a question and they would normally have probably ended up on some sort of educational blog post that answered the question. They're not doing that anymore. They're just landing on Google AI overview or ChatGPT or wherever they are. They're getting the answer there. And then then they may then go to Google and go, okay, find me this product and land on your page. They may go back to the overview and go, you know, okay, where did that information come from? Okay, read evolution. They go away and stick read evolution into Google. They land on our home page and suddenly they're having to use the menu to find the page. And I was like, oh my God, that that throws everything upside down.

So we're saying the citations in the AI are not always to the actual piece of information that it's citing.

If it's a citation, that just means they're just like and read evolution is somewhere that you could get it.

Because it's just, yeah, brand citations as opposed to specific pages.

So even when they linked the pages, it's not always the right page. Mhm. Um, it's not always the right place at all. They get the information presented to you first, then they go away and try and find links that sort of match what they've said. So instead of people necessarily going, right, you know, I want, um, marketing for engineering companies and landing up on our very specific marketing for engineering companies page. They're going, who does marketing for engineering companies, read evolution, Google read evolution, go to read evolution's homepage, and then they have to go to the menu to try and find the page and like, oh shit, that's not how we structured.

We would ever actively, you know, have developed menus and thought to ourselves, well, it doesn't really matter. Nobody uses them. I mean, we're always creating menus that make it easy to navigate around a website, including a sitemap, for example.

But we've always said that people are more likely to land on the page than actually stand on it from the. Yeah, still.

Are. Ninety nine percent of them still are. But you're saying like, as we go forward, then it could.

Be it's going to be.

The we see fewer people landing on specific pages potentially.

Yeah. And they're going to be coming in a different way. And, you know, blog posts are basically just going to be fodder for the AI engines. Nobody's actually ever going to land on a blog post because they're just going to get the information they want from the AI engine, the blog post, just there to get the engine to mention.

To cite you. Yeah, to mention you.

But, um, yeah, people are, you know, in the long term, which is probably about three weeks, um, going to be more often landing on your homepage and then trying to find the bit they want than, than just always landing on the, on the, the relevant page. So yeah, that is, um, that's a big change. Mhm. Or it could be a big change.

So site search is probably a big thing as well. No, probably it's worth bringing site search back.

Oh my god. Yeah.

That's yeah. Because that kind of didn't really get used. So we kind of started phasing it out. But you know, but it's maybe something worth.

Yeah. It's a big site with, with lots of pages and that you can see that people land on the home page and don't quite know where to go next, then yeah, it might be like, you know, have a little AI thing. What are you looking for on this site?

Yeah, yeah. It's interesting because, you know, we people are used to asking AI, etc. and then you've got the next or not the next step up from that. It's a step backwards, I think. But you've got the AI agents which are on individual websites. How can I help you today?

Yeah, yeah.

And they can, I say inevitably don't help you. They inevitably give up and say, oh, I'll get I'll get a real human to come and talk to you. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Unless it's a very simple question.

Yeah, yeah.

Although people do use them to, um, if they, if they use up all their credits on ChatGPT and they've used their daily thing, there's certain websites that have really good bots and people use it to answer like, you know, is it Chipotle or somebody? Um, like, rather than going on like, you know, how much is a bit of chicken there? Like they ask it like really detailed questions. Can you, can you review my CV or something? And it goes away and does it because it doesn't know. Okay, there's some of them are being used as, um.

Yeah, they're using somebody else's tokens to get their own job done.

Basically.

Yeah. That's interesting. I thought of that. Yeah.

But yeah, some of some of the, the brand website chatbots are, are good enough to, you know, answer questions way beyond just, you know, chicken related questions. Yeah, I'll see if I can dig out something on that because that was really funny. Mhm.

Okay. Google ads.

Google ads.

We're fans of Google ads. Yeah. Are we fans of the interface that changes every four minutes? Probably not so much. I think it's not the worst. It's got better.

It's better than.

It got worse and worse and worse and worse. And now it seems to be getting better. So much better. So much so that when I'm using Google ads, I actually find what I need. And I think, is that right? Because that was far too easy to get to. The thing I really wanted to look at here. It seems to have improved quite a lot. I think they must surely have realized that people were just getting fed up with the complexity of the interface, when all they want them to do is spend money.

Things are still in weird places, but I think they haven't moved for a while, and Bing's interface is nicer to use, even though obviously.

Nobody uses it.

Yeah, but it is. It is.

Fortunately, nobody uses Bing now that it's more intuitive. Yeah, we we support the use of Bing ads because sometimes all the numbers are a lot, lot lower.

It's cheaper, way cheaper.

It's way cheaper because the numbers are lower. But the quality can sometimes be good.

If you're targeting sort of big corporate enterprises.

Have locked him into being sort of thing.

Yeah, but it's nicer to use.

What I was gonna say about, um, Google ads was that we are. And you had a conversation last week, and I've had plenty of conversations with Google reps. Oh, God. And they keep pestering us to use inappropriate features. And that's the wrong word. Inappropriate. Um, features that are not useful for the type of Google ads that.

We're running.

For the very specific niche B2B industrial engineering type applications.

Yeah. The conversation I had last week was, um, so we're for one client, we're running a campaign just for around a very specific geographical area, people that would actually use their services. So it's maybe half a dozen postcodes, very specific.

Okay. Um, yeah.

So the Google rep had done some research and, you know, gone in and obviously kind of fairly clutching at straws and had worked out that some of these post codes had a lower cost per click than other post codes based on really very small numbers. And so the suggestion was to split the campaign into two campaigns, um, and have like different maximum cost per click for the different post codes, all of which are really close to each other. And there's no logic to that. There's no reason why one part of Bristol is going to have like lower cost per click than the others. And, you know, you could look at it like two weeks later and it could be completely different. But, but this was the, the kind of the best he could figure out in terms of how to improve the campaign. I think they feel they've got to suggest something.

Well, I think that's it. I think I think there's there's two camps in in the Google reps who fawn up, um, companies, you know, agencies like us who do PPC for our clients and it's the the only really understand B2C and they just want you to use the AI and turn this on and turn that on and just let the, let the algorithm take care of it and do it and everything else. And then there's the other camp who kind of, when you speak to them, they go, ah, right. Okay, I see what you mean. We're talking really low numbers, very specific. Yeah, you're probably right. The AI is not going to have enough data to learn. And they're very straight, straight, straight up about that.

Yeah. He didn't push me to the AI. He didn't push me towards the AI, which was always something. I made it very, very clear that it's low volume. This is this is not happening.

Because the AI tools within Google ads are good if it's got the volume. And generally that's a B2C type type type thing, business to consumer as opposed to what we're doing business to business. And, you know, I wrote quite a lengthy, um, blog post, which I think I published it at the beginning of this week, uh, which is worth looking up on our site. It's talking about like, you know, niche Google ads, niche PPC campaigns and what to do, what not to do, and not just to kind of give them the money and switch on the AI and hope for the best. You have to be really, really control. You know, we're just working. We've just got a new client and we're working on a, um, a PPC campaign for them. And it's, you know, it's very expensive clicks. It's a niche software used by enterprise type businesses. You know, they want, they're targeting the US and, you know, we have to be all over that like a rash.

It's going to be totally manual.

AI Macs or whatever at that. It'll just obliterate the the budget. And I think speaking to them, they were saying that, you know, they previously had spent nineteen thousand quid on clicks and got it was like six enquiries or something ridiculous. It was it was absolutely ridiculous. It sounds like they were paying for clicks that were completely, you know, very possibly.

Yeah.

Never going to work. Um, and they're doing something similar with, uh, with another agency who are doing a very bad job, it seems, on their LinkedIn because they are paying for LinkedIn traffic, which so far isn't converting. It's early days, so anything could happen. But when we looked at the landing page that they were sending people to.

It's very confusing.

Six or seven things that you could you were being different.

Yeah. Different CTAs doing. Yeah.

This is just such a, you know, a mistake that people make.

Don't make me think is is still the first rule of website.

Don't make me think so. Don't make me think to whatever. The second is what he did. Bring another one out, didn't he? I think we've got both of them in there somewhere. And we did have. But yeah, you know what you've got to think about if you're not aware, and if you're thinking of running PPC and you're in a, you know, B2B niche is like you're going to pay sometimes ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty dollars per.

Click.

Or one click. You could pay fifty dollars easily. And you know, if you're paying that and you immediately confuse people, right? So you're paying fifty dollars a click. What do they need to see? They need to you need to look credible. They need to see some social proof. And you need to give them make them, you know, give them an offer, offer them a demo. But you know, that's, that's how it works in SaaS world and offer them a demo. Prove to them that other people are already using this software. So they wouldn't be idiots if they decided to use it.

Yeah. Make them feel comfortable.

Not kind of. I mean, the one we were looking at, it said on Above the Fold book a demo or book a workshop.

Yeah. What's the difference? Read this blog. I genuinely don't know.

Or download this thing. It was just like, what do you want me to do? Like, yeah, you know, and then we did some research looking at their competitors and, um, straight away we found like, literally like no scroll pages.

Just book a demo information.

Social proof book a demo or book a chat or whatever it is, you know, and it was kind of straight away a little bit there from what I was talking about. But, you know, there's so much to get wrong with Google ads and the Google ads reps will help you get it wrong as well and spend more money. I'm not saying they're doing it with malice. They're doing it because they are very much focused on the software.

Yeah, they're trying to get people to use the.

Tools and.

Like and they're trying to help, but sometimes it's like.

They just don't understand.

We can't actually find anything to tell you. So we'll look, we can, we can see that the cost per click in different postcodes is different. So, you know, that's the only thing we can find. So let's do that. But it's because because we had actually made it very manual, having gone with air Max and found that it even even for that market, which isn't really B2B.

So if you are running Google ads yourself, you're not using an agency. And that's all well and good. Just make sure when Google phone up that you recognise that they're not not doing, maybe not doing it with any malice, but they may well be trying to get you to use features and they and they can be quite persuasive about that. Yeah. Because it's clever. It's AI and it's and you know, it'll, it'll, it'll figure out, just tell us the page and it'll figure out what traffic you need.

It'll make the best of your budget. It'll figure out who's going to convert. Well, it can if you've got thousands and thousands, but not if you've got small numbers. Mhm.

All right. That's that little rant over what you got.

Well, just kind of going back to the whole landing page thing. I mean, we've always said, you know, with, um, with clients making adverts, one message, one thing, an advert, you're interrupting people. It's in a magazine or it's, it's online when they're trying to do something else. You have to only see one thing in that advert. And we've had a lot of clients be like, you know, um buy this thing. And also we do this, this, this, this, this. No no no no, please.

Just.

Just do one thing in the advert. It's so much more powerful. You know, Kit Kat don't say, you know, um, have a break. Have a Kit Kat. And also, you know, you know, you might, you might not be having a break. You might, you might be working and eating a Kit Kat or you might be driving a car and having no, no one message. Um, so if the ad only has one message, the landing page also should only have one message. You know, the ad is um by this software. The landing page should be like direct them on the next thing they need to do. Don't just go, oh, but what if what if that person. No, you've got to go like eighty twenty rule. If eighty percent of the people are gonna like, want a demo, then that's what you want. If you think, then what what they want to do isn't book a demo, then do that thing. But just do one thing.

And it's guesswork. You know, you know, a lot of marketing is guesswork a lot. Maybe most, I don't know, experimentation. It's experimentation. Absolutely. I mean, you know, with this PPC gig, we've just landed, I mean, we're going to start off really simple. And then if we're getting, you know, click leave, click leave, click bounce, whatever you want to call it, you know, then we'll, we'll start to, to review it rather than go in like, you know, the really long page and lots and lots of different things on it. And then watch what people do. We're going to try a really simple approach for starters. Um, I'll tell you, um, One thing I don't understand when it comes to adverts is on radio adverts because I listen to talk radio. Listen to LBC quite a lot. Um, you get like um, I don't know, you'll get like say for example, we had an advert, you know, like red evolution. Industrial marketing specialists, um been around since two thousand and three. You know, if you're an engineering company, give us a call. Yeah. And then your home is at risk. If somebody's like crap at the end or some of them go, terms and conditions apply. See our website and others do a whole long blurb about terms and conditions. Why do they do that?

Because some industries, they have to.

Well, yeah, but it doesn't seem that it's the financial people that do it and the other people that don't. It seems that it doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason. It is if they have to. Surely that rule should be changed because, number one, nobody listens to it. You can't listen to it because it's too fast and it is clearly ticking a box. So that can't be good for consumers.

Completely.

And and by the end of the.

You're not listening.

You have no idea what they were advertising.

No, no. It's so weird. There should be a much better way. I've always thought that.

But the much better way seems to be. Terms and conditions apply.

Yeah.

And we all know terms and conditions apply. I don't know, I just it was just, you know, when you were talking about landing pages and it's sort of almost related. It's this idea of like hitting people with all that noise at the end. Yeah, it's all right. You know, we've ticked that box. Great. Yeah. You've also lost the consumer. You've lost the person.

It's a regulation thing. I mean, we've got clients who are like, um, FCA, you know, financial services. And every single page has to have the your home may be at risk, blah, blah, blah. Even though if it's a blog post, even it's a page about something else, it still needs all this blurb. Um, and not only that, we've had situations where like, um, we've like put it at the bottom of each page or this page, it's a longer page. It has to be further up this page. So then you've got to move it around, which then means you've got to change the entire, the whole website to move it around.

People who make a living out of busy bodying on stuff like that in the, you know, in the full knowledge that nobody's reading it. It's not helping anybody. All it means is if somewhere down the line something goes wrong. So yeah, it was in our terms and conditions, who the hell it is. It's so annoying, so annoying. But, um, yeah, you were, you were onto that. Yeah. So going back, you're absolutely right. Going back to landing pages and adverts and everything else, the temptation and we've seen it so many times. The temptation is, as you said, to put, you know, when we used to work with the um the Aston Martin specialists. Yeah. You know, they always used to get twitchy because we, we, we created some classy magazines. Yeah. Lovely, lovely ads, lovely photography, very clear message, which would make anybody who needed work doing on their classic Aston Martin think, oh, these guys classy, I like that. Yeah. And they just go to the website and find out more about the business. And they wanted to put on loads of other details, like some of the other adverts, which were literally just noise and made them look like jobbing mechanics. We were trying to set them out and you know, and it worked for them, you know. But, but they were really twitchy about it and they just, they just, you know, they actually did one, didn't they? Once they, they, um, they tweaked one of the adverts and put it into the owners magazine. And then we saw it and we were like, oh, Jesus, what have they done?

Yeah.

Just, just.

Keep it really simple. Just, you know.

Simple is good.

Think about, think about the audience, think about somebody. They're, they're not wanting to read all that bluff. They're just, they want to, if you're going to put it in front of them, make it nice to look at and make it so that at one glance, they know what you do.

Powerful imagery, clear messaging, clever messaging. As long as it's not so clever, people don't understand it. Yeah. And I think, you know, plenty of brands are guilty of doing that. Okay. Interesting one. Have you got how else?

The only thing I had was like, I was on LinkedIn the other day and I was just reading a few posts and they're just so samey. They're obviously getting written by AI and there's just a real pattern to them. Um, there's always like a few bullet points in them, but there's the, um, this is one most people think they're stuck. They're not. They're in a pattern they haven't recognised yet. And then it goes on. That's not coincidence. That's conditioning. You've seen that. It's like it's this. No, it's this and it's not this. It's that. That's a very AI thing. And I just want you kind of once you see it, you can't unsee it. And it just keeps popping up.

Do you use LinkedIn much?

I don't like it.

It's just.

I try.

To like it. Do you think.

Some people.

You think, do you think people who use it a lot genuinely think people care when they do? You know, the the so proud to announce that.

They've been downgraded, thankfully, because there was a while where it was just like if you didn't have a mental health problem or a tragedy in your family, then you weren't going to get any visibility. But that has.

As it have. They changed the algorithm.

They have changed the algorithm, and there's noticeably less and less of that now. That's good, because the actual sob story stuff, that was just really painful for a while. It was like, oh, for God's sake. That's not why I'm here. And I don't I don't know you. So why, you know? Yeah. Terribly sad that you've had a personal tragedy, but I don't actually know who you are. And. Yeah. And why are you telling me this? Um, so that that's gone down the, you know, we've done really well and we've, we've done this actually, that gets engagement people, which is kind of quite nice.

I don't think it gets genuine engagement. I think it gets platitude type engagement. Oh really pleased for you. Well done. Yay. Go you sort of thing. And it's like people are really thinking, oh, wanker. Well I think.

I think I mean.

Well that's what I think.

I see I'm going with the. That's really nice. People are actually congratulating people because they've done something.

I don't know.

But yeah.

I'm interested in people. I'm interested in people's stories. I'm not interested in people just trying to tell me how great they are, how wonderful their life is. And I think that is a thing with social media.

I'm more interested in them telling me how awful their life is.

No, I mean, that's the other extreme. But but like stories that have a yeah, that have a, not a meaning, but stories that are interesting, you know, we've just won a nice a good contract. Yeah. It's not really that interesting. You know, we've, you know, we would we did some B Corp stuff and you know, that kind of kind of made me teeth itch a bit because nobody really cares that we're a B Corp except us. Yeah. You know, broadly speaking, but we did a little bit of that and yeah.

We didn't we didn't push it too hard.

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I don't spend enough time in LinkedIn. If I do spend time in LinkedIn, I, I'll be trying to put something that is either entertaining or educational and staying away from the self-congratulatory. Proud to announce that I've been appointed as type bullshit.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's all quite boring.

Nobody cares, I don't think. Anyway. Maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm just horrible.

But somebody you know and they've done something, then that's nice, but it's just it tends to be full of a lot of people you don't really know. And then it's like, well, I don't, I don't, I can't even remember why you're on my LinkedIn. I must have met you somewhere at some point. And I don't know who you are and I don't really care. But you know, if it's somebody you went to school with or somebody you used to work with, and they've moved jobs or they've they've done something, then yeah, I'm genuinely interested in that and I'm happy to see it.

I saw something like that, you know, stuff that from somebody that I actually like or know. But anyway.

Yeah, it's um.

You're not going to convince me. I think it's a pile of pants.

No, I'm not, I'm not a fan. It's like I don't go on it for pleasure. I kind of go on because I have to and I'm trying to do it every year. I'm like, right, I'm going to use LinkedIn this year. And then like, oh, do I have to? You can't make me.

When I go in to try and you know, I will, I'll share, you know, maybe if I've written a blog post and I think it's particularly good, useful, I maybe share that with you guys. Take care of all that anyway.

Well, I'm.

Generally putting.

Stuff out, me and Leslie putting stuff out on the radio channel, and it's just a case.

Of repost it on our own personal channels.

That's right of us having to repost it because again, I think LinkedIn, the company pages are even less and less obvious. It's very much the individual stuff that is getting pushed out.

Because why would you go to a company's page? You could go to the website if you want to know about them. If you go to their page on LinkedIn, it's almost certainly just going to be telling, you know, articles telling you how wonderful they are.

Yeah, yeah.

Unless it's like ours where we just link to, to blogs and.

Educational stuff that we're still finding that on the blog on the website anyway. So it's very much the, um, individual posts that that matter and carry weight on LinkedIn. Yeah. So, um, yeah, if you're putting stuff out in the company page, it's really, really important to, um, share it from personal accounts because that's how it's actually going to get seen.

Good. So when was the last time you were pestered by, um, a utilities salesperson.

In the office, like constantly. We get.

Them.

All the time at home. No, because we don't have a home. We don't have landlines.

We don't either anymore. And that means they've kind of gone away, although I do still get them on the mobile phone. In fact.

I.

Yeah, I.

Still, I don't answer unknown numbers on the whole. Yeah.

Unless I've suspected spam red button.

Um, I did answer it by mistake the other day. And then that was the Google rep who ended up having me meeting with. Yeah.

Um, but we do in the office, we're getting them all the time. And how often. I mean, the first thing, first thing is I assume that that method of cold call marketing must work because they all do it. So they can't be employing all those people.

Yeah, they can't be.

They must get when they phone up and say, you know, right. You know, because it's a really difficult suppliers. I mentioned it because it's a difficult sell because like we work in B2B and it's often a difficult sell. It's, you've got to get in front of the right people, everything else. It's not just like, check these new trainers out for fifty quid. I'll try them. You know, it's more more complicated than that. So they call up the first thing they need to do is when is it due for renewal? And like, who knows that? Yeah, exactly. I'm not clear. I've got no idea. So. And then and then it's like, well, have you have you got access to the bill? You know, who takes care of it? Yeah. You know, who are you with all of that stuff? They've got to gather all that information and then and then they've got to try and persuade you to let them court. And then you're going to hand over your utility bills to potentially an absolute clown show.

Somebody who's not utility provider.

We're with. No, they're we're with them here. We're with octopus for the electricity, and there is no gas or anything else. So we just use electricity and water. But with business stream for the water and they are an absolute clown show. We've we've we've already after changing the direct debit, we're already four hundred pounds in credit with our water because yeah, they insist on taking, oh, we'll drop it to one hundred and ten pounds and we're like, we're using about fifty quid a month if that. Do you know what I mean? And whatever it is, we don't use a huge amount of water. We've got, you know, cups of tea and a toilet.

And a.

Shower.

That drips constantly.

Tap that drips a little bit. Yeah. That's right. Because that's it's designed to drip, which is incredible.

So annoying.

Though. Um, but yeah, it just this week because I, the guy phoned and I managed to get rid of him last week and then he phoned up, I said I wasn't the same guy. I said, I said I wouldn't phone back till Friday because I said I'll phone Karen. I was in, I kind of slipped up and I said, oh, you need to speak to Karen for that. Oh no. And then he phoned back and then I said, look, I've had to think about it. And yeah, don't you know we we're with octopus. It's fine. I mean it's not going to make much of a difference. Whoever we're with, we don't use a huge amount of electricity. Doesn't mean the bill isn't huge because electricity is more expensive than gold, I think. Yes. And, um. Oh, that's a real shame. That's a real shame, because. Because I can actually get you some quotes this afternoon. It's just like, no, it is so like hackneyed and old and boring and tedious and like, I don't like hanging up on people I don't like.

I know it's a shame because.

They're just up there anything or just hanging up without saying bugger.

Off. And there aren't any jobs. So if they've got a job doing that, it's because.

I'm always polite to cold callers because it's a tough job.

Yeah. I mean, but nobody's nobody's doing that job because it's their dream job. They're doing it because they need a job.

No, because we get pestered a lot. Being an agency, we get pestered from companies who want to do our outreach for us, which will effectively be cold calling. Yeah. All right. Do you want to buy some inbound marketing? You know what I mean? All right. They've maybe got ways that they can sell it and everything else. And thankfully, you know, we've we, we get decent, you know, decent enquiries coming coming through anyway because of the tools that we're using. But I don't know, I just wonder, you know, is there a shelf life on this whole cold call?

Well, it is hard because um, because um phones or your phone does less suspected spam. Mine doesn't do that, but still, I just don't answer it or very rarely answer it if I don't recognise the number because you know that, that it's just going to be somebody trying to sell you something. Mhm. And so people hardly ever, and younger people in particular, they never answer their phones. So how can you make a living out of cold calling if people literally don't answer their phones anymore?

It's almost like that industry refuses to acknowledge and think, you know what? This is kind of done. Or I suspect it must work.

It must do, it must do because, um, otherwise they're going to go out of business.

Yeah. Mhm. Certainly there's a lot of cold calling done to try and get you to buy their cold calling service.

Yeah.

For us anyway.

Yeah.

Um, anyway, it's just. Yeah, I was kind of more interested, like, you know, like, how often have people been contacted by a utilities person and actually finished up like getting a really good deal and everything went really well.

Yeah. I don't know, I don't know.

Speaking of, that thing's not going really well just to finish off and it's a digital related thing, but I was trying to pay somebody some money this week and for some reason, because I did it at like ten past nine on a Monday night, it's like flagged up by there. Now, this is somebody I've already paid some money to, right. So I'm now paying them some more money, but it got flagged up by fraud.

I mean, if it was two in the morning, I kind of get it sometimes. Yeah. I had a, um, online shopping payment and um, they, they put it through two in the morning and it got blocked. Okay. Fair enough. Because that's quite weird and weird.

Yeah.

But nine at night really?

No. That's right. But it did actually say in the, in the banking app it flashed up and said, oh, you know, this has been, this has been flagged. It might take up to four hours for the payment to be released. Well, at eleven o'clock the next day, I finally got called by their fraud department just to make sure it was a legit payment.

Why did they think it was?

Meanwhile, I've got to contact the person who I've told two minutes ago. Right. I'm sending the money now. I've then got to contact them and say, oh, um, the bank, you know, and I asked to me, I was like, will it just sound like I'm, um, you know, like making it.

Sound like you're scamming them now? Exactly. I mean.

For God's sake, you know, but I did say to the guy when they phoned, you know, I appreciate that, that you do look out for us and try and spot these things and it's great. But at the same time, I was thinking, oh, you know, did you really need to do it with that one? I'd already made a payment to them.

Yeah, it's.

Here or here or.

I think, I think it is a positive thing on the whole that they, they do block payments that look iffy. But I, you know, it's automated. It's based on rules. So it's, it's always going to be majority kind of. Yeah, most of them are right. It's always going to kind of catch the odd one. It's like your spam filter on your email isn't it?

I love technology. I love what we do. I just I'm just blown away by it all the time. But the complexity that it's bringing into our lives, you know, like the two factor we were laughing the other day, like, when are we going to have like, you know, five factor authentication now go to your window and wave, you know what I mean? It's like, I know, it's like, how, where's that going to go? Because Google will get cracked at some point.

You're in Google.

We use.

Gmail, we use Google Calendar, We use Google Meet all of them, and you can be working away in Google using the Google Chat using Google Mail. And you go into a meeting on Google Meet and it goes, please verify who you are. You have to put in your your email, you've got to put in your password, you've then got your get your phone and it always does it when you're, you know, if you've got a meeting at nine o'clock in the morning and you click on.

It, it's.

nine o'clock.

Sitting there going, oh, Julie's about to go into a meeting. Click.

She's running late. You know, it's nine o'clock on the dot. She's just made it to this meeting in time. We'll just make her log in again and then we'll make her.

Decide the fingerprint won't work. I want the password because my password for my Mac is like this long.

It's, you.

Know, and it's like, you know, fingerprint in, fingerprint in. And it's like, no, no, I want your password today.

Yeah.

It's like I was in there two minutes ago.

It's still me. That's the thing with Google. Like I literally just sent an email and I literally have been putting messages in chat. Yeah. Why? Why do you think it isn't me? When I try and go into a meeting or you were halfway through writing an email yesterday and it logged you out like I was, it was me when I started writing this email. It's still me at the end of the email. Why do you think it isn't? It's so yeah.

Maybe that's it. Maybe that's the mystery of it. Maybe they have it all randomised like that. So you can't predict and it keeps it keeps, you know, keeps the crims on their toes, I don't know. Anyway, anyway, we've talked about all kinds of things today. Some of it was digital marketing as usual, and some of it wasn't as usual. I can't think of anything else just now. I'm quite happy just to, uh, just to.

Yeah.

That's enough. It's, uh, what, six minutes past eleven?

Sun. Sun still shining. Still no clouds.

It's good. Yeah, it's going to be twenty degrees today. Fantastic.

Oh.

Love it, love it. Lovely. Yeah. All right. We'll speak to you next time. You've been listening to Digital Marketing From The Coalface, Julie. And see you next time.

Bye.