Latest / Data Beats Opinion / The Google Ads number you shouldn't trust

Transcript

The Google Ads number you shouldn't trust · Data Beats Opinion

• 0:00
  Speaker A: Your Google Ads dashboard says you're doing eight times row less. Your bank account says something very different. One of those is lying to you. My guest today took over an account spending six figures a month. Google reported the campaigns were crushing it. The conversion tracking was a complete mess. They were making a fraction of what they thought they were. David Porcieri is founder of Growass. His AI agents manage around $35 million a month in Google Ad spend. He has looked inside thousands of accounts and he says most of them are broken in ways that the owners just can't see. Today we get into why Google Ads got so much harder this year. The one report that tells you if your agency is actually doing anything and two levers that still decide whether your ads work at all. Let's start the show. David, super glad to have you on. Really excited about this. Thanks for. Thanks for joining us.
• 0:57
  Speaker B: Thank you, Keith. It's a pleasure to be on.
• 0:59
  Speaker A: Yeah. And for people who don't know who you are, can you tell us a little bit about your background, where you came from, and the awesomeness of GrowAss?
• 1:08
  Speaker B: Sure. I mean, look, I'm the founder of GrowAss. Prior to that, I used to work in private equity and venture capital. Before that, I studied computer science. A bit of an unorthodox, I think, background to starting to start in grass. Right. But it all sort of linked into place at a moment in time and so here we are.
• 1:28
  Speaker A: Yeah. And so as we were kind of talking about before we started, this, Gross is probably my favorite company name ever created. And I assume I'm going to go out on a limb. It's a portmanteau of Grow and Roas. Is that correct?
• 1:43
  Speaker B: That's correct. That's correct.
• 1:44
  Speaker A: And yeah, go. Go into it a little.
• 1:47
  Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, look, we started. I started Grass probably a year and a half ago now. Okay. Okay. And I was playing around a lot of different names actually. It's not like it came to me at first. Let's just be clear. It didn't just come to me. I was looking for also a name where the AI was available at the time. And it was also obviously we started off just doing Google Ads. Like that's still all we do. We will eventually branch out, but the G as well. The G for Google. So, yeah, that's kind of. It sort of came to me a little bit of inspiration, but it also seemed quite natural. So it's not.
• 2:23
  Speaker A: So you mentioned something here like Google Ads are in a weird place. So we're in the middle of 2026 right now, for the last few years, honestly, Google Ads has been getting harder and harder and it feels like it's kind of gone off a cliff in the last couple of months. Are they failing? Like, what is going on? Help me out here.
• 2:50
  Speaker B: So Google, they have a big thing that they have to reckon with right now, right, which is obviously chatgpt. And the way that people are searching is now basically very different to how it was two, three years ago. They have to adapt their business model to that, but obviously they can't just turn off their entire ad engine and they think they've been building for 15, 20 years.
• 3:08
  Speaker A: It's the only thing that makes them money.
• 3:09
  Speaker B: Right, correct, exactly. So I think that's there in a very, very transitory phase right now where they're trying to get that figured out and they're finding ways of. We actually already started experimenting with ChatGPT ads. That's proving quite interesting. So, yeah, I think they're still figuring a lot out internally what they can do for clients, what it's doing for performance. I mean, it's nuked. The organic side is nuked for a lot of people. It's a very, very transitory phase. They're also trying to embed as much AI as possible into their own products. And a lot of the times that's causing also a lot of disruption. So, like, it's a very, very tricky position.
• 3:48
  Speaker A: I think that's one of the biggest. So we do ads, although not much anymore. We used to do a lot of ad spend each month. We started scaling that back about, I think, a year and a half, two years ago, because we just weren't seeing the ROI anymore. And one of the things as we've kind of dipped our toes back into it, is that all the controls that we used to have in ads are really gone. And it's interesting because all the controls around CREAT are gone, but there's no controls around budgeting. The thing that I want AI to do, which is the budgeting, the automatic turn on and turn off to let me know the combinations that are doing well are not where any of these companies are putting their AI effort, they're all putting it into gen AI of like, hey, here's 20 headlines we're going to test and. Which seems less valuable to me. Like, how do you feel about that having. Having a company that optimize ads through AI? Right.
• 4:47
  Speaker B: Like, I'll be careful what I say here because obviously we have very, very good relationships with the people at Google. But I think what some People don't know is that like the incentives are sometimes misaligned. Okay. Google wants you to spend as much money as physically possible through their platform. Right. So sometimes they'll give recommendations or they'll do certain things which align with their incentives and maybe not yours. Okay. And that's where you as the advertiser really need to know what you're doing and need to be on the pulse of things to be able to counteract whatever Google is suggesting or whatever Google is pushing. The other thing is that Google's out there is also constantly changing like Google Ads, like how it was even just a year ago. It feels so different today. Like what we're seeing working campaigns today is so different to not even a year ago. And that's only going to continue changing. So yeah, Google have their own set of incentives basically. And you have to be very careful to, to navigate those, I think.
• 5:41
  Speaker A: Yeah. And I think that there is also in Google's defense, there's, if you are spending a ton of money on Google Ads, then there's a lot more learning for the AI to have and I think there's a lot more value there. But for a lot of people in kind of the small to medium business size or the creator size, I think it's, I think it works against them because they can't get enough volume to give good recommendations from the Google AI engine. Yep, yep, I'll remember that. I remember we were doing one ad and Google, we didn't even have the AI thing turned on, I don't think. But it was, it gave me a. The best performing ad was title Segmetrics. Okay. Headline Segmetrics, okay. Description Segmetrics. So when people saw this ad it was just segmetrics, Segmetric segment. I thought I was like in being John Malkovich, right, Where everyone's just saying Malkovich. But that was apparently Google's number one ad for us at that time. And yeah, so it has been rough I think. And that's why I am interested so much in grow as and things like this that are not. I've always. So one of the reasons we created psychometrics was because you can't as good or as not evil or as whatever all these ad platforms are, they do have their internal biases and I fully believe that third party systems taking that data and doing analysis on top of it is the only way to keep all of your marketing honest. And that's why I'm so interested about grow as, which is that we have a system here that is a lot of the intelligence that you would hope that Google Ads would have natively, but it lays on top of it because it is that third party trusted source.
• 7:36
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I'll give you some context as to grass and what occurred, how he got to this point. It started off just as a little tool, right? Like a recommendations tool that people would have to log in and use, et cetera, et cetera. We got a lot of users. It was a very low ticket offer. Like the first grass price was like $49 for up to 1k of ad spend. Back in the day got a lot of users. And what we realized is that actually it was actually like the smaller spenders who were the most demanding. Like people spend like 2k a month were like, well, I thought this could automate my entire campaigns. Oh no. But then it got me thinking, is that even possible? Is that even possible? So then we basically did a six month rebound and started building towards full autonomy. Yeah, we learned a lot, right during that phase. We saw a lot of things. And just the other thing is what, the other challenge we had is that Google itself changed. Google changed a lot. Yeah, that's the story on us. That's sort of how we evolved from a little recommendations tool to now full autonomy where we trained our own models, etc. Etc.
• 8:38
  Speaker A: And so do you still, are you still able to work with those small medium business people doing 2 to 5k a month or is it something that, okay, you have to be doing 10, 50k a month to actually getting results from it?
• 8:51
  Speaker B: Yeah, that's a fair question. We still do, we still definitely do work with the smaller people, the smaller spenders with the objective. And we only take, we only take these accounts on if we have a very clear plan to getting them to spending 10, 20, 30. That's really how we approach it. And that often comes down to the offer, Right. Is the offer good? Can it convert on call traffic? One thing as well we've seen a lot is you have people who are, who can close their offer, can close really well on warm traffic, on referrals. Getting that to convert on call traffic is a whole other story.
• 9:21
  Speaker A: Right?
• 9:22
  Speaker B: So that's something else that we, we see and are very careful of.
• 9:26
  Speaker A: Interesting, interesting. So do you then see not only just the offer, but are there types of businesses that are good, bad, valuable, not for maybe even Google Ads in general now? It used to be like any company could use Google Ads and now I feel like it's, it's changed a lot
• 9:46
  Speaker B: well, it's just got a lot more competitive. That's the problem. So I think 10 years ago you could have, you could not be super competitive and then actually be profitable with it. In today's day and age, that's a lot, lot tougher. So I think still any business model can work, but ultimately it still comes down to ltv, to cac. Right. That's like the number one thing that you need to. Sometimes we'll talk to businesses. Yeah, I just want to go. And they don't even know. Like, they have no sense of any numbers whatsoever. They don't, like, um. And we're like, you should probably figure that out before you even consider running any form of ads. It's very important.
• 10:18
  Speaker A: It is important to know how much you're spending and how much you're making back from your ads.
• 10:22
  Speaker B: Correct, correct.
• 10:23
  Speaker A: Also what that window is because like, you know, we're a SaaS company and so we do not expect to make our CAC back or yeah, our CAC back in the first 30 days or the first seven days or whatever. Like, it's just not possible. So like we have to. But we have to know, okay, it takes this long to move back. And then from that we can calculate, okay, this is the conversion rate we need. And then we can start to see, okay, within the first five days we know this campaign is doing well or not, because we know those back end numbers.
• 10:51
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yep, exactly.
• 10:52
  Speaker A: Yeah. So you've said that, you know, you work with a lot of these companies that are doing ads and you say that the majority of them are misconfigured. And I'm always curious, like, you know, we were kind of talking about like, it's so complicated at this point because Google and Facebook have tried to make it simple, but. But by making it simple they've made everything very opaque. You don't know what any of the levers are doing anymore except through trial and error. So what are some of these misconfigurations that you're always seeing?
• 11:24
  Speaker B: Countless. Countless. I think. I mean, it's just often basic stuff. A lot of people even have conversion tracking set up correctly. We took on an account that was spending six figures a month where the conversion tracking was a complete mess. They didn't actually know what their roas was. Oh yeah, we're kind of making some money. And then after we completely fixed it and they're like, oh, we're not actually making as much money as we thought because a previous agency had just like Google said their rice was like 8 or 9. I was like, oh, it's amazing. It's actually closer. Whatever. I won't say, but it's a lot of. So that's what negative they were paying. So yeah, this stuff happens very often. I think you need to be careful. Conversion tracking. I think Landing page is off is a lever that a lot of people don't spend a lot of time thinking about. I say that more and more because you have all these platforms like lovable and all these landing page builders, which I think are good to get something basic going but that you can always see when something's being created by AI. And those sorts of pages are very clearly just created by AI. They definitely do perform worse than something that has a bit more thought into it. Landing page is often a lever that we see is just breaking everything. You can have the best Google Ads, campaign, best everything. If your landing page is trash, no social, social proof, no nothing, then you're going to be in big trouble. Often the stuff I think you're doing off Google that can, you know, that can really mess your results. And within Google, we don't have to get too technical like what we see inside Google. But yeah, we see a lot. We've seen a lot of pretty horrible stuff.
• 12:56
  Speaker A: It's been one of the, I mean we've had this problem before, many, many years ago. We decided to take a shortcut with our conversion tracking and we're like, okay, instead of. Once the. We had a trial signup form, right. And it requires a credit card up front. And we said, well, it's a pain in the butt to get it on the, on the page after the sign up. So let's just do it on the button click. And so yeah, yeah, so we trained Google to send us a bunch of credit card scammers and that, that took us, that took us a good two weeks, three weeks to A figure out and B figure fix. Because we had to destroy all the campaigns and say like, no, no, no, no more of this. Like change the conversion events and just get rid of them. Because we had, we had trained Google and Facebook to like, hey, you know what we really want is people testing out our form with fake credit cards.
• 13:43
  Speaker B: So that's tough. That's very tough.
• 13:45
  Speaker A: Yeah, it's. And it's easy to do like if you don't consider all that. And then you have an agency or someone come in and you're like, okay. I don't know what they did. They just said something. Yeah, I can see it's very easy to have this all be configured in ways that you don't even understand the repercussions of.
• 14:04
  Speaker B: Yeah, for sure, for sure.
• 14:06
  Speaker A: And do you find that these things are. I mean, I guess they are kind of visible but still invisible to the business owners. Right. Because they could go find it, but they generally don't know how. And is that something that when you come in, you're like, look, we need to do an audit. You need to figure out what's actually going on with everything.
• 14:27
  Speaker B: I mean, yeah, of course. That's always like the first thing that we'll do. I think things have been made easier, though, recently, to be fair, which is with Claude, with all these LLM tools. And I recommend people just do this anyway is you go and like, export as much of your data as possible. Google Ads dump into Claude and see what it says. It's a good. Often we'll say some complete crap sometimes, but it might say some things that are useful, so. Or at least it might draw your attention to certain pieces. It might say, for example, this search term here, you've had it live for like 90 days. It's completely overspending. Cut it. That's interesting, that's useful. And that's like a first step any business owner should take. Whether you go to an agency, even if you're actually with an agency right now, you should just do that to like, almost double check what they're doing now. Again, Claude can hallucinate. It's nowhere near perfect for this sort of thing, but it's a good, good starting point. So the tools today do make it easy to catch stuff that, you know, two years ago probably would have been a bit more tricky.
• 15:19
  Speaker A: Yeah, I find it best. I mean, I always assume that Claude is lying to me. I find it to be lazy, I find it to be a liar. But it does, just like you're saying, it does bring in ideas. It's like, hey, this pixel isn't installed correctly. So I go check, I double check. It's like, no, it was installed correctly. It's like, oh, you were right. But it will find stuff that you didn't even think about to check. And it has found stuff for me that I haven't even thought to check before. So correct. 100%. 100%. So I want to dive a little bit into kind of like what you said. Google's really pushing everyone towards AI automation in the ads themselves. So we're talking about performance Max, we're pmax and all the new stuff. I can't even keep track of a lot of it everything seems to be named Max at this point. So do you feel that these are actually making the campaigns better or just more opaque or like what's your take on all this?
• 16:18
  Speaker B: Yeah, better. Definitely not yet. Okay. Like most people forget, PMAX sucked for the first two, three years after it came out. Completely sucked. Now it's. I'm not saying it's limited control, but in some cases it's just amazing. It's great, whatever. Yeah. Google is 100% pushing it. The big thing now is AI SearchMax, right? Which is a complete again giving more control to Google, more AI, more automations. The problem is as an advertiser you can't resist these. You can't be like, nah, I'm not going to do that. Why? Because, for example, if you want to AI Overview mode is this new big thing, right? AI Search, you want to show up in that sort of top list. Google is making it such that if you want to show up in a over mode, you have to be running AI Searchmax or you are running Target CPA plus Broad Match. Again, Broad Match is giving a lot of control to Google. They're like, yeah, it's tricky. They're basically trying to force you, force you into using these things if you want to compete in the new search box and what that's going to look like effectively. And we're seeing it be more important in some niches than others. So for example, we have customers in healthcare where they literally have no choice but to adopt AI Searchmax and Broad Match and all that stuff. Otherwise they just will not show. That's just healthcare, for example. But there's others where maybe it's not so important, right? Maybe legal services, more Legion type of businesses. It's a bit more relaxed. So yeah, it's a tricky spot and I think unfortunately you're just gonna have to adapt or die. You're gonna have to be. Don't be too much of a guinea pig either. But I think if you are careful, you know what you're doing and you have other things set up in your account to counteract what Google is pushing, you'll be fine. That's 100% where everything is heading, without a doubt.
• 17:58
  Speaker A: Do you still feel like retargeting has a place anymore? Like because they've. They retargeting has done a whole 180 because it used to be retargeting was the cheapest ads you can run. Now it's the most expensive by far. And do you still feel like, okay, AI Search, Max P Max. All that's your top of funnel cold. And then you, you just need that retargeting at the back end. I think so many people are pushed off of retargeting because of the price and also because no one really talks about it as much as they talk about AI search and stuff. Because they are the new thing that everyone needs to get their heads around. How do you feel that relationship is going?
• 18:38
  Speaker B: Yeah, I think still, it's still too early to stop things like retargeting traditionally. I think we're still there. I expect we're probably a year or 2 away before AI, Searchmax, etc. Really cleanly outperforms not running it. Maybe, maybe we won't have a choice. Maybe, maybe it will be opt in by default and you won't have a choice but to run it. But yeah, I still think we're a bit far away before. Like we can forget a lot of the old Google Ads principles, I would say.
• 19:09
  Speaker A: Yeah. And I think that at some point it's going to come back to what we were doing before all this happened. And I keep feeling like everything that's new is. Everything that's old is new again, especially within the ad space. And I'm definitely not smart enough to know what form that's going to take, but I have this feeling like it's going to. Eventually we're going to hit that singularity of the AI ads, not the AI singularity, hopefully. And that will be in this place where we can actually understand what's going on because everything just feels so up in the air right now.
• 19:46
  Speaker B: It does. I'm very curious to see what OpenAI do with their ads platform.
• 19:50
  Speaker A: Yeah. Have you checked it out much?
• 19:53
  Speaker B: Yeah, we're spending on it right now.
• 19:55
  Speaker A: Yeah. So are we. So are we.
• 19:56
  Speaker B: Okay.
• 19:57
  Speaker A: It is limited.
• 19:58
  Speaker B: Yeah, super.
• 20:00
  Speaker A: Like I. Not to. Not to disparage because everyone's ad platform sucks when they launch it and. But I logged in, I was like, wow, this is like a crud app that a junior dev could build in a weekend kind of thing. It's so bare bones. But that's not the value of these things. Right. So we've been testing it out and so far it's been interesting. It's been an interesting experiment and I'll see. I'm curious to see what it does going forward.
• 20:30
  Speaker B: Yeah, if they keep it, I think they will. They have to. They have no choice.
• 20:35
  Speaker A: Yeah, they do. They're full into that at this point. I'm curious to see if other places decide to.
• 20:43
  Speaker B: Yeah, well, Claude said They wouldn't. Right. Anthropic. They always.
• 20:47
  Speaker A: Anthropomics said they would not.
• 20:48
  Speaker B: Yeah, which I don't know why, like what's the, the reasoning for not?
• 20:53
  Speaker A: I. I mean, I think enterprise will eventually have. Yeah, it's enterprise, but I think all things will eventually have ads. Just like they said. Netflix will never have ads and everything goes down eventually. Like it's a differentiator in the beginning. Cable, cable TV originally was sold on. Hey, we don't have ads. And we see how that went and I think that's just the, the flow of things. Yeah, I do, I do want to jump back to something that you had mentioned that I thought was interesting. You were talking about the landing pages and how it still really is the quality of the landing page and the non aness of the landing page. I'd love to. I'd love to. I think so many marketers are now like, I can just have Claude stand this up and it looks great and yeah, talk to that a little bit because I want to dig in on that a little bit. Okay.
• 21:48
  Speaker B: I mean, look, I think things like layout, structure, not silly at all to like experiment and prototype is Claude. I think the problem is like you have these AI, you can just tell when something is air slow. The buttons, the gradients, the. All these things. It's just super obvious and it's a massive turnoff I think for a lot of people, at least for me, when I go to a website and I see like it's just been fully done with AI, I can see it's just some Claude code thingy. I think it's a big turn off. So I think it definitely has a place to maybe actually if you can set up workflows such that you have your existing landing page that you've had tested work for a while on and you can use Claud code to spin up lots of variations of it and test those ab, test those. Makes complete sense. If you want to generate landing pages from scratch, I would be careful because you can see, like you can actually just see when something's there. It's still at this point.
• 22:41
  Speaker A: Yeah. It's funny because.
• 22:43
  Speaker B: What was it?
• 22:43
  Speaker A: It was. ChatGPT just released the new image model a couple of weeks ago or a month ago or something. And one of my marketing team people, they showed me this image. I was like, oh my God, they finally cracked it. This is great, this image. It's on brand, it looks great. Like we could definitely use this. And then I started scrolling in LinkedIn because I scroll on LinkedIn and everyone has the exact same image. It looks exactly the same. So if you're not used to seeing them, I fully agree. Like, if you're not used to seeing this, you're like, oh, this is great. And then you start to realize, oh, everything that has a curved border and that left hand. Oh, God, kills me every time. It's like, yeah, it does. It definitely has a style and a stink to it, I think.
• 23:29
  Speaker B: Correct.
• 23:31
  Speaker A: I think it's going to be similar.
• 23:33
  Speaker B: I think.
• 23:34
  Speaker A: Was it the 90s that they clip art, Remember, clip art was such a big thing and at the beginning everyone was like, I can just put in an image and then it's going to spice up my PowerPoint presentation. And then within two years it's like everyone was using it and it's like, this is just cheap garbage at this point.
• 23:52
  Speaker B: Yeah, 100%. 100%.
• 23:54
  Speaker A: So what are some of the ways that AI does help with this? With landing pages and this optimization? Because I mean, one of the things that I think that you're bullish on is this idea that AI is really going to help marketers. It's going to be this superpower for marketers where we don't have to do all of the, all the schlock work. Right.
• 24:13
  Speaker B: Yes, I agree. Yeah, I think so. You know, my position on this changed a lot. Just I'll give some context, right. I think probably nine months ago I was like, what? From what I was seeing, what we were building, I was like, okay, it's over for all PPC humans. Bye, bye. See ya. See ya. Thanks for your time. That's actually my position. That's what it was nine months ago. It changed a lot. So I think where I think the human is still extremely important is on strategy, like big picture strategy. What are we going to do? I think AI can sort of help a little bit, but you still need a human in the loop. Like the idea, and that's actually what we were building towards initially at Grass is like, okay, we don't have to even speak to you ever. You have to speak to any humans. You can just sort of connect a campaign that actually doesn't work well in practice because you still need the human touch point. You still need to understand the business, what they're after. Like there's so many things that go into it. There's also psychological aspect to that as well, I found. Because.
• 25:11
  Speaker A: Interesting.
• 25:12
  Speaker B: Yeah. Because people like if someone, let's say a campaign is dipped for any reason, it could be, it could be any reason also, it could be Google could be the business, could be competition has entered the auctions, could be anything. A human asks that to some sort of chat bot, what the hell is going on? And they get that answer. Oh, this is, this is B.S. this doesn't work. Whatever, whatever. I don't buy this. If they ask that to a human that they know and they trust a little bit, it's completely different conversation. Yeah, completely different. And they accept. Okay, fine, all right, it's just a bad week, we'll move on. I say this because I've experienced this like hundreds of times, so I know what I'm talking about. So I think the human loop is still super important in this space. I do think, however, the daily execution work that goes into improving optimizing campaigns, I think that solved. I think that solved. I think we were like probably one of the first to solve. Like we got there. Obviously I'm speaking, I'm saying that myself, obviously. But I do think that bit is solved. But I think the bit that will never go away ever is still. That the human loop element is still very important.
• 26:14
  Speaker A: For sure. Yeah. I think that also this is, I mean there's so much talk about AI. No one really knows to be honest, like what's going to happen. But the way that I see it as in two camps. So one is there's people who think I just does everything for you and takes the human out of the loop, which I don't personally agree with. And then there is the human in the loop where AI is just a tool to remove our busy work. Because as any ad person will tell you, the worst part is managing the campaign spend day to day like it is absolutely mind numbing boring work that no one wants to do. And that part being taken off our plate so that we can focus on, okay, what are the macro trends here? What are the things, what's the strategy that we need to do from these changes? That's the fascinating part to me.
• 27:07
  Speaker B: Agree. I also think it depends a lot on the job as well, to be honest. Because for example, I'll say this without trying to scare off or offend anyone. I do think software development is one where it's like, that's a lot more tricky because it went from like, okay, we're like spinning up agents to do the work and write code and push whatever, whatever. Now I think I was watching something and actually I sent it to my cto, like why are you not doing this? Which is like the anthropic guy was talking about how he. Now all he does is Write loops. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's like the next, like where does it stop? Right. I think it depends on the job, but I do think someone like soft development is a lot more affected. I think if you're managing campaigns for other people, you're managing other people's money, you will always need a human in the loop. Some contact point has to be there.
• 27:58
  Speaker A: I, I think and I think it is that responsibility. Like you're talking, you're talking about with, yeah, you're talking about with ad spend. But lawyers, doctors, even development. Like yeah, the co, the, the, the AI is going to do that churn. It's going to do things but you have to have the tastemaker, you have to have that taste maker who has the responsibility of okay, what are we actually putting out there? Is it going to be useful? Is it going to destroy everything our customers need? Like what, what does all this stuff mean? And I think that's an important part to look at as we're looking at all this, which is are we using AI to become more generic or are we using AI to up level ourselves and to leverage it so that we can be better at what we're doing?
• 28:44
  Speaker B: Makes sense.
• 28:44
  Speaker A: Yeah, I agree with that. That's what I'm fascinated with. And yeah, yeah. So one of the things that you had, you had mentioned is that there's, we are talking about the fact that there's all these things that can go wrong like conversions are not set up correctly or all this stuff is. I think a lot of people listening to this maybe have an ad agency that is doing their work, but they are not necessarily ad centric. Right. They want to understand. They would love to manage their ads but they don't know enough. Right. But they also, it becomes a problem because they also don't know enough to check their ad agencies or whoever they're working with to say is this good or not? I don't know because they don't have the expertise. So what are two or three questions that someone could ask to look at? Like, I mean and it doesn't have to be like specific, like what my ROAS over CAC on a three day, like what are some of the signals that people have is like is this going in the right direction or not?
• 29:56
  Speaker B: That's true stuff.
• 29:58
  Speaker A: I think curveball at you.
• 30:00
  Speaker B: Yeah, I think there's one, one check I do ask people to do like when they come, maybe they're working with like a big agency already and they're saying that results are not going well. Whatever Whatever I do, I do say this every time. Go into the change history logs in Google Ads. You can see this. You have access to this. How often are things being actioned? How often are they logging in and modifying things? And you'd be unbelievably surprised when they do. They're like, oh, my. Oh, my goodness, you're right. The agency's logging in once a week, if that, maybe making a couple adjustments to the campaign budgets and that's it. And these are agencies getting paid five figures a month, by the way. Right. Not small sums. I think that's a good first hygiene check is go look at the change history logs in your Google Ads.
• 30:46
  Speaker A: That is a great one. That's one I had never even thought of as. Well, it's interesting.
• 30:51
  Speaker B: See what they're doing. See what they're doing. See how often they're doing. We also have seen in the past where they're doing like fake appear to be busy work, which is pretty ridiculous. And they'll look, they're all like, yeah, they will change like the target CPA from like $6.80 to like $6.75. Like just nonsense like this, which has no effect on anything. Complete waste of time. Yes, that's like a good one. What else?
• 31:18
  Speaker A: I have one of my pet peeves that I'd love to know your opinion on branded ads. So if you. So if you don't have good SEO, then 100% you should do branded ads. If you have competitors going against your keywords, branded ads, if you don't have those, those two things, there's no issue.
• 31:36
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. There's no. But there is a test you can also run. So you're right. I mean, it's only if you have basically competitors bidding on your terms. That's really it. If you know that that's occurring, then maybe.
• 31:47
  Speaker A: But.
• 31:47
  Speaker B: But again, I, I fully agree with you. I'm. I'm in the camp of are you actually really a brand yet or are you just some. You know, like, if you're like a Nike or whatever and you have the budget, the excess budget for sure. Go crazy. Not. Not. But yeah, you're right. I see a lot in SAS.
• 32:03
  Speaker A: Actually.
• 32:03
  Speaker B: It's funny, in SAS, I've seen people where 50% of their budget. This is, this is not like a small budget. This is.
• 32:09
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
• 32:10
  Speaker B: Six figures a month just on branded. So I think, yeah, it depends. But if you're like a very much smaller business who doesn't have a brand yet, I would be careful.
• 32:19
  Speaker A: Yeah. And I Would also say, like, my kind of warning sign for an agency was if all of their success and they keep talking about how well the branded ads are doing, then I would run for the hills. I had an agency doing that and I was like, I don't want to hear, I don't want to hear the word branded. Ad time.
• 32:38
  Speaker B: Yeah. No, no, no. Yes. That's a joke. We've seen that too. But we've seen that we inherited an account where the branded campaign had a 28x for us. 28x for us. And the rest of. Yeah. And the rest of the campaigns that are 0.5x.
• 32:51
  Speaker A: Right.
• 32:51
  Speaker B: 0.2 is an absolute joke. So. Yes.
• 32:54
  Speaker A: Yeah. It's amazing. If someone knows who you are and is interested in buying your product, the ROAS is going to be great.
• 32:59
  Speaker B: Correct.
• 33:01
  Speaker A: That's not what we're trying to solve for with ads here.
• 33:03
  Speaker B: Yeah, agree, agree.
• 33:05
  Speaker A: So I wanted to. So we mentioned this a little bit, but the AI, when you use it, it feels great until you realize that everyone else is getting the exact same results and it becomes generic. Right. And this idea that, oh, it's so awesome. And then you realize that everything else is. Do you what. When people are running all this AI, what is the way that you still get this edge? So if you. Let's take it back to the PMAX campaigns or to anything really. It's like if all the inputs are the same and it's all going through the same AI, what is our edge anymore? How do we stand out?
• 33:45
  Speaker B: Good question. Comes back to my first point. I think offer. Offer is everything I really offer. Landing page. Those two are the biggest levers. Yeah. If everybody had access to the exact same optimization, let's say, then that's really what it comes down to is how good your offer is and whatever. And there's a lot, there's a lot that comes down that comes into that. Right. I think one lever that is often massively overlooked. And I say this because we've reviewed thousands of landing pages for people. Thousands is social proof, real social proof, good social proof. That's somewhere where we see people lack a lot and maybe they have it, right. They have like some Google reviews. They have like a thousand plus Google reviews, like a 4.8 star, 4.9 star and they don't even think to put that on there.
• 34:34
  Speaker A: Just not leveraging it. Yeah, yeah.
• 34:36
  Speaker B: So I think if, yeah, if we get to a world where everybody has the exact same access to intelligence, that sort of thing, ultimately it's going to come down to the quality of your offer and then obviously then the whole other part, fulfilling on the offer. Like that's a whole other book.
• 34:48
  Speaker A: Yeah, that's a whole other ball game.
• 34:51
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 34:52
  Speaker A: It's interesting that you mentioned the social proof because I think that is one place that a lot of people, they know they need social proof, but I don't think that they usually do it well. And social proof I think is very, it's a very interesting thing because I, so I ran an agency for a number of years before we started Psychometrics. And one of the mistakes that we made is thinking that the bigger the name, the social proof was, the better it would be. And so we had worked with Toyota, we had worked with NTT, we had worked with all these JREs, like all these huge billion dollar companies and we were targeting small to medium businesses. And so we put, right, we put those on our homepage along with some of our small to medium business. But people saw that and like, oh, these guys worked with Toyota. They're not going to want to work with me and removed that. So it's really. Social proof is an interesting thing because I think a lot of people just say bigger is better, but it's really who is talking to the audience that you want to see. And that's the, that's the fascinating thing to me big time.
• 35:54
  Speaker B: And actually I can. Yeah. Like even for, just to piggyback on that, like even for agencies, if you've worked with these, all these great clients, like we have so many success stories. Whatever, whatever. They don't care. They're like, what have you done for people in beverages based here in California? That's, that's what they want to know.
• 36:13
  Speaker A: Yep.
• 36:14
  Speaker B: They don't care that you've helped whatever. Some huge company doing something else. They don't care. So whatever. It's what have you done for people? Very similar to me. So I think that's a very important point. I agree.
• 36:23
  Speaker A: Yeah. I think that everyone wants to know specifically, what can you do for people like me? They don't care if.
• 36:29
  Speaker B: Exactly.
• 36:31
  Speaker A: And they're always looking for reasons not to believe it. Right. And it's just natural. Right. They're like, well, I mean, that person's in New York, I'm in California. It's so different. Right.
• 36:44
  Speaker B: Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 36:46
  Speaker A: Just overcoming those objections.
• 36:48
  Speaker B: Very relatable. Very relatable.
• 36:50
  Speaker A: Awesome. David, thank you so much for joining us. Where can people find you on the Internet? Sure.
• 36:55
  Speaker B: I think our website's probably the best point. Growas.com, g R A- dash.com I'm on LinkedIn as well. David Bulkwerry. Feel free to reach out there. Email dpaggrass.com and yeah, I'll get back to you.
• 37:07
  Speaker A: Yeah, we'll link all those things in the show notes. And David, thank you so much. This has been absolutely awesome.
• 37:12
  Speaker B: Thank you, Keith. That was really fun.
• 37:13
  Speaker A: All right, cheers.