Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: AI is a capable driver is how I would think about it, but the question is whether the GPS is pointed in the right direction. So if your strategy is clear and your account structure is sound, I think that AI can be a real multiplier to help you. But if you don't know where you're pointed at and your strategy isn't clear and sound and you have no data because you haven't made any choices yourself to see how it impacts things, then AI is just going to accelerate the problem.
[00:00:23] Speaker B: Welcome to AI Ads and Beyond. I'm Lisa Rustler. This is a show where we discuss how artificial intelligence is changing paid advertising strategy and performance.
My guest today has been in the trenches and he is not holding back.
Joel Miller has been running a boutique marketing agency with his identical twin brother Alan for 17 years and they've never hired a single employee.
He works inside live accounts every day using AI tooling and he has some strong opinions about when the platform recommendations are working for you or when they're working for Google. Happy to have you here, Joel.
[00:01:01] Speaker A: Thanks so much for having me.
[00:01:03] Speaker B: My first question is Alan and you. Are you splitting the work 5050 or how does
[00:01:10] Speaker A: it really. Depends on what the task is. Sometimes with a different client, we'll, we'll split some tasks with a certain client or we'll end up like taking on one client, just kind of each it really. I don't know when you grow up, maybe if siblings are close. I don't know if this happens to anyone else. Maybe it's a twin thing. I don't know. People always ask what's it like to be an identical twin? And I'm like, what's it like to be. Yeah, exactly. To not be one. I don't. But we always like developed complimentary skills and so I think we carried that into our work life where it's like certain things we overlap but sometimes I'll need him to take a look at something I'm working on and vice versa. So it really ends up being the room of requirements to make a Harry Potter reference.
[00:01:45] Speaker B: Yeah, that's. That is, that's amazing. That's an amazing story.
Before we get into the main questions, I want to do a rapid fire round.
But first tell us a little bit about how you got into payment media.
[00:02:00] Speaker A: We, I think it really. Speaking of requirements, clients, we were doing marketing work, websites and it just became a natural question, can you help us manage some of our campaigns and whether it's. Well, later on Facebook, Google, and we're very distinctly lifelong learners. So if we see something out there that we're like, oh man, I bet we could probably help you. We can apply our strategic thinking that we're bringing to other parts of this project, to this. We'll do it. And so we started learning about ads and really it got to a point now it's like an integrated part of our relationships. But there was a point where we were doing just ad contracts with a few clients too. So it just organically grew and then became something that we offered. Even though if you go to our website you won't find anything about ads because we try to meet our clients needs instead of just having one solution for every problem.
[00:02:48] Speaker B: Okay. Yeah. In fact you have two.
[00:02:51] Speaker A: That's right, that's right. We just look alike. But it is two solutions.
[00:02:55] Speaker B: Right, right. Okay, let's go, let's do the this, let's do this rapid fire route.
[00:03:00] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:03:01] Speaker B: So I'm going to name some, some Google features and you rate them one to ten. One means do not trust it.
[00:03:09] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:03:10] Speaker B: And ten means turn it on. You can turn it on and walk away like full trust.
So give me the number and then maybe a sentence as to why.
[00:03:19] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:03:19] Speaker B: Okay. Are you ready?
[00:03:21] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:03:21] Speaker B: Okay.
Auto apply recommendations.
[00:03:25] Speaker A: I'm gonna give that A1 because Google is optimizing in my opinion for Google's metrics. Not ours, not yours. And it also is like so aggressively trying to opt you in unless you're actively watching it, it's probably gonna get you into it in some fashion.
[00:03:40] Speaker B: That's true. It does have very assertive recommendations, doesn't it?
[00:03:43] Speaker A: Yeah. Even opting into the program, they're like, you know, if you stay out of it, it's going to just keep popping up. And sometimes I don't know, you've probably, I'm sure you've had this where it's like if you don't say you don't want to be in this again, it's going to in seven days we're turning some of the features on and you're like, what, why are you doing this?
[00:03:58] Speaker B: There is some very super buried setting where it says, yeah, opt out probably.
I mean very berry.
[00:04:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:05] Speaker B: Okay, let me, let's go on. We can talk about all of these for an hour.
Increase budget based on Google's projections.
[00:04:13] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm going to give that a 2 because I think that their projections are often based on what's good for spend velocity and not what's good for the client's margin. So they're going to end up using often in my experience More of it than you usually intend to if you just go with the suggestion. So I like to control the increase.
[00:04:29] Speaker B: Okay. Broad match with smart bidding 3.
[00:04:34] Speaker A: Because I think it can work. So I'm going low still. But I think it can work. But it can work is not a strategy. It's just living on hope. And I'd rather have an actual strategy that I can test.
[00:04:44] Speaker B: Gotcha.
Performance max with no asset group segmentation.
[00:04:49] Speaker A: Yep. That's gonna be a two. And it's kind of similar. You. I think you lose diagnostic visibility. And if you. You really can't fix or communicate to your client what's going on. If you can't see it very well.
[00:05:00] Speaker B: Okay.
No, that's good. That's good. That's why we want to explore what artificial intelligence is doing to these. Adequate. Here's the. Here's the last one for this segment. Okay. This is Google's campaign objective.
Suggestions?
[00:05:15] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:05:16] Speaker B: This is when you create an account and it holds your hand through the setup processing. Oh, do you. Is your objective sales? Is your objective leads? Yes. What do you think?
[00:05:26] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm gonna give that a five right down the middle. I think that it's interesting to send the campaign in a direction. Right. And it feels hopeful to me when I'm doing it that it's going to make a difference. And yet not all of the things that impacts are readily apparent. Or you end up clicking through each one to try to figure out what's changing and just get lost in the noise.
[00:05:46] Speaker B: Okay. Excellent. Excellent. I like those ratings. You didn't give anything more than a five, though.
[00:05:53] Speaker A: No.
[00:05:53] Speaker B: We'll see what happens the next five. Yeah, let's. Okay. Let's talk about some longer form questions. You have a story about Google Strategist call or maybe just Google strategy calls in general. Can you tell us about that?
[00:06:09] Speaker A: Yeah. The thing that always happens when they're first off. It's so persistent and annoying. We need to talk for this quarter. We need to talk this quarter. They're always switching who you talk to.
[00:06:17] Speaker B: Right.
[00:06:18] Speaker A: So there's no continuity there. And then I find that most.
I think there's been one time out of I don't know how many I've. Let's just call it 20, I think is probably fair over the years that I've been on because I mostly ignore them.
They.
I know so much more about the platform than it seems like the person on the other side of the call does. So I'm just navigating circles around their description and they're always like it's going to take 30 minutes or I've had a longer one. They promised it was going to be a 45 minute call and it's over in 15. Just because they're expecting to talk with someone who doesn't know anything about it. And that just doesn't give me confidence in what they're saying.
And then beyond that, nearly every suggestion is something that I've tried already.
And when I've done those edits it usually ends up spending more with not like maybe either lateral results or worse results. And so I'm always just skeptical that it's like their number one button to push when they want to make sure that that profits and revenue are up for the quarterly stock call.
[00:07:13] Speaker B: How have. So along those lines, how have you found their troubleshooting to be Ooh, well
[00:07:20] Speaker A: I, you know, I really haven't come to the calls with an issue typically, but I will say that oftentimes I'll click the help article and find out that it's about two versions old. And so it doesn't actually help because the interface has changed and they haven't yet updated the help docs, which is just always surprising to me because it is their main source of revenue. It's why we have a profitable Google. And so I'm always just like, how do you not have this just like totally dialed in when it comes to, when it comes to the Help docs. And I do want to actually circle back a little bit because I just remembered one of their things since we talked about in your ratings, the quick ratings Auto Apply. Every call I'm on when I don't have Auto Apply on, that's one of the things they bring up. It's something that we should, that they're helping us with. Well, if you turn on Auto Apply, it's going to get better. And I'm like, I just, I want to actually know what changes are happening so I have something to test against and I can't test against it if I'm like just going back and doing like a forensic hunt versus having a new theory, employing it and then seeing how it does.
[00:08:21] Speaker B: I wonder if the Auto Apply is smart enough to know when the changes are being made by the specialists. So, so if it's being actively managed, how does it know what we're actively managing it? And if the applies are relevant versus you're doing autopilot, which I don't think is really a thing, but you're doing autopilot and you Auto apply, right?
[00:08:42] Speaker A: No, I think that's True. And that's something. Even as I was thinking through our conversation today, I started to realize that a big sort of tipping point in my head is just understanding what's happening. And I'm finding a lot of the AI features and I think we'll probably talk about this more. But are opaque. There's not. And maybe it'll get better. But right now, there's not a singular place where it's like I can go look at the things that the AI like, theoretically, if it's intelligent, that it's making choices actively. Well, what are those choices? And what signals told it to make that choice.
At least I don't know of a place where I can go look at that. And I would love to know.
[00:09:13] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. That goes into my next question, is what Auto Apply does to Signals.
[00:09:19] Speaker A: Exactly. It completely.
[00:09:21] Speaker B: The specific changes in the account, how hard it is to undo. How do we keep track of what's being done?
[00:09:28] Speaker A: Yeah, it's. It totally obscures it to me. Any account where I've had that on, I don't think there's a single one right now that I have. I might have one of the most basic settings on Auto Apply, but not anything that actually changes, you know, like a. A fundamental something that's going to actually end up impacting cost per click or cost per conversion. And. Yeah, so it makes it invisible to me where I'm like, I don't know. Again, I think there's. There is an audit log where you can see the things that it applied. But again, I'm not.
Because I'm proactively doing this for clients. And so I don't want to go on this historical mission to figure out when something happened and what happened because of it.
I want to sit here at my computer and say, all right, this is my new test. I'm going to make this ad group with these experimental theories, and I'm going to run it against the other information I have in the account and then see how it performs. And then I'm going to put that into my memory bank to test with other clients or at least, you know, keep momentum on the stuff that's working for this specific client.
[00:10:26] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. It's not perfect.
It's not. It's.
[00:10:30] Speaker A: Yeah, you have to be right. It's like a.
And this is. It's such a living, breathing thing. And it's like at the end of the day, it's all still Google's game that we're playing. Right. So, like, I don't. It can feel a little Futile sometimes to think like, well, if I don't use the AI stuff or I don't use auto suggest, then I'm like in complete control. Well, that's not really true either because at the end of the day we don't really see the auction, we don't really see all the components going into it. And yet we still have the ability to have a. Assert a little bit more control over our campaigns when we know what levers we're moving to see a certain result occur.
[00:11:02] Speaker B: And sometimes the levers that they want to move are not completely appropriate for the client. For example, just something very simple like the keyword recommendations. Right.
So sometimes there it's like you, you did discover something.
Like the machine did discover something. It's like, okay, I'll apply that. Sometimes it discovers things that are more general, more broad, or like only a human can understand what the context of that is and that it means something different.
[00:11:33] Speaker A: Right. Yep.
[00:11:34] Speaker B: Look at the word itself.
[00:11:36] Speaker A: And this wasn't during. Yeah, go ahead.
[00:11:38] Speaker B: No, the intent is different. When a human looks at it and knows that means something completely different. That's not what we're doing here.
[00:11:45] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.
[00:11:46] Speaker B: So, yeah, speaking of intent and the keywords. Keyword intent, collapse and AI overviews.
[00:11:52] Speaker A: Yes.
Yeah, this is something that we are having to remake a lot of campaigns that were working before. As last year, as AI overview rose, we found that a lot of the.
When something wasn't very intent oriented on the user's part, it was just getting eaten up by the AI overviews. And so we saw a dip in conversions and even clicks on some campaigns. So I'm not sure if that's exactly what you're after, but it's. So we've been having to go and get a lot more specific about. And in some places where I might have been using phrase match, I'm going even more, keeping it even more specific so that we're really targeting searchers specifically on search who are looking exactly for the thing that I'm trying to point them at. And I actually think back to this was pre AI stuff. But when we had a campaign running for a medical group in the Chicagoland area and for some reason this is just reminding me of your last thing that they sometimes miss. What, what the signal is. And I can't even make sense of this one. But I repeatedly had to negative keywords about buses. For some reason they kept showing our ads, you know, attaching it to our keywords, something about buses or school buses. It kept happening in different combinations and I was Just like what, what in the Google world do they think that a medical group has to do with buses?
[00:13:18] Speaker B: Okay, so there was some term in the medical group that was also a term used in transportation.
[00:13:24] Speaker A: Yeah, I think. Right. It must be. It just, it kept popping up and it was like, all right, negative, negative, negative. And it finally got rid of it. But, but to the point of that doesn't always understand the intent or context that a human would understand that. That's one of the clearest examples I can think of. Because there was no, there was. There's no, no human would look at that and think, yeah, yeah, we need to show this to this. People using this keyword combination.
[00:13:47] Speaker B: Right. I think that's interesting because what they have been recommending is because of the AI overviews to customize the campaigns and the keyword groupings so that they're more responsive to conversations. Right, the conversations and these solutions and that, that more conversational sort of research where you're typing your query in there but then you're refining it as time goes on, rather than just the one to one keyword experience of. Here's a keyword.
[00:14:20] Speaker A: Right. Yeah, yeah.
[00:14:21] Speaker B: You know, I'm looking for a bus part.
You get a list of bus parts.
[00:14:27] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I don't want to. It's. I'm trying to avoid saying the client name. Although they were in the medical community, they've been bought and bought again, so it probably doesn't matter. But it was funny just to imagine someone typing this in and then getting, you know, Blank Medical Group 247 urgent care. Like it must have been so confusing to the user as well as pointless money for us to spend.
[00:14:47] Speaker B: Let's, let's jump to another question because I know you have strong opinions about this one. This question is about AI's place in PPC.
The difference. Let's talk about how AI helps the practitioner versus how it helps the platform.
[00:15:05] Speaker A: Yeah, I think AI is a capable driver is how I'd think about it. But the question is whether the GPS is pointed in the right direction. So if your strategy is clear and your account structure is sound, I think that AI can be a real multiplier to help you and maybe you don't use the tools built in. I'm a big proponent of.
Like I would love, I love to use Claude, for example, for helping with idea generation and not just relying on the little AI output that Google has built in.
But if you don't know where you're pointed at and your strategy isn't clear and sound and you have no data because you haven't done any, made any choices yourself to see how it impacts things, then AI is just going to accelerate the problem. Probably it's not going to help you fix it most of the time. Especially if you're only relying on the tools within the Google sphere instead of maybe analyzing it somewhere else. Where there's a.
The incentive is for you. The incentive for the AI is to help you understand it. Not necessarily a little bit of a mixed incentive where there might be sometimes in the Google suggestions, not that I'm saying they're being nefarious. I just think there's naturally going to be some mixed incentives. So I think it can be super helpful to iterate faster to surface like anomalies or to reduce repetitive tasks. But it's more helpful to the platform when it's trying to suggest things that are like automated spend increases, broad match versus phrase are more specific. And when it reduces transparency by taking away the data from us to be able to actually see what's occurring.
[00:16:26] Speaker B: And I mean, hasn't this been a little bit of a recurring theme through our conversation? Is that Google's goal is to make money for Google?
[00:16:36] Speaker A: Yes. Oh, exactly. And this is a segue that building in. But I can't help but think of this story because it's super. It's a fascinating look into how clients think about this as well. And we had a client who we were doing ads for as long as well as their website and we did, we worked with them for years, three or four years, and they were always convinced that their next closest competitor in the area was just spending 10 times as much as them, but also just getting so many leads and so many conversions from Google Ads and you know, every meeting I know it's going like this for them. And then they closed because of COVID and the competitor ended up hiring us. And so about two years after that I was in their ads account and I could go back in time. You know, I was so curious because I remembered this conversation being constant. So I'm like, all right, here we go, I have access, I'm gonna go look. So I go back in time and look and they were completely wrong about everything. Their, our ad campaigns looked better than theirs at that same time.
And so what it made me realize is that you have to. And I think this ties into AI. You have to realize that the don't be competing against an invisible opponent so that whether that's your competition or even what Google's doing with their AI things be intentional about what Your implementing and testing and how it works and then realize that the race is against yourself and not try to optimize based on your past performance and then be continually increasing and improving that and not getting.
And that's why I think you need to maintain control. So don't get stuck thinking you're competing against the client, that you don't know what they're actually doing, or that you're blaming the Google AI for everything when there's still a bunch of things that you can keep in your own hands.
[00:18:09] Speaker B: I think that's really interesting because it reminds me of what I've. One thing I've encountered over my 18 years of experience is when looking at competitors, assuming that they're doing it better, assuming that they are doing it well at all, and saying, let's copy what the competitors are doing. How do you know if it's working for the competitors? You could be copying their worst ad.
[00:18:31] Speaker A: Yeah, right.
[00:18:32] Speaker B: No sense to me.
[00:18:33] Speaker A: I know.
[00:18:34] Speaker B: I mean it gives you information about what their strategy is, what their direction is. You don't know if it's working.
[00:18:41] Speaker A: Right.
[00:18:41] Speaker B: Oh yeah, I like that you said like race against yourself or like focus on your own lane. Right, yeah. That analogy going.
Yeah, that's great. I'm glad that you said that. Do you, do you think.
Let me switch a little bit here.
[00:18:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:59] Speaker B: When we're looking at, when we're looking at AI and some of these accounts, some of these AI features, do you see that there's an area where there's over. It's over trusted, where there's over reliance or over reliance on the automation. I think you talked about just like the auto apply settings where there's no touch. Is there anything else that you see?
I, I see when people are like auto applying the, like the ad strengths, like really?
[00:19:30] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:19:30] Speaker B: Like into this ad strength kind of.
[00:19:33] Speaker A: Yeah. Just trying to.
Yeah, yeah. I think there is definitely. I, and I'm going to put myself in this camp because sometimes it feels good. So I'm about to throw myself under the bus to say to a client like, oh, Google's releasing this new feature and I'm about to use it. And so that's happening a lot more with AI things right now. And where I've been guilty sometimes of just being like, well, let's turn it on and see what happens. I'll just check on it. And then of course I'm going to really monitor it and then report back to the client. So it's a little different than just like over trusting it. And yet I think what I would encourage people to do is to always have something that they're in charge of that they're actually controlling and monitoring and editing all those things and iterating on while they're testing maybe a new feature. So I don't think it hurts at all to turn on the AI search assist where they're retooling the ads and where it lands and all those things and even keywords that are presented based on intent or whatever. They have their whole list of things they say it helps with.
It's not bad to use that. But maybe run it as a separate campaign or ad group and pit it against your own management and see if it actually is helping instead of just assuming that it is going to help because of the claims. And I think like you have to again, you have to know where you're pointed, where you're going. I think it's not ads, but I think of a something we did for a client in the last couple years where I listened to like 30 hours of their sales calls, their incoming sales calls, and then I made a custom GPT that automatically grades them. Now as it comes in, I identified six things their team struggles with.
I made the grader. Now it happens automatically and alerts everyone when a call comes in with the grade and the problem areas and suggestions on how it could be better. But we didn't just go.
We kept a very human element. Right. By using our intelligence, our ability to identify patterns in a way that the AI might just miss what's specific to that client. And so I think for ads it's the same thing. Don't just let it run it for you. Make sure. Because if you do guess what, it's doing that same thing for everyone else too. And so you want to bring a little bit of your intelligence and experience and strategic positioning to your campaign design so that it can stand out a little bit.
[00:21:39] Speaker B: Peakdad is absolutely brilliant to take the sales calls. And so you're probably looking at what are the common objections.
[00:21:48] Speaker A: Totally.
[00:21:48] Speaker B: And using ChatGPT to analyze those so that you can. So that you can optimize towards that. I think that is really brilliant. And I have not done it in that exact format.
It was more like saying what are you hearing? Or for me to listen to some of the calls. And yeah, definitely that's something that they're not. That the AI is not going to know in any recommendations whatsoever. And it's not like that's something that what you're suggesting is not something that is super complicated.
[00:22:22] Speaker A: No it's not. It really wasn't it just the most. The biggest investment was taking. Yeah. Taking the time to, to be perceptive, to recognize objections is one, how do they interact with the client? So a couple of things quick that we surfaced is that they often got into the pricing conversation too quickly and then there's just a couple other talk time. Right. They didn't ask enough guiding questions at certain points to keep the prospect talking. Now you want to give them the information. This. We won't get into sales calls, but you want to give them the information they need as fast as possible. Certainly. But this is a high touch business that we were talking about. And so learning more about the client is critical. But I think what's interesting is that then you can take things like that and circle it back into the ads. So you're right. We hear the objections on those 30 hours of calls and.
And then we can take that information as we're building this ecosystem of understanding and use the AI to synthesize that and then say, great, we can address an objection in our ad copy before it even comes up. And now we're more informed.
[00:23:18] Speaker B: Exactly. I love that. That's definitely advanced.
So. Right. Incorporating that right into the ad copy so that you can do some of the work before they even contact you. But it also helps to filter. You could also use it to help to filter people out. Right.
So if they're asking for something or getting on the calls with, let's say, certain expectations, something that client absolutely does not do, you can use that to filter that out Right. In the ad copies for, you know, for businesses of this size or for. For businesses that specialize in this.
So. Yeah, I think that's amazing. I love that. I don't have anyone that will apply to. But I would. I'm gonna take your tip.
[00:24:02] Speaker A: Yeah. Oh yeah. And when it comes up, run with it. It's great. And if you ever reach.
[00:24:06] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. And I think there are a lot of. I've. I've heard a lot of tips floating around about using ratings and reviews.
[00:24:14] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:24:15] Speaker B: Yeah, same concept, but consumer based. Yeah, that's great. That's. That's really putting the AI to work in a really solid and deeply knowledgeable way.
[00:24:25] Speaker A: Exactly. And doing the things that it's so good at, synthesizing information and lots of it. And yeah, that's. That actually is probably a waste of human energy sometimes and but identifying what things you want to get out of it first. So giving a framework around the synthesis you're looking for is Going to stop it from being generic.
[00:24:43] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's great. I'm loving the feeling that I'm getting from this big win that we just talked about because it is just such a cool way to combine the, you know, the human and the AI. Let's do the closing. The closing rapid fire round.
[00:24:59] Speaker A: Okay. Okay.
[00:25:01] Speaker B: Okay. Now you have to shift. Now you have to shift gears. The. Okay, here's the. Here's the first one of the second round. Okay. AI Max for search.
[00:25:10] Speaker A: Yeah, I think I just gave it away a little bit. I'm going to give myself. I'm going to give it a seven when it came out and maybe a four now if I can do that. Because of that, I, I was really excited about it. I really want there to be a one click. This is really optimizing everything. Even though I can't see it in ways that are great and yet I've seen the stats that they claim. I'm not seeing that in my own campaigns. And so I got to demote it a little.
[00:25:35] Speaker B: Okay. Okay.
Responsive search ads with full asset rotation handed to Google.
[00:25:43] Speaker A: I'm gonna give it a 3, but I do use it. But I'm gonna give it a three for this. Cause you're giving up the ability to control message to market fit. Right. Like you're saying you're just trusting them with that. And sometimes when I see the actual ads that are running, I'm like, you put that. You made my ads look so redundant. I would have assumed that you would have paired this headline with this description to make it so that it was logical. So I don't know how intelligent it actually is. I don't think it is very.
[00:26:06] Speaker B: Man. I can talk about this one. That one for an hour for sure.
[00:26:08] Speaker A: Yeah. Oh, yeah, Wait. I wish it was more intelligent. They can do it. Why aren't they doing it anyway?
[00:26:12] Speaker B: I don't know, but that's interesting. That's an interesting idea for a feature pairings because sometimes the ad is written as like a story or written like a conversation where you're handling part of it in the headlines and part of it in the description.
[00:26:26] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. There's a setup and a payoff and you're like, why didn't. It didn't detect that at all. Come on.
[00:26:31] Speaker B: It just repeats the same thing.
[00:26:33] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:26:33] Speaker B: Their rotation. Right?
[00:26:35] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:26:36] Speaker B: Google's automated bidding adjustments.
[00:26:39] Speaker A: I'm gonna give this. I'm gonna give them the most credit on this one. I'll give it a 6 out of 10 because they. When the account has enough data.
It does some seem to have some accuracy but it's. It's still oftentimes will be carried away as well. So I take it with a grain of salt just. But couch it within how much I know that it knows about the campaign and I trust it a little bit more.
[00:27:01] Speaker B: I've seen the.
I've seen with a decent amount of data with good data that it can really hit those. The goals.
[00:27:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:27:10] Speaker B: That makes everybody happy. That's like you just a sigh of relief. But it's the up until you have the data where all of the issues lie.
Keyword match consolidation pushed by the reps.
[00:27:23] Speaker A: It's unsurprisingly anything rep related I'm going to give a one just because I'm like they. I don't know how many calls they're on in a day. They definitely have a quota of whatever they're doing and they're really not strategists. They're like we reviewed your account. Well tell us at the outside of the call what your business is and you say it and then they repeat it back to you and you're like I don't. You can't just repeat what I just told you and have me believe that you understand our actual goals. I just don't buy it.
[00:27:47] Speaker B: Yeah, they should just say, hey, we have most updated features we want to recommend to you.
[00:27:51] Speaker A: Yes. Yes. Great. You might have missed this unless you're looking at the feature releases every day. Okay, great. That's useful info, right.
[00:27:58] Speaker B: And this is how it would apply to you specifically.
[00:28:00] Speaker A: Do you want to. You can think about doing it right instead of trying to get you to click and do it right today. And I'm like, I don't know. I want to think about this.
[00:28:07] Speaker B: Okay, last one. AI overviews, ad placement. Right. That we don't have separate targeting controls or reporting right now, do we? I don't think that's been anything that's come out.
[00:28:18] Speaker A: No.
[00:28:18] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:28:19] Speaker A: Not that I've seen again I. With Google I always like when I'm. I should to the people listening give the caveat that we all know they do incremental rollouts. So if you have that feature let us know because I'm excited to see it. But yeah, I think if you can't see it or I'm giving it a 22 out of 10 if you can't see it, you can't defend it to a client. You can't even understand what is occurring. And it's all about the information. And I'm just that's the biggest, maybe my biggest takeaway thinking about this conversation. I want information.
So I love AI. I think it's going to help us be more efficient generally as a society and more industrious overall. But I want the information so that I can still use my human intelligence to make informed decisions about how I use it.
[00:29:00] Speaker B: I think we're in a transitional period right now with paid search, paid social, where it's sort of this Franken monster where there's a. Their AI features are added, but we still have some manual things. We don't have full reporting. And one of the issues is this is people's, this is people's livelihood, their businesses and their spend. When you, especially when you're talking about small to medium sized businesses, they don't have a lot to lose. This is it. It's like throwing these things in and learning how to work around them is a big issue right now. I hope that soon in the future I'm able to do an episode of this podcast where I'm like, we've got nothing to talk about. Every. Everything's perfect.
[00:29:43] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:29:44] Speaker B: The machines have taken over and we're beat. Maybe we check in and send in some strategy ideas.
[00:29:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:29:50] Speaker B: You know?
[00:29:50] Speaker A: Yeah. And somehow there's a slice for everyone. Right. The competition on the auction, everything is so niched down and perfectly targeted that everybody's reaching their as much audience as they need to grow the amount they want to. And we can all just sit back and have our margaritas, right?
[00:30:05] Speaker B: Yeah, it's AI Utopia.
[00:30:07] Speaker A: That's right. That's right. It's coming, right?
[00:30:10] Speaker B: It should be. I don't know if I'm going to predict it, but I'm hoping so. Thank you so much for joining me today, Joel.
[00:30:18] Speaker A: Thank you so much for having me.
[00:30:20] Speaker B: If people listening want to find you, where do they find you? Online.
[00:30:25] Speaker A: Theskyfloor.com, that's our business name, the Skyfloor. And you can come there and we have blogs and ideas and read about what we do and subscribe and reach out if you want to start a conversation.
[00:30:34] Speaker B: All right, I will. I know I will.
And thanks everyone for listening or watching to AI ads and beyond today. If you're on YouTube, please subscribe for the most recent episodes. If you're listening through your favorite podcast platform, subscribe there too, because I know you will love what is coming up in future episodes. So thanks again and signing off.
