What You Need to Know About Google Ads in 2024

Brandon Welch 0:00
If you realize that your job is just simply to connect with the human and give them a better life. And all the nerd things, all the knobs we turn, all the keywords we search for, and then all the links we put into the landing pages is just should be in line with. Did I connect with the human and offer them a better life? Then you would naturally go, Oh, if they search this, they probably want this. And if you’re being an empathetic, awesome marketer, you would say, Well, how about this?

Welcome to the Maven Marketing Podcast. Today is Maven Monday. I’m your host, Brandon Welch, and I am joined today by the search engine shaker, the efficiency maker, the conventional rule breaker, Ryan Baker, hey. His middle name is the conversion king. He has managed well over 500 Google ad accounts in the 10s of millions of dollars of ad spend. He has a regular call for some of the biggest, baddest gurus in the industry. And because of our history, we are lucky enough, I’m lucky enough to work with him, and he now oversees all of the search at Frank and Maven as for a while now, and we have, we’ve been trying to make this happen for a while, but we got him in the studio today, and we are going to equip you with everything you need to know to be profitable and prosperous in search engines in 2024, and maybe beyond, yeah, what did you say for yourself?

Ryan Baker 1:29
Well, I mean, yeah, all of those things are true. And thank you for that sparkling intro. The middle name thing. My parents were nerds, so yeah, but I just wanted to thank you for Conversion King Baker, yeah, it was weird, but it caught on. So when Google Ads came out, it really cut on. I just wanted to thank you for giving me this foray into my sweatshirt modeling career. I’ve been working toward this my whole life, and I’m excited to transfer out of digital marketing and into modeling. You know, he

Brandon Welch 1:57
is we we picked it was a tough game, but it was a bribe. We said, listen, we’ll let you, let you model our sweatshirt. He has one of two of the new official Frank and Maven sweatshirts. And let

Ryan Baker 2:10
me tell you, these things are warm, they are soft, and they will be stolen by my wife immediately.

Brandon Welch 2:16
They’re very cuddly. And

Ryan Baker 2:21
yeah, actually, so I kind of have the keys to these. So the first person that sends a question about search engine marketing for me to answer for you and help you out, I will tackle the security guard and and get do A a sweatshirt like this, a hoodie. However, you got to send it to Maven Monday@Frankandmaven.com. Yes.

Brandon Welch 2:41
Send your question to Frank and Maven. Sorry. Maybe Monday at frankon maven.com he will tackle Nate the camera guy, lock and key over the swag stock around here, I was gonna say he tried a long time to get a sweatshirt modeling gig. Nobody was calling him. Yep. Were you were you starting to sweat it? You hooded to make a pun. I hood to make a pun. Hooded. Okay, we had to get one in all right, this is the place where we answer your real life marketing questions so you can eliminate waste in advertising, grow your business and achieve the big dream. And the big dream for so many that we’ve worked in the past is about getting in front of that customer. Yep. And when you were at any phase of growing your business, it’s, how can I get a little more? A little more? And search engines, typically, is the fastest way to get the phone to ring. So it is, I would say that’s what Frank and Maven was originally kind of built on, was our ability to do that. Caleb and I, back in the old days, would rebuild accounts 10, 20, 30 times, so we could, you know, make the phone ring for our friends, Keith and Tyler. And, man, it was like we were just scrappy, and we were soaking it all up. And then over the over the years, we built this team that does it. And now we’re working with, you know, the likes of Ryan, the highest levels. He happens to live in our town, which is probably the only reason we get the we had the opportunity to work with him. It doesn’t hurt, yeah, if

Ryan Baker 4:04
we go way back, though, yeah, we do. Just I have known you since half your life ago, half my life ago, which is also basically half my life ago. We’re almost the same age. I’m actually just a little older than Brandon, so I have more life with gray

Brandon Welch 4:17
hairs. Yeah, one more child and one more great gray hairs than I do, yes. So yeah, we’ve, we’ve been in the music industry together, and then we both became marketers. We were competitors from the competitors. But yeah, kind of

Ryan Baker 4:29
Yeah, you can’t compete with Brandon. You can’t compete with Frank and Maven. Now that’s not

Brandon Welch 4:33
true. It’s not true. But when it comes to search, we’re going to cover. Ryan has laid out five things he thinks you guys need to know about, search coming up, and, man, the game is changing. And so I’m just gonna give an overview, and I’m gonna lob you all of these softballs to knock out of the park, because I know you eat, breathe and sleep this stuff. I would have considered myself a guru at one point, but I. I’m, I’m a manager of gurus at this at this point, so I trust experts like Ryan to give me the latest and greatest. And it is changing faster than it ever has. It’s insane. I tell people a lot, for what it’s worth, we, we spend millions of dollars a year on search engines here Frank and Maven, we get great results. It is, it is a bucking bull at times. But I tell people all the time, even when Caleb and I were essentially working, you know, 40 hours a week a piece just to make campaigns produce, what we have to do now is like 10 times harder than that. That’s not a that’s not a, I’m not saying that lightly. It we have to work 10 times harder to get the same result. Yep. And so that’s why we have heavier horsepower. And there are five major things that are changing and that you need to be aware of. And I’m just going to lay these out, and we’re going to go into each one of them, yeah, AI, Al, super hot topic. I, a, i, a, i, L, Al, has complicated the game Ryan’s gonna tell you about the latest in that Google is making things more expensive just because good times. Conversion Tracking is getting more complex. Match types are a disaster. Speaking of matches, train wreck. Anyone else Ryan’s gonna throw in when you send a search engine question? Do question a frank and Maven candle called Frank and sense with a cute little box of matches, this

Ryan Baker 6:28
thing smells amazing. I’m also taking this home, but you can get one too. Yes,

Brandon Welch 6:32
match types. He’s gonna tell you all about that our disaster, and we’re gonna, actually, you know what? The fifth I’m gonna make you listen and wait for Yeah, because it’s really, it’s really the one that takes care of all four. It’s the clincher. Yep, cliffhanger. Ai, yeah. How is AI complicating the game for search engines?

Ryan Baker 6:52
Well, aside from just generally stirring up a lot of confusion about something that’s already confusing, it A, it makes everyone think that they can do it without knowing it, without understanding it. And so it’s increased competition, but that competition is just throwing money at things. So in one way, it’s it’s kind of improved your competitive advantage, and in another way, it’s taken it away. Because the playing field, it’s kind of level the playing field for people to access Google ads, but to operate at a more efficient, higher level yes of operation, you really need to understand the platform so.

Brandon Welch 7:31
So even a couple years ago, I would say that if you were just 10 or 20% better than somebody who might just have a, you know, an internal marketing manager or some, you know, Swiss Army knife of a marketer that just went in and put some keywords in, like, first of all, used to be, you could get results if you just put something in, like, it was going to work to some level, right? And that goes in my experience, you know, business owner or business owner plus their marketing person goes, Hey, let’s enter some keywords for, you know, my plumbing business or my mechanic business or my law firm or whatever. And you know, there was a lot of waste, probably that happened, but Google was cheap enough. It was generally not over saturated enough with other competitors, and as long as you were in a medium market now, maybe not like a huge city, like you were going to get some calls, you get some clicks, and you might not have been able to diagnose at the level that a, you know, high caliber marketer does, you’re going to go, ah, that 1000 bucks I spent got me something. I feel like it did, right? Yeah, and all my friends that are listening, and all of our listeners now who are primarily, you know, managing marketing spend for a small, medium business, are going, I’d like just even, even, even in the what I would consider a high caliber environment, a frank and Maven are going, huh, that money ain’t going there as far as it used to go. And we have some people that spend 2030, $40,000 a month, and, it’s because Google, and if, even if you log in and look at it, the platform, in and of itself, is giving the illusion that anybody can come to it, yeah, that, yeah. They have very,

Ryan Baker 9:11
very clean and easy, simple, well, very clean and simple startup wizards that any small business owner. They’re designed specifically for small business owners to come in, set up accounts, and it gives all of the control to Google. So you just tell them, hey, here’s what I want to show up for. And Google’s like, we’ll take care of that for you, and not completely. Don’t need

Brandon Welch 9:32
to worry about that button, like the buttons that we use to press, yeah, you know, metaphorically gone. Actually, we’re buttons, yeah, they’re taking they’re taking stuff away. Now there’s still ways. Like, it’s not taking the you can access them, it’s not taking the skill set or the advantage away from having a high caliber manager. And there’s a lot of good ones. Like, there’s a lot of marketers that I don’t really believe in. Like, there’s a lot of parts of marketing. There’s like, you better find a really good one that’s hard to do. It’s not hard to find somebody. Who has expressed knowledge in AdWords, yeah, yeah. Now, they may not be the best, but

Ryan Baker 10:07
finding competence in search engine marketing is not as hard as it once was, yes, but I do have some agency owner friends who have said that it’s getting harder because the platform operates in some ways the same way that it used to, but in other ways it’s night and day difference. And if you don’t keep up with changes 10 years experience doesn’t mean anything, because it’s a completely different platform in a lot of ways than it used

Brandon Welch 10:39
to be. And what I’ve seen is that you got to be, you got to be really good problem solver. Not, not like there’s rule followers that go, oh, I learned from the course that you do this, this, then this, and that linear cookie cutter equation is just gone. So you have to have an intuitive person that can go, Hmm, I’m going to break the rules here a little bit, or break what used to work two years ago to solve this problem. Yeah? And, man, I can’t, I cannot think of an account we haven’t had to do that to some degree with. Yeah,

Ryan Baker 11:07
yeah. So a lot of the the difficulty that AI is bringing to the table is how much control they’re taking away, yes, how much data and information they’re hiding behind the black box machine learning algorithm fill in the blank, and if you don’t understand what the algorithm is trying to do and how to feed the algorithm what it wants, while also giving the customer what they want, because that’s the end goal. Yes, and Google is trying to give the customer what they want, but they don’t have the technology yet. The AI, isn’t

Brandon Welch 11:40
there? There weren’t enough good marketers to make it work predictably for Google. Well, I

Ryan Baker 11:44
think the problem is not so much that they were trying to get good marketers. It’s that they were trying to get, maybe economists or people to make them more money, more and more money, because so I actually was, was talking to somebody that has access to 10s of 1000s of Google Ads accounts and the data they’re in. It’s anonymous data. But he was telling me that Google has what they call auto applied recommendation. Then they will make recommendations for your accounts. Yeah,

Brandon Welch 12:11
and anybody who logs in, it’s, it’s a loud notification, yeah. They’re like, ooh, your account needs to be optimized. You better auto apply all these 147 things you got to

Ryan Baker 12:20
do. And they say they they have a metric called optimization score, saying that if you increase your optimization score by 40% your account will approve by 40% which is a bold face lie. I thought you gonna say something else. I was gonna agree with you. But well, it’s also that, yeah, so. So if you take their recommendations, what he found through his studies of all these accounts and the accounts that use the auto applied recommendations, they actually, on average, saw a 21% decrease in performance over time because of these auto applied recommendations, and they saw a significant increase in ad spend. I’ve had the experience Frank

Brandon Welch 13:00
and Maven is not an agency that keeps everything behind closed curtain. And some of our clients and some of my friends over the years like to get in and just look at it. And we love that. We love to teach and share as much as we can about that. And sometimes, like before, before we gave kind of the word a warning, when these auto apply recommendations started coming in, they just go, Oh, that looks like a good idea. I’ll help Brandon and the team out and click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, and then, like, you know, two or three weeks later, like, we’d be like, What in the world’s going on? We go back and look at the history, it’s like, oh, they added all this, yeah, junk. And so Google is trying to make this utopian world where any business owner can come in and put $1 in the machine and don’t worry about it. Google will take care of it, and you don’t need do anything else. Don’t scrutinize or ask questions. We’ll take care of that for you. And it’s just not working out yet. And so what I would say to land this part of the equation, if you were new to the AdWords game, man, hire somebody to at least teach you well, if you are, if you are an advertiser that has, you know, I would say 30, 40, $50,000 to spend in the medium level, in your, you know, local business, or even an E com or whatever. I would say it is very, very unlikely that it’s worth your money to try to do that yourself, yeah, unless you just legit enjoy it and you legit want to be that nerd, and that’s one of the things you want to hold on to. But I don’t know any CEOs or founders or CEOs or even managers that should do that. If

Ryan Baker 14:33
you want to run a good business, you don’t have time to also be in the weeds with Google ads.

Brandon Welch 14:37
Yes, and try, yeah, exactly. And it’s a weeds equation, man, I promise, I promise you, it is. And then the third thing I would say is no. Know how to ask the right questions. Yeah, what would you say that some somebody who’s letting somebody manage their account should be asking?

Ryan Baker 14:58
So that’s a really good question. If you don’t know anything about search engine marketing or about Google ads or anything like that, then what you want to ask is, what should I be looking for? How do I know if it’s working? And just really high level questions like that. You don’t need to understand everything going on behind it, and unless you want to, right? But then you’re going to get a nerd talking to you for an hour. Somebody

Brandon Welch 15:24
asked me that question, I would say, what is it costing me to get an opportunity to talk to somebody? Yeah, a question I think isn’t asked a lot is, where have you seen waste? Because I promise you, when Google changes something, everybody gets waste. What waste are you eliminating? And it’s not, don’t look at that as a bad thing. Like your your sem person should be coming to you saying, there was waste. Yeah, I found it and I deleted it, and that should be thumbs up. Not like, how in the heck did you let that happen? Because it’s going to happen, right?

Ryan Baker 15:53
90 95% of of managing a Google Ads account is eliminating waste, and that’s

Brandon Welch 15:58
in the name of all this AI stuff. That’s why it’s such a crazy thing, because Google took the friction off a lot of things we’d have to go in and individually manage and change, and they just kind of generalized it. And so digging under the surface to find problems is actually more the game of optimization than it is like, you know, used to be like, could you find the right keywords? Well, that’s not hard to do anymore. So last thing I would say about that be very, very wary of shiny objects and new features and things like performance Max. Google is pushing this down people’s throats, and this is going to lead to the second point beautifully. Oh yeah. The reason Google is doing this, and the reason you should be very skeptical with all their new features, is because they are making things more expensive. They are trying to please shareholders and show even 20 years after AdWords was a invention or sorry, that dates me saying AdWords, Google ads now, right? They are trying to perpetually expand their revenues. Yeah. And what happens when you’ve built a entire economy or an entire store off of there’s three or four spots that they’re selling inventory on, right and now, now, essentially the evolution of advertisers. It’s like there’s enough people in enough cities, in enough categories bidding, that those four spots are perpetually filled up. Yeah? And so it’s not like there’s unsold inventory. And so they go, Oh, wow, we’re sold out. So what do we have to do? We have to make new inventory. Yeah. And what are we going to do? Well, we’re going to, first of all, they’re going to say, You know what, you can’t control our inventory anymore. We’re going to put this little AI thing on it, and so we’ll control the supply and demand a little more. And that’s what they want. They want. They want their preference and their advantage of control on the inventory so they can charge more for it, fit more people in a in a smaller window by organization, and then even when that kind of ran dry. And what my observation is, 2000 22,021 when the world was just going bonkers COVID, you know, everybody’s buying online, like, instant, instant, like, major increases for Google. Yeah. And then that starts going down. And because shareholders don’t care that it was just a bubble, they go, Wow. What are you going to do to give us our revenues? Yeah? And Google’s like, we’ll pull a rabbit out of a hat. Don’t, don’t mind this over here, we’ve got new revenues, new inventory. That’s when we started seeing, you know, after it was, I think it was a third quarter earnings report or something that came out that Google was losing, we started seeing a lot more performance Max, a lot more forcing these features.

Ryan Baker 18:35
Yeah, and with the new features and performance Max, and anything new Google comes out with a there are always going to be bugs, so it’s best to give it a little bit of little bit of time for those to get ironed out, but they always explain it in a really good way. So the theory and concept behind performance Max is wonderful. It actually fits in really well with the Maven method. The problem is the execution is 100% geared toward making more money for Google and not for you.

Brandon Welch 18:59
Yes, they’ve they have yet to. They either have not figured it out, which I would find hard to believe, or they ignore what’s actually best for the user. Yeah, because grand scheme of search engines, if you realize that your job is just simply to connect with a human and give them a better life, and all the nerd things, all the knobs we turn, all the keywords we search for, and then all the links we put into the landing pages is just should be in line with. Did I connect with the human offer them a better life? And you would naturally go, Oh, if they search this, they probably want this. And if you’re being an empathetic, awesome marketer, you would say, Well, how about this? Yeah. Would you like it in a box? Would you like it with a fox? I have that for you. Yeah, it is Ritz Carlton level. I can do that for you, right? But instead, Google wants to go now we’re going to use data. We’re going to use these, you know, this big set of big data, to kind of blend it all together and try to follow numbers instead of human desires. And I think that’s, that’s where. Lost their way. Yeah, they really can’t

Ryan Baker 20:01
understand human desire as well as they’re trying to. Even with all of the data they have, it’s still making cold, analytical predictions, and a lot of times it’s coming up wrong. Now, there is a way that I have seen performance Max work really, really well, but we can touch on that in point 5.5,

Brandon Welch 20:17
okay, cool, because it’s very, really a cliffhanger, another cliffhanger. So performance Max, if you’re seeing this, if you’re doing your own AdWords, be very, very wary of it. We’ve tested it for the tune of more money than I’d like to say, and it, it didn’t work out. And some more often than not, yeah, yeah. And it’s going to, this is going to lead to point three. It’s going to, it’s gonna make you think it’s working, but it’s actually not. So performance Max is just simply Google forcing your inventory wherever it sees fit, which really is just we can spread your dollar out thinner over these really weird places that don’t actually lead to conversions, and they hide a lot of the data, and a lot of the conversions, or maximized performance that you get is actually from your brand name, yes, which people are searching and clicking on. Because so instead of you paying $5,000 and all of that goes to being in those like top three or four positions on search, they’re going, Ah, well, we’ll put a little bit over here in the superior site. We’ll put a little bit here in a random YouTube video, and they can count it as an impression and charge you for it, because you agree to it by clicking, yes, performance Max, but it’s not the way people buy. People are still going to if they really, really want something, or really want to find that company or that number or whatever, they’re going to the search engine, typing in the name and you want all your money there, in my opinion, not these other corners of the Internet where you’re where it’s a mystery, right? Find demand, so fulfill that demand. So yeah, Google’s making things more expensive just because they need to make more money. Need to make more money. So that should inform all of your skepticisms about the system. And I’m not saying Google doesn’t have a place. Are people gonna walk away going, how do we leave Google? I’m going, we can’t, and we shouldn’t. Yeah, but understand that the game it was two years ago, and definitely the game it was five years ago, is not the game today. They’re right. They’re just and then, in addition to all that funny smoke and mirror stuff they’re doing with AI and all that, they’re just legit raising the price of their inventory saying, Actually, I have an article here from our friends at Search Engine Land. Big research search engine research firm Google, quietly increases ad spend to meet targets, claims the executives the search engine reportedly raises prices by up to 10% without informing advertisers. So just because it’s like going to a restaurant, yeah, fake was $35 yesterday, at $65 today, or 45 today, or whatever, Google has admitted to quietly tweaking advertising auctions to meet revenue targets up until this, Google has largely been supply and demand, and that was the beauty of it, yeah. And whoever was the most competitive, whoever’s the most aggressive, and whoever’s the most satisfying to the customer won, yeah. And now they’re just going, Eh, that’s fine. You guys still play that game, but, boop, yep. Boop, that’s what they do, yeah.

Ryan Baker 22:56
So what was $5 every click five years ago is now $45

Brandon Welch 23:01
every class. I’m seeing it, I have an account right now. The literally the same thing. And the analogy would be actually more like seven or $8 for, like, roofing company, oh, yeah, in Tulsa or Bentonville. I have two of those, right? Yeah? Now it’s literally $40 yeah. And it’s, and you could argue some of that supply and demand, but a lot of it is just perpetual. Nope, we’re gonna make it more competitive. So

Ryan Baker 23:23
there’s a lot of competition there. And competition does drive up prices, but so does Google when they want to reach their quarterly numbers,

Brandon Welch 23:30
exactly right? And they can do it because they are Google. So um, they’re frequently raising the price. And then the last thing I would say, because of that, advertisers that used to be able to enter or like, do a little bit of good with a couple grand a month. It’s really, really tough. Yeah, yeah. I was explaining to a client at one point that we couldn’t have weekly meetings because there wasn’t enough data to talk about your $1,500 every month? Well, you can get maybe 37 clicks, if you’re lucky and you have cheap keywords, yes, you can get maybe 37 click sometimes you get four clicks in a week. And guys like Brian and our team and me, we don’t know what dog to chase with 37 clicks. Yeah, that doesn’t tell a compelling story over 30 days, if I’ve only gotten a click or two a day, yeah, I’m going, there’s nothing here that sticks out high enough out of the ground. Yeah, for me to go, that’s the one to chase. And the best search engine practices are generally put, you know, a group of things out there, find the winners, follow the winners, put more money towards the winners. I’m talking about the winning keywords, winning landing pages and the winning ad copy, yeah. And because, you know, two grand used to buy you a couple 100 clicks generally, yeah, maybe even more, we go, ah, a couple 100 clicks with a, you know, well, managed. You can go, Okay, I’ve got a hunch here. I got a 50% chance. That’s my winner, right? Yeah. Now it’s like, oh, boy, I spent two grand. And got, you know, a data set of 3035, 37 clicks. And I’m going they’re all ones. It’s not like there’s a

Ryan Baker 25:09
you get one clear with this. Yeah. So the the name of the game, you do need to start with a deep understanding of the customer, the market, the business, but you do need to human behavior is difficult to predict. Yes, and you do need to have data to make those wise decisions. The

Brandon Welch 25:24
and the ante is just higher, yeah, to get to get the right amount of money to optimize, it’s it’s like one plus one doesn’t equal two. It’s like two plus two equals 10. Yeah, what I mean by there is you got to have a budget over a certain level that you really hit that efficiency. And I hate that, because Google, over the years, has been the tool that we take, you know, advertisers who are just, just, you know, established enough to kind of get in the game. Yeah, and it’s like, for 2030, grand a year, I can, I can get you to the level to be a real advertiser. And now it’s, it’s tougher, it’s harder. I’m saying it’s completely impossible. But a lot of cases, it’s you got to be spending 50 grand to get the get to the level you got to be to optimize so things are more expensive, just like everything else in our world. Yeah? Okay with that. On the note of more expensive, proving this is the point number three, conversion tracking is getting more complex. Yeah. Conversion meaning used to be. We knew exactly what worked. We knew we put a keyword out there. We knew essentially, to the minute when it worked, yeah, and to the minute, what it cost us, and to the minute, what the cost of that result was, which is a conversion, right? Yeah, in our world, for most of our advertisers that are listeners, phone call, form fill. Yep, that’s 90% they click the ad and Google is tracking. They click the ad from this keyword, they went to this landing page and turned into a lead. Yep, you got emailed form fill. Or they just immediately click call, and they could tell, well, that was associated with this keyword. Yeah, roofer and Tulsa or whatever. And yeah, over the years, how are they changing that? It’s not it’s not that clear anymore. Yeah. So over

Ryan Baker 27:06
the years, privacy has become more of a concern amongst the users of these platforms, and to kind of satisfy those people and not get sued, Google has hidden a lot of data, including at least 40% of the things people typed in. We call them search terms that triggered your ads, even if those keywords led to conversions, Google will not always tell you what keyword it was, what search terms it was in this not provided category, yep, yep. And so we don’t get all the data we need. Now that’s not conversion tracking, per se, that’s causing that, but there are a lot of other changes. Apple is leading the charge on a lot of this that are causing us to have to track things differently, and Google is leaning more and more on requiring email addresses as part of this tracking equation, and so you need to turn on something called Enhanced conversions, which requires CSS selectors. And, you know, sometimes auto collect stuff the website. Yeah, it doesn’t always work the way it’s supposed to. And so you sometimes can’t trust the numbers you’re seeing. You may actually have more leads coming from your ad platform than what your ad platform is showing, which hurts the ad platform a bit, because it can’t use that data to optimize, using the algorithms, the AIS and all those things. But the difficulty is that you can’t always use the simpler, straightforward methods you used to use. So you need to use complex things like Google Tag Manager and tags and triggers and data layer variables and write that down. Eighth camera guy you got that he wrote, he wrote comprehensive course coming soon. So it’s, it’s getting a lot more complicated, and it’s getting harder and harder to get accurate numbers from the Google Ads dashboard. Yes, from what happened and and people are using a lot more platforms. People are using more devices. So you may have somebody searching on a phone to understand what you offer yes and how you can help them. And maybe they’ll call, or maybe they’ll go and fill out a form on your website on their laptop. And maybe there are several days between those, those actions. And the good part about that actually is, and it it’s blowing people’s minds, because they were used to going, Mr. Ad guy, did I give you $5,000

Brandon Welch 29:30
and what did I get in return? And he was like, Well, let me say you got 19 people for that. The true and then, and then the conclusion is the advertiser and maybe rightfully perpetuated by the likes of search engine people, but the advertiser goes, cool. That was all there was to the equation. I put money in search, and then there was this magic, you know, machine thing that captured a customer, and there was no other influence involved that actually has never been the case. Yeah. Com score, and even Google have long said you’re given a lot of credit to search engines. And it wasn’t actually the search engine in entirety. It is things like online reputation. It is things like, how long has your business been established? It is things like referrals from a friend. It is things like the billboard they drove by, or the corner of the street you were on for the last 82 years. And then people have this collective understanding of who you are, and then they go to the search engine and they trust you, like just the inherent establishment of your business, and if you do any other advertising and branding was always in effect, right? Foreshadowing, 4.5 but now so, so there’s not even the illusion, or there’s less of an illusion that, ooh, it was all the search. So truth is, for a long time, it hasn’t been all the search, unless you’re brand, brand, brand new. And my So, my guys that are there for a long time are used to like, you know, 5060, $70 leads, or, like, extremely cheap customer acquisition that they can go, you know, every $100 I put into Google, I get a customer that made me three or four grand. And I’m like, That’s a beautiful equation. But, hey, it looks uglier to begin with. It probably is uglier, but it’s not quite as ugly as it looks. Now, because they’re, they’re blurring the data. Yeah? Fair, fair. So there’s, there’s more happening in your Google account than you’re able to see most likely, especially if you’re spending at any level of scale, always, and what you need to know about that is, don’t freak out about cost per lead, yeah, especially if there aren’t other confirming factors. Yeah, it may

Ryan Baker 31:42
be reported as higher than it actually is, and what your ads are doing for you is going farther than what you can see in the platform. Yeah,

Brandon Welch 31:51
it’s in that category, sort of of, you know, the tomorrow customer and all of that. And I’m not saying search is the best way to do that, but, yeah, you know, there is a there is a reality that there’s probably more going on than you see, because conversion tracking and privacy is perpetually Yeah,

Ryan Baker 32:11
the primary goal of search is to show up for those today, customers that are searching for your products and services, yes, but it has expanded, which is why it’s called Google ads. Now, instead of AdWords and of AdWords to include a lot more tomorrow customer that weren’t they Yeah, big brains over there,

Brandon Welch 32:28
yes. Okay, quick recap. AI is complicated. The game competitive advantage is not as easy as it once was. And kind of all the all the lower knowledge people and the higher knowledge people are getting suppressed into, like this, middle homogenous, like, result, um, still there. There is still such thing as a competitive advantage. Yes, less than it’s not writing better ads. Yes, we didn’t get into that. But just trust me on that. It’s not about like they’re taking, taking ad copy a little bit more out of the banks. Yes, Google. So that’s point number one. Ai, is complicated the game. Point number two, Google is making things more expensive just because we didn’t talk about the antitrust lawsuit, but they’re getting sued. They’re not going to lose because they’re Google. But matter of fact, the conclusion here, the outcome, the landmark case, could bring significant changes of Google to the future the internet, but it’s equally likely the trial will result in no changes. Huge antitrust lawsuit. Basically, there’s people suing Google, saying you’re monopolizing and you are conspiring to raise the price with no competitive advantage in the market. You’re too big. The whole monopoly, yeah, and that’s happening right and completely right now. In court today, it’s happening, yeah, not like happened a few weeks ago. There’s like a 10 week trial going on, started in November. So they’re raising prices just because, and they’re getting scrutinized for it. They are rigging auctions as well. But we didn’t talk about that. We won’t rigging auctions. Yes, it’s bad. Yeah, deciding who isn’t a person, Google’s a necessary evil, and they’re getting more evil, yep, well, remaining just as necessary. The whole

Ryan Baker 33:59
do no evil thing went out the window along? Yeah, really did. So

Brandon Welch 34:02
point number three, this is supposed to be a quick recap. I just took two minutes to recap what we talked about. Point number three is tracking what’s happening is getting more complex. Yeah, so your results aren’t quite as black and white as they once were? Yeah, it’s okay. You can still advertise with faith, as long as you have good principles in place. Doing the right thing still

Ryan Baker 34:17
leads to results. You just can’t always see those results in the Google Ads dashboard. Yes,

Brandon Welch 34:21
it’s not instant gratification is tougher and tougher Google ads. Okay. Point number four, we’re not gonna spend a ton of time on this, because this, this gets into nerd weeds,

Ryan Baker 34:30
match types, quick, conservacy. So match types is essentially Google’s way of determining how relevant someone’s search is to the keywords you’re targeting, and that determines when your ad shows up. So you have three options, broad match, phrase match and exact match. And back in the day, broad meant broad Yes. Phrase meant if you search this phrase with something before or after it shows up, and then exact was exactly that search Quick, quick.

Brandon Welch 34:57
Practical example there. Yeah, yeah. If I were, um, estate planning attorney in Dallas, Texas, yep, okay. And I entered that and I said, Hey, Google, I want to, I want to show up for estate planning attorney in Dallas. And they’re asking, Okay, do you want us to match that exactly? Is it only when you say it has to literally be Estate Planning Attorney Dallas, or your ad won’t show that the person types. Or are you willing for us to be like, you know, have that in a sentence like, best estate planning attorney in Dallas, right? Other words around it will still show your ad, yeah. Or do you want us just to kind of determine loosely, what Estate Planning Attorney means, yeah. And so I might, there might be somebody that said, you know, wills and trust attorney and Google go, ah, that sounds like it broadly, we’re going to match that search with this ad and then, therefore charge you when somebody searched something outside the match type, yeah, right, yeah. Or estate

Ryan Baker 35:51
planning attorney in Fort Worth, you know? So it’s, it’s close, yeah, or, but it’s, it’s just closely related, right? So

Brandon Welch 35:56
it’s what they call a close married and generally, we would used to use all three types. We’d use the broad to find extra intent that we didn’t think of find extra keywords, and to kind of cover our bases until the broad got out of whack and it, you know, within a month or two, you’re like, Ah, now I know enough of the actual phrases that I’ve put in exact because they charge more for broad match. Effectively, you

Ryan Baker 36:19
spend more money with broad match, because you show up for more searches, more waste. Yeah, yes, more waste. Okay, so

Brandon Welch 36:23
that was the old days, yeah. And now they’ve essentially taken these what used to be we, like Ryan and I and Caleb and, you know, Tanner and everybody over the years here, and Audrey and Leslie everybody’s like, we go in there, like, we would like to, we know this is a really expensive keyword, so we would only like to show for estate planning attorney Dallas, yeah.

Ryan Baker 36:43
So if you choose an exact match for estate planning attorney Dallas, and you only want to show up for that, then you will only show for 1160 there, seriously, over 1000 searches can match to your exact type match your they’ve taken away the specificity, specificity. They have taken away the precision, because Google has shifted from matching based on relevance of search, and they are trying because they’re with a machine to match the intent of the search. So they say, oh, estate planning attorney, yep. Well, if somebody’s searching car accident attorney, well, this is an attorney, yeah,

Brandon Welch 37:26
they’re taking liberties. They’re taking it’s

Ryan Baker 37:29
not always liberties, but we have seen with a an exact match keyword Yes, targeting a window supplier, when a replacement company a search for a roofing company come through, yes, because Google thought the intent was the same, oh, they’re

Brandon Welch 37:45
looking for Windows. They probably need a roof too. Yes, yeah, yeah, it’s close. That is not accurate. It was. It was exactly kind of close, is what they’re saying. So 60% of the time it works every time, yeah.

Ryan Baker 37:56
So the the the end result is that you have to spend way more time filtering out the waste and getting to the good data to make wise decisions and increase lead flow, decrease cost per lead. Yes, and so exact match is broad match. Phrase match is, oh, my goodness, that’s really broad match. And broad match is just show for anything I predict

Brandon Welch 38:19
the Netflix documentary coming in the future about some whistleblower that was like, hey, this was happening, and somebody had pressure on them to make revenue, and they were telling me to skew the algorithm, and it wasn’t in a Google official update or anything. And they’re like, Yeah, and it resulted in wasted money for a lot of people. I would watch that. And the truth is, consumers will cry less about this. They can get a they can get away with a lot more sins, yeah, showing Ryan a roofing ad when he actually wanted a window company, because Ryan, in a split second, just goes, Yeah, I scrolled past it and I didn’t click it, yeah, or I just clicked the first result and then I just clicked back and I went to the next one, yeah. It cost him four seconds. Of his time to go, Oh, that wasn’t a winner, but it cost you $50 yeah, you meanwhile, you paid cost per you know, that kind of cost per click. So what you need to know, it’s a disaster, because Google is cooking the algorithm, yep, and yeah. But

Ryan Baker 39:18
if you understand how I disappear, how to use the the waste filtration system in Google ads, or the negative keywords, they work the match types there, which a lot of advertisers don’t know that there are different match types for negative keywords, they work the same way that positive keyword match types used to work and with slight changes. But it’s it’s important to understand how those work, so that you can go in and make those changes to filter out as much waste as possible from one change,

Brandon Welch 39:46
we should start a company called Search waste management. We could sponsor golf. What a trash truck? Yeah, waste management open or what, what are the it’s a big golf tournament out in Arizona. Waste Management. I just You said Waste Management. And I was like, Ooh, I’m

Ryan Baker 40:00
not a sports ball man.

Brandon Welch 40:02
Sports ball man, okay, yeah, he’s. He’s too busy modeling sweat, turning knobs. Oh, yes, that. I mean turning knobs, knobs. Yeah, I do the work. Yes. Okay, so AI is complicated. The game Google’s making things more expensive just because conversion tracking is getting more complex. Match types are disaster, which means there’s more waste, and it has all led to this point five, giant conclusion, what is the most sure way to win in search engine marketing?

Ryan Baker 40:32
If you want to win in search engine marketing in 2024 or beyond, and this has always been the case, you need to have a trusted, recognizable, and I’d say, widely known brand, the stronger your brand, the more you will be searched directly by name, the more you will be recognized, and therefore get clicks, which leads to cheaper clicks because of the way the system works when people see you in the search results, and the more people will come to you without you having to pay for clicks, it’s there. There is no downside to having a strong brand, and it is the number one competitive advantage that no one else can copy.

Brandon Welch 41:17
There. You said it. Branding is your best bet.

Ryan Baker 41:20
Branding is your best bet.

Brandon Welch 41:24
I would add a fourth thing, yeah, when they actually get to your page, they already trusted you. Yeah, there’s already a reputation that precedes you. There’s

Ryan Baker 41:32
less time and education needed yes to win their conversion action or their phone call, their form submission,

Brandon Welch 41:41
their share of wallet, yes, exactly, yeah. And some random name that popped up on the list doesn’t feel as good as somebody they’ve known and trusted for a long time that can show up in a lot of forms. That’s what we talk about. That’s tomorrow. Marketing, for those who didn’t know, winning over your customers before that gruesome, convoluted, overpriced, tedious moment of the search engine auction winning them over. Long before that, I have dozens, if not hundreds of case studies where I can prove that’s true. There are some big, big marketers, les Bennett, or les Bnei, les Binet. He’s a European guy has a fascinating case study with 1000 it’s like a little over 1000 really big brands. And he tested, he had a methodology for testing targeted advertising in discount promotion, and meet them here and try to, you know, win the auction of the day versus just good old fashioned do the right thing, be a good company, make people feel and that the results aren’t even close. Yeah? So, no, sure. And, man, that’s a lot.

Ryan Baker 42:59
It’s a lot less stressful, yeah, well, and the wonderful thing is that at the end of the day, this is still coming down to relationships between humans and everybody wants complicate things with the metrics and the numbers and the digital everything. And frankly, it comes down to understanding people, understanding what they want, giving them what they want, and building this relationship of trust over time.

Brandon Welch 43:25
Yes, it’s coming from a guy who makes his living and feeds five beautiful children by being that digital dork. Yeah, I said it, I am. I’m

Ryan Baker 43:37
It’s sweeter than the way my wife says it.

Brandon Welch 43:40
I just paid him a compliment. As far as he knows I did. I did too, and he’s seriously one of the best you can obviously tell by the last 43 minutes that Ryan is top of the top in guru land. And trust me, I wanted to say some of the names he’s worked with, he wouldn’t let me, but like the guys that are you would see on any major marketing conference are Ryan is on their speed dial, and digital can connect us faster and we can make the connection of the process easier for the customer, and showing up when they need us is a huge part of The compassion and like the final step, yeah, but it’s not in a vacuum, yeah. And it’s not a completely linear equation that only exists there. And so the more you are guys I’m talking about, it’s not just TV and radio that’s going to leverage this, if you do it well, and we’ve got a bunch of episodes on that, but I’m talking about even sponsoring your employees, kids, football, soccer, hockey, Girl Scout, whatever. I’m talking about showing up at your church or at a good cause in your community and building relationships and loving on people. I’m talking about putting your name on your trucks. Uh, and driving them around town rather than just, you know, not doing that. Yeah, I’m talking about picking up the phone and calling past customers and asking them how they’re doing, just because I’m talking about getting your team together regularly and saying, This is why we do what we do, and we are offering this good in the world, that those sorts of things that build an aura and build a Association and build a relationship and build a bond, that it isn’t about the stupid dollar. Yeah, these are the kind of things that by the time that reputation has preceded you, just like a good reputation of a of a of a boy who’s trying to get a date with a girl, and all of her friends say, yeah, he’s a good guy. Like, that’s what’s happening. And the light you’re recording the customer in that way, when they get to the search engine, it’s going to be less about these silly, AI, dorky, shiny objects that all are going to pop up perpetually because Google, the big machine, is always going to make them a thing. It’s going to be a lot easier if they just already like you. They’re looking for you to begin with. So it’s true. We all know that’s true. It’s self evident. It shows up in every area of your life, and you need to know that the prospect of marketing, it’s never been more important to important to be human, to be real, to be liked, trusted, yeah, and that’s where I would land it. Do you have any final words if you want

Ryan Baker 46:29
an unshakable competitive advantage that no one else can copy in this age of excessive digital focus of distraction, of chaos and confusion and busyness, show that you care, like like Brandon said, reach out and call a customer, send a handwritten note, an actual handwritten note. Oh, actual Yeah. And and just if you can prove that you care and take good care of your customers, this leads to all of the things in the digital world that help us as consumers take out some of the thinking work so it leads to reviews. It leads to higher click through rates, which in the algorithm, lowers your cost per click prices gets you more clicks that convert because they recognize you and trust you and have read your reviews and seen all the wonderful things people are saying about you, it leads to referrals which cannot be tracked on Google. Oh, it leads and don’t cost you any money, because it’s a transfer of trust from one person to another.

Brandon Welch 47:35
Yes, for free. Yeah, it costs just as much money to be remarkable like that as it does, to just be average, yeah, which is nothing, do

Ryan Baker 47:43
the right thing consistently over time, and you will have an unshakable, trusted brand that is loved to buy your market.

Brandon Welch 47:54
It’s warm and fuzzy day. These sweaters is good advice, guys. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for being here. It’s been my pleasure. I will get Ryan back for anybody who wants to ask specific questions. You can send those and get a free hoodie at to Maven Monday at frankon maven.com so send your questions in. There’s a lot to dig into. So if you’re seeing something in your accounts and you’re going, what is going what is going on here, promise you we can solve it. And we’d love to do that for we will actually pay you to do that in hoodies and candles and matches. We just love to do this. We love to teach. That’s what a Maven is, an expert with the heart of a teacher. This is Ryan. He’s an expert with the heart of a teacher. This is Frank and Maven. We are experts at the teacher, and we will be back here every Monday answering your real life marketing questions, because marketers who can’t teach you why are just fancy live. Just fancy live. Have a great week.

Hey guys, you may not know this, but last year and a couple years before, we recorded some Christmas tunes as a company, and I am going to leave you with my favorite track off that album, which was not our host today, but Caleb and Sierra singing. Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas. Hope you enjoy.