Brandon Welch 0:00
Every single change Google has incorporated AI into for on the ad side has been a negative, in my opinion, to add managers and end users and customers, and I would say even the consumer, it does not make as good of a precise match as what we used to be able to do as marketers and sophisticated managers of the ad budgets. And I think, frankly, Google wants that to create more bogus inventory, and always be saying, Oh, we’re making it more aligned with your business, and we’re sophisticating the, you know, the engine, and it’s like, I’ve not seen it yet, right? Yeah.
Welcome to the Maven Marketing Podcast. Today is Maven Monday. I’m your host, Brandon Welch, and I’m joined today by Kyle big chili debris.
Kyle DeVries 0:41
Thanks. What would I do to earn that?
Brandon Welch 0:44
We are cooking up some big chili tomorrow, but as far as you’re concerned, last Tuesday, big chili cook off here at Maven marketing headquarters. And I don’t know I like Kyle’s chances, but I like mine better. Yeah, I
Kyle DeVries 0:57
got so I got a little surprise coming to my chili. But I can’t say, or else, I’ll give it away. You
Brandon Welch 1:01
can’t say, well, by this time, next Friday, we’ll post in the comments, or, sorry, next Monday, we’ll post in the comments. Who won, and you’ll know if Kyle’s secret ingredient was we’ll see magic. This is the place where we help you eliminate waste in advertising, grow your business, and help you achieve the big dream, and today we are kicking open the door on something you need to know if you have anything to do with Google Local Service ads, we’re going to talk about what Google Local Service ads are, if you’re not familiar, but if you are, we’re going to jump quickly into some big changes that they just silently dropped on people who are spending 1000s and 1000s of dollars. And would you guess? Could you possibly guess that Google would make some changes that aren’t necessarily for the betterment of everybody? It’s shocking. It’s shocking that they just they would not improve it, right? But it is not the greatest news. But we’re going to tell you what you need to know, and then maybe how to overcome some of these things that would directly affect lead generation profitability if you are using these platforms. So just jump right into it. Google Local Service ads, I’ll give the preface and Kyle’s kind of the local expert on this topic, and he spent hours and hours researching this just for you, so we can bring you the best of the best today. But we talk a lot about Google being in mostly the today customer category. This is where we’re reaching people, typically at the end of the finish line, unless we’re using Google’s other products like YouTube ads or something like that. If it’s search related, these are people who are have typed for some service or put in some sort of brand name, and your ad is showing up as a possibility on the list, right? Historically, you know, way back when, in the old days of, you know, pre 2021 maybe there were Google ads, there were maps, and then there were good, old fashioned Google organic results. And just to give you a broad overview, Google saw a lot of, I guess, market share, for lack of a better term, going to a lot of these lead aggregators, like Angie’s List or home advisor or something. And they wanted a piece of the pie of the local service business. So instead of just settling for their Google ad revenue, which had served them well for many years, they said, We’re going to go create another platform that’s going to be self serve, and we’re going to have way more control over it. And so they’ve actually elevated in most service categories, think home service, think even legal and medical services. Now, I think anything that’s that’s kind of a local business that has an expert factor to it, they’re showing ads above where the good old fashioned Google Pay Per Click ads used to be, and they are calling those Google Local, Google Local Service ads, or you may know them as Google guaranteed ad placements if you were the user searching for searches. Yeah.
Speaker 1 4:02
So in theory, this new kind of platform or product that they that they came out with, was in theory, it was supposed to give the client more control over or give the business more control over their leads. Oh, it’s always in theory. Oh, it’s
Brandon Welch 4:15
always better for you, yeah. So
Speaker 1 4:16
unlike Google ads, where in Google ads, you know, you’re paying per click, and Google guaranteed you only pay whenever the lead is a quality lead. So I’m sure everybody understands when how bad it is when you get a call and it’s like the wrong number, or it’s somebody looking for something that you don’t actually sell you sometimes, if you I mean, if you’re using Google ads, you’re still paying for that, because those people clicked on your ad, they clicked on on your phone number, that type of stuff, you pay at the point
Brandon Welch 4:42
they clicked and there’s and there’s no recourse, right? You might pay in some categories, 1015, $20 like the market has gone up quite a bit over the years on those clicks, right?
Speaker 1 4:51
So for Google guaranteed, they were giving the control to the business owner. They were able to give feedback and say, this was a the wrong number, this was not a good. Need for me and Google guarantee to actually credit them the money back. And so that gave a lot of control, and it was a really nice tool for business owners. Yes.
Brandon Welch 5:09
So if I search for a local electrician or something, if all the stars align and I’m on Google, LSA, and I’m the electrician, and my ad shows up rather than paying to, sorry, paying for somebody to click and go to my website, it just takes them to this general page. Now, there’s a lot to say about the quality and the the just the general overall, like propensity for somebody to do business with you on, you know, that type of interaction, versus if they were aware of your brand, and if they got to experience your website and all of its glory. But what’s happening is they’re seeing an electrician, and they’re clicking on it, it’s just going to a very, very generic page. Everybody has kind of the same fields they can fill in, and then the person could call, they could say, Yeah, I’m looking for an electrician, and if the electrician provided the service, great, and Google would charge them for that actual interaction, not for the visit to the website. So just want to be clear about the difference. Yeah, the cool part in the beginning, which is this kind of the subject, and the pivot of today’s topic, is that very easily, you could say, if I called looking for a plumber and you were an electrician, you could say, No, I don’t do plumbing. And you could manually click a button and say, dispute, I’m done. Yeah, you know, dispute this lead was no good. I’m I don’t want to pay for this. And Google would say, Okay, sounds like that wasn’t a good fit. And they wouldn’t charge you the 50 or 100 bucks, or sometimes 150 bucks, you know, that cost to get those. And
Speaker 1 6:38
they would have, like, a human reviewing the call. They would they would go and they’d say, Okay, you disputed this. Let’s go make sure that you’re telling the truth, or whatever. They would review it. It would take a little bit of time, because they because they went to a review process, and then they would credit you the money back,
Brandon Welch 6:51
indeed. Now, if you have been depending on that to get profitable leads, if you’ve been depending on Google, LSAS for profitable customers, you’re gonna wanna hear what’s next, because they took away what I would call the most valuable, or the only valuable, part of the whole equation, which is you cannot manually dispute those poor calls anymore.
Speaker 1 7:14
Yeah. So what we ended up finding out, like through some trial and error, was that some of our clients who use Google guarantee were finding out they were being charged for leads that they shouldn’t be charged for. They were being credited for leads that were actually good. Think just suddenly things kind of changed, and we were kind of trying to figure out more information, and we found out that Google guarantee moved to like an AI detection system that basically automatically credits or charges your leads based on complete machine learning.
Brandon Welch 7:46
When you hear AI as it relates to Google, you need to, you need to think a I’m not so sure about that. That’s what I think. Right exactly. It’s AI has been, quote, unquote, used for good and to optimize things, and every single change Google has incorporated AI into for on the ad side has been a negative, in my opinion, to to add managers and end users and customers, and I would say even the consumer, it does not make as good of a precise match as as what we used To be able to do as marketers and sophisticated managers of ad budgets.
Speaker 1 8:23
So cost cutting initiatives for cookie cutter results, for sure.
Brandon Welch 8:27
And I think, frankly, Google wants that. I think they want to create more bogus inventory and always be saying, Oh, we’re, we’re making it more aligned with your business, and we’re sophisticating the, you know, the engine. It’s like, I’ve not seen it yet, right? And
Speaker 1 8:41
they will even tell you now, after switching to AI, we’re gonna, we’re gonna credit more leads. You’ll, you’ll have more leads credited. That’s what they have specifically said.
Brandon Welch 8:49
Oh yeah, yes. Which,
Unknown Speaker 8:50
there’s not much public information about this switch. That’s
Brandon Welch 8:53
your number one sign, right? Yeah, they like to do this. They’re seeing how loud people are gonna scream. Is really what they’re doing right? Now, this has been in effect for about a month, the best I can tell. I think they rolled it out slowly. But if you were somebody who’s been using Google LSAs, and you were, you know, maybe once a week, or once every other few weeks, going and saying, Ah, that was a bogus, bogus, bogus lead, which, by the way, was kind of the only way to make it profitable in most categories, Google guaranteed has become widely used enough that the quality of the leads is pretty low, like we see a really, really low quality per lead, and actually in some about half of our clients cases, it’s just not a viable platform, even with the manual dispute in place. But now the manual disputes out. And so effectively, you’re going to say, if somebody calls you for the wrong thing, you’re you’re not able to use that, like golden parachute that they used to have, just to say, I’m not going to, you know, I’m not going to pay for that one, so
Unknown Speaker 9:52
at least I’ll get my money back. Yeah.
Brandon Welch 9:55
So what does that mean? What does that mean? Kyle. It
Speaker 1 10:00
means we’re gonna have to use the platform differently, and that means we’re gonna have to probably be checking Google more on on how they deem your lead. Is it a good lead? Is a bad lead? That’s gonna be up to you to provide some feedback to the machine learning so and one other thing I will add is that I know some of the people that we work with were using the mobile app for Google guarantee. Another thing that I discovered is the mobile app is now completely useless. That’s another thing they did not announce. But you need to be using this moment in time. At this moment in time, you should be using the desktop app exclusively for Google guarantee, which
Brandon Welch 10:36
just means you’re gonna have to Google the local services, login and use that platform. That’s totally bogus, because that’s that’s how the majority of people, I’m aware of, the you know, the salesman and the owner operators were were doing that in the field. They were saying that was a bad lead, right, right? So we’re gonna use the platform differently. Let’s talk really quickly about how to determine if this is still even a viable option for you, because, if you’re not aware, you used to be able to set sort of a weekly budget, you know, they would suggest a number, and they would say, Do you want more Leads? Or do you want, do you want to determine what you pay for lead? Or do you want the Google team to decide what you should pay per lead? And basically you kind of kind of just have to let them choose it, and you put in a number, and you see how many you get, and if you like, how many you got, you would increase the budget, right? And there was really no more sophistication to it than that. That is totally contrary to the control that we still have on the Google ad side of things, to where we can go in and control click and keyword bids manually, and they’re just basically how they were determining what you paid is how many of your competitors showed up to to bump up that, you know, competitive price. But they never told you who was in the auction or what to expect. So what that resulted in, to begin with, was a lot of people would get really good results at first, and then it would just go to nothing. And that’s Google like just whispering, you come in and put more money, come in and put more money. Well, the longer that happened, the less profitable those leads got. And so what you should be doing, if you’re you know, going to go into using this, or if you’ve been using it all along, is you need a very, very quick record of what did I pay last week? What did I pay last month? Like a trending average, and then how many calls did I get in that same time period? If you’re not tracking that manually, and by the way, it will tell you when you get a Google lead over your phone or in the email, you’ll be able to determine who that record is from. It won’t be ambiguous. It’ll be it’ll say, this is a call from Google Local Services, and you write that person’s name down, and you needed to track, what did I spend on it and what did it end up netting me? Because there is no real branding value to this. Unlike tomorrow marketing, unlike other platforms that we say, You know what the profitability is, kind of a rolling snowball, and it always gets better. This generally does not get better. So if you spent 1000 bucks last week and you got 20 phone calls, that would be $50 per phone call, you need to determine how many of those you were able to set an appointment with. Let’s just say it was 10% of them. Well, then you paid $500 for an appointment, right? And if you can stomach $500 for an appointment, fine. Keep doing it. If you can’t, probably pretty quickly, gonna opt out of this. Would you agree absolutely? So, you know, maybe something you sit out for a while Google will improve it like they’re gonna, they’re, they’re, they’re secretly probably listening to this episode and all the people griping on the internet about how bad this is and,
Speaker 1 13:40
yeah, I would say, as one other thing, as a direct action that you can take in response to the change that’s been made, switching to AI, there is an option to provide feedback to the leads that come in. I would say, if you are using Google, guaranteed, I would be very, very diligent about providing feedback, at least early on to see what happens. So you can rate the lead based on your satisfaction level. You can put in some notes in all of those leads that come through. So that’s basically the best advice that you can possibly give at this point, because there really isn’t much that you can do with them. They’re not going
Brandon Welch 14:16
to give you any immediate recourse. They’re probably not going to even follow that feedback survey and say, Oh, Kyle, we saw you got so many low quality leads. Gosh, golly. We’ll, we’ll change our minds on this. I don’t think that’s going to happen. Probably not. But they’re secretly hoping all the people that have been depending on Google LSA gives them enough data and feedback to quote, unquote, make the system better. And it, it probably will, yeah, but like Kyle said, if you want to be part of the solution, and if you’re kind of on that line of profitability where it’s like, I can stomach this, you know, as long as it stays about the same, then just at least be diligent giving them that feedback. Yes,
Speaker 1 14:53
and hopefully the machine learning gets better at learning and gets that more accurate for you in the future. Gosh, it
Brandon Welch 14:58
makes me so mad because. Because Google’s doing this with every product. They’re saying, Oh, we’re gonna and by the way, they’re they’re laying off people by the hundreds and 1000s. Like, yeah,
Speaker 1 15:06
you really can’t pay a person to like, review these phone calls and make sure they’re accurate. You’re only making
Brandon Welch 15:11
a billion dollars an hour, right? I don’t know what the number is, but it’s a lot. It’s definitely that. And it’s all in the name of capitalism, which is a beautiful thing, but it’s all in the name of like, more, more, more more shareholders will never accept no as an answer, so they’re creating new inventory and ways to charge more for giving you less. And so you need to be skeptical of all these things. You’re already skeptical. I know you are, because it’s working probably, probably not as good for you. We’ve heard from just about everybody that’s been using this in our kind of, in our world that it’s, it’s not what it was even a, you know, even a month or two ago, but yeah, definitely not even with that what it was a year ago. So, so run those bias, how to maximize the best service going forward. Just final action items,
Speaker 1 15:56
yeah, definitely just remember to provide feedback, rate those leads. Let’s, let’s try to make the machine learning as good as we possibly can. If, if we’re going to deal with it, let’s try to make it as accurate as we can. So that can definitely be helpful. Use the desktop app exclusively. I They the Google reps have told me the mobile app is useless. Don’t use it anymore. So if you, if you are using Google, guarantee use it on the desktop app. And then I would even consider, you know, if this is if Google guarantee is not working for you anymore, there are other avenues. There are other lead generation platforms like Google ads or Facebook. We’ve had a lot of good luck in those other areas. So, you know, it might be worth exploring other options.
Brandon Welch 16:37
Yeah, yep, pretty cut and dry. If it’s not working, just just go to a different lead gen Avenue. Of course, the best plans and the best marketing plans, and the most profitable and the ones that really don’t have to worry about this sort of stuff are the ones that have tomorrow customers in mind. And maybe this is a perfect time for you to reallocate that budget that’s no longer working with you and start thinking longer term, like all of the companies that we are helping that are growing faster than their competitors, uh, even in an election season, even in a down market, even in an economy with headwinds, um, be building that tomorrow marketing and then your today marketing, this lead gen capture, just starts to kind of be take care of itself. Um, I will say Our most profitable clients never use this service in the first place. Like it can work. It can produce a result. But man, if your business is dependent on Google LSAs, it was shaky ground to begin with, and this is exactly why, because Google has all the control, and so what you want to be doing is building a brand and a bond with your community that happens long before the sale, so that when they need what you do, you automatically win that race, because you’ve been running a marathon with them the whole time. So hey, if you have a problem with your LSAs, I know Kyle and I know our team would love to just take a look at that with you and leave you better than we found you. Drop us an email to Maven Monday Mondays at Frank and maven.com and just ask your question. We may feature it on the show. We may just help you. We may just give you a quick answer to that problem. Or if you’re if you’re lucky enough, Kyle may get on a call with you and just rock your freaking world because he’s a genius. So if you like this episode, if you found it valuable, please rate it. Please click, click that thumbs up button. Please Subscribe that helps us reach more people and fulfill our mission of helping entrepreneurs grow and eliminate waste in advertising, that pesky advertising we get, we eliminate that waste every time we put a message out, we help another entrepreneur or another, you know business make a better marketing decision. So we’ll be back here every single Monday answering your real life marketing questions, because marketers who can’t teach you why are just
Kyle DeVries 18:48
a fancy lie. Have a great week.
