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[00:00:00] it's costing with the data google news and i'm so excited to be chatting today with uh michael natalin michael thanks for being here thanks mate really happy and honored to be speaking with the great google ads guru himself ha so i'm gonna do my my best to turn you beat red because dude you're a badass like i'm looking at your resume um you work for a referral only consultancy that does uh only works with seven eight figure enterprise and medium-sized businesses and uh real quick i just wanna pause on that referral only is that like is that like a marketing ploy or you legit won't take a cold prospect at the moment everything is inbound firstly because uh i can only do it myself at the moment because it's just me recently left the job it is a referral and it's not i've done no outbound no outreach it's purely just referral only at the moment that's awesome oh so this is this is your agency you're the dude yeah yeah oh i
[00:00:55] didn't know that because it says i'm the director at market league so i you know i wondered like i didn't want to put a fancy title like ceo or like yeah no it makes a lot of sense too because it leaves things opaque and so it kind of lets you dance into whatever role people want you to dance with you've worked for three of the really big ad agencies yeah i think that experience is invaluable for a lot of reasons like learning what not to do learning how to do it you've worked with 580 businesses in the last eight years yeah and you've spent 50 million dollars in ad spend yeah now this is like 50 million dollar like you that what i mean you know are we talking what was zimbabwe i'm us as well mostly u.s clients now but uh whilst that sounds like a lot of numbers when you work agency side there were times when i had like 70 or 80 clients in my portfolio what times were 30. so that number can hit up fast a lot
[00:01:47] but i'm sure it's the same with you guys i know you guys have had a lot of rapid growth and with the years i'm sure you've probably had the same we've got 57 million dollars in our if you look at our mcc accounts there's 57 million dollars right now in either management or observation which when i say that out loud that's so terrifying that's like yes and i haven't added it up over the years i probably should but it's such a liability you know like it's such a it's such a dangerous like oh i could go make 57 million dollars with the mistakes right now oh my i know exactly the feeling like sometimes when i take on like smaller clients spending 10 000 or clients spending a quarter of a million dollars a year i mean a month whilst i feel like in my head the strategy is exactly the same you're just spending more you are spending more so it's like this the responsibility is so much higher not that the results or the
[00:02:37] fluctuations of the campaign management will change but the responsibilities are so much higher absolutely yeah and i mean one you know we've made a couple of mistakes i had a gal um she turned off the geofence on a six-figure campaign and it was off for like four hours yeah and you know one one straight keystroke and we had to stroke a check we went and reimbursed the client for that ad spend and we we ran to google this was back when google actually had a support team for agencies and we ran to them until tucked between our legs and they were just like sorry no we're not we're not helping you which was you know those are those are good lessons to learn um you've been doing this for how long does it stay here eight years ideas yeah okay that's like 80 years in the internet years well the thing and that's eight years full-time it wasn't like half-assed doing some stuff it's like full-time on the google ads stuff
[00:03:25] as well so you know i've worked with a lot of people who kind of do a bit of google ads but then they do facebook they do everything or content websites but yeah for the google ad space so yeah and what did you think they got on your own when was the uh actually in december so oh yeah that's awesome good for you yeah well thanks mate i and it's probably similar to what's happened with you guys i was watching one of john's videos where he said you guys went from about a 60 clients to about 160 or something over the cover it was insane yeah yeah and you mentioned i think you heard that uh you work with a lot of agencies like kind of white labeling or partnering is that correct yeah like that's exactly what happened with me i've got a few friends who were marketing managers of places they were uh they run their own agencies and they just like hit me up and it just that's where the referral work came from but it
[00:04:15] was almost like it all happened at once and this was probably the first quarter of last year and then it got to a point and i was at a really great agency i was getting paid very very well but then i got to november last year i was like what i'm working two hours a night on my business and i'm making 60 more a month in my salary and i was like wow i think it's like time to move so for me like i'm very um i placed the game conservatively at times especially with like client money my own like business and things so rather than just like going like i'm just gonna you know burn the boats as they say and then just start a business it was really built up but it got to the point where i was like i couldn't say no anymore like it was actually more of a disservice to my clients so i thought [ __ ] i've got to i've got to do this now yeah and that's kind of how it happened and it's just keeps growing like i keep
[00:05:08] getting referred work i keep getting people reach out to me on linkedin so you ask me like what's your website what's your business like if you're going to promote yourself what are you going to do it's like i'm not going to promote myself i'm just here just to talk about this stuff and if anyone wants to hit me up i've got linkedin but that's it there's no website the best way to promote yourself it's like when you don't want customers everybody's like oh please do god take my money well it's the same with you mate um well ed lee like i went to his website the other day i'm a huge fan of his i've been like he is he had a course uh about six years ago that changed my life called the secrets of analytics or was something about analytics he's put on youtube for free everyone watched that [ __ ] it is our stuff it's called the secrets let me get ed leake yeah track it down we'll link to it in the in the in the
[00:05:57] notes analytics secrets that get every sale in adwords now this course whilst i've done a lot of like my specialty area was google ads but then i've really gone into the analytics area so like data analytics dashboarding like really knowing the numbers this was the first air training that i went through i'm like oh this isn't just like here's google analytics or his data but it's like how do they actually practically merge so yeah how do they play together well i think this might be a bit dated in terms of the interface the core strategies are outstanding so everyone watching this please watch it ed link is a badass i [ __ ] love you like i mean ed sorry if you're watching this mate hit me up yeah he's you're a part of forge i imagine right not yet not yet i'm going to do it michael right now today the problem is like there's not enough time in my day to like be part of community i've already got like
[00:06:50] a i call it like my google ads illuminati so i've got a few mates who are in the us as well who are like they work agency side but they work from really really really big businesses with big budgets and like we've got our own little click of like um like sharing strategies yeah so i will be jumping into another one but i've already got my own little forge but i ed's stuff is outstanding so i can't even imagine what his content is like now like dude ed pissed me off i wanted to do that me and my partner were talking about forever we were like we should build a membership we should what we're gonna do is we're gonna start with our sops we're gonna give our not give away but we're gonna make our sops available to anybody that paid to be part of this membership and then we would teach them everything that we do and they could have access to like internal documents and then ed rolls out and he charges dude he
[00:07:38] charged nothing i remember now it's more now but when i signed up for his god tier ads it was a hundred bucks and i remember buying it thinking this is going to be dog [ __ ] somebody paid for some plr content and i but i buy everything just to be sure and it was gold yeah it was go and then he adds to it and he adds to it and he adds to it and then he rolled out forge and i was like well he just killed the membership model for everybody because again he charges nothing and he gives so much he's like online at the moment like the real dudes are not charging that much like regardless what industry the real people who are not internet marketers are charging a few hundred bucks yeah if you start saying 997 1997 or higher you're just like you're just going i've got a big um issue with that whole industry as well because yeah yeah and i think with especially in the consulting space now it's really um
[00:08:29] whilst it won't affect the google ad side much it really is like ruined the facebook side where people do a course they're like what a high ticket what high ticket uh item can i sell that has high margins and it's like consulting what can i consult facebook ads and then they just sell that and then it just kind of like ruins the market because people who are actually specialized who can actually offer the value for actually usually a better price um are getting pushed out yeah first period in the noise yeah and there's so much noise especially in the facebook sphere because everyone goes i've got a facebook account i can run facebook and then they look at google like oh it's just numbers on the screen i can't do this so um very different there but i've i've obviously heard your um views on facebook i'm pretty vocal about it on linkedin where it's actually people hit me up a lot about like oh
[00:09:18] this is so amazing but i'm getting a lot of people going hey can you shut the [ __ ] up about this stuff like it's really like affecting us and um you got to be aware of stuff like people are protecting their businesses not just like like they're getting so defensive over facebook but you go you've got to service your clients at the end of the day you've really protect your clients from themselves and you have to protect them from the faulty narrative i've i can't say i have 180 on facebook i've brought in my view and it's been since we started using north beam you know about north beam it's a attribution software um now john and i invested so we struggled so we're partial owners so whatever disclaimer people need to know um but we started using north beam and it showed us how many touch points were actually involved in a conversion and when you're just in the google ads dashboard especially when you compare
[00:10:06] google to facebook it's so easy to get like high and mighty and realize like google is so much better than facebook in every way when you zoom out and you look at north beam we saw the participation that and not just facebook like every ad channel on the planet we saw the participation they had in the conversion process and it's not negligible like google's better at tracking and reporting but gtm is really greedy so google always says oh that was me oh that was me when we were able to zoom out north people was like actually facebook played a really big part in bringing this person to the conversion event it didn't convert them but it nurtured them and so i i think the facebook narrative is flawed and i think most facebook ad agencies are full of absolute complete kaka yeah but but i do think that an omni channel strategy yeah i think that that's the approach that most businesses especially
[00:11:00] if you if you have more than 10 grand a month to spend start to diversify your traffic channels um not that i'm i'm not here to push my ideas like i whilst i'm a google ads only agency i still have clients doing facebook because i've been doing that and i know how to do it i know how to do it like effectively some like in a very focused way but i'm not going to put all the eggs in that basket right a lot of businesses have are relying on facebook being their only channel but if at the end of the day you can't measure it you can't manage and if you can't manage it you're at a seven day window and there's a three-day delay in attribution it's like how would you manage this anyway i have to wait three days to make a decision on a seven-day window so that means that i have you know what i mean like it's unbelievable and i like i have to be fair like with my clients i still go into google analytics and the advanced reporting
[00:11:46] look at the multi-channel like the multi-touch reporting to see that and like it is part of it but because it's not a last click thing sometimes it gets missed facebook's um guesstimated conversions are like sometimes they're real sometimes they're guest and that makes a real issue because and lose trust like i was chatting to a business owner in australia who does about 50 mil a year in um econ sales and he was half google facebook he's cut all his facebook out because he's like you can't like you know it's just not working anymore and whilst it does work for some businesses some of the times a lot of my enterprise clients or clients i've worked with in the past doing 300 to 500 million dollars as a business who are using it then i spoke to a marketing manager last week who's like dude we just like i'm not doing any of the advertising but you guys like facebook has just cooked for us like we've just stopped it and this
[00:12:36] is a huge brand huge brand in australia and it's like you know whilst i can give my own view it's like i've got to listen to that seven eight nine figure businesses and what they're saying because i can have my own advice for you google ads is amazing i make money off it but then at the end of the day you've got to go well it's not amazing for every business not all the time it is expensive and it is difficult at times but you've got to be aware that um not all glitter is gold and i think facebook sometimes people are like losing perspective of like once it was great the data the abuse of the data they once had was great but now like the audiences are shrinking the data's shrinking ios 14 i'm sure you've heard about the android's version of ios 14 we're going to start doing the same it's like well google that's not going to affect google at all because there's no way they're going to kill themselves that's going to
[00:13:27] affect facebook more and it's like we've got to be realistic about this stuff it's not that we just throw the baby out with the bath water we've got to make sure that um like this is real money this is big money this is business money it makes such a huge impact on businesses so um yeah that's my little rant on that no it's a good rant and it sounds like you fish in a much bigger pond than i fish in most of our clients are you know in that that smb world most of our clients are small businesses and there's such a there's such a paradigm shift once you get past that it's kind of like the six figures a month in spend that seems to be the land of demarcation you know and there's there's a couple of maybe more there's a couple of segments underneath that but once you're at 100 a month and spend i've noticed that clients are kind of receptive to oh we're going to go test we're going to experiment or
[00:14:11] whatever anything subbed that it's like i need this back like i'm giving this to you temporarily and in 90 days i expect you to bring this back with friends yeah um so it's got to be kind of a fun sandbox to play in no definitely and i still have clients who are spending five 10 grand a month like but it's mostly now working with bigger clients because i've worked at agencies where i've worked with the small clients for years and it's just kind of i've realized through my last few years at my last agency like oh working with bigger businesses not only is better it's actually easier and it's weird to say that no you're absolutely right the small business there's a desperation to it that makes it difficult that's that's exactly it you're working with a marketing manager who will have technical expertise versus a business owner who is more this is my money please make sure that you know a lot of the times like when
[00:14:58] i've spoken to people they're like i'm still hand holding them through i'm like i get that's part of the job but then sometimes i'm like look i really am here just to do the work and i know that's part of the sales process but i've got to be aware that um you can't do that all the time and like you guys would be amazing at that like you put out so much content so that when people have um come to you they've already bought in they've probably only done they've done their research so what you're saying to them is the same they're saying on the video so it really helps them out but you know i don't have videos out there i've just got linkedin posts coming facebook ain't good well so here's the problem is the videos if people aren't up to date they have the wrong narrative because google changes so much so often so you know anybody who's watched a four month old video comes to solution eight thinking like oh you can do this with
[00:15:46] you know with sas right and we're like well we used to be able to do that now and which leads me to the thing that i really want to talk to you about uh performance max yeah like it i mean it sounds like you're having the exact same experience we're having holy [ __ ] mate it is unreal firstly everyone watching this the work solution site and customer doing is outstanding like they release videos all the time and they're up to date if you watch a video from five weeks ago six weeks ago six months ago it's going to be out of date fast so i want to say to you directly mate thank you because what i've implemented on clients is what i've learned from your videos like straight up like there's no one else who i've learned from i've been reading like fred valley's new book but like that's lying around here too it's good this what we're talking about now mate is like scared me this is where i'm like oh
[00:16:37] i can't be complacent anymore i disagree with 51 of what fred says oh interesting i i really like fred he's a buddy he's been on the channel a couple of times um here's the thing is if you open this book up the forward is by jenny marvin yeah yeah who's the google ads product liaison yeah fred's in bed with the enemy you know what i mean like he's his whole and you know he's employed in 400 invented conversion tracking really brain guy and i don't think he's lying i think that i think that he's wearing the frock you know what i mean like he's he's kind of bought into the google i don't want to call it the google lie but the the google story propaganda yeah so here's the problem is is if you go to the root of it and dude i actually really want you to challenge me on this michael please please please no google knows how much we make what we're willing to spend how much inventory there is and who else wants that inventory
[00:17:39] this is the perfect environment for for price fixing on it would actually be impossible to build a machine learning mechanism that didn't optimize that way yeah unless you intentionally went out and said don't do this so google's not an auction the way we think it used to be an auction and this is a conspiracy theory but it's i feel this way strongly the data you give google is given at your detriment and so you want to give google the least amount of data you possibly can in order to be the most successful you can so it's kind of like finding the apex the peak of the bell curve fred thinks that you you know open the komodo give google the data and i'm just like dude no hell no absolutely not because all that's going to happen is we're all going to get squeezed google the way that google calculates cpcs this is really interesting if you go look at their documentation there was a name for it forget the
[00:18:33] nomenclature but they introduced a convention a bidding convention that forced a minimum cost per click arbitrarily an arbitrary minimum cost per click that was independent of the auction and their their response was so it was like an attorney wrote it it was like oh we want to make sure that our clients that our customers are met with you know uh quality whatever ads and so we're we have a minimum and and when i read that i was like well that's [ __ ] and then now i do i don't think the auction exists i think the whole thing about ad rank and the way that the auction is calculated in the victory auction model and all that stuff i think that we're so far removed from that google is not trying to deliver traffic based off of a meritocratic ecosystem google's trying to deliver based off of how to maximize its own inventory and so i think playing into that is is damaging to all of us
[00:19:25] but i like i i definitely agree and i had those thoughts um years ago when they start to put out the target um target cpa so if they're wanting everyone to do on it then it pretty much means that like you don't have any outliers pulling it down but like google can slowly keep pushing up there dude it's a race to the top yeah like when you say that i completely agree like i don't have a disagreement and once you like there it it never really was like well whilst it is a cost per click model there's always like the quality score stuff and now they've got rather than just be like cost per click tom's quality score it's times like 50 000 or 500 000 other data points so realistically our bidding is like one out of uh 500 0002 metrics or data points so um yeah i completely agree and i like when i'm reading this like i've got to come from like like i said jenny marvin wrote in it um frederick valley's like he owns a
[00:20:25] software that he wants everyone to go on like this is definitely dude which is great have you played with optimizer i have years ago but i haven't recently it's badass it's badass so i don't want to i don't want to talk anybody out of it buy fred's book yeah dude fred is in here's the other thing fred has he has a house in silicon valley right like he's made way more money than me he's smarter than i am he's an engineer so clearly there's he's a voice that you should listen to um but by fred's book play with fred software i just man i i think that we're playing with fire here a little bit can you hear me sorry my audio just cooked itself yeah i've got you're used to there i might it said my headphones connected but they're sitting they're closed um yeah so i missed the last bit what you're saying but oh i was just saying that optimizer's worth playing with fred's book is worth reading i just you
[00:21:15] know i sit on i feel like it's this is so self-serving i feel like we're the rebels and they're the evil empire yeah no i get it yeah and but you've got to be aware like the technology is changing and you've got to stay up to date with industry leaders like yourself or fred or ginny like and whilst you might not agree you've got to be like well we need to know the enemy's strategy so we can kind of look around it that's great like a lot of what i'm doing now is about the workarounds because whilst they're wanting everyone to go in the box our success will come this like on the fringes and you're like i noticed from your videos you say that like it's whilst they're trying to limit a lot of stuff and data into a black box um which if it pulls the results at the end of the day like you've got to think about the clients like they're not paying um for our black box of information they're paying for the result and whilst we can
[00:22:05] all have our egos and high horses oh we're better than everyone the best way to just say you're the better is just get the result and i've noticed that if google does deliver results from this like a lot of my clients i don't use target cpa because it's not working i still use manual cost per click with enhanced cpc or maximize clicks because i can like configure it more but with ecom clients i will use smart shopping on everything now i'll always start off with standard shopping so i can review the search term reports clean it up make sure that uh it feeds like optimizations the feed need to happen but then as soon as that's clicking along smart shopping will go all the way sorry so now i i like this i like where we disagree michael because i think it makes for for a better video so i don't want you to take this yeah but when when you say like who cares about the black box as long as it's
[00:22:54] working i think the smart shopping i think it's a perfect example because smart shopping is a black box that works you know you plug in smart shopping it's like four thousand percent of roads uh but what's interesting is and there's no way to prove this obviously because it's a black box but it's all your traffic it's remarketing traffic branded traffic it's all the lowest hanging fruit so all of a sudden the black box kind of works against you because when it comes to new customer acquisition the only way to get new customer acquisition as smart shopping is to lie to google in a way that destroys all of your data so i i i don't know i it it it puts us in a position of being at the mercy of their decision making that the brand part and the remarketing part i've heard from a lot of people as a big concern now from i was actually i posted something on linkedin the other day about this so and
[00:23:46] people were like oh but isn't this brand of traffic so i went from uh brand two brand campaigns like one brand one brand people looking for coupons and then a smart uh shopping and then i put performance max on uh the smart shopping was operating around 950 to just over a thousand percent the client goal was a thousand so like we're trying to like figure it out like very thin margins the branded campaigns only doing like 150 to 800 return on ad spend so it's really not like a two thousand percent rice when i put just like performance max i did this the results are so much better and people like oh but it's all brand i'm like no here's the data of the brand over the last 90 and 180 days brand's pulling it down so i um but it is case by case like a lot of this stuff for any google ads account is always case by case but you've always got to start off with full control being a manual cpc a shopping campaign and
[00:24:46] then you can start to like plug in the automate i'm finding this you guys might have a different strategy but i know that like i just wrote it down like i start with manual for search manual and then manual with enhanced then target cpa or shopping or do shopping all right let's go back to that because this this feels like a value bomb you're about to drop so the way that you start all campaigns start over the way i start all campaigns is like for search just search and shopping uh manual cost per click so and this might be i'll kind of talks about some other stuff but uh manual cost per click with that enhanced then once i get about five or ten conversion then i'm putting hands because enhance is there for conversions if you don't have conversion data google's just going to put another 20 on it right but once you're getting that and you're getting you know 30 50 conversions a month then target cpa can work really
[00:25:37] well at the same time like i said i don't really use target cpa because a lot of the big clients i work with whilst they get a lot of conversions overall there's a lot of campaigns because they're segmented by regions or different campaigns so it might only get 20 conversions a month and i need to be more flexible based on like market trends um to be adjusting bids so that's there and um yeah there's something else i wanted to mention but i've already forgotten well so why do you think about it because it's going to come back to you do you think manual cpc is going away uh i don't think so look the only way i think it will go away and you just change it to maximize clicks and then you just turn that to it and then you put a cpc bidding on it and that's the thing i actually use a lot of maximized clicks on clients now well always with a cost per click um bid limit and really really on top of the search term
[00:26:35] report because that will just like literally just like pull in all that probably yeah and actually that's what i wanted to say and i know this is just kind of going off um term i watched a video yesterday where someone was saying are you experiencing questions someone's like how can i outsource the search term report um and i just think to myself i don't think that's the fun part but i love it because that's where you win it's the most important strategy you're gonna get out of it's the best data and google i was listening to a podcast the other day where google recommends do it like check your search to report like every six months i'm like i check it with a new client every single day right i'm in there and i've got i'll manually select all the bad terms and then press exclude just so i've got a um cross next to it so i know i've excluded it i'll also have a text stop next to me so i can just get like the
[00:27:25] phrases the small terms it might be like pdf or something else yeah um and another advanced hack is i've noticed this and i wanted to share this google is refining the search term data what they're showing you but there is a bit of a hack and a work around if you're linked to google analytics you can go in there and it will actually show you most your search terms so if you go into analytics campaigns google ads search term report you can actually start to see um search terms and analytics that google ads hid from you so it's a really advanced way just to like keep refining that search um those search terms because at the end of the day if you can just clean all the traffic up after time you'll just get a clean river of just like search terms like the goal at the end is just to get clean pure traffic but if you're wasting all this money on traffic that doesn't work like you're just wasting your money and i
[00:28:22] know for one of my clients they're a sas uh software i'm targeting all the type of keywords that at a time you came in and out but you're back now um for one of my clients i started using a dynamic search ads campaign and a few days ago and got a lead from it but it wouldn't show me the search term i was like this doesn't help me so that went to analytics it actually showed me in there and it was a keyword theme that google prediction didn't show the keyword tool didn't show so like i found a keyword theme that literally built out my account by like twofold now well so just i have two questions the first one is uh instead of analytics the phrases that you're seeing that you're not seeing in google google's giving us a lot of zero click phrases which i really like because they're they'll you know like show you where you might end up spending and wasting money um the phrases in analytics is it only click
[00:29:19] phrases are you seeing zero zero clicking so in analytics it will show this is the thing it will show zero click but then on another column we'll show you sessions and it'll show that they've had a session so i don't know if there's a bit of a a gap between they might have said if they didn't click on it but there is a session that's triggered for that search term so it could be zero click with the positive session at the same time on the same row with you know session visits like time on site so i don't know if there's a bit of a lag between data pushing through but this was a i can i can't show because it's client data but this was google ads that showed dsa campaign with one conversion i went into google analytics this search term had zero clicks one session and one conversion next time so is that a view through conversion you think is analytics reporting all conversions mm-hmm no because analytics like
[00:30:14] dsa showed a click for it do you see the show click for it yeah okay wow so we're getting very in the weights here but like when i mentioned no that's that but that's important i want to talk about strategy as well because these small things these are the one percenters that if you do one two five ten you're ten percent ahead right there's small things that really add up i've noticed yeah it's kaizen um i really like that man that's a hell of a pro tip using the analytics search terms i didn't realize that they would differ from google ads that much yeah um i'm going to go through it at my strategist what else do you have michael without me trying to like rip your brain open and make your own secret sauce like what can you give our listeners and our viewers oh mate well i'm conscious of your time i don't know how much time we've got i've got it let's run it i've got time if you've got time
[00:30:58] hell yeah i'm firstly once again like this is amazing like even when i logged onto the zoom and i saw your face i'm like wait this isn't a youtube video and now we're friends so you have to talk to me now we're buddies that's right yeah uh what this is like more of a philosophical approach to this stuff now so i've just noticed with the clients that i'm the bigger clients i'm working with now the thing i'm noticing is like you get the results like that's a given you've just got to get the results there's no bypassing that the part that a lot of agencies or people miss who run google ads for people is the consulting part and it's really like this part like the word consulting has really been ruined by internet marketers but if you go back to the original term of like a consultant like a a business consultant or like a lawyer or someone who's actually highly qualified like a specialist if anything
[00:31:55] when i've been speaking to really big clients you're getting the results this is where the real value comes from so they're not just paying you because you can do the work they're paying you because you're helping make their life easier so i just noted a few things like a lot of what the clients have worked with who are the big ones they're like yeah like we know you get the results but like we just want to chat about market trends and have the competitors and this goes back to another little um i look i just wrote in like google ads vanity metrics and every agency is like we don't report on vanity metrics and i'm like well if you're not talking about vanity metrics you don't have good clients like big clients because if you've got small clients conversion cost per lead roast is all important but when you get bigger clients vanity metrics like impression impression share competitor insights are so valuable
[00:32:45] because those market trends are so valuable for them like if they've got a core area that the impressions are down by 2000 impressions this month which could be 20 percent that's going to impact their business and during college it's not a vanity metric anymore now it's a kpi that's the thing but it's it's these terms that people like oh we don't do very much like every metric is valuable if you use it like we can't just like bastardize terms because like you just want to use it as a sales pitch like i speak more about vanity metrics with big clients than conversion data because i've built custom dashboards out for them they know their results but when they're talking to me they want to talk about market trends what are happening with their competitors where are the growth opportunities and these things shouldn't be overlooked and i don't know how what you guys do but i just know exactly what
[00:33:33] you're saying not to do we tell people vanity metrics are [ __ ] don't pay attention to them that's what other agencies want us but to the point you're making you know we've got i don't know what it is it's less than 20. we've got less than 20 clients that are in the seven figure spend sphere yeah and i mean it's man i don't know that it was as readily apparent to me until you said it but it's obvious that that's important like confession share is very obviously important you know what i mean the number of impressions they're getting is very obviously important and so it instantly lifts out of vanity metric mode and it becomes this is what lets me know six months from now we're gonna have a big drop you know or a big spike depending on on what it is that we're looking at and during like i'm in melbourne australia so we were having all these lock downs and a lot of service-based businesses like i had a big um
[00:34:21] enterprise painting business i was working with and because of lockdowns painters couldn't go to houses so there was a trend going down of impressions now that's obvious but then whilst we're still in lockdown the impressions were going up so and then leads were increasing because people knew that these lockdowns were ending and then then this business needed to know to invest more money to capitalize on the trend changing it but if we're just talking about cost per lead conversion rate and conversions and all that you're not going to capture this opportunity and because we're on this like a hawk we knew that when the market was trending up we're like hey like people are searching now lock down still for another two weeks but this is people probably proactively searching for a painter now um to start you know when the lockdowns are done to get their house painted so it's it's whilst those are still vanity metrics
[00:35:11] like you can't overlook it because big businesses rely on data points like this to really shape decision making internally because uh yeah it's just like it's not just like you get a lead in sale like people have to hire sales people and consultants to match the work the last thing you want the worst thing is what's worse than um not getting leads is getting too many leads that can't be serviced right and you've got you're under selling or you're not selling properly and then you know the client isn't happy because like oh we've got too much work and it's like there is a fine balance but this can be like a like a prophecy of things to come essentially well that's the scaffolding to put on it so this is what i'm thinking like if we were to if we if you and i were building the glossary of terms for digital marketing it's only a vanity metric if there's nothing you can do with it yeah and say hey michael look
[00:35:55] how many views i got you you're like i can't eat views and that's my favorite thing to say like i can't eat clicks i can't eat comments i can't eat shares i can eat conversions like those are you know that's that's so the vanity metric stops being a vanity metric as soon as it gives you the opportunity to make a decision yeah and the stronger and more important the decision the less vanity attached to that metric definitely and if you're working with a certain type of business that like an e-commerce business this doesn't matter for like if they've got a certain budget and they want to certainly rise it doesn't matter like my goal is the raw ass and the spend but then if they are talking about scale or growth like this is where that's important and when you're talking with like bigger businesses spending you know 100 grand 250 500 million a month these are the numbers that are going to drive
[00:36:42] investment because they need to go back to their marketing teams or their um like board of directors to get additional budget to capitalize on this additionally i've got a few clients or i've got a client that i'm catching up within 20 minutes that is a sas product that they're the leader in their market there's only like their leader and then there's them their product is better and it's cheaper but this other company does about 50 ml a year and these guys aren't doing that yet but i'm looking at impression shares like on certain keywords like the money keywords which are the ones that convert and get the sales and i'm looking at like what the competitors impression share or like out ranking is versus ours and these things are really important metrics when you're going head-to-head with someone because it really is a competition it's a race sometimes and it's not about position but it's about impression share or even
[00:37:31] once someone gets to the site how long are they on the site for how many pages are they visiting because the more engaged they are the more likely they are to convert and i've noticed you've mentioned that recently like you're moving away from landing pages to sending traffic to high quality websites so they're dude i think landing pages are going to die on the vine and performance max is the reason why you know google's pushing this 500 impression or yeah 500 touch point narrative you need to be in in front of somebody 500 times and if you've got a squeeze page there's no way to send somebody to a squeeze page 500 times but i can send you to my content rich website 500 times yeah and i like i work with a lot of landing page i don't design them but i work them because they do convert but i think the journey if you're going from a last click model they work but if like nothing's last click anymore right especially for high
[00:38:18] ticket artists people are researching heads you've got to realize that's my favorite quote of all time or at least definitely this interview nothing is last click anymore there is no last click like you're always at the middle of the journey even if they bought like think about the middle of the journey what's next where are we going yeah and that's something else i wanted to share especially for e-commerce clients whilst google can be flexible about their reporting in google analytics you can do um you can compare attribution models so you can go okay a last click ecom model verse a linear or not data driven dot drives and google ads but you can look at first click first last click or position based and you can significantly see that row ass could be 40 higher on a different attribution model now that's why they say don't use last click because they know that no one buys off just off last
[00:39:08] click like people do their research google it click on something come back to the website multiple times and purchase organically or directly or through an email funnel so they know that and i think like if you've got big clients that you can use data driven on beautiful but if you don't i reckon using position based is like so important like what are your thoughts on like conversion attribution so google just made data driven attribution inside of google ads the default and i think even for small clients every day across the board across all accounts police me by the way let's fact check me real quick hold on data driven so because data driven attribution wasn't available unless you had a certain amount of spend i think it was like 300 conversions a month on that goal yeah so google at the end of 2021 made data-driven attribution the default attribution model for all google accounts interesting and they did that in
[00:40:06] preparation for performance max because yeah so that's me and john were talking about this google kept doing all this stuff that made no sense data driven attribution became the default and we were like well that's weird because first of all not everybody was allowed to use it and then all of a sudden they open it up and made it default and then like customer lists were allowed for everybody overnight a bunch of really weird and we realized now that they were positioning for performance mechs i don't think i'm about to say something that's going to get me in so much trouble because i know there's going to be a million exceptions yeah i don't think we can afford you have to at least start with data driven because performance max is so multi-touch and you're talking about an infinite number of combinations when you think about all the assets asset groups targets audiences uh and then and then
[00:40:52] touches so it's it's it's four dimensional right so there's the assets the audience the touches and then time um i don't see you me or anybody else being able to look at a standard attribution model and really making sense of it i think we have to rely on the machine learning so i think data driven attribution because of performance max if it really is what we think it is i think it just became the gold standard now this is on the heels of what john has been saying and he's really the smart guy solutions ain't i'm just the mouth he's the brains but his whole thing is there are no golden rules so what i just said is a golden rule is you know i mean like performance max has actually brought about this ecosystem where there are no golden rules but with that said if you were to put a gun to my head i'd say data driven attribution because of performance definitely going and talking about that that really comes
[00:41:40] back to uh in unlevel the playing field they don't go the human can't outperform the machine now but they can't human plus machine and what i've seen in performance max but all my campaigns now is for rsa ads um and now performance max i hate saying this because i'm a data guy but like the creative is going to be king like you're creative uh and that i know this is opening a whole thing but this the things i really wanted to talk about on this call was about like the whole consulting piece of big clients like that is so vital but creative now whilst google in the past could you could just write an ad get some clicks and analyze the data yourself like the the optimization and a lot like the analysis side is becoming hidden but where we have more leverage is creative so you can't bypass this there's no bypassing with just like a shitty banner and no video like you need a video because you've probably seen what google's
[00:42:38] they'll create it for you dude is that the scariest thing you've ever seen have you seen the videos they're horrible they're a little like 2005 powerpoint presentations they're awful so you and if you do performance max you've got to realize like that can affect brand and a lot of people once again this is a whole big thing that google won't be able to bypass there's always people do have um brand uh limitations and they can't put themselves in certain networks or certain websites or things like that i think those people are going to suffer greatly yeah i think what are the limitations they want if they're like these big enterprise like american companies or asx listed companies that have really strong brand guidelines that they don't want to lose and they'll have like work around and i think they are offering workarounds soon where you can have placement exclusions oh yeah they've teased it i don't know if i'm
[00:43:27] allowed to say this so yeah you can do it yeah we've been teased with features like that as much though you know negative keywords for performance max is something i think has been publicly teased privately they've you know mentioned that there are some things that are in you know currently in alpha testing um but even so i think that i think that people that try to put too many uh exclusions or or too many rules on performance max i think they're going to do so at their detriment yeah the only exclusion i always want is uh mobile app placement your work placement mobile app you know when you're playing a free game so and the annoying thing is in google ads you can't exclude it you can only exclude google ads editor i don't know if you guys it's like that's one of those things that i don't know my ads showing on when people are playing like flappy birds or all the exclusions are one at a time
[00:44:16] like you think they'd allow us exclusion rules yeah but you know i think again that's google trying to maximize the value of their inventory um which just sort of is what it is i know you've got 12 minutes left i don't want to over the rest of the call yeah the last thing i just want like in terms of the creative is like the the copy you're writing for performance max like my big thing is really like direct response strong us like strong unique selling points like punchy stuff like not going we're so good it could be like 40 off this week plus 10 off with this discount code like really really pushing the value because riding boring creative is not going to break through anymore because if everyone's playing on the level playing field with performance max or all these other things you've got to have a copy that stands out and it really comes down to just like really punch short punchy like we're used to short headlines
[00:45:07] because of google ads copy over the time but really clear and short copy because um you know it's like i see so many ads i'm like these are boring like why would anyone click on this like even if you've got a boring product like it's a b2b product humans are still humans people will see something that stands out and will click on it so you need to look for just these are the leverage points we can have with like great banishing videos direct response copy or really clear and punchy copy and and then just like the consulting piece and funny as well yeah the thing that i like about performance mac well not the thing there's so many things but um the asset groups being audience specific uh puts you in a position to make copy that's so targeted you know targeted not just to the audience but also targeted where they are in the funnel you know like what they need to hear in that moment um this is don's video this morning and he
[00:46:00] was sharing some results i don't know if you've watched that what was it who was it john's video your business oh yeah was that the internal video uh yeah was that about how he segmented out an audience yeah that was meant for employees like that wasn't we weren't supposed to publish that and i watched and i was like dude we've got to post this like you've got to let me post this to you that was really valuable because they're the small things that help people like me or people who are really on the forefront of this you know we're all in this together like that's a really important thing for me because i've just started testing out performance max i'm like okay this is a valuable insight that i can start to segment out myself yeah so like you know keep sharing dude those insights are not to what what google's given us there's a lot of like weird like for instance google's reporting performance max only reports on all
[00:46:45] conversions yeah that's weird it's weird right like you look at then you're like why well i'm going to be straight up with you i've only used on e-commerce clients i haven't done any lead gen well there's no in oh yeah i guess i see what you're saying why that would make a big difference yeah um but even even ecom you'd have you know add to card as a conversion i guess if you don't have a conversion value to it though that doesn't matter so never mind i was trying to no no no no keep going because this is still valuable to me and anyone well so if you if you're looking at ecom and you're trying to you're trying to with e-comm you're protected because you actually have a cart value there so it makes it it makes it academic but you're still tracking you know there's five conversions that take place for uh an ecom product before it's purchased right you have uh view page uh add to cart uh click checkout purchase whatever so
[00:47:33] maybe that's four well if you're tracking all conversions every purchase now has four conversions you know what i mean and so uh no they don't all have a conversion value but then the conversation john and i had in a video that's about to be posted is whether or not google that's juicing the algorithm and if so is something like view product over influencing the algorithm should you remove that from your trapped conversion actions because if google's deciding like everybody that uses product might be a viable candidate it could be sending the mechanism off in the wrong direction so it just felt like a really weird decision that they would report on all conversions instead of the conversion your conversion goal you know um especially if they rolled out conversion asset or conversion groups what are they called conversion sets they rolled out conversion sets again in preparation for performance max
[00:48:22] i feel like that alone would would necessitate the ability to delineate between the conversions that are inside of the conversion sets because i understand giving google like the predictive indication of what's going to work but then to bundle and to say that all conversions are created equal like that goes counter to the conversion set narrative and i think that's why they always want you to add conversion values to things which you've talked about but that's more on the legion side rather than the econ space but it's like the great thing here is like this is still very primitive and there's people like you who are on the forefront of it so whilst you might go oh there's all these issues you're still in the top 0.01 of this and that's like really going to shift the dynamics of your business that you know what people were doing five ten years ago is not going to work anymore like i love picking high intent keywords and
[00:49:12] doing negative keyword lists and having super tight settings good ads but it's like i love that because i've been doing it for so long and i'm good at it and it's relatively forward but i've got to realize that's not work like that's not going to be the future so whilst we're having the discussion all this sucks we this is better let's strategize about this this is like us in the primitive stages of a new technology now and like the old days are gone and if people aren't realizing that then good on you like have a good job in an agency but like if you're running an agency or you're running clients and it's your responsibility you can't bypass this there isn't some like i will wait till like it's mandatory like you've got to do it when it comes out like rsa ads they work i get higher click-through rates higher conversion rates this is a simple one but image edge extensions like i'm sure you guys use
[00:50:00] the image like every image add extension when i do the reports higher ctrs more conversions higher conversion rates and lower cost per leads like the small like image extensions is easy but like talking about rsis auto applies image out extensions if you don't add them like you can't not use them now yeah but they work the thing is they do work i love that that's one of those things that i do out of all their changes over the last few years image extensions i love yeah that's a good pro tip for us too dude you're so much fun to talk to yeah i know there's a billion things that everybody has to do as an entrepreneur but you should you should do a channel like you would be a great voice in the ecosystem thank you for saying that and i'm going to snip at that and then share it around to people like see you want to hear like you know cussing from solutions ain't the biggest google ads agency in america is saying this so
[00:50:49] i'm pretty good nah i appreciate that there is i think what they came down to is like i've worked agency side for years with a lot of clients and you just see things so these aren't like whilst these are original ideas to me it's only because i've been in environment instead of like stimulated i'm not sitting in a forest and just like going oh how can i evolve the industry i just look at where the gaps are and then how to fill them like my business is more whilst i do google ads i position myself more as a consultant because that's where the gap is and that's like when i was talking about that before so um yeah i'm potentially going to start doing more content but you know between trying to build a website running client accounts talking to clients it's one of those things but yeah thank you for that's a very nice compliment from you yeah well anytime you want to come back on the channel let
[00:51:35] me know i'd love to have you back um anything in the honor the thing i'm most interested in just to throw my cards on the table i want to know when i'm wrong yeah you know what i mean and and you're very clearly one of the people that could like kind of call me out on my [ __ ] be like hey man here's here's here's where i just so you know it would be very respectful russell brand-esque but like if you're ever like oh i don't like that let me know let's shoot a video on it because i think people are gonna get way more out of that well what i come down to the end of the day is like i won't disagree with you i'll just let the data do the talking yeah here's what i think is gonna happen here's what michael thinks is gonna happen yeah well realistically i watch your videos i love your content and when i see something i'm like actually that's applied with my clients i'll implement it some clients it works on some it
[00:52:20] doesn't i don't go your ideas are stupid i go no it works for some clients and others but then you could say that about anything you could say broad match keywords like i run broad match on some clients because it does work right but most of the time i won't do it but that's the thing there is no golden rule but mate if you want to have me on again i'd love that because like is that like it's an honor to chat you so if you want to chat again and go deep with stuff like i feel like you know we've been chatting for nearly an hour and i feel like we could just keep chatting because i feel like i'm rushing through things because i really want to oh and every idea spawns two three four more ideas um but yeah man let's do this again i'm gonna post this asap if you're watching this this is michael natalin michael if somebody wants to work with you what are they where do they go how do they do that
[00:53:03] uh linkedin that's the only way like i am not doing emails i only do strategy calls um at the moment a lot of people i'm actually doing like paid consulting for so like they've got it's like some clients it's done for you a lot of my clients are done with you so bigger clients because like and then i'm doing a lot of just like consulting but that's what's more for agencies i've got a lot of agencies reaching out being like can you teach us um we don't do any of that i'll refer you all that work because i don't i can't it's just it is it's good for me to check but you got to realize so um yeah just look me up on linkedin that's it i'm gonna include a link to your linkedin profile in the description of this video um if you're watching this video and you want to be a guest on the solutions date show go to solely.com forward slash pitch solely.com pitch and uh let me know what you want to talk about and uh i'd love to have
[00:53:55] you on michael you're the man dude i'm going to give you the last words any closing for anybody watching uh i promised them so there's there's a data there's a company called data slayer which is outstanding they're not paying me i use their software i pay for it they're so amazing for data integration use data slayer because it will make your pvc life easier data slayer i've never even heard about it it's a cheaper alternative to super matrix that's slayer.ai yeah okay got it i'll include that in the description too that's not a paid promotion i love them they're the best company you want to make your life easier use them awesome appreciate you coming on man thanks for your time i appreciate it i thank you for i really appreciate it i hope i get to chat you in the future like your content is extremely valuable thank you on behalf of me and the people i work with they reference a lot of your
[00:54:41] work as well so you're a bloody legend mate [Laughter] awesome thanks man guys wait before you go i'm constantly looking for amazing people to come join our team so if you're passionate about google ads and you're passionate about customer success please go to solate.com forward slash apply and we'd love to see you as a part of the solutions 18. also if you like
[00:55:04] this video give us a thumbs up it lets the youtube algorithm know that we actually know what we're doing and don't forget to subscribe we shoot a video every single day and i don't want you to miss out on any of it lastly if you have questions comments concerns confessions or you just hate my face my voice go ahead and hit us up in the comments we get very little human interaction and even the heckling is something that i kind of get a kick out so thank you so much for watching thank you for being subscribers if you're a subscriber don't forget to apply if you're interested in working at solutions8 otherwise i'll see you tomorrow
