The PPC Agency Tactics That Turn Failing Campaigns Into Gold

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Introduction and Guest Introduction
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Jim Banks: hey podcast fans. It's Jim Banks here with digital marketing Stories. I've got a fantastic guest for you today. somebody who actually was put in touch with me through another one of the guests, Anton Schulke put me in touch with, with my guest today. Who's John Joel Bondorowsky Joel is a veteran digital marketer like myself, founder of a PPC company called PPC Designs, which is a boutique agency that helps startups and e-commerce brands grow through paid media.

So again, he's a man, dear to my heart. Since the early two thousands, he's worked with early stage venture companies, as well as global names like Wix and Similarweb where building campaigns that drive measurable results. Joel is known for spotting opportunities others miss and turning struggling campaigns into consistent revenue.

He shared his expertise through partnerships with SEMrush, where he taught thousands of marketers as part of their PPC Academy. I don't know if that's still available, if it is. It was one of the best things I've ever seen on, the SEMrush, academy. his approach blends data, creativity, and a deep understanding of how to capture, demand and [00:01:00] create it helping brands grow in competitive markets.

Joel, it is so good to have you on the show today.

Joel Bondorowsky: Thank you, Jim. I really appreciate it and thank you so much for that. Welcome. I'm, I'm really glad to be here.

Jim Banks: I, I was, I was trying not to make it look like I was reading it, but you know, there was a lot on there and I, I've got like really bad eyes. I normally wear glasses, but I try not to wear glasses when I'm doing podcast, podcast episodes. I've got the font up as big as I can get it. I'm like, oh, still I'm struggling with some of these words.

But anyway, we're done with the, the

Joel Bondorowsky: I think you're good.

Jim Banks: reading off a script. now everything's gonna be freeform, so to like I said, great to have you on the show. 

Joel's Early Career in Digital Marketing
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Jim Banks: tell us a little bit of your backstory. How did you kinda get into digital marketing in the first place?

Joel Bondorowsky: That's really like an old story. so I was like, one of the first jobs I had, I was about 18 years old, was, doing technical support for a small local internet service provider back in the day when people would dial up, to connect on, to connect to the internet. and it was there that actually I had the idea that I could with, a friend of mine who was like one of those little computer [00:02:00] hacker kids.

We could, offer competing service. So we, I mean. Partially competing. So we started a web hosting company, which is one of the things that they offered, a very small web hosting company. We, basically built servers, sent them over, sent them to a data center where people could set up their own web hosting accounts and put sites on it, right?

and after we got it set up, we thought, okay, we need clients. How do we get it? It was about that time when really PPC was really an discovered an ad network called Go to.com. go to.com was the PPC network that all of the search engines at the time used. And when I say search engines, I'm talking about Netscape Navigator. escape.com was the head of the default search engine. the main search engine that was used, everyone was connected with America online and through America Online. They were like doing searches and whenever they would see paid results, those paid results were served by go to.com. So basically I, opened, I opened up a campaign and I'd been on keywords like website hosting, [00:03:00] and I would, and I started seeing traffic coming.

I, this is before anyone really knew what digital marketing was. but I do remember like figuring things out on my own. For example, I remember thinking to myself, I remember noticing you know what, for every a hundred visits, I get a sale. And I'm paying about a dollar per click, so a sale is costing me a hundred dollars per sale.

and then I thought about what the value of the sales were, and that's like how intuitively I understood all of it without even like knowing any terms, mind you. no one taught me what conversion rate was. I didn't even think of the word conversion rate, although the concept was in my head.

So I mean, really, I, I got into it really early on, and the reason for it, to answer your question, to make it shorter was just because I opened up an online business and it was, the most effective, efficient way I found to get traffic.

Jim Banks: Yeah, it, it, it's interesting you say that,I I, I've talked to a lot of people on this show, who have been in the trenches for a long time. And, quite often the origins are very similar. I remember having a, a draw [00:04:00] full of the AOL discs. I mean, every magazine that I used to buy, I used to buy loads of magazines.

Every single magazine on the front had a, a kind of a sticky tape thing with a a an AOL disc in it, right? Every single month, I'm thinking I've got an account with, I mean, again, I had an account with him for forever. I think I had one with CompuServe, and as you say, nets Netscape Navigator. 1.0 was just, wow, mind blown, right?

I mean, I got a, I think I got my first, computer with Windows 3.1. Right. I, I, again, I think I probably could buy like a top of the range Mac. Mac now, right? For the same money I paid for this tiny little kind of junky, computer that was Windows 3.1. I had to load everything on floppy discs into a hard drive.

It was just so clunky. And, and as you say, like the, the kind of the terminology that we take for granted today, right? The clicks click-through rates and CPCs and CTAs and everything else, right? Was just alien. I mean, as you say, like [00:05:00] it was by traffic for whatever, convert a certain number of people, that becomes your conversion rate.

and then from there you can work out are you profitable or are you not profitable? And and I think the most important thing then as it is now, is the ability to be able to track things. So one of the biggest challenges that I've seen, and certainly the last sort of. 

The Evolution of PPC and AI in Advertising
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Jim Banks: 12 to 18 months is the arrival of AI and the adoption of AI by the platforms that we, we buy traffic from.

Right. So your Googles and your Microsofts and your Metas and everything else, right? And their insistence that their way is better than anything else because they've got these fantastic algorithms and everything else. I would just love to know what your thoughts are about how good their AI actually is.

Joel Bondorowsky: Well, the way I see, I mean basically, meta ads, Google Ads, these companies, I mean, they're businesses and at the end of the day, like what? They build our products that enable them to profit as much as possible. [00:06:00] Right. They want to be able to make as much money from their advertisers as possible while still giving advertisers a product that can deliver results.

And, they, so their ai, like all their AI is built actually, I think, first to earn them as much as they can off of traffic that they sell. so I, so what, so an issue that we have is that like with all this ai, we lose control and we trust them to figure things out in that learning phase and overspend a little bit in order to figure it out because that's necessary.

I mean, I think, by the way, AI has always been there in one way or another. Like when you look at PBC platforms, for example, broad match keywords and Google people searching for something and then matching it if it was loosely related. I mean, that was ai. We didn't call it AI back then, but that was ai.

'cause 'cause really, I mean, go, go Google introduced broad match modified because people, so many people complained about how bad [00:07:00] broad match was, right? They would, they would match completely irrelevant terms and say, oh, that's a broad match. It's well, no, it's completely not what, what I wanted. Oh yeah.

Jim Banks: But it's it's broad, right? We can do whatever you want, right? so again, like in, in New York, there's two airports. There's JFK and there's new, and there's what's the other one called in J in New York? LaGuardia. So there's, there's LaGuardia and there's JFK, right?

in Google's view, they would say if you type in. LaGuardia, they will show stuff for JFK and it's well, no. If I'm, if I want to go to LaGuardia, I want stuff for LaGuardia. I don't want stuff for JFK. They just go, it's a new, it's an airport in New York. Therefore they, they are broadly similar.

And, and I'm thinking, well, yes, they, they are broadly similar in so far as they're both airports in New York, but that's where the similar area ends. And I think that, they, they've taken so many liberties, so they had to walk it back. And then obviously they've done away with broad match modified now.

Right. 

Challenges and Strategies in Modern PPC
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Jim Banks: And, and again, I, I think for novice advertisers who don't know anything about [00:08:00] PPC, then the AI can be incredibly helpful and incredibly powerful for them. Right? 'cause they don't understand the way how things work, right? So sometimes they can get some results from running. Using Google's ai, but I think for practitioners like you and me right, that have been doing this a long time, they just basically dumbed down our, our capabilities to level the playing field at a level far below where we were operating at, right?

To make it fit everyone, rather than just allowing everyone to be outliers and say, well actually, we've got a much more sophisticated model of and way of managing things to deliver better results than, than most advertisers that, that you have on the platform.

Right? Which is how

Joel Bondorowsky: Did everyone, and also get you to spend more, did everyone, and also make you spend more okay, like one thing that they got rid of, I mean, they still have exact match keywords. I mean, they use the word to describe it as exact match, but at the end of the day, it's not exact match. back in the, let's say, back in 2012, 2013, if you had a keyword in [00:09:00] exact match, that search had to really exactly match.

I mean like, I mean really, really, really like down to exactly every little letter, right? And what that gave. Advertisers who knew how to, hack the system was the ability, and I don't wanna say hack the system, but you knew how to make the most of the system, was the ability to make campaigns profitable, or at least really understand where search campaigns stand for very little budget.

Like for example, let's say, your advertising a particular product or service and that product and, and that service, let's say is, I don't know, let's say talk about, let's talk about a small local business like your, like a local gym, right? Okay. So you could bid on the exact keyword. Gym near gym's near me, or gym's in Orlando, Florida.

I'm from Orlando, Florida, right? You can put in exactly gym's in Orlando, Florida, or Best Gym in Orlando. That's a great keyword. Let yourself get a hundred clicks from it, which wouldn't cost that much money at the end of the day. But guess [00:10:00] what? From those a hundred clicks, you will know with confidence what your conversion rate is from people looking exactly for what you have to offer and the value of the visit from those people.

You could back in the day when exact match was really exact match, you could spend very little to get real results. And with all this ai, they take away control. They started by taking away exact match and then now they're doing it even further with all these new campaign types,like Performance Max and whatnot, where you're just sort of like trusting them to figure it out and narrow it down.

And because of that, you lose control. You lose the ability to like growth hack it. But there are ways around it. And I think something you, one thing you keep talking about, like you brought it up earlier, conversion tracking. Sending the best possible signals back to Google and meta regarding the value of every single click that you're getting is the best way to feed those algorithms, what it needs [00:11:00] in order to, for those, AI systems to narrow down and reach that like narrow audience, that narrow targeting that's gonna be the most likely to convert.

So I mean, I think,it shifted in a way, like back in the day we could learn a lot with like minimal tracking just by bidding on very few exact words, just like looking at the outcome from that. But now that campaigns have to go so much wider, broader because of the fact that we're trusting AI to find that audience the way to really get the most out of it and kind of like get the system to work for you as much as possible is with very advanced conversion tracking.

Jim Banks: And, and the thing is, like they, they, they again, they came up with this arbitrary number that I think initially was 50, then they changed it to 30 conversions in a, in a month. Right. Which again, sounds, sounds a lot, right. But for some, like a really small business that's selling, fairly high-end products, right?

That, that is a, a lot of conversions that need to take place, right? if, if you're a big e-commerce retailer,you could send, you could sell 50 products in 20 minutes, 15 minutes, [00:12:00] 10, five minutes even. Right? I mean, black Friday you watch some of the, the kind of merchants we work with and the number of sales going through on a minute by minute basis, basis is huge.

Right? to get to that point, they've got enough statistical data to know, yeah, fine. That's great that the conversion phenomenal. so what they say is, in the absence of you having say, 30 conversions in a month, you should optimize for something that's not a conversion, but is something that's maybe a signal towards a conversion.

So that could be an add to cart. And I'm like, how much money has ever been put into my bank because of people adding things to the cart. Like zero. No money ever hits the bank if you optimize for. A, a co a conversion event other than the conversion event that is of value to you. Right? if it's a, if you're doing lead generation, then it's somebody fills in a form and becomes a lead, right?

What happens after that event is down to the skills and ability of your sales process, right? Your salespeople, everything else. But from a, a, conversion event, [00:13:00] it's that initial conversion. Yes. There are reasons why you'd want to, pass back the information of quality. So was it a good lead? Did it convert?

If it converted, what did it convert to? What sort of value did it have? You send those signals back to Google, they can learn about what to send more of in the future, right? So I think it is a, you, you do need to have, I mean, I'm, I know whenever I talk to people, they, they say, are you really anti ai?

And I'm like, no, I'm not anti ai. I'm just anti, they, they, they, broadly speaking, put out this marketing blurb, right? Thinly veiling it and saying, this is all about the technology. The technology is great, right? But it's only as great as the way in which the people can use it to their advantage, right?

And I think, to say, settle for something that's suboptimal, just to make life easier for us, isn't acceptable in my view. Right? I mean, it's if, if you have a, like I said, a small business that can't afford to spend 20 grand a month on paid ads, right? Again, let's, let's say they're saying a big ticket item.

[00:14:00] It could be, garden furniture or whatever that might cost five grand, right? So 30 conversions in a month, if the average order value is five grand, 150 grand a month, right? They might spend 10 grand to acquire those sales, right? But they might only get seven or eight in a month, right? if, if they're going to rely on Google's AI to, to deliver that, I think it would be far more beneficial for them to be able to continue to run.

It, manual CPCs to work out exactly what it's worth initially, right? So you're not on the hook for, really ridiculously high CPCs, right? And then once you've got enough confidence in your, your own data, then you can switch to something that could be a, cost per conversion, right?

Cost. Cost per cost per cost per sale, right? So then that way you can say, I'm prepared to pay up to 200 pounds per sale. $200 per sale, right? And anything more than that, I don't want to go there, right? I mean, I, I'm, I'm spending loads of time in Reddit now. I think Reddit's a great platform for understanding what [00:15:00] challenges and problems people are having.

And this, you see the same thing over and over again. People say, I set up a budget for 10. there's one I looked at today. Guy set up a budget for $10 a day, right? Then he, he, after a week, he doubled the budget to $20 a day. He changed the mechanism to,basically. Just open-ended maximum con maximized conversions, and he got a click for $34.

Right. And you're thinking, well, that's great. I mean, he, he, he's obviously did, did got a a, a sort of $34 click on a $20 a day budget. And people say, well, how can he get that? That's because they don't understand that, Google's algorithm allows them to go more than up to double the kind of the daily budget.

Right. If they feel that the conversion. Opportunity is presenting itself. But what it does mean is if they go over for seven days in a row by $10 a day, $20 a day, then they have to go under right in the, in the sort of [00:16:00] calendar month to enable them to come in at the, the kind of appropriate level.

Right? so they're expecting $20 a day, times 30, right? So that would be, whatever, 20 times 30 is 600, right? I have, I always have to do this mental arithmetic as I'm going along. $2,600. So in total you won't spend more than $600, but on some days you might spend up to 40 and they don't understand that.

Right? But again, Google's, Google's algorithm will not say, oh, by the way, you may not want to do that because we could send you traffic. That could be way, way above your, your kind of, if you like, your pay rate, I mean, you've gotta go, which auctions am I gonna go in and be, in a position to potentially win, right?

So as, as you mentioned at the beginning, like that was where. being able to do exact match, I, I used to say to people, right, I want you to, to go to, to a keyboard, right? Open up a, a notepad document or something like that and type this, this, this term, whatever it was, right? So let's say it was, car insurance, Orlando, right?

[00:17:00] Type in car insurance, Orlando 20 times really quickly and press the enter key 20, 20 times, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, and see if there was consistent ways in which you misspelled it, right? And it used to be we would grab those misspellings, put those in as variations, right. And sometimes it would be, you would forget to put the space between say, current car and insurance.

It would be just car insurance, all one word, right? And,there'd always be the plurals and then there'd be the, like extra spec. I mean, there's all sorts of different, different variations. So the, the kind of, the main,

Joel Bondorowsky: way they heard exact command. The first way they changed it was they took that away so that they, they made some misspellings with one.

Jim Banks: so it used to be, I, I, I used to be an affiliate and I, I would clean up on some of the,the, the kind of, the big, the big terms that the main head term would probably cost, upwards of seven, $8 a click. Right. But all these misspellings were like 10 cents, right. And nobody else was bidding on them 'cause nobody else could find them.

I found them, [00:18:00] I bid on them. There, there wasn't, obviously there wasn't the same volume of search searches for the misspellings as there was for the main term. Right. But there was still enough collectively if you found 40 or 50 variations of the main keyword, right. There was enough volume in those 40 or 50 terms to make a decent living.

Right. And I, I did for a period of time and then Google said, no, we're shutting that down and it's gonna include, it was exact match and similar variations. Right. So it just, they, they, they took away that, because it's not in their f it's not. Beneficial to them and their bottom line to allow you to buy keywords for 10 cents when they can charge six bucks for the same.

Joel Bondorowsky: Exactly, especially when it's got that high intent. So that's why they started it. But I think it did go too far. And I mean, in other ways they took away control. Like you mentioned earlier, the, daily spend cap. I mean, it used to be that the daily spend cap was like a hard cap, and that was amazing. You could really control how much you spent every day.

They got rid of that to make it average out for the month, but by the way, something you said [00:19:00] earlier, like back in your affiliate marketing days, like you would find low hanging fruit and low hanging fruit could have been, let's say, the misspelling of a of a, of a, of a, of a search, right? so I think like a way to adapt today, the low-hanging fruit might just be a different angle.

If you're selling car insurance in Orlando, then maybe then, then the low hanging fruit might be like, okay, you're still bidding on that term car insurance in Orlando, but maybe you. Ad is gonna be something niche or something different sports, car insurance, let's say, or, I don't know, like insurance for, like car insurance for tourists.

I dunno if that's a thing, but my, but what I'm getting at or car insurance for young drivers, but what I'm getting at is that you can still find low hanging fruit, but the difference is instead of it being directly in the keyword itself, it's gonna be in that angle. And if you're able to present a different angle, then you're gonna get traffic, you're going, your ads are gonna do better for that kind of traffic.

Your quality score will go up, your CPCs will drop. And you also convert that niche in a way that other people who might be bigger advertisers than insurance companies aren't [00:20:00] because they're not paying attention to that kind of granularity.

The Importance of Quality Score
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Jim Banks: Yeah, I mean, I, I, I've, I've, again, on back on Reddit, I've seen a, a lot of people talking about quality score and, my quality score is three and, but I think I'm doing everything right or No, no, not, I think I know I'm doing everything right. Right. And I, I always go, well, I'm sorry.

I think, I think your score disagrees. Right? And, and when you actually explain what the mechanisms of what makes up the quality score, right. And what the implications of it, right? I mean, people think just having a low score is. it's just low score and it doesn't matter, right? It really matters a lot because, it means that it's shown less frequently.

And when it is shown, you tend to pay significantly more money than if the the score was higher. And the reason for that is, it's, there's, there's three elements. There's the, the kind of the landing page experience. So that's what happens when they get to the site. There's the relevancy of the ad, right?

So again, if the keyword is not on the page in some way, shape or form, whether it's [00:21:00] in the title in or tags on images and stuff like that, and those are the two elements that kind of are related to your, your end, like your site. And then there's obviously the, the, the, the other one is to do with the, the quality of the ad, right?

If the ad is good right, then that will get the expected click through rate. To be a, a decent level, right? So if you have an, a good expected click through rate because you've written good ads, then you will get a higher quality score by virtue of the fact you've written good ads, right? So it always starts with, look at those three elements, see which one's the low one, and that's where you need to focus your attention, right?

So it, it's, it is, it is always amazed me how people just assume that it, the, the one to 10 score is just a completely arbitrary thing and it's, there's no maths behind it. There is definitely math

Joel Bondorowsky: No, there's massive

Jim Banks: Right. And,and,

Joel Bondorowsky: there's mass. Yeah.

Jim Banks: and I mean, I, I did a presentation in Barcelona back, way back two, 2019.

and we'll come on to talk about presentations in a, in a, in a, a little while. 'cause, Jo Joel and I [00:22:00] spoke about,him, him trying to get back on the speaker a second. We'll talk about that in a sec. But just to finish off this point, so obviously on, on, on that, I had two slides.

One, which showed you what those three elements were, the expected click-through rate, the ad relevance, and the Landing page quality. and then the impact on, if it was a, quality score of 10, it was typically up to 50% cheaper. And if it was like a quality score of one, it was like 400% more expensive.

Right. And that's how, I've always said anything, you, if you have ones and twos in your accounts, get rid of them. I'm not saying they're bad keywords, it's just, it's a bad experience that you created for the person that's typed that in. Right. So if it had significant volume, I would probably take that one back to, to the, a drawing board and say, maybe we need a dedicated landing page just for that purpose, right.

Because in that way, you will improve your quality score, which means that you've got more chances of actually winning the auctions that you're in, and you'll pay less money for them as a result of that. so what are, what are your thoughts on that? I.

Joel Bondorowsky: my thoughts on that. Okay. Well, [00:23:00] earlier I was saying, Google and Google is a business Met is a business, right? and at the end of the day, go with Google Ads. You, you don't, they what they're selling, really what their limited commodity is, eyes on ads people. How many, only so many people see the search result page for car insurance in Orlando every day.

That's limited, right? and at the end of the day, what will make Google more money from ads? Well, it's an advertiser that has a higher click through rate on that ad than an advertising competitor, right? If, you're able, if, if you, if you have a, if you ads get a CTR of 5% and someone else's ads have a CTR of 2.5% and your bi Google can make twice as much money.

Showing you first then your advertising competitor charging the same cost per click. I mean, that's not how the ad auction works at the end of the day, but that's kind of like what it means, right? So that's why I think that's why Quality Score is invented without Qual. It used to be back in the day when I was running like Ad Go two.com, like I was talking [00:24:00] about, that was before they had quality score.

Basically what they were doing was is they would show ads on top that high had the highest bid. And what that would, what would the end result would be that an advertiser who would get, would have a higher, lower click-through rate, could be ranked higher than an advertiser with a higher click-through rate.

Then Google came in and events with quality score and basically said, look, if your click-through rate isn't, if, if your click-through rate isn't there, then we're gonna make it difficult for you to be seen. We're gonna make it much more expensive for you to be seen. And that sort of helped fix things, I mean, to fix things very, very, very well.

So like as far as like when I, when, when I'm dealing, if I see a keyword with a very low quality score and it's a keyword that I, know that we really want, it's really like impactful. It's actionable. People searching for it, they're ready to buy. I'm going to, the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna split it into different ad group and really work on those ads in order to improve the CTR.

And then what I find is that over time, if I'm able to get a very good CTR for those ads, that quality score will go up. Now of [00:25:00] course there are other factors like, linear page experience and like linear page load time and whatnot. But like from my experience, I've always found that to be secondary just simply because of the fact that at the end of the day, what makes Google more money, out of all the factors related to quality score is CTR, because they get paid per click.

Jim Banks: Yeah. 

Speaking at Conferences and Industry Insights
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Jim Banks: So just, just to change tack a little bit, so we, we were talking, we had, we had a kind of a, a pre-interview call to just talk to make sure that, this would be a good podcast for Joel to be on and he, and that he'd be a good guest. And obviously we are here now. So clearly we ticked both the boxes on those counts.

but one of the things that we talked about at that, at that particular point in time, I thought it'd be useful to, to, to talk about it here actually on the podcast, is the subject of speaking at live events, right? In person events, right? It was something that you used to do a lot of, right?

And you are trying to get back into it. So why did, why did you kind of like do it before? What made you stop and why are you trying to get back into [00:26:00] it?

Joel Bondorowsky: Well, it just, okay. So basically back in the day, like I, I had, I, I sold an advertising agency, like an agency that I, helped scale back in 2000. I opened in 2013 and then I got outta it in 2016. And before starting PPC Designs, I had a bit of a transition period, and in my life and I really wanted to get into education.

In fact, I was pushed to get into education by Anton, who, you brought up earlier, that encouraged us,

Jim Banks: Anton could be very

Joel Bondorowsky: in touch.

Jim Banks: He could be very

Joel Bondorowsky: very persuasive. No, what, what happened was, is that I ended up, I went to Ukraine once with, I mean he was living in Kiev. And I went there with a friend of mine just to accompany my friend who was speaking at an SEO conference there.

That's where I met Anton. And afterwards Anton kept pushing me like, look, why don't you speak? Why don't you speak? Why don't you speak? And eventually I gave in and I kind of like found that it gave myself a lot of value and it also gave the audience value. And I got hooked with it. I started getting involved with FCM much more.

I did the [00:27:00] PPC Academy, which by the way is like still a thing. Like every once in a while someone will take it, get a certification from it, and get my certification and then tag me on LinkedIn from it. And I love it. It, it's, really very rewarding knowing that I'm helping people, with that.

Jim Banks: of that was, was, was really well produced, really well put forward, obviously well thought through by you. and, and I, again, I, I know from, from my own experience, from when I watched it, right, that it's, I think you try to do it to be more of a sort of evergreen thing, right?

Because I think the problem is if you go into too much in the tactical stuff, right, then the tactical stuff changes pretty quickly. Right. And I think sometimes you, if you keep it at the higher level, right, then one, the, the presentation is more valuable for longer, but I think it also helps people to, under, I think if you understand some of the background behind things, I think it helps you to, to be able.

Staying how to position things.

Joel Bondorowsky: You're 110% correct. And also a lot of the tactical stuff as far as I like the tactical stuff. You learn like Google teaches you that very, very, very well. Meta teaches [00:28:00] you that very, very well. They're not teaching strategy. You know what I mean? So that's one reason why I, I, I did, they were actually pushing me to get more tactical than I wanted to be.

And I, and I felt like I was just doing like at some point, step by step guides on like how to open campaigns, like basically walkthroughs, click on this and click on that. Then click on that data and ad group, then this is where, enter your keywords. And I, I wasn't so thrilled with that because I just felt like I was redundant to what you get.

Just from Google's help center and whatnot. But, yeah, you're right. that was something there, but then, so basically you asked how I about speaking. So I, I was really more involved with it. And then, I started PBC designs and I started getting, very involved with clients and that, and then my, my, my focus then shifted more to servicing clients, which, is really my bread and butter.

At the end of the day. That's how we get paid. I don't think there are any, and there are very few internet marketing speakers out there who, do, who speak and have a significant in income from it directly. Right. but now I'm at a point where I'm actually looking to juggle both [00:29:00] just because of the value that I add to myself by speaking and also the value that I add to others and also.

To help, me scale my own agency. Like one, one of my goals is to grow and, the more I speak, the more I make people aware that I'm out there, what I have to offer. it's, it's a campaign strategy, and basically I'm running awareness campaigns for myself.

Jim Banks: Yeah. And I think in some respects, I think, conveying your knowledge, I, I, I, I mean, it used to be if you'd spoke in a conference, and there'd be a, a bunch of people in the audience, you'd have 40, 50 people would come up to you afterwards who were budget holders and decision makers, and they would be able to go, Hey, I want you to come and come and do some work with me.

Right. And it was great. And I think we've moved on. And I think in some respects it's, it's. It's nice to see because it, I think it means that the industry's matured more, right? So what tends to happen is those people are not going to the shows now. They're sending their team members to go and learn more, right?

So they, they, they typically work in-house. So quite often they're, they're [00:30:00] with, writing copious notes to kinda make sure they've got the, the latest kind of information. and then they will go back to the, to the office and kind of implement the things based upon what you've discussed.

So I think the days of being able to go along and pick up five, 10 new clients on the back of just speaking at a conference are gone. But that's not to say that it's still not valuable. I mean, I, I've picked up definitely, new clients. I mean, I mentioned speaking at, a, a conference in Barcelona about,Google Ads and quality score and stuff like that.

And,I picked up, I think two clients on the back of that because I was showing them something that. They'd never seen before. And, and they really saw value in what I was presenting to them. 'cause again, I wasn't, I wasn't just, Hey, this is how Performance Max work, and this is demand gen and this, I, I really obeyed my soul in some respects to, to, to present again, stuff that nobody had really seen before.

And, I think consequently that, that kind of helped me. But,but I think it, it, it's, for me, it's always a way of, people like me and you who've been here doing this a while. I think it's [00:31:00] important to give back. I think it's important to keep the, the, the industry going in the right direction.

I think it's important that we help to provide a platform, hence the podcast, to, to provide a platform for the education of the next generation of digital marketers in whatever shape and form they come in. Right. And,and obviously podcasting is a good way, webinars a good thing. You and I both have done webinars with, Anton and, and Doda quite recently and,again, I really enjoyed yours. and I had the opportunity to in interview, Nava Hopkins, who is another guest on the podcast. because she's now got a new role as a product liaison for Microsoft Ads, right? So again, I think Microsoft Ads is a very they've, they've had a bit of a bum deal in, in, in the way kind of things have gone.

And I think they've always been, particularly productive for me. so seeing sort of Nava in there now has given me kind of good confidence that I think it'll move forward in the right way because she's got her, her eye in the kind of community where we are, but also kind of her, her sort of company hat on as well, which I think will be good.

[00:32:00] but, but I think,in, in that respect, I think it's, it's, it's one of those things I think the, the opportunities to present now, right? I think more and more people are wanting to speak, it's become a bit like a bucket list thing, right? I want to. Present at a conference. Right.

And I've always asked people, well, why do you want to do it? Right? Well, I just wanna say that I've done it right? And that's not the reason to go and present at a conference. Right. Just to cross it off a checklist. Right. Done That done what next? and, and I think that, that it's important to have, the, the, the, the kind of, the general reason for being there should be to help educate the people that are in the audience, educate and entertain in some respects.

Right. And,and, and I stopped speaking much like yourself. I had, commitments and, and everything else. And I, I just took myself off the speaking circuit, because I, I felt I was too white, too male and too old. and then I realized that in actual fact, my ogus was probably one thing that I [00:33:00] think stood.

Stood the test of time. It, it's, I think it, it makes people like me and you unique, anyone that, that,has been doing it for as long as we have. You can't fake longevity, right? You go, there's lots of things you can fake, right? It's very easy to fake testimonials, fake this, fake case studies, right?

But you can't fake having been doing it for as long as you've been doing it, right? so I think in that respect, I think it's still important that, you can impart your knowledge before you decide that you're gonna go off and retire or whatever, right? Still important that you impart your knowledge, help educate.

I think sometimes also, if you're trying to grow your agency, going and speaking at a conference can be a really good sort of interview process for people that are potential candidates to come and work with you, right? Because if they look at you, watch you present, they meet you in the, in the sort of casual, breakout sessions afterwards, right?

They have an opportunity to get to know you a little bit better outside of the formal formality of an,an interview to get a job, right? And I think that the, the one thing I've always found in our industry [00:34:00] is people are very transient. They move around a lot, right?

The Changing Job Market
---

Jim Banks: I've always said that, lots of people don't really stay very long in one place. People expect them to stay forever. I mean, it used to be my dad would be, 40 years man and boy working for the same company. And now if he, if you can get three to five years out of somebody, you've done well, right?

I mean, I, I don't think,three years is, is a stretch by any, any, imagine you look at anyone's LinkedIn profile, how many experiences they've had, lots of them, right? so I think in, in some respects, that's part of the reason why a, a speaking at conferences would be good.

and certainly if you are an event organizer looking for good speakers, then maybe John and I can do a double act. We can go and come together,

Joel Bondorowsky: Oh, I'd love that.

Jim Banks: but, but I think, you

The Importance of Experience in Digital Marketing
---

Joel Bondorowsky: No, but experience is what matters the most. Like you're talking about strategy and tactics earlier, like experience is what, helps people become strategic thinkers. okay, for example, you could learn people's,digital marketing is a profession, it's a profession, which you in many ways drives economies.

It's like how Google and meta make the majority of [00:35:00] their money. and you could learn everything it takes in order to, as far as features go and tools for meta and Google Ads, you could learn it very, very quickly. There's maybe about this much documentation to get through, right? How much documentation do you have to get through in order to get a university degree to be another type of profession?

It's massive. Anyone could learn how to do it, but really what makes you successful is having experience of being trusted with budget. And pulling that trigger. When I say pulling that trigger, I'm talking about launching that campaign about like launching, about having, let's say, a certain amount to spend that you're going to like, basically like trust in a system on campaigns that you build around what you know, and put your name behind how it's going to perform that.

And, and being able to do that and do that with confidence can only come from experience, And then that, that's why I have to say over and over again that experience is by far the most valuable thing. And for people who are like, just looking to get started in digital marketing, I tell them like, look, get your [00:36:00] certifications, Google, all the PPC platforms, give them to you free, and then just get a job.

Any job you can where you're trusted to some capacity with some sort of budget, forget what the pay is going to be. Look at it as school, look at it as university because you're gonna, first of all learn from your superiors, but second of all, you're gonna get that hands-on experience that then you're gonna, you're gonna then carry on to either grow that company that you're at or six months later find another job.

Jim Banks: With six months of experience of actually doing the job under your belt, I

Challenges of Running an Agency
---

Joel Bondorowsky: 've, I've seen, I've seen so many people who work in agencies who say they want to run their own agency and, Mm-hmm.

Jim Banks: Again, I, I've been doing it a long time. You have too. It's it's no, it is no walk in the park. Right. It's really not as simple and straightforward as people think it is. And,and I think sometimes the people who think it's easy are the ones that probably find it to be the hardest.

Right. They don't see a lot of the stuff that goes on behind the scenes that makes things run smoothly, right. Within the agency itself. I've [00:37:00] always maintained my job as the agency owner is to clear all the crap out the way so they can come through behind and know that everything's gonna work the way they, that, the way we've discussed as an agency, we're gonna deliver the, the kind of, as you say, the campaigns that, our clients rely on our performance.

Right. 

Performance-Based Compensation
---

Jim Banks: I mean, in a lot of cases we are a performance agency, so a lot of our compensation is tied to the performance, which means we're more selective than I think a lot of other agency. Agencies might be right? Because for us it's like we, if we've got our skin tied to the performance of the, the company we're working with, right?

We need, we need to make absolutely sure that, they've got their sort of stuff together. Because if they don't, then our income's gonna suffer as a result of that. Right. it's, like I said, it's, it's a. Something that works for them because they feel that we've got skin in the game.

'cause we have, right. And it works for us because if we deliver great results, we get compensated incredibly well. Right. Regardless of how much effort, I mean, I, I, [00:38:00] some of them, the biggest checks clients have ever cut me have come in months where we've had to do hardly any work at all because things have just been

Joel Bondorowsky: I, I could tell you the same stories as well.

Jim Banks: Right. So well Right. But they understand and accept, right, that there's equally times when things are going horribly wrong where we do tons of work and get paid next to nothing because we're just scrambling around trying to troubleshoot and solve problems. Right. And that's, again, that's, that's kind have, all the good and none of the bad.

You have to accept both sides on both sides. Right. So clients and us have to accept that if things are going well, they cut a check. They don't even blink an eye, they just go, great. Thank you so much. That's fantastic. Right. Because we, I've always maintained, we are putting far more money on the table than we ever take off it.

Right. And I think a lot of agencies don't operate that way. I mean, there's a guy who's complaining, he's, he's complaining. He's, he works for an agency. He's been working with I think something like,seven clients a month for a month. And he does an hour a day with each client. And the [00:39:00] agency that he's working with have given him another three clients to look after.

Right. So he's now basically saying, I can't, I've got, that basically means I've got like another three hours of work per day per client. Right. I'm thinking that seems again, o really excessive amount of work that's being done for, 10 clients. Right. And,and I'm thinking to myself, well, even if that is the case, right?

He, he then went on to say, that the three clients that he's been given Right. He, he actually hasn't done anything on them. 'cause he doesn't have the time. Right. And I'm thinking. Again, if, if you're the agency owner, why have you allowed that sort of scenario to happen? Right? I mean, you, you, you should be able to see that a person is at capacity.

Don't give them more capacity expecting them to be able to just pick up the slack. It just doesn't work that way. Right. and that's, to me, again, that's poor, poor management on the agency owner side of things, but also poor feedback from their side to not.

Joel Bondorowsky: I think it's, I think it was representative of a different business model. Like I think you, you and I are different in the aspect that we [00:40:00] work. We, we, we work off of performance. We look for performance. We understand what performance is. So the clients that we're gonna work with, we're going to, when we build our strategies, we're going to look at what's most effective in order to move the needle in order to like really at the end of the day, bring more money down to the bank account as opposed to other agencies.

And I think this is the more popular way of thinking, which is basically to check off boxes, to be like, oh, okay, well you need internet marketing. Okay, well, let's make sure you have all these things ticked off without really focusing on what matters. You know what I mean? At the end of the day, what matters is a sales funnel that could convert and campaign sources that can bring more revenue than they spend.

That's it. Right? That's what we wanna primarily focus on. And if we don't have that, then putting effort into social media presence, I mean, just for the sake of social media and other places really isn't going to matter. It's not gonna help until you have that first thing. You and I get that.

But I think people who are just looking to tick boxes, don't, and I think that might be the type of [00:41:00] business model that's, that's the case of the agency from that, friend of yours that you're describing, where they're just basically selling lists of services as opposed to results.

Jim Banks: Yeah. Yeah. So they have a monthly, monthly retainer. They have an expectation from the client. They, they're gonna deliver a certain number of hours of work, right. With no accountability for performance. Right. So it doesn't really matter. We did, we did the six hours that we had on our kind of,our contract.

So payers, right. And.

Joel Bondorowsky: Yeah.

Jim Banks: Again, if it's sort of like, well, what did you actually do this month? You look at the change history, nothing at all. Right? Well, why would I pay you anything if you haven't done anything? Right? I mean, you know

Joel Bondorowsky: Look at the results.

Jim Banks: Yeah, yeah. But, but that, again, that's because you position it Again, I always positioned those things right at the beginning, right.

Before we've even done signed the agreement. I always position it and say, I'm really good at running paid search campaigns. I'm really crap at chasing people for money. Don't ever stiff me on bills. Don't pay. Don't not pay an invoice. 'cause if you do, [00:42:00] right, then as far as I'm concerned, we're done.

Right. We're not, my relationship with you is over. If I have to chase you for money and,and they all go, no, no, no. We, that will never happen. And it never has. Right. And,and, and, but

Joel Bondorowsky: Yeah. And there's a reason for that. The reason for that is because you work off of results, and if you bring the results, why would they not pay?

Jim Banks: yeah, and, and again, like there's, there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes that most. 

Data Management and AI in Marketing
---

Jim Banks: clients don't really see, I mean, as you know yourself, if you run an agency, you have a lot of money that you are paying out over and above the overheads of the people, right? You have a lot of money that's going out on again, I mean, I, I don't pay necessarily a huge amount of money 'cause I still think it's quite, quite cost effective, right?

But I warehouse all the, the kind of ad data from BigQuery, right? Using a sort of an ad transfer. So I've got all the historical data for, for, clients I've worked with from whenever I could first do that, right? So I, I transfer that data. So I've got, I've got that data that I can interrogate.

So if I ever need to work on a new client, I can kind look at that historical data, [00:43:00] right? So I store that data, the, the kind of, I I I use Supermetrics a lot to store some of the information there, right? One of the things that you always see is people looking in Google Analytics and they're trying to compare meta, Microsoft, Google, and they've got all the Google cost data.

'cause Google kind of is a Google, Google Analytics four is a Google. Add product, and it like links nicely and everything else. But then you see some of the, the performance data from, Microsoft and from Facebook, and you don't see any cost data at all, right? Because it's not natively brought in.

they, they see the, the sales, the revenue, but they don't see any of the underlying costs. so it's almost like it makes GA four completely worthless at that point, because you can't really evaluate to say, well, I ran this campaign in Google and Microsoft, I got this conversion rate, I got this amount of revenue, but, but, but ultimately, again, you need to look at what's the performance good from how much we spent versus how much we made.

And if there's no how much you spent in there, then you have [00:44:00] to find some other way of getting that information out of there and put it in, in, manually through a spreadsheet or whatever it might be. Which just, again, it just means that, you're on the hook for providing more. man hours to, to the clients.

I mean, with reporting,it used to be that that reporting took a huge amount of time, and I really think that the, the, the time and agency owner should be spending is not on producing the reports. It should be on analyzing the data within the reports. That's what you should be looking at. Not, how long does it take to actually do the reports.

And if it takes you 10 hours a month to produce the reports for clients, then that's 10 hours less that you'll be able to do of analyzing, changing, strategizing, putting new stuff in place. and that's really, I mean, I, I'd always say that's something that, that AI and automation can really take off the plate for you, right?

Joel Bondorowsky: You can you can do, do so much now with it, right? But again, it, it relies on you being able to set those sorts of things up in the first place, but [00:45:00] understanding what value they bring to the table, right? But again, like As a big, that's a big data guy. 'cause I know you're really, really into data and you're really into measurements. And I, I actually find it interesting what you said about using, about storing all, all this historical data at BigQuery. and you've been doing it for a while. I mean, did, a question for you, do you find that ai, are you using AI to dive into that data?

'cause I think like with ai it's like you could, kind of like go through tons and tons of data very, very quickly to get new insights.

Jim Banks: it's interesting. I mean, I had to kinda have a fairly steep learning curve for trying to understand how the sequel worked to write the queries to be able to interrogate the data. what, what you're finding now, I mean, there's a guy called Hemanchu Sharma who runs a, a blog called, I think it's Optimize Smart or something like that.

I'll leave a link in the, in the comment in the Descript. But,he, he's a prolific writer, about stuff. He's written books on it. and he's basically got like a, a sort of a cheat sheet, if you like, for, for writing SQL queries, using ai, right? So you can basically write a, a SQL query to interrogate your [00:46:00] GA four data without having to know a single thing about sql.

Right. Which I think, again, I think is amazing to be able to do that, right? 'cause it, it, for me, it was a really steep learning curve to get to that point, right? But again, it's just understanding, like there's a, there's a lot of, there's a lot of data that goes in there, right? And some of it is just noise and a lot of it is signal.

Joel Bondorowsky: And you just need to be able to understand where's the signal, where's the noise, and what do I actually need to pull out from there? Yeah.

Jim Banks: so

Joel Bondorowsky: Okay. No, I, I found it useful for analysis as well. I use it, I like, one thing I'll use it for, I'll take search term reports and I'll have, I'll have it like break down, for example, like what percentage of the searches are irrelevant, what percentages might come from highly actionable terms, how many might come from awareness terms and whatnot.

to help me like optimize, my groups.

Jim Banks: Yeah, I mean, it's like, it's like in, in GA four, right? In most cases you look at reports in GA four itself, right? And you get uns sample data a lot, right? they, they don't have enough to be able to report it [00:47:00] all. But all of that data goes into, big query, right? so I can extract all the GA four, updates in, in pretty much in real time.

So again, you can interrogate as, as queries are coming in, visitors are coming in. You could create reports, dashboards, and show that. Again, data Studio or Looker Studio is great for having the, the nice front, front facing things right. That all that data can feed into.

again, it's just understanding how you can get the data out of BigQuery into, like the, the kind of Looker Studio reports. and again, I, I think for me it, it, it is

Joel Bondorowsky: It's another trial together.

Jim Banks: absolutely, but, but, but it also, like I said, it, it, it, instead of having to spend all the time creating the reports, I can actually spend all of the time analyzing the reports and working out what to do next.

And that's, to me, has been the most invaluable thing, 'cause, 'cause ultimately it is, it is about that, that whole thing to do with performance. I mean, I've had a couple of what I considered to be home runs of, I discovered keywords that nobody else had heard of. [00:48:00] Right. Where, I used, I used to scrape log files and stuff like that.

And I used to, to see all these keywords. so like when you had these broad match terms, they would show you what the actual underlying term that they matched was. And,and, and again, it's hard to kinda look through it all in one, in one hit, but you know, you'd see some keywords that would have a, a reasonable amount of statistical significance in terms of the volume.

Right. And sometimes I'd look at it and go, I don't even know what that word means. Right. but it obviously meant something to, to a certain number of people. And then you could isolate that term, put it into a campaign, run it, you'd be the only person bidding on it. And and again, you could clean up for a period of time.

Right. Because, nobody else was. Bidding on it, there was no worries of, that whole deviation of, ex, the exact match, but not really an exact match and broad match and everything else. It would just, you could bid on an exact match and, and, and clean up and,but, but unfortunately those are few and far between now.

But again, I still try and do that. I still try and, and interrogate some of the [00:49:00] underlying data that kind of is available. Right. I think a lot of the, the kind of keyword data when that went away, right, there is still more,information. If you look at the underlying sentiment of, the, the search behavior of what, what people, again, it's like, it's not even about what, what keyword is it, what landing page they go to, what did they do afterwards?

And, again, with, with, certainly with old ga, you could understand. Demographic, the information, ages, genders, locations, so you could model all that sort of stuff out. So we used, used to spend so much time modeling those types of things out. Right. And Google have dumbed it down. They said, oh, we can let our, a Ai, AI can do it all now.

Right. And it's just well, no, it doesn't. I mean, if you, if you

Joel Bondorowsky: That say it's also privacy. Remember, remember Facebook analytics.

Jim Banks: Yeah.

Joel Bondorowsky: Do you remember that? That was fricking incredible. Remember what you used to learn about people back then? Amazing. Amazing, amazing. And they didn't dumb it down because of ai. They, they, they dumbed it down for another reason. it was because I think, I believe it was, it had to do with the election.

the scandal was Cambridge [00:50:00] Analytica. They discovered that like Facebook's getting too much information about people and then they had to, kill it.

Jim Banks: But the, the, the irony is, is that the sources of places where data, Facebook, were getting all of their data from still exist. Right. There are still. Hundreds and hundreds of these sort of, data companies that capture information about, people that have an American Express card, like every single transaction like value and how much money they spend, whether what they voted and all that sort of stuff.

So like loads and loads of,pollsters that kind of do all these surveys of people. and that information is still available for savvy advertisers to to run ads on, but not through Facebook, right. Directly. Right. You can do it indirectly by building the audience elsewhere and then porting it across, but it's, again, it's complicated, not easy to do.

and, and very few people that I'm, I'm aware of are doing it right, but it's still possible.

Joel Bondorowsky: seen, I've seen, I've seen, I, I've, I know companies that do that for you, that help you do that, but I, but I mean, but Facebook still [00:51:00] gets that data though, don't they? I think they just only, they used to be called partner categories where you could like, let's say target people based on their purchase habits, because creditor companies would sell people's purchase information to Facebook and you could reach 'em in aggregate.

But I believe they still get that data. They just don't want you target by it. And because Facebook still gets that data, I think,their own campaign targeting will eventually find those people using it.

Jim Banks: Yeah. Yeah. And it's, it's, it is interesting. I

Privacy and Ad Targeting
---

Jim Banks: mean, be, because people using cell phones have become so ubiquitous now, right? That device, wherever you go, is telling the people that have that information so much about it, right? And,if, if you look at it like, I, I, I work with a company and they have like access to all of the apps, right?

They can tell exactly how many apps people have got installed. on their phones. Right. again, let, let, let's say, obviously you would know all the, the sort of traditional apps like your Gmails and so on and so on, right? But if you were trying to target people that were high net worth people, right?

There might be people that read [00:52:00] Bloomberg, people that, have their Wall Street Journal app installed on their phone and all that sort. So there could be a whole bunch of apps that by the, the nature of the type of things that they provide, right? You could imply that this particular person has a certain degree of knowledge and wealth, right.

Just by virtue of the fact that they

Joel Bondorowsky: But even, even without the app, like face, Facebook will know because of the web, like almost every website out there has the, has the, I say Facebook, we can't help but say Facebook, but yeah, the, megapixel, right, there's a tracking pixel on almost every single site out there, right? People are on their web browsers, they're logged into Facebook and they're visiting websites.

So basically like Meta knows who's visiting? Bloomberg Meta knows. I mean, there's a reason why, let's say, I mean, I'm sure like almost everybody's noticed this, but at this point that if you're like interested in a product and then you open up Instagram, you're gonna start seeing ads for competitors to that product.

How do they know? Because they know that you've visited that website because that pixel's there, so they know. So not only are they able to get app data, I mean, they just know the most basic stuff, which I think is not that high tech, [00:53:00] and it's, which is just basically who's browsing where because of that pixel, which is in every site.

Jim Banks: Yeah. And like on my phone, I've got a sort of Samsung phone, Android. So like I've, I've got the Samsung Health app, right? And if I leave my phone on the side by the bed right, it'll tell me exactly how, how much snoring I did in, in the evening, right? So I can, if my wife says, oh, you were, you were snoring a lot, I could actually validate that, whether that's true or not, by looking at the evidence.

Right. And not only does it actually show

Joel Bondorowsky: no, you're just being mean.

Jim Banks: not only does it show you how long you sno snort for, it will actually record you snoring, which is even worse. Right. That's, that's honestly the most creepy thing I think I've got on my phone, is that capability. Right. But again, to, to your point, I think a lot of the.

People are very naive to assume that things are not being recorded and sent back somewhere to enable the, these specific ads to appear. People are, I was just talking about that and now all of a sudden I'm seeing it in my ads. It's guess, guess what?

Joel Bondorowsky: It's just that, that, that, but there's no, but there's no, but I, but I, but there, [00:54:00] but it, but I think one myth that's really out there, which isn't true is that your phone's listening in on you, and that's why you might say something and then see an ad right away.

That's really not happening. It's just that targeting is very good. And it's not every time that you speak about something that you get an ad, you just notice it when it happens.

Jim Banks: like generally speaking, you are talking about something 'cause you're having a conversation with somebody and quite often the conversation will lead to, I'm just gonna go to Google, I'm gonna type something in. Right? And that's what has triggered the interest in that particular and put you in an audience.

Right? that's usually the reason why, you start seeing ads for things that, you, you think, how, how on earth am I doing that?

Joel Bondorowsky: And by the way, I think people are inherently, in a way, selfish about realizing it because everyone's, 'cause people hear this, I'm not talking to internet marketers, like generally consumers, just the general population. They get freaked out by this. They're thinking like, oh wow, we're getting tracked. So that way ads can be served to us as if it's a bad thing.

And in many ways it might look on the surface like it's a bad thing. But guess what? [00:55:00] If. 

The Value of Targeted Advertising
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Joel Bondorowsky: Advertising didn't exist online. You would not be, people would not be able to get the content that's out there. I mean, the publishers would not be able to afford it. Facebook and all, and Meta and Facebook, Instagram, and all these other apps out there, and not just, I mean, they wouldn't be able to exist without advertising.

And if they were to exist, they'd have to charge very, very, very hefty subscription fees right. To where just basically the internet wouldn't work. Advertising enables all these great products and services, which are generally free. And, and, and also by the way, and, and content like all these publishers to provide us with everything that they're able to do without really charging anything.

And it's only because of ads. And not only that, the better the ads work, the more the publishers are able to make, the better the, the better, the easier it is for them to survive, to provide better services. But I'm gonna say something even like more beneficial to society, better, the better ad targeting is, the easier it is for small businesses to be [00:56:00] successful.

The better Facebook and Google are, is is that gathering information on you to provide advertisers with effective targeting, the easier it is for a small business to come out with a product and service and compete with big guys because that targeting helps them compete. Without it, there's no competition without it.

Whoever's able to, shout the loudest broadcast the most messages are the ones you're able to gather, get, get, market share, so I mean, I have a very strong opinions on it and, I think that like most people don't realize it and understand why, target what, why tracking being tracked and being served as is actually a positive thing

Jim Banks: Yeah, I've, I've, I'm, I'm always amazed, like I'm, I'm in the uk so we're covered under GDPR, and there's a whole big thing going on at the moment with consent mode, permissions and V two and all that sort of stuff. And, what, what I'm finding amazing is when you talk to people like, so every single site in the European Union has to have a [00:57:00] consent mode banner that says, I accept targets, or I reject them, or I can choose which ones I want to accept or, or not.

And I've always maintained, like as soon as I see one of those, I click on accept. Immediately. I just know there's tracking, tracking cookies and functional cookies and everything else. I want to ensure that I provide the best experience for me, right? And also, I want to make sure if I am gonna be served ads, which I know I am, I want to make sure that they're relevant to the interests that I have.

Not just random ads, just because I've rejected the ads on a particular site. So I'm seeing stuff that's not relevant to me. It's well then do yourself a favor. Anyone watching this video? Now, do yourself a favor. Accept all the ads, right? Because regardless of whether you accept or reject, you're still gonna see ads, right?

All you're doing by accepting is making the experience more personalized to you and your your interests.

Joel Bondorowsky: Right. But, but then, but then there are people out there who like, and, and I think I think one reason why [00:58:00] people say no is they'll think oh, I don't want to be tracked. as if someone's actually paying attention to them personally. And at the end of the day, my answer to that is you're not that important.

None of us are that important. No one is gonna, I mean, first of all, the technology's not even there. They don't let the technology exist to where you can be personally identified and someone could say, okay, these are the sites that so-and-so's visiting, that's not even there. Right. But even if it was to be there, nobody cares.

Nobody cares about you. I mean, people care about you, but nobody cares about what sites you're visiting. You're not that important. I'm not that important. Almost none of us are. You know what I mean? And so at the end of the day, I think, people have this brando sense of my privacy matters because everyone wants to look at me.

And I, I'm that interesting when at the end of the day, nobody is. I

Jim Banks: and I, I, I, I, I've always maintained if I'm in market for something like, so let's say I'm in market for buying a new phone. I don't wanna have to jump through like Ninja Warrior style kind of hoops to try and find the information about, which is the best phone or whatever it might be.

I just wanna be able to get to the answer quickly to be able to make a decision. Right. I don't [00:59:00] want to have to troll my way through a whole bunch of stuff because I haven't given permission. So a lot of the experience that I'm having is not as personalized as it could be. So hence the, the, the, the results are not, they're not optimal for kind of my, what I'm actually doing, right?

I mean, pe I, I sit and watch like Amazon Prime and Paramount and Disney Plus. I watch all the sort of different paid for subscriptions, right? So I pay for a subscription to Paramount Pay for a subscription to Amazon Prime, which means I can go watch Amazon tv, right? And they introduce fairly recently a kind of advertising on their platform, which you could pay, right?

Maybe three, four bucks to get rid of. So I have a choice. I can either say my time is worth more money than the three or $4 a month to get rid of the ads so I can watch it without ads, right? Or not. And that's my choice. But you know. Equally, they could say, okay, well we won't provide ads, but we're gonna increase the price by 20 bucks.

Right? And I'm [01:00:00] like, well, okay, then I have a choice of do I wanna continue with Amazon Prime or not? I mean, there's so many different things that you can make a decision on based upon what's presented to you, right? But again, it's, it's entirely up to me as the consumer to make my decision, right?

It's if,if you go to some sites, they'll allow you to read maybe one article. Then if you want to read anymore, then you have to pay. a nominal fee to kind of like be, get behind the pay, right? But that's what, journalists are. They've kind of like, they're, they're paid to provide, stories about a particular topic and they, they dive into the research and everything else.

It's well, those publishers are gonna make their money from, from somewhere, right? They either make it un ungated and everything's free. Free as in, you don't have to pay to get behind the paywall. And then you get bombarded with popups and banners and god knows what else.

And it really makes the experience suboptimal, right? Or you go for a paywall, get behind it, no ads, and you you, that's a choice, right? And I think that the more people accept that, [01:01:00] that's what you're dealing with, then, then the better. Really.

Joel Bondorowsky: But you bring that up and what comes to mind is, is YouTube, YouTube premium. And I think there's, so basically for a small monthly fee you could, get YouTube without ads. And I'll tell you like there's a big downside to advertisers there and which is basically they're people who are price sensitive and they're people who are more likely to spend.

So because YouTube offers that feature, it makes it harder to you, you basically eliminates being able to target on YouTube to people who aren't price sensitive, who, pay a little bit not to see those ads. And I think if Meta was to do that, it would, it would make a difference. It would make it much harder to do e-commerce and be, make it much harder to sell higher ticket items because those people would, opt out of it.

But paying for it,

Jim Banks: so Joel, we, we've obviously talked for a while. 

Conclusion and Contact Information
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Jim Banks: I'm, conscious of your time, my time and the time of the per people watching. I'm, I'm gonna kind of like leave, leave some parting thoughts. What, what if people wanted to get in touch with you, what would be the purpose and what, what would you suggest the best way for them to do that would be?[01:02:00] 

Joel Bondorowsky: Oh, look, I, I just love ideas. I love brainstorming. I love the business. I live in a marketing. I look at every single, business or offer online as like another, as a different adventure. Just figuring out how to approach it, how to strategize it, and how to make everything just align in a way that you're able to invest in PPC to where you get a positive return.

Just like really excites me, just for the sake of it. I mean, if someone just has something they wanna talk about, do get in touch. I'll speak with anybody, I'll brainstorm with anybody. And if it feels right, then maybe there's a way we can work together. You could reach me by email, Joel at PPC.

Do pc designs.com. You could visit, pc designs.com as well. Fill out, the form of the website, get in touch with me and, myself and my team, we'd be more than happy to, follow up with you and, give you service.

Jim Banks: So that, that was

Joel Bondorowsky: Oh, also by the way, you could follow me on social media as well.

Jim Banks: Sorry. so that, that was, that was today's guest, Joel Roski, who, has come to us from PPC Designs. All of his contact details will be available in the show notes after the event gets published, or the, the [01:03:00] episode gets published. It just remains Joel to, for me to thank you for being such a phenomenal guest on, on the show.

and anyone that's watching on YouTube, I'm gonna put this kind of last screen on here. if you are watching on YouTube, please do us a favor. Thank you so much for watching. But don't forget to subscribe. That sends Google Signals, YouTube signals that it's actually a podcast that's worth following and worth watching.

and then they'll send more people that are involved in interested in digital marketing to come along and, and learn more about it. with that, thanks again and we'll see you on the next episode of Digital Marketing Stories.

Joel Bondorowsky: Thank you, Jim. It's really been a pleasure. We'll be in touch.

Jim Banks: Brilliant. So let me come back here. yeah. So there we go. We're all, we're all done. We're all good.

Joel Bondorowsky: That was fun. I didn't realize how much time passed.