Google Ads: Search and Display

How can we handle the increasing complexity of Google Ads?

Matt talks with Google Ads expert Brad Geddes about the recent changes to Google Ads. Increasingly, advertising is becoming more complex, creating difficult choices for SMB’s and Enterprise advertisers alike. Budgets, technology, confusing language, and G4 or Universal?!?

Who can handle all of this? This is why we talk to Brad.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Brad Geddes: I truly believe that marketers need to understand a top level of how different channels function, creativity, strategy, and analytics. And I think everyone needs to know analytics. I think that’s just one of the top skills there is. Um, you may not need to be the analytics person at the company, but if you’re asking for someone else to go read you a quick, you know, Adobe Analytics or Google Analytics report, you, you should know more than that to be able to get in there and do at least the, the first level understanding of your own traffic.

[00:00:40] Bumper Intro-Outro: Welcome to Endless Coffee Cup, a regular discussion of marketing news, culture, and media for our complex digital lifestyle. Join Matt Bailey as he engages in conversation to find insights beyond the latest headlines and deeper understanding for those involved in marketing. Grab a cup of coffee, have a seat, and thanks for joining.

[00:01:09] Matt Bailey: Well, hello, listener, and welcome to another edition of the Endless Coffee Cup podcast. And as always, I, I’ve just had some amazing guests lately and I have been having a great time talking with them. It, maybe it’s this whole lockdown and inability to travel a lot and see each other a lot, so, for me, this is just a way to keep the conversation going and talk to people I like.

And today’s podcast, Brad Geddes is with us. If you don’t know Brad, then you don’t know paid search. Brad is one of the big names in the industry, and when it comes to paid search, Brad’s the guy I go to. Brad, how are you doing today?

[00:01:48] Brad Geddes: I’m doing well, Matt. Thanks for having me on your show.

[00:01:50] Matt Bailey: Hey, absolutely. I don’t know what it is, but it seems like every week or two now there’s news coming out about Google Ads, and, and so my list of things to explore is getting deeper and deeper. And that’s why I contacted you. I’m like, “We have got to talk about Google Ads and what you’re seeing.”

[00:02:07] Brad Geddes: Hey, there’s always something new, right? And it’s Google, big name internationally linked to, so there’s good news, bad news, organic news, paid news, everything going on with them.

[00:02:16] Matt Bailey: Absolutely. Brad, if you don’t mind, could you, uh, just give us a quick introduction? What you, you know, how long have you been doing this and, and, you know, your expertise in the industry?

[00:02:26] Brad Geddes: Uh, sure. So, I started in paid search in ’98, um, organic a couple of years before, so over a couple of decades now. I have built software companies, agencies, currently we have another software company. Um, I do consulting and so we build stuff, sell it, start over and keep our hands in all the pots as we go along.

[00:02:49] Matt Bailey: Wow. Wow. Fantastic. I think that’s, it’s a similar story to anyone who started in the late nineties of you, you know, every, I think everyone started organic and then the branches just started coming and then company, software, company company, and moving all through there. It’s, it’s kind of a fun, fun track to talk to people that have been in the industry that long.

[00:03:11] Brad Geddes: Yeah. It’s, it’s been, it’s been a good ride.

[00:03:13] Matt Bailey: Good. Hope, hopefully it still will be. Well, Brad, one of the first things I wanted to talk about, and, and this was from just doing like an intro course, uh, with, uh, a group of small businesspeople about Google Ads.

And this was a couple of years ago, and I’m kind of showing some screenshots and someone puts up their hand and they said, “I’m not seeing that.” And okay, so I go over, and they do, they have a completely different interface and somehow Smart Campaigns had come out and I didn’t even realize what was going on.

And so, I started playing around more and more with these Smart Campaigns. I, I hesitate to call them smart, Brad. What’s going on with Smart Campaigns, and, and I, I feel bad for anyone getting into Google Ads and they’re forced into this Smart Campaign.

[00:04:02] Brad Geddes: I think we should back up and talk about Google users real quick, right? So, you’ve got…

[00:04:07] Matt Bailey: Let’s do that.

[00:04:08] Brad Geddes: Right? So, you’ve got your, “I have very little time in my life. I’m a small business owner. I just want something running and I’m never going to learn everything to do it myself.” Smart Campaigns aren’t terrible in that context, right? And then you’ve got the, “No, no, I have a little more time,” or “I really care what I’m doing,” or “I can devote, even if it’s 5 or 10 hours a week to what I’m doing, so I should graduate from Smart and do these other things instead.” Right? And then you’ve got the ones who are true experts who are going to segment out their different types of, you know, search and display and so forth. So, it’s not that certain campaign types are bad necessarily.

It’s that they’re different, they should be used by different groups of users, ’cause if you’re brand new, and you try to jump into the deep end, you could have just as bad of results, right, or probably worse results than starting with one of these automated things. But you have to learn from it, and naturally the trick to it is, “How deep do you want us to go down the Google rabbit hole of advertising?”

[00:05:17] Matt Bailey: Right. Right. And that, that’s a, a great comment right there. The, the rabbit hole of Google advertising. I mean, it seems like they are pushing it to be more and more automated. Like, you know, it’s a good time to ask you, is it more of a, “Trust us, we’ll take care of it for you,” does that seem to be where Google’s going with this?

[00:05:38] Brad Geddes: Oh, in many ways it’s a choice. Right? So…

[00:05:41] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[00:05:41] Brad Geddes: When you think of, of Google, they are amazing at math. I mean, let’s just, I will give them their kudos where it’s due. Their math skills are unbelievably good.

[00:05:50] Matt Bailey: Right. Right.

[00:05:51] Brad Geddes: They are terrible in understanding your business, and they’re pretty average at linguistics. So, when we think of the automation, that often sits in the math, the bidding, the really grunt work side in, in many ways, which people never really did well because it was grunt work, and they sort of didn’t want to do a whole lot of math.

[00:06:13] Matt Bailey: Right.

[00:06:14] Brad Geddes: Where humans bring a lot to it is creativity, and marketing is influence another person to take an action, right? Marketing is, is a person-to-person conversation, and there’s these things in the middle. Right? So, the human still has a lot of work to do, whether it’s steering a machine, right? I mean, you can’t hop in an auto drive car and say, “Take me somewhere.” You got to say where I’m going, how I want to get there, right, it needs perimeters. So, humans are still setting a lot of guide rails for automation, and they will for a long time.

[00:06:45] Matt Bailey: Oh, absolutely. That seems to be, you know, they’re, they seem to be really, really pushing the automation. And I’ve kind of played around both in, in my existing accounts and then some of these newer accounts, just to see the difference in, in how they’re pushing or recommending, and, you know, I think it gets to your point is how involved do you want to be? And can you be involved at that level for long amounts of time in order to get this into place? I think that’s, that’s where you’re going, but that’s, that’s kind of what I’m experiencing, but at the same time, it just feels like there’s this pressure of, you know, “Trust our black box.” I’m not trying to be negative or anything, but it just seems like that’s where they’re putting me.

[00:07:27] Brad Geddes: I would agree, right? I would agree wholeheartedly with that. And um, if you’re newer, you often don’t know how to verify versus trust, right? It’s the trust but verify aspect. And so, a lot of the new stuff is more, “Let me get, you know, an education and, and have a clue what I’m doing so I can verify if I should trust this or if I need to do it manually,” right? Where people who’ve been doing this for 5, 7, 10 years, whatnot, they instinctively go, “That’s not for me. This is, let me try this.” And they have a better just, sort of feel of when to use automation versus when to back off versus how to get parameters to the machine.

And so, some of the black box stuff, uh, bidding, really good. Um, audience expansion, really good. Um, how they do match types to your brand names, really bad, right? So, there’s, there’s a lot of places where the human, like, really needs to overwatch the machine. So, there is a lot of, “Trust us,” but it’s, “Trust us with your bidding or go spend 20 hours a week in Excel to set your bids.”

[00:08:36] Matt Bailey: Right. Right.

[00:08:37] Brad Geddes: You know what? I might trust you a little bit here to get away from the, some of that work.

[00:08:42] Matt Bailey: Yeah, and, and it’s always interesting with the bidding. I mean, like I had one campaign where I’m optimizing for sales and I just wasn’t too happy with the results, but when I optimize for clicks, all of a sudden sales went up.

So, it’s just kind of, like, I’m trying to wrap my head around it, you know, I’m, it’s one of those things, I do Google Ads ’cause I have to.

[00:09:06] Brad Geddes: Well, and, and when you get into Google settings, right, Google is, um, really good at how they word stuff, which can be very, um, obfuscated for people to read at times. And so, a lot of times, you say, “Optimize for sales,” and you could use a max conversion campaign that goes, says, “Hey, well, trust us, we’ll make it work.” and then you have this little optional checkbox that’s like, “But do my sales, but only at this target ROA. So, this target CPA amount.”

And whenever I see “optional” in Google, in my head I read the word “required,” because it changes parameters of how the system works and gives you more control over the, how the black box is going to function.

[00:09:49] Matt Bailey: That is key. Yeah, I, I, same thing, when I see recommendations, I’m always a little bit skeptical, like, “What are they trying to get me to do here? What does that mean?”

[00:09:58] Brad Geddes: Yeah. It’s read between the lines a lot. Right?

[00:10:00] Matt Bailey: Absolutely. Absolutely. So, yeah, I’m, I’m going to throw just a couple of things. I, I don’t want it to come across that I’m being negative because honestly, when I look at analytics, and, and that’s, that’s the standpoint where I really focus.

When I look at any business that’s using Google Ads, it’s right up there in producing leads, producing sales, it is one of the top three consistently. So, I absolutely love it, but to work with it, I find it absolutely frustrating, as probably one of the most time consuming and frustrating of all the channels at the same time. When you’re teaching people, is that kind of the expectation you give them?

[00:10:41] Brad Geddes: No, not necessarily, right? And this is where, once you have an understanding, so, let’s put things, let’s put some parameters in place, right? So, there are, are companies who are managing 1,000 active campaigns in Google. Yeah, that’s a 10-person team, and yes, they’re going to do it full time.

And then you get people who are managing 2 or 3. Once you understand set up and how things go and what daily tasks should be, it doesn’t have to be all time consuming. But this, again, gets into your statement, right? It’s too much time, well, then the answer is automation and black box, “But if I don’t trust the automation, then I have to do it myself, but I don’t want to do it myself, so, then do I need to trust the black box?” Right? And, and this, you, you’re walking right into the balance marketers are making, right? What side do they want to be on?

[00:11:29] Matt Bailey: Wow. Wow.

[00:11:30] Brad Geddes: You can’t have both, right?

[00:11:31] Matt Bailey: Yeah. I guess that’s the frustrating thing, ’cause I’ve always been the person who, “I want to control. I want to control what happens, I want to control my keywords, I want to control all these things. I, I think there is definitely like a psychological barrier to just giving that control away.

[00:11:48] Brad Geddes: And this gets into, so, when I started advertising, I mean, we’re going to go back to last century, right? So, if, you, you, marketing per year was an hour, two hour, you know, visit with the yellow page rep per year.

It was maybe an hour a month with a radio rep, and every once in a while, you made a new jingle or, or commercial for the radio. And then you had your newspaper stuff that you were running, and you were done. I mean, under 20 hours a year, and you were done marketing.

[00:12:18] Matt Bailey: Wow. Yeah.

[00:12:19] Brad Geddes: Right? And now we’re saying, “No, no, no. That’s a day,” which is a tough day, or like, “That’s a week now,” right? And, and so, we’ve changed what was a year into what is now per week or per month for, for some people.

[00:12:32] Matt Bailey: That is so true. That, that, that is such a great example. Um, yeah, it’s one of those things that, yeah, you just don’t remember how it was back in the day when you, you know, the transfer to now. And, and, you know, so now we have marketers growing up in this where it’s, it’s so time intensive. Um, and then you’ve got to divide your time between channels, between campaigns, between all these things. Uh, it’s no wonder that, I mean, one of the things I saw on LinkedIn that, that digital marketing and digital advertising, they’re two of the top jobs that are in demand for like, the next, they, they were saying for the next 15 to 20 years. I mean, these are amazing skills.

[00:13:14] Brad Geddes: Right. Web development, IT, digital marketing. Now, I mean that’s top three, your top growth jobs.

[00:13:19] Matt Bailey: Absolutely. Let me ask you this, Brad, since we’re kind of on the subject of jobs, what are the top skills that if someone wants to focus on paid search, what are some of the top skills they need in order to develop that as a, as a career path?

[00:13:36] Brad Geddes: I, I truly believe that marketers need to understand a top level of how different channels function. The minute I need to know the depth I’m no longer in SEO. I understand what SEO is doing, how it works, right? To understand how channels can even operate. Then from a skill standpoint in paid search, I believe the top three skills are going to be strategy. Understanding how things work together to put certain strategies in place ’cause that’s what the machines follow.

Writing creativity. Early in, in paid search, math was the most desired skill. Right? Over creativity. It’s marketing and machines are doing the math. So, in reality, the persuasion’s often been sort of understated and it really shouldn’t be.

Analytics. Because you have to understand how our thing fits together, and so, I always think of, if you’re going to be digital marketing, you need to understand a traffic driver, which is, you know, paid search, paid video, whatever you want to do, analytics to see how it converted, and, and then often maybe some website testing or serum testing or enough information about how backend systems work to have intelligent conversations with your developers of what you need done. ‘Cause you’re not gonna do all the integrations yourself. Right? You got, you have that conversation.

[00:14:53] Matt Bailey: Right. Right.

[00:14:54] Brad Geddes: And then that informs your changes to your marketing channels, right? It’s just for like this nice little circle. But creativity, strategy and analytics. And I think everyone needs to know analytics. I think that’s just one of the top skills there is. Um, you may not need to be the, the analytics person at the company, but if you’re asking for someone else to go read you a quick, you know, Adobe Analytics or Google analytics report, you, you should know more than that to be able to get in there and do at least the, the first level understanding of your own traffic.

[00:15:26] Matt Bailey: I, I could not agree more with a statement as far as every marketer needs to have a, a firm grasp of analytics, because honestly what we see in the industry now is exactly the opposite. You know, most universities, even if they’re teaching marketing, they’re not teaching analytics. It’s not coming into it. I, I know when I teach analytics, I’ll ask, you know, “Those of you that are, you know, in my marketing team, how many of you have ever had any formal training in analytics?” Maybe one hand out of 30 goes up. It’s, it’s kind of sad, but it’s expected now.

[00:16:01] Brad Geddes: It should be, right? I mean, years ago, again, I don’t mean to harp on the past, but we, we had to use like Nielsen.

[00:16:06] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[00:16:06] Brad Geddes: Right? To understand your marketing effectiveness, which was sampling of TV watching data. Right? And, and it was all sample data. The advantage of digital is we get everything. Well, we don’t, it’s a big lie, “We get everything.” We get everything sort of sampled, but, you know, ignoring iPhone and all the problems, right? We, we get enough…

[00:16:25] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[00:16:25] Brad Geddes: …to, uh, to make intelligent decisions. So, you gotta be able to read the data to understand what’s going on, ’cause we have better feedback loops now than ever in the history of marketing.

[00:16:36] Matt Bailey: Absolutely. And, you know, especially too, with analytics, you know, paid search is such a dynamic process of adjustment of, you know, anyone who’s trying to improve their quality score. You’ve got to know how to read the data to know where to focus and, “How do I do that?”

And I, I’m finding that just that basic understanding of, you know, that funnel from impression to click to landing page, there’s confusion of sometimes what even the KPI is, and what the goal is, and the language and, and to this person, the KPI means this. To this person the KPI means that. And, and we don’t have a shared vocabulary even, when it comes to data.

[00:17:21] Brad Geddes: I work a lot with enterprise companies, right? And one of the things we always talk about is a source of truth, right? So, all your data is lying to you, that’s just, we, we accept that. But you can’t have your marketing team using one source of data, and your organic team using a different source, and everyone’s using their own source. Right? You have to tell a consistent lie. So, if you all have a source of truth you’re working from, right, then at least you’re lying to your CMO in a consistent manner.

[00:17:50] Matt Bailey: I love that. I love it. That is great. It’s, I mean, yes, it is the refreshing brutal honesty of digital marketing. And I mean, that’s one thing I love to tell people is, and, and there’s never such a thing as accuracy.

So, John Marshall, we, we both know John very well. I, I, at one trade show years ago, I remember asking him like, “What makes,” if you remember click tracks, “What makes click tracks…”

[00:18:15] Brad Geddes: Yep.

[00:18:16] Matt Bailey: “…more accurate than any other, uh, software?” And he, and he shushed me. He’s like, “Sh, sh, sh.” And then he says, and I wish I could do his British accent. It’s just so lovely. And he’s like, “In, in this business, we don’t talk about accuracy.” And I said, “Well, what do you talk about?” He says, “We like to think that we are less inaccurate than our competitors.” And right away, it’s like all of a sudden, the world just opened up to me, you know, the, the clouds parted, the angels were singing, and I finally understood analytics.

[00:18:48] Brad Geddes: That’s exactly it, right? It’s, it’s really it, it’s and that’s why you can’t use multiple sources, right? I mean, you, you have to, but in the end, everyone needs a source, and you have to understand it’s not absolutes. Your systems will never agree. If you’re someone who has to balance your checkbook, not that they exist anymore, balance your bank account to a penny, right, you should not be in an analytics career. Um, because it’s never going to balance your CRM system and this and that. Right? It’s, it’s, it would drive accountants insane.

Um, but it’s crucial, if you’re spending money and you have to know how things work and where to put money, where to set strategies, how someone interacts multi-channel, as we’ve been talking, you know, Google Ads over and over, but most people don’t interact with just Google Ads, right? There are Google Ads, and they might see you on Facebook or Twitter, and then they, you know, click on an organic link. And so, that multichannel experience, it, it’s, you know, you have to be able to measure how that works overall.

[00:19:44] Matt Bailey: Absolutely. And yeah, I’m starting to get more and more questions, especially on, on attribution as well, which, you know, depending upon what you’re trying to do and how many systems you’ve got, and it, it, it’s funny, ’cause it seems like those who ask the most about attribution are the least prepared to deal with it.

[00:20:00] That’s just what I’m finding with that. I mean, are you running into the same thing with the questions about attribution and, and how do we find the root of all of this?

[00:20:10] Brad Geddes: You know what? It’s, so part of our attribution issues right now are going to get worse as walled gardens get higher. Right? And that, and so, attribution was a little easier a few years ago than it is today. The second part of attribution I believe is that most systems have attribution within their own channel only. So, when I think of the next 5 years, I think we’re solving what I call the weather problem. So, we’ve been able to accurately predict the weather with 100% accuracy for about 10 years.

Now, you’ve probably never seen a 100% accurate weather forecast. It’s ’cause it’s so much data, by the time the computer figures it out, it’s 2 weeks after the event happened. So, you’ve lived through the day. Right? But it was there, they would’ve gotten it. And so, when we get down to keyword level and individual ad level attribution cross channels, it’s a processing problem too.

And so, I think in, you know, a few more Moore’s laws and so forth and, and better sampling rates. Um, we’re getting closer that if the walls can come down a little bit to do interest system sharing, that’s a big gas to have Facebook, Google, and Apple play friendly. But, you know, but, but if we have that, I think in 3 to 5 years we’re going to have some really awesome attribution systems. That’s a huge if.

[00:21:39] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[00:21:39] Brad Geddes: And the way today’s world’s going, we’ll have less accurate attribution, right? Which makes measurement even trickier and understanding how to do, um, incrementality testing and geo and cross-channel testing a very specialized but very important skill set in the next few years.

[00:22:02] Matt Bailey: Wow. Wow. So, yeah, so you’re seeing, definitely that, that the generalist is not going to be able to play kind of in this playground. That it’s going to have to take some focus and dedication to develop skills in different areas of this advertising.

[00:22:20] Brad Geddes: Yeah. I think generalists are always going to have a true generalist cross-channels. It has a good perception of how channels play across each other. And I think you’re still gonna need, need that generalist from that standpoint of, of overlooking, looking over how all these pieces fit, right? It’s, “Should we use the same, um, display ad on our DSP as we showed on a TV commercial in Chicago to have a cohesive marketing message?” Right?

That’s, I mean, that’s a huge question. It may take a specialist to get the data, but the, you need a generalist to see the pieces to even ask the question. And so, I think we will play in a world of both, but Google Ads, I mean, you could call it a video channel. You could call it a shopping channel.

[00:23:11] Matt Bailey: Right.

[00:23:11] Brad Geddes: It’s of course a search channel. Right? And, and so, I, I would argue that even now, you could have specialists within aspects of Google Ads.

[00:23:23] Matt Bailey: Right. Yes.

[00:23:23] Brad Geddes: I’m going to, local specialists and local advertising probably is not the person you want running your shopping campaigns and, and vice-versa.

[00:23:31] Matt Bailey: Yeah, they do take a very specific set of skills and knowledge and focus because even within those little areas, the nuances change frequently. I mean, we just saw, you know, Google My Business is now rebranded to something else. Uh, I, I think even still, uh, shopping, there’s always different changes to the feeds and, and things like that. I, I mean, let me ask one question. You, you noticed, you did say you work a lot with enterprise, but let me ask from the small business standpoint, how’s a small business to keep up with all this?

[00:24:04] Brad Geddes: Right now, as a small business, it’s a difficult world. It really is. So, we used to manage a ton of small business accounts. Actually, when I met you, Matt, I mean, we’re going back 15 years ago. We, we managed over 40,000 paid search accounts for small businesses, um, like 660,000, um, overall data points for them. And right now, a small business has the option of going to an aggregator, you know, your web.com’s, your whoever’s and saying, like, “Do this for me.”

They pay pretty hefty margins, they get decent data back, and it’s better results than doing nothing. Okay. Option two, they hire a small agency who specializes in this stuff. Little lower margin, better results, don’t expect to talk to someone very often. Right? I mean, if you spend five grand a month, you just, I’m sorry. Yes, you can get results, but you don’t have the revenue, or you don’t pay them enough that they can talk to you a lot. That’s just the reality of, of margins for agencies.

[00:25:06] Matt Bailey: Right.

[00:25:06] Brad Geddes: Um, and then you got the ones who will spend some time to do it themselves. I see a lot of, I hate to say CEO because they’re, they’re a small business owner, right? Who, 3 people, to 100 person companies. And the CEO does a lot of the marketing. And we’ve seen quite a few who have a firm grasp on, on what’s going on and how channels play together. And they’ve often either done courses, they, they started themselves, they’re going to have to leverage some sort of Smart Campaign. It’s just the fact of life, right?

[00:25:40] Matt Bailey: Right.

[00:25:41] Brad Geddes: They’re going to have to learn how to do some post boosting or something over at Facebook. Um, they’re going to have to learn how to do local reputation management or local business management across their Yelps and various things. It’s a pretty good skill set. And what often I, I find is that the CEOs who devote their time to us, the small business owners, are better than 99% of agency workers, and they could actually go in the agency and manage the thing themselves.

[00:26:08] Matt Bailey: Right.

[00:26:09] Brad Geddes: I’ve seen a few small business owners who’ve turned in, who stopped their small business and become local agency services because they were so good at it. Right? And it’s this weird progression I’ve seen over and over again ’cause they learned it all for themselves, and they went, “We’re really good.” Um…

[00:26:25] Matt Bailey: That’s great. Oh, I love that.

[00:26:26] Brad Geddes: But it does take that, that range of skill set, right? And it’s a tough, it’s a really tough, fast for small businesses.

[00:26:33] Matt Bailey: Yeah, I, I, I see that as well, and you know, over the past few years, it just seems like that bar has just gotten higher and higher of managing the campaign, “How much do I put in?” I mean, just the questions are, are very basic questions for a very complex system, and yeah, the learning curve is just phenomenal and, and I, it’s not going, I don’t, I don’t see how it can get better, uh, or how it can get easier, uh, because it is becoming such a complex thing.

[00:27:05] Brad Geddes: I’m often in, in the more Google bashing camp than Google fan camp at times. Right? But if you were to, if you were to say, “What has Google done? What are their changes look like the last five years?” They’ve made their changes to make average marketers better. Right? So, not, they’ve sort of ignored and said, “If you’re really good at what you do, you can work around us.” Right? And so, the smart marketers are working around Google a lot, where the ones who don’t know anything, Google’s like, “Hey, if we do this, you’ll get more impressions. You’ll get a few more conversions. If we do this, you’ll get more.”

And so, Google is using our big data to make recommendations, which you should use your brain to say, “No, that’s a stupid one,” or “That’s a good one,” but they’re trying to make marketing easier. It’s still very complex, right? But they’re trying to make it easier for the person who doesn’t know a lot about Google Ads. And that, of course that’s mixed results. I mean, and you’re always going to find when you’re taking large data sets to make individual recommendations, a lot of poor ones.

[00:28:05] Matt Bailey: Right.

[00:28:06] Brad Geddes: And that’s just, that’s just the law of nature of doing stuff, right? But Google’s made a lot of strides in trying to make that easier, um, which is why the experts get to sit back and say, “Those are all terrible, Google,” but at least they’re trying at times, right? And, and that is something they have devoted some time to.

[00:28:23] Matt Bailey: See, and, and, and I would put myself, I, I am in the Google bashing camp, and I see those things and my reaction to that is you’re only selling the perception of doing it better. You’re not actually selling better results. That’s, to me, that’s what I see is a lot of the perception because, you know, and I’m sure you’ve heard this too, like business owners will call, just ask, you know, “They want me to do broad match and you always say not to do broad match,” and “Why are they trying to do, work so hard at this?” And I just got to roll my eyes on that.

[00:28:54] Brad Geddes: Yep. And, and that gets into, again, right, where you’re, uh, support comes from. You spent a lot of money? We have some companies who have incredible reps. I mean, reps with a decade of experience who’re really good at what they do.

[00:29:07] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[00:29:08] Brad Geddes: Then you have your reps who are really salespeople with the name rep. Right? And their goal is just to get more money, quarterly basis, it’s not really for results.

[00:29:18] Matt Bailey: Yeah. Yeah. I think the thing though, that I see, especially with small businesses is, “I talked to Google and Google said,” and it’s, it’s like invoking the name of God because they talked to Google and I’m trying to tell them, “You talked to a Google rep. Uh, big difference. It’s not The Google, it’s Google. Um, so we, and, and you’re spending, you know, $1,200 a month, so you’re not, you’re not getting the big guys.”

[00:29:46] Brad Geddes: I always remind them, it’s still talking to people. Some people are good. Some people are bad. Right? Someone says, “Hey, I talked to your small business, and I got this terrible answer,” like, “That’s a new person we hired.” Right? It’s the same thing.

[00:30:00] Um, it’s, they’re people, they’re not “The Google,” I hear that all the time, right? No. It’s still, it’s still a person who works at Google, who has X years of experience, and, and often, right, I’ll tell people, “If you’re gonna talk to someone at Google, ask them if they have ever managed their own accounts before they went to work at Google.”

[00:30:19] Matt Bailey: Hmm.

[00:30:19] Brad Geddes: ‘Cause you often have very different answers if they previously managed accounts versus they drank the Google Kool-Aid of, “Here’s the answer you’re supposed to give ’cause that’s how we expect the world to work, not how it works in reality.”

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[00:32:17] Matt Bailey: Yeah. So, one of the things that, you know, we saw just in this past year is the dropping of the broad match modifier, which I absolutely loved. And now kind of going back to phrase match, but it seems like they want everyone to go more broad match. And the examples they gave of how good broad match was, I wasn’t too impressed with.

I, like, someone could have written that better, uh, or explained it better ’cause the way they explained it, I think it was something where they gave this very detailed automotive part, and it would fall under “cars.” I’m like, “No, that’s not, that’s not how it works. That’s not what I would want.” What’s going on with keyword matching and, and how should we, how should we filter, you know, all of these changes and the recommendations?

[00:33:01] Brad Geddes: So, this is where I’m about to jump into the more sophisticated marketer, right? So, our match types are intent based, not words anymore. So, we can actually change our names completely from exact or phrase. They, they no longer have a meaning in place, right?

[00:33:14] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[00:33:15] Brad Geddes: It’s more, “This is my intent. This is similar to my intent. This is something semi-related to what I was actually looking for.” And, and so, since words don’t matter, your job is to, is still say, “Here’s the keywords I want,” often an exact and phrase match if you’re newer, right? Don’t go broad crazy. But then it’s to steer the machine away from words or negative keywords, right? So, it’s to show what I want.

Now, the problem is because there are so many low volume queries, you, if you’re reading queries, you’re back to wasting your time. Right? So, what you need to start getting into is n-gram analysis, but now we’ve jumped into a world of statistics, and we say, we should be looking at n-grams, bigrams, and trigrams to decide how to steer the machine. For people who’d never heard these terms before, right? What an n-gram does, or bigram, or trigram is it looks for one, two, and three word patterns across search terms and reaggregates data.

So, you might be a plumber and you want to know if someone types in the word, um, “how.” What does my data look like? Because if they’re asking how, and I’m a plumber, they’re probably asking how to do it themselves, just matching my queries. Or if they use the word, um, “near me,” how does that affect my results? And so, because this data is so little, reading the queries, the human doesn’t pick up the patterns, right? And you’re not going to read 8,000 queries anyway and remember the numbers.

So, n-gram analysis is something Google does not offer. Um, you’re going to run it, you know, with a script or a third-party software or something, but it gives you better insight into steering the machine. And so, right now we think of “Here’s my keywords,” Google takes them as suggestions of how liberal they can be with it, based upon the match type you gave them. Your job, it’s kinda like, you know, you go bowling and the kids are with you, so you put rails in there. You put the bumper rails, right, into the gutter lanes, you know?

And so, your job is to basically tell Google, “You can’t roll a gutter ball, so I’m gonna use my negative keywords to keep you out of the gutter by doing this type of analysis to at least make it so you’re hitting at least one pin, right? When, when the ball hits the end of the, the track.” Um, that’s really what marketers are doing with keywords right now, or they should be doing. But you get into some of that statistics, and now you’ve, again, lost all the small business owners, the most part, right?

[00:35:47] Matt Bailey: I, I mean, I, I, I see where part of what I’ve done is just watch people set up a campaign for the first time, just to see how they interact with the interface, how do they read the instruction and what are their responses to it? And, and I think the, still, when setting up a campaign, a lot of people just default to, “I fill up all the relevant keywords. Anything that has to do with my business, I’m popping it in there.”

And the Google keyword planner kind of helps with that because it gives you 20 suggestions, so, “I popped 20 words in.” And so, what you’re describing though is no, it’s, it’s more of what is the intent we’re trying to meet? What is the need that people are actually searching for? And, and a lot of times the searcher may not even know how to formulate the search.

[00:36:36] Brad Geddes: Yep. And that’s exactly right. And so, one of my first trainings, 2004 showed a slide of what an ad group structure looks like, right? Relevant keywords in ads and, and how you should break those down, which is not easy in the Google interface to do, right? To, you actually have to know how to save a campaign and then go back and do this.

[00:36:54] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[00:36:55] Brad Geddes: That slide is 17 years old, and I still occasionally use it to show some of these concepts are timeless and they never change. Right? It’s, it’s search, which means someone asked a question, they’re not an expert. They see your ad, which you should be the expert if you’re advertising and trying to get people. Right? And so, you’re still, a search ad is just answered questions people have when they will do business with your company if you have the right answer. That’s all search is in the end. So, but yeah, you’re picking keywords that matches that intent, and that’s, it’s not keyword matching, it’s intent matching now, though.

[00:37:32] Matt Bailey: That’s powerful because, you know, now, and it’s funny too, ’cause I’ve had to shift, also, the way I, I teach, as well, is now we’re not composing full on ads. I mean, in some cases you can, but especially in smart campaigns and, and how they’re doing it, now it’s come up with five headlines, come up with three descriptions, come up, you know, and that has been, I don’t know, you know, for you that transition from thinking of the ad as a solid, “This is the structure,” to now breaking it apart so that it can be reconfigured to match that intent. Has that been a bit of a, since you were teaching this, it’s like, “I got to go back and change this now or, or…?”

[00:38:14] Brad Geddes: Well, yes and no. So, there’s a lot more nuances to creating the responsive search ads, right, the RSAs, where we see overall people who just put lines in to RSAs and let Google go, get worse results than ads they wrote themselves, ’cause they thought about the construction themselves.

[00:38:31] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[00:38:31] Brad Geddes: And so, you can do some advanced things, like say an ad overall is headline one, add to ad group, headline two is a call to action or a benefit statement, et cetera. And you can pin lines. So, you could say, “Well, here’s my two headlines, pin in position one.” So, Google shows one of these two in position one, and, “I don’t want two different calls to action in the same ad, that would look terrible looking.” Right? But a machine has to actually do that to figure it out. The human knows it. So, “Here’s my two call to action lines, pin both these to headline two, but Google, still play within the parameters I give it.”

And, and so, we see a lot of enterprise companies, um, pinning every line and turning the responsive search ads into the old ad format and never using it. Others give it all to Google and say, “Hey, go trust the machine.” And that gets back into more of a, uh, a marketing philosophy at times of how do you want to approach these types of responsive assets as opposed to hard data at all times?

[00:39:33] Matt Bailey: Yeah. And this gets to your point about the creativity and developing the creative of the ads is, like, now we have two different structures of how to accomplish that, but at the same time now, it’s almost like you’re being creative and developing an ad, but you also have to think about now, that structure of the ad in a programming mindset.

[00:40:00] Um, and that’s all I was thinking about when, you know, “I’m pinning this here, and if this, then that.” It seems like, you know, it’s not only taking these creative assets, but now I’ve got to think like the machine in order to use the machine.

[00:40:07] Brad Geddes: Something I used to do at my old company, right, was run internal classes that were how marketers and developers can talk to each other. Right? It is, ’cause you’ve got, you know, developers’ one mindset, “Marketers just make this thing happen, and I’m going to give you the wrong parameters ’cause I don’t know any better.” Right?

And that’s why you have project managers in the middle and let’s do some basic structure. If it’s, if then, if it’s, you know, however it looks like, and marketers who have that skillset, right, of talking to developers, also then understand basic logic arguments. And I don’t, I mean, I can break PHP, I can’t code it, but I’m really good at breaking it, but I can read it. Um…

[00:40:48] Matt Bailey: I say the same thing.

[00:40:49] Brad Geddes: You know, but, but it means I can think of the logical standpoint, right, of how these things sort of fit together. And so often, I mean, Google Ads is built as much by the, the program has built it, right? The marketers and the project managers say, “How do we want it to run?” In the end, the developers still have to interpret that and build it. So, having a clue of how developers think and how those pieces fit together definitely helps with advertising these days.

[00:41:13] Matt Bailey: Yeah, that’s powerful. I always used to joke about the marketer that goes back from the, the conference and walks into the IT room and says, “Here’s what I need. And I need it, you know, by the end of the week.” And it, you know, and, and the IT people, programmers that, you know, there’s blood in the water. They, they know there was just a request made that this person knows absolutely nothing about how it’s going to happen.

To that same point, it’s just, if you don’t understand the language, the structure of how that comes in, and it seems like this is becoming part of that skillset with advertising now. It’s not just the creative, but it’s working with the machine to deliver the right creative, you know, that, the old mantra of the right message to the right audience at the right time is so very true still to this day, but to make that happen is becoming more technical, alongside the creative.

[00:42:04] Brad Geddes: It is, but it’s not, it’s more the thinking aspect of it, right? So, I don’t think marketers need to go out and learn how to code, right? Taking a, you know, a Python 101 class or taking a project management 101 class, right? A couple of those as electives I think would help a marketer significantly into the future.

[00:42:26] Matt Bailey: Right. Right.

[00:42:26] Brad Geddes: They don’t need the 201 and 301, right? They don’t need the advanced level classes. Um, now if you want to be a PMP, do project management, that’s a whole different ball game, right? But, you know, in general, in, in these organization skills and, and are very important, too, when you’re balancing a lot of things.

So, I think they’re really good classes, or, you know, if you’re, if you’re not in school, go watch some stuff at Khan Academy or something, right? Just, just the basic level of understanding, “Oh, that’s what this type of stuff means. And that’s what a logic argument is. And that’s an infinite loop error.”

And, you know, those are things that, that help you think through it, and it’s not to be able to do it. Right? It’s more to be able to, your goal is to understand the logical progression of thought and, you know, what those statements look like.

[00:43:12] Matt Bailey: That’s a great, great piece of advice. I still get questions now of, you know, “Do I need to know HTML to do SEO?” And it’s one of those where I have to respond, “It would greatly benefit you. You could do it, but it would greatly benefit you and your career if you did.” Just understanding the structure of how those are put together, the language, those types of things, it makes so much sense and kind of leads me into, you know, kind of my next series of questions.

We kind of talked earlier about the, the people that listen to the podcast, my wonderful listeners who are amazing. I’ve got people who are just starting out, and I got people that are trying to stay sharp and re-skill. What are some of the best, most trusted resources that they could go to, to stay sharp, to learn more on, on paid advertising or, or even more specifically, paid search and Google Ads and everything that is involved there?

[00:44:14] Brad Geddes: Yeah. So, I have a bunch of favorite resources, right? So, if you want a formal progression of training, right? I mean, Matt and I have taught at Simplilearn, previously Market Motive for years. Of course, that’s a good one for a very formal aspect of training. Thinkwithgoogle.com is a fantastic resource Google puts up about research, but read it with the mindset of, they asked the questions that produced the research, right? It’s sort of like you read a research Pfizer does about Pfizer drugs…

[00:44:44] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[00:44:44] Brad Geddes: …and you’re like, “Ehhh…” So, but it has great, it has great high-level thoughts, stuff, right? It, it definitely does. Khan Academy, I mentioned if you’re thinking about a little bit of programming stuff. If you’re thinking about, um, project management, the Basecamp blog, and actually the Basecamp founder wrote a nice book on project management or JIRA, which is, most people know Trello, has a nice blog that kind of talks about the basics of project management. Again, you don’t need to be an expert, but, but organizational help starts.

There are many, many incredible tutorials on YouTube, but pick your authors wisely because there’s a lot of very bad content on YouTube, just as there are good content. I still, every once in while, go read, um, WC3, right? The Web Consortium. I will sometimes go and actually take a look at what are the new aspects of HTML styling and CSS styling, just to see what’s being talked about these days.

Search Engine Land is probably my overall favorite publication on, um, marketing. They do a conference and I’ve, I’ve spoken at the conference many, many times. But they do a nice thing and then, Paid Search Organization. PSA is its short name, which is a really bad name since PSA also means public service announcement, whatever. They do a daily recap of like, the best five to seven articles produced each day. And so, it’s only a year, year and a half old now. They’ve done a couple of conferences to help while everyone’s sort of in lockdown, um, all free. Right? So, it’s for, for people to help with the re, ongoing resources.

So, those are probably some of my favorite resources. I mean, my blog was just really long, but you know, I’m still an RSA, um, RSS reader, which, you know, most people don’t know what RSS says anymore, and I love RSS feeds. So…

[00:46:33] Matt Bailey: I am with you. I, I want my RSS back. I, Google Reader was like my go-to home page every day and it made it so easy. And, oh yeah.

[00:46:45] Brad Geddes: Yep. Yep. So, I went from, I, I merged Google Reader to Feedly, and I’ve used Feedly ever since. And you know, like, I like my RSS feeds.

[00:46:52] Matt Bailey: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:46:53] Brad Geddes: Most people don’t even know they produce one, right? And most web systems produce an RSS feed. You can still get them, even though they don’t know they have one.

[00:47:00] Matt Bailey: I don’t know why that was killed off because it was, it was the most wonderful thing. I could read articles without the ads. I could, I could get everything I need. Let me just kind of throw this out there. So, one of the things about, especially, you know, I love Search Engine Land, it’s a great way to keep up on, on great stuff, even looking at news sites, aggregators where people are writing articles all the time.

When people see articles that tend to be clickbaity about paid advertising, uh, you know, I read one the other day that was like, “Google Ads is against small businesses and small businesses won’t survive.” How should people react when they see some headlines or articles that are kind of “the sky is falling” type of this, this is all going downhill.

[00:47:46] Brad Geddes: They should not worry about it at all. I’ll put it this way. If I see TechCrunch, Forbes, Forbes writes a lot on Google Ads, I don’t even open them. I don’t care what the headline is. I’m like, “It’s a Forbes article on Google Ads.” And like, like they don’t realize Forbes has a, a section which authors pay to write. Right? And so, they’re actually paid by the authors to Forbes. So, Forbes produces their article, right? And a lot, and then, so you see like some, “You could never do Google Ads on your own, but here’s our agency.” Forbes didn’t write that. Their agency wrote it.

And so, if it looks like it came from a press release, I only, I don’t bother, it’s, Google yet they make, I mean their biggest advertisers spend crazy amounts of money. Right? And, and they have a good voting block of what Google does. When you aggregate the overall small business spend, it is substantial. And, and so, they’re not going to isolate them. They’re not going to kick them out. Um, they’re trying to make it easier for them to advertise, whether you argue their methods are right or not, they’re trying to make it easier, right?

So, they, they can’t lose the millions of small businesses using them. Um, that’s very important to their growth and Facebook’s the same way. Any “the sky is falling” article is clickbait that you can roll your eyes and save yourself three minutes of reading it. At least that’s my opinion, right? That’s how I feel about it.

[00:49:12] Matt Bailey: No, no. I wanted you to say that because people need to practice digital literacy, and simply because an article is at a site does not mean that that is the policy of the site, or that’s the, that is someone who’s writing an article who, you know, maybe they’re not getting paid, maybe they are. Just like you said, there’s some good stuff on YouTube. Unfortunately, 90% of it is crap. And so, practice a little bit of digital literacy as you evaluate some of these articles, because just because it’s there doesn’t mean you have to react. So, I, I wanted another expert’s…

[00:49:47] Brad Geddes: Yeah. So, what I will say is pay attention to author names. Right? So, I do a lot of stock stuff, right? So, like, I look at stock stuff across quite a few sites, and there are certain authors I know if they wrote the article, I shouldn’t read it because I don’t believe anything they say. There are other authors I’m like, “You know what? I read your stuff over here, and I like it.”

[00:50:00] So, I often look at author names. There are multiple ways to do the same thing with Google, right? So, you could have, Matt and I could each write an article on how to do something and they say completely different things. Your results may be the same, right? And so, you’ll find…

[00:50:20] Matt Bailey: Right.

[00:50:21] Brad Geddes: …people have what you feel is a better mindset for how you want to work and think. And so, you’ll find those, and a lot of people, right, across many sites. So, often I’m more likely to follow a person or, you know, an author than I am necessarily a website in general. Like, who’s your trusted sources?

[00:50:41] Matt Bailey: That is such a good point, Brad. I’ve seen that on numerous training sites where people come at it different ways. And I, and I think that, you know, back in the Market Motive days, we were all very similar, and especially Todd Malicoat and I, he was on a different side of SEO than I was. Our methods were completely different, but we were working for the same end, and it, it really depends on what are you more comfortable with?

You know, I’m coming from the journalism side. I’m coming from the writing and content side and PR, Todd’s coming from the technical and the, you know, the linking and the programming side, and it really just kind of had to fit what are you most comfortable with, because that’s what you’re going to follow the most. So, I think it’s a great piece of advice.

[00:51:25] Brad Geddes: Well, excellent.

[00:51:26] Matt Bailey: Absolutely. So, oh my goodness. I can’t believe how quickly this has gone, Brad. This is…

[00:51:31] Brad Geddes: Time always flies by, right?

[00:51:32] Matt Bailey: I know. I know. Man. So, I, I want to, before we end here, you, the other day posted some software for free to assist paid campaigns. Can you talk to us about that and, and what it can do?

[00:51:48] Brad Geddes: Sure. So, we’re a software company, right? So, I’ll just, you know, Adalysis is, I’m the one of the co-founders, and we’re a recommendation engine and workflow system for Google Ads and Microsoft Ads, which uses marketing rules, not Google’s rules, which just means a lot to some people. And so, we launched a audit system anyone can use to get a quick checklist of how their accounts are doing, um, with suggestions and it’s a 71 point checklist, I think.

[00:52:17] Matt Bailey: Wow.

[00:52:17] Brad Geddes: Um, fully automated, connect your account, click a couple buttons, we believe in automation for setup, you’re done, and you’ll get, you know, a fairly lengthy PDF report you can even download. Agency’s also using a client proposal, so you can also use it in multiple ways.

[00:52:31] Matt Bailey: Hmm. Fantastic, Brad, and that is something I, I definitely will link to in the show notes, because that, uh, I, I, you know, just the comments when you initially offered that and, and, uh, you know, of people raving about it and, and what it can do, and hey, anytime you can get, uh, a good checklist about your account, oh my goodness, take advantage of it.

One last question ’cause you brought it up and I hate that I forgot. Bing, okay. We have talked, and, and I’m sorry, this is like, you know, it’s like the rest of the world. It’s 90% Google, 10% Bing. Let’s talk about Bing a little bit, and, and why you shouldn’t neglect Bing.

[00:53:06] Brad Geddes: You know, it’s, so Microsoft in, in reality, when we look across stuff, I mean, 95% of spend is in Google and like 5% is in Microsoft. So, you’ll sort of forget about it. The most important thing to know about Microsoft is when you open a Microsoft Ads account, there is literally a sync with Google button.

[00:53:25] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[00:53:26] Brad Geddes: And you can click a button and your Google account populates to Microsoft. You need to read it because they, they do have slightly different variations, how they do stuff. You got to do a double check, um, but it takes seconds to get going. Um, they try to what they call have parody of Google, meaning any Google feature is also Microsoft, doesn’t break syncing, and then they offer some of their own things where I have high hopes, and I’ve had high hopes for them for years. They keep disappointing me, but you know, I, I have high hopes that they’ll do, like, they’ll just get more traffic in the, in the end, right? We’re marketers.

[00:54:00] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[00:54:00] Brad Geddes: We gotta spend time on this traffic. Is you can use LinkedIn audiences within your Microsoft Ads data. So, for B2B marketers who are always struggling to reach B2B people, um, you do have features in Microsoft you just don’t find in Google. And that is one of their, their big selling points. And they have a few other things here and there, but in, in reality, you manage it almost identical to Google. They have a lot of the same options. Um, the interface is a little, not, I don’t think it’s user friendly, but then Google’s fails half the time anyways, so whatever.

Um, but it’s, their, their LinkedIn audience is interesting. Um, and they have a slightly different user base than Google does. We found an account last week, two weeks ago, their results are almost 500% better on Microsoft than, than Google. We don’t always find this. So they, they spend like 25% of their entire paid search budget on Microsoft, which is a huge number just in general.

[00:54:59] Matt Bailey: That is.

[00:55:00] Brad Geddes: And they’re not in B2B actually. They’re actually B2C company, which made it even more surprising, right? So, every once in a while, there’s some real nuggets over there. Um, it’s worth doing though. It’s so easy to manage it, and if you’re using, you know, a bid automation and looking at your n-gram data and your search queries, it’s not that much more time, it’s not enough, it’s not that much more data. Um, it’s less than you’ll get on Google, so it’s totally worth running Microsoft.

[00:55:22] Matt Bailey: I, you know, I’ve seen that both in organic and paid on Microsoft, on Bing, and, and I see it somewhat consistently, and it’s always been that way, that I get so much less traffic, but yet, the average cart order is so much higher. The conversion rate is higher. It’s just, it’s a smaller group of audience, but it, it’s a very consistent thing that I see. So, I’m not surprised that you saw that because it’s one of those, I guess mysteries of the universe that the Bing users are just really, really valuable.

[00:55:54] Brad Geddes: Yep. And you know what? And so, the other thing to know is you’re more likely to talk to a higher-level Microsoft rep than a Google rep. So, you often will get better support or help, and if you spend even low five digits on Microsoft, which is, you know, a healthy budget on Microsoft, you can get some personalized help with getting into certain aspects of stuff. You spend six digits, you’ll get a world of support.

[00:56:19] Matt Bailey: Wow.

[00:56:20] Brad Geddes: Um, where six digits on Google is, I mean, yeah, it’s a hundred grand a month, but it’s, it’s, it’s not at their top, you know, probably 20% radar at all, by any means.

[00:56:29] Matt Bailey: Wow. I could see how that works and yeah, I’m with you. I’m, I’m, I’m rooting for Bing. I’m rooting for them. I, I’m hoping they don’t go the ask route, ’cause that was a company I was rooting for. I was all in and they just, like you said, they just kept disappointing me over and over and over.

[00:56:46] Brad Geddes: Yeah. And, and that’s, so, I remember when, when, you know, Yahoo and Microsoft merged advertising systems and it was sort of like, this is an all-in play, right? It’s, if Google wins this, they win all of paid search.

[00:56:58] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[00:56:58] Brad Geddes: If, if they lose it, and Microsoft’s, historically they’ve been the best number two company in the history of companies. You know, we had Corel, if anyone remembers Corel and WordPerfect.

[00:57:10] Matt Bailey: Yep.

[00:57:10] Brad Geddes: Word was not even a thing. Um, we had Lotus Notes and Microsoft, we had Netscape, Microsoft hung around and suddenly we had Excel and Microsoft Word. And at that point in time, IE, which IE no longer controls the world, but they did for a while. Right? And Microsoft historically has been great at just hanging out at number two, I mean, X-Box has been number two for years, but it’s a massive division now. Um, they’re, um, they’re amazing number two company and they’re, they hang around and they find their spot and take advantage when they get it.

[00:57:43] Matt Bailey: Yeah, absolutely. And, uh, I, I, they’re a strong number two, however, I will say as someone who started out a PC, then went Mac, and five years ago I went back to PC, and I have not looked back because I’m buying the surface stuff. And, and they’re doing what Apple did. They’re managing the hardware and software together, and I find those devices are just phenomenal.

[00:58:05] Brad Geddes: Yep.

[00:58:06] Matt Bailey: So, absolutely. Brad, this has been a great, great conversation and great to, you know, catch up, but also get a sense of what’s going on in the ad world, as well. Any final thoughts you want to give to, to anyone who, you know, maybe they’re feeling a little overwhelmed or, you know, just words of encouragement for them?

[00:58:25] Brad Geddes: You know what? I always say, “There’s, there’s nothing to be overwhelmed about,” right? Start simple. Search, by definition, means someone has a need and put a word in a search engine and said, “Give me this.” If you can say, “I have this,” and you get it here, you can be a very, very average marketer. Hopefully you won’t be average marketers, right? But you can be a very, very average marketer and actually do quite well in search.

It’s the expansion into display and video and apps where you need much more of a clue of what to do. But if you’re sticking to core search, you just stick with it ’cause it’s not overly complicated. There’s rules to learn and parameters to put in place, but I still believe the search keyword, someone saying, “I want this,” is the best form of targeting advertisers have had in the history of the world. And yeah, you can add audiences and you could add demographics, you could do all this stuff. “I want a new X,” or “I need a plumber.” It’s such a needs-based amazing targeting that it’ll still work. So, you can get results while you continue to learning it better.

[00:59:39] Matt Bailey: I love it. I love it. And I love how you broke it down. Yeah. “I’ve got it. Here it is.” And, uh, that is, uh, I’m with you. I, I think this is one of the most powerful methods of advertising the, the world’s ever seen, and that’s why I always see it.

[01:00:00] Top two, top three, uh, or maybe the number one in, in all the analytics that I see for companies, even if they’re doing an average job, they’re still seeing so much results from it. It’s just the small businesses I see that struggle and, and trying to get over that. Um, so, uh, but wow. Way to break it down. Keep it simple. Absolutely love it, Brad.

[01:00:15] Brad Geddes: Excellent.

[01:00:16] Matt Bailey: Hey, I want to thank you for spending time with us, and Brad, where can people find you if they want to know more about you and check out your, your software as well?

[01:00:25] Brad Geddes: Sure. So Adalysis, just like analysis with a D, we’re ads at adalysis.com. We have a blog which is just free, we have videos and stuff at least once a month of new things to learn. Um, you can find me at Twitter on BGTheory. You’re more likely to find me on LinkedIn, just search Brad Geddes on LinkedIn. I will be there, and that’s where I probably hang out more than anywhere else.

[01:00:46] Matt Bailey: I’m with you there. And I will put all those links in the show notes, so that dear listener, you’ve got them all right there and I would suggest highly that you take advantage of that Adalysis offer. Um, so Brad, once again, thank you so much for your time today. Really, really appreciate you taking the time, especially in a busy time of your life and a busy time of year to make some time for the, the recording here.

[01:01:09] Brad Geddes: Of course, Matt, it’s been, it’s great time talking again, and you know, I, I love talking to people in marketing. It’s such a fun dynamic conversation, so I’m sure we could, we had a conversation yet again, it would be totally different.

[01:01:21] Matt Bailey: Oh, absolutely.

[01:01:21] Brad Geddes: There’s always something new, which makes it just so much fun.

[01:01:24] Matt Bailey: Absolutely. Thanks again for being part of the podcast, and, and dear listener, thank you for spending some more time with us, and I look forward to seeing you again on another episode of the Endless Coffee Cup.

Featured Guest:

Brad Geddes

Website: BGTheory
LinkedIn: Brad Geddes | LinkedIn

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