Are Google Ads Dead? Your Digital Performance Marketing Questions Answered with Anthony Chiaravallo, Vallo Media: Show Notes & Transcript

Welcome back to Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business! Looking for Marketing Smarts? You’re in the right place. After almost 4 years of helping to make you savvier marketers, we decided to broaden this podcast to include more business-oriented topics that will make you savvier business leaders.

In this episode of Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business, we’re removing the mystery around digital ads with Anthony Chiaravallo. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and your other favorite podcast spots – follow and leave a 5-star review!

• Episode Summary & Player
• Show Notes
• Strategic Counsel Summary
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Are Google Ads Dead? Your Digital Performance Marketing Questions Answered with Anthony Chiaravallo, Vallo Media

Are Google Ads dead? The answer may surprise you. Digital ads – along with other performance marketing vehicles – can feel like a black box. Even for the most skilled at managing these campaigns, it can be difficult to predict the behavior of the algorithms.  However, new capabilities like AI (Artificial Intelligence) are making us smarter, more efficient, and ultimately helping us produce better results. We wanted you to learn from an expert who truly knows how to help you navigate the world of Google Ads & performance marketing, so we welcomed on Anthony Chiaravallo, the Founder & CEO of Vallo Media. They’re a digital performance marketing company that helps brands & agencies implement strategies that grow revenue. Here’s a small sample of what you will hear in this episode:

• Anthony shares examples of how performance marketing can work in business
• How do you qualify a lead?
• Do Google Ads work well for B2B and nonprofits?
• How user behavior differs between Google and socials
• What is the role of AI in performance marketing?

And as always, if you need help in building your Strategic Counsel, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at: ForthRight-People.com.

Check out the episode, show notes, and transcript below:

Show Notes

• Are Google Ads Dead? Your Digital Performance Marketing Questions Answered with Anthony Chiaravallo, Vallo Media
  • [0:29] Welcome to Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business
  • [1:32] Welcome Anthony Chiaravallo
  • [2:45] What is performance marketing and why does it matter?
  • [4:15] Are Google Ads dying? And Anthony provides examples
  • [10:09] How do I know if a lead is qualified?
  • [12:26] Anthony’s process to clean up “bad” data
  • [16:22] Level-setting expectations for working with an ad expert
  • [21:01] Make sure you’re using EVERYTHING Google Ads offers
  • [22:49] Which industries and business types does Google Ads work best for?
  • [27:04] Google is always going to say you need to spend more
  • [28:22] Why is Philanthropy doing so well in ads?
  • [30:57] How Google and social can work together in a funnel
  • [36:40] How can business owners capitalize on brand awareness?
  • [41:52] Finally, we get to the AI of it all (Artificial Intelligence) – What is the role of AI in performance marketing?
  • [48:02] You don’t want to optimize for the lowest common denominator
  • [51:28] What are the common pitfalls in performance marketing?
  • Quick-Fire Questions
  • [54:58] Anthony’s one book recommendation – The 10x Rule by Grant Cardone
  • [55:25] City or Country?
  • [56:04] What’s Anthony’s favorite show right now?
  • [57:00] Connect with Anthony on LinkedIn and at ValloMedia.com
  • [57:37] Make sure to follow Strategic Counsel on your favorite podcast spot and leave us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts
  • [57:43] Learn more at ForthRight-People.com and connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn

What is Strategic Counsel?

Welcome back to Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business! Looking for Marketing Smarts? You’re in the right place. After almost 4 years of helping to make you savvier marketers, we decided to broaden this podcast to include more business-oriented topics that will make you savvier business leaders.

Thanks for listening Strategic Counsel. Get in touch here to become more strategic. 

Transcript

Please note: This transcript is not 100% accurate.

00:03

Welcome to the Strategic Counsel by Forthright Business Podcast.  If you’re looking for honest, direct and unconventional conversations on how to successfully lead  and operate in business, you are in the right place.  In our discussions, we push on the status quo and traditional modes of thinking to reveal a fresh perspective.  This unlocks opportunity for you, your team  and your business. Now let’s get to it.  Welcome to the Strategic Counsel Podcast. I am Anne Candido.

 

00:32

and I am April Martini.  And today we’re gonna talk about how to drive revenue from digital performance marketing. So a big question we’ve been getting from our clients is whether Google ads are dead.  And digital ads along with other performance marketing vehicles can feel like a black box. So it’s not unusual and there’s no big question why we’re getting that question from our clients. And even for the most skilled at managing these campaigns, it can be very difficult to predict the behavior of the algorithms.

 

01:00

However, new capabilities like AI are making us smarter, more efficient, and ultimately helping us produce better results. Yes, and we’re going to talk about all of this today. We’re also going to talk about how to effectively leverage performance marketing  to elevate your brand and business. Most honestly ignore this part as they see performance marketing as more of an end of funnel tactic. However, what we would say is when combined with top of funnel activity too,  the power of the effort grows exponentially.

 

01:27

Of course, we’ll find a way to even brand all of our discussions. That should be no surprise to any of our listeners. But we do have a special guest to help us with this topic, that’s Anthony Chiarvello of Vallo Media. Anthony, do you want to introduce yourself and give the listeners a bit of your story? Absolutely. Yeah. So I’m the founder and CEO of Vallo Media. We’re a leading digital performance marketing agency that partners with clients ranging from venture-backed startups to Fortune 500 companies.

 

01:54

I’ve got about 16 years now of agency leadership experience, developing integrated marketing strategies, digital marketing programs, and paid media solutions for a variety of brands.  We work with really big brands like Nike and Amazon and Walmart, but also  smaller brands and smaller businesses as well. Awesome. And everybody is having a big sigh of relief because thank God Ian and April aren’t carrying this episode all on their own.  When she brought this one to the table, I was like…

 

02:23

Oh, OK. Well, we’re getting a guest, right?  Nice.  I like our episode would be done in 10 minutes. like, well, that’s all we know about that. Thank you very much, everybody, for listening. That was a quick hit. Awesome. Awesome. No, and it’s great to have you because  obviously, you’re a wealth of knowledge,  and you have really great examples to share. So this is going to be a fantastic episode. So let’s start with just the basics. So give us just a lowdown. What is performance marketing? Why is it valuable to drive revenue?

 

02:50

Performance marketing is data-driven advertising where a brand essentially only pays for measurable results, whether that’s  clicks,  leads, bookings, revenue. Unlike traditional marketing or brand marketing where you invest upfront with no guaranteed outcome, performance marketing ensures that every dollar spent is tied to some form of a clear or trackable return.

 

03:18

At its core, performance marketing is about optimizing your ad spend, refining your audience targeting, we’ll dig into some techniques for doing so, as well as continuously testing and improving your campaigns  to maximize ROI. So it spans channels like paid search, such as Google ads, which I know we’re gonna dig into today,  paid social, such as, you know, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, programmatic display ads, CTV.

 

03:46

which is connected TV and also affiliate marketing. The key though is that it’s not just about traffic, it’s about  ROI. And so that’s really what we’re focused on. Yeah, and that’s awesome. Definitely speaking our language, that 360, right, approach to things. And  I think one of the reasons we get this question about our Google Adsdead is people don’t understand how to make all of this work together, right? So

 

04:15

paired with the fact that it is that black box that Anne talked about. So  just wondering if maybe we could jump in with an example or two to contextualize for people, use the big brand, use a smaller case study, whatever makes sense to really bring this to life so people can be like, ah, okay, I can see what all those things are. So I’ll start by saying, so Google ads are not dead,  but  lazy and outdated strategies are, right? I want to let the listeners know

 

04:45

the landscape for Google ads, we’re talking, you know, particularly search ads right now has changed dramatically. But what I’ve found and what, you know, we’ve found in the industry is so many brands are still running that same playbook from five years ago, and they’re all seeing diminishing returns, right? And so, yes, Google ads are evolving, not necessarily dying, but the real key takeaway here is those who adapt will win.

 

05:11

And I know that you touched on, you know, the black box, right? And that refers specifically to performance max campaigns within Google ads. And we’ll dive into all that as well. That’s a new AI ad type, but just to get back to your question about an example. So we audit hundreds of clients, Google ads accounts.  And for the most part, we find that they’re running that lazy outdated strategy and it’s not just the clients, it’s the agencies as well. In fact, they’re the worst.

 

05:38

of the worst.  It’s sad to see, you know, I’ll just give you an example. We recently audited a client’s Google Ads accounts. They’re in the  healthcare space. So they provide clinical treatment for depression where a user, patient will actually come into their  facility and they’ll actually receive a new innovative treatment for depression.  And they were running Google Ads campaigns. They partnered with a specialist agency that specializes in their industry. The problem is

 

06:07

They don’t really know paid media all that well. So they were running these Google ads and they were celebrating the fact that they were getting them a hundred leads a month and they were so excited. Not a single lead was qualified. And the reason being is that they were not tracking properly. They didn’t have the appropriate conversion triggers set up to actually measure the quality of these leads. And every single lead that came in ended up being a total dud. wasn’t that they never even became a patient. We don’t even know if they were even a real person.

 

06:36

This is a huge, huge problem in paid advertising is the fraud from spam and bot traffic. It’s normal. It’s part of  the industry, but there are ways to mitigate it to the greatest degree possible. And what we’ve found is that with this particular client and hundreds of others  is that the agencies and even the client teams that are managing these accounts  are not properly tracking and measuring and looking at these things. And so the way that you do this is through a variety of

 

07:05

analytics  and the setup  that we take when looking at a Google ads account is really, really important. So having a simplified campaign structure so that you can  have access to data more readily to make better decisions,  but also having the appropriate conversion triggers in place. So it’s not just enough to track conversions. You got to make sure you’re sending that data  back to Google so that the algorithm

 

07:30

can make better decisions on your behalf. So their algorithm kept optimizing and it’s working as intended. The problem is the data they were feeding the algorithm wasn’t accurate. It was saying, yes, these were getting these leads, find us more leads like this. But nobody was there managing it. It kind of taking a set it and forget it approach, which is the worst thing that you can do in performance marketing.  People think, oh, you just set it up, you let it run, the algorithm does everything. It’s not.

 

07:56

quite as hands off as that. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. There’s literally thousands of little levers and triggers that a media buyer has to be adjusting on a weekly, monthly, quarterly basis, whether it’s keyword filtering,  adjustments to your bids, where your ads are showing up.  I mentioned feeding the algorithm the data about the lead quality, because then your algorithm is now going out and it’s getting you more leads.

 

08:21

that are like the bad leads. So you’re literally training the algorithm on bad data. And so what we do when we’re working with clients and what I would recommend to your listeners  is really take a very, very close eye around the quality of your data and look at and audit those signals that you’re sending back to the ads platforms, whether it’s Google or Facebook, it doesn’t matter the ad platform. It applies to any form of digital advertising, even programmatic. You have to have clean data.

 

08:51

And you get that through a good measurement strategy, which then informs how you’re actually setting up the platform. So making sure your Google Tag Manager is clean, making sure you have all of your data points around conversions.  And we don’t just look at lead conversions, right? So when a digital marketer hears the word conversion, they’re like, oh, that’s, an online sale  or that’s a, somebody filled out  a contact form on our website. They want to, you they want to learn more about our service or our product.

 

09:19

That’s one form of conversion, but there’s a ton of others, right? So we look at something called behavioral conversions as well.  And so for this particular client that I was  referring to, they had no behavioral conversions set up. And so what is a behavioral conversion? One example is time on site. So how long is a user spending on your website when they’re coming to your platform, when they’re coming to your site from like a Google ad,  that’s going to indicate  user quality.

 

09:46

And then we can then find more users like that because again, less than 10 % of users that come to your site from a digital ad, they’re not going to convert that first time around. So  how else are we determining the quality? Right. And this is what we find. So many brands are missing.  I mean, just such great information and a lot to unpack. So I want to back up and you started hitting at it at the end, but I want to like make sure it’s very, clear because I’m sure a lot of people are like, okay, I can theoretically get what you’re talking about. How do I know that elite is qualified?

 

10:16

Because it is,  it feels like eyes and nose, right? It’s like, you know, just the digital data coming in and you don’t really  physically  have in person manifested in front of you, it’d be like, oh yeah, I can kind of characterize that person. So you had mentioned like the behavioral conversions as being one way, maybe you could speak more to that. But also, can you give us a little bit more of like a criteria of like, how does somebody qualify a lead? Yeah, it’s a great question. And it’s different for every business.

 

10:43

And this comes down to, you know, the internal processes at a particular business. let’s, you know, we can use the example that I started with. This is a healthcare provider that’s looking for qualified patients that want to come in and receive a depression treatment.  In that particular case, there’s going to need to be follow-up immediately upon receiving a lead. So let’s say the lead comes in, you get an email and a phone number and a name. So what does that business’s process look like for now contacting this person to schedule their appointment?

 

11:12

Do they automatically send them an email with a CTA that says, click here to schedule your appointment? And if so, what is that conversion rate? Out of the 100 people that got that email that signed up on your website from the Google ad, what percent is actually then scheduling the appointment? Secondly, you could have an internal, for example, in this instance, a patient coordinator could actually call that person and talk to them and determine.

 

11:37

through a series of very short questions. Is this person qualified and can we get them into the provider for an appointment? That would be another way of doing it.  And again, if we’re talking about another type of business, there might be  other methods for a sales team qualifying a potential lead that comes through the door and understanding, okay, if we’re servicing other businesses, if it’s B2B,  is this.

 

11:59

person come from a qualified company? Do they have the correct need that we can service? So there’s a lot of ways to qualify the leads. And then once that process is complete, then you have to go back and then within the paid media platform, signify what’s a qualified versus non-qualified lead. So you can then send those appropriate signals back. So I’d to hear, I’m going to use the term clean up. Like how did you clean up?

 

12:26

this situation for this client because I think this is one of the other really hard things is  people get excited, right? Like 100 conversions, yay. And we know that that maybe means nothing.  What does that then look like? Or how do you work with the client to  one, guess, rebuild their trust about even doing this, but then also showing them

 

12:49

the right way. And then the other part of this question is how does the tracking start to work? it them and you combined all of that? Like kind of walk us through the correction or cleanup. typically we’ll start with a data immersion. We’ll gain access to Google ads, know, Google analytics, their Google tag manager, and we’ll look exclusively at Google ads for now. We could talk about social later,  but in that case, once  you know, you can peek under the hood, you know, this is very technical stuff. So not every client actually has these capabilities, but

 

13:17

You know, I’ll walk them through the process. You want to look at number one, the quality of the traffic. So going into your Google analytics and asking yourself, okay, let’s look at all the key events that this traffic is converting on.  Do we see that they have a really low session duration? If so, that might be a lot of spam.  You also want to look at your search terms in your Google ads account. And actually what we have found a very large majority of the time is that these Google ad accounts are flooded with junk traffic.

 

13:47

We could tell by the low session duration, but we could also tell  by the keywords that people are typing in and actually coming to the site are not relevant at all to what that client or what that brand is offering.  You know, we had worked with a  client that was selling luxury cars  and the agency that was running their ads was driving traffic to his site for cheap cars.

 

14:10

And we said, guys, you’re bidding on a  term here for people that are looking for cheap cars, but you’re selling luxury cars. I said, who is running this? Because they are literally asleep behind the wheel.  I got it. Pun intended. Oh, that was funny. Oh, took me a minute. I got it. Got it.  That was accidental, but it worked out.

 

14:30

It’s so true when you when you see just the different keywords that are have flooded so many of these of these brand accounts, it’s unbelievable on how many of them are not qualified.  And we also have found that clients are running unbranded campaigns, meaning that the Google Ads accounts are targeting unbranded terms.  But they’re also using that to generate new search terms. So what you should do is you should actually have a separate campaign that is

 

14:58

dedicated specifically just for generating new terms. And when you find a high converting relevant term, you move that into your primary or what we call your core unbranded campaign. And that is a sort of a hack or what I would call a really important strategic pillar  for a high performing and a high converting Google Ads account. Now, this is really just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a lot that can be done as it relates to your ad copy  and your bid strategy.

 

15:26

And I know we’re talking a little bit about tracking. making sure in Google Tag Manager, for example, you have the different conversion events in the appropriate priority.  So for example, a qualified lead would be a higher priority than a one minute session duration. We still want to track both, but we want to make sure that we’re telling Google which one is the priority here. But oh, by the way, there’s this other signal that’s equally as important in terms of really

 

15:52

filtering out that junk traffic, which we want to eliminate as much as possible. And there was one particular client we took over.  They were spending 150K a  month on Google ads and they were driving 90 % junk traffic.  And we cleaned it up. It took us a while, but we cleaned it up and they’ve  absolutely  5X their business since then. It’s been about three years of running, but absolutely incredible success story.  One of my questions is going to be,  if you could…

 

16:19

talk about the importance of having somebody who’s knowledgeable doing this.  But  I think  that is  the proof right there and just in how you’re articulating the skill associated and the skill needed to really manage somebody’s campaigns and manage somebody’s accounts and not just in  a conceptual way because I mean, almost everybody knows enough to be dangerous, right?

 

16:43

You can go in and you can look at your Google Analytics and you can play around and you can put some Google AdWords out there and you can play around and you know, we’re gonna get into social in a second, which is where a lot of people  spend a lot of their money and their time. But I think the important part here is to highlight the benefit of having somebody who actually does have that expertise.

 

17:07

But what we always get,  the blowback is always, well, that sounds expensive.  That sounds like it takes a lot of time. So maybe you can give little, Andy, just a little bit of contextualization for  sometimes  the cost of doing business here, as well as how much time it does take. Because you had mentioned it took a couple years to clean up what this looked like for this other client.  And yeah, just kind of set some expectations there.

 

17:33

Absolutely. Yeah. And it depends on the spend level. This client had  five properties. They were spending  100K each. So that was a very complex  setup. Now for smaller companies spending a few thousand dollars, we can get it cleaned up pretty quick within a month or so.  And I think the key that a lot of brands  that maybe they don’t understand  is when we take over an ad account, in this particular case, like Google Ads,

 

17:58

The strategy that we put in place for the first 30 days, that’ll change completely after that, right? Because once we can now clean things up, we can get the appropriate tracking in place. We’re gathering clean data. We’re sending the appropriate signals back to the platform.  Once we gather about 30 days of that data, the whole thing changes. like, all right, now we actually have clean data. We have real data. We know what’s working. We know what’s not. And here we can double down in this one area. And actually, it turns out these other campaigns, we need to actually dial back.

 

18:27

because it’s not getting us the desired result. It is pretty complex. think Google does their best to try and simplify it because they just want you on the platform spending money. They don’t care whether it’s working great or not. And every time we talk, we have a great Google team and they’re fantastic. But every time we talk to them, their suggestion is always the same. You need to spend more money. Well, that’s always possible for clients. 90 % of the time it’s not. So it’s about

 

18:55

really  making your campaigns work smarter rather than harder, right? So you’re not always going to be able to compete with the brands that are bidding against you. Some of them might have multimillion dollar budgets. You we’re working with one client who was spending 80 million a year on Google ads and Google’s telling them you’re not spending enough money.  So, I mean, it’s like that story never changes. But  the key is, again, we noticed a lot of the same problems with their account that  we’ve been talking about.  It’s the bid strategy is not correct.

 

19:24

They’re bidding too high for some keywords. They’re not bidding enough for others.  They’re not analyzing the data properly. Their retargeting campaigns are not set up correctly. They’re afraid to even test PMAX because it’s a quote unquote, you black box  when,  meanwhile, there’s a lot of things you can do, like building custom scripts to gain additional data from these PMAX campaigns to allow you to make better decisions when it comes to optimizing. Now that’s

 

19:51

you know, a hesitation that a lot of brands have with some of these new AI ad types. But, you know, just to get back to your question, I think there when it comes to paid media, when it comes to optimization, it’s not just kind of like one or two big things. It’s literally a thousand little things that you need to do. And I know I touched on some of them. Another big component is the creative and it’s making sure your ad copy is matching the keywords.

 

20:19

that a user is actually typing into Google. So having that congruence  between what a user is typing, what they’re seeing in your ad, and then again, what they’re seeing on the landing page  after they click on that ad, making sure it all matches up, making sure that that user experience is consistent across each of those touch points, you’re going to see your CTRs go through the roof. You’re going to see your CPCs, which is your cost per click, come down,  and you’re going to see your

 

20:47

Quality score improve. And when your quality score improves in Google ads, that’s going to give you better placement in the algorithm. It’s going to give you better placement on the search engine results page. And it’s also going to improve all your other metrics. And so that’s what I would encourage your listeners to do is to look at some of these things,  go in, look at your quality score of your ads, make sure that you’re using every single available field that Google ads offers. So for example,

 

21:17

Headlines. Typically brands will have maybe just a couple, maybe three to five headlines, but Google allows you to have up to 15. Make sure you’re using every single one of those fields.  They also allow you to have what’s called extensions. This could be additional sub links below your ad. It could be a trademark, could be an image. Make sure that all of your extensions are filled out because that’s also going to give you more real estate.

 

21:44

on the search engine results page, it’s going to make your ad stand out and it’s going to give you a leg up above your competitors that aren’t taking advantage of all of those fields. Those are offered free. So don’t pay anything extra to add these extensions to your ad. You only pay when a user actually clicks on your ad, which again takes us back to what is performance marketing. You only pay when somebody clicks. But the key is you need to maximize  that click because number one, like we talked about, it’s got to be qualified.

 

22:13

Number two, when the user actually lands on your website, they’re not just bouncing immediately. They’re actually spending some time. They’re clicking around. They’re learning about your service. And ultimately, they’re making a purchase or they’re converting in the form of a lead or something to that effect.  Awesome. OK, so.

 

22:30

I’m going to put a pin in one thing. You started going down the AI route and I know we want to get there and you mentioned Performance Max and I do want to have you contextualize a little more. You’ve done a good job with lot of the definitions. I want to cover that, but one thing I wanted to talk about first is a lot of our listeners and clients are B2B service-based nonprofits, those types of industries.

 

22:52

What do you see working well in those spaces specifically or maybe not so well? Or are there certain  pillars of industry that work better than others? Google Ads just as a whole works better in the B2C space and D2C. But for the most part, if we’re talking nonprofit, we are seeing a lot of success in that industry as well on Google Ads when it’s done properly and the right strategy and the right tracking is in place.

 

23:21

When it comes to service-based businesses or B2B, I would say focus more on demand gen,  which is also another ad type offered by Google. But I would say there’s a lot to be done on the content marketing side. When it comes to B2B service-based businesses, I’m in a B2B service business, right? So doing things like we’re doing right now, podcasting, creating social content in the form of videos, are still doing really well without the need for paid ads. But

 

23:49

you need to produce a very large volume of content, right? So that’s really the key. know Gary Vee, I think just did a keynote about this where he’s like, need to be creating 30 pieces of content per day. And you know,  it’s a lot. He’s not wrong. But I know that’s it’s hard for for smaller businesses to create that volume.  He only lives one speed. So yeah, exactly. Everything you know, it’s like

 

24:13

My toilet doesn’t work. Do you have enough content out there? Yeah.  It’s so true. It’s so true. was listening to that. was like, okay, he’s right. But okay, this is insane.  but the truth is, like, when it comes to service based businesses, it’s a combination, we look at this through the marketing funnel, right, creating a lot of awareness, making sure that you’re taking that awareness and you’re converting it at a later time. So having multiple touch points with your audience.

 

24:42

making sure  you look at this through the entire marketing ecosystem. So if you’re a service-based business, Google Ads is not necessarily bad,  but you never want to just do it in a silo.  You want your Google Ads to be there so that way after someone has maybe seen your content four, five, six times, they go to Google, they’re researching competitors, and boom, you’re there. So you’re top of mind,  especially on the retargeting side. So that is what I would consider very, very low-hanging fruit.

 

25:10

because the retargeting ads through Google allow your brand to or your service based business to stay top of mind with people that are coming to your website. so, you know, presumably people are coming to your website from a lot of different sources. They’re coming to you from social media.  They heard you on a podcast. They come to your website through your email newsletter,  whichever way they’re coming to your site. You want to be able to re-engage them. And that’s where retargeting comes in. So that is an ad type that’s offered by Google.

 

25:40

where people that come to your site will then see your ads after they leave. And you could set a frequency cap, which is the daily number of times they will see one of your ads. You could also set a look back window, which means that, you know, for example, 30 days after somebody comes to your website, they’ll see your ad up to two times per day. And that’s no matter where they go on the web, anywhere they go on the open web that has Google ad code could be a news website. could be a blog, any website that has the Google ads code.

 

26:10

they can encounter your brand. And that’s what retargeting is.  And  many of your listeners may or may not be familiar with it, but again, very low cost. It’s not a ton of money to retarget those website visitors, but it’s again, low hanging fruit because you already have an interested person. They’ve already come to your website, whether it was from a paid ad or whether it’s organically.

 

26:33

They found you, they came to your site, and now you don’t want to lose them. You want to stay top of mind because you want to bring them back. Let’s say they didn’t convert that first time around. You want to make sure that we have an opportunity, especially if we’re paying money to drive somebody to your site. So you spend $2 per click to drive somebody to your site from a Google ad with the assumption that 95 % of those people are not going to convert that first visit. I want to make sure that we bring them back so that that $2 wasn’t a wasted investment.

 

27:00

Yeah, I think the ecosystem is super important. But before I get that your your Google story,  the one about how  they say that you never can spend enough money with them reminds me of when I was at PNG and, and Facebook was just becoming a thing. But they used to come to PNG every year and do their little presentation. And it’s amazing how the presentation shifted based on what we wanted.

 

27:24

So if we thought engagements were hot, they would come and be like, engagements are all this rage this year. All of our algorithms are now all prime for engagement. The next year, it’s like, oh no, we want like, lead conversion. Well, now the whole Facebook is all geared towards lead conversion. So it was basically just addressing what we said we thought we wanted in order to get us to spend more money on there. So I’m like, does anybody else see what’s going on here? We’re by the only one.

 

27:54

It reminded me of that and I think  it’s still the philosophy to this day. Yep. But I wanted to go back to a very specific question on something you said about philanthropy that kind of piqued my interest. But then I want to kind of get to the ecosystem a little bit because I think that’s really important to really address because you had mentioned only 10 % will engage the first time they see something. And we always say six to seven times is like the magic number before somebody is going to engage with your business. So I’m going to get there in a second.

 

28:23

But I wanted to go back to the philanthropy  piece, because you said philanthropy is doing really well from a  paid ad standpoint. I’m kind of curious, what is it about that that is generating the interest? Is it in the fundraising? Is it in the  attention and the awareness? What is it that’s working really well there? So from a Google Ads perspective, what’s working well is because it’s lower funnel. People are going to Google with a very specific intention.

 

28:51

going to Google and they want to donate, let’s say, for example, they want to donate on Thanksgiving, they want to donate 100 meals and figure out how to do that. They’re going to Google specifically to do that. And so if your nonprofit, if your organization can show up at that moment of intent, then you have a very, very high conversion chance, right? Because Google overall is always our highest ROI channel. And this the simple reason is that, again, it’s a higher intent. If someone’s on Facebook and they see an ad to donate, you know, they might

 

29:21

or they might not. But on Google, they’re specifically going and searching for that. So you have automatically a higher intent user. And if you’re a nonprofit trying to solicit donations, or if you want to raise awareness for a specific cause, you’re targeting people who are already in that mindset of, hey, this is what I want to do. This is what I’m looking for. And if your brand is there to basically support them in making that donation or in making that decision,

 

29:50

that’s going to give you a huge advantage. And that’s why the conversion rates on Google are always double or triple or more than what we see on social. Social is more of a discovery platform and Google is more of an intent platform. So it’s further down the funnel. And that’s what we see working  specifically for nonprofits is actually, you know, targeting those keywords for people that are actively looking to give to a specific cause. And I think the LA wildfires is a really good example.  When that happened, you know, there was a huge  search spike in just

 

30:20

pure volume of people looking to donate. And so if your organization was able to appear at the top of search during that huge spike in searches, then you were in a very good position to help get donations for that cause. That’s great. That’s very, very helpful. think a lot of our clients in that realm will be very interested in hearing that because it’s traditionally something that they’re straight away from. One, because they tend to be lean and mean teams, and they don’t have the capacity or the expertise.

 

30:49

or sometimes the resources in order to be able to do that kind of effort. And then you said something very interesting, what kind of gets back to the other aspect of the ecosystem. So let’s go ahead and go there. Then we’re to come back to the AI thing.  And this says like, don’t forget. I put a pin in that. think if people, I mean, they continue to ask us, so we’ll come back. We’ll just use that as a little carrot for people to continue to listen if that’s what you’re really interested in.  I love if you kind of give it like the more of the ecosystem, because you just mentioned something that was very interesting.

 

31:18

about  how Google should be used  from a paid platform standpoint and how social should be used from a paid platform standpoint. Can you say more about that and how those two pieces work together? So back to your  earlier point about the touch points, right? Six to seven touch points before a user can convert. This includes multiple channels. we find, don’t get me wrong, every channel can be used across the funnel, but how you build the campaigns is really important. And as you mentioned before, Facebook’s like,

 

31:46

We can do engagements, we can do awareness. You want leads? We could do that too.  So yes, every platform can be used for multiple stages in the funnel. So it just, it depends on how you set your objectives. And it also depends on  how you build audiences. So we find on social media, for example, it’s a discovery and awareness channel. So having really good visual creative is important and videos do really well.

 

32:11

And it costs you pennies on the dollar to drive views of a video on social media. So it costs you next to nothing. I mean, we’re talking under six cents per view and a view is defined as anywhere between five and 10 seconds. And so with that, you have to make your point pretty quick,  but we’re not just going after views. We want to build audiences. And this goes back to our discussion around the marketing funnel. And so just.

 

32:35

To make it very simple for the listeners, right? We can think of the marketing funnel as at the very top is awareness, in the middle is consideration, and at the bottom is conversion. We’ve been talking a lot about conversion because performance marketing is all about the conversions. Google ads, high intent channel, very, very conversion centric,  but you can’t just  rush to the conversion, right? You have to actually think about this through the lens of the funnel. And that’s another big pitfall.

 

33:04

that we see brands making because they’re very much married to the metrics. We need to drive conversions. And so we’re just going to ignore  the top stages of the funnel. We’re just going to go right to the bottom. We just want conversions, conversions. Well, that doesn’t really work actually. And we found that every single brand that did that not only didn’t get conversions, but they had horrible performance. They were paying more for clicks. They were paying more  for  leads and the leads weren’t as qualified because they did not take the time.

 

33:33

to educate and nurture their audience through the earlier stages. And so  back to what I was saying about social media, you can drive  video views for very, very cost effective  metrics and not a ton of investment.  And more importantly, you can use those videos to build engaged audiences. So Facebook will actually take every single person that watched more than six seconds of your video. You need to set this up, but they have the capability and will actually parse them out.

 

34:03

into what we call a warm audience or a hot audience, right? And so that will allow us to then target those people with subsequent messaging. And so maybe now we serve them a video. Now we maybe serve them an in-feed ad, a GIF or something along those lines  that moves them from awareness, like, hey, this is who we are. This is what we do. This is what we stand for  to consideration. Hey, this is what we offer. Here’s some features or benefits of our product or our service, or here’s how we’re differentiated in the market.

 

34:32

and making sure that those ads, which are now in the consideration phase, are targeting only those warm audiences. In other words, only those people who had watched at least 10 seconds of your video. So you know that they have seen your brand, they were interested enough to stick around for more than a couple seconds on your first video, and now we want to see if we can bring them to the website. And that person will be more qualified coming to your site as opposed to someone who’s just coming directly from that very first ad.

 

35:00

And that’s just on social media.  But you also have to think about how does our brand campaigns and not just social, but other forms of digital such as programmatic or influencer marketing or even traditional advertising like TV or out of home. How does that actually drive search volume? And this is  a really important point because we see this happen a lot.  If a company or a brand invests in awareness campaigns,  many times will see a correlation.

 

35:30

in branded search traffic. So a client runs an awareness campaign, all of a sudden we see a 20 % spike in people looking for the brand name in Google.  So that is something that is really worth tracking because it shows just another way of how brand campaigns can be effective when combined with performance marketing. And I think that’s really the key takeaway is  your performance marketing campaigns are only as good as what you invest in your brand.

 

35:57

because the brand campaigns act as the tailwind for your performance marketing. So even though I’m a performance marketer, I own a performance marketing agency, I am a huge supporter of brand because it makes our campaigns that much more effective, but it’s got to be done right. It’s very easy to just spend millions of dollars on brand campaigns and get nothing for it. But when done strategically  and when done through the lens of this funnel, you can have actually a huge success  of

 

36:26

tying and the brand campaigns to the performance campaigns. Well, I love that you just bring in don’t. that’s  where I was going. I was like, oh, you’re doing our job for us. Usually that’s our role to,  you know, speak and preach about how important brand is specific to that.  How do you  with the way your work is oriented? Can you give either an example or I’m kind of pulling on that? OK, so.

 

36:53

there’s awareness or traditional marketing or whatever, however it’s run, right? But then you see the spike. How do you capitalize on that? Or give us a case study, something that shows  the magnitude of when the things work together, because obviously I’m asking you to do my job now, but  this is what we talk about all the time too. And I think it’s really hard for people to internalize that it’s an and. And I appreciate it also from the lens of where you were like people, can’t just.

 

37:20

jump to the conversion because then you haven’t done the work to build the relationship and the audiences and all of that. So. Right. Yeah. No, it’s a great question. I would say there’s some good examples. One that comes to mind  is a company that we worked with called Plyaboles. They are an acai bowl franchise. They make  smoothies  and these different, you know, frozen fruit bowls.  And they are a true brand story that

 

37:45

When I came on board, they had grown to, think, 30 locations, mostly organically through handing out  flyers on the beach, running airplane banners, like just posting to Instagram, like not spending a single dime on performance marketing.  But eventually, they did hit a plateau. A lot of competitors entered the market. They were looking for investors, but they didn’t have any marketing data, and no one was taking them seriously.

 

38:11

In the investment community even though they had grown you know pretty significantly all organically  so that was an example of how we took that strong brand they had a huge following i think they had like thirty thousand instagram followers all organically at the time  and how do we now combine that with some performance marketing and so what we did  as their partner. Was we set up  the customer data platform and so a way to actually capture.

 

38:37

customers through their digital channels, but also through the point of sale. So this is a real important point is in instances where you are dealing directly with consumers, you how are you marrying the physical with the digital? And that became really, really key. So the first thing we did was we set up a local SEO platform so they can manage all of their online listings for each location from one centralized place.

 

39:02

And that allowed them to respond to reviews at scale, whether it be, you know, a negative review or even just having a system in place for responding to every single positive review. It allowed them to do that from one location that elevated their local SEO through the room, because basically now they’re appearing in search way more  prominently, just organically. So this is before still before we ran a single ad.  The second thing we did from a marketing standpoint was we built a customer loyalty program.

 

39:32

that allowed us to capture people at the point of sale with either their phone number or an email address, and then an app where they can then track their purchases and basically gamified the whole thing, where if you buy, you know, nine, 10 bowls, you get the 11th one free, you can get points, redeem it for swag. And so we made it into this entire ecosystem  of brand loyalty.  And additionally, with this customer data platform, we were able to set up marketing automations, which means that, for example,

 

40:01

If somebody doesn’t make a purchase in 30 days,  the system will automatically trigger like a Miss You coupon. And you can text people through the platform. You can email them.  It all depended on what their communication preferences were.  And so we set that up at the point of sale and through the website. And by the end of the first year, I think they had over half a million people in the system. And now all of a sudden, investors were just…

 

40:24

salivating over that. They’re like, have the data, you have the research, you own your customers information, and so you don’t become so reliant on the performance marketing channels.  And then eventually we did launch, you know, social and some search ads, but they didn’t need it. It was really just an organic, you know, brand powered customer acquisition machine that we put into place that also then now

 

40:47

catapulted them. think they have over 200 locations now. They’re all over the country. They got acquired for 110 million two times over  and just tremendous success story. Yeah. I, that’s a fabulous story. And I’m hoping people understand that even what seems like a simple product  has a sophisticated way of which people engage  and is knitted together into this ecosystem.

 

41:15

I mean, because I think people don’t really appreciate what goes behind that. They’ll put out a couple of ads, they’ll put out a promotion, and then they’re like, hey, why isn’t this working? But the sophistication is in knitting it all together and making sure everything is working as hard as it possibly can. And then using that to your advantage in order to get the flywheel to continue to move. And I think that is the art of what you guys do that I’m hoping people are really appreciating right now.

 

41:44

because I’m going to segue into the AI piece, which of course people are like, yeah, that’s great. I’ll just put whatever content I want to in the chat GPT and they’re going to generate 20 posts for me. And I’m just going to ching ching ching ching all that out and I can schedule them out. And then it’s all out there. That’s all I need to go do.  And so I think  Anne’s tide box is second. And I think April would stand on here with me.  When you’re thinking about the art and the skill associated with

 

42:14

creating the content, as you said, the content generation and then knitting it together into a system that really works hard for you.  mean, AI isn’t that sophisticated and they can’t do that. That still takes brains and people’s brains and knowledge and expertise and experience and understanding to kind of continue to do that. But there is a role for AI to play, potentially.

 

42:38

So I would love for you to talk about how that is showing up now in the work that you’re doing and feel free to take it from a social media standpoint, a more general standpoint, going back to when we were talking about performance max from Google, can it give us the lay of the land with AI and when is it a good tool that’s gonna be really helping people be more productive, efficient and generating all of those wonderful results that you’re talking about and when do people are over relying on it?

 

43:07

where it’s going back the other way where people are of just continuing to be lazy. That’s a great point. would say right off the bat in  digital media buying,  know, AI is not really a new thing. We’ve always dealt with machine learning and the algorithms, right? And that has always been AI in a sense, right? And so it is shifting the job of digital media buyers. And actually, that is a very good thing because it means less time on

 

43:35

what’s called the optimization slog, which is just manual, you know, audience testing and target. So the AI is actually  removing a lot of that repetitive manual labor.  And people think, oh, well, this is going to put media buyers at risk. They won’t have a job. Well, actually, no, it’s just, again, their job is evolving, much like the Google Ads platform, right? Their job now is more strategic, and it becomes much more important.

 

44:03

to think about how you’re structuring your creatives and your testing and your A-B  tests that you set up.  And having that strategic understanding becomes so much even more important than it already was  because a lot of that manual labor that media buyers were doing is no longer needed because of the way these AI engines are now operating within the platforms.  So that’s number one. And then number two  is we’re also seeing these new AI ad types.

 

44:31

touched on it earlier, what Google calls Performance Max or PMAX for short.  It’s a new ad type they’ve had for probably over two years now, but a lot of marketers still don’t like it because they like having control and PMAX to some degree relinquishes that control. So Google says, let our AI  run the ads for you. We’ll automatically place your ads where we think it’ll generate the best results. So this could be in

 

44:56

you know, Google search results. could be on other websites. It could be on YouTube. It could be in Gmail. These are all places where Google ads show up. And the PMAX  campaigns will automatically determine those placements based on what the AI thinks will generate the best results. That goes back to the idea of having clean data and clean tracking. Because if you’re not feeding the AI the proper data,  then it’s going to make you show up in places that are not good for your performance.

 

45:25

But with Performance Max, the ads are also a little bit different. So unlike a traditional banner ad or a traditional search ad, which is either just text or a traditional just, you know, design display banner ad,  the Performance Max is akin more to a native ad. And if your listeners aren’t familiar with a native ad,  that’s just typically an image, what we call a clean image. So there’s no like text on it. There’s no buttons or anything  and headlines.

 

45:54

paired with descriptions. so Performance Max will take those three elements, the image, the headline, and the description, and it will mix and match them to the tune of thousands of different combinations. And it’ll do it all automatically. But  you submit the approved images, you submit the approved headlines, but the algorithm and the AI agent will mix and match it based on what they think will drive the best performance at any given moment.

 

46:20

And with Performance Max, again, it’s been called the black box by the industry. A lot of performance marketers don’t like it. And it also is susceptible to high volumes of spam traffic. So you do have to be very careful and you have to monitor these things very, very closely. But we’ve seen really good results when we develop custom scripts that allow us a little bit more optimization opportunity,  as opposed to if you’re just running PMAX by itself. And with that AI ad type,

 

46:50

What I tell clients is you have to test it, right? Because if you don’t test it, you don’t know. We have many clients that are afraid to even test it or even turn on an ad. But when you’re dealing with very large campaigns, we had a client with over 250,000 product SKUs. And again, this is that client I mentioned earlier spending 80 million a year. You need some form of automation to manage that. Because if you’re trying to manually optimize a campaign of that scale with potentially hundreds of campaigns under that umbrella,

 

47:19

Uh, it’s not going to be possible. And you’re just, this is where the AI really comes in handy is at these larger scale campaigns, but it’s gotta be set up right. And it’s gotta be done strategically. And we’ve found the use of custom scripts is really helpful  in gaining a little bit more insight under the hood  for something that’s normally very much a black box. That’s just strictly now talking from the ad types. Now we can talk about AI for content generation as well.

 

47:46

And that’s also a slippery slope. It’s really good at brainstorming and generating ideas and iteration, but you have to be careful because you end up sounding like everybody else. If you’re plugging in similar prompts, right?  this goes back to also the AI engines in the platforms. You don’t want to optimize to the lowest common denominator. Cause if you’re just constantly following the algorithm,

 

48:08

Everyone’s ads are going to end up looking exactly the same because you’re just optimizing to that lowest common denominator because you’re just like, all right, now change this, now change that, because this is what the algorithm’s saying.  Your brand has to stand for something. You have to have a unique point of view. And that’s where you’re going to see success.  And that comes down to, you know, the identity of the brand and what is that emotional connection that you establish with your audience? And then how do we take that and then amplify that?

 

48:37

through the performance marketing channels. And I think that’s really the key takeaway  with the AI content generation is you don’t want to sound like everybody else. And you absolutely run that risk by relying too much on some of these tools. Well, and you set me up perfectly to actually do my job now with my comments.  But I think it’s the piece about it being an and right. So when we talk to our clients and we get the question about AI and, I are quick to say it’s a tool.

 

49:05

Right? It’s a tool. It’s not, it doesn’t replace the human brain.  And so I think the first point I’ll bring up is what you were speaking to at the end, which is really, I’m always the brand character police, right? And making sure that we have tone and personality and all of that. And that that’s what the true differentiator is.  When you start putting things into these tools, the reason you sound like everybody else is because you don’t have a human going back and assessing whether you’re on tone for the brand presence that you have.

 

49:33

hopefully done the hard work to build  so that you’re showing up the way that you want to that’s different from everybody else. And then the other thing that we talk to  a lot with folks when we get to this point is, especially, mean, my background’s in the creative industry, right?  So the other piece that we say is while a human is needed in addition to the tools, it’s the responsibility of the human  to adapt and change and elevate their skills as more tools come out to stay in front of

 

50:02

what the tools can now do.  And, you know, unfortunately there are positions in some of these creative agencies and it’s not just specific to creative, but it’s part of the world that we live in where  positions are being eliminated in the more quote unquote traditional sense because the tools can replace some of it.  So a lot of what we talk about also tied to this topic of AI is yes, you do need the human aspect, but the human has to keep growing and outpace

 

50:32

what the tools can then do. And the combination can be great, but it’s that and that I was talking about at the beginning,  not necessarily thinking you can sit and be safe, quote unquote, in your job just because you’re human. And I know that’s a little bit of an aside from everything we’ve been talking about today, but I still think relevant to the conversation of AI. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Look, the truth is we’ve saved a lot on copywriting costs. We’ve saved a lot of time, you know, from AI. But if it doesn’t have that human level oversight, I don’t think it can.

 

51:01

be as effective as it should be. Yeah, a thousand percent on that. And when people think it can, I just remind people where it all is coming from. Like it’s coming from stuff that people have already produced and it’s already out there. It’s just aggregating. It doesn’t think about new things. It doesn’t come up with new stuff, you guys. So think about it from that standpoint that  the whole basis of AI is to aggregate, not to create new. I love just to kind of like round out this conversation. We always like to end on a negative note. No, I’m just kidding.

 

51:29

But it’s always about like, everybody always asks us, well, what are the pitfalls? What could I do wrong? Or where have you seen it go really, really bad? And you’ve kind of intertwined those throughout the conversation. But I know you probably are like, OK, don’t do this, don’t do that. Or here’s big watch out. Can you just kind of sum it up for people about what they should be really thinking about and what they should be on the lookout for? Yeah, just to sort of round it out, like you said, I think the key that I really want to hammer home is

 

51:57

audit your data, make sure you have clean data, make sure the signals that you’re sending back to the ad platforms are correct. Because we have seen so many brands just waste so much money  and they’re celebrating their clicks, they’re celebrating their impression volume and all these metrics, but they’re not actually looking a level deeper. They’re not looking at the quality of the traffic. What is the traffic doing upon coming to our website? And

 

52:26

you know, don’t celebrate a low cost per click if the traffic is not qualified. It’s okay to pay a little bit more. And that’s our big thing is like quality over quantity. So the truth is, it’s hard to know what to look for. mean, we work with agencies and brands alike who are experts and still miss like close to 70 to 80 % of these different optimizations. It’s because it is pretty technical.

 

52:54

And it’s really important that you look at it holistically as well. You’re not just looking at certain marketing channels in a silo, but how they impact each other. And just a really quick example is we worked with a client who was running Facebook ads and they were like, oh, we don’t really know if we’re getting good results. This is questionable.  So they turned them off, but as soon as they did, they noticed that their leads started going down. So even though the leads were not directly attributed to Facebook, it was having an impact.

 

53:22

And so this goes back to our question of brand and performance is that you don’t realize not everything is going to be one-to-one attributable. In other words,  there’s still a bit of an art and a science behind it because at the end of the day, there is influence that is created from these various channels and campaigns that even though your data and your tracking might not directly attribute it to that particular campaign or that initiative,

 

53:51

there is an impact and there are ways to obviously look at that. Of course, one is turning it off and seeing, we saw our leads go down.  But  it’s important that you that your listeners understand that just because something’s not directly attributed to one of your campaigns doesn’t mean it’s not working. So clean data, but also understand the positive impact of brand that is not always directly measurable. I love that. And that’s the ecosystem again that we’re talking about, guys. All the information provided is like this been

 

54:20

hugely helpful. know even for me, like learning so much, um, and now considering myself a little bit more knowledgeable and I’m sure for all of our listeners too. And we purposely didn’t go into every single little detail. We left a little nuggets over there because I’m sure everybody’s like, Oh, what’s the custom scripts? I’m like, well, we didn’t go into that. So if you want to know about custom scripts, you’re going to have to go and talk to Anthony.  But before we wrap this up, Anthony, and let, tell people how to find you, are you up for some rapid fire questions? Yeah, let’s do it. All right.

 

54:49

If you guys were watching this, which you wouldn’t be able to because we don’t put it out, but you would see that there’s a bunch of books behind Anthony. So Anthony, if you’re going to recommend one book that you think everybody should read, what would it be? The 10X rule because that is something that we apply to our paid media campaigns  and have seen really tremendous results. Oh, which one is that? I don’t even know if I’ve heard them. Yeah, 10X rule by Grant Cardone. He’s a sales coach, trainer.

 

55:16

and  just really good philosophy for just success in career, in marketing, in branding, and all that good stuff. Oh, good one. All right. And this is a little bit apropos from where you said you just  were, but let’s see what your response is. City or country? Like places you prefer to go visit, like being in the city or in the country?

 

55:39

Oh, I would say like definitely country I like being out in nature. So I just got back from Japan like we were talking about before the show. I got the chance to see both I was skiing in Niseko, which is their upper island beautiful nature tons of snow if you like the mountains  and then got to see Tokyo as well which is just a massive sprawling city but prefer the country on my end. love it. Okay. And one more. What’s the favorite thing that you are watching right now?

 

56:08

Oh, favorite thing I’m watching? That’s a good question. What am I watching right now? Nothing new. I’ve been watching reruns of the Big Bang Theory because I’m just a big science nerd and I just love all the references to physics and all that other stuff. They never get old. They never get old. Yeah. Well, that’s awesome. Thank you so much for sharing a little bit about yourself outside of your experience and expertise, which has been phenomenal in this episode.

 

56:33

Why don’t you wrap it up for us anything that we might have missed anything you want to highlight and then obviously tell people where they can find you. Yeah, absolutely. I would say yeah, the biggest thing I just wanted to highlight was the importance of brand and performance. I’m actually writing a book  about brand powered media about the importance of marrying brand and performance marketing.  that’s something a topic that I feel very strongly about. So I just wanted to reiterate that with your audience.  And yeah.

 

56:59

They could find me on LinkedIn or our website, ValloMedia.com. If they like, we’re offering audits for free. So if you want an audit of your paid media channel, you can go to ValloMedia.com backslash audit and we’ll take a look at your paid campaigns and we’ll give you our honest opinion. Oh, I love that. Thank you so much. My pleasure. And with that, we encourage all of our listeners to take at least one powerful insight you heard and put into practice. If you can pick just one.

 

57:26

And remember, Strategic Counsel is only effective if you put it into action!