S1E19 - Unveiling Google's Ad Secrets - Revealing the truth with Boris Beceric

Jim Banks [00:00:00]:
Hello and welcome to this episode of Bad Decisions with Jim Banks. I'm delighted to have on the show today Boris Beceric, who is. Did I. Did I muller your name or did I do all right?

Boris Beceric [00:00:12]:
No, you didn't.

Jim Banks [00:00:13]:
There we go.

Boris Beceric [00:00:14]:
No, you did perfectly fine.

Jim Banks [00:00:16]:
Anyway, Boris. Boris, it's great. Hi, you here. Boris is a PPC consultant. I guess you're just like, I think when I was reading your bio, it's sort of talks about Google Ads. You don't do anything other than Google, is that right?

Boris Beceric [00:00:29]:
I try not to do anything else besides Google Ads. Yeah. So I get the occasional request for meta ads or for something else, but I like to stick to Google Ads. I think it's hard enough to stay on top of things there and all the frequent changes, so I like to stick to Google Ads.

Jim Banks [00:00:48]:
So just to finish off the intro, Boris is married, couple of kids, lives in Germany. He's been a consultant for about ten years, I think. Or you've been in the industry about ten years. How long have you been consulting?

Boris Beceric [00:01:00]:
I've been consulting for close to four years now. So that's the time that I've been self employed, basically. So I started, started working on my own in 2020, so right when the pandemic hit. Prior to that, I actually got hired by a UK travel company. So that was my first foray into online marketing. Got trusted with affiliate marketing and Google Adwords, how it was called at the time. And then I did the usual circuit, you know, the agencies working in house, until I decided to, I might as well go out on my own. So, yeah, I've been around.

Jim Banks [00:01:39]:
So you decided to go out on your own because, I mean, usually the reason people go out on their own is because they either get laid off or, you know, they get fired or whatever. I mean, you know, you just said, I want to take control of my own destiny. Yeah.

Boris Beceric [00:01:52]:
Truth be told, I think it was a mixture of both. So I realized that I had gotten unemployable, so to speak. I mean, I've seen a lot, I've done a lot, and to have a 20 something tell you, Boris, you better be at your desk at 830 each morning or else it's not going to fly at one point. So I knew it was the right time for me to be doing this. Plus, I had a nice contract lined up, so the decision was not so hard.

Jim Banks [00:02:21]:
That made it easy.

Boris Beceric [00:02:23]:
Got to pay the bills right before you. Before you go out, what do you.

Jim Banks [00:02:27]:
See the big challenges between consulting and working in house or working for an agency, what do you see the differences?

Boris Beceric [00:02:32]:
I think one of the cons of working in house, certainly, is that you can really put your head down and concentrate on this one thing that you're trying to achieve with the company. Right. So whether that be your role as a PPC manager or you're doing SEO or analytics or whatever, or you're doing a mixture of both, right. You can, over time, you'll learn the ins and outs of the business and you'll generally get a very good grasp of how things should be running. At least that's my experience. Whereas a consultant is not more challenging, per se, but I think there's more new scenarios being thrown at you constantly. So it might be like the typical case of consulting with the client, or it might be someone needing a very specific solution to a very specific problem they might be having, or a thing that I'm experiencing right now working with an agency, and they need me to do very hands on work in the account. So it's a mixture of everything.

Boris Beceric [00:03:35]:
And I. I think I enjoy that more than, you know, doing the same thing over and over again. Just get bored over time, fairly, fairly.

Jim Banks [00:03:44]:
Quickly, like, just to finish off completely the bio, you came to my note primarily, but because of marketing Twitter or whatever. Whatever, right. You know, we were talking in the green room and Boris said that he's. He's had his Twitter account. I'll always call it Twitter. I don't care what says I'm going to call it Twitter until.

Boris Beceric [00:04:04]:
Until they shut it down.

Jim Banks [00:04:05]:
I'll always call meta Facebook. Right. And I'll always call Google Google, not Alphabet or whatever they call it. Right. The only thing I won't use, I won't call it Google AdWords because it's not Google Adwords, but that's by the by, so. And you came to my notice because a lot of the stuff that you posted on Twitter was primarily to do with memes. Right. You kind of, like, again, you've become, for me, one of the kind of go to people for digital marketing means.

Jim Banks [00:04:33]:
So what made you decide that that kind of good thing to do?

Boris Beceric [00:04:37]:
Yeah, that's a good question, actually. I don't know. It's sort of taken on a life of its own, for sure. So I don't post memes regularly on Twitter anymore. I think I do it on LinkedIn every Monday. So every Monday is meme Monday, basically. But it just came. It just came from, obviously, I think, a lot of frustrations around Google Ads and reps and the way that agencies and clients maybe are being treated by Google.

Boris Beceric [00:05:09]:
So I decided to pour some of that frustration into memes. Turns out I'm really good at making memes, but I want to make a point that I'm not only like the meme guy, even though people refer to me as the meme king, but I think there's also something to be learned from a meme. If you do it properly, then it can absolutely convey a message. So it's not just trolling Google or manhandling them in any way, shape or form.

Jim Banks [00:05:36]:
Yeah, because I mean, one of the things I'm noticing with certainly with sort of meta advertising in particular, there are so many people that are talking about, you've got to have this structure, you've got to have the first 3 seconds, it's got to be a hook and you've got to be punchy. Three quickly changing the scene and everything else. Right. And again, I think so much of it is contextual. It really depends what clients you're working with, what they're trying to achieve. I'm working with some clients where if I was running those types of ads, we'd never sell a single thing because it just doesn't resonate with the audience. The audience tends to be an older audience, more discerning, probably a bit more mature, maybe a little bit more money. Right.

Jim Banks [00:06:17]:
In which case they're just not going to be taken in by 20. Again, it amazes me when you see these 20 something females putting on skin cream and I'm thinking you don't need anything on your skin when you get older. Absolutely.

Boris Beceric [00:06:31]:
But right now I think that trend is predominant in mainly d, two c, Twitter. I guess there's also this trend that. It's not a trend anymore. Make ugly ads. I'm sure you've heard of that as well, so. Yeah, but as you said, I mean.

Jim Banks [00:06:48]:
At some point in time I can get very hot onto the podcast to talk about make ugly ads again, I've always maintained I've created some of the most ugly ads ever that performed. Incredible.

Boris Beceric [00:07:01]:
Exactly. So like you said, it's highly contextual. If you're selling like a high ticket SaaS subscription to a company, then I think an oddly ad is not going to cut it in most cases.

Jim Banks [00:07:15]:
Yeah, I think one of the, one of the clients I work with, they sell a set of a product for dogs with hip and joint problems. And one of the, one of the ads I created for them, they sent me a video. It's always difficult to try and get videos of dogs with hip and joints, because it's like, it's painful to watch. They sent me a video of an old Labrador getting up off the ground, walking over to a water bowl and drinking out the water bowl. Right. We ran that ad for probably eight to eight to ten months. We probably generated a million dollars worth of sales. It was like one of the most hideous ads you've ever seen.

Jim Banks [00:07:52]:
I've lost count of how many video views this particular ad got because really, everyone loves a labrador. And it was really the words that went, the creative piece of it, the video asset was less relevant than the words that went with it. And I've always maintained that that's one of the challenges. And how are you finding that now with Google? Because obviously, Google, I think, are trying to get in on some of the ad. Right? They're trying to capture some of the. Because Google's always been a. People go looking for something specific, whereas social advertising, that's not what they're there for. Whereas I think with Demandgen, I think that's really been there to give you more exposure to people that are maybe not looking for things.

Jim Banks [00:08:35]:
They're looking for maybe awareness and that sort of thing.

Boris Beceric [00:08:38]:
Yeah, I think that's absolutely Google's play with that particular product, for sure. So that's also something that's often said on Twitter and LinkedIn, that if you're a paid social advertiser and you're doing well on meta or TikTok or whatever, it's quite an easy play to just take your best creatives and put them in a demand gen campaign and see how that does for you. So this.

Jim Banks [00:09:08]:
Yeah, but I think people try and do the reverse. They try and bring their best sort of social ad and bring it into Google search, and it just really doesn't work at all.

Boris Beceric [00:09:17]:
That I don't know, actually, if that doesn't work or if it. Or if it works, I think it's. It's a probably a misunderstanding from. From people who come from paid social. So, like you said at the beginning of this segment, paid social is probably the place where people hang out to connect with friends or, you know, just to watch a couple videos while they're on the subway or from on the way back home from work. So that's when you show them ads for things they don't know that they want or that they need. Whereas Google search, obviously, is this very straightforward thing where people go to that search box and they type in a very specific problem that they have. And that's the way it used to be for the last 20 years.

Boris Beceric [00:10:08]:
Right. Buy handbag, show them ads for handbag. They buy, they don't buy. It's like very binary. Yeah. But that real estate is probably pretty saturated right now. And that's why Google is pushing increasingly products like demandgen. Performance Max.

Boris Beceric [00:10:29]:
Obviously YouTube ads have been a thing for a long while now because they want to capture people that are higher up that funnel so they can, you know, advertisers can obviously drive demand or brand awareness, but also they want, quite clearly, a piece of that paid social cake. Yeah.

Jim Banks [00:10:47]:
Yeah. Because, I mean, I had Nava Hopkins on to talk about sort of BBC because obviously you. It's been my core competency for forever. So to talk to my peer group is always amazing. So again, it's great to have you on, but when I was talking to Nava, we were talking about how a lot of advertisers would run YouTube ads and Google display network campaigns and Gmail campaigns, and they would perform horribly because they just didn't understand how they worked. And I think really, in some respects, the onset of PMAC was partly driven by that. It was driven by they lost. Advertisers who had tried it, failed, walked away somewhere else, and Google wanted to keep the money on their platform.

Jim Banks [00:11:29]:
So they said, well, let's create an ad that will create it for you rather than you trying to do it, butchering it in a bad way. What are your kind of thoughts on that?

Boris Beceric [00:11:38]:
I think that may hold some truth for sure. So if I think back to my first foray into display or YouTube, I mean, obviously I was younger and I didn't know as much than I do now, but for sure, I mean, you're running a YouTube campaign for two weeks and not seeing any sale, like, being tracked through that. That's kind of like, hmm, what's going on here? I mean, obviously now I know much better and I know to wait and I know that that exposure is going to manifest somewhere else, not necessarily in that YouTube campaign. So I think, yes, performance Max is a way that Google has to have people buy YouTube ads and display ads, but also give them that performance that they're probably lacking when they're running YouTube on its own. Then on the other side, that may also be sort of a compromised product in the end, but the jury's still out at that.

Jim Banks [00:12:32]:
Of course, I've been running ads on Google since the very first day they started. I. And it's always.

Boris Beceric [00:12:39]:
Sorry to interrupt. Did you, did you actually run ads on overture?

Jim Banks [00:12:43]:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Overture was amazing.

Boris Beceric [00:12:45]:
I just I just got into a bit of a discussion with a guy on LinkedIn the other day. He tried to school me on Google Ads and how long he had been in the game. You don't even know how to set your overture bids. And I'm like, what is this person talking about, for Christ's sake?

Jim Banks [00:13:00]:
It's funny enough, I mean, again, I've been doing it so long, I even was running ads before overture existed. So the first iteration of overture was called go to, and then it changed name to over. And then Overture got bought by Yahoo, I think for again, 170 million, I think was what they paid for overture. But yeah, but I mean, again, I loved the fact that you could see the search volume. Everything was transparent, which I guess probably brings me to privacy because I know Google have started to withhold a lot of the data around search terms that kind of triggered the cost. What are your kind of views on that? I know a lot of people are very angry about that. What's your view?

Boris Beceric [00:13:40]:
I want to say I'm not angry, but I am sort of. I get the point around privacy for sure. So there, I mean, I can think of many scenarios where it'd be beneficial to withhold the actual search term that triggered an ad thinking like a local lead gen campaign and some, you know, maybe a very specific disease or a divorce lawyer or what have you. So these are all cases where I can understand that whole movement around privacy. And now lately, of course, there have been increasing laws around privacy, especially in the EU, so that adds another layer of complexity to the whole thing. Now, I think it's a bit shady that all being said, it's a bit shady of Google to withhold like two thirds of search term and just bucket them under other search terms and then they'll show us search terms that had maybe one impression. I can see that, but I can't see the thing that actually drove cost. So that's not very logical to me.

Boris Beceric [00:14:44]:
But the official communication always is. Yes, that's absolutely because of privacy laws, and you need to trust us on that. And I find that hard to believe sometimes, especially, you know, the thing is.

Jim Banks [00:14:59]:
I always use the analogy, I have an allergy to shellfish. If I have like lobsters or prawns or something like that, I love the look of them on a plate. But if I eat them, I'm going to be like, be pretty. And so imagine I walk in and I ask them, you know, about the menu, and they go, we can't tell you about that, but it's going to be $40 for you to buy this meal. I'm going to go. Not really sure how to do that. So in some respects, again, as an advertiser, there are things that you want to be associated with and things you don't want to be associated with. So I know that you can have a master keyword list.

Jim Banks [00:15:33]:
Again, if you were like, you know, Gucci or Lamborghini or something like that, you wouldn't want to have cheap, cheap handbags or cheap this or cheap that, you know, so you would have, you would probably. Again, I've always maintained, I mean, like, cheap is very subjective. What might be cheap to you could be really expensive to somebody else and vice versa. So in some respects, like saying, let's exclude cheap completely or free or whatever it might be. I mean, although people are looking for free, they may be quite happy to pay for it if the price is okay. So sometimes you might be excluding yourself from an auction that maybe you ought to be in. But I think that's where sometimes that keyword data can really help to unlock some of the. Well, that's a positive.

Jim Banks [00:16:19]:
I'm going to do more of that. That's a negative. I'm going to do less of that. And I think that's always the challenge when you're trying to do that analysis with data that you don't have. I think it's only going to get worse as we move forward to that point.

Boris Beceric [00:16:31]:
I totally agree with you, and I think it's actually counterproductive for Google in a way to be withholding some of those search terms from us because quite obviously if it's driving conversions and it's got positive metrics throughout, then I'm going to be willing to spend more on that. I can only spend more on the things that I know and that I see. Right. So getting back to that analogy, like you're going to the restaurant and you're ordering lobster for 40 pounds, and then like half of what you get on your plate, they actually slip you shellfish without you knowing. So that's a bit fishy.

Jim Banks [00:17:10]:
So, Boris, again, one of the things that I'm always interested in, the PPC community is very close, tight knit. Everyone knows each other. I don't know if you feel the same way, but it's, again, it's a good community to be in, but again, it's one of the big challenges is sometimes there is the onus. Again, Google are doing it, meta are doing it, Microsoft are doing it, where they're basically introducing AI and saying, oh, actually this is going to resolve all the problems. What are your thoughts around AI in the Google Ads ecosystem?

Boris Beceric [00:17:44]:
I have many thoughts around that. Personally, I'm very intrigued by that whole notion AI, and I think that we are now seeing that. So if you think of the law of how is it called accelerated rate of improvement or something, do you know what I'm talking about? So anyway, this is going to be super unscientific, but if you take the rate at which we increase our knowledge, basically we're just at the bottom of that curve. Right. So where everyone is now excited about AI, imagine like where we're going to be in ten years from now. So I think the perspective or the outlook for me is rather positive. Now, what's, what's being done with AI right now from, from many of these platforms is not always the right thing. So we need to understand that that's also driven by the need to produce shareholder value and increase revenue and all that good stuff.

Boris Beceric [00:18:51]:
I think all in all, I'm, I'm rather excited about AI and how it's gonna change the way we work and maybe hopefully also the product, the results that we're gonna be able to produce.

Jim Banks [00:19:05]:
Yeah. Because I think I'm kind of like, I'm partially skeptical and I think part of it is because I think there's a lot of marketing speak that goes with it. It just makes the assumption that they're the only people that can possibly know what is going to work best for your clients. Right. And again, I've maintained they don't understand some of the complexities on the back end. They only see what happens on the front end. If you're a business that's selling, let's say you're selling a subscription based model, your lifetime value could be huge, but your initial purchase cost, you're competing with people that maybe are not running a subscription model. And Google lump you in with everyone else.

Jim Banks [00:19:48]:
They just assume that everyone is exactly the same.

Boris Beceric [00:19:51]:
Yeah.

Jim Banks [00:19:52]:
I think the problem is sometimes it's missing the input from the end user. So Google never asks you for any input. Tell us about your business, tell us what your objectives are, tell us what your, again, you give them a TCPA or whatever, it might be great, we'll try and work towards that. But they're miles out of it. They're either miles over or miles under. They never hit the right spot. And I think that's one of the challenges, is that they don't ask enough questions. I mean, I did an exercise yesterday.

Jim Banks [00:20:19]:
So, so OpenAI came out with chat GPT 40.

Boris Beceric [00:20:23]:
It's in all the chatter.

Jim Banks [00:20:24]:
Is it 4.0?

Boris Beceric [00:20:26]:
Who knows anymore? I know I don't.

Jim Banks [00:20:28]:
So again, one of the examples that they said is, I think, I'm trying to think what it was, but it was something like, I've got a photo shoot tomorrow, can you suggest an outfit for me to wear? So I put that in, into the chat and it came back and it came up with, you should wear a nice dress and a blouse and a skirt. And I'm thinking, well, surely the first thing they should be doing is to say, well, what gender are you? What age are you? What's the occasion? What's your target audience? Are you doing it for LinkedIn? Are you doing for Facebook? What's the end product going to look like? And from there, I'm sure they would do. I mean, again, once I made some tweaks to it and did some refinements of the initial query, I ended up with, okay, well, that's probably okay, I could probably run with some of the suggestions that they've made, but it took a lot of backwards and forwards for me, me instigating the backwards and forwards, not them asking the questions, it was me prompting them to say, well, oh, by the way, I'm this age and I'm this gender. I'm this.

Boris Beceric [00:21:27]:
I get that. There's so many different ways we could take this, this, this talk. Now, first of all, if I'm referring back to some things you said earlier about the input that you need to give the machine, and you gave the example of the subscription model that probably has a much higher lifetime value than like a one off sale, my answer to that is, wasn't that the case all along? So I remember when we used to run campaigns on manual CPC and the way to do things was to calculate backwards from your AOV and your conversion rate and then come up with your maximum profitable CBC, right? How is that different to now? So that is, don't want to sound harsh, but that to me is not a valid argument because I think you should have always, you should have always realized, like, what's the value a click brings to that business? What's the value of a conversion? Like, work with the client and really strive to understand what they're trying to achieve. And then, of course, there are different ways to do this. If they want to scale aggressively, you don't need to make a profit on the first order. If they are trying to increase profits, on the other hand, then there's probably other things that you should be doing and so on and so forth. And then.

Jim Banks [00:22:53]:
Yeah, because again, I think sometimes there's the ancillary benefits. I think a lot of the benefits, again, I think one of the challenges at the moment. So we see a lot of situations where historically, with the Facebook pixel, it used to be that Facebook would take credit for virtually every single sale that was made on your site, because the pixel fired everywhere, then introduced the iOS 14.5 update and that changed it. And all of a sudden that kind of went out the window. When you look at it now, you're never going to get 100% accurate data. Some of it is going to be assume that based on all the patterns of what we saw, we assume that a sale took place, but we have no idea whether it was a sale for a dollar or a $1,000. You worked in travel. I always remember when I worked for a travel company, the value for us, because we were selling clicks, we were selling outbound clicks to airlines and online travel agents.

Jim Banks [00:23:52]:
So the value of us to a click is exactly the same. Whether it was somebody that was, let's say, somebody in the UK looking to fly from London to Amsterdam, turn on easyJet, versus somebody looking to fly in first class to Singapore in British Airways, it didn't matter. They were worth the same value to us, but really worth a lot more to the airline and the online travel agent if that person subsequently went and made a book. But ultimately, our model was one we were happy with, comfortable with. We were monetizing the outbound clicks at a multiple. So we would buy a click for, say, twenty cents, and we would sell it four or five times for $0.50. So it's like hugely profitable in that regard. But I think, again, I think if you lay out your this is what a sale is worth to me.

Jim Banks [00:24:42]:
This is how much I can afford. That's always the kind of challenge I get. Clients call me up and say, Jim, Google's suggesting we increase our TCPA to dollar 50, or whatever. I'm like, but that doesn't tie in with what you've said. Your kind of profit margin is on that initial kind of sales. What's the point in trying to generate sales at $50 if you're losing money hand over fist as a result of that? Again, if you knew that the lifetime value based on the next 24 months was going to be $10,000, knock yourself out. You could probably go to a thousand for an acquisition, right? Because you know that profit. But again, that's information that I don't ever think unless you send the data back to Google through enhanced conversion data.

Jim Banks [00:25:29]:
They ever know about that happening? So for them, it certainly in lead Gen. For them, lead gen is binary. It's ones and zeros. A lead was generated or lead wasn't generated. Right. There's no intrinsic value to the lead because it relies on factors that are outside of their control. They can't control how good the salesperson that picks up the phone or anything like that is. But equally, I can say this actually, that click that you sent me, that cost me $3 or whatever it might be, that translated into a $10,000 sale, it might be.

Jim Banks [00:26:02]:
Again, the one thing I don't like is I think with Google's enhanced conversion window, with the g clid, you can only have a 90 day window. Most bigger sales, they're a much lengthier sales process and 90 days is nowhere near long enough to be able to pass that information back.

Boris Beceric [00:26:20]:
That's absolutely correct. That's one of the gripes I have with the GClit upload as well. That leaves you with no other option than to guesstimate. Do the calculations from conversion rates through all the different steps you may have in your lead funnel and then assign the value to that one conversion that has enough data amassed that you can actually optimize towards. For Google. Yeah, that's hit and miss very often. Now, there have been some interesting talks between Google and HubSpot for an acquisition. Don't know if you've heard of that, but I mean, if that ever.

Boris Beceric [00:27:02]:
Yeah, so that's actually been going on for a couple of weeks, I guess. So if that ever happened, I think that'd be a very good sign for advertisers for a more direct and seamless integration. I mean, there's already native integration for HubSpot inside of the Google Ads UI, but yeah, I see. So from that aspect I see some positive signals also for B. Two B advertisers.

Jim Banks [00:27:27]:
Yeah, because I've always looked at the ecosystem. Again, one of the challenges is sometimes, again, the clients don't have the technical capabilities to do the implementation of tracking and all that sort of stuff to give you what you want. I've always maintained that not all clicks are worth the same. If somebody clicks, great, it's a click. But if somebody clicked and they spent three minutes on the site, they read three pages, they got to the bottom of the page where your call to action is. Again, we spend a lot of time in lucky orange looking at people's interactions with the site to understand. We got a call to action button in the right place. If people are going to 50% of the page, but the call to action buttons at 75%, we're missing out on the opportunity.

Jim Banks [00:28:17]:
So we could probably say, well, let's just move that call to action button a little bit higher on the page. Right? So again, it's not we're always looking at, it's not just the clicks and conversions, it's also the clicks and the non converters. And why did they not convert? Right. Was there something we can do to try and push them closer to completing whatever it is that the conversion mechanism is?

Boris Beceric [00:28:39]:
That's actually one of the reasons why I always ask my clients to give me access to their CRM, that I get access to any recordings of calls, if possible, that I get access to all the backend data, to all the sales values that actually got generated. Excuse me, because only by looking at the whole sales funnel and the conversion steps afterwards can you really assess the effectiveness of your campaign. Like you rightfully said, if someone submitted the lead, that doesn't mean anything to me. Or if someone clicked on the call us button or, you know, click through an ad like I'm interested in, how quickly is the sales team in actually picking up the phone? Do they call people back? What's with chats on the website? Is that being maintained or just people like, going to the chat and then sitting idle for ten minutes and leaving? That's all valuable information. And only by being able to see all of that data, I think, can you also educate your client on the importance of. I mean, that's almost operational things, so you're being like a coach to them. You can tell them you spent €150 for someone to click on your chat button and nothing ever happened with that person. Do you think that person is ever going to come back? Or does that person have five other tabs open with competitors of yours that are quicker to pick up the phone or get back to you? So almost, almost.

Jim Banks [00:30:16]:
And I think, again, I think when you look at certain types of industry, again, like if you're in sort of a technical b, two b sales, if somebody has like a 15 field form to fill in with loads of information about the company and the size of the company and turnover and all that sort of stuff, they're not going to go to seven different companies to try and get quotes from. They're going to go, whoever gets through to me first is going to probably have a much, much better chance. I think what came out with is that it's something like you've got a seven times more likelihood of closing a deal if you get back to somebody within an hour of them actually filling in a form or whatever it might be. And again, there's so many companies that if you run your ads 24/7 which we definitely think you should, you've got to make sure that there's a mechanism in place to capture. So again, it could be, you have nine to five. You've got, like, people answering the phone after 05:00 they go to a chat bot where they can fill in some information and kind of request a callback or whatever it might be. But there's so many different ways, as you say, operational things that I think a lot of agencies and consultants don't pick up. They don't pick up that type of stuff, and I think so much of it.

Jim Banks [00:31:32]:
I've always maintained that Google Ads is very easy if you've joined all the dots between all the components of the customer's business to ensure that you're not leaving money on the table, there's loads of leakage. If you leave the leakage unplugged, you've got to plug them in and make sure that there's nowhere for the stuff to go.

Boris Beceric [00:31:52]:
Absolutely. That comes with experience, I guess so. I'm sure you used to be the same. I mean, there was a time when I was of the opinion that I sent relevant traffic from Google. Like, the rest is none of my business. That was six years ago or so. But that took me also a lot of time to realize that there's other aspects that are equally, if not more important. The landing page, the offer, speed to lead.

Boris Beceric [00:32:22]:
Like you said, how quickly are people to get back to you? I have, actually, a personal anecdote for that. So I was trying to find a contractor to tear down my old garage and build a new one and also remodel our garden. So that would have been like a 30k contract for someone, and I couldn't, for the life of me find someone in my city that would get back to me from the forms I filled out on their website. Not a single one. I had to rely on a neighbor and a recommendation. So someone. I got someone to that, and that is insane to me.

Jim Banks [00:33:02]:
Yeah.

Boris Beceric [00:33:03]:
Absolutely insane.

Jim Banks [00:33:05]:
Yeah. It's crazy. Crazy to think that there's loads and there must be so many scenarios like that all over the place where, like I said, people are leaving money on the table. I've got €30,000 here, take my money.

Boris Beceric [00:33:17]:
Exactly.

Jim Banks [00:33:20]:
Interested, can't be bothered. So, Boris, I know that in the community as a whole, the PPC sort of community as a whole, we have a slightly different viewpoint as far as reps go. So what's your kind of thoughts on Google reps and what value they add?

Boris Beceric [00:33:38]:
You came to just the right person to ask that question. I'm not sure if you know, but I actually applied at tele performance last year, and I got the job offer. And in that process, I did. Of course I did. That in itself is insane to me because they could have just went on Google and typed in my name and be like, well, that's probably not someone who's gonna relocate to Spain or Portugal and, like, work for €20,000. But, yeah, I went through a whole round of interviews with a recruiter and then with a team, and then with the team lead, and they asked all sorts of different questions, and none of them were even related to Google Ads, so they didn't want to know if I had experience with Google Ads. Obviously, I told them that, but that was not a prerequisite. All these third party companies care about is your sales experience and how you do under pressure and in high pressure environments.

Boris Beceric [00:34:36]:
And I think that also explains the trouble that many advertisers are having with reps. And I think most of the bad rep that Google get for, you know, how reps handle accounts and client relations and how they go over the agency or the freelancer handling an account straight to the client that comes from the third party reps, because they are incentivized just by sheer volume, and they have to hit certain numbers to get that bonus. So, yeah, that's a funny personal anecdote. And then, like, the Google reps.

Jim Banks [00:35:13]:
Yes. The reality of it, it's been like that forever. I mean, I think the only time it didn't apply was pre IPO Google. So the minute Google became a publicly traded company, everything changed. And in my view, it changed for the.

Boris Beceric [00:35:30]:
I don't know. So when I was. When I was working in house in Switzerland, we had excellent reps. Of course, they were also constantly haggling us for more budget, and they were bringing up our CEO. Hey, Q four is around the corner. How is your stance on increasing the budget by five times or something? That happened, yeah. But also they were super helpful, and you could always get them on the phone and you'd get invited to Google and Zurich, or you'd get invited to the Google shopping days or what have you, so that it was, in my opinion, at least, it used to be very different, more like a corporation. So Google obviously give us support and we give them to the best of our ability, what they need, which is more budget, but obviously we have to spend it responsibly.

Boris Beceric [00:36:24]:
So that's, I think, where the clash always happens, because Google doesn't see spending responsibly as their main focus.

Jim Banks [00:36:33]:
Yeah. I've always maintained I have a mutual hate hate relationship with Google. We probably hate each other because I'm, again, I'm very outspoken, always have been, and I'm sure they don't like it, but at the same time, I know I have to work with them. I respect they're doing their job. I just, again, I just wish they, they didn't employ some of the tactics that they do. I mean, when they send an email to say, well, if you don't do this, then we're not going to be able to support you, it's like, why does the amount of money we spend matter to you, being able to support us? You would think that they would want to support every single advertiser that in the best way that they can. Because not again, what? Every advertiser is a Fortune 500 company with unlimited pockets. I mean, even Fortune 500 companies don't have unlimited deep pockets where they can spend as much as they want.

Jim Banks [00:37:24]:
They still need to achieve certain corporate objectives with the money that they're spending on advertisements.

Boris Beceric [00:37:29]:
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. The eBay fiasco comes to mind a couple years back when they publicly announced that Google Ads wasn't working for them and they stopped all spend. I mean, that backfired in a big time, big way for them. And also, I think people were quick to point out that they were just bidding on every word in the dictionary, regardless if it makes sense or not. But to your point, you need to spend money in a way that you're able to spend money next year and then the year from now, because otherwise you're going to go out of business and we don't want to go out of business. So. Yeah, agreed.

Jim Banks [00:38:07]:
Yeah, I think that was the joke with dynamic keyword, as you say. With eBay, it was. I think they find death on eBay.

Boris Beceric [00:38:20]:
Use cypress, something like that.

Jim Banks [00:38:24]:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Because again, I think dynamic keywords great when they work, but when they don't work, they don't work horribly.

Boris Beceric [00:38:33]:
Yeah, that's true. But I mean, SEO comes into play with dynamic search ads in a big way. So first of all, if Google doesn't understand what your website is about, then no need to be running dynamic keyword. And as I said, then best to work on your data on the website and your content, and then Google will be able to understand what it is you're trying to sell, hopefully.

Jim Banks [00:39:00]:
So, Boris, I mean, we're probably getting close to running out of time, but. But one of the things I'm always curious, when people are consulting, whether they're consultant, self employed, whatever they call themselves, I've always maintained that pretty much every single day you wake up and you're unemployed and you've got to go looking for work every single day because of that. Whereas if, at least if you work for a company, you've got the security of an employment contract, you get paid holidays and all that sort of stuff. How do you balance that? How do you find the time with your family and your children and holidays and all that sort of stuff?

Boris Beceric [00:39:34]:
Being a consultant, that's a hard thing to achieve, actually, very often. So, yeah, admittedly, there have been times where business has been very low or had been, it dried up. And in these scenarios, I mean, obviously it's always helpful to have a couple of months of saving in the bank somewhere. So when business dries up, you're actually able to pay a mortgage and put food on the table and send your kids to dance class or whatever. But I've learned to live with that uncertainty. I think I'd much rather have that freedom to decide who to work with and when to work, instead of being forced to return to the office as it's been a thing lately, again, and work for clients that maybe you wouldn't want to work with or. Yeah, so that's, that's one aspect.

Jim Banks [00:40:32]:
And then, so what sort of criteria, what sort of criteria do you use for kind of choosing the clients that you work with or not working with?

Boris Beceric [00:40:41]:
First of all, they're going to have proof of concept, so it's got a gotta be a product or a service that people actually want, because I can't just set up the Google Ads and then all of a sudden they're failing business like rakes in millions. That's not how it works. So it's got to be something where I'm confident that I can make it work. They already have sales coming in from organic or paid social or whatever, so that's one aspect of it then, obviously. The other aspect is they need to have a somewhat healthy budget. And the third aspect, I think that's almost the most important one, is I gotta enjoy working with them. So the very minute I get on a call with someone and I have this, like, bad feeling about them, or I'd rather not work with them or ah, this guy again, I gotta present, like, the failing campaign, and he's gonna be all up over me, like, cussing me out or something. That's not something I wanna have to tolerate anymore.

Boris Beceric [00:41:46]:
So that's my litmus test of, do I enjoy working with this person? Could I imagine sitting down over a cup of coffee and just talk to them? Not about business, but about anything that's almost, or even more important to me.

Jim Banks [00:42:01]:
Family? I just spoil.

Boris Beceric [00:42:03]:
Yeah, no time for negative nellies, for sure. Like, I've. I've been there and it's. It's not fun.

Jim Banks [00:42:09]:
No, for sure. So, Boris, again, like I said, we could probably talk for absolute hours. All your contact details will be in the show notes to the episode, and those will be available when we publish the episode. It only remains for me to say thank you so much for being a fantastic guest today. And, yeah, I mean, is there anything that you would like to sort of say to the audience before we wrap up?

Boris Beceric [00:42:38]:
Oh, you put me on the spot there. I don't know, Jim. Probably just enjoy the process, whatever.

Jim Banks [00:42:43]:
This is your opportunity.

Boris Beceric [00:42:46]:
I don't have anything to plug. I don't have a course. I don't have anything I want people to buy, if anything. I have a friend of mine, Michael, and we are doing a weekly live hangout each Friday at 03:00 p.m. central european time. So if people are interested, they can always shoot me a message over on Twitter or LinkedIn, and I'll send them the Zoom invite, and they can ask any and all questions about Google Ads that they want. That's sort of our weekly tradition to cap off the week.

Jim Banks [00:43:18]:
Very cool. Hey, well, that's great. Thank you again. Like I said, Boris, thank you so much for being on the show, and I look forward to at some point in time, maybe we will get the opportunity to hang out in person again. I don't know if you do any speaking at conferences, but I'm trying to get back onto the speaker circuit. But if you did any speaking, then maybe we can find an opportunity, grab some time together in person.

Boris Beceric [00:43:39]:
Yeah. First of all, thanks for having me. Secondly, I never did any speaking. Just last year, I did a couple, like, small scale online presentations, but I'm absolutely interested in maybe getting into speaking now. I think my sort of.

Jim Banks [00:43:57]:
Well, clearly, you're very knowledgeable.

Boris Beceric [00:44:00]:
Yeah.

Jim Banks [00:44:01]:
Very affable, personable. I think you'd have no issue with it whatsoever.

Boris Beceric [00:44:05]:
Thanks.

Jim Banks [00:44:06]:
Good. All right, well, we'll talk to you at some point in time soon. And, everyone, thanks for listening. In to the episode, and we'll see you on the next episode of bad decisions with Jim Banks.

Boris Beceric [00:44:16]:
Excellent. Thank you.