S2E2 - Lisa Raehsler Shares Her Biggest Digital Marketing Fails

Lisa Raehsler [00:00:00]:
Google Ads. And I just immediately loved it. I love the challenge of it, that it's constantly changing. I think the thing that really flipped me over into it was that I couldn't figure it out, that it was very difficult to understand it. Just such a challenge. And I said, that's exactly what I want to do. I want to do this. I want to do something that's challenging.

Lisa Raehsler [00:00:21]:
Takes my advertising experience, my econ degree, everything that I know and how to reach people and technology. So that's sort of how I ended up there. And I have my business for about 14 years. I love it. I work with, directly with clients across different industries over the years. I also, as you mentioned, I write for search engine Journal. I just had an article published on PPC hero. And.

Lisa Raehsler [00:01:02]:
Yeah, just living the dream.

Jim Banks [00:01:05]:
Keeping busy.

Lisa Raehsler [00:01:06]:
Yeah.

Jim Banks [00:01:08]:
So what did you do before you kind of got involved in digital marketing? What was your sort of journey before you got to this point?

Lisa Raehsler [00:01:16]:
I was actually working as a, like a communication specialist, basically. I worked on websites. I wrote content, e commerce sites, did multimedia type of stuff. So it was still within digital. And that's where I learned about websites.

Jim Banks [00:01:33]:
Yes, funny.

Lisa Raehsler [00:01:33]:
Also basic HTML from back in the day, I had a book and I studied it to understand what it was all about. So always in advertising, always in marketing. And so it was easy transition to.

Jim Banks [00:01:53]:
You mentioned those AOL discs. I remember, like, apart from having like literally one in every drawer in the house, right. I used to, I was, again, when the Internet first started. I mean, I got my first computer. I had Windows 3.1. I got that. And it's just like mind blowing how great this thing was, right? So I used to do coding in basic and, you know, like really, really super, super simple, simple stuff. Long before computers kind of like the talk to other computers existed.

Jim Banks [00:02:24]:
I mean, although they existed, but they're big mainframes. But when the Internet sort of first came out, probably trying to think maybe 92, 93, something like that. I bought my first computer when 3.1 came out, which was again, mind blowing. Got onto the Internet, used the AOL disk and I used to run up every quarter. I would have the most ridiculously expensive phone bill from running like crazy bills just from kind of watching what was going on. He's Netscape Navigator 1.0. And there were so many things which, again, when you look back at it now, you go, wow, that stuff seems so basic. The whole operating system for Windows 3.1 was on a couple of floppy disks.

Jim Banks [00:03:14]:
You're looking like now. You don't really buy any sort of software, whereas disks or cds or anything like that. It's just like, literally everything's cloud based. You mentioned, obviously Google Ads as much as, yes, it was probably difficult at the time, but I think when you look at what the original Google Ads was compared to what we have now, it's so dramatically different. I always say, even though it's still called Google Ads, the complexity of the current landscape is so much more complicated than it was back in the day. Which then begs the question, I always ask this of agency owners like yourself, the challenges of people doing things in house versus using an agency versus going directly to, to Google or what have you. Right. But I just wondered kind of what your, what your thoughts were as far as, you know, agency versus in house.

Lisa Raehsler [00:04:19]:
Say agency versus in house. I think it depends. It depends on what your marketing department looks like. People that work with me usually have a smaller marketing department, so they can't have a dedicated person doing PPC ads or paid media ads, because you really, I mean, you can just do it. But really, it takes somebody who's focused on it, who is an expert, a subject matter expert, and that's keeping up with the trends. And there's a lot that goes, a lot that goes into it, and there's a lot on the line for advertisers. So, you know, if it's a, if it's a company that can't afford to have the resources to hire somebody and have somebody in house who's dedicated to it, then I definitely, it's something that they need to outsource if they want that, that special, you know, that special expertise. But I think the thing is, for me, is that they have to want it.

Lisa Raehsler [00:05:26]:
They have to want to do it. And so it's hard to convince somebody who thinks that they can do it in house or wants to do it in house, and they're really set on that to convince them otherwise. And, you know, so they're, but they, you know, they may also be able to hire, you know, an amazing expert. So that's where I see.

Jim Banks [00:05:46]:
Yeah, I mean, so, again, so with bad decisions with Jim Banks, the premise of the podcast is to enable us to kind of help educate and bring on the next generation of digital marketers. Right. To learn from the experiences, good and bad, of people like yourself and me in terms of their journey in the industry to date. Again, if you were to go back and advise I 20 year younger Lisa, you know, to kind of get involved in this, what, what sort of advice would you give yourself back then as to, you know, what, what sort of, what sort of things to do at school, you know, like what, what education to get that type of thing. I'd be interested to know what you thought.

Lisa Raehsler [00:06:32]:
What would I advise someone. So someone now, I think it's, I think that it's really important to have the marketing fundamentals and advertising fundamentals. So this is, I see this all the time, actually not knowing what positioning is, not knowing what branding is. So I think that is super important for someone of any generation to have that nailed down if that's not their specialty, if they're moving into it, definitely technology and understanding the different pieces of technology that connect into it. Because even if you're focused on just working in the Google Ads platform, the Microsoft ads platform, any of them, you still need to understand what a cookie is or how the, what load time means. You need to be able to look at general, you know, web analytics and understand what those metrics mean. You don't need to be, you know, ten on a scale of one to ten, but you need to be, you know, a solid five in order to be able to do your job. So those are two really big things and I think having a passion for how those things converge.

Lisa Raehsler [00:07:58]:
So advertising and technology, your advertising on the Internet, you're doing it a lot of different ways. It's not just restricted to search. I mean, it seems like an unlimited way of reaching people now. So, and then I think those learning the platforms and learning the buttons to push will fall into place if you have that basic basis for being open and able to learn quickly how to implement.

Jim Banks [00:08:29]:
So I mean, one of the challenges I always had, like back a few years, so I mean, I've been doing this 2025 years. So one of the challenges I always had, Washington, in some respects, a generalist Ppcer would say, I'll work with any company of any size, in any location, in any vertical. And it became really apparent to me, like that was a bad decision because I realized the companies that I really didn't want to work with, it wasn't that I didn't believe in them wasn't, I think they were good. I just realized I didn't like startups because I found them quite arrogant. A lot of the people I was talking to because they had ideas way above their station, they were brand new businesses, but they were thinking they were like a Fortune 500 company. And I'm like, you're not that. I mean, you might want to get aspired to be that, but you're not that now, right? So I said, okay, well, I only work with businesses that have a floor of a million dollars a year in sales, right? So that kind of cuts out a lot of startups. They don't have that sort of run rate.

Jim Banks [00:09:37]:
But I also found that I was working with a lot of industries where, again, there was heavy regulation, compliance and stuff that you needed hoopsy to jump through. It was constantly getting Google Ads declined and disapproved. And you got to verify this and do this, do that again. I said, well, let's just do ecommerce. Because in most cases, most e commerce businesses are fairly vanilla, fairly straightforward, unless they're selling a particular adult process or something. There's generally, there's no problems or issues with running Google Ads or Microsoft apps or paid social Facebook ads or whatever. How do you find, because I'm curious, because you're more of a generalist, you site on your profile that you work with lots of businesses, lots of verticals. How do you do that sort of screening? How do you actually screen which clients might be a good fit for you to work with and which ones are not?

Lisa Raehsler [00:10:40]:
That's a great question. I do have listed the different types of clients that I have worked with, but I don't work with them all at once. So one of those qualifying considerations would be, what does my client portfolio look like? There are, I was just making some notes here. There are several different industries where they're kind of tricky, right? So legal, healthcare, e commerce, affiliates, finance, and many more. And so, you know, for example, I, I don't typically do e commerce anymore, but I have experience with it. If it was, you know, low level or, you know, easy level of e commerce, but I would definitely not take a couple of e commerce clients at the same time because there are people that specialize in that.

Jim Banks [00:11:38]:
Yeah.

Lisa Raehsler [00:11:38]:
That I would, you know, want to refer them to. So I look at, I mean, just like that answer of it depends. I would look at, you know, what kind of time commitment it was, um, what the, what the industry is, how does it fit into, like, my, you know, my portfolio, my time, my effort, you know, what, what sorts of things do I need to brush up on for that business? So, like, right now, I have a lot of b, two b clients, and I'm loving it. It's great.

Jim Banks [00:12:16]:
So, I mean, again, I've had a really great variety of different guests of different locations and everything else, but there seems to be kind of one common theme that a lot of them are coming through with. Right. And that's that their kind of current position in the industry is very much a kind of like a lifestyle choice rather than it being, you know, you've got to set up an agency and you've got to grow it to like 500 people and, you know, make it huge and flip it and make millions and millions of dollars. They're very comfortable to be able to choose what their lifestyle requirements are, both from a sort of family perspective, work perspective, how much time they want to spend working versus socializing with family, exercising, that type of thing. Again, I always say, I run a boutique agency. It's small by design. I could make it much bigger if I really wanted to, but I'm not after chasing big dollars. That's just not my thing.

Jim Banks [00:13:19]:
I'm happy to work with people if that's what their aim is, what they're trying to do. Again, I call myself a growth agency. So people go, well, how can you call yourself a growth agency if you're not growing yourself? It's like, well, that's purposeful on my part. I don't want to grow. I'm comfortable to be small because then that way I can give the clients I do work with, like, a greater amount of my time and effort and energy and expertise rather than getting it very diluted and bringing in junior people to help manage certain aspects of things and maybe not necessarily doing as good a job as you want to. How did you kind of like, decide with big click co what your lifestyle journey would look like in terms of where you are now versus maybe what it was at the beginning, like when you first set it up? I mean, you know, what was the reason for setting up big clicko in the first place? Leaving kind of maybe corporate jobs to kind of work and set up on your own, right?

Lisa Raehsler [00:14:19]:
Oh, leaving corporate jobs. I think that the corporate job part is about reaping the rewards of my hard work for myself instead of benefiting nameless, faceless corporations was sort of my thinking at the time. You said something really interesting about growing yourself and growing the agency. And why wouldn't you want to do that? I've heard that many times. And I think growing yourself and growing your agency can be two different things. Those are things that can coexist. But I, you should. I.

Lisa Raehsler [00:15:00]:
In my opinion, I don't want to grow my agency or grow my business to the point where I'm sacrificing my own personal growth. Sometimes that personal growth is about my business because I, you know, I'm a nerd. I love this kind of stuff. I like, I like work in business it's one of my hobbies in my career. But I also like yoga. I like spending time with my family. I like traveling. And those are things that I don't want to sacrifice in the pursuit of, I guess, making more money or, you know, like you were saying.

Lisa Raehsler [00:15:39]:
And I think I'm really happy that the way things have been sort of turning in our culture lately, it's more in alignment with what I've been thinking the whole time. I think that, you know, with COVID and with the increased cases of burnout, and I think all of those things are contributing factors to people being more open to flexible schedules, work from home, work life balance, mental health considerations. All of those things, I think, have really come into alignment for me personally, and I think, and hopefully for, you know, everyone else and people entering the industry, because if you don't have that kind of personal satisfaction, you really can't be good at your job. You're just gonna burn out.

Jim Banks [00:16:36]:
Yeah. I mean, like, so pre Covid. I mean, I probably spent three months of the year traveling. Right, to kind of. But traveling. Not traveling kind of for personal reasons, but traveling for work. Right. I would go and visit clients.

Jim Banks [00:16:51]:
Right. So I live in the UK, but I had a lot of clients in America, clients in Australia. So I would just travel and see my clients, which, again, sounds very whimsical, but I felt we could kind of, like, one, establish a much stronger bond. Two, get more work done. Right. By doing that. And it worked for me. So, again, I had the sort of the home environment to kind of enable me to do some of that.

Jim Banks [00:17:17]:
A lot of the times, my wife would travel with me. Right. So we didn't have to kind of worry. Kids are grown up, left home fine. So I was in a position to be able to kind of do that. Right. So. But, you know, and then, obviously, when we kind of had the pandemic, everything kind of shut down, and I found it very difficult.

Jim Banks [00:17:34]:
Right. I mean, again, I think. I wouldn't necessarily say I struggled with mental health issues, but I definitely. It was something I became more aware of. Right. There was a couple of people that we probably both all know in the industry who decided that they kind of wanted to check out on life, right. And took their own lives, which, again, for me, is tragic that people who worked at home in an industry that, again, it sort of permeates people that are introverted. Becoming even more introverted.

Jim Banks [00:18:10]:
And sometimes attending conferences was the only way where you could rekindle your enthusiasm for interaction with other people. I mean, again, it's very difficult. You can sit in an office all day at home and not see anyone. And I think you need to have that interaction with other people. Right. So again, I always kind of, I find myself now, like, going out and maybe grabbing a cup of coffee. I'll go out and have a walk, grab a cup of coffee and a takeaway cup, have a walk home. And then that's given me some fresh air, some headspace, listen to a bit of music or a podcast episode, you know, get a bit of caffeine in me, but, you know, talk to some people and just sort of see what's going on.

Jim Banks [00:18:53]:
Right. So again, people probably sitting at the coffee shop going, he's this weirdo. He keeps talking to me. Right. But, you know, but again, I think it's important to be personable, right. To kind of just put yourself out there, you know? And, yeah, I mean, I just, I didn't know how things were for you. Now, I know that you used to do a lot of speaking before. Have you sort of picked up the speaking mantle again and doing a lot more of it now? Or is it sort of, have you changed as a result of the pandemic as well?

Lisa Raehsler [00:19:22]:
Well, I really, I thought about what is it that I want to do? What, what do I feel like doing? What makes, you know, what will bring joy to me and some of the other things that I'm working on right now with doing, doing more writing. And I'm looking at how to take my content and repurpose it into, you know, video or audio, learning more about AI. I'm really enjoying that right now because it's a, it's a new challenge. And I have been, I have spoke before. You know, I have done those things. And I'm not saying I won't again. I definitely want to. I did some, not last year, but previous year I spoke at ad World experience in Bologna, Italy, and also search why in Paris.

Jim Banks [00:20:18]:
Nice.

Lisa Raehsler [00:20:19]:
And, yes, it was nice. And I thought, you know what? This is fantastic. Like, how, you know, how do you beat this? And so, yeah, so, no, it's not. It's definitely nothing off the table, but it's not something I'm pursuing right now.

Jim Banks [00:20:37]:
I think a lot of people make the mistake, right. They don't send people that work for them to conferences because they go, we can't afford to send people and they don't speak at the conferences because they go, well, I'm not picking up any new clients, and so on and so on. I mean, I know when I used to sort of speak a long time ago when I first started doing it, I mean, it was literally like shooting fish in a barrel. You would kind of stand on stage, present some mind blowing stuff about PPC, and people go, this is just mind blowing. And they would come up afterwards and want to work with you, right? And I'd have a queue of people that would want to work with me. And it was great. And I could, like I said, cherry pick which clients I wanted to work with. And I think what's happened now is the industry's matured, it's become more developed.

Jim Banks [00:21:24]:
I think what tended to happen before it was decision makers and budget holders that used to sit in the audiences themselves. What they now do is they maybe send junior people to learn. So those people are not budget holders and decision makers. So theyre there to be educated. And I think a lot of speakers, theyre still looking for the leads and the sales to come from it and theyre not coming from that because I think a lot of those people maybe are working in house and so on. So again, I kind of go now, if Im speaking at a conference, I want to make sure that whoever is in that audience is going to get. So lets say the tickets are $1,500 for a ticket, right? So it's $1,500 for the actual conference, maybe another 1500 to two grand for travel, accommodation, incidentals, beers in the bar, that type of thing. So you might be looking at sort of three to $5,000 worth of expense of being there, plus the time away from the office.

Jim Banks [00:22:19]:
Right. Even if they work from home, it's still time away from kind of the normal job. I always say to people, if I'm presenting on stage, I want to give them three to $5,000 worth of value just from my presentation alone so they can go away and go, yeah, I got some great takeaways that will be incremental revenue wise for us as a business to make it almost like to justify it. I hate it. Again, I don't know about you, I went to a conference last week and I spoke, but there were still loads of people when I, you know, when I wasn't on the stage, you know, speaking, I was supporting other people that were presenting and watched them speak, but there was all these people in the corridors, right, doing work on their laptops, sitting down the side, right? And I'm thinking, why you? Why are you even here at this conference, right, if you're just doing your normal job, right, you again, it's. I just think they're missing the point of what that in person interaction is all about. I met some great people in the affiliate space. I picked up some new podcast guests.

Jim Banks [00:23:30]:
I picked up some new speaking engagements. So for me, again, I kind of put myself out there, but I was there also as a speaker, supporting other speakers. And I think that's probably one thing. If I could give anyone advice or tips, if they're going to speak at a conference, don't just go for the bit that you're involved with. Go for the whole event. Right. And support all the other speakers that are there. Right.

Jim Banks [00:23:54]:
Because they're relying on feedback from, you know, people that will give them candid, you know. Hey, I thought that was great. Hey, I think you could have done it better in a different way. Right. Because it's only by doing that that that will help bring, bring about a kind of a positive change.

Lisa Raehsler [00:24:11]:
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I used to do that as much as I could. As much as I could. Up until the presentation, I was still working on it, but after that, it was like, so then the fun would begin. But I think, yeah, I think that's really interesting. I mean, I think also ten years ago, I think we were more dependent on the information that we could get from the conferences, that it was more limited to that sort of a venue. And then again, you know, sorry, bring up Covid.

Lisa Raehsler [00:24:46]:
But I think, you know, that really forced people to find alternate ways to present information like this, you know, like this video podcast that we're on right now. The number of webinars that, you know, video meetings are common in the norm. It wasn't ten years ago at all. It would be sort of like, oh, you want to meet on camera? Why?

Jim Banks [00:25:10]:
Yeah, it's really interesting.

Lisa Raehsler [00:25:12]:
Things have changed a lot where that information is available in so many different formats. So I feel like the conferences are a much, play a much smaller role in people's continuing education. But the, you know, the, but the personal interaction is, you know, definitely very important. And, you know, maybe some of the junior level people that are going just, you know, don't really, I don't know, maybe they don't really appreciate it. Maybe they're just nothing that into it. You know, maybe it's, you know, less of a passion and more of a job.

Jim Banks [00:25:46]:
Yeah.

Lisa Raehsler [00:25:47]:
So, I mean, but I would encourage people that go to conferences to max out on their opportunities. You know, it does not hurt to, you know, get your included lunch and snacks and strike up a conversation with people around you, say hi to the students speakers, give them feedback, and definitely for speakers, I mean, yeah, I would always, like, be dialed in. I wish I could have gone to all of them because I wanted to learn. I felt like I was getting a bonus.

Jim Banks [00:26:23]:
Yeah. And that's the thing. There are people that go to events. So again, this event that I was at was an affiliate event, and I was primarily talking about e commerce for affiliate marketing. Right, fine. It's a subject I know pretty well, and I feel I gave some good content, but there were some other people talking about compliance, there was some other people talking about AI, and there was other people talking about all sorts of different things that I'm really interested in as a casual observer, not necessarily market for any tools or whatever, but again, it's just good to understand how other people are looking at a particular thing and what challenges and opportunities and threats that it throws up. So again, if you've got somebody that is really, really deep in the weeds with AI, it seems far more sensible to just be able to sit and watch somebody talk about it at great length. And obviously you can then pick up a lot from that.

Jim Banks [00:27:23]:
Again, I've now got a couple of people that I watched present that I'm going to try and get on as podcast guests, because again, I think they've got industry knowledge that I think would be of immense value to people who are either in the industry now or looking to break into the industry, both on a sort of male and female side. I mean, again, I've tried purposefully to help promote digital marketing as a female kind of career because there's no physical attributes you need to do the job. You don't need to have big muscles or great strength or anything like that. You just need a good brain, right. And I just think generally speaking, you know, women have a greater brain than men do for this type of thing. So for me, again, I've got two stepdaughters that work in the industry, right? I've been sort of really promoting and helping them kind of as best I can. And again, I try and do whatever I can to help promote the awareness of, you know, this being a cool industry to work in if you're a woman, right. Because, you know, it is.

Jim Banks [00:28:28]:
I think all the people I know that have been doing it for a long time, people like yourself, you know, have done very well with it. And I think they've, they've set the, you know, the benchmark for what this industry will look like in years to come when we decide we're not going to would, we're going to call it a day and put our feet up and sit on a rocking chair on the porch. I mean, that that's, you know, we can kind of say, well, we did. We did good work and we did well, and we've kind of handed it off and left it in good shape.

Lisa Raehsler [00:28:56]:
I think it's one of those jobs and one of those careers where you can make it what you want to make it. And we could have this someone who does this same job, basically be in two different locations, have different types of clients, have slightly different experiences. We're not the same. It's like when you work on an account, you could have two accounts in the finance. They will not be the same. It doesn't matter. They could do exactly the same thing. They will not be the same.

Lisa Raehsler [00:29:26]:
So there's so much variety, even with all the similarities, and you can make it whatever. You can make it whatever you want, you can get out of it. Not only what you put into it, but what you want. If you're more in the creative side, you can go crazy with that. If you're more into the analytics and, you know, there are lots of experts that are a lot more into analytics. They're into data. They're. They're more into the numbers side than I am.

Lisa Raehsler [00:29:54]:
So, you know, I just, I'm like, kind of, you know, I'm listening, listening and learning from them, and you just, I mean, you can take it a lot of different directions, and I think, you know, that's. That fits with so many different types of people.

Jim Banks [00:30:11]:
Yeah. And like it. And. And that's one of the reasons why, if I go to a conference, like, if there's, you know, I mean, I know you can't be in all the places at one time. Right. But, you know, if you go to the show and there's three sessions and then a break. Three sessions and then a break lunch and then, you know, three more sessions or whatever, I make absolutely sure I kind of go right. If there's, you know, let's say there's competing things, I'll go right, I'll go to that one and that one and that one and that one.

Jim Banks [00:30:38]:
And I've kind of, like, laid out my agenda of things. Right. Again, as much as anything, sometimes I'm there to support friends who are speaking. Some of them are speaking for the first time. They're very nervous. Right. So I try and do what I can to kind of help calm the nerves and, you know, go through their presentation a few times with them. Right.

Jim Banks [00:30:58]:
Again, generally speaking, if they're good subject matter experts, which they all are, to kind of be on the stage, then you know, you know it's going to go well. Right? Even if their delivery is not so good, as long as the contents of as good as it could be, and generally it is. But equally, like I said, to your point about things like analytics, I've got a roller Dex full of the best people in whatever it might be, whether it's technical, SEO, black hat, SEO, link building, whatever it might be. I don't do organic search, other than for a comparatively small number of clients. I do a little bit here and there, but again, I would have almost kind of class it as sort of almost like a hygienic stuff rather than anything kind of far more complicated than that. Right. But I think, you know, if somebody has a problem with, you know, getting manual penalties or something, I know who did. I know who to call, I know what to do to kind of facilitate getting that sorted out.

Jim Banks [00:31:54]:
Same with analytics. When they have an analytics problem, I know people that are amazing. I mean, I'm reasonably good at things like GA four and data studio, but there are people that are way, way better than me. If the challenge exists, then I can pick up the phone and say, look, this company is looking for help, and I think you'd be the perfect person to provide that help. And again, I just think it's. Having watched those people present, I'm speaking with a degree of confidence to know that they're not completely full of shit. Right. I know that they know what they're talking about.

Lisa Raehsler [00:32:33]:
Yeah, yeah, definitely. It's. Yeah. Building that network is important because there will be a time in your career that something comes up that you are not the expert on. You may not know anything about it. There's. I had to. I had to refresh myself on grantsd a couple weeks ago.

Jim Banks [00:32:55]:
What? Google government grant. Right.

Lisa Raehsler [00:32:58]:
Yeah, I just hadn't had to touch it for a while, so I had to refresh myself on it. Yeah, luckily I could refresh myself, but you will come up with things like that where you're like, I gotta call the grant. Someone I know who does that so they can, you know, help me out with that. But, yeah, those are. That's great. I mean, you also have a thirst for knowledge. So I think I've seen you do see you on different webinars and different sorts of things out in the industry over the years.

Jim Banks [00:33:29]:
So again, I'm doing that because I want to give back. I mean, like, again, probably sounds blase, but the industry's been really good to me. You know, I've made some great friends. I've done really well, made decent money. Right. I've been comfortable. Right. But I just want to give back.

Jim Banks [00:33:45]:
I want to try and sort of help the next generation. That's really the kind of the ethos behind it all. The way you can do that is impart your knowledge. Sometimes people go, I don't want to. Hey, granddad, shut up. Get out the way. Just let us young kids get on with it. And again, I know my playground, but the areas I'm comfortable with, with this podcast, I create a video episode.

Jim Banks [00:34:12]:
I then chop it up using some AI tools that I have access to to enable me to put it out on TikTok and to put it out on, you know, like, YouTube shorts and things like that, right. It's taking me dramatically outside my comfort zone, but it's also giving me good skills to understand the kind of, like, the concepts of how it works, right. Because I want to. I want to kind of. I want to be able to say with confidence with clients that I work with, whether TikTok ads or YouTube short ads would be a good proposition for them to run with. Right? And the only way I can kind of do that is if I understand a little bit more about how. How it all works. I mean, I think when TikTok came out, I'm like, unless you're a fashion or retail company, that your target audience is 18 to 25 year old women, then TikTok is probably not the platform for you.

Jim Banks [00:35:01]:
But I think if you look at it, it's evolved a lot in the last couple of years, probably since the pandemic, it's changed quite dramatically. But I also think there are a TikTok ads specialists who are nowhere near as good as the people that do PPC, like Google Ads, Microsoft and so on, pay social, and they're almost like they're winging it on TikTok, right? Because when you actually, when I've looked at some of the kind of the backends and I've audited some of the accounts that I've seen, I'm like, wow, this is horrible. Kind of the way they've got it set up in terms of the configuration and the splitting up of products and that sort of thing. Um, you know, but I, at the same time, I'm not comfortable enough with TikTok to be able to say, yeah, let's kind of go and offer it as a service, right? So at the moment, I'm kind of, like, casually observing rather than actually actively kind of getting involved, but that may change.

Lisa Raehsler [00:35:58]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:35:58]:
So have you done, have you, have.

Lisa Raehsler [00:36:00]:
You done any research into Reddit?

Jim Banks [00:36:02]:
Um, I I've done a little bit. I've done a little bit, but again, not, not too much. I mean, you know, it used to be that whenever a new platform came out, I would go, right, I'm just going to throw $1,000 at it and see what happens. I'd pick a client, get them to commit to $1,000, throw it at the wall and see what happens. I think Reddit's probably one of those, I should have done something with it, but I just haven't. I definitely did core ads, TikTok, Snapchat. There's lots of things I've tried, and some of it has been more successful than others. But again, in the same way that I've kind of refined my service offering in terms of the clients I want to work with, I've also done the same thing.

Jim Banks [00:36:46]:
I said I don't want to be as much as I'm a generalist, as in, I'll do lots of different channels. I'll do the ones that I think really make a difference. I think, again, we might get incrementally, one or 2% incremental uplift from TikTok or Snapchat or whatever it might be, but it still takes a significant amount of time to actually do the work to get things prepared for that, because to your point that you mentioned earlier before about things like cookies, it's like you got to get the pixels in place and all the events and all the tracking and all the parameters and all that sort of backend stuff, which if you don't do it properly, then you're literally shooting arrows over a wall and hoping that one of them hits the target when it lands on the ground. And that's no way to run a business. But unfortunately, I think a lot of people, that's the way they do run a business. When you look at b two b, again, I think with b two b stuff, and you can probably talk to this, but I think a lot of people, they set up the conversion events, but they don't actually, as much as people say, I want leads, they don't really want leads. They want quality leads that turn into sales or whatever. And I think that's where that feedback loop of the enhanced conversions and feeding back the information to Google to say, hey, this actually was a decent one.

Jim Banks [00:38:09]:
We got something more out of it than just a lead. That's a signal that their AI can learn from. But I think a lot of people are not doing that. They're not closing the loop. They may be generating leads, $10, $5, whatever the number is. Right. But it's like, again, as we know, there are publishers out there, nefarious publishers, that will fake leads to kind of make more of the traffic go to them rather than to other publishers. Right.

Jim Banks [00:38:36]:
So if you're not doing quality control, then you could end up getting hurt really badly.

Lisa Raehsler [00:38:45]:
Yes.

Jim Banks [00:38:46]:
So in terms of, again, so on the subject of AIH, I think when you look at the last couple of years, AI has become a really big thing. I think Google have adopted it massively. Microsoft have adopted it massively. Facebook have adopted it massively as a result of it. I think a lot of the controls that experts like us used to do to get the good results that we got have been almost, like, dumbed down to enable the AI to kind of do a mediocre job for everyone, rather than a really good job for someone who.

Lisa Raehsler [00:39:27]:
I love that. A mediocre job for everyone. Yay.

Jim Banks [00:39:32]:
But I just didn't know, I wasn't sure kind of what your thoughts were, because, again, I know some people, they've gone all in on the whole AI that Google does, and they'll accept every recommendation that they come up with, you know, but I'm sort of a little bit more selective. I'm kind of more selective about the things that I'll adopt and the things that I won't adopt.

Lisa Raehsler [00:39:56]:
Right. I think. I think so. In my experience, a lot of the, many of the recommendations are not very good. So I'll get a couple. A couple or a couple I could work with. It's, it's the, it's the minority of the recommendations. And actually, I'm really excited when I get them.

Lisa Raehsler [00:40:16]:
I'll say, all right, now I have something I can work with that is valuable. Thank you. But it's not often. So I think the other thing, and I wrote, I wrote some posts about this, is the different things that you need to get in place to be AI ready in your campaigns, which is having, you know, certain bidding, bidding settings. Various different settings. I can't, there's so many, like, little buttons that you have to push. And one of the, one of the, the major things that I don't think people realize is that they're also taking content from your landing pages. And this concerns me the most of all because most companies, small to medium sized, I mean, basically any size company, right.

Lisa Raehsler [00:41:09]:
They're not 100% on their website, right. 100% up to date, 100% a perfect website. So then we have this content that might be outdated, that is imperfect, that's flawed, and Google's taking that and putting that into the ads. And I don't think they realize that's where it's coming from. It's not coming from the AI thinking it up, it's coming from their website and from other things they have entered in. So that's really interesting. So is that really AI?

Jim Banks [00:41:52]:
Yeah, yeah, I think. I think the problem is, is that, you know, sometimes the, the AI builds on like really crap stuff to begin with. Right, right. And, you know, as you say, like, I mean, I've got a client who I do sort of b two B lead Gen for. So even though they're like, my core business is e commerce, I mean, this is, again, absolutely love the client, but they're doing b two B lead Gen. When I first logged into their WordPress account to have a look at the backend, to get all the tracking working and all that sort of stuff, they had a testimonial plugin that they downloaded from the WordPress repository. And I looked and they had like five or six basically boilerplate testimonials set up in there. I think it's kind of like if you wanted like Lorem Ipsum kind of type of thing, but they had them for, for testimonials.

Jim Banks [00:42:46]:
And one of the testimonials was from somebody called Brad Pitt. Right. I'm thinking obviously a completely bogus testimonial, but because the previous agency had not done their homework and made sure that everything was hygiene and cleaned up, this page was live on their site. This is crazy. Again, I don't think it added any value to their business. I don't think it was detrimental because it was a small business, but that sort of thing could have been really damaging. And also it's like, well, if Google is going to go right, I'm going to go out and try and find more customers like the one they've got. Like Brad Pitt.

Lisa Raehsler [00:43:30]:
Right. Yeah, for B two B. I mean, at least the clients I have, many of them have complex products. So what I'll see the AI from Google Ads and Microsoft ads is something more generic and that just, we can't use that. We can't use something more generic because a lot of, a lot of times, like, the more generic things will be, sorts start to fall into like the consumer side, you know, where it will pick up those types of searches and those type, that type of messaging. So it doesn't really have. It doesn't have the ability to do that. So I mean, the bottom line is you still need humans to inform the AI and to pick and choose what's good out of it.

Lisa Raehsler [00:44:23]:
What I have been having really good luck with is getting seed ideas, processes, lists of stuff that has saved me a ton of time in research where that's pretty easy for AI to do. So that's what I've been having really good experience with. I also built my own GDP GPT and put in customizations to think like me. So I've been using that.

Jim Banks [00:45:08]:
Yeah. And I think, I think, you know, I think that's where it's important that you try to educate it to be like you. Right? So again, like, use more examples of your own stuff, right? Your own content. So if you get, if you've written a whole bunch of LinkedIn posts, you don't want to write the LinkedIn post using chat GPT, and it makes you sound like some need something or somebody that you're not. Right? Because again, I think people will really resonate with authenticity, and if you're not uniquely yourself, then they're going to go, the person that is reflected on the page is not the person that's reflected in real life. I know that obviously there's a whole bunch of ghost writers out there that are probably coining it right now. There's probably loads of people that are using chat GPT to pretend to be somebody else passing themselves off as ghost writers for people. But really all they've just done is they've been good at understanding how to write prompts for GPT.

Jim Banks [00:46:10]:
So, Lisa, we could probably sit and talk for like 3 hours, right?

Lisa Raehsler [00:46:17]:
But oh, wow, I just write.

Jim Banks [00:46:20]:
I don't want to, you know, like, I always find sometimes it's good to kind of keep the episodes to be enough that people could have a lunch break or a kind of like a reasonably comfortable walk with their out with headphones on. So I wanted to kind of thank you for being a fantastic guest with me today. Hopefully at some point in time we get the opportunity to kind of see each other again in future, a future event. If you decide to kind of put yourself back on the speaker circuit, it just remains for me to say, like I said, thank you so much for being on. Is there anything in particular that you want to kind of like, convey with the guests. Sorry, I. The listeners or viewers of the podcast as to something that you have as an offer or something that you kind of want to promote that you're involved.

Lisa Raehsler [00:47:07]:
In well, if someone wants to get a hold of me, they can go to my website, bigclickco.com, or they could look me up on LinkedIn and get a hold of me there, friend me, connect in there. I also have a newsletter that I've been working on called the paid media mix on LinkedIn, and I've been really having fun with that and being able to publish topics that I'm interested in. But I have some awesome and detailed articles on search engine journal that people might be interested in, including one about AI that's pretty recent.

Jim Banks [00:47:54]:
And I'll make sure that all of the stuff that we've talked about in the show itself and also the stuff that you just mentioned now will be in the show notes and available on the website for people to kind of go and access at their leisure. Lisa, thanks again for being a fantastic guest for everyone else that's been sort of watching or listening. Thanks so much for being on. See you on the next episode of Bad Decisions with Jim Banks. And take care. Bye for now.

Lisa Raehsler [00:48:23]:
Thank you.