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Google AI Max: What You & Your Landing Pages Need to Know with Andrew Miller
00:50:25
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- [00:00]
Andrew Miller
With AI Max, one of the areas that we're paying close attention to is how much control we can have over that post click experience. Especially in B2B, which is our specialty, the landing page is the customer experience. If you're not focused on that and you're only concerned with getting the click, you're missing an opportunity to improve your roi.
- [00:15]
Ralph Burns
What do you advise on all of that and how do you sort of simplify it down to say this is what we need to focus on and here's how we move forward? You're listening to Perpetual Traffic. Hello and welcome to the Perpetual Traffic podcast. This is your host, Ralph Burns, alongside my amazing co host, Lauren E. Petrulo.
- [00:37]
Lauren E. Petrulo
The founder of Mongoose Media.
- [00:39]
Ralph Burns
So glad you joined us here today. If you're new to this show, this is a show all about how to do marketing the right way in the digital, the digital realm that we are now finding ourselves with AI, with all kinds of shiny objects, but we do things the right way through metrics that matter and growth that scales. If you're a VP of marketing, if you're a director of marketing, you have found the right spot here. And today we are going to be talking about a highly overlooked aspect of digital marketing. And yeah, one that I don't think a lot of people really pay that much attention to or they pay less attention to it than they probably should. Would you agree or would you not agree?
- [01:19]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Lauren epitrilo oh, I 100% agree and I actually was guilty of this for years. Like three years ago, I remember being like, oh, who cares after the click.
- [01:29]
Ralph Burns
Yeah, who cares has nothing to do with it. Well, actually it does and I think it's even more important now. And we this is the third in the three part series of the importance of landing page optimization or just landing pages. Just in general. You're just sending to PDP pages and you're an E commerce company. You learn something from this show here today. If you're a digital products business, if you're a services business, the example we're going to be using is in the services based business, which is a great example and the importance of everything that's after the cloud click. And we have a very special guest here today, Andrew Miller, co founder and VP of Client services at Workshop Digital, who I thought was really just a landing page optimization company. They actually do a lot of SEO too. No wonder they're so good at it. So welcome to Perpetual Traffic.
- [02:16]
Andrew Miller
Thank you both. Glad to be here.
- [02:19]
Ralph Burns
So before we get into the LPO stuff I just want to get your take as an SEO guy and I'm a reformed SEO guy, meaning that I did it when there was link wheels and black hat and the ultimate spinner, like spinning articles and creating like thousands of meaningless backlinks and buying, you know, PR6 domains and all that other crazy stuff. Paying Harvard University to put like a thousand dollar scholarship on their page to get a backlink from them, like all of that crazy stuff which you now know how to do, which all those strategies which I just mentioned are completely out of date by the way. So we are not sanctioning those or recommending them. Whatso, what's your take as somebody who knows a fair bit about SEO? And SEO obviously is important to pages that you're going to be sending to. So we'll get that. Just a second with relation to Google. What's your take on AI and how things have changed? Obviously in the last year and a half, two years when it comes to search engine optimization and search results, I've.
- [03:21]
Andrew Miller
Seen a lot of proclamations that SEO is dead. SEO is changing. Over the last 20 plus years that I've been in the SEO space, I would say the last two years have by far been the most interesting. The tactics you described kind of in that lead in, I don't even want to say they're the golden age because different strokes for different folks, but that.
- [03:41]
Ralph Burns
Was a bronze Age. I think there's a Bronze Age, that Golden age.
- [03:45]
Andrew Miller
Yeah. What's, what's the Neanderthal.
- [03:47]
Ralph Burns
Neanderthal age.
- [03:48]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Age of Fire.
- [03:50]
Ralph Burns
Age of fire.
- [03:51]
Andrew Miller
I think you're, you're playing with fire and eventually the tactics get you burned. Right. Um, these days, obviously it's, it's come back full circle in the SEO space where it's now about and always has been about the quality of the content and the quality of the relationship you can build with a visitor through content. The AI is better able to see through a lot of the crap and the low quality content. Google's SEO and ranking algorithms have been really, really good over the last few years at filtering out duplicative or irrelevant results. AI is only adding another layer of, of complexity to that and opportunity. So as we're all kind of discovering what it means to do SEO these days, while fending off other acronyms. Aeo, aio, geo, sxo.
- [04:36]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Sxo. Wait, what is.
- [04:38]
Ralph Burns
That's a new one on me.
- [04:39]
Lauren E. Petrulo
I don't know this one.
- [04:40]
Andrew Miller
Search Experience Optimization. Oh, right.
- [04:44]
Ralph Burns
We didn't even have a name for it. Isn't that so Funny, I didn't know.
- [04:47]
Lauren E. Petrulo
This, but I, I almost like a lot of things that you're saying is like how like the dawn of answer engines and LLMs of SEO. I feel like AI, even just like the AI bots in the programmatic side of AI is not only fighting AI slop and those padded keywords, that size 0 font in white in the footer, all that garbage from before, but I have seen that even well designed landing pages and websites are now being restricted impressions because of structure data. Like that data flow of how to read your website for the user experience. It's like this balance of you want to make sure the user can enjoy their time on the website, but if you don't structure it from like basic headlines, H ones H, well headline H1 and then H2s, H3s, all that jazz. If you don't have that set up, they're not gonna be able to read. And like you saw that Gemini released, they're now doing off server chatbots reading your website. So even if you don't care about this, you're screwed because they're making closed system chatbots on people's websites reading your whole website. So that now if someone finds a Google intent answer matching their response, they go to your website, they continue the Google experience on top of your existing website using all that structured data. So like you're saying, oh, there's a experience Engine optimization.
- [06:02]
Andrew Miller
Pick your acronym of choice, but let's just call SEO and if you really want to expand it, it can be search everywhere optimization. Because everything is a search engine to some extent these days. Social platforms, LLMs or chatbots, traditional web search.
- [06:17]
Lauren E. Petrulo
My mom's brain.
- [06:18]
Andrew Miller
Yes. If your mom has encyclopedic knowledge of something, I'd still trust that over some of the web results out there.
- [06:23]
Lauren E. Petrulo
It's more of her gut feeling though.
- [06:24]
Andrew Miller
Intuition. I can't account for that. But I can agree that mom's intuition is usually right. Yeah, yeah. So just it's kind of tying it all together. Like yeah, it's a fascinating time to be anywhere near SEO these days. The biggest challenge we're all trying to solve for and what we hear the most from our clients and with the questions they have is, you know, how do we track visibility and inclusion in. In LLMs or chatbots or search experience or bad experiences. Right. There's a big black hole in our analytics and attribution and performance data right now because we can see an increase in impressions. Research Console, for example, typically see a decrease in clicks coming directly from organic Sources, we might say. Right, the alligator. Right, the alligator chart that we see in search console. A lot of cases, direct and referral traffic is up. To offset that, it's just being misattributed in analytics tools or GA. 4 other times total traffic volume is down, but traffic quality is up. So, you know, leads and qualified leads and revenue can be flat for increase. It's just such a mixed bag. And every client of ours is different, but the general trend is quality is up while even while traffic might be declining from traditional organic search.
- [07:33]
Ralph Burns
So as somebody comes to you for SEO and they say, I just don't know what I'm doing now, ever since, you know, all this AI stuff and these, everything changed about a year and a half ago, two years ago, what's the one thing that you try to focus in on? Content quality is always going to be the most important thing. Like, and that's hard to quantify, but like, what do you find? And we'll get into some of the algorithm updates here, which we've talked about in previous shows, but before we get into that, I think this is an important one because this is something that people struggle with and I hear this a lot every single week. And I, I don't necessarily have an answer. From an SEO standpoint, what would your answer usually be?
- [08:10]
Andrew Miller
Understanding what your customers or potential customers need, not just the keywords they're searching for. I think the keyword specific content strategies that did work and still continue to work in, you know, SEO strategies. We have to translate our thinking now to thinking in terms of obviously longer form queries or prompts. Right. Just call it a prompt. Understanding what people are actually looking for and then answering as many of those questions as you can with your content, with your unique expertise and authority, your experience, all the E A T signals that Google's looking for do directly translate to AI visibility and inclusion. Google's on the record saying that. So anyway, I feel pretty comfortable carrying that message forward. Then it's about, you know, content distribution and syndication. LLMs are trained on large data sets. So the more times and more places your brand, your content shows up across review sites, social platforms, content, you know, distribution, news sites, pr again, what's old is new again. So we're looking at content distribution and syndication as a way to help train the next generation of LLMs to include more of our clients and their brand's content.
- [09:09]
Ralph Burns
It's interesting because on one side the AI algorithm seemed to be favoring longer standing, almost fermented content that's been around for quite some time and has a track record of, you know, any sort of backlinks or just content that has been consistently created. But then there's other times when I'm searching where it's like, recent is the most important thing. And it's not necessarily news based. Like, for example, if you Google marketing podcasts, like, we're right there. But I was Googling like chipping versus putting or chipping versus wedge, something from like one of my kids. Like, what's the difference between like chipping and. And using your wedge? Like, what do you do?
- [09:49]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Or like, which wedge? It was all on specific sand traps.
- [09:51]
Ralph Burns
It was really recent content. And I'm like, that is a huge keyword that you want to dominate. And this guy just so happened to have a video from a month ago. But I'm like, there's plenty of other videos on chipping in golf. Like, why is he ranking high? Like, I was like, what the hell?
- [10:06]
Andrew Miller
So I believe it was perplexity. The SEO industry tries to kind of, I wouldn't say reverse engineer, but understand more about the behaviors of these, these LLMs and how they, you know, how they return a response to your prompt. I believe it's perplexity that's noted for testing that recency component. So they're actually just like a social network. They'll give you an initial boost of visibility to see if your content is actually engaging and gets traction, and then if so, you'll maintain more that visibility. If not, it might drop out of that AI result. So what you're seeing is probably a, you know, some sort of freshness component to content. Which is why, you know, we encourage clients not to just sit back on their laurels and rely on their old content. Keep producing fresh content. But it's gotta be.
- [10:49]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Or updating.
- [10:49]
Andrew Miller
Valuable. Or updating. Roll it up. Yep.
- [10:54]
Lauren E. Petrulo
If you have a 2019 Best Apps to use for your Shopify store.
- [10:57]
Andrew Miller
Right.
- [10:57]
Lauren E. Petrulo
If they're still relevant changes 24, 25 or update that list for the ones.
- [11:02]
Andrew Miller
Yeah. So remixing content is a great way to repurpose what you got and engage your internal experts and get their fresh takes on what's going on in the industry that's proving successful early on in this AI world. But, you know, who knows, the next iteration and the next LLMs could come along and rock the boat even more. And that keeps us all employed. Right?
- [11:20]
Ralph Burns
Yeah, no, for sure.
- [11:21]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Do you watch tennis, Ralph or Andrew?
- [11:24]
Andrew Miller
Caught a little bit of the Open this weekend.
- [11:26]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Okay, well, like, you know how like, tennis rankings are the lower you are in the world the higher players you play against. So like obviously like Naomi and how she was 724th and was always playing against the top seated. I wonder if Perplexity or other alums are going to start treating your content the way that the U.S. open and just tennis tournaments treat ranked players. The worst person will play the top tier people and then if they succeed, then they'll increase rankings because it's like you're more recent. That's why I'm saying you're like lower ranking, you're more recent to this division. And so you're playing a top tier person. And if your performance outperforms them, then you can increase that significance because you have that recency. So you're being put up against like the Arnold Palmer content of short play, long play in golf.
- [12:11]
Andrew Miller
Yeah, I mean it's simplistic, but yes, I think there's a place for new contenders, new brands in the AI space. But I think the educational piece we're trying to communicate is that it's not a true algorithm like a search engine. Right. It's going to be more fuzzy in terms of inputs and outputs and what correlates to success. Because LLMs and chatbots are probabilistic, they're not random. But nobody knows how they work. Right. There's not one single or a series of algorithms behind the scenes that anybody can explain. We're doing a lot of testing and learning and experimenting to see what potentially could work. And what works for one brand may not work for another. It is truly the wild West.
- [12:47]
Ralph Burns
It's a, it's a fascinating time, I think for all of this. One of the things that steered me away from SEO because it got too hard, now it's even harder, obviously like by a factor of like 100 is the fact that paid advertising is just the easiest way. And what we found is that a lot of businesses just say, hey, I want results now as opposed to waiting on SEO or improving what used to be there. And it's a longer process. I mean obviously there's a whole show in there. We could talk about that. But relating this all back to changes within Google, there's obviously there's a huge change right now on the landing page optimization side with this new Google AI Max. And we've talked about it here a couple of times with Taz and with Val on this three part series here. But what's your take on it and how does this sort of affect marketers? We can kind of get into some of the examples of some of the landing page stuff that you've done in the past, which is pretty impressive.
- [13:45]
Andrew Miller
Yeah, I love the transition from organic to paid. AI has been around in the paid space for a decade. Google's obviously given us a lot of advanced targeting and bidding optimization tools just within the Google Ads platform. And of course the other paid platforms have followed suit. So our paid team at Workshop Digital is much more familiar and comfortable with, you know, how to leverage those tools now. And you know, those in the SEO space are still kind of poking around and figuring it out. You know, with Google's new campaign types, starting with Performance Max a couple years ago and AI Max now, we're losing some of that fine grained control as advertisers about who sees our ads, where they see it, how they see it, what format it takes. And that creates challenges, but it also creates a lot of opportunities, opportunities to reach more prospective customers or a larger audience, even if they're not specifically searching for the keywords they think they should be searching for, could be searching for in their journey.
- [14:38]
Ralph Burns
So Aimax, how has it affected you all and the clients that you have and how does it relate back to obviously quality, score, cost per click, ctr, like all of that? Like, give us sort of an overview of it and what you've sort of seen. I know it's still relatively new, but what are your thoughts on it? And obviously one of the things that comes out of this is the importance of landing pages, which is sort of a precursor to everything that we're talking about here in today's show. But what businesses should be looking for in their paid ads? Is there a decline that you're seeing? What's been your observations recently?
- [15:12]
Andrew Miller
AI Max is new, right? It's a few months old. And across all of our clients in a paid media space, we've only had a couple early adopters that are really starting to just gather some data now and be able to compare against previous results. So I don't have a, you know, a fully formed POV yet on AI Max. Obviously Google's pushing it hard. We think there could be a future where Google, you know, moves away from keywords and match types entirely and asks us to trust the black box. But you know, our job is as an agency is kind of to be professional skeptics and trust but verify or validate the results before we recommend these new platforms to our clients and migrate their campaigns. So zooming back a little bit in time, you know, we had the same trust issue with Performance Max or Femax several years ago when this first started coming out, you know, as kind of the latest iteration of AdWords Express or the automated way to launch Google Ads campaigns. Inside that black box, just tell us who you want to target, we'll do the rest, we'll do bidding, we'll do keywords, we'll do creative and then we'll optimize it. It took us a couple of years as an agency, you know, literally 18, 24 months of kind of poking and prodding within PMAX to actually start to trust the results to the point where we could start to roll it out more comfortably to more of our clients. I think that's what we're going to see with AI Max. You know, we're very much, you know, in the early stages of learning where it has strengths and where it can beat a human. But now, you know, a year, year and a half later with Performance Max, the previous iteration, we are getting more comfortable offloading some of the more routine, mundane tasks to the AI. And I think we're going to get there with AI Max. But it still could be, you know, another year, year and a half before they've got that system really dialed in to where our humans can then more effectively focus on strategy, creative strategy, data and insights and actually, you know, tying into CRMs and optimizing landing pages to feed all that data back into the AI.
- [16:56]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Yeah, the data flow back to AI I think is going to be the, the dawn of the new age because while so many of the pieces that we're doing are restricted from the media buying side, things like landing page optimization and ensuring that the data flow back into the CRMs so that your programmatic a optimize for what you actually want to go for me is the non negotiable for agencies in the next few years or you won't have an agency because media buying is going away. So where I admit earlier, like several years ago, I remember being like as a media buyer, I care about before the click, the business owner is responsible for after the click, their offer, their landing page assets. They're not paying for me to do and optimize those things. But in this world where media buying as a role is going away, if you don't focus on the data flow and if you don't focus on the landing page optimization, your programmatic AI isn't going to be able to do anything for you.
- [17:45]
Ralph Burns
Hey, you know, when I was first a consultant, actually doing the stuff that we're doing right now in Tier 11, one of the first tools that I learned how to use was from a company called Unbounce and they are now a sponsor of Perpetual Traffic. And the reason is is that their landing pages and how quickly you can create those landing pages without having to consult your designer, your developer. With Drag and drop builders now built in a copywriting, it's even better than when it was 10 years ago when I first started using it on my own to create my very first landing pages. These guys are absolutely amazing. They've got conversion optimized templates giving you everything you need to launch your pages on your own without developers. In fact, Unbounce is the leading landing page platform for building, testing and optimizing high converting pages powered by data from over 2 billion conversions. That is 2 billion conversions with a B. That means they know what converts. So if you want to Convert more customers one platform and launch pages fast, Unbounce is offering PT listeners a special offer. They are giving you the PT listeners 10% off when you enter a coupon code PT10OFF over@unbounce.com PT so head on over to unbounce.com PT, enter code PT10OFF and cash in. Today convert more customers with one platform. Launch pages fast. You shouldn't have to wait for your designers and your developers to build and test your landing pages. Get started with Unbounce today.
- [19:20]
Andrew Miller
Absolutely. It's the biggest differentiator we have as marketers is the first party data, right. And the performance data on the back end. So it's kind of short sighted to not put as much attention into those areas as your audience identification or keyword targeting or ad creative itself. With AI max, one of the areas that we're paying close attention to is how much control we can have over that post. Click experience for visitors and landing pages are obviously in many cases, especially in B2B which is our specialty. You know, we focus, you know, 90 plus percent of our business on B2B and lead generation objectives for clients versus the E comm and retail experience. But in a B2B or lead gen environment, the landing page is the customer experience. A lot of times it is the first brand. So if you're not focused on that and you're just, you're only concerned with getting the click, you're, you're missing an opportunity to improve your ROI by converting more of those visitors to leads or pre qualifying some of those visitors to the right types of leads for a business. It's often overlooked. But Ralph, to your point early on, marketers have known about landing pages for a decade. Unbounce, our platform of choice has been around since we signed on with them in at least 2010. So we're big advocates for it. And I think one of the craziest parts of this whole industry to me is we're all chasing shiny objects and learning as quickly as we can about AI, but we're still neglecting a lot of the tried and true strategies. Conversion optimization and landing page optimization utilizing first party data. And it's a wild time, but the basics still work.
- [20:45]
Ralph Burns
Yeah, that's funny because it's. And I've talked to the Unbounce people about this. It's like the first three tools I think I bought when I started doing what I'm doing was Unbounce because and that was before like Leadpages or any Insta pages or any of this other sort of stuff just because it was so modular. It's gotten even better over time. But I was forced to do it because I had a client that only sold at Home Depot and I couldn't. He was like, yeah, just sell more of my stuff at Home Depot and then we're eventually going to get Lowe's. I'm like, well, how do I do that? So I needed a pre sale page and they didn't have a website. I was like one of my first clients. So like what resource? And so I must have Google searched it, found Unbounce and then they stayed with me for like four years and they're now like a $100 million company.
- [21:30]
Lauren E. Petrulo
So they didn't bounce.
- [21:32]
Ralph Burns
They didn't bounce. They clicked and it was like before and afters, like they sold this radiator cover. It's like the strangest institute. Anyway, so the point is like that sort of stuff like that was the same back then. Now that was a different set of circumstances because they didn't actually have a website so I was forced to do it. But it's like all of this is so vitally important now and I think people just forget get about it or just think, oh well, everything after the click really isn't my job. But there's two parts to after the click in my opinion. There's the experience after they actually physically click on the ad to say, oh, I've arrived at the right place. My ad is in alignment with what I'm seeing when I land there. They teach you that in landing page optimization school way background.
- [22:20]
Lauren E. Petrulo
No bait and switch.
- [22:21]
Ralph Burns
No bait and switch, of course. But then it's like once they click, how deep do they click? And meaning how deep do they click? What data do you ultimately want at the end of the line that you want to push back into the algorithm, which typically, you know, in some cases like with straightforward E commerce brands is just a purchase or a new conversion or a conversions API. All that sort of stuff that we talk about here on the show. But in the case of the example that we're going to use here today, it's an offline conversion, which people still are not doing that. I had three calls last week with service based businesses like, what's an offline conversion? Oh no, you know, I get, is.
- [23:00]
Andrew Miller
There a phone ring? Right, that's an offline conversion.
- [23:03]
Ralph Burns
The phone's ringing. But we're not signing any cases. I had that same exact answer for two lawyers. Different type of space PI law and the criminal space. The point was, is like all of that is we've said this a hundred times on the show, but we're going to say it again because you train the algorithm and the right thing that you actually want the algorithm to find, right, which is a paid customer, provided that you're giving as much of that data back to the algorithm as possible. That's the thing that you want. Or maybe it's the precursor to that. It's like they show up for the appointment after they schedule the call with a salesperson, whatever it happens to be. So can you talk to that and the importance of CRM and offline data with all this AI max and how it all kind of works together?
- [23:44]
Andrew Miller
Yeah, absolutely. I mean just drawing on an example from last week. I was in a strategy presentation to a home builder client, good mid sized home builder client here in Richmond, Virginia where we're based, they manage and operate several large communities are constantly expanding their, their geographic footprint and AI has been beneficial to them. Right. Our paid media strategies have yielded, you know, triple digit year over year growth in leads, which is as far as we can typically see into their conversion journey, the customer journey. So by our metrics, what we can measure, what our marketing manager client can measure, you know, we're killing it for them. Leads are up over 200% year over year. Great. Here's the challenge. And when we're sitting down with their sales team, this happens a lot similar to your example, Ralph. We're sitting down with, you know, the, the entire revenue team over there. Sales is represented, operations is represented. They're saying great, leads are up. But you know what, so is spam.
- [24:37]
Ralph Burns
So yeah, huge problem.
- [24:39]
Andrew Miller
So is spam. And there we can look back, it's coming from the performance max campaigns. And why? Because AI is only as good as the data it's trained on. So you put garbage in, you're going to get garbage out. And so your point, Ralph? The number one thing we recommend to clients, and this story has a happy ending from last week. That's how you get buy in for saying we need CRM data, that first party data, the conversion data, the lead qualification data fed back into the bidding algorithms or the targeting algorithm so that Google can go find more customers. Like the ones that actually purchase or sign a contract or tour a model home or what, you know, whatever, whatever stage we want to measure and qualify. The challenge is if you only optimize for leads, Google's going to go find you more leads or conversions at a low price, but they're going to be crap because they don't know what a quality customer looks like to that brand and how, how uniquely that brand qualifies a visitor in their CRM.
- [25:33]
Lauren E. Petrulo
You don't weight the people in your CRM according to the value that they have to your business. Then everyone is treated equally. And that's where like, for me, I'm like, very aggressively violent, that leads are horseshit. You don't have dialogue, you don't have sales. So if you're saying that everyone in your CRM is the same, it's like every visitor to your website is equal to that person that's on a thank you page for a purchase or a privacy policy page in your footer. Like, they're not all created equal. We have to like, market to humans individually and. Yeah, like that. Again, that data flow, like, if you don't feed that back in, you're optimizing for more of what you don't want and you're accepting mediocrity. But I'm like, whatever, keep doing it bad other competitors, you make it easier for me. And as you said, it's really hard right now.
- [26:19]
Andrew Miller
It's hard. But here's why I'm bullish on where we're going with AI and data and mapping customer journeys and everything. It's typically in a conversation like we had last week with this home builder client as an example, you've got marketing pointing the finger at sales, sales pointing the finger back at marketing, saying the leads suck, but you're not closing enough.
- [26:37]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Yeah.
- [26:37]
Andrew Miller
Who's to blame? Nobody knows. Because there's no single source of truth. The happy ending to that story was we got, you know, finally, after years of trying to push forward and work our way into different parts of the organization, now we have everybody at the same table sitting down saying, yep, actually our goal is qualified leads. Let's work together to clean up the data flows, capture more data from the campaigns through the website, through HubSpot, the CRM and then into Salesforce. Right. So the more of those data points we can connect, then it becomes an automated process where that data flows back into the Google Ads, bidding algorithms and LinkedIn and Meta and everything else we will soon be able to optimize for qualified leads, not just lead volume.
- [27:16]
Ralph Burns
Right. And that's a challenge, I think, with a lot of businesses. So we have a regional medical services company that we're doing a test with right now and they probably get two to three new customers a week, but at their ad spend it's maybe one to two because they're doing small tests for each one of the individual regions. And at that volume you're not giving the algorithm enough data. So the key then is, is okay, what's the step before they, they buy? And in the case of the construction company that you're talking about here, it might be, you know, an in person meeting, it might be a consultation, it might be a sales call with, you know, a prospect that, you know, has the money and is pre qualified for a mortgage or whatever it happens to be. There's some event somewhere along your continuum that says, this is the customer I want Google to find more of.
- [28:11]
Andrew Miller
Yes.
- [28:11]
Ralph Burns
And I think it's, we say it's easy, like, oh, just, you know, plug in your customer and that's it, that's your event. Well, it doesn't always work quite that way. There's always that. It depends and it depends on budget, it depends on a lot of things. And especially for a purchase of maybe a half a million dollars. I don't know what the prices of real estate are in Richmond. I have to assume these are, you know, 300 to $700,000 homes is what we're talking about here. Like that's a pretty significant purchase which isn't happening every single day. Unless these guys are totally cranking maybe that, that is the case. So what do you advise on all of that and how do you sort of simplify it down to say this is what we need to focus on, this is what we need to construct the landing pages and the, the LPO all around and here's how we move forward.
- [28:57]
Andrew Miller
Sure. Yeah. There's Lauren. Lauren made a good point. You got to put a value on each of those interactions.
- [29:02]
Ralph Burns
Right.
- [29:03]
Andrew Miller
That we can track. Right. Obviously a qualified lead is going to close at a predetermined rate to an actual sale. So that's, that's a relatively easy calculation to say an average profit margin on a new customer's. Let's just use round numbers outside of the home builder space. But, you know, let's say an average customer is worth 10 grand. We need, you know, 25 leads to convert one new customer. So we can do the backwards math pretty easily to say how much are we willing to pay per lead to acquire or hit the sales goals. The challenge is not every company out there is driving enough sales every month or every quarter to feed that data back into the algorithm, get statistical significance and really account for seasonality and everything else. So then we have to look at micro conversions or kind of those upper funnel conversions. And in the case of a home builder, that's people that view a virtual tour. Right. How many do they engage with? That shows a sign of interest. How many are clicking to get directions to a community when you're downloading brochures, watching videos, each of those little engagements help us determine the value, potential value of that visitor. And then each of those events or key events in Google Analytics can be given an approximate value. And that approximate value is what's fed back into Google Ads to say, yeah, help me go find more of these people. Obviously we want to weight more heavily weight the qualified leads, but since we don't have enough data there, let's also look at the people that are engaging with the tours, the videos, the brochures, because they have value too. They're not going to convert at as high of a rate, but we want to continue nurturing them. Then we can reach out back to them. If they complete step A, they view a tour or they don't submit a lead yet or visit a model home, we can still target them, create a separate targeting list with the people that have, you know, started that journey but not yet finished the journey, and then market to them specifically in that middle of the funnel consideration stage. Because it can take months for someone to really, you know, have those conversations and feel comfortable moving forward.
- [30:48]
Ralph Burns
I find that it's usually it's just getting everybody in the room together trying to figure this out.
- [30:53]
Andrew Miller
It's not a technology problem.
- [30:55]
Ralph Burns
It's not a technology. So true.
- [30:57]
Andrew Miller
Yeah, the technology is the easy part, right? Getting data out of Salesforce or out of HubSpot back into Google Ads, that's been solved. Where we're finding the difficulty is in getting the right people at the table and then getting buy in to prioritize some of those beta projects. Right. So our analytics team is constantly working with IT and dev resources to say actually we need these salesforce fields built and we need to capture form data, pass it through and then once we see that all those fields light up with data, we know the marketing team can go back in and do what they need to do.
- [31:29]
Ralph Burns
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that leads into our example here of you want to figure out who is in those meetings, you want to figure out who's our most lucrative customer too, who's the one that we really want to target. And I know in your example here that's a big part of it and data is a huge part of obviously.
- [31:49]
Andrew Miller
The.
- [31:51]
Ralph Burns
Data that's being fed back to the ad platform but in the middle there is the ux. It is speaking to the client that you've already had all the interested parties within the, within the organization come together and we say we want to focus on this type of business and we want because they have higher value, they have higher ltv, they have higher all these other sorts of things that are going to benefit the business and ultimately grow it. That's metrics that matter and growth at scales as opposed to just getting any old person coming in the door. It does come back to how do you target them, what do you say to them, how do you speak to them on your front facing ads and then having a consistent message once they actually do click the ad with those business metrics that matter in mind. I think the example that you have previewed to us, which if you're not watching over on YouTube you definitely want to head on over to perpetualtraffic.com forward/YouTube because this is a tremendous example of how to sort of bring all that together with right messaging and then with the data in the back end feeding it back into the algorithm in order to target the right business to grow that this particular, in this case it was a business, but it's you want to actually grow the business through targeting the right type of customer. So this brings us all back to the importance of landing pages and having it be a consistent experience with the message that's in the ad and then after the landing page the right data being fed back to the algorithm. But I think just showing an example of how you were able to do this to really turn around not only a campaign but also focus on the right types of customer through ads and through the landing page in order to really move that business forward. And if you're not on our YouTube channel, you should be for crying out loud, at this point in time. Perpetualtraffic.com YouTube so, Andrew, maybe if you could do a screen share here, we can show exactly what we're talking about. And this all ties back into AI Max. And this is the kind of stuff that you're going to need to start doing in order to make these paid ads really, really work. And it's not, the landing page is not like the lost black hole. It's super important to the entire customer journey. And I think this is a great example of that.
- [34:06]
Andrew Miller
Let me set the scene because it's always more fun to show rather than tell, which is just so you know what we're looking at when this, when this pops up. One of our clients is in the custom wall mural, custom wallpaper space. They can take any photo, design graphic and blow it up. You know, think of the city skylines you might see in a business or a restaurant or hotel. Custom art that people might have in their homes. Very unique, very customizable, very cool stuff that lets us individualize our spaces. So the challenge that we're trying to solve with this client is that they've traditionally grown up as an E commerce style business focusing on the residential market. B2C. They do a great job. Anybody searching for custom wall murals is going to find their products either through our paid channels or organic. The challenge is, you know, a big and growing section of their customer base is B2B, right? They're, they're designing building hotels, office buildings, commercial spaces, and they want these custom wall murals for these spaces as well. But they're kind of being forced into an E commerce experience. So opening with a landing page and a couple variants that we have tested to try to speak specifically to this B2B audience and show them that these products are available. In fact, there's a whole sales team at this company that works with designers to outfit commercial spaces, doctors, offices, hotels, et cetera. But this audience wasn't seeing what they needed to see in the paid ads that were running and the E commerce experience, right? They want to talk to a human. They want to get custom quotes. They want to say, I need 50 of these things, not just one. So we experimented. Our hypothesis, like any good scientists, our hypothesis is that a dedicated landing page for the B2B crowd is going to speak to their needs more and make sure they know that there's a solution for them within this product set. So we built out on unbounce a series of landing pages for testing to try to segment out this, this B2B audience and drive them to a landing page that looks like this where right away, within a second or second and a half of landing on the page, you know, you're in the right spot. Right. I'm a business or I'm a designer. I'm in the right flow here. Right. And I can see a background visual of what appears to be, you know, maybe a medical office or some sort of commercial space with a waiting.
- [36:20]
Ralph Burns
I'm a developer, like for something. I'm building a medical office building like this speaks to me.
- [36:26]
Andrew Miller
Right. This is not a dining room, it's not a living room, you know, not a teenage dorm. Exactly.
- [36:31]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Type of space. This is clearly professional and as you even have it later iterated while coverings for business and designers, business designs, ideas and trends. Like it's so relevant to that audience that if it's not relevant to you, you're going to bounce right away and not send the positive signals of duration on page, scroll depth, et cetera.
- [36:49]
Andrew Miller
Absolutely. With, you know, AI max or performance max. Those platforms within Google Ads, it's even harder sometimes to segment out specific landing pages to different audiences. You know, Google doesn't necessarily know if somebody searches for custom wall murals as a keyword, which is one of the, you know, the high value, high volume keywords. If somebody searches for this, you know, Google may not necessarily know their intent right off the bat. They don't know if they're searching for residential or business use. However, by feeding the algorithm different signals, you know, has this person been to our site before? What else do we know about their browsing behavior? What other audience attributes can we pull in that might suggest they're more likely to be a B2B buyer? Then we can segment that out into a campaign or an ad group and drive traffic to this experience. The B2B landing page experience, we recognize that may catch, you know, some residential people, of course, so we give them an out on this page. Right. If you're interested in wall murals for a business, great. I'm in the right spot. Oops. I'm a residential buyer. I can click back to the regular experience. Right. I'm not going to get, I'm not going to lose my spot. I just have to click back, back, back and lose the thread tying in the offline conversions though, because you know, for the B2B buyer, they're not going through an E commerce experience. The importance of the Data comes from two places. One, obviously, you know, B2B buyers. There's a phone number up here which we use call tracking through CallRail to quantify the number of phone calls we're getting, track them back to the original traffic sources like Google Ads or LinkedIn and then obviously measure the quality of those calls. Do they convert or not? But of course there's also a lead form option when you scroll down the page or click any of the CTAs above the fold. There is also an email leave form option that routes to the appropriate sales team or salesperson based on a couple of other identifiers. So we give these B2B buyers two primary calls to action. One bailout if you're a residential user. But the value of the landing page and really why a page like this designed with, you know, a high converting template. And again, our preferred platform is Unbounce. But landing page like this eliminates distractions. And one of the reasons I think that marketers aren't using landing pages enough is because it's technically easier, sometimes cheaper to just throw up another page in your CMS. Right. Just add a WordPress page or just drop them on our category page or God forbid, a homepage. But when you really customize that post, click experience on a landing page for a specific audience segment, you start to see some really powerful results. So this is where we saw leads and value ROI skyrocket.
- [39:28]
Ralph Burns
So on this page here you've got. I'm interested in wall murals for businesses on the left and then home on the right. If they click home, do they go to the home landing page or do they back click? What happens there? Just interested in that.
- [39:44]
Andrew Miller
Okay, they are redirected back to the site to a specific category page for home. This is not dedicated landing page on Unbounce, but you can see the number of distractions that already pop up in front of that user, literally and figuratively. Now I'm like, okay, well, I know I'm in the right spot, but I got to click through all these things and probably some cookie consent banners and it's easy to get distracted. A landing page is single focus. Minimize distractions as much as we can and focus the visitor as quickly as possible on the CTAs or calls to action that we want them to take.
- [40:16]
Ralph Burns
I know there was another page that you folks used prior to going to this page, which speaks to the fact that you also had to change the language on your ads as well, which we can touch on. But clearly two distinct ideal customer profiles here and obviously with different LTVs, I gotta assume.
- [40:37]
Andrew Miller
Yeah, the B2B buyer is a higher value, right? Oh, yeah, yeah. Because they're typically buying, you know, in bulk or larger spaces.
- [40:45]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Yeah, it's like a franchise model. So they're buying in bulk or they own an entire hospital and they're doing three wings. Absolutely worth of stuff versus the individual like or even this here is the individual office. Like you could have 27 offices inside your medical center.
- [40:59]
Andrew Miller
Right. So those, those B2B sales are typically higher value. Speaking in e commerce language, the ROAS can be significantly higher from one sale to the B2B segment. But if they don't, if they don't know you do B2B because you know you're not segmenting that audience in your campaigns and your landing pages, you're going to lose them. Or maybe best case scenario, before you have a dedicated landing pages, you're dropping them on this category page on your site, which by itself is not bad. It's not terrible by any means, but it's distracting. There's a lot going on here. I'm kind of forced to choose and choice a lot of times will deter people or make them stop and think and then they click back, back or they bounce and that's not always the best experience. So we tested this variant, we created multiple variants and variations of this page to try to speak to different types of audiences. You know, are they more design focused aesthetics or are they, you know, functional? Are they doing commercial or kind of family friendly, kid friendly spaces? So different landing pages. Speaking of that B2B crowd with different intents. And so at the end of the day, you know, the fun part is when we actually get to compare the before and after results. And the case study we were able to produce with this and in partnership with this client, you know, showed the 300% increase in average order value. Speaking again in E commerce terms, that's what they're used to. A B2B buyer is going to spend three times more and then the ROAS is higher simply because that AOV is higher and the conversion rates are improved because they're getting a customized experience. So it's a win win for the brand and for their customers.
- [42:31]
Ralph Burns
Oh yeah.
- [42:31]
Lauren E. Petrulo
So when you said earlier you said how much control you have over the post click experience and how you focus on that, this focus allowed you to generate massive amounts of new revenue at a third of the cost.
- [42:45]
Andrew Miller
Absolutely. Yeah. And you know, because again, we're nerds, we love to geek out on the data and the philosophy, the science behind it. We compared and when we broke it down for the client, it's really interesting to see the before and after experiences that a visitor's having. Right. Obviously they're default Site experience, our landing page experience is shorter, more concise. Talking a little bit more about how we focused on the right calls to action and lead gen forms. B2B buyers are looking for, you know, sales contacts or quotes versus, you know, shop now, buy now, take TTAs. And then there's a whole other, you know, slew of metrics that we were able to compare before and after. And again, this is over a relatively short time period. But clients were thrilled, right? Anytime we get a case study and a testimonial out of something like this, it's transformative.
- [43:30]
Ralph Burns
The thing that I love about this is that there's going back to our. Part of our conversation with getting the right CRM data in is that this is the literally the exact same product but being sold in two completely different ways. We see this obviously all the time. We've got, you know, clients that are primarily in the B2C market and then you just see this huge B2B order that comes in out of nowhere like, oh, I'm going to buy 100 cases. We have a, we have a case manufacturer. It's like, you know, you see onesies, twosies and all of a sudden you see like 100. I'm like, oh my God, where did that come from? So which lends this case study lends credence to the fact that you guys need a dedicated business page, which we have not done yet, but we've been pushing for it. But they're making enough money on their own so they're not worried about it. But the point is, is that there is a very big difference between the commercial buyer and the residential buyer. And all of that data is going to be different being pumped back into that individual campaign. I have to assume that you sorted these out or you stratified them out or maybe you just focused on the B2B crowd in order to leverage that appointment. Sales, qualified lead and then ultimately the sale, which I would imagine isn't a, you know, isn't a long sales cycle. It's probably not like selling a house, but it can't be extraordinarily long.
- [44:47]
Andrew Miller
No, but it still is an offline conversion in most cases. Right. Handled over the phone or through a pinot. Right. Tying it back to AI max, though that's where I think marketers need to start to focus is with a homogenization of AI tools in Google Ads or Meta or any of the paid channels, you're going to get homogeneous results. Our whole premise here is that using the value of your first party data, your industry Knowledge, your ability to segment your audiences and match them up to the right messaging. That's where you're going to stand out against the competition. Otherwise you're just going to be locked in an upward cycle of CPCs and lower CTRs.
- [45:21]
Ralph Burns
And I think at the heart of this, I'm reiterating this just because I see this so often. It's not a marketing problem, this is a business problem. And all of the stakeholders, my COO will love the fact that I'm saying stakeholders because it's like a scrum term. All the stakeholders need to get aligned with this. And this is something that if you are a big business, like marketing is not beneath you. That's why most CEOs are involved in marketing to some degree or another because it relates to the growth of the business in such a great degree. Like this is a huge differential. Like when you made this discovery. Like we're talking about two completely different clients here, two completely different customers for your business, which maybe they knew, maybe they didn't know, but they just didn't know how to piece together the strategy. And it brings together everything that we've talked about here on today's show to ultimately grow it and scale it. And it's gotta be pretty satisfying. But my point is like the stakeholders need to get into the room and get involved in the marketing to a certain degree. Cause these are business metrics at the end of the day that you're trying to shoot towards. Not just marketing tactics and cool LPO analysis and UX design and everything. It's growing the business in a fundamentally major way. And you guys kicked butt on this, which is great.
- [46:34]
Andrew Miller
Yeah, thank you. That's a long, long term partnership for us and with this particular client. And it's born fruit over and over again for both sides. It's a win win. And that's, that's what we look for in our partnerships. If somebody wants a quick win and they just want to drive more leads, yeah, we can, we can hack that together all day long. But at the end of the day, we, we would lose the business or lose a relationship because the sales team is sitting there saying, you know, the leads suck. Right. Of course, we're not seeing a revenue lift or I only care about the B2B buyers. What can you do for me there?
- [47:05]
Ralph Burns
So the marketing saying sales sucks, by the way.
- [47:08]
Andrew Miller
It takes everybody going and interacting.
- [47:11]
Ralph Burns
Yeah, that's true. And operations and saying, why can't sales and marketing get along? We just want to like place orders or.
- [47:18]
Andrew Miller
Yeah. So our job as consultants is to try to come in and figure out where those, you know, solid reporting lines and the direct reporting lines exist within an organization. And if we can get everybody seated and figure out, you know, who really calls the shots. You know, sometimes there's a chief revenue officer or CMO that can really make change happen. Other times we just have to go in and win hearts and minds with data. Oh, yeah.
- [47:40]
Ralph Burns
It's not an easy thing to do.
- [47:40]
Andrew Miller
We don't always win. Right. So we. We have battle scars like everybody else, but at least we're fighting the right fight.
- [47:45]
Lauren E. Petrulo
You create anti fans when that conversation.
- [47:47]
Andrew Miller
Nobody likes to be told that their conversion rates are terrible or that the leads are terrible. But like.
- [47:53]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Or that no one cares about the brand.
- [47:54]
Andrew Miller
Right. But you can't argue with the data.
- [47:56]
Ralph Burns
Yeah, the data. The data.
- [47:58]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Lil Wayne says it best. Women lie. Men lie. Numbers don't lie.
- [48:02]
Ralph Burns
Lil Wayne said that?
- [48:04]
Lauren E. Petrulo
Yeah, it's in one of his songs. He's one of the best lyricists ever. How dare you Come up. I. I listen to your love. Oh, okay. Phew. I was like you, Van Halen. Yes, that's. You play on the guitar. See, I'm learning your music.
- [48:17]
Ralph Burns
Yeah. Really matured as a co host here forever. Speaking of maturity, Andrew is like the most mature person in the room here with some amazing results. How can people get in touch with you? And obviously we're going to leave links for unbounce because it's sort of our default. Hint, hint, best landing page builder that we have here. So how can people contact you?
- [48:42]
Andrew Miller
Yeah, workshopdigital.com or find me on LinkedIn. I can nerd out with you guys on this stuff all day long. I love answering questions too, so reach out directly. Shoot me an email or a LinkedIn message with what you're working on and I can give you a quick set of eyes and maybe point you in the right direction even if we're not the right fit.
- [48:58]
Ralph Burns
Well, we appreciate you being on perpetual traffic here today. And if you were not watching this and we're not able to sort of visually see this, this is the reason why we have the YouTube channel. It's not just to get subscribers and make money off Google, which is pennies, by the way. We don't make hardly anything on this. The point is, is like that exemplifies the messaging that we've discussed here for the last 40 minutes or so. Go over to the YouTube channel, perpetualtraffic.com forward/YouTube. Look for Andrew Miller here and watch along at a minute 30 and or so. And you'll understand exactly why we're so excited and we're geeking out about this because we actually move forward, which is our whole goal here. And by the way, it's the whole goal of this show, Lauren, to help businesses do marketing the right way. So super appreciate you coming on here today, Andrew. Wherever you listen to podcasts, just leave us a rating and review. It helps get this show out to a wider audience so we can teach people how to do marketing the way that we discussed it on today's show. So thank you so much for coming on Perpetual Traffic. Andrew Miller.
- [49:58]
Andrew Miller
You're welcome. I'm looking forward to the live show in a couple weeks in when we run into each other in San Diego.
- [50:03]
Ralph Burns
That's right. Yeah. We're in San Diego at the same time. We're like, we gotta get together.
- [50:07]
Andrew Miller
Yes.
- [50:08]
Ralph Burns
So cool. All right, so on behalf of my amazing co host, Lauren e Petrulo, ciao till next show. See you.
- [50:16]
Andrew Miller
You've been listening to Perpetual Traffic.