Our 400th Episode: Inbound Recap and Latest Trends (Part. 1)

Summary

The Digital Marketing Podcast - 400th Episode Summary: Inbound Recap and Latest Trends (Part 1)

Hosts:

• Kieran Rogers
• Daniel Rolls
• Louise Crossley

Release Date: October 4, 2024
Produced by: TargetInternet.com

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1. Milestone Celebration and TargetInternet Announcement (00:00 - 02:20)

The episode kicks off with the hosts celebrating the remarkable achievement of reaching the 400th episode milestone. Daniel Rolls humorously corrects the initial misstatement of it being the 400th episode, hinting that it might actually be their 600th due to the podcast's increased frequency from annual to weekly releases.

Key Announcement: Daniel announces a significant update to TargetInternet.com, their comprehensive learning platform for digital marketing. They are introducing monthly half-day masterclasses as part of the membership package.

• Daniel Rolls (02:20):

  "If you've been a monthly member for six months, you now get those included every month. So every month there'll be at least one half-day masterclass... all for the same small monthly fee."

Kieran enthusiastically confirms the value of this addition, highlighting access to quality on-demand training alongside live interactive sessions.

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2. Inbound 2024 Conference Recap (03:03 - 08:38)

Daniel Rolls shares insights from attending Inbound 2024 in Boston, emphasizing the plethora of announcements and innovative trends discussed at the conference.

Notable Speakers:

• Neil Patel: Presented alarming statistics regarding social media engagement.
• Jay Swedelson: Focused on email marketing strategies.
• Ryan Reynolds: Delivered the keynote speech.

Neil Patel's Insights: Neil revealed that 59.4% of social media posts receive zero engagement, underscoring a significant inefficiency in current social media strategies.

• Daniel Rolls (04:40):

  "59.4% of them had zero engagement. Now, our last episode was saying, is social media worth the effort?"

Daniel contrasts human-written content with AI-generated content, noting that while AI can produce large volumes of content, human-authored pieces gain more traction and sustained traffic over time.

Key Statistic: Daniel highlights a standout stat from Google presented at the conference:

• Daniel Rolls (08:24):

  "15% of all the searches that are done in Google every single month have never been searched before."

Kieran expands on this, explaining the vast opportunities for search optimization given the constant influx of new queries.

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3. Evolving Social Media and Email Marketing Strategies (07:58 - 18:34)

Shifting Focus from Social Media: Daniel observes a trend where social media is becoming more challenging, yet still holds opportunities. He emphasizes the importance of building and owning an email list to maintain direct communication with the audience.

• Daniel Rolls (13:04):

  "We're just doing it wrong. Putting a whole piece of content into social media that's really useful and then saying sign up to our newsletter for more stuff like this is actually a really powerful use of social media and email because what you're doing is taking an audience that you don't control and don't own and then having that on your email list."

Kieran Rogers (13:36):

"It's very clear call to action, isn't it? And actually, do you know what? I think people will be more likely to give you the thing you ask for because you've given them something of great value upfront without any requirements at all on it."

Email Marketing Updates: The discussion shifts to the impact of iOS 18 on email marketing. The new Apple Mail update categorizes emails into Primary, Transactions, Promotions, and Updates, affecting deliverability.

• Daniel Rolls (18:02):

  "If your newsletter is of that kind of tone, you're going to find yourself just not getting delivered in the first place."

Louise Crossley (18:02):

"Encourage replies within your emails as well... the more people that are applying to you, then obviously the inbox is going to recognize that it's something of importance."

The hosts stress the importance of conversational tone and personal sender information to enhance email deliverability and engagement.

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4. Google Ads Enhancements and First-Party Data Integration (18:34 - 29:15)

Enhanced Conversions and Data Management: Daniel explains Google's new Enhanced Conversions feature within Google Ads, allowing businesses to integrate more first-party data from their CRM systems to optimize ad campaigns.

• Daniel Rolls (20:03):

  "Enhanced conversions are a massive step forwards... especially when you start mixing it with performance max and you start playing around with things, you know, about your audience."

Kieran Rogers (20:08):

"And it Makes a huge difference, especially given we should be preparing for the end of third party cookies."

The hosts discuss the significance of transitioning from third-party to first-party data, highlighting how owning email lists aligns with this strategic shift.

Performance Max and Broad Match Strategies: Kieran shares his positive experience with using Performance Max campaigns combined with broad match keywords, challenging traditional Google Ads wisdom.

• Kieran Rogers (23:12):

  "The more you clip its wings and restrict it, it might seem clever, but actually, you're sort of shooting yourself in the foot."

He advocates for allowing Google's AI more freedom to optimize based on extensive data, rather than manually restricting keywords.

Daniel Rolls (26:26):

"It's very exciting and it's definitely the way forward."

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5. AI Innovations and the Future of Work (29:15 - 32:08)

Agent AI by Dharmesh: Daniel introduces Agent AI, a concept presented by Dharmesh, co-founder and CTO of Inbound. Agent AI refers to specialized AI agents capable of performing multi-step tasks and can be sequenced together for complex workflows.

• Daniel Rolls (29:47):

  "If you want to kind of see where this is going with all the AI stuff, I think it's definitely worth taking a look at."

He shares his experience using Agent AI to perform comprehensive competitive analysis by combining multiple agents for tasks like social listening and report generation.

Kieran Rogers (31:42):

"I love that the most used agent on that page is the website domain valuation expert."

The hosts discuss the practical applications of Agent AI in streamlining marketing tasks and enhancing productivity through automation.

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6. Closing Remarks and Upcoming Features (32:08 - End)

As the episode concludes, Daniel teases the continuation of the discussion in the next episode, promising more insights into the latest trends and AI updates. He also highlights upcoming features on TargetInternet.com, including a new app for exclusive podcasts and audio courses with certifications.

• Daniel Rolls (32:08):

  "We've got a ton more stuff to talk about in the next episode... launching an app in the very near future for exclusive podcasts and for the audio courses we're building."

Kieran and Louise encourage listeners to subscribe to the newsletter for the latest updates and resources.

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Notable Quotes

• Daniel Rolls (02:33):

  "Yes. That didn't sound like advertising at all. Kieran."

• Daniel Rolls (08:28):

  "15% of all the searches that are done in Google every single month have never been searched before."

• Daniel Rolls (13:04):

  "We're just doing it wrong. Putting a whole piece of content into social media that's really useful and then saying sign up to our newsletter for more stuff like this is actually a really powerful use of social media and email because what you're doing is taking an audience that you don't control and don't own and then having that on your email list."

• Kieran Rogers (23:12):

  "The more you clip its wings and restrict it, it might seem clever, but actually, you're sort of shooting yourself in the foot."

• Daniel Rolls (29:47):

  "If you want to kind of see where this is going with all the AI stuff, I think it's definitely worth taking a look at."

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Conclusion

This milestone episode of The Digital Marketing Podcast offers a comprehensive overview of the latest trends in digital marketing, emphasizing the shift towards first-party data, the evolving landscape of email marketing, and innovative AI tools shaping the future of work. The hosts provide actionable insights and strategic advice, making the episode a valuable resource for marketers seeking to stay ahead in a rapidly changing environment.

For more resources, to leave a review, or to get in touch, visit TargetInternet.com.

Transcript

[Kieran Rogers]

Welcome to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by targetinternet.com hello and welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast. My name is Kieran Rogers.

[Louise Crossley]

I'm Louise Crossley.

[Daniel Rolls]

And I'm Daniel Rolls.

[Kieran Rogers]

And today we have a digital marketing trends and AI update for you.

[Daniel Rolls]

Okay, so people probably won't be aware of this, but this is in fact the 400th episode of the digital writing podcast, which is quite mind boggling that we've been doing this. When did we start? What year was it?

[Kieran Rogers]

Well, we only do one a year. That makes us both 400 and yeah.

[Daniel Rolls]

I think it was 2011, right?

[Kieran Rogers]

Yeah.

[Louise Crossley]

If it helps, that means when you started the podcast I was 11.

[Daniel Rolls]

That doesn't help at all. It does quite opposite, as you well know.

[Kieran Rogers]

So it feels so old now. Well, so old.

[Daniel Rolls]

That's all right. Lots of things to talk about.

[Kieran Rogers]

I'm gonna go for a little lay down and a nap now. I mean, it's exhausted me, this conversation already.

[Daniel Rolls]

Yeah, well, bearing in mind we used to like one a month and then it's one a week now. Yeah, it shifted. But anyway, some interesting things. Talk about. So it's filled at a very, very, very good time because I've got a big announcement about Target Internet and then I have just come back from inbound 2024 in Boston, which I go to every year, and there are so many announcements and so much news to kind of talk about that it's, it's going to be really important. We kind of give a bit of an update on all of those things. So let's just start with that announcement first. So as you know, Targetinternet.com is our learning platform for everything digital marketing. But we do this other thing where we do these half day masterclasses every month and it was like a kind of paid for addition thing. And we have decided because they go so well and people love them and having that face to face interaction is such a nice thing. If you are now a 6 monthly or 12 monthly member of Target Internet, or if you've been a monthly member for six months, you now get those included every month. So every month there'll be at least one half day masterclass. Different times the day for different time zones, you can find the one that suits you. And essentially you get half day of interaction every month of doing these kind of live courses.

[Kieran Rogers]

So wait, so what you're saying is I get access to hundreds of top quality on demand training courses and I get a live face to face session every single month, all for the same small monthly fee.

[Daniel Rolls]

Yes. That didn't sound like advertising at all. Kieran.

[Louise Crossley]

That was really natural.

[Kieran Rogers]

That is incredible.

[Daniel Rolls]

That was very natural. Well done. You could get a job in this. I should say. Before we started the podcast, we said, this is the 400 episode, and Kieran started it and promptly used completely the wrong title. So this isn't the 400 episode. This is probably about the 600th. And it's always the bit at the beginning that goes wrong.

[Kieran Rogers]

It's the hardest part. That's why I have to do it. Daniel, you wouldn't cope with. Honestly, the pressure. Unbelievable.

[Daniel Rolls]

It's the. We wouldn't have that level of enthusiasm required, I think. Although that last recording did start with you yawning, which we would have had.

[Kieran Rogers]

To edit out anyway because I was. Wait, no, we won't go there. We won't go there.

[Daniel Rolls]

But yes, let's move on. Okay, so inbound 24, great conference. It's HubSpot's conference and great speakers. So Neil Patel is all we there. Jay Swedelson from the do this, not that podcast and so on. So loads of great people. Ryan Reynolds was the keynote.

[Kieran Rogers]

Interesting.

[Daniel Rolls]

He was. So that was very cool. But there's some stuff I think that's really, really key. And I want to start with the Neil Patel stuff because as ever, Neil came out of a lot of really interesting stats and his. His general thing. And there was a bit of doom and gloom because the keynote at the start of the conference was a bit like this as well. So the CEO of HubSpot comes out and says, we're getting less traffic, less conversions, poorer retention. We're all. That's what everyone's experiencing.

[Kieran Rogers]

Yay, let's throw a party.

[Daniel Rolls]

That's very positive. So we then like, okay, so what do we do? And their angle was, look, we've got all these AI tools. We've got this new co pilot thing built into HubSpot that's going to help you streamline things, automate things, and then we can take things to the next stage so we can. We'll discuss that a bit more and how much we believe that in terms of what a great thing AI content is at the moment. But Neil Patel came out and said, look, we've analyzed tens of thousands of social media posts and it was amazing. He said 59.4% of them had zero engagement. Now, our last episode was saying, is social media worth the effort? And what I was kind of looking.

[Kieran Rogers]

At, not to add fuel to my fire, but I love that.

[Daniel Rolls]

Thanks Neil, I thought you'd like that. Now what was interesting is that there was some really insightful talks about, look, if you look at how much time people are spending on social media, they're still there for hours every day. This is where they are consuming media. But we're just doing it wrong. And actually, if you want to get engagement, I'm going to try and talk about that a little bit more in a moment. But that's a real eye opener. You know, 60% of stuff does not get any engagement. Complete waste of time. Now, it's worse than that because the.

[Kieran Rogers]

Stuff that is getting engagement is getting it from fake accounts, potentially quite possible as well. So that's watering it down even further.

[Daniel Rolls]

Well, it was interesting because he did the thing about how people are creating content and there was three, three columns. One is written by humans, one was written by AI, and one was AI assisted humans. And what was interesting, sadly, was that the AI column was by far the highest. The AI assisted by humans was pretty small, which I thought was really desperately bad because that's going to trigger all the negative stuff from Google. But what they showed in another chart you have was that how much engagement and traffic basically this content was getting on the website from an SEO perspective. And you know, the human written stuff generally was getting at the beginning, slightly more engagement. But what was really clear is as it went over five months, the human written content was ramping up in terms the amount of traffic it was driving and that AI stuff was going down.

[Kieran Rogers]

So just hang on a second, let me understand this. When you say as it was going over five months, what do you mean?

[Daniel Rolls]

Like month by month? So month one, the, the stuff that was written by humans did slightly better than the AI stuff. Right. Month two, the human stuff got more traffic. The AI stuff went down slightly.

[Kieran Rogers]

Is this for one particular organization or.

[Daniel Rolls]

Just across the board, a whole range, Whole range of organizations. Okay, so it was like it was thousands of data points. It was a pretty good study. And what it kind of shows, I think is that Google is getting better and better at working out what good quality content with all that eat stuff, you know, the experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust built into it is. So actually you might get some initial results because I've seen a million Twitter accounts go, look, I've automated all my content on my website and I've driven this much traffic. But it's not playing out in the long term, which is as every single SEO strategy that you're using just to get SEO and tends to happen. It's not giving the long term benefit. Now I spoke to a couple of people from Google while I was there and they're like, they're really, really happy for people to be using AI tools to generate content but you have to add all that other good stuff in there to make it unique and make it really standalone and so on as well. Now I'm going to come to at this point while we're here because I was going to come to it later when I talk about Google. My favorite stat from the entirety of in Band and bear in mind three days intensive talks. I was there from very early in the morning to the late night kind of sessions as well. I planned out on the app running between all these different stages. So I got an awful lot of talks. I was in two places at once multiple times by accident.

[Kieran Rogers]

And like you were like Hermione Granger with a time turner.

[Daniel Rolls]

It was, it was very good. Right. And essentially I like being compared to Hermione Granger. That's quite, that's quite good. That's never happened to me before. Thanks for that. Stick with me then. And now someone's going to use an AI tool to come up with an image as well.

[Kieran Rogers]

Daniel Rouse, the Digital Hermione Granger.

[Daniel Rolls]

That's incredible. So I've totally lost my thread now. Right. I know the best stat of all those talks. Yeah. Was one from Google and I heard they must have kind of leaked this somewhere else before because someone else had mentioned it to me briefly and they basically came out, went 15% of all the searches that are done in Google every single month have never been searched before.

[Kieran Rogers]

Yep.

[Daniel Rolls]

Okay, well you knew this. Okay, well that was a huge build up you go. Yeah, whatever.

[Kieran Rogers]

Oh no, sorry. It was a real standout stat for me. When I visited Google about five weeks ago, I spoke for Google. It was very fun.

[Daniel Rolls]

Check you out. What are you speaking about?

[Kieran Rogers]

I was talking about using the latest like data and extensions on AdWords.

[Daniel Rolls]

Very nice. Yeah. Did you tell them it was called AdWords again? I mean this is.

[Kieran Rogers]

Don't know. I didn't. Yeah, I avoided probably, probably. If anyone, for those not kind of.

[Daniel Rolls]

Catching on to this, it hasn't been called AdWords in a decade.

[Kieran Rogers]

Google Ads, Google Ads. Everybody knows what. Even Google knew what I was talking about. Yeah, I was their guest so they couldn't say. Oh actually could you correct yourself?

[Daniel Rolls]

One of my greatest moments on stage with Google was that I went on stage and it was a panel discussion and they said, Daniel Rose, I'll come to you first is growth Hacking a thing. And I went, ah, just another one of those phrases where they've made up and, and it's just pinging, search and social media, a few different things together. And then they go to the person sitting next to me and say, Mr. Smith or whatever his name was, Head of growth hacking. Oh, that was a bit embarrassing.

[Kieran Rogers]

Yeah.

[Daniel Rolls]

So, yeah, anyway, I probably told that story before because you knew that story. So anyway, that's okay.

[Kieran Rogers]

I haven't heard that one.

[Daniel Rolls]

No. All right. That's right. No.

[Kieran Rogers]

But you know what, everyone at Google's so gracious. It had been cool.

[Daniel Rolls]

Yes. I don't know. He did, he did.

[Kieran Rogers]

Profoundly upset. So anyway, what on earth are you saying, man?

[Daniel Rolls]

I wonder if that's his job. Touched though, I'm going to check. But Anyway, so this 15% of all searches new I think is fascinating because what that tells me is that there is a huge opportunity still within search optimization all the time. Because I mean a lot of this will be new TV shows, it will be new music, artists. All that kind of stuff is testimony.

[Kieran Rogers]

To how in the moment Google is in our lives. So isn't it like how often do we turn to Google when we have a need and those need to constantly changing. Like look at what's going on in the news in any week.

[Daniel Rolls]

Yeah.

[Kieran Rogers]

And that's going to massively influence the concepts and keyword landscapes that people are going to start bringing together in their, in their searches. And I think, you know, you start taking a look at that and actually it's not too hard to start brainstorming where the potential next niches are. Right.

[Daniel Rolls]

So I had to think about this. You know, I'm going to talk in a minute about iOS 18. Okay. New update to the app operating system. Do you know what there's going to be after that?

[Kieran Rogers]

There'll be iOS 19.

[Daniel Rolls]

So the reality is you can start creating pages of content about topics and say, these are the rumors at the moment about iOS 19. This is what we're expecting from it. And then you'll be in a really good place to go through, look at it, look at a TV show, look at a film that's going to come out next year. There's a lot of stuff that you can start looking at and going, I think that could be a big thing. And starting to try and work on that. So I thought that was, that was my standout stat, which Kieran already knew, but there you go. So I'll come back to Google in just a moment. But the thing that came out for me A lot was that everyone was saying social is getting harder. We've spoken about this a ton. Still an opportunity. LinkedIn had a huge presence and I've got some really interesting stuff about their ads to speak about in a bit. But there was a couple of things that really stood out to me. A couple of people said it. Jay Swedelson, who runs Subjectline.com does the guru email conference and it's going to be coming on the podcast very soon as well. Biggest marketing podcast in the US and we met up at the show and he's always been really a big advocate, as you have Kieran, about email still being a huge opportunity. Also met the lovely people from Marketing, Millennials and they focus their business really on having an email list and having an event that they're running. So there's this refocus and one of the things that I just like a little tactic that came out is that we've got this kind of obsession with taking people from social media to our website. We know that's a problem with the algorithm sometimes, but actually rather than doing that, putting a whole piece of content into social media that's really useful and then just saying sign up to our newsletter for more stuff like this is actually a really powerful use of social media and email because what you're doing is taking an audience that you don't control and don't own and then having that on your email list and being able to do with that. And I think increasingly for, I mean that's definitely for a B2B audience. That's going to be a no brainer from LinkedIn and things like that as well. But I do think that's we need to be thinking about how we own the audience a little bit more as well.

[Kieran Rogers]

So do you know what I really love about that approach though is it would be very measurable, wouldn't it? You know, you're really going to get sign up. So you're not. So I challenge everybody. You know what guys, don't say it's necessarily a B2B only thing. Why don't you try? You know, you could run experiments like that. If the platform allows you to put longer form content in there, why not? It's very clear call to action, isn't it? And actually, do you know what? I think people will be more likely to give you the thing you ask for because you've given them something of great value upfront without any requirements at all on it.

[Daniel Rolls]

Yeah, I think that's the thes if you provide a great piece of Content that could be a carousel of information, it can be long form, it could be a video. But if you then say you want more like this, sign up to the email and you then got the opportunity to keep engaging. And if they're not engaging, you can remove people from your list, that's fine. So keeping that quality of list up is going to be important.

[Kieran Rogers]

Do you know what else is genius about that? You don't have to, have to put the link in there, especially if it's a video. Just say it. Because that's the thing, that's, that's what the algorithms will like start. Oh, they've put a link to something else. We'll, we'll downgrade it. We won't show it to as many people want to. We're greedy. We want to keep everybody on our platform all the time. No one take them off elsewhere. You just, you just direct them to your homepage where they can sign up.

[Daniel Rolls]

Yeah. Or just, you know, if you've got a particular inc or you just go search for, you know, the marketing download newsletter.

[Kieran Rogers]

Way better than messing around going, check out our links in LinkedIn bio. No, don't. That's another step. Just take them straight through to the website. Give me, give me a domain name. Bish bash bosh. Done.

[Louise Crossley]

And you only have to look at, say everything about TikTok being banned in the US to know that it's so unsafe now to rely on one platform. And at least like with your audience in the whole community building and speaking directly to your customers, you've literally got them right in front of you because anything can change.

[Daniel Rolls]

It's not looking good to this TikTok thing at the moment just to update people. So TikTok are arguing a number of points that just don't know that they're going to stand up at the moment. And if TikTok is banned in the US it's very likely it'll be banned ever because the app stores are US based as well. So it's something to bear in mind if you're kind of going down the road. Now, while we are here at email marketing, probably the most important update for people to consider at the moment, iOS18 is coming out in the following days, which is the latest update to the Apple operating system for smartphones and tablets. And it has a completely new version of their email client. Now why this is so important is that 56 of all email clients are Apple Mail. So it is by far the biggest because people have got it on their iPhones and they're Using it a day to day, even if it's a business account, they've got their Outlook stuff maybe coming into into there. It's got a load of AI stuff built into it because that's the way the operating system is going and there's lots of AI built in there, but it's been built in quite heavily into the email and they're going to basically when your emails come in, you know you've got that thing within Outlook where it's got your primary and kind of like a secondary email box where it tries to stick all your newsletters and things like that. Yeah, well, with this they are going to have primary which is your essential, time sensitive type stuff. Transactions, which is like order confirmations, shipping confirmations, things like that. Promotions, which is marketing and sales and updates which is kind of newsletters and everything else. You do not want to be in transactions or promotions. You want to be in primary ideally or updates because updates people go, well that's the newsletters I like. I'll go and check those sporadically. I'm probably not look at the other folders at all. So one of the things that kind of came out, I need to credit, credit Jay Swedelson for this as well, that he was talking about this a lot at the conference, his talk. And you're going to love him when it comes to the podcast because he's an absolute brilliant public speaker and podcaster. But essentially if you've got an email newsletter going out from your company and it's not from a person as in it's like from newsletter app and the tone of voice is very corporate or just, you know, very brand, you are not going to end up getting delivered a lot of time. You're going to end up in promotions and marketing messages. Now thankfully, you know our marketing download is written by me and Lou and it's from my email address. Okay. And the tone of voice is quite conversational. So what we're starting to see is that there's a lot of kind of AI trigger words. So things like registration, confirmed, meeting, invite, exclusive invitation, important updates, X days left, new features, subscription details, action required, all of these words, it's okay to include them, but if they're the main focus of an email, you're going to end up in one of those folders which is kind of okay. If you've got an event and you know you are sending the event confirmation, people are going to actively seek that out and that's okay. But if your newsletter is of that kind of tone, you're going to find yourself just not getting delivered in the first place. So now is maybe the opportunity to.

[Louise Crossley]

Have a think about that and encourage replies within your emails as well. Yeah, because the more people that are applying to you, then obviously the inbox is going to recognize that it's something of importance and people are actually engaging with you. And I was. I'd subscribed something the other day and I can't remember what it was for, but sometimes you get an email and it's just asking you to confirm your subscription and rather than clicking a button, they'd actually said if you actually meant to do this, just reply to us and let us know what your biggest pain point is in marketing or something like that. So you've confirmed that that's actually someone you're going to engage with and you've.

[Daniel Rolls]

Created a signal for the AI to say, oh, that's a proper email. They're replying to each other. Yeah, as well. So this RS18 piece is going to be important. I think email is going to be increasingly important because social getting harder. Therefore focusing on this a little bit is going to be going to be huge. So let's carry on. I spoke About Google, the 15% of all searches new. That's great. A couple of things that they have announced and Kieran, you might know about these kind of things as well. So they've got. There's some new terminology that came out that I hadn't come across and basically within Google Ads now, something called enhanced conversions. And what they've done is separate out something in the settings called Data Manager. And what it's really allowing you to do is connect up more of your first party data, that is stuff you've collected directly through your website into Google Ads. So essentially I'll give you an example is that I can go in, log in there, I can connect it to my CRM system in this particular case HubSpot. In this case it will import my contacts and it can take certain lists I've got. So I might have a list of B2B customers right now. Those business to business customers. The conversion would have happened offline. They would have come to the website, done something and then spoken to someone at our end and ended up signing up. I can now use that data to help the AI optimize my ad campaigns within Google Ads. That's a massive step forwards.

[Kieran Rogers]

So that. That's what I was invited to Google to talk about.

[Daniel Rolls]

Well, there you go. So you probably know something about this.

[Kieran Rogers]

I've been doing this. Yeah. And it Makes a huge difference, especially given we should be preparing for the end of third party cookies, which is going to make it harder to use online platforms to reach people. But you see, if you start using your own first party data, that's okay. And that's what they've been able to do. There are a few hoops you have to jump through to get this all up and running. I was very lucky in that probably about a year ago, the team at Google who specialized in this helped me set up a whole bunch for one of the companies that I work with. And we've been playing around with it ever since. And it's phenomenal, especially when you start mixing it with performance max and you start playing around with things, you know, about your audience. So we were able to focus more on more valuable customers. For example, you know, how's that going to help your return on ad spend? Well, hugely. And actually what you can start to do is take your first party data and if you've got a broad enough kind of stream of it, that's the key with this, a couple of dozen people at a certain level, that's not going to help you much. It's AI, it still needs a big pipeline of data to make the right decisions on. But if you can use your own first party data to help direct platforms within Google, like using your performance max to the best advantage, it's hugely beneficial. And we've seen, yeah, definitely on the accounts where I've done this, I've seen a big improvement in terms of, you know, the cost per lead and the profit that you get back from those leads as well. So you're sort of squeezing that kind of efficiency at both ends. It's very exciting and it's definitely the way forward. You know, I can see why Google are doing it. You know, in the absence of, you know, huge audience data from third party cookies, this is the way to go. And that's why, you know, the more you focus on your first party is. I suppose that's why I love email so much as a channel. I can see that it's, it's got the future written all over it because that's first party data you own, you own your email audience, you know, you push out to a whole bunch of people on any social media platform. You have no idea who those people are really. You certainly can't, you know, reach them with in any way through your own platforms and through your own data. You're reliant on, you know, the platform, you know, giving you that. And they do, they do and will charge you more and more for that as the competition for those audiences gets more and more fierce. We've seen that it's a marketplace, right? You don't have that with your, your email data. It's a very, very different thing. And it, and it syncs up beautifully with this because actually every email you're getting more and more first party data back from your email audiences so you can begin to segment around that. And it's, it's a beautiful thing because it, it makes it more profitable. But actually the reason why it makes it all more profitable is because actually enables you to do more things better for your customers.

[Daniel Rolls]

More one to one targeting.

[Kieran Rogers]

Yeah, totally.

[Daniel Rolls]

So I'm interested. They, they talk about the Google Ads power pair. This was a big thing that kept talking about which is basically saying is the search ads and it's the performance max. And just looking at how those two things kind of fit together and going through and making sure that you're using those to maximum ability. And now everything they say is switch on asset creation, new asset creation, switch on broad match, switch and all these things. What's your experience of that? Because my experience of switching on broad match, I end up cannibalizing a load of my own tracker.

[Kieran Rogers]

So they advised me to do this and I was very skeptical. So we ran some nice tests to make sure. And sure enough, I mean it flies in the face of everything. Every book about Google Ads says, there you go, I've got to write that. Tom Daniel. All the books out there will say.

[Daniel Rolls]

Only taken 400 episodes.

[Kieran Rogers]

All the books out there will say no, don't use, don't, don't, don't use broad search. But actually you're dealing with a completely different beast here. Right? Because actually if you don't use broad search, what you're doing is you're reducing the amount of data that the algorithm has access to. And actually these campaigns are much more sophisticated now. You know, you generally have return on ad spend targets that you're giving Google rather than just piling in money on a keyword. Nobody does it like that anymore. That would, you know, that's not gonna, that's not gonna cut it. So actually what in my experience, when you focus on the broad search, actually when we open that out, we saw that suddenly the algorithm was able to do what we were asking it to to do. So it sounds counterintuitive. Yeah, there's another development coming very soon if it's not there already. For some people, they do tend to roll these things out Gradually, but they're actually enabling within Performance Max. You can actually now add negative keywords to that and that I think that'll make people feel a lot better about this. But like everything you've learned in the past, this is the danger with this stuff. Stuff's moving at such a pace now. You know, we have these rules of, rules of thumb. The rules are changing all the time as well and you have to reevaluate everything. So you know, you now you don't know what you don't know, but I can tell you I've learned through this. And actually when we A B tested it, actually the segment that we allowed to have broad keyword, it just worked better because actually was able to learn because it wasn't manually excluding everybody, it was using a broad search keyword and actually it was making decisions for us, as Performance Max does, based on the roas we were trying to make. So, like, don't clip its wings was my learning. And actually rethink that whole rule of oh. Because for years, actually I said this on stage, for years everybody said it was just a tax for stupid people that Google applied to ad accounts, which is a bit harsh, bit unfair, I think. Well, it was back in the day, there was an element of that if you didn't really know all the bells and whistles and knobs and twirls that you could twiddle, you could come unstuck with that. But actually now, Performance Max takes care of a lot of that stuff. So more data is good and get out of the way and allow the AI to do what you've asked it to do. The more you clip its wings and restrict it, it might seem clever, but actually you're sort of shooting yourself in the foot.

[Daniel Rolls]

So I want to ask you one more question on this because something I've had a fresh way with Performance Max before was that if you haven't got much conversion data, like you aren't getting that many conversions, it just doesn't. It's not getting traction, basically.

[Kieran Rogers]

Yeah, yeah.

[Daniel Rolls]

So do you think that by plugging it into your CRM makes a difference.

[Kieran Rogers]

With that because you can see all.

[Daniel Rolls]

Your previous conversions, or is it if they're not going to work for low volume stuff?

[Kieran Rogers]

It depends. So it all depends how you've got it set up. I've got it working with relatively low volume stuff, so I'm working on campaigns where, oh, I don't know, we might get 10 to 20 conversions a day. That's fairly low levels of traffic. What you can do though is you can broaden the time scale. You can go up to 180 days, can't you? So that actually builds up to quite a sizable or audience, if you like. And you've also always got the option of lookalike audiences to broaden these things out as, as well, you know, it, it, it gets complicated basically, is what I'm saying. But there, there are certainly are ways of doing it. What we, with the one example particularly that I'm thinking of, they as an organization, grade their customers by the amount of money that they're looking to spend and actually they, for the purpose because they've got very low volumes of things for the purposes of this experiment, what they did was they said, well, look, if they're worth below this value, then we'll, we'll, we'll kind of actively exclude them from the campaigns. But if they're worth more than this value. So as an organization, they break people down into six or seven different silos. Right. But actually that wouldn't necessarily work. So they've kept it simple to begin with and that's working well. But the more you get into this, more you want to push it that little bit further and see, you know, how hard can we get it, to get it to work. And you know, the thing to do is to work with your Google account manager. Everybody has one. And you know, make use of them. You know, ask them best ways to approach this because they'll have a better understanding of how you've got your campaign set up. I think that's, that's the thing with this. There's so many different little levels that you can set and tweak that there's no kind of one rule for everybody. But I've certainly seen you definitely can make it work. And you know, there's just, just improved results off the back of it. If you, once you do get it working, it's well worth the effort of experimenting and trying it. You know, it's that whole adage, isn't it, of the man that goes to the doctor poking himself repeatedly in the eye and it says, doctor, it hurts when I do this. And the doctor says, well, just don't do it then. And that's the thing. Like, you know, we all very, it's very easy to complain and moan, but actually maybe you need to try doing something a bit, bit of a different way to find a better way of doing it.

[Daniel Rolls]

That's, that's a very good point to, to kind of move us on because I think I, I want to, we're going to split this over two episodes because we've got so much stuff to go through. But I just wanted to go through one more thing for this episode, which was one of the big keynotes is always Inbound Dharmesh. Dharmesh was one of the co founders and he was the cto, the Chief Technical Officer. So he is, he would say he's the geeky one, he's the slightly introverted one. His public speaking is actually. If someone doesn't like public speaking is excellent because he drops loads of dad jokes in the whole way through and they're excellent. They're really, really good.

[Kieran Rogers]

You've got to love a dad joke.

[Daniel Rolls]

Yeah. But he's come up with this thing called agent AI. So I'd advise people to go and take a look at it. Basically what he's saying is the future of work is going to be a hybrid workforce where you have got people but you've also got AI agents. An AI agent. The difference between like an, an AI and an AI agent is just that an AI agent can go through a multi step journey. So it can do a number of things in a kind of sequence. But then you can start putting these AI agents together. Like you can have numerous agents out there, you can move together. This website Agent AI is an experiment basically, but it's him and lots of other people building agents that you can go in and use. You get loads of free credits when you sign up and they, they will do competitive analysis for you or they will generate images and put them into a document and generate a report of some description and things like that. So it's kind of like a custom GPT and that it's an AI created for specific task. But the idea is that you can kind of sequence them together. Now his feeling is that is going to be the future of all this kind of AI stuff in that there'll be loads of different AI agents out there and you'll be able to sequence them together to do the particular tasks that you want. And we'll see this in lots different places. But it's. If you want to kind of see where this is going with all the AI stuff, I think it's definitely worth taking a look at. I was a little bit at the beginning. Oh, here we go, another AI thing. I'm not sure about this now. I've played with it and sequenced a few of them. I managed to do a complete competitive analysis report for a particular industry using three or four of these agents together to do a bit of social Listening to go off and summarize their websites and all those kind of things. And it's kind of important because as we're fragmenting our user journeys, it's not just search, it's not just social media, it's not just email, you know, to understand what's being said about your brand. As we saw with that HubSpot AI grader that we looked at in a previous episode, trying to understand your brand in from a conversational point of view becomes. Becomes important as well. I would take a look at it.

[Kieran Rogers]

I love that the most used agent on that page is the website domain valuation expert.

[Daniel Rolls]

How much is my website worth and can I flog it? Yeah, yeah. And I don't know how many domains I still own that I've got these broken dreams and I get the domain renewals every year and go, no, I just, I am going to renew it this year because I'm going to do something with it this year. Yeah, I've heard those for quite a long time. I'm still owned BesideTheC.com, still one of my favorite. Yeah, keep it.

[Kieran Rogers]

It's part of your personal brand.

[Daniel Rolls]

It is. It's beautiful. Right. I think that's enough for today. We've got a ton more stuff to talk about in the next episode, but thank you for listening to the digital marketing podcast. If you haven't signed up for the newsletter, targetinternet.com newsletter and get on there because that's where we're announcing all this new stuff that we're doing. We've got. We're launching an app in the very near future for exclusive podcasts and for the audio courses we're building. So if you enjoy the podcast but you want to learn a complete subject and we're starting with SEO and we're doing a certification and accredited certification with that, that'll all be much easier to use via the apps. We've got that coming up. As I said, we've got those audio courses. So we'll all notify you there. So get over to subscribe to the newsletter and join the thousands of other people that subscribe as well. Thank you for listening and we'll speak to you again in the next episode with a continuation of these latest trends and AI updates. For more episodes resources to leave a review or to get in contact, go to targetinternet.com podcast.