Google Ads in B2B Marketing

Tom Nixon (00:02.108)
Okay, Curtis, fair is fair.

Curtis Hays (00:05.572)
You’re always throwing me off here with these. I don’t know where you’re going with these intros sometimes.

Tom Nixon (00:08.316)
I’m the master of the I’m the master of the cold open. Please, people at home, don’t try this at home. Uh I’m clearly a podcasting professional. Welcome back to Bullhoards and Bullseyes. But Curtis, fair’s fair because we did a whole episode on storytelling. An entire episode on it and I was like in my seventh heaven. Today, fair’s fair. We are gonna do a whole episode on a topic in with a guest near and dear to your heart about something a little more technical than just telling stories all the time.

Curtis Hays (00:13.988)
You are.

You

Curtis Hays (00:38.116)
Yeah, we’ve had our audience asking to get kind of into some specifics on SEO and paid advertising. So we’ve got a paid advertising expert here with us today. So excited about that. Should I, should I introduce him? All right. Yeah. So we got, we got Corey Lindholm and, uh, gosh, I met, I met Corey about two years ago when performance max campaigns were, were being rolled out and I felt like I had a lot.

Tom Nixon (00:51.74)
Yeah, let’s bring them on. Let’s get the brains of the operation on this show here.

Curtis Hays (01:07.204)
to learn there, even though I’ve got 10 years experience in, uh, in Google advertising. I did not know what I was doing with performance max, at least to really dive in. So I reached out to a great company called, uh, solutions eight. And, uh, I was talking to their team and they said, you know, who you need is to talk to is Corey Lindholm. So, so Corey, you’re, you’re a consultant in the paid advertising space. You’ve got a YouTube channel, uh,

Cory Lindholm (01:31.499)
Yes.

Curtis Hays (01:36.068)
At Cori Lynn home, you’re very active on LinkedIn as well. And then you’re just started another, uh, sort of podcast and got a YouTube channel with, with Michael Natalie. Am I pronouncing his name correctly? Yeah. All right. And, uh, you guys are definitely PPC experts, Google advertising experts, been following your channel here for a couple months. And so, you know, really honored and appreciate you joining our show today. So, so welcome to bull horns and bulls eyes.

Cory Lindholm (01:37.419)
Yeah. Yes.

Cory Lindholm (01:46.155)
You got it. I know you nailed it.

Cory Lindholm (02:03.499)
It’s my pleasure, thank you guys for having me.

Curtis Hays (02:05.604)
Yeah, of course.

Tom Nixon (02:06.748)
Yeah, Corey, I was just gonna ask you, Corey, so explain for people who don’t know anything other than what Curtis has said, kind of what you do day to day. Again, you could just validate why we wanted to have you on the show today, but tell us like your daily expertise. What are you working in every day?

Cory Lindholm (02:19.371)
course.

Cory Lindholm (02:22.763)
Yeah, I am mostly Google ads. Um, I do do a lot of data science projects as well. Um, and they’re actually starting to blend more and more at when I work with clients with a, a large database and they want to make predictions with their data, or they just want to better understand some correlations within the data. I do do data science as well, mostly working in Python and, uh, business intelligence tools. Um, but a lot of it’s going to be Google ads, some Microsoft ads, uh, when advertisers decide that’s a good fit for them.

I’ve been doing it about a decade. I have seen it all. I have done it all. I am a super nerd at this where I am going through the documentation pages of Google, just looking in the API for a little hacks and, and ways to reconfigure things strategically to get better performance for my clients. So I do do consulting training for marketing teams, as well as do it yourself business owners. And I manage a very large accounts, a lot of e -commerce, some lead Jen as well. Um, and that’s.

Probably the majority of my time is just managing the data for those larger advertisers, but I also love training and consulting. It’s a really big passion of mine.

Tom Nixon (03:26.908)
you’re talking to an English major. So, I confess, I’m already lost. Alright, so, I’m just kidding. I understood most of what you said but Curtis, you understand it much more than I. So, you are probably the appropriate person to be asking the questions here. What should we ask on our listeners behalf of Corey today?

Cory Lindholm (03:34.219)
Ha ha.

Curtis Hays (03:46.436)
Yeah, I think one of the most important questions a lot of our clients ask is, where do we start from a budgeting perspective? And I’m going to surprise you a little bit here, Corey, with something that a Google ad expert shared with me about 10 years ago. And so if you remember the days where we had dedicated reps at Google and I’m in Michigan and there was an Ann Arbor office for Google in Michigan.

And I got a guy who was assigned to my account for longer than three months, which is all you get now. I think you get assigned to rep for a quarter. This guy was assigned to me for like two years and basically taught me everything I knew. So I had like individual training from a good Google account manager, but he gave me this basically rule of 10 to create, uh, my daily budget, which was whatever your CPC is, your average CPC, your average cost per click in your campaigns.

Multiply that by 10 and that needs to be your daily budget. And then from there, I could figure out and give a client what a monthly budget is. So today, if a client comes to me and says, Hey, I, I, I sell and install windows and our average CPC for windows is $50 a click in our market. Then in my head, I’m like, well, we need to have at least $500 a day. It doesn’t mean we’ll spend $500 a click, but.

Cory Lindholm (05:13.067)
Mm -hmm.

Curtis Hays (05:13.38)
That’s where I need to start at a daily budget. And from there, we can go to a monthly budget. A lot of times our clients are starting at a monthly budget. Say, well, I’d like to run a campaign, but we have $3 ,000. Like, well, if we’re at $50 a click, that’s going to be tough. So, um, yeah, that’s how I operate. That comes from somebody sharing me their expertise about eight years ago. And a lot has changed in that world with.

a lot of automated bidding strategies and of course, Performance Max, which is using more than just search. So how do you approach budgeting with your clients?

Cory Lindholm (05:51.083)
Yeah, so I like to look at it. I mean, it really is a mathematical question, so I do approach it from from a standpoint of mathematics. So if I don’t have any data like I am just starting new, I’m going to rely on keyword research tools, whether that’s Google’s built in free keyword planner, whether it’s some rush, nonpaid promotion, you know, the A refs or whatever I have available to me to get a rough idea of what the average cost per clicks are going to be. And then I’m also going to be.

setting the expectations and discussing this with the client of, or whoever I’m working with that, how much are you willing to lose to test this? Because at the end of the day, if we need to come at it more conservatively, that needs to be weighed very heavily. Whereas if we are just saying, you know what, cause this happens sometimes they’re VC backed or something, they just say, just, you know, blow the top off the budget. Like we just want to spend and get data as quickly as possible so we can make decisions as quickly as possible in terms of optimization.

I’m going to approach those two things differently. So I would say the mathematical standpoint is really going to be in order to determine your profitable bidding level for your cost per clicks. It’s really simple math. It’s once you have conversion rates, conversion rate times whatever your max cost per acquisition can be. So if you’re saying the max you can pay for a lead is a hundred dollars.

and you have some kind of reliable conversion rate, let’s say you’ve got a thousand clicks and 30 plus conversions at least like bare bare minimum, you can go ahead and calculate, okay, the max we can pay for a click is now X conversion rate times your max cost per lead or cost per acquisition. So you can come at it that way as well to say the max we can pay for a bid or a click is gonna be this. Therefore, if we extrapolate that out, how many clicks do we need to usually get in order to get a conversion?

Then you’re just going to be doing one divided by your conversion rate. And that’ll let you know, maybe on average it takes 30 clicks to get a conversion. So it’s a little more technical. It’s a little more mathematical, but that’s the real answer to really try to get a rough idea of what is this going to look like to get the volume of leads that we need as a business, maybe based on our sales team being able to close those leads. So kind of reconstructing, you’ll do some, some reverse engineering.

Cory Lindholm (08:01.387)
That’s as you have data and like going back to my original point, if you don’t have anything, you’re kind of doing a little bit of guesswork and it is what it is. We’ve got to see what those cost per clicks actually end up being based on your quality scores in the account. And then as we get some data, a couple of weeks, a few weeks, we’ll have a better idea of people to better estimate those budgets.

Curtis Hays (08:19.62)
Are you lost yet, Tom?

Tom Nixon (08:21.468)
I have a clarifying question. Does that count as being lost? No, I something that you Yeah. So what are we talking about here? No. So you mentioned something you touched on something that struck a chord with me and that is the question. I don’t know whether you actually ask this or just sort of metaphorically pose it, but what are you willing to lose to test this? And I think with any form of marketing or advertising, I think the ROI at the beginning is very poor.

Cory Lindholm (08:23.915)
Please.

Curtis Hays (08:24.26)
But that means you’re following.

Cory Lindholm (08:29.995)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (08:48.7)
And I’ll be the first to admit that typically speaking, right? So you’ve got this investment with very little return, and then it’s got this dinosaur tail that eventually starts really yielding, you know, results. But that takes patience typically in the advertising world. Is that true here? And how do you preach patience and how do you achieve patience from maybe a skeptic client who’s just starting this and they’re like, I want to see the clicks. I want to see the conversions.

Cory Lindholm (09:13.035)
Yes. Yeah. So I usually will ask them whether they’ve ever done any sort of investing in the stock market or otherwise, and remind them that this is really, it’s a little bit of the same. Uh, you have to be able to be willing to risk in order to get those rewards. Um, and this, now this is not crypto investing, you know, it’s usually going to be a much better ROI. That’s more consistent, but, um, but yeah, it’s going to be investment. We’re going to have to take some risks. The more risk we’re willing to take upfront, the quicker we can get over.

Tom Nixon (09:35.388)
Hehehehe

Cory Lindholm (09:42.699)
that trough that’s going to happen in performance so we can get that data very quickly. If we come at it very conservatively, it’s going to take quite a while, especially if you don’t have a lot of clicks that are coming through, if you don’t have a lot of conversions coming through, it’s going to take us a long time before we have statistically significant amounts of data to actually make confident decisions in where we should be moving our budget to or whether this is a good channel for us. I’ll throw in one extra thing, which is if you’re going to be looking at…

your budget like on a monthly basis or annual or quarterly basis also consider dynamic budgets. So I think a lot of clients or businesses come at this and they think the max I’m willing to spend on Google ads is let’s say $10 ,000 a month or maybe it’s just $1 ,000 a month. Also consider if you have a very set bucket of money that you can spend on Google ads, for example,

You don’t have to spend it evenly throughout the year. You can approach this more dynamically. If you notice there’s some seasonality in your business, let’s say you’re an accounting firm and around April things skyrocket, cost per clicks go up, don’t spend the same amount every month starting with January. Make sure that you’re spending more in those months you expect some kind of peak seasonality or for costs to rise and conversion rates to rise. Very important.

Tom Nixon (10:57.98)
Okay, Curtis, I heard the term statistically significant, which is my cue to toss it back to you.

Curtis Hays (11:03.044)
Well, okay. So there were, there were a couple of great points I heard out of that. The first thing, um, first I’ll have you elaborate Corey, and then I’ll go into the second thing. You mentioned quality scores, which for those who aren’t in that PPC world don’t fully understand. So I want, um, to clarify that, but it’s super important. Um, so instead of me explaining it, I’m going to let you explain what, I mean, I know what it is, so we’re not testing me here, but I want to.

Cory Lindholm (11:27.947)
Of course. Yeah. Yeah.

Curtis Hays (11:33.412)
Explain quality scores to those who don’t know and how it, uh, it’s a huge factor, I think, honestly, in selecting or holding your vendor accountable. If you are using somebody to manage your campaigns for you, their job is to look at quality scores and making sure they’re optimizing your campaigns to get the most out of your budget. So explain what quality scores mean real quick.

Cory Lindholm (11:58.315)
Yes. Yeah, I like to think of quality score as well. It’s a score. It’s a grade, right? So Google is going to look at your landing page, your ad copy in your ads and the keywords that you’re targeting, as well as factoring in some bids and budgeting to essentially just give you an overall score for each keyword that says, you know, add a 10, 10 being the best, you know, one being the worst.

Um, how, how well is everything fitting together? How well are the keywords are targeting? Are those in the ad copy? How well, how well do we think this ad copy will be received by the target audience? How well does your landing page help answer the question of the search? These are all the questions that are, these are all the factors that are weighed into that score. The better that score and Google’s incentivizing you to get that better score by lowering your average cost per clicks. So that’s something that’s a big, big factor, especially for any lead generation based account.

Curtis Hays (12:51.012)
So let’s say the platform Tom is telling us it’s $50 a click for that window campaign, and we’re at a quality score of a three, we go and improve that to a seven, we could be down to like 25 or $30. So seven’s really that like target, if I’m right, Corey, of like, at least you’re paying what the, you’re not being penalized in a way for your quality scores at a seven.

If you get higher, you’re likely paying lower than a lot of competitors, but you’re, I mean, if you’re down to that one to three range, you could be taking a big hit. And the, and the thing is it’s a, it’s a smart thing for Google to do because a lot of people want to, let’s say, bid on a competitor name. And you’re going to get sort of penalized for that competitor name because you can’t use their name in your ad copy. You can’t use their name on your website.

So you’re going to get that lower quality score. So you’re going to have to pay more than the, than the actual company who owns that name for that bid. So it’s a smart thing to do, but it also holds us accountable to like have quality inside the platform and not, it doesn’t get, you know, filled with a bunch of garbage. So, um, the second thing you mentioned, which I think is important for any company who’s going to do this. And.

Cory Lindholm (14:03.435)
Absolutely.

Cory Lindholm (14:07.083)
Absolutely.

Curtis Hays (14:15.588)
Tom, this is a conversation we’ve talked about a lot is really those companies before they enter into any kind of advertising need to have established goals, but what the value of say in lead gen a new customer is and not just the value of maybe that one time purchase or sale, but what the lifetime value potential is that goes on outside of not only what they might spend, but how you could potentially use that.

company or individual after sale as an advocate for the brand? Do they bring referrals in? Tom and I work with some insurance agencies and a lot of their business comes from referrals. So you bring in a new client, that one client on average might send you two or three pieces of business. So the lifetime value of bringing into that client is more than just that one time sale. So that’s what I really heard from you is really important as you’ve got to understand the value of.

the leads or outcome that’s going to come from a qualified lead into a closed deal for you to establish budgets. And then you get into this sort of nitty gritty into the platform with daily budgets and CPCs and seasonality and all these other things.

Cory Lindholm (15:22.923)
Mm -hmm.

Cory Lindholm (15:31.499)
Absolutely. Yeah. I think too many businesses look at it from a standpoint of how many leads did we get and they kind of just keep it there and then, okay, what was the cost per lead? But is it a quality lead based on your say, what is your sales team telling you? If it’s just the person at the front desk, what are they telling you in terms of quality? Cause a lot of agencies could get you a lot of leads and maybe phone calls, but are they actually leading to opportunities, booked appointments, the things that are actually going to put money in your bank account. There’s a big difference in those two strategies.

Um, so sometimes even though your lead volume is going down, but your opportunities, your appointments, your phone calls that turn in transactions, money for your business are going up. I’m okay with that. That’s might be the goal. Sometimes when I come into an account is we’re getting lots of leads leads is not the problem. It’s quality of leads because we’re seeing that some services lead to higher customer lifetime value. How do we optimize to that? Those are usually really good questions to, to come at it.

Tom Nixon (16:26.044)
Optimize. There is a word I understood. So, let’s go to there for a minute. Talk about both of you guys. The data that you’re looking at as a campaign is running because it’s not like let’s set this and then come back and look at 90 days from now and see if it worked. You guys are looking at the stuff daily. I’m assuming hourly. What is some of the analytics you guys are watching and then what are you doing with that data to optimize the performance of these campaigns so you’re not only generating more quality leads but you’re getting a higher quality score.

Curtis Hays (16:54.212)
Let me start this Corey. And then I want to get, I’ve heard you and Michael talk about some things on your podcast that I think definitely relate to this. So we’ve talked about this on our podcast and the offline conversions, because a lot of our clients are in that lead lead gen space. We’re using HubSpot and Salesforce to import those offline conversions back to Google ads. As you mentioned, when you start out running a campaign, you might have to measure clicks and sort of first conversions.

Cory Lindholm (16:56.139)
Thanks.

Curtis Hays (17:23.716)
form fills, phone calls, but you eventually have to move to a model where you’re, you’re informing Google to optimize off of the good leads, not every form fill, just the good ones. And that is Rick and Legion, which is different from e -commerce where you get the sort of real time satisfaction of a sale and you can inform Google off of that right away. You have a lead time with Google. Unfortunately, it’s only 90 days. We only have a 90 day window and Google ads, but, um,

So that’s something we’ve talked about a lot on this podcast is like, you need to measure those offline conversions. You have to have a system like a HubSpot, a Salesforce or a spreadsheet where you’re qualifying the leads. And then we can take those using the GClitter, GBraid values and import them back to Google. And the thing that I heard you and Michael talk about is this difference in conversions over time and conversion value over time, which isn’t something that I’m looking at too closely. So.

Cory Lindholm (18:20.587)
Mm -hmm.

Curtis Hays (18:23.62)
for our clients help you talk about the offline conversions and then talk about that like further analysis and optimization of the conversions over time for lead gen.

Cory Lindholm (18:34.155)
Yeah, so real quick on the conversions over time. So a lot of people, the default, when you log into your Google Ads account and you’re looking at it and you see conversions, conversion value, if you’re using that, you know, conversion or cost per conversion, that’s all based on the time that the click occurred that led to a conversion eventually. Maybe it was the same day, maybe not. Conversions by time, you have to go in, customize your columns and throw these in there. I wish they were, I sometimes wish they were the default, but…

the bidding algorithms, the ones, you know, the automated bidding that they’re using the default ones. So it’s a little risky for them to set that as the default to buy time ones. But the conversions by time, that’s telling you the date the conversion actually occurred. So that can be very valuable because if you’re someone that’s looking at your account every day or you’re just wondering how yesterday went, you probably, unless most of like almost all of your clicks lead to conversions in the same day, looking at yesterday and looking at those default conversion values,

Curtis Hays (19:07.876)
Mm -hmm.

Cory Lindholm (19:31.307)
going to be super valuable for you. It might not tell you the whole story, whereas if you want to see the conversions that happen on a particular date, you’re going to want to use the conversion by time. So it’s really a time and a place to decide which one’s going to be most useful for you, depending on what analysis or questions you want to ask. But I would usually say if you want to know what the bidding algorithm is judging itself off of, let’s say set a target cost per acquisition, look at those default columns to see what cost per conversions are in a given time range.

If you want to see what conversions actually happened during a certain set time and when those conversions happened, conversion by time would be a good option for you. In terms of the offline conversion values, so imports, I love this because I feel like it’s, I hate to use the word hack, but it’s something just very underutilized, right? Google can only see what Google can see from a privacy standpoint, but also just the technical limitations. They can’t see your entire conversion funnel and they don’t have any way to do that.

Curtis Hays (20:07.396)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

Cory Lindholm (20:28.043)
This is a way that we communicate to Google. You didn’t just get us a lead. You got to say fantastically like this person led to this much actual revenue profit for our business. Here is that information. Google can then utilize its contextual signals as they say, you know, audience, audiences, the devices, the, the geography is whatever to understand. Okay. I’m, I’m figuring out patterns here and I can do a better job when you give me those values of who a good customer is.

versus who a decent one is versus, ah, this one doesn’t usually lead to any actual true value for the business. I’m going to set my bids differently for you. I’m going to be willing to spend more on a click for these very high value customers potentially than these other people. You can imagine the competitive advantage in these ad options when you have that coming into the account.

Curtis Hays (21:15.876)
Right. Right. This, this sounds familiar, doesn’t it, Tom? Where we talk to clients about, I think most of our conversations are centered around the quality of leads. I’m not talking to clients about how many clicks came from the campaigns and what their CPCs were and how many form fills. That data is available, but we mentioned on a previous podcast that there’s tracking that we’re doing, and then there’s measuring and measuring the offline conversions. What’s good, what’s not.

good, feeding the good data back to Google. That’s the information I want. And it sets up a system accountability for the client where like the onus is also on them on the performance side to give us feedback. And that feedback is really informing us and allowing us to pull some levers, but also allow the platforms themselves to do what they need to do to optimize.

Tom Nixon (22:08.092)
I think what’s been especially helpful for the non -expert is some of the visualizations that you show in a dashboard that you can show what Corey was just describing is that this was only we only got maybe two clicks. They both converted and they both resulted in a $20 ,000 plus sale for you when somebody can see that they’re like what’s another 50 bucks on a few clicks, right? So those are very important and they allow part of I think

what makes those useful and why I love the way you approach it, Curtis and Corey, you chime in on it is you’re very transparent to the end user who doesn’t get, you know, what did he say about G Clit? I don’t even know what that is. You know, all of the stuff that’s over even my head and I live in this stuff every day. But the transparency is critical. So do you use those same type of visualizations and dashboards, Corey?

Curtis Hays (22:50.948)
Hey.

Cory Lindholm (23:01.195)
Oh man. Yeah. Not to get too technical, but like I said, I’m a, I’m a data scientist and data analyst first. And then I’m a Google advertiser second in the sense that we are data analysts. Uh, don’t kid yourself. If you’re a Google ads expert, you’re a data analyst here. You might be a creative, uh, first person and that’s, that’s, there is a time and a place for that as well. But if you can’t understand and look at the data correctly,

Tom Nixon (23:23.068)
Thank God.

Cory Lindholm (23:25.579)
You’re going to be tough pressed to when you have a challenging client or they have challenging goals to hit those goals. If you’re not good with working with data. So I think at the end of the day, absolutely. I, I build dashboards for both me internally and whether that’s, um, with Python scripting or whether that’s with power BI or whether it’s a Tableau or Google sheets or, um, Looker studio formerly known as a Google data studio. I have a lot of different dashboards depending on the needs and the security needs.

of the client, I’ll build those out, and as well as the complexity. I think one of the most valuable things you can do in terms of dashboards and data visualization is to bring in all of the relevant and valuable data sources into those reports, right? So I think a lot of agencies get comfortable with just sort of building a Looker Studio dashboard. It’s live updated by Google and it just has a Google ads data. And that’s awesome. There is a good place for that. It’s more than most agencies will offer, honestly. But if you can bring in…

their Shopify data, some of their CRM data, like their HubSpot data as well, and layer all of that data together, we can really get interesting insights to tell the whole story of how is the business doing in utilizing this channel and how does this channel fit into all of your marketing in general. It’s very, very valuable. So when I’m building out dashboards and data visualizations, I’m usually going to try as best I can to build and connect all of those other data points to tell the whole story.

Tom Nixon (24:48.156)
I have a question for both of you again. So, we’re gonna play a game of factor fiction. So, I’m gonna let Cory go first cuz I already know Curtis’s answer. Factor fiction. Google advertising and pay -per -click advertising is great for consumer product goods and e -commerce websites but it has no place in the marketing arsenal for B2B professional services providers. Factor fiction.

Cory Lindholm (24:55.051)
Yeah, love it.

Cory Lindholm (25:10.795)
Oh wow, if I could only show some of my accounts and the results that I’ve gotten, yeah, totally fiction, fiction, absolutely.

Tom Nixon (25:19.708)
So just explain for the skeptic, maybe who doesn’t believe that their firm could get hired via a click on a website or in a Google ad, explain why they should not be so skeptical.

Cory Lindholm (25:30.955)
Sure. So if you’ve ever been in the position where you’re looking for making a decision in terms of software, choosing a dentist, whatever it may be in terms of you want to go get a service perform, maybe it’s to fix your car. What do you usually do? You usually search on Google. Maybe you’re a weirdo and you use the Bing or Microsoft search engine. That’s fine. No judgment. But most people are going to use a search engine or Alexa or whatever.

Curtis Hays (25:52.356)
What?

Cory Lindholm (25:58.731)
to search for that service and would you, if you were driving down the road and you could, and you see the billboards that are all over the place, there’s a time and a place. Most of them nowadays are accident lawyers and there’s a reason for that. It’s about placement. It’s about relevance at the time the advertisement is seen. In Google, if someone’s searching for the local dentist or their boiler broke and they need an HVAC person,

They’re going to search for that and they’re going to say, I need, you know, emergency service HVAC or something like they’re heating and cooling service specialists or something. You want to be there. That person is they have their credit card ready to go, or maybe if it’s B2B Saws or something, they’re in the research process and trying to compare you to all of these other softwares. And they’re, they’re going through that research process, trying to understand what do I need? What are my needs? What are the ways I even should think about?

getting a software, what types of software do I need? If you’re not involved in that person’s research process, you’ll probably get left behind to all the other competitors out there that decide, hey, this is worth taking a little bit of our marketing spend and putting it on these search engines. So that way, when the person is ready to make the decision to actually buy something or fill out a form and talk to our sales team, we’re going to be we’re going to be top of mind. That’s where you want to be. You don’t want to miss that opportunity.

Tom Nixon (27:14.62)
Yeah, well said Curtis factor fiction. Do you agree with Corey?

Curtis Hays (27:18.052)
Oh, I agree with Corey. That’s total fiction. I mean, uh, I’ve made a living helping companies on Google, uh, whether it’s organic or paid. Uh, we know, I think HubSpot did a study a while back, you know, 80 % of people are going to research a brand before they make a purchase decision. So whether it’s in that initial stage or they did see a billboard and now they’re going to, what does this company have any reviews or, you know,

Give me a little bit more information about the brand. They’re going to do a search. And so, um, I think it’s, did I say it’s, it’s like 80 % or something like that. So, you know, to make sure that your placement is there, um, a lot of times if you don’t have that organic position, or even if you do the, the paid is, is likely something you’re going to need to consider. And then your approach to it is different. If you’re HVAC versus a company selling a piece of software, there are different.

tools or tricks in the bag sort of speak that you could use inside of Google to get visibility. Yep.

Tom Nixon (28:28.188)
I think the the stat I’m most familiar with is 87 % because it sticks out because it’s so high. The B2B buyer or decision maker 87 % of the time is doing some form of web research on prospective service providers. So, alright, Curtis, we’re getting near the end of our time. I’m going to allow you to ask the last question since I don’t know what we’re talking about.

Curtis Hays (28:50.116)
Well, I’m going to put Corey on the spot a little bit here. Maybe I did not prep him for this question. Qasim at Solutions A, he likes to make a lot of predictions or he’s really good at where he sees the state of things. And so where do you see PPC in 2024? Again, I don’t need you to make any predictions, but what I’ve seen over the last couple of years is CPCs go up.

Cory Lindholm (28:52.459)
Awesome.

Curtis Hays (29:20.036)
Especially in search, which I think is fueled a lot by new people entering the market. COVID, there were a lot of shifts in COVID after COVID. Money that was otherwise diverted to events, marketing, especially in the B2B space. E -commerce maybe didn’t change as much, but B2B, there was a lot of money in e -commerce or just sales activities and different things like that. Money shifted to digital because digital was still operating the way it was prior.

Cory Lindholm (29:49.707)
Mm -hmm.

Curtis Hays (29:49.956)
So with all these new companies entered the market and Google is an auction. And so the more people who are bidding, the higher the cost because there’s only so many positions that can display on the first page. So I think with that, we were having to be a bit more creative. That’s what I’m seeing, you know, pushing more companies to consider video doing commercials because YouTube’s really inexpensive to branch out into some other.

areas we’re doing more advertising on LinkedIn now and they’ve been evolving their platform. So where do you see paid? Um, and, and you’re here to talk about Google. So even Google specifically or paid in general, what do you see in the marketplace right now as far as trends and what’s what we should be focused on.

Cory Lindholm (30:38.539)
Yeah, I absolutely agree. Um, I think it’s to be expected that cost per clicks will go up. Um, obviously inflation will pay, play a part in that. Um, and demand will play a part in that. So as more advertisers, um, see the value of Google ads, um, which always shocks me that people don’t see the value and they start with, you know, a tick tock ad before they’ve even tried search. It shocks me to think that, because, you know, again, I think of that as when I’m searching to, and when I want to answer a question, I go to Google.

you know, that’s a good spot to maybe advertise. But regardless, as our abilities to utilize machine learning and predictive algorithms, we as those continue to evolve, we can get a better idea of utilizing true attribution. So where where is my where should my money actually be being spent? Where is the actual value coming from? Because all ad channels will want to raise their hand and say, I should get full credit for that sale.

But how do you decide if Facebook ads is saying, I got the sale and Google ads is also saying, I got the sale. Who do you trust? These attribution models, these softwares, those types of things, those tools are going to help advertisers become better informed as to where should I spend more money. So I think that’s going to play a part. So you’re going to see increased competition there. You’re going to see better utilization of your data. I think really smart advertisers are starting to get more data scientists involved in the Google ads.

data and their marketing data in general. And they they’re seeing that investment be worthwhile because they’ve got all this data sitting around. They’ve been spending money on these marketing channels, internal, external, whatever, and they want to use it. They want to activate the data. Um, and it’s just been sitting there. They’ve been, they’ve been told for years, you know, you should use your data. It’s, it’s, uh, you know, it’s the new oil. That’s your true currency for your business. So I think you’re going to see better utilization of the data, which is going to make it more competitive. It’s going to be driving costs up, but I think.

This is just my own hypothesis. Those higher costs for smart advertisers are going to be more worthwhile than they ever were. You might’ve been paying a little bit more for each cost per click. You may be paying more for each click, but you’re, I think you’re going to be usually getting better value out of it. Now it’s debatable whether Google’s doing a better job or not with their automated bidding. But my assumption is with the way that these machine learning models work, the more information, the more data they have, the better they get at doing their job. And in this case, it’s predicting.

Cory Lindholm (33:01.163)
conversion rates, for example, or the average basket value of someone, the e -commerce space. So as we get more and more data and we’re feeding it to the Google machine, it’s going to do a better job of getting you what you actually tell it that you want, which makes it vital that you’re working with someone that actually knows how to communicate with Google, those types of insights and act and activating your data so that we can give data the information it needs to do a better job. Um, so that’s where I see it going to your point. CPCs are going to go up.

Yeah, it’s gonna cost a little bit more to play the game, but the game I think is gonna be more valuable at the end of the day because of those things.

Curtis Hays (33:34.98)
Yeah, I’ll be excited to see, you know, good attribution tools on the lead gen side. I know some of my e -commerce clients are using triple whale right now and they’ve been getting a lot of value out of triple whale. Have you seen anything work outside of stuff that you’ve built on the attribution side for lead gen?

Cory Lindholm (33:42.987)
Mm -hmm.

Cory Lindholm (33:55.179)
Yeah, for Legion, I mean, I hope that HubSpot has something that’s, you know, yeah.

Curtis Hays (33:59.652)
They do have some tools if you’re connecting LinkedIn and Facebook and your Google ad platforms. You can do that in the marketing module or whatever you call it. We are doing with some clients. It’s better than nothing, honestly. I do see Google Analytics hopefully moving in the right direction. We just have these key events now, so they’re separating what a conversion is.

Cory Lindholm (34:15.403)
Right. Exactly.

Curtis Hays (34:27.524)
We, they used to be called goals in the old analytics and now they switched it to conversions. And I think that may be confused some people and conversion has a very specific meaning. I think when we talk about conversions and that a lot, I was getting into a lot of analytics accounts where people were setting up conversions in GA four that weren’t really conversions. And I think this was smart for them to separate that and just call them key events. But I hope this is on a path moving forward where they’re.

Cory Lindholm (34:38.731)
Yes.

Curtis Hays (34:56.388)
Setting it up to do better attribution and get more accuracy between what we’re seeing in Google analytics versus what we’re seeing in Google ads Everybody’s always fighting for that credit like you talked about like if Facebook wants credit for this conversion Google ads wants credit for this conversion They came through an organic visit to like

Cory Lindholm (35:07.915)
Yeah, everyone’s… Yeah.

Cory Lindholm (35:15.467)
Yes, exactly. Yeah. But I think it got, yeah. Yeah.

Tom Nixon (35:17.884)
And the sales rep closed it. Right.

Curtis Hays (35:19.62)
Yeah, good point, Al.

Tom Nixon (35:23.42)
they want their cred as well. Cool. Well, Corey, this is great. Corey Lindholm website is adsbycory .com. We will link to that in the show notes to your LinkedIn. I just wanted to state for the record that I was just pretending to be ignorant this whole time. Okay, that was all just a gag. I got it all. You guys did pretty good. I’ll offline. I’ll give you some pointers on on some more of this particular arcane elements of

Curtis Hays (35:24.42)
Yep.

Tom Nixon (35:50.172)
Google Ads and Analytics. Until then, though, guys, this was great. I mean, watching you guys dirt out on the stuff. I know you guys didn’t go nearly as deep as you could, and I guess I will thank you for that.

Cory Lindholm (35:59.787)
My pleasure. Thank you guys for having me. This was fun.

Curtis Hays (36:02.052)
Yeah, thank you, Corey.

Tom Nixon (36:03.932)
Alright, see you next time on Bull Horns and Bull’s Eyes, everyone.