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July 23, 2024 94 mins

Enhance your understanding of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) with the expert insights of Mike Shaug, Founder and CEO of Premier Online Marketing. This episode offers a thorough examination of PPC campaigns tailored to the automotive and power sports industries, beginning with an in-depth analysis of the buying funnel. Mike provides a detailed exploration of essential keyword categories, ranging from high-volume, low-intent keywords to highly targeted, high buyer-intent keywords. He covers industry terms, dealer-specific phrases, and finance-related keywords, emphasizing the importance of aligning your budget and goals for maximum effectiveness.

Discover how to optimize your new vehicle PPC campaigns to attract high-intent traffic. Mike shares his expertise on incorporating leasing terms, trim lines, and specific model years to engage car enthusiasts ready to make a purchase. Learn how promoting upcoming models, such as the 2025 Toyota 4Runner, can generate leads even before the vehicles are available. Mike also provides valuable advice on optimizing keywords for used car campaigns, stressing the importance of updating keyword lists based on current inventory and understanding the benefits and limitations of dynamic campaigns.

In our comprehensive discussion on budget allocation and finance strategies, you will learn how to manage your ad spend effectively by targeting geo-specific dealer terms and finance keywords that indicate purchase readiness. We also address the necessity of brand defense strategies to safeguard your traffic from competitors. 

Lastly, we analyze inefficiencies in the automotive industry's advertising spend, highlighting common pitfalls in current digital marketing practices and frustrations with Google's platform. This episode is essential for anyone aiming to master their PPC strategy and enhance their digital marketing efforts in the automotive sector.

Premier Online Marketing helps businesses grow through smart SEO, content, and search strategies. Learn more at www.premieronlinemarketing.com

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Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hello and welcome back to the Palmcast.
Today we're going to focus on aniche in the PPC, the search
engine marketing, the SEM world.
That's right, our favoritetopic usually Keyword categories
, and I'm really I think this isnot only an important subject,
but I think it once again willallow Mike, for you to really

(00:22):
give some more detail, get intothe weeds.
It's important for car dealers,it's important for power sports
dealers, it's really importantprobably for every business
that's using Google Ads.
But if you think about boostingyour visibility, driving
traffic, increasing salesopportunities which are three of
the probably biggest reasonswhy any business and your

(00:42):
business for those of you tuningin and listening and or
watching that's why you're doingGoogle ads, and this episode is
going to help deliver someinsights for you that you
definitely don't want to miss.
You're probably coming back forinformation here, because you
know it's not just surface levelor boilerplate stuff that
appeases you, but it reallygives you insights into things
that can help you get smarterabout your campaigns, whether

(01:03):
you're managing them yourself orsomeone else is doing it on
your behalf.
So it's not a podcast withoutour super expert, founder CEO at
Premier Online Marketing, mikeSchaug.
How are you doing, mike?
I'm doing great.
How are you?
I'm doing good, really good,looking forward to another great
episode.
I want to start I know you havesome thoughts around buying

(01:26):
funnel things that get talkedabout top of funnel and I really
want to start there by justkind of opening up but just get
your thoughts there on just kindof setting the stage for what
we're going to be talking abouttoday with keyword categories.

Speaker 2 (01:37):
So I this conversation is going to be
primarily focused on cardealerships and motorcycle
dealerships, power sports andauto, but this can be applied to
a lot of other industries.
I'll probably do onespecifically on real estate and
apartments soon.
But in a nutshell, everybusiness that requires traffic
to meet its business goals hasdifferent levels of intent or

(01:59):
keyword categories that servethem at different parts of the
funnel.
And obviously we're allfamiliar with the funnel.
We've got the very top of thefunnel, which is lowest intent,
highest volume, the costs for ittends to be like medium to high
.
And you have mid funnel, whichis a little further down, a
little bit more clarity on whatthat customer is potentially

(02:20):
looking for, that if the volumeis lower, the lower you go down
the funnel, there are lesspeople in that category.
Then you have bottom of funnel,which is high intent, low
volume, super high cost and highROI, and then finally, at the
very, very end, you already gotthe customer.
So retention is really thefinish line of that buying

(02:42):
funnel.
And something that comes out alot when I do audits is what are
the kind of keyword categoriesthat I should go after?
So there are a number ofdifferent categories that I want
to put forward in thisconversation and kind of talk
about what stage of the funnelthey fit into and where you
should invest your money andprobably where you should not.

(03:03):
So that's that's my uh feel onthe funnel.
Do you want me to jump straightinto category number one?

Speaker 1 (03:10):
Well, yeah, I want to do one little thing just to
help the audience understandthat there are a handful of
categories that you're probablyfamiliar with, and because we're
going to focus mostly forautomotive and power sports
dealers.
There are always people in anaudience where they don't want
to raise their hands and say,well, I'm not really sure which
ones they are.
And because I know on thisepisode we're going to talk

(03:31):
about keyword categories thatpeople probably not really
considered or heard of.
So, just very quickly for theaudience, I'm going to tell you
we're going to talk about whatgeneric terms are for an
industry.
So there are always industrygeneric terms and we'll give you
some examples of those.
That's a dealer or new cardealership or best SUV, and I'm

(03:54):
going to let you get into moredescriptions of these.
But then another keywordcategory is new inventory, used
inventory, dealer terms, financekeywords, brand-related keyword
terms A lot of times, and youand I have been in this for a
long, long time.
We really have almost apioneering history of paid
search within these industries.
That's why I think what youshare on these episodes is so

(04:18):
critically important, becauseyou can actually get into the
depth that really matters.
Get into the depth, that reallymatters.
But in the case of all of thesekeywords, that is where I think
most people have either a lackof knowledge or perhaps that,
but a deep level of interest oflike well, why does it matter?
So, going back up to the top ofthis list, let's just hand it

(04:41):
back over to you.
Specifically, on industrygeneric keywords, how do you see
these?
Like dealer and new cardealership Are they contributing
to the visibility and the reachof a car dealer's Google Ads
campaign?

Speaker 2 (04:56):
Yeah.
So if I'm a car dealership I'mgoing to probably care about six
different keyword categories.
The first on that list and thislist is going to kind of
conform to high funnel to lowfunnel.
So at the very top of thefunnel we have industry generic.
So what would that be?
Car dealer, car lot, you know.

(05:18):
Second chance car buyer, youknow car auction.
Car, you know like supergeneric stuff that doesn't say I
know what type of car I want.
It's not even indicating like abrand or sometimes, most of the
time, not even a type of car,like a truck or whatever,
although you can get like newcar dealer, used car dealer,

(05:39):
motorcycle dealer, you know carsales.
It's super generic.
It's top of funnel.
There is a ton of search volume.
Surprisingly, it's kind ofinteresting, given the amount of
information we have about theautomotive industry and a lot of
the industries we serve, howmany people still are at that
top of funnel level.

(06:00):
The thing to note about genericor industry generic terms is we
don't recommend going after themat all unless you have an
extremely large budget.
And the reason why that'simportant is there's a
tremendous amount of searchvolume at the top of funnel
level for a new car dealer.
But if I'm a Subaru dealer or aHonda dealership, I'm going to
want to invest and capture thatuser when they're a lot closer

(06:22):
to the end of the funnel andcapture that user when they're a
lot closer to the end of thefunnel.
So yeah, that's kind of.
The first category is industrygeneric terms.
Basically, what it says about acustomer is I'm looking for a
car, I'm looking for the carthat I can afford, I don't care
what brand it is.
It doesn't really tell the cardealership if this is a high or
low quality user to potentiallygo after.

(06:44):
So that's why we tend to steerpeople away from the top of the
funnel because there's so muchmid and bottom funnel traffic
that you can go after.
That is going to have asignificantly higher ROI for you
.

Speaker 1 (06:56):
So not a lot of clarity when you're that far up
and it can get really expensive.
Yeah, so how about somestrategies that dealers would be
potentially want to looking atThey'd want to be looking at to
optimize bids on things that arelike high competition, things
like new SUV or buy a new truck,things like that?

Speaker 2 (07:18):
Okay.
So if you have more than$50,000 a month to spend, you
know, let's say you're in the$20,000 to $25,000 range then,
yeah, allocate $3,000, $4,000towards generic.
You could test a small campaignwith it to see how it performs.
But again, set up the campaigncorrectly so you have all of

(07:44):
your themes correctly.
Maps don't have new cardealership and used car
dealership in the same ad groupso you can kind of pause
keywords and ad groups thataren't performing for you.
Um.
So definitely, running searchis is one way to do it.
It is expensive though, like Isaid before, a better way to
leverage that type of top offunnel traffic is actually build
those keyword lists out forYouTube.

(08:04):
So YouTube has much lower CPCsthan Google search does right
now.
That could change.
But if I have, if I'm being ona keyword like car lot or buy
here, pay here finance orsomething like that, that click
on Google ads or on the Googlesearch results will cost me five
to ten dollars sometimes,depending on the market, whereas

(08:26):
on um, on youtube, that clickwill be a matter of cents.
So if you're going to be goingfor super broad, low intent
keywords, make sure that you'releveraging the medium that does
it in the most cost effectiveway.
So google search would not bechoice number one for me.
It would actually be YouTube.

Speaker 1 (08:47):
Okay, that's a great tip right there Certainly a
great tip.
Are there ways to potentiallythink okay, we need to have a
balance right Between you knowhow how we're basically going
after generic keywords versusthe more specific longer tail
type of keywords, keywordsversus the more specific, longer
tailed type of keywords.
Is there a happy medium here?

Speaker 2 (09:12):
Again, it really depends on how much budget you
have, because the other keywordcategories that I'm going to
show you next have a tremendousamount of search volume and
you're going to get more ROI outof it.
So, again, my note on genericwould be don't do it.
Or, if you do note on genericwould be don't do it.
Or, if you do, leverage a lowercpc medium like youtube to do
it.
Or, you know, have a smallsearch campaign to test it out

(09:32):
before expanding?

Speaker 1 (09:33):
would this?
Would there be anything for, uh, somebody who's just got a new
franchise?
Or if they're ever like a in abuy sell and they're going to
change the name of thedealership, is that a place
where generic might be a?
Absolutely don't mess with itthere.
Or maybe you do want to carveout, especially if you're budget
planning.
Is there anything in those twotype of scenarios where you

(09:55):
might consider generic becauseyou need all traffic?

Speaker 2 (09:59):
Right.
I mean, well, if you're goingthrough kind of an awareness
phase where a brand is changingor you're opening a new
franchise or buying a franchiseor something like that, you want
as many people to know aboutthe change as possible.
So, for a period of time, thatis where that sort of more top
of funnel approach could makesense.
Because, let's say, it's a newharley name, it's in dealership

(10:22):
uh, people are going to knowthat dealership by a different
name when they won't know it byany name at all because it's a
brand new franchise.
And in that case you might wantto bid on a keyword motorcycle
dealer, cruiser dealer, uh youknow.
Or very all these differentpermutations of kind of I'm
looking for something harley-ishthat I would send to you to hit

(10:44):
the user with a reallycompelling ad 15, 30 seconds,
one minute and that would be agreat way to engage that person.
Because the thing about genericis it's really hard to ascertain
timeline.
If someone is saying car dealeror motorcycle dealer, that
doesn't tell me that they haveany kind of intensity or urgency

(11:05):
around making the transaction.
So, yeah, yeah.
So you just want to make youknow your if you need to
introduce your brand orreintroduce your brand to a lot
of people.
That would be the one place Iwould consider it.
I would still go, though, um, Iwould.
I would focus more on, on thenext category, war, which I can
jump over to to now if we'reready.

Speaker 1 (11:26):
Yeah, absolutely so.
On generic, I think peopleyou're hearing Mike say there is
some use case, but sparinglyand make sure you have the right
amount of budget for it,because you could burn through a
lot of money.
The category is very broad,sitting at the very top of the.
In this case we're talkingusing the analogy of funnel.

(11:46):
That means that, yeah, there'sa lot of stuff up there, but
it's highly competitive, highlyexpensive and you got to be
smart.
So, yeah, great, great stuff.
Yeah, let's get to the nextkeyword category.

Speaker 2 (11:57):
Right.
So the next category is newinventory.
It's still fairly high funneland that's kind of that's one
that took me a long time tofigure out that if someone was
looking for a 2024 Honda CRV,for example, like that's someone
that is feature shopping a caror they're ready to buy that car
, you know.
So inventory tends to be kindof more of a mid funnel strategy

(12:19):
.
It's definitely not top offunnel, but it's the cars that
you sell, it's what you have onyour lot right now or what's
coming in from the OEM.
So you have to go after it andit doesn't matter what OEM you
have.
You could have, you know,harley, you could have Honda,
you could have BMW cars.
There's always a ton of surgevolume at the inventory level,

(12:43):
which is why generic doesn'treally make sense.
If I can, if I can, get in frontof people that are looking for
2024 honda accord, why would Igo after buying new sedan or
something like that?
It's the intent is much higher.
It says I'm curious about thistype of car.
I know the brand, um, I.
I'm looking for a specific year, ideally, or I'm specifying new

(13:05):
or even better.
I'm saying products like HondaAccord Austin, honda Accord
Dallas, the more specificity,they add, whereas the year, the
brand and the location, thatincreases that level of intent
and there's a tremendous amountof search volume at that new

(13:25):
inventory level.

Speaker 1 (13:28):
Very interesting.
You and I have ventured througha lot of new vehicle campaigns
and keywords over the years andyou're talking about some of
those things that get into thespecifics, which I think are
really important.
Are there also areas aroundlike leasing type of keywords

(13:48):
here, that kind of play in um?
You know, definitely I thinkthere are probably a lot of
people that might be interestedin that.
I mean, it's affordability.
I think it'll be interesting tosee if leases continue to be a
big play for people these days.

Speaker 2 (14:02):
I like lease in my new car in my new inventory
campaign.
Typically the way we split itwill be by trim line.
For instance, sedans, trucks,SUVs.
The products under thosedifferent trim lines should have
the keywords for them in thosedifferent areas.
If the dealership offers leasewhich most still do absolutely

(14:23):
have lease terms in there, addbuy terms in there, add finance
terms in there, very few peoplewill actually look for stuff.
A keyword that says finance,offer lease.
Add Acura, mdx or somethinglike that.
Not a lot of people will do it,but the very few that will are
very high intent.
So it's good to have thosekeywords in the mix because for

(14:44):
the very small amount of peoplethat will go that far on their
intent, signaling you want to bethere for that- yeah, for sure,
I love that.

Speaker 1 (14:53):
I love that tip.
How about, like your specifickeywords?
That's been a topic for many,many years.
People have a lot of differentthoughts around.
Hey, should we put in the 2020,2024 or whatever year?
Obviously, that is usedoftentimes in current model
years, but every once in a whilethere are vehicles that and

(15:16):
we'll get into this we're notinto this keyword category yet,
but something that would beconsidered pre-owned or used.
But while we're on the topic ofnew inventory keywords, share
your thoughts on that, on theimportance of using that.

Speaker 2 (15:34):
Absolutely.
You want to have you know ifwe're in 2024, you want to have
2024 and you want to have 2025,the second they start announcing
and teasing those models outand the second that it is no
longer 2024, you're on toeliminate those keywords.
Because that's just.
The person is indicating theyear and model, which, for cars,
are very specific and varywidely from year to year.
So it's a super valuable intentsignal.

(15:57):
Most people will, the vastmajority of people will say
Honda CR-V and they will notindicate new Honda CR-V or 2024.
But there will be some and youwant to make sure that you have
those keyword variants in playso you can capture those users
and the value of that traffic.
If someone's looking for a 2024Honda CR-V versus a new Honda

(16:19):
CR-V, I think 2024 is a morevaluable keyword.

Speaker 1 (16:23):
I think 2024 is a more valuable keyword.
Yeah, and for the audience, asyou take all this in, especially
for dealers, and this is bothpower sports and car dealers.
I'll use Toyota as an example,because I've been a Toyota guy
for several years now.
If you haven't seen the 2025Toyota 4Runner and it's uh, and

(16:45):
if you like toyota's, it's a.
It's a really nice, um lookingvehicle.
Yeah, it's super, super cool.
They did a really good job withit, in my opinion.
My point being is um and Ihaven't looked on toyota's site
yet but I don't think that evenat toyotacom, you can actually
go see anything other than justvery basics.
They don't have it listed, asyou can do a whole lot.

(17:08):
Just yet They've been teasingthat, and that is done by every
single vehicle manufacturer,especially when they do
something really big, a bigmodel update or a brand new
model.
Think about how sad for Fordwhen they brought the Bronco
back.
Yeah, hey, by the way, this isgoing to be a pandemic and
there's going to be a supplychain shutdown.

(17:30):
And oh, by the way, most of thehard tops for these things are
made in Wuhan, china.
No joke, I mean, there were allthese things that just made
that difficult.
But, the point being people whowere searching specifically for
that current model year, peoplewho are searching for 2025
forerunner, because they arefans.
Every brand has loyal fans.
As a Tundra guy, when they cameout with the new remodeled

(17:54):
Tundra, I wasn't as excited.
I still like the generationbefore it to look a little bit
better, but still there were alot of people that were excited.
Those are obviously goodreasons, right, because there
are people like that that theymay be a smaller segment of the
search traffic that will type inthe model year, but they are
high intent, right.
And so, even if this percentageis smaller of those people, you

(18:16):
want to make sure that yourkeyword coverage considers that.

Speaker 2 (18:20):
Absolutely, and it's always hard to know when.
How far in advance should youstart running the 2025 Land
Cruiser or 4Runner before itcomes out?
I would say probably a month ortwo on search, but similar to
the generic kind of keywordthing using the New Year's model

(18:42):
that you're not going to getfor six months.
That's a great one for you too,and you want to make sure that
you're driving them to a place.
Ford Bronco did this reallywell and the Tesla Cybertruck
they did this very well.
Where you know, I signed up forthe Cybertruck.
You know I still don't have it.
I'm probably one or two yearsout on the list, but they teased
it.

(19:02):
They showed us a little bit ofthe car, drove us to the landing
page.
You sign up and you're wait.
If you have some way to capturethat intent, like all four
dealers did with the Bronco,where you had to go and get on a
list, you can recreate that forwhatever vehicle you want.
That is for coming.
I mean, I think the models thatwe mentioned today for Toyota

(19:24):
are a no brainer.
Especially when you have, likean iconic rebrand.
You want to make sure thatyou're getting out in front of
it a little bit, but not too far, because you don't actually
have that inventory yet.
But when you're about a monthout from receiving units or can
start taking orders, that's whenyou want to start your Vivo
campaigns for that.

Speaker 1 (19:44):
Yeah, I'll share one more for the automotive audience
that's been at this for youknow, at least a handful of
years.
They may remember this.
But a perfect example of thisalso was when the first
Transformers movie was comingout.
It was the Chevrolet Camaro.
It was them basically doingwhat Ford had previously done

(20:04):
with the Mustang.
It's like, hey, we justChevrolet Camaro.
It was them basically doingwhat Ford had previously done
with the Mustang.
It's like, hey, we justredesigned the Camaro.
It's coming back.
It was bumblebee, that yellowCamaro.
We saw it in all of the you knowtier one advertising.
We saw it on all of the movieads and everyone was like, even
if you weren't a Chevy person ora Camaro person, you're like
that car is badass, it was justawesome.

(20:25):
A billion dollars ofadvertising oh, my goodness,
yeah.
But you know what?
You couldn't get that.
Those ads came out and thepromotion of that movie months,
maybe it was even a year beforeyou could even order one of
those cars.
But Ralph Paglia, an old friend,rest in peace.
Ralph and truly was a mentor tome when I worked with him in

(20:48):
Reynolds in the Reynolds days,way way back.
He was at Courtesy Chevrolet inPhoenix or in Arizona at the
time when that was all goingdown and he brilliantly came up
with a search and landing pagestrategy to harvest the interest
of people, and I don't thinkthere was a single Chevy

(21:09):
dealership in the entire countrythat was harvesting a longer
wait list and more interestaround that because of exactly
what we're talking about.
So I just thought I would addthat, as one of those kind of
like feel good stories and likethinking of really great ideas
that are outside of the box orperhaps more progressive than
what your competitors are doing,the kind of information that we

(21:30):
talk about here on the podcastthat, mike, you're so good at
helping people understandcomplex things, but you know,
simplify.
I think the practicality ofusing some of these actual
stories that have happened willput the light on for some people
to say, man, we should be doingthis.
We should be doing that Because, when you're not, your paid

(21:55):
search providers, especially,are probably one of the places
that get laziest, fastest andwaste your money, and you need
to know these things that wetalk about on this, this podcast
, because it'll help protect youagainst that.
It'll help you make your moneygo even farther and actually
perform better.
So, anyway, I could go on aboutall this stuff.

(22:15):
I love talking to you about it.
It gets me really pumped up.
Um, anyway, let's talk aboutthe next keyword category.

Speaker 2 (22:22):
So similar level or I would say same level of intent,
uh, as new, um, when I.
The mistake I see a lot ofpeople making here is they'll go
too broad and they'll kind ofuse generic, use, use car dealer
, use cars, use trucks um,that's an okay strategy for
driving traffic, but depend, youneed to structure your used

(22:46):
campaigns almost more definitelya lot more carefully than you,
because at least if you're a newToyota dealer, you're
reasonably certain that you'regoing to be selling the Tundra
next year or the RAV4 next year,whereas a used car buyer can
have some kind of rhyme orreason to the inventory.

(23:06):
They go after that and youreally they can be a Toyota
dealer that goes after a lot ofChevy trucks and really wants to
focus a lot on used trucks andbuilding up that inventory.
But, especially with your spendallocation, you want to make
sure that you're just spendingon the units you have on the lot
as much as possible andspending a lesser amount on that

(23:29):
generic used car category.
And the reason why is, again,there's so many people looking
for a 2015 Chevy Silverado.
There's so many people.
So if you have a 2015 chevysilverado, have an ad in an ad
infrastructure in place to servethat versus acquiring the used

(23:52):
truck search, which is what mostdealers do.
Um, which is a lot.
It's just higher, just wayhigher.
Funnel we don't know what kindof truck they actually want.
A lot of times when people willuse a generic term, they're
kind of truck they actually want.
A lot of times when people willuse a generic term, they're
kind of trying to remember whatit was that they were looking
for or they're trying to findwhat they're looking for.
So that could be a Ram, thatcould be a Ford or whatever.

(24:13):
And if you're a dealership thatjust has a bunch of Chevys and
Rams and you don't have a FordF-150, then that user looking
for a Ford F-150 coming to yourwebsite through a used truck
dealer is not going to be avaluable investment.
So my tip here would be makesure that your keyword lists are
updated very frequently on amonthly basis around the

(24:36):
inventory that you have in stock, and try not to invest too much
on kind of the broad used carcategory.

Speaker 1 (24:48):
Gotcha, invest too much on kind of the broad used
car category.
Gotcha, um, is it still?
This is just because you knowI'm not in the paid search realm
uh, every single day, 24, 7,like you are.
Is it still popular?
For do you remember it reachedlocal when, um, I think it was I
won't say the dealer group name, but let's just say in the

(25:09):
Southeast and no, not SoutheastToyota, so I'll just say
Southeast.
But we were at Reach Local andthere was kind of a challenge
thrown down because dealercomwas pushing hardcore the
connector inventory and pipingin your used inventory would

(25:33):
create these specific ads andthat methodology was going to
chase down far better conversionrates, better lead quality,
more sold vehicles.
And I remember this, like itwas last month that you're like
we'll take that challenge and,uh, you actually set up these
campaigns in a test for thisparticular group.

(25:54):
Um, that has a bit of a sassyperson or two that were, well,
one of them still there.
And then we said, well, look,and we ended up proving that no,
no, no, you can stillmeticulously put together a used
car campaign that will by faroutperform the set it and forget
it.
But now I mean, that's so manyyears ago, like almost not 20.

(26:15):
Is there a better?
Has that improved now to wherethey're okay, that's actually
better.

Speaker 2 (26:21):
back then it worked like crap.
Yeah, thanks to a lot of peoplespending and wasting a ton of
money, dynamic campaigns havegotten a lot better.
I think a lot of it has comefrom just shopping campaigns.
Getting so much better.
So dynamic is great.
You could create a keywordwhere all of your used inventory
is and they will dynamicallycreate and bring up and take

(26:44):
down ads for the inventory thatyou have on that page.
There's still definitely a lotof things that you need to do to
set it up correctly.
I definitely think it's a goodidea for dealers to do that as a
layer, maybe for 30% of theirused budget, but the rest of it
I would suggest manuallybuilding out those list.
Hopefully your dealershipdoesn't buy like a Jaguar one

(27:07):
month and a Lotus the next and aMaidlock the next.
Hopefully there's someconsistency to the strategy of
used car acquisition, and thereusually is.
Most of the time, if you're aToyota dealership, you are going
to be selling used Tundras.
You're going to have more usedTundras than you will use
Silverados a lot.
Typically, you'll have more ofthe core brands used inventory.

(27:30):
A lot of people will trade themin for new cars.
But then there will be, likeyour secondary interserity kind
of greatest hit models thatpeople are always looking for
that you know have a really goodmargin.
So sharing that informationwith your agency is going to be
super important for them so theycan know that.
Okay, yeah, it's great that youhave two GeoMetros on the lot,

(27:54):
but we're going to focus more ofyour budget on the 13 Ram
F-150s that you have.

Speaker 1 (28:00):
I had not planned to ask this question but I know
you'll have a good answer for itIf you were a dealer,
especially because as we gotinto the COVID era and then
supply chain and there were alot of things that dealers had
heard about but started to getmore involved with as we kind of

(28:22):
went through some of thesestruggles together, one of which
was acquiring inventory usedinventory to sell and we started
to see more of a rise of someof the services that help and
enable, give a tool set todealers to acquire vehicles from
private sellers, and I startedto notice a little bit, but not

(28:44):
a lot.
Acquire vehicles from privatesellers and I started to notice
a little bit, but not a lot.
And still today I'm thinking Ilike that strategy a lot, but I
don't ever really see a lot ofdealers that think, you know
what, we should actuallyincorporate this into our paid
search campaigns to runcampaigns that would.
So I'm curious to know ifyou've ever seen that or if a
dealer is doing more of their,Even if they're supplementing

(29:04):
what they do from the auctionwith used car acquisition from
private sellers, but they aredoing it.
Is that a good place to do alittle bit of advertising?

Speaker 2 (29:12):
super good place.
That, okay, honestly, is all wedid when everyone gave all
their inventory way out the show.
That is, we pivoted 70% ofbudget to use vehicle
acquisition and it's supereffective.
Um, surprisingly, you, you canget a very good margin on

(29:33):
vehicle acquisitions directly,um, I think, and you can be a
lot more strategic, whereas ifyou go to an auction, you're
buying but they're selling then,and of course, you'll have the
things that kind of conform tothe criteria you're looking for.
But if you want to buy a bunchof Silverados, you can do that
Trade in your Silverado, createa specific landing page for that

(29:54):
.
We do this nationally for acouple of different brands, and
the direct acquisition ofinventory to your website is
super valuable.
I'm sorry, I've got someone atthe door, no problem, go ahead,
we'll.
Someone at the door.

Speaker 1 (30:05):
No problem, go ahead, we'll, yeah, we'll, we'll,
we'll do a post edit.
No problem, don't worry.

Speaker 2 (30:12):
Thank you well, well, in my save, this decided to

(30:49):
show up all right, no, it's noproblem.

Speaker 1 (30:54):
No problem, I put a clip marker on there so I'll
know where to go and grab that,so awesome.
And I'll do like a um littlefinal thought on this.
You just tell me when you'reready, right, yeah, just one
last thought on that one.
I love that you can verify that.
That was a smart strategy andstill can be a smart strategy.

(31:17):
I know the ceo and founder atadvanced vehicle acquisition
network and I was talking withhim recently actually, and now
I'm thinking now I got to tellhim like, hey, if you guys are
not promoting that, um, that's aactually palm and van should be
talking about strategicallyhelping, because it makes a lot

(31:40):
of sense to help your dealersthat are adopting a strategy
like that to have a paid searchpartner that knows what they're
doing with campaigns like that,and I think, yeah, that just
seems like a little bit of anopportunity.
So, for dealers that areinterested or you're already
doing that, don't sleep on thatnow If that's still part of your
strategy.

(32:00):
That's one of those things tome.
I think a lot of dealers arelike, yeah, I know about private
sale or vehicle acquisition orwhatever, but most are not doing
it, and then probably a lot ofthem that are kind of doing it
are missing so manyopportunities to really go in
and make it significant to theirbusiness and bottom line we

(32:20):
actually did a project that onedealer wanted to do is just a
business they wanted to startfor their own vehicle
acquisitions.

Speaker 2 (32:28):
It's a business called get more cheddar and you
know, made a little wordpresswebsite.
Uh, the guy that put ittogether uh, david gruen,
brilliant guy and he puttogether just this kind of like
bubble gum and tape process thatwas mostly automated, for the
person submits their, they get afollow-up.

(32:49):
You really need to have a tightprocess for doing it.
We definitely know how to dothat because we've seen other
people do it the right way.
But if you are just droppingpeople on a page that says, hey,
come by our dealership, they'regoing to be like you have to
make them submit their VIN uh,they.
You've got to follow up withthem via text, um, and you've

(33:09):
got to have a reminder forwhenever the inspection is.
You've got to have a system setup for do we send inspectors in
person or do we set appointmentsat the dealership with the
knowledge that, like 60 of yourdealership set appointments are
going to be flanked on or laid.
So that's why we actually foundthat going to the person and
having a system and these guyseven made a cheddar nobile.

(33:31):
It was like wrapped with cheeselogo and stuff and go and do
these appraisals and their closerate was insane and uh, so that
was a really cool project.
And then later on we workedwith a big motorcycle dealer
group and we still work withthem to nationally acquire
motorcycles uh, typically abovea certain price threshold.

(33:53):
They're not looking to buy yourROM for $1,200.
They're looking for a $15,000modded street bar or much higher
tier motorcycles that they'llbe able to fix up and sell at
higher margin.

Speaker 1 (34:07):
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.
Yeah, I think any dealer that'sdoing that, especially, like I
was saying, with vans technology.
Uh, I was.
I did an interview, Iinterviewed tom last week and he
mentioned something about howtheir, their technology allows

(34:27):
dealers to basically buildcriteria on what they're really
looking for.
It's kind of to what you werejust talking about when, when
you're like I don't want to beharvesting groms or I'm not
looking for more, you know 2008honda civics like you're looking
for things in a particular year, I only want things that are up
to six years old.
I will go up to 120 000 miles onthe vehicle like all this, and

(34:49):
then it goes and collects allthese potential opportunities
from places where privatesellers are putting their stuff.
I'm part of it.
It's just I geek on it becauseI'm a little bit fascinated by
that.
I think if I was in retail, I'dbe like absolutely, we're going
to double down on a strategylike this, um, and it just kind
of puts more lights on for methinking about there's a, there
is a real smart play in thisaround um, your paid search

(35:11):
strategy.
But I digress.
Uh, I don't, I'm not reallydigressing, we're just expanding
.
But let's move on to our nextkeyword, topic or category.

Speaker 2 (35:21):
I should say Okay, and this one's funny because you
don't think of this as beinglow funnel, but it really is and
this is the category that werefer to as dealer terms, which
is Honda dealer, hondadealership, honda dealer near me
it's.
I know I'm looking for a placethat sells this product.

(35:42):
So it's saying what and it'ssaying typically where or near
me or something.
So because of that, it's superhigh intent, similar to
inventory.
But for whatever reason and Idon't know why, honda dealership
Austin will get more leads than2024 Honda CR-V.

(36:02):
For whatever reason, both areindicating that they're probably
looking for a new product.
Obviously, the inventory is farmore clear in that and Honda
dealer Austin, you can look atyour service and you can do it
for service.
However, we get more leads forjust phone calls, form
submissions on the dealer termscategory than we do off of any

(36:23):
other category.
So it's a super good net andit's definitely kind of mid to
lower funnel tends to beextremely competitive.
So you have to do it right,kind of be appropriately for it.
You can't overspend on that onthis category.
But yeah, it's a great place toinvest your money, probably the
most important keyword categoryoutside of finance and brand.

Speaker 1 (36:49):
Do you have an average percentage of a dealer's
budget that you would typicallyrecommend in this particular
keyword category?
I mean, is it 60 or 70 percent,or is it?
Does it fluctuate a bit?

Speaker 2 (37:04):
percent probably.
Yeah, much furry just on dealerkeywords.
Um new inventory, that'll belike another 20 to 30 percent
used allocation.
That depends completely on howmuch used inventory you sell on
a monthly basis.
Hang on, can you hear that inthe background?

(37:25):
All right?

Speaker 1 (37:31):
A lot of the little hold on.
I'm going to make anothermarker A lot of the little
things like even a dog barkingand stuff.
Most of the time they don't getpicked up at all, but even
things like that we can.

Speaker 2 (37:41):
I have a wee whacker right outside, okay, I can't
even hear him.
Yeah, okay, in terms of likebest practices for the kind of
dealer term keywords.
Honda dealer near me is a goodterm.
It signifies I'm looking forsomething nearby that I can go
to, probably soon now, maybewhen they geo-indicate it's

(38:03):
higher value.
So spend more of your money onthe C and neighborhood terms
concatenated with your dealerterm Honda dealer Austin.
Honda dealership near Westlake,texas, plano, so on and so forth
.
That is going to be yourhighest converting uh keyword
category.
Outside of um, outside of brandand from an seo standpoint,

(38:23):
this is the category that youneed to spend the most time
focusing on, because brandtraffic you're going to show up
for pretty much you know,automatically if you have your
website that's moderately wellput together.
But you won't necessarily showup for Honda dealership Dallas.
There's a lot of other Hondadealerships to show up for and
that is the highest amount ofhigh volume traffic.

(38:44):
So you're going to want to makesure that you're optimizing to
that.
You're going to want to makesure you're spending ad dollars
against that as well, because itis a very keyword category.

Speaker 1 (38:54):
Yeah, I think that's one of the areas where people
think they know but they don'tquite know exactly how to come
up with the balance.
That's why I was kind of askingif you guys have kind of an
average of where it falls outaround the percentage of budget
used on that term and really allof them.
I think a lot of people arealways curious about what should

(39:15):
my pie chart look like in termsof how we carve it up into
these different categories.
Thoughts on maybe a little bitmore of explanation on the
impact of generic terms like thehonda dealer, one um on ad
performance, maybe how dealersshould balance these with those
more localized keywords yeah, I,I would say, have have the non

(39:39):
geoindicated dealer terms inyour ad groups paused, but run
the geoindicated versions first.

Speaker 2 (39:46):
So you're going to have ad groups for Honda dealer,
honda dealership, hondadealership near me.
Keep put those in there, writeads for them, pause them and
spend all of your focus and tryto spend as much money on the
areas where people aregeo-educating westlake honda
dealer.
Westlake honda dealer, austinbecause that is just a much

(40:08):
higher signal.
Um, honda dealer is like betterthan generic, but it's like a
very generic brand term.
You don't know what they'redoing, you don't know if they're
going for service, if they'relooking for new or used, and you
still don't know that if theygeo-indicate.
But at least you know thatthere's a little bit.
They are certain of wherethey're trying to search, so at

(40:31):
least they're telling you that,hey, at least I'm searching in
the right area.
I'm not accident, you know, Ididn't uh, forget to change my
browser history when I wastrying, and now I'm talking to
someone in New Brunswick whenI'm in Austin, or something like
that.
So, um, geoeducation woulddefinitely be the way to
optimize that keyword category.

Speaker 1 (40:51):
Okay, again, just very, very good insights there.
Uh, let's move to.
Very good insights there.
Let's move to, let's, let'smove to that keyword category of
finance.

Speaker 2 (41:13):
Yeah, Finance is really tricky because everyone
does finance.
So many people focus on lowcredit finance.
Second chance buy here, Payhere is insanely popular right
now and they work really well.
So finance is probably actuallyas low intent as you can get
right, Because a lot of peopleare not brand shoppers, they're

(41:34):
what can I afford shoppers,right.
So if someone is looking for,you know, a Subaru dealership in
Austin, that's great, Greatdealer keyword.
If they're looking for Subarufinance incentives like that's
someone that clearly wants tomake a deal, work with me, work
with me.
So that is a much higherquality user to go after when

(41:59):
they're indicating finance andthe other thing too.
And I really do believe thatfor a lot of people, for most
people they're searching for,they have their kind of
preference list of what theywant and then they have what
they can afford and obviously,with interest rates being what
they are today, a lot of peoplecan't buy what they want, so

(42:20):
they have to shop by what canthey afford.
So shopping by finance and alsopayments, the search volume
around those keywords is goingto be very low.
It's going to be expensive, butif you win it, it converts at a
very high rate and that's aperson that's really steady, A
really fun one to do is forbrands that are not as popular.

(42:43):
I'll give you an exampleMitsubishi.
Not a lot of people wake upinspired to drive a new
Mitsubishi.
Fast and Furious came out a longtime ago and the reason why
Mitsubishi new cars are sold isbecause their marketing is
totally finance-driven and theyhave some pretty good finance
incentives, better than a lot ofother brands.

(43:05):
So a lot of people stumble intothat brand because they're a
finance shopper and that is ahuge category of buyers.
Also, what finance indicates isreadiness.
If someone is already at theend of that search and they're
looking for hey, this is mybudget, this is what I can
afford, this is the interestrate I'm looking for, or I'm

(43:26):
looking for specific OEM financedeals, then that's a person
that is very close to thattransaction and they're waiting
for the right moment to transact, which is very different than
another quality and keywordcategory like the one we just
discussed, dealer terms.
We don't know what that personwants when they're typing in
Honda dealership in Austin orhopefully they want a finance

(43:49):
car.
But if someone is saying Hondafinance incentives, Honda sales
special, finance special orsomething like that, that is
someone that is ready to buy,and that is the person that you
prioritize above the other typesof intent.

Speaker 1 (44:04):
So, in this particular keyword category, you
would say that that's aneffective way to target
potential customers who arelooking for these types of
options, like Honda finance orMitsubishi finance or car
finance, special or I thinkthat's a much better way to flip
buyers from one brand toanother.

Speaker 2 (44:23):
Like I remember back when we worked together, we'd
always have people doing likecheeky stuff, like hey, we
really want to sell more ChevyVolts, so we're going to shit on
the Fiesta.
You know Like we're going tobid on Ford Fiesta for the
people that are looking for FordFiestas and we're going to try
to change their mind on thefirst result of Google.

(44:43):
You know like, you know what Imean.
It's just like that's.
That's a stretch.
But if someone is looking for afinance incentive and they were
looking for the F fiesta, thatyou can convert them into a
whole driver.
Uh, I feel bad for them.
But hey, you know, and that's,it's an effect strategy.

(45:03):
It's way more effective thantrying to tell someone that
their preference is a bad idea.
You're just giving themsomething that is more
financially tangible to them.
So that is by far the mosteffective way to flip here on
the, you know, ford to toyota isto leverage financial.
Most effective way to flip KiaHyundai, you know.

Speaker 1 (45:24):
Ford to Toyota is to leverage financial incentives to
get out there.
Are there any strategies thatyou know kind of highlight those
incentives in a way that makesthem perhaps perform better in
search results?
I don't know if you can doanything beyond just trying to.
It's almost, like always, theprocess of iteration, of slight
changes, but it's I just.

(45:45):
My guess is there's probablynothing you know distinctively.
Oh yeah, do this Like it's kindof one of those categories
where it's straight down themiddle.
Whatever your brand is financeincentives, whatever your brand
is finance incentives, whateveryour brand is you know special
finance or you know that type ofyou know thing.
But I was just curious ifyou've ever seen anything that
kind of rises up as, ah, this isa little bit of a insider tip

(46:09):
that could help.
I don't know that there are any.

Speaker 2 (46:11):
Yeah, I've had a couple of buy here, pay here
dealers across the country withkind of a guarantee of a rate
cap which is kind of a crazything to say for you know cause
some used car dealers sell carsor 15% or 12% interest rates.
So as shitty as a 10% interestrate sounds, you know, for a lot
of people that's the best dealthat they can get.

(46:33):
So the interest rate cap, kindof on a non-branded side, is a
good one.
Ultimately, if you have areally good apr, you should just
lead with that like andwhatever that apr is.
That is, that's going to getpeople's attention right from
the search results.
And a lot of brands are doingreally great finance stuff.
Subaru did some incredibly lowfinancing.

(46:53):
I've seen some really goodstuff from each and four and so,
if you don't, you should have,honestly, in your dealer terms,
new inventory.
You should have finance in yourad copy, because that is just
another great way to kind ofreally make that product stand
out to them.
But yeah, the closer you canget to just saying, hey, here's

(47:15):
the finance rate that we offerfor people who apply, you know,
insert the disclaimer, that'sdefinitely the way to go.
Or if you have some kind of afinance guarantee or maybe it
can be something really vague,like we work with second chance
or you know low credit buyers tofind the car.

(47:36):
You know because everyone needsa car in this country for sure,
and you know if you can kind ofspeak to that user, whether,
regardless, you've got to speakto them at their level.
So for someone that's lookingfor a great finance deal on a
new car, that's going to be alittle bit different messaging
than you're going to have forsomeone who's kind of in the
buyer-bayer acquisitionsituation.

Speaker 1 (48:00):
So the inclusion of finance-related keywords, what
kind of impact does it haverelative to budget and then
performance of campaign?
And I guess the other thing Iwould ask in this is maybe some
examples of you know, if not alldealers are going to need at

(48:21):
every given moment to havefinance-related keywords in
their campaigns.
Some are, like you know,they're performing in other
categories, but when it'ssomething that needs to be
either in the mix or perhapseven maybe one of the more
prominent ways that they areactually trying to accumulate
traffic and generate salesopportunities, can you speak a

(48:44):
little bit to that, maybe someof those scenarios where, when
it's going to make sense andwhat's maybe some of the
expectations from yourexperiences that dealers should
think about around budget andhow these things perform?

Speaker 2 (48:56):
Yeah, typically, like I mean.
Again, it depends on thedealership model.
If you're a buy-pay-heardealership, then 100% of your
spend is probably going to be onfinance.
If you have good finance rates,that should be present in all
of your ad copy as much aspossible.
And it's kind of easier toanswer your question by saying

(49:18):
when you don't have finance inyour ad copy keywords is when
you have nothing to offer, andthat is true for many oems.
Some of them don't have verycompelling offers right now
where offers that aresubstantially less appealing,
and then what another oem isdoing.
In that situation you may notlead with finance rates being an

(49:38):
incentive because it's not areal value proposition that you
can offer relative to what yourcompetitors have.
But for the most part there arefinancial products and packages
that dealers offer or they havein their network.
So, whatever, the best that youcan do is you want to make sure
that you have that ad copy whenpossible that you can do is you
want to make sure that you havethat ad copy when possible.

(49:58):
And you know, from a spendallocation standpoint, for your
standard new OEM store, probably10 to 15% of your budget would
be well spent on finance.
It's a very expensive categoryand everybody goes after it.
So whatever has a limitedvolume and a lot of competition
is always going to be veryexpensive.
So you can expect higher CPCs.

(50:20):
But if you target your userscorrectly and retarget them
correctly, you can expect a verygood conversion rate there.

Speaker 1 (50:30):
Yeah, you mentioned this and I think it's really for
dealers really important torealize that it's competitive
and so if you have good offers,it literally could be the thing
that puts you in considerationover whoever it is you're

(50:51):
competing with, whether it's adifferent brand.
Like you said, when you'retrying to conquest, some people
end up with a conquestingaccomplishment and they weren't
even really trying.
It was a finance deal thatmoved somebody over, or a
finance opportunity we've saved.
I don't know that it's the best, but it's certainly one I think
most people are pretty familiarwith.

Speaker 2 (51:13):
For the last keyword category, and yeah, From a
conversion standpoint, brand isdefinitely the best.
From a cost standpoint it isdefinitely the best, but you can
absolutely cannibalize SEOtraffic.
So our rule of thumb here isnever spend more than 10% of
your budget on your brand.
But our rule is definitelyspend something on brand.

(51:37):
And the reason why?
Uh, it's funny because, likeright as you're preparing for
this conversation, a searchengine, uh journal article
popped up.
It says, uh, that google ads isselecting broad match keywords
by default.
Now, in all new campaignimplementations, you better go
out of your way to use matchtypes like exact phrase.

(51:58):
So a lot of times, uh, peoplethink and there's a really funny
example it was huffines, chevy,lewisville and stonebriar
shudderway, and I remember wewere on the huffine side.
I still work with those guys,uh, all these many years later,
but they were like man, everytime I type in chevrolet

(52:19):
lewisville, uh, you know, boom,briar is showing up.
And we thought it wasdeliberate for years.
And then I went over to workfor dealer dealer.
We met and worked with the repwho was managing so briar is a
really nice guy and I was justlike I need to look at your
keyword list, see.
And sure enough, it was just anelectric brand, broad matching.
Basically they were bidding onChevrolet Louisville and broad

(52:42):
matching to Huffine's ChevroletLouisville.
So most conquesting would notactually deliver it.
It's accidental.
It's lazy.
Digital marketers and mostdealerships wouldn't want to
spend that much coaching brandtraffic from their competitors
and other OEMs.
Forbid it, harley,mercedes-benz will literally cut

(53:03):
your allocation after twowarnings.
Bmw, lexus you cannot do it.
But through broad matchkeywords it's really easy to
make that mistake.
So that's why you have to bevery, very, very cautious in how
you defend your brand terms,because it's so easy for someone
to poach traffic from you, evenaccidentally.

(53:23):
And here's the cool trick with.
You know, let's say you justyou think your SEO is awesome
and you don't need an ad.
You don't need to.
You know you don't need ads todrive that kind of traffic.
I would say spend 3% of yourbudget for one reason alone, and
the reason is this If your CPCfor your brand term is, say,

(53:44):
$0.30, sure, maybe you wouldhave gotten that click without
having to pay $0.30.
But if your competitor isbidding on your brand term and
you are not, then they might getit for $0.30.
But when you bid it and you'redefending your brand at 30 cents
, they might have to pay threebucks.
So the cpcs for yourcompetitors will go way higher

(54:05):
when you're defending your brand.
And a lot of brands havelearned this amazon does it,
walmart does it, there's theyall show up organically on
google when someone searches foramazon or walmart.
But they do that brand defensebecause there are so many brand
challengers out there that aretrying to coach people at the
bottom of the funnel.

(54:26):
And again, whether it'sdeliberate or accidental, it's
happening a lot to yourdealership, regardless of where
you are.
So you want to be cautious andthoughtful and have some brand
strategy in there withoutspending too much.
Something we see a lot in allof our audits is that our
competitors will allocate toomuch, sometimes as much as like

(54:48):
30, 40% of the budget to brandand they'll trot out the reports
congratulations, we got you a$3 CPA or something insanely low
.
But that is super misleadingbecause you are catabolizing a
lot of your organic traffic andobviously you want some brand
defense.
But from my point of view, youwant to spend more money getting

(55:10):
new people to the website andspending overspending on people
that you've kind of already got,if that makes sense.

Speaker 1 (55:17):
So there's a balance overspending on people that
you've kind of already got, ifthat makes sense.
So there's a balance.
Yeah, no, it makes all thesense that you would want to be
making smart.
I mean, it all comes down tohow smart you're spending money
to develop opportunities foryour business.
And everything you sharedaround brand terms I think is
really important because I thinka lot of people are.

(55:40):
If you were to ask them, likewhat keyword categories do you
know about paid search?
What they everyone would belike brand terms and everyone
usually has an opinion about.
Well, you shouldn't buy yourown name.
You and I have been throughthis back when it actually was a
topic worth having some seriousconversation or argument about,
because there were so, so manythere probably still are so many

(56:02):
vendors that just are literallyjust garbage campaigns and they
burn through budget becausethey know that the dealer
doesn't even know where to lookto find that they're literally
just lighting their money onfire and giving them some
bullshit report.

Speaker 2 (56:14):
I'll tell you that that's what penix does.
If you don't set a brandexclusion, phoenix will look
like it's performing really well, but it's doing a ton of brand
hitting.

Speaker 1 (56:23):
So yeah, yeah, that's I.
It's one of those um keywordcategories that I think, if I'm
a dealer, I really do kind ofwant to know more of the nuance
and intricacies here becauseseveral different reasons why

(56:45):
it's important.
But, like all of these keywordcategories, there is a certain
amount of knowledge that'snecessary to make sure that it's
being managed properly, whetheryou do it yourself or you've
got an agency or whomever you'reusing.
Your amount of knowledge andbeing able to be detail-oriented
, even within the big oldcategory of brand terms, is so

(57:07):
important or you won't catchthings, you won't see things,
the anomalies in search resultsthat you, even at the dealership
level you're a Harley dealer,you're a Ford dealer, you're
whatever brand you are when youare sitting in your dealership
and, hey, we've got a little bitof idle time we're not selling
anything and you're sittingaround looking at Facebook or
LinkedIn or doing some searchresults, looking at what your

(57:30):
competitors are doing.
The reason why podcast episodeslike this are so important is
because we've just been sittinghere for several minutes
listening to you share thingsthat should make the person
sitting there in the dealershipsmarter.
So when they're doing some ofthese casual searches that they
would see some of these thingsthat are, hmm, that's not quite

(57:50):
right.
Yes, for your own business, foryour own brand, but also to see
what's going on with yourcompetitors.
I will.
Just yesterday, a friend ofmine posted something that he
found within the Ford brand,where tier one, two and three
are all competing for the samekeywords and his part of his
post was well, I guess the autoindustry is actually returning

(58:13):
to normal because here's a brand.
This is not smart at all, likejust blowing through millions
and millions and millions ofdollars, and I, you know, I talk
to people quite a bit nowadays,with the things I'm doing
around content creation, thatare like they have a disconnect

(58:34):
between.
Well, car dealers are not thesame as within big franchises,
where they waste a lot of moneyin advertising because they have

(58:57):
$5 million to spend thisquarter.
We need to spend it all andwhere are we going to go shovel
it?
We're going to shovel it inthese places and it gets spread
out.
In the case of automotive,you've got three different tiers
to waste millions of dollars in, and I would just I guess I'll
get off my soapbox just to say,for the audience that tunes into

(59:17):
this podcast just be aware ofthat so that you can one defend
yourself, fight back a littlebit, be smart enough to realize
that you shouldn't settle foryour hard-earned advertising
dollars basically being lit onfire, and imagine what you could
do if tens of thousands,hundreds of thousands, millions

(59:39):
of dollars in advertising wasn'tbeing wasted but it was being
architected into reallythoughtful campaigns across all
of these keyword categories thatwe've been talking about, with
more strategy, with more insight, with more specificity, more
planning.
That's how you get good results.
That's how you become acompetitor that makes your

(01:00:02):
competitors wish you weren't inthe market, because you're doing
things they're not doing.
So I would just say be reallybe very careful with what's
going on, even at the top brandlevel, because it's very likely
that you may need to be havingsome conversation with people
that think they know better thanyou.

Speaker 2 (01:00:21):
Yeah, yeah.
If I could wave a magic wandand get OEMs to stop spending on
inventory or tier two or threeterms I would make.
It doesn't matter what searchshows or what we pull up or
auction insights, but the numberone competitor by spend is the
OEM always.
And you know, I think about ifI'm a poor dealer in you know

(01:00:45):
Colorado or something like that,and the user is in Colorado or
something like that and the useris in Colorado as well.
They're looking for a 150 lightink.
Where is that conversionexperience going to be better?
Is it going to be better at thedealership where they're going
to actually buy the car, or isit going to be better when they
go to the OEM website, fill outa form and then they farm that
lead out to sometimes one or, inmost cases, many different

(01:01:08):
dealers and then you're gettingall these different inquiries.
That's just a really shittyuser journey and it's a huge
inflation and inflating impacton individual dealers, the
ability to drive traffic forpeople that are locally in
market.
So that's OEMs are always a bittricky.

(01:01:30):
I've seen them try to do thingswhere they'll say, hey, don't
bid on any inventory terms, justgo after generic terms or
whatever, because we don't wantyou to compete with us, but it
really should be the other wayaround.
The OEM should be going allgeneric new car, best new truck,
best new SUV.
They should be creatingawareness at the tier one level,
for if someone thinks about atruck, they think about a

(01:01:53):
Cybertruck or they think aboutan F-150.
That's their job is convertingthat general generic intent into
I want to be an F-150 driverbecause I saw these really great
ads.
I think that their investmentwould be so much better spent on
YouTube versus search.
They should leave as much ofthat as they can to the dealers
and they sort of like collectenough data from the dealers to

(01:02:16):
know who is getting kind of thatshare of voice and uh, yeah,
it's, it's.
It's lame when you have, uh,when you have a dealer with a
budget that's $10,000 to $20,000, but you're going out and
asking for a million-dollarstate or regional budget, that's
just a very hard thing tocompete with.

Speaker 1 (01:02:37):
Yeah, I got to tell you that it's, and I know you
will agree.
It's astonishing that here weare, more than halfway through
2024.
And I don't know, maybe thereis I don't think so employed

(01:03:10):
that has, I mean deep level, atleast 10 years of experience in
digital marketing, specificallypaid search, specifically
knowing the very beginning ofGoogle AdWords.
Yes, I know it's Google Ads now, but lived through the changes
in that platform, which was oneof the last properties that they
did real big overhauls on whenthey started several years ago.
They did real big overhauls onwhen they started several years

(01:03:33):
ago.
It's astonishing to me that Iwon't call any of them out by
name, because it's really all ofthem.
They've basically moved thatresponsibility to a third party
and even the third party doesn'thave that institutional
knowledge of doing these things.
They make these huge decisionsthat have so much to do with,

(01:03:54):
certainly, results, but so muchmoney.
And when you go all the wayback and track it to well, who
is it?
It's the great and powerful Oz,behind the big green curtain.
And they don't know anythingabout how google's ad platform
works.
They don't know anything aboutthe depth of these different

(01:04:15):
keyword categories.
They don't know anything abouthow I wouldn't.
Would you be surprised if oneday you and I got invited to
whatever?
A big oem invited us to theircorporate headquarters and like,
will you please help usunderstand?
We got to sign non-disclosureso you don't embarrass us all.
Will you help us understandwhat we should be doing better

(01:04:37):
across all three tiers From ourlevel?
Where should we be?
What kind of keyword categoryshould we be more focused on?
So we're not cannibalizing atthe dealer level at tier three,
because we give them the abilityto run campaigns that are going
to maybe focus on differentthings.
And what should we tell tiertwo, so that we don't have the
you know north texas, fill inthe blank dealers cannibalizing

(01:05:00):
either those areas like would itnot just blow your mind if we
got invited to a hypotheticalmeeting like that and you find
out that they clearly and haveno clue what they're doing?
Would it surprise you if theyhad actually disclosed?
We don't really know what we'redoing and we we need, like,

(01:05:21):
tell us what we're doing thereare typically other ways that
those characters disclose thatthey don't know what they're
talking about.

Speaker 2 (01:05:28):
It's usually just by virtue of them talking.
It's funny that you say thatbecause I know you're
referencing something from ourpast when we worked together
when you got invited to one ofthe big Detroit shops I don't
know who it was, but I will tellyou that I did have a meeting

(01:05:48):
with the regional uh, I guesslike tier two group of infinity
dealers in ohio and I did meetthe vp and man, like we were
kind of presenting our strategyand it was just it totally went
over his head.
But you know, we were talking,we were, we were there to kind
of support these, this dealerthat was primarily owned by one

(01:06:10):
guy, to like, hey, let us dothis different thing, because
they were trying to restrictco-op and trying to basically
force all of the inventorysearch to be at the oem level
versus at the dealership andthey were trying to penalize the
dealership for spending againstthe inventory that they had on
their lots and that they weresupposed to sell and they're
going to be penalized for notselling it by the OEM.

(01:06:32):
The OEM is not letting themmarket it.
Yeah, no, they don't know, Idon't know, whenever you get to
that EP of marketing title, it'shonestly guaranteed you know
absolutely nothing aboutarbiting.
I think if I were an OEM or abig automotive company, I would

(01:06:54):
really want to have people thathave a deep understanding of
Google, organic and the historyof keywords and match types.
You'd want to have kind of likethat custodian of knowledge for
your brand, but unfortunately,because there's so much turnover
in the industry, we just neveraccrue that much knowledge and

(01:07:15):
the only places if it's accruedis third parties.
So the third parties are goingto give very self-serving
recommendations for them and fortheir affiliates.
They give them kickbacks.
So the entire like oem andco-op system is it's.
You know.
It's been farmed out to thirdparties that pretend to know
what they're doing and maybethey do, but they're they're not

(01:07:35):
steering the industry in theright direction.
They're just steering moremoney for own pockets.
So definitely a point offrustration, and it's always
funny too.
I I was at um, a googlemarketing live event I think it
was like in 2018 or somethingand they brought the CEO of
digital for Chrysler, duke Dodge, and he was researching or

(01:07:56):
rehearsing just a Google spielthat he had worked on with them
for a while and it was like Iwas like you don't know what
you're saying.
You're like a puppet rehearsingother someone else's lyrics.
You're literally just sayingwhat Google wants you to say,
but you have thousands ofdealers that would expect that
you should be the Jedi Knight ofdigital marketing for this

(01:08:18):
brand.
Your level once, once youascend to that level uh, from
what I've seen, the thepersonalities that get up there
kind of want to get away fromthe leads and they want to work
with the consultants and letthem make all the decisions and
go to the steak dinners.
That's, that's what I'veexperienced.

Speaker 1 (01:08:39):
Um, I'm sure it's not the way it is across the board,
but just in in my small samplesize yeah, well, in the
beginning, for for google, uh,you know, you and I have lived,
lived through this but in thebeginning I think google had a
real healthy appreciation for,uh, the barbarians and the
vanguard that took the access togoogle adwords and learned the

(01:09:03):
platform.
And then people who builtthings and, um, you know people,
people who built even bidengines and like, they're
obviously even our days, goingback to the reach local days.
But I don't, I don't sense thattoday, when I listen to what
google puts out, when I see anyof their people uh, show up at a
small or a large event inautomotive and I listen to their

(01:09:23):
keynotes, I'm just like it's anothing burger, it's just
propaganda, more propaganda,it's, it's, it's so, and there
is no healthy appreciation forpeople then that ask questions
that even have a mid-level ofdepth, it's like, ah well, I
don't know that, but I could getwith the team.
Yeah, it's always been thatkind of shit from them for a
long time, and this is like,okay, I still say like it's the

(01:09:45):
most amazing ad platform that'sever been created in our
lifetime.
Okay, great.
But now that there are thesepeople like yourself, you're a
perfect example of somebody thatcould be so instrumental in not
only cost-effectiveness butoutcomes for a brand, and yet

(01:10:06):
the people that are in thoseconversations conversations they
don't know half of what youknow, they don't have half of
the experience that you have,and yet, for some reason, I
won't say it.
I it feels like somebody couldsay well, it feels corrupt,
right, it feels polluted, andthat's really sad because then,

(01:10:31):
in the case of this episode, andreally all these episodes,
we're doing these things andhaving these conversations to
hopefully make sure that thebusiness owners learn and they
get value and it makes thembetter and it's for them, so
that they have thisunderstanding.
It sad that it's sad when, whenthere's a projection that the

(01:10:51):
customer is most important andin all reality they're literally
not just the afterthought,they're like the after
afterthought, once everyone elsehas been considered first, and
I think it's batteries in thematrix.

Speaker 2 (01:11:06):
That's.
That's what they are and like Iwas planning on talking about
this because I don't have mytalk track fully rehearsed, but
like I think about my career,right, it's gonna be the next
episode.
I've been doing google ads for16 years.
That's a very long time, kindof a very young, dynamic

(01:11:27):
industry.
And I remember our Google repswould come and talk to us.
They would wine and dine us,they would give us credits for
hitting targets, they would sendus Google swag.
We always had one point ofcontact for our agency.
They were super flexible onbilling terms so we could get
more people on.
Because, guess what?
There were still very fewpeople that had adopted digital

(01:11:47):
marketing and that has justflexible on billing terms so we
can get more people on because,guess what?
There was still very few peoplethat had adopted digital
marketing and that has justexponentially grown and now that
they're at this point ofcritical mass, they are 100
percent.
Uh, they are.
They are monopoly like googleand they're they're acting like
one two.
That the the interesting thing.
And I remember you gave me abook, uh, about google and I

(01:12:09):
remember reading it and I waslike, wow, I love this, don't be
evil concept and that's goneyears is almost whatever they
say.
Almost in every case, whateverthey say, the opposite is true.

(01:12:35):
I don't know if you pay muchattention to the Google leak.
I did a post on LinkedInfocusing on this, but it was
this, this the Google leak.
For any good SEOs was notamused because we're like
Google's full of shit andthey've been lying to us
directly for a long time.
Google said that the amount oftraffic you get doesn't play
into your rankings.

(01:12:56):
They said that links weren'timportant.
They said that time on site orPogo sticking and all these
things are not signals we lookat Bullshit.
They are definitely signalsthat they have been looking at
as soon as this year in Marchwhen that week happens, and they
have been lying about this fora long time.
Ran Fishkin from Moz was reallydemonized and a lot of bad

(01:13:21):
things were said about him.
You know, but like these guys,these talking heads, I can't
remember their names.
I I present them so much I Ican't even remember the main guy
, that, the main seo guy thathe's.
They're lying mouthpieces andwhat I don't understand as an
agency.
It's my job, if you know if I'mworking for google or with

(01:13:42):
google.
Their goal should be we'regoing to give you as much
information as we can so you canconvince your clients to peel
ledges away from TV, fromnewspaper, from being.
But they're not doing that andit's super myopic because what
they're recommending everyonejust do PMAS, broad match

(01:14:04):
keywords are the way to go, 25mile radius, no exclusions, like
all of this bullshit which will1000 waste your money.
They're saying that it's fine,but I'm like you know that these
people are going to know thatit's not fine whether business
starts to decline when yoursales reps are spending all of
your time qualifying crappyleads because you didn't have

(01:14:27):
the robust exclusion category.
Or like these 60-hour keywordcampaigns.
For any car dealer that wouldbe about 10 different campaigns,
but for some of Google's,google will tell me, yeah, just
throw it all in one campaign, acouple different ad groups and
throw in an RSA and yeah, you'regood, you're doing great,
you're doing great.
Look at your optimization score.

(01:14:48):
It's 85.
Good for you.
That optimization score is suchbullshit because sometimes what

(01:15:14):
the optimization score will berecommending is increasing your
minutes by 100 with the customerdirectly and is starting to try
to push agencies to the side,just all like and it's not even.
It has been playing favoritesfor the last five years and I
know that because we were afavorite and then we weren't.
And, yeah, the amount ofsupport we got dramatically
changed, even though our revenuethat we were driving through
google dollars, so we spent moremoney with them, but because we

(01:15:35):
pushed back on some of theirstuff that they were trying to
push down down at us.
We lost support reps.
Now this is a real kicker,because this is a big deal and
it just hit a couple weeks ago.
Google is starting to not allowbusinesses to run their ads off
of credit cards.
They're forcing everyone to VCH, which is mind-blowing.

(01:15:58):
You and I have been in auto fora long time.
We know that now that we've gotVCH, everything is on a float.
You're floating your inventory,you're floating your ad spend
where your agency is, so we willdo a lot of that too.
Sometimes we'll float addollars because our credit card
gives us that float.
And now Google is goingdirectly to the client saying

(01:16:21):
you can't do this anymore.
They're going around us.
Wow, you are clients, and man,some of my clients have just
been completely livid.
They're furious and I kind ofthis whole idea basket that I
just ranted about.
I did kind of thinking about anarticle about like, basically

(01:16:42):
like Google partnership kind ofneeds nothing.
Google is not your partner.
You know it doesn't matter.
You can try to play by theirrules, but if it's a decision
between fostering the businessthat got them to where they are
today, which is a massivenetwork of partners and
publishers.
We made Google what it is.
I have personally spent about ahundred100 million in my

(01:17:07):
lifetime.
I should be getting baskets ofsteak from these guys every
month.
I am their best sales rep byfar and I have been for a long
time and I've been tellingpeople not to use other
platforms.
That's over man we are.
Now we're converting everyoneto Bing, to TikTok, wherever
else they are not, because, atthe end of the day, google can

(01:17:30):
do things now that they couldn'tdo before.
Well, actually, honestly,they're losing impression share
at Bing.
Bing is growing because theyare innovating more on their
platform.
Do I think they'll ever bebigger than Google?
Not anytime soon.
But in any given market for cars, they have 20% of the search
volume.
It used to be seven.
That's a big drop in revenue.

(01:17:51):
And Bing with Microsoft ads.
Their support is awesome.
They offer incentives forsigning up new ad accounts.
They make it super easy toimport from Google and I think
that for dealers, you absolutelyneed to diversifyify because
Google changes the rules of thegame all the time.

(01:18:13):
It used to be you pay one pennymore than your competitor.
That's no longer the case.
It's had.
It used to be that the bid inan auction is set based on
whatever people are willing tospend.
People are willing to spend.
So if you had an auction whereyour starting price was a dollar
because someone was bidding adollar and therefore you had to
bill or bill, it did a dollarand let's set.

(01:18:34):
You know that was the price.
Now google's just like nope,starting price is five bucks,
starting price is seven dollars.
Uh, and in some categories wework in like law or yeah, like
law it's.
It can be like as high as 70bucks and it's not.
I'm like, are you sure it's 70bucks?
Like you don't have any sevendollar clicks here.

(01:18:55):
You know it's.
They know where the rabbit,where the monetization is for
their traffic and they're justwheezing everything out of it.
And for any dealer that is 100%leveraged on Google just for
paid media and SEO, you'remissing out on 20% of the market

(01:19:15):
and you're also puttingyourself in a really bad
situation where you have a kindof ascending platform with
Microsoft and all these otherplatforms that are going to
erode Google's dominance overtime and you're not going to
know those and a platform thatyou know and that you're
trusting is going to make itharder for you to manage your

(01:19:38):
business.
Well, they're going to takeaway your levers of control.
They're going to push downstupid things like broad match
or destroy your ability to use acredit card for your ad spend.
I actually think that's illegal, to be honest.
But like it's this, this kindof escalation I'm seeing with
Google is really frustrating,and I have so many great
relationships and great friendsover at Google, but they're not

(01:20:02):
in charge.
And there are our Google repsare amazing and they do their
best to help us, help, protectus and navigate around whatever
Google's policy changes are, butit's becoming a full-time job
just to keep up with them, andif our SEO team were listening
to Google, we would spendthousands of hours doing work

(01:20:25):
that was completely uselessinstead of doing the things that
we ended up doing, which areincreasing organic traffic and
visibility for clients.
So it's it's a really weirdsituation.
I think that, um, I think thatGoogle is really out of touch.
Uh, I think that they thinkthat they are thought of as a
good company.

(01:20:45):
I think if you were to goanywhere in the country and pull
a hundred people and say do youthink google is a good company
or a bad company, or do youthink they have a good influence
or a bad influence or amonopoly?
I think most people would saythey're a monopoly there.
They control what we see, whatis is shown, who is successful.

(01:21:06):
It's a lot.
It could be such a greatplatform if they were a little
closer to their end users, butthey're not really interested in
that and they're definitely notinterested in bolstering
partnerships with agencies likeus.
I mean again, it doesn't seemthat way and what it does seem

(01:21:26):
is that they're trying to givedealers the idea that they can
just put in a credit card andlaunch a theme apps campaign and
hey, you don't need to spendthat managing a few years,
remember?
That's totally not true.
What I thought is are youwilling to allow that dealer to

(01:21:48):
set up an express campaign andblow $20,000 and then write off
Google forever?
Is that worth it?
Or are you okay with themworking with a partner on your
extremely complicated platformthat changes all the time and
they get a little bit of amargin?
That's not hurting them?
It's really interesting to seewhat they're doing.

(01:22:09):
The rationale for kicking peopleoff credit card is the
transaction fees are high.
I'm like you made 50 milliondollars in the us.
I think you got it like I don'tcare if your transaction fees
are.
They're not more than twopercent or three percent.
That's nuts.
You're gonna literally piss offyour customers and force them

(01:22:30):
to change the way they dobusiness just because of
transaction fees.
It seems like they're lying andit's like for me.
I have made a great livingworking in this space.
I know this platform super well.
I've done trainings on thisplatform.

(01:22:50):
I've trained so many youngdigital marketers and what I see
is this platform is constantlyeroding our means of control and
also kind of not fostering apositive relationship with the
people that have to use theplatform.
Like seos are the bad guy.
I'm like no.

(01:23:11):
They manage websites that drivetraffic, which drives revenue,
so you should tell them whatworks and what gets things to
rank and what moves the needleand what you actually care about
, instead of making thisplethora of lies of oh, this
useful content thing or thisover here.
Don't view links that doesn'twork when we know that it does

(01:23:33):
Like.
Just tell us what works andwhat you actually want us to do.
Keep morestill-let-it-work-on-your-ads.
No one will ever be able togame the system so much so that
it diminishes Google's adrevenue.
Yeah, and there's other stufftoo, with the AI overviews that
drive something insane.
A lot of it is wrong.
First of all, I was changingthe fluid in my Porsche and they

(01:23:57):
changed where the coolant was,and the article that they have
listed in the SGD was fromPorsche Littleton in Colorado.
I'm in Austin, I don't know whyI would pull up, and it was an
article from like 2017.
It was the only one I couldfind, because they had changed
the search results becausethey're like oh, yeah, it's an
AI overview, because this iskind of a how you do it question

(01:24:19):
.
So we're trying to steal thattraffic from all of the
different content websites, fromheadboards, from all of the for
Porsche.
They're trying to steal thattraffic from Porsche.
I had to.
It took me a while to get tothe Porsche site and make sure
that I wasn't pouring it in thewrong tank.
You know like, yeah, it's just,it's remarkable.

(01:24:40):
I tried to call Mexico recentlyon a project.
Ai overview was long there too,and it's just, it's really
messy.
Project AI overview was longthere too, and it's just it's
really messy and they don'tunderstand that for your average
user if you have 10 badexperiences and then you go over
to edge and you're like, oh,this was a little smoother, you
lost that person.

(01:25:00):
That person is interviewed.
The same way, we all thinkabout pay.
Well, and those C's and hotmailand all all these platforms that
nobody uses anymore, that arekind of dying platforms.
Google can get there reallyquick.
You know the war.
They spend time trying tobolster gemini and, you know,
have issues with gemini whereit's like making uh, you know,

(01:25:23):
you know, uh, native americanpopes and nazi soldiers who are
black or stuff like that.
That was their new unveiling ofthe Gemini platform and they
haven't stopped pushing that out, even though it's just a
cataclysmic failure.
And it's just really weirdbecause I know that Google had

(01:25:45):
to do something innovativewithin AI.
They had to Like you absolutelyhave to, it's where things are
going.
But just to have such acolossal fail and then try to
like jam Gemini into theirgolden goose which is Google
search.
They could have done itsomewhere else.
They could have created anotherplatform and be like hey guys,

(01:26:06):
try a Gemini search, but nowI've got to let it deselect it.
If you look at my Google Trends, the number of people that are
looking for how to turn offGemini is just like.
People don't like it and it'sin their own data and they're
changing it and they're evenlimiting it more because it's
not working.

(01:26:26):
So again, long rant on Google.
I think there's a lot of thingsthat they've done right, that
have allowed them to do a lot ofthings that are just
horrifically wrong, and there'san end of a road there.
And is it going to be fiveyears?
Is it going to be three years?
Who knows?
But things change very fast intech and, as it relates to
customers, you have to be inmore places than just Google.

(01:26:49):
You need to be thinking aboutSEO on Bing.
You need to be thinking aboutit on Yahoo.
You need to be thinking aboutads on those platforms.
If TikTok stays around, youneed to be thinking about TikTok
because that's where everyoneunder age 34 is right now.
You can't just be like ourchoice of social platforms is

(01:27:10):
meta and we don't care abouttiktok as people are dancing
over there.
Whatever, that's the wrongthing.
You need to be very diverse inyour channels, because there are
some really great competitiveother options uh, other than
google.

Speaker 1 (01:27:25):
Yeah, I always enjoy having some of these deeper
conversations about Googlebecause I don't think that car
dealers and motorcycle dealersand I don't I mean talk about
you know apartments, multifamily, talk about lawyers, talk about
health care Most of thesepeople at the business ownership

(01:27:49):
level have really no clue, andthat's not putting them down,
it's not what they're supposedto know.
But even the people that theyput their trust in have these
limitations and boundaries andguardrails and things get
changed all of a sudden, likewhat happened, all dictated by
Google, and I think it'simportant for those business
owners to actually have at leasta decent level of knowledge and

(01:28:15):
to really have that.
You kind of have to know fromthe beginning.
Somebody could summarize likethis is when Google unveiled
their ad platform and this wasthe approach in the beginning
their ad platform, and this wasthe approach in the beginning
and this is how they told peoplethat were providing these
services on behalf of uhbusinesses to charge for their
you know fees, like there's justso many things.

(01:28:36):
This is what the premier andthe uh you know a little premier
partner status.
This is what that really means.
If somebody has this logo overthat logo, it just gets
conflated and confusing, andthen it gets used, unfortunately
.

Speaker 2 (01:28:52):
It changed the meaning.
It used to mean something, tobe a premier partner, and it was
a really big deal for us thatwe were.
Now it's being meaningless.
We do not have centralizedsupport.
We don't get the kind of salessupport that Google should be
giving people that are sellingtheir product.
So, yeah, I don't understandwhat they're doing.
I know that there's always somekind of rationale for what they

(01:29:13):
do, so I can only assume thatit's not good.
Uh, and you know, just based,you know, I, I, I, they're
either completely out of touchwith what the industry thinks
about them or they don't care.
I kind of think they don't care.
That's my assessment.

Speaker 1 (01:29:33):
I don't know what percentage of both.
I think it's both.
For me, I think it's completelyout of touch and we don't care.
I think the evidence of that iseverywhere.
You guys, your agency is not theonly one that's kind of gone
from hey, this was great, thesupport was amazing, and when
you get to that consideration of, well, maybe they don't care

(01:29:55):
you and I have talked about thisbefore, I've shared this with
other people that are in thissame space they don't care,
because if they leave an agencythat's actually better in every
category, right, the way theyset up campaigns, the way they
manage campaigns, all thedetails that we talk about on
these episodes, it's painfullyobvious that you and your agency

(01:30:18):
know exactly what you're doingand you've got a lot, many 16
years of experience doing this.
But Google is playing this in away now where, um, the I don't
care part from at least myopinion is, if somebody decides
to stop working with you, googleis betting on them going to one

(01:30:42):
of these other providers thatthey don't care if the results
they get from the other providerare worse, because the
profitability to Google isprobably higher, right.

Speaker 2 (01:30:52):
But the problem is, as more of these platforms grow
in popularity, people will belike why?
You know what?
I tried Google, I thought.
Just the other day someonetried Google in-house and they
were like we don't want to talkabout Google Ads because it
doesn't work.
And I had to explain howcomplicated it is and how to do
things correctly and they'relike okay, we're open to trying
this with you.
But if I didn't bring thatperson back around, they were

(01:31:16):
like fuck that platform.
I wasted thousands of dollars,I had no support.
I was talking to somebody andthat's just not what businesses
in the West expect.

Speaker 1 (01:31:26):
Yeah, yeah, I agree this may be a future topic that
we plan out and talk about someof these things.
It has to be, I think,carefully discussed and planned
just to make sure that theaudience really gets a point of

(01:31:46):
view and perspective, that theyrealize that they one should be
educating themselves.
I've said this for years Stopeating baby food, that your
vendors keep popping the jars ofGerber because you love the
taste of baby food.
You got to learn how to eatsteak and that's why we do
episodes like this.
So maybe there's a Google,maybe there's a further down the
road episode that digs a littlebit more into just what to know

(01:32:09):
, like from beginning to current, like here's what to know about
google, because you I mean youjust in your last few comments
here um, it was very revealingto a lot of people when that
google leak happened and joyhawkins did a really good job
with michael king and ranfishkin.
They did a kind of a episodewhere they talked through a lot
of those things.
Rand was absolutely he's been,you know, kind of vilified a

(01:32:32):
couple of times when heshouldn't be, and so I, yeah, I
think there's a lot to learn inin all of it.
I also think this brings us toa great place to park the
episode.
Man.
Always appreciate your time,mike, you're just home run
hitter with this um informationthat, I think, is, you know,
just so helpful for for youraudience, to the audience.
Hey, we always appreciate yourtime.

(01:32:53):
We never want to waste it.
We, uh, we, very muchappreciate comments and
questions.
Feel free to share.
Uh, if you're watching this onyoutube, it's easy to drop a
comment in there.
Your feedback helps us deliververy relevant episodes and we've
stayed on track with thesefirst three of the podcast,
based on the things that you areresponding to and what you like
.
So if there are other thingsthat you hear as we talk about,

(01:33:16):
things on these episodes thatyou'd like us to go deeper in,
we'd love to hear that feedback.
Until then, thanks for tuningin.
We'll see you real soon rightback here on the podcast.
Thanks John, thanks Mike.
Let me hit the stop.
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