GM, Miles here!
I recently spoke to Louis Bogdan, one of our best students who went from struggling as a freelancer to signing 40+ clients in <6 months.
Yesterday, we published our full conversation on The PPC Mastery Podcast.
In this issue, I want to share his inspiring story, the leverage AI agents gave him, why you should build deep expertise first, and what you can learn from his journey.
Here’s a link to the full episode (also available on Spotify).
Let’s dive in!
Quick background on Louis Bogdan
Louis is 21. He was going to study computer science and become a developer, built a solid product but had no customers.
As he went looking for strategies on how to get customers, he found Google Ads. He fell in love with it and changed his career path on the spot.
To build expertise, he took more than 50 courses (free and paid), but was still stuck:
“I was really struggling to find good knowledge. I just felt like everything wasn’t being explained how it should be.”
Then he joined The PPC Hub and went through our Google Ads Success Path. Not a few lessons here and there, he speedran the entire thing with over 50+ hours of content:
“The way Bob teaches in there is exactly what I needed. He breaks it down to its principles. He goes from top-level strategy all the way down to: this is why you take this decision in Google Ads, because of this thing all the way up here.”
Using AI agents with PPC OS to speed up service delivery
Then, after a few months into his membership, we released PPC OS (our AI-powered operating system for Google Ads that uses AI agents to execute real tasks).
It came at a perfect time for Louis, as he had been building his expertise for a few months and was ready to start driving results for his clients.
He was one of the first to jump on and start using PPC OS, integrating it into his own AI agent he calls “Alfie”.
Alfie has its own Gmail address, tone of voice, and entire online identity.
It’s even listed on the Affirmed website like a member of the team. It runs on an account with read and write permissions, so it logs into Google Ads and makes the changes itself.
“It’s basically just three employees right now, technically. Me, my co-founder, and my custom agent.”
He also built his own diagnostic layer on top of it:
“I created an algorithm that basically deterministically decides what is wrong with an account, and I have AI run that across all my clients. It instantly tells me the diagnostic. I don’t have to open up and try to pull together different parts of data from this analytics dashboard, from that analytics dashboard. It all just gets done.”
That runs across every account, every day, and hands him a prioritized list before he opens anything.
Reports are done quickly: Alfie drafts them, Louis reviews them, then Alfie sends them.
“I don’t even open up Gmail anymore to send out emails.”
60% timesavings with agents running on PPC OS
I asked Louis how much time he’s saving by using PPC OS and AI agents:
“A solid sixty percent of my day is saved up. After I fully finalize it, and you guys also build out the final skills, it can probably go up to eighty percent.”
Those timesavings are nice, but what matters is what he does with that saved time:
Louis’ secret client acquisition method
“It’s very hard to do both client acquisition AND deliver the service AND do all the execution yourself. Once I was able to automate all the service delivery, still to the standard that I would do it manually, then I could just focus on getting clients.”
Louis leaked his outreach method live on the call, so here it is.
He works with Shopify stores, so:
- He scrapes the web for Shopify stores running the Google & YouTube app and Tag Manager
- He runs those stores through the Ads Transparency Center to check they’re already running Google Ads. If they’re not, he skips them: “that’s way too hard of a sell”
- He finds the owner on LinkedIn or X. No cold email, no cold calls: “nobody likes to get cold called”
- He sends a personalized message referencing their actual live creatives, written by AI: “your ads look great, but there can be some improvements here”
Out of roughly 100 LinkedIn messages, he signs about two clients.
How awesome is that! Louis automated most of his client work with AI agents running on PPC OS, and uses the saved time to do outreach to clients to grow his agency.
When I spoke to him in June, he sat at 40-ish clients but I’m sure that number is even higher now.
I just love it.
But… AI did not improve his performance.
Someone in the live chat asked Louis if his performance improved once he started using AI.
He said no:
“I wouldn’t say the AI by itself changed the performance. What really changed performance was me becoming really good at Google Ads through The PPC Hub, and then applying AI just sped up that process and made me able to provide that expertise to multiple clients instead of just a few.”
He continued:
“Search term analysis is search term analysis whether you do it manually or whether you do it by AI. It just improves the speed at which you do it.”
AI didn’t make his accounts better per se. But it did let him deliver the same standard to 40 clients instead of 5.
Which is why he’s careful with the phrase “AI-first”:
“AI-first by itself doesn’t really make sense. There’s always something you have to add to that. AI-first Google Ads expert. AI-first consultant. AI-first accountant. It’s always an expertise.”
If your fundamentals are bad, AI will just produce mediocre work faster.
Where AI can still go wrong (and how Louis fixed it)
But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. I do like to ask about cases where AI was wrong, and Louis was honest about it:
“The biggest and most mistakes that I’ve seen was when I was running AI without a solid knowledge base. Without my SOPs, without the PPC OS SOPs, without all the custom thinking it should do.”
Out of the box, AI reads a million contradictory posts about Smart Bidding and has no way to tell which of them are right. That’s your job as the human to determine and give back to your agents.
“Ninety-nine of those posts are complete rubbish, and there’s one percent that will actually apply to your situation. AI doesn’t really know right from wrong. It’s just trained on that data.”
Give it a custom knowledge base and the mistakes become significantly less because your agents operate the same way you would.
He hasn’t seen bad outputs since he started using PPC OS… But he still checks everything before it goes live, and he’s honest about why:
“It’s very solid for like ninety nine percent of the times. But there will be that one edge case where you need to pay attention to catch it. And if you don’t, it might mess up the account.”
5 ideas worth stealing from Louis’ inspiring story
- Build expertise first, automate second: that order is important. Automation with AI agents is nice, but only if you have the expertise to back it up. AI just amplifies whatever is already there, the good and the bad.
- Automate delivery so you can go and sell: timesavings are nice, but what matters is what you do with all the extra time. Louis focused more on client acquisition to grow his agency. Another option could be to spend time improving your skills beyond the ad platform, so you can solve bigger problems and go deeper on existing projects. Whatever you do, is totally up to you.
- Bad AI output is usually a missing knowledge base: give it your SOPs and client context so it knows how to execute a specific task for a specific situation. Instead of building his own, he relied on PPC OS which saved him a ton of time, allowing him to serve clients at the same level but much faster.
- Obsess over reaching your goals and you will achieve them. After falling in love with Google Ads, Louis obsessively started looking for the best sources to help him master it. We’re proud to see that he credits some of his growth to what he learned in The PPC Hub, but it would not have been possible had he not had this amazing drive to succeed.
- You grow by giving. Louis has always been super helpful in The PPC Hub community, helping other members without expecting anything in return. As a result, he built a great reputation and many people have referred new clients to him. Give without expecting anything in return — that is how you grow.
Louis’ final advice
Louis’ own advice is really the summary of this whole issue:
“Stop stressing about AI taking over your job. Focus on becoming the expert. Then understand that once you’re the expert, the ceiling of that AI is only going to be as good as you are.”
But the full conversation goes much deeper than this issue can. We also discussed what an average day looks like for him now, where he won’t trust AI, and why he lowered his prices to sign even more clients.
👉 Watch the full episode with Louis here
And if you want the 3 things that made his amazing transformation possible, then consider joining The PPC Hub.
You’ll get the knowledge (Google Ads Success Path), system (PPC OS), and community (2,500+ specialists) to build deep expertise and drive better results faster.
Lastly, we’ll help you set up PPC OS in our upcoming AI Agent Challenge, which starts next Monday.
In just 5 days, you’ll have an army of AI agents running on your accounts, so you can find what’s broken and know exactly what to fix next.
Enrollment closes Friday and we’ll be closed for a while (as we will have full focus on The PPC Summit after).
👉 Join The AI Agent Challenge and get PPC OS (only in The PPC Hub)
I hope you liked this inspiring story.
See you next week!
Cheers,
Miles
