You can't trust Google Ads data, do this instead

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00:00most of that information inside of it besides your spend is designed to make you spend more money and I would say like the biggest thing I would say to not believe is going to be the conversion tracking all right welcome back to the PBC Mastery podcast today I have another special guest uh he's actually one of the most if not the most requested guest to come on so I'm super excited to finally talk to him um you may know him as the co-founder of solutions 8 he's also Chief strategist at tier 11 uh he's a co-author of the well in my opinion bestselling book you versus Google um my personal opinion one of the smartest Minds in PPC uh and absolute PVC Legend here's the man the myth The Legend John Moran welcome to the show man thanks for having me I know I'm gonna try to live up to all to that that hype that was that was an amazing intro thank you yeah man for sure now you're actually one of the people that who's content I always look forward to to seeing and early on in my career as well um I watched most of the solutions 8 videos I don't really um consume as much PPC content nowadays as I did back then uh but you were always the one of the main guys that I really enjoyed following and always gave me like really nice cool ideas to think about so it's super cool to to talk to you here awesome well I appreciate that yeah I try to just you know try to put my brain on YouTube so I think I have like over a thousand videos now over like almost the last so I've been doing this for 10 years I think we started the Channel maybe five six years ago so um yeah that's a lot of content yeah man for sure for sure all right so uh John I

01:38I would like to start this off with one quick question and that is tell us something about yourself that most people don't know yeah uh so I am uh like a big outdoor survivalist Training Guy um so self-reliance there's actually a methodology of outdoor like kind of camping and Hiking called Bushcraft where you go out there with basically like you know flint and steel not like a pharoh rub like actual like you know whacking a piece of Steel against a rock and like a knife and pretty much just kind of like live off the land for as long as you can so that's always it's always been kind of fun I've been into that for man probably 15 years and uh it's it's self-empowering so I think like you know it's kind of like in your professional career if you're an entrepreneur you're like making your own way surviving off of what you can what you can forage and so it's kind of uh kind of synonymous with business cool man so it's like going back to that primitive urge of just getting out being out there and hunting and Gathering yeah trying not to get lost yeah yeah exactly well how's what's the longest period of time that you were able to survive out in your own so i' I've only had like the time to do like three days but you're I mean we did it in the snow one time which is crazy so we were like chopping down a tree and and you know bucking it and then you know quartering it and doing you know feather sticks and basically Building A Fire and like sleeping on the snow and you know kind of building your own Survival shelter and that kind of stuff with uh I brought a clear plastic tarf that's all I had uh so it was fun but it was it was a good time epic epic I came back yeah still alive still alive yeah exactly um all right man um so here's another question what is something that you believe about Google Ads that most people would disagree with and I'm actually super curious to hear what you have to say about this oh man yeah I mean where do I begin uh that's kind of

03:15the the premise for you versus Google is you spend more money um and I would say like the biggest thing I would say to to conversion tracking um the conversion tracking is something that uh is going to get worse and worse and worse uh till September 31st um that's when we're going to probably see rock bottom but what I would say for the most part is never measure the success of your business from looking at anything to do with the conversion tracking inside of Goog Google Ads holistically um so think about you know get good at running Google Ads without ever having to track a conversion inside and that's where I think the biggest misconception is people are like well you need to learn that the algorithm needs to learn sort of um it comes at a cost of scale uh and that's what's really interesting about Google Ads is they will start to charge you based on your goals not based on scale so if you're ever thinking about you know what do I trust and what do I not trust in Google Ads the competitiveness is something I would I would say trust like who's bidding against and where you are in the position those seem seem to be pretty pretty accurate um but kind of take off your data hat and put your good marketer hat back on uh and be able to manage your account based on the actual impacts of your business you'll be able to be you you'll you'll see many more forests for the trees I guess I would say yeah um and that's a really cool I would love to dive into that um get more specific

04:53on it because in uh a recent interview that you did on the Perpetual traffic podcast uh which I I believe it's owned by tier 11 right yeah yeah so um fantastic podcast I recommend everyone to subscribe and and check that out um you kind of exposed how Google is inflating cpcs and uh you're showing a method of what you're doing to combat that basically and I just looking at how you usually look at Google Ads I think this ties perfectly into the whole you versus Google idea um but I would love to hear your thoughts about what it was that you were able to find uh um and what you're doing now that's differently from what you did before you learned that because I think that cost a lot of um well kind of stirred up the PPC industry lots of people are talking about it um and and you can see that you um have the the the deep understanding of of Google Ads of the PPC industry as a whole to be able to do these kinds of things and see this and and actually test it and then prove it so I would love to to um hear you talk about what it is that you found and then we I'm sure that there's going to be so many more like directions we can take from there yeah so what's interesting is the way that smart bidding works I think that when everyone has a a really good holistic understanding of how smart bidding Works everyone kind of pierces the veil like it it's really cool all of a sudden you have this aha moment where you just begin to have this Moment of clarity that unlocks what most people are struggling with and one of the most reasons the top reason why people contact me is I can't scale and and

06:32that's kind of uh that's usually the main reason why people people reach out to me so I want to bring you into a scenario and in what we're seeing in the day-to-day um aspect of Google Ads that is smart bidding so imagine for for an example there's a 100 people in a room Google knows 10 of those 100 people are going to buy today it does not mean that 90 won't it just means that Google knows that 10 will or have a very high probability of of buying today for e-commerce for example and you may have five other competitors that you're bidding against for those 10 people and whomever has the highest spend and CPC wins the majority of those 10 people that's what smart bidding is says I know 10 are going to convert and there's five competitors you're bidding three you're bidding two you're bidding one because you're T is set at 100 versus 200 versus 300 um or your CPA is set at like you know tcpa of 50 and 70 100 what that means is that the person that can afford to spend the most and use the or achieve the least amount of margin will win the highest amount of sales and as you scale that campaign you earn more of those 10 people but you also cap out if you earn seven of those 10 you're stuck and that's where you just see increase my ad spend and I don't get incremental impressions in clicks you do but it very slowly and not at the same rate of increase as your CPC you put 50% in uh more ad spend and sometimes you sp get

08:1240% more CPC but only 20% more clicks and that's where you're like uh oh I can't scale and that's because smart bitting is locking you into who it knows will convert not buying more people of good quality uh good quality searches that is also another reason why broad match the Search terms don't match up with the keywords most often you see Search terms that are Broad and you're like well those shouldn't work but why did it work it's because those people Google knows what they're doing and it's almost to the point where people can that are interested in buying like let's say a mouse pad can Google something like home equipment and buy your mouse pad and that's because Google knows okay this person's ready to buy a mouse pad it has nothing to do with the actual search term or the keyword it just knows that those are relatively close enough that Google can can earn a sale for you but if you bid on that search term like HomeGoods you're never going to sell that person ever again or those type of people ever again and that's why Google wants you to go to smart bitting is because it says I have 10 people out of a hundred that I know will buy in close similarity to what your website says what your keyword is and I'll allow you to buy those and that's why it doesn't scale so what my what my thinking was is well how do I get the other 90 how do how do I get 90 instead of just those 10 can I pay 90 for good qual or can I pay for the 90% of the people with good quality placement in Search terms but not have to spend the four five six seven per click go back down to the $1 and that's the basis of that test and the way that I did that was and people

09:50think I killed conversion tracking I did in a sense and that's why I think there's a large um large kind of disruption in the industry is like well don't you know of course yeah manual will will do that what I did is I changed my primary conversion action to YouTube engagements and YouTube engagements is a trusted Google hosted conversion action that doesn't need to be relearned so Google's expecting good performance but when it can't that's when it spiked up my positioning it dropped my bid it basically gave me all of those people that I wanted and now I no longer run into the limited by bid strategy because Google doesn't see that this is valuable to me yet so it's not going to price fix me into quot quote unquote the upper echelon or the the other auctions that aren't available to me which is the literal definition of price fixing so it's kind of the way that once you understand how smart bidding Works you're buying what Google knows rather than buying incremental traffic and that's that's the big aha moment that I think people will hear wow okay so could you elaborate a little bit on that YouTube engagement thing you said yeah so there's three algorithms at play Google has three algorithms that it mainly uses on his inbound campaigns shopping in search for example it's going to be the campaign algorithm that is your campaign objective it has the bid strategy which is obviously what you know TCP T has man CPC and then it has the conversion action so there's three algorithms at work at the same time when you use a campaign algorithm of let's say sales or leads and that means okay I'm going to try to get it's almost like a video action campaign on YouTube it's like okay I'm going to try to get a

11:27conversion and then the conversion action is something that is known and trusted and longstanding like let's say YouTube Eng agents this does not work if you launch a new um a new uh conversion action because now you've disrupted one of the three now it's relearning it's learning for the first time it has no historical precedence and it's not trust and doesn't even know if it fires and so when those two are working kind of with each other it will n naturally drop your bid when it sees less performance all of a sudden happening and what I did is I just locked into a CPC that showed historically good performance before it scaled with my with my bid or sorry scaled with my budget so before Google said that $1 works now it's really valuable to you so I'm going to cap now now your your audience so I went back down to that level I just never let Google know that it was valuable but there was no disruption to those three algorithms um and that's why this works interesting interesting um man so many so many ways to go from here hey guys real quick if you like this episode don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss anything in the future and feel free to share with a friend colleague or family member cuz that's the only way we can grow the show all right back to the show um but you I want to take out a quote that you said in on the Perpetual traffic podcast you mentioned platforms are purposely designed to trick you to spend more money uh what do you mean with that and can you talk about your findings yeah yeah so for example um well you know what here's here's what's really cool I'll uh I'll share screen here for a moment um and this is what I mean by that if I was to look at this one of these manual tests for example

13:05you see there's no conversions that are being tracked um if I go into this campaign actually just go here campaign settings if I'm on manual CPC and that's this is what's fun is if I'm on a manual CPC and I use let's say no no conversions and I hit save if I'm on manual CPC why can't I do that that's number one well they and the other part is number two is if you have to track a conversion why is that and why is Google so hyperfocused on calling literally every single client of theirs to get enhanced conversions on because it might increase anywhere between 5% on e-commerce and 14% of lead generation and why is the push for a maximiz conversion value so harsh I mean you have a lead generation campaign it says no use value based bidding BBB it's because as soon as Google knows how valuable something is and it sees you scale that's when they can adjust the pricing based on your goals the other thing is that when you look at the actual um when you look at the actual uh let me do this here this is two examples of how I noticed Google is adjusting then it was confirmed by Jenny Marvin and that's why I thought was another thing that was really crazy is Jenny's like yeah smart bitting is not designed for incr incremental Impressions I was like wait a minute you mean like scale whoa um that's yeah she she quoted it on a LinkedIn post which I

14:43was like that's interesting so there's three areas here this is Raz clicks and CPC when you have low Raz on the same day you have 30 clicks and you have low CPC but the next day you have 938 so it says okay that you have 930 because you have a low CPC now because this day was good you look at the following day and then you have a 224 row as but arbitrarily you pay $253 why why did my bid go up more than a dollar well because that day then had a slightly poorer performance they went back down and gave me better performance and Jenny Marvin on the post says it smart bidding adjusts based on your goals when set which means I'm going to keep you into the TR as or tcpa that you want to keep you fat happy and complacent and and then this the the next kind of case study here which is we saw Zero Performance $119 good performance at $160 so I had um I had a $220 or $211 C it you know spiked up 50 cents the next day but that started to go down here a little bit so it arbitrarily went down but they had bad performance cheap bad performance cheap but I mean you can see that when there's bad performance Google will allow you to have twice as many clicks as the previous period with good performance because is trying to get it back to that goal so you see that it arbitrarily spikes up your your clicks not because you pay for them but because Google saying uh oh it's not doing as good you're going to do what stop giving Google money yeah but this is um it it kind of makes sense if if smart bidding is is taking

16:21the averages over a longer period of time right so then I guess this would this data proves that that one day you have a spike up then it's going well pushing harder and then it brings it down whether that is good or not let's put that let's keep that in the keep that in Middle um so the the approach that you have you're just trying to keep that consistent right consistently low cost per click without sacrificing uh conversions right and so what I did is and that's where I think uh you'll kind of see some of the same stuff from the Perpetual traffic podcast but the CPC was at $250 $2.78 and I mean hit $280 and the only reason is because my costs jumped from $800 to $1,200 a day so my CPC hit an all-time high um and then you see kind of Flatline and stay there and then my cost is able to scale out of it um and that was obviously at the same time that I killed conversion tracking um and so because of that now what's nice is I look back at the days before like last 7 Days compared to end of May when I started the test and I can still see that my you know my new visits are nice and cold as 78% my first- time transactions are increasing I have 65 first time 16 returning and this on a cash basis so if they ever made a second purchase from back then it's going to show up here on a cash basis but all for kind of like the the same cost um CS dropping CPC is even getting lower like everything's starting to head back in the right direction that I want my cpms are fixed my click the R's actually getting slightly better um so when you go to switch to like what happens if I don't want the 10 and I buy the other 90 and

17:58and it's not been a 100% success for sure um the sales Cycles are usually longer on the 90 they're a little bit you know more cold to your brand but does that mean that it's going to have worse performance no it just may take longer might have to look at other ways to remarket on YouTube and meta for example to help support your Spike up in non-brand cold traffic inside of standard shopping so again put your good marketer hat back on and think these are humans you know I I I think that once we started to look at oh these aren't real people this is you know numbers on the screen you it's almost like no there's still people that you know maybe found out about your product for the first time today and you're not you're kicking yourself because they didn't buy immediately like the other 10 people yesterday on sparting because they've already known about maybe your brand or a brand like yours for last two months you know that kind of thing so you got to put that like sales cycle and marketer hat back on in order to say do I want the 90 people that will be interested or do I want the 10 that are interested now it's a it's a big mindset change that people just I think the last 10 years we've been so focused on roaz WE we've become complacent true true I I guess I guess that's true maybe even lazy U yeah yeah or train wrong well that's yeah you know we learned the we learned to be the the the Turner of the dial rather than marketers yeah and I think it's also uh a lot of people who are getting into PBC now they don't really have that background in how to actually manage manage manual CPC uh how does it even work um are you using bit layers at all or is it just that you're setting up a

19:35manual CPC bit and that's it set a manual CPC bid um high priority um I add about 800 negative keywords a week um so you know kind of going back old school which is like eight years ago old school um a lot of manual keywords but I look at always the search intent and positioning and if the search intent and positioning are good I hang tight I I don't really you know I don't make a lot of uh lot of changes um if I see that for example if I uh well you're just going to have to kind of like you know trust me on this one but if I look at my search term that was now a 50% less for a cold traffic search term like this is our brand on Amazon and then our brand here in the in the second position and these kind of bounce between you know the first and second position that's okay I'm building a brand they buy on Amazon or they buy on the website I'm okay with that I'm driving awareness to my brand through inbound which is high in 10 uh I'm just paying half the price now but I can scale yeah yeah yeah for sure for sure so I guess you I assume you don't use broad match then right with manual CPC you really can't now broad match is not uh search term based it's yeah it's does Google know the 10 people um you know what's funny is if you if this is kind of proven by if you ever run a broad match and you see competitor bids in there or competitive Search terms uh yeah sure yeah why if you have a if you have a search term that says you know blue mouse pad or sorry if you have a keyword that says blue mouspad and you get a search for Office Depot that means that Google knows your site

21:13they don't care about your keyword they know your site and they know the intent of the person they know that there is a person out there that kind of wants to buy something that you offer and so it's just buying the person where they're at in their journey and that is a huge blockade for people's minds like wa wait a minute so Google is almost a few steps away from what's your URL and give me your credit card yeah and less about driving that incremental growth so yes we can fall into the smart bitting of it knows who wants to buy your product not at scale just however many people are available but when you switch on Broad match and manual you get the just whole bunch of junk I mean it's so irrelevant and so bad but that's when you switch back to exact and exact is kind of like exact broad you know the close the close variant are yeah it's like broad match modified again almost almost um yeah so that's what's cool is like switching on exact match will get you you know kind of that broad match modifier again um but then you you bid for positioning a placement so it's it's so weird because I switch back here like I have like no competition like everything's just m miraculously it's getting better cuz like now in these industries I'm like the only person buying the other or 90 while everyone's fighting over the 10 it's actually really cool so so you mentioned that Jenny Marvin actually said on on a post or in a comment on LinkedIn that smart she confirmed that smart bidding is not uh does not have the goal of driving incremental conversion is that it incremental Impressions which is essentially meaning searches because I'm on inbound and so I I kind of I was blown away by that it's

22:52almost like you're saying the quiet part part out loud um and and it was actually uh it was in this one and I think there's a few things here that open my eyes a lot uh to this sort of uh phenomenon and I'll actually pull open the um I'll open up the the post uh I think it was Raul um that actually shared this on LinkedIn uh or one of the people that kind of shared on LinkedIn and someone called Jenny out uh says we look forward to hearing Jenny Marvin Thon can't actually be true we need to game the system in order to trust the system so called jinny out I asked jinny she's like oh yeah that's that's you know that's that's not happening and I'm like okay I'm like I guess my question would be why would remove it the conversion value allow me to drop the uh bid CPC and then enter into those incremental inventory and she said uh thanks for the question the key note watch this the key to note is that smart bidding does not optimize for incremental impression delivery okay okay that's kind of a big deal what do it optimized for then usually conversions at a known conversion and Google can't know everybody in the world but it has people that are kind of like okay these people are moving into more closer to the bottom of the funnel and you're just going to have to pay for them and then the other part is with smart buing conversion signals are used to predict the likelihood of conversion or probable conversion value then determine when and how to bid based on your goals and targets when set MH

24:32that's why you're you keep a 4X return but you can never scale it um and then this means that you may enter different and more or fewer auctions with different bids than you would otherwise using manual bidding so basically it's you know all the scenarios that I explained it could only mean that Google has a finite number of people that it knows are going to convert and whomever that's when when I use my TR as 40% bid or my low T as my low T as uh strategy I just blow into a high amount of sales because I'm buying more of the available conversions Google knows about but I get stuck there dude super interesting man wow um so there's a a key part of this is uh the tracking side of things so you you mentioned you set up YouTube engagements which is going to be stuck at zero right almost always um it's a nice hack how do you I know you're you're big on third party attribution but um um actually know for a fact a lot of people have never touched third party attribution tools what are you using to gauge performance and keep an eye on um everything else except for oh I'm getting more clicks with in my budget how am I actually performing what do you use in that regard so I'm actually uh testing another tool that's it's still kind of in development though um it's called EDG mesh um EDG mesh is a server sidetracking uh that is actually delivered at the edge of the site but not based off of a tag firing so it's not susceptible to speed or anything it's also can't be blocked uh by ad blockers or anything because it's almost

26:09like I can't give away the secret sauce but it's almost like tagging the person in the parking lot before they get into the store to then accept the cookies so it's kind of I don't know how compliant it is just yet which is why I don't really recommend people just rushing to it's also extremely expensive you're talking like eight to per month um right so it's it's it's you know it's not cheap at all but it is extremely powerful and so what what the edge mesh platform allows me to do is look at hundreds of different uh intent based signals based on a campaign that is 100% accurate um it does not do attribution though and I don't really care I don't need attribution um in my opinion a lot of the clients that I work with have a large amount of their sales happening on Amazon on which means if you're one of those people your inapp is only half true your third party tracking is also only half true what's not going to be half true though is the intent because you're still sending them to a page you own whether or not they go and buy from a a different you know shopping cart I.E Amazon that's when that's when your in apps don't make sense so you're sting your like your trz your tcpa your bid caps and your cost caps on meta and then you find out well half these people went on Amazon so now I have to like cut my bids in half and or I have to double my bid and cut my goals in half and y y y this sort of takes all that out of that uh that that sequence so I'll I'll kind of share with you and tease a little bit um we have to

27:47blur some stuff out here this is actually a very very large we're you know nine figure per year income company um but uh as this load you'll get to kind of see what this looks like here and so it's loading right now with last 15 days of data and it is insane like this thing is probably one of the most powerful tools I've used for intent that I've ever seen so think about like if you had a if you had a view into like Google's metrics that's as close as I can get with this tool here um it's going to take a minute to fetch this data so I'll just kind of come back but long story short I'm looking at are they building carts what items are they putting into carts what are they checking out um how many unique users and how many engaged unique users and what's the average revenue per user and the entry page the exit page the duration the region the device I mean everything and so a ni spot on inbound standard shopping is if I start to scale and I see the intent on a 7-Day sales cycle start to drop I know that I'm reaching into lesser and lesser relevant people um I'm going into the 200 people rather than Google knowing about a 100 but wanting to give me 10 and so that's the tool that been using um to prove this out and so it's it's been pretty positive and that's for the for the big lines right as you said if it's a 8 to 10K per month that's uh Out Of Reach for most um there's that's why I'm working with them we're going to be introducing a much lower price um that doesn't have they they do two things sight speed and analytics we're breaking those out yeah uh interesting interesting um and what about um the rest so people can't use

29:27Edge MH right now uh I know you've in the past you've used other tools yeah um like North Beam for example it doesn't really matter like what the tool is but more so interested in what you're doing to leverage these tools to get the insights that you're not getting from Google then yeah yeah I'm using nor beam right now I'm I am for all transparency I'm a an equity owner of norbe um so I do like that tool the problem that I have with using an attribution tool is again that client that I'm running that test on 2third of their sales happen on Amazon sometimes more so it's like uh oh you know am I actually getting good performance or are they going elsewhere are they still interested or am I just like waiting the 10 days to find out uh the sales cycle is also about 14 days so when I make a change I gotta wait two weeks and then look at half that data and then hope that it's coming out so a good way to look at it is just um product m is what I call it so how much you spend on the product versus how much did you make on the product and are they scaling at about the same rate or if you're looking at just like Shopify data every dollar you put in is at least 50 cents worth the more sales on that product and then you have to go look at Amazon see is the total sales of that product also increasing at the same incremental um so usually that's a good way to look at it if you're like hey you know we're just starting off or I'm lower budget don't really have the money to put into like third party tracking or first- party data and all the other stuff y y yada y y look at um I would say enac is your truest Northstar um just the cost per acquired first-time customer if you're if you're scaling up safely and smartly that should not change by much it'll get either a little

31:04bit less or a little bit more but it should not be you know if I put in 20% more spend and your endat goes up 20% nothing's working um that's what I do like about this tool here is uh it's actually loaded now if I look at something here for example I can see you know engage active cart initiate checkout completed checkout conversion rate unique engage users I mean you name it I have it in this tool and I can see everything about these people um did they did they even look at a product or did they look at a category and did they search something afterwards like all of the intent I have now that I don't need to do conversion tracking I can see you know the active sub toal average revenue per user by campaign like I know all of this stuff here it's and this is this everything that's on this screen here these like I don't know 100 columns is only what I haven't added out of these columns here as well so I know everything about these people if they've been a new user how long since they've returned uh like days since first seen as an example like I can see these people are you know 33 days old and they're now coming back and converting so yeah I I know all this stuff here and that's what I like is I have the ability to do this but I do share it for free like I'm G to teach you how to do this based on you know the millions of dollars that I've spent this last month on this strategy um and hopefully people can just find Value in that and maybe you know think outside the box and learn to test on their own a bit at the very least that's definitely helping uh helping people think outside the box for sure so here's a question that I have for myself about this strategy U I would

32:41like to hear your take on it is how sustainable do you think this approach is um truth is I have no idea uh honestly I I've been running it since May 5th um okay so it's been about well was that uh May so months yeah two months and 10 days and so far so good um and it's worked on every test now I have seen diminishing points of return in areas that I looked at which means oh my conversions week over week went down that was true um and then I do see a start to come back and that's why I think that we've went into like the people that are at to by now into starting people on their Journey so I wouldn't say test this over a 7day 7day period really I would test this over a quarter to quarter period so don't just throw the whole baby out with the bath wire and say kill conversion tracking everywhere um you know do this smartly and measure measure smartly but your goal is to not necessarily pay a lot less CPC your goal is to fix the CPC at a healthy enough price whatever that may be but then scale that's the thing is everyone's like oh if you switch to manual you're going to pay less CPC that's not the point I I'll I'll be fine paying $2 instead of $25 as long as that $2 doesn't go up to $6 when I start to increase my spend right super interesting man um so in terms of uh the testing this um I think one of the the possible pitfalls for people could be is that they try to mimic what you're

34:18saying on on YouTube um and that's definitely not on you because you're just openly sharing what's working for you and and you're smart and you have a lot of experience in in Google with with with PPC and in Google Ads um but I think the the potential danger that people uh can find themselves in is if they don't really know exactly what it is that they're doing and what data points they need to be looking at in order to run this type of test so for those uh kind of people who um I just mentioned it before as well some people have never done manual bidding um they just grew up on on Smart bidding um what would you say to people in uh on how to actually put this to practice and start testing with this in a sort of safe and controlled way um so again that is not to take anything away from you because I think this is really great but it's just for those who might think like oh this sounds smart I'm gonna do it and then boom everything just crashes wrecks crashes and burns yeah no I removing conversion tracking and uh so I would what I would say is gain as many sources of data points that you possibly can and track that for like a 10day period first before making any changes don't be like well that's cool I'm gonna do that too like what you don't know yet is the cost per like new user versus just a CPC so that's something that is huge like ecnv is something I track very very very tightly which means what is the cost per new person versus cost per click mean that could be a1ar 15 three now just that little thing right there can

35:55completely wreck your whole day TR and TPA tcpa goes they go after uh existing people they it it does the only way they can get your conversion to happen predictably is to go after people it knows and I.E also people that maybe have been to your site from meta so when you turn on manual bidding you may see your CPC go from let's say two to one okay but your effective cost per new visit just went from you know $2 to $336 because now you're buying more new people which means your inapp conversions are going to go down even if you're measuring secondary but you're now have actually cut your budget by 60% and so now you're not sure what's going on so all of those little data points of track your clicks versus you know new versus returning your customers new versus returning your overall traffic to that prodct and what you spent on it what the what the conversion was and was it also from other sources of channels like I measure probably 45 to 50 data points for 14 days before I make that switch so I can look at all the things and be like okay these are how those metrics changed and why and that's why I would say is if you're going to do that um it kind of goes to my other ma uh Mastermind speech that I I gave like two months ago this right here this is what people are typically measuring CPA and Ras that's pretty much it this is what they should be measuring and at least for a time period before moving into uh this sort of test like versus endak um so it's say a conversion versus conversion that is new those are going to be violently

37:33different in terms of cost so all of these things here on the screen I won't go through we don't have time to go through each one of these individually but when I measure be uh data points before I just switch this strategy on these are all the things I have to take in consideration to then say aha this is GNA actually start to go good after this horrible down period of buying this new traffic as example so those are all things just kind of take into consideration as I make this I make test very meticulously it's bold but I'm measuring 50 things so I'm never worried yeah yeah exactly and I think that most people are just they just think that it's oh remove the conversion tracking uh okay YouTube engagements uh and then um uh manual CPC and that's it but there's so much more that goes into it to keep a finger on the pulse to to to gauge whether it's actually successful or not so thanks for thanks for sharing that those are some good insights yeah um so two more things about this uh before we go to the next one is is this going to be or is this your go-to approach right now for most accounts is it something that you're rolling out in well the accounts that you're managing and overseeing a few things to take in consideration um if we're not wanting to scale on Google actually no um I can make Google much more effective by pushing on Meta Even by using non-brand standard shopping amound um and that's because Google is going to bid for for the hottest audience but sometimes you have a uh a wizzy wig that not many people have heard of you know I just I wizzy wig is is something you know I just made up in my mind um it stands for

39:12what you see is what you get it's all development term but you might have this cool thing that no one knows about you're like I'm a scale shopping because I killed conversion track and why didn't that work like ah like it's not gonna work so you have to take into consideration everything in in that company and say a do I want to scale on Google B is it smart to scale on Google and C is it easier to scale somewhere else um if any of those are no or yes at the end um yeah I won't I won't actually do this so there's a lot of times where 10% of an audience that wants to buy shoes is a million dollars a month you know I don't need to scale past that um so or I'm in a I'm in a company that sells bulk aggregate so it's literally tons of rocks like driveway gravel like that that tcpa and T Bing that I was testing there was good up till like a 20x scale my CPC like still only was 60 cents okay cool like I'm not hitting that point to returns I would say only use this when you're like I have to scale in Google it's working well but I'm just starting to pay crazy amount of more money for the same traffic that's it I'm paying the crazy amount more money for the same traffic 30% more spend my CPC just went up 30% I didn't get anybody new that's when you use this yeah exactly exactly so first like check your data as well over a longer period of time to see if you see those spikes and then that would be an interesting opportunity to start testing this right except for apart from the things that you mentioned about scaling and not scaling yeah don't just do it because it's a cool trick that you want to see if you can be Google like yeah take take your business or your customers you know

40:50right strategy and and goals first yeah that's that's probably the best not step to take first always um and uh is there is there um anything about this approach that you're still trying to figure out uh no not yet it's actually I have I no joke I probably spent over a million dollars on it so far since I've introduced this um I am trying to break this by the way it's not like I don't recommend this honestly I don't recommend it to anybody I'm just sharing you the cool that I'm doing um yeah I but I really I wouldn't just say like do what I'm doing because you'd have to probably pay me a lot of money for this me to teach you all the stuff that I'm actually doing I'm I'm sharing with this so that if this becomes like a good standard strategy or something that we can we can rely on that people will will kind of uh be able to start to start to adopt or at least you know think about can I do this I've been following John I've been learning from it he's teaching me as he learns himself um and is is something I want to test too because I think that's that's where the magic can really happen is is if we can find an area that this is you know as solidified as possible um it'll be it'll be good and I think that that's what's what we're we're looking at is is the same thing on this one here on this this company this is that bulk company where they sell the the Rocks um when we looked at our shopping campaign here we killed our conversion tracking and shopping what's funny is our brand my one little brand campaign spends ,000 now to make $160,000 like it's insane and this company is brand new by the way um but that's just because we spent 94 to make 5.4 million here is all conversion

42:27valuable R track in one thing and we sell tons of rocks at thousands of dollar aov so it's great but our um our our brand now is is getting where everything was getting on April like it's insane so that's just because we killed conversion tracking so so many more people you see coming back in the brand which means your top of funnel is working so all those little things like hey we hit a point diminishing returns and we have zero competitors so why is my adsen or my CPC tripling we're the only people in this town selling tons of rocks on Google shopping like there's no reason for this to be price fixed so those are all things I think like you know it really helps the small people which I love yeah yeah and it also proves some of the suspicions that everyone kind of has you know of what's going on under the hood and behind the scenes and we we just can't really prove it and now this uh yeah this allows us to think on a on a different level as you said like think outside the box so I love that yeah um all right so I have a quick question about your um approach to to testing it's just just short I'm actually curious what does your Innovation process look like because this is something that you know comes from you in tier 11 I I assume um what does that look like you're just sitting down and brainstorming ideas and oh maybe this will be a cool test what does it look like for you yeah you know what's funny is I I had this Epiphany um because I don't track uh an app um everything else is tracked elsewhere most of the time manually actually in a spreadsheet um I noticed that and I've work with 470 accounts by the way so that's that's my my depth of of of scope of range and so

44:05that's where I I get a lot of data quickly and I noticed that the majority of accounts that have either failing or non-existent conversion tracking were stupid easy to scale and I was like a man this is now kind of obvious to me I'm kind of feeling stupid I didn't notice this five years ago um and so I started to investigate all of the accounts that are getting like a five six and even 10 m Med efficiency ratio like put a dollar you know 10 out um were companies that have like sometimes long sales Cycles large aovs but Google never went over like 65 and 70 cents in CPC and then I also noticed on the complete flip side on accounts that were doing good I dumped $10,000 more a day in spend and then had to go tell the client how we spent $50,000 more to get 1% more more cold traffic and I felt like an idiot so I just kind of you know it came at a perfect time where I'm like wait a minute and oh like all of a sudden that just kind of clicked for me there so it's just because I'm in this like 10 hours a day that just like it end up just kind of happening in my brain where I'm like these are easy to scale and cheap those I can't even get more traffic and I was like this is only spending like 10 grand this is spending 100 Grand I'm tapping out what Google wants me to get to all of a sudden just became like a little Epiphany so I didn't have like necessarily a brainstorming it was just kind of like a happen stance but um yeah I just wanted to share that with everybody yeah that's cool man and that comes with experience as well how long have you been in in the in the PBC game like 10 years plus yeah about uh this actually just past 10

45:43years Yep this last month 10 years so yeah there you go um all right man well John I want to transition into a few rapid fire questions let's do it so it's going to be this or that no it depends and no elaborations okay all right all right yes I know I know I know it depends um okay all right the first one is pmax or standard shopping standard shopping yeah I expected that one Google has advertisers best interest in mind agree or disagree disagree brought match yes or no no a ARS automatically apply recommendations good or bad I like how we're both laughing yeah suicide um all right let's see manual bidding or smart bidding manual manual nice was that a tough one it was because it's smart bitting is excellent only until you want to scale but I but if you don't want to scale smart bitting interesting um all right will all match types except broad be gone in two years yes and will search and shopping campaigns be around in two years yes so what do what do you think uh this is not like a this is no more rapid fire answering um what do you think it's going to look like in the next two years or so Google Ads I do think that search and shopping will still be around um only because I know that Google has heard the violent reaction as to pmax and that's why they develop demand gen

47:22so quickly um is because they're like uh oh we found out it's caping more demand than generating and so I think that unless they nail it with something that actually can generate demand the only way for them to do that is to not use Smart bidding in those platforms unless those smart bidding things are like you know new visits or you know New Impressions but if they are keeping with the same Mantra that they have for L since Inception which is roaz is King and conversions are King you cannot fundamentally develop a campaign that will generate demand um that's why YouTube does it so well but it doesn't track conversions very well yeah man um all right one final question for you uh if you had to share three golden nuggets about driving results with Google Ads what would that be yeah um go back to Avatar development and add copy that's that's where you're going to be generating the most amount of demand um get good at understanding the difference between capturing demand and generating demand YouTube generates demand performance Max captures demand I've proven that actually um that is something I think is really interesting and then also understand how the algorithms and strategies try to Target existing website traffic first before going in Al those are things that will that will

49:00stop you from leading down the row ass pitfalls yeah man super interesting and thanks for sharing all these uh all these epic insights uh this is one that I'm going to be uh watching back myself so many cool cool nuggets so thank you for sharing so so openly as always um where can uh where can people find you John where could people follow you yeah so uh follow me on LinkedIn um and tier 11 is going to be producing more and more content we're kind of getting a Content schedule uh I don't know if everyone knows this but I end up uh I sold Solutions 8 um and I'll be you know kind of leaving there you know someday soon kind of thing um so that's why you'll see less on Solutions 8 YouTube channel of me and and More Of Me elsewhere but tier 11 uh to contact me and Linkedin to questions and to follow me there and everything like that awesome I'll be posting a lot more there as well cool yeah I'm looking forward to that cuz I checked your LinkedIn profile and the last post was from six months ago so it's like okay yeah get back into the posting Cadence I have uh we have another very large education platform called uh Revenue Rush um it's actually with the current partner of ours we scaled his business to $ hundred million in four years um and everything that we know how to do use that I mean running like a brand campaign training is like two and a half hours it's I mean so everything that we've done we've been filming for over a year now um and that's something that uh we'll be launching here in the next three to four months so that's where I've been putting all of my kind of uh education power behind exact yeah cool man sounds good all right well John thank you very much once again and um to

50:37everyone else thank you for listening watching if you're on YouTube and uh don't forget to like And subscribe all that stuff and we'll catch you on the next episode Peace thanks everyone all right that's the end of this episode of the BBC Mastery podcast I hope you enjoyed it and if you don't want to miss any future episodes we're going to be back next week then don't forget to subscribe and share with a friend family member or a colleague uh cuz that's the only way we can grow this show now there's two more things I want to share with you if you want to take your Google Ads game to the next level the first one is if you want to get advanced Google Ads tips delivered straight into your inbox on Mondays and Fridays head over to PBC mastery.com newsletter to subscribe to our newsletter called the PBC Edge and next to that if you want to really really really take your skills to the next level and become the best Google ad specialist you can possibly be then consider joining the PPC Hub which is our coaching and Community platform for experienced Google Ads Specialists you can find everything about it on PBC mastery.com Hub and with that said I'll catch you in next week's episode Peace