How to leverage AI with Google Ads

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00:00I don't know how many people are going to disagree with this but I'm basing this on the actions that I've seen so what I believe is that AI is going to change things much faster than people think all right welcome back to the PBC Mastery podcast we have another special guest today we have the one and only the legend Mike Rhodes he is uh well founder of Mike Rhodes Ideas the creator of the pMax script um but apart from that he also built and sold an agency in the past he wrote one of the maybe even the number one bestselling Google Ads book uh in the past uh and he's building lots of Epic scripts and products and things and always doing public speaking gigs and and and sharing really cool insights on a high level of the industry um and it's always such a pleasure to to talk to this man so I'm super excited to have him on the podcast uh he's been sharing his knowledge with us in the PPC Hub many times so I'm super excited to finally chat to you on the podcast welcome Mike Mike uh pleasure to be here thanks for inviting me on anytime anytime so I would like to start this conversation Mike on a sort of um easy start tell us something about yourself that most people don't know um I used to fly helicopters um since I was I think six I wanted to be a helicopter pilot um when I was I took 3 months off in between uni and happened

01:39to be in Hawaii and I called up every Helicopter Company in Hawaii there's six of them and said like I just I don't know I was sitting on the beach for two weeks like I was cleaning toilets at the hostel I was working in a pub and I was just like if not now then when so I called everybody and talked my way into a job the next day with a little Helicopter Company down at Honolulu airport my bosses had two bosses they were awesome one of them was the helicopter pilot in Magnum PI and I somehow talked my way into having free training because I said like I'll work in the office all summer I'll I'll computerize your systems I'll get you like drag you into the 21st century and you will pay me half in cash and half in flying time I said great if you can convince that swi guy who's just landed here to do it for that deal then yes we'll do the deal so I learned to fly in Hawaii flying around Kuai and Malachy it was epic and um when I finally got home to the UK a few years later I ended up working for the most prestigious Helicopter Company in Europe uh Lord Hansen's Helicopter Company flying around people like the queen and bod and diad and uh schumacker did Bill Gates I wasn't a pilot I wasn't f those guys I didn't have nearly enough hours to fly those guys I was working in flightops um but you know very closely with the pilots but no I I mean I did some flying in the evenings and stuff and uh every now and again had to put on a white shirt and look special and go sit up the front next to the real pilot don't tell

03:16anyone about that uh but no I didn't fly those guys but it was it was pretty epic wow so cool I have so many questions but maybe for for another time yeah uh that's that's so cool man uh but you don't do that anymore now then I guess I haven't flown for so long no it was my birthday the other day last week um and the kid said what do you want and I'm like I never know but I'm like not socks um so I said get me some paraglide lessons I used to paraglide as well and I haven't parag glided in God 15 20 years so I'm like get me some paraglide lessons I'm going to re this summer I'm going to retrain and Reet my paraglide license just love just being in the air so yeah epic epic also in the intro I forgot to mention which you uh have said to me you're also a dad and a husband so I I didn't want to put that out there very important that's the first two words on my LinkedIn profile like nothing is more important than that Y and I agree um all right so let's transition to to Google Ads and and marketing side of things um what is something that you believe about Google Ads that most people would disagree with I don't know how many people are going to disagree with this but I'm basing this on the actions that I've seen so what I believe is that AI is going to change things much faster than people think and I think missing out on this initial wave I think we as humans I think that's a mistake I think we as humans tend to look at something maybe try it once and go uh that's not very good and we kind of write it off you know there's this weird little memory in the back of our brains for websites that are crap that's why we don't go back and

04:54click on that ad again because we just sort of somehow remember oh that that was rubbish and I think a lot of people did that early on with Chad gbt which has been out almost 600 days now um in the middle of 2024 yes it wasn't chat gbt 4 at the beginning but a lot has happened in those 600 days and I think it's the pace of change that most people don't see they tried it they disregard it and they don't go back and try it again every 3 months every six months they don't think about how could this be useful um because it isn't it isn't perfect not by a long shot but it isn't like normal software normal software you go you use it and it does the same thing every single time because it's built by rules if this then that AI isn't that and it's going to be different every single time depending on how you prompt it give it the same prompt you might get two different answers on two different days you might get two different answers two minutes apart so I think it's all of those things that have people thinking about AI the wrong way maybe waiting for Google just to do whatever Google's going to do to jam AI into the product that we all use but I think it's going to disrupt every agency it's going to change an awful lot and I think people are sleeping I think the majority of agencies are sleeping on it all right so let's definitely dive into that but before we do that um I would like to take a step back and because I have I think I think you have a really interesting journey and background in in PPC um as we mentioned in the intro briefly

06:32like you wrote a book you skilled and and sold an agency um and now you're um building scripts and and other things but could you talk a little bit about your your journey and um yeah basically like your career and and how going through all these things sort of got you in the place where you are right now doing the things that you're doing I'll give you the I'll give you the longer backstory but I'll try and shorten it up for you because I know time is always liit did um my first business I started in New Zealand I'd left the UK I decided I was heading to Australia started a business in New Zealand went for three weeks ended up staying for three years that business was successful because of a book which was doing the rounds 20 years ago called the emth by Michael Gerber when I got to Australia I discovered there was something called an emth coach Jesus that would have helped um so I became an emth coach I wrote to Gerber he invited me to California long long story but I became an emth coach and I sucked at being an emth coach because I was young and stupid and thought I could solve every business problem because of this system what every person said just about every person said who I went to visit to try and sell this thing was mate can you just get me more leads so when I saw Google Ads for the first time in 2004 it was just like oh my God this is what they all want and need this is the future for small business I wasn't thinking I didn't buy Google Shares back then I should have done but I just thought this is what they want they they're doing letter box drops and yellow pages and radio

08:09advertising not much of it's working they can't measure anything and then here's this thing well you mean I I only show ads to people looking for me and I only pay if they're interested enough to click this is unbelievable so I kind of dropped everything and and I ended up running someone else's business for a bit I ended up being given half of a business half of an Ecom business who said like mate I don't want you to consult to me have half my business and in three and a half weeks I think we sold 100 Grands worth of stuff and I was just like that was the proof I needed this thing works and my Mo has always been when I find something new I just want to tell everybody about it I was telling my Mastermind and all the small business owners I knew and everyone's like mate mate just whatever like it took me two years to start the agency after that of people people saying I don't really care how it works mate can you do it for me yeah okay so for cases of beer here and a round of golf there and a chat and I started doing it and that's how the agency got started but since the very you know first week really I've been teaching Google Ads to anyone that would listen I did my first course back in 2008 one of those you know like bubble wrap three- ring binders with the DVDs in and like three different versions of it um I've just I've discovered along the way that I'm a teacher at heart so when I caught up with Perry Marshall again he is who the he's the guy that I learned it I learned about Google Ads from back in 2004 then he had this epic small conference in Maui so going full circle

09:47going back to Hawaii which was awesome back in 2010 and Ah that's a there's so many stories I can tell about that but I was really strategic about it and managed to get some one-on-one time with him had this huge mind map I had mind mapped all of Google Ads printed it out on this massive sheet of paper and I rolled it out on the table in front of Perry and he's like this is really cool we can do something with this like I can remember it so clearly standing outside this country club in Maui the Rolling Hills in the distance and him looking at this thing and that's where that's where my life changed really because from there on I ran all of the Google Ads training for Perry's uh Community which is like half a million people strong we wrote the book together I dived in you know fourth edition of the book it was already the world's bestselling book on Google Ads so there's a tip as a aspiring Young Writers anywhere find someone that's already really successful with their book and then come along and help them for a future version like it wasn't successful because of me Perry didn't want to do the technical stuff anymore so I did all the tech stuff and he did all the fun stories and it was just a really good match I did that for probably about 10 years um meanwhile yeah built the agency the book led to lots of speaking gigs outside of Australia so I did a lot in the states really enjoyed going over to traffic and conversion and catching up with friends like Tom Brees and Molly Pitman and we all caught up in Italy a few months ago Molly got married in Italy and it was wonderful to see that whole crew again Ross henbury and olle Bilson that was

11:25really good um yeah and the agency just kind of just right place right time I've always fluked things like that there's an awful lot of luck involved in this stuff and the agency just grew and grew and grew even through covid I think we pretty much doubled the team size through Co and um yeah as you mentioned I sold last year my kids at the time were not quite teenagers they're 10 and 13 now and I just I'm very very aware that this window of them wanting to hang out with me is closing and um I just didn't want to waste another day of that and uh and I wanted to go all in on AI so I'm yeah I'm not working particularly hard at the moment but I am thinking a lot about AI as you mentioned creating tools for the community and I just love building stuff but I'm spending an awful lot of time with them as well which is great yeah yeah I love that and uh it definitely shows like we we share that value of of family I don't have kids yet myself but I do understand that at some point um priorities are going to shift because it's so easy to waste those those years and it's it's really cool to see that you consciously made that shift to spend more time with them I think I you know made that decision stupidly early in my life like as a 10-year-old I decided I mean I remember going and chatting with a mate of dads I think I was 16 and he said oh you want to be a pilot I said yeah yeah definitely I want to be a pilot I like I like helicopters but you work for a I think he worked for British Airline or something I'm like well you know I'd consider doing something like that he said what else is important to you I said I don't know but I really want to have a family one day he said you'll never see them you're traveling

13:0315 days of the month if you want to see your family grow up being a commercial pilot is not the way to do it okay cross no not doing that like really early I decided that that was important to me so I don't know it's just yeah one of those values that it's sacred time right so um yeah there's too many people I think wake up um I don't know 55 and go can I do it again please that wasn't the way I wanted it to turn out no it's not address no doovers yeah yeah so um so here here we are and as you said you're you're you're you're um going really deep on on AI we building things with AI You're Building scripts with AI um and and doing Keynotes about AI um I would love to know before we dive into how you can leverage AI with within Google n within Google Ads I would love to hear your personal opinion about the current state of AI um in general but also as it relates to to marketing is it opportunity threat some something in the middle um just your overall opinion of AI yeah I think there's there are so many ways it can be used I mean the G is generative right but it's also another meaning of GPT is general purpose technology um that acronym has been around a long time too so computer chips mobile phones we've had these big big turning points where this general purpose thing can be applied to so many areas that's why I think it is yes it's probably overhyped as we've talked about previously but I just think it is going to make so many big changes even if it

14:42never gets better than it is today it's going to take a while for the current state of things to make its way into Enterprise in particular where can it help I kind of tend to break it down into a few areas to make it easy for people to picture because every every body's situation is different so obviously it can help a lot with words with language so it can help write things whether that's a script or an email or a presentation just working with words but that ability for it to take on different personas if if you prompt it properly so it can play the part of a customer and you can bounce ideas off it I I tend to think of it too in terms of three levels is like there's all these different ways it can help words images and pictures videos code is a big one for me but then you've also got this kind of sort of teacher Mentor sort of like looking up somebody that can help you learn something so when I started coding again a couple of years ago I hired a JavaScript mentor and I'd spend a week an hour each week with them talking about code how do I do this how could I think about this what's another way to do it what's a more elegant way to do this and then chat gbd came along and I didn't need him anymore so there there's that there that sort of top level there's this sort of like looking down version which is sort of that that overeager intern that that can get stuff wrong but can work really hard really

16:20long and deliver really good value and then I heard this phrase today which I've never heard before I need to look up where it comes from but rubber ducking and it's this idea that you have a rubber duck sitting on your desk that you can talk through hard problems with so I it could be anything right you could just like have this weird 3D printed metal thing and you can talk to it but it's like the rubber duck that talks back I use this almost every day on my walks now it's using the ChatGPT app on my phone and brainstorming with it and bouncing ideas off it and getting questions back and ideas back and thoughts and Reflections and it's just incredibly useful in that sort of almost like peer relationship so you've got this like Mentor coach Junior intern but also peer so if anyone is like Jesus what's he talking about I think you can apply this to almost any area of your business you want to brainstorm some new strategy you want to learn something without judgment you know the the classrooms that are using this really well of finding that the kids sometimes prefer learning some of the stuff from the AI because they don't feel stupid like they do in class having to put their hand up being judged by everybody for not knowing something that maybe I should know and so it's a really safe easy way to learn and of course this thing is so general you know it's so broad that if you like soccer or I don't know underwater hockey playing or something you can say like give me an example in this style make it more complicated make it easier tell me again

17:59like I'm a 12-year-old help me understand this and it can just regenerate and regenerate and regenerate and I think yeah I should probably stop there no no that's good um that's uh I ask for your opinion and is that that is great so would you consider it as an opportunity for people in marketing as Google Ads Specialists um to be able to learn how to leverage these kinds of tools yes and word I think it's going to change a lot of White Collar work and most of us in agencies are in the Professional Services game and there is so much of that work that is going to change because of AI I believe and I can't really understand why people aren't pushing the boundaries a little bit more experimenting and playing a bit more I think the argument against it is it's often wrong and I don't have time well that's just a PR prorities thing everybody has the same amount of time it's just how you prioritize that time and how you prioritize another value I think we share is education and learning and spending time every day sharpening the axe and getting better and if you're not skating to where the puck is going and thinking about the future of what you need to learn then I just think you're going to fall behind I it's the pace of it that makes this so so important right if you think back to I read my first book about the internet in 95 I had my first email address in 88 that's how old I am

19:37um if you didn't start a website in 95 it didn't matter if you didn't start that for 10 years if you didn't roll out a mobile website a year after the iPhone came out it didn't matter if you didn't do that for another five years if your website wasn't mobile responsive but the pace of this is so quick that if you sleep on this and think oh I'll catch up in a few years like I did with everything else it all worked out fine it won't be fine this time because it's going to change so rapidly that those people that dive in scuff their knee a bit try things fail a lot but learn while they're doing that they're going to do really really well because they're going to stay up with this thing as the pace of that just increases and increases and if you try and dive in and and start learning this stuff two three years from now I think you've could you've missed a huge opportunity yes if you start now a lot of the things that you try won't work we can talk about you know the Whisperer script that I put together as an example of this but just because it doesn't work sometimes isn't a really good excuse for for not experimenting with it I think 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 the friend colleague or family member cuz that's the only way we can grow the show all right back to the show so you mentioned that it's going to replace a lot of white colar tasks could you give some examples of that so yeah I'm I've been saying since 2017 when I first went really really deep into AI I was talking

21:16about it a traffic and conversion and I said back then I don't think it's going to replace all of our jobs but it is going to replace a lot of the tasks that make up our jobs and so there's this tool that can make you twice as efficient five times as efficient I saw a coding video today the guy reckons it's made him 20 times more efficient as a coder that's where I sort of feel I'm at I'm at least 10 times more efficient than I was a year ago at coding and I spend a fair bit of my week now coding I mean the opportunity then to spend the rest of all of that time doing all this other stuff whether that's hanging out with going for walks in nature learning something else or applying those skills so yeah let's break it down um writing we spend a lot of time writing we spend a lot of time in meetings you used to back in the day hire someone to sit in the corner and take meeting notes um we all have tools now that I mean I'm doing this workshop at the moment I'm sure you've seen the same thing and people send their otter and their fireflies and whatever to your meeting it's just going to take take the notes and go back to them but even in in-person meetings in the office you can have an AI summarize all of that and listen to the meeting and assign action items after the meeting I mean anywhere that you're using writing anywhere you're using words in the business whether that's strategy planning replying to customer support tickets I

22:53mean imagine for most people waking up to 38 draft email replies in instead of a full inbox I think everybody would like that and yes it's not going to be perfect yet because it doesn't have the full context of your life and of that whole project and it isn't thinking three months into the future it's not going to write exactly the same email as you are you're not going to go through and hit send 38 times quickly but it solves the blank page problem um writing script I have this sort of mental model that I put together a few years ago of where I think our industry is going and that is creative platform and data and the importance of platform I see shrinking over time yes you still need to master it but it isn't the be all and end all that it was say five years ago if you platform you mean sorry whatever you do with platform you mean whatever you do inside of Google Ads or the marketing using yeah right yeah and five years ago it was enough to know the platform really well you could get away with pretty shoddy creative because often clients wouldn't give you great creative and on the data side yeah okay like if you weren't doing server side you analytics wasn't installed really really well like most Google analytics installs are not done particularly well all of that didn't matter you could still get by and that isn't going to be the case going forward data becomes way more important because the machine needs that for every decision that it's making which is everything basically inside the account so getting your together around

24:31data understanding the data that you need to give the machine to steer the machine in the right direction that's super important and on the other side what are you doing on creative and creative isn't just the ads inside the platform you know using AI to write a 30 character headline that isn't you know interesting but thinking through different offers different pricing strategies most Google Ads accounts can be improved by getting out of Google Ads and thinking about everything else that isn't inside the account fixing the website fixing the offer most people never test the offer they never test price um there's huge gains to be had there and again you can brainstorm and think that through and try different things in this safe environment where in the past you probably would have had five different meetings with various people on the team and most meetings don't go anywhere and you brainstorm and you think and oh somebody will make make a decision about that at some point and oh we waste so much time in meetings on the creative side I thought for quite a long time about buying a creative agency clearly it's going to become more and more important you know Google have this pie chart they've been using for years about how creative is like more than 50% of the equation and that's true if you've got your data sorted and if the machine is getting the right data through having a process to quickly test lots of creative is really important I think another one of the things that people will say about generative AI is well it can't come up with anything new

26:10you know it's just regurgitating the average of of all of this stuff that it's found online and yet anybody that teaches how to have good ideas they will say the way to have more good ideas is to have more ideas so if you can use AI to generate a 100 ideas quickly and virtually for free within that you're going to find two or three that you just yes that with a bit of that and some of this and yeah maybe the stuff that comes out of the machine won't be massively new or novel to you but you can again use it as a starting point to fire off new ideas can't tell you the number of new ideas that I have while going for a walk maybe listening to a podcast about something unrelated or brain storming with the AI something will just trigger and it like ah why did I think I had this cracking idea yesterday listening to a different podcast and then I immediately grab the app and start I'm thinking about this help me think it through what am I not seeing what questions should I be asking how would I set up a partnership program for this thing boom bo boom bo boom and half an hour later I've got this massive transcript and the whole thing summarized in questions and action items and by the time I come back and sit down here all of that is just sitting waiting for me in the chat gbt app it's yeah such a timesaver yeah super nice and I I think you mentioned a few times like yeah um it's it's not perfect yet etc etc but I think that's probably the for a lot of people the wrong way of looking at it to expect that it's going to be

27:47perfect you know you're just brain as you said you're just brainstorming with AI here um it's not the goal to get like a 100 page perfect essay from it you just want to get ideas and things to work work on I think you said the key word it's expect it's it's people's expectations going in if you have the expectation that this thing is and I don't want to say it's like a person you know I I always use alien intelligence rather than artificial intelligence that I think is a good way to think about it it's not an intern it's not human it's definitely not sentient or conscious but it has remarkably humanlike qualities so it's sort of easy to anthropomorphize so so it is a bit like a particularly eager intern who is sometimes wrong but I'm wrong a lot so if I'm using this tool that's occasionally wrong I'm thinking of it like it's a bit like working with another person and that's how I talk to it when I'm coding I'm like I'm asking it to do things I'm asking it questions can you do this can you do that can we change I'll ask like why are we doing it this way and not that way you know I'm talking to it like another person if you go in with the expectation that it's a bit like a human and sometimes humans suck at stuff too and don't treat it like a piece of software that's going to do the same thing every single time um then I think you're much more forgiving of those mistakes and you start treating that creativity like a feature not a bug yeah so um I think one of the most important um and the best ways to leverage AI within Google Ads is to have

29:25it do data analysis and to gather insights it's also what I got from your presentation in the bpc hub is basically translating data into insights that you can share with clients um I think you wanted to add something go ahead yeah there there there's two different parts to that so there's this wonderful thing in computer science circles this algorithm or like a way of thinking explore and exploit so there's a lot of stuff that you can do to maybe explore a new data set that you haven't seen before or if you don't know to ask for certain things now maybe you're familiar with the data maybe it's a search word search term report and you're loading it up and you're just saying find some insights in here well that sort of General vague prompt isn't going to get you very far but the more you push it and prod it and push it to the edges of what's possible the better it's going to be so you can use something like ChatGPT to explore things early on you know show me five different ways of visualizing this dat show me some different charts show me some charts I've never heard of before like play with sunburst diagrams and Sand Key diagrams and then once you've found a way that works through all of this explor exploration then you can start to codify that and say actually whenever we do engram analysis I want to see a bubble chart of the individual words of search queries versus keywords because that shows me these particular insights really really quickly and so you're not using the AI to always generate the same thing you used it the first few times to

31:05get new and novel ideas but then once you knew this is a really good way to get insights over this particular piece of data this particular type of thing that we do all the time in the business then turn that into some sort of automation or bit of code or use zappier or however you want or hire somebody in a different part of the the world that's cheaper than hiring someone locally if you need to use human automation but these days anything that can be checklist can be turned into code really really easily so that every day when you wake up and you do this particular analysis you have all of the information not the raw data but the useful information is just sitting there waiting for you in the way that you like it in the format that you like it ready to go maybe you even ask the AI to come up with five insights and give you five extra questions that you'd never asked before you know tell me questions that I should ask of this data set that will enable me to have insights that I haven't yet seen and every now and again you get a really good question and you write that down and you add it to your list and you ask that question every time you codify it so I mean that's what I did with my um audit process about 10 years ago excuse me too much bubbly water um I basically took my entire audit process and turned it into this like 40 page back then it was a data Studio report and gave it away and everybody said you're an idiot because we were charging maybe two and a half grand for an audit back then and I know

32:44that some of my old team still use that freelancing to do the bulk of the work and still charge a couple of grand for audits as Freelancers and I created that tool and gave it away I've done that with a bunch of different things over my my career cuz I just love building stuff but if you can codify the knowledge whether that's your own stuff as a freelancer or your agency's knowledge you have to turn that into some sort of process yeah and that's what you did with the pMax script right yeah same thing right it's the same thread going through all this like take this raw data turn it into useful information and I'm working on a thing now that um gives you those insights of the data that also gives you follow-up questions that you might want to ask of that data and just packages all of that together just to make it nice and easy because you shouldn't have to be hunting around for all these different bits of information every time you want to do some work interesting so I would like to transition to your script but before we do that um because I know that a lot of people most people are not even experimenting with AI and one of the things that stuck with me the most from your workshops in the PPC Hub is that you mentioned that everything is changing so fast and just because it's it may not work for you right now doesn't mean that it won't in three six 12 months so you need to continuously uh keep experimenting with it because six months from now it's going to be well so much better than it is today that's just that's a fact okay probably probably yeah um but for most

34:23people I don't think they have dabbled into AI as much except for maybe like a write me a Blog about quality score on Chad GPT so for those people and and basically anyone else how do you suggest how what would you uh advise them on how to get started with AI where do you get started because I can also um understand that it might be overwhelming to some one useful thing that many people have found to be useful there's so many different starting points but I think this is a a fairly good one that covers a lot of bases is if you can draw out a little 2 by two Matrix on a piece of paper so the vertical axis for that is how much do I enjoy doing a particular task do I love it do I hate it or is it me somewhere in the middle and then the x-axis is how frequently do I do this thing is it just very very occasionally or am I doing this thing at least once or twice a week and then look at that quadrant and then basically your job is to map all of the little tasks that you do not the big big jobs but break that down into little tasks one way to do that is what we did in emth when I was an emth coach is you would give people a sheet of paper and literally every 15 minutes sitting down on the desk you would write down what you were working on for that 15 minutes you do that for a week and you'll be amazed what that brings up most people won't do that so there's a massive opportunity for you just just doing the exercise puts you ahead of just about everybody but then map those tasks onto that grid

36:01and then find that quadrant of stuff that I really don't like doing that I'm doing a couple of times a week that's where you start and you use AI you bring AI to the table and you start to figure out ways that AI can help with some of those tasks you're not trying to automate your job away you're not trying to like turn everything into code but that stuff that you really don't like doing that you're doing over and over again start there I spoke probably a few months ago now with a a a Consulting Prospect uh he's pretty high up in an organization and he's spending 15 hours a week in Exel doing the same stuff every week getting the same reports delivered and doing the same things over and over and over and over again and he's wasting at least 10 of those 15 hours every week I don't know what he's being paid let's call it 150 Grand a quarter of his week 40 Grand a year it's just a complete waste of bloody time that if he took the time to or maybe he doesn't know but like to to to learn or to start to automate to codify what those things are or even just go hire somebody for 10 bucks an hour to do that work I mean I'm a big believer in starting with human automation first if if you can teach somebody else how to do the thing before you jump to trying to turn it into code then it's generally much much easier to to tweak that process but you

37:39can't improve a system until it's documented you got to get something down on paper as a starting point but you can use AI for that too just record a video of you doing the task you don't even have to speak aloud anymore I used to do this I'd record a video speak allowed and then give the transcription of the video with this big ass prompt and I'd put that into ChatGPT and get an sop back but Loom will do it for you now yeah you just finish recording the video and there's a little button in Loom that turns the transcript into an sop it's it's basically there for free but people just need to know that these things are possible right that's really the starting point have the Curiosity to go find out what's possible and then carve out a little bit of time and it only needs to be like half an hour a week it doesn't need to be days and days and days half an hour a week just to say right this week I'm G to focus on this bit and I'm G to figure out a way to make this task disappear or I spend half as much time on it I made M used to have this thing across the top of his laptop that said how do I do this so I never have to do it again that's taking it to the extreme right he he tried to automate systemize everything but the stuff that you love and certainly the stuff that doesn't happen very often don't even try with that stuff yet but start with the repetitive stuff and start with the stuff that you don't like because that will give you the the juice to make sure that you find the time because Jesus if

39:15I could get rid of that five hours of work oh my God that would be fantastic yeah my sister she has a um dog training school uh she's self-employed so she's doing everything by herself and she's really like um she used to have a a partner now she's doing it by herself and she's wearing all the hats you know she's doing the dog training she's doing marketing uh she's creating the website writing the blogs everything um operations taxes everything so she actually went and used Chad GPT last week to create a new blog post based on the pter uh copyrighting framework um and that was really cool to see because she um she doesn't have a marketing background but she's like self-taught she's you know super curious and and smart in in trying to figure these things out and then she just thought hey okay I'm GNA ask Chad GPT to write this blog post based on a proven framework and I checked it and it was actually really good um so that was to me like perfect execution of yeah of what you can do without prior knowledge just ask and even this is what I remember also from what you taught is you can even ask it for these Frameworks and then okay okay maybe generate one based on one of those Frameworks I just thought that was really cool yeah the example I used in the webinar we did a few weeks ago was I wanted to write a sales letter I suck at writing copy and my my initial prompt this is before Chad gbt 4 came out I think my initial prompt was ask me the questions that you need from me in order to write a compelling sales page for this thing and it asked me 14 questions because I didn't know what I had but when it asked me what's

40:53your guarantee going to be and what are three testimonials then then I can go figure out what information to give to it and then yeah sped out not only the sales page but the YouTube script the Facebook ad the LinkedIn post the questions to ask during the onboarding process and the application process it was you know the thank you page copy everything it was Mind Block that's crazy actually because then it just becomes a consultant really for you yeah and and guess what it knows all of the Consulting Frameworks from Bane and BCG and mcari and all of those super high paid consult I always wanted one of my dreams was for our agency to basically provide those same services that your deits and pwc's gave to to bigger businesses in town but for a fraction of the price to those small businesses that really really need that stuff and it was just impossible because you know they hire all the good grads and they pay them stupid amounts of money and promise that you're going to be a partner one day and it's just really really hard to find someone from that world that would come and work for what my little agency could afford to pay them and for what small businesses can afford to pay for that but AI can do a lot of that work it can with a bit of prompting and a bit of massaging and a bit of work but it could spit out or help you write a 60-page strategy document which won't be perfect and you would certainly not say like take this thing cutpaste and go deliver it you would do work on it but it can do so much of that stuff it knows all of that stuff it's read all of those things

42:32it understands all of those um two by two matrices and you know that all these high paid consulting firms have churned out over the years it's read all of those strategy books and it can help you not only do this for your own business but help you as an agency offer these new better different services to your clients agencies are not going away small businesses are more overwhelmed than ever they need help figuring all this stuff out yeah I agree um so just want to quickly transition to um to your script uh your pMax script because I just think that is one of the best innovations that we've seen in the in the BBC World in the last two years um because it's giving the insights that Google's not giving us um and then some because you've expanded upon it um but you've built that primarily with AI as well right could you talk a a little bit about that process of how you came up with the idea and then the execution into how it became what it is now yeah so the idea it probably started a couple of years ago before ChatGPT and I had a awesome Dev worked for me for eight years she found her dream job and wandered off to do that and I had the time I had a GM at the time in the agency so I had the the Curiosity and the time to basically sort of take over all of the scripts that she had created over eight years our agent used a lot of scripts a lot of automation but inevitably these things I don't know they go out a date stuff breaks and straight after she'd left stuff started breaking I'm like right okay I'm gonna have to learn how to code again

44:10and I'm going to dive in which is why I got the JavaScript mentor and would sit down and code some of this stuff and one of the things I had started doing in pmax with the team was we'd worked out fairly early on that if you looked at your total video views and your cost per view you could work out how much pmax was spending on video um and then also if you went into listing groups and added up all of the white rows because there's lots of duplicate information in there but if you added up just the white rows you could work out what you're spending on shopping you know what you're spending on video and then everything else has to be searched and display and then this awesome guy in Copenhagen Tobias showed me a way to dig into this like grab this report and this report and this report and squish them together in this particular particular way and if we make these assumptions we can kind of work out what's display versus search wow okay and so we just put that together thre a free script together that went ballistic on LinkedIn um and that was it like for six months I just gave it away and then as the sale of the agency was finalizing I thought oh I'd really love to spend more time on that I'd been playing with chat gbt 4 I'd been learning how to code for that year in between huh maybe I could make it better and I just kept having ideas and then people that were using it for free would write and DM me and say oh it' be great if it did this and could we do this and could it have a better asset group report and Google's changed the API a couple of times since then so every time

45:47they came up with something new I'd figure out a way to code it and most requests not all but most requests I would like yeah I just love solving problems I get to spend our days now during school hours solving hard problems and I just I love that thing of solving a problem that I I'm fairly confident has an answer that's the key thing for me like I have to believe that there is an answer to this thing and I'm not just going to churn away for ages like I spent most of the last week redoing this whole part of the script so that with one go you can update all of your client spreadsheets Allin one go it's freaking awesome I'm so excited about I haven't launched it yet but it's just it's so much fun to solve that hard problem and then to ship something so that's really where it came from I just gave it away for free it did really well so gosh where are we now about nine 10 months ago I thought why don't I do a improved version of this why don't I charge a tiny bit of money relative to the value that this delivers for an agency or even a freelancer I want to make it cheap enough I don't want to deal with recurring income and revenue and all that stuff let's just make it super cheap so that someone gets Insight so you can use it on as many accounts as you manage as many times as you like free updates for life that seems like a decent deal then just after that I discovered that the um is it Jason freed 37 signals the base camp guys he's bought once.com and he's got this whole philosophy about just charging once for software they've started with like a slack killer that they charged I think $2.99 for we're paying 10 grand at my

47:26old agency for annual slack now cuz it's per seat and his philosophy is really good software charge once I'm like that's what I decided to do that's really cool I love that one of my most respected software people in the world base camps are awesome all of Jason Fred's books are really really cool I love that they sort of have this same philosophy around it make it cheap make it useful make it enjoyable to use um and then just keep on building it keep on solving new problems and keep making it better and better and better I'm just having too much fun yeah so about it where can where can people uh get that is it paccom terrible marketer of my own stuff way I just assume everyone's going to know about it and everyone will find it useful and I never have to sell it I'm terrible at marke stuff um pmaxscript.com um I've also got mccscript.com there's an MCC version which will do this the same does the same thing but it just does it for every account in your MCC um and everything is mikerhodes.com but yeah I've got bloody domains all over the place I really need to spend some time on my own marketing and maybe I should get AI to help me with that hey that would probably be a good idea but before that uh since you said you're bad at marketing your own products I'll do it for you um this is not we didn't discuss this is not I'm deciding to plug it because this script is just if you're running pmax campaigns it is just a no-brainer to use because it's giving you even if you're only using it for the insights that it gives on where your spend went across different channels on Google Ads uh then it's already worth it

49:04that's the main reason why I'm using it um and next to that there's so many other features that Mike has added but just that thing the performance insights per Channel That's yeah just gives you the insights you need to really make sure that bmax is working well versus not I always forget that that's like the main use case of like I'm so interested in the latest little thing that I built like the asset report I just still a landing page report but yeah just just being able to see that Spike when the machine suddenly starts spending on YouTube or display and and giving you that thing of oh I need to focus I need to make some changes to that asset group to that campaign thank you better than I could search as well not only display in video but search as well sometimes especially with Leen I've seen a lot of advertisers uh or a lot of Google specialist struggle with Le with pmax for Legion because it tends to cannibalize on their existing search campaigns which sometimes gives them better results and more control um so just that insight as well like or see seeing more on search you you can analyze and and check where okay where might that be coming from and make changes accordingly in your campaign structure whe whatever drill down too now you can you can see that Spike and then you can run the script again with a different date range and look at the search campaigns look at the engram of the search campaigns look at the asset group report look at the headlines and descriptions and which ones have had a spike I just had somebody just before we jumped on um messaged me on LinkedIn send him a screenshot of the new asset report and he's like oh my God this is so much better than Google's information I'm like oh yeah it is I should probably

50:41tell people about this but yeah I think people will find it they'll find it useful and if they like it they'll B and if they don't they don't yeah it's all good some some will but that's why also we love spreading spreading the word about these types of things um all right so you Lego kits for the kids sorry you spooking it will help me buy some extra Lego kits for the kids appreciate it thank you that's awesome um all right so um let's transition into some of the rapid fire questions that I have uh it's just this or that no um no it depends yep so depends yeah it is it is that's why this is such an annoying section for you uh the first one is performance Max or standard shopping H if you know what you're doing standard shopping if you're relatively new to Google Ads pmax you thought I was going to say pmax but if you really know what you're doing standard shopping but you broke the rules still gets Impressions you broke the rules I broke the rules already on the first question no it's okay that's why I mean that's why I created these yeah this or thats um but yeah I I tend to agree uh Google has advertisers best interest in mind do you agree or disagree disagree fair enough they optimize for their profit first yeah and it make sense as well I mean um I'm not saying it should be that way but it's bus of course they their shareholders and they've given us this

52:18amazing tool and if you want to play the game you play it their way yeah um BR match yes or no eventually okay okay if you want to elaborate feel free uh I wouldn't start there but can be useful if you know what you're doing yeah all right so uh manual bidding or smart bidding this one is interesting smart bidding yeah um will all match types except broad be gone in two years yeah we'll be using search themes in two years that's what Nicholas was saying as well I think that's interesting interesting approach um that could very well be the case uh lastly will search and shopping campaigns be around in two years bloody hope so uh yes yes search is their point of difference over say Facebook um search is also massive on YouTube so yes they will still and a lot of the big big guys you shopping as far as I'm aware not so much pmax so they will look after their big advertisers let's let's hope so let's hope so um well actually this is another one what's your favorite AI tool right now to use uh cursor it's a AI coding tool it's magical cursor nice I love it cursor.

53:47comom uh and another one what book are you reading right now oh um I'm reading it's on the desk over there Amore tows I think is how he pronounced his last name he wrote this Epic book a gentleman in Moscow and I'm just reading a book of his short stories at the moment which is wonderful nice good recommendation when we when you did your session in the PPC Hub everyone just wondered about your list of books yeah I tend to get through a few but yeah more so now yeah more time um all right last question Mike uh before we close off if you had to share three golden nuggets about driving results with Google Ads what would that be me um first one get out of your account so think about the website think about conversion rate optimization think about your offer pricing probably the easiest way to improve the performance of a Google Ads account is not in the Google Ads account I think um secondly I think you have to have a philosophy I think you have to have a belief system of why you do what you do why you do it the way that you do it certainly if you want to move from being a freelancer to employing someone to help you to then maybe growing a small team maybe growing an agency you need to have a way that stuff is done which actually is probably then number three is process um I think this becomes even

55:25more important animportant as we move into this world of AI so all the management books that I would have read over the years they all say like don't tell people how to do stuff tell them why you need it tell them what needs to be done and then get out of the way you don't tell people how to do stuff because that removes all of their agency and autonomy and ability for Mastery and that's what people want right autonomy Mastery and purpose with AI that's different because you want this slightly dumb sometimes wonky but very enthusiastic thing to do stuff the way that you want it done and so giving it process giving it feeding that at this point the way to do that is with words if you have documented Sops for all the stuff that you do you can feed that into chat gbt or whatever AI tool you use together with all of that data and then say what should I do next but if it doesn't know the way that you do things it isn't going to be able to suggest very good actions and that's where we're sort of heading I believe with AI into this world of agents and agentic behavior of the AI starting to take actions through apis or whatever it's a whole another podcast um but unless you put some constraints around that and say like this is the way that we like things done then it's going to do some really wild and crazy things just like if you hired a new person you sat them down and said optimize some Google Ads accounts please like you don't know how they're going to do that how they did it at

57:04their last place might be completely different to the way that you do it you need Sops around that how most of us do it is we don't have very good Sops because as entrepreneurs we suck at writing systems and so people learn by osmosis they sit next to you and they listen in on your phone calls and over time they get better and better but that's too slow and too inefficient and completely useless if you're trying to teach a machine to do what it is that you do so I think having really good processes like we talked about using loom or having a person create those for you you as the entrepreneur do not have to create your own systems um go a book like there's another book recommendation systemology by my mate Dave Jennings he talks about this and how you can do it and you can hire his systemology to create systems for you I think in the world of AI that's very very good at language i words yes it's going to get really good at images and videos and everything else as well but right now it needs words to understand and sips and processes are great great and most people don't have that so again massive opportunity if you can do that or maybe you help your clients your those small businesses you help them create that stuff so they're ahead of the curve they've got it when they need it yeah excellent thank you very much Mike thank you so much for coming on and and sharing all these insights it's always a pleasure talking to you and uh feel free to come back anytime my absolute pleasure thanks miles me yep and for everyone else thank you for listening uh or or viewing this episode if you're watching on YouTube

58:40don't forget to like subscribe all that stuff and we'll catch you on the next episode Peace bye 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 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