The One Where AI Killed the Ad Agency

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

ad, customer experience, platforms, traffic, conversions, business, google, ai, people, making, site, day, content, coming, based, adjust, paid, test, personalize, faceless

Podcast Episode Transcript

SPEAKERS

Ted Jones, John Paul Mains

John Paul Mains  00:03

Hey Growth.Venture family, I just wanted to welcome you to another podcast episode today with myself and Ted Jones. Welcome, welcome. All right, so the topic we’ve got for you today is all about ads and specifically managing ads, and as a business, how can you leverage your paid media? It’s digital ads, Google, Facebook, social media, you name it? How can you use this to do a better job on driving leads, driving conversions driving sales into your business?

So yeah, of course, lots of people use this. I mean, everybody knows everybody, pretty much. If you’ve got a business, you’ve probably done Google ads, you’ve probably tested the waters with Facebook ads, or something along those lines. And some people do well with them. Some people do great with them. Plenty people

Ted Jones  00:58

It probably depends on how well you define your audience and your targets.

John Paul Mains  01:02

Now, I don’t know if I’ve managed ads for a number of different organizations here at our company. But one of the things that if the trends, if you can think of a trend, if you look back over the last probably five years, one of the things that’s kind of been that I’ve seen kind of coming about is when you used you used to be able to just create an ad and it ran. And if you wanted to try and test against each other, you created another ad. Well, the platforms these days are they’ve enabled that actually been done this for a while, you to basically run ads against each other. Google’s introduced features to like responsive ads for a give me five headlines, five or 10, descriptions, and a whole bunch of different images. And we will test to see which one works best. Run those, I mean, these ad platforms, it is in their interest for you to sell as much as you possibly can. If because if you don’t, you’re not going to use their platform,

Ted Jones  02:07

just an ad for them. And that traffic your way.

John Paul Mains  02:10

Yeah, yeah, I hate that I have to give my money to them. But it works, it does work.

Ted Jones  02:16

They’re not going to send them your way if you don’t.

John Paul Mains  02:20

Because if I’m making if I spend $1, and I’m able to make $4 off of an ad, you know, there’s no reason I probably not going to continue and keep doing that and keep doing that I will spend as much as I can, if I can spend $1, and make $4, or whatever, whatever the return on ad spend is. So it’s in their interest to do the best job they possibly can for us. Now, what I’ve been noticing is, we’ve got these capabilities now. And I’ve been seeing this with Google left and right lately, they’re going to give me calls and saying, Hey, we want to help you optimize your account. Sometimes it’s good sometimes it’s a lot of times, it’s not so good. But they’ve introduced a lot of things for automation. Okay, so hey, you know what we see in your keywords? Do you want us to automatically create new add new keywords or subtract or put negative keywords and things like that? Yeah. And sometimes I turn those on, sometimes I know, I got it depends on, on what’s working, what’s not. Again, it’s all testing. But the thing is, it’s AI-based, right, they’re introducing more and more and more AI into the algorithms, because there’s too many variables to try and keep track of. Now, I know that as a human being, I can pretty much still beat these Ais when it comes to knowing what the right thing is to do. But they’re continuing to add on these new features and more new features and more new features and new types of ad types and new types of creative types in order to try and do the best job it can in order to find your audience and convert more of your audience. And so as a business, it’s getting to the point where I I’ve really questioned the future of paid media ad management agencies. I mean, how useful are they going to be if our you know, an AI, at least in time is going to be able to beat us out and beat us shoot more humans out

Ted Jones  04:28

or to your point, put it on automatic mode, and it starts sending traffic your way, based off your target.

John Paul Mains  04:35

Yeah. Because I can say, okay, Google, or Facebook, or wherever. This is my business. This is my audience. This is what I these are my goals. Please go get me, customers. That’s kind of the trend on I think where these platforms are going. And there’s a whole bunch of service AI services out there for doing things along these lines. This is where it’s going. I think ad agencies, as we know them today are going to be really hurt no, here in a few years, because these platforms are going to be doing it for us, they’re going to be at it.

Ted Jones  05:12

Well, and this gets back to what, you know, we were talking about a couple of weeks ago about Google not sending traffic to your site. And, you know, because they’re generating responses in the feed results, right. But their best interest is to continue that, that flow, you know, to your site. And really, the best thing you should be doing from that point is, how are you consuming those that traffic coming in? And whether or not you’re having a good onboarding process through your site? Or through your lead forms? Or your landing pages?

John Paul Mains  05:49

Exactly. It’s the customer experience. And so Google and Facebook or whatever ad platform out there as optimizing your ads and driving you traffic, it’s now up to you as the business to optimize your customer experience. When people get here? Are they are they able to pass the grunt test? Are they able to find the conversion in buy your product or fill out the form or whatever it is, that you’re you’ve set up as a goal? Sure, customer experience?

Ted Jones  06:18

Yeah. And that platforms, even the content management platforms today, when receiving those traffic’s, whether it’s based off UTM parameters or some other source, you can personalize that content, you know, completely, whether it’s different images. So, you know, it’s going to work on both sides, where you can take your web platform, and personalize the experience based on those incoming ads.

John Paul Mains  06:45

And that says, you know, as the business owner, or director of marketing, or whatever it may be, it is our responsibility. Now, for making the best experience possible. That’s always been the case. But most people have been, oh, make my ads work better. And they focus less on the customer experience, because they think if they can get more traffic, by default, they’re going to get more conversions, which is true to a point. But the number of conversions you can get if your customer experience was fantastic, solid, people able to find what they need, buy what they need real quick in, you’re making money. You’re minting money if you can get that customer experience. Right.

Ted Jones  07:23

Yeah. And you said something about more traffic, possibly more leads, but you know, that’s that debate of quality over quantity and whether or not you’re getting, you know, actual purchasers coming back to your site.

John Paul Mains  07:37

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That’s the video, that’s kind of what we’re, these ad platforms are going to be they see these conversions, assuming you’re setting everything right, they’re seeing these conversions. And if they’re saying, oh, conversions aren’t working, maybe I need to adjust my audience. So if you’ve got a bad customer experience, then these ad platforms are going to get the wrong, excuse me the wrong insights, and adjust incorrectly. And so yeah, be really good at that customer experience and making sure it’s working.

Ted Jones  08:08

Matt, get you thinking about Google Analytics, and how Google Analytics is going to tie back into that conversion and knowing that the traffic that’s getting sent over, you know, can be tweaked a little bit on the front end? Definitely. Definitely. It’ll be an interesting time on it. Yep.

John Paul Mains  08:28

On the day, the day, yeah. It’s crazy to think of the day to come, okay, Google, you do this. Now, my AI content management system, you adjust over here with a few parameters based on what’s coming in, and you just flip a switch and everything’s kind of constantly adjusting itself to get sales at the end of the day. And you’re just like, Okay, well,

Ted Jones  08:52

that’s scary to think, you know, I’ve heard of people having like faceless bought blogs and faceless YouTube channels that are content generated and get into this automated cycle that, you know, I was like, Yeah, is it? I think, going back to some earlier authenticity, and whether or not something is unique or not, and, you know, the, the product that you offer as well. So yeah, yeah,

John Paul Mains  09:18

most definitely. You’re absolutely right. I mean, of course, the product has to be something somebody wants, or the service has to be something somebody wants. But yeah, this is still just crazy times that we live in. It’s still the wild wild west to me, I know that we’ve been have the internet’s been around a long time, but it still feels like things are just just we’re just at the tip of the iceberg of what we’re capable of accomplishing.

Ted Jones  09:41

With Yeah, and you know, it. I don’t know if you’ve seen the past week or so people are starting to put spiders on there are two blog crawlers, these AI crawlers and there’s gonna be a gap, you know, from some of these sites that, you know, just haven’t opened up their knowledge, right, like we’ve talked about before.

John Paul Mains  10:05

So who knows what we’re going to end up predicting coming out of all of this. But the end of the day, I mean, if you might find a good business, and I can communicate well, and I’ve got good product, it’s going to sell as long as people are aware of it. And ads are still to this day, in the top three drivers, channels for getting paid customer getting customers today. So because they do work, and that’s why Google is as big as they are because they do work. They work extremely well. And they’re constantly making improvements to make it better.

Ted Jones  10:41

And people are still starting at Google. I mean, I’d say Amazon might take a little bit of that now when people are going strictly to Amazon to search for something. Sure.

John Paul Mains  10:53

Absolutely. So at the end of the day, what are we saying is, you know, I think personally, ad agencies as they exist now are going to be in trouble here over the next few years because of this, but there’s a big opportunity for people to step more into the customer experience side of things, where there’s probably greater opportunity for every business that’s out there that wants to take that seriously. Because it’s going to, that customer experience is going to pack paid organic, whatever other channel we’ve got coming in, if you’ve making improvements on that, it’s, it’s going to be a big win for the business.

Ted Jones  11:30

Yeah, conversion rate optimization. Yeah, is key just knowing internally what your visitors are doing and where they’re getting snagged in the journey.

John Paul Mains  11:39

You got it. That’s spot on. Alrighty, so I think that’s it for the episode today. Please follow LIKE, SHARE wherever you’re consuming this and we will see you on the episode next time. Appreciate it. Everybody appreciated.