Google Ads Is Only Getting Harder in 2025 | Ep 25 Feat James Gregg

Ian Binek (00:01.73)
James, thanks so much for being on, man. How are you doing?

James Gregg (00:05.462)
I'm good, I'm good. It's been a while. I think, I don't know when we last talked, but the last time we talked, you were in Denver heading to Utah and then to Oregon from Atlanta or something like that.

Ian Binek (00:16.334)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was just thinking about that. Yeah, we were in Salt Lake for a bit, now we're in Oregon and we're on the coast. It's flannel weather, so the place we're staying at doesn't even have AC. It's just 60 -ish degrees year -round, which is just crazy. But apparently, yeah, and I don't know, you know, I didn't know this, but maybe you do. But you know how like,

James Gregg (00:24.747)
Mm

James Gregg (00:36.29)
Wow.

Ian Binek (00:43.87)
Oregon's just kind of foggy all the time or if you're on the coast, it's foggy. I didn't realize that that happens just because you have like the sea breeze with cold air and then the mainland is hot and whenever that air collides, it just gets foggy on the coast.

James Gregg (00:48.14)
Mm -hmm.

James Gregg (01:03.042)
Okay, that makes sense. I'd never put any logic to me just saying that it's always foggy like in Seattle, you know, so that makes sense. Yeah, yeah.

Ian Binek (01:10.68)
You just think about it though, right? Like you're just like, it's foggy in the Pacific Northwest. I didn't know why, but...

James Gregg (01:16.194)
Yeah, they had they're just so hand in hand you like you just you don't you stop looking for answers at some point. But yeah, that makes sense. So you're is it you said it's 60 like mid 60s year round there.

Ian Binek (01:28.362)
Yeah, yeah, mid 60s year round. Yeah, it's not bad at all. Not bad at all, I love it. And especially for like running and all that fun stuff, outdoor activities.

James Gregg (01:31.648)
I could use that.

James Gregg (01:41.29)
Yeah, yeah, it's kind of the opposite of Atlanta, which as I understand you came from.

Ian Binek (01:46.732)
Yes, yeah, Lana, Hot Lana. Some people call it Hot Lana, but I think they get really butt hurt because the people that have lived there long enough are so tired of the meme. But it's true, it's freaking hot there all the time. Yeah.

James Gregg (01:52.446)
Yeah.

James Gregg (01:56.438)
Yeah.

James Gregg (02:00.748)
Fair enough, fair enough. Yeah, I imagine that just like you just get bored of hearing that. It's like come up with a new thing to say. That's fair. Well, how's business for you?

Ian Binek (02:08.318)
Exactly. How are you? business is good. We're doing some consulting, Google Ads specific. We won't get too far into it. I I have this whole new offer that I'm really pushing, which I'm pretty excited about. We can maybe talk a little bit about it whenever we get into the topic today. But how about you, man? How's Search Click Boom doing?

James Gregg (02:13.772)
Yeah.

James Gregg (02:34.838)
Business is good. I don't know about you, but obviously I picked the name of my company, but I hate hearing it. It's like hearing my own voice sometimes, but I've been in search click boom for five years. Business is good. I went really hard with cold outreach for the past. mean, kind of starting when we first talked and it just kept going. And then I stopped because you get burned out. And then I started getting pretty busy with the business had drummed up.

and I'm still getting that trickling through. So I'm like kind of ready for some dust to settle at this point. Hired an outbound agency. I think I asked you about that at one point for LinkedIn to try to ease my load and put more time into clients. So yeah, business is good. Honestly, looking forward to things to settle a little bit.

Ian Binek (03:06.488)
Yeah.

Ian Binek (03:23.032)
That's awesome, That's definitely the opposite of what a lot of agency owners I talk to now is, you know, a lot of people are struggling to get clients with tough economy, I guess, and a weird election year, right? So it's super weird. People don't know. Yeah, people don't know what's gonna happen. no, dude, I'm happy that, I mean, those motions that you put in place, like, yeah, it takes like a few months for you to see the results and they still trickle in months later. dude, that's awesome. I'm so happy for you.

James Gregg (03:36.266)
Mm People kind of holding their breath. Yeah.

Ian Binek (03:52.832)
you

James Gregg (03:53.152)
Yeah, it's like the first three months are like the hardest thing because it's like you're doing this thankless, like tedious work with people. Like most of the times the responses you're getting are like, stop bothering me, you know, and you're just like, why am I doing this? it's definitely a couple of times early in my agency growth where I like started that. And then we're just like, this is too negative. I have to find a new way. but yeah, you're a content machine though, man. I don't know how you do it.

Ian Binek (04:07.95)
Yeah

Ian Binek (04:18.349)
Mm -hmm.

James Gregg (04:22.881)
I don't get it.

Ian Binek (04:23.726)
All the time you spend on sales, I probably just spend on content and that's it. I honestly, I'm kind of ashamed to admit that I spend like four hours a day on LinkedIn. Pretty much every day. It's like kind of insane. It's definitely exhausting, but I like it. I like doing it. And this kind of stuff that we're doing here at the podcast, mean, it's all fueling something for the future, hopefully.

think, figure's crossed. Yeah.

James Gregg (04:52.298)
Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, it's that deep investment stuff. yeah, it does kind of feel wrong to spend hours on social media for your job, you know. But people say there's a you gain traction at some point. So it seems like you are up and I'm in one of your communities and see your posts and you've got like an infrastructure built around the podcast. You have like the intro video where you like learn about that. So yeah, it's all it's all good.

Ian Binek (05:02.518)
Yeah.

Ian Binek (05:20.75)
I appreciate that, man. I really do. Yeah, for anyone that's listening and just like, is he talking about? think he's, what James is talking about is like, we have the podcast page on our website where you can like read, watch or listen to any of the shows. I mean, whenever we work with someone that wants to come on and be a guest and talk about something cool, we send them a bunch of like little introductions of like, this is like what you can expect and before, during and after the show. So if anyone's interested.

James Gregg (05:48.896)
It's professional. Yeah, it's professional. It's very thought through. So obviously you're not new to this anymore. So yeah. And I saw you got a, who, what was, you, you've been getting some big guests was kind of what I was digging out there. Yeah.

Ian Binek (05:50.542)
I appreciate it, James.

Ian Binek (06:03.978)
We had Tass on, Tass Bobber, great episode. I actually find myself listening back to that episode sometimes, like right before I'm about to have a big consulting call. I just want to really understand the user flows. I listened to Tass real quick, so shout out to her. And then we had Ashawn on, founder of Spear Growth, big name as well.

James Gregg (06:08.256)
Yes, there you go.

James Gregg (06:22.355)
Yeah.

James Gregg (06:28.396)
Mm

Ian Binek (06:30.366)
And actually really exciting, a little bit of a tease, but we got Sam Dunning. He's scheduled for, yeah, he's scheduled later this month. He has this, it's so funny, this like the SEO fellas. I don't know if you've seen any of his recent posts, but he's like the mafia dude. And he's like, we'll take out your competitors. It's so funny. I love it so much. I'm so excited to talk to him. It's actually.

James Gregg (06:36.819)
heck yeah, I love that guy.

James Gregg (06:49.312)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Ian Binek (06:58.752)
It's funny because I remember reaching out him back in like March and I was like, Hey, I'm thinking about starting a podcast. have any, do you have any like recommendations? And he like never responded to me. He just said, good luck. And I was like, thanks. And now here we are. Like he's going to be a guest on the show. It's so cool to look at how far it's come.

James Gregg (07:18.486)
Yeah, he, like I talked to him in person when I was just trying to like meet people. And I was like, obviously you've been in the biz for a long time. And he's like, actually I started two months ago. I was like, what? And so like, he's like, he's figured it out really quickly. Cause he's like, his brand on LinkedIn is so unique. Like it's no question that he's going to grow fast. I mean, he already has been, but yeah. Yeah.

Ian Binek (07:32.152)
Yeah.

Ian Binek (07:42.764)
Yeah, no, it's so cool. Yeah, I'm excited to talk to him more and I want to get some of the other bigger names in here too. I'm trying to get Lashay Lewis on, so shout out to her. Trying to get her up.

James Gregg (07:51.41)
she's like my first exposure to like business influencers, like in our niche a little bit. was like, they exist and they have a huge following. I was early LinkedIn days. Yeah.

Ian Binek (08:00.072)
Mm -hmm.

Ian Binek (08:03.694)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'd love to have her on and then I'm also trying to get the guys at Fletch PMM on, but they're a lot harder to get a hold of. They're huge, I mean, 50 ,000 followers on LinkedIn. So I actually have a meeting with Anthony coming up just to like talk to him about some like mentorship stuff, but dude, mean, trying to. I mean, he was really gracious enough to lend me like 20 minutes, so I'll try to make the most of it.

James Gregg (08:14.006)
They're huge.

James Gregg (08:22.036)
Really? Making moves.

James Gregg (08:29.858)
Yeah, yeah, I used to when I first started be like, you know, because there's always people like, I don't have time, you know, and I was like, come on, you have time. Now I start to get like why like 20 minutes is like a valuable commodity because that guy's that guy's busy.

Ian Binek (08:37.795)
You

Ian Binek (08:42.41)
Yeah. yeah. yeah. I mean, I'm just like, like I said, I'm just super gracious because I just started this this year. So the fact that I'm able to even just talk to some people that have been in for a while, even you, James, like you've been in this for a little bit, like at the Google ads space. Like it's awesome that you're to be all, we're going to be talking about Google ads today and like getting into the weeds. Yeah. So it's, it's great. Yeah, we should, we should just dive in.

James Gregg (09:04.234)
Yeah. Yeah, should we? Should we get in the weeds? Yeah.

Ian Binek (09:10.446)
We should. I think we should. So let's introduce the topic that we're going to be talking about to listeners. And we're just going to riff on it, I think, for about 30 minutes and just kind of talk about everything that we've seen over the years and your expert opinions, my slightly less than expert opinions on things, and then kind of go from there. So let's talk about the theme. It is going to be about

James Gregg (09:36.854)
Okay.

Ian Binek (09:40.034)
how Google Ads has really subjectively, with really small updates over the past few years, really refocused on B2C and focusing on those B2C ad spenders and less on B2B paid media buyers. And because of that, it's making it lot harder for your B2B folks to actually drive results using Google Ads. Because of the things that Google Ads is pushing,

It's making it more catered towards B2C and B2C tactics, we know this, they don't work in B2B and if you want them to work in B2B, you're just gonna end up wasting a lot of money. James, I'd love for you to kinda expand on some of those. People are probably wondering, what the heck is he talking about? So, could you kinda give us a little bit of a rundown on some of the things that have changed?

over the past couple years that kind of make Google Ads more B2C focused.

James Gregg (10:40.278)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, a lot of it is just like the broadening and the like the increasing focus on data from the Google side of things. And what I mean by that is like, you're matched. If you're familiar with match types in Google ads, it's like basically the constraint in which your search term can attract kind of search variants. And so, you know, it's basically how Google has been starting to say, you know what, you have all this control on it. We're trying and it's out of a

Well, they want to make money, but it's out of a good place in terms of they're trying to get, you know, small B2C shop owners involved in using Google ads and make it easy. like they want you to be able to just put in four keywords, turn on and on, made a bid strategy, and then get, you know, more, more conversions in. And when I mentioned data earlier, I mean, because like they have this pretty good awareness if you're selling red basketball shoes.

of who your customer is and those automated strategies will catch on quickly. And you really don't need that big of a budget to get those to work because purchase size is smaller and that correlates to your cost per click. that's kind of the preface is that just like B2B. And this is kind of my soapbox a little bit. Like if you follow me on LinkedIn or anything, it's just like, is what I talk about a lot because it's literally the most pervasive issue in Google Ads.

Google ads might not be right for you. So this might be completely irrelevant to your B2B SaaS even within that niche. But yeah, I mean, the whole thing is that like you can't run it like a B2C company anymore. Not that you ever could, but like I think the campaigns for a B2B SaaS and a B2C company would have looked a lot more similar 10 years ago than they should today, I think.

Ian Binek (12:16.814)
Absolutely. Something that happened when I started learning Google Ads, literally just, I it was like right before 2020, like 2018, 2019, was when I really dipped my feet into the Google Ads world.

They still had this thing called Broadmatch Modified, BMMs. And gosh, dude, that stuff was awesome for B2B because you basically, for anyone that doesn't know, you could put a little plus sign next to a keyword and you could have multiple plus signs of multiple words in a string. And the way those worked was as long as those words were triggered in the Google search, then your ad would populate.

you could have three or four words in there and they don't have to be in some certain order as long as they're in the query, then your ad shows, which is incredibly useful for B2B because yeah, B2B, I preach this a lot now with my service offering, but I think that a lot of people are not finding you through category terms anymore. They're finding you through capability terms and outcome -based terms.

James Gregg (13:25.855)
everything.

Ian Binek (13:41.774)
And so that broad match modified, I literally dream of getting that back because that would make so much more sense for our capability driven like campaigns. And now it's just gone. I think it was removed in like 2021 or maybe it was even 2020. I don't even remember when, but it was a long time ago, but people don't know what it was like.

James Gregg (13:59.094)
Yeah, it's kind of been a, yeah, they really don't. And it's funny how everyone who knows anything or like you audit a lot of accounts, I'm sure where like the manager of the account is like their demand gen lead. So they're doing a hundred other things. That's why they're talking to you. But they'll talk about like, I used to manage, know, when it used to be exact match was actually exact match and broad match modified was there and stuff like that. The way people talk about it is like,

Ian Binek (14:15.299)
Mm

James Gregg (14:25.836)
the way like an angry old guy talks about like prices in the eighties, you know, it's like, it's like something that they to their chagrin they miss and, you should miss it greatly. Cause like being able to say, I need the word, you know, for enterprise in there is like, you know, we're doing it now, but with negative keywords to make sure that shows up. It was just such a hack, you know? yeah. So.

Ian Binek (14:30.838)
Yeah, yeah.

Ian Binek (14:51.181)
Yeah.

Ian Binek (14:55.382)
Yeah, it's, I mean, that's the thing. So I guess like really for, to summarize though the whole issue, it's just Google wants you to use the broad match type, like James was mentioning. And because of that, you are gonna end up wasting a lot of spend and your ads are gonna show up for a lot of spots that like, or queries that maybe just don't make sense. And because of that, you're gonna waste a lot. You're going to...

confuse your prospects. You're going to show up with competitors that are not competitors at all, not even in the space. And ultimately, you're just not going to see performance. You're just not going to have a consistent steady performance. there are, this is the thing, there's some, I'll call them heretics. There are some heretics out there, James, that think that they're like, you know what? Doesn't matter because CPL is the same.

They're like, you can drive the same number of quality leads from just like 10 X the number of unqualified clicks. But when you ask them for the data, they're like, it's just a thing. Like they don't really ever have anything to share with you, or at least in my opinion, they don't. I'm like, well, like I get it. Like maybe that makes sense, but I've never seen it before. I've never seen it work because yeah.

James Gregg (16:12.236)
I agree. It's like a willing, a willing full disillusionment in performance. It's like, it's just like underlying want to see more conversions in the account that keeps people going back to broad keywords. It's like, yeah, but if we, you know, if we moved a phrase, our cost per SQL might go down, but you know.

our salespeople will see that our MQLs go down as well and they'll get upset. And it's like, well, half of those MQLs weren't qualified, then what was the point of paying to get them in the first place? And a lot of people are just more satisfied by seeing more conversions in the account without seeing any kind of down life cycle results. I think that's where the heretics get, they feed off of...

Ian Binek (16:58.766)
Yeah, exactly.

James Gregg (17:03.02)
button click conversions and stuff like that. So yeah.

Ian Binek (17:07.438)
Yeah, and especially when you get into organizations where there is a specialist managing the ads, but they're working with you because they're not seeing the revenue, the return on investment. But the specialist is like, look at the native data that's coming from Google Ads. Conversion rate's really high, CPL's really low. And yeah, it's great. I used to be that guy. I really did. I used to be the dude that was like, I'm doing everything I possibly can.

As a specialist, I was working in Fortune 500 at the time and I was working for a company called NCR and they were selling POS systems for small businesses. So this was a pretty good use case for Google Ads, especially with Broadmatch Modified and we were driving those results. But at the end of the day, I wasn't looped into the sales process. Sales cycles were a lot longer and these leads weren't closing.

James Gregg (17:52.642)
Yeah.

James Gregg (18:03.297)
Yeah.

Ian Binek (18:04.256)
And I was getting that information from the higher ups, I was like, well, I'm doing everything I possibly can. So I was just frustrated. So I guess that whole little monologue there is just to say, there's a couple of people you need to satisfy in this equation. You have the higher up leaders, you have the salespeople, and then you have the specialists too. You need to educate on what's best nowadays. And that's why I think

our role as consultants is becoming more important just because of how less geared Google Ads is towards the B2B buyers.

James Gregg (18:42.988)
I agree. I agree. And I, I, I, I know that's true. And with all like, you know, do you ever get caught kind of in the overhype about AI, like taking our jobs, as managers, as man specifically, and I sometimes get like fearful of that. And then I'll go audit an account and look at their, the searches, their broad match keywords are matching with. And, know, they'll be targeting like a construction management software keyword and.

Ian Binek (19:07.907)
you

James Gregg (19:12.236)
they'll be like, there's a good cost per conversion there. But then you go look in the search terms and every one of their conversions came on keywords like Google or construction jobs or something like that. Like I see the search term Google is searched way more than you think. And it's triggered by a lot of random broad keywords. then so you're like, all right, so yeah, this keyword is getting MQLs, but let's go into the CRM and look at those because I can see that the actual searches that are leading to those are

Ian Binek (19:24.588)
Yeah.

James Gregg (19:40.354)
not on theme at all. So I'd be very surprised if they were also relevant to your customer base. And then we look and none of them have turned into customers or anything like that. And that's eight times out of 10 how I prove to someone that they need a manager is that like, let's go check out the search terms. I could almost like just say that in my messaging and it would probably be true.

Ian Binek (20:04.382)
Yeah, I think that you kind of brought up an interesting point about AI. I have talked about this a few times. In fact, the last podcast I just released it. I've kind of taken this hot take approach where I really do think that lower level specialist roles, I think that they could be on their way out in the next five years with the advancements in AI, but with the caveat.

that you need to have really good strategy. You need to have someone that is driving the ship. So someone that's like, we are launching this campaign that's focused on capabilities, outcomes, and category terms. And here are the keywords. by the way, they're all exact match. They're not broad or phrase because the AI is not going to able to figure that one out in terms of what's important and what's not. But as long as you have someone that is providing strategy, at least on a quarterly basis, and then you have your AI tool,

like an Optio, for example, but a little bit more on steroids with more hands -on AI number crunching abilities, then yeah, great. I think in five years, that's gonna be the case. I don't think that strategic decision -making people are gonna be on their way out anytime soon.

James Gregg (21:06.006)
Mm

James Gregg (21:18.242)
I think you're right. I think the bigger AI change we have to prepare for is just like what search is going to look like as it evolves, like the actual results and how that targeting is going to change. Like that's probably our first concern. I don't have any theories on that necessarily.

Ian Binek (21:35.79)
I don't really have any theories other than the fact that I think it'll actually look really similar. I feel like you will have some sort of interface with the AI output and the AI will be selling ad spots still in its answer, but it will also bring up organic results as well. But I think similar to how when Google Ads began,

I think that there will be potentially cheaper ad spots in the AI's response. And because of that, think people will be confused with what is actually an ad and what is actually organic, similar to what happened in the beginning whenever Google Ads started. People didn't really know. The older generations or even the younger generations, didn't even know what they were looking at was an ad for a hot second.

James Gregg (22:11.511)
Hmm

Ian Binek (22:32.032)
Now, maybe information will pass a little faster through the generations and through people and they'll realize what's ads. I still think, I still find myself clicking on ads. If I search for something and I see an ad that's compelling, I'm going to click it. And it's the landing page's job to convert me at that point. I mean, that's my theory. I really do feel like the AI interface will kind of still include ads. There's no way that they won't. mean, Google's model.

what, like 70 % of the revenue is made through ads or might be even higher than that. I think it's like a really high number. Yeah.

James Gregg (23:04.77)
Right. That's why we're like, that's ultimately what keeps me, that gives me good sleep at night is that Google still needs to make ad revenue. And I didn't waste, you know, 10 years becoming an expert in Google ads because they still need to do that. I feel like we're probably going to switch to like, you know, where broad match turns into more like a long tail broad match where they're like context -based targeting.

So, you know, it becomes less about how you target like this one or two, three, one or two to three word broad match keyword and more where you're like saying, you know, SaaS company for construction workers or something like that. You know, I'm curious if they would move towards that where you're adding context and then it's trying to determine.

Ian Binek (23:51.738)
Ian Binek (23:58.202)
That is super cool. I didn't even really think about the triggering of things, because I was still thinking that it would pull from the same index, but thinking about its actual output, that makes a lot sense. Yeah, that would be cool. Because then it's just different kinds of contextual targeting, which sort of gets into social media ads, in a way. But maybe it's utilizing more of what

James Gregg (24:18.251)
Yeah, yeah.

Ian Binek (24:25.718)
A lot of people don't use in Google Ads Now, which is like the targeting features and the audience features. think, I can't tell you the number of accounts I look at that don't have segments added where they could be used for advanced bidding adjustments. That's like such a missed opportunity, but I feel like maybe that will become really important with this new AI search capability in the next few years.

James Gregg (24:47.936)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I people even just like I, I, one of my, get on these like loops of being like a fanboy of certain tactics and Google ads. but one of my favorite ones that I've been using a lot is just like a retargeting search ads campaign. you can, then you can use broad match and if they're in theme with the search and they bend your site before, like, but then people will stop there and not put in like,

the different audiences of retargeting all users versus like that and people who went to your pricing page or clicked on a specific button. Like you can still layer those things in. Like you're saying, like these audiences, if they're not in there, aren't helping you leverage the AI to the maximum ability. And if they are, even if they're in observation mode, they're helping in some way. yeah, yeah, I agree. I guess it's a long way to say that I agree.

Ian Binek (25:42.85)
Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so we kind of talked about the preface of, okay, like Google Ads, very B2C focused, pushing B2B advertisers and lower level specialists that maybe don't even know any better to focus on broad match keywords. There's something else I want to talk about we didn't really highlight, which is like Performance Max. So I don't know if you had any like strong takes on Performance Max, but.

I think there's two memes in the Google ad space right now and one is Broadmatch, which we've already talked about and the other one is PerformanceMax. So James, what are your thoughts on it? I'm curious.

James Gregg (26:24.066)
Yeah, there's I feel like when you ask a question like that, there's like my my has to take a hard stand social media response where it's like absolutely never use broad match, absolutely never use P max. I still think that with a Google ads campaign that I'm running. However, so first of all, let's start with like the right answer. If you had to choose one or the other, don't use don't use don't use broad match or P max. You know, P max will not understand.

Ian Binek (26:49.368)
Sir.

James Gregg (26:53.504)
your niche manufacturing procurement for electronic SaaS. It's not going to get what that is. Same thing with BroadMatch. The looser you get, the more I would just consider those algorithms the same thing. Because it's basically Google understanding your business, the more control you give to it. So BroadMatch, PMAX wouldn't use it.

too much of a black box with PMAX. You don't have any control over it really. And if you're going to get conversions, if you're using it and you're getting conversions, like keep in close eye on those conversions, see what kind of quality they're bringing. Are they just, you know, random bots filling out forms or are they actually using your product and, you know, checking out that kind of thing? I will say my one caveat on that is as you get to the B2B SaaS side of products,

where it's more widely applicable to all businesses, consider a Calendly or a Monday, that start behaving more like your cost for the software is lower. Again, it's applicable to every B2B SaaS. I think as you get to that point, that maybe if you've maxed out all of your phrase match and exact match keywords and all your themes and you're looking for some more conversion volume,

that's more where a PMAX or broad keywords can actually come into play. And I have seen success in those scenarios where, because it's behavior, you're getting the data because, you know, theoretically, if your CLV is lower, then your cost per clicks are lower. You're getting more CLV, you're getting more customers in a, in a given month and you can feed PMAX that data and PMAX already has some like universal data and understands your business. So yeah, long -winded way to answer your question, but don't turn on PMAX and broad.

broad keywords, would just stay away from that and keep an eye out for that setting in Google ads that like automatically turns on broad keywords, which is crazy.

Ian Binek (28:54.526)
Yes. yeah. No, I've seen that actually. That setting actually triggered me so much the other day because I made a campaign and I didn't realize that it was added in the settings. So I was in there and you know how you can just, you can add like if you don't want to work in Excel and you don't want to be lazy like me sometimes, I'll add all the keywords and then I'll just like select all and then change match type.

Well, if you have that setting checked that says only use broad match, it'll just say match type failed. This applied to zero. And I was like, I've never seen this before, this is so weird. And then I was like, dude, what is going on? So I looked in the settings and I saw this new thing and it was only use broad match. And I'm pretty sure it used to be defaulted to off and then it was defaulted to on. So I was like.

James Gregg (29:26.327)
Yeah.

James Gregg (29:43.478)
default song. Yeah.

Ian Binek (29:46.156)
So yeah, dude, was like, I can only imagine someone like older who didn't have the patience or it wasn't their job really to make Google ads. They just be like, okay, whatever. Like, I'll just keep it on. Like that is so kind of sneaky, kind of sneaky about Google ads.

James Gregg (29:54.252)
Yeah.

James Gregg (29:59.912)
It's always Google so sneaky when they don't want you to know about the setting. It's like they can really hide it like, like expansion targeting those auto suggestions that you have to go through like three layers of settings to get to turn off auto suggestions. And they just like, I mean, I don't know our perspective is so narrow with B2B SaaS, but they seem like settings that literally are just there to spend your money without you knowing.

Ian Binek (30:12.696)
Yeah.

Ian Binek (30:18.253)
Yeah.

James Gregg (30:29.142)
Yeah, it just -

Ian Binek (30:29.792)
Exactly. Use unused ad spend, AKA let's just take the money you've allocated and not give you results.

James Gregg (30:33.931)
Yeah.

James Gregg (30:38.676)
I know that's such a, that's such like a, I'm sure that's been memized for years, but cause the Google ads reps have been saying it for years where you like, talk to them and they're like, well, to improve your performance, you just have to raise your budget. And I was like, well, wouldn't that be nice? Like, yeah.

Ian Binek (30:56.366)
Yeah, yeah, it's hilarious. In fact, talking about PMAX, I can't really think of this. Me and you both have worked in other ad platforms before, and we've been there when new features have been released. I was thinking about this, but I cannot think of a single thing that was released that really was better, that made performance better.

especially in the first year or two of its release. I think as some things have grown, they've gotten better, but I think the only thing maybe that has been kind of okay is Advantage Plus in Facebook ads or meta, which I'm not even sure if you're familiar with. yeah, I mean, they're horrible. I hate them too. I try to stay away from them, but sometimes I get caught up in them. But that's the only thing out of maybe 10 or 20 releases that I've seen.

James Gregg (31:40.748)
I don't use Facebook ads,

Ian Binek (31:55.702)
in my lifetime, I can't think of a single one that's been like actually good.

James Gregg (31:59.274)
Yeah, I mean, I'm racking my brain. I have heard whispers that sometimes Facebook's targeting goes through better, better, you know, up and downs. But, yeah, I don't know. Automated strategies. just like, they've been bad so consistently in the first year or two that, like you said, that it's just like, you lose trust in them at this point. there's been so many where like, it sounds so good on paper and you're like, I can't wait for this to come in.

Ian Binek (32:11.309)
Yeah.

Ian Binek (32:26.848)
Yeah.

James Gregg (32:26.882)
Google's selling it so hard and all the recommended settings and you're like, want this to work. And then it just, doesn't. And you're almost when you manage like our accounts, you almost forced to feel kind of like antiquated because it's like Google's like, look at all this shiny new stuff over here. And we're like, I have to keep holding down the fort with exact match keywords. And they make you feel like you're the only person not doing like what they're telling you.

Yeah, it's pretty crazy the system they have around that.

Ian Binek (32:57.145)
Yeah.

Ian Binek (33:01.75)
Yeah, no, I just hope they don't get rid of exact match. they do, you know, dude, if they do, that's so bad. I feel like they lose a lot of, I mean, maybe they wouldn't lose a lot. Maybe they'd make a lot of money, but performance would definitely go down. Who knows?

James Gregg (33:14.891)
I don't know.

Do you have opinions on GA4?

Ian Binek (33:23.886)
My opinion really is that it was built for e -commerce, which at the time when it was released and when it was teased, even before it was released, that e -commerce was a huge thing and it was getting bigger and bigger every year. But in my opinion, I don't think that a lot of businesses really find it useful because

GA4's main dashboard has this worldwide view and it's like, here's all your users across the whole world. It's like, yeah, but if I'm only selling domestically, I don't even care about 90 % of the world. know what I mean? So that's number one. And then two, I think that they've just made it a little bit unnecessarily difficult to set up. They've changed the terminology for conversions. They call them key events and they've made it difficult to create those.

James Gregg (34:00.45)
Yeah.

Ian Binek (34:19.598)
key events now, you have to actually create them through Google Tag Manager and then sync them, which is, they're basically incorporating other products in their ecosystem, which makes it kind of difficult. So yeah, my hot take is just like, it's just unnecessarily difficult. And I'm not, by no means, I'm not an expert in it. I like to use like, DataBox, and I'll just use my original source data there and see how things are doing.

I really don't touch Google Analytics that much to be honest with you because I feel like it is just not really that useful for a lot of my clients. What are your thoughts?

James Gregg (34:51.796)
I you're, mean, I don't really, for me, it's like whatever they're using, I'm gonna adapt to. So I feel like it doesn't matter what I think, but the general sentiment is just like Google ads. Like you said, it's built, it's the same. think the reason I brought it up is because it highlights like the mindset of Google and it's shifting everything to be for like the e -commerce and more specifically like the.

the sole proprietor e -commerce or like the, you know, the shop that's, you know, just a couple of people selling their stuff because they want to get everyone involved. It's almost like they made it so simple that if you have like a medium grasp on Google or on analytics, it's hard. And it's like where having a medium grasp on like universal analytics, the previous generation was like enough to be dangerous. And now it's like enough just to confuse you. So.

Ian Binek (35:36.866)
Yeah.

James Gregg (35:48.748)
I don't use data box at all though, tell me about that.

Ian Binek (35:49.28)
Yeah.

Ian Binek (35:54.446)
DataBox is great. mean, it's a, generally speaking, paid platform, because you're basically just connecting all of your ad data and CRM data inside of one dashboard. I mean, you might use Looker Studio for this stuff, which is like, I mean, I think some of the connections cost money there. I could be wrong, and maybe they're not, maybe they don't, but I've always used DataBox. It's super easy, and I mean, I...

James Gregg (36:06.274)
That's right.

Ian Binek (36:21.262)
follow the CEO on LinkedIn, he posts a lot. So that's also a plus for me. I actually see what this guy is thinking about, but I just think the vision for their business going forward is only getting better. They want to integrate with HubSpot. And something that I really like about HubSpot recently was that they integrated with Clarity. And so I can see all my heat map and session data with each one of my leads, or at least like 70 % of them, right?

James Gregg (36:45.846)
Yeah, that's cool.

Ian Binek (36:50.124)
And then if you include DataBox, you just have this ecosystem of HubSpot Clarity, DataBox, which I is just super dangerous in my opinion. I get all the information I need there for the revenue team. it's, I mean, it's just really productized at this point for me. I'm just like, these are the tools I use. This is how I get all of my insights that I need.

James Gregg (37:08.66)
It's funny how important integrations are in the SaaS world. I think I sleep on it all the time and realize it really matters what it works with. You just talked about that ecosystem and why you're sold on that and why you already know the next products you're going to get because of the integration that's there. Do you run integration -based campaigns in Google Ads?

Ian Binek (37:31.597)
Mm

Ian Binek (37:37.918)
like for some startups, like if a startup is integrated with like a bigger name player in the space or in like a complimentary space, is that what you mean?

James Gregg (37:38.955)
Yeah, like

James Gregg (37:44.33)
Yeah, exactly. like Arena is like a procurement platform for like big manufacturers. And I work with a client who like integrates with Arena. And that's a keyword we target. We're not trying to compete with them, but we're just trying to like draft off their notoriety. Do you do those?

Ian Binek (38:00.109)
Yeah.

Ian Binek (38:04.013)
yeah, I would factor that in my outcome -based campaigns. So whenever I work with a client now and we get into this whole 90 -day sprint that we do, we have product marketing, customer success, and account executive interviews. And basically I just talk to these people and I try to understand why do customers like, especially for customer success, why do they like your product? Why don't they turn?

James Gregg (38:06.977)
Mm

James Gregg (38:20.46)
Mm -hmm.

Ian Binek (38:32.654)
Why don't they go somewhere else? And a lot of times it's like, they like this integration specifically. And I'm like, how many people say that? they're like, 50 % of them say this. And you're like, great, so I'm going to bid on that keyword. Even if it doesn't even have more than 10 search volume, I'm going to bid on it. And then that's just a long tail campaign, and it's pay per click, so you only pay when someone clicks. So low competition, you can have lot of these kinds of outcome based or

capability -based campaigns. And so I actually lumped that into my evergreen Google Ads strategy, which is like, you never need to turn these campaigns off and you just need to have some strategy and oversight on them every 90 days, which is kind my strategic positioning now with my services. But yeah, I agree. mean, it's also a similar concept to competitor targeting, Very similar. So yeah, definitely.

James Gregg (39:26.4)
Yeah, yeah, I agree. think competitive targeting can be weird. But yeah, this is like, yeah, you know that they, know, some, some softwares have a prerequisite of using this blank software, right? And so that filters that out and it's like, well, we can't get a lot of lead volume off it, but it goes back to that thing. It's like, why do you want lead volume of people who aren't relevant to your ICP? It's like, why don't...

spend less money in pay -per -click and spend more on a content writer. you know, so you don't need to spend $30 ,000 a month in Google Ads just to get more leads. Like, I think a lot of people feel pressure once they get it to work. They don't really realize that there is like kind of a limit to what you can reach with Google Ads sometimes and their money can be better spent elsewhere. Yeah.

Ian Binek (39:53.612)
Exactly.

Ian Binek (40:06.509)
Yeah.

Ian Binek (40:16.526)
Definitely. Yeah, mean, and part of that evergreen approach that I take is, hey, if you don't rank for these kinds of terms now, like integrations or competitor alternatives or outcome -based searches, then let's bid on them. Like I said, it's pay -per -click, so you're gonna give people that are higher up in the marketing funnel, so not your standard bottom of funnel searches. These are like top of funnel, middle of funnel searches that are getting people

taking the mental real estate, number one. But what I say afterwards is like, hey, once we're bidding on this stuff, it would be great if you worked with like a Lachey Lewis and made these pieces of content that are organic that can actually start to rank for these things because then maybe you don't need to pay for them anymore. So it's sort of like looking at it in an investment standpoint of, hey, if this is something we need forever, let's just make a piece of organic content before we

James Gregg (40:59.618)
Right.

Ian Binek (41:12.77)
have that content and before it's ranking, let's bid on it for now.

James Gregg (41:14.048)
And if you can rank on it, you're eligible for so many more impressions because those mid funnel searches, I'm sure you've noticed, but like maybe other people haven't that there's not ads at the top of those mid funnel searches a lot of the time. So like, you're just not showing up for that, which is fine. I mean, again, you're not paying for a click. You're not paying for a click. That's not an issue, but it's just not the best way to get that kind of reach all the time. You talk about out.

Ian Binek (41:28.139)
Exactly.

James Gregg (41:40.138)
based searches and I'm sure we just categorize searches differently, but is that like like increase? What's an outcome based search? Give me an example that.

Ian Binek (41:53.59)
Yeah. So I would get like outcome based searches from the sales team or from like the account executive. So it might be something as generic as like streamlined efficiencies between X and Y platform. Like that's super long tail. So we'd probably try to bring it back and, or we just put it in a phrase match, like word type and definitely not broad, but like we might experiment with the phrase and like these kinds of middle funnel searches because

The variations of what people are typing in are going to be drastically different. And the thing is, we're not expecting low CPL, like cost per lead, in the middle funnel and definitely not in the top of funnel. But it's sort of like, hey, if we have these bottom of funnel ads running right now, and this is like the benchmark CPL data that we have, and then we turn on the top of funnel and middle of funnel, and then we start to see, hey, bottom of funnel CPL is dropping.

James Gregg (42:23.543)
Mm

Ian Binek (42:50.786)
then that just kind of goes to show like, okay, yeah, middle funnel, top funnel is actually dropping the CPI, which is making a better return on ad spend. So to answer your question, yeah, like the searches are really just saving time, saving money, kind of things like that, which is primarily why people are motivated to buy. And that's why we talk to the account executives or just someone in the sales team about that.

James Gregg (43:14.23)
Yeah. What kind of landing page are you delivering to them? you getting, mean, this obviously there's like, I guess probably important to state that like, at least in B2B SaaS, there's like, softwares that you anticipate the person will buy on the first time they see it. And then there's the far side where it's like, they might buy after six months of interacting with your website and salespeople. But in general, maybe to more speak of that higher CLV range, what are you serving people who are looking for?

Ian Binek (43:37.187)
Yeah.

James Gregg (43:44.064)
you know, those outcome based searches.

Ian Binek (43:49.312)
Yeah. So for that kind of stuff, we're going to generally try to push them to use cases or case studies because that's going to be more of like a middle of funnel search. that's, know, if you're in the paid media space, you're going to be for a middle of funnel, you're going to be showing case studies, testimonials, like use cases. I try to, whenever we work with a client, I really try to make sure that they have like comparison pages for competitive, competitive searches. have

use cases for middle of funnel, case studies testimonials for middle of funnel. And then top of funnel, it's like, hey, do we have good content we can push these people to? Is there a blog that actually makes sense to put out here? If so, maybe we should push it because we're not expecting these people to convert. We don't need to have an optimized conversion landing page in the top of funnel. We just need to put something that they're expecting to click on there. And they won't even maybe even think that it's an ad because like you said, it's the top of funnel search.

It's not like they typed in a category term or they're like best content platform. that's, yeah, you're gonna put a freaking conversion landing page there. But if it's like, I need to make a PDF, like, you know, like you're not gonna put like a conversion, you're not gonna put like a freaking conversion landing page there.

James Gregg (44:50.059)
Yeah.

James Gregg (45:03.018)
Yeah, yeah. be interesting to me to see. So are you, when you're starting a new account, they've never run ads before, are you, how early on are you recommending to move up funnel?

Ian Binek (45:24.014)
I try to, like I said, I try to do it in the beginning. It does depend on ad spend, right? So if they only have like 5K ad spend or something, I don't know, we might just have to stay and BOF bottom of funnel. if they have anywhere upwards of 20 to 50, I'm already immediately thinking we should be in middle of funnel, top of funnel, conduct those interviews with the team members.

James Gregg (45:27.66)
Mm

Ian Binek (45:53.422)
and actually show up for those things that we don't have content for yet. It's not just like, I'm only working with marketing directors, they're only working with VPs and marketing. I've just integrated in the team for 90 days and I'm talking to all these people that maybe the VP of marketing doesn't even talk to because they don't have time. That's why I'm coming in. I'm coming in to bridge the gap of knowledge and what is actually needed in the Google Ads account.

James Gregg (46:09.249)
Yeah.

Ian Binek (46:21.608)
No offense to lower level specialists, they might not know to do that. Or they also don't have time because they have other things that they're probably being grabbed to do. So, I mean, that's the value add really, is you just come in and you bridge the gaps between the team members and try to optimize the ads accordingly.

James Gregg (46:37.41)
I agree. I think that's like when I'm, you know, a lot of people spending 30 to $70 ,000 a month are in still that like small medium sized business stage. So you really do have the flexibility to say, like, that's why I like being in that same space that sounds like you're in. It's like, you have the flexibility to be like, you hear a lot about gym and sales. Like, can I talk to Jim and talk about, you know, the CRM and why I'm not seeing like...

Ian Binek (47:04.674)
Yeah.

James Gregg (47:04.768)
you know, how they process those leads afterwards and why they do it a certain way. And maybe just talking to them about like the intents. Cause a lot of times the sales just see, you know, source and lead in that they don't have any idea what like the, the intent of that lead coming in was they don't know that this one actually just downloaded a case study and doesn't need to be called or needs to be nurtured or, you know, that kind of thing. And so, and it's kind of crazy that those conversations don't happen.

Ian Binek (47:28.385)
Yeah.

James Gregg (47:33.1)
naturally, but that is what you're being brought in for as a PPC manager at the same time. So you should be expecting to those conversations. So yeah. Yeah. Well, what else you got for me?

Ian Binek (47:44.928)
Exactly. Exactly, James.

Cool.

Honestly, we've hit upon everything. We hit upon the B2C world and why Google Ads is of hitting and gearing towards that. We've talked about PMAX. We've talked about what's wrong with PMAX and what's wrong with Broadmatch. We've talked about AI and our thoughts on how that's going to impact ad managers. And really, we've talked about best practices, which is this most recent part of our conversation where we were talking about...

James Gregg (48:11.212)
Mm

Ian Binek (48:21.346)
Hey, like top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom of funnel, Google ad campaigns, factoring in SEO content over time. we pretty much did everything, James. This was super, super insightful. I would say it's high level enough that your medium level people would understand. And then I could say it's advanced enough that your expert Google ads people might be thinking a little differently about their campaigns afterwards. So I love this episode. I think this was great.

James Gregg (48:47.552)
Yeah, heck yeah. Yeah, I was trying to think of maybe some like one little high level summary because like I feel like our both of our goals with our content is to like help people run internally Google Ads as best they can. If they can't, then obviously we'd love to take their business. But like I try to help people like be able to run it in -house as long as possible to make it affordable and that kind of thing. How about you give first, first let's do like a

Kiss Mary punch bed strategies. Who would you

Ian Binek (49:24.272)
yeah, mean, I would definitely, mm, kiss it. No, cause like, dude, I really only have like two, so I'll, but no, here's what I would say. So I would kiss ECPC, Enhanced Cost Per Click, because I, you know, I'll kiss it for like, it's like my short term thing, like my fling, cause I'm not keeping ECPC on forever. I'll marry my,

James Gregg (49:43.445)
Mm

Ian Binek (49:49.326)
I really like max conversion value in the B2B space because if you're tying your CRM data in, then you can optimize around that deal size value. And then as far as punch, mean...

James Gregg (50:00.78)
There's so many.

Ian Binek (50:04.32)
I don't know. I mean, yeah, it's like, don't really use anything else after that. I think there are unique use cases for some things and definitely worth testing, but I will always be kind of turned off from the target impression shares or the more brand awareness related bidding strategies. I think it's just there to confuse people. MaxClicks is probably not worth it.

James Gregg (50:24.704)
Nice clicks. Yeah.

James Gregg (50:30.411)
Yeah.

Ian Binek (50:34.348)
I've used it before, like no getting wrong. Like I use it sometimes in tandem with like ECPC, but it's, I'm like, I'm kind of turned off by it. Like ECPC and like max conversion value, that's it. I don't really use anything else.

James Gregg (50:40.076)
Mm

James Gregg (50:46.262)
Yeah, Max clicks is one that I once in a while am like, maybe I could get this to work. I have these exact match like super bottom funnel keywords. And my only issue is that our cost per lead just a little high. what if I just use Max clicks and just drove that with automation drove the click price down, like would that work? And I've never seen it work that well, but yeah, it's one of those things in Google ads where I'm like, maybe I could get this to work, but yeah.

I'm with you. My thing that I would throw in for Mary is like my ultimate goal often is to get to a target CPA or a target ROI. Obviously that's another step up in like data requirements. But I've seen it work with not a lot of data as well. What I like about it is that like I can play with budgets because I have a lot of seasonality. Like I mentioned the construction management software.

Ian Binek (51:17.997)
Yeah.

James Gregg (51:43.5)
There's different demands for different times, like the accounting side of things. Obviously during accounting season, you have the invoicing things at the end of the summer when they're finishing projects. So I like to move budgets around or I have to move budgets around a lot to accommodate for that. And I found when I moved budget up or down with a max conversion strategy, there's just like this little like knee check with Google's algorithm sometimes. And so

At least the idealistic manager and myself likes to have a target CPA put in there so I can theoretically throttle the budget all the way up and it's not this idealistic, I could put the budget at that $100 ,000 a day and as long as we're just hitting that $200 CPA every time, then you can spend as much as you want. So that's kind of where I'm at.

Ian Binek (52:34.158)
Yeah, for a second there I thought you misspoke, then you tied it back. You said $100 ,000 a day. I was like, my gosh. Yeah, but no, that makes sense. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. I think Target CPA works really well when you have a really good understanding of what your qualification rate from MQL to SQL is.

James Gregg (52:39.968)
Yeah, dude, yeah, we're handling big budgets over here. Yeah.

Ian Binek (53:02.478)
If it kind of fluctuates too much, it's like so hard to pull that off. But if you're in a space where like if someone does take action and you know that 70 % of the time they become an SQL and you know, maybe 50 % of the time after that, it becomes an opportunity. great. Like Target's CPA makes a lot of sense at that point because you're basically reverse engineering your ROI. Yeah. Versus like if you just do max conversion value, then it's just trying to get the highest deal size, which

James Gregg (53:22.338)
Yeah, I agree.

Ian Binek (53:31.178)
Maybe you have standard deal sizes, maybe you don't. It just depends. That's actually an interesting use case that I don't really use CPA for, but I could for some of my clients, I think, now that I'm thinking about it.

James Gregg (53:39.488)
that in that case go to like why don't you do like a I'm not saying what you're doing is wrong but this is just like how I think about it is like why don't you go to a target ROI then or I forget what they call it now that I'm losing my words but instead of a max value

Ian Binek (54:00.17)
Yeah, mean, that's true. And that's something that I would want to test. I think the problem is just the target. I think it's target ROAS. I think it's ROAS. don't think it's, yeah. I don't know. just don't, we don't have like a safe, I think it's quarterly where we have fluctuations with like how deals close, especially this year has been weird with some of the clients where deals aren't closing in the cybersecurity space as much. So it's like...

James Gregg (54:08.0)
Yeah.

James Gregg (54:22.924)
Mm

Ian Binek (54:30.658)
We just, we just want to get the highest deal sizes and we want Google to prioritize those and get from there. We don't have like the standard rates to kind of factor in. feel like, yeah.

James Gregg (54:37.302)
Fair enough. So you're saying the value of your customer is so high that you have a big fluctuation in how much your leads can cost, basically, or how much leeway you have in your lead costs. That makes sense. I have a couple like that,

Ian Binek (54:51.886)
Yeah, yeah like sometimes someone will come through and they're worth like 70 ,000 and then sometimes they come through and they're only worth seven and it's like okay well, they're really different. Yeah, they're very different. Yeah.

James Gregg (54:53.9)
Yeah.

That's crazy. Yeah, that is really different. Yeah, when you get into like seat numbers and stuff like that, the deal sizes start getting pretty wild. Where it's like they have 200 seats or a thousand seats. That's a big difference for whatever you're charging. Yeah, that's interesting if you don't care about that. Because that's my issue with like the max ones is that it makes sense. I mean, this is why it's case by case. You have to think about, you have to understand

Ian Binek (55:10.54)
Yeah.

James Gregg (55:25.698)
what they do, not just what they're called and how they operate. Cause that's different too. Like max conversions, that sounds great all the time. But if you have a budget, say, I mean, there are some markets where you have 10 conversions available per month. in say this one's this one keyword, if you max your budget out, Google might find a way to show for the top for every single search and, show up for every search possible. And you're

Ian Binek (55:33.014)
Mm

James Gregg (55:51.906)
your cost per conversion could be $1 ,000 when last month when you had half the budget, it was $500. just like, you know, that's my one issue with Max. But if that's not a problem for you, then like, then it's not a problem. You're just meeting your goals.

Ian Binek (56:03.298)
Yeah.

Ian Binek (56:11.338)
Yeah. Yeah. And so like, guess you're what we do is we calculate like the ROAS kind of separately. So not really inside the ad account or, you know, we kind of do it inside of the CRM and we definitely do it inside of data box. but yeah, like you're right. It's definitely, it's something you just have to like check on, which yeah, maybe like thinking about it now, it's like, maybe I am just like, I should test that, see if it works. If it does, then great.

James Gregg (56:16.405)
Mm

James Gregg (56:24.416)
Yeah.

James Gregg (56:35.616)
I that's the best thing. I don't know how you go into agreements with your clients, but my mindset when I go in is like, well, if they've been running ads for a long time with a lot of money, it's one thing, but like if we're starting an account, it's like, this is attached. Everything we do is one big test. I mean, I'm going to give you as good of a guess for a good start, but like kind of the mindset I like B2B is to be in, even if I'm just giving them advice to run it on their own is like show up for keywords that...

If you never got a conversion for them, that you'd be happy about that. like, you know, if you're showing, if you're a construction management software for remodelers, show up for remodeler construction management software, see who's showing up for that keyword. And you know, this is, you're not going to get no conversions for that, but just pretend what are the keywords that, you know, you would be most proud of showing up paying for, without, you know, that's how I would start. And then, you know, make sure you're matching those intents with like proper offers. And you should be like,

on your

Ian Binek (57:39.722)
Makes a lot of sense. That's smart, I don't think I've ever positioned it that way. I'm always like, hey, you know, this is what we're projecting in six months, so maybe five of those months are gonna be not that great, but in month six, like we might actually get to the point where we're getting a positive ROAS, and at that point we could probably upspend a little bit, try to optimize from there. So yeah, I like that. I might use that a little bit in my pitches.

James Gregg (57:47.702)
Yeah.

James Gregg (57:58.454)
I kind of feel like it's just two ways to go about the same thing. Basically, like, because I think there's a lot of people in our space who will be like, we'll get a lot of leads. Don't worry. You know, and yeah. And so you're being conservative. I'm sure you see results a lot faster than your projections, which is a good thing you're just going to make. But if you can sell people on the conservative projection, you're just going to be a hero when you come in and your client relationship is going to be a thousand times better.

Ian Binek (58:13.162)
Yeah, you can't say that. can't say that. Yeah.

James Gregg (58:27.99)
because you didn't butter them up, I guess, for lack of a better term. So, yeah.

Ian Binek (58:37.1)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and also like we'll just tell clients up front if like, hey, like you might not see results in six months. Like this is a longer term strategy. Like literally, conservatively it looks like you're gonna do bad or maybe even liberally you also might do bad. Do you still wanna invest in this? Like you don't have to. yeah.

James Gregg (58:42.998)
Mm -hmm.

James Gregg (58:54.24)
Yeah. Right. Yeah. That's so interesting. mean, that's why how many, how many people work at your company? Is it just you? Yeah. You wouldn't be able to tell with all the content you put out, but you, I feel like, you know, when it's just you, you don't have that sales pressure coming down from like a company to like, try to make the sale and like,

Ian Binek (59:08.15)
It's just me. Yeah, just me right now. Yeah.

Appreciate that.

James Gregg (59:21.076)
You're the one who has to, you're also the person who has to sit in there with the meetings as they go on. So like it kind of, I've been talking to a lot of people lately who want to talk to people who are just themselves as Google ad managers. And I think that kind of speaks to it. Cause it's like, you're not being pressured from the top to sell this with false expectations. You're also the person that knows they have to go into the meetings with your client and face the consequences. like it incentivizes you to be honest. And if you make that sale, it's like,

That relationship is so much better than a sale that I'm sure the people that we scoop clients up from who like promised all these things and didn't even come close. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we've been pushing the minutes. I wonder if someone will want to listen to our voices this long.

Ian Binek (01:00:02.808)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, James, we...

Ian Binek (01:00:14.324)
We'll see. We'll see. I know I will. I always listen back to my podcasts and I go on like runs and stuff. So I'm excited to listen to this again, because I feel like we did talk about things that like there's this mindset of I think you need to be reminded more than you need to learn sometimes. And for this, like this whole conversation for me, like I've learned a little bit and definitely reminded of a lot of things that, sometimes you just have to listen to them over and over and over, week in, week out.

they really sink in and that's the same for other marketing leaders too. So if anyone's listening to this, you're doing the fighting the good fight to say the least.

James Gregg (01:00:45.472)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's not easy out there for all B2B sasses struggling with low volume and high cost per clicks, but just target keywords that mean something to you and definitely not in broad. You'll be good. Simply than it sounds.

Ian Binek (01:01:06.035)
Absolutely. Yeah. James, before we wrap up, how could people get in touch with you? What's the best way for them to reach out?

James Gregg (01:01:10.678)
Well, can, most of my brand is published on LinkedIn. You can find me under James Gregg. My father's name is also James Gregg and he's on LinkedIn. So I'm the younger of the two. you could email me at james at searchclickboom .com. Yeah. I mean, that's the two best ways. DM me, like some posts. If you just follow me on LinkedIn, I'm genuinely just trying to give tips to improve your...

Ian Binek (01:01:25.258)
Nice.

James Gregg (01:01:39.542)
You're LinkedIn and most of them just come from ideas from audits. So like there's other accounts that are B2B SaaS accounts making these mistakes and you can maybe learn from them. That being said, you can grab a free audit from me about any time if you're a B2B SaaS. So I'll look through your accounts. I also do LinkedIn ads, you know, Google ads, I feel like there's a lot more to talk about and a lot more disillusionment, but yeah.

Ian Binek (01:02:08.418)
yeah, awesome James. Well, thank you so much. Everyone give James a follow if you're listening this far. I think we had a great conversation. see you guys in the next episode.

James Gregg (01:02:14.338)
Ian, thanks, man. It was nice talking to you again. Yep.

Ian Binek (01:02:24.864)
Likewise, thanks James.

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