AI Discovery, Creator Partnerships and the Return of Cash for Links!

0:00Hello and welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by TargetInternet.com. My name is Ciaran Rogers. And I'm Daniel Rowles. And in this episode, we are talking about AI discovery, creator partnerships, and the return of cash for links.

0:25Ciaran Rogers: this all comes from a conversation kieran and i had yesterday something that's been brewing in kieran's head for some time a little bit since we've recorded lots been going on in kieran and daniel world yeah but i spoke at the richmond marketing directors conference today and you raised some ideas for me yesterday that i actually put into my speech today which is this idea yeah Yeah, which is the idea that actually, if we are getting less and less traffic because of AI overviews, then actually one thing where the AI overviews is getting information from is really important. But what's actually spurring people to go to them is important.

1:00Ciaran Rogers: And actually, there's this whole new sphere of influence. So that's what we're going to get into a little bit today as well. Before we do and we get into it, I just want to real quick announcement. you're aware of targetinternet.com which is our digital marketing training platform we have launched targetaiskills.com as well I don't want to say any more than that go and take a lot if you want to there is a free trial on there at the moment as well what's it called Daniel what's it called targetaiskills.com so I go take a look at that but very excited about that and there is a new podcast that is launching with it that's on the website so you fancy another podcast with Kieran and I in it go and look out for the target AI podcast that will be live by the time you listen to this but let's get back to it right so i think i'll start with what's changing and i think there've been some massive shifts and actually i'm sure all of you have noticed the fallout from it but you're perhaps not noticing what the undercurrents are that are causing this but it was very interesting so i went along to a brilliant event last week in london set up by google and it was all about leads and how you can get more of them using the latest tech and i thought well my current role as head of growth leads are important let's go along and i'm really glad that i did just a little shout out to the guys at google i have never been to a google event where everything was made so crystal clear and every single speaker interlinked beautifully like hats off to google for the work you did on that it was quite remarkable the the skill with these things is very often taking very complex subjects i'm just breaking it down into something that's easy to take on board.

2:37It gave me a lot to think about. I came out feeling slightly shell-shocked, but I think let's get back to what's changing. And what's really changing is how people discover your brands. So back in the day, for a long time now, as a strategy, you could camp out on what we all call cash keywords. You know, those cash phrases that always result in lots of bookings. And we spent a few years back in the day working out what those cash phrases are, and then they largely stayed untouched unless you're in a very new place where new phrases are cropping up and or you're inventing them yourself to try and get control of them and actually it was easy like you could have a whole variety of exact and phrase matches and you could just camp out on those cash for click keywords and you would get the traffic and you would get the business and actually in that world the way it worked I think was largely that people would have an idea of what they wanted to buy or they would do the obvious search let's say i'm buying double glazing on the isle of white i might type in isle of white double glazing and all the isle of white double glazing firms if they've got any sense would be like camping out on that or buy isle of white double glazing buy double glazing isle of white all that jazz and i would find you know three or four different companies and i would go to their websites i'd do my research jobs are good and right and i'd pick the one that was going to give me the best deal and the best price and can get it fitted quickly without any hassle.

3:58Not so anymore, right? So AI summaries have come in and shifted. In fact, before AI summaries in Google came in, AI came along. And actually with, you know, ever increasingly powerful large language learning models, people discovered that actually they could get the LLMs to do the research for them. And actually it's evolved from two or three keywords that you might search for any one of your brands out there. You know, you'll all know what the money keywords were. and now actually if i for one of the examples they gave at the google event was one of the guys over the senior execs over from the state said he needed to get his son a a new truck because his son was off to college and his truck was falling apart so a little pickup truck i think and normally what they would have done is typed in their favorite brand and they did that but they typed it into the ai summary and actually the ai took a step back and went well you know before we decided on the brand what is it your son wants from this car and started quizzing them and there was a bit backwards and forwards the ai teased out of them what was important and actually what they ended up doing was buying a completely different brand they would never have considered before and so what i think this shows you like think about your own search habits like daniel when you now go researching for something like where does it start for you well more from the night it's

5:13Ciaran Rogers: actually still twofold if i'm trying to make a big complicated decision yeah i'll start in claude because I know that I'm going to go down that path. If I'm doing a fairly quick fire, it ends up in Google, but it is more often than not happening within what ends up being the AI mode. Because one thing I've noticed that's happened in the last couple of weeks is you do your first query in Google as normal, and it gives you the opportunity of an AI overview to expand it. And then the second you continue that conversation, it switches you over to AI mode. There are no longer any what we call the blue links.

5:42Ciaran Rogers: There's none of the links on the actual page itself. My behavior has completely changed. When I very often at a conference will ask people, has your search behavior changed? Everyone put their hands up. Everyone does. Everyone knows they've done it. So we know that old way of doing things is gone. But yet we haven't adjusted. We haven't adjusted to it fully at all yet. So I think that's fascinating. But what it tells you, which is the point that you got me thinking about a lot yesterday, was suddenly when you arrive on someone's website, you are so much further down the funnel already. 100%. And this is the thing, like the AI summaries and AI discussions and like I go far, it's like AI explorations that we're doing.

6:22They are massively shifting the influence to much earlier in the buying journey. And so the point now where I start searching on Google, I've probably already selected my target. Right. And so, you know, your brand, massively important. Right. But remember, back in the day, with things how they used to work, it was easy to catch everybody that was typing in two or three keywords and now they could be searching for all sorts of things and they are and actually a lot of that search doesn't even happen within google it's happening else elsewhere and it's happening with other conversations with other machines and you also need to remember that ai is very good at understanding who you are and where you're at right now right so what they recommend me daniel is going to be very different to what they recommend you even if we ask the same questions and have the same discussions right so you're suddenly you're dealing with machines that deal with an audience of one rather than a mass audience of many millions and so by its very nature it's much harder to get purchase on it now don't get me wrong i still think that dining out on the core keywords is a good thing right i still get results from that and i'm sure many of you are as well but unless you are starting to really invest some time in things like performance max and ai max and demand gen and type of us i'm going to come on to those in a second because that was something Google were highly recommending.

7:43I think you're somewhat doomed. In fact, I got to attend a practical session with the Google search team and they had a panel of their experts.

7:52Ciaran Rogers: I got to ask a question. My question was a bit loaded and I hope if any of the panel listeners are listening, I hope a bit of a gift. Certainly they all wanted to chip in on it. So I think it was a good sign of the question. But my question was, if I'm still doing things the way everybody was 18 months ago, and if I stick to my exact match and phrase match and tie it down to the money keywords how much devastation will i expect to see on my campaigns over the next six months it's actually i've already seen devastation right i haven't been able to move quick enough on this as i'm sure many of you have been in the same position and actually they all said you're going to see lots of devastation they particularly like the phrase devastation and actually i think what this tells us is actually unless you evolve you are somewhat doomed.

8:35I mean, what I've seen within campaigns that I've been running is literally

8:39Ciaran Rogers: over the last three to four months, a third of the traffic has just disappeared. In the paid search campaigns? In the paid search campaigns. Yeah. And actually some of that will be because actually people already know what they want because they've had the discussions with AI summaries. Some of it would be because AI summaries, even within Google, are taking them off down different paths. And remember the number of potential outcomes from individuals chatting with AI is vast because it's an audience of one and each ai even on google it learns about you as you search and also as you interact with other google services i'm sure they're making use of that so a massive shift in how influenced people are now and i like hats off to google they spotted this months ago but actually one of the things they shared is that they've completely rebuilt the engine behind behind search to accommodate all these things i'm i am experimenting at the moment a lot with ai max and i'm getting fantastic results from it but here's the thing you have to focus in on telling it what it is you want more of right and actually that was we tried it in the past we tried it about a year ago and it was a disaster it didn't work at all well but at that point we had you know three or four different signals that we were selecting in and actually that just creates noise actually what they recommend at the moment is just have one call signal and you have some secondary like signals as well but one core signal that you really focus the algorithm on and yeah i found that highly highly explain what you mean by a core signal so it'll be what what is it you want google to find right so you might say to them well i want to find more people who are in the market for actually buying double glazing right or i want to find more people who are actually prepared to make an appointment with my sales team right now to do that every time anybody makes an appointment with your sales team you'd need to fire a like an offline conversion back through to google so it can see that and the way it works right it is i think it's fascinating i'll try and explain this in my simple man from the isle of white way but you're talking customer lists right you're basically saying i've got a list of people are you uploading that list yeah so here's the thing your first party data your customer data is absolutely highly valuable in this world because it's the only thing you've got really it's a key signal and actually as long as it's a decent size like minimum you need at least 30 signals a month absolute minimum but actually ideally you'd have like three four hundred signals so whatever it is like pick something that's solid that's a value to your business and that you have a decent amount of and that that is on a per campaign basis right so if you've got some smaller campaigns and they're only like pulling in 10 15 conversions and it's the conversion that you want to fire back, then you're going to probably have to rethink this, maybe go slightly higher up the funnel, which is why I mentioned people making appointments.

11:29That can be quite a useful thing. The way it would work, let's say I've told Google, Daniel, I was going to pick something a bit ridiculous because I want to make it really generic. I only want to find people who wear blue socks on their right foot. I've got to find a way of firing back into Google that offline information. So let's just say, for argument's sake, we do capture that. It's quite a specific thing, but apparently, you know, in this scenario, in this story world, there's a good 30 people plus every month. You're going to have that. So we're able to file that information back. Now, what does Google do with it?

12:01Well, Google's AI systems are able to look at literally thousands of different metrics, right? And so they can go, okay, so let's have a look at what these 30 to 300 people who have a preference for wearing blue socks on their right foot. Where do they go? What do they do? What are they watching on YouTube? what are they doing and interacting with on gmail and how what is there any patterns with what they're doing on google maps like any google surface they've potentially got that data on these people and actually what it'll do is it'll try and work out well of all these people what's the common denominators what are the strands and actually i think the amazing thing is it tends to i believe look back over the last three weeks or so and particularly focusing on signals so it's kind of live and in the moment like what's going on in your life right now and it'll try and work out what's the formula what's the recipe for predicting people that happen to wear blue socks on their right foot and that's what it'll go after and obviously you can set all sorts of other things with it i'm because i tend to deal with smaller data sets i'm a big fan of keeping things quite broad so not even bringing in things like a target cost per acquisition and stuff just go for maximum conversions initially you can always hone things in and rein things in a little bit later but that that's the kind of power of this that actually it's predictively using all of the data to work out who are the best bets and actually if it can get enough handle and give it a decent enough signal it does it it's quite remarkable yeah so i was being asked some questions about

13:30Ciaran Rogers: this in the we did a paid media session so you might know target internet we do these master classes every month we did a paid media session and i was describing this to people and And the number you came up with, like 30 a month, is quite an interesting one because that was a challenge. And I'd said to a few people, if you haven't got an end conversion, you might have a micro conversion, some sort of other sign up to something else. But actually, what's really interesting is saying that you'll go broad. And I'd looked at this as well and say, actually, you want to get some data. Yeah. So let it go broad.

14:00Ciaran Rogers: Just give it that one signal to focus on. Now, the one question I was asked about privacy. So what happens when you upload an email list and actually they have a method of handling this? Yeah, so what I've been doing is not uploading email lists, actually using my CRM data to actually send the signals through. And it can do that hashed and anonymously. It matches to Google traffic and Google click IDs. I never know exactly who those people are. And Google can identify them, but doesn't know who they are as actual individuals necessarily. So it's anonymized to that extent. Even if you do it at the email list, what happens is before it even gets to Google, it gets encrypted and it gets converted.

14:38Ciaran Rogers: and then they match it to encrypted data there and go, how many of these people have got Google accounts as well? So either way, it's really interesting. It's one of the important things. I mean, even with like Google GA4 audiences and stuff, you must never have anything that can personally identify an individual. And actually, if your audience is too small, it'll get blocked because that might lead you to working out who that person must have been that person. Yeah, exactly that. Exactly that. So I think they work very hard on that. That's the shift. And it's enormous. one of the key things Google had they had put the Google AdWords icon and the YouTube icon and they were on almost every slide and they kept you that you said it's Google AdWords icon as well yeah sorry I know I'm so old school I'm not gonna say I'm 52 that certain things are locked in my head it's just yeah so why why always place them together because actually they're arguing that actually now don't just rely on search you need to like lean into YouTube as well and this was fascinating right so so google is definitely putting youtube at the top and center of its story and i think if you think about the way youtube content works i mean it's a it's an enormous platform and it's fantastic for signals right because actually you get to see how much content people are consuming whether they like comment share what the topics are i mean it's a huge boon for them i bet they're really glad they bought youtube i've got a great point on this so i have been but you wouldn't know if many of my google searches you wouldn't find anything in my google searches about this yeah but i've been building a wildlife pond in my house in portugal you've told me and i have obsessed with watching videos of people building ponds watching them turn to like mush and then suddenly being full of nature nice like this is an obsession so but i haven't googled that once yeah i will see ads on non-google platforms i will see recommendations in Google itself, I will see stuff on YouTube that is taking that signal and obviously extrapolating it pretty clearly.

16:34Ciaran Rogers: So it is a really big source of signals for them. But it's more than that. You see, when I'm researching, I will very often go and find out the influencers that know about this subject. It was another example. And now it's following those people. Exactly. I'll take another example that was used on the event. Actually, one lady was obsessed with how expensive her energy is about to get. She's a good Google employee. And she was saying, like, what's the first thing i did well i had a conversation with gemini on how i can beat this and gemini instantly recommended some some youtube influencers who are very versed in this and actually if you want to find out about solar and batteries and you know how that can help you youtube's some fantastic influencers and actually she said she went on a learning marathon over the course of two evenings down the rabbit hole and again that's when the real decisions were made and before she knew it she was knocking on octopus's door to get them to install and she had her installation date and it all flowed out all off the back of what these influencers were saying now two points here one that now means that in terms of our strategy reaching people upstream of their google search is really important and youtube is obviously a fantastic place for doing that then actually that's kind of where our reference to cash for links comes in because like for me it's like oh oh, no, this is the whole, oh, I hold a load of power and I will sell it to you kind of thing that we had for Cash for Links back in the day.

17:59But actually now the power, it seems to be shifted into being an influencer who has a very large audience. I mean, if there are any influencers out there who really help people that like wearing blue socks on their right foot, I mean, game on for my little scenario world, right? That would be perfect. I would want to partner with them and actually get my brand referenced or cited in their content. But here's the thing, This is the killer point Google made, which is AI also dines out on content online, right? In particular, video content. Why? Because it's got so many signals about it. How much it is watched, likes, shares, comments, all that jazz, when it was uploaded, how long it's been there, how many people are watching it, how quickly.

18:41All of that comes into the algorithm and particularly Google's AI. I obviously can mine all of that from a YouTube perspective. i think obviously for google youtube's their diamond right so they were pushing that but i taking a step back objectively i think there are some fantastic other platforms out there as well you've got a lot of influences on tiktok and instagram and meta and facebook and linkedin you know and it depends on who your audience is but the point is actually you've got potentially a double whammy here right it's like a double payback because actually if you can partner with an influencer and get them to create some content around your brand and build confidence in your brand a that's a shortcut to those early decisions that are now being made but the double whammy is ai will start spotting that and you could start then surfacing in ai summaries because of that

19:35Ciaran Rogers: so let's expand what we mean by influencers then and creators because i think that when we think about creators at the moment we tend to go tiktokers youtubers it's that kind of thing but actually an industry news website is certainly a creator and an influencer. A popular podcast is, but I think at the moment, most of the AIs, they are going multimodal. They are using video and audio and everything else, but they are very text-based. So actually those influencers that are text-based, so if you've got your bloggers or you have got your money-saving expert type people that have got publishing stuff, that's the stuff that's having a big impact as well.

20:11Ciaran Rogers: yeah yeah so that's where the online pr piece comes in so much where suddenly where you're being mentioned online really matters yeah who are the people in french in your industry and therefore identifying those and leaning into that and i think the online pr industry is having a huge resurgence because of this stuff massively but it's come full circle hasn't it everything went digital and everything went down search ads and stuff and budgets were cut and i suppose the thing I took away was holy moly strategies need to change because the world has changed and it's changed really quickly and I just think that's very exciting so the conference I did today I literally spent half the talk talking about exactly this and then said to everyone what they think it was oh this sounds like hard work we've got to change your marketing strategy and so on and then I said to them do you think the search experience is better and they were like oh yeah much better yeah so what I'd say is this is Google have done it as a reaction to ChatCPT but actually it's what we all want because you go in and you start asking questions have a discussion you get what you need yeah and you don't have to search and go oh no i'm going to search that differently because he didn't get it or search differently again because he didn't get it oh now it's kind of getting what i want yeah so actually it's better for the user so we might not like it but that's the bottom line of the direction yeah and the signals are different and for sure like embracing new ad formats really key so i mentioned ai max and performance max if you haven't got those dialed up and working you need to get a shifty on and start experimenting what you can do in those because the inference is if you don't employ those you will just see declining results well i've seen loads of people's campaigns be shifted by google as well so if you had certain things switched on like if you had accept recommendation switched on yeah something will be switched on and you won't have set it up properly so i think you've got to be really careful of your campaigns i was chatting to one of the googlers about google trends right and google trends always my go-to if i feel like things are shifting within the market because you can get some insights into well is this a is this a nice problem or all of our competitors like experiencing this and actually i was chatting to one of the google is about it and he said to me actually you need to be careful at the moment with that we've got some fixes coming but one of the things that google trends was set out to do was to only focus on searches that had at least 30 searches a month so one of them right yeah and actually what they've seen is that the way people are searching has expanded so two three word keywords they're no longer the norm because people are having whole conversations and so the number of searches being done has exploded massively but actually the long tail is now so large of all those different phrases and combinations that actually the majority of it won't even show within google trends it actually could be any of the keyword research tools then the exciting thing is that they're working on a fix for this right so that will be resolved but i think you know even that helps to illustrate how much things have shifted and why actually you have to start employing ai within your campaigns to monitor this and the other thing that i've been learning a lot about is demand gen which is a video format and actually i've had some brilliant input from the guys at google on a really nice model they use for creating like demand gen ads but i'm going to share it with you because i think it's really clever right so So you'll have had lots of similar models, I'm sure, but they call it ABCD.

23:23That's really easy to remember. So A stands for get attention, right? B stands for branding, right? C stands for connection, and they are adding that generate some emotion as well. Of course, that's really powerful. And the D is for like direction, like the call to action. And actually, I'm really having a lot of fun at the moment exploring how can we use that to create some really sharp, pithy ads that really cut to the point. and they made another really good point which is actually your ads now need to help people that are searching for answers i think that's really powerful one of my favorite examples ever of really great remarketing was when we started an agency and i was sent out to buy microsoft office and i got retargeted by microsoft with loads of ads that showed me how to get more out of my office purchase and i just thought that's genius but that's a really good example of this and actually take a step back and think about well what are the problems your customers are trying to solve with your product right what are the common questions they come to you with and just start creating content that actually answers that and actually because of the way it all gets targeted you know those things will surface quite naturally and you'll have one foot in the door already because you've been really helpful with your ad yeah i look i think this whole piece around

24:37Ciaran Rogers: if people are searching with questions if your ads aren't answering questions they're not going to be in the right place at the right time is a really important point as well just try it try some experiment with demand gen think about how could you use that a b c d model that's not just going to work on youtube that'll work anywhere like it's really good life simple model that social media as well yeah these things can be experimented with you don't have to have huge budgets and shoot multiple angles for different platforms and stuff anymore like you can get ai to do that if you've got the raw footage and you've shot it 4k you can get ai to crop in so you get all the different ad formats that you need so i would definitely encourage you to like explore that and it's definitely the route google are going because they're actually putting these products and access to them into the ad product itself yeah because under the the tools within google ads now you've got all the ai image and video generation built in as well so what do you think marketers should be doing about all this if you're not speaking to your agencies about getting set up with things performance max and ai max and demand gen ads you definitely should be i think you definitely need to take a step back before you dive in on that and check what signals are we sending through to google and are they confusing like simplify it work out which signals have actual value for you what's the most valuable one that's the one i would go with as long as it's got enough data behind it speak to your google reps as well they can help you with this for sure and actually that's exactly what i did and they helped me set up a whole bunch of like quite complex conversion actions offline stuff checked it was all working helped me get that all over over the line with With that, there is a warning though, right?

26:12When you start changing your conversion actions within your AdWords account, you will almost certainly trigger learning mode, right?

26:19Ciaran Rogers: So your campaigns will suddenly drop off a cliff for two to three weeks. Yeah, up to three weeks. In my experience, the first five, six days of white knuckle ride is horrible. And then it turns. And once it gets the flavor for what you're after, it turns quite quickly. But you're going to need to have enough signals in there. The more signals you've got being fed through, the quicker it will get through that phase, to be sure. And actually, that's taken me quite a while. I think you just need to rethink your whole strategies, really, around this. I mean, hopefully we've given you some food for thought on how things are changing.

26:51But don't just take our word for it. Think about and talk to people about how they're searching. Speak to customers. That whole question of how did you find out about us has never been as important as it is now. Because the bottom line is you just want more of the good stuff. The question I would ask everybody is, how did you first find out about us?

27:09Ciaran Rogers: Yeah, I was just going to say in Google search console now, you've got two things that are great. You can now see your AI visibility within Google. So you can see, you know, how many times you're feeling up, doesn't give any click data, but you can separate your branded search queries really easy. So if you go down to your query level and ask about branded searches, if you're doing the kind of the branding type stuff, so the YouTube type stuff or the German gen ads, you want to see an uplift in searches for your brand. And if you're not seeing that, And there's obviously an issue. So I think it's fascinating.

27:37Ciaran Rogers: So let's just come back to a point that you mentioned, which is the danger of cash for links all over again. And I think it's probably worth explaining to people about that and what you meant. I'm not a massive fan of shelling out huge amounts of cash to influencers for content. I have issues with it. Sometimes you don't get great stuff back. Sometimes it's all very transactional. So that whole thing of, well, if you give me a grand, I'll mention you on a couple of posts and I'll put out a video. So a good creator, like an industry journal, but leave an industry journal. They're not even going to talk about you for cash.

28:08Ciaran Rogers: A lot of people won't even accept the cash. It's actually you have to have something exclusive, interesting data driven to talk about. So I think you're absolutely right. And I think you need to get a bit more creative with this. Maybe you could work with them to create some content that their audience would love. It feels much more credible and sustainable to me. Because my worry is that, gosh, if word gets out that influencers have a stranglehold on those earlier parts of the journey. I mean, in certain verticals, of course they do. Like money-saving experts, it's a given. But what they're doing is going out of their way to be really helpful.

28:41Now, they're ahead of the curve because they've taken to heart that advice I was given at the event last week, which is make your ads really helpful. Do you know what? Let's go a bit beyond that. Make everything you do really helpful. That's where it's at. And it has always been a battle for hearts and minds. It always has been since marketing ever started. but i think the way that you do that has shifted and i think youtube potentially is a fantastic combo kind of solution to this because actually it's all under one one roof and actually you can work your ads your content and also broaden out the reach with influencers i think the the paint is yet to dry on you know how can you work with influencers to get those ai citations google had some very clear advice on that which is don't chase the ai algorithms chase being useful and i think that holds true of any platform actually because the the ai will work out the signals

29:35Ciaran Rogers: off the back of that so what does this lead us to in a measurement problem yeah so it's a big headache for everybody even at the event i was speaking to quite a few people and a lot of them were investing in like server-side attribution systems really complex really i think i just think you're blind you're too blind on that because it doesn't matter how complex you make it you will never have javascript or code that can measure what's in people's heads if they've spoken to what they've thought about and then the chain reaction that navigates out of that you know this is now happening across so many disconnected platforms on different devices you know you'll be having a chat with your large language learning model on the way home on one device and searching on another one so and using multiple large language models as well yeah which is why i come back to keeping it simple that question of how did you first find out of us is really important if you're not asking that i think you need to revisit that and you can decide where that where that goes i think each platform will try and claim its credit but they all have bias no doubt about they have their own attribution models in this 90 day window yeah okay they came to us and then your product must have been and it's confusing because i look on meta and oh gosh everything's coming through meta i look on google and everything's coming through through their ad platforms and stuff and it's like actually no i think we need to take a step back from that and actually we might actually have to start talking to our customers to find out the challenge is i was giving you an analogy or we've got a kieran analogy yeah a mill pond so i do love just taking time out and just observing nature and trying to apply the natural laws that i see happening there with what i'm experiencing and for me i spend a lot of my time with my head in data but i realized actually it's kind of like a mill pond actually take a mill pond it was a beautifully clear day and i was walking one ball my dog and there was a perfect mirror reflection on this mill pond until this duck leapt into it and it created loads of ripples and actually i thought actually this is interesting because actually you know the millponds like the data that i look at i'm actually getting my hands to it with the data i'm looking at the reflection on the top when that duck jumps in that's like an event that causes ripples and it masks what's actually going on now i saw the duck come in so i knew that was a thing but just like you know you might see a downturn in the economy and you know that's creating ripples and noise making it hard to read what you're actually looking at on a day-by-day basis but when you have lots of events happening some of them you don't even see where the ripples are coming from suddenly it becomes very messy and difficult to read now in those instances i think we all of us fall back on our years of experience and intuition because you always end up with like noise she you all do the same thing we pull back look at a larger data set larger period and try and work out the overall trends but here's the problem things are changing so fast our years of experience and intuition could be wrong right and I think my lesson here has been let it go.

32:37You're going to have to trust it. These things have been set up to help you. And right now I can testify to the fact that they do help if you implement them properly.

32:47Ciaran Rogers: But it is a whole new learning and it is a whole new way of doing things and it's happened very quickly. And I think that's why it's challenging. And we spent so much time learning to do things a different way that we went from thought, let's just have everything on broad match, let everything match up, just get as big audience as possible. No, you need to be more precise and everything. And now it's going, oh, no, be broad, but give us some sequels. And yeah, everyone's seen the film Titanic, right? And there's a brilliant line in there where I think the narrator is explaining that everything Captain Smith thinks he knows about how quickly that ship will turn is wrong.

33:18And he's got years of experience working against him. And that's kind of the wake up call. Like, actually, you know, we maybe need to revisit this and revisit our strategies and just question more than we normally would because things are changing so fast. And, you know, even Google are racing to catch up with this with new products and new changes. I'm very excited about some of the things they're going to be launching this quarter.

33:39Ciaran Rogers: As ever, all those resources we mentioned will be at targetinternet.com forward slash podcast. You'll find them all in the show notes. Just if you aren't a Target Internet member, just one thing. We did this paid media masterclass. All of these masterclasses are recorded. And if you become a member, you get access to the previous ones now, which is a new thing. but also we've decided because members feedback and say what they want we're going to do some live build sessions where we go in and build one of these Google Ad campaigns step by step and do that live as well so if you're not a member go over to targetinternet.com sign up there's a month's free trial and it's actually for the next two weeks is the last two weeks it's on a half price offer it's only£30 a month so if you want to spend a bit of time with me each month get signed up we'd love to do that thank you for being back on the Digital Marketing Podcast Kieran thank you for your insights as ever and we'll see you next time on the Digital Marketing Podcast Thank you.

34:30For more episodes, resources, to leave a review or to get in contact,

34:34Ciaran Rogers: go to targetinternet.com forward slash podcast.