EP317 - How a $50,000 Mistake Became a Learning Opportunity ft Navah Hopkins

Hello and welcome to PPC Live The Podcast formerly the PPC Chat Roundup. My name is Anu, the founder of PPC Live. And if you are used to hearing advice from PPC experts about how to ensure that we are keeping up with the ever changing landscape, don't worry, you are still in the right place. But instead of me relaying what the PPC experts are saying, I'm going to be bringing the PPC experts to you. Every week I'm going to be speaking to a different PPC expert about their biggest f up, but how they've also turned things around. We are gonna share what has been disappointing, who has been supportive along the way.

What our clients have been like in those situations because loads of the experts I'll speak to will be people who working agencies or had their own agency or have their own consultancy and we'll talk about how they recovered from it and how it has led to some of the biggest triumphs.

Now today I am so delighted to speak to one of the biggest experts in our field. We are gonna be speaking to Navah Hopkins, who's the evangelist at Optmyzr. She's a frequent speaker at major industry conferences. I'm always bumping into her at one conference or the other. She's always contributing to, whether it's Search Engine Land or Seaech Engine Journal, and also getting, always gets involved in the conversations that Google and Microsoft has about the products before they even release them.

So she's one of those people that knows what's going on has close to two decades of experience, is someone that we really should pay attention to. In this episode, she talks about a highly costly, a costly mistake, that she experienced, and we talk about how trusting automated tools without proper safeguards can lead to expensive mistakes. The importance of documenting your concerns when you know clients especially push for a particular solution. Why establishing a strong relationship with in-house teams can save you when things go wrong. Smart ways to leverage portfolio bidding floors and ceilings to prevent budget disasters, and how to approach AI as a partner rather than delegating your strategic thinking.

This conversation is very much all about failing with grace. She's someone that says that she speaks about that a lot and she's gonna keep speaking about that here, failing with grace , and talks about how she was able to really survive and recover from this very costly mistake.

So, without further ado, let's dive in and hear all from Navah.

Hello there. I am so thrilled today to welcome a true powerhouse in the world of PPC and digital marketing Navah Hopkins. She's the Evangelist at Optmyzr, a frequent speaker at major industry conferences like SMX and Hero Conf. Actually, I think the only time that Navah and I meet in person is at a conference.

We're always bumping into, different conferences, whether it's in the UK, Berlin, Munich, different parts of the world. It's fantastic. She's a seasoned strategist with close to a close to two decades. She corrected me on this. I'm, I made it a bit shorter. She's close to two decades of experience helping brands and agencies scale through smart automation and data-driven insights.

She's even one of those that Google and Microsoft comes to, to gain insight about the industry and features they are about to release. Navah is also a regular contributor to Search Engine Journal, but more importantly, Search Engine Land because I work there. And yeah, she shares deep knowledge of paid search, audience targeting and performance optimization.

I'm so thrilled for this. Welcome, Navah. Welcome to the PPC Live podcast. Thank you so much for having me for the gracious intro. I'm super excited to talk about this because I know our episode is about failures and if there's one thing I think we all need right now is to learn how to fail with grace.

Grace for ourselves, grace for our clients. Grace in general. So delighted to be here. Amazing. And yeah, we'll get even into more about that, about how we do that properly and why it's important to talk about this, but let's get straight into it Navah.

So tell us, what is the F up that you want to talk about today? So this is really embarrassing. I once, because I very well intentioned trusted the tools and trusted the tools would behave the way that they said that they would behave. Spent $50,000 in three days. That was supposed to be the budget for the month.

Now, how that happened is I had a really well running campaign. It was driving great conversions. It was really firing in all cylinders, and the suggestion came up "Hey, max conversions would probably serve you better than manual CPC. This was in the earlier days when smart bidding was still finding its feet, and I'm like, you know what?

Let's test this. Let's see how we go. And the problem was I made that change two days prior to the start of the new month. So the budget ended up getting really discombobulated during the learning period. And so it was like we're trying to do max conversions, and the client at the same time was like, you guys are doing great.

Take more money, put more budget in. And so that perfect storm of towards the end of the month more budget, which would initiate learning periods anyway and switching the bidding strategy led to a very angry, scary conversation. Now I'll say that the client ended up actually staying even with that F up, and I'm happy to talk about all the different parts of what happened there.

But this is just to tell you that even those of us who were seen as gurus or like these industry influencers in the space, we all have these moments of, oh my God, yeah, this is terrible. I have just royally screwed myself, my client what do I do? And everything is fixable. So if you take nothing else away and you turn off the episode right now, if we could walk back and survive that $50,000 ad spend, and again, happy to get into all those details.

I promise you, whatever situation you find yourself in, you can overcome it. Absolutely. Wow. Yeah. Spending a one month budget in three days. It was terrible. I was like, oh God, I'd be scared. Yeah. I'd be like going like, where's the alcohol in my house? Create a way to get over this feeling.

Anyway, i'm sure people are interested in this because it happens, that whole budget spending, even like bids, you put the wrong bids and just what it could do wrong strategy, what it could do. How did you turn that around? What was like the fix for you guys?

Yeah the first things first is we checked for invalid clicks, and one of the first things that we noticed was that there was an increase in invalid clicks ratios from this, and that got us investigating previous months. And so we were able to actually file a ticket with Google Support and get them to not only

honor those credits, but to issue an actual refund. This was several years ago when they still would do that. But the other thing that was really useful here is that we found that max conversions for this client, because it was a lawyer client or a legal client, was never going to be a good fit. And the reason why is that there are certain things that go into whether someone qualifies as a case

even if they fill out the form, and it's a, it's an interesting looking form. They have a 20, 30 minute conversation with intake, something could still go wrong. So maximize conversions is never ever gonna be a good fit. Maximize conversion value on the other hand is because you're then able to teach the system, "Hey, this person filled out a form, it was worth x".

Then taking first party data, putting that in that then is worth the actual value of the case and Google, Microsoft are able to actually optimize off of that real first party data. The other thing that was very important, and this was a good learning experience for the client is that when we say, "Don't do large budget increases at the same time, or you will have a sad time"

this was a way for them to touch the stove and realize it, because that one thing ( I will stick up for myself), I was like, I don't really think it's a good idea for us to dramatically increase the budget and do the bidding. But the client really wanted to do it, so I was like, all right you're pushing we'll test it.

And so the fact that I explained that it could have gone wrong and that it did go wrong, and then we found ways to fix it, really re established trust that I'm going to stick up for what will serve the client best, even if it means disagreeing or debating the client on the strategy. So that's another really important takeaway is that

if you suspect that something could go wrong, it's okay to still test it. Just voice and document why you think it'll go wrong. Because then you have data points that say, okay, we'll test this thing. This is the outcome. This is why I suspected it. It would not go well. Let's now do this, and then everyone will be puppies putty in your hand, like super easy.

The other thing I'll say about this is that smart bidding has improved dramatically. So this was in the dark days when smart bidding was still finding its feet, and it was really traumatic, but I think one of the reasons why manual bidding is so important that everyone does at least one manual bidding campaign in their life before they fully go into smart bidding,

knowing that smart bidding has really improved, is that you need to understand the auction. You need to understand why smart bidding is behaving the way it is, and so that you apply reasonable levers to your bidding. Amazing. I love that. Yeah. I loved all the whole give caveats, give the caveats, give the, it depends.

I think SEOs like to say that they own that phrase of, it depends. It's very much in paid search as well. Humans, it's a human thing. Yeah. Yeah. So something will work depending on X, Y, Z, and when clients wanna push back on what your expertise is, sometimes you've just gotta give in, but make sure you have that documented -

these are my concerns that I wrote down. Documenting a lot of things is so important. Now, also, what I think is very important about having issues like this or making these kind of f ups is also the, how it was approached, what was the communication style of it? Who found the problem? So can you take us through that journey?

Who was the one that first saw, "oh my God, this is the issue". Was it you, was it someone else that mentioned it to you? How did you communicate that to the client? Funny story, it was me. I found it and I panicked so hard. I just paused the campaign, which is something I normally would never do.

Like I know better than to pause campaigns 'cause then you risk them not coming back as strong. But I was like, "oh my God, we just spent all this money" and I wrote up this whole big long email of " Hey, I just wanna let you know this happened. Let's let me know when you're available to hop on a call and we can talk about it.

But I just wanna let you know this happened. I'm so sorry that it happened." I did not in the email say I told you so with the budget, because that's the worst way to start off anything. It was just I was like, I really would like to explain like why this happened or why I suspect this happened and what we're gonna do to try to course correct or help you make you whole.

And so when we got on the call I was ready to get eviscerated. Like I was, because the client in particular, it was a little bit of a little bit of a hard ass. Like he was an aggressive person, right? But he actually said, " this is not that much money for me, but i'm more appreciative that you have the reasons why."

Like I would've been a lot more angry and frustrated if you couldn't explain why what happened. But the fact that you can explain it, alright, fine whatever. Now not every client is gonna be able to shrug off 50 grand. Yeah. Like I, I'll just say I have other clients where if 50 grand was spent like that's someone's entire salary.

So it, but it's worth noting like the client in question, like they had several thousand dollars a day budgets, so they were, they had bought into spending those sorts of budgets. Yeah. The other thing that was worth noting is that the client had an in-house team, and the in-house team really developed a partnership with me.

And the fact that I was always going to bat for them meant that they, in turn were going to bat for me. So that's the other kind of lesson in this, is that (relationship) wherever possible, build those bridges, build those connections with your clients' in-house teams, because ultimately they're gonna be your champions.

The CEO is not always gonna be able to be present or to care or to do whatever, but if you can make friends with the people who work with them day in, day out and that you are, they know you're in their corner. It's a lot easier to get past the F ups. If you don't have that person in your corner, then you become the scapegoat.

They can blame all of their problems on you, and you then have two hills to climb. You have your actual work and then overcoming the perception that you're the problem in their team. Yeah. As you were just talking there, I was just thinking I'm gonna be spoiled for choice to just get one clip or two as we're promoting this episode because everything you've just said there I am just so passionately in agreement about, and I always say this in the past - mistakes happen.

The important thing is how you approach it, how you come to the client with it. I'm always telling them, like, when I used to manage folks I used to be like, make sure you are the one that brings it up. When you see the mistake, don't hide it. Don't be like all of a sudden be hard to communicate or hard to get a hold of.

Make sure you, you come ahead, you've researched what the problem was, you explain what happened. You tell them the steps that you're gonna put in place to ensure this doesn't happen in the future, and you just, it becomes part of the learning for future things. I just, yeah, I love that. And this is really what this whole, I wanted to really communicate with people about, with this podcast about - f ups happen with the best of us in this industry.

But it's how we've approached it that has still made us still a success regardless. It's worth noting that earlier in my career. When these sorts of things would happen and to be fair to myself, they don't happen often. Like I usually don't put, allow myself to be put in the situation where that bad of an f up would happen.

But in this case, it was it was what it was what it was. But when those things would happen and they do happen, I used to want to give away free service and let me make you whole, let me do all these things. And one of the things I realized when I got older and began to really value myself more and not feel like I was trapped in this, I have to constantly prove that I'm worthy mode.

It was less about let me make you whole through giving away free service. It was, I am still here willing to work with you in the trenches. And if the person asks for something happy to work with them. But I am, I no longer am the one volunteering free service or free work to make up for an f up.

And that took a long time to get comfortable with that mechanic. 'cause even as a person I like doing nice things for people. Like I have to fight the urge to like, give away everything. But when it comes to service people tend to value people that value themselves. Yeah. One F up, I would encourage everyone to avoid -

is to devalue your service. Yeah. By throwing free service at people to make up for an F up. It's far better to back yourself, have the reasons why it happened, and work through it together than let me throw service that you may no longer even value at you to make up for the thing. Absolutely, totally agree.

And looking back, what would you say are like signs that you may have missed? Is there anything that you felt like, if you had done X, Y, Z, just after you'd implemented the stuff kind of thing, you would have been able to prevent the increase in spend? Yeah, so there's the soft skills answer and then there's the technical answer.

Yeah. So soft skills answer is had I have listened to my gut and my intuition and backed my brain and my knowledge, this would not have happened. I would've pushed harder to do what I knew was right. But I was like, ah, all right, we'll let the client have their way or we will, we'll test this thing.

Sure. And had I listened to my gut probably wouldn't have happened. The technical hard skills piece is there are not enough people that leverage the floors and the ceilings and portfolio bidding which are, for those of you that don't know, you can actually set a portfolio bidding strategy per campaign so you can have a minimum bid and a maximum bid when you're using maximize conversions with a target CPA or a maximize conversion value with a target ROAS.

And had that have been in place, we probably would not have had as big of an issue because the way Google works, Google can up to double your budget to average out across that 30.4 days. So on the, in the pursuit of maximize conversions, it was bringing in some crazy bids and forcing the budget to go way above what it was supposed to.

Now in this case, and this is why we're able to get the credit, the budget exceeded the double. It was like quadruple the daily spend, and I'm like this is broken. This is a problem. Now I can shamelessly plug Optmyzr? Yes. That there are, there, that there are tools for budget pacing and that, that would help you with this.

But there are some free things that you can do as well. There's a lot of rules and scripts that you can add within Google ads. If you wanted take a look at ChatGPT if you wanna take a look at things like Claude or even Perplexity to help you come up with some rules. One thing I actually really love 'cause I'm not a coder is Cursor.

And then I know VZero is another offering where you're actually able to build tools through AI to help you with some of these tasks. So the biggest bit of advice I can offer folks is to come up with your, if this, then that rules of engagement of what should happen for each sort of scenario and each sort of campaign.

And then from that you can put that into whatever tool. Amazing. That sounds great. Now, is there a process or mindset now, I feel you've probably even mentioned a bit of that already, that helps you recover a lot quicker if you were to make such mistakes kind of thing. I called it here in my my doc -  fail better.

Is there like a phrase of mindset that helps you like fail better? So I'm trying to think about how to put this.

I don't look at failure as failure unless nothing was learned. Yeah. So if you are spending a whole bunch of budget, but you get a whole bunch of search terms out of it that you can then build out organic content, or you can adjust your creative or you can change out your keyword concepts that you know that you're bidding on a more cost effective keyword variant. That's not failing, that's data harvesting.

If your landing page is just not sending the forms to your customer base, that's not the ad account's fault, that's you learning that you have to introduce a new QA or quality assurance process to your landing pages so that you actually confirm before you start the campaign that the form fills work or that your phone rings.

One actually crazy thing to look for when you're looking at call tracking, a lot of call tracking solutions, depending on the VoIP you're using or the voice system that you're using will actually have a ring before it hits the actual number. So you wanna be mindful if you're gonna do a call recording service.

Do you actually send people to a constant ringing phone, which people will hang up after two or three rings, or do you have it ring once or twice and then it automatically goes to, a statement that can be interrupted by the person picking up the phone. I definitely recommend people testing their conversion workflows, because again, at the end of the day, it's, and I realize that this is a question about failing better,

I prefer to avoid failing by testing for everything ahead of time. Yeah. And if you still fail, then you've found something new to test for before you begin for the next client. No, I think that perfectly answers the question because I was asking about what mindset and that the mindset Yeah. You shared is test as much, prepare, test as much as possible, and then if there's a failing.

Yeah, that's a great mindset. So we've come to a nearing the end of this really great chat, and I feel that we could do a double the time that I set for this because you've just given some, amazing answers you've already answered questions that I've had that I've not even asked yet.

It's been great. Thank you so much, Navah. But if you were to leave people with one thing, and you might have actually even said this right at the beginning with one piece of advice at the end of this all to remember if they take nothing else away and if they take, but if they take one, you want them to take one thing from all everything that you've said, what do you want people to take away?

Give yourself grace. And I, and those of you who have heard me talk you've probably heard me say, give yourself grace a lot. We live in a chaos timeline right now. Yeah. Yeah. Everything is crazy. Yeah. Between AI completely disrupting our workflows between privacy being there or not being there between just different

economic conditions, that's how I'll put it. Like there, there are some crazy things going on, so nevermind the fact that people are learning account structures. People are learning new platforms, like there's new tools coming out all the time. There's also a lot going on. So give yourself grace and build in

testing budget when you're sending out your budget. So for example, when I am starting with a new client, I typically will have an agreed upon 20% additional ad spend that is there for wild and crazy testing time that's there for the ramp up period. And then once you've been going with someone for a bit yeah you bring 'em back down to efficiency.

Or scale, depending on their goals. But make sure that you build in grace for yourself, grace for your accounts, grace for your team. Like ultimately that's the biggest thing we can give to ourselves. 'cause when we're kind to ourselves, we're able to be kind and compassionate and clever with other people.

When we're constantly beating ourselves up and telling ourselves that we're small or that we're worthless, we end up putting out worthless work because we're not backing it, we're not confident, we're not leaning into those opportunities. Amazing. Recently I saw this lovely Instagram post a comedian, comedians sometimes say some of the most wise stuff that just hits you for one.

And this guy was like, words are like spells. Yes. We think words don't have power. I dunno. You might have seen the clip that i'm talking about. Words are like spells, like you gotta be careful what you say out to somebody. You tell someone, Hey, you look great. Even if they might not even thought it, all of a sudden they feel great and they're like, whoa, okay.

They're all outside. . Go on. Yeah. Yeah. I was gonna say thoughts become words. Words become actions. My, my husband share shares that with me all the time, and he'll actually yell at me when I'm being super down on myself. So I fully agree with you Anu. That's, this is not a PPC thing. This is just a life thing.

No, it's a life thing. Absolutely. Put kindness out, put good out. Amazing. And it'll come back to you again. That one, you brought it out, it'll come back to you. We mentioned AI and before this I was like, we've gotta talk a little bit about how ai, a little bit like AI could be tripping us up. How we use it, our fear of using it.

With Optmyzr, you guys must see, loads of campaigns and loads of people trying to use automation and maybe not approaching it well. What are, what's like the most common, like f up, that kind of thing with clients approaching AI? One of the reasons why we've invested so much into AI functionality and there's a whole bunch of new tools we can have a blog post linked to, to go with the resource.

I'm not gonna spend more time plugging Optmyzr. But one of the most common mistakes people can make with AI is delegating their own strategic strength to the AI. So AI is really good at solving for grunt work. Helping you compile reports, helping you edit a video, helping you keep creative in a good spot.

AI is not going to be good at explaining why a client should do X or Y. They will or and actually selling them on it. It's gonna be a mistake in almost every situation to delegate out that strategic strength and the reason why is because of hallucinations. So for those of you that don't know, hallucinations are where AI gets, says something really smart or it seems so great, but then it's not true.

It's not actually possible. It's a whole series of things. Oh, and I think that the people who fully delegate their strategic strength to AI, whether that's making blog posts that are just a copy and paste from AI, whether that's reports that are just a copy and paste from AI, whether that's account structures that are copy and paste from AI, that is a mistake.

What is not a mistake is to treat AI like a partner. Yeah. To have AI come to you and say, "Hey, listen, these are some areas you may wanna work on because of these stated goals", or "This seems like it's not quite right. Here are some suggestions you might consider to fix it". But ultimately the human still needs to be in that driver's seat, and those who delegate fully to AI are going to be the ones who are redundant.

Those who partner with AI, those are the ones who are going to lead the next generation of marketers. Absolutely. Totally agree with you. I was just thinking that like I would say AI should be your junior pa. Yes. Like it should be the person -  look, I'm gonna give you this. This is what I want

to do. This is the information. Make it look, help format it. Yeah. Yeah. Whenever 'cause I do a lot of, writing for Search Engine Land or blogging for PPC Live and stuff. And whenever I've done, oh, here's a topic, write a blog for me, it's always been nonsense. The details have always been wrong or out a date.

But then if I give it like, a thousand characters of information that I know, but I'm like I, I want you to sort out, oh, format this. Yeah. Gimme the key takeaways, summarize this at the end, do this like that. It's a great, it's a great tool for that. So yeah, I need a Chat GPT of my content, not to write the things for me, but because sometimes I

have writer's block. Yeah. And I need to talk to a friend to help me get through the writer's block. And so my ChatGPT, like my GPT, buddy of Navah's, wild and crazy ideas, this is the name of the GPT. It's like, all right here's some thoughts, here's some ways you can take this. Here's what you would normally find Interesting.

Yeah. And it's okay. Thank you. Yeah. Now, that's amazing. And on that note, we have run out of time and Navah, thank you so much for being on this chat with us today actually, although before you go, give us a quick, if your career were a movie, what would be the title? A movie?

What would be the title? To Honorable profit and Glorious Victory. Oh wow. Okay. Interesting. So the story behind that, I know you said quick. During the pandemic I ran a guild of 150 mandalorians on the Star Wars Knights Of the Old Republic, MMO. And one of the ways I would greet new members and like we would have our communications is to profit and victory. Yeah. But as things were going on and like the I'm deeply rooted in ethics, it shifted to honorable profit and glorious victory because it's really important that you make money doing well by doing good that you don't sell yourself to, to make profit.

Yeah. But that you're always chasing opportunities for growth. And because victory is not just about winning, like I'm gonna fight you. Victory is also, how do I unlock that within myself, that growth. And so the kind of glorious victory of seeking challenges that are worthy of us, that unlock that growth within us is exciting.

So amazing. It's and. True to form. It's a Navah-ism. So amazing. I love that. What about you? What would your movie be? I've not thought about that yet. I'm sorry. Let me come back to you on that one. Maybe put it in your notes. Can I say what I think it would be? Because I've known you and loved you and watched you go from like struggle to like glory.

Back Yourself. Aw. The new film is Back Yourself. I love that. I love that. And that does make sense. That does make sense. It took me a while to get there, but yeah. I appreciate that. I appreciate that so much now, Navah, and before we leave, where can people find you online? I am on LinkedIn that is my busiest and most active social channel.

I'm also on blue Sky. You can of course get ahold of us over at Optmyzr. I'm one of the ask the PPCs for SEJ and I'm a quarterly columnist for SEL. You can get ahold of me and the Women in Tech SEO Slack Group. I'm also on the board of the Paid Search Association. And I also just bumble about at different industry event.

So just come say hi. I'll happily talk about PPC, about metal, about gaming, really silly poetry, like whatever. Amazing. 

So thank you so much Navah there for that amazing conversation. And yeah, remember words are powerful. Whether it's you saying it to yourselves or you saying it to others. It's a spell and it can really change how you perceive yourself or how people perceive themselves. So let's give each other grace and be kind to one another, shall we? So yeah. Next about, PPC Live. We've got our next event happening on June the 26th, and that's happening in Leeds. So if anyone would like to join us, anyone that's out there, we'd love as many of you to join us. So those who are listening to us from the north, please join us there on June the 26th.

Just go to ppc.live for your tickets for that. I'm also going to be giving out some coaching hours. I've decided to, allow some of my hours in the week to be booked for some coaching time, and that's booked in one hour block. So if you wanna reignite your passion for paid search and your confidence that you are doing the right thing or you are on the right path, yeah

let's chat about it. Give me as much information as you can beforehand so that I'm well prepared to help you in the area that you want to improve in. So yeah, go to themarketinganu.com to book that hourly slots. So, yeah. All the other stuff that you'll hear me talk about or writing about is gonna be on searchengineland.com

So please do check that out. And, that's it for now.

Thank you very much and I hope you'll join us next week where we will be speaking to another amazing PPC experts talking about an f up that they have experienced. Bye.