EP318 - The £50 Bid Disaster ft Chris Nightingale

 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're 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 PTC expert about their biggest effort, but not just that, but also how they've turned it around. We are going to share what has been disappointing, who has been supportive, and just how things have materialized along the way, especially their biggest learnings.

This week I speak to Chris Nightingale, founder of Can Do Digital Marketing, and he does PPC and paid social under that company. And yeah, he, he talks about a story early in his career at a time when mistakes do happen, and he talks about how this mistake happened. His immediate response to it, which is late at night.

Harry recovered from the situation who was supportive, who was surprising in their reactions, um, and the lessons that he had about failures. The conversation also touches about advice on other areas of others similar in this situation and the importance of good management especially, and some thoughts about using AI in PPC marketing.

So I hope you enjoy this episode.

Today I'm delighted to welcome Chris Nightingale to PPC Live The Podcast. Chris is the founder and director of Can-Do Digital Marketing Limited, a UK based agency specializing in performance marketing services such as PPC and paid social media. With over a decade of experience, Chris has worked with notable brands like AO.com and Matanlan focusing on delivering commercially driven, profit focused digital strategies.

His approach emphasizes integrating AI tools to enhance campaign efficiency and performance. Chris is also active in the digital marketing community, always giving fantastic insights on LinkedIn. I personally must say.  I've quoted him a few times in the PPC Live, newsletter, so you might recognize his name from there, but he's always sharing insights as well through webinars

and podcasts. And for instance, he discussed strategies for managing branded search campaigns in a 2024 Lunio webinar. And additionally, he appeared on the Marketing Showcase podcast where he talked about transitioning from working at a billion dollar company to running his own agency. Now, outside of digital marketing, he does have a fairly interesting life.

He's a black belt in TaeKwonDo and loves rock climbing. So without further ado, welcome to the show, Chris.

Brilliant. Hello. Nice to see you. Thanks for having me on. Pleasure to be here.

Amazing. So about the rock climbing, I said I'd do this, so you should be prepared. We were saying how you, we were talking about it and saying about how it's like PPC.

Tell us more about that. How is rock climbing similar to PPC

Yeah. I, I remember been rock climbing for a number of years now, and I, it's such a mental problem that you solve in a very physical way, and I just thought one day, this is exactly how PPC is. You've got a wall, you've got loads of different boulders that you could potentially go up on,

but there is a finite set way of which to best do it, and a number of boulders of which you need to put your foot on, and then you need to put your hand there, then do this, then do that to reach the top.

And if you do it wrong, then you're just gonna fall completely all the way down and you're gonna have to start from scratch again. So for me, it's very much that PPC mindset of I need to build the campaign structure, then I need to talk to creative, and I need to talk to all these people, do all these things.

But once I've got them all together in the right order, I'll get the problem solved. So that's how I've always thought the two are connected.

Yeah, I pretty much agree with you on that one. So as our listeners are used to now, we don't waste too much of our times with too much chitchat at the beginning.

We know what this podcast is about. We wanna hear about, the mistake that, that, you came up with an f up that you experience and how you turned that around, what the process is about. So you know what the story was. Yeah. Let's get to it. Chris. What is the f up that you want to share with us today?

Yeah. It's a big F up and it pains me to speak about it to this day. But the f up in this case was a caveat - it was nine years ago, so pretty much a year, maybe two years into my PPC journey, was a PPC exec at a kind of a well-known agency. And an agency life for me back in the day was managing lots of accounts, very new to everything.

Working all the hours of the day because I was very passionate. So I'm passionate about PPC, but it's very time intensive in certain companies. And this particular client was a sort of a secondhand car market client. There was multiple different cars you can imagine, different car types, different car models engines, everything like that, colors big there.

There's a big keyword database set to manage. And I was working all hours of the day and we were spending not that much in the day. So in the evening of. of the day. I sat down, managed to get home, got home about six o'clock. I thought, you know what, let's just check in on performance.

Let's see what needs to be done. Let's really get the most that I can for this client here. And we were pacing a little bit behind. So what I decided to do was up bids by 50P.  What I instead did, and the way that SA 360  and Google kind of worked by then, it was really easy to change bids by percentage or pounds instead of percentages.

But what I ended up doing in that scenario was - I can't believe this is being recorded, but hey ho -  change bids by 50 pounds instead of 50 pence.

  so as you can imagine, pretty big difference between a £1 bid going to £1.50 and a £1 bid going to £50. And those were the days where PPC was still very automated.

Not too many bid strategies in play here, very manual and Google  swallowed that investment that we gave it. Luckily, I guess you could say, I was very proactive within this journey and I checked again at 8:00 PM because of just I was checking in for this client to see if we had made it up for the day and we had more than.

made  it up for the day. We had spent a lot of money. In fact, when I had to pause the campaigns at 8:00 PM because we'd spent so much money Google was still catching up with itself and, checking it at 9:00 PM, 10:00 PM that cost was still going up significantly. Yeah. So you can imagine the the panicked ness that I had to that  I was just panicking, very junior, maybe a year or two in your full PPC exec.

And not sure of the consequences. What's gonna happen. Who I'm gonna have to speak to, was on the phone to people who probably wanted just to be enjoying their evenings. But PPC never sleeps. I, so I guess I'll pause there. That was the mistake. Very big mistake.

 Wow. Yeah, you gave us lots of info, useful information then, and I think something that is very useful to understand about that mistake is that you are junior  and

 you will make more mistakes when you're junior and hopefully I'm sure you can say that now there's a lot less that you make, the volume is a lot less and that is just the nature of the game.

And I think some people get nervous, starting a career and they're like, oh my God, I made a mistake. I'm the worst person in the world. You're like, no, you're just one year in. You are supposed, I actually argue that you are supposed to make the mistakes now

 Yeah. than later, even to do these

 I would agree. I think the only way that you're gonna learn, particularly in PPC is by making mistakes. And if there is someone out there who's never made a mistake or says they've always done a test that's been perfect, I would challenge, they've not done enough tests or they've not done the right tests. Because the only way that you learn is by doing things that go wrong and then learning what to do in place of that.

There's so many new queries that are being  input into Google every day, particularly when you look at different kind of platforms and how big the query length can be how people are reacting to different types of media and images and video, the stuff that's changing all the time. And we're not gonna know what people want unless we test it and actually understand what they want.

I'm a big advocate of failure, but obviously within its parameters,

  I think that tests failing isn't a bad thing. It's a test that's been learned from, and I think that's almost better than not learning at all.

Absolutely agree. So now going back to that problem to yourself nine years ago, and yeah, you've seen this issue, the spend has gone up and oh, you're panicking a bit.

How did you turn it around?

 So the immediate thing was obviously pausing the account phoning my director and then we past that point there's not much you can do at eight, nine o'clock at night other than do that and sit tight for the night. And as you can imagine, not the best night's sleep I've ever  had.

 But in terms of that it's about being proactive.

For me it was about saying, this and owning yourself straight up to the client, first to hold your hands up. It's always, and I've known people who have done this before, you never want to put these things under the blanket and try and run along with it.

And  you've always gotta be upfront, show them what the issue was, show them the steps in place that you're going to do to rectify that problem and how you're going to do that. The other thing that we tried to do as well was go forward to these advertising platforms like Google, like Bing, to say, listen, this was a genuine mistake.

You can see that the click traffic was about the same, but the actual cost per click was just significantly higher than expected. And sometimes Google being will give you refunds for that

if  they know it wasn't necessarily malicious, which is a, which was always good. And then for the months afterwards, we actually built up a really good relationship with the client because they could see we genuinely cared about their brand and their reputation and their accounts, and getting the maximum amount of money for for them as humanly possible.

And actually the months afterwards, we got some of the best results in the account we've ever had. And that was just a case of us, us just caring and saying, we did waste a chunk of money, but actually we've made it up and then some in the months ahead. So that was, yeah, I guess that's how we turned it around.

  Was there anything that surprised you about the situation? Reaction from the client, for example, how did that go?

 The reaction from the client in this case wasn't great. They did want a big chunk of money back in return. The biggest surprise for me though, was the reaction from a manager at the time.

 They were actually super supportive and a lot more supportive than when I thought I was gonna pick up the phone and I was gonna get an absolute hounding.

But actually they were very calm, very supportive, talked us through the next steps, what we should do, what my thoughts were. And there was actually a little bit of.

It  was eight, nine o'clock at night here. But a bit of coaching involved there. Asking  what I would do, what I think we should do and then told the steps in place that we should do that next.

And yeah, that was the thing that surprised me. 'cause I thought I was really gonna get the opposite. I think a lot of people think that, and that if they've effed up or they've failed or they've done a test that hasn't been quite right, that they're just gonna get nothing but shouting or abuse. But actually they were really supportive and I think that's a great quality of a manager actually, is to

  Work with people in a very calm, measured way.

As we're all working towards a common goal, everyone wants the client to succeed. Everyone wants their business to make more money. No one's here to necessarily maliciously deviate that. Yeah that surprised me.

That's the kind of a surprise you want at, with issues  like

It's, I've said it so many times, you hear it so many times, people leave roles not

because of necessarily the situation or even salary is because of a good manager or bad manager or

how, good the managers was.

 That's the thing. I remember that quote is that you'll never remember what people said, but you'll remember how you made them, how they made you feel.

And for me that, that's so important when you're a manager as well, particularly if you're taking your first steps into management and people don't necessarily know how to people manage. It's just building that relationship like you would a friend,  building blocks in terms of working together, working towards the same goal, being patient allowing employees to make mistakes and giving them the, effectively the keys to an account and trying things for themselves.

Because like I said, that's the only way they're gonna learn. But being a good manager, I cannot emphasize that enough. I'm, I've had plenty of not great managers and I always strive to be a good manager.

That's really good. Now looking back as well, back to that issue, what would you say are signs that you missed? If you had, if there was something that you'd paid attention more to that would've, helped to avoid this issue, what can you give for listeners to avoid?

 Yeah, so I, I think I was thinking about this and the only real difference maybe is that there was some seasonality adjustments or time of day bidding adjustments in this case that were

 perhaps probably off that meant we weren't spending through the day as much as we should have done.

And I  know kind of these days we don't perhaps rely on as much of time of day bidding seasonality or that too much thing.

'cause it's all, a lot of, it's very automated. But in this case, there was certain nuances behind the scenes in the, very much in the settings of a campaign that probably should have had greater kind of attention. And what I would say, I guess is a solution to maybe thinking about that in today's age is that I use a lot of tools now that can help me  spot 404s, misspellings ads that are perhaps redirecting loads of things like that.

There's tools out there, there's loads of great tools that can scripts and paid for tools that can just help you pick up on things without having to, because I remember I've done this in Black Friday for a client once is I clicked on every ad in every ad group, in every campaign, just to make sure that the uls are working.

And Yeah that  was a great waste of an hour, but it was necessary to make sure that we weren't wasting those clicks, right? 

​So there's so many more tools and I'm a big advocate of ai. There's so many tools that just allow us as PPC is to do that job better and not miss the absolute fundamentals that crack an account.

So yeah, I think if that, that really, goes into one of the other questions I had there, which is like, what is the process of mindset that you have now and the process is use the tools that you have available to you to ensure that you're putting those checks in place and those checks are being done well, correct?

 Yeah, exactly that. Yeah. I guess the way I'd probably say it's like hoping for the best book, planning for the worst, putting the checks in place that just in case it goes wrong, particularly around Black Friday, a sales period, summer holidays. Things are gonna be changing like rapidly.

So to have that plan in place, whether it's a campaign build, it's a new promo thing and always have either automation  or maybe an assistant or someone else to spot check you or just double check that work because when you're spending tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds of clients money, it, in this space, performance marketing, right?

It has to perform, it has to make, it has to go to the website and it has to convert. Yeah, it's always good to get a second opinion.

Absolutely. What advice would you give someone that's going through this process right now? Maybe they've not quite come to the other side of, you guys have found the solution and you and a client that is finally understanding. They're just in a few hours of just making the mistake. What's your advice to them?

 I would say don't panic accept that these things happen. But follow up things as you would like a good human. Example of this is ao.com one of our morals, and I'm probably messing up the words a little bit here, but the kind of, the  principle was do stuff that would make your gran proud, or if you were to talk to your mom at the end of the day-

would the decisions that you've made make her proud, and would she say those are the right decisions? And if the answer's yes, then you've made the right decision, even if it cost the business money, or even if it did this or that.

 So always just go about your way and things that you would think, yeah, I'd be happy that was the right decision, even if it might.

Cost the business money, let's say. I'd always say as well ask for forgiveness and not permission. So I always think that you should be going and trying new things and not being accepted, that you're gonna just be pigeonholed into a very nuanced  thing. So I'd always go out there and just try and be the best person you can effectively and try new things just, and just accept that failure might be happening.

It might be part of that. And that's absolutely fine because many other people, everyone I would, would've, would argue has failed at some point.

Yeah, absolutely. I, and I love that for, that's another very, my favorite quote of mine in terms of ask for forgiveness. It's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission because that's where, that's all where all the entrepreneurial spirits come from, and companies want that.

People want someone who is willing to like test something and try something that is different, that could be really great. And the whole asking for forgiveness is that  a mistake could happen. And and I think, companies who are willing to grow that are willing to be seen as, innovative and if they're really pushing the bar for their clients are the people who have employees that are, willing to test things without necessarily asking for mis permission first. Because they are really, they're just going out with, they're having ideas, they have, things that they want to try and they try it out.

 Yeah, absolutely. And that they've got their very solution mindset focused. And I think that's the other thing as well, is that when you come to a potential F up and you come to your manager might not just want to see what's happened, but actually what your opinion are, what your opinions are in terms of the solutions.

So I'd always say rather than just going to your manager with problems, come to them with at least what you think is a solution and run it by them. Because again, that can go well in your favor.

Absolutely. And then giving, talking to them about what you were trying to do, what you were trying to actually achieve.  Because if you

Of this is what we wanted to. Dude, I, I felt that I've seen this other brand do it that's very similar to yours.

They had success with it so I was trying to replicate that success for you. And if you start the story that way, they might be like, bracing themselves for where it went wrong, but it starts off right. That is how you start the story. If you just go in with oh, someone said this, so I did it, without any good logic with why you were

 Yeah. That's where it goes wrong.  Exactly.

you've given our listeners, amazing tips, amazing takeaways, but if people have been really busy with, and multitasking while listening beforehand, I, but, and you at this point, you want to give them with one takeaway about, this issue that you had and how you went through it.

What's one thing that you wanted people leave people with?

 I probably can't put it much better than that, asking for forgiveness, not permission. But if I was to elaborate that and it, it'd just be just. Just do it. Just try it. Just go ahead and make it happen. Even if you think it's wrong. It's not, like we were saying, it has to be in the good intentions.

The reason I was doing it was because we'd not spent the daily budget that was perhaps allocated to us, and we wanted to make sure we were maximizing the client's traffic,  maximizing the return on investment. And it was always with good intent, right? So if I was to apply that to maybe other failures, it's just about making sure that whatever that test is

that you are trying to do it with the mindset of maximizing your own business revenue or your client's business revenue, having a framework or something in place that means, yes I'm going to do this and trying to make it happen.

Amazing. That's a great takeaway if I ever heard one. So yeah let's, as we're coming near to the end of this fantastic episode, let's talk about our industry as a whole. Do you think we talk about

 our  failures in our industry?

I don't, and especially when you look at LinkedIn these days in the PPC world it's all about amazing tests. It's case studies, it's ROAS going up, it's this, that and the other. And what perhaps people don't show is behind the scenes, there's 10 other tests that were of complete flop. But actually over the scale of 12 months, things are looking great, which obviously makes sense.

So no, people  definitely don't talk about it enough, but it definitely happens. It is like the sort of the Instagram models of the world where you see this perfect life, behind the scenes. There's arguments there's loads of other sort of messier stuff that's in play that makes up a good overall account.

So failures Yeah, are definitely happening. We just don't see enough of them. And I think people don't talk about it enough either  because it's it's it's liberating in a way, talking about failure because you help other people learn as well, what challenges and, that you've come across what mistakes they should not make.

And particularly for people coming into the PPC industry, there are so many things that you could trip up over so easily. one of the first things I ever tripped over, which I know so many  people do to this day, is the location settings on Google, where it's the presence or local interest in.

And if you haven't got it into presence, only then you could potentially be sharing anywhere in the world for that reason. So it's just little tricks like that I think. People need to be aware of them. People need to be sharing their failures and more people will, do a better job then.

Amazing. and another question that I, some of my other guests have gone, Anna, what are you asking here? I we'll give it a shot. Is there a safe way to fail in digital marketing? I think we kind have touched on it is it always risky, but, or is there like a safe way to do it?

 So it is risky because you're playing with real money whether that's a client's money or your business's money. If I was to say, is there a safe way I'd probably be thinking about how I might apply that maybe to a, if I set up my own business and I just wanted to test a few pounds myself, maybe I could test that in my own.

My own Google Ads account rather than a, an ads account that's spending 200 grand a month.

 So maybe think about a passion project or a mate's website, or a local charity, or just someone that you know that you feel like you get really good results for them, but maybe they're spending not as much money and you just wanna test a few things.

That's probably the safest way to fail because wasting a hundred pounds is always. Less risky than wasting a hundred thousand pounds. So I'd always do it that way. Naturally, the bigger the account, the faster you're gonna get results.  But particularly if you're in your early days and you're just looking to fail in a safe environment, I would say try it.

Try it on a kind of a smaller account and always just get people to spot you or spot the people. It's very much like weightlifting. You've always got a, the big heavy task. It's always good to have someone looking over to you, make sure you're doing that right.

Amazing. That sounds great. And one, one question that as well that I didn't give you to prep for that I hope that works out in both our favors, but it'll definitely work in the listeners' favors. Ai, I feel like we always,  we

To, we are not done with talking about ai and what I really love about the fact that I'm gonna be speaking to so many different people on this podcast is that we're gonna get so many different views of it, about it. And since we are talking about, ops and mistakes, I imagine work, working with clients, with can-do and even possibly even like on air, seen some. That is not how you use AI guys. Oh my

 are you  doing? Can,

 Yeah.

would you say is the biggest effort that you see? What, that you've witnessed or maybe even you've experienced of implementing ai?

 for me it's about all the stuff that is very customer facing. That ai seems to be a, be

a  great job of when you look at it, put something to track pt, you'll spit it out. But actually when it's very customer facing, it's very obvious that it's been written by a robot. So I can tell. Pretty instantly, and I think a lot of people will as well.

If you could tell ad copy on Google Ads being anything that's been done by chat GBT you look at the dashes, for example, the capitalization, the way it says things it is very kind of robot esque and I think the real opportunity in PPC ads and advertising in general is to have a brand tone of voice.

I'm a huge fan of ai, but I don't necessarily think it's great for just ad copy and things that are very customer focused. You need to say those things in the way that you would coming out of your mouth or your brand's mouth. Yeah. where AI really has that superpower is the backend stuff. creating those bridges, audience research and definitely informing creative and copy, but not necessarily just copying and pasting from chat

ChatGPT Or Perplexity into Google Ads. That's definitely not the way to go, and I've seen so many people do that because they think it can save loads of time.

  Actually in the long term, it'll probably damage their brand. It'll lower their CTRs, and you can, you'll be able to spot it a mile off as well.

Yeah. So yeah, the whole client facing stuff the things that your customers or the things that your customers are gonna see yeah, that's what you shouldn't be using AI for. And I totally agree with that. You know what I've said in in previous episodes is the fact that AI should be like your junior pa.

 The source should be you. The source shouldn't just be like random internet. And then just, yeah give me something that you think from the internet I should use on my, that never, I personally think that never works.  Chris, definitely not.

A great chat. Thank you so much for being on the podcast today. But before you leave us i've got a nice fun question for you. That's not quite PPC or AI focused. If your PPC career were a movie, what would the title be?

Yeah, so this is a really good question. And I think for me it's always for a lot of my clients now, they're not spending millions and millions a month on, on ads. And and for me it's always that David and Goliath situation a little bit. So for me, if it is a career PPC, if it was a movie about my career right now, I'd probably say it's called like Outsmart, Not Outspend.

Because it's all about how to outsmart the competition and  not just spend more money than. Ai as you can imagine now, is putting everyone in that kind of level, evil level playing field, so to speak. So there's gotta be other ways around strategy and audience, like loads of other things outside of just spending that you can actually get that

step ahead. So that's all. What I'm focused on now, is to help my clients really beat the big boys without just trying to spend more money than them.

So yeah, Outsmart, Don't outspend.  Not

Yes. Fantastic. I love it. Thank you so much for that. Chris. As I said earlier on, you are very much active in the community, so where can you know people want to learn more about paid search or maybe even wanna employ your services?

Where will they be able to find you?

 Yeah. Yeah, thanks for having me and the best place will probably be to be search for Chris Nightingale on LinkedIn. I'm sure we'll come up then and feel free to connect and would love to share my content.

Amazing. Thank you so much for that, Chris.

Thanks for having me. Anu

Thank you so much, Chris, for sharing that very honest story about early in your career. And yeah, remember mistakes happen. If you have someone who has never made a mistake, you're probably not testing enough and you're probably not pushing the boundaries hard enough. So don't be scared to try something new.

Don't be scared with all the new updates that are coming out. You don't have to test everything. Don't be panicked about testing everything but. Yeah, go out and make sure that you are making your job interesting by testing new things, and that you are surrounded by good managers who will lift you up and really help you out during those situations.

For more information, more about all that we've talked about and the full transcript of this episode, please go to podcast PPC Live. Of course now going on to a little bit of an update about PPC Live as a whole. Our next event is June 26th, and that's happening in Leeds UK for those who are of that way.

I would love to have you there. Tickets are live on ppc.live. Just go and check that out. We're still on Earlybird ticket sales right now, so please do check that out for anyone who's up there. We'd love to have you. Before I leave, I'm delighted to say that I'm allowing time by time to be booked.

For some coaching calls with people, so just go to the marketing annual.com. Gimme as much information as needed before the calls. I'm well prepared to help you to help reignite your passion for doing paid search. I hope you have enjoyed the show and I look forward to bringing more PPC efforts from our PPC experts next week.

Bye now.