EP321 - How Holiday Traffic Destroyed My Client's Lead Generation ft Peter Guba

 Hello and welcome to PPC Live, The podcast, formerly known as PPC Chat, Roundup. My name is Anu and I'm the founder of PPC Live. And if you're used to hearing 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 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 also how they've turned things around, what their disappointments were, what their surprises were, and how you know the story of how that f-up turned into a big learning and how it made them the successful marketer that they are today.

Today I have the very delight of bringing you Peter Guba, who is a great supporter of PPC Live, and he has sponsored previous events. He's written on our blog, so go check it out. He's the founder of Profit Mill and he's yeah, a Google Ads freelancer. An all around, great freelancer working with clients of different sizes, [and] an ex Googler as well.

So he's got some very interesting stories that he's dealt with when he's dealing with like multimillion campaigns and even how to ensure that you don't do an f-up while you're pitching for clients. So there's some really interesting stories there. So I hope you enjoy.

So yeah, let's go speak to Peter. 

 Hello everyone and welcome Peter to PPC Live The podcast.

Thank you for having me. Hi.

Amazing. Hi. Peter Guber such a fantastic support of PPC Live. He's written on the blog, he's sponsored some of our events, so it's such a delight to speak to him today. He is a Google Ads expert with over a decade of experience, out of marketing experience and digital marketing experience in general. And during his eight year tenure at Google, he managed over a thousand advertising accounts across nearly every industry vertical, from early stage startups to enterprise clients with multimillion dollar budgets. And yeah, he's gonna talk about some of those multimillion, dollar budget clients very soon. Currently Peter runs, Profit Mill where he helps lead generating advertisers, achieve profitable growth through paid ads. Interesting facts about Peter, which we almost talked a bit too much about this just before recording. a previous life, he wanted to be a dentist. And right now with all my dentist issues, like literally I feel that very strongly.

And he has a strong passion for politics, which I'm like i'll give you a moment to sit with that one oh, anyone having a, passion for politics right now - I hope you all are okay. I hope you guys are seeing your therapist on a regular basis. And yeah. So thank you, Peter for joining the show today.

Thank you. No, it's such a pleasure to finally catch up with you and have a good excuse to have a conversation. So, you know, you're I think famous on the internet for me, just across the pond.

I'll chat to people, I'll meet like people, like finally in person. They'll be like, oh yeah, I knew about you. I see all about you. And I'm like, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Yes. I'm, and the internet I want LinkedIn too much and I'm always just typing away any, everything that comes into my brain on LinkedIn. Yeah. And thankfully, a lot of the times, a lot of people agree with me, so it's nice to find my people online who are like, yeah annoying. Google is annoying in that way as well. Or, you this is definitely how we should be doing this, especially with recruitment and how people even get jobs as well.

That's the one that, that

Yeah post of mine last week really kicked off on giving people tasks on their first stage interviews. And I'm like, why? Why do you do that? What do you have any opinion on that? Do you ever think it's a good idea to give someone a task at the first stage of an interview.

Yeah, PPC interviews. I mean, I don't know what you would, what you would ask as a task in the first PPC interview. Like, I don't know, create this campaign for me.

See how you do it, I guess. 

That has happened. For me i'm literally like I, feel it trying to get free work. Especially if you then don't, if that candidate doesn't get through and you you know how

Yeah, and I'm like, it little bit. That's a little bit, yeah, people should be wary about that. we're not here to talk about the f-ups of the whole, of our whole industry or recruiters or agency. We are here to talk about our personal experiences, about Peter's personal experience, about, you things that have gone wrong in the past.

how we've turned it around because forget the title of this podcast is the f-ups that that led to Triumphs. We're gonna talk about an f-up.

We're gonna talk about how Peter turned it round. We're gonna talk about the people who are supportive and what we should all remember in terms of making mistakes.

There is always a way out as long as you communicate well. Without further ado, Peter, what is the f-up that you wanna share with us today? hear that you have a funny one and a serious one for us, so Yeah, go ahead. Start with each other one you wanna start with.

I think the funny one's really funny 'cause it has a good ending at the end of the day. Otherwise it would not have been that funny. But the funny one that I don't think warrants an entire podcast is that when I was at Google, I used to work with a startup incubator and I feel like,

you know, I was working with advertisers who were like trying out Google ads for the very first time, and there was a lot of like, leeway with I think the stakes were not as high, like kind of working with that type of advertiser for the first time.

You know, they certainly weren't like holding you to like

a really high,

expectations. But then I went and I went from working with the, with the startups to working with our

largest travel ad advertisers, like our largest airlines, hotel groups, online travel agencies. I had three accounts the entire year that I was responsible for, so I was kinda like an extension of their team.

And, you know, their budgets were anywhere from $10 to $20 million a year roughly.

You know, happened to be put on two accounts that were actually competitors of each other.

They both had physical locations and the product called The Local Campaigns just kind of came out. This was, I think it probably in around like 2018, 2019.

And I needed to pitch both of them to try it out. And they were aware that we, we had their competitors within our overall book, but I don't think that they were aware that I was working with both of them.

Yeah. Yeah.

I put a deck together of the local campaigns and explaining why they should do it.

And I put the client logo in the bottom right corner on like every single slide.

I presented it to one of the competitors and they were kind of like, I think they had a bit of like a lukewarm response. Like they were like, okay, cool. It's like

Google Beta product. Like do we wanna test it out?

You know, do. know what it's gonna do yet.

Exactly. Yeah. And then the other company that I worked with, the other competitor, like put the same deck together. I think I hardly changed anything and I most importantly did not change the one thing that was really important to change, which was the client logo, it's like, why was that even necessary on the deck?

Right? Like, how much personalization did that add?

And I sent it off and the agency that worked for the client responded first. and was like,

Peter, do you wanna check like the bottom right corner of the slides Winky face? And I, even when they sent that email, I still didn't know what they were talking about.

It wasn't until I opened the slide that I saw the competitor's logo. And this was like

early into the job. So I basically, like the stakes were just so much higher. Like I was just like, no, this is a really important client for us. And I've just sent a competitor's information to them, you know, and I told my boss about it.

I told my, account executive, my counterpart, and they were kind of like,

Eh, I mean, look, they're not gonna fire us over this. Like, don't do it again, but, you know, it'll be fine. And

It's kind of funny at the end of the day is the other client who got the smaller one, I think of the two,

got back and was like,

Yeah, we'll try this out.

We'll try this out. Like if, if you say maybe this to our larger competitor, we're gonna try this out.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a classic case of some competitors, they're like,

Yeah, our competitors is doing that - I want to do it as well for sure. Which I'm not always

sure is the best strategy because you're like, oh, you're not really gonna set yourself apart if you're just

yeah, the same thing that your competitors are doing.

But I guess in this stage, like it's about trying a new Google Ads product anyway,

yeah. I was like performance review -  local campaigns, check.

Yeah, guys, when you're, if it's those who are doing pitches, you're doing pitching documents. Yeah. Pitching clients and pitching products. Watch out for the logos. But no, that's not the

big lesson you want to share with us. Get onto our second story.

Cool. Okay. So I was managing this advertiser that was in the enterprise event management space

and and platform they sold which is kind of important as context here is a platform that allowed you to do quizzes, surveys, you know attendee management, like everything all together.

So even if you were hosting a big tech conference or  even sort of like a, it could be a,

like a quarterly or annual you know, review for a larger organization, you might want a platform like this. And honestly it was really hard to, advertising for them because the space that they're in is so massive.

Quizzes, surveys like employee engagement, God, there's so many, both B2B solutions, but also like a lot of B2C solutions. Like think of like SurveyMonkey, Typeform, like these are not their competitors whatsoever, but they're gonna show up for a lot of that.

lot of, And then there's a lot of people who just, I don't know, they're like, I wanna fund quiz trivia for my like first grade.

like they're gonna make that type of search. And of course, exact match or Google's match types are not actually what they say they are. So

yeah. yeah. Anyway, that's a whole podcast

let's not talk about match type. Right. So, so it was, it was literally impossible to only show up on the right keywords. I mean, like there, there was not enough time to do the whack-a-mole of negating every single keyword that would come up.

But we had a really difficult goal that we've set for the algorithm. It said somebody had to book a demonstration. The website itself was very clearly enterprise. So once you got there, you kind of understood like what the, what was going on. And we used the ad copy to really kind of filter the type of people we wanted to go after.

And I did have dynamic search ads turned on as well. That should be another one that I should add. And they had a,

had they had like a big SEO strategy and a huge blog with all sorts of content, some of which was related to what could have been seen as like a B2C ish piece of content, like Christmas trivia and things of that nature.

Like you know there's also another important topic, but this is more like consumer related, but like Juneteenth in America.

You know, is an important holiday, right? So they would kind of write about that,

And what happened was we had dynamic search ads turned on and it was working. We were getting a lot of really interesting keywords.

People would book demos. The client was super happy.

American Thanksgiving hits and we are now onto Christmas, and we started to get some keywords for like Christmas trivia and things of that nature. And I remember when

we initially reviewed it with the client, it was like, oh, maybe this could be like, some like enterprise search. Like, wait, let's keep it on.

You know, we had obviously didn't search tests running and things were just kind of humming it along. The lead volume started to like kind of slow down, but whenever I'd meet with the client, we actually met on a weekly basis. We'd say could be the seasonality, you know, that's why things are slowing down.

And then after like a couple of weeks. The client's like, no, this is way too slow. Like, something's happening, we should really be getting some leads.

Yeah. and I, and I kind of dig into it, I dug into it a little bit

Not enough. And I was like, I don't know. It must just be like competition.

It could be seasonality. It wasn't until the client  reached out to me and was like, our hosting provider has just reached out and wants to increase our prices significantly due to the volume of traffic that we're getting.

we're and all the traffic is coming from Google Ads. What is going on?

And that's when I knew something happened and I looked into it and we started to really rank for all sorts of Christmas trivia quiz from DSA, the blog content that they have and

I don't even know if it was necessarily like spending the most of the budget on that. And I think that's kind of what threw me off.

But the algorithm was driving so much traffic from this poor quality or, or some, or something that was not going to convert that it didn't even know what to do with the right keywords and how to find the right people.

And basically we just didn't get any leads through all of December. And I had to use you know, some tools to really kinda help the algorithm forget all of this, so we could talk about that. But in essence, I mean, a total miss a month and a half to just no leads. Yeah.

So would you say the issue was, what was the issue that, was like the mess up really that caused that? It was it just not an efficient use of actually adding negative keywords? What was the thing that like, because the output

you guys were showing for a lot of keywords that are irrelevant.

There was traffic going through, there were no leads going through. What's the thing that you did or didn't do that led to that?

I think there's, there's two parts, right? Like there's, I, I have to say that this was, at the end of the day, a human error on my part. Like I, I could have really been monitoring what was going on and we could, we could talk about also the,

what are the settings that kind of caused this? But from the human error standpoint, I think the part that was really challenging is

this client would get, like I don't know, it felt like a hundred thousand search impressions in a, in a week.

Like there's just so many of these irrelevant keywords that they would show up for just to get the right ones. And it, and it kind of worked

that like I just did not have the bandwidth to go and.

and Comb through everything that was going on. And if I was using one of these like online tools, they probably would just be shooting red flags, constantly being like, this is not getting conversions, this is not getting conversions.

Yeah.

So, so I mean that at a very high level that today I, you know, I wish I probably used some sort of like a, a third party tool just to kind of monitor that or maybe just make some

like large scale decisions. But at a very high level, it was a perfect storm.

Smart bidding, Dynamic search ads,

the clients creating SEO content that is not necessarily related to what it is that they're selling, as much.

Seasonality. Pick, pick one.

Yeah. It was the wrong time for that kind of mistake. Like it had happened, let's say during springtime, we wouldn't have had so many of these Christmas surveys. 'cause during springtime what surveys are people really, serving, you there's very popular.

Yep, yep. I get it. So yeah, perfect storm for all those kind of things. And. So was it the client that spotted it or you spotted it first. 

Yeah, so I mean the worst thing is that the client spotted it, right? Like you never wanna be in that position because at least if you spot it.

You can proactively bring it to the client and say, Hey, I'm, I'm watching this. Like, you know, obviously there's things that happen within Google Ads that are a little outside of our control and we're there to catch them as quickly as possible and make those adjustments.

That's why they pay you.

But the client really kind of spotted like, no, this is really not that great. And we had weekly calls, so it's not like we didn't get sort of check-in,

But things were going almost so well for a long enough period at the time that there was no, like, doubt that something could be doing going wrong.

And it was our first holiday season together, like our first Christmas season. You know, so, so it wasn't like, and every time you take on a new client, there's also you're learning about their industry. Like you don't realize like, okay, this, this is a potential issue with the types of keywords that we're gonna show up for for them.

Yeah, no, definitely something that I imagine then becomes part of a process in the future. Try to really understand what the seasonality is like. Was there, you said that, it was your first season, instinctive question I had in my head was there a second season that you had with them?

No. So there wasn't a second season. And they probably, they probably didn't say it directly to me, but I imagine that that's what, that's actually what caused it. Before I stopped working with them, I did fix the issue. So you know, I felt terrible that, that this, this occurred and, and to be quite honest, like I do think that I still probably would've been the best candidate to keep working with them because it's probably good to work with the person who knows where the mistakes could occur.

I'll make that argument. I completely understand the decision. Yeah, yeah. So I will say that I basically excluded that entire period. So I just went

absolutely crazy on the data exclusion functionality within Google Ads and just excluded like two months that this was running, that it just didn't make any sense. And the day that I did it is literally the day that both the CEO and the head of marketing got back to me and said,

Yeah, leads are back. Like, they literally. The leads were looking like it was before, whatever you did that, it did that right. Right. Yeah. And it, and then that point, like they did not wanna work together anymore.

And I, as, as it happened, they, they were like had me on account access for a while and I thought I would kind of monitor it for a little bit too, just to make sure that they were good and on their way. I think overall the account itself like was doing okay, you know, it's the larger, larger challenges with the industry of like, it's extremely competitive. They were probably kind of breaking, even with Google ads. I don't think it was ever like the best you know, performing option for them.

Okay. But I think that. So the client was working with this person on SEO. I knew this person on SEO was an extremely big fan of manual bidding.

And I knew, I knew the moment that they would stop working with me, they would just work with that person to do paid app.

And they kind of had it running the way I had it set up. Which I, I honestly, I think with their industry. You cannot use manual bidding. It has to be smart bidding. Like you need a system to sort through the haystack

Yeah,

this, you know, this one or two enterprise leads that are gonna make sense for them.

'cause it was not a big industry and I saw that they were getting leads for like another three months after. I set it up and I was kind of happy that things went back to normal. And then I saw eventually that they switched everything to manual bidding

bidding and started getting zero leads. Yeah. Yeah. Surprise. Like, Oh Surprise, surprise.

I feel you. I feel you. And this is why I love, this is such a great story. This is such a great story for people to hear about as to how because you make a mistake, doesn't mean that you are the bad choice for that client.

You I love that even like point you made earlier on, it's actually better, usually better for the client to work with someone who has the made the mistake and who knows how to fix it and who knows that, that mistake will probably never happen again. And, depending on that conversation goes.

Because look we, all know the phrase better, the devil, you know better the person who has made the mistake,

the grass isn't always greener. Yeah.

the grass is not always greener on the other side. Absolutely. It's about gaining your leads and. Yeah. And on the client side, like let's say, a bit of the, advocate for a second. 'cause you think to yourself, okay, yes, you, you're annoyed, you've lost a lot of budget. You Internally wanted to make it seem like if, we fixed the problem. The problem was this advertiser spent too much of our budget.

So what's the solution? We fire the person who made the mistake. That's not always the solution and I think everyone should learn this, whether it's the. PPC advertisers that are listening to this

or clients who are listening to this now, if you're an in-house person, the solution is not, is hardly ever fire

the person who made that mistake, it's hardly ever the solution, especially if the person owns the mistake and goes, you are right. I know how to fix it. I will go and fix it. I'll sort it out for you. If it's a person that all of a sudden becomes very hard to get ahold of and is all Oh, it wasn't me, oh, starts to make a whole bunch of excuses as to what the error was. That's the kind of person you wanna fire. It's not necessarily about the mistake. It's about how the person responds to what the mistake was and, if the person is taking accountability and owning it and knowing how to turn it around, that's, that should be a good partnership for the future i feel.

Yeah, well there was, there was some other funny stuff that I think was hilarious as part of the story is.

The CEO was the one who had a conversation with me and he goes yeah, we found somebody cheaper. And I was like,

like, okay, cool. Sounds good. You know, and it's, it wasn't even the mistake, I don't think, I don't think it was the mistake, dude. It was just no, cut costs now. And I'm like yeah. you're gonna cut leads as well but good luck Yeah, no, I look, I,

God. Obviously, I, this is not a, this is not a story about a, about a bad client. I'm very thankful for working with them and, and it was lovely to, to work with both of them. I think it's also, also. you know, here's another part of this sort of story and I think feel like all these stories have multiple layers. Let's uncover all the layers of this, of this onion. How many times do advertisers hire PPC specialists to like fix the problem of demand for the entire company.

company. Yeah. like, oh, we, we are not growing. We are churning customers and we need to like fix this hole in our finances. And I feel like we could do it with paid ads.

And it's almost like. I don't know what the right solution is. I don't know if that is, I mean, paid ads is really powerful. It's also really costly. It's, it's a high stakes game, know? Is it gonna solve bigger problems? No, absolutely not. I mean, demand is creating, generating demand is so integrated with all other aspects of marketing, like your website, positioning everything else that you're doing.

So it, it definitely was helping them out. You know, I think that they were making their money back with, in revenue, in real revenue after they would close the deals.

like the, the margin for error was so razor thin. It was like, this needs to work. If it doesn't, I mean, we are. You know, this, we're not in a great spot, and that's also a really bad spot to be in as a, as a, you know, PPC I think specialist to be helped to that type of situation is like, you are the savior here.

And it's like, no, I, I'd rather not set up for this.

That. Yeah, again I, also repeat what you said, like this is not a dig at this client particularly, but

No. advertisers should be wary of clients who think paid search is the answer. When they have not really gone through a robust marketing overall strategy and looking at the product looking like if they've actually created a good, interest, a healthy interest. 'cause one thing that our friend Jyll Saskin Gales always say is a lesson I've got from her. I was like. Actually, you need to understand your landing page, your website's, conversion rates. Before you even start doing paid search, you need to have been able, you need to have known what the healthy organic traffic is and how that converts.

And then say, okay, let's bring, let's pay you do paid search ads to it, and then you can go

Yeah.

okay, maybe paid such ads is actually good or not good, but you cannot know that really well until, you know the landing page is pure organic traffic, like conversion rate for it. So yeah when clients have not really done that depth of analysis as to overall what's creating the, healthy, demand for your, the brand itself, the product itself. Yeah. 

You put a lot of, a lot on paid search's shoulders and it, yeah, it's not worth it. This is not supposed to be a log. We could talk so much about this thanks, Peter

This has been, that has been such a great topic to talk about. More questions still on, the topic itself. What, if someone is going through this same kind of issue right now, what is your advice for them? They've just, a client has just phoned up and said, oh my God we've hit so much traffic, leads are not great and, you not even sure what the problem is until, you client has said it. What or what's your advice to someone like that?

My policy is always honesty, so just own your mistakes. Obviously you need to dig into what happened, but, but when you do find out what it is that caused this, you need to own your mistake. If you do not, and if you're not transparent about what it is that occurred and I think there can be a gut reaction to be like, oh no, it wasn't, it wasn't me.

It was this, it was that, blah, blah, blah. Then I think that sews a ton of doubt into, you know, the client as to are you gonna catch this mistake in the future? Was it really that? Right? Like and so I think that with the right client and with the right partner, they'll say, okay, great. This was a good learning experience.

We all learn a lot. Right? And I now feel more confident that you're not gonna make that mistake in the future. And that is, that is just as important, knowing that they are gonna do a better job, you know, in the, in the future.

Absolutely and did this change anything for you in terms of your process on working with, 'cause unfortunately that client decided, no, this is the last time be allowed to make the mistake. But did it inform how you do other things and how you work with other clients or similar to this

Did it Yeah. So I actually, I don't, I don't, actually I in terms of client work, like , I keep in consistent

communication with my clients at all times. So all my clients we meet on a weekly basis. I'm available by Slack. So, so it wasn't a lack of communication, a lack of sort of eyes on the account. So there wasn't that much that I felt like I learned from that perspective, but I feel like I really got a hard lesson about how Google's algorithm works.

so Google's automated bidding is at the end, at the end of the day, needs to get like a good sample size of traffic for any sort of search or category of it before it says, yeah, this is good search to go after, or this is bad search to go after. Like, did it convert into the leads or not?

not? That we wanted. And if that search category is massive, it is going to need a lot of time, a lot of budget to hit that minimum viable or that minimal sample size that it's looking for. I don't know what that is. Is that a percent of the search, that 10% of the search traffic, whatever it is, to, to feel,

feel to create that confidence that it knows what it's supposed to do.

And when you get a massive category, it's gonna spend indefinitely. And especially if you have like a smaller budget, like our, I think our budget was like five, six grand a month,

a month.

And it just kept spending on it.

It just never figured out should it not keep spending on it, should it not keep spending on it? And.

that was the one caveat to smart bidding where I said, no, this is, this is where smart bidding does not work perfectly, and you need to make a bit of intervention because it's not just gonna figure it out on its own.

Absolutely. Yeah. So yeah. Smart bidding, have your eyes on it and it's what I, do like to tell people about automation.

Don't just set it and forget it. Like make sure you are putting those daily checks. Are there any tools that you feel like you would've helped with this as well?

You know what, I have not explored this enough, but obviously there's awesome tools like Opteo and many of the other ones out there. They get a little pricey you know, frankly. So you need to get really good value out of them.

And I think they can, can go up pretty quickly when you have a lot of accounts that you're

managing. yeah  One of those would've been, would've been, I think, great

for this particular account.

yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely. I also speak to our guests about, this is such a, I think, a brave thing that my guests are doing, and I'm really grateful already to every single person who's here's the mess-up I did, and this is how it, I turned around.

This is what I learned and this is how it, you made me a better marketer. Do we talk enough, you feel about failures and should we talk more about it?

Based on what I read on LinkedIn. We don't talk about failures at all. I don't see.

Oh no. It's like I can't, I can't there's too much of this. Like, here's how I changed the world. Let me tell you how in the seven step process, and I'm like,

I'm I can't read this anymore.

If I want to, you know, feel depressed, I guess about, am I doing enough? I should just go on LinkedIn and read about people's great successes online. But no, I actually think about this a lot because obviously in the world of ai, anybody can write like an amazing article and, and there's so many of these people who I think are like LinkedIn influencers that have now come up with their own like SaaS product that's like, here's my platform for creating viral LinkedIn post

right? And it's got like a certain script in there. It's probably like a ChatGPT wrapper.

And starting to sound the same. And I think about the fact that if you can talk about your and your failures and the things actually really hard to say to people, then that's gonna be one of the last things that are gonna,

Be authentic and real in the world of the world of ai.

Because people don't actually want to share these things. I mean, even this conversation, right? Like it's not totally comfortable for me to share this story, but it is way more interesting than like

I am the best and I did all this. So I think, yeah, I think that we don't, we don't say this enough, and I think that, that this will be the, the superpower for people who can be. Vulnerable and which is like built building in public, right? That's what we, that's what we call it now. But some people are way more extreme about that. Adam Robinson

he talks about his like financials and firing people and all that stuff, and we're just like, all like tuned in, like it's a reality TV show because it's like real and authentic.

So I think that that is super cool. Hoping that this is going to be the PPC version of this PPC reality show.

We wanna hear that each other's is human. And I love that you put that aspect of yeah, AI is helping people to be whole like have such a polished post kind of thing. And actually it's removing authenticity from it. Would you say that's one of like our big issues with ai and there any others that come to mind?

Yeah, so the thing that I think about that I, I don't know how this is gonna change, but, so

when, when these, like we see all these posts on LinkedIn and on social media, and

these like universal truths about how people like, to consume their information, right? Like, we love narratives and there's these different like archetypes or, or, or story archetypes that have existed for like centuries.

And that's why we like Disney stories, right? Like there's always like the falling of the hero and the hero rises up, right? Like, but like, but if we all start using those 

archetypes in the content, because like we don't need to be good writers anymore. We could just ask ChatGPT and be like,

use one of the common archetypes that people like to use to consume information.

Is that gonna create a new archetype? Is there gonna be a different type of format for information that we're gonna crave?

That's gonna be so different from what everybody else posts that we're gonna throw, you know, the playbook out of like how we've written narrative forever. I think about that.

Like what, what, I don't know, like, and, you know, maybe people will be super creative and original, but I think that that's becoming, you know, really, really tough.

Interesting. Peter, this has been such a great, like over a half an hour, I, tell people it's gonna be less than half an hour but,

when i've got a good guest on this show, I'm not gonna hold them back.

I'm gonna let them say all that they need to say. We didn't even ask all the questions, maybe Peter's gonna have to come back for a part two of this, so you might see him again and we'll ask him more questions about, you another f-up and, ways that we can learn from it. Before you go I'm gonna ask you what I ask all my guests.

A nice, fun non-AI, non-marketing, non PPC question. If your career were a movie, what would be the title?

My career as a movie would be the title. I don't know you. I feel like you're gonna have to help me find the right title for it, but I really do love this quote, and I forget who said this again, but that half of the work is just about showing up.

up, title is like a, like Showing up. Oh, It doesn't have to be a real movie. Why did I think that that was the case?

I was like, that's a really hard question.

Amazing and Peter, you definitely embody that. Like every time that I've done like a last minute, oh God, Peter, I need you to show up for this or help me with this.

You a hundred percent show up. So that one I feel is very fitting

Awesome.

So honestly, thank you so much for that fantastic chat and yeah, hope, hope to see you again on the on, on the podcast sometime soon. Cheers.

Thank you. Bye.

 Thank you so much, Peter, for sharing that very honest and transparent experience from those two stories. The one that was a hilarious mistake of I'd call it a hilarious mistake of putting like a competitor's logo whilst presenting a solution to another client, the competitors client.

So yeah look out for those kind of things when you're writing all those, putting all those presentations. I know it's a lot of hard work where attention to detail will win or lose a client. So yeah, and it was just so great to hear those stories that Peter gave and that experience that he gave with that second client.

Even though how he lost, he might have lost the client. They their agency might have lost that client, but there was still a big learning and look at that, even though he lost the client and the client decided they were gonna go in a different direction with a different, paid search expert.

Yeah. Performance did not do as well. Don't ever, advertisers don't be too disheartened when you feel like you've made a mistake and then a few weeks later the client goes, oh yeah, we no longer want to work with you. That's not necessarily the end of the world. That's not necessarily a big failure.

It's as long as, as Peter did, you were able to really turn things around and fix things and bring leads in because honestly, the person who has actually made the, a mistake on a, an account they're going to be the one that works twice as hard. So that's not just a message for advertisers, but also for clients and brands who are out there being annoyed that, their paid search expert has made a mistake.

They are the ones now, they are going to do everything they can. To continue to win your trust and to do going hard and ensure that they not another mistakes, make mistake happen. So yeah, I think those are the ones that you should really keep keeping your back pocket. 'cause they're the ones that really will try to, win as hard.

for you as you would for yourself. One question I forgot to ask Peter when we were chatting was asking him where we could find him and yeah, you can find him on LinkedIn. That's Peter Guba last name, GUBA. But also find him on his fantastic website. That's profitmill.io. So that's P-R-O-F-I-T-M-I-L-L.

io. So yeah, go check him out and check out the fantastic feedback he's gotten from past clients and the model that he uses and just, he was able to bring so many years of experience, whether you're a small brand or a big brand. He can definitely help you out. And for all the information and the full transcript of this fantastic chat, please go to podcast.ppc.live

You'll get all the full details of the fantastic story that Peter just shared. Of course, we can't leave you without giving you some update about PPC Live and what's going on. We've got two events coming up for you in both June and July. We are gonna be in Leeds in June. We are gonna be

back in London celebrating three years of PPC live in July, so make sure you go get your tickets for that. If you go to ppclive.eventbrite.com, you'll be able to get tickets to either of those events. We hope to see you at one of them. Before I leave you, I'd love to share that. I've also got coaching services that I've started paid search coaching and you can book on an hourly basis if you go to themarketinganu.com.

Just to help you guys reignite that passion for paid search, give you that confidence that you are on the right path, especially with all the changes that we are seeing, all the updates that we are seeing. I get to see them firsthand, whether I like it or not, it's my job, so I can help you give you that insight to ensure that you are on the right path of what you're trying to test for your client, for your brand, or even how to question your agencies on what they're doing.

I'd love to support with that as well. So yeah, if you go to themarketinganu.com, you'll be able to find more details about that. And yeah, look forward to bringing you more stories from PPC experts and more f-ups and triumphs next week.

Thank you. Bye.