EP329 - The £30K Mistake: When Too Many Leads Became a Problem ft Gareth Westhead

  📍  📍  📍 Hello and welcome to PPC Live, The Podcast, formerly known as 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 in the right place. But instead of relaying what the PPC experts are saying, I'm bringing the PPC experts to you. Every week I'm gonna be speaking to a different paid search expert about their biggest F up, but also how they've turned things around.

This week I speak to Gareth Westhead, who is someone that has been in the industry for many years, and like most will agree that you don't go that far in being in the industry without making a few booboos. And yeah, this time he shows us a very different side in terms of mistakes that he's made, and very rightfully so because he's someone that loves, integration with the different channels he hates when channels are working in silos. He's all about collecting datas from all the different channels, and he's actually gonna speak about the experience, experience that really formed this view of him. You always say that people are the best experts in an area because they made a mistake in that

specific area at some point, and they never want to make that mistake again. So for someone who hates silos, he's gonna talk to you about what it was, what life was like for him before that whole him hating silos when he was okay with the silos and what that cost him and cost his clients.

So yeah, let's go speak to Gareth.  

  📍  📍  📍 Hello, Gareth. Welcome to PPC Live The Podcast. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's been a long time coming. Really happy to be here. Thank you. Absolutely. I know Gareth I'm so privileged that we got Gareth's time in here. I saw him booking sometimes and then having to cancel, then booking again.

And then the last time I was like, Gareth, please keep it. We really wanna talk to you. So I'm really grateful, Gareth, that you're on here. On, the show today. So Gareth is a digital director who has 18 years of experience in this industry. I don't think I've spoken to anybody that has any anything less than 10 years.

Guys, it's all about the experts that you know that I'm bringing you to speak with. He's worked with agency and client side and he's now an independent consultant across the full performance marketing mix. He's managed somewhere around 150 million in marketing budget directly and consulted on more.

And his keen interest, which is, someone who's just, yeah, got the same kinda heart and soul similar to mine is about connecting data sources together to tell the full story of performance, making sure that you're not working in silos. It's why people sometimes will get confused whether PPC Live events they'll see someone that is

sEO or they'll see someone that's paid social and I'm like, yeah guys, I know this is PPC Live, but PPC does not work in a silo. All the different channels don't work in a silo. We need to be talking together with all the different channels and even understanding them, even if you're not gonna be an expert in a lot of them, understand them.

And yeah, I think Gareth has very much that kind of mindset as well. I asked him for a fun fact and his fun fact is that he's got two kids that take up a lot of his time and he, they're gonna be going on holiday very soon. Where are you guys off to for the summer holiday? Yeah, we're off to the, we're off to the south of Spain and just looking at the temperatures at the moment, close to kinda 40 degrees in a couple of areas.

So looking forward to physically getting cooked while we're in, while we're in Spain. Getting cooked always is always a great idea. I, although you, we have had, I don't know whether it's the because you are based in Manchester, am I correct saying off in Manchester? Yeah.

Yeah, based in Manchester and the past few months in London here has been ridiculously hot, sometimes over thirties, and it has not been enjoyable. And I think there's just a difference between heat in London and heat on the beach. We don't mind close to 40 degrees on the beach, but we don't want close to 40 degrees in the city.

Do we? That's what my wife keeps saying. I'm very nervous about temperatures, anything that starts to get up above 30 degrees and I get, start to get nervous. I've got absolutely no hair, so I've gotta buy. Oh, good. I've got so many hats, sun hats that I need to wear to protect my poor little head.

But no, I'm looking forward to the down time. I just hope the temperatures are kind to us. Yeah. Yeah. No, definitely. But anyway, look, we that's all lovely. We hope some people are even listening to this episode from the holiday, from their holiday destination, because that's what August is about.

But let's get straight into our very interesting conversation. As we know, what we talk about with our experts is the f-ups that they've experienced. The times that, they've just missed something and it's cost, budget. And, maybe it's because of communication or you're not double checking things properly.

But as I've, as I keep on saying, now, we don't leave on a defeated note. As I've said, Gareth has been in this industry from 18 years. He's gonna share something from earlier in his career and he's still winning, for his clients winning revenue for his clients. So these are the kind of

stories that we should hear about how, the biggest successes in our industry are people who have weathered the storm. So we are gonna go to Gareth to share one of those with us. Gareth, please share with us what f-up do you wanna share with the audience today? Yeah, so I think when you talk about f-up you hear things or I've missed this, or I've made that mistake, I've spent too much here, or I've made a spelling mistake or something like that.

But the one I want to kinda touch on, and it's not something that I've shared too much before, but it stuck with me. Throughout my career. This was around what, around 12 years ago that this happened. And I'd just taken over the account for a manufacturing company early, fairly early in my career

still, I was still really enthusiastic about it. Looking back now, probably a bit too enthusiastic. I immediately spotted a load of opportunities in the account and got to work straight away. And what I did, I made a load of changes really quickly. I optimized campaigns, rebuilt, rewrote ad copy.

I increased the spend 'cause we were actually under budget based on the brief that I'd been given. We were under budget and to my mind it, it worked really well. Leads went up, conver conversions came in, leads with leads were going up. And I was hitting my lead targets really quickly, but the f up side of it was that sales couldn't keep up.

They weren't, they were overwhelmed. Their processes, they weren't geared up. They didn't have enough resource to, to actually deal with the number of leads that were coming in. And yeah, the majority of problems in performance marketing come back to wasted budget.

It's not all of them, but a lot of them do come back and we were wasting budget because we were sending the leads, but they weren't being followed up. So ultimately they were wasted. Absolutely. And that just sounds like, because you said you were hitting your targets, but this is actually an important point to actually talk about targets and what's

a proper target is, and who should be involved in talking about all these targets? 'Cause I've worked in-house before and sometimes, an agency will be like, oh, this is our target. And I'm like, we can't handle that. I'm the person in-house team, we can't handle that. And who's gonna tell them and who's really having these conversations.

I don't want to start, doing pointing fingers kind of thing, but how. Why would you say that went wrong? Who should have caught that out really in terms of at what point should the discussion should have been, this is what we can actually handle, would you say? Be before I started doing any work, I think.

And I think, when it first happened, my, my reaction was, I've done my job. But that was, back, back then, CPAs were down, leads were up. It was from a marketing point of view. Absolutely brilliant. Everything I was asked I'd done, but what should have happened?

And it's one of those things that you hindsight's a wonderful thing it really is. Yeah. But what should have happened is, at the point of briefing, we should have discussed both marketing and sales. If we were to hit that, that lead target. Can you deal with it? Is that something you could deal with within a month?

Is that a six month thing? Is that the next financial year? That impact that hitting those marketing targets could have on the business, should have been discussed before we'd even started to make any optimizations, because I was coming into it and a bit that the account had been managed previously by somebody who had just done it.

It was somewhat internally. It's that old story. Oh, it's the CEO's nephew or something had done that. Oh. And it was okay. The leads were coming in, but there was just so much opportunity within it. But for somebody coming in who had been doing it a few years at this point, that I should have had the conversation, if we make this work, what can you deal with?

And the planning outside of marketing, it's very easy for marketing to say, we're going hit our target, but what does that then mean to the wider business? Okay. And what was the communication like relationship with the, with the company, with the brand. Because were you in-house or you were part of, it was your agency.

You were in an agency that was doing marketing for that. Yeah, I was agency side at this point. Yeah. And it was probably, it was quite a standard kind of agency comm line of communication. There was account, there was an account manager that sat directly between me and the client. Yeah. There wasn't loads of opportunity for me to actually say

to directly to, to the business. It was, the communication was done through the account managers. But gen, generally speaking, a after a little while, I think I worked I worked up to having a more of a relationship with the internal marketing team and by a dotted line into the head of sales.

Yeah. The communication was never, was, never bad. I think I, I got the feeling early on that the sales reps, they were very stressed in terms, there were just too many leads for them. They were too busy, but there hadn't been any immediate kind of plan B, if this was to happen,

how quickly we can we hire people in? And this was before the days of real automation. We wouldn't have the same problem now because automation could help an awful lot. Sure. But the head of sales and this. And these conversations with this head of sales, they stick with me for, they've stuck with me for the last 10, 12 years now.

He didn't get annoyed. He didn't shout, he didn't point fingers. He openly said in, in a meeting, look, we just weren't ready for it. And it was very, mature of him to say that. Yeah. I think he could have quite easily got all hotheaded and started to say you're doing it wrong.

And things like that. And it was it kind of him recognizing, look. Love, love the enthusiasm that you've got here. Yeah. But don't do it again. Yeah. But it was a really good conversation. And from that point, then we could scale back. We could actually start to, and what we did do was put in place some, bearing in mind 12, 12 years ago, some rude, fairly rudimentary lead scoring just in terms of, look, these leads are hot. If they're coming from this conversion point they're hot. If they're coming from this, they're warm. If they're coming from others, then don't send them to sales. And yeah, and it was a fairly quick kind of pivot into something that, that worked.

But yeah, I mean we'd wasted probably about 25, 30 k in, in budget by that point. Yeah. On leads that could have been good. Yes. But they just didn't get, they just didn't get followed up. They didn't. So even taking it on a bit of more personal, because I feel like you came in enthusiastic and you knew, you saw this, you had a strategy that you knew would work you were implementing it.

I'd say that, with agencies and clients, there's usually like a regular cadence of of like meetings to report back, like maybe every week or every month. Kind of thing. Yeah. And so I'd say that, so when you started increasing the volume, you'd report back and they'd be like, great, thanks.

Great, thanks. And then it took a while for them to actually then the sales guy to be like, actually, no, you've sent actually too much. What did that do for your confidence? Did it be like, was there a bit of frustration? How did you feel just hearing that? Why didn't you tell me this a lot earlier?

Yeah, I think I was quite defensive at first because it was very much, look, you, you've given me this brief. I've hit this brief. So it was defen defensive at first. But I think very personally, I was I took a lot of confidence from it because it was like, my process works.

So the process that I'd followed. It works, but then also it did help me reflect internally and internalize, actually, do you know what? I've gotta start talking to people outside of performance marketing here. I could, 'cause I can go ahead and do what I need to do in platform and things like that, but if that's not working for the wider business, then it's not working.

And it's applicable to both B2B and B2C because if you are sending too much to the business and it's not the worst problem to have by any means, but if you are sending too much to the business, then you're still wasting money. And that's the crux of it. Absolutely. Totally agree with that.

Now, looking back, were there any maybe like signs that you feel that you missed that 'cause Fair enough. If the client hadn't told you that they, they weren't, those leads were too much, you can't really know, or is that, or was there, is there actually something that you could have looked at that you, maybe you didn't look at that you're like, ah, next time, even if, let's say I, I can't get in touch with the sales guide, there's something that I could look at my end that will make it clear that, okay, I am pushing too much and maybe I should pull back.

Looking at it now, all of the signs, like literally all of them. Okay. And I think it's one of, it's one of those, I was looking at things inside a dashboard. I was looking at clicks, I was looking at conversions. I was looking at cost per acquisition and the lead numbers.

But what I wasn't looking at were, was the percentage of leads that weren't being followed up. Looking at gaps between, handover points between the different points in the sales process? Yeah. The key, I think the key piece that I've missed, the key piece that I was missing in my day-to-day reporting was that percentage of leads not being followed up.

Yeah. I think if I'd have had that, if I'd have spotted that and seen that was going up, then the conversation could have been. Why are there, are they crap leads are there, yeah. Are there too many? Which is what the case turned out to be. Yeah. So it wasn't that I was measuring the wrong stuff, I was just missing some the key metrics in terms of joining sales and marketing together.

Yeah. And that's why there's so much importance in bringing everybody's reporting data involved. Was that something that they had provided and or they, or you hadn't asked for, like how come you didn't have access to that piece of data? It was very much that old kind of classic case of marketing's targeted on leads we're not targeted on revenue and sales.

It was very much, look, we're gonna stay, we're, we are in our lane, we're gonna stay in our lane. And yeah, we just didn't, we just didn't ask for it. Which, knowing that now, it's one of the very, very first things that I will ask for is, yeah, how are sales and marketing working together back then?

This is your lane. Let's stick in it. Let's stay in it. Absolutely. Yes, everybody. Your lesson is make sure you, yeah, even though you have your lane to stick in, make sure you understand how it's feeding into other, marketing lanes. What we said at the beginning, don't work in silos, knowing how the channels feed into each other.

Marketing and sales are not so separate. You need to know how your marketing is leading to sales. And you help each other to succeed. So it's, yeah. I feel it's, what you've already said is full of advice as to what we should do, but if you just wrap it up in one summary, someone is going through something like this, they feel like they've been doing their best, they're sharing their the great, PPC results or marketing results, whatever the channel, it's not leading to good quality leads.

It's not leading to, increasing revenue. What's your advice to people? I think it, it comes in three stages. And I, yeah, that, that side there, just thinking out loud, 'cause I've thought about this so many times. I think first of all, it's just stop. Just take a breath.

I think you, it's very easy when you're in the moment to kinda think the world is just falling in on you. And it's not most mistakes that, that happen, they feel bigger to us than they actually look on the outside. So first of all, just stop and breathe. Sometimes you have to slow down to then go faster.

And then the second is get it out in the open. And I did this early on in my career, was to try and cover up these things. You try and quietly fix something. Small issues, you can absolutely do that. But if it's really a burning issue, get it out in the, get it out in the open.

Talk to the key people that you need to talk to because you will actually be amazed how many people are willing to help you. Yeah. I can't stress that enough. It's not embarrassing to say I'm struggling. It can feel like it, but it's really not. And when you're talking about kind of cross-functional teams and multiple moving parts, talk to people.

But I think the ultimate takeaway here is don't confuse your effort with being effective. Yeah. Just because you are working really hard on something, just because it looks like it's working for you doesn't mean that the result is spot on for everybody else. Yeah. And that example that I've set, that I've given hopefully will help people contextualize this is that even though in platform, my conversion numbers looked brilliant, the business was struggling for it because the the metrics weren't right for everybody. Weren't right for everybody else. Yeah, absolutely. And I think some a theme that has actually followed through from a few episodes already is, don't necessarily be lax when things look like they're going so well.

Even with with the great results that you see. Investigate that till you, you've reached all the numbers, till you've reached the fact that your performance is directly leading to good revenue. Because, we've experienced that in the past that even if things are going well, figure out why it's going well.

That's don't just sit back and be like, oh, okay, it's going. Actually figure out what's going well. 'cause you wanna then replicate that. But then if it's something, if you don't, if you don't investigate. It's so well, you might just replicate it and then get bad performance and then you're confused as to wait,

it ha it worked well the last time. Why is it not working well this time? It's because the last time actually you didn't investigate it hard enough and there was something that was going wrong. So yeah, even with good performance due diligence and knowing whether it's actually hitting the right revenue, I'd say is a good, yeah I love that.

Because it's, you can you go through the process and it's very easy to say That went wrong. Why did it go wrong? But one of the things that businesses sometimes, and it does still happen quite a lot, is they don't check in on what's gone and why it's gone well. They just gloss over it.

That's gone well. Okay. Brilliant. Let's focus on the stuff that we've not done so well. But ultimately you're playing, if something's gone you're play into your strengths. And if you can do more of that's where this. That's where the root to scale is, of course, fixing things that aren't going well.

But actually and this again, I can give people the the advice here. Hopefully if you think something's going well, raise it with the business. Investigate it like you've just said, but make a case for yourself because if you think something's going well, tell someone that it's going well.

And yeah, have a party for yourself. I think Pat yourself on the back. There's absolutely. If you're doing something well, the business should know about it. Yeah. That's how you get your promotions, that's how you win awards. That's how you like, you, yeah. You get the recognition that you deserve.

Yeah. Pushing, making sure that you can show that the good performance that's happening is because of something you've done now. That's fantastic. And also you said that you do things differently now, so what are the specific things that you'll say that you do differently because of this issue that happened specifically?

Yeah. Yeah, I mean there's two, two stages to it. One is before anything happens, and that is the at that point when the brief comes in, it's to really interrogate that brief, what problem am I being asked to, am I being asked to solve here? Is it the right problem, first of all?

Who are the key? People who are the key components of that problem we're trying to solve. And if I was to solve that problem, what impact is that gonna have on those key people? Yeah. Because if we're saying, for example, look, we're getting a hundred leads a month at the moment in a business, if we were to take that to 200 to 300 to 500.

What, what's gonna happen? Yeah. Can we cope with those? Yeah. Do we need to do further resource planning on that? Yeah. So yeah. First of all really interrogate the brief. Make sure you're solving the right problem. Understand the problem you're trying to solve, make sure it's the right problem, and make sure that there are, there is resource in the business to back that up.

And on the B2C side, if you were to start really shifting volume in a particular line of products, is there enough supply? Yeah, in the, on the backend to, to that that's the B2C equivalent of of kinda driving too many leads. If you're driving too many sales, then ultimately you might run out of a product and have a different problem within the business.

Secondly, when you are running a campaign or when you're running campaigns, it's try things. In a on a smaller scale. So if you are gonna fail, you fail small, you fail early, you fail loudly. Yeah. I think is the key. And share, if you've got, if you've got thoughts on something, share them before they're fully formed.

Before they're perfect. If you are making smaller bets on something before you're going all in yeah, then you are limiting the liability. You're gambling far less. Yeah. If you are reliant on one big campaign idea, if you're relying on one campaign doing well, that's more akin to gambling.

But if you are kinda doing a lot of small things on the move then I think you, you are you're setting yourself up for learning far smaller, far quicker. And you can scale. Because when you make a bold call, of course you. You're trying to drive growth, you're trying to you've spotted an opportunity, you're trying to move forward with it.

Doing that is not a mistake. It's never a mistake to try and do that. Sometimes you can implement it wrong. Sometimes you can you can get things wrong, but sometimes it's just up. We're doing the right thing. It's just at the wrong time. Yeah. But talking to people, talking to other people about that, you can get their thoughts on it and then they can put plans in that they need to put in for you to then go and do the thing that's gonna drive the scale.

Absolutely. I, that is brilliant. Do not be scared to test, but always be good in communicating along the way and what your ideas are, what you're trying to test. But yeah, really do not be scared to test. I think that was actually something that came on in our latest PPC Live event that happened just last Thursday about someone was asking, oh my God, with this new AI and with PMax and AI Max, how do we get the confidence to tell our clients that, we want to test and we, when everybody's saying it's bad results.

It's all about communicating and that you need to test stuff because nobody really went further in their career by just playing it safe and just doing the same things that they've been doing all over again. And with Google, those same things will, they'll just get rid of them. Like you can't do text ads the way they used to be done, like maybe 10 years ago at all.

Expanded text ads doesn't exist anymore. So if you're like, oh, I don't wanna test RSAs. Then you don't want to do paid search really. You don't even wanna be in the industry. So you've gotta be bold to go out and thank you Gareth, for giving us that nice template of how to go about doing it. It's just go out and do it and you'll be surprised at that result.

Thank you, Gary, for that fantastic story. I know it's always oh, it can be a little bit heartache to go back and look at some of that, some mistakes that you've made earlier in your career. So I'm really, we are really grateful that you shared that with us. Now, taking a different spotlight away from you and now to our industry.

You, I'm sure you've already. Experience or overseeing other people just making some mistakes that you're like, guys, this is avoidable. What's are your biggest pet peeves in terms of mistakes that you see some folks make? So I've, I've seen yes so many of these and to, to the point where it's water off a duck's back now that they happen and it's part of the course really when it comes to to paid media performance marketing.

But I think it, for me, and it's because I've been there and I've made these mistakes, it's just o often attention to detail. And that is things like set setting budgets correctly. Budget pacing is another one, particularly when you are working in an industry that is you're working for a company that, that has a budget that's very set.

It's laid down at the start of the financial year and that there's not really room to scale it. So it's, yeah, getting the budget pacing wrong spelling mistakes in ads the, use using the wrong campaign bid. Sorry. The bid models using the wrong bid models. Yes. Bid strategy.

Yeah. And I think it's also blindly following the recommendations that, that Google give. Oh, yeah. Google. Google comes at these. And I think some of them, if you think about it, they make sense, but they're not always right for the account that you're managing. Yeah. And it's very much being aware that Google is a revenue generated

machine. It's not just an operation, it's a machine. Yeah. And all of those recommendations, they are geared in some way to driving more revenue for Google. Yeah. That can work very well for a business fine. But it's very, it's being very aware that's the overall aim of Google Ads is to get more revenue for Google. Your revenue or your leads, your scale as a business

it's just a byproduct of that, and it's just make sure you're flipping those recommendations on their head and making sure that the first priority is that recommendation going to make me scale, not just drive more money for Google's Christmas party. Exactly. Go, Google's tools are there to make Google money.

You are a secondary priority for them. Like sometimes even tertiary. 'cause it's like they, they've got board members, they've got other of the other product partners that they wanna make money for. So yeah, you see a lot of people getting so annoyed oh, this doesn't work for me. Why Google, are you doing this?

Because it makes money for them. take a chill pill and just you, it's your job to decipher what will work for you and trash the stuff that wouldn't work for you. And that will be a lot of things. So just, yeah, everything is about being aware about it.

And we talked a bit about, I mentioned the whole like yeah, the AI chat that we had at the previous PPC Live when it does come to ai. What would you say are people's also biggest foley at the moment? People are getting AI wrong in the sense of the inputs that they're, they, it's the fundamentals, the inputs that they're giving it.

I think some of the, the AI campaign types, performance Maxs, early on with some of the, kind of the maximized conversions, bid models, the target CPA, the ROAS bid models, the early foray into more automated and now AI driven. Big models I think they've. It's the inputs you give it.

I think if you, there's the old saying shit in shit out. And I think if you are starting a campaign with, hopefully not, but if you're starting it with bad data, the wrong customers, the wrong audiences, if you are giving it the wrong, audience signals, if you are giving it the wrong kind of search term signals you're not, you're setting yourself up to fail straight away.

Yeah. But also I think it's around the structure of campaigns from a and I've used Performance Max more from the B2C side of things. And it moves over into shopping a little bit. There's the whole debate as to whether you should run Performance Max or whether you should just run traditional shopping.

I am a very, I am an advocate of running performance max shopping. Okay. Stat shopping campaigns still work. Yeah. But I'm, I am an advocate of Performance Max, but I think in terms of how you segment that. It's not just about segmenting it in the old ways you'd segment by the nav basically by the navigation on your website, product types, service types or whatever.

Now, I think it's much more about segmenting by product performance, and that is in terms of your high margin products, your low margin products, and then you can prioritize budget. You can prioritize structure based on what's actually gonna perform. And it gives you a lot more flexibility in the sense of you can move products around, you can move budgets around if you are

saying, look we've got this budget for this product line, this budget for this product line. It's then what happens if there are products within that product line that are outperforming others? What are, what happens if products are underperforming? How do you then segment those?

It's segmenting up based on performance. Yeah. But with that then, we could, I could talk for hours on this and I won't, but it then comes down to, okay, we are. We've got over performers. We've got under performers, but sometimes the product that actually drives the drives, the visit isn't the product that then that people then buy.

So there's then that comes into it. There's just, there's so many different rabbit holes you could go down. Yeah. But ultimately with the ai campaign types, the data that you put in is. The single for me, the single most important thing. Yeah. The second is the structure and how you prioritize that, and that's different per business.

It's different per product line. Yeah. But yeah, that that's the second most important thing. But also it's getting over this idea that it is just a black box. I think there, there is less information that we get outta some of the AI campaign types and I've recent, more recently started to experiment with ai.

With AI for search AI max. Yeah. Yeah. And that, it's been a slow start with some of those campaigns, but again, it's just experimenting, small budget and feeling, feeling the way into it. But it's don't be afraid of them. There, there's less information comes out of them.

It's getting better. But it still doesn't mean that you shouldn't experiment with them because it's almost going back to that point around all of the tools that, that Google give us they're all aimed at driving revenue for Google. And the, these campaign types are no different.

No. However, this is where Google is, this is where Google is moving. And you've almost gotta play the game a little bit. And you've gotta, you've gotta understand that, look, this is where it's going. So test and learn while it's, while you still can, while you've still got the other campaign types to fall back on.

Yeah. Test it with a small budget and move into it, because ultimately that's where we're going to be in the next few years. Absolutely. So do you think keywords is gonna die out altogether? From the perspective of us as account managers? I think. I think so. I think, keywords in terms of how people search, they're always gonna be there.

But in terms of the functionality that we have, yeah. I think 'cause the. It might not be keywords as in you type them. The people have been saying for the last, what, 15 years that it's the year of voice. And I think voice is becoming a lot more a lot more prevalent, a lot more prominent.

But I think people are generally gonna search via keywords or via sentences via natural language. Yeah. But in terms of the tools that we have available, keywords are probably gonna go away. Yeah. Do you have a, an exact timeline? You can, we can do a crystal ball of a year, two years.

Oh wow. Wow. I would say I'm gonna be very conservative here. Within the next five years, we won't have any any keywords or we'll have less keywords, but no. Potentially within the next three. Just looking at the speed of development on P max and AI for search and think AI for search and things like that.

I think yeah, just with it within the next few years, I think it's, it we're gonna see a even bigger change than what we've seen in the last few years. Okay, so next three to five years. So guys, save this episode, come back to Gareth in 2030. Is it? And we should have had a lot less keywords that we're working with.

2030. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, 25 years away. God, the way these kind of times fly. Oh, makes it scary. Gareth, this has been so wonderful. We've come to the end of this chat now, but just before we go, I like say asking people a very fun, non-technical question. If your career were a movie, your PPC career, your paid media or marketing career, were a movie, what would be the title?

So I saw this in the questions you sent over, and I've thought about this probably more than I should have done. But no I'm a big, I'm a big Lord of the Rings fan. And I think given kind of the theme of what we've talked about here and the real kind of passion I've got for actually sales, talking into marketing and operations and all the other departments.

I think it would have to be, and please, people don't hate me for this, don't unfriend me on LinkedIn and things, but I think The Fellowship of the Budget just making sure, look it's my budget in marketing, but it's also kind of sales budget. It's also it's a business budget. So yes The Fellowship of the Budget.

The Fellowship of the Budget. Look, I'm a Lord of the Rings fan, and I've always, I've gone to so many talks where they've referenced it and it makes sense and I love it. So yes, The Fellowship of the Budget, that is so fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us today, Gareth. Where can people find you if they wanna follow you, more people is gonna, are gonna follow you.

We're gonna send a load of rings, fans your way. Where can they find you? Please do. No, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. And yeah, maybe we can share the link if people do wanna, do, wanna come say hi on LinkedIn. I'm in the process of building, building out a blog, possibly a substack as well.

Okay. But I'll, yeah, stay tuned for news on those. Okay. Fantastic. Thank you so much for that, Gareth. And yeah. Bye. Thank you very much. Bye. 

  📍  📍 Thank you so much, Gareth, for sharing that very honest and transparent experience. So yeah, remember, don't work in silos. Make sure you understand not just your data, but what it's feeding into. Marketing team talk to the sales team. You might be sending so many great quality leads. You've cracked P max, you've cracked AI Max, you've cracked, using your, search ads and yeah, they're getting the

the types of customers that they want, but they are not actually having the capacity to convert all that fantastic traffic and leads that you're sending through, so that having that full funnel view of what you're sending is really important so that you don't. Waste your client's budget. So yeah please remember that. For more information about that

and yeah, the full transcript of that fantastic conversation with Gareth, you can go to podcast.ppc.live to, yeah, get the details, watch the video, listen to it however you want it, and share with your friends and rate of review, if you did enjoy that podcast episode, which that would be really appreciated. In regards to our PPC Live fantastic events,

our last event was went off without it. I was gonna say without a hitch. That is not true. There was a few hitches, but it did. It did. Go ahead. It was a great success. There was cake, there was pizza, there was drinks. Everybody enjoyed it. So yeah, we will definitely be coming again on October the 22nd.

That's October the 22nd, this time on a Wednesday because we want to give you guys a chance to experience going, coming to PPC Live, as well as going to brightonSEO the next day if you choose to. So yeah, please join us on October 22nd. Go to ppc.live for the information about it, although beforehand

there will be an online version of our PPC Live 17th, and that's happening on August the 14th. So yeah, I miss it. It's mistook that, so even before October, there's an August the 14th online version. Jyll Saskin Gales, who's one of our ambassadors is gonna be brilliantly leading the talks. And we are gonna be live streaming no, not quite live, but we're gonna be streaming the talks.

All three of the talks. And two of our speakers, especially Paul Salame and Ayisha Yousef, are gonna be joining for a live q and a. That one will definitely be live and not a pre-recording. So you'll be able to ask them questions and they'll be able to give you the answer for that. So yeah, go to ppc.live.

The details for that will be up by now by the time you're listening to this. So yeah, join us on August the 14th. But if you want an in-person experience, join us on October the 22nd for that as well. Before I leave you as well, I'm delighted to share that I am taking on. Coaching clients. So yeah, just a few clients a month and I'd love to, yeah, if you need help, I'd love to help you out in terms of building your confidence and taking a hold of your career.

So if you go to themarketinganu.com for that, you'll be able to get all the information about that. So yeah, I hope you've enjoyed the show and I look forward to bringing more PPC f-ups and Triumphs next week. Thank you. Bye.