EP333 - When Consent Mode Kills Conversions ft Nils Rooijmans

Anu Adegbola (00:08)
Hello and welcome to PPC Live the podcast. I'm your host 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're still 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 bringing up different PPC experts about their biggest f-up but also how they turn things around. We never leave things on the defeated notes.

And yeah, we'll be sharing what has been disappointing, who was the person that really helped us out, who discovered the error, because that's always like, you know, it can be a bit of a biggie. Today, I have the delight of interviewing ⁓ Nils Rooijmans who is a script expert. This is someone who has made his living pre-COVID of being able to work anywhere in the world because he knows how to automate his ⁓ paid media accounts and

just to do the, you know, all the checks that needs to be done on a daily basis so that, you there's not too much spend or too little spend or conversion track is not working or ad copy that should be, you know, paused, isn't still live. And, and, and so many more, so many of us have in the industry have been, you know, doing paid search management so much better. And paid search management has been so much easier for us because of the scripts that Nils have has created for the industry.

but yeah, as he says, as you'll hear him say, this level of success doesn't come without errors, without mistakes. And he's going to be sharing one of them. some of the oversights that he made in terms of, you know, onboarding a client and that how that led into, ⁓ an F up that led into, lost revenue possible, lost revenue and even lost budget. So yeah, let's go speak to Nils about that.

Anu Adegbola (01:58)
Hello Nils, welcome to PPC Live the podcast.

Nils (02:01)
Hey Anu, thanks for having me.

Anu Adegbola (02:03)
It is so my pleasure. It is so overdue. I feel like I will need to, you know, give you an apology of like how I did not ask you to be on this, on the show before now. Like, you know, was Nils that got into us. could say got into my DMs, got into my emails, going, Anu - podcast, when are you having me on? I was like, now, now, never, you know, no time like the presence. couldn't have, we couldn't have Nils on this podcast too soon. So I'm so delighted to have Nils joining us.

Nils, for those who have been living under a rock, and you don't know for some reason, because Nils is pretty much everywhere. He's a very enthusiastic search specialist who specializes in PPC automation and Google ad scripts. Sorry, sorry, no one specializes in scripts the way Nils does and he, so, you're so generous with, you know, the scripts you've created. A lot of people.

Follow it, a lot of people use it. especially in the, our PPC chat, our lovely PPC chat community, I know several people have gone, that Nils scripts, I need to use it. Or if someone has an issue, someone's always saying, have you checked out that Nils scripts? You know, that kind of thing. And we also even get that in the PPC live WhatsApp group. As recently as last week, someone was like, I need a script to do this. And someone was like, have you checked out the script by Nils? It happens so often and I'm so delighted that.

Nils is here to share firsthand his experience. And Nils continuously gets voted as a top 10 PPC influencer and he got voted on it for 2025. But yeah, he's very much here to make businesses grow by helping get clients at lower costs. He's also a speaker of several industry [conferences] So I'm glad that Nils is one of those where our meeting has not just been online. We have met in person. We have met on the

conference circuit, hung out just to share our ideas and how to do business growth. And yeah, as I mentioned earlier on if you want a list of fantastic scripts to go, go to his website. It's at nilsroman.com. That's N I L S R O O I J M A N S.com. And you'll get an, you'll be able to navigate to some of like Nils' best scripts. So.

⁓ I wanted to give a very fitting introduction, Nils, because you've done so much. But yeah, thank you. How does that sound? Do you feel like you've done a lot in this industry the way it sounds?

Nils (04:29)
Sounds great. Yeah, yeah, I made a lot of mistakes actually. That's why we're here. So, Yeah, so no need to apologize for not inviting me because I assume you thought that, you know, scripts wouldn't make any mistakes. And since I've automated everything there, but yeah, luckily, yeah, a lot of mistakes. I'm, you know, I'm also trying to share all these learnings from the mistakes through my newsletter so that the other PPC professionals don't make the same mistakes as I did.

Anu Adegbola (04:32)
Exactly. And that's

Right?

Great.

Nils (04:52)
So I actually love the idea of your show and the fact that the F-ups, I think it's a great idea. So yeah, let's share one.

Anu Adegbola (04:59)
Amazing. I'm so glad.

I'm so glad to hear that. And a very fun fact, Nils takes the digital nomad life very seriously. I think he's always saying that, the point of our job is the fact that all we need is a laptop and an internet connection. We don't really need to be tied down anywhere else. ⁓ So yeah, Nils is one of those that is always traveling, traveling some very interesting spots. I won't even be the one to say Nils, are you joining us from today?

Nils (05:26)
Today I'm on the island called Curacao, it's in the Caribbean. It's a Dutch island, part of the Dutch Kingdom. It's pretty close to Venezuela. So yeah, the is shining, 30 degrees Celsius, a light breeze.

Anu Adegbola (05:34)
Nice.

Amazing. was telling Nils earlier before we started recording and I'm so jealous, but I'm also happy that his background isn't like of the beach, of the palm trees, which it very could be. It so could be. I'll just be distracted. So thank you for choosing a very considerate background for this recording. I also find it very interesting that Nils lives on a boat. Lives on a boat. It's usually parked in in Amsterdam because that's where her home is.

Nils (06:00)
I

It is a houseboat, yeah. So the houseboat

basically it has a static location, so it's not that I move around. But yeah, it's on the canals in Amsterdam. I love it. I love Amsterdam during the springtime, the summertime, just not so much during the winter because yeah, the Dutch winter is on real winters anymore anyway. So it's mostly gray, rain, windy. So that's why I love traveling to this area, this part of the world.

Anu Adegbola (06:20)
Alright.

Nice. I'm sure a lot of people are going to be there. Some of the biggest questions would be, so how do I, am I able to get a job that allows me to travel and be able to be in a Caribbean country?

So let's get back to the get to the crux of our topic. I know it's been, it's been close to six minutes and thank you Nils for like direct tangent to me. I'm going, I know what we had to talk about. I get it. I love it because we are here to talk about F ups as Nils has already mentioned before. He's had his share of mistakes. We, we, we don't want to be, you know, I don't want to be part of an industry where it's only, I got

Nils (06:47)
No, No, this.

Anu Adegbola (07:03)
100K client today, got it, you know, a million pounds of revenues wins, wins, wins. you know, even as we said earlier on, Nils is noted as a top influencer, top PPC marketer in our field, despite all the errors. Errors does not block you from being, very good paid search marketer and someone who's going to always be, after your clients,

revenue and always trying to push your clients revenue further. We never leave things on a defeated note. So it's going to be not just about the effort, but how things got turned around so that you don't make the same mistake. So let's get straight into our topic now without further ado, Nils, what is the f-up you want to share with us today?

Nils (07:44)
Yeah, it's an interesting one. It's like roughly four months ago, an existing client of mine acquired a company. It's a client that is in the airport parking services, and it took over another company, which was already running a small Google Ads account. And my client, basically wanted us to manage the account of the new company as well. But they basically didn't want to pay extra money for it. So we were like, ⁓

Anu Adegbola (07:52)
Mm-hmm.

Nils (08:11)
sure if we can include it in our current agreement, but we'll see what we can do. So we took on the account, but basically decided to migrate it slowly to our existing setup for the account that was already running. So the new account, we sort of left it on its own and we didn't pay that much attention to it. The client agreed that we slowly migrated it to a new set. And then after six weeks, we certainly noticed that for some reason, the number of clicks went down dramatically.

And also conversions went down. We didn't know what was happening. So of course, we went into the account. We started looking at the data. And we noticed that a few days prior, conversions dropped to zero. What happened? The client didn't call us. in, there were still bookings, reservations for these parking spots were still being made. The website was doing fine. We tested conversion tracking with the Google Tag Manager in the preview.

tags were being fired, data was sent correctly to Google. We didn't understand what was happening. But Google reported zero conversions. And then I decided to have a look at all the emails Google was sending to the inbox of that Google Ads account. And there was an email stating that the consent management platform wasn't implemented correctly. And if we didn't take action, they would stop allowing conversion tracking for this domain. And that is actually what happened. ⁓

Anu Adegbola (09:25)
home

Nils (09:34)
We were very ignorant. We didn't read the emails from Google, and we were relatively slow in responding to the issue. So the end result was that because of conversions weren't being tracked anymore, Google's smart bidding algorithm thought, OK, I'm buying clicks. They're not converting. We're not meeting our target, so let's reduce the CPC bits, right? So slowly, the traffic has been decreasing. Conversions were still there. They just weren't being recorded. And so smart bidding just scaled down the compa-

Anu Adegbola (09:34)
Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Nils (10:03)
the campaigns to almost nothing. So yeah, was not good.

Anu Adegbola (10:05)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. So the biggest mistake there was like, you were getting comms from Google, but no one was paying attention to it. And I know we do get the whole, sometimes Google is bugging us too many times. Cause then it's usually, yeah. Spend more, spend more. need to do auto recommendation. And we tend to be like, okay, no, no, I know my client better. you know, leave me alone. So is that, was that kind of like the, you know, the trap you fell into that this was actually the one time you should have listened to Google.

Nils (10:31)
Exactly.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like us being very arrogant. Is it now it's Google again. Just ignore it. And to be honest, since we decided to slowly migrate it to the new setup, we didn't have many checks in place. So normally I would, you know, during, if I own more than new client, one of the first things I do is I, I install a lot of scripts or I make sure that my scripts monitor the account and then we migrate the accounts to a setup that fits with these processes that I've always had in place. but yeah, for this client, we didn't.

for this account. Yeah, so that was a thing that in hindsight, we should never allow the client to have us manage the account without doing a proper onboarding. ⁓ So that's basically the biggest mistake that we make, or the root cause of all this. ⁓ That's actually also one of the advice that I would give to the listeners is that first, of course, fix the issue if it shows up. But then I always like to do a root cause analysis, or

Anu Adegbola (11:18)
Right.

Yeah. Yeah.

Nils (11:34)
what happened and why it happened. And so during this root cause analysis, I always ask myself the why question five times. So why did the ad spend go down? Why did the number of clicks go down? Well, it was because there weren't any conversions and smart bidding decides to ⁓ place very low CPC bids. OK, so why weren't there any conversions? Well, that was because we didn't implement consent mode correctly. And why didn't we implement like that, right?

Anu Adegbola (11:35)
Mm-hmm.

Mm.

Nils (11:59)
Just ask five times, six times the why question, and then you will get to the root cause of things. And you can fix things on different levels. That's basically what we also did with this account.

Anu Adegbola (12:02)
Yeah.

Yeah, no. And why did you miss the email? Would you say like throwing a why back to you you don't mind? I'm not trying to be like, you said this, I say that. like, why did you was? Yeah. I think you, you, touched on it, but why, why did, why did the Google alert get missed?

Nils (12:16)
I know.

That's

Right, yeah, so that's the root cause, actually, because there were two factors involved. The first one is that since we didn't do proper onboarding, me and my team, we also didn't reown the account the way that we own the real client accounts that we manage. So there wasn't anyone responsible for actually checking the inbox for that account. And also, the other thing is pure arrogance in the sense that, OK, it's Google again.

Anu Adegbola (12:37)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Nils (12:54)
let's

not waste money on these emails from Google because most of the time they're just, know, we know what they are. But yeah, that is not good. yeah, lesson learned. Don't be arrogant, especially not when it comes to GDPR and consent mode and compliance because to be honest, also in hindsight, because I did see a lot of similar messages for other accounts ⁓ and Google really didn't take any action.

Anu Adegbola (12:59)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Mm.

Nils (13:19)
So we were expecting that Google would, you know, we were migrating the account slowly, like I mentioned. We thought, well, we'll have another three months. And then the website will be good. Our account setup will be like the way we want to manage the account. So that issue will be gone, because setting up consent mode is also part of the onboarding. ⁓ But yeah, Google really took action. I think the European Union decided that, you know, Google, you should start enforcing it now. And so they did.

Anu Adegbola (13:33)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So because other people might be getting away with something that, you know, you shouldn't be, they shouldn't be doing, or an update has rolled out and it's not quite being implemented on your account. Doesn't mean you shouldn't take the right action to ensure that, you know, all of a sudden your tracking is not going to be checked. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So let's go. Sorry. Go on. Go on. Go on. Before your next question.

Nils (14:08)
Right? Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. So, all.

Yeah, so that's

also another one because one of my standard scripts or one of my favorite scripts, of course, is monitoring conversion tracking because conversion tracking is so it's one of the most important things in Google Ads accounts these days because we're all running smart bidding and smart bidding. If conversion tracking is off, smart bidding goes haywire, right? So I always run a Google Ads script that monitors the conversions and the conversion value. And if there is a significant change in what is expected based on historical data,

Anu Adegbola (14:22)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm.

Nils (14:44)
I get alerts so that I know immediately if things are broken. Yeah, so that is also something that I would highly recommend to the listener. Monitor the conversions and the conversion tracking like a hawk.

Anu Adegbola (14:48)
Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Now let's bring this a little bit personal because I know you, I know you have a, you take a lot of pride in doing good work for your clients and, and, and making sure that you're doing things with integrity and you're, know, you're not cheating your client in any way and you're just standing by your word with clients.

So like that mistake must have, you know, knocked your confidence a bit, did it? How did you handle noticing that mistake and you going, can't believe you fell for that. How did it make you feel?

Nils (15:26)
⁓ I'm terrible with that. You're right. I really take pride in not making mistakes like these because yeah, especially since I love to check all for things like this with scripts. So it really hurts when this happens. So my first reaction is to basically just, I'm going, I'm just going to hide. But then of course, after a few minutes, like, no, I got to take action. I got to fix this as quickly as possible. yeah, luckily for me, I already had a very good relationship with the client.

Anu Adegbola (15:36)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Nils (15:53)
But well, no, this is actually also an interesting story because, so my primary contact at the client is the owner of the business. ⁓ So I I literally picked up the phone. I explained to him what was happening. Last two weeks, traffic has been relatively slow on the website. Bookings reservations were still being made, but he also noticed that there's a small decrease in the number. And I explained to him what happened. was like, ⁓ yeah.

Anu Adegbola (15:53)
it.

Mm.

Nils (16:17)
But we didn't spend as much. No, no. Also, the Google Aspend went down as well. So I said, OK. So he didn't really have an issue with that. But a few weeks later, when I was in a meeting with his partner, who was more like the CFO, the financial guy, ⁓ that person had a different reaction. was like, so there's x number of revenue being missed due to these mistakes, right?

Anu Adegbola (16:25)
Yeah.

Mm.

Right.

Nils (16:43)
and we hire you to not make these mistakes. So what are you going to do? I said, well, we already fixed this, la la la la la la. And then he was expecting us to also take responsibility for the financial hit. So he was expecting that we, without him asking, would reduce the number on our invoice. And that was an interesting discussion. In the end, I played along with his request. So I decreased the number on the invoice with a certain percentage.

Anu Adegbola (16:47)
Aye.

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay.

Nils (17:13)
But yeah, so that was also being aware that although you have a very good relation with your client, expectations can be ⁓ something that you really need to manage in situations like this.

Anu Adegbola (17:13)
Yeah.

Yeah, can shift.

Absolutely. Do you think that was the right call in terms of you giving them that money back? Did you actually lose their money? Because from the sounds of it and correct me if I'm wrong, it's what happened is that you guys didn't weren't able to track the revenue coming through. It's not that the revenue wasn't coming through, right? They were still getting bookings. So do you still feel like now thinking back and having more time? Cause I know in the, in the middle of like

Nils (17:47)
Correct. Yeah, so.

Anu Adegbola (17:55)
You know, you made a mistake. You just want to make the client happy. You want to do whatever they want, but now you've got time and maybe years after that mistake as far as would you still looking back? Would you still do that same thing in terms of how you resolved it?

Nils (18:09)
Yeah, well, that's basically two answers to that because do I think that he is right in expecting us to manage the account the way that we have been managing the accounts that were on boarded through our process and that they were actually paying the full amount for our service? That my answer would be no, as in because when we took on this new account,

Anu Adegbola (18:32)
Mm.

Nils (18:33)
the client and I, we agreed that it's gonna be a slow process, you know, because they didn't really wanna pay for the new setup and the onboarding the way they paid for the prior account, for the other account. So in that respect, no. But on the other end, it's like, I've learned over the years that, you from professional perspective, it's better just to own the mistake and say, okay, you know, it's a small F up. ⁓ I take full responsibility. I'm gonna fix whatever I can fix and then just move on. So, yeah.

Anu Adegbola (18:37)
Yep.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Understandable. and that also even just leads to a better. do. Is that client still a client of yours or did, was, was there any? Yeah, exactly. So yeah, still having a good relationship with our clients, still making them get money, which is really great. If someone is has, sorry, go on. Yeah.

Nils (19:10)
Luckily, yes, yes.

Right. ⁓

Yes, another interesting thing, because I always try to fix things at different levels, right? Like I mentioned, first fix the issue at hand. So we needed to increase the number of clicks again so that new reservations would come through. So we switched off smart bidding. So on manual CPC, the campaigns were spanning again. And although we couldn't track the conversions, of course, they were still converting. So based on the back end data, we noticed that the quality of traffic was good.

The click still converted, so all was good again. So problem fixed, as in the main issue for the client. But then, of course, we need the conversion data in our Google Ads account. So we tried to fix the conversion tracking by fixing the consent management platform. Didn't work. So I picked up the phone called Google Support. And then they gave us the runaround with the way it works.

Anu Adegbola (19:49)
Yeah. Yeah.

Mmm.

Nils (20:11)
⁓ seven different Google reps, ⁓ technical support, the tag management support, the compliance. Google couldn't help us. And then I figure out that it's maybe a bit too technical for this session, but really sure what is happening. Conversion tracking tags are being fired. There is an HTTP request that goes to Google. And inside the URL of that HTTP request, there is the domain name of the website where you're sending the traffic.

Anu Adegbola (20:11)
Hmm.

Hey.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Nils (20:39)
Normally, that HTTP request would return an HTTP 200 response, meaning all good. But only for this specific domain name, it would return an HTTP 400, meaning that the request wasn't processed on the server side. And if we changed the domain name just by one single character, again, an HTTP 200 response would be returned. So on the Google side, they basically flagged the domain name as in all the

Anu Adegbola (20:45)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Nils (21:07)
HTTP requests for this domain name for conversion tracking. Just don't process them. So again, we got in touch with Google support. We explained the situation with video, screenshot. ⁓ No help there. conclusion, Google has conversion tracking. We couldn't use it anymore. So the way to work around that is to either use imported conversions from Google Analytics, GA4, or to

Anu Adegbola (21:10)
Alright.

Yeah

Wow.

Nils (21:31)
to set up a new conversion tracking from your manager account and track conversions through there. So that is the technical solution for this specific issue. But don't expect any help from Google.

Anu Adegbola (21:34)
Mm.

right yeah i mean

⁓ so that's a that's a clip that is a social media clip to give to to put on all our socials i'm like the fix of getting around google you know google ads yeah we know that that mistake was yours at the beginning but now you're trying to get on the fix on it and google are not being helpful how do you get around that so yeah thank you for that fantastic lesson that that that people should definitely have in their back pocket because you never know when you're just gonna

Nils (21:47)
Ha ha ha ha ha.

Anu Adegbola (22:05)
have an issue that Google is just going to be a bit, you know, quiet with you on. So yeah, thank you so much for that. so if someone has just found this kind of mistake, ⁓ as well, and you know, realize that, yeah, they've been ignoring Google for a while, maybe for a while it was for good reason, but yeah, that one of those emails, you know, was actually some important information about an update they should have made. And you know, now they're like, panicked. What's your advice to them as someone who has gone through

that experience. What's your advice?

Nils (22:35)
Yeah, so first take a deep breath and then try to fix it as quickly as possible. make sure that you start spending again if smart billing has been scaling down. ⁓ Like I mentioned, just switch to manual bid for a while. Fix the conversion tracking. And in the process, be sure to always stay, get in touch with the client first, explain the situation, make sure that the client is aligned. ⁓ Then fix it. And once everything is up and running,

Anu Adegbola (22:46)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Nils (23:02)
Perform the root cause analysis, ask yourself, why did this happen? Ask it five, six times. Why did that happen? OK, so why did that happen? And then once you have the root cause, I like to write down a post-mortem, something from the software development world, where if software gets broken, the good developers, always write a post-mortem explaining what has happened, what they've learned from it, and they share it with the team. ⁓ And I like to write it even for myself so that in the future,

Anu Adegbola (23:05)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Nils (23:28)
I can always go back to it, which helps me stay on track by fixing similar things. And also sometimes it makes up for a good story, right? So yeah, there you go.

Anu Adegbola (23:31)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Or podcast episode. Yeah. ⁓

It really does. No, thank you so much, Nils. and you, you, you said, feel like, you know, this next question I'm about to ask, you've kind of mentioned the answer to it in, some ways, but in one specific way is, you know, in one, this specific, ⁓ answer you're going to give us, is there now like a process or something you now do different that was based off that particular story? I know you said, you know, you do a post-mortem, but that's for.

different kind of mistakes, but from this particular mistake that you made, what's something that you now definitely do differently?

Nils (24:14)
Yeah, so the root cause here was that we allowed to start managing, we allowed taking responsibility for this account without doing proper onboarding and a proper ⁓ audit and yeah, migration to our preferred way to, preferred setup for managing account like this. I shouldn't have, I shouldn't have one of that. So that kind of deal is out for the future.

Anu Adegbola (24:21)
Mm-hmm. Mm.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. Make sure that the on-board approaches and all the whys are taking place and you know exactly what needs to be done from the get-go. So what's one thing? after this question, we're going to go to talking about other people's mistakes. But before we go to that part of the conversation, what's one thing you want to now just leave people with in terms of that story, what they really should take out from that story?

Nils (25:00)
Yeah, so I think next to what I just mentioned, conversion tracking, track your conversion tracking. That is basically the thing. Because the importance is only going to get bigger in the future. It's really important that that stuff is working.

Anu Adegbola (25:11)
Yeah.

Absolutely. Conversion tracking incredibly important. All right. Let's now take the limelight away from, from you. Thank you so much for sharing that personal story. Um, but like mistakes that maybe you have seen when, you know, a new client comes on and you know, you're doing an audit. You've, I'm sure you've done loads of audits in your times of like, yeah, I've got my new client account. What's one big mistake that you see, or maybe even some things that people

you share on their LinkedIn and people always like to share like the stuff that they're doing in terms of like their automation or AI. What's a big mistake that you see that people are still making in 2025 that really shocks you that, you you feel that we should, we should stop doing this.

Nils (26:00)
yeah, there's so many. Right, right, right, right, right. Well, today, we're actually recording this. It's Black Friday today. ⁓ It is, yes. So people are going crazy. But one of the things that can go wrong during Black Friday, and I've seen go wrong many times in past years, is that on Black Friday, Google will try to spend a lot of money because ⁓

Anu Adegbola (26:01)
I should have several, but like maybe cut it out to one or two. ⁓

It is. is. Everybody. Yeah, we recorded this on Black Friday.

Yeah.

Nils (26:25)
There are a lot of people searching for mostly products, let's just say e-com. And then the campaigns are limited by budget. So you're missing out on an opportunity. So even though they have this over delivery thing, so let's say you have a daily budget of $1,000, Google is allowed to spend twice that amount on a single day. But it's Black Friday. People go crazy. And if you have good offers and you, for some reason, you're bidding high, then you might.

Anu Adegbola (26:29)
Yes.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah

Nils (26:54)
be spending five times as much. So again, I use scripts for that. yeah, so to prevent that mistake, be sure to monitor the spend during days like this. if the spend is at, let's say, 80 % of 90 % of your daily budget, you want to be in the know so that you can decide whether or not you want to increase the spend. So having a limited budget on days like Black Friday is a mistake.

Anu Adegbola (26:56)
Yeah.

Yeah, no.

Yeah.

Nils (27:20)
Another

one would be, this is actually also related to conversion tracking. This is a few years ago. A few years ago, I onboarded a new client. And during the initial quick scan, I always like to do a quick scan in the account first, I noticed that the freelancer that had been running that account had set up conversion tracking, both imported from Google Analytics and Google Ads conversion tracking. And these were both set to primary.

Anu Adegbola (27:43)
Mmm.

⁓

Nils (27:47)
meaning that the reported results were roughly 100 % above what is actually happening because every conversion was double counted, right? So when I noticed that, was telling the client, OK, are you sure you're generating this return on your ad spend? I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I can see it in the reports. I was like, OK, but this number is inflated. It's like they're counting every conversion twice. So that was an easy win for me. in, yes, yeah.

Anu Adegbola (27:54)
Yeah, double.

Yeah.

Right? Exactly. Exactly.

Nils (28:17)
But

Anu Adegbola (28:17)
God.

Nils (28:18)
yeah, that also was an interesting mistake.

Anu Adegbola (28:22)
Yeah. I mean, as much as even an easy win, I feel like it's a bit of annoying when, you know, a previous agency or previous consultant was doing that because for a while then it's like, okay. So that means, you know, when you fix that all of a sudden it's counting half the conversions that they used to. Did it take a while? Does it take a while for the claims to be like, are you sure it shouldn't be higher? Because yeah. How do you, how do you even. Yeah.

Nils (28:45)
Yes, you're absolutely right. You're absolutely

right. But then luckily, I always say, but look at the numbers in your own back office.

Anu Adegbola (28:53)
Yeah. Yeah, it's annoying.

Nils (28:55)
So in the end,

it all worked out. But you're right. It takes a while before the client is really convinced. Because the client, of course, he didn't know anything about online marketing. He didn't know anything about Google Ads. He was just like, OK, this is the numbers that I get. Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (29:03)
No. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

No, amazing.

Also like, yeah, that's really great two examples that you're giving us, two great lessons that people should look out for. I know like, yeah, we're recording on Black Friday. To my time, this is released, Black Friday would have gone, but we're still gonna be in like peak shopping for Christmas gifts also season. So those mistakes can still very much happen and with loads of people.

you know, going on there searching for Christmas that you're counting those conversions properly. And also, yeah, your budget management is on point. Cause yeah, I know that update came ages ago and we,

throw a whole fit about it when it first came out. feel people have kind of gotten over it, but you know, it doesn't mean that you shouldn't be, keep an eye on what Google can do. And especially during peak shopping seasons that way Google can spend, can just go crazy. Before we wrap up, I also like just talking about the theme of this podcast, about talking about mistakes and the importance of it. And also being,

you know, the kind of person you manage like international team and maybe you've got team members who might be a bit afraid to make mistakes, but you know, it's really nice. I'm sure I hope they all listen to this episode so that they don't feel so scared because mistakes happen. In fact, the best of us get to this, our, our, ⁓ our level of success because of the mistakes that we've happened and we've learned that have happened that we've learned from.

Why is it important that we do share the stories of our mistakes? And why is it important for managers to instill that confidence of like, don't be scared of making a mistake. When a mistake happens, this is the process you should go to. Why is that? It's important to have that communicated with people you manage.

Nils (31:03)
Yeah, yeah, good question. We learn through mistakes, And that's part of the process. So we should anticipate for it as well. I run a remote PPC agency with part-time contractors that help me manage my account. And the way I anticipate mistakes by my team and myself is that, first of all, the scripts, they monitor the work. But then I always like to have a second pair of eyes that is capable of judging the work of the others.

Anu Adegbola (31:23)
Yeah.

Nils (31:30)
We basically look at each other's work and see if any mistakes have been made. And if a mistake has been made, then the other person can fix it and explain how to fix it to the person that made the mistake. Another thing that I would say is that I like to encourage a culture of the fail fast, fix fast motto. So just be experimenting, be testing. Just make sure that know, have an

have sort of like a scientific hypothesis before you start testing things. So what is the result you are expecting? How would you monitor that result? And how would you act if that result didn't play out? And if you have that in place and you anticipate for both the positive and the negative outcomes, then failure is actually a very, very good thing because you learn a lot from it. yeah.

Anu Adegbola (31:55)
yes. yeah. yeah.

Yeah.

Absolutely. love that. That phrase you just said earlier on fail fast, fix fast. That's it. That is the key.

Nils (32:18)
PhilFast, FixFast. not, yeah,

yeah. I think it was a design company that came up with that. It's not my own, but yeah, PhilFast, FixFast.

Anu Adegbola (32:23)
Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a branding

company. Now, of course that didn't, but yeah, no, I love it. I love it. I'll see if can, we can track down the branding company that did it. Cause yeah, that's really a great phrase for everyone in advertising, whether you're everyone in marketing, we're always testing something. Something could just come out of the blue of, you've done this a million or one times before. And then just this one time, something just puts a span in the work and you know, a whole mistake. It makes a whole mistake out of it.

And there'll be good reason again, put your scientific, you know, hypothesis as to what you're trying to achieve. If you just did something without thinking about it, that's actually the biggest mistake. That's unforgivable mistake. If you're like, you don't know why you were doing that. You don't know what you were trying to figure out. If it's clear that you had a pathway of what you were trying to figure out, what your hypothesis is, even if it ends up being a mistake and something fails and money is lost, you know, you have a path, you have a path to correction as long as you have a path to correction,

It's, it's always a learning curve that is worth going on for sure. I Did you agree? Yeah.

Nils (33:25)
Yeah,

100 % is in. Our world is changing constantly, especially these days with the development of AI. The Google platform is changing continuously. New features like AI Max, just don't turn it on. Start thinking about, OK, why would this be interesting to test in this account? Don't just turn it on. We should always be testing, but yeah.

Anu Adegbola (33:32)
Yeah, every week.

Yeah

Yeah. Yeah.

always be testing. ABT, that's the that's the acronym for for google ads. ABT, always be testing. That has been said, that one definitely has been said several times over. but yeah it's a good one to always remember. Nils, this has been a fantastic talk, so filled with so many learnings. my brain is at for like the personal social media. Which one am I going to take? I'm not even sure. I'm gonna there's just so much knowledge that you've thrown at us today. Really grateful.

great technical knowledge, this is what we need. And we're so excited for you to do more of that on the 5th of February when you're joining us live for PPC live, our first event of the year. So excited. Yeah. I'm sorry. It's probably not going to be as hot as in the Caribbean. So soak up as much sun as possible and bring some sunshine to us when you come in February. We'll be looking forward to that. We really will. But before we leave our last question to round up this fantastic conversation.

Nils (34:36)
I will. I will.

Anu Adegbola (34:44)
Nails, if your career were, if your PPC career were a movie, what would the title be?

Nils (34:50)
Ah, yes, yes. I saw the question already. So if it's OK with you, I'd like to make it a book, the title of a book. You already mentioned I love traveling. I love PPC because it allows me to work from anywhere, anytime I want. I basically, the reason that I succeeded in doing that has a big, big part to do with a person that I met back in 2002, 2004, sorry.

Anu Adegbola (34:54)
Sure!

Okay.

Nils (35:16)
It was in San Diego. I was at a O'Reilly e-tech event and then there was this guy on stage talking about how he used websites to sell supplement. It sounded sort of like a get rich quick scheme. to be honest, I didn't really take it that serious. But then I met this guy later that same day in the gym and he was exercising like a robot. I was like, what is he doing? And he was logging everything in his book. I got into a chat with him. That guy was Tim Ferriss.

Anu Adegbola (35:30)
Yeah, yeah.

Nils (35:45)
And Tim Ferriss, he published a book, I'm sure many of you know the title, it's called The Four Hour Workweek, where he basically explains how he created this business that allowed him to live a lifestyle where he only needed to work for four hours, give and take, and make more than enough money to facilitate that lifestyle. And I was really inspired by his story, also because around at that time, I was in a transition from being employed to becoming an entrepreneur. ⁓

Anu Adegbola (35:45)
Okay.

For hours. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Nils (36:14)
And I basically decided to read the book and take on a lot of his lessons. based on that, I sort of like created this lifestyle business that my current agency is. It allows me to spend a lot of time.

Anu Adegbola (36:19)
Yeah.

Nils (36:28)
Yeah, doing the things I love next to next to PPC, of course. So that was good. So so I would say the title would be The 10 Hour PPC Week.

Anu Adegbola (36:30)
Your love. Yeah, absolutely.

There we go. There we go. The 10 hour PPC week is going to be at your title. That sounds amazing. I'm sure you're going to be getting loads of people in your DMS now going like, Oh my God, Nils help me get on that 10 hour week. I want to do that as well. And yeah, I've not, I've not managed to cause I know we've talked about it and you, you know, I was almost on that pathway as well, but

I don't know why I like being busy. It doesn't make sense. You know, now you have the events. It's very hard to automate doing events and doing them in person. yeah, yeah, I have a lot of fun doing it for sure. I like meeting our paid search experts who I've talked to online for so long in person and just see the passion they have for the industry and how they talk about. ⁓

Nils (37:08)
yes, that's a tough one. But events are much more fun.

Anu Adegbola (37:29)
are they annoyed with Google or how they're, you know, happy that something worked and speaking to someone, my God, yes, I can do that. yeah, just being in the same room with other people that share your frustration, I think is like no other, you're gonna see that. And you do that, you show up to so many of these events. So yeah, you know what it's like to be in these rooms, which is fantastic as well. So we've come to the end of this. I know you and I could speak for like,

Nils (37:49)
Yeah, it's a lot of

Anu Adegbola (37:55)
even hours on ends about so many different things. So I will do that on the fifth. So, but like just before you leave us, where can people find you, know, sharing many more of your fantastic tips on how to do, how to have like efficient paid search account.

Nils (38:10)
Right, yeah, so I send out daily newsletters. So my newsletter would be the best way to learn from my mistakes. You can find it on my website, which is my name, nilsrooijmans.com, or just simple Google search for Nils and Google ad scripts, and you will find me.

Anu Adegbola (38:16)
Right.

Yeah. Yeah. Yes, you will. Yes, you will. So thank you so much, Nils. It's been such a pleasure to ⁓ have you on our podcast. And yeah, if you guys have not heard me say this a million times already, Nils is going to be with us on the 5th of February. So if you want to have some follow up questions to ask him, or you can ask them to him in person on the 5th of February. So go to ppc.live to get your tickets for those who are on early bird ticket sales right now.

Nils (38:32)
Thank you.

Anu Adegbola (38:53)
That will end really quickly. make sure you get there soon. Anyway, without further ado, thank you so much, Nils. Bye, speak to you soon.

Nils (39:00)
Cheers, bye.

Anu Adegbola (39:04)
Thank you so much, Nils, for that fantastic and honest review of that experience that you had that just shows us that even the best of us, even the script masters amongst us do make mistakes. And yeah, remember, when you get those emails from Google, I know our instinct is just ignore them. I sometimes will even advise. Yeah, ignore Google's advice. But if it's a subject line that keeps repeating about an update that will...

prevent your client's accounts, you know, conversion tracking from stopping to work or will help, that will, that will help you keep up to date with some new changes that Google is about to make. Yeah. Make sure you pay attention to that so that you obey the rules and you ensure that your client's account doesn't get shut down. so yeah, don't, don't listen to everything that Google says, but every once in a while, yeah, do check those, those emails that enter your inbox.

For all the information and the full transcript, yeah, go to podcast.ppc.live to get the full show notes, the full details of everything we discussed and you know, resources that Nils actually even shared on the podcast as well. In regards to our PPC live events, I am so delighted to share that yeah, Nils, as I've already said several times on the recording, Nils is going to be joining us on the 5th of February to talk about his favorite.

Ecom scripts that he has created and shared with the industry and how to implement them. And he's also going to be joined by the fantastic co-founder of House of Performance, Kat Sale, who's going to be talking about, loving your job, loving your work in paid search and still keeping on growing as, despite all the AI revolution stuff that keeps on going on. And he's also going to be joined by Dave Alexander, who is from award winning impression, who's going to be talking about ensuring that you're getting those correct leads.

and how sometimes bad leads is not always a bad thing. I believe that's going to be the topic, but yeah, go to ppc.live to get all the details, the full details of all those talks and yeah, to get your tickets. Early bird's bird sale is on. That's going to end on December the 22nd. That's been an automatic, you know, feature that I have set in. there's no, there's no, once it's gone, December 22nd goes, that's it for price tickets, but that will still only be.

£49 so isn't really that bad. So hopefully we'll still be getting ticket sales coming in before and after that date. So yeah, go to PPC.live to get as a cheap ticket that you can afford. yeah, before I leave you as well, I've got, I'm delighted to share that I am doing coaching. I'm taking on coaching clients for people who just feel stuck in their career, feel stuck in their jobs.

and just don't know how to get ahead or trying to get a salary increase. And you just don't know how to come across that conversation. That is something I secured for myself as recently as this year during a time where were redundancies were being made. So yeah, I know how to get you through that hurdle. So get in touch with me, go to themarketinganu.com to get your personalized plan, how to ensure that you're getting ahead in the industry. I hope you have enjoyed this show this week and I look forward to bringing.

More PPC F-UPS and Triumphs next week. Thank you. Bye.