EP335 - The PPC Restructure That Tanked Performance ft Nadia Mursal

Anu Adegbola (00:10)
Hello and welcome to PPC Live the podcast. I'm your host Anu and I'm the founder of PPC Live. Like I almost forgot who I am there. If you are used to hearing from PPC experts about how to ensure that we are keeping up with the ever changing landscape, because it's changing so much. Don't worry, you are still in the right place. But instead of me relaying what the PPC experts are saying, I'm bringing the PPC experts to you. Every week I'm speaking to a different PPC expert.

We're talking not just like, you know, PPC manager or just, or an account director as much as those roles are vital. We're talking like heads of departments and heads of agencies, speaking to them about their biggest f-up but also how they turn things around and how we share how those mistakes did not hold them back from being a success. We share what has been disappointing, what was surprising and just really how they turn things around and what they learned from it and how they do things differently now so that you don't have to make the same mistake.

This week I speak to the fantastic Nadia Mursal of, ⁓ iff digital, she's based up in Leeds also an ambassador of PPC live, a speaker of PPC live, a great supporter of what we do here. So no better person I could think of to share her experience. And, she really does share much more than we even asked for. so yeah, great story about how to really get back on track with an issue of doing a process that is just.

you know, everybody's got every account manager or every account, exec is going to do at some point in the career, what could really go wrong, what to look out for. And, ⁓ some advice for managers as to how to really help juniors not feel so scared if they're about to make a mistake. so yeah, let's go speak to Nadia.

Anu Adegbola (01:52)
Hello Nadia, welcome to PPC Live the podcast. I'm very well, thank you. And I'm so delighted to have you on. yeah, it's also one of those, I really think my audience is now ready for the fact of hearing that I literally asked my guests whether they could be on the podcast the day before. And then they said, yes. And they were like, okay, great, we're ready. I think I even put it for a calendar for Monday and Nadia had to be like, no, I knew that, no wrong day, we can do earlier than that. I was like,

Nadia Mursal (01:55)
Hi Anu, how are you?

you

Anu Adegbola (02:19)
I was at a Christmas event when I was sending you the invite. That was not the time to do that, right? Of course you're going to get all the details wrong. So thank you so much for being wiser than me in terms of the organization skills. So that's amazing. Some of you might know Nadia already. Nadia is part of our PPC live community. She's actually one of our ambassadors. And when we were really trying to get PPC live to be a thing in Leeds.

Nadia Mursal (02:21)
Okay, perfect.

you

Anu Adegbola (02:47)
Honestly, Nadia, you and Scott, you guys were the backbone of like, you know, honestly trying to get me to you and my ears on the ground, feet on the ground, really getting those in place. So unfortunately guys in Leeds, I'm sorry, we weren't able to do one this year, but we might come back for that. And if it's going to happen again, you'll have Nadia to thank. If we can make another Leeds event happen. Without further ado, Nadia has got a fantastic

Nadia Mursal (03:05)
That's Jim.

you

Anu Adegbola (03:13)
journey in the digital marketing world. She's got skills that varies across different channels, whether it's PPC, programmatic, SEO and social. And she's also developed a knowledge around the traditional marketing channels, such as TV, radio and press, and has managed clients across numerous verticals, B2B, B2C, and with a range of budget levels as well. She's got a great ability to develop, implement and deliver strategy.

and has enabled clients to have a 60 % year on year increase in revenue. Now that's definitely claimed fame in terms of our industry here for sure. Yeah, and so it's all about, you know, this, world understanding requirements, business targeting, and that provides, you know, further opportunity within her role to develop like, you know, new businesses and consultative roles.

⁓ I like that she says that she's a firm believer that working in an industry that changes every second of every day. Absolutely. As someone who writes regularly, I'm literally like, how are they like that has their new update that Google is coming out with. We're still trying to settle in in the one that was announced last week. So yeah, she's keeping on top, keeping her finger on the pulse of something she loves doing, updating clients and adjusting not only the offering, but also the delivery method because she is a co-founder of her agency.

Nadia Mursal (04:23)
Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (04:35)
digital and that's IFF, not just IF, right? Yeah, IF Digital often leads. I had a very lovely time discussing her fun fact. She started from a law degree, much to the dismay of her parents, but she decided not to go down that path and decided to try out running a nightclub, which is very interesting up in Newcastle and then...

Nadia Mursal (04:39)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (04:58)
Yeah, now she's running an agency in digital marketing. So yeah, Nodia, tell us a little bit about that why there were so many switches and turns in your career.

Nadia Mursal (05:08)
I think I never actually felt settled in something. I get bored quite easily, so I like challenges. And so this industry definitely fulfills that. You can't get bored. As you mentioned, changes every day. What does that mean? How do we change? So it definitely keeps me on my toes. yeah, just, also, I love numbers. I know it sounds really geeky, but I get to

Anu Adegbola (05:12)
Mm.

Yeah. No.

Nadia Mursal (05:32)
deal with data on daily basis and it helps me, you know, plan strategy and understand exactly what's going on. So it just all, it always keeps me intrigued. So I'm just always hungry to find out more, which, you know, keeps me interested and keeps driving me forward. yeah, I think that's kind of it. Why I love this, this kind of industry that we're in.

Anu Adegbola (05:34)
Yeah.

Nice.

Yeah.

Amazing. Awesome.

Absolutely. Do you use your law degree in any other like creative ways, even as someone in digital marketing?

Nadia Mursal (06:03)
⁓

usually for family, not that they're bad, just contracts, just like contract stuff, but generally no, don't use it on a regular basis. Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (06:07)
Okay. Yeah. You're saying you're right. Yeah. No, not really. Not all interesting. Anyway,

no, again, Nadia, thank you so much. We were also having a very great conversation pre this about the importance of talking about mistakes, the importance of managers and your teams. as our listeners will know now, we definitely spend time.

on that, you know, after you share your story about why managers shouldn't, you should not encourage people to make mistakes, but you know, at least help them to approach mistakes as in, in a not, you know, it's not a fatal situation that will happen, you know, when you make mistakes. So I'm really grateful that, yeah, you're joining us today to help us discuss, you know, what one of the mistakes that you made so that our audience can really learn from it and know how to approach.

Nadia Mursal (06:47)
Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (07:00)
these kind of situation, in their career, whether it's something that they've done a million times before, or they're just starting out. It's always great to get someone else's perspective as to even what could go wrong when they want to do this thing again. So yeah, I'm really excited for the story that you have to share with our audience today. So I'm gonna, yeah, leave it to you now. So Nadia, what F-up would you like to share with us today?

Nadia Mursal (07:21)
No, thank you so much. So I think it was really interesting when you gave me this subject and in digital marketing, from my point of view, you're allowed to make mistakes. That's what you learn from. But the biggest learning curve I had was when I had a client and their account structure wasn't really up to scratch. It wasn't really getting the performance. But at that time, I've been in this industry a while.

Anu Adegbola (07:40)
Mmm.

Nadia Mursal (07:45)
It was, it was given the opinion that we should be separating out match types and they had all match types in one. So I was like, I'm going to restructure this account. This is what we're going to do and it's going to make it work. And I was very confident with that decision. because thinking it through, it made sense. I'm listening to obviously, you know, best practice and Google. made sense. So.

Anu Adegbola (08:07)
Yep.

Nadia Mursal (08:09)
You start by going, right, I'm going to restructure. Here's the campaign. This is what I'm going to build them out to, laid it out in an Excel, started doing it. Now what happened, and I think this is the biggest bit that is the mistake, when I started rolling it out, I did the best performing campaigns. I rolled that out first. So I changed the structure of those first. Now what happened was the performance of the full account then just tanked.

Anu Adegbola (08:28)
Mmm.

Nadia Mursal (08:37)
like just went down. And so I'm like, ⁓ okay, it's going to go into learning. We all know it goes into learning for a couple of days. We'll let it learn. It'll come back up. Just tell them, yeah, don't worry about it. We've noticed it. Don't worry about it. Didn't come back up. It was, and I was like, okay, I need to do something about this because if I leave it much longer, the whole month is going to completely miss its target.

Anu Adegbola (08:43)
Mmm.

Yeah.

Yeah,

yeah.

Nadia Mursal (09:05)
So

to that, I just then reverted the campaigns to what they were, hoping that they would pick back up and went, okay, I need to go back to the drawing board and understand what went wrong because I'm doing what Google's told me to do and it's not working. ⁓ And the bottom line is, is really,

Anu Adegbola (09:12)
Yeah.

Mm.

Mm. Mm-hmm.

Nadia Mursal (09:25)
you launch with the not so well performing. They perform, but they're not the best performing campaigns first and understand what it is that you need to adjust to get those to work better.

Anu Adegbola (09:31)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Nadia Mursal (09:37)
And then once your learning comes in, you can then roll out, start rolling out the other campaigns until you've got all the learnings. But also the performance picks up with the lower performing campaigns because you've now put this new structure in place. So much so that now if you turn, if you are adjusting the best performing campaigns, the impact of the overall count isn't affected as much.

Anu Adegbola (09:43)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay. Yeah.

Nadia Mursal (10:03)
So before

your top performing campaigns tanked and your campaigns that weren't performing didn't perform. But now your lower performing campaigns are working. And so if you change the top performing, even if they're down a couple of days, three or four days, it's okay because those, you've got the other campaigns working. So the impact on the full account isn't as much. And so then you roll the rest of them out. Don't get me wrong. I felt panicked.

Anu Adegbola (10:09)
Mm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Nadia Mursal (10:29)
very guilty. I don't know, a loss of confidence when you see that this that you've put in the account has gone so wrong and you're like, I promised the client so much and trust me, it's gonna work. It's a new thing. We have to do it. And they put all their trust in me and I ruined it. But it's a learning curve.

Anu Adegbola (10:30)
Mmmhmm.

Yeah.

Yeah...

How

was the client like, because it sounds like you yourself more of a bollocking than the client probably did, for the sound of it.

Nadia Mursal (11:01)
Well, it's really

interesting actually. So within the agency, it was a lot of blame and pointing fingers and, you know, made you feel a lot worse, made you feel worse about what you've done. The client on the other hand was so understanding. It's like, well...

Anu Adegbola (11:19)
wow.

Nadia Mursal (11:21)
you know, these things happen, you've reverted it, it's fine, we've learned from it, we can move on. Which also a big lesson from that is if you have the right relationship with your clients and they understand the work that you do, you have that feedback when you mess up. It's not someone screaming down the phone and, you know, pointing their fingers and blaming you from the client's point of view because they fully understand the aspect of what you were trying to do.

Anu Adegbola (11:36)
Yeah.

Hmm.

Yeah. Yeah.

Nadia Mursal (11:47)
So,

I mean, looking back now, thinking the persons who money I was spending was supportive and understanding, and the people that were supposed to be supportive and understanding were completely blaming you and making you feel worse for the mistake you made. But it is just that it's a mistake. You didn't intentionally want to completely ruin that performance. So.

Anu Adegbola (12:05)
Yeah.

Nadia Mursal (12:11)
you know, it's kind of like, did you learn from it? What's the solution? What do we do next time? Should have been the approach, but it wasn't. And so, yeah, that's a kind of another lesson of make sure you have that supportive team around you to know, okay, it's all right. It's a mistake. We live on. It's just media. No one's hurt. It's fine. We can move on.

Anu Adegbola (12:16)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah!

Like, you know, this is something also that, you know, we've chatted about is to a manager's role when someone has worked for you, makes a mistake. cause I'm guessing you weren't the most senior person. Were you the most senior person in the team at this point? No. Okay.

Nadia Mursal (12:50)
No, no, no, I was, ⁓ I think I was account manager or

just being promoted to account manager. So it was kind of like your responsibility is, so you're like, Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (12:56)
Right.

Try my best.

how was the relationship with your, with your accountant director? mean, you don't have to name, well, yeah, you've not mentioned an agency that you were talking about or they might recognize themselves. But like, how, how do you feel like they, I don't want to say let you down though. They could have done better in terms of turning that, that issue around. Yeah.

Nadia Mursal (13:08)
⁓

Probably best not to. Probably best not to.

Yeah, I

think it sounds horrible to say, but I don't feel like it was directly his fault for treating me like that. It was the way the agency treat people. So it was like, this is how it's done, so this is how I've got to be. Where I think that's probably one of the biggest issues rather than being able to be yourself because him as a person, great guy.

Anu Adegbola (13:35)
Right, okay.

Right.

Hmm... Hmm...

Nadia Mursal (13:52)
But in situations like that, there's a line that has to be told because you're an account director and this is how they have to act and this is what they need to do. And it's a shame because I think they lose a lot of people by having that sort of mentality and not understanding. ⁓ So yeah, i think the situation could have been handled better. I think if it was just my team alone in a room and nobody was overwatching.

Anu Adegbola (13:59)
Yeah. Yeah.

Of Of course.

Yeah.

Mm.

Nadia Mursal (14:19)
the situation might have been handled different. But as it was, you're in an open office, there's always ears and eyes on you and how did you handle that? The client's gonna call me, what are you doing? Put them in line type of attitude. It's unfortunate that so many people feel pressurized to act in that certain way, even though they feel it might be wrong.

Anu Adegbola (14:22)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. What could have been done in like, you know, the week before in terms of what, what are the specific cultural like benefits? Because you know, I don't like necessarily just doing, ⁓ yeah, bad culture, bad kind of thing. What is the good culture that that manager should have, you know, maybe helped you with in the weeks coming up to that account structure that would have helped that.

that process not going as badly as it did.

Nadia Mursal (15:14)
Well, just, and I think it's an assumption as well, I'm assuming that account directing would have done restructures before. So even just giving that insight would have been beneficial. Like, okay, talk me through how are you gonna do the restructure?

Anu Adegbola (15:22)
Right.

Nadia Mursal (15:31)
What's your plan? How are you gonna do it? It's not telling me what to do. It's understanding how I'm gonna do it, how I'm going about my thought process. And then saying, okay, your plan is great, but actually just reverse the rollout. And then give me the rationale for it. And I would have been like, ⁓ of course, I never even thought of it like that. And then I've learned something without the mistake.

Anu Adegbola (15:45)
Right.

Yeah.

Absolutely. Yeah. I think that we are weak in teams like that. They can be that era of like somebody wants to prove themselves. And I don't necessarily want to even like share what I'm going to do with my manager. want to show like if, you know, I've, I've, I've earned this role, so I'm just going to go out and dance. Sometimes it takes a bit of humility of just going like, actually let me discuss this with someone who's been doing this a lot longer than me. So I actually make sure that, okay, I'm on the right path. I've not necessarily forgotten anything.

Nadia Mursal (16:18)
Mm-hmm.

Anu Adegbola (16:23)
And also a manager's role to actually, yeah, bring them on that journey and be like, Hey, what are you planning on doing? How are you going to do it? That is a big part of managerial role. think in the agency world, something that we don't speak enough about is that the trajectory of some people's career is it's always like, it's set based on that agency works and not necessarily up to even like the skillset of the person.

Some people are not skilled to manage people, but hey, that person has been in the agency for three years. They, they've done, they've managed this out. They didn't need to be managing a team. know it's like, they don't necessarily do it well.

Nadia Mursal (16:46)
Yes.

Yeah, but there's

no training to manage the team. It's just because you've been there, so you deserve it. Yeah, 100%, I've seen it so many times that people are in roles that are not people people. You'll know what I mean. They're not people people. And so they quite easily...

Anu Adegbola (17:02)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah? Yeah.

Nadia Mursal (17:15)
change the whole mood of the office by just, you know, just walking in because people know, okay. And it's scary. It's scary to think that you have that much power over people, but you don't then acknowledge that you could change that to be helping them. ⁓

Anu Adegbola (17:16)
Yeah!

Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Nadia Mursal (17:32)
And not putting people down, there is some people that have been put into roles they didn't even know that they could do and they've been superstars. So don't get me wrong, there is people out there that just suddenly shine. ⁓ But I do think like what I do currently in my current agency, if I know, I'm on quite a few client calls just to check in, see how things are going. And if I know, if I can see that there's a theme coming up.

Anu Adegbola (17:39)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah!

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Nadia Mursal (17:59)
I will ask the team to do a workshop. So we do monthly knowledge share. And I'll be like, actually monthly knowledge share, can we do a workshop around this? So if it's account restructure or if it's launching new campaigns or it's launching a new product. And because it's a workshop, everyone, it's not a session. You don't have to listen to a presentation. It's a workshop. So you're like, okay, I thought doing this, everyone talks, everyone joins in, everyone takes something from it. And you're like, okay.

Anu Adegbola (18:08)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Nadia Mursal (18:27)
So then when it comes to the doing it, rolling out the client, somebody in the team, whoever it is, or put in our chat, but going to try and do this this week, anybody free to work alongside me to do it just so we're on the same page. And it's like, great. They're working together and they confident enough to go, I think I can do it, but I just want another set of eyes to make sure I'm okay. And it's not, it's not the insecurity of, my God, I can't make a mistake. It's I want to get this right for the client.

Anu Adegbola (18:28)
Right.

Nice.

Yeah. Yeah.

Nadia Mursal (18:56)
And it's just

that different mentality that you give them that just makes them want to go and do more.

Anu Adegbola (18:59)
Yeah.

Yeah. No, absolutely. I think I hope people are listening. You know, that's that's you've given people like a way of working that some agencies just don't think, you know, everybody has like, this is how we've done it. And we've always done it this way. We'll do it this way. And I hope, you know, if you're someone who's like, you're the junior person in your team, please. Yeah. And you want to learn, but you don't want to feel like you're being looked over. Like if someone's looking over your shoulder to look at,

This is a fantastic way of doing that. Cause if you're the one that asks for it, it's a different, the environment, the vibe of it is very different. Cause you're the one that's like, I want you to help me with the thing I'm doing, not, Oh, someone has been put to be in charge of you kind of thing. It's so different. And I think it's a lot more empowering even because it's like, you're working in a safe space and you're working in a space of wanting to grow and learn, which is really nice.

Nadia Mursal (19:44)
Yeah.

Absolutely.

I love the fact that you just said, we've been doing this and we haven't changed. Another quick story is I was with another agency and in the one-to-ones they had, you had to fill out strengths and weaknesses and everything like that. And I was like, I'm not a great fan of the word weakness because I don't think anybody's got a weakness. I think they've got...

Anu Adegbola (20:00)
Sure.

Mm.

Nadia Mursal (20:13)
an area they might want to improve on because they haven't had the opportunity to do it. So, and I remember with my team, I crossed out weakness and I put wishes. So I was like, what's your strengths and what's your wishes? And just by changing that one word on a piece of paper, I suddenly got a list of things they wanted to do rather than weaknesses, rather than weaknesses where they were like, I don't want to say that I'm weak. Okay, what do you want to do? What do you wish you were better at?

Anu Adegbola (20:15)
Mm-hmm.

Alright.

Amazing.

Yeah!

Yeah.

Nadia Mursal (20:42)
Okay,

this and I got a list and I was like great but the manager above me

tore into me going, we've always done it like this, how dare you come in and change it, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, okay, go try it with another team and see if you get some feedback. And they did. And then by, guess what? The next month, every team was saying strengths and wishes because it opened the gate to go, everybody's struggling with something, but nobody's asking for support. So how are you going to get that answer? Change one word and you suddenly get your answer because you're not.

Anu Adegbola (21:02)
Wow.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Nadia Mursal (21:16)
You're not picking at somebody for not being good. You're asking them, how can I help you? It opens it up completely differently.

Anu Adegbola (21:19)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. It's not, it's not weakness. It's more like a wish. How this is the area I want to improve in. Oh Lord. Love that. That's going to be a clip. always like, how is there that in that's going to be a social media clip guys. Strengths and wishes, not necessarily weaknesses. Absolutely love that. Um, so now looking back, you've answered so many questions in here. My brain is going back to the script of like, where am I? Where am

Nadia Mursal (21:30)
Yep.

Thank

Sorry.

I know, I'm going off in tangents, I apologise.

Anu Adegbola (21:51)
Yeah, no, I love it.

absolutely love it. so like, yeah, let's go straight into acting here. Cause I want to actually talk, I'm looking at it at the time as well. And I want to talk about mistakes that you see in our industry as well. But like, so if someone is going through this, this issue, this account structure, they've, they've, messed it up. Um, so I'll even quickly, even before I get into this question, you found the error. wasn't like that. was a client. I was saying you, I mean, cause you were, you were. Yeah.

Nadia Mursal (22:04)
Thank

I found the

error. Because I was like, yeah, yeah. I was looking at the campaigns and I was looking at performance and I was seeing that it wasn't picking up. So I identified that something was wrong.

Anu Adegbola (22:20)
Yeah, okay.

Yeah.

Yeah, because I always something that we also always like covered like in these episodes is the importance of being the one that saw it and then you you put a plan together and you feed that back to the client. So yeah, that happens. They're like, what advice now if you know someone has is, you know, put a account structure setting.

The way constructors work now is very different, you know, but like still, like still they've done something, you know, that, that has constructed did not do what they expected it to do. And they're about to plan to respond to the, to their, their client. feel that they're in an agency where they don't feel like they'll be supported with their plan. What, what would you, what's your advice to that person?

Nadia Mursal (22:52)
Yeah.

Mmm.

I think being honest is the key thing. This is, but give your rationale. We have tried this, it doesn't seem to be working, but then put your solution in place and your next plan. So we've tried this, it's not working. We want to revert it. This does mean, and be clear. So we have spent, I don't know, £50 today.

Anu Adegbola (23:18)
Yeah.

Nadia Mursal (23:35)
on this test, but it hasn't worked so we're reverting it. But this is where this is not additional, but it's part of the 50 pound. But I think it's been very transparent in what did we try and test? Why didn't it work? This is the solution we're putting in place. Are we gonna revisit it or not? So when you're tapping the client, you have to relay what we've learned from it. Because if you just say there's a mistake, sorry.

There's nothing there for the client to respond to. But if you say, we tried this, it didn't work. We know that it's not going to work if we roll it out again. So in future, we'll make a note that this isn't going to work on this type of campaign. But we are going to now test it in a variation and try it like this. That covers you. That covers why you've done it, what you've learned from it.

Anu Adegbola (24:16)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yes.

Yes.

Nadia Mursal (24:27)
like, and you've put rules in place and the client can't really argue with you about that and neither can your manager because if your manager is going to argue with you about something that you've learned and you've corrected and you've got a solution for, what else are you supposed to do? There isn't. So it's like, you're covered.

Anu Adegbola (24:32)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Nadia Mursal (24:46)
and that's how I would approach it and I still approach it if my you know I'm still working with a team that's how we cover it you know it's just like okay there's still mistakes that happen it's like okay cool let's just but I think above all stay calm don't panic because it's media no one's getting hurt ⁓

Anu Adegbola (24:53)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Good. Yeah.

Nadia Mursal (25:10)
just don't panic about it. It's okay, you know? And then you're, because I think when you panic, you tend to do knee-jerk reactions of, okay, I'll do this and I'll do this and I'll do this. And then you think, actually, now I'm sat thinking about it. I could have just done this and it would have been fine. So by staying calm, don't panic and just thinking it through, you know, you will probably come up with a better solution than you would have originally thought of.

Anu Adegbola (25:18)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Nadia Mursal (25:36)
So that's how

I would approach it now if I was in it or anybody going through it, that's what I would say to them.

Anu Adegbola (25:43)
Absolutely. Like, again, I think you answered like three of my questions there and I like it. That's nice. That's fine. That means we can go into talk about more stuff, but I mean, in a way you did say this, but our final questions to round up this story before we talk about what mistakes we see in the industry. What's one thing, one thing, one final statement about this story that you'd like people to take away.

Nadia Mursal (25:47)
Okay. ⁓

Don't be scared of mistakes. I think.

Anu Adegbola (26:09)
There we go. Yeah.

Nadia Mursal (26:12)
I wish somebody would have told me that at the time, because I've gone through everything I've told you guys not to go through. So I panicked. was like, my God, what am I doing? But what I learned from it is yeah, make mistakes. Cause I learned from it. I learned not just about how to run the campaigns, but how to build strong relationships with clients, how to manage the strong relationship with a client, how to manage things internally. It wasn't just a one thing of how to do PPC. It was a

Anu Adegbola (26:14)
Hmm

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Nadia Mursal (26:41)
learning lessons so yeah don't be scared of them.

Anu Adegbola (26:45)
Don't be scared. Don't be scared of mistakes. love it. Fantastic. Thank you so much for that, Nadia. Now switching, switching the spotlight to, to our, our fun industry and maybe those accounts that you, you've won and taken in and you're auditing them and you're like, why, why are people still making the, this mistakes? Why, why are these still being done in this way? What are like, what are the, it could be AI specific because I know that's, that's the word of the year.

Nadia Mursal (26:50)
Never.

Anu Adegbola (27:14)
But it doesn't have to be something, maybe something that you, the one, most interesting thing that you've seen is a lot of, yeah. So mistakes that you see really happening still.

Nadia Mursal (27:24)
And this is going to be a one and everyone's going to probably roll their eyes, but tracking.

Anu Adegbola (27:29)
Okay, yeah, yeah. How is it being done wrong? what is, cause people do hear like, yeah, don't track properly. But what is the issue? What are people missing?

Nadia Mursal (27:32)
I still look.

Thanks

I think the key thing,

they don't, they've got an objective and they're like, this is the objective of this campaign, but they don't track the objective. And you're like, so how are you, how are you matching that together? I don't understand. you, you've kind of.

Anu Adegbola (27:52)
right.

Nadia Mursal (27:59)
Got your tracking and your conversion point to people signing up for newsletter, but you want me to tell you how they're engaging with, you know, another part of website. I don't get how this is working, but they will tell me like, no, no, no, newsletter is really working. And was like, that's great, but that's not the objective of that campaign. So.

Anu Adegbola (28:11)
wow.

Nadia Mursal (28:18)
what are we doing? So it doesn't work. Because you ask me to audit something and you go, this is for newsletters. I will read it and I'll look at it I'll go, yeah, structure's all wrong. But then you go, no, no, no, it's working for newsletters. And I'll be like, it's not because your tracking's not. Do you see what I mean? It's like really weird how I think, and then there's also not a specific sector I work with that just doesn't have any.

Anu Adegbola (28:19)
Yeah

Okay.

right

Okay. All right.

Nadia Mursal (28:46)
and they,

and we, a lot of the campaigns we get, and they're like, we had a really good campaign this year. And I'm like, brilliant. Can I have access to the account to audit it? And they're like, yeah. And I'm like, which campaign are you talking about? Which is really good. And they're like, give me the name of the campaign. I'm like, what's good about it? And they're like, well, we, well, we drove some clicks and I'm like, uh-huh. ⁓

Anu Adegbola (29:04)
no.

God.

gosh.

Nadia Mursal (29:11)
and

they were like no no no we drove clicks and I'm like okay that's not that's not what this channel's for

Anu Adegbola (29:14)
no

no you're just throwing your money down a well you literally just about have helped me throw your money down the well we're not we're not measured by just clicks anymore at all

Nadia Mursal (29:26)
Yeah. And I'm like,

okay, let's, let's fix this for you. But then I think we spoke previously about a client, um, a pitch we went to and the feedback we got from the client said we're too advanced for them as an agency. They'd come back in a couple of years when they were, they, they'd grown a little bit. uh, I was like, what do you mean by too, like, this was just a basic audit. And I was like, could you elaborate on this? I'm not sure which technical aspects you're talking about.

Anu Adegbola (29:30)
Yeah.

I

Yeah.

Nadia Mursal (29:56)
And they were like, he kept talking to us about tracking.

Anu Adegbola (30:02)
⁓ God.

Nadia Mursal (30:02)
And do know when

you're like, that's...

Anu Adegbola (30:05)
That's basic. You'd hope...

Nadia Mursal (30:08)
I

felt like going, which agency have you gone with?

Anu Adegbola (30:12)
Honestly, that is okay with you not having tracking in place. Wow. This is a recent situation that happened.

Nadia Mursal (30:16)
Yeah.

It's about...

It's this year.

Anu Adegbola (30:24)
this year. That's embarrassing. think. Okay. What your anyway interesting. that is still surprising. That's not even like, cause I'm like, okay, maybe you need training on how to put tracking in place, but just have track, track something, make sure you're tracking something. There it just is. I would like take on the account. That makes me nervous about the integrity of that agency that's willing to take the money and not tell the client.

Nadia Mursal (30:27)
Yeah. So always surprises.

Yeah.

This is it.

Anu Adegbola (30:51)
By the way, you should have track it in place. That should be the baseline of all agencies.

Nadia Mursal (30:56)
But we all had access to the accounts and we all audited it and we were the one that told them that they didn't have tracking. So we'd have to spend time on setting up all their tracking. I can't like, you know, when you're like, I can't be the only one talking to you about this. So it keeps you on your toes because you're like, okay, yep, that's cool. Like give them your money, but you'll definitely come back to us in a year's time.

Anu Adegbola (31:06)
Yeah, yeah.

Right, exactly. Exactly.

Right. Yeah. Right.

Exactly. Exactly. Because how are you okay with an agency who taking your money to drive clicks and they're not going to report back to you, whether that's making money or whether that's driving any conversions or whether that's driving any or sign up, you're just going to be okay with going, yep, more clicks. Yeah. You can do that yourself. Don't get an agency to do that for you actually.

Nadia Mursal (31:31)
how it's done.

Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (31:44)
do that yourself. AI will do that for you. AI will happily do that for you. my God. What's our industry like? Well, keeps you in business. So we're glad for you to keep it going, keep it going. But yeah, that was a very interesting part. But before we leave things off, I do definitely realize I said before,

Nadia Mursal (31:53)
I know, it's

Thank

Anu Adegbola (32:07)
taking a bit of the time to talk about, you know, the theme of this podcast and the importance of talking about the mistakes, talking about what the, how the culture of a department should be. You know, I know this wouldn't be new for you to have like, it all starts from the top, right? Like literally, however, you're the manager is a director is the CMO is the CEO is that trickles down.

Nadia Mursal (32:24)
Absolutely.

Anu Adegbola (32:31)
So let's say like a head of department, what's the important for them to be feeding down to their teams so they're not too scared about mistakes that could happen. That probably will happen even.

Nadia Mursal (32:44)
Yeah, I think I mentioned like mistakes aren't a bad thing. ⁓ I'm not saying go ahead and do them, but we're human, they will happen. But I think it's just making sure that you build the right atmosphere of support. it's not the, my God, I've done a mistake. It's like, okay, I need help because I've done something and I think it's wrong. It's a completely different attitude towards how people will operate.

Anu Adegbola (32:49)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Nadia Mursal (33:11)
It's not finger pointing and blaming someone for getting something wrong. It's, okay, my team get things wrong, that's fine. Okay, how can we, what happened? How did we go about it? What have we learned from it? How do we not do it again? Because specifically it's shown to not work and.

Anu Adegbola (33:11)
Mm.

Hmm.

Mm.

Nadia Mursal (33:33)
It's not an I game, it's a we. Whenever I talk to my team about a mistake, I say, okay, how can we fix this? It's not how can you fix it, or what did you do? It's like, how can we fix this? And it's straight away, they're like, it's not just on me. We're gonna do something together. tone, your tone of approaching it.

Anu Adegbola (33:40)
Nice. Yeah. What are you gonna do? Yeah. What are we gonna do?

Hmm.

Nadia Mursal (33:55)
So you could be boiling inside like, I knew this would happen. But your tone to your staff needs to be, okay, how can we fix it? What do we need to do? Are you okay? Check on them because it is scary for somebody in a business world that's not used to a corporate environment or any sort of environment to have that sort of pressure and know that they've made a mistake. So check on them because as soon as you check on them,

Anu Adegbola (33:58)
Yeah.

Yeah

Hmm.

Nadia Mursal (34:20)
they realize that the problem isn't the key thing that they might have done, that they're still really important. So I think just combining those is definitely how I approach it. Treat people like people, put the person first. Media is still going to be there if you take five minutes to check on somebody, it's fine. But check on them. Put your people first because your people are the ones that's delivering you everything.

Anu Adegbola (34:25)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And it makes me think about how you get some of these agents, you're doing like, you know, they, they, want loyalty, your loyalty from your team. I'm like, you get loyalty when you show that you value your team, but you show that you value them when things go wrong, where it's literally like, okay, how can we help you? And especially when you understand, like you even said with your client, you understand that this is a team member that you saw, you hired them because you saw something you saw as a skill, as so, so a potential in them.

So it's in those times of errors that you need to be like, look, I still have faith in you. We hired you for a reason. So what's the thing that went wrong in this individual situation that caused you, and that's how you show that you value them. And that's what builds their loyalty. It's not just, not just something that they get from being paid every month. Like any company can do that.

Nadia Mursal (35:16)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No. Yeah, exactly.

think feeling support, showing that you acknowledge them, show you that you listen to them is key because they're not just a person in front of a screen every single day for you. They have feelings and emotions and they want to be heard because do you know what? They might have the best idea ever that you're not listening to because they're in the accounts every day so they'll see something that you don't.

Anu Adegbola (35:40)
Ugh.

Yeah.

No. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Absolutely.

Nadia Mursal (36:01)
So yeah,

absolutely. It's just, yeah, support everybody that you work with and you'll just get a lot happier atmosphere and environment and they will talk to you more. So they will come and talk to you before there's an issue. Which is, which is kind of better, isn't it?

Anu Adegbola (36:11)
Yes.

Absolutely.

Absolutely. It's

better to get it from your team than you get it from the client of being like, this has been going wrong. This has been, and it's like, Oh my God, I didn't know because your team, your team didn't feel bold enough to tell you. So yeah, yeah, there's a way to get these things. We always have to just think about what is it that I want to get about from my team? And it's your job to try and get it. I'm not just expected. You can do something about getting that best out of your team instead of. Yeah. Just, just leaving to them to do.

Nadia Mursal (36:22)
shouting.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I think the biggest, well, the motto I live by just every single day and especially now running a team is treat people how you want to be treated. And that if you do that, you get back what you, you know, you get the conversations you need, you get the discussion, you get the, you know, the loyalty without forcing anything or making anything a big issue. You get it.

Anu Adegbola (36:54)
Mm.

Yeah.

Nadia Mursal (37:14)
So, you know, find a motto and live by it. How do you like and that's if you stay true to that, you stay true to yourself and people can see that.

Anu Adegbola (37:18)
Yeah.

Repeat the motto for us because my sound might not have caught it very well.

Nadia Mursal (37:29)
treat people how you would like to be treated.

Anu Adegbola (37:32)
Absolutely, absolutely. Love it. On that note, yeah, our final question, our final question of the chat, could go, I could actually just sit here listening to you Nadia, like, cause you give so, you just give me so much different wisdom and going off there and I'm just like, I want to hear all of it, but let's get to our fun final question that of our session. If your PPC career were a movie, what would the title be?

Nadia Mursal (37:40)
and thank you.

this is it's a really good question and I'm thinking now

Anu Adegbola (38:03)
It could be a movie

you've watched or you could come up with a brand new title of like a title that just speaks to you.

Nadia Mursal (38:09)
So one that I've watched recently, only because my brother told me to watch it, is if you see Moneyball, where they basically revolutionize baseball through data analytics, we're doing that through digital marketing. We revolutionize some businesses by introducing digital marketing. So yeah, I'd say Moneyball.

Anu Adegbola (38:15)
Yes.

⁓ okay.

Nice. I love that. I love that explanation of like, this is you almost like pitching the agency to anyone who's listening, like come to us. We will revolutionize your agency through digital marketing. I love it. I love that Nadia. Thank you so much. ⁓ Where can people find you? Where are you active in terms of your like knowledge sharing that you do?

Nadia Mursal (38:38)
Thank you. ⁓

Good.

Thank

⁓ so I do a lot of, well, we obviously I go on LinkedIn and I share on that. I do quite a lot of different talks with, ⁓ different agencies. So, I'm also now an ABTA partner. if, and if there's anyone in travel, we talk there at quite a lot of events and did one this week, just to say, ⁓ so yeah. ⁓ I generally, you know, on the website, we share a lot of blogs and everything else. And I share my wisdom there, but also PPC Live you know,

Anu Adegbola (39:15)
Nice.

Yeah!

Nadia Mursal (39:26)
I'm an ambassador, contact us through that. Definitely, I'm more than open to chat to anybody that would want some advice or just want to chat. I'm very open to helping people. So reach out, I'm here.

Anu Adegbola (39:28)
Amazing.

Yeah.

Love it. love that. Thank you so much, Nadia. You've done a lot in terms of helping us today in terms of the story you shared and lots of advice that you've given, you know, advice for like managers and teams and, clients and account directors. So yeah, this will be a wide range of people that this will be helpful for. So definitely thank you so much for taking the time today for joining us. Pleasure. ⁓ Pleasure. All right. Thanks Nadia. Bye.

Nadia Mursal (40:01)
No, thank you. No, thank you so much. I've enjoyed it. Thanks. Bye.

Anu Adegbola (40:10)
Thank you so much, Nadia, for sharing that very honest and transparent experience. I've got to say guys, like just before we hit record with Nadia, she was like, I have got different stories I could give, but let me share the one that I feel that'll be most useful to your audience and something that people can learn the most from, like in terms of something that you will do, you're most likely to come across.

in your ⁓ career. yeah, thank you Nadia for sharing that so that everyone, regardless of ⁓ what level you are in your seniority, you know, can learn from. Yeah. So remember, you know, making mistakes is not the end of the world. Remember for account directors, leaders of team, it is your job to get the best out of your team, even when they make a mistake and to ensure that you're not just pointing fingers because clients...

will see the hard work that your team have put in. And even if a mistake happens, they will know that that mistake was not something that was just, that came from oversight or overthought. So treat your team the way that you'd like them to treat you as well. So for the information and the full transcript and the full show notes and all the details and the links that, you know, Nadia talked about, please go to podcast.ppc.live to listen to this episode or watch this episode, et cetera.

So yeah, in terms of PPC live events, I'm always excited to come to this part of the show. Tickets are live. Yeah, go to ppc.live. know, the early bird sale is gonna run out before even Christmas happens on the 22nd of December. You're gonna have, we're gonna now be increasing the prices. So yeah, please go to that to get your cheap tickets ⁓ because we're being sponsored by the fantastic guys at Shopping IQ because we've got a fantastic venue with Strategy Q.

⁓ at near Liverpool street station in London. So that's why the ticket can be this low. We've got fantastic speakers, Kat Sale Dave Alexander, Nils Rooijmans who is our ad scripts, know, master in our industry. So you really don't want to miss this event. So yeah, go to ppc.live for the tickets for those. Before I leave you, I'd love to share I'm taking on coaching clients even.

Uh, people who just want to get ahead in the industry, people who want to get out of their heads, people who want to know how to approach making mistakes. People want to know how to help their team to be better and opening up in terms of, you know, things that they're struggling with. Um, and just to get ahead in terms of, maybe let's say you want a promotion, maybe you want to go for a salary increase. Talk to your manager about salary increase. I want to talk to me about, you know, your imposter syndrome, confidence issues.

Just let me know I'm here to help you out. So yeah, just go to themarketinganu.com for that to book a 15 minute discovery course so that we know exactly what you need so that you can get ahead in this industry.

Anu Adegbola (43:01)
So yeah, that's all from me for now. I hope you enjoyed the show and we will be bringing more PPC F-UPS and Triumphs in the new year because yeah, we're going to be closing down for Christmas. I'm not sure that you want to be hearing about people's mistakes while you're enjoying your turkey or some family time. So yeah, you'll hear from us in a couple of weeks where I'll be sharing more amazing PPC F-UPS and Triumph stories in the new year. So yeah, hope you have a very good Christmas and a happy new year.