EP352 - When Losing Big Is Winning Bigger ft. Emina Demiri

Anu Adegbola (00:07)
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 are still in the right place. Every week we speak to a different PPC expert about their biggest eff up, but not just that, how they turn things around even. These are people who are heads of departments, heads of digital, founders.

You know, and people who are doing well, still well, still doing well in their career are still respected in the industry. So these are not people where the mistakes, you know, held them held them back in any way or held their career back in any way. But yeah, we'll be also talking about things that were disappointing and just learning to ensure you don't make the same mistakes again. Today, we speak to Emina Demiri, who is ⁓ of a head of digital.

at Vixen Digital who are based out a lovely agency based out of Brighton. And she talks about how they fired one of their biggest clients, like a client that accounts for, let's say about 70 % of their revenue. Now this is not a lesson of don't fire the toxic client because of how much revenue they're binging in. It's a totally different lesson. you know, and just, yeah, she speaks to us as to how, what they didn't do well, what they did well.

and how they then got back on their feet from making the mistake of overloading their revenue on just one client. So yeah, that's a key clue there in terms of what the mistake was. But yeah, let's go speak to Emina now.

Anu Adegbola (01:43)
Hello Emina welcome to PPC Live the podcast. it is, this is such a long time coming. you know, I always love hanging out with you like at the conferences and especially at FCDC where literally we decided to do a photo shoot in the toilets. Cause why not? They've got the best lighting. Selfie in the toilet. It's a classic one. It's a classic one. Oh bless. So yeah, thank you Emina for taking the time. I know you've got such.

Emina Demiri Watson (01:47)
Hi Anu.

toilet yeah the selfie in the toilet

Anu Adegbola (02:10)
a busy schedule, a busy team and Vixen Digital are always doing great stuff. So yeah, let me get to introducing you to my fantastic audience. So Emina, she's got a fantastic career of helping organizations grow with digital marketing. She's managed teams, created strategies, wrestled with agencies and got stuck in the weeds. She's their head of digital, but I love the way that...

She pretty much also will always be talking and she's like, yeah, I've got my hands dirty with PPC and SEO and the different marketing channels knows how to talk in depth about [how] the different channels work, which is very, very amazing. So these days she's worked, still learning agency side, helping their brilliant clients at Vixen Digital and their agencies.

to grow. She's a firm believer in data and performance driven marketing. So focus on ideal customers and revenue impacts, the right blend of channels to maximize success, testing and learning approach and failing forward. This is what this podcast is all about. So great guests to have. She believes in this and building lasting partnerships with clients and other agencies. Fun fact, this is, know what?

I started doing this in the last episode and I'm going to continue with you. I'm not even going to say the fun fact. Emina, what's your fun fact do you want to share with us today?

Emina Demiri Watson (03:29)
Do you want the pasty or do you want the fishing?

Anu Adegbola (03:31)
I want both!

I want I'm greedy! Let's start with pasty and how you were, how that experience was.

Emina Demiri Watson (03:37)
my god.

So one of my jobs, early jobs, actually a job after doing my master's degree in development studies, I was trying to find a job and struggling, know, the catch-22, you need the job to get the experience, but you need the experience to get the job, yeah? So I ended up applying to work in a pasty shop and I got fired.

Anu Adegbola (03:51)
Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Experience. Yeah.

And

what was the reasoning again that they gave you for firing you?

Emina Demiri Watson (04:05)
They said, okay,

it was two things. One of the things was that, rightfully so, and I was honest about this, they were worried that I'm not going to be there for very long because I did say very honestly in the interview that, you know, I have a degree, I'd like to work in something that's connected to my degree. So fair enough. But the second one, I was too opinionated.

Anu Adegbola (04:13)
Yeah.

Emina Demiri Watson (04:31)
because obviously I came in there and immediately tried to reorganize things and that didn't plan well so I got fired from a pasty shop. ⁓ The other one is I love fishing and I actually have a trophy and a couple of medals from fishing.

Anu Adegbola (04:31)
the-

Improve things, yes!

Okay

Wow. Wow. I

love it. And who, who, who's your favorite person to go fishing with and who's not allowed? You know, no, you're.

Emina Demiri Watson (04:57)
Not my husband.

Not my husband. He does go, but my dad is my favorite person because one thing, that's the only time that my brain is quiet because I really like the kind of the peacefulness of it and just focusing on the fishing. Well, my husband likes to talk while he's fishing. So he went with me and my dad and my dad said, in Croatian

Anu Adegbola (05:04)
next

Mmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, ⁓ gosh

Emina Demiri Watson (05:23)
Can you please ask him to stop talking? Otherwise I'm gonna

throw him into the sea.

Anu Adegbola (05:30)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but still, yeah, still.

Emina Demiri Watson (05:30)
Obviously he wouldn't have done that, but I thought that was hilarious. So

he's a persona non grata when it comes to fishing. ⁓

Anu Adegbola (05:39)
amazing. Amazing. so yeah, I, you know, as you, as we know, Emina is coming here to talk about, you know, a mistake that she's experienced. And I love even how she was given the brief. She was like, she was talking about some parts of it. I was like, yeah, but so that wasn't a mistake. And she's like, no, no, no, it was a mistake that turned into a triumph. She was literally repeating my podcast title back at me. was like, ⁓ yeah, of course that's the whole point of this.

So I'm so

Emina Demiri Watson (06:05)
you

Anu Adegbola (06:06)
excited for Emina to share the story that she has with you today. You're going to learn lots. And, you know, even to prepare those, this might not, this is not one of those examples of, know, you made a max CPC mistake or you made a targeting mistake. This is for big level working with clients. We've talked to other, other guests about, you know, red flags you should spot kind of thing. And this kind of touches on it, but really is for

maybe consultants who have clients or agency leaders who have clients to figuring out, know, when you do read that decision that a client needs to go, but doing it the right way, why it's important to do it the right way. So please, Emina take it away. What's the f-up you'd like to share with us today?

Emina Demiri Watson (06:48)
So the biggest one was ⁓ basically firing our biggest client. Now that's scary on its own when you think about it. It's particularly scary when you have three people in the senior leadership team who just want to do well for clients and for their employees. But one of the things that they haven't really done is

Anu Adegbola (06:57)
Yeah.

Mm.

Emina Demiri Watson (07:14)
made sure that they are very focused on not having a customer concentration issue. Big mistake not doing that because and this happens apparently this happens quite a lot in agencies where you have like that one big client and then if they leave you kind of have to fire people and get rid of people which that is problematic because nobody wants to do that.

Anu Adegbola (07:20)
Mm. Mm. Mm. Yeah. Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah

Yes.

Emina Demiri Watson (07:40)
But we actually fired our biggest client. It wasn't an easy decision, as I said, and we learned through the process, we learned so much about so many things. So I'll talk about that.

Anu Adegbola (07:42)
Wow. Wow. Okay. No.

Okay. Yeah.

So the main mistake was not preparing well for it. was the right decision, but not prepared. So what made it the right decision to do?

Emina Demiri Watson (08:07)
What made it the right decision is because we all want to make money. You have an agency because you want to make revenue and you want to hire people, you need the money to pay that people, you know, it's a business. But depending on the agency, sometimes it's for us, it was better to prioritize culture and the happiness of our employees. And I say this with, you know,

Anu Adegbola (08:20)
Mm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Emina Demiri Watson (08:35)
feeling a little bit hypocritical because at the same time I did have to let go of an employee and I'm sure that they were not happy. However, when you are in a leadership position you can't just focus on that one. You have to focus on the company as a whole, the culture that you're building and all of your other employees. So what we ended up doing is spending a lot of time talking

Anu Adegbola (08:44)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes. Yeah. Yes.

Emina Demiri Watson (09:05)
having meetings and talking about what to do and then we did a cost and benefit kind of analysis ⁓ and we just made a decision there and then and and it's interesting because you know it happened about two to three years ago now and since then that was one of our core values was really about yes we want to make profit but not at the expense of

Anu Adegbola (09:10)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-mm.

Okay.

Emina Demiri Watson (09:34)
us and our team pulling their hair out and everybody being unhappy because we're a small agency so you know perhaps I'm being cynical now but perhaps in a big agency when the leadership team isn't actually the one that's that's getting the grunt then it's not you know you can maybe it's much more not that attractive

Anu Adegbola (09:34)
Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yeah.

Mm.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're far away from it. The leadership is very far away from the people who are hands on. You don't see hands on the issues. Yeah.

Emina Demiri Watson (10:02)
to say, okay, well, but we need the money, yeah?

Exactly.

Exactly, you don't get that.

Yeah, but when you're sitting in a meeting and there's somebody who is, you know, being unkind and you're all there, it's personal, it gets a bit so, yeah.

Anu Adegbola (10:20)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yes.

Yeah. So it was definitely a right decision. And then at what point did you then start to realize the way we've done this is not going well? Like at what stage did it start having issues? Was it like immediately after or even like, you you said the whole person, like, you know, you started learning, seeing that the way you did it wasn't great.

Emina Demiri Watson (10:40)
⁓ with the client.

Anu Adegbola (10:48)
At what point did you realize the way you do it was not going well?

Emina Demiri Watson (10:52)
So there's two things. One of them is like this agency organizational bit. We realized that we have made a terrible mistake with our customer concentration when we did the financials. When we kind of sat down and saw that this is going to wipe out a big chunk. ⁓ And it was kind of, my God, like, you know.

Anu Adegbola (11:03)
Sure.

Right. You saw the money.

Mmm.

Yeah. And this was,

was this something that this was picked up after you fired or, okay. So you saw it happening before. So you were like, this is a, but you still made this day. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So it was more like you, were reviewing about to fire this client and then you were like, we've made a mistake of actually the concentration of our client. Okay. Okay. Yeah.

Emina Demiri Watson (11:24)
No, before.

Yeah, and we had to make that. This is the impact. Yeah, exactly.

It's much bigger than what we thought. Obviously,

you will always, there's always financials and even in a small agency, even if it's a spreadsheet, you're going to have all of your clients and revenue and all of that. One of the things that when you have quite a bit of clients and you don't have very fancy, expensive financial systems and things like that, what can get lost is the percentage that a single client holds.

Anu Adegbola (11:49)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Good.

Yeah.

Emina Demiri Watson (12:10)
within your revenue and that's your customer concentration. ⁓ And ⁓

Anu Adegbola (12:13)
yes. yeah.

Emina Demiri Watson (12:16)
we didn't realize how big that percentage was tied to this client. So it was at the time when we were already thinking, okay, right, this has gone far enough. We've done everything that we possibly can to save the relationship. Let's sit down and do the, you know, the benefit and cost. ⁓

Anu Adegbola (12:18)
Yeah. Yeah.

Sure.

Yeah.

Emina Demiri Watson (12:36)
a quick Excel formula and we were like, didn't expect it to be that high. ⁓ And that was a big learning for us. But then there's also the mistake on kind of like expectations. ⁓ It is incredibly difficult in an agency to manage client expectations. ⁓ And particularly if you have goalposts.

Anu Adegbola (12:38)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Mm.

Yeah. Yeah.

Mm. Mm-hmm.

Emina Demiri Watson (13:04)
that are kind of shifting.

And I know you mentioned red flags. It's easy when there's red flags in ⁓ the beginning in the discovery call. It's much more difficult. We're all people. So relationships changed and people come in and get out of a company and teams change. It's much more difficult when a relationship starts shifting.

Anu Adegbola (13:12)
Interesting. Yeah? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm. Yeah.

Emina Demiri Watson (13:34)
later on. So there's

no red flags and everything is working really really well and everybody is really happy but you have to kind of get in there at the right time when the relationship starts to shift.

Anu Adegbola (13:39)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Emina Demiri Watson (13:51)
and choosing

that moment, understanding the signs of it, you know, I'm not talking about, you know, a pissed off female from before, before.

Anu Adegbola (13:56)
Yeah.

No, no, So give us a few of those signs. Give us, do you know what

a few of those signs that people could look out for can be?

Emina Demiri Watson (14:07)
Yeah, so one of the obvious ones is performance. As soon as you see that you have a client, you're running Google Ads and it's been doing really, really well and all of a sudden you do your monthly reporting and the results are not there or you have your OKRs and you have targets and you see in month two that you're not going to reach those targets and then you kind of go into, you know,

Anu Adegbola (14:11)
Okay.

Mm.

Hmm.

Yeah.

Emina Demiri Watson (14:36)
kind of fighting fires modes, like trying to figure out why this has happened and being one of the things that's really important is to be transparent with the client, not to try to kind of hide. results are like the first thing that you're gonna be getting. ⁓ There are some more subtle things that you need to pick up on that are not so much as, you know,

Anu Adegbola (14:39)
Okay, all that time, yeah.

Yeah.

Emina Demiri Watson (15:04)
the relationship is changing, but there are risks to the relationship changing. So, for example, if there's external factors that are happening that might impact how they're feeling. For example, if the company is going for restructuring, there's a lot of team changes.

Anu Adegbola (15:09)
Okay?

Mm.

Mm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Emina Demiri Watson (15:29)
We had a situation where a client was suffering from a security breach. That was, you you would think it's a security breach. That doesn't, it's down the funnel, you know, like why do we care that, you know, their system had a security breach and they can't do some of the things down the funnel. We're just doing, we're here to just bring them the leads.

Anu Adegbola (15:34)
⁓ fuck yeah.

Yeah, it wouldn't affect you.

Emina Demiri Watson (15:52)
Well, it doesn't work like that. If their system on the other end has had a security breach, those leads that you're bringing in, it doesn't matter. They can't convert them. So the relationship, it's going to have a knock on effect on your relationship with the client. So, I mean, a lot of it is common sense and understanding the company, understanding their audience, you know, market, market shifts.

Anu Adegbola (15:59)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yes. Yes.

Sure. Yeah.

Yes.

Yes.

Yeah.

Emina Demiri Watson (16:20)
⁓

We tend to just be looking at Google Ads performance. ⁓ A lot of agencies just look at Google Ads performance and don't kind of think about, only think about market impact if they have a few clients in the same industry. And then they think, okay, I've seen a trend there, so it must be the market. When actually, market conditions should be part of your...

Anu Adegbola (16:26)
Hmm.

Mm.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Emina Demiri Watson (16:45)
auditing when you're thinking about what might be impacting and you should go online and have a look at what's been going on in that industry that might be impacting what's going on on your account. So yeah.

Anu Adegbola (16:46)
of analysis. Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Well, that's some great, very great insights for people to take away in terms of like predicting of like, you know, cause as you say, you're very right. Those like, ⁓ you see a red flag when you're trying to onboard a client and you know, you take that on board. Those are actually quite easy to tell, but actually we tend to get comfortable when things are going well. And then maybe we forget to look for any other flags that are coming down the road. Like, the relationship is great. blah, blah. Yeah.

Emina Demiri Watson (17:15)
yeah.

And then all of

a sudden an email comes in and you're surprised.

Anu Adegbola (17:27)
Surprise. Yes. You're like, where this coming? Yeah. Prepare yourself. Prepare yourself. Always be prepared for possibly things going wrong at any stage.

Emina Demiri Watson (17:30)
Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (17:36)
⁓ so yeah, coming back to your story, this story about, know, you fired a client, realizing that, the cost of it was really high. So at what stage did things, how did you guys try to turn it around? What was it that really like turned it around that then made you guys more stable? Cause you still fired the client that needed to be done. how did you guys claw back in terms of like making sure that your balance of clients were looked better?

Emina Demiri Watson (18:03)
Yeah, so one of the things is obviously track it better. That's like the basic, you need to track it better, which I found it really interesting when you were saying that I was data driven and I'm data driven, but I'm also data realistic. Some things you can't track and some things you can like your customer concentration numbers. So yeah, so from like the basic side of things, that's a big one.

Anu Adegbola (18:06)
Yeah, yeah, of course. Of course. ⁓

Yeah?

Sure? Yeah, okay.

Yeah, yeah, if you can't do it.

Emina Demiri Watson (18:32)
⁓ The second one where it kind of like how we turned it around is we talk a lot about values and about culture, but I mean, it took us to go through this this kind of exercise and this really, really big decision to just remind ourselves and to look at our values again, because it's up.

Anu Adegbola (18:42)
Mmm. Mmm.

Hmm.

Emina Demiri Watson (19:01)
It's like a document that you do at the beginning. Yeah. And it sits in your drive. And a lot of the times with everything that people are busy, there's lots of things happening. Clients come in and go all of that stuff. You forget about that little document that's sitting there in your drive. And now we kind of try and go back to it and we try and build on those values.

Anu Adegbola (19:03)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Mm, yeah.

Mm.

Emina Demiri Watson (19:27)
and we know what we want to develop a little bit more. So there's kind of that side of things. The revenue, it took us a long time to get to where we were. mean, I'm not gonna, so the market, it was time and it was hard work. And it was also, if there's a lot of time,

Anu Adegbola (19:31)
Mmm. Yeah.

Mmm. Okay.

So the solution in that area was just time. Sometimes you just have to give it time. Yeah.

Emina Demiri Watson (19:53)
This is the kind of this idea of ⁓ time has value. ⁓ Yes, we had a really big client who was giving us revenue. And obviously that revenue is value. But we were spending a lot of time fighting fires and trying to take care of our team in a difficult situation. And that time has value. So when the client went, that meant that we had more time.

Anu Adegbola (19:57)
Mmm. Mmm.

Mm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Emina Demiri Watson (20:22)
to

A, get new clients and B, we enjoy it. Like our leadership team, that's what we like doing. We like talking about what we do. We like, you know, being part of communities. You don't have time for that if there's a relationship that's taking up all of your mental effort. Exactly. So I think you get a lot of that back and that helped us.

Anu Adegbola (20:24)
Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

Emina Demiri Watson (20:46)
claw back the revenue, but it did take a while and this is coming back to my market thing. Agencies, it's a difficult market out there, it really is and any agency who's pretending that it's not, I'm skeptical because whoever I talk to, those that are more open about what's going on, they're saying it's much more, you know, the leads are coming in okay, but it's much more difficult to close leads.

Anu Adegbola (20:48)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm.

Emina Demiri Watson (21:13)
partly because the competition is really high and partly because of AI. So I think that that's impacting budgets. You know, people are scared to invest in something that apparently is, you know, dead when it comes to SEO. ⁓ Funnily enough, paid.

Anu Adegbola (21:13)
Okay?

Yeah.

Yes.

Mmm.

Yeah.

Emina Demiri Watson (21:35)
going much more leads now from paid. So we're in a lucky, yeah, you'll be happy about it. No, but it's true. It's true though. I mean, I look at kind of like the leads that we're getting in and majority of them is for paid advertising because that seems a little bit more secure at the moment, which is.

Anu Adegbola (21:40)
Google ads are doing well guys. My PVC audience folks will be happy to hear that. ⁓

Yeah.

Emina Demiri Watson (22:02)
It's a false, know, it's not actually, SEO is not dead. SEO is not dead for the record. ⁓ But there's quite a bit of fear out there. So it's taken a while, but we're in a much healthier position in terms of our customer concentration, where our profits are good, our team is happy. So, you know, it was the right decision, lots of learning from it.

Anu Adegbola (22:07)
Yeah, yeah. No, I don't think as you said.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yes. Yeah.

Lots of right decisions. And how many team members, if don't mind me asking, like, did you lose from, from having to fire that big client? Yeah.

Emina Demiri Watson (22:36)
So we

lost two team members, so quite a bit. ⁓ But it wasn't just because of that one client. We had another client leave because they decided to just go a different kind of, we weren't doing the channels that they were kind of interested in and it just wasn't working. It was like a three months.

Anu Adegbola (22:39)
Okay. Okay.

Sure, they want it.

Emina Demiri Watson (23:01)
We have these test ones where we will run an MVP for three months and to see whether a channel is kind of viable for business. When we're not sure, then we'll say, okay, we can give it a go. From the looks of it, it might work, particularly for pay that really, that works for SEO. can't do that because it takes like a few months to even get results. But for PPC, you can do that if you're not...

Anu Adegbola (23:06)
Mm. Mm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes, yes.

Yeah.

Emina Demiri Watson (23:29)
very honest, say, okay, looking at the volume and kind of the projections, these are your numbers, but it all depends on your conversion rates on the other side of the fence there. yeah.

Anu Adegbola (23:34)
Mmm. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

also, so what I'd also like, ⁓ you know, asking like people ended when he shared mistakes is that there's some people in this state that will be very pro let's get the stuff solved. And there might be some people who are literally like challenging and just like, who was this kind of thing? Like, why did this happen?

Were there any people, those kinds of people in the team that, that you're like, you are, you are being the enemy of progress right now. Let's just get on the right track of solving this. Always everybody pretty much on the same, same, same, ⁓ train of like, let's get the solution.

Emina Demiri Watson (24:19)
for the client that we let go. It was difficult. We did a consultation with the team members. Obviously the team members who were like only working on those accounts, yeah, will of course have issues because, you know, there were very capable, smart people who understood that if this happens, then, you know, it's not gonna...

Anu Adegbola (24:22)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Of course we'll have issues. Yes. Yeah.

Emina Demiri Watson (24:47)
Yeah, it's not gonna be good for them. But in general, is what I mean about kind of thinking about the whole team and everybody. I think it was time. It wasn't something that we did in, you know, we're not talking about a week here or two weeks. We're talking about a relationship that was tricky for three months, you know, and it was kind of...

Anu Adegbola (24:47)
Yeah. And well for them, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Wow, yeah.

Emina Demiri Watson (25:12)
it started having a really big impact on everybody. So I think by the end of it everybody was for it, but all of us were, you know, I don't know if you can say shit, but scared shitless.

Anu Adegbola (25:15)
Mmm. Mmm.

Good.

Emina Demiri Watson (25:27)
We were, we were, I'm not gonna lie. were like, like a week after I woke up in the morning thinking, you know, like from a dream about this client thinking, my God, we made a mistake. You know, it's something that it's not like, but we knew that it was the right decision. We knew, but it was a scary one to do. So yeah.

Anu Adegbola (25:29)
Yeah. Yeah.

A goat. ⁓ a goat. Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay,

look, we have so many, you know, we, and I'm very grateful. I feel like you're helping me rein it in and not say we could talk a lot more and there's other things. Yeah, the two of us, there are other things I want to bring on. We don't make, this is not an hour long podcast guys. This is like a snappy main lessons, get to the point kind of episode. and I would like to, you know, speak, get Emina to speak on.

Emina Demiri Watson (25:58)
My god, the two of us.

⁓

Anu Adegbola (26:14)
mistakes she's found from other people and mistakes she's found, talked about in AI. well, before we get into that stage, what's one final takeaway? I mean, are you wanting people to take from that story that you've just shared in terms of, let's say you're the person who is in charge of like, you know, making that decision of accounts kind of thing and, of clients of, and, know, and they're a bit nervous and you know that you've seen the relationship go sour for like three, four months and you know, you'd have to make the decision.

What's your advice to that person? What's the takeaway for people?

Emina Demiri Watson (26:46)
My biggest takeaway really is to go back to your values and your values are going to tell you if the decision is right or not and if commercial values are at the top of your list then don't do it. If it's not then it might be

Anu Adegbola (26:51)
No.

Hmm

Okay.

Emina Demiri Watson (27:09)
the right decision, it might be time. So it really comes down to the values you have for your company. ⁓

Anu Adegbola (27:09)
time. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay.

Interesting. Okay. Um, all right. So now let's, um, let's go into talking about, yeah, some other mistakes that you've seen other agencies do in terms of like, you've done an audit. What is like one or two like big mistakes that really, you know, gets under your skin as to how are people still doing this in 2026 even when new year we're into it.

Emina Demiri Watson (27:38)
I

mean, I don't like to talk about other agencies doing a bad job because I think all of them, you know, I would want to hope that all of them try and do the best for the client. have seen accounts that have been in a bit of a disarray and a bit is an understatement. I mean,

Anu Adegbola (27:43)
No.

Yeah. Yeah. But if we say we want to talk about.

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Okay. Well, you're kind,

so.

Emina Demiri Watson (28:07)
So the one that we all, that's kind of like, it's a cliche, but it's so, it's the broad match. I mean, I come from Google ads, when Google ads were not Google ads, they were AdWords, and they had the broad match modifier.

Anu Adegbola (28:13)
Yeah.

Yeah.

AdWords. Is that? Yeah.

Yes,

BMM! Like, yeah! We show our age, why are even saying that? ⁓ God.

Emina Demiri Watson (28:32)
So, you know, yeah, I've been, so I've been, I've

been around for quite a long time. And you've seen lots of things, but one of the ones that does happen still is, is, and I can understand why it happens, is this broad match thing. It happens because of that kind of recommendation, little pop-up. So companies, companies come and they said, well, I'm doing all of the recommended stuff.

Anu Adegbola (28:54)
Mm, good girl, love it.

Emina Demiri Watson (29:01)
think about who's recommending it. And I don't say that as a, you know, this, it's you have to have critical thinking. I mean, you know, I'm not saying Google is evil or there. It's a business they're trying to also. And it does sometimes for some some campaigns, it might really work. I haven't necessarily maybe if you had like custom audiences and everything else, maybe, I don't know. So that's like a big one. That's that's like the basic stuff.

Anu Adegbola (29:03)
Wesley!

Yeah. So it's me.

So it's like mainly that whole, and I think we, cause I'm with you on this, but some people are like, "Anu you cannot just tell people not to use broad." I'm literally like, it's more like use broad with loads of targeting audience targeting and, know, sub targeting the subcategories because just broad on anything. Yeah. Yeah.

Emina Demiri Watson (29:42)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, but most don't have that data. That's the problem. The problem is

that most companies do not have enough data to be able to put the guardrails.

Anu Adegbola (29:58)
Yes.

Emina Demiri Watson (29:58)
on the other side so

that they can, you know, do the broad. I mean, I've seen accounts where there's no negative keyword lists. It's just for me, that's just it's it's like mental. You don't like you're running PMAX campaigns or you're running like search campaigns on phrase match and you don't have any negative keyword lists. So that's also a really big one.

Anu Adegbola (30:03)
Yes.

Yeah.

⁓ gosh, ⁓ god.

Emina Demiri Watson (30:26)
Sometimes you see targeting that is too narrow. So you will get an account and the client is going to be very particular about who their ideal customer profile is, which I always say you have to have an ideal customer profile. However, you need to understand that not every channel will allow you the segmentation that you need. So...

Anu Adegbola (30:30)
Mmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Emina Demiri Watson (30:51)
As an example, a client coming to you with high net worth individuals ⁓ targeting that's their target market. ⁓ You can kind of

Anu Adegbola (30:56)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Emina Demiri Watson (31:03)
try and sort out your location targeting. For example, you can target areas that are more affluent with your ads. Okay, so that's something that you can do to kind of make sure, not make sure, but to try and get the right audience. However, a lot of the time, it just doesn't work. So you end up with a very, very, very, even if that's done, you end up with a very small area and the system has nothing to learn from.

Anu Adegbola (31:11)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mmm. Yeah.

Emina Demiri Watson (31:33)
and

it just doesn't work. Or you have a client that is expecting a keyword that has commercial intent and it's the right keyword to just target people who are high net worth. It doesn't work. Even on LinkedIn where you have company growth rates, those are not completely 100 % correct.

Anu Adegbola (31:43)
Mmm. Mmm.

Mmm. No.

No. No.

Emina Demiri Watson (32:02)
because

we're talking about product information. So that's another big one. I could go on. mean, there's so many ads, creatives.

Anu Adegbola (32:11)
How about mistakes when it

comes to AI, AI usage? I know you have lots of opinions on that one. They were like, sorry, sorry, I'm sorry.

Emina Demiri Watson (32:15)
You're triggering me. I know you're

triggering me. Okay, the first thing, the biggest mistake is believing the hype. I mean, it is, I was reading, I think it was Gartner or somebody who, or Deloitte, one of the like the big consultancies came with a research around that we are currently in the valley of disillusionment when it comes to AI. And I think

Anu Adegbola (32:22)
Okay, yeah

Hmm.

Emina Demiri Watson (32:44)
LLMs, if we're correct. And I think that is slowly happening, but there's a lot of snake oil out there being sold. In PPC, it's an interesting one because when it comes to Google Ads using, I mean, we're used to automation. AI isn't something new. It's like,

Anu Adegbola (32:46)
Yes.

Yes, yes.

Mm.

Yeah, yeah exactly. It's on your

scripts. We've been doing scripts for many years and you know all this like yeah, yeah.

Emina Demiri Watson (33:13)
Exactly.

it's something that, you know, PPC teams are maybe less paranoid about what's going on because they're more used to it. And Google Ads has been more of a black box than, for example, when you're looking at search much more, there is much less out on how Google Ads works these days ⁓ than on search. So I think there's this kind of idea that

Anu Adegbola (33:20)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Emina Demiri Watson (33:41)
LLMs can, in Google Ads, they're great for things like, you do little scripts that you used to do anyway. We have scripts that do our UTMs, for example, on a client level. We have lots of scripts from other people in the industry that we're using in our campaigns. I did a little script for...

Anu Adegbola (33:50)
Mm, mm.

Mm. Mm.

Mm.

Emina Demiri Watson (34:04)
when PMAX came up with, you know, no longer shopping campaigns are going to be prioritized, but you know, kind of if you run both of them, ⁓ I did a little script that basically tells you if you have the same thing running to kind of like alert you that you might be, it's on our website actually, wasting some budget ⁓ for PMAX. Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (34:11)
Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Yeah.

Interesting, okay. That's a good one. Yeah

Emina Demiri Watson (34:31)
But LLMs in general, mistakes, the biggest mistake is just believing the hype. Yeah. Yeah, you need to use them strategically, so.

Anu Adegbola (34:38)
Everything, everything. Yeah. But I also think,

absolutely. And I think like, again, it's really great how you say that, say that of like, don't believe the hype, but use it strategically. I think some people there, there's also those people are like, get, get this AI slop away from me. I don't want to see AI in the morning. Don't use ever use. And I'm like, no, no, no, that's, that's going to an extreme on the other end of things. And that's not actually necessary, but

Emina Demiri Watson (34:50)
Yeah.

I'm gonna.

Anu Adegbola (35:02)
Definitely use it. Like I'll ask someone who's like assisting me with like doing work on PPC Live I was like, are you using AI for some of our postures? Like, no, I never, and I'm like, why? Why not? Like, sorry, why? I need you to work faster and AI will help you do that. Why are you not using it?

Emina Demiri Watson (35:12)
Yeah. I mean...

I ⁓

have a confession for you, Anu.

Anu Adegbola (35:23)
please.

Emina Demiri Watson (35:25)
So since we, I love using LLMs. Again, coming back to you have to be critical. So whatever you get out of it, like don't just believe it. But one of the things with junior members of teams, ⁓ I'm awful, that I do, I get a question, I sometimes will just respond with a little robot emoji.

Anu Adegbola (35:29)
Yeah!

Nah.

Okay, I was like you can ask what are you trying to say?

Emina Demiri Watson (35:50)
which is basically

a code for have you asked Claude first? Because if you haven't asked Claude and you've asked me, I want you to ask Claude first and then you can give me if you're not sure about what the response is, you can give me that response and I will review it and tell you if there's anything you know. But what I want you to do is A, use the systems in the right way and also B, resourceful.

Anu Adegbola (35:54)
Yes. Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes, my saying, yeah.

Yeah.

Emina Demiri Watson (36:18)
Yeah. So for us, one of the main things in talking about values is I hire people. The first thing first thing that I look for is somebody who is proactive. Yeah. Somebody who will actually go and look it up themselves first, because that shows me that shows me the drive. Yeah. So yeah, I'm a little bit mean. I will like sometimes just

Anu Adegbola (36:18)
Yes.

Mmm.

Sure. Sure.

Yes.

Yes.

Emina Demiri Watson (36:46)
pose that little emoji of a little, you know, like a robot.

Anu Adegbola (36:48)
I think I'm gonna start

doing it and if I feel guilty I'll be like it's cause Emina said it, it's cause Emina told me to!

Emina Demiri Watson (36:54)
Honestly, don't know. feel I do feel guilty about it. I feel it does not make me a really bad manager or a really good manager. I still haven't like this decided. Yeah. Yeah, both probably.

Anu Adegbola (37:03)
don't forget. ⁓ I think it might depend on the person, depending on who you're dealing with. Some people,

some people will be like, yeah, we love this. We love that. Some people will be like, what?

Emina Demiri Watson (37:13)
Well, you know, so far nobody has actually complained, so hopefully it's alright.

Anu Adegbola (37:16)
There we go. That's a win. Well, we'll take

that as a win. We'll take it as a fantastic win. Anyway, like, look, we've had such a fantastic conversation here. You've given us so much from personal stories, mistakes we should look out for, AI mistakes. That has been such a full episode here. ⁓ So yeah, thank you so much, Emina, for that. But before we leave you, a nice, fun, non-PPC question. If your PPC career were a movie, what would the title be?

Emina Demiri Watson (37:44)
So are we supposed to use real movies? Okay. So I think it would be The Martian, which is also a book by Andy Veer, I'm terrible with names. And it's about a guy who gets stranded and he's like a botanist or something, but he ends up doing absolutely everything because he's trying to survive.

Anu Adegbola (37:47)
any whether it can be real it can be not real whatever you feel like it okay

Okay?

Mm.

Okay.

Okay, okay. Yeah,

yeah, yeah.

Emina Demiri Watson (38:11)
So he ends

up being an engineer, a communication person, you know, like, and he has this kind of, let's, science the shit out of this ⁓ attitude to be able to survive this like hostile environment. And when I think about the Martian, kind of, that's how I see myself a little bit, because I always say that I'm like too curious to specialize and that's very true. And, ⁓ and it is about,

Anu Adegbola (38:20)
Right.

Yeah, you're right.

Okay.

Yeah. Yeah.

Emina Demiri Watson (38:40)
For me, there's a really a big value in full stack marketers, particularly today when we're talking about LLMs and AI and understanding how it all works together and having somebody in the team who can be that, you know, I always hated this jack of all trades, master of none. don't think.

Anu Adegbola (38:45)
Mm. Mm.

Yes.

Yeah, None.

Emina Demiri Watson (39:02)
I don't think that's the right way to look at it. I think it's more about orchestration. ⁓ So yeah, it's the Martian. I'm a Martian.

Anu Adegbola (39:08)
Yeah.

It's the Martian. Fantastic. I love it. Absolutely. Absolutely.

You guys are actually going to be the first to hear this. And I'm going to say, did tell Emina that I was going to announce it, but Emina has agreed that she's going to be speaking at our next PPC live in person on the 29th of April. And that's going to be the evening before our big Brighton SEO. So that's going to be in Brighton. So you can't back out now. Sorry, Emina. Everybody now. I get it. It's going to be.

Emina Demiri Watson (39:36)
you really put me in it now.

Anu Adegbola (39:39)
Fantastic. So if

Emina Demiri Watson (39:40)
I can't wait.

Anu Adegbola (39:40)
you're going to be in Brighton, please join us. Try to book your accommodation so that you're there from the Wednesday evening. And as usual, it's not just going to be a PPC talk. We're going to provide pizza and food, food and drinks kind of thing. So you can just really enjoy that evening with us. So we'd love to have you there. Emina, where can people find you chatting about things and all the things you're passionate about before actually seeing you in April?

Emina Demiri Watson (39:50)
Mm.

Oh god, just to say I'm more nervous about speaking at PPC Live than at Brighton SEO. So I'm speaking at Brighton SEO as well, but I'm so looking forward to it. You that's it. You have to kind of throw yourself into it. So where can people find me? On LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn quite a lot. Slack. Slack communities. I'm big on that.

Anu Adegbola (40:14)
Really? Really? I don't understand.

It would be great. Yeah!

Yeah.

Okay. Okay.

Emina Demiri Watson (40:33)
And since recently on WhatsApp, I have too many WhatsApp communities now as well.

Anu Adegbola (40:35)
⁓ I need to add you to the PPC live one then.

You can be that one too.

Emina Demiri Watson (40:40)
Please do!

mean, that's the thing. It sounds really cheesy, I really like, you know, I love digital marketing, so I will, I like talking about PPC even, you know, I have no... Yeah, it's the work-life balance thing that I have a problem with.

Anu Adegbola (40:43)
Yeah.

Hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, I love that I know. Yeah, look,

it's, it's so true. Like I was the previous guest, this lovely lady, Andrea Cruz out of the US, she's the head of B2B at Tinuiti And she was talking about how she's amazing and she's just got such energy and such passion. And even before then I was like, look, is it possible to be stressed about something that you actually enjoy? She's like, yeah, we, we, we feel it's stressful.

Emina Demiri Watson (41:08)
So that one.

Yeah. God,

Anu Adegbola (41:23)
We can't think of doing anything else. It's not that I'm so stressed I wanna leave. It's just that I'm so stressed I want it to be better. You know, that kind of thing. It's a crazy, it's a drive.

Emina Demiri Watson (41:25)
you

Yeah, it's drive, it's drive,

know, it's some people will, I'm not recommending it to anybody, but ⁓ some people will get this drive from it and that can make you stressed. I'll be stressed before the talk at PPC live and then I'll have the dopamine when I start doing it and it's worth it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's worth it.

Anu Adegbola (41:37)
No. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, you're doing that would be amazing. I don't know. Amazing. It would be amazing. We can't, we can't

wait to have you there, Mina. Thank you so much for this great chat that you've had with us. We've learned so much and I'm sure the listeners have taken so much away from this. ⁓ but yeah, thank you for now. ⁓ see you in Brighton and, yeah, can't wait to chat later. All right. Bye.

Emina Demiri Watson (42:10)
Thank you. Bye.

Anu Adegbola (42:14)
Thank you Emina for sharing that very honest and transparent experience about something that is worth a lot of money, that was a big loss for an agency. That is not something reps from different agencies or people who work in different agencies are quick to share. So yeah, I mean, that was an amazing transparent way of just showing us the importance of.

you know, ensuring that you are not putting all your eggs in one basket or you are not putting, you know, 80 % of your eggs in one client baskets, ensure that you're getting the best in terms of relationship and, you know, revenue from different kinds of clients. So yeah, for all the information and the full transcript, please go to podcast.ppc.live to get show notes, transcripts and everything of that fantastic conversation. So now in terms of PPC live events,

Yeah, ⁓ it's I do all the, you know, podcast, you know, production and so depending on when this goes live, you might be in time for the PPC live online that's happening on Wednesday, 18th February. So that's today as I'm recording. And that's happening at 3pm, you know, British summertime, though it's not summer out there, but like British time, GMT time, it's 3pm happening and it's happening up to 4.30 and that is

We're going to be doing a recording. We're going to be streaming the recording of the talks of PPC live 19, but also in the last half hour of it. like from four o'clock, we're going to have Dave Alexander and Nils Rooijmans joining for live Q and A. if you, you'll get those who are joining at 3 PM and are going to be there at 4 PM can ask Dave and Nils

questions directly, they're gonna be joining us for that. So yeah, please join us or go to ppc.live to get to the YouTube link or to get to the LinkedIn, go on our LinkedIn and you'll be able to see that we're live to join that. But if you're joining after 4.30, if you just go to our YouTube page as well, you'll be able to see the talk that we did, the recording, the streaming of all the talks that we did and the Q and A that we did. So yeah, go there as well. Go to ppc.live for that.

But if you're not an online person and you're just excited for our next in-person event, put April 29th in your diary. We're gonna be back at Brighton. So join us for that. ⁓ Go to ppc.live by the end of this week. We'll have the tickets up because yeah, can't wait to get that going. And a new structure that's gonna happen because we wanna reward, you know, early buyers, people who plan ahead.

and buy their tickets on time. So we're going to start with an early bird sale. And after a few weeks, we're going to go to, you know, normal ticket price, first ticket release, but we're going to have a final ticket release on the week of the event. the week of the April 29th tickets [price] are going to go up again, because yeah, if you're going to be last minute.

You're going to be charged for that. You're going to be charged for the stress that we're having. ⁓ my God, are people going to come? So yeah, make sure you get those tickets as early as possible, as cheap as possible. But whichever way they're all, all the prices are going to be less than a hundred pounds, much less than a hundred pounds, even the, even the last minute ticket sales. So yeah, join us for that. See what that's going to be like. You know, I'm sure that's something that can be expensed through your company.

for the amount of knowledge and knowledge shared that you get with the amount of people who are just ready to share their knowledge in a room with you, plus pizza and drinks, always, always guaranteed for our in-person event on April 29th in Brighton. Go to ppc.live for those tickets. Before I leave you, I'm delighted to also share that I'm taking on coaching clients. So yeah, all you have to do is go to themarketinganu.com

 for that if you just are struggling with your confidence, know, asking for that pay rise, asking for that promotion and just trying to get ahead in the industry. If you've got stress, stressful situations with managers or other colleagues, I'd love to help you through with that. Those are all issues that I've dealt with. Even like things like imposter syndrome, not feeling that you're, you're, you're worth the role you're in. I can help with that. So go to the marketing annual for free 15 minute discovery call.

And after that, yeah, we'll figure out what your needs are so that we can have a great coaching session set up. So yeah, I hope you've enjoyed the show and I look forward to bringing more PPC F-UPS and Triumphs next week. Thank you. Bye.