EP354 - The Leads Were There… So What Went Wrong? ft Danny Gavin

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. But instead of me speaking to the different experts and saying what they're talking about, I'm bringing the PPC experts to you. Every week I'm speaking to a different expert about their biggest FOP and how they've turned things around. So we never leave things on the defeated notes, we show how that, you know, warned them.

and help them forge their path ahead and continue to be the best PPC experts that they are in the field today. Today, I have the delight of speaking to Danny Gavin, who's based out of US but has a very lovely history ⁓ from South Africa and very highly motivated digital marketer as well as a professor. And he shares an incident that happened like several years ago about how like communication led to failed.

you know, led to like them failing to actually communicate the work they were doing and actually be able to prove that the results that we're getting was actually getting to the client. So they were doing the work, they were getting good results, but the client was not getting it. So we're gonna talk about how that breakup happened and how that breaking communication happened, how that break in, you know, delivering the results happened and what that led to in terms of how they fixed it.

And what that means for, you know, clients not being able to connect with possible leads if they don't come in in time. So yeah, let's go speak to Danny.

Anu Adegbola (01:51)
Hello, Danny. Welcome to PPC Live the podcast.

Danny Gavin (01:54)
So excited to be here.

Anu Adegbola (01:56)
so amazing. Like, ⁓ I love our industry. feel like I genuinely like, let me be honest, like Danny and I have not known each other for much, for too long. you, you went, you were on the, PPC zone, show by our, our mutual friend, Jill Saskin Gales. We'll all know the PPC live folks will know about Jill Saskin Gales. She's a great ambassador of PPC lives, you know, sponsor supporting us.

in so many ways. actually I'm always like looking out for guests that Jill is speaking to so I can be like, yeah, that would be a good person for our podcast. Cause if Jill rates you, that's good. That's the seal of approval. That's the only sort of approval that you need. So thank you so much, Danny for joining us today. Amazing. Amazing. So yeah, so Danny.

Danny Gavin (02:42)
for sure.

Anu Adegbola (02:45)
Is a very much like one of those days, a highly motivated result-driven internet marketing strategist, you know, known for a persistence and creativity and problem solving kind of skills. He's got deep roots in like family, ecom business. And what was the ecom business that you said your parents started?

Danny Gavin (03:02)
Yeah,

yeah, so we sold, we sold, sorry, we sell diamonds jewelry online. So my dad's actually a fifth generation diamond man. I guess that makes me sixth, but I'm more into digital marketing than diamonds.

Anu Adegbola (03:14)
Right,

right, interesting. Oh, wow. So yeah, so very much like, you know, extensive experience and hands-on first-hand experience in leading, you know, web development and digital marketing, you know, projects of all sizes. He's helped Brian Gavin-Diamonds into, you know, nationally recognized, you know, rankings and, you know, being an internet retailer, retailer's top thousand, but also has consulted for major organizations, including Microsoft, Houston Public Media.

And he's also a professor at the University of Houston, C.T. Bauer College of Business, where he teaches MBA students and executives about social media and search engine marketing. And his agency actually specializes in PPC. So a fantastic guest for us to have here, but also including SEO, social analytics, email marketing, lead gen and some Ecom. Also, fun fact, know, this is guys, my listeners now know this one, my favorite part.

of the show where like I get my guests telling me about your random hobbies that you have. So yeah, Danny, what's your fun fact you'd like to share with us today?

Danny Gavin (04:21)
Yeah, so number one is I love music. I'm a guitarist, I sing. But what I was telling anyone before was when I was 21 years old, I was in Africa and my friends were like, hey, what do we do for your 21st birthday? And so randomly we had a friend of a friend, like we've got to go to this amazing African nightclub in the middle of downtown Johannesburg. And that's going to be your initiation, Danny, into the world. And honestly, it was crazy because I was never in ever in my whole life in a place like that.

Anu Adegbola (04:49)
Yeah.

Danny Gavin (04:50)
But it was such a... I'm not going use the term spiritual, but such an awesome vibe. Aaron was so nice, the dancing, the everything. Just a very special moment for me because it was like so out of my comfort zone. But it shows you that when you go out of your comfort zone, sometimes you can find really amazing things that even though it might look different than you or what you experience, but it's really, really awesome. So that's one of my highlights.

Anu Adegbola (05:06)
soon.

Yeah. Yeah.

Amazing. And like, as someone, you know, I've, I've partied in parts of Africa, not in South Africa, not in Johannesburg. Yeah. You know, cause I need to put that on my list now is the music style, like the kind of Afro beats we hear, or is it more, do they have their own cultural stylings that has not quite gone, gone wide yet?

Danny Gavin (05:35)
think from what I remember, because it's almost 20 years ago, which sounds crazy. I mean, the music I think was more mainstream. ⁓ But I I would say the Indigenous, the natural music of Africa or South Africa is quite amazing. ⁓ And I forget the name of the choir, but there's that famous South African choir that I think they did a concert with Paul Simon and then also were featured on Sesame Street all the time. But there, for those who've seen, I don't remember their name.

Anu Adegbola (05:50)
Nice.

Yeah.

Danny Gavin (06:04)
For those who have listened to them, that's very much South Africa.

Anu Adegbola (06:08)
Yeah, yeah. that's amazing. That's really nice. And yeah, there's the, in all different parts of like Africa, North, South, East, West, we all have our different stylings. So it's really nice to, yeah, to see that those kinds of like celebrations happen and anyone, it's always like, come welcome. You know, even if you don't know what you're, to do. Cause I feel like people look at Africans and we're like, those guys can dance. We've got the moves and you're like, what are you gonna do?

Just get involved, just have fun, enjoy and have a good with us. It's always, always a good time. But anyway, like this, the point of this as this talk, as know, Danny and I've been chatting just before recording here is talking about, you know, some f-up some mistakes. And we'd love to give you our audience, like a full story of before, during and after. Danny was even actually going to be so kind to even maybe share a story that was how that's like.

Danny Gavin (06:37)
Exactly.

Anu Adegbola (07:01)
They're in the middle of right now. They're in the middle of that facing fire, firefighting moment. But I was like, no, let's not let's, let's do it. Something to talk about something that we can really have a good, you know, rear you mirror as they say, the, you know, retrospective view is 2020. You, once you can see that and time has passed, you can really see the whole story for what it is. we're gonna, you know, Danny is going to be so kind to share a story of something that happened a few years ago.

so that we can really see the full picture of what happened, what were the learnings and what it now takes with him in working with new clients moving on. So yeah, Danny, please share what's the f-up you'd like to share with us today.

Danny Gavin (07:46)
So now I am part of an agency of around 34 people. But when we first started 2017, 2018, it was just a group of three or four people in house, all in the same room. Now we're remote. And when you first start out, whether you're a freelancer or an agency and you don't really have a lot of people with a lot of experience with you, that means you're going to experience things. Right? Like you're gonna make mistakes. It's bound to happen. And I think the trick is how do you come back, right? And that's what we're talking about.

Anu Adegbola (08:05)
Mm-hmm. Yes.

Danny Gavin (08:13)
So I think the first time that this like really hit us hard was we had a client in the ABA space and that's a special type of therapy for children with autism. And they were located in the Midwest of the United States and we were running Google ads for them. And bottom line, we're looking at Google ads, we're looking at the platform and we're seeing, wow, we're getting clicks, we're getting leads, we're getting it at the right cost per lead and things look really, really good.

But on the other end, you have the client who's getting very, very frustrated because week after week, she's not seeing anything. And the crazy thing is no one's really talking to each other about it. Like we've sent the report right after month one, I think it was like month two, but nothing was going on. And it got to a point where we basically figured out. So we, for years, we've set up custom landing pages. And when you have a custom landing page, you'll have, usually you'll have a form in there. Form, once it's filled out, is going to send an email.

Anu Adegbola (08:53)
you

Mm-hmm.

Danny Gavin (09:10)
to the client and the problem was something broke down and was not actually receiving the emails. So even if when we exported like the list of the contacts like, ⁓ here are all the leads, but we just didn't realize that the client was not getting the emails. And you can imagine when that happened and when we actually figured it out here, the client has spent money paying the agency, paying people and for a period of

Anu Adegbola (09:14)
Mmm.

Danny Gavin (09:40)
one to two months, there are all these leads that no one followed up with. And just that when you found out about it, when they find about it, your heart drops, your stomach drops. And it's just it's craziness.

Anu Adegbola (09:52)
⁓ yeah. So yeah, those are guys. yeah, cause again, for me, I'm also thinking you guys have put this amount of work and you're proud of yourselves and you're like, know, you're like, yeah, we're doing a great job. The client must be happy, but they're not. And it's literally like that, that disconnect. So who was, who was the person? Was it like your team, someone in your team that figured it out? Or was it the client that was like, by the way, we're not seeing what you're, you think we're seeing.

Danny Gavin (10:21)
So it would have been better if we found it at any time, whenever there's a mistake, if you can find it better. But in this case, from our perspective, like we didn't have enough experience then to ask the questions like, hey, are you receiving the emails? But from our perspective, everything seemed fine. So it came from the client, unfortunately. And so we had to deal with that fire.

Anu Adegbola (10:27)
Yeah.

Mmm.

Okay, all right. Now take us through the process. Now they let you know, we're not seeing it. What was your investigation process?

Danny Gavin (10:54)
Yeah, so at that point it was, so first of all, we've got to see, do we even have the leads? So that's when you go into the system, whether it's the backend of the landing page, software or your website and export the leads and make sure at least you have them. And thank God, sometimes it could be even worse where you fill out that form, no email gets sent, but you don't even save the data itself. And that would have been an utter disaster. But here at least in the backend of the database, each lead was being saved.

Anu Adegbola (11:07)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Fantastic.

Danny Gavin (11:23)
So we were able

to export the data and then send it to them and try to at least triage some of it. ⁓ As we all know, usually when people contact, you get the biggest bang for your buck when you reach out to them immediately. Every day or week that you're following up with them, the colder it gets. So I don't remember exactly how much they were able to save, but it wasn't great. It wasn't great.

Anu Adegbola (11:30)
Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

It wasn't great. that's, that's annoying. How did you guys, I also like taking, having taken a moment to get into that emotional state of like, what, what did it feel like? Like, was that, was that like a personal pain point for you? Was it kind of a bit, you know, further away from you or was it something that you really felt of like, I should have caught this out kind of thing. How did that feel for you?

Danny Gavin (12:15)
So I take my business very personally, as if it's a reflection of me at any point. And at that point, it was a small team, right? It was just three or four of us. And the person we were working with was, I wouldn't say like a personal friend, but I knew her husband. So it wasn't like six degrees of separation, it was like someone I really knew. So the idea is like, my God, we let them down.

Anu Adegbola (12:31)
and

in the

Danny Gavin (12:39)
Did we, you know, in a way you feel like you stole money from them. And it's so there's a lot of regret. There's a lot of pain inside because you don't even know what to do. And then to go ahead and say, we'll just, you know, refund you for the past two, three months. can't do that either because you still have to pay people. So you just feel like you're in this horrible spot of like. Like, what do I do? I can't do anything. And it's just, yeah, it's it's really rough. It's really tough.

Anu Adegbola (12:42)
⁓ yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Sure.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, it can be really tough. And what did you do to kind of push yourself forward and like, okay, we've made the mistake, I regret it, I feel bad, but you're not going to be helpful to anybody just sitting there feeling sorry for yourself, feeling bad. What took you out of that, that that headspace?

Danny Gavin (13:24)
Yeah.

So the first thing is to be honest, right? Like sometimes we reach a fork in the road or like, Ooh, it might be better if we, you know, lie or fib a little bit. It's going to make us look better. But, hopefully people realize that, you know, when you're honest and you're open, that's the best thing to do. Because once you start to lie, it can go into a bad, you don't remember what you said two weeks ago and things like that. So number one, you got to be honest. Number two is getting together and start coming with an action plan. So.

Anu Adegbola (13:43)
Yes.

Danny Gavin (13:53)
When you make a mistake, it's important to get together and be like, okay, what are we going to do now to help the client? And then also moving forward, what are things that we can put in place so that this never happens again? So with the client in particular, I don't remember exactly what the exact solution was, but from what I remember, I think it was a combination of A, like number one, I think the emails that we're sending out, we need to make sure that we CC ourselves so that if you don't see the, right, I think at that point it's just the client gets the emails, but no.

Anu Adegbola (14:03)
Fantastic.

Yeah.

Danny Gavin (14:22)
Every email that goes out, we need to be CC'd, so we'll be able to be see, are we getting the emails or are we not? I think we also, at that point, made sure that every lead that came in also went into a Google spreadsheet. And that way it's an easy visibility that at any time the client or us can come in and look at it. So let's say, God forbid, the email did break down and no one noticed it, but at least those...

each lead would go into the spreadsheet and at any time someone could come in and take a look at that and be like, yeah, here are the leads, that's what's going on. So not a perfect solution in that case, but at least it's a really good backup plan. And I think it increases that visibility because when all the leads are within the landing page and the client isn't really tech savvy, they're really at their mercy of you. And therefore the more that we can get the data available for them to see without them having to ask you and let it be free and open,

Anu Adegbola (14:55)
Yeah, yeah.

Danny Gavin (15:17)
helps. So and then another thing is testing forms, know, testing forms on a monthly or quarterly basis to see like filling out. the email actually go out and then checking with the client? Hey, did you receive the form? So I think those were the three big measures that we put into place to start being OK. We didn't even know that this could happen, but now that it did happen, all right, let's get a little bit careful and let's add these points in place. And even though this story happened, you know, nine eight, nine years ago,

but this is something that could easily happen today, right? And therefore something that we should always consider in PPC when we're doing lead gen and we control, know, even if you're not building a landing page but you're using the client's website, but there still is a responsibility that you have that they're getting the leads. So even if you could say, I don't control the website, you do, and you didn't get them, but it doesn't make a difference because in the end of the day, they're paying you, they're paying Google, and if they're not getting the leads, you're...

Anu Adegbola (15:49)
Absolutely.

Yes.

Danny Gavin (16:15)
You may not get all the trouble, but there's going to be trouble.

Anu Adegbola (16:17)
Yes, absolutely. think like, you know, cause yeah, I started, I paid second like, I know this is another thing that shows my age, like 2008 ish, don't do the maths. But yeah, like back then, yeah, we responsible for traffic. It was such an exciting time. Oh, you know, you could, you know, in a few moments you could bid on some keywords and as soon as you, you know, set your campaign live, boom, you see your ad up there and we send the clicks and we're sending so many clicks and

At a time, yeah, sometimes we'd be like, it's not doing revenue, but hey, you're seeing the visibility. Visibility was a good thing, was a good target. But now it's not just, that does not cut it. It has to be visibility that leads to the right thing. Cause if it's just visibility, we're just throwing money at Google. You're not working for your client. If all you're caring is about the visibility that goes onto your client's landing page. You need to make sure it's going down to the right landing pages.

you know, the right forms are being seen and of his, obviously for the stories, especially specifically that the leads are going to the clients and the client is seeing your hard work. Cause yeah, it might just look like you just, you just stole your client's money because you're like, yeah, it's sending traffic. That should be good enough. That's definitely not good enough, you know, anymore.

Danny Gavin (17:32)
The crazy

thing, Anu, is that there are people and there are agencies today that still all they like, they just do traffic. And I mean, obviously not to put anyone down, but there are a couple of guys out there that still say, yeah, it's enough that we're sending traffic to you. Look how much traffic, right? And I find that crazy in the year 2026.

Anu Adegbola (17:39)
⁓ gosh.

Yeah.

Okay. Yeah.

Absolutely, absolutely. That's absolutely crazy. But looking back, I mean, you did, there's something that you said that stuck out to me where you were like, you didn't feel your team was experienced enough to ask that question of like, you guys seen, you know, the leads? Is that, I don't know. I'd be like, I'd hope that's something that you, because I feel like.

A team should be able to communication. it, isn't communication like a big thing when you have a client to be able to be like, okay, we've sent the leads. think you're getting it. Can you confirm that you're, you're getting it? Is that the kind of conversation that you feel agencies should be having with their client or are there other ways to just, you know, mitigate that because yeah, we should be experienced enough to communicate with our clients to ensure they're seeing the right things. Right.

Danny Gavin (18:37)
I

agree with you. And that's why one of our core values right now at the agency is communication. ⁓ So I agree. No, you're right. Like you would hope that some of these things are natural, but sometimes like, think about it, if you're not so good at technology, but you know, and then you're like, the technology works. Like it's going to work. And therefore it, you know, they're getting the leads. We send the reports. Sometimes you get into a groove.

Anu Adegbola (18:44)
Sure.

Hmm.

Yeah.

Danny Gavin (19:04)
where you don't even realize what could happen. ⁓ So I agree with you that naturally we should be over communicators, but I think there are always parts of our life where we rely on certain things like, of course that's being done, or of course that's going to work. And therefore that leads us to not even think that that's an issue. And yeah, and so in this case, that was the example. Like the woman,

Anu Adegbola (19:07)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Danny Gavin (19:31)
who was running the campaigns. I mean, she was really good at what she was doing, but I think she never experienced the fact of technology not working. And therefore in her mind didn't even realize that that could have been an issue. Now, could we say, yes, you should have been communicating all the time and speaking. And yeah, and I think that that, I'll say another change from that is, is that what we did in the agency over time was instead of relying on the

Anu Adegbola (19:40)
Sure.

Yeah.

Danny Gavin (20:00)
strategist or the specialist to be the one communicating with the client, we started getting account managers because we'd rather the strategists work on the actual accounts and not having to worry about the communication. But then you hire people, especially just for communication, so that they're reaching out weekly and they're talking. And therefore you are right. Like part of the trick of why people choose freelancers or agencies because of communication. I need to hear from people. They need to tell me what's going on. And if they don't get that. So

Anu Adegbola (20:10)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Danny Gavin (20:29)
I think a lot came out from that. But you are right. There should be something ingrained inside of us around communication. That when communication is bad, whether it's in your marriage, with your partner, right? We know that's when it breaks down. But when communication is good, that's when life is good. And that's when things work.

Anu Adegbola (20:41)
Yeah!

It is. I look, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to do like if I was poking at you like, I didn't, know, I was just like, my brain was like, he said that bit. Let's pull up that thread a little bit. That's what I do. Sorry.

Danny Gavin (20:50)
No, no!

So I know

I am naturally very, I take things very personally and I've had to work really hard in my life to like, hey, Dan, it's not you. But that always comes out a little bit. So no, this is really good conversation and I'm happy because I want people to hear, right? Like ⁓ these are all things that people need to consider when they're doing, especially in the lead gen.

Anu Adegbola (21:12)
kids.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And you said something nice as we were like, you know, talking about the story, please tell us like the aftermath of that, of like what your relationship with that client is now.

Danny Gavin (21:28)
Yeah, so I think right afterwards that was like, I don't want to the straw that broke the camel's back, but a couple of things happened and she ended up leaving us. I think it was like, sometimes something bad happens. You do your best to fix it and it doesn't work. And in our mind, like, you know, she kind of hated us and it was just the worst thing. And I kind of knew her personally. So I kind of even avoided, like, I think I may have seen her personally one or two times and like felt weird to even like go up. But recently, about a year ago, I got an email from her, you know, about

Anu Adegbola (21:51)
⁓

Danny Gavin (21:57)
needing some help, potentially looking at using our agency again. And I actually told her like, are you sure? Like you said some pretty strong things to us back then. And I'm just going to quote it because I actually pulled up the email, but what she wrote is, when I think about our past experiences, working with OptiJ was definitely the most professional and experienced firm that we worked with. So what's interesting is, that hindsight, she didn't remember the bad times. She remembered the good times.

Anu Adegbola (22:06)
OOOO

Danny Gavin (22:26)
the things that we did to make it better. And I thought, and I think that's so powerful because I think naturally us as humans, often when we look back at our past, we don't see the bad, we see the good. And that's why it's important to do a lot of good, right? Do a lot of good. And then you never know, a couple of years down the line, someone can come back to you like, wow, yeah, we may have had some things in there, but you know what? The good times, the things that you did do were really, really special.

Anu Adegbola (22:26)
Nice. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah,

yeah. Absolutely. You know, it just makes me think of there was a time where, I don't know if you know this, this really good friend of, let's just industry, Rand Fishkin, who's like, you know, yeah, they in the SEO world kind of thing, you know. There was a time where he gave me this amazing feedback about how, even though he's never, well, at this day, when he was giving me this feedback, he'd never been to like,

Danny Gavin (22:56)
And therefore I want to talk to you again.

Anu Adegbola (23:23)
the UK, like, according to my knowledge, or come to any of the events of the PPC live events that ran. But he's like, yeah, I I've heard so many good things about what you do and everything. I think it was actually mentioning about an event that in my opinion went wrong. There was a time we had one of the events, had so many technical issues. sound wasn't coming through properly. I think we were trying to interview him virtually and it was just like,

my God, what is going on? he basically, he was like, ⁓ I've got so many positive, you know, feedback as to how you deal with stressful situations. Like how you like, we're just so calm in the middle of like, cause yeah, sometimes when, things just going wrong, my brain just goes, okay, solution. What's, what do do? got my brain just goes, if I start panicking right now, I'll be no use to anybody. So you just have to, you know, keep calm and those.

Those positive, it's never too late, even when things seem to be just going so wrong, it's never too late for your positive actions to be noticed, for people to like, wow, that person did some really good stuff, even though they really messed up. It's never too late to really show you, putting your good foot forward. So yeah, now I think that's a really great anecdote to have from that client.

Danny Gavin (24:42)
And it reminds me of, it's like, I don't know if you have this with your parents, but like whenever I'm sitting with my parents and my mom is like talking and kind of like just embarrassing me and it's always, it's like, my God, this is horrible. And then, but it's funny that like everyone else doesn't like, doesn't even realize it. don't even, so sometimes we like see things in our head that like are like amplified a thousand, but then in truth, in reality, the way that everyone else sees it, it's not the same.

Anu Adegbola (24:54)
And they do. And they do it all.

Thanks.

No, no, it's not. We should always give ourselves grace, give ourselves grace in those moments and yeah, try to push forward and do your best regardless of what has happened. So I want us to, know, because you've got so much knowledge, you teach, you're a professor, so we'd love to get that, you your viewpoint in terms of how the industry is doing in terms of the mistake they make and especially AI. But before we get into that,

Danny Gavin (25:14)
Yes.

Anu Adegbola (25:38)
What's one last takeaway you'd love to leave our audience with about this story you've just shared?

Danny Gavin (25:49)
I mean, I think we've covered it already, but I think I'm just going to push it again. Honesty is key coming up with a solution and then making sure that you, so you come together, figure out what you did wrong. How are we going to fix it? And then going and implementing that. And then I think when you put those together, that's where like we all have mistakes and we have these as learning opportunities. And when it's, when, when I call it learning opportunity is when you actually learn from it and put.

Anu Adegbola (26:17)
Yes.

Yes.

Danny Gavin (26:17)
in to make sure it doesn't happen again.

It doesn't happen again. That's when there's problems. it shouldn't get to that point.

Anu Adegbola (26:24)
Absolutely. Amazing. Yeah. Honesty is key. I can't think of a better, better note to leave that side on. so yeah, now going into the fact that, know, you guys, like my, you know, when clients probably like an agency is do, do for clients, get things, there's always a process of auditing the accounts, you know, and being like, seen what the previous agency or whatever they were doing before kind of really missed or might have messed up. What are things that, you know, really stick out to you that you're really surprised?

that is a mistake that people are still making that you'd have thought this is something that shouldn't be happening in 2026.

Danny Gavin (27:00)
Yeah, so we focus a lot on lead gen. So naturally, a lot what we're looking at is what happens outside of the accounts. whether that's a big thing is taking the quality of the leads, meaning whether the lead was qualified or not, or if the lead turned into a customer, and then pushing that data back into the platform. That's something which we're seeing a lot of people are not doing.

Anu Adegbola (27:17)
Yeah.

Mm.

Danny Gavin (27:24)
I would say another big one within the platform is negatives. I know there's different opinions on how much, how many negatives to put, you don't want to constrict or tighten things up. But I still think, I think it's crazy when you go into some accounts and you see like when there's just five or 10, it's like, what are they doing? Are they looking at the search queries? Are they analyzing what's going on? I don't know. I don't even know like what they're thinking. So I would say that's definitely a big one.

Anu Adegbola (27:27)
Hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Cool.

Yeah, yeah.

Danny Gavin (27:54)
Um, I think even, even landing pages would be another one where we recently launched a campaign and we sent traffic directly to the homepage and it actually works really, really well. I know that sounds kind of crazy. I, I,

Anu Adegbola (27:59)
Okay.

Okay? Yeah, I was literally like, would never used to do that. I was always, it was

always like, where's the PPC landing page for this campaign?

Danny Gavin (28:15)
No, I know, I know, I

know. But this was more like we tried a couple things and it didn't work. And we're like, OK, this is our last ditch effort. Let's try the homepage. And for this industry, it seems to work pretty well. We've seen some success in Facebook as well. but but outside of that one exception, the idea of having a specific landing page, a specific experience that you're sending people that matches to what they're doing. Typically, that is what works really, really well. And.

And like not to trash any agencies or freelancers, sometimes it's just, they don't provide that service. Like I run PPC, I don't do that. Like if you want to have it, then you know, we need to do it. So, but the point is there are times that you'll see that those unique experiences or experiences that really are matching the ad group and the keywords are missing. And therefore maybe if you created that situation, create a custom landing page, performance can increase.

Anu Adegbola (29:09)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And then when it comes to like, you know, the big, you know, two letter word AI in the field, have you seen some, especially you say you mostly do like, you know, lead gen and I do feel like a lot of people working like, you know, like B2B and lead gen kind of feel things to themselves. Yeah. Although the AI protocols that Google come out with really doesn't work for them. It's actually, I think that's even the question I'd actually like to ask.

Is there a space for like lead gen to make use of AI or is it doesn't really not work too well for Li Jian?

Danny Gavin (29:47)
I think there's components, right? Let's talk about... So a big part of lead gen is phone calls, right? Because not everyone fills out a form. Some people don't make phone calls. And part of whether it's the client or whether it's the agency, it's important that we have to listen to those phone calls and say like, what was qualified, what was not? Was it just someone asking information? So typically in the olden days, we would actually get someone to listen to every phone call, to tag it. But now you don't have to do that anymore.

Anu Adegbola (29:49)
Okay.

Okay

Danny Gavin (30:15)
because you can actually

have AI, first of all, an automatic transcript that gets popped up, and then you can have a prompt that then reviews that transcript based on what you want to say. Like, you know, the customer, did this result in a lead? Was this person just talking about, you know, jobs or whatever it is, and therefore you can go ahead and get these phone calls tagged and marked a lot quicker, and then you can then use that data to then optimize further. Look at the campaigns. What are the quality of the phone calls? Do we then?

Anu Adegbola (30:40)
Yeah.

Danny Gavin (30:43)
put that data back in. So that would be like one example of where AI is really helpful, right? And can really have a heavy lift. I mean, yeah, that concept, because think about it. When we talk about e-commerce, it's very much, it's black or white, right? It's very cut and dry. Did I get the sale or I did not? But now that there's this concept of someone reaching out and is that reach out, it's more qualitative than quantitative.

Anu Adegbola (30:48)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Danny Gavin (31:11)
is this considered good or is this bad, if

I can use something that can help me decide that faster and quicker, it's going to make my life easier and it makes the client's life easier as well. So if you think about it from that perspective, I think AI could be, it's so powerful and the more we can figure out how to use it, it can make our PPC campaigns when it comes to lead gen a lot stronger.

Anu Adegbola (31:17)
Yeah.

It's very powerful. Yeah. Yeah.

Mm.

Amazing. But okay, now, now we have that fantastic case study, you know, like that scenario of how to use it. Is there like, maybe like, you know, potholes that people should try to avoid in terms of like, don't necessarily lie on it too much in this certain way. Are there anything that they call do, they call it like, yes, is an exciting opportunity here, but still use it in this way to ensure that you're still, you know, bringing value to your client.

Danny Gavin (32:06)
For sure. So first of all, if you're in the medical industry and when it comes to HIPAA and data that's very personal, a lot of companies in that space do not want AI to touch anything because they don't want that data going out. number one, realize that this technology, this software will not work for every business. And therefore you really have to understand what's the company that you're working with, what's their policy around AI. Because you might have this great system, but it won't work because of certain

policies that they have in place. I think with anything AI, right? It can hallucinate, it can break down, and therefore, it's kind like what we spoke about earlier, tying it in. Just to think that the technology works and rely, no, like we have to spot check and we need to look and see how did they determine if this is a high quality or low quality. I think you do have to constantly check. It doesn't mean you have to check necessarily always one to one, but you do have to be in there and don't just like say, ⁓

That's covered. never have to look at it again because if you do do that, it's kind of like an avalanche or like a snowball effect, right? A little snowball coming down the mountain and it's going to get bigger and bigger and bigger. So if you don't catch that. So yes, with any of these things, anytime we have technology, it's really good, but we have to spot check because that's why we humans are there because more often than not, right? It's the same thing with like a PMAX campaign, right? I mean, in the end of the day, if you just let it do what it's going to do and it's got the wrong inputs,

Anu Adegbola (33:02)
Yeah.

So, lady, take him, take him.

Danny Gavin (33:29)
then yeah, it's going to start optimizing on the wrong sort of leads and you're gonna have trouble. So I think that's, we're not at a point yet where we can say the technology is perfect and I don't have to worry about it.

Anu Adegbola (33:40)
Absolutely. You don't, this is something we were saying when even automation was just like, you know, maybe AdWords scripts, where, know, like, you know, campaigns that will like, we'll set a rule of like, set it live at this, that don't set it and forget it. You might've just done the wrong thing or maybe a date is not in the right format. You need to make sure you double check all those inputs, but also make use of it because like there was a friend who I was speaking to last week and she was asking me about search engine land articles and saying that,

Do we write in, you know, do they write in the first person? And I was like, you know what? I can ask Chat GPT that I can tell it to give me the example of first, you know, you know, person examples, those kinds of things. They are definitely use cases, but like you, I double check it and I wouldn't necessarily use it for every kind of questions, but you put the guardrails in and you double check it every time that you're using it. But like, yeah, there is so much opportunity in it as well, but also.

a lot of value that human beings should bring into it. Another big thing that I say that I've pretty much said in nearly every episode so far is that it's the experts that should be using it. So a lay person at home shouldn't be going on AI and be like, what symptoms do I have? I mean, and they decide to diagnose themselves and start going on a medical route. Go to your doctor with your information. Maybe use AI to start your diagnosis, but go to a doctor for the final.

output there's a lot of things that lay people just someone in the house should not be just going I'm gonna type this into AI you'll give me the answer and I'll do the right thing it's ⁓ it can be powerful and dangerous at the same time

Danny Gavin (35:15)
And being the professor or the teacher, it also makes our job a little bit harder because I do get students, but AI told me. And then I've got to be like, okay, now I need to figure out why did it say that if I disagree? And it's not, I mean, it pushes me to think harder, but it makes it a little bit harder. Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (35:22)
RIGHTS!

But frustrating. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. People, can't be doing AI told me this, so I'm going to do it guys, especially to a professor. I feel for professors and people who are teachers right now dealing with the whole AI told me said it that way. So it must be correct. God help us. So good luck. Good luck in your journey of dealing with all those students. mean, Danny, this has been such a

Danny Gavin (35:55)
You

Anu Adegbola (36:00)
great and honest, you know, conversation that you've shared with us. So thank you so much for that. And, yeah, we'll kind of rounded it, coming, coming to the roundup, parts of it. before we let you go, one last question, if your PPC career were a movie, what would the title be? You said you had an interesting one that you're like, nah, I'm about to find out guys at the same time as you're finding out. I've no idea what Dan is about to say here.

Danny Gavin (36:27)
So this

is definitely bittersweet. So when I was in school, like seventh and eighth grade, which is 1998, 99, Dawson's Creek was really big. Now I know I have a beard. So I know I have a beard now. And so I would, you would never know, but people thought that I looked a lot like James Van Der Beek back in the day. So obviously it's really sad. James just passed away and he was an incredible person, a beautiful family. So although it's not a movie.

but I would say that I would love some sort of movie version of Dawson's Creek and that I would be the main character.

Anu Adegbola (36:58)
⁓ bless you. you know what? I'm glad you didn't tell me before now, because I don't think I'd have been able to hold it together. Because yes, I grew up on Dawson's Creek. was such a hit, such a sad headline to read when I woke up to like games, all these kinds of things you find out on social media. Yes. So social media posts was like, sad to say James Van Der Beek has passed away. And yeah, such a sad ⁓ loss of life due to disease. ⁓ But yeah.

Dawson's Creek, that's the story of your movie. So yeah, very sweet one to have. But yeah, thank you so much for that, Where can people find you in terms of like sharing any like thoughts and advice that you have for the industry?

Danny Gavin (37:42)
Sure, I'm primarily on LinkedIn, so you can definitely reach out to me there. I also have my own podcast, which is called the Digital Marketing Mentor Podcast, where we go through the mentorship journeys of people who influence them and how they influence others. We also do some internal office hours, so get to see the behind the scenes of Optige. But yeah.

Anu Adegbola (37:55)
Okay.

Amazing. Yeah, was share the link of all those resources that yeah, Danny has shared there so that you can check out the podcast and check him out on LinkedIn. And I'm sure you'll get some really great learnings from those resources. But yeah, for now, thank you so much, Danny. This has been such a great, great conversation. I'm really grateful that you joined the podcast today.

Danny Gavin (38:18)
Thank you for finding me.

Anu Adegbola (38:19)
My

pleasure, my pleasure.

Anu Adegbola (38:21)
Thank you so much, Danny, for sharing that very honest and transparent experience about that big mistake and even the whole just thinking back as to how you'd have approached that differently, how the communication mindset wasn't as formed and developed. And that's something that you will expect of people we should all expect of ourselves. Do not...

Do not really give yourself a lot of grace. That's something I love that Navah Hopkins says. Give yourself grace when early in your career you feel that you didn't develop some natural communication skills that you now have. We're all starting somewhere. There's loads of things that we're thinking about. And also you never know what a client is thinking or how a client took away your ⁓ reaction to a problem. you know, the problem is never the end of the story. The mistake is never the end of the story. You can always...

change how a client perceives you by how you react to the problem and how you're proactive in ensuring that you're looking for fix and you're implementing the fix. So yeah, for all the information and the full transcript of that fantastic conversation, please go to podcast.ppc.live. Now going on to PPC live events, we've got some another fantastic event happening at Brighton this time. We're going proper down south.

Brights to brighten and we're gonna be doing a fringe event. So like just the evening before Brighton SEO We're gonna be doing a brightness your fringe event just before it but it's gonna be like that same format Same ticket kind of prices early bird sale is out now at 33 pounds It's gonna go up to about 50 pounds in a few weeks and then the week of we're gonna put it up a little bit You know for like that

last minute incentives for people to come. It'll still be a very low price, the cheapest you'll ever get for an event like this of three fantastic speakers from WeDiscover, Vixen Digital, a third one to be announced. So look out for that. But yeah, go to ppc.live to get your tickets. The early bird sale is on and closing in a couple of weeks. Don't miss out on that. Before I leave you, I'm also delighted to share that I'm taking on coaching clients.

⁓ yeah, so for anyone who's just dealing with confidence issues, trying to navigate, getting back into the paid search world, whether you want to work for an agency brand or tech tool, I've done them at all. So I can help you navigate that journey. Or if you're in that journey and you've got imposter syndrome issues, you're trying to go for that promotion, go for that pay rise. yeah, let's, let's have a conversation. You can book a free discovery call with me by just going to the marketinganu.com.

and I'm going to the one-on-one coaching part of the site. yeah, you'll be able to book a free 15 minute discovery call so that we know exactly what your issues are and we can work through a program that is very relevant to you. So yeah, I hope you've enjoyed the show today and I look forward to bringing more PPC F-UPS and Triumphs next week. Thank you, bye.