EP356 - From Costly Mistake to Competitive Advantage ft Heidi Sturrock

Anu Adegbola (00:08)
Hello and welcome to PPC Live the podcast. I'm your host Anu and I'm the founder of PPC Live. And if you're used to hearing from PPC experts about how to ensure we are keeping up with the ever changing landscape, don't worry, you are still in the right place. Every week I'm speaking to a different PPC expert about their biggest effort, but also how they're turning things around. Where we'll also share about things that were disappointed, people who helped them out, people who were challenging.

about things and just like who was actually the person that really got them through that finishing line of finding going from problem to solution. Today I have the delight of speaking to Heidi Storrock who has been in the industry for a very long time, longer than myself. And yeah, she shares this really important example about the whole broad match when you use it, how to use it and how a big mistake actually had a very brilliant silver lining.

And as someone who has been also testing AI max, she also gives us her tips on how to use it, what's been working, what's not been working. So yeah, make sure you do listen to this episode all the way to the end. All right, let's go speak to Heidi.

Anu Adegbola (01:20)
Hello Heidi, welcome to PPC Live the podcast.

Heidi Sturrock (01:23)
Hello, hello, thanks so much for having me.

Anu Adegbola (01:26)
Amazing. Um, Heidi is another one of those we met five seconds ago kind of thing, but I promise you, you will not be able to tell. We've just had a really lovely chat. You know, she's bringing the vibes. She's bringing the whole, let's talk about our mistakes. That's where you get your biggest learnings from. And I absolutely love that energy. So you guys are a hundred percent in for a treat, um, with this conversation. Um, so Heidi is a paid search consultant.

with, oh my God, when I read this figure, I thought I was reading wrong. She's been in this industry for 24 years. Yes, after the episode, after listening, DM her about her skin routine, because she's definitely got some amazing skin routine going on. But yeah, she's been in this industry for 24 years with hands-on search marketing experience with full funnel strategies. She works with in-house teams, freelancers, agency, and agencies to level up.

Heidi Sturrock (02:09)
You

you

Anu Adegbola (02:25)
their performance, tighten up execution, build real confidence in their SEM skills. So whether it's managing Google ads accounts, coaching through audits, refining campaign structures or navigating the latest changes. Hi AI, for sure. Yeah, she's here to help marketers become true performance leaders and not just the button pushers. Those days are gone. AI is going to do all your button pushing. You need to bring your brains to the table now for sure.

So ⁓ for brands, she helps to give them a deeper support. And she also can step in as a fractional director of search marketing, bringing senior level thinking, team leadership, and paid search strategy without the full-time overhead. yeah, tidal vague ideas of half-baked strategies of like, yeah, I don't know what broad match is about without negative keywords. Yeah, she's the person.

For you, I've just won a second pair of eyes. That's how we avoid the mistakes. Really one of the biggest key of avoiding mistakes is a second pair of eyes. Someone who's not been in the accounts every day and she is absolutely great for that. And now I'm gonna hand her over to share her fun fact, which is something that just blast from the past kind of brand name that she mentioned. So yeah, Heidi, take that away.

Heidi Sturrock (03:41)
Yeah, so thanks so much for having me in the awesome intro.

A little fun fact about me, as Anu mentioned, I started over 24 years ago in the search engine marketing industry. And back then, it was around 1999 that I got my first job in page search. And I was working for a content hub in the height of the internet.com boom. Wonderful, wonderful network of sites. one of my first job there was to bring

traffic into the portal so that we could get new visitors and really make the ad model work well.

Fun fact, back then, Google Ads really wasn't a thing. In fact, it wasn't a thing at all. And Yahoo was the Google back then. So Yahoo was the primary place where you would get your paid search media dollars spent. around 2003 or four, 2003 is really when Google started to take over and it almost happened overnight. And so we went from.

Anu Adegbola (04:48)
Mm.

Heidi Sturrock (04:50)
Yahoo being the everything in the industry to Google really taking over. And the reason why Google won, a little secondary fun fact, is because, sorry Yahoo, love you, love what you did, but their model was really content focused and they kind of didn't see Google coming up as the person or the company that would really have the best engine for answers, right? So it's a quality.

Anu Adegbola (04:53)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Heidi Sturrock (05:16)
Quality one back then, quality one, and the industry migrated it over and Google is what it is today, one of the primary sources of paid search.

Anu Adegbola (05:18)
Yeah.

Amazing. And I think even like I was speaking to, it wasn't Ginny Marvin, it was somebody else. I was doing some interviews for Search Engine Land and talking about what Google was like at the beginning. And some people might think like at the beginning, they didn't really care about the quality, you know, and they were just like bringing, quality really just came up next.

I know it was Fred Vallaeys who is ex Google and he started Optmyzr now. And he's like, actually from the beginning, quality was, has always been a thing, know, quality score and that kind of stuff. so, yeah, cause I was going to ask that like if Yahoo were the first to market, usually you think first to market wins, wins the race kind of thing. But Yahoo really, really, you know, messed the bed on that one. Yeah. Right.

Heidi Sturrock (06:13)
They were in a unique situation back then, right? So Yahoo was thinking, I really, really, really want to grow into not only a search engine, but a content portal. But what happens sometimes is you lose sight of your core asset, and that was their search product. And Google was very happy to say, we could do this better. And they did.

Anu Adegbola (06:33)
Yeah.

Yeah,

and they did.

Heidi Sturrock (06:39)
And people realized

that they would prefer to flock to a search engine that could give them more reliable answers quicker. And they would still go to Yahoo for all their content needs. And Yahoo, for a while, Yahoo did try to stay in the game. But I think they came up with the perfect solution, which was they went to Google and they said, well, if we can't beat you, we'll join you.

Anu Adegbola (07:02)
Yeah,

Heidi Sturrock (07:03)
And so that's why you will

Anu Adegbola (07:03)
yeah, yeah, yeah.

Heidi Sturrock (07:04)
see some Yahoo placements when you do your search placement report. ⁓

Anu Adegbola (07:06)
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. Bless them. Yeah. Yahoo. And the thing is that, I think they've even come up with like a new, I guess, as news like, like visible, like search engine kind of thing, like new branding for their search engine. And I feel like they keep trying hard and I think they're trying to take advantage of like trust for Google is not really great, not been great recently. So yeah, some people are trying that. don't know how well they'll do in that area considering Bing.

had had try have been in it and I still try to like take that market share and they've not been really great at it. Anyway, we could talk that that's another podcast episode. The whole search engine was so let's not get get into that. We know our listeners are here to hear about another story and other incredible story about you know, a mistake that has happened. What happened how we came up out of it. I love that Heidi has already said about this story that

Heidi Sturrock (07:47)
Right.

Anu Adegbola (08:04)
She's going to highlight the silver lining and very surprising unexpected silver lining. So this is going to be a great story for, for, for our listeners today, I am sure. So yeah, Heidi, take it away. What's the F of you'd like to share with us today?

Heidi Sturrock (08:17)
yeah, okay, so well first of all I want to say that

You know, I love Anu's podcast because it really does take on the topic of what mistakes have we made and how can we learn from each other with those. You know, in our industry, it's really, really, really easy to talk about the wins and, you know, have that be the forefront of the conversation. But the value really is what did you learn from making a major blunder, right? So here's one of mine that I'm happy to share. It happened quite a few

Anu Adegbola (08:44)
Yeah, yeah.

Heidi Sturrock (08:49)
number of years ago, earlier in my career, but it's still applicable because I still see this happening in accounts when we do our audits. let me start. We had this one software as a sale B2B client. Wonderful.

Anu Adegbola (09:02)
Yeah, software as service, yeah.

Heidi Sturrock (09:04)
Yeah, as a service client back then, they were very high spending account and had some pretty aggressive goals. And ⁓ they were niche, right? And so they really had this one competitor that they were hyper focused on in terms of their ability to grow their business.

And so my client said, you know, I really want to get in front of those people that are also searching for our competitor who are sort of in the prospect mode for that. And he's like, I want to reach as many people as possible. So I had this brilliant idea. Well, let's do a competitor conquest campaign and search and let's make a broad match to capture as much impression share as possible. You know, thinking, this is going to be great. He wants to go aggressive.

on this, let's do this, but we did not add the anticipatory negative keywords that we should have ended in the end and I'll get to that in a moment. So we launched this campaign very very high spending daily budget and on Monday morning I get a voicemail, email from the clients

contact call center team and they said why, why are we all of sudden getting, you know, tons of phone calls from angry people who want tech support and want to know their login information to want to have a refund, but it's not for our service, it's for our biggest competitor. Like why are we doing this? And my heart sank.

Anu Adegbola (10:36)
All right.

Heidi Sturrock (10:37)
And I said, okay,

let me check out what's going on in the campaign. And we did our search terms report and quickly realized we had spent over the course of a weekend, thousands and thousands of dollars on searches for like competitor name, customer service number, competitor name, refund policy, you name it in those types of genre we were bringing in the traffic. So I had to call the client and explain what happened. I was so nervous.

Anu Adegbola (10:55)
Yeah.

Heidi Sturrock (11:07)
I wanted to just die, but I figured hey, you know better just to get this over with right away I called the client and I explained what happened

Anu Adegbola (11:07)
Mm.

Get ahead it. ⁓

Heidi Sturrock (11:20)
And he was actually kind of fascinated with how broad match worked in general. He was like, I gave him a complete, I guess you kind of have to explain in detail why this happened in the first place. And so he, I'll never forget this. I thought he was going to totally scream at me, which he had the total right to, right? But he didn't. And he goes, so Heidi, let me get this straight.

Anu Adegbola (11:28)
we did.

Heidi Sturrock (11:42)
We were getting tons of phone calls from my competitors clients and they were angry about the service that they were receiving over there. He's like, you sent a bunch of disgruntled customers to me that from my competitor. He's like, keep sending them, keep sending them. And I was like, what? And I was like, but you more like their intent, like they're already customers of this prospect. He goes, I don't care. I'm going to have the sales team feel these types of inquiries as a soft sales pitch, sort of like, oh, you you've reached the wrong place, but you know,

We offer the same thing where they're competitor. don't typically have those same problems. We'll offer you a discount if you'd like to migrate over. And so I was like, that's brilliant. so silver lining, but ⁓ moral of the story is please, please, please be very diligent in a broad match

Anu Adegbola (12:17)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Heidi Sturrock (12:30)
campaign whatever you're using that has that capability, make sure you're very diligent about those negative keywords for sure.

Anu Adegbola (12:39)
Yeah. Yeah. No, that absolutely

right. mean, honestly, yeah. even as I was hearing You like tell the story. was like, will the listeners take this as a good story? I was like, I am going to start doing that now because that is your, you had like the guy who that company or what was your contact? He had a very, that's very visionary. That's very like a great way of like, the important thing is potential customers came to us.

And I think that there is such a missed opportunities with paid search marketers who are like, we're about the clicks and CPCs and ROAS and all these like, know, acronyms that are very paid search jargon based. And you're like, guys, you're doing paid search for a business. Think about what that business needs. Like we, you know, was at this conference like recently in Munich, SMX Munich, there's run by Sandra Finlay, shout out to her.

She's amazing. And like she put these like fantastic speakers together. And one of the speakers were like, you know, we do all these like, you know, we clicks ROAS] you're speaking jargon. Especially when you have those client meetings. They want revenue. They want customers, potential customers. Cause you get people doing all these competitor campaigns. Again, I guess, you know, this was 10 years ago. So nothing new under the face of the sun.

people like doing competitor campaigns. And everybody's always like, how do I get the unhappy customers to me? And I think that is the biggest, that is actually a big takeaway for our listeners. When your client starts asking for, cause I think sometimes when these are, you're two different people, like paid side person coming to speak to, you know, a brand, that brand is going to speak revenue and you know, profit.

Heidi Sturrock (14:04)
you

Anu Adegbola (14:31)
You're speaking clicks and AOV and ROAS. so when, by end of the day, it's the client's money. So it's not what you think that matters. Sorry, at the end of the day, it's what the client thinks that matters. So when a client goes, want to do a competitor campaign. Actually, what a client wants to do is get the disgruntled customer of their competitor to come to you.

Honestly, that's the biggest translation from that mistake you just shared with us. When, and when any when any leader goes, let's do a competitor campaign, you have to go back and think, cause we all, cause I know you get all those, a lot of paid seconds. Sorry, I'm rambling on a little bit. I apologize guys, but I feel very passionate about this. Cause about the whole, how do you do competitor advertising? There's the school of thought that people are like,

Heidi Sturrock (15:04)
Yeah, it was.

Anu Adegbola (15:25)
don't do it. It's not worth it, you know, because if you don't have a better offer, why are you showing for your competitors brand term? It's not going to make sense on one hand. Yes, I say that that's my school of thought. But at end of the day, if you're, if this brand is going, I want to get in front of my competitors, customers who are unhappy. That is what they're trying to say. When they say we want to do competitor bidding, that's what they're trying to say. I'm not sure like

Like this was more of like a mistake strategy, right? So like, clearly let's get back to this story. Like, so what did you then do to then still keep those disgruntled customers calling, but ensure that the spend was not too blown out?

Heidi Sturrock (16:12)
Yeah, so I actually remember what we ended up talking about back then.

So we had two different, we actually then had two different competitor campaigns that we broke it out to. One specifically looking for the disgruntled folks. We're talking about competitor name plus problems that they were seeking solutions to after they had purchased, refunds, their customer service number, so forth. And then we had just a general, like another campaign for the competitor, a second competitor campaign that was sort of like, you know,

Anu Adegbola (16:32)
Yeah.

Heidi Sturrock (16:43)
them versus us, right? So, so you had to, could control the spend on each and figure out how much we were spending, sending the disgruntled folks over instead of it kind of just being all lumped into one. So it kind of had a further refinement to it. That was the kind of takeaway at the end of that. But, but we kept it running. We kept it running for quite a while, actually. And we did get good, we did get people to switch over. And I thought that I thought the entrepreneur I was working with was amazing.

Anu Adegbola (16:53)
Yes.

Wow. Wow.

Heidi Sturrock (17:12)
And he was like you said, and you would like you do need you whether you're the strategist or your client is the strategist or you're actually doing like a tag team hybrid approach of like sharing ideas. You know, these are the these are what makes campaigns great. He had this vision, right? Let's let's send the angry people over. He trained a sales team to address them in the way that he wanted to. But, know, the discount the discount he offered was great. He's like, on over. You want to refund? No worries. Ditch them. I'll come and give

Anu Adegbola (17:33)
Yeah.

opportunity.

Heidi Sturrock (17:40)
you 50 % off the first month.

Anu Adegbola (17:43)
Wow. No, that's

amazing. A bit of like those salespeople, like sales guys listening. If a customer does not a customer yet, but is a customer of, of a brand or a marketing thing that you're doing, use that as an opportunity. I'd say like a brilliant salesperson would have thought, Oh, you're actually trying to go to somewhere else. Well, let's do something about, you know, you're unhappy. Why are you unhappy?

You start a conversation. Isn't that what salespeople are supposed to be doing? Anyway, this, this podcast is not for salespeople. Let them, let them like sort that out. But yeah, I think that that was an absolutely great opportunity. Another thing I picked up. Did you guys really set this campaign up on a Friday?

Heidi Sturrock (18:29)
⁓ girl, yes, you did.

So folks, listen, every single person who is an expert in the paid search field and has been in this game for years and years has done this at least once. You've made a change on a Friday, didn't you? You made it, you did it. Even if you said you shouldn't do it, you said, I'll just do it this once and you did it.

Anu Adegbola (18:42)
⁓ yeah.

Heidi Sturrock (18:52)
And then it was bad, right? Because over the weekend, you say, I'll check on it. And maybe you do, right? But sometimes you don't pay as much attention. You log in Monday morning. that's so fun, right? So yeah.

Anu Adegbola (18:57)
Sometimes you don't.

Yeah,

yeah, literally like Heidi really you guys started something on a Friday. Yeah, we need to need to do a bit of a like What was that about?

Heidi Sturrock (19:14)
Yeah,

second life lesson.

Anything, and I'm talking conversion tracking, new campaign launches, especially campaign launches that have significant setting changes or budget changes that are much larger. The algorithm in Google is amazing. It is so smart and the smart bidding strategies attached to it are phenomenal. But man, there is a learning period that it adjusts to. That's just how it works. don't do it on a Friday in case you need to help guide it. Just don't. ⁓

Anu Adegbola (19:33)
Mm.

Yeah, yeah,

absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think maybe 50 % of our episodes at some point someone has gone, don't learn something on a Friday. So if my listeners have not learned that lesson by now, guys, guys, I don't know what to do with you. yeah, you can move on maybe. But yeah, no, definitely. Another point of that story that I really liked is, you know, cause

Heidi Sturrock (19:46)
you

Anu Adegbola (20:10)
something again that I personally really can you know when I see this it doesn't happen all the time but most of the time there's so many like silos you said the salesperson reached out to you guys so the conversation it would happen with this entrepreneur there's your like your main contact so the salesperson knew to reach out to your department like how did you build that relationship

Heidi Sturrock (20:32)
Yeah, so I think that when we have a client meeting, we often request all of the key stakeholders to be there. So in this case, it was the entrepreneur and their head of sales. And the head of sales was sort of in charge of, know, we could send all the phone calls to the client that we want, but he really was in charge of the nurturing strategy and so forth.

Anu Adegbola (20:53)
Great.

Heidi Sturrock (20:54)
And he was expecting to get nice warm leaves that are coming in through that aren't disgruntled, that are genuinely looking for what they want. And why was that true, right? Because they were...

Anu Adegbola (21:02)
Let's see...

Heidi Sturrock (21:05)
Existing customers are for competitors. So they did want these services. He was not prepared for the onslaught of angry people calling his call center. the point is like have the key stakeholders in the meetings with you and you'd be surprised like because what ends up happening is entrepreneurs, they are so busy. Heads of marketing, so busy. Presidents, client leads, they're not always going to be there at the right place and time to loop

Anu Adegbola (21:09)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes.

Heidi Sturrock (21:33)
people in exactly when they need to be. So loop them in. Loop all the key stakeholders in place. so everyone had my number, everyone had my email. And no one really wants to reach out to you unless there's an important, meaningful reason, right? So don't be afraid to loop people in. They're busy too. They don't want to be, but he, was funny. And he was a spicy dude, let me tell you. The sales, director of sales usually are.

Anu Adegbola (21:51)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Heidi Sturrock (22:03)
And I love them, I love them. But he's like, Heidi. And he played some of the angry phone calls for me and they were. This is what I've been, my staff has been dealing with all weekend. But then the entrepreneur comes in and he ties it in and he says, my gosh, this is terrible. how can we, these are the people we've been fighting to get in front of. Like how can we.

Anu Adegbola (22:11)
wow, he was like, listen to it. Listen to what we've been dealing with.

Heidi Sturrock (22:28)
Leverage it.

Anu Adegbola (22:29)
Yeah. And another thing is that like, look, even I'd actually say that's that because we talk about red flag clients. I think this is actually a nice case for green flag client because yeah, you guys owned up to mistake. Tell them what had happened. And it's not so often, and this is not necessarily something you can, you know, cause we're always telling people like in the, in that initial call, we are onboarding new clients, you know, you have to figure it out. kind of client

going to be like, but I think you're really lucky when you get a, you know, an entrepreneur kind of client who is literally like, where's the opportunity in every situation? Where's the opportunity? You know, and it's not just about black and white, like head of sales guy was definitely great at his job, but he was not there to be the, you know, you know, visionary. Like he's probably like, we've done things this way. We need to do it the same way. And, know, and he's, he's, he understands about.

customers wanting to, he doesn't want unhappy customers on his phone. Cause yeah, salespeople, unhappy customers, something's gone wrong. But if it's, you're not the one that's done something wrong, why is that a bad thing? You know? So yeah, it's really good to have like a client that has that vision of like, okay, where's the opportunity? Which is, which is really great. yeah. These conversations have been going in such, in, I love the organic way that we've, we've done this.

so my, but I, yeah, if I, Lord, this is one of the first times, cause in other episodes we'll be talking about, we've only talked for 10 minutes. We've been talking to close for half an hour now already. So this is brilliant. So let's, let's make sure we kind of wrap things out so that we can talk more about even mistakes that other people have made and you know, the AI world as well, definitely touching that. we thought, but before we get to that now, what's your advice for someone who actually is a bit like.

They've made that mistake. Salesperson has come, you know, has gotten them on the call going, what the heck have you done with this campaign? What's your advice to someone who's just made that mistake?

Heidi Sturrock (24:32)
Okay, and this is something that I guide everyone that I work with on Teams. When you realize that you have made a mistake or someone on your team has made a mistake, the first thing you have to do is stop the hemorrhaging or the bleeding or whatever is happening. Don't wait for it to turn around. Don't think the algorithm's gonna figure it out. Pause whatever is the problem.

Anu Adegbola (24:59)
Yeah. Okay.

Heidi Sturrock (24:59)
and then immediately

call the client and have a conversation. Don't send an email, don't. Call and have a conversation, especially if it's a big doozy and we're talking, you know.

Anu Adegbola (25:06)
Okay. Yeah.

Heidi Sturrock (25:13)
thousands and thousands of dollars in mistake, a lost budget or a lost opportunity. So call the client, own up. You've got to own up. You're going to be tempted to mitigate responsibility for the mistake, to blame it on something else or someone else. But don't. Take ownership. This was your account, whether you are leading a team for the account or you are working on the account as a contributor.

Anu Adegbola (25:25)
mmm

Mmm.

Heidi Sturrock (25:41)
own the mistake. And then what you want to do is explain to the client why it happened.

and then explain to the client what you are going to do to remedy or fix it, okay? And that could look like a number of different things. Sometimes part of the situation is salvageable, like I just mentioned with my client, a mistake that happened all those years ago. Sometimes it's not, right? And sometimes you have to have the tough conversation of here are the things that we now have in place so this will never happen again, and here's how we can either lessen the damage or ⁓ stop it from

Anu Adegbola (25:53)
Uh-huh.

Heidi Sturrock (26:17)
continuing to happen. So immediate ownership, ⁓ don't deflect responsibility and always, always, always propose that solution and like next step. Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (26:20)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. That next owning it, make sure that you explain the why, make sure that you start going into next steps. It's something that we, we, we touched on in the last episode is that the whole, you need to give people the whole story. People are not, when, you make a mistake, it's the people are not, people are still watching you for a little while. So how you actually behave, your honesty in that whole journey.

you know, and then, you know, what you're actually gonna do then can actually even turn you into a hero. Cause people want problem solvers. Every business, every entrepreneur, every heads of sale, they know a business is literally just a lot of series of problems that we're trying to, trying to solve. We're trying to get more customers. The whole point of actually that whole new, that competitor campaign was that you had a problem of, my competitor has too many customers more than me.

I want to get it. You know, maybe a mistake had happened before that led him to even think of that. And it's like, how are we going to do it? And so life is all about, you know, life's all about starting about from the problem and how you fix it. And you've given some fantastic great steps for that, for us there, which is fantastic. And before we go for like, for everybody. So we've just talked to someone who might've just made that mistake, but for everyone listening, what's one takeaway that you'd like to give people before we move?

Heidi Sturrock (27:51)
You know, I would say the industry is going to keep changing. Everything is going to be evolving. Here's what I want you to do.

I want you to jump right into it. I want you to seize the moment. I don't want you to fight the changes. I want you to figure out how to be the master of the new world. So you're going to be, especially some of you who have been in this industry for a little while, you still hold on to some methodologies and critical thinking skills that belong in the past. So come on board and be a master of the algorithm and the bidding strategies. Embrace all of the AI settings.

Anu Adegbola (28:06)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes!

Yeah.

Heidi Sturrock (28:30)
And they're not for everyone, right? They're not for, you cannot have a cookie cutter approach to every account. But do tap into the capabilities of those systems and learn from them and master them. Cause the AI, the AI is awesome, right? And people get frustrated with it. When Performance Max, for example, came out and some of the smart bidding strategies and value-based bidding strategies that rely a lot on ⁓ data that weren't previously needed, like those can get

Anu Adegbola (28:32)
No, no, no.

Mmm.

Mmm.

Heidi Sturrock (28:58)
phenomenal results but you do have to have the inputs and the patients and the you need to know how to master that that scenario. that's my takeaway for everyone.

Be scared, right? Be scared because it's going to motivate you to move beyond that pain point and really master the new situation. I would say embrace it. Embrace the new industry standard.

Anu Adegbola (29:13)
Yes, girl.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Embrace the new industry standard or you will get left behind. Like you can't just be like, I'm going to stick my head in the sand and going to do things how I've always done it. You will lose your clients and yeah, you will lose the race whether you like it or not. Don't try to fight Google. Yahoo tried, they failed. Like literally learn from Yahoo's mistake. Don't try to be like someone else might do it. Google know what they're doing. So yeah.

Heidi Sturrock (29:58)
That's true, right?

Anu Adegbola (29:59)
Yeah, get along with it. Okay, now let's talk about mistakes that get under your skin when you're like auditing accounts or your agency wins a new account and you're like, what has just happened? Maybe like a top three kind of like, yeah, very icky mistakes that you've seen.

Heidi Sturrock (30:17)
Yeah, so we do a lot of audits. I come across a lot of fun things that happen, but

You know, when we sit down and really ask tough questions about why the performance isn't up to par or, you know, what's happening here, sometimes I think the biggest thing that gets under my skin is when I'm dealing with a product or a service that has a much longer attribution window than is set up in the account. So for example, if you're a very high ticket item,

or you have a service that requires a lengthy sales process, right? So, you know, they're not making it, clicking on an ad and making a decision to act right there. It's usually weeks, sometimes months, right?

Anu Adegbola (30:59)
Mmm. Yeah.

Heidi Sturrock (31:00)
And

the attribution window to seven days in the account or even like 15 days or 30 days. And really it should be much longer than that. And ⁓ what ends up happening is the reason why it's such a pet peeve of mine is I observe what happens in the client teams and the client dynamic. There's this never ending cycle of frustration. The client perceives that you are not getting the leads as quickly as they need to. The algorithm and the client team that's supporting

Anu Adegbola (31:05)
Nice. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Heidi Sturrock (31:29)
the account is thinking, my gosh, if we could just have a longer attribution window, we'd probably have enough data to feed the algorithm in mass. So I would say attribution window, make sure it's aligned with how your business actually sees sales come in. Yeah. ⁓

Anu Adegbola (31:37)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, attribution

window. Yeah, important.

Heidi Sturrock (31:48)
The other

thing that I think gets under my skin or more likely is a pain point for everyone, right? The client and the agency team or the provider is when you have a goal, right? So if you're an e-commerce company, a lot of my clients will come to me and say, okay, Heidi, you know, we've ran all the numbers, we know our profit margins, yada, yada, yada. Here's the ROAS target we need to hit every month.

for this to be successful for us. And so I'm like, great, awesome. Client team nails it. Client team is doing awesome. The strategists on the team that are managing Google are hitting that target. But the client comes back and says, oh, but the CPC is $40. Or the CTR went down, click through rate went down 10 % last week.

and we're still hitting the target, but these conversations derail progress, I think, right? Because what ends up happening is we start fixating on KPIs that shouldn't be your primary metric, yet you're treating them like it in the analysis segment. yeah, focus on the source of truth for what makes your business successful, right? And that could be any number one of KPIs, but don't get caught up in what you hear is bad or good for other things. Those should be touch

Anu Adegbola (32:50)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yes.

Heidi Sturrock (33:14)
points and additional data points, right? They should be additional data points that inform how you may or may not optimize, but don't use them as your primary levers because what that's going to do is that's going to jack up your primary goal. They're not the same. So biggest takeaway there for a pain point is...

Listen to the client what truly matters to them and then guide any conversations away from unnecessary fixation on the wrong KPIs.

Anu Adegbola (33:43)
Absolutely.

Don't fixate on the wrong KPI. And even when things come to your story, not that you're the KPI, the sales guys were looking at was wrong, but it's, could, you know, if you look at another, something as an opportunity over a ways to actually do something better, you know, look what the entrepreneur, the business or the owner of the business actually cares about the most. You then go, high CPC is actually not a bad thing. Even though generally we're like, okay, we don't want costs to go up. That's a

Heidi Sturrock (34:05)
Yes.

You're right.

Anu Adegbola (34:12)
fair worry, but if it's driving the right customers, that's all that matters.

Heidi Sturrock (34:17)
Yeah, and I

you're so right. And you know, one of the things that you have to realize now with how Google's bidding algorithms and bidding strategies work is when you are a good search marketer and you are going into that account, you're giving it the right targets and you're giving it the right data to work off of, Google's going to find you high intent customers, right?

it's going to enter into the auctions where it's likely to find that person who's going to convert for you. Now, if it's a $30 click at the end of the day and you're still getting that customer within a profitable range that you have defined, I would rather send you 10 clicks, really high cost per click.

clicks that are going to convert for you at the end of the day, then hundreds of low CPC clicks that convert maybe half as well. It's all about how the numbers work out. So don't be afraid. Don't be afraid of those higher CPCs the way that the algorithm works. It's entering into just higher intent auctions. Not all the time. I'm not saying that's a free for all for all you search marketers out there to not pay attention to what's really going on with how

Anu Adegbola (35:21)
Thank

No. Yes. Yes.

Heidi Sturrock (35:30)
you've set up the campaign and in regards to really high CPCs but don't be afraid of them either if they're netting you results.

Anu Adegbola (35:38)
Yeah, High intent customers is what you're trying to look for. If you're doing high CPCs, low intent customers, like that's a fail fail. should not be in this industry at all. So yeah, start from the high intent customers. Try to get them at as low a CPC as you can. But if it's higher than you expect it to be, but it's still high intent customers, don't worry. Don't be afraid of that. For sure, for sure. Absolutely love that.

We've come to coming near to the end of the conversation, but I want us to do one mention about AI. What's one huge mistake that you feel we're doing in terms of the world of AI?

Heidi Sturrock (36:16)
okay. So as I mentioned before, big, big fan of AI. My personal professional goal is to kind of really be on the forefront of that for all of my clients coming in. So I highly recommend everyone tap into the bidding strategies that rely on AI and certain parts of how Google Ads settings are related to that. But

Anu Adegbola (36:27)
Yeah.

Heidi Sturrock (36:42)
I want you to make sure that you don't enter into those situations before you have the right setup. you know, with AI comes a great responsibility as a search marketer because we often assume, this is supposed to get exactly what I want. It's supposed to be smarter and more intelligent than the other.

Anu Adegbola (36:49)
Yeah.

Yes.

Heidi Sturrock (37:04)
settings or bidding strategies, but really what ends up happening is to be successful in this, you need the correct and right first party data to feed it. You need to understand how much conversion data that gets filtered into a campaign that you need for that bidding strategy to be successful, and you need to give it the right inputs, right? And so what I'm talking about with inputs is

Anu Adegbola (37:14)
Mm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Heidi Sturrock (37:31)
If you have a bidding strategy that would benefit from a target on it, like a CPA or a ROAS related one, give it the right target related to your business. Understand how you can use that to scale up or down. And then secondly, remember my broad match story in the beginning? AI is awesome. AI is awesome, but you've got to give it constraints and parameters. So if you're running broad match keywords, pay attention to where, and you're running, for example, AI max for search, pay attention to the landing pages.

Anu Adegbola (37:52)
Yeah.

Heidi Sturrock (38:00)
it's choosing. Add exclusions if necessary. Give it a little bit more direction if it needs it. And keep in mind folks that a lot of the signals Google uses are based on you, right? Based on your landing pages, based on the way you've structured your campaigns and so forth. So be on top of that as well because really when you have the right ingredients for the recipe, it's phenomenal. It truly is.

Anu Adegbola (38:24)
Yes,

Heidi Sturrock (38:26)
Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (38:26)
yes, yes, it is phenomenal if you have the right ingredients, absolutely. Because you did mention it and because also it's very much on my mind and we're a year in, people are still nervous about AI Max. Like, have you tested it? What's your, how is it working out for you?

Heidi Sturrock (38:40)
yeah. I've tested

it on over 50 accounts. ⁓ I have to tell you, here's the, I'm gonna be honest with you. If you talk to a Google rep, they're going to suggest you run it. Here's my suggestion to you. Not a bad idea. In over, I'd say, I mentioned 50 accounts, I'd say two thirds are killing it with AI max research and the other third, maybe not so much.

Anu Adegbola (38:44)
Amazing.

course.

Heidi Sturrock (39:04)
And it really does boil down to a few things. It boils down to how you set up the campaign in the first place, right? So how much historical data has that campaign had flowing into it that the algorithm could actually learn from and use? What's your budget? The volume? What are the targets you're giving it? Are there constraints? So I would say if you're on the fence on AI max for search,

Test it in an experiment first. So set up an experiment in your Google Ads account. In fact, I'm going to I'll be publishing a how-to next week on this. So it's super easy. Don't be scared about experiments if you haven't run one before. They're brilliant and they're low risk mitigation because what can you can see the results when you have your control.

And then you have your arm of the experiment that's there to test. You can just designate how much of your budget in the experiment you want. And you can quickly see, okay, this AI Max for Search, it's going to truly improve results right now, or it's really tanking and we need to pause it and reconfigure if we're going to try it again. So I would say definitely worth testing. Please do test it, but also understand what AI Max for Search truly is, right? It's a setting in your account. ⁓

[Not a] new campaign type or anything like that. And it does have levers you can use to control it and guide it. So become knowledgeable about that. Again, on my blog, on my website, you could go and check out AI Max for Search but I have a little guide there for you. But yeah, no, don't be scared. Definitely test it. But use an experiment first. Do not switch everything over at once and just hope for the best.

Anu Adegbola (40:20)
Mm-hmm.

Amazing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's, and it's like, it's, it's new, but how you use, you use it is not new. We've been hearing about experimenting and testing things. Every, you know, good advertiser that is worth their salt will say, always be testing, always test something, experiments. need experiments. So same for AI max. And as you've said, don't dig your head in the sand about all these new things. It's coming. It's here, whether you like it or not. So yeah.

Dive into it, do it scared, but do it anyway. And that's how you win. That's how you win, isn't it? Heidi, you have given us so much. I feel like we need a part two of this, because there's like so many more questions I could ask. And I know that as we were talking before, you're like, yeah, there are other mistakes to even talk about as well. So yeah, so maybe like on another episode, we get you in and talk more about other things that are going on.

Heidi Sturrock (41:35)
would love to be on again.

Cause as I mentioned before, remember, if you've been in the industry for a while and so many of you have, like your biggest learnings and growth have been through your mistakes. you know, always an opportunity to talk about them.

Anu Adegbola (41:47)
Yes. Yes.

Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, we're gonna round up now, but before we go, my last question for you, non-PPC, just a nice, fun, chilled one. If your PPC career were a movie, what would the title be?

Heidi Sturrock (42:03)
gosh.

Okay. So for all of you people that love the 1980s, I'm going to say Rocky.

featuring Sylvester Stallone, love, love him, because you see reiterations of the industry through the years. And every single time a huge revision comes up with Google in terms of the rules of the game, how they're operating, how the campaigns are working, what's the opportunity, you kind of get knocked down, right? Because everything you knew, and this is really true about, what was it, five or six years ago when?

Anu Adegbola (42:14)
⁓

Heidi Sturrock (42:40)
PMAX came out and more of the smart bidding strategies evolved into what they are today. We had to kind of throw out everything we do about manually controlling every aspect of the account and relearn how to be great strategists and practitioners under the new rules. So you're kind of getting knocked down in the ring and then you're getting up and you've got to win the next match, right? And you have like what? Like very, a few minutes to do it, right? So I'd say that that would probably be my movie.

Anu Adegbola (43:08)
Yeah, yeah,

rocky. And any of the different parts that you like particularly to like part one, part two, part three, always like just rocky in general.

Heidi Sturrock (43:16)
I mean, let me be honest, when Sylvester Stallone was fighting, it was the Russian guy, right? I can't even remember his name because it's been so many years since I've seen this, but, you know, that was like me when PMAX came out all those years ago. I was like, what on earth am I facing right now? I did not anticipate this, right? And you had to sort of learn the weaknesses. You had to learn the strengths to really master that championship fight.

Anu Adegbola (43:21)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

god.

god.

Ugh.

Amazing amazing,

right? Like yeah, we feel every day feels like a battle every day feels like a battle where you're like new thing new thing We need to try new like how does this work? Yeah. Yeah, that's I think that's like a very very apt Yeah title for that's rocky. That's fantastic. Heidi. This has been such a great chat. I've enjoyed myself so much Like like where can where can people find you to hear more?

Heidi Sturrock (44:07)
Me too!

Anu Adegbola (44:10)
of what you like talking about and your AI max like how to use kind of thing, where can people find you?

Heidi Sturrock (44:16)
Thank you so much. So if you want to come find me, I am very active on LinkedIn. Come find me on LinkedIn, Heidi Sturrock. can also, if you're interested in some of the guides that I have, they're absolutely free. I'm also giving away a free prompt for how I personally write my highest performing ad copy for the LLMs, if you'd like that. Come to HeidiSturrock.com and you'll find lots of goodies for you waiting for you there.

Anu Adegbola (44:41)
Amazing and if people want to see you in person because this is pretty much Set now where I'm gonna people see you in person next

Heidi Sturrock (44:46)
You

well, I will be at SMX Boston in June. So please, please come if you're in the area or even if you're not in the area and you find yourself hankering to come to Beantown. It's where I went to college. It's a wonderful, wonderful city. You can come to SMX Boston. There's gonna be a complete lineup of some of the best and brightest speakers there. Let me tell you, I'm going to also be there. I'm gonna be on a panel answering some of your toughest questions

Anu Adegbola (45:04)
⁓

Heidi Sturrock (45:18)
at the end on the last day. So please, please, please come and see me and ask me all the toughest questions that you can think of. I'm happy to talk with you.

Anu Adegbola (45:27)
Amazing. I'm so excited for that because I'm fielding some of those questions and I'm going to be there putting all those questions together and you know, and asking Heidi them. I was so excited like, cause she was recommended by Navah Hopkins, she was recommended by Jyll Saskin-Gales and we were literally like, well, yeah, that's, that's all the seal of approval that you know, you need. ⁓ and yeah, I, I don't think we've heard, heard enough from, from Heidi in a while. I know LinkedIn is can be a bit of a mad place, but yeah.

Heidi Sturrock (45:55)
Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (45:56)
I hope you follow Heidi, follow her blog. If you don't find LinkedIn fun, that's fine. Follow her blog so that you can still get some of her amazing insights that she's doing. But yeah, for now, thank you so much, Heidi, and hope we'll speak to you soon. to, yeah, see you, well, not hope to, I'll definitely be seeing you in June. So I'm very much looking forward to that. But yeah, chat to you later.

Heidi Sturrock (46:18)
Thank

you. Anu you're the best and brightest. Appreciate you and all the insight that you provide to the industry and for having me on. So thank you.

Anu Adegbola (46:29)
Thank you.

Anu Adegbola (46:30)
Thank you so much, Heidi, for sharing that very honest and transparent experience and sharing how like, again, again and again, do not make big changes on a Friday. Don't even make small changes because small changes can lead to big mistakes on a Friday. Don't do that on a Friday, but also it's very good to get everybody in the team involved in terms of your brand, know, key stakeholders involved in terms of when you're doing ⁓ your paid search activity.

having a visionary entrepreneur, having a visionary, you know, founder, the head of the company, being able to know what was important to them and be able to see how that important thing can still be achieved even during a mistake is such a green flag of a client. So yeah, it's always important to really figure out what your customer wants, what your client is actually going out for so that even a mistake can lead to an opportunity.

So yeah, always reading between the lines when it comes to your client request when they're asking for something. So always look out for that. For the full information, full transcript and all the links that Heidi shared, so to her LinkedIn, to her blog, to get your tickets, to make sure that you see her at SMX in June, that's going to be shared on podcast.ppc.live. So that would be all the show notes and all the details about all the conversations that we had.

In terms of our PPC live events, we've got tickets still selling, early bird sale is going to come to an end soon on the 22nd of March. So as I'm recording this 10 days to go, but who knows by time you're listening to this, a lot less. So definitely make sure you check that out. And so yeah, just go to ppc.live for amazing talks that is going to be happening in Brighton. So yeah, make sure you join us there.

Before I leave you, I'm delighted to share as well that I'm taking on coaching clients. So yeah, we'll be able to do a free 15 minute discovery call to figure out what it is that you need. But yeah, I help you look through things like confidence, asking for pay rise, asking for that promotion, knowing what kind of direction you need to go in your client and your in the industry, how you how to really get into it.

⁓ And to ensure that you don't lose your confidence even though it might be the journey might be going a bit slower than you expect So yeah, go to the marketing annual calm and we were able to discuss how I can help you So yeah, I hope you have enjoyed the show and I look forward to bringing more PPC f-ups and triumphs next week. Thank you. Bye