EP360 - Clean Doesn't Always Mean Better ft Charlotte Osborne

Anu Adegbola (00:10)
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're keeping up with ever changing landscape, don't worry, you are still in the right place. Every week I speak to a different PPC expert about the different F-ups that they've experienced, but also how they've turned things around. So we never leave things on a defeated note.

Today I have the delight of speaking to Charlotte Osborne who ⁓ owned an agency but now she's independent and works with founders to ensure that they are keeping up with you know how to stand out how to cut through the noise of all the different things that Google says you should do and loads of people in the industry say that you should do and she shares ⁓ an issue that she had a mistake that she made

early in her career about account structures. One would think something as simplistic as, know, talking about account structures. How big a mistake could that be? Well, we're going to find out about how a mistake can be made when you just go ahead with the wrong account structures. yeah, account structures is a big thing in our industry, you know, from how we used to make it so granular to how Google prefers you to consolidate it. It's something that different paid search experts have spoken about and it's something that different

podcast, you know, guests I've also spoken about. So yeah, definitely a popular topic. And yeah, Charlotte gives a very brilliant example of how to watch out and steps to ensure that you're putting a good account structure together. So yeah, let's go speak to Charlotte.

Anu Adegbola (01:46)
Hello, Charlotte. Welcome to PPC Live the podcast. I am so good. Thank you. I'm so looking forward to this episode. Like ⁓ Charlotte and I have just been like chatting for maybe like half an hour and it's like we've only really met like once like yesterday before the recording this and it's like just two people who just like to do the whole. So.

Charlotte Osborne (01:49)
Hello, how you doing?

Good.

you

Yeah.

It's like we've known

each other forever.

Anu Adegbola (02:10)
Honestly, honestly, it so feels that and I just love

that it just makes everything so nice you know, natural and organic So our listeners are in for a treat So who is Charlotte Osborne? Charlotte is a PPC expert with 16 plus years of hands-on experience turning ad spend into real growth. She co-owned a digital agency, but now she's managing millions

well, she used to co-own an agency, whether she was managing millions in campaigns, but now she helps founders, in-house teams and marketers cut through the noise, take control of your ads and drive results that actually matter. Because in the world of AI, everything is like, you can do anything, everything with AI. honestly, there's so much noise, especially search engine land so many new things, major news, major update. Not everything is major guys, like, you know,

Charlotte Osborne (02:57)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (03:03)
figure out what works for you. And now going to my fun part of the intro. Fun fact, Charlotte, let us know what your fun fact is.

Charlotte Osborne (03:11)
God, there's not lot really. I'm pretty boring, but I do have two pugs. Very cheeky, sometimes naughty, but yeah, very, very lovely pugs. So yeah, fun facts about me.

Anu Adegbola (03:17)
⁓

course.

Nice, what's one interesting fact about pugs that most people don't know?

Charlotte Osborne (03:32)
God, I don't know if it's that most people don't know. I'm not sure if people know or not. I definitely didn't take it into account. They're very, very barky. They're also very needy. So if you want to go to the toilet on your own anytime soon, don't buy a pug. Don't have a pug. Yeah, they literally follow you everywhere. I think they were bred to be companion dogs. So...

Anu Adegbola (03:47)
happening.

Yeah.

Okay.

Charlotte Osborne (03:56)
they're bred to be sort of lap dogs so they literally don't leave your side. Like yeah. So if you want, if you like personal space, don't bother with a pug.

Anu Adegbola (03:59)
bless. Yeah. You know what? I didn't

know and I didn't do too much because I've got a cat and but at some point I was like, you know, I was getting on the years. The dude was not. I wasn't coming along because, you know, men, let's not get down that path. Men, men, that's a different. That's not what people are coming to listen to. But like.

Charlotte Osborne (04:10)
Yeah.

That's a whole different podcast. No, no.

Anu Adegbola (04:26)
You know, still single

and I was like, look, I'd like a pet. And I actually thought maybe a dog, cause I like dogs. I thought dogs were cute. And I was like, should I get a pug? And I looked at maybe one website and they were like, if you want your independence, don't get like, pugs are needy. You can't just go traveling. And I love traveling. And I was like, yeah, that, that may not work out. Cause I do find them so cute. You know, they've just got the cutest faces. Some people say that they're

Charlotte Osborne (04:40)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, they are, they are beautiful.

Anu Adegbola (04:54)
They're bred in a way that their breathing could be better. What's not about their breathing?

Charlotte Osborne (04:57)
Yeah

so like so actually I mean one of ours is a rescue but the one that we got as a puppy he's actually been bred kind of better so like we went to a really good breeder so his snout isn't quite as like pushed back he doesn't have any breathing issues like he's yeah he's got longer legs so he actually doesn't look like a

Anu Adegbola (05:09)
Okay, good.

Yeah!

Lovely.

Charlotte Osborne (05:23)
potato which is what a lot of pugs look like potatoes don't they ⁓ so he's he's a lovely specimen but yes

Anu Adegbola (05:24)
Now, honestly!

oh my gosh, nice nice,

Anyway, let's get into what this conversation is about. is another one of those very kind folks that, you know,

I posted about something random on LinkedIn like I do. And you know, she was very kind enough to engage with my post. And I was like, ⁓ she looks like an interesting person that's got a lot of experience in this industry. We need to get her on the podcast. And when I reach out cold DM like that, like, you know, how dare I do cold DMS? I hate it myself.

You know, I'm always like, will they say yes? I hope they said yes. And she immediately said yes. So grateful Charlotte for that. And, you know, when I just looked at your experience, I was like, yes, we could learn a lot from you, especially for the fact that now you're in the phase of trying to, you know, get founders to be on the right track of our fantastic industry. ⁓ So yeah, let's get straight into this story. Yeah, this is a very interesting story that, you know, Charlotte has already previewed me.

So you guys are in for a treat. yeah, Charlotte, what is the F up you'd like to share with us today?

Charlotte Osborne (06:32)
God, yeah, so this particular f up, yeah, this is a long, long time ago. So beginning of my career, but I hadn't had as much experience. I wasn't really learning from other PPC people. It was kind of, it was where I was kind of teaching myself in quite a small agency and I inherited this account. It was converting okay, but on the surface I was kind of like,

Anu Adegbola (06:44)
Hmm.

Charlotte Osborne (06:58)
no, I think we need to kind of rip this up and start again almost. And that was fine. I think like the structure was definitely, it was definitely in need of some work, but the carnal sin, which I made was that I essentially kind of re-wrote kind of over existing campaigns, existing ad groups. And so everything got really messy, performance tanked.

Anu Adegbola (07:18)
Mm. Right.

Oof.

Charlotte Osborne (07:27)
And then I basically had a real job for myself. So I had to kind of really try and unpick the mess. There was no line. There's no sort of clean line between like before and after. So I wasn't using Google Ads Editor. had no backup. I had no single point to sort of revert back to. And I was literally, it took me hours upon hours. I was literally going through the change history.

Anu Adegbola (07:31)
Yeah.

⁓ okay.

Okay.

Bye.

Charlotte Osborne (07:54)
kind

of, you know, just in a real kind of state of anxiety, like trying to sort of undo things, not really knowing whether there was one single thing that had kind of tipped things over the edge or if it was a collection of things. Yeah, like it gives me PTSD, like just thinking about it now. And don't get me wrong, you know, I've made lots of F-ups in my career.

Anu Adegbola (07:59)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. ⁓ no.

Charlotte Osborne (08:18)
But that one really, really stuck with me because I genuinely, I didn't know how to fix it. And I kind of, I made lots of changes and I kind of essentially reverted back everything that I could based on memory and the change history and everything. But performance did kind of restore, it did improve a bit, but I think it was just too far gone.

Anu Adegbola (08:20)
Yeah.

Right, okay.

improve.

Go.

Charlotte Osborne (08:46)
you know, it was before smart biddings, you know, we're talking kind of 10, 10, 15 years ago. But on the surface, like, you know, I, I thought this structure is amazing. It's really clean and it makes sense and it's logical and technically it's best practice. You know, I was doing a lot of kind of skag stuff. So those kind of single keyword ad groups. But

Anu Adegbola (08:52)
Okay.

Mmm.

Yep.

Charlotte Osborne (09:12)
because I'd rewritten over stuff essentially rather than kind of start clean and be able to make that direct comparison I just gave myself a hell of a lot of work to do to try and sort of pull it back so yeah I feel like ⁓ I'm not over it to be honest. Are you getting that sense?

Anu Adegbola (09:15)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

⁓ dear!

getting that sense and now this is where I feel a little bit guilty because I'm about to be

like let's dig deeper into what happened and what

Charlotte Osborne (09:42)
⁓

yeah, yeah let's dig deeper, let's go there. Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (09:48)
Yeah, let's go there. This will be therapy. This will be therapy for

you. You'll look back and be like, that is why I will never make that mistake ever again. Right. This is the whole point of this. ⁓ so like you say you were quite junior in the team kind of thing. So you would have had a manager and so was that kind of did the manager what they get? Yep. We need to do that. Or was that kind of thing that you were trying to impress? So you were like, yeah, I know what needs to be done. You went, went in.

Charlotte Osborne (09:56)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Hmm. Hmm. ⁓

What?

Yeah.

So, so this was a very small agency. was my manager was essentially the director of a digital agency and PPC, PPC wasn't there. wasn't their strengths. ⁓ you know, it wasn't kind of where they'd come from specifically. Like we were trying to grow this out as a service. And so, you know, I, I was kind of, know, and this is kind of what spurs me on as a, as a Google ads trainer these days is that.

Anu Adegbola (10:18)
Okay.

wow.

Mmm.

Yeah. Yeah.

Charlotte Osborne (10:42)
There are still a lot of agencies out there like that, the smaller agencies where maybe they're just trying to build out PPC as a service and there's not that framework, there's not that training resource, there's not that, you know, the quality checks or the somebody to bounce off of and go, I'm going to do this. Do you think that's a good idea?

Anu Adegbola (10:57)
Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Charlotte Osborne (11:05)
And it's only kind of as my careers progress that I've realized that all that I probably needed to stop making that mistake and going down that route so drastically was just a conversation with somebody internally that was like, hang on, but common sense says that maybe let's keep it really clean and separate and then kind of see, conserve the conversions that you're already seeing.

Anu Adegbola (11:15)
Mmm. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah,

yeah.

Charlotte Osborne (11:32)
don't

try and kind of destabilise that. But I didn't have that. ⁓ And so, yeah, it happened. You learn from it. But I definitely know what I would do differently now. But when you're in your early 20s and you're kind of...

Anu Adegbola (11:36)
No.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

And you kind of even just directly answered that, um, the question, my, next question, which, know, a lot of different people answered in different ways, the whole, you know, what did you miss? And usually people will be like, Oh yeah, I didn't check this or I didn't check that. It sounds like what you missed was even the training and you know, maybe the correct foundation at that stage. Would you, would you say that's right? Yeah.

Charlotte Osborne (12:02)
Mm.

Mm.

Yeah, no, absolutely completely.

And I think, yeah, if there's kind of, if I could do my career again, like I would love to start in a really established agency, like even if it's as an intern or maybe an unpaid member of staff, just to literally absorb everything I possibly could.

Anu Adegbola (12:28)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Charlotte Osborne (12:35)
I didn't do that and I you know there were reasons I didn't make those decisions at the time that you know there must have been but yeah if I could go back that that's what I'd do or I would continue working in that small agency but I would make sure that I was spending you know a portion of my week upskilling myself training and I kind of was doing that but there wasn't any structure I was kind of

Anu Adegbola (12:55)
Yeah. Yeah.

Charlotte Osborne (13:00)
I was trying to manage accounts and then make time for that course over there that kind of looked good, but maybe still wasn't teaching me the fundamentals. So yeah, lesson learned on that.

Anu Adegbola (13:10)
Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, lesson learned. it's, it's, I think that we've gone far enough. I'd actually even reckon that I say that, ⁓ when you started, it was probably like a thing. And maybe even the industry being so young, which of the agencies was kind of, kind of could have said that they were established enough to know all the best practices of paid search, but

Charlotte Osborne (13:27)
Mm.

Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (13:34)
Now,

now agencies know better. Now the industry has gone further enough. Google has given a lot of like, you know, different updates on, know, how things should be done, things that, how, what, what gets disapproved, you know, what account structures needs to be like and all that kind of stuff. Agencies should still not be decided. We're going to start an agency as a two man band. And, know, we're just going to throw the junior person in without having any training.

Charlotte Osborne (13:49)
Mm. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (14:01)
So yeah, I'm really hoping agencies are doing better by their junior staff by giving them the right training. Yeah.

Charlotte Osborne (14:08)
Yeah, me

too, me too. And I think, you know, it's very, um, you know, you're managing budgets, you're managing clients. Like it's a lot of responsibility and you know, there has to be that kind of support system. There has to be that framework. There has to be, you know, don't get me wrong. I think you learn from making mistakes, but there also has to be a mechanism in place to sort of say, look, you know, if you're restructuring an account or, know, you're.

You know, you're going down a certain route where there's significant changes being made. There has to be someone there that's going to sort of maybe challenge you and go, hang on, like before we do that, you know, have you checked or why are we doing that? Like, what's the motivation? I mean, my motivation was definitely higher, know, increased performance, but it was also probably, you know, a bit of this looks really messy. I want to clean it up.

Anu Adegbola (14:50)
Yeah. Yeah.

woman's hair.

Yeah.

Charlotte Osborne (15:06)
And actually, like something that feels like good housekeeping isn't necessarily going to be good for performance. And I definitely learned that the hard way, you know, 15 years ago or whatever it was. mean, I think the biggest, you know, I don't know what your next questions are, but the biggest piece of advice I would give someone regardless of knowledge level and kind of how long they've been in the industry is just to...

Anu Adegbola (15:13)
Yes, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Charlotte Osborne (15:35)
just to kind of slow down a bit. And, you know, we have a tendency in this industry, there's a lot of, you know, amazing, amazing sort of people that are working on accounts and we've all got, you know, the best intentions and we want to do really well, but sometimes we kind of rush into it and rather than, you know, rather than kind of trying to fix everything at once, just kind of go, hang on a second. If I fix...

Anu Adegbola (15:36)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Charlotte Osborne (16:01)
if I fix that one thing, then I'm going to see that it's that that moved the needle, know, whichever way that needle goes. Whereas if you fix everything, you know, it stands to reason that you're, if, if results go the other way, you're not going to know what, what, you did. ⁓ And it's going to be really difficult to kind of maybe see what you see what you did. But yeah, it just slow it down.

Anu Adegbola (16:07)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Mm.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Charlotte Osborne (16:28)
Just slow it down, phase in those changes. Don't try and do everything at once.

Anu Adegbola (16:30)
Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. Phasing in, doing step by step. And like when you make the account structure error, because also even giving people insight into how quickly cause and effect of these kind of, you know, changes and mistakes can be, how soon before you were like, something's gone wrong. Was it pretty much like immediate or it took maybe a few days? Okay.

Charlotte Osborne (16:45)
Mm.

Hmm.

It was a couple of days, definitely.

mean, you know, their spend wasn't so high or their conversions weren't so high that, you know, it was noticeable immediately. But it was, the change was significant enough for me to go, OK, it's something that I've done. Absolutely. It's not seasonal. It's not somebody else has come into the market. It's not the client.

Anu Adegbola (17:20)
Yeah, yeah,

yeah, Yeah.

Charlotte Osborne (17:21)
website's not down, you know, it was nothing like

that. I knew instinctively that it was something that I had done. And when you're in, you know, since then I've done lots of restructures and you, when you're coming from a place of phasing or being able to create that really clean line, you don't feel that level of anxiety because you're like, okay, well that didn't work.

Anu Adegbola (17:27)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Charlotte Osborne (17:51)
but I know what I need to do now to fix that. I just revert X, Y, and Z and that's absolutely fine. And it's going to take me 10 minutes, not, you know, 20 hours to sort of pick through everything in a panic and just hope for the best. So, you know, it's not just about phasing it, or not doing the restructure at all, because sometimes that is what's needed. It's about

Anu Adegbola (17:54)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Charlotte Osborne (18:16)
doing it in a way that if it tanks, you can go back. There's always a path back. So yeah, I just want to be clear that it's not about making the changes. It's about sort of a process in place so that you don't have to sort of, you're not landing in the weeds rocking yourself to sleep.

Anu Adegbola (18:21)
Yes. Yes.

No. Yeah.

So you

said put the process together, cause that's another question of like, what do you now do differently? That what did that, what did that mistake wake you up to like, okay, this is how I have to do account structures moving forward. mean, you said the whole thing about making sure you like, you know, you do it step by step. Is that, is that pretty much it? Or is there like any, anything else in terms of like process that you make sure you take on board?

Charlotte Osborne (18:43)
Yeah.

Mm.

Yeah,

yeah, I think absolutely phasing any significant change, sort of isolating a change and kind of going, right, we're going to give that 14 days to take effect. And then once we see the impact of that, then we go on to the next thing and so on and so forth. So ⁓ absolutely phasing. Maybe even

Anu Adegbola (19:17)
Sure.

Charlotte Osborne (19:26)
sort of running the existing, some of the existing stuff alongside anything new. Now that's not always possible, but know, leaning into experiments in Google ads. structural change is harder to run those experiments, but you know, even if, what you don't want to do is end up conflicting, you know,

Anu Adegbola (19:32)
Yeah.

Yes, actually, I was going to say experiments, like 50, 50 % kind of thing. Yeah.

Mmm.

Yeah.

Charlotte Osborne (19:51)
essentially bidding on yourself kind of in two separate parts of the account and get cannibalization, but definitely, you know, using sort of A-B testing, reducing budget on kind of the legacy stuff and increasing the budget on the new stuff and then pausing anything old once you realize that actually great, you know, you've done your job, performance has increased over here. But again, not removing anything.

Anu Adegbola (19:52)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Charlotte Osborne (20:17)
always pause, never remove because you

never know when you might want to need to sort of turn that stuff back on. yeah, just being really, what's the word, being really kind of purposeful about everything you do. Having a really good plan before you do it. So rather than just diving straight in.

Anu Adegbola (20:22)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

a bin.

Charlotte Osborne (20:38)
yeah spend spend a day you know on the strategy and kind of going okay this is this is what i'm going to do this is when i'm going to do it this is my logic behind it and you know it might feel slower it might feel you know maybe not as exciting but i i swear to god like it will hold you in good stead because if you did what i did

Anu Adegbola (20:56)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Charlotte Osborne (21:04)
you're gonna get some grey hairs I think.

Anu Adegbola (21:06)
Yeah. ⁓ bless you. ⁓ bless. Okay. Now I, another

question I'm very curious about, even though I kind of have a feeling that I know what the answer is in terms of, cause you've already said about how the agency was very small. Your manager was actually the person who led the, the head of digital marketing. Was there, how, how did they take that whole tank in performance or were they just like, ⁓ make the mistake, fix it. And like,

Charlotte Osborne (21:14)
Mm.

Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (21:34)
Did they figure it out where they're annoyed? How are they? How did they take it?

Charlotte Osborne (21:36)
up

I think they were worried from a commercial standpoint, right? I think the instinct for them was, well, if I don't understand the platform enough to know what she's done wrong, then I'd, so they didn't have any control that they, they had less control than me because they were coming from a place of, I don't even know PPC. don't like, they didn't know how to fix it. So they're very reliant on me to sort that out, which

Anu Adegbola (21:43)
Sure.

Charlotte Osborne (22:08)
You know, I did to a large extent. But I think they're kind of worried. I didn't get into trouble or anything, but I think the worry, their anxiety was we're going to lose this client and the commercial implications of that, which obviously I completely understand. But I think again, I think this is potentially a danger when you have quite a small, you know,

Anu Adegbola (22:09)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Mmm.

Charlotte Osborne (22:36)
agency that where perhaps PPC isn't their first service, maybe that owner or MD, you know, comes from a web design background or an SEO background or something, but they have a PPC team. If you're not really in touch with the, you know, the, the, why's, the what's and the how's of that day to day work, it becomes very, very difficult to.

Anu Adegbola (22:40)
Yeah

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Charlotte Osborne (23:04)
have eyes on it in the same way. So I think that comes back down to kind of how you structure your agency, what training you have in place, whether you're hiring seniors as part of your team and all of that kind of stuff. So yeah, I think that's probably a bit too. But yeah, they weren't. I definitely didn't get into trouble. I think they could probably see that I was beating myself up.

Anu Adegbola (23:17)
Yeah, it is,

Charlotte Osborne (23:29)
enough, which I'm thankful for. But equally, I think there was a bit of stress. Yeah, for sure.

Anu Adegbola (23:30)
Yeah,

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, it just makes me nervous. Well, like, you know, so you were the PPC person. Was there any other PPC person that was maybe managing another account?

Charlotte Osborne (23:47)
I think there was, I think yeah, I think there was another junior at that time, but again, there was, yeah, there no one senior. I think I was probably, I didn't have a senior kind of job title, but I was definitely probably seen as the, you're the PPC person, you you're managing accounts and you're gonna grow this team. And I think in hindsight, yeah, at the very least I should have had a...

Anu Adegbola (23:49)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Charlotte Osborne (24:16)
I should have had a framework and I should have had a process to sense check really big structural changes against somebody else. Even if that was a layman, because I think even laymans can go, well, hang on, if you thought about this, have you, you know, doing everything in one go, is that a good idea? I mean, I still have clients questioning me and they're coming from a place of, I don't really know PPC, but they're asking questions that are...

Anu Adegbola (24:18)
Yes, yes, yes.

Yes. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah.

Charlotte Osborne (24:44)
that come from a place of logic and common sense. you know, I definitely think that, you know, having at least that is a good idea. unfortunately, yeah, you know, 15 years ago, I didn't have that. So. No.

Anu Adegbola (24:46)
Yes.

Yeah. You didn't. Yeah. Yeah. So don't

just, don't just hire junior folks in your team, not give them a framework, not give them someone who can be like, okay, this is how it should look like, but also listen to lay people that don't, that don't actually work in paid search in terms of just having someone else to be able to sensor check and those kinds of companies, because one could argue that yeah, your digital marketing manager, he could have been someone to bounce things off, but it was probably quite a bit of a team where he was too busy.

with too many different things to be the kind of person to have that.

Charlotte Osborne (25:25)
Yeah, yeah and

trust and trusted me to have all the answers and I think you know when I when you're 22, 23 and you're still learning and there's a lot that you're doing that's right but you're still kind of you know in that space where you're making you're making mistakes it's it's a lot of it's a lot of pressure and it's yeah probably not not the way to you know grow it in.

Anu Adegbola (25:30)
Yeah.

Wow.

Sure.

No, and it makes me

think you're saying that you made them as this mistake. Maybe like 15 years ago. That's right at the start of your career. I mean, on one hand, you go into a job and you're like, yeah, excited. I've got a senior role. Maybe the paycheck is better, but then you start going into it and you're like, actually, I'd have loved a lot more guidance that I've got right now. I think.

Charlotte Osborne (25:58)
Mm.

Mm.

Mm.

Yeah,

yeah, and I think, you know, this is not, I'm absolutely not bashing kind of previous employers over the head at all, but I do, you know, I'm 41 now and I do look back and I think, do you know what, I could have learned so much more, so much quicker by some really, like there's so many people in this industry that, I mean, I'm still learning from them now. But, you know, back then, sort of 10, 15 years ago when Google Ads was still, I mean,

it wasn't new was it but you you think back to kind of the really old interface kind of four iterations ago whatever it is and there were still like some really cool people doing really cool things and I never felt that that was accessible to me to really kind of absorb from other people and so yeah like it's it's one of those things isn't it yeah yeah

Anu Adegbola (26:44)
yes. yes. yeah.

has changed. That has really changed. And it's really cool how that

has changed. So a lot of companies, lot of like, you know, agencies, even if you're a brand, we don't have the excuse not to surround your team with people who know things a lot better than you and that they can learn from. Not even access, yeah. Yeah.

Charlotte Osborne (27:18)
No. Yeah. Yeah. Or access. Yeah. Or access, you know, kind of resources or courses. I mean, you

know, I, I learn, I learn from sort of peers in PPC every day, every day. There is not a day that goes by where I don't go, ⁓ okay, cool. And that might just be from my LinkedIn feed or, you know, joining a podcast. Like, so, yeah, I don't think there's a lot of...

Anu Adegbola (27:31)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Charlotte Osborne (27:45)
lot of excuse from it, but I think if you really want to kind of facilitate that in a growing team, in a small to medium agency, think as an employer, a head of search, whatever that looks like, I think it is also your responsibility to kind of go, learn, learn, learn, learn, absorb, go and do this, go and do that. Yeah, but.

Anu Adegbola (27:55)
Yeah.

Yes. Yes.

Yeah,

absolutely. We have delved so much into this. ⁓ and you'll be happy to know that we're going to, you know, move away and, know, leave your PTSD in the back, in the, in the, in the past again, you know, but that has been such a great, great, great revelation in terms of how you went through that. But also even terms of if you're, if you had an advice for maybe someone who has just discovered that they've they've done a big account structure and the performance has tanked. What's your advice to them?

Charlotte Osborne (28:21)
Okay.

Mm. Mm.

Breathe, don't panic, try not to panic, it's easier said than done. But kind of go back, kind of think, okay, what did this account kind of look like on day one? Hopefully you've put some measures in place to be able to go back and make that comparison. If you haven't, you're in for a ride, but I promise you, tomorrow is another day.

Anu Adegbola (28:43)
Okay, that's...

Yeah.

Hmm.

Mmm.

Charlotte Osborne (29:08)
and

you will absolutely learn from this. Like you will never make this mistake ever again because if you're the right person, it hurts, like it will hurt you. And you know, the world's not gonna end, it's fine, but you know, just kind of breathe and just kind of try and retrace your steps. But hopefully it's not as bad as it was for me and you've got that kind of before and after. And...

Anu Adegbola (29:10)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah

Yeah.

Yeah.

Charlotte Osborne (29:32)
you you can go back, you can take it back. But if you're really, really, really struggling, then reach out and I'll give you some advice. If you're kind of in the pit of despair and you really can't revert things back and I will kind of help you the best I can. But it's not the end of the world, you know, it's all good, it's all good.

Anu Adegbola (29:34)
Yeah.

No, no. For those who

are not, maybe you're listening to this and you're not watching on the video, Charlotte has just got such a trusting face and I'd be like, take her up on that. Take her up on that. When she says, reach out to me. Absolutely reach out to her. you know, cause that's, that's what we want to do with, with, with people in the industry now juniors in the industry. It's not, it's.

Charlotte Osborne (30:01)
Aww. Yeah, yeah, I'm here to help. Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (30:16)
We're not all behind walls. It's not all like, we don't work for the same agency, so I can't share anything with you. All of that is in the past. We just want everybody to do things well like this. I feel like I really like that the industry has just gone into this phase of like, we want the integrity of how we do things to be better. You know, we just, and it's all of us involved. We wanna make sure if someone else is doing it wrong, I almost feel like bad that I didn't.

Charlotte Osborne (30:22)
No.

Absolutely.

Anu Adegbola (30:44)
Like how did they not have access to the information to ensure that they don't, they're not doing it right, you know? And that's, that's just how I feel. Yeah.

Charlotte Osborne (30:45)
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.

We know I couldn't agree more honestly and I think we need to normalize. I think somebody put a post up yesterday on LinkedIn. Actually, I can't remember who it was, you know, normalizing, feeling embarrassed, asking for help, saying I don't know or saying I F'd up.

Anu Adegbola (31:04)
Yeah.

Charlotte Osborne (31:11)
what do we do, can someone help me kind get out of this or like, you know, where do I go? And yeah, I think we just all need to kind of help each other and share knowledge and share information. And I think I've absolutely come from a time where you're almost kind of, you you've got people saying, don't copy my homework, you know, I know what I'm doing. There's almost a kind of, you know, a bit of an ego.

Anu Adegbola (31:31)
Yes.

Yes.

Charlotte Osborne (31:38)
and I have no time for that, let's just let's cut through that bullshit, excuse my language, and let's you know let's do this really well, let's do what we can, let's help each other, let's share knowledge, let's keep you know keep bettering people, let's keep bettering each other and that's what's going to be really great for this industry like that's how

Anu Adegbola (31:43)
yes. yes.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Charlotte Osborne (32:00)
That's how we do better PPC and it's as simple as that really.

Anu Adegbola (32:04)
And the way I also say it is that there's enough business to go around because I think that there's a lot of fear of like, oh, they'll steal my client and there won't be enough clients and I want to get all the clients. You can't work on all the clients. No one person can work on all the clients you need. There's enough business to go around.

Charlotte Osborne (32:08)
Yeah, yeah.

Mmm.

No, no, and no, and find,

and it took me a long time to sort of find my lane. And I think, you know, a lot of people are the same, whether you're training, whether you're doing the doing, you know, there's some people that really love EECOM and there's some people that really love LeadGen, like, you know, do you want to really think about, you actually want to service all the clients? Probably not, you know. So, yeah, I just, think,

Anu Adegbola (32:36)
Yeah! Yeah!

Yeah, no. Sometimes between you

and I and all my listeners, I don't want to service any of them.

Charlotte Osborne (32:55)
well yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah well you know we were talking about that year-long sabbatical earlier weren't we so you know that might not might not be ⁓ might not be too too far away from what you've said. ⁓

Anu Adegbola (32:56)
Just be like, here you go. You want all the clients have all the clients.

Who knows?

So far, who knows? ⁓ bless,

yeah, yeah, that'll be, that's on my dream, vision board. It's on the vision board for sure. Taking us about school, knows? So yeah, no, that has been so, we've taken some more time and some people are like, I know we're gonna have time to talk about other people's mistakes and AI mistakes. Yes, we are. So let's squeeze that in. like mistakes that maybe you've seen in audits.

that makes you, you know, go blue in the face and going, how is this still happening? What insights do have for us?

Charlotte Osborne (33:37)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. ⁓

God. Yeah. I mean, so many, but I'm still, I'm still doing audits. And I would say the number one thing is no conversion tracking set up or like it's been set up incorrectly. you know, conversions are double counting. I think the thing I find most frustrating about that is that it's

Anu Adegbola (33:58)
Yeah

Charlotte Osborne (34:07)
not too difficult to do. think there's a perception sometimes it's really technical and really intricate. I don't think it is, you know, I'm not saying it's not technical at all, of course it is, but I don't think it's kind of outside the realms of most people's, you know, kind of capabilities. So I get really disappointed, especially when I'm auditing an account that's being run by an agency that just has done that or set it up incorrectly, because

Essentially, you know, a lot of, I would say 90 % of accounts that I audit these days are using smart bidding, which means that you're asking the algorithm to optimize against those conversions. And if either they're not there or they're, you know, that's been set up incorrectly, it was double counting, then you're, you know, you're really doubling down on like on rubbish essentially, or that you know, you can't quantify.

Anu Adegbola (34:44)
Yeah.

You

Yeah. Yeah.

Charlotte Osborne (35:04)
So that's the big one. The other thing, and I'm seeing this more and more recently, I'm not sure what's happening, but no negatives at all. So going into exclusion lists and there being no negative keyword lists, the odd one may be added at campaign level, but certainly nothing kind of ad group or kind of shared list related. And that is bad, that is.

Anu Adegbola (35:26)
Okay.

And are these campaigns that are used in broad match? ⁓ god.

Charlotte Osborne (35:35)
Some of them, some of them, yeah,

yeah, yeah, some of them. So yeah, like one of the things kind of why I will do kind of straight away is almost kind of run a tally on traffic that's cost the client money where they've essentially, you know, haven't had a conversion and they would never have a conversion on that keyword because it's just so far removed from what they do. Just to sort of, I guess, you know, paint a picture for a client of, well, hang on, that's my money or that's...

Anu Adegbola (35:48)
Nothing.

Yeah!

Charlotte Osborne (36:01)
company's money like that's a tangible you know that's 200 quid 300 quid gone you know sometimes a lot more than that so yeah some some big things coming out of audits ⁓ but they are the two that really grind my gears because it's it makes such a difference when managed correctly.

Anu Adegbola (36:13)
Yeah.

Yeah.

It's it's it's it. And those are perfect examples to that question of things that shouldn't be happening in 2026, because if it was maybe 2016 or 2014 where, you know, Google was, you know, this whole pay tag thing was very young and traffic was what was really all that was important. Yeah. You could get away with that because we're all like, Oh yeah, we've got the visibility. We're getting the traffic, but now you are being judged on.

Charlotte Osborne (36:28)
Mm.

Mm.

Anu Adegbola (36:46)
the conversion coming back, you're being judged on the revenue coming back. And you know, and it's not just like, we've getting clicks, therefore paid search is working. If you're not getting conversions is paid search is not working regardless of the clicks. And then if you're just pushing broad, no negatives, the whole targeting, targeting has gone, come such a long way. You know, that's something that Google give us a lot of, even with all AI, can target by audience, you can target by.

Charlotte Osborne (36:51)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (37:14)
different keywords, creative types and that kind of stuff. And even not doing any exclusions. Yeah. You shouldn't be in the game.

Charlotte Osborne (37:17)
Hmm. Yeah. And

you know, notice as well, those two things, they're not, you know, shiny new objects. They were, they were around, you know, years ago. So the fact that you can inherit an account or all this in account that doesn't have those two things nailed, is, is

quite worrying really. I mean, I would say that the keywords exclusion stuff is not so much of an issue when an agency has been on the account. I mean, it absolutely can be and I've definitely seen massive gaps. But that tends to be where you've got somebody trying to manage it in house maybe, or, you know, it's been left for a long time, which is perhaps more understandable. But the conversion set up.

Anu Adegbola (37:39)
Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Charlotte Osborne (38:07)
is across the board. I'm seeing that kind of on a weekly basis at the moment, whether it's an agency, whether it's an in-house team, an owner manager, whatever. And it's the first thing I fix or would fix. And once you fix that, you kind of know what the state of play is, the real state of play, and then everything else kind of can move from there.

Anu Adegbola (38:08)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah

Charlotte Osborne (38:30)
But without that you are, yeah, you're just, well, you're flying blind, exactly. Yeah, so, and you know, without it, you're wasting a lot of money. So yeah, invest in a very, in a really good conversion tracking setup, I would say.

Anu Adegbola (38:33)
flying blind absolutely fly guy

Absolutely,

absolutely. And how about like mistakes when it comes to AI and how AI is used, implemented or assumed to work even.

Charlotte Osborne (38:56)
Hmm. Maybe slightly controversial. I've not seen great results or people talking about great results with AI Max in platform at the moment. I'm absolutely happy to kind of have my mind changed on that. But I'm hearing and I've seen on a couple of accounts of my own that it's bringing in a lot of kind of

Anu Adegbola (39:16)
Yeah.

Charlotte Osborne (39:18)
relevant, you know, it's like broad essentially and even when you have exclusions in place AI Max is bringing those keywords in when you've already excluded them account, you know, account level. So I've seen a few things with that that I've not been enamored with. In terms of how people are using AI to kind of manage accounts and things, I love AI. think we're

Anu Adegbola (39:21)
Bye.

Yeah

Charlotte Osborne (39:43)
We're now in a position where it can really remove a lot of the heavy lifting, a lot of the tactical sort of manual time consuming jobs, which fantastic. My stance on it is that we should be giving AI as much context as we can. Context is everything. But perhaps not going as far as giving

Anu Adegbola (39:48)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yup.

Yes.

Charlotte Osborne (40:08)
AI permission to make those changes in platform. So where I am on that is great. It's, you know, it's produced a, it's gone through my search query reports and it's, you know, shortlisted some negatives for my review. But what it hasn't done is apply those negatives to my account without me as a human and somebody that knows that account and business and client really, really well. And okay, great.

Anu Adegbola (40:12)
Yeah. Yeah.

Mm. Mm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Charlotte Osborne (40:37)
That's fine. I'm happy with those. I'm now going to implement. you know, and I'm sure there's lots of people out there that will argue with me that will say, well, if you give it enough context, you can trust it to do the automation and to sort of do it for you. I'm not quite there yet. You know, proof's in the pudding for me. I still think that we're, we as humans are needed on the account, think, freeing up time so that we can focus more on strategy.

Anu Adegbola (40:47)
mm. yeah.

Yeah.

Charlotte Osborne (41:04)
perfect, but having AI make those changes for us without any human intervention I think is potentially a little bit dangerous at the moment.

Anu Adegbola (41:15)
Absolutely, like there are these kind of, there's this term that I see going around called a Claudit as in having Claude audit. What is Claude? Like how are you doing?

Charlotte Osborne (41:26)
I don't know, but I love it. That's amazing. Are you going to pan out?

Anu Adegbola (41:29)
too close, what have i done? what have i done? i need my-

I am going to have to do something. my God. Sorry. Give me a second.

I might leave a few seconds of it in just as like, the heck? that was hilarious. God, where was I now? So yes, so I was hearing, I've been hearing like this term called Claudit that you use Claude, the fun AI tool to just do an audit of your account and implement stuff. And it's like so dangerous, so dangerous to you to just give AI the controls. And another friend, Ameet Khabra was like,

Charlotte Osborne (41:46)
⁓ that would be brilliant.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (42:13)
Yeah, people are about to get into trouble with like, you know, it's, you know, the whole Google them being like, well, you cannot then blame performance on us at all. And, you know, and they'll be able to get away with a lot more stuff if you're not careful and the permissions, they're going to start really working more on that than the permissions of that.

Charlotte Osborne (42:22)
Mm. Mm.

Well,

it's really interesting as well because, you know, perhaps there is an overlap that some of the same people that have been saying don't have auto apply recommendations on and Google ads, don't let Google ads, you know, implement ad copy without your say so, you know, keywords and so on and so forth. But then some of those people are now using Claudette to then automate some of that stuff. And it's like,

Anu Adegbola (42:48)
Hmm?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Charlotte Osborne (42:59)
Well, hang on, it's no different. It's no different. So I think AI is great. think, you know, if, you know, and I use Claude a lot and I use Claude code a lot as well. And there are some really, really good resources out there to learn how to take away some of that manual heavy lifting. But I'm talking about

Anu Adegbola (43:01)
No. No.

Mm.

Yeah. Yeah.

Charlotte Osborne (43:26)
presenting you with the findings of that heavy lifting, not actually going ahead and implementing it without you having eyes on it. I think we're still in a position where we all as account managers, business owners with PPC accounts, where we absolutely need to say, great, thanks Claude, I agree with you or no, I'm glad I caught that, you're wrong. And I think that's...

Anu Adegbola (43:29)
Yeah.

Yes. Yeah.

Yes. Yes.

Yes.

Charlotte Osborne (43:52)
That's

kind of where we are at the moment.

Anu Adegbola (43:55)
And I think we underestimate how much they will be wrong. will be there. the AI is very good at doing things quickly, not necessarily accurately. don't care. It doesn't care about the accuracy of it. They're literally like, yeah, I can just, you know, go through a lot of data and then, you know, that's, that's great that you can go through a lot of your data, but it might just bring out the wrong things that you actually didn't want. And yeah, we definitely need that human insight on it.

Charlotte Osborne (43:58)
Mm.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah,

yeah. It's only as good as your input as well. So, you know, what if there's an element of the context that you've given it that is out of date or that you've kind of written incorrectly or that they've interpreted it incorrectly? So, yeah, think, yeah, it's, I'm sure there'll be lots of people out there that will, you know,

Anu Adegbola (44:25)
Yes.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Charlotte Osborne (44:46)
say that they know better and that they'll disagree with me but I in my experience so far I think you need a you need somebody to catch to catch the mistakes.

Anu Adegbola (44:56)
100 %

100 % I absolutely, absolutely agree with you. yeah. And I think our listeners will also agree with that because I think a lot of us are still like, no, don't just give a hand over control. What's the point of view then we're all like, yeah. You know, AI is going to take our jobs. Not if you're going to give it to them. AI doesn't even have to do the taking. It's just literally, you're just telling it to do everything. Of course. Then what's the point of view from a CMO's point of view. yeah.

Charlotte Osborne (45:07)
Yeah.

Hmm. Yeah.

Yeah,

absolutely.

Anu Adegbola (45:23)
We always

have to consider that we're the strategists and AI is never going to be a good strategist in my opinion. So yeah.

Charlotte Osborne (45:30)
No, certainly not yet. mean, you know, we'll see where we are in a year's time.

Anu Adegbola (45:32)
No, never know.

⁓ God,

God, right? Charlotte, this has been such a fantastic chat as you know, I already, already foresaw this. We could go on and on. Usually the episodes are shorter, but it doesn't matter. I love this. I love this conversation. was so great to have you on the show. So, but before, my pleasure. Absolute pleasure. Before we leave you, if your PPC career were a movie, our nice last fun question, what would your movie title be for your, for your career?

Charlotte Osborne (45:45)
Like kids,

Thank you so much for having me. It's been brilliant.

Yeah, yeah so

I haven't had time to give this loads of thought but it has to be fast and furious like it has like with how quickly things move in this industry ⁓ yeah fast and furious. ⁓ god I mean what I mean I mean what's the fastest and most furious? One? I don't know I don't know.

Anu Adegbola (46:10)
Okay, okay.

god which which which which which of the movies the number one or number ten how many have they done so far i don't even know they just keep coming

No, probably

one, they're getting older now, right? So they're gonna be getting a bit slower.

Charlotte Osborne (46:29)
⁓ Yeah,

Vin Diesel on a Zimmer frame, yeah, fast and furious for sure. But you know, I love it. I absolutely wouldn't change anything about sort of this industry or sort of being in the industry. think, yeah, there's some days where you sort of tear your hair out and you strap yourself in and go, okay, right. This roller coaster again, but it's...

Anu Adegbola (46:34)
Anyway, anyway. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes. Yeah.

Charlotte Osborne (46:57)
It's brilliant and it's exciting and you know it's full of full of great people like yourself so. Thank you.

Anu Adegbola (47:02)
You're so kind, you're too kind and yourself. It's just, and for me, I'm just so excited

by the fact that I, you know, I, as a stage, not that I feel like I knew everybody, but it's like, kinda, you know, you, you feel like the people who write on Twitter every day, who writes on LinkedIn every day, they're the ones that, you know, I can, I kinda, they followed all of them. I followed, we're following each other. And to still, for me to discover that, my God, I don't know Charlotte. And there'll be another lady I interviewed that day, Heidi. was like, Heidi.

How do I not know of you? And I am just so excited for me. It's like a kid in a candy store. They're new people to know. They're new people for me to figure out and discover and chat with. And it's my favorite thing to do. yeah, it's just amazing. We're at a key, a nice stage of the industry now, I feel. So many, yeah.

Charlotte Osborne (47:51)
I think so. Yeah, yeah,

there's some great people coming through and, you know, dare I say it, I think there's some brilliant women in our industry as well and I think sometimes that doesn't always get recognised. It's historically been quite a male-dominated industry.

Anu Adegbola (47:56)
Hmm.

Yup.

Yes.

Charlotte Osborne (48:14)
amazing men, amazing men in our industry, but it is great to see some women sort of get some airtime and be recognized as well. I the PPC survey came out fairly recently and it was really good to see some of those kind of female sort of names in there.

Anu Adegbola (48:14)
Great men, yes!

Yeah?

Yeah.

voices yeah yeah no absolutely

agree with you all right so if people want to you know get in touch with you they've just made a very bad account structure mistake and they were like I need Charlotte where is Charlotte how can people find you

Charlotte Osborne (48:43)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So you can contact me on LinkedIn, it's probably kind of the easiest. So Charlotte Osborne, Smart Click Media. Equally my website, so smartclickmedia.co.uk. If you get in touch via there as well, I'll come back to you as soon as I can. But yeah, it'd be really, really good to connect with any listeners that...

want some more advice or just want to of connect and maybe share some knowledge, that would be amazing.

Anu Adegbola (49:14)
Amazing. Thank you so much for that Charlotte. Again, very great chat, very open about your story and I hope people do reach out to you. All the links that Charlotte has shared will be shared in the show notes so you'll have easy access to directly click through that one. But yeah, for now, thank you so much Charlotte and I'm sure we'll catch up again very soon. Awesome. You too.

Charlotte Osborne (49:16)
You're welcome.

It's a pleasure. Thanks so much, Anu. Yeah, great being here. Take care.

Anu Adegbola (49:39)
Thank you so much, Charlotte, for sharing that very honest and transparent experience about your mistake, your misstep with account restructuring that account. definitely, we should all just remember that very amazing tip that Charlotte gave about ensuring that if you're going to do a restructure, do it step by step, have a plan. But also, if you do mess up with it, take a deep breath. It's not the end of the world.

There's always a solution to these things. So yeah, for all the information and the full transcript of that fantastic ⁓ episode, please go to podcast.ppc.live and yeah, you'll get all the full details, the links and even pictures to our lovely Pug. So yeah, for PPC Live event updates, yeah, we've got the next event happening in a couple of weeks in Brighton on April the 29th and would love for you to have us.

I would love to have you there for you to have us to take up your time for in the Wednesday evening coming up to Brighton SEO. So yeah, it's going to be another fun evening. We're going to be led by talks from Jack Willmore from Emina Demiri and Julia Riml They're going to be talking about growth. They're going to be talking about ROAS. They're going to be talking about ensuring you're using automation very well. These are the...

important topics that we need to be discussing in 2026. So yeah, please just go to PPC dot live. We still have tickets left and we're to be doing some last minute increase in prices because yeah, things need to be done differently if we're expecting someone that literally just bought a ticket the day before. So please don't be the person that has to pay the most expensive for the tickets. So yeah, go to PPC dot live to experience that to ensure that you experience this event with us.

the cheapest price that you can get it right now. So yeah before I leave out of view I'm also delighted to share that I am taking on coaching clients and yeah just in case you need help with your confidence and just taking career, sorry just taking hold of your career and ensuring that you're in the driver's seat of your career because life can just seem like you're doing a job but you really should be knowing

what your future is like, not just for interview purposes, but you should know what your five-year plan should be. So yeah, let's get on a call, let's discuss that. There's a 15-minute discovery call that I provide. Just go to themarketinganu.com so that we can have a chat to ensure that we put together program that works specifically for you. So yeah, I hope you've enjoyed the show and I look forward to bringing more PPCF-ups and triumphs next week. Thank you, bye.