EP361 - Why Great Campaigns Fail Behind the Scenes

Anu Adegbola (00:09)
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 the ever changing landscape, don't worry. You are still in the right place. Every week I speak to a different PPC expert about the F-ups that they've made and what they've learned from it so that you don't make the same mistakes again. This is the things kind of mistakes that really help us see.

how experts build up their expertise, how they become the people who are doing the work well, they have their own systems in place, they have their checklist in place, they all start off from mistakes most of the time. And this time we speak to the very geeky and lovely Peter Bowen, who he's based out of Gran Canaria, but he used to live in the UK, but he's South African. And he's got like, yeah, close to 20 years of experience of helping businesses, especially.

deliver leads. So he's been specializing in B2B lead gen. Yeah, we don't get too much of those guys, do we? So yeah, this is another great story that he shares about currency issues, as well as system decay issues, and ensuring that you're not just, you know, bee lining and just laser focused on what's happening within the Google Ads platform, but actually understanding the conversion tracking communication systems that need to ensure that the bid strategies are doing the right thing.

yeah, we share, he shares so much. He really geeks out. I cannot underestimate how much he geeks out. And this was one of like most enjoyable compositions, that I've had, ⁓ on this podcast. And I'm sure you're going to enjoy it as well. So yeah, let's go speak to Pete.

Anu Adegbola (01:51)
Hello Peter, welcome to PPC Live the podcast.

Peter Bowen (01:55)
Thank you, it's great to be here with you.

Anu Adegbola (01:57)
I'm so delighted and I'm so, grateful. Like this is how I do the podcast now. It's literally every week I'm like, who wants to talk about the mistake? And it's, it's hard to do it weeks in advance planning because I don't think I don't want people to think too much about it because this is not something that, you know, you should worry too much. And I think my best guests have been those who like Peter maybe.

Peter Bowen (02:07)
Hahaha

Uh-huh.

Anu Adegbola (02:21)
I literally asked him to be on the podcast maybe half an hour, an hour before we actually start recording. And he's just like, yeah, I've got some ideas. Oh my God. And it's just makes for like the best kind of episode. So everyone's in for a treat. But before we go into what the mistakes are, let's introduce you to Peter. So Peter is someone who has had a very varied career. He used to be a soldier, a Mormon missionary, and then an engineer and then became a business owner.

Peter Bowen (02:28)
Hahaha

Anu Adegbola (02:48)
before actually focusing on Google Ads since 2007. He moved from South Africa, so he's South Africa born, moved to the UK during the financial crisis, built a tool that made it easy to generate leads without any prior experience. what began as a teaching, sorry, what began ⁓ as teaching others, then evolved into managing campaigns themselves. And that system has now produced over 2 million leads.

Peter Bowen (03:08)
Mm-hmm.

Anu Adegbola (03:14)
He's now based in sunny Gran Canaria. Honestly, Peter, I wish you'd had like a background of like, like your window so that we could see the beautiful views. You're it.

Peter Bowen (03:21)
If I turned

my camera around you would see a pile of surfboards packed in the corner of my office because my wife says she doesn't want my collection in the lounge.

Anu Adegbola (03:32)
⁓ Lord, yes, yes. When the guys have their hobbies, yeah, you need to find a special storage for them. I love it. So surfing in Gran Canaria, when he's not surfing Gran Canaria, he continues to work with clients while thinking critically about the future of Google Ads and how businesses can balance technology with a more human approach. And honestly, when I say he definitely thinks about the future of Google Ads, he does because...

He's got this fantastic book. Now those who are listening, you're not seeing what I'm showing here, but those are on the video. You can see me showing Peter's book, which is called Profitable Google Ads. And it's a business owner's guide to getting more leads and sales from Google ads. yeah, it's about written in plain English for those who are not, you know, who are nervous about all the jargon and all our acronyms in it. You'll learn Google ads.

doesn't succeed unless it's part of a working system and he shows what that system should look like, how to assemble it. You'll learn about converting more website visitors, attracting better quality leads, turning leads into customers. I genuinely think this is a very valuable book because a lot of people in the industry, we're always talking about how that will lead gen part of the system, of our industry.

Peter Bowen (04:47)
Hehe.

Anu Adegbola (04:51)
they get really overlooked when it comes to like, you know, Google marketing live or new updates. A lot of the updates just really seem to be for e-comm. For this being very directly about Lead Gen, I think this is a very, very great book to have. Where can people get it if they want to get their income?

Peter Bowen (05:07)
You can

get yourself a copy on Amazon or direct from my website ⁓ pete-bowen.com

Anu Adegbola (05:14)
Fantastic, we'll share that link on the show notes. So if you guys want that book, check it out. I also asked Pete whether he wanted the fact that he wrote the book to be his fun fact, but he was like, no, no, that's not a fun fact, it's fact. So now Peter is gonna give you his fun facts.

Peter Bowen (05:25)
Ha

OK, my fun fact is I was once tricked into swimming through a river where crocodiles had been seen.

Anu Adegbola (05:39)
my god. my god. God. Yeah.

Peter Bowen (05:41)
I used to be an I used to be an I'll be quick. I used to be an engineer and

my company was designing a small dam across the river and we needed to measure the depth of the rock at the bottom of the river so we could figure out what the dam should be like. And we hired a surveyor to go and do that. And none of his guys would get into the water. And so I said, OK, I'll I'll get into the water and I'll hold the surveying stick that you used for measuring it.

And only once I had finished after about an hour in the water did they tell me the reason his guys wouldn't get in the water was because a farmer had shot an enormous crocodile there the previous weekend and they were worried that there might be more.

Anu Adegbola (06:19)
⁓ my god, so

thankfully there were no crocodiles. You didn't see any crocodiles, but...

Peter Bowen (06:24)
Never saw a crocodile, but yeah, a fun fact.

Anu Adegbola (06:27)
⁓

fun fact for that one. my God. Yeah. And this was in South Africa.

Peter Bowen (06:33)
That was in South Africa. That was in the KwaZulu, sort of on the eastern side of the bottom of South Africa. Lovely warm subtropical place with crocodiles.

Anu Adegbola (06:34)
What parts if people are here?

Right, right.

Absolutely.

Yeah, crocodiles love the warm weather. I think that's one thing that I'm grateful about living in the UK. I don't think crocodiles will be coming anywhere near here. No, right? I think I went to New Orleans like a few years ago and it's a beautiful part of the US. But another thing that they're known for is like their swamps and you can do like tours on their swamps.

Peter Bowen (06:51)
Hahaha

No, there's not much there that will kill you.

Uh-huh.

Anu Adegbola (07:12)
And I remember I was like, yeah, so, you know, it was like one of the few things where like, you're going to go to New York, you need to check it And I was like, will there be crocodiles? They're like, yeah, of course. That's what we're going for. And I'm like, no, thank you. I have, I have zero interest in seeing crocodile, even like on the TV, it gives me, I don't know, it gives me a bit of chills. Like I think that was a cruel joke that your ex colleagues paid on you, man. But yeah, you're a better man than me. So amazing for you to have done that.

Peter Bowen (07:21)
Ha ha ha ha ha.

Hahaha

Anu Adegbola (07:42)
Anyway, you guys are like, I knew why you talking about crocodiles. This podcast is not about crocodiles. So let's get onto what this show is about. Peter is another one in our long line of fantastic guests who's gonna come on and share some mistakes that he's made. He's told me that he's got a couple of ones to share. And I think they're really great ones that we really should think about. I find that we don't necessarily think about these kinds of issues because they might seem a bit too small, it's a bit too far away.

But I think these are important ones for us to think about and hopefully that means you don't make that mistake anytime in the future. So Pete, what is the F up you'd like to share with us today?

Peter Bowen (08:22)
Well, the first one was one that I made in the first year of managing Google ads. We had I was living in the UK and we had a lot of clients in South Africa just because of my history over there. And the South African Rand was worth about one tenth of a pound and back in because of the exchange rate. so back in those days, setting up payment was really complicated. So a lot of agencies would pay, would bill the clients and then we would pay Google.

Anu Adegbola (08:39)
Okay.

Peter Bowen (08:51)
for the client. And so we agreed a budget for the client. I forget what it was. I think it was like the equivalent of, I don't know, maybe a thousand South African rand, about a hundred ⁓ pounds. But because I set the account up in the UK, it defaulted currency to pounds and I completely overlooked that. And so in the first month I spent from our own agency credit card.

Anu Adegbola (09:10)
pounds.

Peter Bowen (09:18)
I spent 10 times what the client had allocated as the monthly budget. And this client was incredibly happy. You can imagine how many leads they got when you're spending 10 times their budget.

Anu Adegbola (09:23)
Wow.

Yes, yes,

yes, absolutely. So what happened?

Peter Bowen (09:31)
And it was only after

that, well, we had a I discussed it with my partner and we agreed that it was our problem. And we were very, very sad. And we didn't tell the client that we wanted his money, but we did say next month is going to be a lot worse. And when next month was a lot worse, he canceled it. Because he had been expecting this kind of thousand pound results with a hundred pound budget. So that was a very painful and expensive mistake. So now.

Anu Adegbola (09:50)
Oh no! Yes! Yes!

Peter Bowen (10:00)
There's an item on the campaign setup checklist which says, check currency. Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (10:06)
Yes.

You know what? One thing I also say that, and guys, people are listening to this. I'm like, Oh, I knew must have structured this search so well, weeks and months in advance. were not, maybe not the previous guy to get guests prior. Um, or, know, our guests might remember her as lightening, Maddie lightening, cause she has a fantastic last name. Maddie lightening also talked about currency setting the wrong currency, but

Peter Bowen (10:22)
Uh-huh.

Okay.

Anu Adegbola (10:34)
because the exchange rate was a bit better. She was actually under reporting in that case. So, right, exactly. So that was one case where it was like, it was a mistake, but hey, I'm actually really glad that we now have a case of someone saying that that mistake can go the other way really badly, leading to losing a client, which sucks.

Peter Bowen (10:40)
good, well done, huh.

Yeah.

That's it. And all that money. We never got a chance to make it back. But, you know, this is is part of this is part of learning. I think the important thing is you make a mistake once and never make the same mistake again. If you can help, if you can help that.

Anu Adegbola (11:07)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, I don't think we need to go even more into, you know, to my details. You've given us the roundup, how it felt, what happened. So let's put that one to bed. Let's go on to the next.

Peter Bowen (11:19)
Hahaha, yeah!

It's still scarred on my soul. But anyway, let's talk about the other things.

Anu Adegbola (11:27)
bless. But yeah, yeah. Well, the learning from it, some,

yeah, the learning from that is make that checklist, make that checklist for those kind of, those kind of things in terms of like currency. especially when you're dealing with international clients, you get rid of that these days, especially with consultants being in one country, your client is in another country. It's, it's a very easy mistake to make. So yeah, let's, let's, let's listen out and look out for that. But yeah, let's go into the next one.

Peter Bowen (11:38)
Mm-hmm.

So the next one's actually a class of mistakes. I think about these as system decay or leaky plumbing. know, some part of the infrastructure that connects Google ads to your landing page and connects your leads back to the person who's going to handle the leads and connects the way the leads are handled back to Google for feedback through offline conversion tracking, whatever, all of that infrastructure, that system.

Anu Adegbola (11:59)
Okay?

Peter Bowen (12:25)
I've seen so many mistakes and I've been part of them where that system breaks and then it stops the signal going back and then that causes a disaster with the advertising. And you would think it shouldn't, but this happened just for about a month. we just discovered this problem last week. A client had been they got about 60 tracking phone numbers.

Anu Adegbola (12:30)
Mm.

Peter Bowen (12:49)
because they've got a fairly extensive ad account that I manage for them. And over the last six months or so, they've migrated from Call Rail to something called Cloud Talk, and then to Aircall, these are all sort of AI-enhanced call center type systems. So they've migrated these.

they're tracking numbers across these different platforms. And then I got it about a month ago, the client said, this last one ⁓ doesn't work properly anymore. We're now moving this back to our old in-house PABX system. And we're not gonna be able to give you tracking data for about a month because the developers needed to build the stuff that they needed to send back to my system so that I could upload those as.

those calls as conversions in the same way Corel and what converts did. I've got a system that allows you to do that without using those kinds of things anyway. So I saw no call volume being recorded and I sent them a message. said, we're going to expect as anybody would, we're going to expect our ad performance to suffer because we're optimizing for conversions that aren't happening.

Anu Adegbola (13:45)
Yeah.

Peter Bowen (14:00)
And so over the course of a month, the ad spend went from about 200,000 down to about 40,000 because Google couldn't keep optimizing for no convert. All of this is kind of completely expected. And then the business owner and I were in a meeting and he was getting very, very grumpy with me. And so we called in the developer guy that was building the system. said, right, this is what we are. And he said, OK, we finished this, but we didn't tell you about.

Anu Adegbola (14:12)
Right.

Peter Bowen (14:29)
that we finished and ready. He also said something which is incredibly embarrassing. He said, but the tracking from air call was never taken down. So all of that time, I was supposed to have been receiving that data from air call because I had complained to them that it wouldn't happen, that the ad campaign would be terrible. without telling me they had left all of that in place. But you remember there was a Cloudflare outage a few

Anu Adegbola (14:49)
Mmm.

Yeah?

Peter Bowen (14:59)
a few

weeks ago. Aircall saw all of these webhooks failing. Sorry, I'm getting a bit geeky. If you don't know what a webhook is, it's a message from one system to another, from Aircall to Literow, where we track the conversions. Aircall saw all of these, like 50 of them failed because ⁓ Cloudflare was broken. And so they sent the developer a message saying, hey, your webhooks are broken. And the developer thought, ⁓ I wonder what this webhook is. I'll think about it tomorrow.

Anu Adegbola (15:04)
Mmm. Good!

Peter Bowen (15:29)
And so we lost the month's worth of tracking data because I wasn't aware that we were supposed to be getting that. the developer didn't care. The developer didn't have top of mind that this web hook had failed. So what happened was a whole bunch of people, not particularly, nobody malicious, just everybody busy and nobody monitoring this data flow and monitoring the system. So that was the most recent. I could probably tell you 10 other things.

Anu Adegbola (15:35)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yes.

Yeah.

Peter Bowen (15:58)
where but I won't. But for another day. yeah, system decay, plumbing problems. And nowadays when ads are so dependent on good data, the minute that data breaks, the campaigns fall apart.

Anu Adegbola (15:59)
yeah that can be for another episode we'll definitely bring you back go on ⁓

Yeah.

Yes, absolutely. And like the way I even like see it is that, you know, people don't, people, you don't think about that part of that part of it. And there's a lot of like the issues that people are like, Oh, conversion tracking. There's, there's, wonder whether this has something to do with it because like, you know, in our previous episode is when Charlotte Osborne was like, what's the biggest mistake that she sees. Like when she's auditing the cloud and it's like conversion tracking, conversion tracking and not be set. And I'm like, how?

something that there's probably so many best practice kind of you know documents around maybe I'll ask someone to write another article of an up-to-date you know conversion tracking how you set it up but I'm like it's got to be something else than just not combined maybe this has something to do with it as well is it possible that conversion tracking can be mistaken for this kind of issue that you guys know

Peter Bowen (16:50)
Yeah.

Hahaha

Yeah, I

think what happens is somewhere there's a break in the signal. The signal doesn't flow all the way from the first impression all the way to a sale happening. And any break along that path tends to cause poor ad performance. Sometimes those breaks show up as broken conversion tracking and sometimes broken conversion tracking is the cause of the poor ad performance.

Anu Adegbola (17:15)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Sure, yeah, absolutely. And yeah, of course, it's conversion tracking that can be the biggest issues ⁓ for it. like, yeah, so what's, let's go back to this story. at what point, so it was in that meeting with the business owner that you were like, no, I've effed up something here.

Peter Bowen (17:47)
Uh-huh.

Yes,

and that's what I told them. said, this is my fault. But it's only half my fault because this is what I was told. But I should have been checking that anyway. Because I think ultimately as agents, we carry a duty to our clients. And sometimes that duty goes into their business so that even though

Anu Adegbola (18:07)
Yeah.

Mmm.

Peter Bowen (18:23)
their developer or their call center or whatever, whoever caused the problem. I think we still have the duty to make sure that somebody knows about that problem because it tends not to happen. I'm saying this, this might sound a bit horrible, but employees tend to be focused on their job, not necessarily coloring outside the lines or staying in their land. That's kind of what I meant. So yes.

Anu Adegbola (18:33)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Peter Bowen (18:47)
⁓ I told him it was my fault. I told him what I'd done to prevent it. And we agreed to carry on as we were before.

Anu Adegbola (18:50)
Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, so lovely. So this is a client that all fingers crossed and toes crossed, he hasn't said goodbye to you, hasn't ended.

Peter Bowen (19:06)
Yeah,

we've been working together for about eight years now and this is not the first time his people have broken the advertising. Yeah, so...

Anu Adegbola (19:10)
Nice.

Okay, okay. So he understands. kind of, you

said to him that that was the mistake, this is what happened and he kind of was like, okay, got it. We understand actually what happened. He wasn't pissed off.

Peter Bowen (19:25)
Yeah.

Yeah, and I showed him what I'd what I'd done to prevent this kind of thing. I'm a bit of a geek. And so I programmed a dashboard that checks every single landing page in my entire ecosystem every 15 minutes. And it checks every lead source and start shouting at me if we haven't received a lead within a certain time. And so I'm getting really geeky over here. And it also keeps a log.

Anu Adegbola (19:33)
Yeah.

Yeah. Nice. Yeah.

Don't apologize for that.

Peter Bowen (19:55)
It also

keeps a log of every conversion that we've uploaded to Google. So we say, we told Google this, this lead came in, this lead was qualified, this lead turned into a customer. And so that means that we told Google this on this day, and then we can go in and make sure that we're getting more or less the same data in the account. So got this sort of thing watching everything, hoping, ⁓ I'm sure we're going to find more places for it to break, more leaks in the plumbing.

and fix them then.

Anu Adegbola (20:24)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So you'll be, you know, so you have a system in place to check out for those leaks, check out for like any like miss misstep that might could be happening. Something I also caught in your story that, you know, yeah, Google doesn't necessarily always come out looking like the good guy in some of these stories, but it actually sounds like they did this time. You're like, they, you know, they were not seeing enough of the conversion. So the spend, they reduced the spend. were not just like,

We don't care about your conversions. We're just going to keep spending however we want to spend. So yay, Google are the good guys in this case.

Peter Bowen (20:51)
Yeah!

yeah,

they are. I mean, that's the way the bidding algorithm is supposed to work. If we're not hitting those conversion targets, we're going to drop that. Obviously, if you had a maximized conversions bidding strategy, you would then end up spending all of your money on nothing. But this bidding strategy for this particular account was a target CPA. And so it's saying, I can't get that because there's no feedback.

Anu Adegbola (21:23)
Yeah,

yeah, interesting. No, no, no.

Peter Bowen (21:24)
So yeah, I'm not a Google hater all of the time.

I think we all are some of the time, but it does work when you work within its limitations.

Anu Adegbola (21:31)
Yes.

It does work.

So do you have a favorite or a bit strategy or a bit strategy? Because you've just mentioned one. You just put that case. I think that's a very important point people should listen to. That target CPA meant that when they're not seeing the conversions, your spend will go down. But if it was max revenue that you were going for or max conversions you were going for, it would have kept spending. So would you advise people to maybe stay away from certain bit strategies in certain instances?

Peter Bowen (21:45)
Mm.

Yeah.

I'm not sure that I would do that. What I would what I would say is that two things. One is remember that Google repeats what you reward. So if you reward it by saying this is a conversion, it will go and get you more of those conversions. And so if you tell it your reward is getting me as many conversions, regardless of what they cost, Google will will do that. Will repeat that.

Anu Adegbola (22:20)
Mmm.

to do that.

Peter Bowen (22:38)
So I tend to, there is no right bidding strategy. The answer is always going to be, it depends on everything. But there are some bidding strategies that come with built-in guardrails. And that's helpful. For instance, the portfolio version of the maximized conversions bidding strategy. You can set, if you set a target CPA, you can also set a max CPC.

Anu Adegbola (22:44)
It depends. Yeah.

Yeah? Yeah? Yes.

Peter Bowen (23:06)
which is very, very handy. If you've ever

paid $500 for a click, that should be worth 20. Again, I have that scar next to next to the exchange rate scar. have the two and a half thousand dollar day scar. Five clicks at 500 a shot because the bidding algorithm occasionally does crazy things. So you've got to give it those guardrails.

Anu Adegbola (23:13)
⁓ Jesus.

Yes!

my god

Yes.

Yes. Yes. Put those CPC guardrails in. That's also something that has been talked about before. Like, yeah, even though it's like the targeting, you also don't want to create, you know, high CPCs. And I think that these are the kind of conversations that are also important to bring to the surface about doing paid search in 2026, because you go, you know, I'm with Search Engine Land. I'm always writing, you know, these kind of reports on a yearly basis. CPCs are going up. CPCs are going up.

Peter Bowen (23:33)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Anu Adegbola (23:56)
And on one hand, yeah, maybe CP, yeah, Google could be pushing it, but I think we totally ignore the point of view of the fact of like, the advertisers actually doing the right things and using these beat strategies properly to ensure that their CPCs are not being inflated in a way that could be avoidable? I mean, yeah, there's sometimes like it can't be avoidable, but there's some cases that could be avoidable if you put those CPC guardrails in place.

Peter Bowen (24:21)
⁓

I think the fundamental problem is that it looks really easy. And you can ask chat GPT, how do I build a profitable Google Ads campaign? And they will say things. And then you'll see people complaining on Reddit or complaining on X or in Slack saying, I've just spent 5,000 and I got zero. Google is a

Anu Adegbola (24:29)
Yeah. Yeah.

Peter Bowen (24:49)
Google is a scam, but in reality, it's not Google that's the problem. It's the way you did Google. That's the problem.

Anu Adegbola (24:57)
my God, I think I need to actually send a clip of this to like Ginny Marvin on Google. So I'm like, guys, even the practitioners, we understand the fact that it depends on how you use it. And you cannot just, you can ask ChatGPT to give you an idea to maybe give you like a framework where you need to colour in the lines. It's important. There's so many different colours you can use to colour in the line to create a profitable Google ads campaign for your client.

Peter Bowen (25:14)
Mm-hmm.

Anu Adegbola (25:26)
⁓ or this has been such an interesting chat so far and just going into like the importance of doing this. but yeah, looking back now, let's, let's go back to that, you know, system decay issue. What is it now in terms of process that you do differently from that mistake that you're like, this is how we avoid making that mistake.

Peter Bowen (25:30)
Yeah, this is fun.

Mm-hmm.

Well, think it's well, the first mistake I told you about we avoid by adding items to the checklist. And so I've got a checklist that gets longer and longer. And even though I've done the work over and over again, the checklist makes sure I don't forget anything. And then the other thing is to have a system that does some of the monitoring.

Anu Adegbola (26:01)
Yeah.

Okay?

Peter Bowen (26:10)
So the landing pages, you could go every morning and open up every single landing page ⁓ that you've got, but that would take you half the morning. ⁓ Or you could have some kind of uptime monitor and then you just go and check that the uptime monitor is working. So you've always got to have these, there are ways of having things that monitor what's going on for you.

Anu Adegbola (26:16)
Yeah.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes, yeah.

Okay. Is this kind of uptime monitor? Cause I know like, you know, you're, you're a figure out a solution for yourselves kind of guy. feel like I, that's what I'm getting. You're like a geeky kind of things. Like I want to, I want to figure things.

Peter Bowen (26:39)
Yeah

⁓ I am sorry.

I started programming computers as a child and they've always fascinated me. And so I've ended up building solutions to these kinds of problems. But website uptime monitors, I mean, you can find them all over the show. They're very, very, very common things.

Anu Adegbola (26:49)
Wow. ⁓ that's amazing. Your tools. Yeah.

Okay, okay. Okay. All right. Fantastic.

if someone has just discovered this F up and they've just seen that, yeah, they were supposed to be receiving a whole bunch of this conversions and they didn't, it didn't come through and they knew they were the ones that were, they were the problem. What's your advice to them?

Peter Bowen (27:18)
Well, I guess there are a couple of there are a couple of things to think about here. The first is you've got to get the campaign back on track, right? OK, so that's kind of from a technical perspective. You need to fix whatever caused the problem in the first place. And then there's the facility to do a data exclusion on Google. Now, this isn't something a lot of people think about, but you but Google knows that conversion tracking breaks. And so there's the

Anu Adegbola (27:38)
Mmm.

Yeah.

Peter Bowen (27:45)
facility to go into Google and give it a date range up to two weeks at a time, or you can stack them to get a month or whatever and say, please ignore everything that I told you. Please ignore all conversions or lack of conversions in this period. And that's been surprisingly effective. That's one of those things that actually does what it says on the tin. I'm not sure that AI Max and P Max and all of those kind of things deliver the promise, but

Anu Adegbola (27:48)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Peter Bowen (28:10)
Don't count these conversions. That seems to work really well. So exclude, fix the problem, exclude the data. Change how you work so that it doesn't happen again.

Anu Adegbola (28:14)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And if there's even one thing, I feel like you've already given a little snapshot, because now we're going to be speaking close to half an hour about this issue and you've given so many great, no, no apologies needed. No, like, yeah, you've got a really great insight for us. One thing now, before we now go into looking at mistakes that you see in the industry, what's one thing you want to leave people with to wrap up that story?

Peter Bowen (28:31)
Sorry about that.

Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

I'll say the same thing I started earlier. Don't make the same mistake more than once.

Anu Adegbola (28:55)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's important because, I say that to, you know, I've said that to juniors in the past when I've managed people, was like, look, mistakes can be made once learned from it. Don't, you know, this podcast is all about sharing mistakes, but I don't want people to go away and going, making as many mistakes as possible is fine. No, you're wasting people's money. If you're just, mister, I'm just going to make mistakes. You need to learn from the mistake.

I, know, put guardrails in place so that you're not the person who's just unreliable, just making mistakes left and right. So yeah, for sure. Make that mistake once, learn from it, make sure you don't make it again. So I'm hoping that, you know, that, that close to half an hour chat with, with Peter that we've just had has really opened your eyes to like making sure that you don't miss, make the mistake about currencies, you know, putting the wrong currency in and, know, making sure that you're aware of all the conversions that are supposed to be coming in through in a certain month. All right.

Let's tangent off to something else. feel like I like to tell my guests, know, your PTSD moment is over. can, we can now put that story back into this box that you've neatly tied it into. And let's move into seeing what other people have done that has got made you go, what is going on guys? We should, we should know better. So any, any mistakes that, know, that jump out to you that you're like,

Peter Bowen (30:00)
Okay.

Anu Adegbola (30:19)
That really shocks you that it's still happening.

Peter Bowen (30:22)
Yeah, yeah. I think the root cause of this mistake is that the person managing the ads doesn't think past the interface, past the UI. They don't connect. These are ads and this is business. And they don't make that connection between the two of them. I had a recent case. Most of my clients I deal with remotely.

Anu Adegbola (30:40)
Yeah

Peter Bowen (30:47)
This guy phoned me up and said, hey, my wife and I live here in Gran Canaria. Can you please come around and meet with us? Because we've spent 30,000 euros in the last two months on Google ads, and we haven't made a single sale from that. And I went there and I sat with them at the kitchen table. Their laptops were kind of sticky because the kids were there. Great, great people.

Anu Adegbola (31:09)
no.

Peter Bowen (31:10)
They had hired somebody who had worked at Google and this guy had set up the the most technically incredible campaign. But because they were using a booking, a booking engine, their conversion is someone comes in there, chooses a date and time and pace. That booking engine didn't have the facility to track a conversion as a lot of these third party tools don't. And so

Anu Adegbola (31:32)
⁓ Yeah.

Peter Bowen (31:36)
This person said, well, don't worry about that. We'll just tell we'll just maximize clicks. We'll get you visits to your website. And because he had worked for Google, I think he was one of the ex-WFs, not a real Google employee. They trusted him. And all this money, you know, for a small husband and wife business, 30,000 euros is a it's a car. It's a nice holiday. It's it's it's real money for somebody, perhaps who, you know,

Anu Adegbola (31:55)
Is this Medicaid?

Exactly. Yes.

Peter Bowen (32:03)
was used to spending somebody else's money. It's not. Anyway, no conversion tracking. So he had said maximize clicks and every month he said, look, you're getting 15,000 clicks. You're getting 40,000 clicks or whatever the number was. And I've seen that kind of disconnect so often it drives me mad.

Anu Adegbola (32:23)
Yeah. Yeah. And how long ago was this?

Peter Bowen (32:26)
This happened earlier this year.

Anu Adegbola (32:29)
Earlier this year, an ex Google person said, let's just do maximize click. We'll just do traffic. I said it recently and I was like any agency or any consultant that is just going clicks is enough and I'm going to charge you for driving clicks to your side. They should be fired. They should be fired and we should be name and shame them. ⁓ that annoys me. Yeah. Yeah.

Peter Bowen (32:31)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I don't know his name, but I'd like to punch him in the face.

Anu Adegbola (32:54)
So what was your solution? Cause you know, there was the, you did say that there is, there was the issue of like this third party booking tool. They don't know how to manage, you know, conversions. So what was your solution for them? Just go.

Peter Bowen (33:00)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Well, the first

thing we did is we turned off the Performance Max campaign because they operate a specialized service in a small country. I won't give any more details than that in case they bump into this. Hi if you do. They were getting every month, they were getting more impressions from this Performance Max campaign than people live in the country where they operate their business.

Anu Adegbola (33:09)
my

Peter Bowen (33:28)
Obviously, they were targeting a whole bunch of rubbish. Turns out they got this Google person because the wife had run the campaigns for a while, but she'd taken maternity leave for a couple of years. And so we went back to the basics. You can't track conversions. OK, let's get as best. Let's do the best we can. So we're going to have a very tight campaign with the exact match keywords if we can. You're going to bid, you're going to bid maximized clicks, but we're not showing ads on search partners, only search.

We're not showing ads in the middle of the night, only during working hours when you can respond. And we're going back to what worked as well as it could have with the data that we have available. And then they've got some developer building out a booking platform that will allow them to track conversions all the way from click through to sale. but yeah, going back to old school.

Anu Adegbola (34:02)
Nah. No? So...

we have.

Peter Bowen (34:27)
seem to seem to work for them.

Anu Adegbola (34:29)
Okay, fantastic. Going back to old school and yeah, you don't have P max on if you can't track because P max will just throw in any rubbish. And for the fact that he fresh, ⁓ yeah.

Peter Bowen (34:37)
Yeah, that's what

was happening. It's really sad when you see there's a real business behind this. This is people who are working hard, are good people. They've got a nice family, and they're just getting badly served by their person, their Google Ads person.

Anu Adegbola (34:46)
Yes. Yes.

Yeah,

yeah, no, it's such a shame and shame to those guys. Like if you're just running on clicks and you're not finding a way to ensure that those clicks are gonna come out into good conversions, yeah, you shouldn't be. You shouldn't be working on those accounts. And now let's talk into shifting to more of like the AI world. ⁓ I think it will be, you know, my first guest since the news.

Peter Bowen (35:08)
Mm-hmm.

Anu Adegbola (35:19)
of the fact that DSA has been finally [deprecated], I think there was news that most of us in our industry were like, yeah, we knew that was coming. Okay. You're like, all right. It was almost like a non-news. Pretty much, pretty much. And now that has been, you know, it's now being replaced with AI Max. We've got PMAX that's been around for years now.

Peter Bowen (35:21)
Mm-hmm.

Took it out behind the shed and put it out of its misery.

Anu Adegbola (35:43)
you know, and, and, and all different kinds of things. And I don't know whether AI Max is working well for you. Cause that's a little bit of some people's response saying that that's why they're not really excited because AI Max is not necessarily working well yet. How are you finding AI Max? Are you testing it?

Peter Bowen (35:59)
I haven't tested a single campaign on AI Max. I have an approach that's worked quite well, is that generally for the first two years of any new Google initiative, it's terrible. then, I've done this for almost 20 years and I've seen the same pattern over and over. Maybe it'll be less than two years this time, we don't know. But it's terrible. And then it does what it's supposed to do.

Anu Adegbola (36:02)
Okay.

Peter Bowen (36:24)
And we think we don't do that anymore the old way. Now we only do the new way. But it takes a couple of years before it matures. And I saw the same thing with automated bidding and with smart bidding. I saw the same thing with broad match keywords, same thing with Pmax. And we'll see the same thing, I think, with AImax.

Anu Adegbola (36:42)
Absolutely. You know what? I get it. I totally hear you loud and clear and several of the people like in my circle of like experts who are like, yeah, I'm not testing the AI max yet. And you know, I get it. Some people are and they're like, they can see some, you know, here and there and even the good performance. just, I'm worried though for people that, you know, as you said, the first couple of years, it's not, that's not even how it's supposed to work. And there's going to be loads of changes and

Peter Bowen (36:55)
You

Anu Adegbola (37:07)
You know, I guess Google is lucky that there are some people who are willing to be like, you know what? Sure. We'll still, we'll, have enough budget to test it, even though that's not how it's supposed to work. yeah, hopefully Google will learn from some of the mistakes happening, some of the bad results that have been shown and they do make, make it a lot better very soon, especially for the fact that DSA is gone. But like, would you say that is a particular mistake when it comes to AI in terms of testing too early or is there anything else on your mind?

Peter Bowen (37:16)
Hehe.

I'm not

sure if it's testing too early, but I think sometimes the mistake would be applying without thinking it all the way through. So if you think about any kind of test that we run and if you think about, okay, let's just say for Max, for example, we're gonna run an AI Max campaign. How are we going to know if that campaign is actually successful? Or we're gonna look at impressions, clicks, or I think we need a

Anu Adegbola (37:44)
Mmm.

Yeah. Yeah.

Peter Bowen (38:01)
jump a little bit further and say, are we getting qualified leads? Sorry, I only talk lead generation. I don't know any kind of e-commerce. That's witchcraft to me. So are we getting qualified leads? Are these leads roughly the same or better cost than what we were getting from search? Are these leads turning into bookings or sales or whatever the case might be? So I think the mistake would be not thinking

Anu Adegbola (38:05)
Yeah. It's true.

me that's fine i love it yeah

Peter Bowen (38:29)
all the way through to the end where the money comes out of the whole thing and just looking at the kind of the early, the upstream performance metrics, the in-platform metrics, impressions, clicks, leads, cost per click, cost per lead, that sort of thing.

Anu Adegbola (38:33)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. People are, we're all about saying that we should test, we should test. And that's like a very big, like, um, big thing that has always been said since big beginning since 2007, since you started Peter, since we started, it's like test things. Don't necessarily just go full hearty, but how people are protests, what should success look like? We don't talk enough about that. Defining that this is good. Defining things like

Peter Bowen (39:05)
Hehe.

Anu Adegbola (39:11)
are statistically significant. You know, when you get that bit of being statistically significant and then you can be like, okay, this good performance, I can actually rely on it. Those kinds of things. I don't know whether that's still being looked at.

Peter Bowen (39:24)
Yeah,

I laugh at that. One is I studied statistics as part of my degree and failed it.

Anu Adegbola (39:30)
no!

So what's your views about statistically significant?

Peter Bowen (39:37)
Well,

firstly, so that's the only part of engineering that I use in my day-to-day work. So I had to figure it out. think this statistical significance is not well understood. And I think stats in general is not well understood. So people will say things confidently like, oh, run an A-B test for a month. And then you'll know the answer. The real answer is if you're getting

Anu Adegbola (39:42)
still used. Yeah. Yeah.

yeah.

Peter Bowen (40:07)
If you're doing 100 leads a month, you probably need to run that same A-B test for three years before you hit some kind of statistical significance in terms of useful data, like for a qualified lead or a sale. In our industry, we tend to jump onto this is statistically significant with almost no data. ⁓

Anu Adegbola (40:20)
Yeah

Yes.

Right.

Peter Bowen (40:32)
I don't subscribe to the ABT, always be testing. And maybe that's heresy to say that. But often I'm not testing things that other people are testing. I seldom test ad copy. I seldom test a different color on a landing page button, that kind of stuff.

Anu Adegbola (40:42)
Okay. ⁓ Lord, I feel like.

Okay?

Yeah, yeah, those kind of different colors like I think that's good point. I feel like I want to ask you 10 more questions about that, but I feel like that's another podcast episode or an article that we can put together.

Peter Bowen (41:03)
Yeah, no, we've got any we've been we've been here.

Yeah, we've been here a while. I'm happy to talk about those things. This has been really fun talking with you and I could I could geek out about ads for ages.

Anu Adegbola (41:10)
⁓ This-

I could listen to you geek out about ads for ages. I don't know what about it. listen, just literally you just, I like when geeks are really like, it's exciting. You can see that sparkle in their eyes when they're talking about like, don't answer that. I just love it. I just love watching it. That's why, that's the reason why I do this podcast. I love doing, I love listening to people talk about the things that they're passionate about, especially in terms of the digital ads and how we're doing it.

Peter Bowen (41:18)
Hahaha!

Hahaha!

Anu Adegbola (41:42)
And why my angle is from mistakes is because a lot of people are doing it wrong. And a lot of people are, you know, giving advice based on like their one account of one piece of data. And I'm like, guys, we can't just do that and just say that, ⁓ Google is wrong because of this one thing that I do, you know, with minimal budgets and it didn't go well. like, ⁓ so yeah, I hope we keep talking and I'm hoping people are encouraged.

to even like, you know, go on podcast.ppc.live, please try to register to be a guest so that we can talk about your different ways to do Google ads to ensure that you're not spiking up your CPCs and not giving bad advice out there. So I'm gonna wrap us up now. This has been such a great chat here, but like, yeah, we need to do a part two. Please, please tell me that you'll be willing to do that. That'd be really great.

Peter Bowen (42:35)
Yeah, that would be a pleasure. It's fun geeking out about these things.

Anu Adegbola (42:39)
Amazing. But yeah, before we go one last question that, you know, I don't know whether you want to hear a movie geek like me. I love movies, but so this is my last question. If your PPC career were a movie, what would the title be?

Peter Bowen (42:53)
Okay, I'm not going to tell you that yet. You tell me, what would your movie title be? I'm allowed to turn it around, aren't I?

Anu Adegbola (43:00)
I don't know. The one movie that comes to mind because I'm like, what's what? Because I tell people it can be something that a movie that you know, you relate to or just any random title. And for me, the movie that comes to mind is like my favorite movie is like Moulin Rouge, you know, as cause red is my favorite color. Everybody will see that on PPC live branding and you know, even Rouge means red and

Peter Bowen (43:09)
Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Uh-huh.

Anu Adegbola (43:25)
It's such an extravagant movie. And I'm like, how does that relate to my career? I feel like with my career in the past, especially in the past, like let's say five to 10 years, I've just made allowed my career to go in whatever direction I wanted to do. I wanted to do a podcast one day and I started doing a podcast. I wanted to start an event one day and I started doing events. And even some of my friends are like, Anu, you do a newsletter and a blog and content management. And I was like, Anu, what?

Peter Bowen (43:41)
Okay.

Brilliant.

Anu Adegbola (43:54)
what for me it reminds me of Moulin Rouge if you watch Moulin Rouge there's a lot going on and it's like poof poof and you're like guys one scene can be just so chaotic it seems like and so for me I think Moulin Rouge will be my yeah

Peter Bowen (43:57)
Okay.

very

nice. I guess I would choose only from the title, the good, the bad and the ugly. Because there's been some great stuff. I've made a great living out of it for years and years. There's been some terrible stuff and well, there'd been some things that have been frankly ugly.

Anu Adegbola (44:16)
Right? Okay?

⁓ yes. I think

the industry, think that we can blame on the industry just in general, the general industry has been good, bad, and ugly sometimes. So definitely, definitely relate with you on that one. Pete, that has been such a great conversation. Thank you so much for reading. My pleasure. You didn't hold back. I love that. You just let the geek out. And I love that. That's, I'm glad our audience.

Peter Bowen (44:43)
Well, thank you for inviting me.

Hahaha!

Anu Adegbola (44:52)
got to experience that too. And if people wanna hear more about you geeking out, I feel that we don't hear enough about you on the social medias. And I know that might be just a personal preference, but like, where can people find you geeking out?

Peter Bowen (45:04)
Well, I write at pete-bowen.com. It's my personal website, and I try write there often. I publish a newsletter, usually once a week. And that's been the extent of my sort of public contributions. I try help people on the internet, wherever I can find them on Reddit and on PPC Live and places like that as well.

Anu Adegbola (45:24)
Yes, yes. And PPC live is a good mention. Like Pete is very good at sharing articles and even that system decay story that he shared, he gave a put an article together. I'll share the link to that. That's very relevant in terms of how to really, you know, spot that out, avoid it and just making sure you're like, you're looking at all the different things that can affect your paid search accounts and making sure that you're not having just too narrow.

point of view when you're looking at your account, that you'd really look at the whole system and what would affect. So yeah, we'll share all those links to the show in the show notes. So make sure that you check all that out. But for now, thank you so much, Peter, for being on our show. And yeah, I'm sure I'll catch up with you soon.

Peter Bowen (46:07)
Thank you very much. know this has been an absolute pleasure.

Anu Adegbola (46:11)
Thank you so much Pete for sharing so passionately that story about, you know, the mistakes that you've made, why it has now made you the expert that you are today, the advice of what people need to do to ensure that they're not making that mistake or if they've just already made the mistake, what needs to be done. And remember, as Pete said, we are not click pushers. We are not just there to drive whatever kind of nonsense traffic.

that we are, you know, that there is to our clients' website. Like, that client of his that had an ex-Googler just set up an account, a PMAX account, sending impressions of outside the target area. that just fills me with dread and just makes me think that the integrity of our industry, yeah, you know, is at a loss. But yeah, for the full discussions and for all the links and all the resources that Pete shared.

please go to our podcast.ppc.live site. will be the latest episode that you'll see up there. just, yeah, just search for his name. You'll find his episode. it was such a fantastic conversation. I'm sure you'll agree. But yeah, going on to, you if you're listening to this before April the 29th, five o'clock in the afternoon, there's still time for you to buy a ticket and join us in Brighton as one of the...

Brighton SEO HeroConf fringe events that's happening on April 29th at about starting from 5.30pm at Temple Pub, which is just on the riverside, like on the river itself. As soon as we finish the event, I might just.

Well, it's gonna be evening, so I'm not gonna jump into the river right after, but maybe I'll have an afternoon swim before joining the event. Who knows? It's gonna be a very brilliant and bright day. Join for fantastic discussions that are gonna be led by Jack Willmore from We Discover, Emina Demiri from ⁓ Vixen Digital. They're based out there in Brighton, as well as Julia Riml who is coming all the way.

from Germany, she's someone who's a top hundred influencer. She is also spoken at different events in Barcelona, Copenhagen, Munich, Berlin, know, co-hosted events with the Google growth team. And she's going to be talking to us about growth. So yeah, she's a headliner speaker that you do not want to miss. And if you want to bring friends with you, we're giving a free ticket for every free ticket sold. So yeah, please join us for that. We'd love to have you.

But before I leave you now as well, ⁓ sorry, if you want to get a ticket, go to ppc.live or just search PPC live on Google. It will be the first one. know, PPC live events will be the one of the first. We've done our SEO strong. So it will be one of the first links to go visit. If it's an event bright link, you click through as well. That will take you to buy a ticket anyway. So before I leave you delighted to share that I'm also taking on coaching clients.

If you want to build up your confidence, you know, you want to have the confidence to ask for that promotion, ask for that pay rise, you know, and just be the confidence like entrepreneurial spirit that you can have within a company. I totally highly recommend that we have a chat. Go to themarketinganu.com to book some time with me so that we can really figure out, you know, what's missing, what's what you need to do to ensure that you skyrocket your career. So yeah, I hope you've enjoyed.

the show and I look forward to bringing more PPC F-UPS and Triumphs next week. Thank you. Bye.