EP362 - From Keyword Chaos to PPC Comeback ft Cathryn Stormont

Anu Adegbola (00:01.56)
Hello Cathryn, welcome to PPC Live the podcast.

Cathryn Stormont (00:05.302)
thank you so much for having me.

Anu Adegbola (00:07.182)
such a pleasure. Yeah. Like I was telling, telling Cathryn, Cathryn is another one of those on a long line of like lovely ladies in our industry have, who have been in it for years, but I've never quite come across you like, like I say before this year, we were both at the, UK paid media awards, you know, earlier on with them. imagined, yeah. You were, were you one of the judges Cathryn? that right? Yeah. And you presented an award. Yeah.

Cathryn Stormont (00:32.164)
I was one of the judges, yes, yes. Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (00:36.366)
Yeah. Yeah. It was, it was such a lovely fun night, but yeah, let's, let's, let me introduce you to the lovely Cathryn Stormont who, um, yeah, doesn't just go to awards events and judges events. actually does the amazing work. Um, Cathryn, is a paid media and SEO consultant with over 16 years of hands-on experience, helping SaaS tech travel and e-commerce brands grow through Google Bing, AI platforms and social ads.

Cathryn Stormont (00:48.644)
Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (01:04.92)
That's the latest one on that long line of platform that is very important. Everybody wants AI visibility. So yeah, you need someone who's good at it. She also specializes in bringing paid organic and AI search together into one unified strategy with a strong focus on UX. that's user experience, customer journeys and delivering measurable results across UK and global markets. She was also a PPC speaker at Brighton SEO last year. So that's in,

a of years ago, 2024. And yeah, she's been a podcast guest on Majestic and similar web podcasts. So yeah, she's experienced in this whole podcasting game. She's gonna be confident, gonna bring her best foot forward. I'm delighted to hear what she's got to say. There's something, oh, in our prep conversation, I usually ask what's the mistake that Cathryn's gonna share. So I'm about to be as surprised as our listeners.

Cathryn Stormont (02:00.004)
you

Anu Adegbola (02:00.768)
as to what the mistake Cathryn is gonna share, but I'm sure it's gonna be a great one. But before we get into that fun fact, she's got a very fun fact for you. So yeah, Cathryn, take it away.

Cathryn Stormont (02:12.174)
So my fun fact is I have jumped out of a plane 14,000 feet in tandem skydive I've had to say. But yes, very, very scary, but very, very fun over the beautiful Mission Beach in Australia, which was amazing.

Anu Adegbola (02:22.957)
Right!

Anu Adegbola (02:26.486)
that would be amazing. Someone like Australia doing like, yeah, jumping out of a plane. That's just amazing. No matter how many times I see it, either on clips or YouTube or something or TV. And I'm like, why? Why are people doing that? It just looks so scary. What inspired you to do it? Had you always wanted to do it or it's like someone kind of convinced you?

Cathryn Stormont (02:42.34)
Wow.

Cathryn Stormont (02:52.708)
I would say it's something I've always wanted to do that I probably ended up convincing my husband to do but yeah it's one of those ones that I've always wanted to do but I found myself doing it with probably quite yeah so different younger people than me at the time and it was yeah just one of I prefer doing that to bungee jumping I'm a bit weird like that yeah it's just one of those things I think I was more scared of being in a tiny little plane than I was actually jumping out of it which was a bit of a accident.

Anu Adegbola (02:58.733)
Right.

Anu Adegbola (03:14.807)
Okay.

Anu Adegbola (03:19.758)
Wow, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Tiny little plane that high up. Yeah. It does makes you feel a bit like, whoa. Um, yeah, either way, even in one of those nice Boeing seven foot seven, whatever planes, I'm still like, can we land? When are we landing? so people do I jump it out of plane. I respect your bravery, but no one is convincing me to do that. So yeah.

Cathryn Stormont (03:22.593)
You

You

Cathryn Stormont (03:36.718)
Fair enough.

Anu Adegbola (03:46.146)
Happy, happy for you guys. But yeah, Cathryn is one of those agendas on a long list of my fantastic guests who's gonna share some mistakes that they've experienced in their career, how they learned from it, what the situation was around it, so that our listeners don't make that same mistake because yeah, mistakes is how we grow, how we learn, how we continue to be the best. yeah, the best of the folks in this industry have made.

mistakes and we learn the best from it. yeah, take it away, Cathryn. What is the F up you'd like to share with us today?

Cathryn Stormont (04:20.964)
So, there's been a few, however. I would say when I started out my first, very first dedicated PPC role, I was working at a quite sizable e-commerce and did this quite large account, it easily about a hundred grand, spend a month. My first task was to look at restructuring it, trying to tidy things up, make things work.

so fairly new to this thing. thought, okay, I'm going to go and hunt out what's the best practices. And at the time it was very granular. so it was all the, you know, to restructure the campaigns into tightly themed ad groups, make sure that the ads relate to the ad groups and really, really even go down to the level of, you know, single, exact match keywords. Obviously think things have obviously changed now, simpler forms, but.

Anu Adegbola (05:14.926)
Thank you, Adia. Yes.

Cathryn Stormont (05:21.22)
It's one thing that came out of that is that, okay, I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna look at the top forming campaigns and I started moving keywords around and I moved, you know, the highest converting one of, you know, the top five highest converting keywords in the campaign that we're generating thousands of, you know, pounds of a month and thinking, okay, if I move this into a much.

It's going to get more impressions. It's going to have a lot of better cost per click. It's going to perform much better. And truthfully, it didn't in some of the cases. The thing I've sort of learnt there is make sure you look at the history of the campaign and the performance of those keywords. And it was in a situation where...

Anu Adegbola (05:59.598)
Anu Adegbola (06:10.158)
Yeah.

Cathryn Stormont (06:15.426)
Some campaigns did work, but the higher performing ones started generating less revenue, even though we were getting a little bit better on the more impressions. was just a bit tricky to manage. And I was expecting it suddenly to things be suddenly much better. And my manager at the time thought, you know, did a really good job. over time, it turned out how I thought it out, found out how it didn't work.

Anu Adegbola (06:25.774)
pressures.

Cathryn Stormont (06:43.268)
was actually brought to attention by one of the Google account managers at the time where you had a dedicated person, the same person that gave you a call and did a report and said, actually, we're not quite seeing before and after the results that you'd hoped. And I was like, oh, this is my first real role, my first real task. I was really hoping this was working.

Anu Adegbola (06:53.174)
Nice. Yes. Thursdays. Yes.

Anu Adegbola (07:05.058)
Yeah. Okay.

Right.

Cathryn Stormont (07:13.634)
what tended to happen is, you know, after a few weeks, things settled down, things stabilized, and revenue started building back up. And ultimately I learnt from that and I paid very much close attention to the detail and how much those keywords are actually making. And from any other strict structures from then on, have been absolutely, when I go in and go into some agencies and train some.

Anu Adegbola (07:18.818)
Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Cathryn Stormont (07:41.837)
and one of the things is please pay attention to those converting keywords. Do not move them, the very top ones, otherwise you're going to make a real impact on your campaign. so it did resolve itself and give it time, but it was quite a stressful thing to go through for your very first task.

Anu Adegbola (07:48.012)
Yeah. Right.

Anu Adegbola (07:56.078)
Okay? Give me a time, yeah.

Yes, absolutely. So let's clarify that the, the thing that was wrong was it should have, it lost its history is that what pretty much they were saying because it lost its good performance history, moving it to a div those top performance campaign just went to the whole zero learning point and was not performing as well as it should have anymore.

Cathryn Stormont (08:24.044)
Yeah, so it's because those keywords move from, so these keywords have these massive, massive ad groups at the time, you know, with hundreds of keywords. And so we move those keywords into a restructured into their own little individual ad groups, which in theory should have worked fine. But because moving that initial location was to unstabilize things and was such a shock for those.

Anu Adegbola (08:33.068)
Yeah. Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (08:41.422)
Didn't ya? Yes.

Anu Adegbola (08:50.19)
Yeah. Yeah.

Cathryn Stormont (08:51.428)
even though you still had the account history, your campaign history, where it was in the ad group wasn't there anymore and that just unsettled things a lot. And I think there is a lot to be said for just having that history and that performance that sometimes people forget when they make these sort of big changes.

Anu Adegbola (08:58.828)
Is,

Anu Adegbola (09:11.566)
Absolutely. I look like I when you were saying structure, I was like, I wonder what the angle of this one is going to be because a few other people has talked about structural mistakes and they're different. They're different than, and I think sometimes we're like, yeah, just one street in terms of structure. There's only one way to make a mistake. There's several, which we really need to pay attention with. And yeah, people have known has really not yet talked about the whole year account history.

learning, learnings kind of go back to zero, especially on a campaign level, because yeah, you think on account level, it'll keep that history, but the fact that even if you lost it, even in campaign level, that was a mess up. So what would you have done differently if you could go back?

Cathryn Stormont (09:54.787)
If I had to go back, would definitely as a start point, pay attention to the top performing keywords in that account from, especially this is e-commerce. that, you know, they've direct revenue associated. So yeah, work out what are the top keywords in that account? How much revenue is that bringing in? And do I need to just leave those well alone and focus on the other ones to try and get some sort of incremental revenue? So I think.

Anu Adegbola (10:02.274)
Yeah? Yeah.

Yeah, that's a lot.

Anu Adegbola (10:19.661)
Yeah.

Cathryn Stormont (10:24.268)
you know, that's one of the things I just wanted to talk about was best practices are not always best practices. there is a list of things to follow, but actually they don't always, in reality, they don't always work. And yeah, it's why testing is so good. have experiments and different platforms. If I had to do it again now, then I would be running that through an experiment and I would be doing it, you know, differently.

Anu Adegbola (10:30.826)
No. No.

Anu Adegbola (10:35.564)
Yeah, always worked.

Yeah.

Cathryn Stormont (10:53.346)
So, and so these sort of mistakes can't happen as well, but you're back then you were very much in the dark and you're testing learn of what you could do. So, yeah.

Anu Adegbola (11:02.284)
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So you said it was one of your first jobs. So that means you had a manager who saw the mistake as well, or heard learned of the mistake. How did they take it? Were they, were they encouraging or where there was it a bit of a tight spot?

Cathryn Stormont (11:14.404)
Yeah, yeah, I think so. think the, think the truthfully, think it overall, was a, the exercise itself was positive and deemed positive as far as the company, and Curzon, but there was a period of time, which there was a bit, yeah, it was a mistake. And I think definitely supportive on that. It's just, it's just kind of part and parcel of all all the things you learn. The way that kind of turned though, is that role became.

probably one of my top ones in my career. it actually led to becoming sort of set a lot of international expansion and built the accounts up to from like 10 million to 36 million a year through. it complete, you I think although there was a bit of early, early working out trust, I think initially I turned that around and actually, you know, I think that it worked out really well at the end, but you've got to learn from those mistakes. That's the thing.

Anu Adegbola (11:55.65)
Wow.

Anu Adegbola (12:12.486)
Yep. Yep. And you know, we, we, we get to almost like you come, kind of hit one of the main punch lines for this, whole podcast about the whole fact of it's when you actually turn things around from a mistake that people are actually, people are impressed by that. cause we can't do the whole, my God, I made the mistake. That means I'm not good enough. I can't share this, this with anybody. We a bit of a shame spiral that we can put ourselves in. But if you just

Keep your cool and just look at the mistake and that is the moment where you can be the hero and be trusted with a lot, you know, much bigger accounts. That's amazing. And how about the clients? The clients, where the clients are a bit like, whoa, why have our revenue dropped? Like, you know, those keywords that we're working on. Yeah.

Cathryn Stormont (12:56.51)
So that this was actually, this was more direct. this was the, I was the client. So it was a bit, yeah. So it was a bit sort of directly affecting, it, you know, it sort of, as I said, it kind of resolved itself in time. That's the other message I think is just give things time. Sometimes things just don't panic and let account history, let click through history.

Anu Adegbola (13:03.041)
Alright, okay.

Anu Adegbola (13:15.917)
Yes.

Cathryn Stormont (13:23.68)
let things keep going, things will reset themselves. That's one thing I have sort of learned. And from that is back to the really focus on, it's hard when you've got lots of clients and lots of campaigns, that counts, it's to try and isolate opportunities and look at the detail, make sure you're looking at things like search queries and it's all those sort of things because otherwise,

Anu Adegbola (13:25.474)
Yeah. Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (13:37.964)
No.

Cathryn Stormont (13:52.77)
you can end up wasting, wasting spend.

Anu Adegbola (13:54.978)
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. and if you think about it, because he also said like, was the Google ads manager who was like, yeah, the performance is not, it's not what you're expecting. It took a while. Do you feel like you could have caught it earlier? And you know, what would you say that, you know, never, it's not about putting you in the hot seat because you've been so kind to come here. I don't want to be like, why didn't you? It's more like, you know, for people listening.

What should they pick up on early so that it's not a Google ads manager saying that, you've messed that up. What could have been picked up on?

Cathryn Stormont (14:35.894)
I would, doing the atlas now, I would be looking at, soon as you made a major change like that, constantly looking at every couple of days to see how things have changed and you're going to be reporting and trying to analyse that a lot, sooner. Just any major change you need to be on it really and just keep abreast of what's going on. think it's, with that, certainly with that situation, I should have.

looked at things a little bit earlier, worked out what was going on, but I'd say that being new to things at that time and due to PPC, was not, it's learning on the job in terms of the skills to try and work that out. Actually, I knew you need to analyse this. This is the campaign before, this is the campaign after what's happened. And I think at that point, I asked the account manager to provide a report and that's where it kind of...

from. So I think, you know, I think one thing from that is really, really stay on it. If you make changes, keep checking, keep checking. Because even those, if you do make those changes, yeah, mistakes can still happen. know, search queries, things could show up for the wrong things, relevant things that you didn't intend to when you had a keyword and all that sort of thing.

Anu Adegbola (15:49.603)
Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (15:57.87)
I don't know. had this analogy because I'm, love analogies and most of the time them are going to quite extreme. And I was like, it's almost like, you know, mother having a child, those first few weeks, like, you know, they needed, they need feeding every couple of hours. You want to double check that? I no, no, their temperature is on, is on point. There is like those first few days. And that's always like how you create, when you first create a new campaign, set a new campaign life, setting your account life.

You need to be on a lot. Your brain just needs to be those first few weeks. Let me make sure everything has happened the way it should.

Cathryn Stormont (16:31.746)
Yeah, absolutely. No, it's something I always said actually, because again, one of the best practices I think is they say, okay, set a campaign, leave it for weeks and then gather the data and then you can go from there. But I always find that the first four weeks are actually the most important and just to keep checking and refining that traffic. I think if you don't do that and set things up in the right way to start with, then you could leave it little bit. But it's just that first bit, I think.

Anu Adegbola (16:49.293)
Yes.

Cathryn Stormont (17:02.004)
doesn't that's what I've sort of learned from that is I'm really curious how's that going how's that going can I check it that's just me and some people aren't and they'll just leave things but I can't do that and it's just have to keep sort of checking and making little tweaks and then coming back and checking yeah and with bigger accounts it's harder to spot these things and you know there are some good tools out there to help manage all that but it yeah it's

Anu Adegbola (17:25.742)
Mmm.

Cathryn Stormont (17:29.9)
And that's what's good now. You can actually have those tools that will give you an overview and even AI will give you with recommendations and will allow you to see what's going on and help you move things along. But again, you've got to use your common sense. I I suppose that's what my message is really. When I was looking at that data back on early in my career, I didn't use my common sense to think actually those are really high.

Anu Adegbola (17:46.786)
Yeah.

Cathryn Stormont (17:57.859)
revenue keywords, perhaps I shouldn't move them. And that's the thing I would say is just, you know, when you're looking at some of these recommendations, things like for AI, where, for example, it's recommending to divert your keywords to broad match and think, actually, is that going to do what they wanted to do? And it's just applying that level of, yeah, of common sense.

Anu Adegbola (18:00.235)
Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (18:13.806)
Hmm.

Yeah, you do.

Anu Adegbola (18:24.578)
Absolutely. And you know, I think with these kinds of things, you know, as you said, even earlier on best practices is it is not like a one sweep like works for every type of accounts and you know, the whole checking of accounts waiting for four weeks. You know, I also think it depends on what you check, you know, like maybe, you know, if CPC spike, yeah, pay attention to it. But then also be like, something else outside of the account happens, like you, you'll know the importance of Yale.

how search, SEO and all the different kind of different channels that could affect it. So maybe it's that. So you don't necessarily need to panic, but it's, it's good to be aware, you know, so that if something is wrong that you did was a settings thing that you weren't supposed to have done. You will also catch that as well. think it's a balance of checking, but also not necessarily being worried and not, you know, not panicking as it's settling in, but also know that, you know, be checking it in those first few, few days so that if anything has gone wrong.

you'll pick it up. You'll be the first to pick up. It's a bit of a balancing act, isn't it?

Cathryn Stormont (19:27.332)
Yes, definitely. think it's, yeah, I can say it's hard to do if you've got lots of clients. I've worked agencies and I know when there's lots of clients to deal with it's impossible to get to everyone. But if you've just learned something, you better just check it at least the next couple of days.

Anu Adegbola (19:37.794)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. and how did it make you feel? Because, know, early in your career, you may, you know, this is one of your first mistakes. Like, would you say, did you beat yourself up a bit or were you a bit more confident in like, look, let's just find the solution.

Cathryn Stormont (20:01.38)
I you know, you do, you do beat yourself up, but I think I was, yeah, confident to find a solution. I think I wanted to, one thing I do is I try lots of things, see what works. If it doesn't work, then I try something else. And that's how I ended up in lots of fields and lots of sectors. I think it's, with this, it did, yeah, it did make me feel, okay, maybe I should have done things differently. But then I thought about it and thought, actually, I'm just following.

I haven't done that bit before, so I'm just following what I think is recommended and okay, know, perhaps that's not, let's go and find a solution, let's give it some time and it did solve itself out and it turned into a really big account and it was successful. it just depends on, you just, you just got to learn from it. You can't take it to heart too much because things do happen. So yeah.

Anu Adegbola (20:38.381)
Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (20:50.668)
No. Yeah. And how about if someone has just figured that, yeah, they put an account live or did a restructure a couple of weeks ago and they've messed up the performance of their best keywords, best performing keywords. And they're looking back and they're like, God, how do I get through this? What's your advice to them?

Cathryn Stormont (21:13.844)
I would say again, give it time, see if things settle. If they don't, then there'll be, then look for solutions, look actually, maybe we're gonna try a different campaign type or perhaps also have to think about why is that not converting? It may not just because I've moved it. It may be seasonality, it may be something else affecting it. Unless you're looking, doing this.

Anu Adegbola (21:29.006)
Mm.

Anu Adegbola (21:38.318)
Mmm.

Cathryn Stormont (21:43.137)
that A-B test you can't you're not gonna necessarily know and that's sometimes that people jump to the wrong conclusions because they haven't thought about the bigger picture and what's happening sometimes it might just be it's holiday season or something that's bringing it down but if it doesn't resolve itself over a longer period then yeah then then you need to make some start thinking about making some changes and and I would say if you're there then and you've made a mistake best thing you can do is own it and

Anu Adegbola (21:57.004)
Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (22:12.076)
Yeah. Yeah.

Cathryn Stormont (22:12.504)
Be honest, go to the managers or clients and explain that because they will respect you for it. Definitely, I think it's when you do that and you try and get, don't do that and you try and get around that, then that makes it a lot harder and you get stuck in various situations. It's best just to be honest in these things because mistakes do happen.

Anu Adegbola (22:18.914)
Yes.

Anu Adegbola (22:36.462)
Yeah, yeah, honesty is the big thing that several of our guests have said that like just, you know, cause hiding it does not make you look good at all. And just thinking that you're just without telling anybody, you're gonna try and fix it all. So don't do that. We're gonna now go on to talk about like in a moment, we're gonna talk about other mistakes that you've seen from like, let's say audience accounts. But before we go into that,

What's one last final message you'd like to leave our audiences with about that mistake, about that story, about how you recovered and turned it around?

Cathryn Stormont (23:12.65)
I would say just don't panic, know, things are resolvable. It's just a case of just letting things settle and if you need to make some adjustments then talk to your managers, talk to your clients and see what you can do.

Anu Adegbola (23:16.494)
Mm.

Anu Adegbola (23:30.574)
Absolutely. Okay. Now what I like to call like a fun part of the show other mid people's mistakes and how like in 2026 you see some things that just makes you go, why, how is this still happening? Um, do you have any, anything in your mind or love like, you know, mistakes that you're just like shocked that you see, especially when you're auditing accounts or when you're taking on a new, um, new campaign, taking a new client on. Yeah. What have you seen?

Cathryn Stormont (23:37.838)
Yeah

Cathryn Stormont (23:59.555)
One thing I see quite often when I'm sort of auditing or even when I take new things on is that the client thinks their campaign's going really, really well. Reports are all good. And then you kind of dig into it and it looks like there's getting lots of conversions of the keywords. And then you start looking at the search queries and you just notice that there's been trigger from all the just the brand names and they're not getting anything from anything else. And I think that's one thing that I noticed that a lot.

Anu Adegbola (24:25.976)
Yeah?

Cathryn Stormont (24:30.03)
campaign, they just don't put in brand level negatives. They don't separate the brand campaigns. That's even if, even if there's not a separate brand campaign, then there's not even a negative in this. They're just getting success from their brand name. And that's not always the case, but there's a lot of that. I see that it's because what's reported to clients is you're just seeing the keyword level. You're seeing the campaign, but you're not necessarily seeing the search query level.

Anu Adegbola (24:33.472)
It is.

Anu Adegbola (24:44.269)
Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (24:58.806)
Yeah, yeah.

Cathryn Stormont (24:59.216)
so it's just, it's one thing I would say is just make sure that you don't, that the brand is separated, that you're going to, yeah, you can report on it fairly and that in that way, you know, the results aren't, construed by the fact that you've just got that the brand, the brand in there. think that's one of the things I do see quite often. and yeah, I think, that's, that's, that's probably one of the main ones. And I guess, yeah, no, sometimes no negatives as well.

Anu Adegbola (25:20.076)
Yeah. Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (25:28.322)
Mm. I can't believe that. Yeah.

Cathryn Stormont (25:28.824)
just to make sure that there's at least some baseline of negatives. Especially now, because it's really, I'm sort of seeing traffic quality a lot. When I say traffic quality, the quality is not there, though it used to be. It's just not, it's not. I I love PMAX, I've talked about that. I love all that, but it's...

Anu Adegbola (25:41.23)
Mmm. Mmm.

Anu Adegbola (25:47.636)
Hmm, yeah, no.

Cathryn Stormont (25:56.675)
You know, there's just so many variations now with the broad manage with PMAX that you can't with PhraseMax and ExactMatch variations, you can't control it the way that you had. so I think that the but on the plus side of that, you can see lots of opportunities, you can get volume and I really like that. It's just but because of that, it's really important to have more negative management, I'd say that I can. Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (26:00.046)
Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (26:20.43)
Absolutely. In terms of that, know, in terms of the, you know, people only seeing brand performance from the brand keywords, what's your take on people bidding on brand? Because there's a bit of a divide sometimes people are like, what's the point? You know, it's actually be on SEO on here, you're showing for your SEO brand. What would you say? What's your advice on like whether people should bid on brand or not?

Cathryn Stormont (26:46.076)
I get this, had this quite a lot over the years. And I think actually my take's always saying, yes, you should bid on it because it's taking the whole page. I'm always focused on, you know, with the SEO, with PPC, maximizing that whole page and the effect of if that ad's not there, then your competitors are going to be. And I think I've done tests, you know, we've done tests where we've taken off brand and it does.

Anu Adegbola (26:48.526)
Okay.

Anu Adegbola (26:58.028)
Hmm. Yes.

Anu Adegbola (27:07.651)
Yeah.

Cathryn Stormont (27:15.16)
does impact. It's just having all those visually more touch points in the space. I think what you can see more than ever is competitive bidding is really quite aggressive sometimes. And it's important to be there, I think.

Anu Adegbola (27:20.044)
Yeah. Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (27:30.827)
Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (27:35.31)
How about if it's not a competitive space? know, because some people argue, well, it's not a competitive space. When people bid on my brand, you know, and I search for my brand, I don't see, you know, any other brands showing up. Even in those cases, you'd say still be there?

Cathryn Stormont (27:49.46)
Less so, however, I still think that it should be there from the point of view that you've got, if you're still scrolling down that page, you've still got, you're still there a couple of times and there's proven studies that show that conversion rate is better with both of those. However, there are exceptions. If you're on a tight budget or you need to try and streamline things, then yes, you could test without it.

Anu Adegbola (27:59.798)
Yeah. Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (28:06.264)
Okay.

Okay? Yeah.

Cathryn Stormont (28:18.404)
I'm quite about offsetting PPC and SEO and working out where there's, you know, where best to spend budget. So it's about, yeah, there are exceptions to that, but generally I'd say it's a good place to be.

Anu Adegbola (28:22.67)
Mmm.

Anu Adegbola (28:33.56)
Good place to be. Okay, all right. And how about like how we are using like the whole AI tools and you know, how we get AI to assist us or do the work for us? How are we getting that wrong? What are the mistakes that you think people are making?

Cathryn Stormont (28:48.42)
I think it's sometimes it's too easy to just switch everything on and accept things. Now I think I think it's brilliant in the way that you get recommendations in terms of keywords to add or match types and things and it's great to just accept those but again just use your brain and see actually is that going are those going to help me and the mistakes I sort of see happening particularly is around

Anu Adegbola (28:54.998)
Mm-hmm.

Anu Adegbola (29:06.882)
Yeah. Yeah.

Cathryn Stormont (29:16.75)
where people enable ad copy to automatically change, AI to write ad copy. I think that that is a hard one because with the accounts with keywords and that's in the account and that's not front-facing, but with your ad copy, that's customer front-facing. if AI get that wrong, you're in trouble if you come across with the wrong message or something doesn't quite read right for your business, then that will...

Anu Adegbola (29:22.444)
Okay, nice.

Anu Adegbola (29:32.258)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Cathryn Stormont (29:46.871)
impact it and I think it's, I'm not saying that can't, I think using AI to write the copy and things like that is nothing wrong with that but actually having it to make automatic changes, just keep a very close eye if you are doing that and that's what I would say. Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (29:58.798)
Mmm.

Anu Adegbola (30:02.924)
Yeah, yeah. How about like using it for like creatives, especially like image, image creators? Are you a pro or against that?

Cathryn Stormont (30:12.612)
I think if you're if you haven't got the resources to devote to creating good imagery and things like that then there are some benefits and benefit to it but at the same time you want things like that to be natural and you want to make sure that they do seem natural so it just depends on the output but I would say yeah I'm a little bit against it guess in the sense of at foremost it'd be better to have something that's

Anu Adegbola (30:23.47)
Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (30:28.237)
Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (30:32.749)
Yeah.

Cathryn Stormont (30:42.468)
you've created. if you are, again, you are budget constraint, are needs for it.

Anu Adegbola (30:50.05)
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. There needs for it sometimes, especially you don't have like a great production team is all the way. It's a big, big line that I get fed when I'm putting those articles together of like, for like nano banana. They're like, you know, great, great for, know, if you don't have like production team and all that kind of stuff. before we go, I'd also even just like to talk about, know, the theme of our podcast, about talking about mistakes and why it's important. I don't know about you. I see a lot of.

Cathryn Stormont (30:56.286)
You

Cathryn Stormont (31:03.635)
Hahaha

Anu Adegbola (31:18.208)
You know, this great thing happened and we won this client and we, you know, you know, yeah, it's always the positives, but why is also actually talking about mistakes, would you say also important for us to look at?

Cathryn Stormont (31:37.509)
So in terms of the sort of mistakes, think, yeah, it's important to actually, as well as just having cases of successes, it's sometimes important to have those case studies of mistakes and just, but actually what you learn from it, so it's similar to this, but actually having that to show your co-case that would just add a bit of credibility, I think.

Anu Adegbola (31:46.637)
Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (31:59.968)
Yeah, yeah, it absolutely adds credibility and you know, because how can you really say that, that things worked well if you've not actually made any major mistakes? That's really important, I'd say in our industry, especially right now with all the mistakes that AI should make. I wish a lot more people are just willing to say that this is how I did it and it went wrong. So don't do it that way. There's a lot, feel like a huge encyclopedia size book that could be written about the ways that you probably shouldn't use AI.

and ways that can it be, it can be used very well, but yeah, we don't talk about how we're not doing it well enough. don't think anyway, Cathryn, that has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much for being on the podcast, but before we leave you a nice, just fun, non really PPC, related question. if your PPC career, if your career were a movie, what would the title be?

Cathryn Stormont (32:52.804)
I would say into the vertical verse. I've just done too many verticals. I've been through all the different sectors.

Anu Adegbola (33:02.792)
It's a multi verticals verse kind of thing. There's so many verticals to get through. Yeah. Yeah. No, I know. I do feel like when I was working agency wise, I was like, how am I going to choose which to specialize in? I don't, I don't really feel like I want to. And yeah, I did a lot of skipping around as well, which is our, which is your favorite kind to, to, work on Ecom or like lead gen

Cathryn Stormont (33:04.676)
Heh.

Cathryn Stormont (33:25.444)
that's interesting. I, yeah, I would, before I probably would have Ecom, but I really, yeah, I do like lead gen a lot actually. It's kind of more, yeah, it's harder and that's the point. So yeah, yeah, yeah.

Anu Adegbola (33:28.716)
Pick your favorite child.

Anu Adegbola (33:38.943)
Anu Adegbola (33:42.882)
Yes, yes, it is harder. It requires more critical thinking, I really feel. So yeah, well, you've taken us along several great, you know, level of verses of, you know, talking about mistakes, AI and that kind of stuff. We're very grateful for that. If people want to hear more about, you know, you talking about our best, our evolving best practices of loads of different industries, where can people find you?

Cathryn Stormont (34:09.842)
They can find me at digifreelancer.co.uk.

Anu Adegbola (34:13.496)
Amazing. Digital Figurons, so the Coder UK. Are you on LinkedIn as well? I liked it. Fantastic. Awesome. We'll share all the links in the show notes for that. So yeah, guys go check that out. But yeah, for now, thank you so much, Cathryn, and I'm sure we'll catch up soon. Cheers, bye.

Cathryn Stormont (34:17.058)
and LinkedIn.

Cathryn Stormont (34:29.646)
Thank you very much.