The Future of Pay-Per-Click Advertising: A Conversation with Wijnand Meijer

Unveiling the hidden world of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising and software development is none other than one of the founders of True Clicks, Wijnand Meijer. Meijer joins us to guide us down his unique path into PPC and software development - a journey sparked by a simple idea to bridge a gap in the market. This lightbulb moment led to the genesis of the PPC Survey, a community-led initiative that aims to share invaluable, up-to-the-minute data within the PPC industry. Since its May 2022 inception, this project has garnered an overwhelmingly positive response.

Fasten your seatbelts as we navigate the most recent findings from the PPC Survey, revealing the inner workings and sentiments within the industry. We bring to you the reality of job satisfaction in the PPC realm, where seeing the fruits of their labor is the highlight for as many as 62% of industry professionals. Don’t miss our discussion on the financial angles of PPC management, where we uncover that managing a single account leads to higher spend levels for in-house teams. We also shed light on the top pain points for PPC agencies, with the crown taken by unrealistic client expectations. And let’s not forget the future - we're talking scripts and AI in PPC!

Our deep dive doesn't stop there. We take you through the projections from the PPC Survey of 2024, laying bare key trends and forecasts. This data-heavy chat covers the rising trust in Microsoft compared to other platforms, such as Google, Twitter, and Amazon, and the average number of scripts running in each account. From the projected spend for major campaign types to satisfaction levels with Google Ads features, we've got it all. Whether you’re a seasoned PPC professional, or taking your first steps in the industry, this episode is packed with priceless insights into the current and future state of PPC. You don't want to miss it!

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

So, vinon, thank you for joining us today. Well, thanks for having me Happy to join. Absolutely. Why don't you guys start it? Tell us a bit about yourself. What are some themes that interest you? What are your areas of interest, your skills?

Speaker 2: 0:13

Sure, so I'm Vinon Mayer. I'm one of the founders of True Clicks, so for a company we started me and my co-founder about six years ago, and before then I worked for over eight years as an agency. So that's and it was actually my first career. So I started doing PPC a long time ago just to just bumped into it by the end of my studies, 2006 or something. So really different times, simple times, and I just did it a bit on the side, you know, then freelance a bit, and at one point it just yeah, it just really took me out of it. Yeah, this is actually a really cool line of work, even though it was pretty new back then.

Speaker 2: 0:50

At one point I switched freelance part for looking for an agency to learn more, to work on bigger clients, not just SMB ones, and really take it to the next level.

Speaker 2: 1:00

And I really enjoyed that. I really enjoyed the whole, you know, starting as a pretty junior person in the agency and growing with the agency. Also, in that case, when I joined back then there were like 20 people and you know when I left was over 100, got acquired halfway. So I then so I prospect so also experienced also the international part of that really enjoyed that as well. And yeah, by the end of last year or so there I really started thinking about my next step and realized that there was, yeah, an urge to build something, to create a piece of software. I always had affinity for software, saas schools, all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2: 1:37

I always did that, you know, as much as possible within the agency, but really had an idea to create something to yeah, to give a shot at creating our own software, and that's what kept me busy most of the last six years. So I'm much less hands-on in campaigns as I used to be, but of course, we have a couple of thousand users that are using, you know, working in Google Ads every day, and they give us lots of feedback and ideas. So that's my main way to stay up to date to learn nowadays.

Speaker 1: 2:04

Yeah, yeah, definitely and totally relatable, because I also spent quite a bit of time on the software side as a product manager and got a bit out of that hands-on part. But then you stay in touch through all these users and everything. But, yeah, so you know, we want to talk about one topic in particular today in some detail, and that's the PPC survey, and so I'd love to if you could get us an idea about how and why PPC survey started. And then, you know, and as we go along, we can get into some specific data from the last edition and from this edition, yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2: 2:41

So as many of these it was kind of scratching my own itch. A bit more than two years ago so summer 2021, I was actually looking for recent survey data in the PPC industry, or benchmarks or the kind of stuff. And you know, I found a couple of things and they were pretty good, but they were all at least one or two years old, whether it was like the BrainLasps State of PPC 2019 or Marketing Landed and Agency Survey or a couple of other ones that are good and kind of inspired us to build this one. But they apparently weren't doing it anymore on a regular basis and just thought, hey, well, why not do it ourselves? And but not just ourselves as True Plagues, let's make it kind of an independent, very community-driven initiative that is not about, you know, getting leads for your product or something or getting the survey, not just really creating useful data with a group of, you know, ppc companies. So I was in touch with Swaidu back then, which is still one of the partners right, a reporting tool, also here in the Netherlands, so they're easy connection and they were also interested in doing this that I reached out to Eth League, who was also interested in joining and working together on the questions, and then you know, a couple of other partners joined and spent a lot of time on, you know, aligning everyone on the questions and preparing everything. The fun fact is, you know, we were like, okay, ppc Survey, that would be the preferred name, right, just call it PPC Survey. And actually the dot com domain was for SEAL. So we were lucky with that and we bought it for a reasonable $1,500 actually. So now we can really brand it as a separate thing. It doesn't have to live under one of the partners, it's just separate, separate logo, separate entity.

Speaker 2: 4:21

And when we publish it in May 2022, so next time we'll be faster that's the clear sign that it took us a lot of time to process all that data. We just got a lot of positive feedback right, including from you and from our thought leaders, but also from the public. Right, we saw over 4,000 downloads, and that's only the ones that we can measure right. Pdf can get forwarded or emailed or stacked whatever. So definitely that inspired us to do it again. But because it's so much work not every year, at least not this time so now it's two years later. We made it bigger and better, but we'll talk a bit more about that soon enough, but that's kind of the background story. Just a need for having this data and then seeing it wasn't on anyone else and just what. Well, let's do it ourselves.

Speaker 1: 5:03

Yeah, I really like that background because I don't know if you've heard of this expression of eating your own dog food. Yeah, you know in the case, anyone has, and it just means basically using your own product, and so when that need comes from yourself, like you know, I think it leads to good things, like an awareness of how the job should be done. But you also took, like you studied some other surveys and took inspiration from those right, and maybe some notes and improvement too. How did you go about that?

Speaker 2: 5:31

Yeah, so yeah, I started just, you know, looking at some other surveys. Some were focused specifically on agencies, some were like a marketing and agency survey, or teamwork has done, by the way, a very recent agency survey, Pretty good one.

Speaker 3: 5:43

If you work on agencies.

Speaker 2: 5:44

I would definitely recommend the state of agency operations by teamworkcom. That's about a month full now and one type of agency I found especially fun, almost, but we have a hard time replicating that is where they survey both agency side and the clients of those agencies on kind of the same, asking the same questions to get the two sides of the table. Type of insights Setup has done it Setup's marketing relationship survey.

Speaker 2: 6:10

Definitely look that up. And Google and before AS also did something like that called ready together. There you would. I would notice or anyone that reads it would notice disconnect between some of things like value perception and then agencies think they provide lots of value for money and the clients are having kind of a different opinion and things like that, things that inspired me to make sure that we ask that we segment whatever we're asking on the company type at the very least, actually on more segments. So one of the first questions you'll get me over in the survey is what type of company do you work for? Are you agency side or are you advertiser side? And if you're advertiser, brand site, are you working in-house or managing your own campaigns or do you hire an agency? And that changes everything. So yeah, we looked at those existing surveys but most of them didn't go way as deep as we do into the paid search and the PPC, all the practicalities and challenges and tools and features you can do. So we'll be the only one that has that kind of insights.

Speaker 1: 7:15

Yeah, it's a really comprehensive survey and it does to be fair. It takes its time to complete it, but I think that that's well worth it.

Speaker 2: 7:22

Yeah, definitely, once I haven't completed it yet. I think it's good to know and just be transparent about that. We also ask about your role, and if your role is what we call individual contributors so we define it as doing the hands-on campaign management you will get a bit longer survey, probably about 15 minutes, maybe even 20 if you take us in very seriously. On the other hand, if you're like a manager or an EP or a director, you will get a pretty short survey. You can be done in five minutes. So it's because the individual contributor will get all these questions about which tools you use, which features in the platforms you use, how do you use AI?

Speaker 1: 7:54

for your work, all that stuff, and we don't ask that to the managers and directors. It's okay, Vyne. The individual contributors are used to having more work on their tables.

Speaker 2: 8:01

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1: 8:02

Just kidding. Yeah, so, but I really love the segmentation. You mentioned this kind of he said, she said approach, because it, yeah, these are two really different perspectives and I never heard about that one from the setup marketing relationship.

Speaker 2: 8:17

That's such a fun one. I mean, just to mention one thing I really found Larry's almost. They asked both parties why does the relationship end, right between market, between agencies and there? And I think I should have looked this up, but I'm pretty sure one and that I studied a few of these same surveys from the other side that agencies say things like you know, it's budget cuts, it's changing leadership from there and right basically saying it's not us, it's them, something happened on their end and we couldn't do anything, we couldn't help it. Sorry, not our fault. Yeah, vyne's the same question. It's like you know there weren't, you know they weren't delivering the value that we needed from them. So yeah, that's an interesting observation that you can make when you do this kind of stuff.

Speaker 1: 8:59

Yeah, I believe that. So maybe that's for sharing that highlight. Maybe you can share a few highlights from the last PPC survey that you yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 9:09

So for the ones that haven't read it yet, you can just go to ppcsurveycom, click on the 2022 report. It's direct download and I don't need for any more anything.

Speaker 2: 9:17

So a couple of things also things that maybe we will definitely want to improve on this time. So, because all the partners last time were based in Europe, we got a two thirds of our respondents last time were from the EMEA region and that's something that we already see. A different, luckily. This time. Right, we wanted more from North America and the rest of the world, so that's why we also we added a few partners and just focus a bit more and to make sure it's nice globally balanced. This time we had an open-ended question. Those are not just more work to fill in, but definitely more work to analyze, and one of them was you know what's the most satisfying part about your job? And it was astonishing. Maybe obvious, but like 62% of people mentioned that seeing the results of their work was the most satisfying part, and just to clarify how much of an outline that is.

Speaker 2: 10:02

That shared second place was 8% for strategy and analysis. So we all kind of noticed but these are the numbers then that we, yeah, clarify that. It's that people see. People are very much about results. Right, you want to see the results, they go for the results. One thing that would school. When you start combining the answers to different questions, you can get a visual insight without people actually telling you. And we do that with two questions. One is then, of course, how much spend do you or does your team manage on a monthly basis and different tiers, and another question is what's your PPC team size? And we have the same two questions this year as well.

Speaker 2: 10:40

And then what we did last year or two years ago is combining these questions to get a feel for average spend on our management per person, both in-house as agency side. A couple of things we noticed there. That in-house, obviously those spend levels are much higher per person, which makes sense. It's much easier, right? You don't have 10 different clients, you have just one account. One company is very. You don't have to switch from context all the time, you don't have to have client meetings and that kind of stuff. So that makes a lot of sense. But within the agency group we saw that the average spend on the management per team member really increases once the agency manages 1 million and 1 film more, but then it really goes into 200k and more range, while the smaller agencies have a pretty low we'll see what it will be this year pretty low, let's say between 20k and 60k average monthly spend on our management per person. So that was an interesting observation.

Speaker 2: 11:32

And then, more deeper into the daily work, we saw people not being happy with auto blind recommendation, which I can already spoil earlier. That's still the case. Very satisfied about scripts and smart bidding, and that's also still the case. Career Mining and Reporting were mentioned as a tune. Most time-consuming activities? Not sure yet we don't ask that exact same question by this year. And the number one agency frustration was unrealistic client expectations and I think we already see similar things. That is not something that's sensitive to trends and technology right, that's something that's probably gonna stay forever. And let me see and yeah, I mean I want to highlight one thing that that is really tough for us to to that's kind of the both sides of the table story I just mentioned to get the side of the table the clients or the brands, hiring agencies Right. So last time we just didn't include that segment because we're too few respondents from that, from that audience, and even though we have great responses here.

Speaker 2: 12:31

You know really already been last time's numbers by far.

Speaker 2: 12:36

We still have a hard time getting the the clients to talk about their agency. They have a special survey. So any agency listening, please ask your clients to to go to ppcsurveycom and they will have a very short specific survey for them. Because, again, if we won't have enough respondents from their end, we won't what won't make sense to publish benchmarks based on 50 or 30 people or something. We want to have solid data there. So, yeah, that that was a learning from from the first time and it makes sense, right, if you're a client and you hire an agency, you're probably not on LinkedIn following all these PPC people. You're probably not reading Search Engine land and knows what, because that's what your agency is, but it's still so. That's. It's a audience to reach for us.

Speaker 1: 13:16

So yeah, that's kind of the learnings from the first time.

Speaker 1: 13:18

Yeah, those are all really interesting. I mean just like right from the start, the idea that that people just like seeing the results. I mean, I think for one thing it is, you know, sometimes even problematic how results oriented we are in, you know, demand capture and in paid search and stuff like that. But just the it's almost like these dopamine loops, like the turnaround cycle between the inputs, the budget that you put in and the cost, and then the cost he put in and then the revenue coming out. It's quite snappy. But yeah also, I just think as a knowledge worker generally, I mean everyone's going to gravitate toward the more tangible things or the outcomes, because there's there's so much that you do as a knowledge worker that's not tangible, that's just not hands on.

Speaker 2: 14:03

That's true. Curious how this will evolve when, when things will become less and less measurable. Right, people talk about things like dark, social and and all that stuff and the death of attribution and who knows what, and then you know, maybe we'll have to learn to accept that results I mean, the results will still be there, but you know, it will be harder and harder to know exactly where they come from especially if you look if you have long sales cycles like B2B, so yeah.

Speaker 1: 14:24

Yeah, and I think also that highlight that scripts were so popular. Yeah, you know, I I imagine that scripts in some ways have their brightest days ahead, as people are you know, even less technical people are are trying to script with the support of like chat, gpt and these other tools, and it might be too early to see that reflected now, but I definitely think it could head in that direction.

Speaker 2: 14:48

Well, it is one of the questions. It's not one. I have, you know, the data already for this talk today, but we have, this year, a lot of questions around how do you use AI for all types of you know PPC work, whether that's you know reporting or budget management, and one of them is for writing and editing scripts, as we call it. And we'll ask two questions on all these AI things. Right, how often do you actually use something like chat, GPT for this activity? And if you said you use it you know sometimes, regularly then we're going to ask a follow up question on how satisfied you are with the results or time savings by using AI for that specific task. So, yeah, that will be the report, because we see a lot of response on that. So we will see how often people do that and how satisfied they are with that.

Speaker 1: 15:31

Yeah, the next question here would be about benefits. But I think, I mean, I think A, I think people are starting to get a flavor for that and maybe we can, we can also put that toward. The end is like a last yeah of course, yeah, yeah. So so at the end of the survey. There's also a kind of another special question in audience favorite. You might say yeah, what is that question and what's going on there?

Speaker 2: 15:54

Yeah, and it's definitely something we didn't have two years ago. So, next to being bigger and bigger reach with more partners, kind of similar to what triggered me to start the initiative with the survey in the first place was, you know, as many people know, ppc Hero, the blog now owned by Brain Labs since 2012. So that's a long time the yearly top 25 most influential PPC experts, and it was always a thing I mean you could always, you know, argue about, you know how they got to the data and then, if it was, if people could ask all their friends and family to vote a bit much but, it was a fun list, and I mean the people that you know that were doing a lot of sharing, fun leadership and that kind of stuff were usually on that list, and they stopped doing that two years ago.

Speaker 2: 16:37

The last edition they did was 2020. And while preparing for the survey. So when we started preparing this survey, I wasn't even thinking about that, but then I thought, hey, this is exactly the same audience. Right, it's exactly the same people. We're going to ask them the questions about all these PPC stuff that that's also the same people that should vote on the most influential PPC experts.

Speaker 2: 16:56

So then I asked kind of permission to Daniel Gilbert from Greenland. It's like hey, are you going to speak to a hero, going to do this again or not? Because if they are, then of course keep doing it and we won't touch it, but if you're not doing it anymore, then we'd be glad to take it over. And he said, yeah, go ahead, we're not doing it anymore.

Speaker 2: 17:16

So then the fun job started. I thought it would be helpful and also fun to create a short list, a very long short list because it's 100 people, but to kind of get people on the field for who they could vote and also to make the actual voting process easier. Even though, I have to say, you can vote on anyone, right, you don't have to vote on one of these 100 people. You can enter names also in the survey that I actually want to vote for someone else.

Speaker 2: 17:39

There are a few restrictions, by the way, that mention on the website for people to be eligible. For example, people that work for Google or Meta or the other platforms are not eligible.

Speaker 3: 17:47

Maybe people are wondering why?

Speaker 2: 17:48

because it doesn't explain. So this podcast can be my opportunity. So people working for one of the platforms aren't eligible and full-time industry workers aren't eligible. And you would think, well, why? Because someone like Jenny Marvin is super influential, and she is, but that's her job. I don't want to be.

Speaker 2: 18:05

I really appreciate these people, but it's kind of their supposed to be right. And I think the rest of the list is that people actually have other jobs right. They're running an agency, they're running a software company or do other kinds of work, and they do this. Next to that, right next to that, they're still sharing lots of content, creating podcasts, etc. I think that's the part where we need to highlight here. So that's kind of a little thing that you need to know when you enter a name and there's nothing in the top 100.

Speaker 2: 18:30

So, yeah, that's the background on, and just because it makes so much sense to combine these things, because it's about the same audience, create a top 100 was a lot of work. To make sure you can always argue like maybe people are missing there and maybe they are, but then you can vote on them and they will make sure we include them next time. And, yeah, we see a lot of positive response, obviously from the people that are on the top 100 are usually flattered and sharing that with their audience. So it helps us get more served responses and it's going to be a hell of a job.

Speaker 2: 18:57

And one other thing I want to mention about this top 100 is that people like you and I are also on it, and some people may be skeptical about that. Right, they are one of the partners and you are also on it, and I fully understand that, and that's why I want to make a promise that we're going to be super transparent in the eventual top 25, how it has been built, how you know what underlying data has influenced the final position in the top 25, and votes are just about 25% of that, for example, and that's the part we can see right. External people cannot see the votes, but the other data that will influence the top 25 will be very public data, whether it's a number of followers or engagement on your shares, or if you have a podcast or not, and all that stuff is actually already partly on the website.

Speaker 3: 19:45

So I'm hoping people will trust us to be super.

Speaker 2: 19:47

You know, objective and transparent about whoever will be in the eventual top 25.

Speaker 1: 19:52

But it looks like people are trusting us.

Speaker 2: 19:53

so far, so yeah.

Speaker 1: 19:55

Yeah, thanks for mentioning that disclosure and some of the details there. I just want to mention, like that top 100 list. It's already on ppcsurveycom, yeah, and it's so you don't have to wait for the survey to come out and it's just super valuable. I was in a meeting yesterday, a knowledge sharing meeting with it's, with all of the account managers in our company, and you know one of them. She said that she's going to go out and follow everyone all one, just so that she's making, because it's a great way to stay up to date by following these people and get exposed to ideas. And you know that was a recommendation, that that all the account managers go out there and follow these people, and so it's an awesome resource. Just if you're looking for information and experts, it's a great place to find them.

Speaker 2: 20:37

Yeah, and I just followed them on on Twitter, but some of them, quite a few of them, have YouTube channels, podcasts, some of written books, and you will have them directly into those resources as well.

Speaker 1: 20:47

Yeah, yeah, so thanks for putting in the effort there, because it's kind of a significant expansion over, like your typical list. That's just like a name and a headshot, maybe a bio, yeah. So I think we've talked about some, some expectations for this time. Like that, it's going to be a bigger survey and there's going to be some new technology representative there, like AI and performance max. But what about some of like? Because we do, the data is live. You're already seen some of these results flow in and it's a substantial amount, so maybe you can give us some like sneak previews.

Speaker 2: 21:23

Yeah, let's do that. I mean, it's so much neat. We ask a lot of questions and we're doing really well on our goal. We we. Two years ago we had 540 respondents, so we were pretty happy that work for a first edition I see most surveys out there has somewhere between 300 and 700 respondents, and so I thought let's be ambitious this year and let's go for a thousand. Right now we're well on track. I'm going to say the exact number, but we very likely to hit a thousand and probably more than that, because we've just been live for a week. So, yeah, the expectation this time is more response with that, you know, more significance and more options to segment and still keep it significant Right.

Speaker 3: 22:00

With the exception of that.

Speaker 2: 22:01

You know, brands, hiring agencies please, please, have more of those.

Speaker 2: 22:05

So sneak previews, yeah, so I mean, there's a lot and, as I said, right, it's not definitive yet, but you know, with with, with a lot of response that we have now, it's definitely starting to look like we could end up around these, these numbers.

Speaker 2: 22:18

So one of the questions was it was a close question, so was it an open and a question that we asked? Probably almost everyone is, you know, because these are tougher economic times right and two years ago and was curious about, people would expect like budget cuts across the line, just regardless of their performance, or they still see an opportunity grow, to grow the budget or the volumes next year. So and what we see so far now that I think that will change, because it's such a large majority 71% of people say that their goal for PPC in 2024 will be growth, but what we call efficient growth. So they're allowed to grow as long as they hit their ROAS or CPA target, and budget cuts was also one of the options and it's not been chosen very often. So people are still allowed to spend more as long as they reach the CPA or ROAS target which makes me think, obviously, that it's super important to make sure you actually have the right ROAS or CPA target.

Speaker 2: 23:15

That's a different topic in itself, but that's something you need to really think about and then calculate to make sure you have the right target, that it's not either too restrictive or too aggressive. One other fun question was actually an idea by Fredrik Beles, to put this in there this year is asking people that had at least two years of experience because we asked that at the beginning If managing PPC has become harder or easier than two years ago, and actually just 17% has said it became easier. That means the rest of them said it was either about the same or it was harder than two years ago. Yeah, thoughts on that. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 23:50

I mean it's interesting because I think from the platforms if you look like things like Advantage Plus from Meadow or if you look at performance maps from Google they seem to have an intention of making things easier, and I can remember that it's really interesting to hear that it's not playing out that way.

Speaker 2: 24:10

I think so. What's also good to know is that so far, a large portion of our audience has pretty experienced, like the majority has like five plus years of experience. So maybe the audience at Google and Meadow are trying to reach with making things easier, or maybe the less experienced people and just to get started. And yeah, maybe it's easier to get started, but maybe it's not easier to improve and optimize like you're used to and I'm just opening the survey here because these are. Then we ask an open-ended follow-up question like why is it easier or harder? And we will, of course, nice to summarize that, probably with wordclubs or so the final report. But what we see here is actually, if everyone is using the same machine learning, it's pretty hard to distinguish yourself, right, or things like higher CPCs or increased competition or making it tougher to track everything or less control over the campaigns All that type of stuff is what people mention, why they think it's hard.

Speaker 2: 24:57

But, I don't know. That's really hundreds of open-ended questions or answers, so I can summarize it for you now. One of the questions also a new question this year, which is, of course, very relevant because of all the shaking the cushions and that kind of stuff is if your trust in the platforms is higher or lower than what's a year ago, and so we ask for each platform, like Google, twitter, amazon, Meta.

Speaker 2: 25:17

And, yeah, google Twitter are on surprisingly indeed, the losers, where we see the highest rate of people being less trust for those, and actually I think I need LinkedIn, but I think also Microsoft's actually is more increased in trust than decreased.

Speaker 2: 25:33

And I heard about the same, by the way. So I think this was, this was this answer was to be expected, and it's. This is what we need to keep repeating to see how that trust is changing. But I guess people at Google and and at X are aware that they need to work on this with all the news that came out lately, and for that one, yeah, I'm not.

Speaker 1: 25:52

I'm not too surprised to see those two, you know Google, right in the middle of the Department of Justice investigation. Of course there's things are heating up with there's investigations with Meta and Amazon, and it's just a busy time right now, and but then the absolute train wreck that has been X. It's not surprising to see that they're faring the worst. But but let's see, I mean, I would, I would love nothing more than to see trust increasing in these platforms on the next survey.

Speaker 2: 26:23

Yeah, of course, yeah, yeah, Although I do think it's what we see. That that's another question, but I think it's healthy and it's a lack of trust. There's not be the reason, but it's healthy if people start to diversify bit more their at budgets, right? So not not 90% of your budget in Google, but maybe let's try LinkedIn, let's try TikTok or Amazon and see how that plays out. Maybe Google needs a bit of healthy competition, a bit more than they're used to, and some other insights. So, yeah, we see that.

Speaker 2: 26:50

We also ask for all the major campaign types on Google and for all the other platforms, like do people expect to spend more or less on them next year? We see, or about the same, of course, right, we see that standard shopping campaigns that are this been networks or within Google ads, people are spending, expecting to spend less Twitter again, maybe also because of the trust issue, people are definitely expecting to spend less on Twitter ads. And we see an increased expectation for Pmax, youtube, the Vengeance, but also most of the non Google platforms are actually seeing an increased at spend expectation, right? So Microsoft, meta, amazon, tiktok, linkedin all of those score pretty well on their expectations. Of course, this is just what people think right now and or maybe even want. We'll see how it plays out for real spend.

Speaker 2: 27:35

Also, we just like three years ago we asked for satisfaction on all the different features and stuff and Google ads and see again high satisfaction. And then we asked for target Roas for the editors, cribs, things like that we expect. That I thought was surprising and I don't have numbers here, but brought match score pretty well. They know what much had a pretty bad reputation and you know, especially now you don't have brought much modified anymore and so it's like real broad but the word that many people really dissatisfied with broad match. So I found it surprising. Any thoughts on that?

Speaker 1: 28:10

I think it's been. Yeah, it has been an evolution. We've seen definitely the sentiment changing over time and I remember there was some messaging from Google, a certain point that was like hey, I think people are misunderstanding this. You really have to combine broad match with smart bidding. Yeah, see, and. And that gradually got through and that's that's what you'll see. People typically saying is that you know what broad match plus marketing not such a bad combination. I know that there was some interesting research lately from optimizer because they had in the past done some research that said, yeah, we think if you kind of look at the full funnel conversion rate in terms of from impression to to conversion, that's the time you pull funnel there that it's netting more conversions. And but they had a really interesting, pretty lengthy article lately where they're kind of a little bit more cautious once more. It's definitely where the platform is headed, so yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 29:07

Of course, later on we can segment this or even this types of satisfaction scores. Maybe we'll see difference between spend levels, agencies in house, that kind of stuff, or experience. That what I found surprising with. We also asked the question how many scripts do you have running on average in each account? That you have like zero, one, five, 60, 10, 1120, 20. And you know we slightly touched upon this area. But no, indeed there's lots of talk about creating your own squares, which are to be.

Speaker 2: 29:34

You can copy paste hundreds of existing scripts that are just out there. Just Google, free Google and scripts. You'll find them. But in the end 78% picked one to 10. So either one to five or six to 10, and actually the large majority have one to five. So it's not that much if you consider there's hundreds out there. I'm not saying you should have hundreds of scripts in your gun, but I guess my expectation was more like 10, 20 or something like that, because there's so much stuff. I mean, in the end, each script does one thing right. One script checks the URLs from the script, it does this, or I mean there's more fancy stuff right now, especially about PMAX. But so I guess, with all the talk about scripts. In the end, what people have really running like by default is not that much. It's probably a couple of basics, probably like like five, six, seven things. They just want to make sure it's checked or it's whatever. And all the hundreds of other ones are maybe more like yeah, for special cases or something.

Speaker 1: 30:29

I found that was impressive yeah it's interesting, and maybe there's a chance to differentiate in there, if you can find scripts that are, you know, able to, you know, add to your insights or add to your capabilities in a meaningful way.

Speaker 3: 30:44

But it's quite interesting I love to know, like.

Speaker 1: 30:49

Ultimately also, like you know, is there is it almost, in a way, the same scripts that everybody's using, or is everyone's using one to five, but they're always a different one to five.

Speaker 2: 30:59

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that would I mean we already had too many questions. So so when we did last ask them which scripts, I'm like, no, no, we have stuff. This is getting to. But another interesting thing I found, like not so much about you know how you manage your campaigns, but the whole events. At the end we asked about your experience with events, both in-person events and virtual events, and which ones you prefer if you go to both, and we see about 40 to 50% actually prefer in-person events. And we also ask you like, do you think you have enough choice in either or both of these types of events? And about 40% says there aren't enough in-person events in their region. So there's an opportunity here and I can understand it right. There's no more HeroCon, which I was always a.

Speaker 2: 31:45

UK edition and a US edition every year they stopped doing that and as a mix it's not longer doing the US versions of at least the in-person versions of the US, so maybe there's an opportunity here for and we're not going to do it. I'm busy enough now. But someone to relaunch a cool or a fun search marketing or a PPC conference, at least in the US.

Speaker 1: 32:07

I mean, as we, as we're at time of recording as we speak, Brighton SEO is having its first edition in San Diego and it seems like it's a big hit. I think people are hungry for something like that. Yeah, and if you can make an event with the word Brighton and it succeed in San Diego, then I think it's probably low hanging fruit for somebody out there.

Speaker 2: 32:28

Well, even about Brighton SEO. It's called Brighton SEO, but they actually embrace a lot of paid search as well and they have paid search speakers and paid search visitors. So, yeah, I think Brighton SEO is definitely stepping into that gap, and maybe some other parties as well. But I thought it's at least now we have the data right. Maybe some event organizers are afraid there's not enough people wanting this, but I think it's safe to say people want this. So, yeah, I think that was just a few of the early results, but I mean, there's so much more and maybe along the way we'll post some stuff on LinkedIn. I did the other day something about already raised, but it was more me bashing the already rate, because I just wanted to do that for a long time and I have some data.

Speaker 2: 33:06

But yeah that's that there may be a bit more sneak please coming up, maybe in the coming months.

Speaker 1: 33:11

Yeah, well, that's really something to look forward to and I think we're all really excited about the survey being come, you know, getting the complete results early next year. Yeah, maybe you could wrap us up with just, you know, just a last reminder people what's in it for them for taking the survey.

Speaker 2: 33:25

Yeah, yeah, of course, if you go to ppcsurveycom, we try to kind of tell you that also on the homepage. There's nothing like it, right? So and it's, I think it's a very well spent let's say, 10, 15 minutes on average, as talked before, depends on your role, not just to help us with the survey and a point of benefit you'll get for it, like we'll plant a tree for each survey completion. Will you got reports two weeks early? You get a chance to win. We have 70 Amazon gift cards and three versions of the got here as from FD that will give away. So decent chance to win one of these things. You can vote for your favorite ppc experts or support them at the end.

Speaker 2: 34:01

So those are, I think, are in itself already good reasons to fill it in. But also, we can't not do, we can't do it without you, and if, if you don't fill it in, your and your take on things will not be included in this report and I'm pretty sure this report will be kind of widely adopted by the time it's out in March next year. As kind of this is the state of PPC. So I think it's cool that your voice is heard in that state of PPC and I think it has the additional effect of, while we ask you these questions in that survey, it forces you to think about these things and maybe that's actually good Some of the things that you made it and not have thought about for a little while. And then, yeah, that's always good to kind of, yeah, ask yourself some, some questions. Now you know that and now we ask you these questions, so there, are many many reasons to do it, but yeah, it will.

Speaker 2: 34:45

If you're an individual contributor, I'll be honest it probably will take you 15 minutes and maybe, as a consultant, it takes me more than 100 hours to do this whole thing. So I think that's a fair, fair trade.

Speaker 1: 34:55

Well, thank you for putting in those 100 hours and we really appreciate it. Yeah, and any final words?

Speaker 2: 35:01

Wyman no just fill in the survey, go to ppcsurveycom, you will see that list. Indeed, you can read last year's report If you like lists. We've also built a free resource called ppcsoftware. It's kind of similar, actually even using same technology, as the list of ppc experts where we, but the difference is it's filterable. So if you're, we try to make an ultimate collection there of all free and paid solutions in the paid search and ppc space. Out there Also scripts.

Speaker 2: 35:32

So if you go there you just look for some scripts as we mentioned, you can just pick the category scripts and you'll have it handed to you, so that's also a cool resource to check out.

Speaker 1: 35:40

Thanks once more, Wyman, for coming on the show.

Speaker 3: 35:43

And we really appreciate it. Yeah, so do I, looking forward to the final results. Thanks for listening to Growing Ecommerce, and if you enjoyed this podcast, please consider sharing it with coworkers, friends or within your professional network. We really appreciate it. This podcast is produced by Smarter Ecommerce, also known as MEC. To learn more, visit Smarter-Ecommercecom.