My Weekly Marketing

Getting Results with PPC Ads with Andy Janaitis

• Janice Hostager • Season 1 • Episode 137

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In this episode, I talk with strategist Andy Janaitis of PPC Pitbulls to bring clarity back to paid ads. If you’re tired of pouring money into dashboards with nothing to show for it, Andy breaks down how to choose the right platform, structure smarter campaigns, and turn small budgets into real results. We walk through the difference between intent-based traffic on Google and demand-generation on Meta, and how a simple pairing of awareness ads plus retargeting can move people from scrolling to booking.

We also get into clean measurement, stronger creatives, and the lean $20-a-day setup that still works in 2026. Andy shares how to craft hooks that stop the scroll, why landing page continuity matters, and how free tools like Microsoft Clarity help diagnose drop-offs. We look ahead at how AI and answer engines are changing discovery and why clear FAQs and transparent content help your brand surface where decisions start. If you want a practical, future-ready plan, this conversation will help you get there.

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Janice Hostager:

I'm Janice Hostager. After three decades in the marketing business and many years of being an entrepreneur, I've learned a thing or two about marketing. Join me as we talk about marketing, small business, and life in between. Welcome to My Weekly Marketing. If you've ever run pay-per-click ads, or if maybe you've just stared at your Meta ads dashboard and felt like you're trying to read a foreign language, like hieroglyphics maybe, or if you even don't know where to start with pay-per-click ads and really want to skip ads altogether. Today we're finally demystifying this beast. I'm sitting down with Andy Janaitis, the founder and chief strategist of PayPerClick Pitbulls, or PPC Pitbulls, a boutique digital marketing agency that helps small business scale past seven figures using Google and Meta-ads. Andy is a former engineer and analytics whiz turned digital strategist, so he brings that magical combo of brain power and practicality to the table and to our conversation today. What I love about Andy is that he strips away the complexity. No jargon, no "you must spend $10,000 a month to be relevant" nonsense. Just real talk that helps you make confident decisions without being swallowed by the overwhelm of it all. If ads have ever felt confusing or intimidating or felt like an expensive gamble, then this episode is definitely for you. Andy shares some super simple tips that you can literally use today to decide whether Meta-ads or Google Ads are the right move for you. Andy has some great tips for making them work. So let's get into my conversation with Andy. Welcome to My Weekly Marketing.

Andy Janaitis:

Thanks for having me.

Janice Hostager:

So let's get right into this, because there are so many gems in what you're talking about here today that I have a lot of questions for you. So for the overwhelmed business owner, which I feel like is a lot of us, how do we know where to run digital ads? Like where do we even start the process?

Andy Janaitis:

Yeah. So this comes up a lot, right? We'll have clients come or potential clients. And a lot of times people will say, "Hey, I heard about this great technique, or I know I've got to be on Meta ads," or "Hey, I know I've got to be running Google ads and doing this specific tactic that I heard some guru on YouTube telling me about." And oftentimes we like to take a step back and make sure that some of the key fundamentals are in place and that we really understand our goals. Because a lot of times, while we're a paid ads agency, we really believe in the power of paid ads. It's also really easy to lose some money pretty quick if you don't have things set up properly and you know what you're doing to get started. It's not back in the Wild West days where it's like you could slap any old ad together and throw it up on Facebook and bring in some revenue from it. There's a lot of kind of gotchas in in the system. So I would say one of the first things is to really understand what your goals are and what you're looking to get out of ads. So the first instinct is just to say, hey, I want more leads or more revenue. But really understanding, are you trying to expand in a particular geography? Are you looking to push fills on your website versus local visits to a storefront? All of these different things are going to change your strategy. And then also thinking about not only what your goals are, but what your constraints are. It's like realistically, how much budget do you have to spend? And what types of creative do you have available to you? And do you have the ability to create more video and image to really supply the ads with the creative that they're going to need? Getting all that figured out first is really going to help dictate what the strategy is moving forward and what the best way to meet your goals is.

Janice Hostager:

Gotcha. Yes, I 100% agree with that. Just based on my own experience and experience with clients too, it really does matter where you want to go and where you're heading with all of this. Talk to me a little bit about search intent too, because I have customers that think that they want to be on Meta, but really sometimes it's better for them to be investing in some Google ads. So how do you how does that play into the big picture?

Andy Janaitis:

Yeah, we say it's different for every business, but largely we think and and where your service-based business is and you're doing work locally, that's where Google often performs really well. So I like to think of it in in terms of what's happening on those two platforms. So on Google, we like to think of that as you mentioned, intent, intent-based marketing. So what's really, really great about Google is that when somebody searches, we know exactly what they're looking for. And before we get in front of them with our ad, we know that they're a person who's looking for our services. Whereas Meta is what we call interruption-based marketing. So somebody's just scrolling their feed, they're looking through, they're just kind of entertaining themselves or doing something different. And then we're gonna pop up and get an ad in front of them that they weren't necessarily expecting. So, because of those two different kinds of delivery systems, Google is gonna be really, really good if you have a service that people know that they're looking for. You know, if you're gonna replace an HVAC system because somebody's HVAC is down, Google's gonna be great because it's, hey, I'm looking, oh, I'm only showing up on ads where somebody is searching for HVAC repairman in my area, kind of thing. So you know that they're in market, they're ready to work with you. If on the other hand, and even it could be the same business, but imagine that same HVAC company says, hey, we need to educate people a little bit that really they should be doing regular maintenance that they may not even know about, they need to get their system cleaned on a regular basis. That's not something that they're gonna be searching for. So that's where Meta may perform a little bit better because you have that space where you're popping up in front of them, you have some space to educate them and let them know about the service that you offer that they may not even know that they need yet. So that's how I like to think about it. If your main push and what you're trying to get done with ads is selling a service that people are coming to you for, they've got high intent, they know that they need this product or service right at that particular time. By all means go the Google route. If it's on the other side, if you have something that takes a little bit more education, somebody doesn't even know they need it before they see your ad, that's where Meta is going to perform really well.

Janice Hostager:

And there's other platforms too, like there's Pinterest and LinkedIn.

Andy Janaitis:

Exactly.

Janice Hostager:

Yeah.

Andy Janaitis:

I'm glad you brought that up too. Cause a lot of times people will come to us and say, hey, I've got to be on, I hear people are doing really well on Pinterest, or you know, I've got to be on Reddit and advertising there. And certainly that is a great place to expand once you start seeing some early results. But I always tell people make sure you maximize 90% of the ad impact, I would say, we see coming through Google and Meta. That's why I really focus on those two platforms first. So if you're just dipping your toe in, you're just getting started, start with one of those two big platforms. You know, don't, don't, uh, it's almost like sometimes people try to get a little bit too clever and try, hey, I'm just gonna try this little thing here. And certainly, you know, you'll hit a point where it makes sense to expand into some of these other channels, but keep it simple, right? And just a lot of times you work with one of those bigger platforms and see if you can be profitable there first before going down some of these more niche routes.

Janice Hostager:

And that makes sense. I mean, if you don't have an audience on Pinterest to begin with, then you probably don't want to be advertising there either, right?

Andy Janaitis:

You know, it could be like one of the few situations where you would start there if you have a really strong following, say on Pinterest, or hey, I've got 10,000 followers on LinkedIn already. Maybe I'll start with ads there. But just as far as like capabilities and the ability to measure results, that the Google and Meta are just so head and shoulders above in terms of kind of their maturity as an ad platform that 90% of the time, if you're just dipping just a little bit of investment, you're gonna be able to get the most impact out of those biggest platforms.

Janice Hostager:

The biggest bank pay buck, huh? Just out of curiosity, have you tried, have you run ads on Reddit?

Andy Janaitis:

Uh, we haven't gotten into Reddit yet. Okay. We've done some LinkedIn, we don't typically do a ton of LinkedIn as like a service, but we've done LinkedIn just for ourselves, trying to market ourselves as an agency. Um challenge there is it can get really, really expensive. But I know you know Reddit is is kind of the hot new thing. It's just coming down the pipe. We haven't really experimented with it yet.

Janice Hostager:

Yeah, yeah. I that would be interesting for me because I don't spend as much time on Reddit as I used to, but it's certainly a great place to get a feel for what questions people are asking if if you do are an industry that people are asking a lot of questions. But they have been historically really brutal to anybody that tries to promote themselves too heavily. So I'm curious how Reddit ads will work. But also I've noticed they come up a lot in Google searches now, Reddit posts too.

Andy Janaitis:

So it's it's an exciting new frontier now that they're the ads available. One fun side thing that we love to use on Reddit. When you go onto Reddit, in the menu, they've got something called answers, and it says it's in beta, so it's relatively new, but we've been using that a ton recently where you can ask, it's it's AI driven, so you can ask a regular question either about your brand or about just anything in your industry, and it will give you it's almost as if you're on a Chat GPT or a perplexity, but it will back everything up with a citation to a specific Reddit post. So it's great for, hey, what types of problems are our customers in my industry facing? Or especially if your brand name is big enough that that people are talking about it a little on Reddit, you can query and say, hey, people who've tried my product, are they saying good things or bad things? Or like what are the complaints when somebody has a complaint? And it will aggregate it and give you a summary and then actually link out to specific posts where people put that in.

Janice Hostager:

Oh, that's cool. I'll flip into that one.

Andy Janaitis:

Yeah, it's been really powerful.

Janice Hostager:

So, how how about the customer journey? Obviously, awareness is something I think people usually focus on during the customer journey in terms of ads, also maybe retargeting. Is one platform better than another for that? Or does it really depend?

Andy Janaitis:

It's interesting. It does depend to a degree and both platforms. So typically we would say that, hey, Meta, because it's got that kind of interruption base, people don't know they're looking for you, it's great for awareness, right? Because it's your opportunity to get in front of somebody when they're not aware of you and really describe what you do as a service and your differentiator. That being said, Google is really catching up quickly with the YouTube platform. So if you have good video and image content, Google's not just search anymore. In fact, we find we get much better results using a Google campaign type called Performance Max, which shows up not only in search, but also with those five second skippable ads on YouTube videos, as well as display ads in the sidebar when you're browsing around the internet. So both platforms will give you capabilities in that kind of display and awareness area. One important thing with awareness, because a lot of times agencies will come in, they'll say, hey, you've got to be spending a ton of money on awareness, or we want to try this awareness play. Typically, awareness-based advertising. So this is when you're getting in front of somebody, not necessarily with a call to action and getting them to sign up for your service, but you're just trying to make sure that they understand the problem that you solve and why you're uniquely positioned in order to solve it. The challenge is that's often not super measurable. You're putting the money into those ads and hopefully people are seeing you and you're top of mind later on when the problem does come up and they're ready to use you. But what we find is we typically almost always will pair awareness ads with conversion-specific ads. So, hey, it's great that we're getting in front of people and we're building awareness with that top-of-funnel ad, but we've got to make sure that we're then retargeting them and ultimately getting conversions in a way that we can measure. Otherwise, again, it's a quick way to throw some money away if you're spending a couple thousand a month on ads that you hope are getting in front of people. And certainly you can measure that they're getting in front of people, but you hope that they're driving new awareness, but maybe they are, maybe they're not, you know.

Janice Hostager:

And that's been something I've been trying on Facebook ads, is just putting out reels of not necessarily even a call to action in them, just to find a warm audience. And then later on, what you're saying is go back and retarget them. But I'm not far enough along yet where I know if it's really a successful strategy. I don't know what you have found with that, but yeah, exactly.

Andy Janaitis:

We love to use that anytime we're on Meta. That's typically our approach, is kind of a top of funnel where it's pretty broad. Oftentimes we're not even necessarily talking about ourselves as a company. We're talking about the problem that the person is facing. And sometimes we even take it one step further and say, hey, don't talk about the problem. Talk about the symptoms of the problem, right? So, you know, it's not that you don't have a strong HVAC provider yet, or hey, you need to find somebody you can trust to come in and solve your HVAC problems. It's actually one step further and say, hey, you're cold in the wintertime or hot in the summertime, really that that pain point that the customer is experiencing. That's what we like to do at the awareness and the top of funnel level. And then we can see when people engage with that. So if people watch the video all the way to completion or people click on the ad to learn a little bit more, that's where now we can say, hey, okay, those ads didn't necessarily have a clear call to action or a clear conversion path, but we do have an engaged audience that came out of that. So now let's retarget them with ads that are a little bit more clear of, hey, we've got a $99 service call. So go ahead and sign up with us so we can come and solve your problem for you.

Janice Hostager:

Right, right. With interruption based marketing too, I think that's a good lesson to all of us. I think it we get a little bit when we're putting ad together, especially for our own businesses, because I think we have a real blind spot with our own stuff, you know. But uh it really has to grab them as they're scrolling through the feed, right? So they really have to it has to be something that they can really attach to fast. So that that initial hook has to be very strong.

Andy Janaitis:

Exactly. That's so important.

Janice Hostager:

So if someone is starting from zero and let's say they decide they want to do some Meta ads and they figured out who their they know who their ideal customer is, and let's say so what why don't you walk us through what you would recommend, like in terms of a starting point for doing media ads? Let's say they haven't run any before.

Andy Janaitis:

Yeah. So these days on in both platforms, you know, typically we're using automated bidding techniques. So what that means is you're not doing a ton of targeting based on very specific customer demographics or very specific customer intents. More often what you're doing is saying, hey, I'm gonna go ahead and measure once people view the ad or click on the ad, what actually happens? Do they ultimately fill out a lead form? Do they ultimately make a purchase from me? And then I'm gonna use that information to then go ahead and optimize. And the other piece of this is we're gonna use the right creative, the right videos and images that really speak to our ideal client and our ideal clients are most likely to engage with. And that's how we're gonna target who the ads get shown to, as opposed to manually targeting that audience. So, all that to be said, the two really important things that you need to have there is one, a good understanding of who your audience is, and more importantly, like we just discussed, what are the pain points that they're feeling? That's where you're gonna start to make your videos and images that you're gonna use in your ads all around those kind of points. And then two, you want to make sure that you're technically set up right so that that signal, as we call it, is is getting pushed back to Meta. So when somebody hits your website, you really understand where did they come from? Did they ultimately take the action you wanted them to take, fill out a lead form, make a purchase from you on the website, and then we're successfully passing that data back into Meta so it can optimize and start showing up for other people like those people who met your goals.

Janice Hostager:

Okay. Okay. So here's the thing that gets me about Meta ads. And I've been doing this since the days of the Power Editor, which was probably long before you even started doing this. So it was like really rudimentary at the beginning, right? So there was just like you picked everything.

Andy Janaitis:

Yeah.

Janice Hostager:

And now Meta wants to pick everything. And I am really kind of I don't know, a little uncomfortable with that, I guess. Is that something that you recommend you let them them choose? Because I mean, yes, they have all these data points on every single user on all of their platforms, but how much are they in it to make money and how much of it how how do you much do you trust them? I guess that's my question.

Andy Janaitis:

Yeah, I would say at a high level from trend perspective, we get better results when we rely on kind of those automated processes, right? So both Meta and Google are set up these days that you're gonna be more successful if you're not you can you can hurt yourself by trying to hold those reins too closely, I'll say. The big caveat there though is as you mentioned, both of those platforms are in it to make money. And oftentimes they'll give you suggestions that are not in your own best interest. So you've got to understand why you're making the decisions you're making. So, you know, a good example that that we like to look at. So I mentioned kind of audience targeting. So when in on Meta, they have a feature called Advantage Plus that's essentially saying, hey, I'm not gonna tell you exactly the demographics or exactly the audiences to target. Instead, I'm gonna let you go out and find the right people who are engaging with my ads and get in front of them. And you can also add a suggestion and say, hey, these are the types of people to start with, and then you can go beyond that and find more people. That works pretty well, and we we like to use that as long as we have, you know, again, good data flowing back into the system so that it is able to optimize. On the other hand, something else they do is, hey, we'll have you know automated updates to your images and automated updates to the text and the copy there, you know, and use AI to generate new headlines and images. Sometimes that can work and that can be okay, but it can also present a brand safety issue, right? If there's you know certain things, especially in certain industries, there's certain things that you're not allowed to say, or there's certain things that you know aren't technically correct about the services you offer, you've got to be really, really careful to make sure you understand what are those auto-generated pieces that are getting injected into your ads. So oftentimes we'll leave those turned off. For some businesses, it's great because it can help take a little bit of information and generate it a little bit further. Or if they have limited creative to use, there's certain tools we can use to kind of expand what's available to them. But those ones I think you do have to be a little bit more careful and controlled about. So all that to say, I think generally the automated approaches are very helpful, but you've got to know what you're doing because again, it can get away from you quickly if you just follow all the suggestions that Meta or Google gives you.

Janice Hostager:

Right, right. I've uh had clients that have run into trouble with that in the past. I think Google is actually well, I don't know now, Meta's gotten kind of complex too, but I think Google initially seemed was so complex that people would easily lose a lot of money on Google running ads themselves and and just not understanding the bigger picture of it. You know, it's not necessarily easy to go step by step with some of these. With with Meta, I I have been unimpressed by their design suggestions for sure, and also some of their headline suggestions. I was like, no, no, sorry. Yeah, some of them are horrible. But you know, it's AI, and I know that AI is in the tendency right now-ish. So we'll see what happens in the future with that. So when you're working with a new client, so what mistakes do you see that that people make generally when they rush into launching an ad too fast?

Andy Janaitis:

Yeah. So a few of the things, one, we talked a lot about measurement early. That's probably the number one thing is before we just start running ads, make sure that you understand or that you're technically set up so that that signal is coming back in. The platform has as much data as possible so it actually can be successful and optimized. Um, that's something that's really, really important. Another thing is trying to do kind of too much, especially with small budgets. We say simplify, simplify, simplify, right? So oftentimes we'll find an account where they're spending, sometimes even with bigger budgets, but with small budgets especially. And you say, hey, we're putting in $1,000 a month or $1,500 a month, and then we look into the account and there's eight different campaigns. So it's like, okay, you're taking that small budget and you're splitting it now eight different ways. The problem there is you just don't have enough data coming back. Any one of those ads might have gotten less than 100 clicks, say. Or if you're looking for a lead form, some of those ads might have less than four or five lead forms. So if you have so little data coming back in, one, there's no opportunity for the model to optimize at all because you've split your budget so far that no one campaign has enough data, has enough actions coming back into it to be able to optimize. And two, it's very easy to start making decisions poorly when you have so little data to make your own kind of manual decisions on it to say, hey, this campaign is doing better than this campaign. Oftentimes we'll find like, hey, after a week or two is run, if you only have one lead form in one and three lead forms in the other, that might just be statistically good luck or bad luck for one or the other campaigns. You really need to have enough data in that's to say that, hey, this has a better conversion rate or this has a cheaper cost per acquisition. And not only does it have that over a very small amount of data, but as we start to grow that data, those relationships hold and it's statistically significant. So that's one probably one of the next largest mistakes we see people make is just splitting into a million different campaigns or a million different creative types, and then making decisions too quickly when there's really not enough statistically significant data in there to make those decisions.

Janice Hostager:

Gotcha. Gotcha. So let's say somebody is going to run one campaign. They're let's say four lead magnets, for example. Do they so they do one campaign? Do they split it out still by different ad sets, or do you suggest one ad set and then multiple ads? Well, say $20 a day. Yeah. So small budget. What would be the best way of making that $20 a day really work for them so that they can, number one, see how well things are really performing without being so granular that you know they missed a mark altogether.

Andy Janaitis:

Exactly. Yeah. So I do like to split ad sets on themes. So start to think through if we have, and and the reason for that is it's easy at that point to roll the creative up and to kind of understand how a different type of creative is performing. Um, so an example I'll give sometimes if you have video versus static. You might have, okay, this is my video ad set, and this is my static ad set. When you can kind of see now, okay, how much spend went into each one, how many conversions did I get out of each one, and start to make those decisions. You can break it down even more granular and say, hey, these are my static images around this particular theme, or these are my static images that have text overlays on them, and these are my static images that are clean with no text overlays on them. Or similarly, in video, you could say, hey, these are my founder-driven videos and these are my customer UGC driven videos and break those into different groups. And then inside each of those ad sets, you could say, hey, I'm trying out four or five different variations. If I'm in the UGC videos, I've got four or five different pieces of UGC, but those are all kind of grouped together into UGC videos as an ad set. So I think that can work really well just from a measurement standpoint to see where things are coming in. And with that small of a budget, typically what I would suggest is don't set budgets at the ad set level. So what you're doing is say, hey, I've got one campaign, I might break it into a bunch of ad sets, and then I just go ahead and let Meta go crazy with do I give $10 to this one ad set and one dollar to this other ad set, or vice versa, as opposed to setting it and saying, hey, no, I want you to spend evenly across all of those ad sets. Spending evenly will certainly get you a little bit more data in a little more quickly, or make sure that you have data coming into every one of those types of creative that you're using. The downside there though is if you only have, say, $20 a day, you have so little data coming into any one, it's tough to, again, hit that level of like statistical significance. So when you let Meta just say, hey, I'm gonna spend more in this particular ad set or less in this particular ad set, that's kind of letting Meta say, hey, you know, based on the algorithm, this is what we think is going to perform the best, or this is the ads that we expect to perform the best. So when you have those very, very small budgets, that's where I would lean on Meta to make those decisions as opposed to manually making them yourself.

Janice Hostager:

Gotcha. And what length of time would you recommend running something like that?

Andy Janaitis:

So we typically want to see between 30 to 50, really on both platforms, we'll say just as a rule of thumb, and it's different for every business, but you know, say 30 to 50 conversions before we start making a ton of a ton of decisions on turning things off or turning things on, that type of thing. So part of it is gonna depend on where your budget is and is your budget big enough that it's going to push that many conversions in. Obviously, if you have a much larger budget, you can pivot and make these changes more quickly because you have more data coming in. If you have a small budget and you're just kind of dipping your toe, oftentimes, especially at that $20 a day, it's probably gonna be a while before you get to that 30, 50 conversions, especially depending on if you have a higher ticket offer, it might be a lot longer before you get 30 to 50 conversions. That's where you're gonna have to start to be smart about making decisions on one step up. If you're not getting that many conversions, maybe we can start to make decisions on what are folks engaging with and driving to the website cheapest, or what are the ads that people are most likely to watch the whole video all the way through at least. Because those you'll have a little bit more data on. You'll have more video views, obviously, than you'll have people going to the website, and you'll have more people going to the website than you'll have ultimately lead forms or conversions, whatever it is on your website. So just kind of thinking through that before you really start making these decisions, you want probably 30 to 50 good data pieces before you start choosing this one's actually performing better than this one.

Janice Hostager:

Okay. Okay. So just to reiterate, so if you really do have a small budget, say $20 a day, one ad, maybe a couple of ad sets, and up to 10, 8, 10 ads.

Andy Janaitis:

Like you could, I mean, with that small of a budget, you probably I'd probably even compress it a little bit further than that. I probably wouldn't spread it that wide, but I'd, you know, I'd probably go with maybe one campaign with a video ad set and a static ad set, uh, and then maybe two or three videos and three or four images, something like that. Just very rough numbers. It could be different for different for different companies, but you don't need to go crazy. Like try to test with just a little bit first.

Janice Hostager:

Okay. Okay. Yeah. So it's just a matter of, I mean, letting it's really a matter of letting Meta decide at that point too, what it wants to show people. Exactly. I would imagine based on the algorithm. Okay. And and then, oh, go ahead.

Andy Janaitis:

I was just going to add too to that. The creative is so, so important. And a lot of times you'll see gurus out there that are talking about creative variations. And hey, we tested a hundred different variations on this specific video before we got to the one that was performing best. A lot of times people get caught up in that type of advice. And a lot of that is really for bigger brands that are spending with much larger budgets. So people will say, oh man, I've got to get, if I'm looking at UGC, I've got to get 10 different creators to create individual pieces of UGC content for me first. And then I'd like variations of hooks and bodies and mix and match all these different things. Ultimately, the number one thing, if you're spending $20 a day, if you're at that level in your business, the number one thing is to really lock in what's your messaging, what's the pain point that you're solving, and who your ideal customer is. And as you start to get those things right, those small variations of, hey, tweaking this hook mixed with this body, or if people even go to the level of like, hey, I've got a blonde creator versus a brown haired creator, it's like those types of decisions later on will make a lot of a lot of impact because the creative really does matter. And some creative goes viral and some doesn't. But at that first stage, like you're just testing your basic messaging. Like, don't overthink it. Just get a couple good ads that are your best guess based on your knowledge of the customer of like, these are what's going to resonate with my customer, and test those out first. Don't think about, hey, I've got to have again like 10, 20, 80 variations right as you're getting started with a very small budget.

Janice Hostager:

Yeah, that can really bog you down too, especially in the in the creative part of it. You're doing different ads at different sizes, and it just gets to be too much. And of course, there is something you touched on briefly, there is the landing page as well. So if you're sending somebody to an optimized landing page, you want to make sure that that content resonates with the ad.

Andy Janaitis:

Exactly. Yeah. You want to make sure that the content that's in your ad is matching the content that they're going to see on the website. So a simple way for service-based providers, we think that is just make sure you're matching up the offers. You know, if you're describing that, hey, we do a free initial estimate call or a free proposal type call, and then you send people to the page and that offer isn't really listed on the landing page, or hey, it's more generally like a pricing page or something like that, there's going to be a dissonance there, and that's where people start to drop off. So make sure that you have a really tight path from the information given in the creative to what they're going to find when they hit the landing page. And then that's where it becomes a measurement thing. A lot of times people will say, hey, I put in my $20 a day. I ran it for a month, two months, didn't really see the results I wanted to get. What do I do next? What do I change? What do I do better? And that's where you can start to look and say, hey, is the cost per click too high? Is it seven, eight dollars just to get somebody to click to the landing page? Hey, maybe it's a problem with your ads. It's not resonating with them. They're nobody's really engaging, nobody's clicking and getting to your site. Or you might say, hey, my cost per click has come down. I've got good cheap traffic coming to the site, but once they hit there, nobody converts. My conversion rate is super low. Okay, maybe the ads are fine, but you got to change what's happening when people hit that site and figure out. What you can do to add a little more social proof, or what you can do to be a little clearer on exactly what the offer is. And a great tool I always like to recommend for people on that landing page side. If you're looking to optimize the landing page, we use Microsoft Clarity quite a bit. It's a free tool and it actually gives you recordings of what's happening when people hit the page. So you'll be able to go back and see, hey, these are the people who converted. How much time did they spend in each section? Or hey, watch some of the people who dropped. And do they all scroll down to the same point and then ultimately drop? Is there a specific point on the page where people start to get confused or they're not seeing the testimonials that they'd like to see, or they're just not comfortable with your service, and that's where they drop. Okay, now I know where to go on the landing page and where to edit, where to add new components in. That can be a really, really powerful thing to see the actual behavior of people when they're on your site. So that's Microsoft Clarity is a good free tool for that.

Janice Hostager:

Okay. I'll put the link to that in the show notes as well. And and the whole process can be extremely frustrating. And I've been at it both as a creator and as somebody who is working with clients to do the same thing. But the numbers do tell a story and it's usually not personal. I think that was the thing. I think especially as solopreneurs, we we kind of take offense initially and think maybe nobody wants my product or my service or whatever. It could feel harsh and painful at some times. But but yeah, looking at the analytics makes a huge difference because then you can see where people are dropping off and where the funnel's getting clogged. And then go ahead and change that. So yeah, I'm glad that you brought that up. So what changes are coming up that business owners should be prepared for, especially to those without a tech team or people running their ads?

Andy Janaitis:

Yeah.

Janice Hostager:

Anything that you know of.

Andy Janaitis:

So we definitely see increased reliance on AI throughout everything. One of the first places, and we've talked about this at length already, is making sure that you're relying on some of the automated systems. It's not just manual keyword targeting or manual audience targeting anymore. It's really making sure that you give the platforms you're measuring properly and then give the platforms a space. So that's the first place where automated bidding is getting better and better and better. Make sure you're using the power of that and relying on that tool in both platforms. The other thing on the kind of AI side is it really does change the discoverability. So people aren't necessarily searching the way they were previously, where you search in Google and you get a bunch of links and you click through and do your research on each individual web page. A lot of times you're getting the answer right at the top of those search results if you're on Google, or maybe you're not even going to Google, you're on Chat GPT or Perplexity. So people are getting a lot of information about your business before they ever hit the website or before they ever get to the page. So there's different techniques in the same way that we used to optimize for showing up in the search engine, search engine optimization or SEO. Now you've got to think about how are you presenting yourself and showing up in these LLMs. We call that answer engine optimization or AEO. So that's a really big thing that small businesses can start to get ahead of. A great piece of advice I like to say is go to ChatGPT and say, hey, can you show me the companies that are providing X service to this type of customer in my local area and see if you get mentioned or not. And if you're not, then figure out what is it about those competitors, what are where are their differentiators? Make sure that you're getting that information and putting it onto your website. The big thing for that is using structured data. So things like FAQs work really, really well now because people are asking these questions and getting an answer directly. They're not seeing a list of links, they're actually getting a text-based answer. So figure out what those key questions your customers are asking. Things like what is the cost to get this particular project done? Or what are some things to think about when I'm hiring an agency to do this particular thing for me? Questions in FAQ sections to make sure that you're showing up and your information is showing up as often as possible in the LLMs.

Janice Hostager:

Great advice. Yeah, I just recently did an episode all about that. So I'll put the link to that in the show notes as well. Now you have a checklist, right? That will help people get set up for ads.

Andy Janaitis:

Yes, yeah. So as we mentioned, there's a lot of fundamentals that people typically need to be aware of. So we have that checklist of those key things that you want to make sure you have in place before you ever spend a dime on ads. It's really important to make sure that you've got your website set up properly, you're measuring things, all the things that we've talked about today. So we've got that checklist. If you come to ppcpitbulls.com, you can down that download that checklist. If that's a little overwhelming, you can always just book a call with me too, and we'll walk through it together and figure out what your next best step is and where you can go to get your ads running properly.

Janice Hostager:

All great, great stuff. And of course, I'll put the link to that in the show notes as well. Thank you so much, Andy. I have just been overwhelmed by the amount of information that you shared with us today, so I really appreciate it.

Andy Janaitis:

Awesome.

Janice Hostager:

So I hope that Andy's advice gave you a little more confidence to go ahead and jump into pay-per-click ads. For more information about Andy or anything we talked about today, visit myweeklymarketing.com forward slash one thirty seven. And please hit the follow button so you never miss an episode. Thanks so much for spending time with me today. I'll see you next week. Bye for now.

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Janice Hostager

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