Speakers

📢 Here are the current speakers we have for this event. We will also hear from you – the event is all about taking part.

Is Google Poaching Your Clients?

The phone rings. It’s one of your clients. 

Whenever a client calls you up, you’re never quite sure if it’s going to be good or bad, but… nothing could prepare you for this.

“Hey,” they begin uneasily. ‘ Google called – they said there were a few things we weren’t doing with the account that could improve performance.’

You roll your eyes.

“They mentioned something about optimisation techniques we should be using. They made it sound like we’re missing out on some big opportunities, and, well, we thought we should talk to you about it first.”

Sound familiar?

Jon Darch, founder of Uprated, says that this kind of thing is happening all the time.

“Google calls up our clients and wants to talk to them about how they can ‘help’ with optimisation, even though they know they have an agency,” says Jon. “It completely undermines us.”

“It makes clients question our expertise because they think, ‘Well, we must listen to someone from Google. And that person from Google is probably not even an account strategist – they’re a salesperson!”

Jon has been lucky in that they haven’t lost any clients to these conniving tactics, but there are plenty of other agencies that most likely have.

“I’ve seen loads of horror stories where clients get called up by Google, and it causes issues,” he says. “It can erode confidence a little bit, and I’m sure there are others that have had poorer experiences than us.”

You only have to do some research and you’ll find tons of articles, tweets and posts on the issue. 

Whilst Google claims they’re planning on resolving these issues, there is no timeline of when this will happen.

👉 At PPC Leaders, Jon will be joining us on stage to lead a discussion about this Google problem. Take part and vent your frustration – and find out new and productive ways of handling this situation.

How to Leverage LinkedIn for Paid Ads

LinkedIn keeps insisting that you need a minimum audience size of 50,000 people for your ad campaign.

But Jennifer Esty, managing director at Sharp Ahead, thinks that’s a load of rubbish.

“Literally every time we create a LinkedIn campaign and it tells me that I need a minimum audience size of 50,000, I just swipe that notification away and ignore it,” she says. “It’s asinine, frankly, for a niche B2B company.”

According to Jennifer, success on LinkedIn often means ignoring the platform’s so-called ‘best practices’ and doing it your own way.

But how?

  • Spotlight vs. Text Ads – “We’ve been noticing a shift towards showing more spotlight ads and fewer text ads; we’re also seeing much higher click through rates on those spotlight ads versus text ads.”
  • Mastering LinkedIn’s Ad Library – “They have an ad library where you can go and have a sneak peek at all your competitors’ ads to see what they’re doing and what ads they’re running.”
  • Strategic Placement Management – “If you are doing a lot of advertising on LinkedIn, you definitely should be mindfully managing where your brand placements are.”

But it’s not easy. You have to constantly adapt your content strategy to keep up with the changes, whilst also not breaking the bank when generating leads.

“The last few campaigns that we have done, we’re seeing more like 100 to 200 pound CPLs for those downloads,” says Jennifer, referring to white paper campaigns that used to cost 30-40 pounds per lead.

👉 At PPC Leaders, Jennifer will take you through how to really leverage LinkedIn ad campaigns effectively, even when it means going against the grain. Afterall, LinkedIn’s one-size-fits-all advice isn’t exactly the most accurate.

Three Ways to Recover ROAS in Google Ads

The PPC space has been getting increasingly difficult to navigate, especially as Google is employing more and more aggressive tactics to squeeze more money out of businesses.

“We’ve recently had quite a few conversations where businesses have said, ‘our performance has degraded over the last two years’,” says Matt Janaway, CEO of Marketing Labs

“We’re telling them that there are things we can look at in their account, and we can probably find some mismanagement there – but it’s unrealistic for them to expect us to get them back to where they were.”

As Matt says, “Google’s been really naughty”. 

They’ve increased cost-per-click rates by 20-30%; they’re pushing AI-driven campaigns; and they’re blurring the line between ads and organic results.

So what can be done about it?

According to Matt, there are three key things agencies need to be doing:

  1. Uncover hidden data with custom scripts – Matt’s been using scripts to get data out of ads accounts, which not a lot of agencies are doing.
  2. Maximise cookie compliance – “The more data you feed Google, the better it performs. So if you can increase the number of people accepting cookies, you’re getting more data through.”
  3. Supercharge assets with continuous optimisation – “Test two product images and see which one converts best in six months; throw away the one that doesn’t convert very well, and make a variation based on the best performer. Run the test again, and repeat.”

👉 At PPC Leaders, Matt will delve deeper into these three strategies, providing practical tips and real-world examples. He’ll even share a free script that agencies can use to start extracting more data from their Google Ads accounts.

“How We Use PPC Data to Outperform AI”

Fred Maude, CEO and co-founder of Addesu, stared at his computer screen, a sense of frustration building. 

Google’s Performance Max campaigns were like a black box, hiding crucial data that his agency needed to optimise their clients’ ads. There had to be a way to peek inside.

“For the first year of P-max, I hated it and wanted it to go away,” says Fred. “But when I realised it wasn’t going to go away, that’s when we started building stuff.”

This realisation sparked a journey that would transform how Fred approached PPC in the age of AI.

“We pull insights from things like Pmax campaigns and are able to find what search terms clients are showing up on, which is something that was being hidden for the vast majority,” Fred explains. “We’re also able to advise them on ways they can reduce spend on certain search terms.”

But he didn’t stop at just uncovering insights, they’ve taken it a step further: they developed their own AI tools.

“So off the back of the tools that are out there on the market, we’re generating two of our own AI tools at the moment,” he explains. “It actually optimises your product data and your product feed for Google Shopping.”

“We built this in collaboration with a leading Spanish football brand”

👉 Join us at PPC Leaders where Fred will share some of the insights they’ve gained from Pmax data, including search term visibility, platform performance and asset management. If you’re concerned that AI is going to make your PPC agency obsolete, this session is here to help you feel more secure.