Seth & Brad Geddes: Paid Search 360

BluShark Digital

Welcome to the SEO Insider with your host, Seth Price founder of BluShark taking you inside the world of legal marketing and all things digital.

Seth Price

Welcome, everybody to the SEO insider Brad Geddes who has been involved in PPC since 1998. He's a co founder of Adalysis, and ad testing and recommendation platform and a member of the programming team for SMX Events. Brad is the author of Advanced Google AdWords, the most advanced book ever written on the topic. Welcome, Brad.

Brad Geddes

Oh, thanks for having me, Seth.

Seth Price

You know, this is a great life event for myself. When I first decided to get serious about Google AdWords. I said, Okay, who is the speaker, best speaker on this. And it happened to be your road tripping through I guess you were lived there, but you had an event in DC. And I sat for several days and just sopped up as much knowledge as I could. And I was lucky because you were there. And since then, my my team has flown around the country to hear you speak at, you know, from PubCon and other places just to get the inside scoop on what both fundamentals but also sort of where you could play around the edges with PPC?

Brad Geddes

Yeah, that's the fun part. Right? I mean, you got to know the fundamentals, but playing around the edges and seeing what else can be done. Right can be enjoyable, tricky was was legal stuff.

Seth Price

No, absolutely. And that, that is one of those things that I've tried so hard, you know, it's one thing to know it yourself. But to scale it for a team to do it, I find to be one of those those great challenges in life. And I think to a certain extent, I almost like the Wizard of Oz reference, which is dependent. So I come from a legal space, meaning that's that's where I built my business. And we now have blue shark that works both within legal and some beyond legal and other professional services. But what I've seen is that the number of people out there that say they do PPC well exceeds the number that do it well. And that, you know, I've always had to say to my team, because in SEO, I know and we are like the best we you know, there may be people who do it as well. But like, you know, the fundamentals, it's question of what resources you have to put at it. When it comes to PPC, you know, there, there are many times when you feel that you are not worthy, because you see people with all sorts of, you know, bells and whistles and claims of data. And when you look under the hood, which we do when a client comes to us and we get to see what's really there, some of the flashiest names in the business. Not that impressive. And I'm sure you've seen this over the years as you've done. You know, what, how do you sort of explain that? Is it is it that people are so mystified by the whole PPC world that they realize that the fundamentals are so important and ignoring those you do at your own peril?

Brad Geddes

Now, you know what it's so when you paid search, is 85% fundamentals, I mean, like just organization, ad copy testing, and and keyword match types right within maybe some remarketing and other stuffing it into. And so when you talk with the big companies, the problem is scale. Right? And that's where, you know, it's one thing to say, Oh, we spend 10,000 a month, we have 100 ad groups, we had written our ads great right now go be Airbnb, or go be Hilton, when you suddenly have 10 million ad groups before you get to keywords and ads, right. That's where things break down, is not everyone can scale on scales, its own almost special skill and paid search.

Seth Price

Understood and that you're coming from the legal space where the clicks are so precious, that, you know, what are the things that I've seen and you know, when you looked at, you know, there was a whole flash in the pan with like the rich local and the yodels and they were basically you give us your money, we're so good at it trust us that we're going to be able to, you know, do work. And what struck me was you could go to the very best person in the nation, you know, pay them X percent, assuming that they would take your work, and you're gonna get really high quality work, presumably, as opposed to the people that sort of knock on your door to do it most rapidly, where it is just about how do I get to a 50% margin.

Brad Geddes

Now I have to defend a little bit of that marketplace. I was in that marketplace, right? We had 43,000 accounts under our management. And that's about scale, but it's also about what is the business have to advertise with. Right. So if you're going to spend 10,000 a month you should absolutely not use that service. If you're going to spend $500 a month, understood you have to you have to. So there is a place for it legal is probably not as place correct it's just too expensive, right?

Seth Price

Understood and that's one of those ones where when your click start to get towards $100 A piece you really need to be very If the mistakes can't be there, whereas if it's, you know, two to $5 clicks, if you can make a certain amount of errors, it's better to do that than not be in there at all. Exactly. Talk to me about 2021. What should we expect in the paid search space for 2021?

Brad Geddes

Oh, gosh, so we're gonna see third party, cookie, first party, Cookie audience, shakeups stuff, rate, and that and that.

Seth Price

Explain

Brad Geddes

What? Yes, so you've got, you know, we've all sort of gone through GDPR already, right. And most Americans went well, I'm not serving as the Europeans, I could care less about this GDPR thing. Let everyone else worry about this right and totally acceptable, right? If you're only in this country, you have CCPA, the California Privacy Act, which now if you do business in California, quote, you have to follow that you have Apple getting rid of some third party cookie stuff. So it's first party, you have Chrome getting rid of some third party, you have cookie limitations coming into place for 30 Day first party cookies. So in the end, right. Most this gets right back to resources. Most people can't manage this, you can't figure out how you do your tracking independent of Google versus Apple, or if someone is on Apple, but on Firefox, we need to treat that differently than apple on Chrome. Most people can't do this, right? So you're gonna let the engines do this for you, right? Say, Hey, this, we want to do you figure out how to surf these. What it means is you have to be careful of your year over year analysis work with attribution modeling, with how certain things work, because if you have a long sales cycle, it's gonna get lost, you're not gonna see what caused the click and closed it later in some of this new world. So that's going to be a data thing. And with the rollout of Google Analytics four, which allows for some tracking in some of this, it'll be an important transition. Now I'm still looking into GA 4 I can't fully explain it yet. And there's a lot of sort of under the hood changes. But that'll be an important part. But along with this right is COVID did an interesting thing from a paid search standpoint. So one, of course, was accelerated ecommerce, that story has been hashed. It's been told, ecommerce, of course tripled in you know, whatever.

Seth Price

And we saw that just to be fair, we saw that in our in the legal business in the sense that relationship marketing referrals way down digital way up.

Brad Geddes

Yep. Like everyone's saw that part. But but what else happened is, suddenly a lot of companies were trying to figure out, how do we walk down statuses, right, different by state? How do we customize your ads by state at scale? And so we saw a lot of people suddenly move into things like ad customizers third party data sets coming in. And I think we're gonna see this trend continue of people being more personalized with features that have been around for years, right, that this isn't new, right? customizers not new at all, but using it in creative ways, because they had to figure it out for COVID. And now they're like, Oh, we could do all this other stuff with these things that have been sitting there. And we just never bothered to learn.

Seth Price

You keep going with that? Because that's, that's really interesting.

Brad Geddes

Yeah, sure. So let's say you are a credit card company, right? Something as simple as a credit card company. Well, one of the things you you look at our by credit card, what's the current APR you need to work with? Right now, if the APR changes, which it does, you don't want to go change all your ads, you can use one simple ad customizer to change that at once. Okay, that's a simple, simple example. But it's it's one sheet, now you're doing and not editing 1000 ads to write the one on path ones locations. So you can put in your ad, just a placeholder that says echo user location. You then list all the locations people live, you list how you want to call it, because some location names are just too long to put in the ads. And then you could put like, you know, find your lawyer in city name. And then you got to have a backup, right? So could be Virginia, Maryland, whatever. But if Google knows that person's location, they can look up either my zip code. So here's the city name, let's pop it into the ad. And so now you've customized geography at scale. And now that you've got backup tax for customizers, you can do this. So this is, I mean, this is a six or seven year old feature, right? It's not new at all, but we saw its adoption and usage grow substantially in 2020. We are going to see probably some more match type changes. For good or bad most people consider these bad if you follow paid search really closely, but we'll see a little more match type changes and some change the search query data, Google pulled some of the query data out already, we'll see a little bit of fluctuation in there. We're going to see some more ad extensions, because every year we get more ad extensions. So we'll see some more of those. That's a pretty easy one to list out. We're going to see more audience possibilities, which is good because the death of the third party cooking, your tracking happens. Google's saying, well, people need stuff. So we've had, you know, industry and company size in beta for a year and a half, we should see some of those leave beta and some new ones be introduced. So if you're a b2b, and you only want to reach enterprise companies, you can use these to do it right, which is a really tough thing in b2b. More pushing automation by Google. And from an agency perspective, I think that internal argument is going to start being should we still be a Google partner? We see this now where Google's pushing their optimization score, they pulled support last year for small and mid sized agencies larger for large agencies. Some of the partner program of hay will pass leads will do these things for you haven't materialized that well, and we often see some of the best accounts have terrible optimization scores. And some of the worst ones have really good ones. And so if you're forced to having certain optimizations score, which is Google's grade, right, not your clients grade, I think we're gonna see some agencies stopped being partners. And I think it'd be interesting to bait to see played out over this year.

Seth Price

And it looks something I've struggled with, we have not gone all in because we felt that there were certain elements, particularly for our clients, that they were pushing things that were not always in the client's best interest. And that it would it would get us more, you know, love, I could get people on sales calls with us if we did certain things, but that I felt that there were, you know, like anything else, our job is that Google is sitting there selling that if we if there's not somebody between the client and Google, figuring out what's right for them, and what's not versus what's right for the agency that will get them the most love and the most prestige, it'd be pretty tricky waters to navigate, because it's a big pole as an agency to want to have that Google love. But I am very torn about some of the things that you're sort of forced to push towards in order to get that love.

Brad Geddes

And this as Google gets more aggressive with recommendations, right. So let's say you've got a bankruptcy lawyer clients. Well, you can't do remarketing, right? You're just not allowed to do remarketing, because it's it's inferring someone's income level and so forth. So you can't do it. But if part of the score is are you doing remarketing, your your option is to do something you're not allowed to legally do or are not legally illegal is the wrong word here google approved right? Or, or two take that optimization score. So you have no option, right? And that says Google ads, these they don't say, oh, we can't do remarketing in health care when it is STD testing. We can't do remarketing when it comes to certain things about, you know, financial statuses. And that's where it gets really tricky to navigate.

Seth Price

You know, we're seeing pressure to move towards like, smarter automated campaigns. That's what I love your thoughts a about that? And B? Is the juice worth the squeeze? Now, again, I'm coming from a specific world. I don't see it fully yet for our boutique world, but I assume at scale, there are places where it may work wonderfully.

Brad Geddes

You know, so I have highly mixed result, highly mixed thoughts on automatic bidding. So let's take target CPA, probably the one with the most historical data works well for 95% of people, right, you flip it on, it does its job, you got more than about 30 conversions. It does well. Will you get the last 10 to 20% of efficiency out of it? No, you won't. Do you have if you look at your data, and you see some clear trends by time of day geography age groups income levels, you're better off doing manual bidding and using bid modifiers. Is everything about the same as not big changes and your time constraint it would rather do something else instead. It's a great solution. So it I don't think it's a it's often a "Do we want the last 20% of juice out of this?" Right? If no, or we could spend our time better doing X instead, right for the client, then on a biddings, great solution. If you're a client who just gets five or 10 leads a month, it's highly inconsistent it you're not going to get your results. Well, it just, you know, machine learning needs data, or you get too little data, and it's not going to work. So it's great when it works. It's not more efficient than a human who truly understands their data. If you're feeding your own data in, you're better off as well. With the removal of search queries, though, it is harder for some people to be Google because you don't have the same data they're working with. Right, which is the downside. So overall, good solution? Would I use it on someone spending 100 bucks to click? Probably not, that's just, you know, a few clicks here and there make too big of a difference.

Seth Price

Gotcha. We'll bring you to that local search, you know, high dollar local search, what are some of the advice you give to somebody in that space? What are some of the best practices you see looking across campaigns that you get to see all sorts of different campaigns?

Brad Geddes

Sure. So, one, make sure you've got your geographies correct. And this includes looking through the advanced feature of people in versus people interested in, right, because it's Google change that people regularly in my geography, big change there often you want the more local setting, um, number one, number two, and this is just inherent in smaller accounts, don't use overuse, broad batches, because you want more impressions, because it just leads to some really bad stuff. Three, when Google assigns completely different quality scores to keywords that you feel are the same, there may be a reason and organization around it. Attorney versus lawyer, you always see different numbers, right? They need to be different ad groups of echoing attorney versus lawyer. It's a subtle difference. Well, if you're a lawyer, it's not a subtle difference for most people, right? It's a subtle difference, but there is definitely a difference. Make sure you still got your iGroup organization correct. Right. Look at what is the geography Are you echoing the geographies in the ad? Why are you as a local business better than a national business you often have really good reasons. Have you tested out locally owned and things like that? Those are really important a lot of people especially these days are looking to local owner support support it right over national companies. If you're a restaurant you put locally on restaurant you'll beat Cheesecake Factory right now. You want in a year right? But but for now, you will

Seth Price

Maybe bad example that that Chinese chicken salad for...

Brad Geddes

You can't win them all? Oh, no, no.

Seth Price

No, I know what you're saying. But right now, you really want to make sure your local guys are still there. They're closing every day. What are some of the mistakes taking keeping you in the our local space? What are some of the mistakes you see people making that that are sort of avoidable.

Brad Geddes

And not using extensions properly? Right? If you're local, especially people come to your place user location extension, use your call extension, turn on call tracking the more data is always better, right? So a lot of times it's called rankings on enabled. Make sure a you claim your listing I mean, if you do local SEO, you know this right? Be better. You better own it.

Seth Price

We're a couple steps beyond that. Let's hope

Brad Geddes

Yeah, I still see them all the time, right, like unclaimed listing.

Seth Price

That's the for people that are playing the SEO game that just do PPC that could happen maybe. But you're never cease to amaze any software that you like that for again, I'm gonna have to try to keep his interview focused on the local professional services, higher dollar click world. And he saw third party software that you really like,

Brad Geddes

You know what, so we're aren't good. If you break about 10,000 a month in your account, if you're spending $2,000 a month on $10 clicks, we're just not going to help you out, you know, at analisys. So when you're at the smaller level spends, then scripts are often better than a full third party software, you'll generally get just better results and you're not paying a third party license fee, right? Once you get to where you are scaling and spending 1020 30,000 a month I need something over watch over your back. Right? That's when you're more likely to look into third party software. So like Well, of course, all of the to dos, right analysis, but we're not always a good solution. And we're very honest and saying so.

Seth Price

Taking that and lifting it. We'll talk more even more about what you guys do. But in general, for this type of world. You know, as an agency, we're doing much more than those numbers. But for a lot of our listeners, their accounts are in that zero to $10,000 range.

Brad Geddes

Yes. So they're not going to if they use third party software, it's going to be the AdWords editor. It's going to be Excel, it's going to be Google Data Studio for reporting. It's gonna be Google Analytics for data they don't need. They don't need a third party solution. They should keep their margin on that and user and use some of the free tools which are really good. overpaying a third party

Seth Price

What about for keyword research?

Brad Geddes

Google's tools very good. I do like a sm rush. I mean, sem rush depending on what how you want to follow the naming convention. If you get into higher level I also like ad Fina to be able to watch competitor ads. So I'd seen as probably a more competitive analysis tool. SEM Rush is a good keyword research tool and competitor insight tool. SpyFu similar I just like SEM Rush little more than SpyFu. But they're pretty similar software's assuming they're not listening because they would argue with that.

Seth Price

But we just had the SEM Rush on the show not long ago. It's funny when we get out people talking about the different people we've had as guests. What are some of the biggest misconceptions you think that people have that, you know, things that you hear are truisms that you that are really not trueisms?

Brad Geddes

Oh, gosh, responsive search ads will fix all your ad searching for you. That's a big one these days of just make I mean, according to Google, you can make one ad group put all your keywords in it, make a responsive search ad and walk away and you won't get very good results to match types are dead, right? You hear this now with all the changes. They are not exact match and broad are still quite a bit different. Yes, exact and phrase have a lot of overlaps. But pay attention to your match types. It's still quite important. You hear this all the time that they don't matter anymore. That in in local space, my the tricky thing I run into is remarketing, because either it just doesn't work and a lot of local businesses right just don't see good results from remarketing. Part of that is either due to it's an industry where there's no comparison shopping, you're gonna pick someone that day regardless, right locksmith and towing companies and whatnot. Remarketing does have its place in the local space. For things that are higher purchase values, you won't see a lot of clicks from them, right? You're just not going to you may have to open up some of your windows, it's worth it to do remarketing in local space, assuming you're not an instant gratification type. But don't believe it's going to be all the traffic. So if you get five clicks a month, except your five clicks, don't be like, Oh, it's not worth US managing this.

Seth Price

No, I agree that I would say that first dollar spent for most people in the legal space should be retargeting before you even do anything else. It's you know, you take all that effort to get someone to your site, and we're not a locksmith, somebody may not choose that day, you know, basic mistakes you see over and over again, in the sort of local sounds like you've done some work in the legal space. What are some of the biggest mistakes you see people making?

Brad Geddes

Trusting Google too much? I mean, I don't want to just Google bash, right. But I mean, in reality going in saying, hey, Google says I should do this. Let me just hit enter and not use my brain. And educated brain is the best tool you have period. It's better than machine learning. Right? So that would definitely be the number one. Two is looking at, whether it's blogs, no offense, podcasts, whatever. And just doing it right, not thinking through how does this affect my data? On houses affect how we do things? Because we'll say things that are good for 90%. But they're not good for 10. Being omni channel not not being across channels. So even if you're small, you can still be on Facebook and Microsoft, and, you know, maybe not Twitter, Pinterest, depending on what your business type is. But there are places beyond Google to spend your money well.

Seth Price

Is there in search? Have you seen them? You know, is historically there was always a talking point by people in the legal space? You know, don't don't look at Yahoo, Bing, because even though there's not that much search traffic, you get cost per clicks less. That talking point seems to have disappeared a bunch as the quality search volume has has not been there. But is there any place to find quality cert direct search traffic outside of Google that you like?

Brad Geddes

I would, I would argue I like Microsoft and other partners, you may turn off, right. But if you think of default search on an Apple device, it's it's out.

Seth Price

For now, right? Yeah.

Brad Geddes

I'll find out. Yes.

Seth Price

What do you see, you know, is Apple gonna make a real play at this?

Brad Geddes

No, no, they're gonna make a play maybe. But it's and they've got their Apple ads and this and that. Search is hard, right? I mean, you're indexing the web. You're writing algorithms. You're doing a lot of stuff that is behind the scenes and things in AI Don't think Apple has the experience, they can choose a search or an Apple car. But I don't think they have the ability to do both directions at once.

Seth Price

You know, the the recent headline in legal search has been the LSAS. The local service ads, how do you see those are short term, you know, observation is that they're cannibalizing traditional PPC, er, what do you see happening short term, what do you see happening long term.

Brad Geddes

So LSAS are definitely cannibalizing paid search, if they're if you're in an area where there's like a Google guarantee, you have to do it, right, the Google guarantee.

Seth Price

Given that the pricing is so cheap, it's a gift right now, it's not gonna last we know what that price is gonna go up. But for now, it's a gift. So short term, obviously, you know, we're telling people as much budget as you can spend there and figure out what you want to do. So what's going to happen.

Brad Geddes

Long term I, so long term, I think Google guarantee is just gonna morph I think it'll eventually become like a pay per lead type of system or, or something else, right? They've done some paper lead stuff, and...

Seth Price

It is right now to us.

Brad Geddes

But the advantage that people who do organic right now is you're focused on reviews. So when some of this review stuff comes in, or the third party verification needs to be done for Google guarantee, and so forth, you already have that done. If your pure paid search, you might not. So all...

Seth Price

Right, it was it was an easy, you know, get the background check done, get people up. And that early, again, the earlier way it was very interesting, I'm talking about this PubCon, shortly, was that what we saw over and over again, was some of the smaller, less established firms had an easier time getting through background checks, whereas legacy firms, it took a bit of push whether you had somebody at Google helping you or not, that took that took real effort. But then once people are up, and they got everybody in the number of reviews with a real differentiator.

Brad Geddes

Exactly. So I think if you're only paid, you haven't focused on reviews, that should be part of your paid search program, or attitude organic, or someone needs to do this, right. Just overall, someone needs to do it.

Seth Price

You can't fake it, you could, you could have more years in practice, but you can't just immediately have more reviews. So the people that you know, what we've loved is that it's gone. You know, as we've generally seen as the LSA is cannibalize the regular PPC, but haven't affected our organic traffic all that much. And if you have the reviews, you could, you know, do some LSA, while it's cheap, get yourself in the three pack organically, and then to traditional organic, and that seems to be as good as you can get in this particular climate.

Brad Geddes

And so we're, I'm keeping an eye on that same local space on Amazon, Amazon's done some stuff over time where they'll like, they'll put up third party services, like maid services and plumbing services, and then they kind of pull back and they go forward, and they Amazon can't figure out what to do when it comes to non ecommerce. It's like, you know, Google was bad at people. Hence, everything social Google does fails, Amazon can't figure anything that's not ecommerce transaction based. And so they're struggling there. But I expect Amazon to pull something out.

Seth Price

If they're already doing it, like in the trademark space for their existing clients as an added value. And that may be sort of the Legal Zoom world, the wills, the the business forms, things like that, that are easier and commoditized and could then work with outside person, I see that much more, you know, easy to adapt it like this, not dissimilar to what Google did. They said, Hey, we have a need for some sort of verification for Locksmiths. And then they said, Okay, well, we figured this piece out. We can make money with lawyers. And there's this whole Legion world that we're not making money on let's let's make let's get Legion and paid ads, rather than just paid ads.

Brad Geddes

Yep, yep. So I think we'll see more of that right as Google tries to figure it out. Gosh, from local business standpoint, I mean, it's you're always reviews First, your you know, your name, address your NAP data second, your paid third. And I would say don't obviously forget the website, right when most most paid search accounts can't convert. It's not the account. It's the website itself. So of course, good experiences will always be important.

Seth Price

I had a question from our team, that recently they've noticed the keyword planner feature in Google ads is either inaccurate or provides incomplete data. What are the best strategies to mitigate that?

Brad Geddes

Yet? So far, this is interesting time because yesterday, someone had told me, they believe it's more accurate now than it's ever been before. So I guess they're seeing something different. But Google redid the planner. I mean, a month two months ago, it wasn't that long ago, maybe three months now time, seems to have no concept these days. And the planners, I used it last time, and it was last week. I had really highly accurate data. So I don't think I have a good answer for you because I haven't seen that...

Seth Price

That is you know, so that's something we've had, as far as you know, you saw the world change in 2020. And you had to adapt, or any of those lessons learned ones that even when the world gets back to normal, we should still be powering through that, you know, you were forced to make adjustments based on the pandemic that you think will survive even post pandemic.

Brad Geddes

You know, from a paid search standpoint, probably not from an organizational standpoint. Absolutely. Right, we're going to see agencies who no longer want to send four people on a plane flight to do an in person pitch, as opposed to using Zoom. We're gonna see more relaxed work at home policies, right, assuming that you can you trust your employees. And that's still a whole big issues that's on the sidelines. Well, we'll assume we should trust our employees. I'm not a big company, I can make that assumption.

Seth Price

Well, look, we've seen this right, we actually turned our keys in and we'll figure things out after COVID, our lease was up, and we're like, we're done. One of the things that I found interesting, as I've seen it, both for the law firm and a digital agency was that you're a employees, they were fine at home. But there was not a trust factor. They did their work, they might there might be kid issues at home and certain stitches, but people were a people were a people. It was the c people that were c people when they were in the office, are now c people that you know, at home, and I feel that it just it makes it that much more important to try to raise your bar on employees harder as you scale, because there's always gonna be a worst of the best. But that has been, I think the truism is that it's not like we took the eight people and all of a sudden they fell apart at home. For the most part, we found those people excelling.

Brad Geddes

Yeah. And what we haven't found yet is the like, we always talk about a work life balance, right? I don't think we've found that yet. Because you're working at home with kids. It is not how your normal workday would be, you know, post COVID. And so we haven't we haven't a figured that part out yet. B, we haven't. And this is just a American problem, right? Of we don't know how to not look at our text messages past eight o'clock at night, right? We don't or whatever pick your time, we don't know how to not look at our phone to see the emails coming in from work. So you almost like I've seen companies who have put a cap on their email exchange servers that after 6pm, local time to the corporate office emails don't go out on the next morning, right, just to the employees can't work. They're like, sorry, we won't send your email right now. It's in the queue. Right, which...

Seth Price

...which is genius, because I look, I'm old school, I can't believe I'm saying that I but I compared to, you know, at BluShark, you know, 95% of the population is 30 or under. And that fight probably higher than that. But that I take the attitude, I have ideas, I'm sending it out. I don't expect somebody to work on it that minute. And there's there's but there's often I think, some resentment about that message going. So the fact that somebody has thought that through and held off the messages, again, you want a button to be able to push No, this is important, which obviously usually moves the text, hey, nothing fell through the cracks needs to be done once in a blue moon, but that there's so much that I because my work day doesn't end. And because I have you know, three kids, I may want to spend time with somebody at one point which pushes something off. I'm doing this interview so that at some tasks isn't happening. But I find that, that I feel that particularly I don't want to call it Millennials or whatever you want to call this, the generation that's working right now 25 to 30, that there is an expectation that their phone will go off at that time. Now those are not necessarily people with kids. And I think that people with kids would become more flexible, because they know that things are going to take place and the really great employees will backfill at other points. Certainly what I have done, as I have, as we talked before we went on air here with kids zooming there often moments where you're like, hey, there's a mini meltdown going on. I got to deal with that. And then you're gonna you make up that time later.

Brad Geddes

Yep. And I think we're still I don't think People because we're thrown into this, right. I don't think people have truly figured out what a typical at home or at home office hybrid experience looks like. You know, so some companies weren't going to do three days at home two days in the office, right? Just to keep the culture because culture obviously is a really hard thing to manage when when no one's in play, and it's...

Seth Price

...hard when you're there. It's even harder online. We're on fumes and what's happening with every passing month, another new employee joins, and then all of a sudden you look at it, you're like, hey, X percent of my workforce has never been inside a building. And I think there's some buildings and some friends of mine who have built stuff from scratch online, which is different than you had a model in house with your happy hours and that interaction that is taken. I would say the only benefit and it's been more of a law firm that I have that I've seen at the digital agency is that as people get families they move away from the city center commute times go up so that people are gaining time back, that seems to me to be one of those benefits that has happened despite the interruptions during the day, that there's less than that it's easier to get an 8am meeting, if something fall if you don't have a mutual time during the day, that's really been advantageous that we can do, you know, 8:30 or 6, whereas before the person would be sitting in a commute.

Brad Geddes

Yep, I totally agree. And this was from someone since 1998. I've spent four years in an office. So I've I've, you know, we're a completely digital company. And most of our employees aren't even in the US. We've got a lot in UK. Well, and so...

Seth Price

As we wrap up, can you tell tell me about your company? I've heard you speak all over the world of sharing knowledge? How can people work with you both software and privately?

Brad Geddes

Yes, sir. So at alysus is our company. It's a software company that does recommendations for Google ads, and Microsoft ads, how a marketer views them, not how Google views them, right? So it's our sort of rule set. And lets you do a lot of things at scale. So we really are for that you've got several 100 ads to millions of ads, right? Our largest customers, like 122 million ads, or you're doing things at a larger price point, you have a lot of data to work with, we make your life so much easier, so much faster, so much more efficient. We're not a good solution for small companies. So but we're really, we're a workflow solution for Google ads, Microsoft at the midsize and up level. And then...

Seth Price

It was just generally economics of how your software works.

Brad Geddes

Economics of pricing or economics of how real price pricing like how does somebody work with you? Oh, gosh, we started with an automated trial system, we believe in scale, right? So it starts at $99 a month. It's we're fairly economical. We're not just a data percent, we're a month to month contract. So you could say take a two week trial, or I'm gonna use it for a month and you get what I wanted. I didn't cancel right. And those those no problem, no contracts, no, nothing. If you really want your legal team to do one, we'll do one, but we prefer not to worry about it.

Seth Price

And are you still doing your courses.

Brad Geddes

I still do still teach at SMX. And simply learn. So simply learn has our PPC courses, as some SMX's are in person days, although digital days right now, we'll do to this year. And then I still do some occasional consulting or audit or so forth, which is on bg theory.com My personal site.

Seth Price

And I just I've got to say that of the people teaching, I just think you have a very good way of explaining it. I've really always enjoyed it and highly, highly recommend those courses for people to find whether it be through SM extra through the the other platforms, they've been really tremendous. And I feel confident when we bring people on that, you know, sometimes we bring people on with limited PPC experience. And I want to make sure that they have the fundamentals that that is one of their required required viewings before they can touch anything.

Brad Geddes

Excellent. Thank you.

Seth Price

So Well, this has been tremendous. I appreciate it. I can't wait till we are back on the road and I get to see you somewhere in person but, but until then, I will be seeing you online and hope to connect sooner rather than later in person.

Brad Geddes

Excellent. Well, you stay safe and everyone else stay safe and enjoy your digital marketing right now.

Seth Price

Thanks so much. Have a great day.

Brad Geddes

Thanks.

BluShark Digital

Thank you for tuning in to the SEO insider with Seth price. Be sure to check back next week for fresh insights into building your brand's online presence. Episodes are available to stream directly on BluShark Digital's website.