How Automotive Brands Can Stop Junk Leads & Increase Real Buyers

0:01Events which happened in terms of what you when you started and then what happened in early 2000s late 2000 now we are in 2020s in the mid '90s it was very hard to start a website for then it was very difficult to establish an online presence whether for yourself or for your business. So now that everything is being automated especially in PMAX especially in advantage based shopping campaigns what is the value ad any marketer would eventually be able to add AI ads are getting better but if you've seen some of these AI generated ads especially we run a lot of Google ads so once in a they're not so good not so good the human touch is still very important I think it's going to become more important and I think the strategic value the knowledge in the industry like specialized industry knowledge. I think all of that stuff's going to be very valid. Alex, thank you very much for joining in and it's a great pleasure to meet you. This is our first podcast. So first of all, happy new year and we have been hearing a lot about SmartSites or SmartSites and you as well. So welcome to ROAS Ranks. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Alex give a short intro to our audience. Do you want to give

1:19A quick and short crisp intro? I'm sure most of you most of them know you already but if you can actually give a quick that would be great. For sure. I'll do the quick intro that I just did for you before we started recording. So I've been my name is Alex Melen. I've been involved in digital space for a very long time. I started one of the first web hosting companies back in the mid '90s predating Google and a couple other big names that you guys are probably more familiar with. But more recently I've been running SmartSites. I'm the co-founder along with my younger brother. We've been doing SmartSites since 2011. We started it from the ground up with just a handful of folks. Now we have over 400 employees. We're one of the fastest growing, top rated I think now largest private digital marketing company because a couple of our competitors got bought out. So we I could I can now use that as well. But yeah so we do we do everything digital from we make websites and then we become the digital partner for small businesses we do SEO pay-per-click social media email marketing and everything in between amazing and I mean that two questions pops up right so obviously it's been since 1997 do you want to create a timeline of events which happened in terms of what you when you started and

2:37Then what happened in early 2000s late 2000s and 2010s now we are in 2020s would Were you able to craft a timeline for the for the Zenzes especially? Yes. Yes. So, let's go all the way back. So, n mid '90s that the idea behind the first business I started was that in the mid '90s it was very hard to start a website. So, the internet is the internet is out right you have you have dialup internet. This is even before AOL CompuServe is the is the internet provider of choice in the US. And you really want to make a website right at that point there was so few websites that the predominant way to find websites was through Yahoo which was a directory right this predates search engines there were so few websites that you could put in a directory and link to all of them so that's the mid90s the idea for me then was to make it easy make it cheap easy quick for anyone to establish an internet presence so I started one of the first free web host ing companies for those that have been around since then. Those were the years of tripod, GeoCities, yahoo wound up buying GeoCities for tons of money hyperart those th those brands all that don't exist now. I

3:55Started T35 hosting at that at that time and before then it was very difficult to establish online presence whether for yourself or for your business. The process was and I'll go through it just because I think a lot of people listening might not have been involved that early and didn't realize how difficult it was but you'd have to call up your internet not and not even enter phone service provider at the time especially in the northeast where I'm from it was Bell Atlantic so you would call up Bell Atlantic and say I want to put a website on the internet it would take maybe a year I don't know 6 to 12 months it would cost thousands of dollars per month right they would like set up servers for you set up the operating system you'd be responsible to like install and set everything up and it was just a very difficult process and that was that the free hosting platforms and they got a lot of slack because and they don't exist anymore right all the free hosting companies have business the reason they go out of business they were abused right because by allowing anything free online you open yourself to a lot of abuse but I think it brought around the whole idea of that you could create something on the internet relatively quickly and relatively cheap. And in the case of free hosting for free. So as we move from the mid '90s into

5:14The late 90s, early 2000s, that whole idea became huge where everyone was creating their online presence, People would have their personal pages. So many people that have a page just for themselves, right, with their like resume and stuff, they would have like literally biography pages. As social media became a thing, those went away. So websites still are very dominant, But in the 2000s, we moved into the whole social media craze and you no longer needed a personal website because you had a LinkedIn page or a Facebook page and the whole social media boom created huge opportunities for advertising, for online presence. It made online presence even easier, where before you still had to know how to HTML and how to build your like your personal page, now you just create a profile on LinkedIn and you fill out your biography and history and that's it. It's public on the internet. So that I think mush moved us further down. And then I think since then in the last I don't know 15 to almost 20 years there's been progress but I don't think it's been I don't think it's been as quick of progress and I don't think it's been as transformative up until the last couple years when we got into AI. So up until maybe 2 3 years ago I don't

6:33Want to say it was the same old every year but certainly there's new advertising platforms and new platforms that came about right Tik Tok came about short form video content became a thing right 10 years ago short form video content didn't really exist right YouTube was all longer videos so we enter the age of short form content but aside from that there really wasn't big changes right we've been doing Google ads for ourselves and for our clients since we started the business in 2011. And for sure, there's new bidding strategies, there's new settings, there's new better ways to do things, but there really weren't a lot of revolutionary changes from 2011 when we started SmartSites to I don't know maybe 2023, a couple years ago. So, I think I think we went through for through that phase and now we're in the age of AI where it's really interesting to me because a lot of the things I'm seeing really reminds me of the internet in the mid '90s where it's literally like the wild west. There's all these companies starting and creating cool like overnight like I wake up in the morning there's like 30 new AI companies doing really cool things. Most of them are doing things for free. This really reminds me of like the mid

7:49'90s where like everything it was before SAS is software as a service before SAS even like that word didn't exist in the in the mid90s everyone was making things to be free and used by everyone. So that's what that's where we are today I think with the AI space. I think the amount of transformative changes that are going to be happening have already happened last year and next couple years I think will be more than last 15 to 20 years combined. So I think it is very exciting times. I know change could be scary similar to when the internet became popular. Change is scary to a lot of people, to a lot of companies, but I think change brings about a crazy amount of opportunities and those that could embrace it and could pivot and be very agile actually benefit from these scary AI times. I know that was a very long-winded answer. I don't know if that's what you were looking for, but No, I mean that's exactly what we wanted, So obviously we started our agency back in 2013 2012 and the setups we have done earlier focusing only on CPMs focusing on interest based has eventually moved beyond what it is actually happening now practically zero

9:08Controls on all those areas especially in Facebook even now on the Google the only strategy you could you could adopt is like dot there is no very specific keyword strategy anymore. More but earlier you used to do like thousands of keywords and then thousands of phrases and then longtail came in a lot of things started popping up. So it is scary whenever the new thing comes in and but like you said it also brings new opportunities you can scale the business much faster you can get more leads for the same amount of money all those things are happening so yeah I totally understand I see through the journey eventually as well now that actually brings into the another question right so when we are having such a big agency and when things are moving very fast how do you hire people or how do you make sure the people actually transition into the new technologies like for example ChatGPT is launching ads what are we going to do about it and how would people learn this ChatGPT ads so that we'll be able to go ahead and pitch to the clients okay this is what you should do this is what it is like for example one is ChatGPT ads the other one is UCP launched by Google the unified commerce platform as well these are the areas where it's carry so how do you see the people generally try to transition into

10:27Learn and adopt especially when you have 400 people working for you. Yeah, good question. And so we've very early well not very early throughout our whole company history, we were very focused on people learning as much as possible, We even have a credit that any employee could I think it was just I was going to say don't quote me, but I know this is going to be public. It was 1,500 a year. I think we either raised or about to raise it. Where people could go to a conference, travel, we cover flights, hotels, everything. Go to learn something new, So I think culturally you have to be in that mindset, not the opposite mindset. I know a lot of companies are the opposite mindset like they I know companies that block ChatGPT and AI search at in the workplace, For good reasons, There's some been some cases that warranted. I don't want to go off to too many tangents, but someone at Samsung needed help coding the mobile repository. They had issued with their mobile repository. They uploaded a whole repository to ChatGPT and then their competitors started being able to use their code. So there's certainly there's reasons to block it, but generally speaking, you just want to create the guard rails and really

11:45Encourage everyone to use it. And the analogy I've used is having seen this firsthand in the early n early mid '90s is you really want to embrace the change. And what's interesting is I spoke I spoken about ChatGPT and AI at a bunch of conferences but more interestingly I've spoken about it at small groups where I've been asked to come in and talk to executives that have been like very afraid of it. They're like is this going to take away my job? Like I literally get brought in to and by the way I stopped doing those because I get no business permit but it was interesting where I would come get asked to come in as a as a as an expert and like tell these executives they're not going to lose their job. So I think the best analogy is in the in the early to mid 90s computers started replacing typewriters. This sounds crazy, I know, but in '9s, early 90s, a lot of office places were still using typewriters, Computers and typing on computers did not become mainstream until later in the '9s. And a lot of workplaces were against computers, They weren't trusting how the data is stored and things will crash and I need someone to maintain and they did not embrace it. And [snorts] whole industries were made around consultants coming in and training employees to use computers instead of typewriters. And this all sounds crazy,

13:03But the companies who embraced it were a lot more efficient, Imagine a typewriter, you would have to white out you make a mist, how many mistakes I make when I type? You would have no idea like I without like if I had to white out everything I wrote it, that would have been that been that would have been terrible. I'd waste half my day. So people became more efficient, companies became more efficient, those who did not embrace it went out of business, what can I say? The employees that embraced it became more valuable, All of a sudden, even any job like let's talk about secretary that used the typewriter before, Now she's using he or she is using his own computer and has word editing, grammar corre correction, spelling correction, could backspace instead of white out. They're now not only more efficient, they're more valuable as an employee. Not only of their current company but to any other employer. So by learning this stuff and becoming efficient at it, they're actually becoming more valuable. So I don't think there's going to be mass like layoffs of people. Yes, there's already been some layoffs as efficiencies start happening, but I think generally speaking, people who embrace it do become more valuable, more efficient. They could accomplish more. I try to tell these executives that they probably will not lose their job. There's still value to the human thought strategy and whatnot, but some parts of their

14:23Job will be given away to AI. And that actually makes sense like the very remedial stuff that right now you're spending a lot of time on that could be done by AI should be done by AI and you should focus your time on other things. So, it's been very interesting to watch this whole revolution and I see so many parallels to the PC revolution in the '90s because I was I was very fortunate that I've been I was exposed to technology at a very young age. So, I had computers around the house when I was 10, 11, 12. I was taking them apart, putting them back together. So I' I've seen this whole computer trans PC revolution and there's so many parallels and I get asked all these like weird questions too like I presented to a big group and they were like and I was showing that there's jobs as a ch as a prompt engineer. So if you go on a job site in the US Indeed is popular companies are paying $300,000 for prompt engineers like literally as a prompt engineer. So this guy goes, "My son is currently in school for something else in university in college. Do you recommend he become a prompt engineer?" He's "Maybe there's a" and there was someone else who was "What if I quit my job and I start consulting company as a prompt engineer?" I'm this is all perfect

15:40And fine, but I would never recommend that because similar to the PC revolution, there were actually a couple companies that their sole purpose was as consultants to help people go from typewriters to PCs, Do these companies exist now? Absolutely not. Do you see do you see like a PC consultant like helping people like learn PCs and learn how to type on a PC? Absolutely not. Because all that stuff became native to what we do. So, I don't think these chat this prompt engineer jobs being 300 grand are going to exist three, four years from now. I think we're all going to become very good prompt engineers and the those of us who are better at it are going to become more valuable. I don't think those that are bad at it are going to lose their job altogether, but I think they'll become less valuable and have less opportunity. So that's my best parallel and I've used this in other times calming people down that they're not going to they a are not going to most likely are not going to lose their job. I can't make any promises of course and b they should not they should not quit their job. They should not quit their career and become a prompt engineer consult engineer. You should look at it. They pay they like six figure jobs pays very well. And it I use this in my slides very often because some of them are just so funny. But if you go and look up

16:57Prompt engineer, there's hundreds of posts and pe some of these are like the funniest things ever. Like one of them I screenshotted for one of the one of the sessions I've been doing. It says they're looking for someone with 80 years of ChatGPT experience. So there's like stuff like that. It's interesting times. Interesting times. No, it is indeed. So like you just mentioned like earlier we used to have automations, So same way you used to do I don't know if you have used the ids you just use HTML editors to design all those things earlier you used to do the wireframes you used to type in every single character of the code and it started autogenerating now it's more efficient to do more work and the way I see it is earlier you were doing same job like one week now you would be able to do that in couple of hours so that the world will eventually become very cost. That's what I'm foreseeing at this point. Yeah. So, like I said, we have a very good relationship with Google and Microsoft because we manage hundreds of millions in ads on both platforms. It's been very interesting to see how quickly they have gotten more efficient at coding. Microsoft has come out, I forget the number, but they

18:15Said like 30% of their code is now being written by AI. Now for sure all that's changing very quickly, but it's definitely I think we're moving too quickly. I think we're in a weird place where companies are implementing too much AI just to say they're implementing AI. And I've seen this for like the weirdest companies that have nothing to do with AI. They go on their earnings call and they're "We've gone all in on AI. We hire developers." I'm "Oh no.", [snorts] so I think we're going a little bit too much to that extreme and I think we'll get there soon, but I think we're as a as a as a industry, I think we're over going there just because investors and the stock market everything is valuing that so much. But going back to the job posting site, there's another interesting job post now that happened is I forget what it's called, but the point of this position is to clean up vibe coding. I think it's like vibe coding like debugger or something that's becoming a profession as people are going all in on AI coding. Now someone has to come in and clean up this AI coding mess. So I do think we're going a little bit too far, but I think that is where it's going to be. I

19:32Think for anyone as a career or as a agency or a company I think the thought for everyone becomes where is my value at in this whole process right for sure AI will replace some of what do I do and I don't even like the word using replace I think AI will help you with some of what you do maybe it is coding once we get a little bit better at AI coding but where is your value ad so if AI is replacing everything and you have no value ad then your business will probably not stay in business. But I think for most for most people it you just have to position yourself correctly and really use the AI to really double down on what your true value ad is. And there's companies I forget there I was just reading an article about there's a website for like developers that was very popular like to ask questions on. Do what I'm think? Yeah. Stack Overflow Stack Overflow. So for them unfortunately their value ad has been fully replaced right their value ad was that people could ask development questions and get development answers that is the that was purely I was so hurt when I saw that traffic was down so much I was like okay this is where I lived this is where I literally lived years for so there certainly will be cases like stack overflow but I

20:51Think it's going to be very rare where AI fully replaces your value ad you just have to think about what your value is. And by the way, for them, I mean, I think there's opportunities no matter what business you're in. I forget which publisher. And they the publisher won and the agreement was that Perplexity now licenses the book content. So maybe that's a play but yeah it's all about figuring out where is your value ad in this AI world. Now this brings us to the next question right so eventually in the podcast we were doing last quarter we exactly mentioned this word for digital marketers. So now that everything is being automated especially in PMAX especially in advantage plus shopping campaigns or advantage plus campaigns what is the value ad any marketer would eventually be able to add is becoming a biggest question right now. So what do you think the marketer would be able to add in apart from the positioning the creatives in those areas but the media buying side where do you think the people would or

22:10The marketers would be able to add that extra incremental value? Yeah, for sure. That becomes that was a very popular question I got asked when Mark Zuckerberg, which by the way, I met him a bunch of times. I went to school not too far from him and I met up with him at a lot of entrepreneurial events. So I can't say I know him super well, but I know him I know him a little bit. But he came out six, nine months ago, maybe a year ago, and said that he sees that Facebook advertising is all going to be AI automated, So, we had a lot of people freak out, both clients, employees, like everyone. They're "How does this work?" We're "Where's our where is our value ad in the world where he sees AI creating all the ads?", and I think that's similar to your question. I think the value ad becomes the expertise, the strategy, the planning, and I think it is a huge value ad. If AI ads are getting better, but if you've seen some of these AI generated ads, especially we run a lot of Google ads, so once in a they're not so good. Not so good. And then in a ideal world, not ideal world, but let's say it gets very good. Let's say AI gets very good at ad copy. They know exactly the human what humans want to see. How does it work when I don't know

23:28Coke and Pepsi are both advertising on Facebook? Is it running the same AI ad copy for both of them, Like what's the differentiator or I don't know United and Delta like how to without a human involved thinking about a greater strategy or a greater marketing plan or really a concept. I think AI is going to become very similar even using different models. I think you're going to wind up with very generic ads. Not because they're generic, but because the ads are being used for a lot of very similar businesses or I do a lot of automotive, so I have a I have a book published, automotive search marketing. There's a lot of dealerships and they compete with each other and not a lot of people realize, but Honda is the brand that makes the car, but then each dealership's individually operating and they want to get the car buyer away from the dealership next door, If AI is creating all the same ads for all these guys, guess what? No one's going to click on any of them. They're going to click on the ad that is created by a human that's different. So, I do think there's still a lot more value ad. I think AI could help with a lot of things and it's already helping us be more efficient. It's helping us brainstorm content that brings brainstorm ad copy. But I think the human touch is still very important. I think it's going

24:46To become more important. And I think the strategic value, the I don't know the knowledge in the industry like specialized industry knowledge. I think all of that stuff's going to be very valuable. Nice. No, I mean the way I at least see it is practically when the marketer is able to put in the multiple data together, So u what A doesn't know is the context like you said okay create a copy for dealership it's going to create the copy for dealership but what AI misses is the lot of context about that particular leadership where does it stands who is a typical customers and how does that whole thing works and how do you make sure that ad actually reaches to the right person is that ad bringing the right people those are the primary areas is what at least what we are seeing in the market in terms of marketing experts are able to dig in and understand okay this is what this business is doing really well and these are the areas where we should actually squeeze in a little bit more on the AI side and just a follow-up question on this Alex if you can think a cursor for marketer how would that be like for example you

26:06Heard of cursor right cursor or claude which can actually do the AI assistant the coding assistants if a market or if a marketer has an AI, how would that would look like for you in the future? Yeah, good question. That'll be interesting if someone does come up with a an AI tool specifically for marketers. U, I mean, there's certainly there's the generic tools, The Perplexities and Gemini and ChatGPT of the world that could do it. [snorts] there's also the built-in platform ones. So, Google Ads, Facebook ads, Microsoft ads, all have built-in AI assistants that do a lot of stuff. It's not like a freerange AI assistant yet. But, it's certainly moving in that direction. I think I think there'll be a lot of value in all this. And what? This really reminds me I don't know if you use Microsoft Word back in the day, like not the recent Microsoft Word, but 15 years ago when you had Clippy, do you remember Clippy? Yeah. Yeah. Clippy pop up and say, "How can I help you?", that I mean I could definitely see stuff like that but I think it's going to be it's going to live in platform. I think it's going to Google will have their own, Microsoft will have their own and Facebook will have their own

27:25Because they all these companies I think to survive will have to either build their own AI models or build very good licensing relationships with AI models. So I think they will all live in platform like the Google marketing assistant is not going to help you with Facebook ads. But I do think that I think that's the future. I think these marketing AI assistants will help the analysts be more efficient. And I think what winds up happening is it brings up the bar at where you start. And what I mean by that is if you have a very bad agency or a junior analyst and nothing wrong with junior analysts, I'm just saying like they're just a junior analyst. They're like right out of college, there's like a certain level that it takes them to like work their way up or like a not so good agency. I don't know. They train bad. They hire bad people. I don't know. There's like a there's like a level that's like let's call it below average. So you have a super junior person out of college or you have a bad agency. They're managing your marketing. Your performance is below average, I think it brings that bar up like that there that level disappears because with the help of AI, no one should be at that level anymore. I don't think AI helps a lot at the top level like the super experienced people like for example I do tons in automotive and I have a lot of what can you say real world experience

28:45And a lot of data and a lot of like a lot of things that I could still do better than AI just from that background that experience so I don't think in my case it helps me a little bit but not as much but I think it raises the bar and I think an ideal world it raises is the bar on the bottom for everyone for the analysts for the companies that everyone using these AI systems should no longer be making silly mistakes and we just had u just had an account we were auditing for very I know this is recorded so I won't name any names big national brand that was that was doing advertising just in the US and they were spending a ton of money and they were running a lot of Google ads and we went into their Google ads account and they accidentally had the targeting set to worldwide. So even though they were just in the US, they were spending a lot of clicks. Actually, more clicks came to them from Africa than from the United States. And they've been running this for three months. They said they switched to a new agency and the new agency must have not noticed. So I think AI gets rid of that stuff, The B like the mistakes, We could that should not have happened, That even if a human could miss like the AI check should catch. So I think that's what it brings to the table. I think it brings everyone up a level

30:04And gets rid of like the poor performing bottom. Nice. No, I personally think if we could do Claude Code for marketers, I think it'll be like one system which will have all the u the first party data and be able to push the data back into all platforms and be able to say okay fine you are doing good in Google and you have to do the same in Microsoft acts or you're doing good in organic you could do the same in terms of targeting in Facebook ads. I think that would eventually evolve into a great system especially sitting on top of the data. I think that would be a most funnest I mean most fun thing to do fun thing to work on similar to how developers right now having fun with the vibe coding / vibe marketing / vibe media buying. I think tomorrow we'll have something like vibe coding / vibe marketing / vibe media buying or vibe coding / vibe marketing / vibe media buying. So yeah, I think that would that would be that would be fun. And another question Alex in terms of automotive things when we were running agency there was a there was one issue we always come up with right so you run the marketing and after a couple of months the when you try not couple of

31:23Months maybe couple of quarters when you go and try and renew the contract the brand owners come up and say hey all the leads you have generated is junk I don't know why I'm paying you that's a very typical mindset what we have encountered. How do you generally solve that problem? How do you make sure you are adding that bottomfunnel tracking inside the ads? It helps in two ways. One for us to track and second for us to eventually optimize algorithm. But how do you deal with that especially in the automotive space? Yeah, good question. And I could talk now you can add more. We could talk about holistically any industry I think it's the same problem. What you described. I really hate that relationship with a client. I really hate it. And I think it and I certain clients are like that and I've we've turned down business and I've had conversations with brands that's not the correct approach. I think the correct approach is not adversarial, That's like the adversarial like conversation like my like I have to go and fight with my agency because if I fight with them, they're going to get me better leads. I think the best approach is when we become the partner to the business and we're all on the same page and the goal is to drive in business and not to have adversarial

32:40Conversations. Any conversations about lead quality or lead count or whatever it is should always be productive, It should be like what should be doing differently? Can we use this data or this is what I'm seeing on the ground floor? It shouldn't be the like let me fight with them and only because I fight with them they're going to give me better leads and I know that if I fight with them for an hour they're going to fix things and it'll be better. But and it's funny but we do and we try to avoid that because our best relationships are where we're a full digital partner like we'll do their website hosting email like everything like we become the go-to not the like not the lead provider. We don't want to be a lead provider. Right. Exactly. Yeah. But the best approach is for the analyst or the primary point of contact to really understand the business and really first of all be on the same page of customers and whatnot. B be regularly in touch with the clients and C the communication has to be a two-way street like an automotive right we ask for the dealership to provide us data back on what they're seeing on at the dealership forward because I'm not physically there at the dealership. I don't know how their weekend went. Like we made a tweak in marketing. It looks like leads went up, but did they sell more cars? I have no clue. Like I wouldn't know unless they provide me a feedback. And a lot of

33:57Agencies don't do that. They just wait for the dealership like to send them their quarterly sales number or whatever. At that point, you're looking so far backwards, it makes no sense whatsoever. So, I think it has to be a partnership between the agency and the business. And I think there has to be two-way communication. And there's certainly a lot of times where it's not. Sometimes intentional, sometimes not. Like the business is too busy, they don't have a person dedicated to do that. And those times the marketing works worse. It's always better when it's a two-way conversation, two-way street. And when everyone could be very agile, I don't know, we tried something new with marketing. This weekend was amazing for car sales. Let's double down on it. Or we tried something new and it actually was worse, so let's roll it back. It's all about being agile and making quick changes more so than it was 10, 20, 30 years ago. If much about nondigital advertising like it's called traditional which is the TV the billboards the radio newspapers a lot of that stuff was it's pivoting a little bit now there's CTV and OTT and other stuff but 20 30 years ago it was all very slowm moving the TV buys where the advertisers would buy TV placements would all happen within a very short period during the year for

35:16The entire year. That's like the opposite of being flexible, agile and pivoting, U you plan all of your entirely yearly TV marketing within a couple one or and I worked at Publicis, which is huge agency. I saw it live, It's a very crazy two-eek process and then you're locked in for that whole year. And what if you pick the wrong channels, the wrong audiences, the wrong messaging? Maybe your messaging is completely off. What do you do? Well, we'll fix it next year, I think in this day and age, success has to come from very regular communication with clients. And I think it's all about being agile, agile and flexible, being a being able and willing to suggest new things and try new things. And not everyone does that. It's very easy to just well, I haven't heard from the client this month. Things must be going well. Let's leave it on autopilot, It's very easy to do that. I'm sure it happens all the time, but th those are the agencies that wind up with cancellations and more importantly with bad reviews. For us, our reputation is probably more important than anything. We focus on that very heavily. And doing that stuff, you wind up with bad reviews, then you get less customers than then you go out of business. Yeah. And in terms of this feedback

36:34Loop, do you do you use any automations or is it still manual? How does the feedback loop? It has to Yeah, it's funny. So in Very good question. Internally we have a lot of I don't want to say automated feedback loops but every task that goes out from one team to another has the ability for feedback in both directions. So this person gave me a task but he didn't give me enough detail so I'm going to comment that he didn't give me enough detail so next time he knows to be better and his supervisor could review it with him. Like there's a lot of that it's not automated but there's a lot of feedback loops like probably too many feedback loops but we want we want continual improvements right with clients it's super manual because everyone is very different everyone has different comfort levels everyone has different expectations and everyone works better differently and what I mean by that is I don't know some people are very old school and want to get on that phone call every week and just chat about how things are going Some people only want to speak on text. They want to like test and I don't know update my campaign, change this, And then there's everyone in between and we in especially in automotive we still have a lot of people who like the in person. It's a very traditional industry where a lot of deals still I call them handshake

37:54Deals. They literally like won't do business with you unless they see you in person and shake your hand and after that they don't need to see you but they need to look you in the eye and shake your hand. So I think it's it has to be still very manual and very specific to how people want to do it. And the biggest and I go off on a lot of tangent so I apologize in advance but I think so I'll go I'll go off on another tangent. The businesses that I saw be the most successful during COVID like the small businesses were the ones that were willing to embrace that. And what I mean by that is like for a car dealership, let's say in New York City, the car dealerships could not be open. They had to close for CO like physically had to close. Imagine a car dealership selling cars cannot sell cars. They're physically closed. So those that became very flexible with like well this consumer wants to text me. This one wants to use the live chat on my website. This one wants to physically come in. So let's figure out how to get them in. We're the ones that did well. And I don't know if much about the automotive market in the US, but prior to co no deals were ever made, not in person. I think it was literally the dealership's goal to get someone in the in person into a dealership. They would not discuss pricing. They would not discuss financing, leasing, they wouldn't

39:11Discuss any numbers unless you were there in person. And it was crazy to see how within three months, the dealerships that pivoted, and guess what? They could give you a lease price over live chat or they could text you and say, "Send me a pictures of your car. I'll give you a trade-in value." The ones that were there were became flexible with communicating to clients were the ones that did very well in co Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean I totally relate that. I mean we work with education clients and they used to come the students used to come and get counseling for opting out and study either in US or UK and everything suddenly became live calls WhatsApp chats and you are able to close thousands of dollars deal over a phone call over a chat without people visiting the office at all. So I can entirely relate to that u transition out there. So I mean in the whole thing now with Google ads let's talk about couple of couple of technical standpoints. One is conversion tracking. Now that you work with lot of automotive clients everybody uses different websites. How do you handle this

40:27Conversion tracking? That is one area. And do you also do the bottomfunnel conversion tracking as well? Like for example, we have generated 2,000 leads. How many became opportunities? How many became I don't know proper sales? So do we also do that? Good question. What can I say? It's as not even automotive in general as a as a any business. We are very fortunate to have Google Analytics as a almost unifying source and what I mean by that is during the early 90s there were two or three website analytics companies I forget them now but one of the bigger ones was Urchin I don't know if you remember that back in the day it was very expensive and most companies not do it I think the Urchin package started $1,000 a, [snorts] Google Analytics bought them and made it free. So, what really helps me and everyone is Google Analytics has become almost like the standard. Yes, G4 is giving everyone issues and yes, we now have to track events and set conversions and each website shoots different events. But we use Google Analytics as the I

41:47Guess neutral third party data source and not all the website providers embrace it. For example, dealer.com, which is one of the biggest automotive website providers, does not do G4. You have to like get them to install it. But once installed, that's become our unifying source, right, of data. From there, we go down to calls and forms, not to actual car sales. But there's ways to connect it back to car sales. It's not always perfect because I don't know, the husband submitted the lead and then the wife bought the car and her name's the car. Yeah. Right. Or they have two cell phone numbers and they put in a different one or the address is different. So, it's not perfect, but we are able to get down pretty close to the bottom of the funnel with because of Google Analytics and because of being able to track forms and every website provider tracks it themselves also. They have their own like CRM and CMS systems. But Google Analytics has been the unifying source that allows us to run similar campaigns and strategies and measure things in similar ways across different website platforms. Amazing. Have you heard of this term signal engineering in recent times? Yes. Yes. I have man it's reminds me of all the audience audiencebased stuff that was very popular like five six years ago.

43:06It's going down like a road of using a lot of with audience targeting when Facebook went from letting you target anyone in any way you can. Yeah. To not everyone started coming up with these audience signals instead of audiences you now have look alikes and signals. So we're moving similarly with this stuff now like proxies for getting data points I guess. At the end of the day nothing's going to beat first party data right but I think everyone is trying to get creative with the data that they are able to get to become more efficient. M no yeah I mean we have seen a lot of advantages in value based bidding especially when you bring the CRM data and how do you use that to get more quality leads but it all works in a volume it doesn't work in a very small 5 10 15 leads so the moment you have volume sorry value based bidding has been so huge for dealerships automotive I've been talking about it for six seven years now but for whatever reason it doesn't really happen much like other agencies in automotive don't do it. And the reason for it is because in automotive the things you measure and things you should measure starts at the top what's called a VDP which is a

44:24Vehicle description page view. So someone looked at a specific car. So a lot of people are measuring that the VDP someone looked at a car that's some a conversion. That's fine. [snorts] On the bottom you have forms called and store visits. Google Ads actually gives you store visits because these are actually physical stores with a Google My Business linked up to it. So you see the store visits. So if you're capturing all these conversions and not doing value based bidding, you're valuing someone looking at a car at the same level as someone physically coming into a dealership. And from our research, someone coming into a dealership is actually 100 to a thousand times more valuable. Yeah. But you're not telling Google that would that value be Exactly. So, exactly. All industries have this wonky stuff like if you don't use value based bidding, you're not doing so well. But automotive has been the worst because if you're telling Google a VDP is just as valuable as a phone call or store visits, all your optimizations are going to be very out of whack. And I've been preaching this for a long time and I have no idea why dealerships don't embrace it. I have I have no clue. The feedback I've gotten is, well, I don't know what the value of the phone call is, but it's not about the value. And by the way, I have I have like a whole chapter in my book on this stuff. You don't even need values for value based bidding. So

45:42For anyone listening, you don't need you don't need absolute values. It could be ratios because Google doesn't really fine. It cares about values if you're doing robust targeting or whatever. But as a service business, let's say you don't make a product, it's not as much as what the value is as what the ratio is. So if that a phone, let's say you don't know that a phone call is worth $100. You have no idea how much a phone call is worth to you which by the way as a business owner you should someone calls me how much is that worth to me you should know that before you spend anything on marketing let's say you don't you should at least know how much more times it is more valuable so for example for the my VDP example a store visit let's say is 100 times more valuable to you than the VDP you set the value of the VDP to one and you set the value of the store visit to 100 it doesn't have to be absolute numbers because Google the way Google bidding works it doesn't need the absolute numbers to bid effectively. It just needs the ratio. It knows that was 100 times more valuable. So, it's willing to spend 100 times more in theory for that conversion versus a VDP. That's all it needs to know. So, I don't know why everyone's so scared of value based bidding. I see it done so rarely in automotive and small businesses like e-commerce, whatever. It's more common, but man, I it's 2026 and I don't know, eight out of 10 accounts I look at don't have value

46:58Based bidding. So, I don't know. But thank you for pointing if you remember this in 2023 Google has released something called offline conversion tracking OCD OCI calculator (offline conversion import). In the OCI calculator (offline conversion import) they have exactly mentioned what you just mentioned. You don't need to know the value of a phone call. All you need to know is what is the difference between step A and step B of the funnel and step C of the funnel. And if you want to get more step C's then you have to adjust your values based on that. So that's how it generally works. I mean would you able to just break this down in a technical term or a non-technical term like why this is important we spoke but how this thing would work with pro couple of analogies or very simple example okay if they give value based how the algorithm would learn and if they don't give value based what would learn so that at least the marketers would understand okay what is the reason behind of doing it yeah for sure I was going to I could share a deck that I present on it but I won't it'll take too long, yeah. So, that's okay. I mean, we have time. We're going to cut it. If you feel that would help the viewers, we definitely can. I'll walk through it in my head. I presented this deck like four years ago, but I'll walk through it in my head. So, we had a very interesting case. So, when the Porsche Taycan came out, so if

48:16Anyone's familiar with the Porsche Taycan, it's an electric car. And I don't know if this will be on video, but if it is, it looks like this. I had one. That's why I had one of these. We do a lot of marketing for Porsche. So, when the Porsche Taycan came out, there was a lot of buzz about it. It was a It was a electric car like Tesla, but it was a Porsche and Porsche. They always correct me. I can't say Porsche. They get in trouble. Porsche. Just like Jaguar. Porsche. When Porsche when the Tyan came out, it was a very got a lot of buzz, but people were not buying it. It was the diehard EV folks were buying Teslas. And then the Porsche people are usually very what I call them purists. They're like they were like I will drive a combustion engine, ICE engine as they call them until I die. I will take it to a grave. I will be buried next to my Porsche 911 engine. Porsche is known for building very good engines. Why would I buy an electric car? So what was interesting is a lot of people were searching about it because there was a lot of press and news and it was like really cool that Porsche is making electric car. A lot of people were searching for it but very few people were actually submitting forms for it. So we looked into doing a marketing c we

49:34Ran a marketing campaign for a couple months when it just came out and that was the result. We were generating a BDPs which is people would look at the would look at the car but they would not be interested in it. So what we did and this was like just when valuebased bidding started coming out. So this same time that the Porsche Taycan was coming out. So what we did is we made we made the value of a form submit like a thousand times higher than the VDP. So before Google's machine learn bidding would just be generating a lot of these VDPs that they would they was like wow you're getting a lot of conversions. Well I keep spending money and the conversions were VDP and again that's a viewing the car. So, we changed the logic to make the viewing of the car worth one. And again, it doesn't have to be an absolute dollar. It was just worth one. And submitting the form worth a thousand. So, a thousand times more valuable. And literally, like the second we turned it on, the amount of form submits doubled. And I think month over month it went up over 100%. With the same spend, same everything. What's interesting is it drove less traffic, the clicks were more expensive, but it generate twice more form submits within the same budget. And the way that works is by telling Google that the form submits is what you're interested in, Google use their own signals to figure

50:51Out the propensity of someone to be more likely to submit a form based on the data of other people who have submitted the form. And they use a ton of data for this. It's time on site, day of the week, the potential age of the person, the gender, where they're located physically, what they've searched before. They went on YouTube and they actually researched the cars before. That's a signal that they're more likely, It uses all this data. It's back in the day, it used to be gut feel, That the like PPC analysts would be like would look through like a quarter of data and be what, people on Sunday are more likely to submit at least a little bit more on Sunday. It was like a backwards looking gut feel. With the machine learning, it's literally on the fly. Google calls at auction time bidding. So literally by telling Google that form submits are a thousand times more valuable. We were able to generate twice more form submits. And it was funny that some of the metrics actually looked worse. So the bounce rate got worse because people would land on the on the form submit page, submit the form, and do nothing else. So some metrics actually look worse. The clicks got more expensive by like 30%. And I remember talking to one of the dealerships. They're "Why are the clicks more expensive?" I'm "Don't worry about the clicks. Let's focus on the form." And they actually qualified leads. And one of the dealerships that we ran the pilot for this Porsche Taycan campaign, it wasn't even like a huge

52:10High volume dealership, but they w up selling more Porsche Taycan than anyone else in the nation. And because of that, they got more allocation to get more of them. And then they want able to sell more again. And then Porsche Taycan became popular a year later. And they did very well because they were getting lots of allocations because they sold a lot to this campaign. So that's a real world example for you. If you tell Google what's the most valuable for you, it could use the machine learning to get you those higher propensity converid higher on the people that will have a higher propensity to have that conversion action for you. Nice. I mean to link this Alex just one follow-up question on Nest conversions now that you mentioned about all these things right so you come you visit the website and you do a search history and I think marketers will also would be able to understand a little bit more about enhanced conversions how these things tie together so that they understand that they understand the importance of enhanced conversions as well. So purely because value based and it has to practically understand the search history or the behavior of the user not only on your website but in the Google properties.

53:28How do you think this will work? Would you able to just simplify it so that viewers will be able to understand the importance? Yes in different way. I don't think I fully got the question. No. So basically what I mean is a user comes in we say he's a high value user okay and Google says use enhanced conversion to track the users right so to eventually set up the conversion tracking and how do you think that enhanced conversion would help so that Google would be able to eventually find the behavior of the users I don't know if I still I'll try answering I don't know if I if I full fully get it but I think so the way all of this works, so there's a couple steps I think to setting this up all correctly, number one, and I'll work I'll walk you through it because I've seen a lot of pits, too. Number one, you have to have Google Analytics linked to Google Ads, Step one. Step one, have Google Analytics, Step two, link it to Google Ads. By the way, you'd be surprised how many people don't link the Google Analytics to Google Ads, which then limits the data in Google Analytics and limits what you see in Google in limits the data in Google Ads and limits that what you see in Google Analytics. So, step two, you have to link them, Step three, you have to set up all your conversions and this is

54:46Probably one of the biggest pitfalls. If you're not measuring everything, you're not going to have a efficient campaign. And what I mean by that is, let's say you're a car dealership. We'll go back to a car dealership example. It's not just a form submit. You probably have a trade-in form. You probably have schedule service. You probably have a finance application. And people don't track those, If you don't track all your conversions, you're going to mess everything up, Google needs to have the full view of all the conversion. Even some of them that are not so valuable, put them in and give them a lower value. Like so a lot of times that's missed. People just track, oh, I'll just track like any action on your website that's that takes place that's valuable in any way should be set up. And sometimes it's just viewing a page, For some businesses, if they get to a certain inner page that has some value. So that's I forget what number I think that was step three. And then step four is assign the values and five turn on value based bidding. I think the way all of this works is Google has to Google ads which has the machine learning everything built in auction time bidding has to have all this data from your Google Analytics and I think that the way it comes together is it knows

56:03Google ads knows the profile of your converting customers and then is able to do auction-time bidding. Auction-time bidding means it could bid in real auction time. So when someone types something into Google before the ad comes up, Google Ads could adjust the bidding for that person based on the data. But I think I hope I'm answering your question, but Google Analytics provides all that data that then Google Ads uses for the auction time bidding. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean yeah, it basically covers the idea. So what I was referring to was more into ID resolution. So why users should start capturing that user information on the form and push that data back into Google ads so that it's Vishno that is actually a high value customer and it's Alex is a high value customer and we should go after Vishno and Alex so that we would bring more people like Vishnu and Alex because these both search history or the behavior would look like a high value customers. So that is what I was trying to refer to as well. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. So, u Alex just to give a summary. So, we eventually started with a nice timeline of whatever we happened. We definitely feel old right now with whatever we have seen

57:21And what's going on in the market for multiple years and we also touch based what would happen if there is a w media buying for the marketers. So if there is a tool and how would that look like especially for the wide media buying and then we went deep into automotive search marketing which is your expertise and spoke a little bit more on value based bidding. So that's like a quick summary if anyone wants looking at this whole episode. This is the most important aspect how to run proper value based bidding and what are the success stories especially in the automotive. It doesn't just apply for automotive. It will apply for all the lead generation businesses. But value based bidding is the important aspect is the major takeaway from the episode. Thank you very much Alex for joining us and we look forward to hosting you once again with a very new concept probably e-commerce and wish you a very best of luck for the rest of the 2026. Yeah. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Thank you Alex.