Road Work Ahead

#11 - Larisa Aslanyan: The Near-Future of PPC Advertising

• Waypost Studio | Sam Gerdt • Season 1 • Episode 11

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Welcome back, after two months of silence, to Road Work Ahead, a podcast that explores the unmapped future of business and technology.

My name is Sam Gerdt, and today I'm sharing a recent conversation with one of my long-time colleagues, Larisa Aslanyan. A few months ago, Larisa and I were talking about big changes in paid advertising. Obviously, artificial intelligence is a major factor in these changes, but there's a lot more than that happening under the surface.

At the core of our talk is how the internet, and the way we interact with it, is radically changing. When it comes to paid advertising, your strategies will have to adapt to the new ways your audience is searching. These search habits are often wildly different from generation to generation, so while I may still use Google like a grandpa, younger generations are developing search practices that require new advertising strategies.

My skepticism and cynicism shines through quite a bit in this discussion, but I really did have a lot of fun imagining all of the ways that new technologies like AI will forever change how we interact with the world around us. The next few years are going to be interesting.

Sam Gerdt:

Welcome back, after two months of silence, to Road Work Ahead, a podcast that explores the unmapped future of business and technology. My name is Sam Gerdt and today I'm sharing a recent conversation with one of my longtime colleagues, Larisa Aslanyan. A few months ago, Larisa and I were talking about the big changes happening in paid advertising. Obviously, artificial intelligence is a major factor in these changes, but there's a lot more than that happening under the surface. At the core of our talk is how the internet and the way we interact with it is changing. When it comes to paid advertising, your strategies will have to adapt to the new ways your audience is searching. These search habits are often wildly different from generation to generation, so, while I may still use Google like a grandpa, younger generations are developing search practices that require new advertising strategies.

Sam Gerdt:

My skepticism and cynicism shines through quite a bit in this discussion, but I really did have a lot of fun imagining all the ways that new technologies like AI will forever change how we interact with the world around us. The next few years are going to be interesting, we were talking the other day about the changes that are happening in PPC paid advertising, and I'm really I shouldn't be surprised, but I'm a little bit surprised about how many common themes there are between PPC and the other things that we talk about on the show, so I wanted you to come on. I wanted you to have this discussion with me in front of everybody and talk through some of those things that are changing in PPC and how they relate to things like artificial intelligence, data privacy and some of the other technologies that we're dealing with on this show.

Larisa Aslanyan:

PPC is very tightly connected to everything else online. Every business that's visible online, every search, every behavior that you have online in some way will have some kind of connection with advertising. It's also such a big part of businesses and consumers how they find products, how they buy so it's, I think, very natural that it's being heavily affected by technology right now and what's happening in the AI topic. So, just to sum up the question, I would say there are four main trends that we could isolate right now. First one is obviously AI and a lot of the new tools that are emerging a lot of AI functionality and new features in almost all of the advertising platforms Meta, google, anything really and so we, as advertisers and businesses who are advertising, have to take advantage of those tools and they have to learn how to use them, because the future is going to be very heavily AI influenced and you need to learn to use those tools. So that's one.

Larisa Aslanyan:

The second trend is PPC has always been such a complicated thing to do for business owners or someone working in the average marketing department of a business who is not really into digital marketing that have this marketing background. It was always very complicated for them to understand. Okay, what does this mean? What does the CPC mean? What is like CPA? And that is changing. It's being more simplified, more accessible to a lot of other professionals, I guess, a lot of people who come from different backgrounds. So, if they want, they can set up their own ads and have a more human understanding of how it works.

Larisa Aslanyan:

Third one is hyper personalization, and that's just how we target our ads, how we choose well, we don't choose, but how we hope our ads will show who will see the ads, how will they react, and all of the functionality and features that we have available in that regard. And finally, it's getting more and more expensive every year to advertise online. I think this changed a lot after COVID, because businesses had to go through this evolution and become online businesses, whether they want it or not. It was either, you know, go online or shut the doors and go home.

Larisa Aslanyan:

So a lot of these businesses adapted and now a lot more companies have their online stores, a lot of online operations, and you have to participate in the marketplace for ads and you have to advertise. So there's more competition, there's more costs. However, it's not just that the competition is raising the cost, but it's getting more expensive and everyone should be ready to spend more on their ads.

Sam Gerdt:

So we've got four things we want to talk about specifically today and just to recap those, we've got the impact of artificial intelligence on paper click advertising, on digital advertising. We've got the increased productivity that new tools are offering and the decreased what we're calling the decreased point of entry. You no longer need to have those highly technical skills in order to understand ads platforms. Then, thirdly, we've got highly personalized ads, which is going to have a lot to do with the way that we collect data. It's also going to have a lot to do with a lot of the privacy and ethical changes that are happening in our market. And then, lastly, we have elevated costs, which seems to be the theme all over the world for all things, not just advertising.

Sam Gerdt:

I want to get into each of these individually and I want to hear your perspective on why they're important and why we need to talk about them, and, specifically, what business owners need to be thinking about in the coming year and the coming years, as we see these changes become more and more apparent. So let's go ahead and start with the big one Artificial intelligence. Why is this a big deal and how is it already changing the paid ads market?

Larisa Aslanyan:

I think the number one thing. It's obvious, everyone is saying this, but we need to understand how it works. We need to be able to start having interactions with AI and not be blind throughout those interactions. I feel like a lot of business owners still don't understand how PPC works.

Larisa Aslanyan:

There are all sorts of these old formulas that if you invest this much money and then if you choose this many keywords, you're going to get this many leads. They don't work anymore because so much of the system, so much of the advertising algorithms, are now governed by AI and machine learning that it's more about what data you feed to the AI, what kind of conversations you're having with the AI and then what it's going to give back to you as a business owner. You have to understand how AI works, how machine learning algorithms work, so that you can construct your own online system, your website, your emails, your marketing funnel, your lead generation process, so that you will be in sync with the AI changes coming up. One of those main changes coming is conversational search. We're going to be able to well, we're doing it now already with chat GPT, right? I mean, how often are you using chat GPT instead of Google, for example, or a search?

Larisa Aslanyan:

engine yeah yeah, and that's coming to the search engines. That's probably going to come to social media as well. As some point you'll be able to have conversations. Well, it is in social media. If you consider the chatbots that businesses can have, you can have an AI assistant talking with your customers. So you need to start thinking about your online marketing in the format of conversations that you can have with AI with your customers.

Sam Gerdt:

We deal with a lot of questions about this ourselves, and then, you know, as we work with clients, they have questions too, and that is so. Much of what we do in digital marketing and advertising is driven by consumer behavior, and it doesn't take a very smart person to look around and recognize that consumer behaviors are changing so rapidly, both just day to day and then generationally too. The way that I interact with the internet is completely different than the way someone 10 years younger than me interacts with the internet and someone 20 or 30 years younger than me. These people are interacting with an internet in an almost unrecognizable way, and so as you look at the future of your own business, as you look at the future of the internet, you have to recognize that our preconceived ideas about how things like advertising are going to work, those things are, those are all out the window. So with artificial intelligence, what we see is we're preparing for it's almost a new type of web crawler as well as a new type of consumer.

Sam Gerdt:

So on the web crawler side you know, on the tech side, when we build websites, when we create all of these channels, we're looking at it from a very technical perspective and asking the question how is the search engine, how is the entity answering a consumer's question going to get the information from my website and serve that consumer to my website?

Sam Gerdt:

So there's all kinds of technical considerations that go into that process, whether it's a website or social media or whatever. And then, secondly, you have, besides, the web crawler, you then have the consumer, and how are they going to interact with the information that I'm putting out there? How are they going to interact with my website? How are they going to interact, you know, with social media? And so there is this huge preparation process, and there's a lot of ways in which we don't know what's going to happen. Where we're recognizing the old way of building a website, the old way of building these funnels, building these channels, it's gone and the new way is going to look very different, because we're serving an artificial intelligence that's way smarter than any Google bot in the past and we're serving a consumer that has far, far different behaviors than anything that we're accustomed to in the past or in our own generation.

Larisa Aslanyan:

We could be probably the last generation well, millennials could be the last generation where they have more distrust towards technology and advertising and AI than the newer generations. Because I feel like it's going just this AI thing and technology in general is going to be so implanted into our lives that it might be your friend. When you go to Google, you might not look at it as this company, this search engine, whereas we saw Google kind of being created and then developed and then becoming what it is now. But for newer generations, it's their best friend in their pocket. So add AI to that and it's their best friend in their pocket that really understands them and the information that they're going to give to that AI. It's going to make these ads so appealing, so targeted, so to the point that I have no idea how people are going to react to these ads in the future, because that's something we'll have to see and it's going to be very interesting.

Larisa Aslanyan:

But one of the examples that we already know and it was announced during Google Marketing Live this year was we'll be able to ask a question on the search engine page. Let's say I'm in the city and I am looking for family oriented activities, and then I will be able to ask you follow up questions and then you give them more info. Okay, so we have how many kids you have, what are the ages, what type of activities you're interested in, and just imagine the amount of personal data or just personal preferences that AI can collect about a user and then use that data to find just the right content to show. It's just mind-blowing. And that's just in the near future. Just imagine in a few years what are the opportunities that we can have.

Sam Gerdt:

Yeah, there's going to be all kinds of ethical and practical considerations that are going to have to be dealt with by probably by us, probably very soon but the idea that those lines are completely blurring. We saw this a little bit when we had voice search and you had little boxes that sat on your countertop and you could talk to them and ask them questions and a voice would respond. What we saw there was a shift away from people interfacing with a computer in order to get the answer to a question, and that meant also a shift away from people interfacing with your website as a business to get an answer to a question. That's already presented us with a lot of challenges. Far fewer searches, we already know, result in a click through to an actual website. Google is trying to serve an answer on the SERPs page. The trend now is like you're saying it's even further where not only are you interfacing with this entity off of a computer, off of your business's website, you're interfacing with it not as a machine, not as a company, a business, whatever. You're interfacing with it as a trusted advisor, as a friend, as someone who knows you and has a personality and has supposedly it's going to give off the perception that it has your best interest at heart. It's going to very quickly become this thing where these AI entities will be trusted advisors. You'll take their consideration as their agency grows. As you get more multimodal engines out there working in this capacity, not only will they have the ability to feed you information, they'll have the ability to take actions on your behalf.

Sam Gerdt:

Let's bring up an example. Ten years ago, my toilet starts overflowing. We've got to go further back. Fifteen years ago, my toilet starts overflowing. I get on the computer really quickly because I don't have a smartphone yet. At that point I might even search the yellow pages for a plumber what I'm looking for because it's an emergency. I'm looking for probably the first one that comes up, which means he had the best keyword stuffing, he had the best backlink strategy, so he's showing up number one on Google. I'm going to call him. I'm making these quick actions.

Sam Gerdt:

Even in a considered decision scenario, I might look at a few options, I might look at reviews and ratings, but I'm taking all of those actions for myself and I'm doing it at a computer. Then we get the smartphone and I can do it at my phone. Then we get voice search and now I can just talk to Google. I say, hey, google, my toilet's overflowing. What do I do? At that point we see this shift where, all of a sudden, maybe Google starts feeding you actual information instead of results for plumbers. Maybe Google says shut off the water valve, instead of saying, here, let's go look at xyzplumbercom and see what this blog post says. There's these constant shifts.

Sam Gerdt:

When I say multi-model agents taking actions for you, five years from now, of course, five years from now we may have a smart home who says, hey, I see the toilet's overflowing, let me shut that off for you. But barring that, five years from now you're going to say, hey, my AI agent. Hey, fred, my toilet's overflowing. Call the best plumber. And Fred the AI agent is going to do the web search, determine, based on his knowledge of you and the situation, which one you would prefer and make that decision for you. Then he's going to call that plumber and schedule the appointment and the plumber's going to show up at your door. And then, in the meantime, he's probably going to say the plumber's going to be a while In the meantime. Let me give you this detailed description about how to shut off the water in your bathroom, and at that point too, five years from now, certainly the capability to show you an AI-generated photo or video tutorial that has photo or video of your bathroom with your model toilet.

Sam Gerdt:

And so there's the place that we're at now is just this place that I don't think we can comprehend, like we're talking about the absolute utter abolition of the web as we know it. And then you say that Fred that just did all of that for you, is going to have built into it I mean, unless you're tech savvy and you build like a private system, if it's a corporate-owned system, it's going to have built into it the ability to serve you ads and it, you know, depending on how the ethics conversation goes with that, you look at that situation, you say I'm not sure that that's quite a good idea, but that's where we're headed and that's why I think this AI-paid advertising conversation is so, so interesting.

Larisa Aslanyan:

All of those things that you said just kind of so true, and I just want to add a few things. So you can one for example, you get a call and your carrier is Google Pie, you can already choose to not answer the call and have the AI assistant ask them questions like hey, who's calling? And then so you can have that AI as a substitute of yourself, as already. But the other thing is that if we go a little bit more science fiction on that and if we consider that in a few years and maybe like 10 years, maybe we have these new rulings or other chips implanted in us, so technology is already a part of us. I wonder how interesting it would be to advertise on those platforms. Yeah, we'd be able to serve ads to people when they're asleep in their dreams, or just. The possibilities are so endless. And I think the number one concern because you touched upon the ethics, I think the number one concern is to as a user.

Larisa Aslanyan:

You're a consumer. If you're a user, you have to understand that you got to be very careful about what you speak, what you type. If you have these, even if you don't have voice search at home, you have your mobile phone next to you. If you, I would say if you don't intend to buy something, just don't talk about it. I started being very careful because I'm Armenian, so I speak Armenian at home. So I will have conversations about some products or services in Armenian and I will get the ads in English an hour later. So I started being very careful about even what I add into this world.

Larisa Aslanyan:

The other thing is when you do want to call the best plumber. In the past, whatever you were using if you were using Google or whatever, it would probably find the company that is targeting the keyword best plumber and then it would serve you that result. Right now, the AI knows you better than anyone else. Probably knows you better than you yourself not yourself so it's going to know what best means for you. Does it mean you want the best customer service, or you want the quickest service, or you want the local plumber? What does it mean for you?

Larisa Aslanyan:

And there's just a lot more context and as a business owner, you have to keep this in mind. So when you're creating your website or when you're creating content any type of relationship that you have with your customers that's not paid advertising, for example you can collect that information what do things mean for your consumers and then use that data, feed that data into the AI to run ads and then you will have more successful results. And I think that every company speaking of ethics especially small and medium-sized companies, because they have much better relationships with their customers, I'd say A lot of them know their customers by name. So you have to take accountability for some of the ethical aspects of targeting and advertising using technology, but when it comes to bigger companies, I would not expect any really ethical standards, at least behind the scenes.

Sam Gerdt:

I'm very careful on this show not to steer too far into hypothetical futures. I have the belief that speculation tends to be less productive, and so when we talk about some of these futures with multi-model AI agents making phone calls on your behalf, I'm actually speaking from just a. We're not postulating too much For each one of those suggestions of what the future might look like. There are already products out there doing these things. So, for example, generating video tutorials that feature your model toilet in your bathroom, that technology already exists. The way that we can auto generate those images and, to a lesser degree, those videos. And also, you know, train an agent on a specific model of anything. Train an agent on, you know, a specific discipline like plumbing in this example. That's all already there. And then I think the other important thing to realize is that advertising, historically, has always been the cutting edge of this kind of data collection and data use, and advertising has also historically done it hidden from the view of the consumer, undisclosed.

Sam Gerdt:

There are a number of examples that we can think of throughout the last several years, and some of them at this point are 10 years old and they sound like there's something that might happen today or, you know in a few years and surprise us. So the one that comes to mind, and I'll just share it briefly is there was that instance, several several years ago, where Target got into some hot water for generating sales promotions for a teenage girl who and the promotions were geared towards pregnant women and new moms. And, of course, the dad of this teenage girl got really upset about that and made a big stink about it and raised it, and then shortly after discovered that his, his teenage daughter, was expecting, and at the time that Target was serving her the ads, she didn't even know it yet. And so the question is well, okay, well, ai can't be that smart, right? It's not like they've got instrumentation that can detect whether or not you are pregnant. No, and that's that's not what's happening.

Larisa Aslanyan:

Let me just sorry, just let me tell you how they did it though.

Sam Gerdt:

What they did is they.

Larisa Aslanyan:

I know how, yeah. So they, they came out and they were proud and they kind of explained everything how they did it and it was, I think, in 2015,. So there was no AI back then, what they did is they?

Larisa Aslanyan:

they took us like their own pool of people who knew that. They knew that these people were pregnant, and then they tracked the fine behaviors of those people. But the data that they collected afterwards they could tell even when your due date was. And then what they did? They took that data and then they turned it into a pregnancy prediction score and they assigned that score to everyone. All their customers of everyone had a. They had a pregnancy prediction score and if yours was high, then you would get these offers.

Larisa Aslanyan:

What they also did they ran some studies and they realized that if they show you ads based on the data that they've collected let's say, they only show you pregnancy items, they advertise just those products to you you will not trust the ad enough to click and buy. So what they did was they intentionally mixed up the products and the promotions and ads to make you believe that you're not really being hyper targeted like that. But just imagine if that was done by humans and it was done just in this area of, I guess, human life. But imagine if you tell AI or machine learning to do that in all aspects of all humans, regardless of their lifestyles. Ai can target you just as well as it can target me, even if our lifestyles are so different from each other.

Larisa Aslanyan:

When there's conversations about ethics, I don't think that anything has changed. I don't think that bigger companies know exactly what you're going through in your life, what's happening. It's Christmas. They know you're buying gifts. They know who you're buying gifts for. Imagine how much it can grow the data and we're all feeding that data.

Sam Gerdt:

So let's come away with an action item from this. You're looking into the future and you say, okay, well, this sounds very different and I think many people are going to say this sounds uncomfortable or concerning, scary. Even so, the action item here, because we want to talk specifically about paid advertising, we want to apply this to business. The action item here is you really need to begin now aligning your marketing and sales tactics, efforts, goals, understanding, with a future that looks very different than the past. So if your alignments in those areas are not strategically forward thinking, it may be time to reevaluate how you're going about making those decisions, because we are looking at a very different web and we're looking at a very different base of consumers across every industry across the board, because it's not just industry related. This is generational and it's happening very fast.

Sam Gerdt:

So let's leave that first bit. We spent a long time on that first bit. It's so fun to just dwell there. But let's leave artificial intelligence and paid advertising and I want to visit these other three areas that we talked about. I think they're also very important, though maybe not quite so sensational. Let's talk about how productivity is changing in paid advertising. Let's talk about how these platforms are becoming a little bit more accessible.

Larisa Aslanyan:

I would just start by saying it's different for each advertising platform. I still find that meta needs to catch up with how simple it is to advertise. I know a lot of business owners that just get lost in the ad manager. But when it comes to Google, for example, instead of having these dozens of campaigns, we now have maybe just one or two campaigns, and everything is grouped into topics. Everything is grouped into relevant keywords.

Larisa Aslanyan:

We look at the intent, we don't look at these. We want to target this exact keyword with. The user is going to search. That's gone. We need to look at search and advertising in a more contextual way. So that's easy on us Everyone who's doing PPC for businesses. It's much easier. We can use a lot of AI tools, like responsive ads. They help us generate headlines, descriptions. I don't know if not everyone is using those features if they're professionally in the industry, but if you're a business owner and you're just getting started yourself and maybe you don't have a budget to hire an agency or a freelancer, you can start doing it yourself. Google is making these features more accessible to anyone without a technical background and again, ai plays some part here, because you can set up your ad account and your campaigns by having conversations with the AI bot. What the?

Larisa Aslanyan:

problem is here is that when Google does this, there's a lot of information that is kept from these business owners. These automatic features don't, let's say, the smart campaigns. They don't provide a lot of data, a lot of information to the business owner, who can then use that information to plan their growth, have a strategy, know exactly which areas contributed to these conversions, where their customers came from exactly, and so there's a lot of in-depth data that's not available to business owners. If they choose this more simple set up process and have a much better productivity, they can just spend an hour creating the ads and then go about their business. So there's a con and a pro to productivity. In some areas, it's better to spend more time and compromise the productivity than go for the simpler solution.

Sam Gerdt:

Do you find that in the cases where a business owner is doing that set up himself using those simplified tools do you find that the end result because the data that's being surfaced is not as deep as insightful does that affect the efficacy of the ads?

Larisa Aslanyan:

Yeah, so I think I've seen businesses that were very successful with these smart campaigns, and those are usually the online shops, e-commerce websites. They can do very well with those very highly automatic features and they can create their own merchant center and just have.

Larisa Aslanyan:

They can even have someone from Google or a partner of Google reach out to them and help them set up the account. They don't even have to hire or pay anyone. However, the decisive factor is if you're a business and you have a strategy and if you've been using this strategy for years, your website is aligned with a strategy. Whatever content you have, everything is in sync. Everything is connected to each other. You're giving out this one message, you're positioning yourself in a certain way and so when you start advertising and use these automatic features, it collects all that data and, because you had a strategy, the data connects to each other and then serves to the right person. But let's say, if you're a business and you're just getting started, you don't even have a website, so you decide to have this one landing page and you're going to run ads. Or if you have a website that's not well built, you don't have enough content, you don't have enough reviews on Google or other places then you don't have enough data and enough data that speaks to each other, that creates this one big picture to feed into the automatic features, into the machine learning, to then get good output to have very effective ads. So that's why it's very controversial A lot of PPC specialists do not recommend using this simple setup processes, and they always recommend you know what?

Larisa Aslanyan:

Just invest some money into advertising. Just have someone that knows what they're doing to set up your ads. But at the same time, I think it's important that these things are accessible. There's a lot of people who are just starting out their businesses, and maybe in a few years they will be they have would have grown enough to be able to invest more into their marketing, but if they can't right now, why should they not advertise? Why should they just log into this complicated platform and not understand anything from there? And so I think it's a good thing to have all of these simple setup processes. The other thing is generative AI and how online shop owners can generate their product images for promotions and advertising inside Google. They don't have to hire a photographer to have these multiple variations, and so there is increased productivity. But I think you should be very careful where you make use of it and where you don't.

Sam Gerdt:

Well, this highlights, I think, one of the common problems that I see personally with a lot of artificial intelligence tools and improvements that are being applied across the industry to different technologies, and there will be people who disagree with me on this, but I I look at what artificial intelligence can and can't do and I'm not convinced that artificial intelligence is capable of creativity. I'm not convinced that artificial intelligence is capable of taking its training data, the data that it's given, the input, the prompt and the original training data, and and producing anything that contributes to the betterment of that corpus, that body of knowledge. So I mean, we've already seen a lot of studies that suggest that AI does a terrible job of generating new training data, that training data is best generated by humans. So you apply that on the smaller scale to an ads campaign and I I have to think that the point at which you're letting AI take the decision making control whether it's in the setup of the account and the and you know the feeding and collecting of that original data or whether it's in, you know, micro adjustments as you're running ad campaigns the point at which AI takes control of that decision making process is the point at which your process ceases to be creative, additive, ceases to be innovative, and it's the same thing and probably even a bigger issue, with the AI generated ads and content.

Sam Gerdt:

I would not, at this point, trust artificial intelligence to do good brand work, whether you already have an established brand or whether you're just starting out, the brand work that AI does for you at this point, from what I'm seeing, is only ever going to be, it's only ever going to have a degenerative effect on the work that you've done.

Sam Gerdt:

It's only ever going to move the needle in the wrong direction.

Sam Gerdt:

It may not be immediate and it may not be readily apparent, but when you have innovative and creative people working on your brand, who are making human connections through the course of their work with your clients, with your company, those people, as complex humans, are going to be far more capable, far more capable of making the decisions and coming up with the ideas that are going to evolve your brand. They're going to improve your brand and they're going to have a greater effect in making those human connections with your customers, your clients, your prospects, whoever your audience. I think that's just a big box that we could open and maybe look into and say I don't know how beneficial this would be. But, to your point, when I think about accessibility and when I think about lowering the bar for what it takes to even get on the platform at all, to get platformed at all, I see the application of AI in that way as being generally a good thing that will most definitely improve over time. So what we're seeing now is only the beginning.

Larisa Aslanyan:

I completely agree with you. In some instances, when I'm researching ads let's say I'm researching competitors or the type of ads that people run in some cases I can see an ad on Google and I can know that they've used chat, gpt or any AI tool to create that, because so many of them look so similar. There is no originality. You can tell it was not created by a human. But I think, up to some point for a business, that could be okay if they're just getting started and they have nothing online. But if they are planning to grow, they want to have a strategy. If they're already, they're out of this stage of not knowing if they will make it or just making that full commitment after that. At the moment, yes, ai will not add anything to your marketing bucket. It's better to just work with humans.

Sam Gerdt:

I think that nicely wraps up this idea of we're seeing increased productivity on the ad side. I want to move on now to the third thing that you brought to my attention, and that was highly personalized ads.

Larisa Aslanyan:

I think hyper-personalization has always been a thing. I have a personal story that happened years ago. I had a friend who was a serial entrepreneur and he would create these small online businesses, one after another. This was a long time ago, before there were these concerns about privacy and how companies collect data on users. This guy shared his strategy of deciding what kind of business he's going to run. He would go to Facebook Ad Manager. He would pick a targeting bundle let's say, people who live in this area, people who have this much household income and people who are looking to buy this thing. He would create a business based solely on that targeting bundle. Then he would make a lot of money because targeting worked every single time on his ads. He was just so relevant to whoever he was targeting that he would make a lot of sales. Then, unfortunately for him, at some point, these targeting criteria that were just so personal and sensitive were changed so that he was no longer able to do that.

Larisa Aslanyan:

I think that's the one thing that has changed. Now, companies may not collect personal data on you that's connected to your identity, but you will be grouped into these audience groups. Then you will be targeted based on that. That can be just as effective and freaky, I would say. In terms of the results, I don't see a lot of change. It's still going to be just as creepy, just as scary. You're still being researched by every website that you log into. Your data is being collected, but just the way it's being collected and how it's being used and what parts of it are being shared with advertisers that has changed.

Larisa Aslanyan:

You can have a lot of different variations of targeting. Right now, if you're collecting a lot of first party data from your website, whatever your customers agree to share with you you can use that data to have a much better understanding of what the customers are looking from you and use it in your advertising, using your promotions, in your content, in your organic SEO, whatever you want to use it in. You can also have these like rules when it comes to targeting. You can target back to people who visited your website but then didn't buy anything and left, or you can target people who visited certain pages and then what happened? Like they did other things. So you can have these behavioral bundles and target based on that. Right now in Google, you can also choose to target to new customers or return, or people who are already your customers or returning customers, so you can have that targeting option as well. There's just so many ways you can target ads or anything. Really, right now, I think the main thing that has changed is just how that collection happens, but in terms of the results, ads are going to get more and more and more personalized.

Larisa Aslanyan:

A funny thing that I do is like I did with my Christmas shopping. Sometimes I shop for someone and I don't know what I should get for them. What I do is I just browse the internet for a bit and then I just leave, and then the next day I have all these suggestions all over my internet and then I kind of use the system to help with some of my tasks. But not everyone is doing that.

Sam Gerdt:

That's the kind of awareness that I think we need to be promoting generally. When we were talking about back on the first point, when we were talking about the intrusiveness of artificial intelligence and how subtly it will have the ability to manipulate and to advertise to a person knowing so much about them and being given that place of trust, I think it's really important for us to take a step back and say, okay, well, what is most valuable for us to be cultivating in our minds in terms of, like, a way of thinking about this, and what I keep coming back to is just a general, pervasive awareness of the fact that everything that you ingest, everything that you look at, everything that you are told, everything that you listen to, is influencing you, and so, when it comes time to make a decision, you want to make sure that your decision-making process is as transparent and observable as possible. So, for example, if you need to decide where to go to lunch, it's best not to. This is a silly example it's best not to drive down the road and just say I'll just stop at the place that speaks to me, you know, because what that's doing is that's putting the advertiser in the driver's seat and it's letting them. It's basically saying, let the best manipulator win, and that's a very broad strokes example, but the idea is there.

Sam Gerdt:

There are so many decisions that we've just made passive, and I think we need to go back to making our decision-making processes as individuals more observable and transparent.

Sam Gerdt:

So, just having that mindset of I am constantly being manipulated, I am constantly being advertised to social media, news media, any media you know being on the internet, being out and about in stores, you know, in these public places and public forums and also on devices, I need to be especially aware and when it comes time to make a decision, I need to step back from those places and I need to make an objective one, I need to think through it and I need to try to, I guess, shed some of that manipulation that clings to us as a result of our interfaces with all of these entities.

Sam Gerdt:

That's a mindset it's. There are a lot of people from my generation who are like, yeah, that sounds great. And then there are a lot of people from, like my kid's generation who are like, nah, that we don't, that sounds like too much work, we don't need that. So I do think there's a little bit of a generational thing there and I think our kids are going to deal with the internet just very differently than we would. But as a person who's a part of that you know, previous generation who has to interface with this stuff for quite a while that's the mindset that I have when I approach it.

Larisa Aslanyan:

The question is, though how can you know that you're being objective? How can you know that the decision you're making is really not influenced by anything or anyone? There's been a lot of conversation about influencers as well. If you're on TikTok and Instagram and you see these girls or whoever using these products and recommending them, how can you really know that that's not a paid promotion? There's been a lot of stories where people were not disclosing that they were paid promotions and they were recommending them, and a lot of people would look up to them and go buy those products, but I think to just be on the more positive side.

Larisa Aslanyan:

I think it's time for all of us to just accept that this is happening and that's not going away.

Larisa Aslanyan:

No matter how much population there is, how many laws we pass, there's just no stopping this data flow. You know you're sending so much data and there's something to catch that data, and that's not going to change the way you can approach it, whether you're a consumer or a business, and especially if you're a business, you can be very honest about it, and you can develop these relationships with your customers through your website, through your content, your emails, your customer service, and you can establish a history of being honest and having integrity, making promises and then keeping those promises, and I think that in those cases, your customers will not even mind that they're being hyper-targeted by you. I have a list of brands that I don't mind giving up my information to, because I know they help me, you know they provide value to my life. I think it's just time we accept that technology is just going to influence every part of our lives and we just need to learn to cope with it.

Sam Gerdt:

Absolutely. I don't mean to put off a jaded perspective, but I do tend to skew quite cynical and skeptical when it comes to interfacing with any of these platforms. So, for example, you said how would you know if you were being manipulated? How, like, they don't always disclose when it's an ad. And I think that's my point is, they don't always disclose when it's an ad.

Sam Gerdt:

And so my assumption is if I'm on social media, my assumption is, if I'm on the internet or on my phone or wherever, that automatically my assumption is I'm being manipulated, I am being. They are trying to steer my thinking in a direction. There's a tug, there's a pull, and that you know. That does sound cynical and it does come across as cynical in a lot of ways. I am infamous in my house, for you know how it is that my wife will come and show me a funny video that she found on Instagram and it's funny, and my any more. My first thought is could that have been staged? And more than usually, the answer is yes, and then my response is it was probably staged.

Larisa Aslanyan:

It's fake, you know it's.

Sam Gerdt:

it's funny. Yeah, it's fake, it doesn't. It doesn't change the fact that it's funny and it doesn't change what you're taking away from it, but I think it's worth it to recognize that that video that looks like it's you know America's Funniest Home Videos from 20 years ago is not actually that. That's probably take 13 on an account that produces a viral video a week. That sounds really cynical, but that's just kind of where I'm at right now. I have this, I have this little bit of a, of a. I have a negative view of the way that people have created and made everything out to be a popularity contest, whether it's for advertising or whether it's for, you know, social likes and engagement, that kind of stuff. I do think we just need this perspective, that that looks at the world and says I shouldn't just believe everything that I see anymore, because we're getting to the point to where that's going to get really dangerous really fast.

Larisa Aslanyan:

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. I agree with you there. You're right about it. But the thing is that what changed is I think it just said less stuff was fabricated in the past. Let's say, we had TV and we had TV shows and even like the reality TV shows right, a lot of those were scripted. So we thought, oh, that's real. But it turns out there was a script behind it. It's just that now everyone is doing that. There's just a scale of it. It's just so massive. But I have a question for you. Last time we talked about your preferences for ads and how you search to find solutions to your problems, and you just said as long as you're on social media, you just have this. You're thinking that you're being manipulated or you're being influenced, let's say influenced. Is that instead of manipulated?

Sam Gerdt:

Yeah, same difference.

Larisa Aslanyan:

But do you have the same feeling when you're on Google or you're on any search engine? Do you feel like you're being influenced by something?

Sam Gerdt:

Yeah, absolutely. The difference is that it's you're right, this is the world that we live in and so we can't escape that. There's a difference between trying to escape it and trying to be hyper aware of it, and I think the second, that second option, is the one that I choose try to be hyper aware of it. So I have a question. I am still of the mind and generation to go to googlecom and search in the search box with my query. I still have an adept ability to craft highly technical search phrases that use all of the little symbols and keywords that Google lets you use in order to make your searches a little bit more effective. That's still the way I search. I don't use voice. I don't often use conversational search queries. More often than not, my search queries look like a collection of keywords, which is pretty old school. So, that being said, google's gonna feed me what it wants to feed me, and that's for me. That's acknowledgement. Number one is the results that I'm getting are the results that were chosen for me. It's not all of the possible results ranked in any way that I can see or recognize. It is the results that were chosen for me. So, generally my approach to whether it's advertising or search or whatever. Generally my approach is I wanna have a really good understanding of the problem that I'm looking to solve and I want to make my searches as broad as possible. So I'm not usually the type of person to click the first link and accept the first answer.

Sam Gerdt:

My behavior on the SERPs page is probably weird compared to most people, but more often than not I will look at the first three pages of results. I'll actually click through and review all of the links If it's an important question. If it's neither here nor there, I'll just take what they give me. Like if I just need to know the name of that actress that was in that movie. That's very different than if I need to solve a complex problem.

Sam Gerdt:

So I'm looking at many pages of links. The other thing I'm doing is I'm clicking through on probably five, six, seven links and looking at five, six, seven different web pages to see how these different people are answering my question, and then I'm adjusting my search. If I'm not seeing the answer that I want, I will use the answers that I'm getting to help me adjust that search. So maybe that's, you know, kind of like what you do with PPC. Maybe I put in negative keywords in my search, or maybe I use the quotation marks to say I need an exact match for this, so like if that's what I'm talking about, like I have a very old way of searching.

Larisa Aslanyan:

That's definitely not how the average person searches for you, sure?

Sam Gerdt:

No, I know we would be in trouble as advertisers.

Larisa Aslanyan:

if everyone searched like you, we would not be able to solve anything, but you know what.

Sam Gerdt:

you would be in trouble, but the consumer would be way better off that. I think that's my point. I as a consumer, and far more protected because of that mindset than the average person.

Larisa Aslanyan:

I think you there I'm much more different. The way I search I kind of I don't. I just go with the flow, let's say, and I kind of just kind of try to direct the flow as much as I can. The one good thing about this hyper-personalization and AI and the machine learning algorithms in advertising is it is getting better and better. So sometimes again, depending on the issue I'm researching sometimes it will give me just the result that I need on the first page or on the top pages, and then I will be immensely grateful for that because it saved time for me.

Larisa Aslanyan:

So I think it's a choice that you, as a consumer, make. Do you want to feel like you have more power over your own decisions? Do you feel like you are making really the most objective decision that you can make, or are you more concerned with saving time? Maybe you need things fast and you're just grateful that you were kind of given the solution faster and so you can go do something else now, and it does depend on what you're searching. But I feel like we also talked during our last conversation whether Google is going away or not, and my opinion on that is still the same that it's definitely not going anywhere. In fact, in the latest lawsuit one of the lawsuits that Google is going through right now, brought forward by the Department of Justice it's about the search, google search and how Google is dominating almost 90% of the search markets. 90% of the searches happen on Google, and the reason for that is because Google has been paying off a lot of these device manufacturers and browsers to have.

Larisa Aslanyan:

Google as the default search engine, right? So it's just so massive, it's not going away and it has collected so much data and it's going to get better. I don't know how often do you find something on the third page of the results, though Like is it? Do you ever? Does it frequently happen that you find your answer on the third page, for the best option for you on the third page?

Sam Gerdt:

No, not frequently, and this is an important distinction to make. Like and this applies too to the question why won't Google go away it's not just because they're on every device, it's because they're the ones that have the data. You know they've spent. You know Google came out in 1998, they've spent the last 25 years collecting data. Any new competitor that comes on the scene has to catch up, and it's not going to happen quickly. But because Google has that data, they are the superior engine.

Sam Gerdt:

So even though they are doing those things that I don't like in a lot of ways, with the influencing and manipulation, I would still choose them over. Say, like DuckDuckGo. You know the privacy search application. Duckduckgo is very popular. I really like DuckDuckGo for a lot of things. I don't like it for search. When I have a question that I need an answer to. If that question is simple, then it'll be helpful. If it's complex, then Google is going to by far give me the better answer faster. So there's value in recognizing that these more powerful systems, these entities that have all of the data while that causes problems in some areas when you actually do need help those capabilities are what's going to be most helpful. I think the whole. Looking at three pages of search is just that's an exercise of. I guess it would be something like heterodoxy, where you want to make sure that you're informing yourself on all of the different opinions. You're wanting to make sure that you're not just looking for the answer from your camp.

Larisa Aslanyan:

You're looking for all of the perspectives.

Sam Gerdt:

Yeah, all of the information, all the perspectives. I would be far more concerned about going to a search engine for the answer to a philosophical question than I would going to the search engine for an answer to a programming question, because both are so incredibly complex but one is going to be far more objective than the other and when you're answering subjective questions you have to recognize that heterodoxy mindset, that I need different opinions mindset doesn't mean three pages of Google results. It means Google results and then go read some books and then go talk to people from different backgrounds and then go to different places in the world.

Larisa Aslanyan:

Google is Google, that's more. Yeah, yeah, and Google those people.

Sam Gerdt:

Like that's the kind of it just depends on the question you're trying to get answered. But that's the kind of way that you want to approach that, in my opinion, is just making sure that you're diversifying your sources.

Larisa Aslanyan:

The thing that you mentioned. Google is still by far the superior product. If you compare it to the other search engines Bing, yahoo, yandex those are not going to catch up to Google. But unfortunately, it's very helpful to us as users, but to business owners and advertisers, as recently discovered, it can mean the hidden raised cost of advertising just because they have the monopoly. And it's very funny because lately, in the past two or three years, we've had some.

Larisa Aslanyan:

I saw some clients trying to find alternatives to Google, asking me where else can we advertise, because Google is becoming very expensive for us and for some industries it can get very expensive for a single click. Unfortunately, I still haven't found the alternative and there is no alternative, and it's hard to tell clients that this is the only place. If you really want high-intentioned search, if you really want a customer who's looking to buy, who's looking to sign up, who's looking to a service they know what they're looking for and they're searching for. This is the only place you can advertise on and have good results. Keep up your leads, the amount of leads, the quality of leads, all of that.

Larisa Aslanyan:

This is something that the business owners need to look out for when planning their budgets for next year, I think the numbers for this year was Google Project 20 to 30% increase in advertising costs. That's a lot, and there was an increase last year as well. In 2022, it was much less, but still it's getting more expensive every year. So, and I understand that not many advertisers can raise their budgets every year, but at least you can review your strategy. You can polish your websites some more, you can add more content, you can make other changes that will contribute to the quality of your advertising, even if you can't raise your budget.

Sam Gerdt:

It's sad to see it, but at the same time it's, I think we have to recognize a couple of things. There's the monopoly side of it. You really do only have one option, and maybe that changes in the future we'll see. I have a feeling that if Google is going to be disrupted in this way, it will be through platforms like ChatGBT, like these AI agents that we will eventually be able to purchase and have for ourselves. In those scenarios, the ability of those entities to advertise is going to be profound, and Google's influence in those advertising platforms that manage that may or may not be what it is today. We would have to see. So if there's any hope for Google being disrupted, I do think that it kind of comes from this artificial intelligence wave that we see coming in. But then I think the other thing that you just have to admit to yourself is costs are going up, in large part because people are getting harder and harder to reach.

Sam Gerdt:

You say, well, I don't know about that. They're glued to their devices, they're constantly there, they're constantly looking. That's true, but there's so much. It's a bidding war. There's so much competition it's not so much that it's not the consumer behavior. In this case, it's the advertiser behavior. Competition in digital advertising is skyrocketing and that's what drives the price up. If your competitor is willing to pay a few cents per click more than you are, then the price is gonna go up. You get that bidding war effect.

Larisa Aslanyan:

Well, that's definitely happening. Definitely after the pandemic, the competition is just so much more fierce. But that's not the only thing happening. There's less transparency with Google's ad auctions, and I think during this lawsuit that it was revealed that Google artificially increased some of the costs in some of the ad auctions to make their profits. And I think, as a business owner, you need to know this so that you don't think that even the Google likes saying that Google is magic.

Larisa Aslanyan:

It is not magic and you should not rely on any advertising platform to generate your leads and then you just sit back and you think you're going to just service them and your business is going to do great. You really have to work on every other aspect of your marketing. You need to work on your website. You have to make sure you're accessible online in the local results and organic results. You need to make sure you're collecting your leads, and then you're sending them emails, you're making these connections with them, building relationships, and this all sounds very easy to say, hard to do, but all the businesses right now really need to invest in their overall presence online, because advertising alone is not going to give them the results for the price that they hope for.

Sam Gerdt:

Yeah, advertising without website advertising, without brand advertising, without someone who's intelligently tracking that process from start to finish, it's just not going to have that effect. And, especially with prices going up, you really do want to be taking advantage of every click that you buy, and so having a look at those other things can in some ways reduce your paid advertising costs, even when costs per click are going up, by improving those conversion rates and those close rates, knowing exactly why you need to advertise where and in which locations you're going to be or in which locations.

Larisa Aslanyan:

having all this data from your first party data collection will make you much more successful, will help you make just the right decisions and then just make use of every opportunity you have online, every promotion, marketing opportunity that you have.

Sam Gerdt:

Recurring business referrals, word of mouth, all these other secondary ways that we think of brand has everything to do with it, and so it can start with paid advertising, but by building that strong brand relationship with your customers, you can build that perpetual, ongoing benefit.

Larisa Aslanyan:

That's another thing that we often, as PPC specialists, we tell clients is you can have the best ads, you can have so much money invested in Google ads or any ads, meta ads, any ads but once the user clicks and they land on your website and your website just does not provide enough information, it doesn't make the user feel safe. Taken care of that there. Their problem is going to be solved. They don't see any human faces on your website, for example. There's not a journey they can go through on your website. Then that click is wasted.

Larisa Aslanyan:

Just wasted all that money. So yeah, advertising is very tightly connected to everything else.

Sam Gerdt:

Very good. Thank you, larissa, for going through these with me. I thought it was such an interesting conversation when we first had it, and having it now here in front of the camera just gave us some opportunity to play around with these ideas in ways that I thought were a lot of fun. So of course, I'll be in touch with you, but is there anything else that you would add before we say goodbye?

Larisa Aslanyan:

Just wanna say thank you for a wonderful conversation and stay positive. A lot of good things are happening.

Sam Gerdt:

No, I'm a cynic. I'm a cynic.

Larisa Aslanyan:

Yeah, well, at some point you won't have a choice but to stay positive.

Sam Gerdt:

I appreciate that. Thank you, Larissa.

Larisa Aslanyan:

Enjoy the objectivity yeah.

Sam Gerdt:

Thank you, sam. Thank you, I'll see you soon.