PPC Origins - Sarah Christiaansen
In episode 45 of “Getting Granular”, host Chris Cesar chats with Sarah Christiaansen, a Paid Media Specialist at Granular, to explore her unique journey into the world of paid media and digital marketing.
In episode 45 of “Getting Granular”, host Chris Cesar chats with Sarah Christiaansen, a Paid Media Specialist at Granular, to explore her unique journey into the world of paid media and digital marketing. Sarah opens up about her transition from a creative background in design to specializing in PPC, sharing the motivations, challenges, and unexpected joys she’s encountered along the way. Together, they discuss shifts in the industry, such as the role of AI in advertising and the platforms that have come and gone. Sarah also reveals her approach to client relationships, her thoughts on effective campaign management, and why staying “granular” in targeting is essential.
Show Notes
- Introduction (00:01): Host Chris Cesar introduces the podcast, welcoming listeners to this episode featuring Sarah Christiaansen.
- Meet Sarah (00:23): Chris introduces Sarah, who shares a little about her life in Los Angeles, her love for hiking and her cats, and how she found her way to Granular.
- From Design to Paid Media (02:21): Sarah discusses her early days in digital marketing, starting with freelance design work and eventually moving into paid media as she grew curious about how ads work.
- PPC in Motion (05:08): Sarah shares insights on the shifting PPC landscape, including major changes she’s noticed, such as clients’ decreased interest in advertising on Twitter (now X).
- Why She Loves Paid Media (07:50): For Sarah, a successful campaign that converts feels incredibly satisfying. She talks about the unique rewards of managing targeted campaigns that hit the mark.
- Design Meets Data (09:15): Sarah explains how her background in design still comes into play, whether she’s adjusting ad visuals or helping make reports more engaging.
- Granular’s Team Culture (11:16): Sarah reflects on her experience working at Granular, highlighting the team’s supportive environment and the camaraderie among colleagues.
- Managing Clients with Clarity (18:17): Sarah explains her “client-by-client” approach, balancing open communication with expertise to keep clients informed and campaigns successful.
- AI in Paid Media: Opportunities and Caution (23:19): Sarah discusses her mixed feelings about AI in digital advertising. While helpful in creating copy, AI can sometimes limit advertisers’ control over targeting.
- The Future of PPC (27:58): Chris and Sarah dive into the potential future of PPC, considering everything from automation to Google’s evolving role in the field.
- Final Words of Wisdom (30:22): Sarah’s advice? Always double-check your settings, be kind to animals, and get a good night’s sleep.
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Episode Transcript
Narrator: Welcome to Getting Granular, the podcast where digital marketing experts from the agency granular talk about the latest trends, tried and true best practices, and share their unfiltered thoughts about the industry. Whether you are here to learn how to grow your business, improve your digital skills, or just want to hear some Midwest PPC experts rant about digital media, you’ve come to the right place.
Chris: Welcome and thank you all for tuning into the Getting Granular podcast. I’m your host, Chris Caesar, senior manager of Paid Media here at Granular, and today we are joined by Sarah Christiansen. Did I get that right?
Sarah: You got it right. Good job.
Chris: I only had to practice what, four or five different times? Yeah,
Sarah: Not too many. Great. It’s a double A throws people off.
Chris: Yeah. Well, Sarah, thanks for joining us today. Great to have you here.
Sarah: Thanks for having me, Chris.
Chris: So this is a continuation of our PPC origin stories where granular employees tell their stories of how they got into PPC, the path they got here and what makes them interesting. Sarah, I hope you’re interesting.
Sarah: Me too. We’ll see.
Chris: You’re interesting, I promise.
Sarah: Wow. High praise from you.
Chris: Yeah, big time. So I guess let’s just start off. You tell me a little about yourself.
Sarah: Yeah, so I currently live in Los Angeles, California, but born and raised in Wisconsin. Still have the very nasally accent to prove it. I love hiking and reading. Those are my biggest hobbies. I live with my partner and I have two cats who are my pride and joy. Yeah, that’s me. Hiking, reading cats. That’s what I put down,
Chris: Dino and Kona.
Sarah: Bobby, you got one though. It’s pretty good. Kona,
Chris: I think that’s actually someone’s kid’s name,
Sarah: But yeah, I don’t have any of those.
Chris: Okay. Okay. I was halfway there. I was close.
Sarah: And I am a paid media specialist at Granular. Have been working here for almost two years.
Chris: Great. And usually we do these a little earlier and first few months you worked here, but as you said, California, you’re in town for the week, you said?
Sarah: Yeah, going into the Packers game this weekend. So thought I’d come into the office and see some coworkers
Chris: And introduce yourself to the world.
Sarah: To the world. Yeah. Everyone’s listening.
Chris: Oh, great. No pressure.
Sarah: No pressure.
Chris: So I guess to start off, aside from all the interesting facts about you that we’ve already learned, how did you get into paid search? What got you into it? Why? Tell us that whole spiel.
Sarah: Yeah, so my previous job I was working in a house doing marketing, advertising, kind of just a little bit of everything. That kind of throwaway job you get before you get a job. You actually, and I was mostly working on Meta and Pinterest, but I was never really taught what I was doing. They were just kind of like, oh, run an ad for us. Good luck. So I did that and I guess I liked that enough that I actually wanted to figure out how to do it and what everything meant and how to use it properly. And I think that’s when I applied at Granular with that sort of base knowledge, but definitely eager to learn more.
Chris: Think. You left a little bit of chunk out, I think you left a little chunk out of there.
Sarah: What part?
Chris: Didn’t you work here before you worked
Sarah: Here? Oh yeah. So back during the pandemic, granular needed some freelance design work and I had a friend who worked here and I come from a design and more like social advertising background. So I did some freelance design for Granular back in 2020. And then fast forward, when did I start? 2022. So two years and then I started working for the company. So that was kind of a nice in to have.
Chris: Definitely.
Sarah: Yeah.
Chris: So what about the introduction of the paid media landscape or just working in paid in general made you want to stick with it? What was it about it that you enjoyed?
Sarah: So I guess what made me want to stick with it is that I liked learning more about each platform and how to target specific audiences. The fact that you can, no pun intended, get really granular with your targeting and be a little creepy about it. It’s fun.
Chris: You’re only about the seventh person to make that pun.
Sarah: No, I thought you meant the creepy part. I didn’t make that pun. Let’s redo that.
Chris: Nope, it’s in there. You got to stick with it now.
Sarah: Dang it. I blame the people who named the company. How could you not use that pun? It wrote itself.
Chris: I think that was kind of the point.
Sarah: Okay,
Chris: So
Sarah: They were just hoping for puns. Well, they hired the right people.
Chris: That’s what happens when you work in a creative agency.
Sarah: Oh yeah.
Chris: A creative field.
Sarah: Yeah,
Chris: That’s what I meant.
Sarah: Yeah.
Chris: But yeah, I mean, I guess, so what did the landscape pedal look like when you got here? I know you mentioned you were doing a little bit more in Meta. Was it even called Meta when you started?
Sarah: I don’t think so. Actually. It might’ve just been Facebook. Yeah, I didn’t even think about that. What did it look like when I started? I think pretty much the same, to be honest. I mean, obviously things are changing within the platforms almost daily if, I think probably the biggest thing was back when I started, a lot more advertisers were using X
Chris: Twitter.
Sarah: Twitter, and I don’t have a single client that uses that anymore. So I would say that was probably a big change
Chris: As an active user still of X
Sarah: You
Chris: Multiple times a day. Yes.
Sarah: You actually have a social media.
Chris: Yeah, big time.
Sarah: Just that
Chris: That’s how I get all my sports news. Got to follow those beat writers.
Sarah: Are you just following that and mean girls quotes?
Chris: Pretty much.
Sarah: Okay.
Chris: But yeah, since the transition from Twitter to X, the ads I see on the platform have gone significantly downhill. I’ve learned that actually, I guess fun fact, if you want to call it that. Ads no longer need to redirect or be hosted by a profile. So I get these weird ads. It’s like a Kenosha Urgent Urgent Care Clinic. I believe it is.
Sarah: Urgent click,
Chris: Urgent, click,
Sarah: Click right
Chris: Now. Kenosha Urgent Care Clinic. And I accidentally clicked on the profile picture expecting to go to a profile, but the click on the profile photo was the same as if it would’ve been a click on the link they posted in there where just basically that whole square took me right to a
Sarah: Website. Oh, that’s kind of cool. It is. Unless you want to go to their profile,
Chris: I would say, unless you’re running a follower type ad. But I think everyone wants to kick down. Is that the phrase?
Sarah: Keep going. Sure.
Chris: Everyone wants to kick down on Elon and everything he’s done with the beat up. But I will say that there have been some improvements for better or for worse I guess. But there are a little improvements, but again, the things that are making it bad are much worse.
Sarah: Okay.
Chris: Well, but yes.
Sarah: Yeah, I used to have Twitter back in college and I think that’s the last time I had it and that was a mess. So I can only imagine what it looks like now
Chris: It’s there.
Sarah: Yeah. Cool.
Chris: But yes, anyway, moving on. This is going to be a wild podcast everyone, so stay tuned. What is it that you like about working in paid media?
Sarah: Yeah, what I like about it is seeing your campaign convert. So when you’ve set something up with a specific conversion and it actually works, it’s awesome. I literally wrote down Chef’s Kiss and I agree with that. Yeah. And of course that’s what the client is hoping for. So when you can actually deliver that, it’s very cool.
Chris: Very cool indeed.
Sarah: Very cool. Very cool. What’s your favorite thing?
Chris: My favorite thing?
Sarah: What do you like about it? He wasn’t expecting me to ask a question back.
Chris: I got the Uno reverse card on that one. If you like
Sarah: Skip,
Chris: If you want to know what I think I recommend going back to probably about mid 2019 when I did my getting granular podcast and you can learn all about me and how I got into paid media. So I would highly recommend that.
Sarah: Shameless self plug here.
Chris: Yeah, we’ll make sure to link that out too. Anyway, back on track again. We should get a back on track counter because this is going to be, this is at least two or three. We’re going to hit about 17 as the over under anyway. You did tell us that you briefly worked in design in the past. Are there any specific industries that you worked with or roles that you’ve held that have worked with design or what else have you done that brought you here?
Sarah: So I guess my in-House job, like I said, was a lot of graphic design and a little bit of marketing advertising. So yeah, it was a lot of design, a little bit of advertising and marketing. So I think it was just kind of wanting to get more into the advertising marketing world of all of that, because I was finding that I was enjoying it more. And obviously Granular is not a creative agency, so we don’t really do graphic design, but we do a little bit of it. So I knew that if I was hired that I could also put those skills forward and help in that area as well.
Chris: I will say there have been those times that I’ve really appreciated your design background of Sarah. This ad is the wrong size and I need to launch it three hours ago. Can you please quickly fix this for me?
Sarah: Yeah, yeah. So little stuff like that. Or even when it comes down to decks or Excel sheets, a lot of people will come to me and just say, can you make this look good? So I use it in little ways here and there.
Chris: The visualization part of it is very big.
Sarah: Yeah,
Chris: I’ll be the first to admit my, I dunno if creativity, my artistic ability is very well below the mean, a few standard deviations below the mean, because I can look at numbers, but yeah, you want me to make it look pretty. I’m more of a function over design person.
Sarah: Well then it’s nice too because then I can come to you and say, okay, I made this look good. Now explain it all to me. And that’s helpful as well. Not that I don’t understand all of it, but different skill sets,
Chris: Skill
Sarah: Sets.
Chris: I can tell you, Sarah, this makes no sense.
Sarah: Yeah,
Chris: Good. What’s the story you’re trying to tell me here?
Sarah: Yeah, exactly. And I can tell you, Chris, this looks ugly.
Chris: So then aside from working with me and talking with me all the time, what is it that you love most about working at Granular?
Sarah: I love our whole team. I think everyone brings really strong skillset and different skills as well. So it’s really awesome to bounce ideas off each other, kind of like what we were just talking about. I also love the opportunities that Granular gives. So every once or twice a year the Wisconsin team gets to go to a Brewers game and then the out of town gets to choose an activity to do. So just cool things like that where it’s a chance for bonding and sort of reset and yeah,
Chris: Like a Workday pellet cleanser.
Sarah: Yes, that’s exactly what I was trying to say. Thank you.
Chris: And for the record, I would like to get it out there in the open, and you’re not going to be surprised you’re going to know this when we go to that Brewers game, it just so happens that everyone who does work remote lives within 10 miles of a baseball stadium. So I have always been on big time team. We’re going to a baseball game. Your activity should be a baseball game. I’m still fighting that uphill battle.
Sarah: To be fair, the last time you guys went to see the Brewers, the Dodgers were playing, but it was at 7:00 PM so it wouldn’t have worked.
Chris: I don’t know if you know this or not, but one of the greatest baseball players of all time, quite possibly, definitely right now plays for the Dodgers
Sarah: Who?
Chris: Shhe.
Sarah: Whoa, that’s a good name. I’ve never heard of this person.
Chris: You serious?
Sarah: Serious. I don’t pay attention. Baseball,
Chris: His contract was almost a billion dollars and all of the money was deferred. So he’s getting none of it now because of all the sponsorships he’s getting.
Sarah: That’s insane.
Chris: So he’s going to be getting paid $30 million a year for basically the rest of his life.
Sarah: Why didn’t I become a baseball player? Wow.
Chris: No kidding.
Sarah: I mean, not that I’m not a man, but
Chris: Anyway,
Sarah: Back on track.
Chris: Yes. Well, I will one more on that show. Hey thing first, MLB player ever to hit 50 home runs and steal 50 bases in the same season.
Sarah: That’s amazing.
Chris: And you passing the opportunity to go see
Sarah: Him? I could still go see him.
Chris: Season’s almost over. Could probably
Sarah: Find him somewhere in the city and just be like, Hey, I heard you’re really good. And he’ll be like, oh me.
Chris: Alright, good luck with that. But yes, I highly encourage you to check out your local baseball team, major or minor league next time, even when they’re not an event. Just check it out yourself.
Sarah: I’ll give it a think.
Chris: So yeah, as bringing it back in, as you can tell, we’re all very close knit and love hanging out with each other and everyone has a great time.
Sarah: Yeah, it’s a nice working environment for sure. As opposed to, I came from an environment that was very toxic and my boss was awful and it’s a nice change of pace for sure.
Chris: A lot of passive aggressiveness or
Sarah: My boss or me.
Chris: Yeah. Well both. No, the previous company.
Sarah: Yeah. Well it was a lot of me getting assigned things that were not my job at all. I remember once I had to rent rent a dumpster for the company and I was like, excuse me, first of all, I don’t like talking on the phone. Second of all, I guess, but this isn’t my job yet. Oh, I have many viewer you can’t see. But Chris is laughing into his hand and I have many stories like this. This
Chris: Is the funniest thing I’ve ever heard in quite some time. Please tell more of these.
Sarah: So the dumpster one, it was because they were moving companies and this was remote, so I didn’t even work at the actual company.
Chris: Okay, hold on. Where did you live at the time?
Sarah: I lived in LA and their warehouse was in Sonoma, so about five hours away. So I had to call this dumpster company and order a dumpster for them, which was insane to me. One time, oh you’ll like this one, one time I had to take a bunch of videos that they had done that were in Spanish and translate them to English. I had never taken a day of Spanish in my life, or I think I took Spanish in seventh grade for a quarter and I had to translate them. I literally outsourced them. I asked someone on Instagram to do it for me and paid them like 50 bucks of my own money. It was insane. It was not a good working environment.
Chris: This is hilarious. I did not know any of this. Was it?
Sarah: Yeah. And then in between all of these insane tasks, they’d be like, put a Pinterest ad up and I’d be like, okay.
Chris: What was your title?
Sarah: Oh, my title was Creative Marketing Specialist. So essentially the same title I have here, but my job was everything.
Chris: Alright.
Sarah: Oh, well let me tell you one more. This can totally be cut. This is just for Chris
Chris: Or keep it in. We’ll see how good it is.
Sarah: So the company I worked for had a bunch of sub companies and one of them was a mezcal brand, which was pretty cool actually.
Chris: Like tequila?
Sarah: Yeah, but not, and they were trying to get it in stores, which they did, which was cool. And it was my job to make these shelf talkers. Do you know what those are? No. They’re like those little things that sit on the shelf that says, this is what I am, here’s how much I cost. And I had to hand make them out of wood so they looked more rustic and glue down pictures of the mescaleros that made the mezcal. It was insane.
Chris: That seems like design to me though,
Sarah: Right? So it did itch. It did scratch that itch. But I was like staying up late gluing in my kitchen.
Chris: There was no mass production of it. It was just
Sarah: No, no, no. This was me making little wood shelf talkers for hours
Chris: And
Sarah: Then having to mail them to Sonoma.
Chris: I still think the dumpster story is better, but that’s pretty
Sarah: Good. Dumpsters your favorite.
Chris: The dumpster was good.
Sarah: Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
Chris: So yeah, all this to say, if you come work at Granular in the future, no one will ever ask you to rent a dumpster unless you would specifically like that to be your job role.
Sarah: And that’s really all I ask. Just don’t make me rent a dumpster.
Chris: Well Sarah, I promise you if we ever need to rent a dumpster, I’ll volunteer to do that so you don’t have to.
Sarah: Thank you so much. I mean, if I can just do it online, that’s fine. But I had call someone. Oh,
Chris: That’s the difficult part.
Sarah: Yes. Insane.
Chris: Alright, well, and from a thousand miles away.
Sarah: Exactly. Maybe even more. Who knows?
Chris: I’m not good with geography. No neither. Especially after I said the Everglades in our team trivia were in California.
Sarah: He did say that.
Chris: Anyway.
Sarah: Anyway.
Chris: Anyway,
Sarah: Back on track for now.
Chris: Let’s talk a little bit more about specifically how you are working with clients and in your role. Talk us through what’s your approach to working with a client, working on their accounts, your communication style. How do you sort of find yourself making your way in the day to day through just your daily tasks and working with various people?
Sarah: So I like to take everything day by day, client by client. I try not to overlap while I’m working on one client to another. And if a campaign’s not performing well one day, but performing great, the next kind of figure out why. As far as working with clients, I think communication’s really important. Obviously. I also think being nice is really important. I think obviously you want to create a good relationship with them, a good rapport. So if you’re coming in being rude, that’s not good. I mean, that’s pretty basic. But I also think it’s important that if they ask you to do something and you know that there’s a different way to do it, that would be better to use your expertise and let them know that. Yeah. So yeah, communicate, be nice, push back when you need to and take everything day by day, client by client. Otherwise you can get overwhelmed and then your performance might not be as good and clients will notice.
Chris: And everyone has sort of a different communication style too, where the being nice sort of, that’s sort of an umbrella thing where you can just be nice to everyone. But then there’s some people who it’s like, I want talk about my kids for the first five minutes of a call. I want to talk about my cats. I want to talk about whatever’s going on in the world. And other people are just like, okay, what’s up with this account?
Sarah: Yeah, totally. And I think knowing which one of those, your client is important. Yeah. If they do come on and want to talk about their cat, great. I’ll talk about your cat with you, please show me your cat. But if they come on and want to get right to business, then that’s fine too. So yeah, knowing which side your client falls on I think is a good thing to know.
Chris: Definitely.
Sarah: Yeah.
Chris: I actually was talking about you when I was talking about I want to talk about my cats for 10 hours.
Sarah: That is how I start every call. And my kids do unfortunately make appearances in Zoom calls sometimes. I almost said Skype. You remember Skype?
Chris: I do remember Skype. It still exists.
Sarah: Oh, does it?
Chris: I’m pretty sure
Sarah: Good for Skype, zoom didn’t take it down. Especially during the pandemic. And then, yeah, of course if it’s a really important, not that all clients aren’t important, but if it’s like a top tier client, then you want to probably not have your cats be in the background.
Chris: Your cat’s regular appearance.
Sarah: I don’t have a door on my office, so I can’t really stop them.
Chris: Can cats jump over one of those baby?
Sarah: Oh yeah.
Chris: Oh,
Sarah: This is very much proof that you’re not a pet owner.
Chris: Very, very much. Not a pet owner
Sarah: Famously hates
Chris: Animals. No, I do not hate animals. I’m just allergic to basically everything. But now that I think about it, my parents did have, I think it was two cats when I lived there, but they maxed out at four, but I think they did set up a baby, A baby fence kind of thing.
Sarah: Yeah, they had four cats and four kids.
Chris: No, like I said, by the time I was moved out.
Sarah: Oh, got it.
Chris: I think at max they were at six with four kids. Wow. Two cats.
Sarah: Okay, I see what you’re saying.
Chris: But they may have had seven at one point. I was moved out, everyone else was at home. Four cats. But for them, love that. As I will famously tell you, cats aren’t people, so it’s not even the same. Not even close.
Sarah: Well true, but is important. What expensive.
Chris: Yeah. One cat swallows one weird thing and nope, that’s a what? 1200 vet bill to get it out.
Sarah: The child can do that too.
Chris: Yeah, but doesn’t that insurance cover that?
Sarah: Well, there’s pet insurance,
Chris: But who actually has, do people have pet insurance?
Sarah: Yes.
Chris: Oh, see, I just thought it was a scam. Every other kind of insurance,
Sarah: I mean probably, but it’s a cheap scam. It’s only like 12 bucks a month,
Chris: So
Sarah: Not too bad.
Chris: Again, I know nothing about pet.
Sarah: Welcome to our podcast about pet owning. My name is Sarah Chris Stanson. I’m joined by Chris Caesar
Chris: And I am going be the last person that’s qualified to be on this podcast.
Sarah: Okay.
Chris: Anyway, refocusing. So again, we talked about the past, how you got here, what you did previously present, working with people today, how you do stuff. So only one more direction to go. Future, future of PBC, paid search, paid media. I guess three questions for you. One, what does it look like? Two, what excites you about it? And three, what concerns you?
Sarah: I’m going to answer two and three first.
Chris: Okay.
Sarah: I’m excited and concerned about ai. I’m excited because AI is great for things like writing copy. I guess you can write scripts now, which is awesome. I’ve used it a lot for a very specific client where it just spits out a bunch of different ad texts for me, which I think is awesome. Obviously you usually have to edit it a little bit, but it’s really nice when you are just out of ideas. I’m concerned about it because there’s certain features that are showing up now in say like meta that you can’t turn off. So it’s taking away these options that we had before. And it thinks it’s adding better ones, but not necessarily is adding better ones
Chris: Just because they’re
Sarah: Automated,
Chris: Tangentially relevant or irrelevant to what the message you’re trying to actually portray is.
Sarah: Right. Or I think they’ll be sneaky about it and check something that you don’t actually want. I was building a campaign a couple days ago and it automatically checked, add this AI text and I was like, I didn’t check this. So things like that feels a little ski to me. And then as far as the future of PPC, what does that look like? I don’t know how to answer that.
Chris: It sounds to me you think it’s going to be
Sarah: Going to be robots
Chris: Everywhere, largely AI controlled? Yes.
Sarah: It seems like it don’t you think?
Chris: Yeah.
Sarah: Yeah. I mean, I assume obviously we’ll get new platforms, other platforms will go away, but I don’t know how else to answer that.
Chris: The big X revival’s coming.
Sarah: You think so?
Chris: No. Yeah, it’s called
Sarah: YZ.
Chris: There’s going to be 25 new platforms. Each one’s going to have one letter of the alphabet.
Sarah: Oh, I like it. I
Chris: Don’t know. Probably not
Sarah: Very confusing. Google just starts going by G
Chris: Hey, are you on W? No, I’m on Q.
Sarah: You never know.
Chris: But it sort of sounds to me like in the recent past slash present, it’s more human driven with AI guardrails of like,
Sarah: Oh, try
Chris: This, try that. But it almost to think of in the future, it’ll be AI driven with the human guardrails.
Sarah: Yeah. That’s kind of what it feels like to me, which is I guess, exciting and scary. I mean, if it’s less work, then that’s a little scary, I think, because who knows if we’ll even have a job.
Chris: I think it’s almost from an efficiency standpoint of it’s less manual mind numbing work where a lot of that can be automated, but then it’s more of a, I’m using my brain power in time to make sure that things are, this is exactly what we want it to say, that it’s working properly, that it’s tracking properly, whatever the end goal is, just to again, that verification of it.
Sarah: Yeah. Yeah, I think so. So we’ll see. Do you think there’s any other things that are coming in the future as far as PPC goes?
Chris: Well, yeah, the other 25 social media networks.
Sarah: Right. Okay. See the letter, duh. Do you think we’ll see different types of Google campaigns pop up?
Chris: Well, that’s a good question because for the last, I don’t know, probably the entire time I’ve been doing this, even when I first started learning this 10 years ago, I just remember it was either I heard it from somebody at Google or a webinar or somebody I worked with of Google’s ultimate goal is you give us your website and we’ll handle everything else.
Sarah: Whoa. Wow.
Chris: And that’s sort of what Performance Max is becoming
Sarah: True.
Chris: So I don’t know if it’s Performance Max is the future, if that’s how it’s going to push somebody that we work on together. We’ve recently tried to run a Performance Max campaign, and it’s shockingly done almost too well to be believable of like, oh, we have 265 new leads this month where we haven’t gotten 265 leads the entire previous part of the year. So I mean, if it does work, great. But then the downside of that is if it doesn’t work, or those, say 250 of those 265 leads are fraudulent, what do you do next? And then aside from not use those advertising platforms or channels, whatever it may be. So I think that’s sort of going to be the next step is fine tuning this.
Sarah: You
Chris: Give us what your end goal is and we’ll figure it out from there.
Sarah: I mean, Google now has DB 360, which is a programmatic platform. Do you think Google’s going to try and take on other platforms? I mean, Google’s pretty much the leader. So do you think they’re just going to be like, oh, here’s our meta section of Google.
Chris: I’m not sure if you saw this or not, but this had to be within the last month or so where Alphabet Google, one of them was declared a monopoly.
Sarah: Okay. I didn’t see that.
Chris: Okay.
Sarah: But I believe it.
Chris: Yeah. So they were declared a monopoly because they own so much percentage of
Sarah: Everything. Everything.
Chris: You want to search something, the top search on Bing is google.com. Right.
Sarah: Love that
Chris: For ’em. Yeah. So I think that might be a next step too of it’s almost unpredictable at this point of Google may not become part of everything because legally they need to break up into seven different companies. And then Google Plus becomes a thing again. Oh yeah. Oh my gosh. And then there’s the social arm of Google, the search arm of Google, the display arm. And if those are seven different companies that need to sort of divest from each other, that could be a sort of next step to what may or may not become an issue of the future and what advertising looks like.
Sarah: Yeah. It’ll be interesting to see, I think, how many times a year do you think Google gets sued?
Chris: Yes.
Sarah: Yes. Every day.
Chris: How many days are in a year?
Sarah: 365 or 366.
Chris: So 366 and 0.25 days, 365.25 days in a year. So they get sued probably 650 times a year. Wow.
Sarah: Imagine.
Chris: And their legal team, they can afford it. They’re Google.
Sarah: That’s true.
Chris: That’s pretty true. We give them a lot of money.
Sarah: They’re just, yeah.
Chris: And quite frankly, in the grand scheme of things, we’re probably small potatoes to Google.
Sarah: True.
Chris: Because they have
Sarah: Billions of dollars.
Chris: I wouldn’t even decide. Be surprised. They end up hitting trillions eventually.
Sarah: True.
Chris: Two.
Sarah: Yes.
Chris: Yes. 2 trillion.
Sarah: 2 trillion,
Chris: $100 billion.
Sarah: Okay, cut that out.
Chris: All right. No, no. If you’re over the age of what, 25, 30?
Sarah: I would say like 30. Okay.
Chris: If you’re over 30, you caught that reference. If not, ask your parents.
Sarah: Beautiful.
Chris: All right. So wrapping up here, one thing I like to do before we call it off, one thing I like to do before we call it a day is just ask if you have any words of wisdom for everybody. Be it related to work, not related to work. Just general good life advice.
Sarah: Oh, I thought this was just related to work.
Chris: It can be whatever you want it to be.
Sarah: Okay. Well, for work related, I said to double check meta settings because sometimes you think you have something turned off, but meta is sneaky and turns it back on, which we kind of talked about earlier.
Chris: You mentioned that a couple times. I feel like there might be some fresh wounds here.
Sarah: Yes. Oh, meta. Love you. Meta. But if you’re listening, let’s see. Words of wisdom for everyday life. I dunno. Get enough sleep. It’s really important. I don’t practice what I preach, but I’m working on it.
Chris: I would agree.
Sarah: Yeah.
Chris: Even if I hit seven hours in a night, I’m just as zombie the next day. I
Sarah: Know you need eight. At least sometimes nine, eight
Chris: And a half.
Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful. Yeah. Get enough sleep, be nice. Be good to animals. Those are my big ones.
Chris: All right. Sarah. Sarah. Sarah Christen.
Sarah: Yeah.
Chris: There we go. I got it. You got it. Alright, Sarah, thanks for joining us if you made it this far, and thank you all for listening to the Getting Granular podcast. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss out on any PPC tips, tricks, or news in the digital marketing world. If you have any requests for potential topics you’d like to see covered, be in a blog or YouTube video or podcast, please reach out to us. We’d love to hear your feedback. I’ve been your host, Chris Caesar. Thanks for getting granular with us today.
Sarah: Yay. Give us five.
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