Data, Decisions, and Results: The Science Behind Effective PPC Campaigns

I’m good, thanks. How are you?

Thank you for inviting me.

Sure. So where to begin? My background, I actually did a psychology degree at University, at the University of Leeds in the UK. And I knew pretty quickly that I did not want to be a psychologist, but I was really interested in behavior. And without sounding bad, the influencing people side of psychology, I I also always had an interest in advertising. I was going to say marketing. I didn’t really know what marketing was, particularly, other than advertising. Yeah, I finished my degree, didn’t really know where to get started, if I’m honest, and fell into a business development, a sales role at a industrial plastics company, which was actually fantastic for getting a real basis for my commercial understanding of how businesses work. It was an international company with different departments, so I really saw what business is all about. They had a marketing department, so I finally understood really what marketing was all about. I jumped at an opportunity to move into that department after a couple of years, where I actually became their email marketing specialist, which was great. I quickly fell in love with marketing and the ability to talk to customers and influence the decisions on whether they’re going to buy with us.

I loved coming up with campaign ideas. Even though it was industrial plastics, not very exciting or sexy, but I loved the challenge, and I did it in 13 different languages. Obviously, with translation help. I’m not that smart with all my languages. It was a real good time and a real good introduction into marketing. Then really, after a few years of doing that for one company, I was looking for something new and there was an opportunity to join an agency which would offer me the opportunity to get exposure to other industries, but also the opportunity to try different channels of pay-per-click being one of them. Within about three months of joining this agency, they decided to relaunch as a specialist, a pay-per-click agency, and that was where Digital Gearbox was born. I had to throw all my, not throw it out the window, but I stopped doing email marketing. I very quickly just did pay-per-click all the time. I learned very quickly on the job. I had a number of accounts where I… Well, I had a great support team at the time who trained me up. I did all the Google examinations, and I just got stuck in, really here I am, 11 years later, still doing the same thing, but the difference being that I am now the managing director and owner of the business. When I started, I was a mere executive and I worked my way up the ranks. Then seven years ago, the previous owner was looking to exit, I should say eight years ago. We had a conversation and she asked if I’d like to take over the ownership. By that point, I was She was in Cornwall and I was running the day-to-day operations anyway. I was beginning to hit the ceiling with that position. I’d been doing it, I wasn’t doing anything new, so it seemed like a really great opportunity to try something new and try a business. So yeah, that was my journey into Digital Gearbox, and that is what we do.

Yes. I think actually for anyone interested in marketing, doing a role in sales, especially where you have two distinct departments, can be very helpful because I think the relationship between sales and marketing team is infamous for being a challenging one and living on the other side and knowing what it’s like to not have leads and to be like, How do we get leads? And really that’s down to the marketing team. But it is a harmonious relationship, sales and marketing. If you’re not getting the leads, then the sales department have them to do it. But if the sales team aren’t feeding back on quality of leads, then the marketing might be bringing the wrong people. So, yeah, it was a fantastic grounding to have. And sales at the end of the day is why we do marketing. And I think a lot Some marketing people forget that. They get carried away in the look and feel of things. But at the end of the day, we’re doing it in sales. So it’s something that- I’m very happy you said that.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, so I had a very steep learning curve with that Because not only did I take over the agency seven years, well, seven years ago, I felt pregnant about three months after doing that. I had to juggle both learning how to run a business with learning how to change nappies and cope without sleep. Yeah, the balance is hard. It’s something that’s hard to get right. I don’t think anyone knows exactly what is the right amount of balance, but I’d say in terms of my experience, it was very different first time around and second time around. The first time, the agency was much smaller. There was just me and two others. Actually, those two others departed before my baby was due. When I was pregnant, there was only me for a month or two, and I knew I needed to hire someone who could help me very quickly. Absolutely. It needed to be someone who I didn’t have to train up, who could step in, who could look after my clients, and knew pay-per-click well enough to carry on, deliver the results we were getting. At that point, I didn’t have enough confidence and knowledge to feel confident in outsourcing.

I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to risk that. I needed someone I could trust. And, thankfully, I found someone who stepped in and did exactly what I needed them to do. But I did have to go back to work very quickly. As a business owner, you do anyway. You don’t really get that time off. But I was back in accounts, still doing pay-per-click very quickly after the birth of my first daughter. But one of the benefits of being a business owner is you decide when you work and when you work. I had flexibility. I could work when she was asleep. I think no matter how hard the balance is, you have to remember the benefits of being able to carving out this life, that you do have that flexibility. You can take the time off to do the school drop off and pick up. You can take that time off to go see a play because it’s your life that you’ve mapped out. Then second time around, thankfully, I’d grown the business enough to have a team, and I’d had trusted people that had worked with me for a few years who I had extreme confidence in that they could carry on things without me.

I’d got to a point where I wasn’t so involved in the delivery. It was just a matter of business admin and running the business that I had to hand over things to. But I was able to take a month off before the baby arrived, which last time I was working until a week after my due date, so there was a big difference. I managed to have three full months off, which doesn’t sound like long compared to what some people have, but it’s a big difference to the first time. I managed to have three whole months where I could just be in my newborn baby bubble Even now, I still get to have a couple of days just one-on-one with my toddler, which I’m very thankful for.

Yeah, it was a bigger adjustment than I thought it would be, to be honest. I think until you step into the shoes of owning a business, you don’t realize how many other things that the owner is thinking about at any one time. Finances was probably the biggest hurdle or challenge, I’m going to say, challenge that I felt when I took over the business, dealing with an accountant. I use my experience with this to think how our clients think, because when I took over, suddenly I was given reports with numbers I didn’t understand. I didn’t know about tax. I didn’t know about quarterly VAT returns. I didn’t know about corporation tax. All of a sudden there’s a huge bill and I’m like, Where did this come from? Cash flow being another one. I felt silly having to ask an accountant what numbers I should care about. I’d be given reports with so many numbers and I didn’t know which ones were important, which ones I needed to check or any of that. I’ve taken my experience with that, our customers and how they feel when they receive a report, and I don’t want them to feel like they can’t ask questions and that there’s any weird numbers because you can just have numbers for numbers’ sake, and I used to be given huge reports, like 12-pages reports for finances, and it was just overwhelming, and I didn’t understand, and I didn’t know how to make decisions off the back of it. Getting to grips with what I needed to care about was the first thing. Secondly, working with the right people. That accountant, I clearly realized they are not the right partner for me because they were giving me too much. They weren’t explaining things. As soon as I had a question, they were running their payment clock. I felt like it couldn’t because it was going to just cost me more money. Finding a partner that understood my background and wanted to work with a business like me, with someone who was new, who was happy to explain, that was happy to educate me. Also someone that I trusted that was going to give me the best advice in that front because when you’re new to these numbers, they’re big and scary and you don’t know if you’re making the right decision. Having not only one person in that respect as well, obviously an accountant is an important one, but having other business owners that you can talk to and get their opinions on things as well was something that I very quickly learned was very important.

I joined a couple of networking groups and had built up some relationships with people that I could talk to in confidence and that would support me. And they taught me as well the importance of working on the business and not just in the business. Again, that was a mindset shift because been so used to just doing a delivery, getting things done, getting results. But knowing that if I could carve out a day a week just to make some small changes to the business, it’s going to speed up what we do or deliver better results or allow us to increase our margins in some way is how you make your business successful. They were all big changes during that transition, but I think I got there over time.

To answer in the first part, what sets us apart? There’s lots of people that do what we do. There’s lots of people that do it for cheaper. There’s lots of people that do it for more expensive. So we’re in the middle there. We’re specialists in what we do. So there’s lots of people who offer digital marketing solutions. One way that we’ve done that is by focussing on PPC rather than being a full house agency, which allows us to give paid campaigns the time and the attention that they need. Because there’s a bit of a cloud out there, people saying that it’s the dark arts and it’s almost trying to confuse people and scare them. Whereas I don’t think it is that. I think it’s relatively straightforward, but you do just need time and attention on the campaigns to make them work. By being specialists, we can be the masters of one rather than the, I forget the same, the one who’s trying to do too much. But aside from that, I think we could specialize further. We could choose a certain vertical, but we haven’t opted to do that yet. That’s because at the moment we’re able to deliver results across many different industries and verticals.

We haven’t felt the need to specialize even further. Actually where we’re based, there aren’t too many PPC specialists. At the moment, that’s as far as we need to specialize. But in terms of, again, what sets us apart, I think the relationships we make with our clients is one thing. We do want to be establishing collaborative and transparent partnerships with the people we work with. We are very good at saying to people that we don’t think it’s going to work. No, we’re not going to work with you because we don’t want to waste people’s money. We’re very good at not trying to cover up if results aren’t great. Instead, we’re focused on what solutions we can put in place to try and make results better. It’s the relationship we build and making sure that we’re also getting back what we need from our customers to make it work because it does take effort on both sides. We’re not just an outsourced supplier option to people. Whilst we don’t want to take up people’s time, we need feedback. Going back to that sales and marketing relationship, if we’re sending people leads, we need to know if they’re quality leads from the people that we work with, we need to know if they’re converting, we need to know what and OS targets people need to achieve for it to make commercial sense.

We ask a lot of questions.

It is important. It’s just that collaborative nature that I think sets us apart. Because some people say it, but they don’t live and breathe it. It’s the cliché comment that people say we care. We generally really do care about the success of our relationships more than the campaigns because we want to have the honest conversations to make it really work.

Good question. I think you want to make that you are not limiting your knowledge by just asking your current employer for access to paid training courses. I think that was a mistake I made. I remember being young and be like, put me on a course, please. Put me on a course. Whereas actually there’s so much free content out there online, on YouTube, on Google. You can go ahead and find it and start learning yourself. You don’t need to be in a classroom setting. You don’t need to throw a load of money at it. Just get stuck in and start learning. I’d also say just be curious because I think I had interests in other areas of marketing, but because I was just doing email marketing, I was like, I should just focus on reading about email marketing things. But the more you can understand about other marketing channels, the more you can often enhance the one that you are offering because they all work It’s a multi-channel thing these days. If you can get one part of the machine wearing a little bit better, quite often it will have a positive impact on your piece as well.

So be curious, look online, and just give it a go.

No problem. Thanks again for inviting me on. I hope it was helpful for someone.