In this episode of Room 301, host Rob Twells sits down with The Digital Maze's Paid Media Account Manager Lewis Hall to uncover why businesses burn through their PPC budgets without seeing results.
Join them as they dive into the biggest mistakes advertisers make, the evolving challenges of conversion tracking, and the future of paid media in an AI-driven world.
Lewis also shares his must-have marketing tools, a nightmare ad mistake that cost thousands, and his biggest pet peeve in digital marketing – one sure to resonate with marketers everywhere.
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Some of the resources mentioned in the podcast, as well as some of our own.
Disclaimer: These resources shared are based solely on the experiences of the podcast guest. This is not a sponsored segment or an endorsement.
Room 301 is a monthly marketing podcast brought to you by The Digital Maze, a specialist full service digital marketing agency. We discuss ongoing themes, topics and news in the digital marketing industry to help marketing manager (and business leaders) stay ahead of the curve.
Rob Twells (00:02)
Lewis, what's the number one reason businesses burn through PPC budget and don't see results?
Lewis (00:10)
I guess if it's going to be the, there's two reasons in my opinion, but the number one thing that, especially with smaller advertisers, I think it comes down to tracking, not having conversion tracking set up. You know, if you've got, we'll take lead gen as an example. If you're a B2B company, you need a mass lead flow and demos booked or whatever. If you're telling Google, hey, we want to get this many leads. We want to get people to sign up to the form. We need to capture information and you don't have any conversion tracking up to tell Google.
what this lead is, it just goes after anyone, random clicks, it just sort of maximizes how much traffic it comes to the site. Now the problem with that is there's no optimization goal, there's nothing to strive for, there's nothing to optimize towards, and I think that's the biggest bottleneck, especially with new advertisers or small companies that, you know, they sign up for some PPC, they think they're gonna have a magic tap and just like a big lead flow, and yeah, it's like.
the tracking's not set up, the number one thing that needs to be done first, even before thinking about account structure or what keyword you want to target, what campaigns you want to set up. That's really the basics, in my opinion, and that's the number one thing, I think, is where most people fail with PBC and really just burn their budget.
Rob Twells (01:28)
And has
tracking got more challenging over the last couple of years, do you think? I think it has.
Lewis (01:32)
Well,
I think tracking in the last couple of months has got a more, a lot difficult because of things like Google consent mode and the slowly rolling these additional things out where it's not as simple as putting it like a tag on the site and having it fire. Like people who have privacy policies, they're always getting updated. So there's so many things that are like changing all the time. And I think that really makes it difficult for us as marketers or performance marketers to go, Hey, this is working because
XYZ. I think also when it comes to tracking is, yeah, you just don't have all the information. You don't have the full picture of stuff, especially if people are not accepting cookies. You've got Google just sort of modeling data. Sometimes, you if you've got like, it depends what attribution model you're using, but in PPC terms, if you're using Google's data-driven attribution model, it's not 100 % set in stone as to what conversion.
has come from what campaign? It just blends it all. Sometimes it models data. Some conversions aren't even conversion. It's just modeled attribution. yeah, in a short answer, I definitely think it's getting harder and it's gonna continue to get harder to track accurately anyway, in my opinion.
Rob Twells (02:47)
Awesome. Well, look, for anyone who's listened to the podcast before, you'll know that we ask three key questions. One of them is what's in your toolbox? One is a failure, bonus points for being funny, and the last one is obviously what we put in Room 301, so what really bugs us about marketing. So, Lewis, the first question I'm to ask is what's in your toolbox? Obviously, you're a busy marketer, lots of clients to stay on top of, lots of campaigns to stay on top of. What sort of tools or thought processes do you use to ensure that you stay on top of your workload?
Lewis (03:06)
Thank
I think for me, the biggest thing, and again, I just love what I do, right? It's just everything I do, I just like paid media. So I spend a lot of time watching people in the space, watching some thought leaders in the space, their YouTube, their LinkedIn posts, just consuming a lot of content like blog posts, things like that. Mainly YouTube is one of my go-tos. There's a lot of people on there that have like smaller channels that have really, really good insights into PPC or really good strategies.
really good opinions on certain things. And I just like to hear and see what they have to say. I think, you know, if I'm looking for some like account structure videos, I already know how I would structure accounts that I manage, but I just like to get other people's views on how they would approach something. Because I think, again, everyone's got their own ways, but if you can hear how other people do it, it's just gonna make you a better person overall. And you may have a few opinions on how they do it and you just sparks like great conversation.
So that's one of the main things that I do pretty much every day is the core thing. But I think a couple of toolbox, tools really in the kit, in the locker, there's a few softwares that are really, really key. I think ForePlay is one of them and it's really good for paid social specifically. It's essentially like a massive ad library, but it keeps all the ads that have been paused by previous advertisers. So you can have like,
Niche, you can basically build like huge, huge boards of all the ads. Niche ads, you can see how they've been running for, what's been paused, why it's been paused. And it just gives you a good view of what competitors are doing in the marketplace. And you can steal some ideas off them and things like that. So that's a big one for me. And another one that, again, there's a lot of tools like SEMrush and things that.
do some keyword research and it's quite heavily SEO related in my opinion, but I just use Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends and they're free to use by anyone. You don't need to pay anything. And they give really good insights into, well, Google Trends is a market trend thing. So if you've got a seasonal brand, it gives you a really good insight into what seasons trends starts to take off. But if you like garden furniture, it's difficult to sell in winter, right? But if you can get an early, know, end of March, April time.
Rob Twells (05:22)
Yeah.
Lewis (05:31)
few discounts to start off the summer sales or start peak season. Like you can get really good return on that and try and beat some competitors in the marketplace. I think that's a lot of things that people miss or people don't understand, especially with like B2B as well. Like there is always trends in when people are looking for software. It might be just after the tax year and they've got a new financial year and they're planning budgets for what tools and systems they need and all these things. It's really good to just have a look at your trends for.
And I guess they're really a couple of key things that I use on a day to day.
Rob Twells (06:06)
Awesome.
And what sort of names, anybody that you're following in terms of the, you'd recommend for anyone listening to this?
Lewis (06:13)
Yeah, good question. There is one person that I think is really, good. Her name's Dara Denny and she is really focused on, well, it was initially like media buying on paid, like meta, paid social. And she kind of transitioned into like creative strategist, creative frameworks. And really now she's more of a creative person before media buying, I suppose. But I think that's a really good evolution of where media buyers can get to.
how Media Minds change and especially on the pay social front. But yeah, think she's really, good, really knowledgeable in the space as well.
Rob Twells (06:49)
Awesome, yeah, I'll have to check her out. And then final question on that, obviously you're following a lot of people and reading a lot of stuff around paid media. What's the general feeling around where it's going or how difficult it might be going forward? How do you think paid media is going to evolve over the short to midterm, I guess?
Lewis (07:08)
Yeah. So I guess the other one thing is AI. Like what's happening with AI? Is AI going to take my job? How does AI get implemented into the day to day? And I think that's probably the biggest thing in a lot of industries alone, I feel like. What's actually the future of that. But I think as a media buyer, the landscape is changing quite a lot. I think the role of a media buyer, even before my time, to be honest,
Rob Twells (07:11)
Crystal, Crystal of all time Lewis.
Lewis (07:37)
I think I've been in the industry now, I think it was in 2019 when I first got involved. So it's not necessarily a long, long time. Before that, was very turn this keyword on, turn that keyword on, pause this keyword, change this headline. On Facebook, it's like deal with these interests, test this one. All of that's kind of evolved into more open targeting, consolidated account structures. A lot more of the focus has gone.
off the account onto things like post-click, offers, funnel building, what are you actually trying to sell, who you're trying to sell to, as opposed to tweaking like buttons in the account. So I think that's gonna continue for media buying. And I think media buyers like myself who kind of do both really like paid social and PPC, it's going to be focusing on conversion rates. How can we actually optimize post-click? What can we do to the landing page to improve user experience and.
conversion rates and yeah, on the paid social front, creative strategy and creative understanding, I think is probably the biggest thing that really drives accounts that drives the growth nowadays on Google, on Facebook, sorry. And I think that's gonna continue for the next couple of years.
Rob Twells (08:54)
I think the skill set is being required to be more broad now, isn't it? We were in the office last week and we were talking about nurture flows and sales funnels and stuff and I think that is, I'm not necessarily thinking that media buyers will need to be able to do that stuff but I think at least be strategic about it and be able to plan something like that out to improve the rate of sale after the click as you quite rightly said. So yeah, it'd be interesting to see how the skill set in your game will.
Lewis (08:59)
Yeah.
Peace.
Rob Twells (09:24)
evolve or need to evolve really.
Lewis (09:26)
Yeah, I mean, the media buyers that will be the best media buyers in the industry will be the ones that want to learn about those things and action doing the learning and actually implementing some of those additional like creative CRO landing pages. You don't have to become a coder. You don't have to become a designer, but it's all about like understanding what that does to the actual campaign itself and the actual paid media strategy. think, yeah, it's so important.
Rob Twells (09:53)
Yeah,
I agree. And I think there's lots of tools out there that mean you don't need to be a coder anymore. A lot of drag and drop, of cool interfaces where you can just sort of drag it and pull it all together and sort of hack it together like that. So yeah, I think it'll be interesting in couple of years. And I'm looking forward to seeing how our business evolves as well with all of that really, which should be cool.
Lewis (09:57)
Yeah, true.
Yeah, to fair, used a couple of for tracking purposes and like try to implement conversion tracking. I've used some chat GPT, some other stuff to fix this code for me. Why is this tracking not working? It just spits it out. So it is definitely use cases for it for sure. Yeah, yeah. mean, well, it's a hit and miss sometimes with tracking. But it does help to a certain extent with trackings.
Rob Twells (10:23)
And it works okay.
It works okay?
Hahaha
Yeah, cool.
Well, you mentioned you've been in the industry since 2019, about six years at this point. Any failures in that period?
Lewis (10:48)
Yes, sir.
Rob Twells (10:52)
Hopefully not an air watch.
Lewis (10:52)
Definitely lots of failures
for sure, but I think if you're not failing, you're not learning or you're not trying to improve. But I think one failure that I'll never forget, I was heartbroken when I did it, it was so bad. It was a while ago on one of a, we was running the paid social, so Facebook and Meta and Instagram.
Rob Twells (10:58)
100 %
Lewis (11:17)
And I was optimizing some accounts, some of the campaigns, looking at some of the ad data, like what's performing, what's getting spend. And there was one ad that was like by far the best performing ad we had. It ate like 60, 70 % of the account spend, doing really, really well. Everything was perfect, way above target. So I was, the plan was to duplicate it and just test a couple of other things, a couple of other assets, but I duplicated it just to get like the base of it. So all the images, the creative, the tracking code and all of the.
sort of settings, enhancements and everything. And I accidentally deleted, I don't know how I did it. I deleted the ad that was doing the best in the account. And I sat there and I was like, wait, I couldn't believe what I did. was like, yes, essentially I just deleted the best ad. It was spending like 20,000 plus a week. Yeah. And I was like, my God, I just deleted it. I could not recover this ad because it's been deleted. So the only thing I could think of was if I can find,
Rob Twells (12:07)
On the way.
Lewis (12:16)
When you publish an ad, it gives you like an ad ID, like a post ID, which kind of keeps all of the social proof, the comments, the likes. So I managed to find that and pull that back in the account. It wasn't the same ad, so it lost its data learnings, but it still had all the social proof. So I managed to pull that back in the account, kind of turn a blind eye to the fact that I just deleted the best ad. And then, yeah, just run from there. And it did pick up spend again. It took a little bit, but.
Yeah, that's probably the worst thing, the worst thing I've probably ever done actually. no, no, this was, this was a good, a good few years ago now.
Rob Twells (12:49)
Nightmare. Nightmare. Is that a recent one or is that from the early days?
How did you get around that one with customer?
Lewis (13:01)
Well, I managed to pull in the post ID. So I technically still had the ad. just didn't have the spend attributed to that specific ad.
Rob Twells (13:06)
Yeah.
You can't recover, isn't
it? can't recover a deleted ad.
Lewis (13:12)
No, I tried so much. was speaking to Facebook support and there was just nothing I could do to get it back. It was…
Rob Twells (13:20)
mean, Facebook support
is about as useful as a brick wall, isn't it?
Lewis (13:24)
Yeah, pretty much. You just
go around in circles. You just keep explaining yourself. It's like, but yeah, that's probably, yeah, probably the worst mistake I've done, I suppose. But it's a good story to tell.
Rob Twells (13:36)
So good to do and I guess particularly in your game, me if I'm wrong, but I guess a lot of what you do is trial and error. So a lot of small failures, learning from the failure and iterating and hopefully improving the account from there, isn't it? I guess that's what you're doing day in, day out.
Lewis (13:52)
Yeah, I mean, obviously at the top level, you've got opinions or you think this could work. You think that could work. But really, when you actually put this stuff to the test, so much, you have no control over it to a certain extent. You may say like these ads are going to fail because they look rubbish or they're not really highly, what's the word? Like they're like low fire. They're not like high production shot stuff. They end up doing the best. So yeah, it's all about having like a hypothesis. What you think is going to happen, a framework, test it, does it work?
if it does, how can we make it better? And that's just pretty much the game at the moment. And that really, yeah, heavily on the uncreative, but it's good. It's always, it's always changing, always adapting. It's good fun.
Rob Twells (14:33)
And
how small are the variables in your experiments? So if you're going to change or look at a variation of an ad, for instance, how granular will you go in the experiment?
Lewis (14:40)
Yeah.
Good question. And I guess the short answer is depends. Good answer, right? No, I think. Yeah, that's true. No, I think.
Rob Twells (14:51)
You don't miss the air, Lewis.
Lewis (14:58)
I personally won't go as like granular as change, like tweaking a headline or tweaking a word in the body. I just don't think that's a needle mover. I think the creative concept itself or the angle, let's say, you know, you're selling like toothpaste, for example. Everyone knows that these are brush their teeth, but then you've got the angle of get whiter teeth in the next 14 days. If that's the angle you've gone down and you've seen people go, wow, like this sounds really good. They've gone ahead.
bought it, tried it, and you can see that kind of taking a lot of spending the account or that angle of teeth, teeth, white teeth in two weeks or whatever. It's right on that concept alone. Don't tweak the headline. It goes, white teeth in two weeks, because it's the same kind of thing. I would make more creative on the idea of you get white teeth in a very short amount of time. If you buy this toothpaste, you don't need to go and get composite bonding or you don't need to go get veneers. That's a kind of.
testing I would do for example around that concept at the top level.
Rob Twells (16:02)
Does that apply even if you have sort of unlimited budget or is that for a somewhat limited account?
Lewis (16:09)
Yeah, think, I mean, even with unlimited budget, I think if you find an angle, because obviously we're not just, we're selling toothpaste. So one angle is wide teeth in 14 days. One angle could be fresh breath. And then from that fresh breath angle, you can say like, oh, like your partner will like love kissing you or whatever. Like they're the kind of angles you can go off of like a core angle or core winning concept. And it may sound silly, but you know, there'll be an audience that read like a headline that's like, oh.
Rob Twells (16:29)
them.
Lewis (16:38)
like fresh beth blah, blah, blah. And they'll go, actually, like that's, need, I need to have a look at this. And they give you the time of day to click the ad, have a look. So even on massive accounts or unlimited budgets, think, yeah, starting there, finding a winning angle and then ways to build off of that angle is really the core. And that will grow accounts to, well, it can, it can grow to a ridiculous level if you've got that sort of foundation lockdown.
Rob Twells (17:06)
Awesome, awesome, that sounds good. And the last part of the show is called what we're gonna put in room 301. So room 301 is a place where we put everyone's pet peeves in marketing. So what annoys you about marketing most, Lewis?
Lewis (17:22)
I think.
The warmth actually, yeah, this is definitely my core thing. think everybody, if the business somehow is not doing quite as well or it's not quite on target, marketing is always an easy finger point and people would say the blame. And I think especially in paid media, again, maybe I'm a bit biased on this one, but I think especially paid media, when you're actually spending ad dollars, it's so easy to go, hey, like, why is this not working? We're spending this much.
and we're not hitting our targets and it's so easy to go, you guys, yeah, you're doing the pay, like fix it, get it working. When really it could be a wider view and your product's not priced right, the offer's just not resonating with the audience. And yeah, I think that's the biggest thing for me.
Rob Twells (18:12)
No, I totally agree. I think, you know, given the agency space that we're in, we often fall victim to that in terms of, you know, maybe our metrics are looking pretty good. But if you look at the entire buyer journey, well, the drop off is actually the bit after we provided the lead. We, know, the sales conversion rate is not good enough. Or sometimes it's pretty that is the product's not priced right. I think something that again, we find challenging, and I think I speak for a lot of agencies is
Lewis (18:19)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Rob Twells (18:41)
historical data comparing even pre and post COVID now is for me, it's a very different time, isn't it? If you haven't got historical data, it's almost impossible to set projections, set forecasts, set benchmarks in my opinion, especially if you don't know what's happening after the click. If we don't know how they're taking the sales call, for instance, it's almost impossible, isn't it? So, no, I totally agree. I totally agree. And I think how do you
Lewis (18:48)
Yeah.
Yeah, sure.
Rob Twells (19:10)
approach those conversations if it was is with a client or if you're sort of in-house maybe a stakeholder.
Lewis (19:16)
Yeah, good question. think, again, once you've took the hit or the initial, hey, it's your fault or whatever, really iron out what's happening in the account and explaining like…
Rob Twells (19:23)
Hahaha
Lewis (19:31)
what's actually going on because a lot of people don't really understand like, if I can sit here and talk about all the tiny little metrics or changes to be made, but again, like at a granular level, especially if it's like stakeholders, if they don't really care about that stuff, they just want to know top line, we're spending X, we're not getting it, this many leads or whatever. think, yeah, understanding what's the actual, let's do the lead example. What's the actual quality of these leads coming through? Are the people filling out the form of value to the business or are they just being binned and threw away?
Rob Twells (19:43)
Okay.
Lewis (19:59)
And if you can understand that, at least you can understand where they're coming from, what keywords they're coming from. Is it related keywords? Is it irrelevant stuff? And you just get in cheap leads. You can sort of do some optimizations based on that. But you can take that step further and go of the qualified leads, who actually ended up buying the service or signing up to the software or taking action. And then you can use all of that data to, you can just plug it all back into Google ads, for example, or plug it into all the platforms.
and you can start optimizing for these qualified leads, for these converted leads, and it just helps the actual platform itself. And yeah, I think it's just understanding that media buying or paid ads is just one cog in like a post-click funnel, even in the fourth funnel, especially for things like B2B or software. It's not first interaction, I'm going to sign up to your system and buy it or.
Rob Twells (20:46)
yourself.
Lewis (20:56)
book a demo or buy a service. It's like, need a few touch points to even interest and potentially get a call booked or get a lead through the door. So yeah, I just think it's trying to relay the point that how the account sets up on a top line, where the budget's going, what kind of audience is actually seeing it. Is it the ICP or are we kind of missing the ball on that? And these are kind of things that you can feed back to shareholders or team leads or whoever sort of point the finger at the paid stuff.
Rob Twells (21:22)
in.
Yeah, it's
interesting. Obviously, again, speaking from agency side, like we are, Lewis, it's you mentioned tracking right at the start of the episode, like we can do all the tracking we want. And then the minute you ask a customer or a stakeholder, or, you know, what's the sales conversion rate? You know, you get, oh, it's about, it's about 50%. It's like, we need data. So I think it's really important that each stage of that buyer journey, there's data to back up and then help with decision making going forward, because then you can really
Lewis (21:33)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Rob Twells (21:54)
not that it's a finger pointed exercise, but you really know where to point the finger. Sometimes it is the marketing, it is the ads, you know, and that's fine, but it's not always, not always. It could be someone letting it down elsewhere in that bio journey, so to speak.
Lewis (22:07)
So true.
mean, it could easily be the sales guy going, oh, I'm just not great at closing, but I'm going to blame them.
Rob Twells (22:14)
Yeah, exactly, exactly. Well, yeah, that's firmly, especially in our shoes, Lewis and agent, that's firmly going in room 301. So, well, for anyone that doesn't know you, Lewis, give people a bit of a snapshot on you, your role and sort of how you got into paid media.
Lewis (22:22)
Yeah.
Yes, I think I do a whistle stop tour. Again, I started in 2019. the reason I really, well, initially I went straight to uni from A level to study geography and I didn't even know why I did that. Yeah, no, I mean, I just liked the subject at school and I thought, like the only one that I really enjoyed and I actually enjoy learning about. And then I feel like school kind of funnied you towards uni. So anyway, I ended up going to uni and
Rob Twells (22:43)
I'm not going down at the Geographer,
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lewis (22:58)
after semester one, it was the Christmas break and I just kind of came home and was like to my parents, my family, I don't really want to do this anymore. I wasn't doing the lectures. I wasn't doing the work. I didn't really see a purpose of anything I was doing. So left there, then COVID happened, which was, well, it was just before COVID actually, yeah, when I left. But that was like the year after, all through 2020. And I didn't really have any career lined up. I didn't even know what digital marketing was at that point, but.
Really, I just had a lot of love for Recom and Shopify and drop shipping brands and how people were like setting up these Shopify stores. I just watched that stuff in my spare time. Then I started to learn a bit more about it and find out like what it is and didn't realize, but it was all sort of digital marketing and whole different industry and space that still kind of emerging in my opinion. after that applied for a few sort of…
work experience jobs in Leicester, worked at a couple of agencies for a few months there just to get some basic understanding of, it was an SEO agency actually, didn't really like SEO, but then I found an apprenticeship, went through the apprenticeship, and I think that's a really good place to get into the industry, like you get your hands in everything, you do all of the stuff, paid websites, I did some sales, all of this kind of stuff, and then I found my love for paid, and then from there, moved to a couple of different agencies and.
I found myself here where really doing what I love, is PPC and paid social and trying to help as many businesses grow and reach their target. yes, the paid stuff, I just love it.
Rob Twells (24:37)
So how much do you attribute your skill set to learning via things like YouTube or who you follow versus your apprenticeship and education you've got?
Lewis (24:47)
Yeah, think, well, education wise, zero application to what I do. Absolutely none. Like I didn't take any computing or business or IT courses in school. So yeah, no application at all. I'd say the apprenticeship definitely laid a good foundation, but it was more of an understanding of the industry and kind of top level basic stuff really showing me what the different areas in marketing or digital marketing are. I think I can probably attribute like,
Rob Twells (24:54)
Yeah.
Lewis (25:17)
or basically everything to doing, like the day to day, just getting involved, learning, asking questions, and actually just trying to manage the stuff. But I wanna say a huge part was a lot of self-taught, just love for it on YouTube. Again, I've been to a few marketing events just to understand what people are doing in the area and what local stuff's going on. But yeah, just a lot of content, just consuming a load of content really on YouTube. Yeah, no, definitely.
Rob Twells (25:43)
That's the one. That's the one, isn't it?
Lewis (25:47)
Definitely is.
Rob Twells (25:47)
them. Well, thank you for joining me and thank you everyone for listening. Doing the episodes every two weeks on a Tuesday morning. We're looking to release these. So yeah, keep tuning in. Thank you all for listening. Thank you, Lewis, again for joining me. We'll see you all again soon.
Lewis (26:02)
Thank you.
See you later.
Rob is the Founder of an award winning digital agency (since forming a digital agency group The Digital Maze with Boom Online) specialising in eCommerce, SEO, PPC, CRO, digital strategy and web design. With over 10+ years in the marketing space, Rob has been involved with hundreds of marketing projects and campaigns with some of the best known brands.
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