Drive and Convert

Announcer:
You are listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e-commerce growth engine, with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Jon:
Hey, Ryan, as I've said before, and I'm sure you'll hear me say it time and time again, we have a job because things are constantly changing. The internet's changing, devices change, user technology changes, preferences change. If those things didn't change consistently, businesses wouldn't need experts to help them navigate the world of digital commerce and driving traffic and converting it. So I'm thankful for that. I'm sure you are.

Ryan:
Yeah, me too.

Jon:
... as well. Yeah, but you put some notes together today on one thing that I didn't mention, which is big changes in the world of Google, and now that I say it, it really does seem like we're talking about this a lot, right? Google is consistently changing. Heck-

Ryan:
They are.

Jon:
... in my world, anyways, they killed off Optimize, Google Optimize, which was sad, but I get it. Okay.
They've totally ruined, in my opinion ... I'm probably not the best to talk about this, but Analytics, it's nowhere near what it was.

Ryan:
I'm very public about my distaste for GA4 and the fact they ruined one of the best.

Jon:
So we're not alone.

Ryan:
Prob- ... no.

Jon:
Now look, they seem to have this outsized impact on the digital world due to their size. Of course, everybody and everyone is using them, right? And also their position in the marketing funnel, because if you want to drive traffic to your site, you almost have to use them, right?
So I know you want to talk about this today, but usually when we talk about Google changes on Drive and Convert, it isn't an insignificant change. So I'm interested to figure out what is this? What happened? Give me the lay of the land.

Ryan:
Yeah, it's ... again, constant change is good for us "experts" if we want to dub ourselves that ... at least we know more than the average bear ... but we were hanging out at Google Boston last week with some clients and prospects, and there's so much going on, and I feel like the two wonderful letters of AI is really forcing change quickly, and I want to say some of it can be good, but a lot of it I feel is change for change sake, in that Google was kind of behind the ball when it came to AI with Microsoft and ChatGPT. And so it seems to be a lot of reactionary things, and if you don't say AI and shareholder meetings or quarterly results, your stocks are going to drop, so they have to talk about it, and that's pushing a lot of stuff around.
But one of the most frustrating things has been a very quiet change that I haven't been able to find any documentation of Google actually officially saying this is going to happen, but it's happening to our clients, and Google is forcing merchants to not use credit cards to pay for ads. And-

Jon:
Whoa.

Ryan:
... seems like ... all right, no big deal, you can still pay for ads. ACH, that's pretty common. No big deal. The problem becomes when that credit card reward system became part of the marketing equation or the justification for certain spend levels, because it brought it to break even or it was a source of revenue to the business owner. It's not insignificant when you're getting checks from your credit card company for 40, 50 grand a year that's tax-free.

Jon:
Yeah.

Ryan:
Cash back rewards are significant. We even have a partner that we have pretty deep ties with that gives 3.3% cash back on a marketing spend, which is-

Jon:
Really?

Ryan:
... significant for a lot of merchants, with daily limits in the seven figures. It's for some large advertisers.
But Google sent a few emails to some of our ... I wouldn't even say large merchants in the last two, three weeks saying, "Hey, because you're in this cool program," I forget there's some initials around it, but essentially it's a high touch program, where you can call somebody at Google if you have a billing issue, or if you want to talk to a Google expert with a Google email address about strategy and ads, you can do that.
And the first advertiser that came to us angry, was ... he didn't know he was in this program, and so then he was being told because he's in this program, he can't use this credit card, which brings him somewhere in the neighborhood of 20, 25 grand a year of tax-free income. And he's like, "I called Google and I can't get out of the program, and I don't even use the benefits, because I didn't even know I was in it, and even if I was, I'd rather have the cash than call a billing person, because I have logical position that's going to help me do that." I was like, "Good point. No way out of it."
And so when you look at Google's earnings, they probably have merchant processing fees north of $4 billion a year.

Jon:
Whoa.

Ryan:
These reward cards are higher cost to use for the processor, so they're probably paying close to 3% on some of these aggressive cards.

Jon:
Okay, so let's pause right there. When does this take effect?

Ryan:
It's rolling out immediately.

Jon:
Okay, so I should go and buy Google stock today is what you're saying because-

Ryan:
Yeah. [inaudible 00:05:30].

Jon:
... as soon as this rolls out and they get two billion or plus of extra revenue, that-

Ryan:
Pure profit.

Jon:
... that's not insignificant, right?

Ryan:
No, if you're going to add four billion of pure profit to the bottom line because you're not letting people process on cards, that's a lot. You might want to sell short some of these high reward cards that are being used for marketing spend, because they're not going to get that usage any more.
Historically, very large merchants have been on invoicing with terms of payment 30, 60 days, depending on your size, and it made sense because large brands ... I'm thinking multinationals ... usually don't have cards to pay for $6 million a month ad buys, because their limits on the cards aren't that high. Or just became cumbersome, and so too much risk to have a card with that a limit out on the internet. And so they went ACH, and just pay it by debit, and it was easy.
Smaller merchants, one of them spending 50 grand a month on average, is being forced into this. And that's generally not a massive advertiser, and so for them to be forced into this with the guise of, "Oh, you're getting all this great service," that you're not using, "and you're going to get these wonderful 30 day terms." I'm like, "That's exactly what a credit card is. It's 30 day terms. I get the invoice and I pay 30 days later and don't pay interest. It's great, and I get the rewards."
So big changes, and it feels like another step in driving a knife into the small entrepreneur advertiser that's trying to start up, and that cash back ends up becoming some of the lifeblood of sustaining a business, maybe as you're pushing for growth, because you don't have as much margin, but hey, these cash back rewards can buy groceries for a month, because hey, we're growing the business and living lean.

Jon:
Yeah, this sounds frustrating for SMBs especially. It's way less convenient, that's for sure. But okay, we live in their world, so we got to do what we got to do.

Ryan:
And I guess Google doing this is one thing, but I have a feeling that if Google releases earnings and there's an extra billion dollars of pure profit to their bottom line to their shareholders every quarter, Meta is going to follow suit. You can't just not have that competitive advantage, where that billion dollars is profit, but you can use that to develop more products, to invest it in AI, which probably drives your stock even higher, than it would if you had billion dollars came back in a dividend.
So I foresee a world in which credit cards are no longer used for marketing spend, at least on the major platforms that need to save on those processing fees.

Jon:
All good things come to an end, huh?

Ryan:
They do. But that's one that ... I mean, how long have we been using credit cards just for stuff in business? And I think there's going to be a reaction towards this that's going to hurt people using rewards cards. I love getting free cash every month.

Jon:
Who doesn't?

Ryan:
I won't complain.

Jon:
So I haven't heard much about Google and AI, because Microsoft, ChatGPT, all that stuff sounds very noisy, right? ChatGPT, everyone talks about it. It is synonymous with consumer AI, if you will. I assume Google's using it. Did they talk about all that in Boston?

Ryan:
They did, and they touched on it in some interesting ways that I wouldn't normally have expected AI to be entering into the marketing realm. We've known about Performance Max, and some of the "AI" being rolled out within that system. It was called Bard, and then it's the Gemini, and they're changing the name again. I think Google spends more time naming their AI than they actually [inaudible 00:08:56].

Jon:
They're changing Gemini again? Oh, jeez.

Ryan:
Yeah, it's going to be something else. I don't know what it is, or when the date's released, but Gemini's ... who knows? But YouTube is where Google is really trying to force advertisers into the space. They tried to compete with Reels and Instagram, and that didn't go as great as they wanted. TikTok's taking a lot of eyeballs, I think, from YouTube. And YouTube still has a lot of people searching for information, but they're struggling to get people to want to hang out there, or scroll like they will on Instagram and TikTok. They're really struggling to figure out the addictive factor that keeps eyeballs and time in sight that then attracts advertisers.
You can really surgically pick the videos you want to be on, the channels you want to be on, as an advertiser, which is good, but it's not as good for just, "Hey, I need mid-upper level branding, because people are there and I know a lot about them." And so what they're doing on YouTube, is they're forcing advertisers, without necessarily telling them, that they're editing their videos into vertical videos.
So for a while we've been shooting YouTube to fit on computer screens, and to a degree now, we're doing it for TV screens and commercials through streaming TV and all of that. But TikTok, Instagram, Meta are all apps on a phone. They need to be in a vertical format to fit on the screens. And so what Google's AI is doing is saying, "Hey, we're going to take your videos, and we're going to shrink them down and edit them and crop them into a vertical video," and they're using AI to really do some ... it's actually really cool tech ... to reformat that video and make it function, because shrinking that and changing the size down to a vertical video, it's not an easy thing to do. And so it's still in betas, and it's not something that they're really pushing out to the public aggressively, and they may never, but there's a lot of ad sets there.
And so if you've been in Performance Max campaigns or some YouTube campaigns, they're going to be doing that on your behalf unless you opt out. And so there's a lot more spend that can come from Performance Max campaign, if you have vertical video slots on your older videos that they can put in there.

Jon:
And it's harder to opt out these days, right? They're not making it easy.

Ryan:
No, no, and if you don't know what's happening, how would you know needed to opt out?

Jon:
Sounds like the mysterious Elite program that nobody knows they're in?

Ryan:
Yeah, exactly. Oh, you're in this great Elite program with all these wonderful contacts at Google, and you're like, "Well, I didn't know it was there, and I obviously haven't needed it, but I'll give up my credit card for you. Thank you, Google."
So in this one, you've got to opt out, if it makes sense. Obviously there's certain brands that you want to be testing certain things, and you want to make sure you're there, and seeing it. You just need to be able to see the data to decide if it makes sense to opt out. And so in Google Ads, when you look at all campaigns and the main page of it, you can add columns if you have all of your campaign showing, by the way, you can't just pick certain campaigns and then show this column, but you need to be able to see the views and your cost per view, the CPV, and then you can figure out how many video views are happening on your account, and you can start trending it over time to see, "Okay, is Google finding more spots for my video? And if they are, am I seeing revenue increase proportionally to that spend?"
As of now, I haven't seen a lot of that. In fact, one of the merchants that was there with us in Boston had spent ... I think the Performance Max campaign spent about $8,000 the previous 30 days, and I think just a little over half was actually spent on shopping ads. The rest was spent on video display and text ads, because of the structure within their campaigns, what they all allowed it to have happen. And the shopping campaign was responsible, the shopping portion of Performance Max was responsible for close to 90% of the revenue. And so the vast majority of the other spend was on things that didn't translate into revenue for the brand.
So things to be aware of when you're analyzing this and seeing if some of these video spots are worth it for your brand, just make sure you can analyze the data.

Announcer:
You're listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on e-commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency, that works with e-commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers and Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, a digital marketing agency offering pay per click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes.
If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Jon:
That goes hand-in-hand with my next question here, which is that I've heard broad match keywords are changing, again, I'm not sure how you change-

Ryan:
Again.

Jon:
... broad to mean something new, but what's changing here?

Ryan:
Yeah, it's well-known that Google has a very loose thesaurus when it comes to broad match keywords. You go through search query reports, and you'll see some interesting things.

Jon:
That's a kind way to put it.

Ryan:
Yeah, I don't know. And some of the dots they tie up, I'm like, "I don't know how that made sense to them, but we need to sculpt that keyword out of there. That traffic app is wasting money."
And within the AI settings on the bids, Google does have a lot more freedom to bid up on terms when they see fit, so there's a lot of freedom a lot of advertisers inadvertently give to Google. To see this, you can go to your search query report, it's under insights. You can see search terms, then filter by or sort by average CPC. It'll put the most expensive one on the top, and that'll probably ... you might want to call me after you see some of those CPCs you're paying for. I've seen people paying 40, $50 a click for $5 products, and you're like, "That's a problem."

Jon:
Yikes. Per click.

Ryan:
But the big change is the wonders of Google AI on broad match keywords. You're going to start seeing Google decide, with their AI, that unrelated searches you may be showing ads for, because that person had recently searched for the products you're trying to sell ... they're not searching for it now, and the search query you're putting an ad in front of them now is not related, but their AI has decided that it is a good time to show those ads.
And again, I'm kind of a control freak when it comes to Google Ads, and I am a big advocate for SMB advertisers and being able to grow and pushing to become large advertisers. But if Google's designing a lot of their AI for large advertisers that are trying to push into that mid-funnel more aggressively on Google, that's really what this is designed for.
If you're spending five million a month on Google Ads, you probably need to be pushing into that space, and that AI has a lot of value in saying, "Well, this person searched for a beige couch three days ago, and now they're searching for home decor, so we're going to show your ad." You're like, "Well, I don't sell home decor, but they were interested a couple of days ago. Maybe they're interested again, and they can come back to my site and see if they need the beige couch now."
And so that type of thing makes sense. If everything else is taken care of, and you're building the funnel from the bottom up, and you've covered the bottom well, great. You do maybe need to bid on some of those terms like that when you know that the audience is great, and it's going to attach it to that broad match keyword.
For small advertisers, that can be very costly to be bidding up on terms that really don't make sense, and they're not showing the intent right now of what you're trying to show for. And so I would advocate for most small advertisers and small ... I'm going to say anybody spending less than 10 grand a month on ads right now would be in that bucket ... probably don't need broad match at this point. And it can only hurt you rather than help you, if you build out your appropriate keywords and exact match and then bid below them a couple of phrase match, which still has a lot of tendencies on broad, but it doesn't use the AI to start showing your stuff. It'll help keep your cost down, let your budget go further, attracting people that are further down the funnel.
If we go back to that beige couch searcher, as a small advertiser, if I'm looking now for home decor, I'm not trying to go look at a couch. It's just not what I'm trying to do. I'm looking for home decor. I'm looking for ... my wife has a full closet, I call it her shelf shit closet, because she loves decorating shelves, and buying stuff to every season evidently I'm told, you have to change out your shelf decor. News to me, because if it was up to me, we would have nothing on our shelves, and I wouldn't spend any money on that. But then people would think [inaudible 00:17:29].

Jon:
I was going to say, the shelves over your shoulder, I don't think they've changed since you moved into that room.

Ryan:
Probably because she's focused more on the ones out there that people see, instead of where I hide in my office here.

Jon:
I just don't have any shelves. I have a generic gray wall behind me, so hey-

Ryan:
Yeah, I have a generic-

Jon:
... you win there.

Ryan:
... blue wall behind me, and my decorator wife told me today that I need something behind to snazz up the wall. So I'm like, "Okay."

Jon:
Well, I will keep an eye out for those shelves with lots of trinkets on them.

Ryan:
Yes, trinkets. That's exactly my design style, design aesthetic.
But as a small advertiser in that example, I'd rather not show for that. If there's enough ... I'm not maxing out a hundred percent impression share on people searching for beige couches. I'd rather save that money and find somebody that's searching for a beige couch right now, if all things are equal. They didn't buy last time, I've got remarketing that can follow them around, if I'm doing things right. I don't need to be showing on unrelated searches to what they're trying to do right now, and try to distract them, or try to get them in and cause confusion.
So broad match keywords struggles. I liken it to like, if you give Google free-range within your account to do what they want, I'm doubting they're going to have your best interest at heart, like the IRS doing your taxes. It turns out you might owe more if they're doing it. Google's goal is not to make you more money as the advertiser. It'd be nice, but I understand that their goal is to increase their shareholder value. That's what they do, and that's okay. It's their world. But you want control as a small advertiser. There's very few circumstances where under 10 grand a month, you need any broad match in your account.

Jon:
So does this kind go hand in hand with revenue tracking? It seems like ad revenue tracking has been changing a little bit, too.

Ryan:
Yeah, you look at GA4, there's all kinds of problems right now with revenue tracking. Just there's so many things. I know I've done an episode recently on GA4, and you've got to find something else.
And unfortunately it's a paid thing, but if you're paying for it, chances are it sticks around in a format that's usable, rather than the free tool that Google gave us, which we have to understand that if something's free, you're the product. And so Google gave us free analytics that is wonderful. And then if they want to kill a free product they made zero dollars on, and they had a ... oh, at one point, I guess that I didn't mention last time that I found out about, totally off script here, Universal Analytics is deleting all of their history.

Jon:
Yes.

Ryan:
So it's going away. Gone. Maybe we mentioned that a [inaudible 00:20:01], but that is a massive thing. There's so much value there.

Jon:
We just found that out-

Ryan:
A decade plus.

Jon:
... where they sent us an email and said, "You got to download all your data if you want it," and I'm like, "We have a decade of data and analytics plus."

Ryan:
So much data.

Jon:
"What are we going to do with it?"

Ryan:
And then you can download it, but how are you going to look at the data? Did you download it? I don't even know what format it comes in.

Jon:
Our team did, and I believe it's like a CSV file or something, but it's really weird, maybe XML of some sort. But the reality was that the team looked at it and was like, "Wow, if we want to set up some reports, maybe you do Looker Studios, something like that with it, is it worth it? What are we going to it for?" Because now instead of just checking year-over-year data, which is what we would use it for, you have to set up a whole new system to do that. And the team is like, "Is the value of that for us going to be worth what it's going to take to set up a whole new system, just to be able to look at the data."
So we're now using all the data from HubSpot and other tools that we have access to, because HubSpot gives us honestly better data than GA4 at this point, especially because we can tie it back to individual contacts who are in our database and have offered up their information by filling out a form, subscribing to email, et cetera, so the data, it's just better at this point.

Ryan:
Yeah, it's again frustrating, but you can only get so mad about a product that you were given for free that you didn't even have to be spending money on Google Ads to get it. And storing that is such a massive amount of data Google ... they are paying to store for us ... that I get it. It doesn't mean I don't have to be frustrated about it, and they can't let me pay, "Hey, do you want to pay?" They should have given me an option, be like, "We will keep the data for you, but you have to pay 50 bucks a year." I don't know, I'm making a number up. There's probably a number that they would've been like, "Yeah," but then it probably would've been a headache to track and whatever. So it's going away.
And so looking back over your previous revenue numbers, we've done a lot of analysis for brands around pre-COVID, post-COVID, because we went in such an oddball time period. It's really difficult to figure out what should be the normal for your brand at this point, and are you doing better or worse than what should be normal? Now, I don't know.
It used to be 10% growth was normal, and if you saw a blip down or up, you're like, "Hey, we can see that you're doing better or worse." Now it's like, it's all over the place, and we'll lose that data and Universal Analytics.
But we were talking about revenue tracking, and Google Ads has some valuable things in being able to target new customers, and if you go into some of your settings, you can tell Google Ads, "I'd like to bid more on new customers than past customers," which is a really good thing to do for most brands. We tell brands they should be separating their goals into brand and non-brand. People on brand are generally not new to brand. Non-brand searches are generally new to file, and they're going to have more lifetime value, or you can bet on that with email coming in, so you can change your goals.
And so if Google's saying, "Hey, yeah, I want to be more aggressive in this campaign." Let's say it's a non-brand, somebody that's an existing customer may search a non-brand term, and that's on my email team to, "Why are they searching this? They should be buying through email." But again, bid more. The problem is, we came across, one brand came to us saying, "I can't understand this. I go into GA4, that I'm using for revenue tracking," I think they run BigCommerce platform, "and revenue's matching up generally speaking to what my merchant processor shows." I think in this particular URL they sent, they had me analyze for them, it was like 150 grand in the month of April, and their Google Ads were responsible for somewhere around 60 grand. Organic was 75 grand, and then everything else was filling in around that.
You go into Google Ads, and instead of showing 60 grand, it was showing 140 grand, and their conversion tracking was right. We saw the conversions line up, but then the revenue was way off. We're like, "This is not making sense." We were looking under the hood for a while, because they were essentially saying Google Ads was responsible for over 90% of the site revenue. And we're like, "That can't be possible, but we're using the same pixel GA4 in ads and the GA4 pixel for itself." They had been adding $60 or so of additional revenue for a new customer to get the Performance Max campaign to go find new customers and get more excited about it. It was adding that revenue into the campaign. So it's essentially this monopoly money saying, "Hey, your average conversion value was," I'm going to make it up as I don't remember, "like $85, but with this $60 of Monopoly money, it's $145."
And some of their conversions were only $30, but it looked like it was a $95 conversion, and so it was just adding that money into Google Ads to make the pixel look better. And so it brought up ... it's not an easy setting to find or understand. We had some pretty powerful minds looking under the hood for this, but it reminded me that this wasn't set up by them recently. It was probably set up by a previous agency that had done it, because they had wanted to get more aggressive. Great, all brands should probably go look at Google Ads and see if their settings have that in place, because you could be inadvertently, maybe not even intentionally, just seeing a better return in your Google Ads because of this. Google should probably have two columns that says, "Real revenue, fake revenue, but exciting revenue for you, because it's a new customer," but that would add a lot of transparency, and you might change goals and not spend as much whatever.
And so they thought they were doing much better as far as the return on ad spend, because that's what was being reported back, was they had spent X dollars and got this great ROAS, but then they went under the hood and they're like, "I can't imagine that Google Ads was responsible for 90% of our revenue, considering all the other things we have going on." It's like, "That's true, it didn't."
And so these settings could have been two years old, three years old, where you were testing something, somebody forgot, or that person moved on, or the agency turned over. So again, a really important, I think, metric to be aware of, that isn't necessarily a recent change, but I think a forgotten change, that you can add Monopoly money into your Google Ads revenue tracking that can be difficult to uncover.

Jon:
I love how you keep calling it Monopoly money, as if this is a game, when I think so many businesses, they're making it ... especially small to medium businesses, they're making a lot of decisions based on these numbers, and if you don't know what numbers you're dealing with, you're going to make some assumptions there, and it's unfortunate, basically is where I'm with this.

Ryan:
Well, in this brand, they've got ... they're not an unsophisticated team. They have 15 URLs, I think, on BigCommerce doing somewhere in the neighborhood of three, four million a month in revenue.

Jon:
Wow.

Ryan:
And so it's a decent-sized online brand. It's just they were completely baffled on, "Why are these numbers so far off, and this URL's fine," and so it's difficult to find this, and you can inadvertently think you're doing a lot better than you are, and get excited and spend more money, and all of a sudden you're losing money in Google Ads in reality. But because of some of the settings, it looks like you're making tons of money.

Jon:
Now, I know at all of these events ... I've been to a handful of them. There's information they talk about that they don't want you to share. So I'll ask, is there anything else that you can and want to share, or do you need to wait and do more in another episode down the line, or is there anything else you can share?

Ryan:
I'll give a nugget of stuff. So as you've searched Google, if you listen to this, you're probably in the e-commerce space. You spend all day in front of a computer searching Google doing various things. You've seen a lot more and more of those AI answers to questions, where it takes a second to populate, and I keep it enabled ... you can turn it off if you want ... but I keep it, because I'm trying to figure out and understand how to use that and leverage it for my brands and my customers, and make sure that I'm not missing the boat when it comes to what Google's doing with AI.
But that being said, AI has taken a very high priority spot in the front page of Google at the top, which has historically been preserved for-

Jon:
It's above even ads.

Ryan:
It is. It's been preserved for ad slots for a long time. And it's surprising to me that Google's willing to put those AI snippets in there, to supplant some of that revenue. They have to be losing some money there. And so there was a VP-

Jon:
Well, maybe that's how they're making the money back is by making you pay with ACH.

Ryan:
That's true. Yeah, merchant processing fees are paying for AI. It's believed by many in the digital marketing industry that advertisers are being hurt by this, and the bigger problem that people are worried about, is not necessarily the advertisers, because Google's not going to cut their arm off on the advertising side. They'll find a way to keep money flowing, even if it's taking away the merchant processing fees. But it's the organic results. And there's been a lot of controversy lately. If you go to Search Engine Land and look, there's some very high up people at Google that have been very open after they've left Google, about how Google is not necessarily following the mantra, "Do the right thing," that they've been trying to do since the beginning supposedly. And the ties between organic results and paid search, and people moving away from SEO results or organic results as far as the results pages.
And so they're not giving any data around the AI results, and where it's taking its traffic from, which is an indicator that if they did tell us, people would be pissed, otherwise they would tell us. If we were happy, like, "Oh, people are finding what they want, and then they go to the website, and buy things, and spend time there," everybody'd be happy if that was the case. Unfortunately, it doesn't feel like that's-

Jon:
Yeah, I've often wondered, I was like, "Can you cite your source?" Because I want to know what page or article you got that info from, which sometimes it seems to do.

Ryan:
Sometimes it does that.

Jon:
Not always.

Ryan:
In fact, my wife and I, we were searching for something this morning, and there was the AI result, and she was staring at it. I'm like, "Well, you just click there and get more information about it from that page." I'm like, "Oh," because it pulls a snippet out of there, that it feels like, "Oh, this is the snippet you want to see," and then you can go to it.
So it's AI driving the result, but it's kind of like what we used to call position zero in SEO, where it answered a specific question, and the schema told it was there, like, "Oh, it's not an organic number one," I guess, air quotes there, "it's the position zero," and that seems to be what it's doing, where it's trying to answer very specific questions so you don't leave Google. So it's them trying to do that Instagram, TikTok thing, "Well just stay on Google, go Google something else now, refine that search, and try to," that's probably what they're trying to do is keep you saying, "Oh, I'm on Google. I got the answer to that, but oh, that drove this question. Now how do I type something else in, to get to a search that I can now click on an ad, or a shopping result of some sort?" But yeah, it's been-

Jon:
Makes sense.

Ryan:
Shashi Thakur, if I'm even pronouncing his name right, is a big VP at Google that was very coy, and avoided the answers on how that AI has actually been impacting organic results.

Jon:
Interesting. And this was presentation they gave while you were in Boston?

Ryan:
No, this came up in conversation around that, and if you go to Search Engine Land, you'll find some stuff on it as well.

Jon:
Okay.

Ryan:
So the podcast is ... we can be done, and you can go off and do the searches now you've listened to us, so-

Jon:
There you go. Well, on that note, I don't know. I don't know if I want to go to Google right now actually. I might be a little upset about some of these changes, but that's the way it is unfortunately.

Ryan:
Yeah, and I predict a lot of this, that the rich, I think, are going to get richer on Google Ads, and this new AI space where we are now. We're very close to a period of time in which you can't launch a brand on Google, and if we're not already there, you've got to have influencers and social ads that are going to help drive your brand to be big enough to be able to leverage Google second, where it used to be, I can go to Google first, capture existing demand, and then move on to the social avenue where I'm going more mid-funnel. It's going to be challenging out there.

Jon:
It is already challenging, and it seems like it's getting more challenging. So misery loves company on those type of things, but this is interesting. A couple of pretty significant changes here. Thanks for, A, always staying on top of this stuff, and then coming back and sharing it with everyone, and especially with me. I really do appreciate it, because I didn't make that trip out to Boston with you, and I had no idea that these things were coming down the line, so good to hear. So I appreciate it.

Ryan:
Yeah, thank you. Anytime. We'll keep it coming.

Jon:
All right. Thanks, Ryan.

Ryan:
Thanks, Jon.

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