AI Is Reinventing Search Marketing with Mike Rhodes

In this Episode

• [00:30] – Stephan introduces Mike Rhodes, CEO & Founder of WebSavvy and AgencySavvy and co-author of the world’s best-selling book on Adwords The Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords.
• [07:17] – Mike talks about his book, The Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords, that he co-authored with Perry Marshall and Bryan Todd. 
• [14:19] – Mike explains the many benefits of becoming an AI business.
• [22:02] – Mike shares two new metrics on Google Analytics; Conversion Probability and Session Quality.
• [30:50] – Stephan talks about Google’s T5: Text-To-Text Transfer Transformer.
• [37:28] – What’s the need to use Google Data Studio for your business?
• [46:27] – What can ANI do to our future? How can it help the quality of human life?
• [55:26] – Stephan and Mike discuss their Kolbe Assessment scores. 
• [62:41] – Mike shares an application with great use of AI called Descript, an all-in-one audio editing and transcription tool that lets you record, transcribe, mix, and edit in one workspace.
• [68:42] – Follow Mike Rhodes on Facebook and visit AgencySavvy’s website at agencysavvy.com and WebSavvy websavvy.com.

Jump to Links and Resources

Transcript

Mike, it’s so great to have you on the show.

It is so good to be chatting with you again. It’s been about a year and a half. I think since we caught up in person. It’s good to be here. 

Yeah, we both spoke at James Schramko’s event SuperFastBusiness Live. And I was impressed with your presentation about AI and Google Ads and where things are heading and how to future proof your business on that kind of thing. It was fantastic. So I’d love to delve more into those topics. But first, I’d love to know, why are you giving some of your secret sauce away to competitors? I find that very generous and giving. The more you are willing to reveal light in the world, I think that’s amazing. So I’d love to know your kind of thought process around that and how you came to that.

There are multiple answers to that bouncing around in my head at the moment. Part of it was when I was first invited to co-author the Ultimate Guide to Google Ads with Perry Marshall. We did all the writing behind the scenes; we submitted it to the publisher. And then literally a week later, after submitting, Google made this huge change that affected a lot of how things were measured and what changed in the interface. So I quickly had to pull it all back, rewrite three chapters in a week, change a whole bunch of screenshots and then resubmit it to the publisher, big sigh, we can all move on. And then, of course, there were two or three other big changes between then and when the book was published. 

I realized that while we try very hard to make that book quite evergreen and quite strategic, there’s going to be bits of it that are going to be out of date as soon as the book hits the shelves, and that bugged me. And so I wanted to create a training that sort of went alongside the book that was going to be the world’s most up to date Google Ads training, and that’s when AgencySavvy was born six years ago now. And it’s kind of grown from there. But part of that is because I’ve just discovered on this journey back from when I found out about Google Ads 16 years ago. I rushed back to my mastermind group then and just tried to teach everybody I could about how wonderful this thing was called Google Ads and how it was going to help small businesses. Anybody that would pay me the slightest bit of attention, I was trying to teach them. And for every ten people that I would talk to, nine said, “Mate, I don’t care how it bloody works, just do it for me,” which is how the agency started. 

And because that ratio was about 9:1, nine people wanted me to do it, and one person wanted me to teach. Most of my energy went into the agency certainly for the first ten years. But I think I’ve discovered that I am a teacher at heart. I love to teach. I also think we all learn better if we teach. So you learn things at a deeper level if you’re going to teach. And there are a lot of sharks in this industry, and there’s a lot of dodgy agencies out there. And yes, part of me, I think, was some very grandiose ambition that if there are a few more good agencies in the world, and if I can help cause that a little, then great. And I won’t mention the names of some of the bad agencies. I’m sure your listeners can immediately think of a few out there. There are lots, and I guess that happens in every industry, from car dealerships to real estate agents. There are all kinds of industries where we know that not everybody in that industry is great. It’s sadly the same in our industry, and I wanted a little bit to help try and fix that. And maybe it’s just selfish because I like teaching, and that’s my creative expression, and it gets me away from sitting in front of the screen and doing something that I love.

Well, I don’t think of it as selfish. I think of it as leveraging the knowledge, the experience, the expertise that you have, and allowing that information and wisdom to be free. And information wants to be free, so you’re just letting it out there. You’re also leveraging your skills in teaching and inspiring others. I think it’s wonderful. So I also take a similar attack where I have some online courses, I don’t focus a lot of my energy on promoting them. So most of my revenue comes from clients wanting me to do their SEO and come up with the keyword research and audits and all that sort of stuff. Yet, I also have some coaching clients, currently three, who are “competitor agencies,” and I’ve helped them grow significantly. And I love doing it.

The biggest change over the past three years is Google is automating more and more. Everything is called ‘smart’ nowadays. Smart display, smart shopping, and so on. Click To Tweet

In an abundant world, so what if we both help a few more agencies, right? There are literally millions–I was gonna say thousands and thousands, but literally millions of small businesses that need the advice, the help, the consulting, and the done for you services. So helping a few hundred agencies, I don’t feel it eats into the available pool of potential clients out there for us, there are more and more small businesses that need help every day. So why not?

Yeah, why not? That’s awesome. So how did the book come to fruition? Because a book is a big project, and it’s not to be taken lightly. I mean, it’s a commitment. How did that come about? 

I wish we’d had this conversation six years ago because I did take it lightly. Well, I can’t take any credit for it at all. So Perry Marshall and his brother, Bryan Todd, they had already published the first three editions of the book. And I met them over the years, I bet Perry was who I first discovered Google Ads from back in 2004, a very infamous conference for a small conference here in Australia, all those years ago. And then the first big conference that Perry ran, which was 2010 in Maui, it was only 70 people, but there was the first super focus Google Ads conference that I had ever heard of, or been to, and went out to Maui with a good mate of mine from Queensland, that event changed my life. And I met Perry and Brian and Jack Bourne, his marketing manager, and just got on well with him and started teaching their audience, the Google Ads stuff. So I started running all of the training courses, and back then, you could create a six-module training course and sell it for a couple of grand; those are days. And we would do a monthly Q&A’s and all kinds of stuff for his group. 

You learn things at a deeper level, if you teach.

And then when it came time for them to write the fourth edition of the book, they said, “Well, look, you’re in accounts, all day every day more than we are, we can’t think of anybody better to help us write the next version of the book. Do you want in?” And I did think about it for a little bit because I didn’t realize just how much work is involved in that. So I think two-thirds of the book was mine, all the technical side of stuff. And then Perry’s got some wonderful stories and metaphors, and the fluffier parts of the book and he’s in charge of all of that. I’m not very flowery with my writing; I’m quite direct and technical and straightforward. And so that’s how it started. And we’ve just heard from the publisher, we got the sixth edition, currently looking for a printer in New York. And there’s a bit of a backlog as you can imagine right now in New York, but it’s meant to be coming out in November, the sixth edition of that book. So it keeps on going whether or not we’ll get to seven, who knows? As long as they keep asking us to write new editions, we will. 

And how big is the book now? 

It’s 330-340 pages. This was a complete rewrite from the fifth edition, which was 2017, to this sixth edition, which should be out November 2020. A complete rewrite of all of the technical chapters. So it was quite a big undertaking. Luckily got done before all of this craziness happened; I think we sort of put the manuscript to bed back in January of this year. And then the same deal as before, we’ve had to update little bits and pieces where we can, but there comes a point where you can’t mess with it anymore. It goes off to the editor, and all the proofing and all of that stuff have to happen. So the same deal, we will keep creating those videos and keep the education being as fresh as we can within those constraints of the real world book.

Yeah. So now that Google has changed the brand from Google Adwords to Google Ads, did you change the title of the book to this new brand? 

Yes.

Okay.

So we’ve managed to keep it as the sixth edition, not sort of start all over again because the title has changed a little bit. Apparently, in publishing, that was a big deal. So they tell us, but yes, it’s updated. New logo and title and lots and lots of changes in there.

Very cool. All right. So listeners, go and get that book when it comes out. What would be one of the best nuggets from the new edition?

I guess the huge change over the past three years is Google’s trying to automate more and more and more. So anytime you see anything in Google Ads that have the word smart in front of it, take it with a pinch of salt, maybe add the words “not so” in front, so not so smart display, not so smart shopping, not so smart bidding. Bits of it work well most of the time, other bits don’t work. It’s one of those independent things sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, you have to test these things. But that’s probably been the biggest change; Google has gone all-in on being the AI, machine learning lead business they are. There’s probably five AI businesses in the Western world, maybe three in China, and Google is right up there, some of the best AI on the planet. But we are constantly balancing how much and which bits of the AI to use against getting the best result possible for our clients. And for some accounts, that means using lots of the AI, and for some, that means using quite a small amount. So it’s a constant balancing act, and this won’t make any friends at Google, but not doing everything that Google tells you to do and using all of the tools that they will push quite hard these days. That the sales guys will push quite hard to use these smart tools, but they won’t always improve the results in your account. So just be very careful with that. That’s probably the biggest change over the last few years.

Well, also to bear in mind that Google’s motivations and goals are not your own, right? They want to maximize your spending; they don’t want to maximize your ROI. They just want you to get as good of an ROI as necessary to keep you spending money.

Yes. I think that’s a very succinct and well put. They have a share price that needs to keep going up into the right. They have their own goals to optimize, and they probably aren’t completely aligned with your own.

Yeah, that misalignment was made very apparent to me when I read the book Freakonomics, which is one of my favorite business books and so many stories in there about misaligned incentives. And this was the reason why teachers in the Chicago Public Schools were cheating on behalf of their students on standardized tests and why sumo wrestlers were throwing matches and actually losing on purpose and so many of these different things as an example.

Yeah, the cobras in India when the English went in, they decided to put a bounty on the head of the snakes to try and get rid of all the snakes, but of course, didn’t take long for the local, very poor people to realize, well, if we create these Cobra farms and breed snakes, and then go, “Hey, look, all these snakes we killed give us lots of money,” then it became a huge problem when the British finally realized what was happening and stopped the bounty at which point these guys went, “Don’t need the Cobra farm anymore. Release the snakes.” And of course, they ended up with way more snakes in the wild than they ever were before they got involved. Stephen Dubner‘s stuff is fantastic. I love his podcast.

Yeah. Very cool. All right. So let’s talk about some of the AI things that excite you. What’s happening and what’s coming that our listeners need to know about that’s AI-related.

AI is a fascinating world. I’ve gone deep into it for the last three years, and one of the biggest things I’ve realized is that most small businesses do not need to. You don’t need to go and hire a data scientist or have somebody on your team that knows Python inside out and knows how to wrangle Google’s TensorFlow and all of this geeky stuff. You don’t need to do it because to be an AI business, I believe you need to be first an analytics business. To be an analytics business, you need to value data. And I still think that the vast majority of businesses will pay lip service to, “Oh, yes, data-driven decision making. Yes, we make decisions based on data.” But when it comes down to it, they kind of don’t, they kind of trust their gut, and still make decisions that way, they’re not truly running the business on data. That is going to change, but where most businesses are right now, they’d be far better served to focus on automation, not AI. 

Now part of that automation may mean taking some AI tools off the shelf; Google and Facebook are full of AI. If you’re using those two platforms, you are using AI, day in day out. But trying to use or build your own AI model to predict which of your customers are going to churn out and which prospects might become customers. Unless you’re dealing with very big numbers, and we’re talking thousands and thousands of new customers every month, you just don’t have the data to make those tools interesting. So I’ve been fascinated by it. I would highly recommend that anyone listening, if you’re at all interested in AI, learn enough about it to understand roughly how it works and how it may change your particular industry. Because I firmly believe that it is going to change every single industry, it will change everything. And COVID has been a big accelerator of many things. So it’s probably fair to assume that AI will accelerate the change in your industry, whichever industry you’re in. But you don’t have to become a data scientist or coding genius to benefit from that. 

Google has gone all-in on being the AI, machine learning lead business they are.

There are some wonderful tools and courses, some great courses out there to learn enough to be able to talk about it sensibly. Google has a fantastic one called Crash Course in Machine Learning, can’t remember how long it is, maybe five or eight hours, something like that. I believe they make every employee at Google go through that particular course. And that’s a really good introduction, just so that you understand the terminology, the basics, just learning the vocabulary. When you’re learning anything new, learning the meanings of 20, 30, 40 words, like everything else, suddenly come into focus and be much more understandable. That was a trick that Kiyosaki taught me years ago; just learn the vocabulary. Start there, whether you’re learning Italian, or real estate investing, or whatever it is, learn the meanings of those 20, 30 words that keep coming up, and you’ll feel so much smarter because you’ll be able to take part in the conversations.

I think that’s great. By the way, there’s another course I’ll throw into the mix to add to the Google one. It’s from Coursera, and it’s called Machine Learning for Business Professionals.

Coursera is fantastic. Andrew Ng is probably the smartest bloke on the planet that people haven’t heard of. He was the guy that introduced machine learning at Google in 2011. He ran machine learning at Baidu back in China. Now he’s founded Coursera and a few other AI companies on the side. I don’t know when the guy sleeps. He’s incredible, a wonderful teacher too, he’s really good. So yes, I love Coursera. And for me, yes, it understands it enough to be able to translate between business and geek, to be able to see the opportunities that will be bubbling up in whichever industry you’re in, whether that’s just making your business better and more future proof or if you want to disrupt–such a popular word right now–but disrupt your entire industry. Somebody’s going to do it, why not you? And at least be able to think through, how might this change things, what can AI do, what can’t it do, what should I be thinking about? I think that’s a fascinating rabbit hole to wander down.

Google definitely plays the biggest role in every business’ online visibility. Be friends with Google but definitely not do everything they tell you to do. Click To Tweet

Yeah. I’ve heard this quote at Abundance 360 when I was there in January, that there are gonna be two kinds of businesses by the end of the decade, businesses that are using AI at their core, and then their businesses that will be out of business. And I’d love to hear what your take is on that. Is that true? I don’t remember the famous person who said that. I can’t attribute it correctly. But I’d love to hear your take on that.

I think Peter Diamandis kind of does live even more in the future than we do. He seems to exist 20 years into the future. And I think asteroid mining is freaking cool, but I have no idea how to make any of my clients any money from things that are that far away. So I tend to focus on my timeline is more sort of 6-24 months. That’s what I love, running out three or four hills into the distance, scouting that near future, and then bringing some ideas and thoughts back to clients and AgencySavvy members around that. 

So that ten-year horizon, I don’t know, I’m probably not qualified enough to think that. It sounds a bit of marketing and hype. He doesn’t have to say AI at your core, or you’re gone, but I do think the gap between the haves and have nots will no doubt increase as it has done so many other places in society. And while you maybe don’t have to have it at the core of your business, you certainly need to understand how to use it, how to benefit from it, how it can help in areas of your business. And there’ll be other areas where it doesn’t make sense. But yes, I think you’re going to have to have a fundamental understanding of what it is, what it’s capable of, and be able to talk intelligently to the geeks about some of the things that maybe you want to test inside the business. And yeah, most businesses don’t have that test and learn, fail fast kind of mindset, right? A lot of businesses have that, “Well, that’s the way we’ve always done things we’ve been going for 30 years, why would we change that out?” Those businesses are probably going to be in trouble. That’s not the way around here, probably doesn’t work so much in the 2020s.

Bear in mind that Google’s motivations and goals are not your own.

There’s a prediction from Ray Kurzweil that we’ll reach human-level artificial intelligence by 2029. If that’s the case, the singularity comes once we’re so far beyond that all known models for predictions fall apart, and it’s kind of like the quantum singularity of a black hole. The laws of regular physics no longer work, and you can’t predict that. So in an evolutionary singularity, similarly, you can’t see beyond that event horizon, so to speak. So around 2015 to 2055 will be so far beyond human-level intelligence for the AIs, we will be like ants if we don’t augment ourselves. 

And I don’t want to get down some philosophical rabbit hole of what that means. Are we still human if we keep augmenting ourselves so that we keep up with the AI’s? Yeah. That’s a tough one. But let’s talk about some of the more near term implications, let’s say, three, four years down the line, what sort of tools would Joe Bloggs be using in his small business? That may not even be at all a technical business, maybe he’s a plumber, or maybe he puts siding on houses or roofs or something on houses.

Gosh, there’s so many directions, we could go in there. So I think where most of the tools currently exist have been sales and marketing because that’s where businesses do have data. Because everybody has Google Analytics installed on the website, nobody ever logs in. That’s the dirty secret about Google Analytics, but everybody’s got it. So there’s tons of data in there, and Google, of course, is building machine learning into those very tools. Inside Google Analytics, there are two new-ish metrics that are cool. They’ve got this thing called Conversion Probability. It tells you how likely somebody is going to buy from you in the next 30 days and doesn’t always work. But when it does, it’s a fantastic audience to use in your Google Ads as a remarketing audience. For instance, there’s one called Session Quality, which again, the same sort of thing but instead of predicting how likely they are to buy, it’s kind of looking at everything that they’ve done and how long they spent on certain pages and which products they’ve looked at, and all of these different features to try and predict which were the good ones, which weren’t so good one. Again, a great tool to use for remarketing. 

There’s lots of sales and marketing, and there are lots of great AI tools out there for helping you with, as I said before, keyword research and content marketing. Writing has changed quite a lot in the past few weeks. If you aren’t as geeky as the two of us, you may not have read about GPT-3, but that is a game-changer. It has been massively overhyped. Even the boss of OpenAI, who came out with this model, has said that this thing has been hyped to the moon and back. And yet, it does appear to be a huge step forward. 

What is GPT-3? It is a model that is simply trying to predict the next word. So if we said a sentence like a cat is drinking blank, most people listening to this are thinking probably milk, maybe water, you’re probably not thinking beer, or a martini or kombucha. Because just based on our experience of the world, and everything that we’ve ever read and spoken and seen, the cat is probably drinking milk or water. And so this tool has ingested every word that humans have ever written, ever put on the internet, half a trillion words, it’s read all of that. And it’s trying to then predict the next word. So you give it a prompt to kick it off, and you say, “Write me a Dr. Seuss poem about Elon Musk.” and it goes and writes a Dr. Seuss poem about Elon Musk. And you’ve primed it, and you’ve given it a couple of examples of Dr. Seuss poems before that, just to remind it, what that sort of thing is like. But this tool is doing things that nobody expected. It’s writing code, and it’s writing poetry, it’s writing essays. People are giving it examples, and it’s doing maths. This was one that blew my head. If you give this thing a couple of prompts, and then you say something like, “What is 457 plus 684” now, it may never have read that particular sentence anywhere in those half a trillion words that it’s ever read. But it’s read lots of similar sentences, what is two plus two, two plus two is four, and it learned how to do math by doing lots of reading, which is kind of crazy.

But there have been newspaper articles written by this thing, and can you tell the difference between this article and this article. And it’s just the latest version of something that’s been going on for a while. People have been writing articles about baseball games, and annual financial reports have been written by AI for quite a while. And anytime you can give a machine lots of structured data and lots of examples, and let’s face it, the typical annual reports are pretty dry, pretty boring, and probably doesn’t change much year to year. And if you pick 100 off the shelf and change the cover, you probably couldn’t tell that this was a different business. They’re all kind of written the same way that’s perfect for AI. But this new thing is seemingly much more creative. Now, of course, it doesn’t understand anything that it’s saying it doesn’t understand who Elon Musk is, or who Dr. Seuss was, or why that sounds a particular way. It’s just predicting the next word, and then the next word and the next word and the next word, but it’s doing a remarkable job of doing that, which probably has many people to be pretty worried, I would imagine. 

Yeah, because it won’t be long before that is 1000 times better than it is now. 

To be an AI business, you need to be an analytics business first.

This is the thing like all the charts are still going up into the right. So when they released GPT-2 last year, they didn’t release the full model because they were too worried about it. They were scared it was going to get used to create fake news because the quality of the writing it was putting out was too good. And so they sort of eked out versions of it over time. This new one that’s just been brought out a few weeks ago is depending on how you measure AI tools. It’s essentially 100 times the size, so roughly 100 times more powerful than last year’s model. But the chart is still going up into the right. There’s still room for it to improve. So yes, we don’t have machines that can make common sense yet or understand the things they’re saying. But they are kind of almost at that Turing test level of can you tell this was written by a machine or by a real person. And it’s the breadth of this thing, and it’s not the fact that it can just do this one thing, but you could use it in so many different areas. 

I was doing a Zoom call with, and I’ve been doing a few recently because it’s just fun with primary schools. I started doing it. A guy contacted me and said, “Would you teach our grade fives about AI?” So when he talks, “They’re doing the thing in STEM, I reckon they’d love it.” And it’s just mushroomed from there. I think I’ve done about half a dozen so far, and I’ve got a few more booked in for term four, which comes up pretty soon in Australia. And the kids ask the best questions, it has been so much fun doing this, but I was saying to them like I can picture when you go to secondary school—sorry, I don’t know the American equivalent of middle school and freshmen and all that stuff. I guess it’s high school. Like when you go to high school, and you’re writing essays for English, it’s not will this machine be good enough to write the essay for me, but how would you be good enough to give it the right prompts so that it spits out something decent enough; Dan Sullivan would call it the 80% swipe. Don’t think of it as a tool that’s going to replace writers but how it can augment writers and give you I want to write an article on this thing, and this thing will spit out 15 different drafts that you could then pick and choose from and splice together or say, “Oh, I like it. Let’s mix that one with a bit of that and a bit of that.” 

And now, maybe a human editor comes along and writes something amazing and beautiful. But a lot of that grunt work was done by the machine. So I think there will be a lot of scopes to use it and those sorts of ways to use it as an idea generator or a first draft or something just to get you away from that blank white page, which for most of us, I think is a lot more scared of it. Most of us are good at editing something. Once we see it, I can tell you what’s wrong with this. But starting with a blank page, much harder, usually.

Right. So we all might be blogging but using our AI to do it. Let’s take a very practical, immediate example that I think all of our listeners could benefit from. They could use this new tool. Google has this T5, text-to-text transfer transformer that’s freely available, you could use that and a simple Python script to generate meta descriptions that are all unique, without having to write them yourself. And they’re not just excerpts from all your blog posts and articles and web pages on your site. It can generate all of that unique new content. It’s just amazing and that’s an immediate application.

Humans are naturally visual learners. If you own a business and you're not using dashboards, you’re not optimizing your decision-making process. Click To Tweet

Some of them might need a little bit of an edit or a bit of a polish, but again, like 80-90% of the work is done for you. So that’s a perfect example. I don’t think in terms of that, because I’m not in the SEO world, but yeah, writing replies to emails, I’ve been using Google Docs a lot recently, I’ve completely done away with Word and Excel as of probably a year ago, my use of it was declining and declining. Now I’m fully into G Suite and Google Docs, Google Sheets. And of course, Google Docs will predict the end of the sentence for you two or three words. What this GPT3 is, you can see ten years in the future, you can see where you go reply, and the whole thing will be pre-written for you, not just the next two or three words. And then it’ll say, “Are you good with that?” or “Do you need to edit it a bit?” Of course, it’s looking at all of those edits that you make, and it’s learning from you over time. Same as Gmail as well, there are three options at the bottom of Gmail. I think even LinkedIn is starting to do that now as well. It gives you those options, and depending on the type of words that you use; it’s changing those options. 

So yeah, we’ll all be using AI, but it’s that old line of it appears like magic until we’re all using it. And then it’s just like, Ah, yeah, try to tell these kids how amazing it is all the stuff that they have to play with these days. And they’re like, “Yeah, whatever old man,” they just take it for granted that you can call somebody on the other side of the world in perfect video with no audio lag or that you carry a supercomputer around in your pocket. So all of this AI, some of the stuff that seems fantastical and amazing to us of what’s coming will be just, “Well, yeah, of course, it does it like that dad. Like, how else would I do my homework?” That’s just another tool to master.

We’re all boomers to the younger generation. And I think you’re referring to a quote from Arthur C. Clarke, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” 

Yes.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

It’s gonna be like Star Trek episodes very soon. And we need to prepare for that. We can’t just be caught unaware. Like, right now, let’s say that your website supports customer service chat and you offer products or services across geographies across languages, you could be using Unbabel, which is at least 90% accurate with real-time language translations by machines. And that 10% that isn’t quite on the mark gets flagged, and then within seconds, their human army of people that work for Unbabel will correct that. And so it’s near real-time, and it’s 100% roughly accurate with the translations. You don’t have to have anybody on your team who speaks those languages. It’s just pretty incredible.

It is crazy, isn’t it? And how that augments us those superpowers that they potentially give us. And that, for me, is the story behind this AI. It’s not that those businesses go out of business, the ones that aren’t prepared, yes, many will go out of business. But I don’t think it’s this, us versus the machine. And the machine turned us all into paper clips. I don’t think that’s the story. I think it’s us and the machine. It’s smart people working with smart machines. That’s the exciting, hopeful future. What will we be able to do, and how do we get rid of all of that boring, mundane, repetitive stuff? How do we get the machines doing that, like coming up with the first draft of five different articles on the same topic because we need to show all these different ways of thinking about it? Having machines do that, and then putting the human layer over the top doing the editing and the curating and the synthesis between different things. 

A random tangent here, I’ve been using BigQuery and sucking a lot of Google Ads data out into BigQuery so that we can start to do some fun stuff there. But Google has this tool Data Studio; I’m guessing many of your listeners have heard of it, and probably use it for client reporting, and so on. It is such a good tool, and it’s getting better at a rate of knots. So we’re using a tool like Data Studio to enable us to better visualize and pull in data from a range of different sources so that you can see all of that in one place together. I can give some examples of that. But it’s quite geeky on the Google Ads side, just trying to think of one that makes sense to everybody, even if they don’t do Google Ads. In Google Ads, the structure is very hierarchical. So you have campaigns and campaigns hold ad groups and ad groups hold keywords and then behind each of those keywords, live hundreds and hundreds of search terms, what somebody has typed into Google. Now in the Google interface, if you want to dig into a particular ad group, and then a particular keyword and see the search terms that live behind that, that’s all well and good-ish, hiding more and more of that data. But anyway, we won’t go there. But then if you want to look at the next ad group across, you’ve got to come sort of back up out of that hierarchy into the next group or into the next campaign, and then back down. 

And then the next one back up and across and all using a tool like Data Studio, everything can be on the screen at the same time. And you can instantly filter everything on the screen and say just go, “this ad group,” “these search terms aren’t interesting, next one” changes, “next one” changes, “next one.” And it’s just so much easier to get context and see all of these different bits and pieces of data because I think that’s what we as humans are brilliant at is that synthesis of disparate things, pulling that together and making sense of that and often making up stories about that but making sense of that and seeing the patterns in that or as a lot of the AI and a lot of the tools right now are very narrow, fantastically good at just doing one little thing, but not being good at thinking, Oh, well, if that happens over there, what could happen over here? So I think humans will be needed for quite a while yet, coming at it from a higher level and more strategic uses of that data. But that still requires you to have all your data nice and tidy and in the right place.

If you start that now, then you’re going to be far better prepared a year or two from now.

Yeah. Would you say that everybody listening should be at least playing with Google Data Studio?

I think Data Studio is a wonderful tool. I’m not the world’s expert on Google Analytics by a long shot, but I am seeing a lot of people as I said before, everybody’s got it, and nobody ever logs in. But then using Data Studio over the top of a tool like Google Analytics, which is all of this geeky data, you do the thinking once and go, Okay, what part of the six KPIs that I need to look at regularly, how do I present that in a way where I can get the insight much, much faster and have that presented on a thoughtful, well-designed dashboard that, “Okay, where are we at compared to the target?” And there are all kinds of ways to make a dashboard, go read Avinash Kaushik, get on his email list, go check out his blog, Occam’s Razor, he is one of the best minds around that sort of stuff, I think on the planet. But yes, I think if you’re a business and you’re not using dashboards, I know that the data purists would say, well, you can do all of that with code, and you can have alerts sent to you. But I think we’re very visual, as a role as humans. So if you’re trying to run a business, whatever level you’re at, and not using dashboards to help you with your decision making, then I would start there. But it has to be a thoughtful, well-designed dashboard that’s going to help you make actionable insights. It’s not just a data puke; there’s not much point using it for that. I’m not sure if I wanted off on too much of a tangent there, but kind of answered your question. 

Okay, so are there templates for good dashboards? Like, is there a whole library that folks could browse to just import or load into Google Data Studio?

I think if you search for something like Data Studio Gallery, you will find lots and lots there, making it very easy with one click at the top of Google Analytics to instantly create a Data Studio dashboard with your data instantly sucked into that tool, so you don’t have to do all of the fiddly, geeky stuff. They are improving it at a rate of knots that the Data Studio Team is fantastic at Google. But it’s a great place to start because that gets you into that thing that we were talking about before of valuing data and starting at least to become an analytical company. If you start that now, then you’re going to be far better prepared a year or two from now to one, basically instant use of all of the AI and machine learning that Google is going to put into all of those tools. 

But it’s also going to set you up well. Because once you start doing that, you’ll start thinking, “Well, how do we do this same thing for this area of the business? How can we pull in all of this data from this area?” That that could be something completely different that could be that manufacturing company that you mentioned before, putting sensors on all of the machines in the factory, and being able to visualize which machines are probably about to fail before they fail so that they can swap that part out and avoid having disruptions on the line. We’re heading towards this trillion sensor may be where they’re already; I’m not up to date with the numbers, but a trillion sensor economy. There are sensors everywhere spewing out data all of the time. How do we then use that data to inform us and make better decisions? And that’s all kinds of business that can benefit from agriculture, health education, every business is going to be affected by that.

Right. And that reminds me of the spatial web and how things are going to change quite drastically there. I had Gabriel Rene on this podcast talking about this pretty fascinating thing. You know how web 2.0 was a thing back in the day, and that was a big paradigm shift like the spatial web is going to transform everything. And those trillion sensors and all that is just one piece of the full equation. So I encourage our listeners and you as well to check that episode. So when you said, “turn us all into paper clips” earlier, I made a note of that. And like, I’m gonna ask if Mike’s aware of this particular game that might be why you said that. There’s a game that was written up in Wired Magazine. It’s a game word that assumes that molecular nanotechnology exists, which it will, meaning that you’ll have self-replicating nano-sized machines. So at the nanometer level, the size of molecules, small molecules will be able to self replicate, they’ll make more of themselves. And when we have that, everything changes. 

I mean, AI is a big deal, but molecular nanotechnology is even bigger. So the replicator in Star Trek and all that becomes very, not just possible, but inevitable. And so this game is kind of like an emulator of what paperclip factories would be used as raw material, which would be pretty much anything in the environment because when molecular nanotechnology comes, it can just break down the nearby molecules into its constituent parts into the atoms and then rebuild it into paper clips. And so eventually, the game always ends with the entire galaxy getting consumed by these machines, that factories, that spew out paperclips, and it goes out of control. And it’s the gray goo problem if you’re familiar with nanotech. So, is that why you said, turning us all into paper clips?

If all of the answers can be known, then the game becomes asking the right question.

I didn’t know that it was a game in Wired. I thought it was a Nick Bostrom thing. But yeah, essentially, if we give the machine the wrong goal, and a part of the problem is going to be that we may not be smart enough to know what to ask the machine to do. I mean, as humans, we ain’t that sad a lot of the time. We can’t agree, I mean, just look at the state of the world right now, we can’t agree on what good is. Seven and a half billion people, seven and a half billion sets of values, what is intelligence? If these kids were asking about artificial intelligence, what is intelligence? We don’t have an answer for that. Squirrels have a different type of intelligence. They can bury 1000 nuts to remember where they all are. We can’t do that. But does that mean squirrels are more or less intelligent than we are? It’s not on one continuum. It’s not just one thing; there are many different types of intelligence. Our job is going to be asking the machines to optimize for the right thing, putting some safeguards around that. But more and more, I think of it as coming up with the right questions. So imagine that every answer is instantly available, certainly anything that can fit into a spreadsheet, and that is based on data. If all of the answers can be known, then the game becomes asking the right question. And that is something that I’m more and more fascinated by the older I get. I realized that questions are the answer and having the right question is everything.

Yeah, if you want a better life, ask better questions.

Absolutely. I was chatting with Bryan Todd, my co-author, the other day, and he was saying how sometimes before going into a team meeting—he’s the president of Perry Marshall & Associates. Before going into a team meeting, he might spend an hour crafting the right two questions to go in and post to the team because he understands the power of the right question to not only get everybody thinking and get everybody aligned and rowing in the same direction but also to get amazing new wisdom and knowledge out of these amazing resources we have in our businesses called people. They have the answer, but asking the right question is what’s required to elicit the stuff that we want? I find that fascinating topic.

You would enjoy the book, Change Your Questions, Change Your Life.

Okay. I don’t know that one. 

It’s kind of a self-help book, but I think you’d enjoy it. You’ve mentioned Nick Bostrom before you tell me who Nick Bostrom is, and our listeners, I’ll tell you who the game designer was of that paperclip game, it was Frank Lantz. So tell me about Nick Bostrom, and why our listener needs to know who he is and why.

I don’t know a ton about him. What I do know, I’ll simplify as what we have right now is what’s commonly referred to as artificial narrow intelligence or ANI, which means a machine that can do one small thing but do it very well. And more and more, these machines can do things at a human level or better, because they’re tired, and they all learn from each other, etc. Self-driving cars, objectively, cars are probably better drivers than most humans at this point, but we are very quick to criticize when an algorithm gets something wrong, but we’re very forgiving when a human gets something wrong. But there are probably–it’s fair to say at this pointless accidents now it’s just a regulation problem, and when will we all become comfortable with machines driving. That was a random tangent. So ANI, the next bit, which and you’ve mentioned 2055, I think the best AI minds on the planet can’t agree on this. Peter Diamandis and the Singularity University guys have sort of one set of beliefs. You’ve got guys like Demis Hassabis, DeepMind in London, who is probably at the head of the pack here trying to solve what is intelligence and trying to create artificial general intelligence in our lifetimes. 

DeepMind was a company acquired by Google, what eight years ago?

Yeah, 2014. So that’s the one that our listeners may be familiar with, that played go and beat the world champion. That was the DeepMind technology, and that’s now a sister company of Google over Alphabet. That’s the technology that drives that smart bidding, and many of the other tools inside of Google Ads. And they’re doing amazing stuff in health care, and all sorts of fun stuff. Some of its PR exercises, sure, but they are doing some incredible stuff with AI. So we’re heading towards this potentially artificial general intelligence. Can we get a machine that can do what we, as humans, can do? I think what Nick Bostrom is talking about is the level above that. 

So once we have a computer that’s as good as a human brain, how long between then until we have a computer that is as good as all the brains combined on the planet. And how long from than before, like you said, before, we just can’t see past that event horizon, because we are an ant at that point, trying to understand what all of these humans are doing wandering around driving cars and how our cars are made, we just cannot begin to fathom that world. And that’s artificial superintelligence, where the whole thing just kind of runs away. And if we don’t have those safeguards in, is it possible to put those safeguards and again, I have not gone into that world, because it seems so far away that anything I learn about that will just scare the crap out of me. And I won’t be able to do anything about it anyway. So worry about the things you can control and come back to six months to a year away.

I have to change the things I can, not change the things I can’t.

Yeah, that’s, I think the Serenity Prayer, right? You have to change the things I can to not change the things I can’t and the wisdom to know the difference. I mangled that one, but that’s roughly the Serenity Prayer. And so Nick Bostrom is kind of at the cutting edge of what are the ethical implications and how do we safeguard humanity from a superintelligence, which is coming faster than we could possibly think or imagine. So, Ray Kurzweil, I gave this stat earlier, 2029 is when he predicts artificial general intelligence, AGI will hit, and then I think it’s 2035 where it’s 1000 times smarter than humans and the singularity 2055-ish.

That is not very far away, right? I mean, the iPhone arrived 13 years ago, and many of us can still remember Steve Jobs on stage with his big finger. That was 13 years ago. 2029, eight years away. That’s gonna be here before we know it. You’ve got a one-year-old when your kid is nine, which is the age of my elder daughter, which, and I can tell you that’s about blink, and you’ll miss it kind of eight years, that’s 2029. It is quite incredible. And then GPT-3 comes out, and you go, “Oh, that was a step change of understanding what these things are capable of.” Like many of the examples, if you go searching for GPT-3 examples, many of the things you’re going to find have been cherry-picked. And you don’t know if somebody has fed that line into the machine 100 times. And oh, there’s one good one, finally, right? I’ll put that in my article in The New York Times and say, like, look how amazing the machine was. But it’s only going to keep getting better. That’s incredibly scary and, in some ways, good, but kind of scary.

Yeah, exponentially better, right? So it’s going to improve at exponential rates.

And this kind of riffs off what one of the kids was asking on this call a few days ago, I said, “I don’t think we need to worry about how smart the computers get, what I’m far more concerned about is how dumb humans are.” And it only requires a very small number of humans to use these incredible tools maliciously. And we’ve always–human beings are idiots–we’ve always used tools in malicious ways. I mean, take fire, it can toast your marshmallows, it can burn your house down. It depends on how you use the tool. These tools are getting incredibly, incredibly powerful. 

There’s a book I read years ago, which I loved, called Future Crimes; this will scare the bejesus out of you. But it was by a guy who had the best job title in the world; he was the futurist for the FBI. So it was his job to look at all of the stuff that the FBI knew about, and then extrapolate that into the future. Now that book was written seven years ago, and a lot of the stuff in there was what’s coming in five to 10 years. And we’re banging in the middle of that timeframe now. And so using AI to write those spammy emails, which right now are written because they know that that same email is going to go out to 10 million people. 

But there’s going to be an idiot somewhere that’s going to press that link and right back to the Nigerian prince, and send the money to the bank account. But what he was talking about in there is what if that email has been written just for you? What if it has scraped your social profiles and knows all of these things about you and writes an email as if it’s from that long lost friend of yours or from someone that you’re expecting to hear from because it knows that you usually communicate quite a bit, but this person is on holiday at the moment. And so it’s going to write this letter saying, “Hey, I’m stuck in Brazil, and I’ve been thrown in jail for the wrong thing. And I need your money quickly,” and your friend is in Brazil. And I’m wandering off on a weird tangent now, but like, these machines could be incredibly powerful. The machines themselves are not going to be evil, but how human beings potentially use them can be frightening. By the way, don’t read that book just before you go to bed; it will scare the crap out of you.

Great. I think we should probably put that warning right next to the link to the book title. Okay, so let’s switch to a really fast lightning round for these last few minutes. What’s your favorite quote by Dan Sullivan? 

Oh, my goodness. I can’t think of a quote, but I love the concept of unique ability and the 80-20 approach. Absolutely love the 80-20 approach.

Well, my favorite quote by him is, “Perfection has no place in times of peril.” 

Oh, that’s good.

We’re in an interesting time right now. So you got to remember that quote so that you don’t get stuck in this perfection mode; instead, you just fail fast and get stuff out the door.

Progress, not perfection. Absolutely. Good question.

What were you gonna say?

I can’t remember. So I think I was gonna say, I’ve never met Dan, but I consider him a mentor of 18 years. I have listened to his stuff religiously for 18 years. He is probably the best thinker about thinking that I know of. And I think my brain works in a fairly similar way to his. We’ve got similar Kolbe scores and so on. So I just feel like all these thinking tools he creates are custom made for me, and they make my life easier and better. So I’m a massive fan of Strategic Coach Shannon Waller, Dan Sullivan, and all the crew over there.

Yeah, I’m in Strategic Coach. I’ve been in for a year now. I love it. That’s great. So you mentioned Kolbe, which is a great assessment, and I’ve taken it. I’m curious about what your Kolbe score is.

There are sensors everywhere spewing out data all of the time. We have to let that data inform us to make better decisions. Click To Tweet

It’s been a while since I did it. So which way round are the first two? I think it’s Fact Finder first and then Follow Thru. So I think I’m a seven, eight, then Quick Start, the high one, right? 

You can’t convince me you’re a low Quick Start. 

No, that’s a nine. So it’s something like a 6,7,9, 3.

Okay, I’m a 3, 3, 9, 3. 

Wow. 

So everything is low, except for Quick Start.

All your ideas are go go go.

Oh, my goodness, I am just prolific. It’s insane; it’s a blessing and a curse. Okay, so next one is, what’s your favorite AI-based tool for our listeners to play with? Whether it’s keyword research or content marketing related, market news, or whatever, what’s something that they should check out?

It’s verging into a very geeky territory, but I have been playing a little bit recently with AutoML. It’s a Google model that if you can put some data into a CSV, and have a bunch of columns there, and then one column is, here’s the thing I would like to predict is this placement from the Google Display Network junk or not junk. So if you can organize some data, it is ridiculously simple. It took me 20 minutes on the weekend to follow along with a video and load this thing up. Load that into AutoML and build your machine learning model. Maybe it only took 20 minutes, because I’ve done all of that backstory and research, but I don’t think so I think you could use the tool quickly. And I am just blown away now at how easy it is; you don’t have to think about neural networks and what type of model it’s going to build. It’ll just figure out the best model to build for you. And then, it’ll start making these predictions on your data for you. So if you’ve got data, and there’s something that you would love to predict, this is the opposite of a quickfire round now, but if there is some data that you would love to predict, then AutoML is my new favorite uber-geeky tool to play with.

Okay, so like if I have a huge list of books I want to read, like crazy. There are hundreds and hundreds on that list. So I could paste that into a spreadsheet–it’s in Evernote right now, I paste it into a spreadsheet, like a Google Sheet, and then I could use an AutoML field. 

What’s the historical data that you’re going to feed in, though. So first, you need your training data, historical data. So that’d be a list of all the books that you have read and love them or hated them, or let’s say a 1 to 10 scale, right? Let’s not make it binary here; let’s go from a scale of one to 10. I love these, and I didn’t like these. But then what features would you be loading into the machine at this point, you’ve only really got the title and the author and maybe what the score is on Goodreads or something? Like, wouldn’t it be amazing if you could feed in the entire text of the book, or at least maybe the Table of Contents or something a little bit easier and say this stuff I love, this stuff I hated, this stuff I didn’t even finish? 

I think to make a prediction about which books you’re going to love, I think that would be a little harder because you’ve got to think about the features of the data that you’re feeding in. I mean, I’ve just done something similar, and I cheated. I went to authors that are similar to Lee Child, and then hit the interweb, and there are entire websites that have that kind of author map. And I figure, so I bought 20 different authors, about tons of fiction books because I don’t read enough fiction, just one from each of these authors. And there’s been a couple I hated so far and a couple I loved, and now I’m going to go deep into those new authors. I don’t know if that’s gonna solve your problem. 

So I’ve got some fiction authors for you, I can tell you that I think you’re gonna love Neil Stephenson. So if you’re familiar with the book Snow Crash or The Diamond Age, incredible, you will love them. It’s so binge-able. The Steven Spielberg movie, what was the name of that one that they’re in the oasis in this virtual world?

Oh, the Ready Player One? 

Ready Player One. Thank you. 

Yeah. Great book. I love that one. I haven’t seen the film yet, actually, but I love the book. 

Well, I’ll tell you, you will be disappointed by the film then. 

Okay.

For those who have not read the book, you’ll enjoy the movie. It’s a good movie. It’s fun. But if you’ve read the book, hmm.

I think being born in the 70s was a big part of the enjoyment of that book, all of the 80s references and all of that stuff.

I’ll tell you if you’ve watched the movie, and you did enjoy it, read the book. Oh, my goodness, amazing. Okay, so another quick question. Are you familiar with the Talk to Books app that Ray Kurzweil and his team had built over Google? So Ray Kurzweil, his company acquired by Google, and then he became an executive at Google and had a whole team to do whatever he wanted that was like AI and kind of futurism related. So one of the things that his team built was Talk to Books, and it reads the entire library of all books. And then you can ask your questions.

Right.

Yeah, it needs some work. I imagine that they’re going to do some sort of update or something, and then it’s going to be amazing, right? For what we were talking about earlier. So do you have a particular favorite app, kind of like that, maybe it’s some sort of IBM Watson thing or something that just will blow people’s minds when they go and check it out?

Descript. Descript has been my app that I’ve just been geeking out on for the last two, three months. So I would imagine some people are familiar with Otter. So creating a transcription of audio, for free, 95% accurate, slightly worse quality than rev.com, maybe, but completely free. So Descript will not only do that part for you, but if you load up a video, and by the way, it will also automatically recognize when you have a new Zoom link added to the clipboard on your computer or a Loom link, and it will say, “Hey, I just noticed you got a new video, would you like me to import that?” Yes, thank you. So it sucks in the video, does the full transcription, but then it allows you to edit the video by editing words. So normally, when you edit video, you’ve got the waveform down the bottom, and you’re scrubbing backward and forwards trying to find the bit between those two words, because you need to chop that little piece out or something. It’s if you can edit a Word document, I think everybody listening can, then you can highlight a paragraph, press Delete, and that bit is gone from not just the audio, but from the video, and that joins the two bits together. 

So we recently reached out to some of our members and said would you say some nice things about us and give us a video testimonial. So then my marketing manager was able to load these 15-20 videos into Descript. See the transcription written so instead of having to scrub through these videos and write downtime codes, she was able to visually see, and you’ve got the video next to you, the transcription, and then the waveform across the bottom just in case you need that. Read through that or to the video read through all, “That line where Darren said that bit and where Laura said that bit” and then just literally highlight that bit of text cut and paste into a new project 15 little chunks of video and that was the rough cut that took 5-10 minutes to create and we did send that on to a proper video editor. Yeah, just to make the transitions a little bit nicer. I think you can do some funky transitions in Descript, but as a transcription tool, as a rough video editing tool, absolutely mind-blowing. Great use of AI for ten bucks a month.

That was so cool. 

Very cool. 

Otter.ai is not free anymore. It is ten bucks a month. I mean, you can do a little, but you can’t import any files for free anymore. You have to pay for it.

Yeah, I’ve stopped using it now that I use Descript.

Well, I’m gonna switch to Descript, I think. Anyway, I’m gonna share something with you that I think may frustrate you to know it now rather than like two weeks ago or two months ago when you were just starting the testimonial project. Always coach the client to explain their objections that they had before they signed up with you. So critical because the key tool that where the testimonial fits in is to obliterate the objections, maybe even preempt to the objections than the prospect hasn’t even articulated yet. So if a prospect is very concerned about the price and that’s always the case with my prospects to lead the testimonial with. We’re a Fortune 500 company, and we have big budgets and so forth, and still, we were very concerned about the price, because he was twice as much as all the other competition that we looked at. And yet, I’m so glad we went with Stephan because, oh, my goodness, the ROI was, like, infinitely higher than it would have been with these other guys. And we’re just so happy and blah, blah, blah. So whenever possible, get the client to talk about their objections.

Yeah, I have a list of six questions that we send to everybody, which I stole from a wonderful guy called Shawn D’Souza, who’s in Auckland. He had a book many, many years ago called the Brain Audit. That book would have to be 15, maybe 20 years old, and it’s fabulous. I just love the way he thinks about the brain. He’s also a brilliant cartoonist. And so the book and his websites filled with these wonderful drawings that he does that he randomly sends to me on messenger, it’s quite bizarre. I’ve just got this thing pop up, like six cartoons that he drew the other day. It’s cool. A very talented guy. 

So the six questions, what are they?

Oh, goodness, I couldn’t write them off the top of my head. I can send them through, and you can pop them in the show notes?

Yeah, I’ll do that. Is it in one of his blog posts, books, or something?

I’ve got them saved. I will try and find them now, but I’ll send them right after this. 

Okay. All right. So last lightning round question. Is it still important to have a third-party ad management platform, or should you just use Google?

If you mean sort of forbidding, like a consumer in that sort of thing? 

Correct.

I don’t think so. Because all those machines are doing is taking what little data is available through the API and building their models around that to then try and beat the Google model. Now, if you are insistent on not using Google tech at all, I don’t think there are many people left in this camp at this point in 2020. And still doing things manually or trying to build your own set of basic rules; if this then that, then maybe those machines that do use a bit of ML, or maybe they’re just really doing a bunch of regression and putting some fluffy stuff over the top of it, then maybe those machines make sense. But I think for the vast, vast majority of advertisers, they don’t make any sense, you better off using the Google tool, the asymmetry of data between what Google has and what we as users get is growing by the day. And so they will use that data. The downside is. There’s a lack of transparency, there’s a lack of control, and people much much smarter than I have written extensively about this. 

Our job is to optimize machines in doing the right thing. We should be able to put safeguards around it. But more importantly, we need to ask the right questions. Click To Tweet

Particularly over the past few weeks, because Google made a few changes recently that are just starting to get a little bit tiring. They’re just really not respecting the partner in the advertiser that makes them all these billions of dollars. They’re treating us, advertisers, as a resource to be maximized. I think that this is going to be the least lightning round of all lightning rounds ever. The longest answers ever, but short answer, no. I don’t think those tools have their place anymore. I don’t think they have had for a while, frankly. And yes, they’re all I think very outdated now, we don’t need them.

So sounds like they might be going out of business. If you’re an investor in any of those platforms, maybe rethink that.

Maybe get out before the rush, yeah.

Yeah. Interesting. So thank you so much, Mike. This was fabulous. If our listener wants to learn more from you, where would they go to take your courses to follow you on social media and read your blog and all that sort of stuff? And also if they want to work with you and have a done for you solution?

So a couple of places, let’s start with the Done For You. Thank you for the opportunity to mention that. So websavvy.com.au because we’re down here in Australia. So websavvy.com.au is the Done For You Agency. So we look after Google Ads and Facebook Ads for a bunch of brands that you’ve heard of and many more that you probably haven’t. Agencysavvy.com is where you would go if you want to dig into our courses, predominantly around all things Google Analytics, Tag Manager, Data Studio, Google Shopping, Google Display, YouTube, all of that stuff. That’s all in AgencySavvy. And if anybody has a question for me, just probably find me on Facebook is the easiest thing. So just facebook.com/MikeRhodes.

Awesome. I’m curious what sort of price range is AgencySavvy like are the courses all priced separately, or is it just an all you can eat kind of monthly subscription?

It’s all you can eat. Yeah, we are in the middle of changing that moment. But I’ve recorded about 150 odd videos in the last 150 days of lockdown. So I’ve been redoing a whole lot of courses. So yes, it’s an all you can eat. I think it’s 300 a month or a couple of grand a year right now for everything, or there are, I think, two courses that you can buy individually. So sort of a Google Ads fundamentals. And I’m more than happy to give your listeners free access to fundamentals if that’s a giveaway.

Oh, that’s very generous of you.

Well, it’s a good place to get started. It’s about 40 odd videos that will explain not obviously, everything from zero to hero, but from zero to pretty damn good. And then if they like my style, and they like what’s in there, then they can dive into search mastery and go to the next step. But yeah, I’ll send you some code or something. We’ll figure out a way to make that happen.

Awesome. That’s fabulous. Thank you so much, Mike. This is great, you’re just such an inspiring not just a thought leader, but a results leader, and I love that about you.

Thank you. I’m gonna have to steal that quote. Get it in Descript quick!

All right. Well, thank you, Mike. Thank you, listeners. Now take some powerful next actions, and have a great rest of your week.

Thanks very much.

Important Links

Your Checklist of Actions to Take

Learn more about Google Adwords. Read a copy of Mike Rhode’s book, Ultimate Guide to Google Ads: Access more than 1 Billion People in 10 Minutes. 
Find more ways to implement automation in my company. Doing so will optimize the productivity and efficiency of the operations.
Become more familiar with AI and its benefits but also make sure that I’m utilizing it for the benefit of my clients and company.
Research thoroughly before implementing new technology. Although it’s profitable to keep my systems updated, make sure I’m investing in the right place.
Take short courses that can improve my knowledge in machine learning. Stephan recommends Coursera.
Observe the present trends in business and economics. Use that gathered information to predict the future of the company. 
Test out strategies so I have a clear perception of what’s both effective and not before moving forward.
Be prepared for change. Adapt gracefully to the highs and lows of running a business. This is how I’ll survive in the industry.
Use dashboards and visual data to help with the decision making process. Using design to present information can help ensure everyone’s on the same page.
Check out Mike Rhodes’ website, Web Savvy, to learn more about who they are and what they can do to help.

About Mike Rhodes

Mike’s approaching veteran status in the Digital Marketing world.

Mike is the CEO & Founder of WebSavvy and AgencySavvy and co-author of the world’s best-selling book on Adwords ‘The Ultimate Guide to Google Ads’.

He’s in his 16th year of building and running Google Ad campaigns for businesses and brands all around the world at WebSavvy. As well as being in the trenches with his team and doing the work for clients, he teaches a few hundred competitor digital marketing agencies how to improve the technical ‘how to do Google Ads and Facebook Ads better’ side, and how to grow and scale their businesses at AgencySavvy.

Mike’s married to the amazing Gabbi and lives in Melbourne, Australia. When he’s not playing in the Google machine, you’ll find him in a forest on a mountain bike, or elbow-deep in Play-Doh with his two gorgeous daughters.