Ep 236: How ChatGPT Is Disrupting Ads (and What Smart Businesses Are Doing About It) with John Horn

“Most people think SEO is dead. But it’s not. It’s just evolving into something far more interesting.”

Paid ads expert, John Horn, doesn’t sugarcoat the reality of digital advertising in 2025. In this episode, we take a look at how businesses can stop wasting money on paid ads and how to prepare for the next wave of AI-driven advertising platforms like ChatGPT. Whether you’re running ads now or scared to even try, John brings clarity, strategy, and a calm ‘don’t-panic’ tone to a space full of noise.

John Horn is the CEO of Stub Group, a digital advertising agency that has helped clients generate over $500 million in revenue through profitable ad strategies. With over a decade of hands-on experience, John is known for helping businesses navigate complexity in a constantly shifting digital landscape.

WE ALSO TALKED ABOUT

• Why AI platforms like ChatGPT are reshaping how ads will work
  
• What small businesses need to know about GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
  
• How to prepare your business for AI-powered ad platforms, even before they’re fully launched
  
• Why traditional SEO is actually more important than ever
  
• How to stand out in AI search results with PR, data, and real human input
  
• Common mistakes that lead to wasted ad spend (and how to avoid them)
  
• A smart tracking tip that helped one B2B company cut out low-quality leads
  
• How to use photos, stats, and content to get picked up by LLMs like ChatGPT
  
• What kind of original content makes you rank in AI-generated search results
  

Tune in now to get practical, non-hype strategies for growing your business with paid ads and future-proofing your marketing

And get regular access to tips, techniques and advice from experts about growing your business: https://onlinebusinessliftoff.com/newsletter/

RESOURCES MENTIONED

• Stub Group website
• Stub Group YouTube channel
• Blog article on the state of Google ads suspensions in 2025

My newsletter is for people who need a way to make money from home so they can build a better life for themselves and their families:
👉 https://onlinebusinessliftoff.com/newsletter

_____________

Trudy Rankin is the host of the Online Business Launchpad Podcast, Director of West Island Digital and the founder of the Online Business Lift-Off program.

Affiliate Disclaimer: If you click on links on this page and then make a purchase, I may earn a commission (at no extra cost to you).  I am a proud affiliate of these resources because I use them in my own life and business.

TRANSCRIPT

Episode 236: How ChatGPT Is Disrupting Ads (and What Smart Businesses Are Doing About It) with John Horn

[00:00:12] Trudy Rankin: Welcome to the Online Business Launchpad podcast. I am your host, Trudy Rankin, and today I have John Horn with me. John is the CEO of Stub Group. And Stub Group is all about profitable digital marketing, and we’re going to be talking about using paid ads and actually getting a return on your money.

[00:00:30] Trudy Rankin: Something that I know that a lot of my listeners just really, really struggle with. So welcome to the podcast, John 

[00:00:38] John Horn: Trudy. Thank you so much for having me. 

[00:00:40] Trudy Rankin: So can you just share with us just a little bit about your background and who you are? 

[00:00:48] John Horn: Absolutely. So I always like to start by saying I’m a husband and father of three.

[00:00:52] John Horn: It’s the most important part of my life. But, uh, what I spent a lot of my time doing, like you said, is helping businesses with paid advertising. So, Stub [00:01:00] Group we started, uh, over a decade ago and I had the privilege of kind of being first, first employee at the founders brought on back in the day, took over the CEO role about six years ago at this point.

[00:01:11] John Horn: And, um, yeah. What we do is we help all different types of businesses, whether it be, you know, retailers, selling products online, local service businesses, you name it, we help them use paid advertising and other marketing methods and opportunities to generate more business and hopefully do so in as, uh, profitable a way as possible.

[00:01:34] Trudy Rankin: And that’s one of the things that we’ll be talking about a little bit because I know so many stories of people who have tried ads, tried to do it themselves, and really didn’t know what they were doing, and then get really, really frustrated when they spend a lot of money and there’s not a return, and it can be super, super, just depressing when that happens.

[00:01:56] Trudy Rankin: Tell us a little bit more about the [00:02:00] parts of being a CEO of a business like this that really light you up. 

[00:02:06] John Horn: The most exciting thing for me is when we drive really good results for our clients. So when I see clients being happy with our team, when I see like a great example earlier today.

[00:02:17] John Horn: A couple clients left us really positive reviews and, uh, one of our team members, you know, posted them in our general Slack channel. And that’s my favorite part of the job is seeing someone say, Hey, I was working with this person here. They did a great job. Super professional. Driving great results.

[00:02:31] John Horn: That’s, uh, that, that keeps me going. Put it that way. 

[00:02:36] Trudy Rankin: Yeah, it always makes a great difference when you can see the difference that you’re making for your clients. I’m curious though, because having dabbled in the, in the art or not so much art of trying to get something out of paid ads can you talk a little bit about the changes that have been affecting just the whole world of paid ads over the last couple of years?

[00:02:59] John Horn: Yeah. [00:03:00] So the, the last couple of years have been particularly eventful, primarily because of the introduction of AI, things like ChatGPT, things like AI overviews on Google. And so we’re in, we’re in kind of an inflection point right now in just how people find information, how people use the internet, which is, it’s fun it’s scary.

[00:03:23] John Horn: It’s all, it’s all sorts of things, but I would say some of the big trends that I’m seeing (A), are of course people are starting to rely more and more on things like ChatGPT and other LLMs. Um, and again, the AI overviews I mentioned that you see when you search on Google to find information that is, um, that can be a problem for advertisers because most advertisers are, you know, using Google ads, Meta ads, things like that to, to get in front of people.

[00:03:49] John Horn: And the more people right now who use something like ChatGPT, the less options that we have to get the right people, uh, to our websites, to our businesses via advertising. That said, I [00:04:00] also think that it’s almost a foregone conclusion that advertising is going to come to these platforms like ChatGPT for example.

[00:04:08] John Horn: There’s just too much money being left on the table by these businesses who are also deeply unprofitable in the case of Open AI right now, to not do it. And so I think that over these next couple of years, there’s going to be a lot of opportunities for savvy advertisers and marketers who are willing to

[00:04:25] John Horn: kind of get that first mover advantage. Really figure out quickly when, let’s say, when ads come to ChatGPT, when more ads come to AI overviews on Google, things like that, to figure out how to leverage those on behalf of their brands and their businesses. And I think you’ll see a little bit of a, of a shift in terms of which advertisers, which marketers are winning right now.

[00:04:45] John Horn: And a lot of winnings are going to go to the people who, who figure out first how to use these new platforms. 

[00:04:53] Trudy Rankin: I think, I think that’s so true. You keep reading articles about how that whole ads-on space is going to, is going to be [00:05:00] happening within the AI tools. And it, it won’t just be ChatGPT, it’s interesting to me how it’s following a pattern, you know, almost like with search and things like that. But before we get into that particular topic, ’cause I’d like to get into that a little bit deeper. Any other changes over the last couple of years that you’ve seen significantly impact on just that whole attempt to get ads to work for your business? 

[00:05:24] John Horn: Couple of things that come to mind. I would say tracking, uh, the success of your advertising has gotten harder over time. Mm-hmm. For a couple of different reasons. Some of it has to do with things like apple making changes to track on their devices. Uh, the big iOS 14 update happened a few years ago that really impacted Meta and their tracking for years.

[00:05:45] John Horn: They’ve kind of recovered from it at this point. Um, but the harder it is to track the success of your campaigns, the harder it is to make your campaign successful because you have to know what’s working, what’s not working, so that you can keep iterating on that and scaling that. So tracking has [00:06:00] definitely become more, more complex, um, and customer’s journeys are very fragmented.

[00:06:04] John Horn: They go to many different places to find information to come across your brand, and it could be hard to know how much you should be investing into those different places to again, achieve profitability from your ads. So that’s been a big thing. I would also say the big platforms, Google ads, Meta ads for example, they continue to get more mature.

[00:06:24] John Horn: And what I mean by that is there is a ton of competition. Everyone is there as advertisers ’cause that’s where all the people are, where it’s where all the users are. And so it just gets more expensive over time. Cost per clicks go up. It’s just harder to, you know, it’s more expensive to get the traffic that you need to get.

[00:06:41] John Horn: What that means is that advertisers have to be even smarter, even more data-driven, even more creative in terms of how they run their campaigns because you know, you could afford to make some mistakes if you’re paying, 10 cents a click. If you’re paying $10 a click, you can’t afford to make those same mistakes ’cause each one is so expensive and [00:07:00] therefore so valuable.

[00:07:01] John Horn: And, uh, so that’s another, I’d say, trend that you just kinda see year over year is costs going up. 

[00:07:06] Trudy Rankin: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So I’m curious just thinking about Google’s search ads and the whole search world and how much it’s changed in terms of being able to utilize the habits that people usually have about jumping onto Google or other search engines and searching for what they need, and AI has changed that and it’s continuing to change, obviously quite rapidly.

[00:07:32] Trudy Rankin: Can you maybe share some thoughts with us about how you’re helping your clients adjust to that shift? And not just be, oh, woe is me, but to take advantage of it. 

[00:07:44] John Horn: You know, the way you frame that I think is really important. It shouldn’t be, woe is me, it should be, um, what are the opportunities here?

[00:07:50] John Horn: Because at the end of the day, the need is still there. People need the product, the service, whatever it’s that you’re selling. And it’s simply a question of where are they going to find that [00:08:00] information and how do you make sure that you are the solution that’s being presented. So I’d say I kind of break it into two buckets.

[00:08:08] John Horn: First of all, we can’t ignore what we’re currently doing to the, I should say, we, we can’t go into new things at the expense of what we’re currently doing. So even though ChatGPT is certainly the shiny new thing, and absolutely the thing that there’s a hockey, hockey stick, uh, curve of growth there still, Google has the majority of the market share when it comes to search.

[00:08:28] John Horn: So we are still investing tons of times, tons of energy into Google search ads, et cetera. Um, because that is still where most people are going to find information. But then we also have to make sure that we’re allocating a percentage of our time, of our thought process, of our investment into doing things like figuring out, okay.

[00:08:48] John Horn: How is ChatGPT sourcing its information? And you know, when I go to it and I say, Hey, what’s the best moving company near me? Or what’s the best agency for this? Or whatever, how are [00:09:00] they choosing who they show? Because they have to filter in some way. They can’t, they’re not just giving you a list of, you know, the 100 moving companies near me.

[00:09:07] John Horn: They’re saying, Hey, here’s the top one, the top 1, 2, 3. That’s a very real example talking to a client this morning about, about that very thing. And so there’s a lot of reverse engineering right now. Figuring out, okay, where are they getting this information? How do we make sure that they get that information from us so that they prevent our clients as solutions?

[00:09:24] John Horn: And when we can figure this out, again, a lot of opportunity there to be a first mover in this space and get a lot of business out of that. 

[00:09:32] Trudy Rankin: Because I’ve been been doing a lot of looking at the whole concept, you know, you’ve got SEO and now you’ve got GEO you know, generative engine optimization.

[00:09:41] Trudy Rankin: And it is a moving, veritable moving flood of stuff coming through and trying to keep up and understand it as really, really, really interesting. Because one of the things that I’m interested in your opinion on is that for a while there, when all this was new, really new and starting to become [00:10:00] more mainstream,

[00:10:00] Trudy Rankin: a lot of people were saying, SEO is dead. Woe is me. SEO is dead. And the more we get into GEO or this generative engine optimization, the more it seems like the people who were doing SEO really well way back when are actually going to be doing a lot better than people who went, oh, I’m not going to do SEO at all.

[00:10:21] Trudy Rankin: What do you think? What do you think about that? 

[00:10:25] John Horn: Yeah, so it’s, well, in many ways it feels like the early days of SEO right now because things are changing so quickly. And yet it’s even wilder, I would say, than the early days of SEO because there’s so much personalization involved in these lms.

[00:10:39] John Horn: So with ChatGPT, you know, it’s learning about you and it’s going to give you answers that are different than the next person. Or in my case, I’ll do five different searches and literally get five different answers, just. One after the other. And that’s, that’s frustrating too for a lot of businesses because they’re like, how do I rank?

[00:10:54] John Horn: You have to say ranking isn’t really a thing. It’s more [00:11:00] about the percentage of times that you may be, are, are presented as a solution and how do we increase that percentage and get more of that pie. And I think a lot of people are realizing two things. One, that a lot of what’s kind of been important in SEO over time,

[00:11:15] John Horn: is also very important in geo and how, ChatGPT, as an example, looks at things. So obvious things like, lots of credibility, so lots of people linking back to you, lots of people talking about you, lots of good reviews, lots of high quality content. Those types of things which are very important for SEO are also very important for geo.

[00:11:35] John Horn: And so it’s not always this completely different process between SEO and GEO. Then at the same time they’re do, like, I see these, these unique pockets of things that seem to really, really matter to ChatGPT. So like, for example, at the moment they love, they absolutely love like lists, like top five of this, top 10 of that.

[00:11:57] John Horn: When you do a search in ChatGPT, that’s [00:12:00] often one of the primary sources that you see. And so that might really have very little bearing on your organic rankings on Google. And yet, um, if you can get into those lists that they’re pulling from, suddenly your business has a ton of visibility and that’s going to change over time.

[00:12:16] John Horn: Like, you know, six months from now. The waiting on that particular type of thing is probably not going to be what it is right now, and it’s going to be something else. But the best people right now in the geo space, I would say, are both trying to get the foundation right of, again, great content, great credibility, things like that.

[00:12:34] John Horn: Then also digging in and finding these little pockets of weight that we can really take advantage of. Not in a bad way, but in a way to make sure that our, our businesses, our clients are the ones that are being sourced by the LLMs. 

[00:12:47] Trudy Rankin: Yeah, it’s kind of interesting ’cause I, I was reading an article, I think just yesterday that was saying that one of the differentiators now is how much PR you’ve gotten.

[00:12:59] John Horn: Yeah.

[00:12:59] Trudy Rankin: [00:13:00] You know how many times you are listed and you, you briefly mentioned that as well. And you mentioned also that the probability of whether you’re going to pop up in a, in a AI search is those probabilities are probably set at the moment. They’re going to change over time as they refine their own internal models. What do you think people could be doing specifically right now based on what we know to actually get some of that, that attention based off of, you could call it PR if you want, but it’s how often do you show up in public, basically in ways that the ChatGPT or other AI tools that they can actually find and spot you because they’re going out there and searching the internet. 

[00:13:43] John Horn: Yeah, a hundred 

[00:13:44] John Horn: percent. Yeah. This is something that we’re, you know, helping a lot of our clients with try and figure out, answer that exact question.

[00:13:51] John Horn: So some of it is, you know, traditionally what you might call PR. It is going out and saying, Hey, where can we get credible [00:14:00] sources to recognize us? Whether it be putting a quote from us into an article, whether it be an op-ed, whether it be, you know, a link of some type. So traditional kind of pr, traditional backlink searching is definitely a part of things.

[00:14:13] John Horn: There’s also creative things like making your own, you know, top five lists where we’ve seen, actually saying, Hey here’s information about us. Here’s legitimate information about our competitors. But putting that on your website, they like that, and then suddenly you’re ranking.

[00:14:28] John Horn: So, strategies like that are, are working well right now. They might not work well next month. They might work well for six months, who knows? But, uh, you know, at the moment they’re working. And then things again, a lot of it comes down to not trying to game the system, but legitimately have good original content about a particular issue.

[00:14:48] John Horn: So one thing that I see the engines liking a lot is they, they like statistics. They like original content. They like content. That’s not just a, an AI generated article in [00:15:00] and of itself. It’s not just a, a rehashing of the thousand other articles they’ve already read on the internet. So great example, just for a tangible example my agency, we do a lot of work in a particular niche helping advertisers who’ve been suspended by Google fix those suspensions.

[00:15:16] John Horn: And so one thing that we did is we have a lot of proprietary data. From people reaching out to us. And we did a study essentially, Hey, here’s numbers, percentages related to this issue related to how many people get suspended and types of suspensions and things like that. And that was content that just didn’t exist on the web because we’re one of the few people who have access to this type of information.

[00:15:35] John Horn: And that ranked very quickly in the LMS because it was new, helpful, accurate information that didn’t exist yet. And um, that’s going to be ultimately the best approach for business is to try and make sure they’re showing up in the 

[00:15:49] John Horn: LLMs. 

[00:15:50] Trudy Rankin: So it’s interesting that you said original content and obviously if you give AI the right parameters, it [00:16:00] can cludge things together to create original in quotes content. Mm-hmm. How human does the content need to be with this new GEO or geo, a way of AI tools helping you find things? 

[00:16:18] John Horn: It’s hard. It’s, it’s a good question to ask. It’s, it’s a hard question to answer because there’s no defined a x percentage of humanity per se, you know, right now.

[00:16:27] John Horn: But what I would say there, there’s a couple of things. That helped to set you apart as being, again, original content. So the, the first thing is, is statistics. So if you can, whether that’s be. Polling, you know, polling your customers, polling people you work with, polling first party data that you have access to, whatever it be actually coming up with.

[00:16:49] John Horn: Obviously accurate, but, but new information, it just doesn’t exist on the web yet. That’s gold to the, uh, the LLMs. ’cause they, they know what they already have and they see, oh, no one has said that. You know, [00:17:00] 39% of Google ads suspensions are due to circumventing systems. Great. That’s super relevant.

[00:17:05] John Horn: I’m going to provide that as an answer and view you as a credible source when people ask questions about suspensions. So statistics I think are really important, really helpful. Something that we’re paying more attention to right now is actually the imagery that is used in posts on websites and whatnot.

[00:17:20] John Horn: So. If there’s debates around this, but likely if you’re using a lot of AI generated imagery, stock imagery, that’s probably not viewed as positively by the LLMs as if you’re actually taking your own photos or really, you know, just creating new original photography or images. So that’s more of a tactical thing, but something that we’re doing some research into right now.

[00:17:42] John Horn: And then again, I would say just new pieces of information that don’t exist yet. So if you know how to do something, it’s maybe it’s very nuanced, very niche, but if there aren’t already a bunch of, step 1, 2, 3, how to do this online, go create your own. And [00:18:00] then when the LLMs are researching that, that type of information, they’re not going to see a bunch of other places that have similar information or similar structure as to what you’ve written.

[00:18:09] John Horn: And that means they’re going to be more likely to grab what you’ve written and source you and point to you as a credible source. 

[00:18:14] Trudy Rankin: That’s kind of interesting. So you’d basically come up with, I, I’m making this up, but it’s a, as a potential example, you would do some sort of report, and then post, you can either post the report, or get people use it as a lead magnet, but you’re going to write about that report, talk about it on podcasts, put it up as a blog post, and then you could either run ads to it or somehow you’re going to get people to, to actually find out about it, which means you’ve got to have good SEO. Not GEO, but good SEO. Um, and then as you’re saying, then the tools, the AI tools are going to then come and using the really solid you know, the SEO foundations, then they’re going to use that to find what you’ve got. That’s interesting. So, so really really building [00:19:00] on expertise that people have. It’s a really good way for any business if you’ve got good, solid expertise and people, maybe it’s something that, maybe you’re in a really crowded space, but maybe you have a, a unique insight or you’ve surveyed all of your customers and they told you this.

[00:19:18] Trudy Rankin: ’cause nobody can replicate that and that’s going to be new. That’s interesting. That’s very interesting. I’ve got a question for you. Oh, I want to touch on this first though. You mentioned photos. And that’s always been a big, it’s a big argument. Should you use AI generated images, should you use stock photos?

[00:19:35] Trudy Rankin: And most small businesses are going to go, I don’t have any choice because I don’t have the ability to take photos or good photos, or I don’t have the creative eye needed to take photos that will catch people’s eye. Can you just comment on the potential opportunities here for small business owners or even somebody who’s a photographer to start a new service that do actually, and [00:20:00] how would they do that making, you know, how would they go about creating like a library or repository of photos or a service that gives people original, unique photos?

[00:20:12] Trudy Rankin: That’s obviously you give them a title and you have an alt image and all that sort of stuff. How would somebody go about doing that? 

[00:20:19] John Horn: It’s a tough one. ’cause you know, like you said, it’s, it’s a lot harder for many small businesses to take good looking photos than it is to write content.

[00:20:26] John Horn: And this is certainly a, a debate, you know, not everyone’s convinced that AI generated images are, are a problem when it comes to ranking and whatnot. And I would definitely say like from my perspective, having an AI generated image is better than, than nothing. Um, so if there’s a question between just no imagery, no graphics at all, versus something that looks decent, that’s AI generated, I’m generally going to go with the AI generated approach.

[00:20:53] John Horn: I would say there are some opportunities to get creative when you’re thinking about how can you take photos. [00:21:00] First of all, everyone’s phones are, are high quality enough now where you don’t have to go invest in a fancy Cannon camera or something. Your iPhone’s, you know, more than equipped to take a, a decent looking photo.

[00:21:10] John Horn: And so you could do something creative. Like for example, if you have a whiteboard, um, great, well let’s say you’re writing a couple different blog posts. Write the name of the blog post on the whiteboard, get next to it. Take a picture of you there pointing at it. It may look a little cheesy or whatever, but hey it’s got you.

[00:21:29] John Horn: It’s authentic. It’s got something that’s relative to, or relevant to the, uh, content that’s in the blog post. It could be something as, as simple as that. So I would say try not to get too caught up on this. ’cause there’s, there’s probably more important things in your business to be focusing on.

[00:21:46] John Horn: But also, just take your photo, just take your phone out, take some snaps and, and see if you can come up with something that looks halfway decent.

[00:21:58] Trudy Rankin: I think that that’s a [00:22:00] really good idea because I, I can remember seeing in the past, I’ve seen somebody made a complete YouTube video, how to video or thought video basically, and, and they didn’t show their face. They just talked through a bunch of post-it notes with writing on them. And I thought that was fairly interesting way of doing it.

[00:22:18] Trudy Rankin: So yeah, that is a simple idea that probably pretty much anybody could do. And if you’re somebody who’s not that comfortable with your face on the camera or being in the camera, then you can do faceless ones that are still legit human and unique as you said. I think that’s really interesting.

[00:22:36] Trudy Rankin: What I’d like to do is I want to touch on something that we started to talk about at the beginning, and I think it’s really, really important in terms of future proofing. A small businesses approach to ads or maybe even bigger businesses’ approach to, to ads and showing up on, you know, the AI [00:23:00] tools ChatGPT or whatever, if somebody, or if a business was wanting to, in the future, run ads on the tools, the way that the tools are being used as search engines now, the AI tools. Hmm. What would be a few things that they could do to prepare for that, given that it’s not, the capability’s not quite there, but we know it’s coming, it’s going to be coming soon. What could they do to be ready for that? 

[00:23:27] John Horn: I love that question. We actually just put out a, a big, long article just about this, about how to prepare for advertising for ChatGPT.

[00:23:34] John Horn: So I’ll pull from some of the things we talked about there in that article. First thing I would say, a lot of the things that apply to advertising ChatGPT are going to be very similar to how you’re thinking through advertising right now. It’s things like identifying the different avatars of who your customer is.

[00:23:50] John Horn: Now on the ChatGPT side of things, it’s going to be incredibly personalized. Because people literally have a conversation with ChatGPT. ChatGPT knows who they are. If I, when I go and search [00:24:00] for something, it knows I’m the CEO of Stub Group digital advertising agency. Um, and it’ll tell me things like, oh, well, you know, you since, since you do this, you might think about this that way.

[00:24:10] John Horn: Or, or something like that. And so, most businesses have multiple avatars, multiple different segments of audiences that they’re going to be going after. And so you want to be really sure that as you’re thinking through your messaging and your offers and how you’re positioning yourself that you are able to tailor that to those different avatars.

[00:24:31] John Horn: ’cause I think that level of personalization is going to be next level with ChatGPT compared to with Google, where yes, they do try to personalize ads as much as they can based upon what they know about what you’ve been searching, what websites you’ve visited recently, et cetera. Still, you’re typing a keyword into Google as opposed to literally having a conversation and telling exactly what you want to ChatGPT.

[00:24:54] John Horn: So, um, thinking through those avatars, thinking through the messaging and how you’re positioning your offers, I think is super [00:25:00] important. I would also say, making sure that the content that you’re creating on your website is friendly to geo really what we’ve already been talking about, I think is

[00:25:12] John Horn: probably going to be helpful. I’m guessing, I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing that if ChatGPT is already sourcing your information organically when people are asking questions, that that’s probably going to give you a leg up when they’re choosing whose ads to serve, because they’re going to say, well, we already know that these guys are experts, and so if we serve their ads.

[00:25:36] John Horn: They’re more likely to be clicked on and they’re more likely to give a good experience to the user because we believe that they have expertise. I don’t know if it’s going to work that way, but I think it should. And that’s my guess, how it will work. So, um, doing good geo, I think will be helpful preparation for for advertising as well.

[00:25:54] John Horn: And, outside of that, I would also just encourage people to not get [00:26:00] too caught up in the shining new thing. I mean, at the end of the day good advertising works. When you have a good business that works, you have to have good fundamentals. You have to have good good salespeople, good products, good reviews, all those types of things.

[00:26:15] John Horn: And then advertising, wherever you do it, whether it’s Google, ChatGPT, et cetera is fuel, uh, on the fire to get people into that funnel that you then convert into sales. So, future proof, think about it. But also don’t forget to focus on your business and the fundamentals at the same time.

[00:26:36] Trudy Rankin: That is definite, definitely good advice. I’m curious because when I, you know, obviously when we organized to talk today, part of the information that you sent through talks about how many people you’ve helped and the amount of revenue you helped them generate through ads and stuff.

[00:26:52] Trudy Rankin: Mm-hmm. Have you got an example of somebody who has had to face a particularly challenging struggle [00:27:00] and actually getting ads to work for them? Can you share that with us and what you did to help them get over the challenges that they faced and actually successfully use ads to generate revenue for their business?

[00:27:13] John Horn: Yeah. Lots of different examples I could pull from. Let me, I’ll go with one. They’re a business to business company and a lot of business to business companies struggle with advertising because often it’s hard to differentiate between a normal person, uh, a consumer, you know, residential consumer searching for something, and a business searching for that same thing on Google.

[00:27:34] John Horn: And they had this issue where like they’re in the fuel industry supplying fuel to people. And a lot of people will go and search for, getting fuel delivered to my home. Like I, I have got, you know, I’ve got gas tanks outside, um, that power my oven and so I might search for gas delivery. And that same keyword might also be searched by a construction company who is looking for fuel delivered in bulk for all of their equipment. [00:28:00] And so what we did with that client that has really helped improve the quality of their leads over time is to, on the tracking side of things, identify where those relevant leads are coming from, um, where the business leads are coming from, and feed that data back to Google.

[00:28:17] John Horn: So, for example, they take phone calls, we listen to all the phone calls we get, and we mark which calls are what we want, and we import those as what we call conversions into Google Ads. And we don’t import the calls from just the normal residential people who we can’t help. And so over time Google has learned, oh.

[00:28:37] John Horn: This is good. And Google is very good at looking at all sorts of signals on the backend, far beyond just what you type into Google to say, oh, well these are, these are 10 people that we said are good, and here’s some patterns of behavior that we see across them. Great. Next time the 11th person searches, it matches those patterns.

[00:28:55] John Horn: Let’s show the ad and let’s bid aggressively to get a click on it. Whereas [00:29:00] this one over here, this isn’t converting. So even though it’s the same keyword search, let’s not as aggressively bid on that. And so over time we’ve been able to, again, really improve the quality of the leads. It’s, it’s not perfect.

[00:29:12] John Horn: It’s never perfect. We’ve gotten dramatically better uh, wasting less time for their salespeople and just wasting less money on leads that are people that they can actually help and service. 

[00:29:23] Trudy Rankin: That’s a really good example because there’s a whole bunch of stuff in there. One is, is using analytics to help improve

[00:29:29] Trudy Rankin: the quality of the people that you get back. And also that the idea that a lead is not always a good lead. A lead can be a time waster, a tire kicker, somebody who really wastes your salespeople’s time and they can be really frustrating. So being able to, to use analytics and data to improve that, I think’s really important.

[00:29:47] Trudy Rankin: And the other thing sort of crossed my mind was that, like I said earlier, I’m a dabbler with ads, so I, I know just enough to be dangerous and I know that what you are talking about right there [00:30:00] in that example, that whole how to use the information from calls to then inform Google, that is next level stuff, that it would take somebody who doesn’t know what they’re doing, a very, very, very long time to figure out how to do it.

[00:30:12] Trudy Rankin: And sometimes, lots of times, it is just better off to pay somebody else to do that and then figure out how to, you know, you know, do the ROI. Make sure, of course, that you get to the place where you’re getting more money from from paying for ads, getting it back from having ads, then you’re paying for the ads.

[00:30:35] Trudy Rankin: So the ROI is there. So I think that’s a really good use case. It’s just been, it’s just a fascinating, I think, topic. There’s so much there that we’ve sort of covered, and we could talk about this for a very long time. But what I’d like to do is, if you could provide the link for that paper that you talked about, the, the blog post that you just put out the article.

[00:30:57] Trudy Rankin: Um, we’ll put that in the show notes [00:31:00] and if anybody is interested in getting in touch with you or talking with you, where’s the best place to get in touch. 

[00:31:07] John Horn: Best place to get in touch is through our website, stubgroup.com. Got lots of information on there. Uh, hopefully some helpful stuff, and the means to contact us.

[00:31:15] John Horn: And I also would say check out our YouTube channel. We put a lot of videos out there, obviously for free, um, about all sorts of topics. Just helping businesses with their advertising and marketing. And, uh, we love to love to get people subscribed on there as well. 

[00:31:28] Trudy Rankin: Fantastic. That’s great. So I’ll make sure I put those in the show notes.

[00:31:31] Trudy Rankin: But John, it’s been really interesting talking with you today. I’ve enjoyed it. Thank you so much for being on the podcast. 

[00:31:37] John Horn: Thank you so much for having me.