Speaker 1 (00:04):
This podcast is brought to you by enrollment resources, innovations and enrollment management. Learn more@enrollmentresources.com.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
Hello and welcome. This episode features a conversation between Greg Meiklejohn CEO of enrollment resources and Tammy miles, director of insights and enrollment resources as they discuss paid search. And now on to the conversation.

Speaker 3 (00:29):
Hi everybody. It's Gregg Meiklejohn with enrollment resources, and I like to introduce my colleague Tammy miles. Hi Tammy. How are ya? Good. Tammy is our director of insights within our company being a conversion optimization company. We have every person in the company constantly working on testing elements of what their job or what they're working on. And Tammy directs the entire staff at ER, and that, uh, that endeavor, uh, in addition, Tammy oversees all of our paid search work that we do. And Tammy, you were, uh, under your stewardship number of years ago, ER, was certified as the first professional partner with Google. I remember that it's like 10 years ago. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:30):
And then

Speaker 3 (01:30):
Tammy, like three years ago, you are the only, we are the only marketing education company in the world invited to Google's ads round table where they were setting the stage for their artificial intelligence and machine learning. And you went there and you're rubbing elbows with like the likes of Expedia and lending tree and all these guys. That was pretty impressive. I was like three years ago, thereabouts. Yeah. And then now, you know, you just kind of let share modestly there's all the intermediaries within the, the world that interact with Google and it's all, they're all set on a percentile. And I think you said are, we're like way up there in terms of how Google views our company. So what was the percentile?

Speaker 4 (02:29):
It's the top 2% of agencies in the

Speaker 3 (02:32):
World. Wow. 2%. That means there's only 2% better than us in the entire world.

Speaker 4 (02:40):
Oh, we're all in a little, little group together. I don't know where we are in that top 2%, but

Speaker 3 (02:45):
Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's a lot of people who interact with Google being in the second percentile is impressive. And so those on the podcast that this is who you're going to be listening to, uh, Tammy's deep skillset and experience in this area. So, so we're going to talk about today. Tammy is just stuff that's going on with all these huge companies like Facebook and Google and YouTube and what have you. Um, and it, it will have impact for people who are using any kind of paid search. So let's start off with, um, Google is starting to get attacked and in terms of getting taxed by, um, various countries. And so there's a number that have been, uh, just given, uh, a VIM tax value added tax in Europe. And then you're saying at the end of July, Canada is going to be taxing Google in terms of GST HST. Want to expand on that?

Speaker 4 (03:54):
Yeah, so basically at least for, you know, in Canada, if the company's education generally is exempt from GST HST. And so, you know, it, unless the schools have some sort of component of their business, that would be, um, has the ability to charge GST. They would have a GST registration number. And if they had that registration number, they would be exempt from this tax. But if they do not, which we've got sort of a half and half with our schools, um, they will be automatically taxi the GST on their advertising dollars in the account. Yikes.

Speaker 3 (04:30):
So the trend here appears to be that Google Google, a multinational company is now starting to get not on a little bit. You get through maybe getting knocked on by two Parana, but if you have 20 or 30, Purana, I'm proud of being a taxing organization. Then the country that it gets kind of crummy for Google. And ultimately it passes through to the user.

Speaker 4 (05:02):
And I think really the catalyst to that obviously was the pandemic. You know, people weren't able to go out shopping. So e-commerce blew up because people were trying to get their supplies. And most people are, I wouldn't say most, but obviously a big proponent of where they were getting their supplies probably were not in their country. And that country would normally be collecting tax on those purchases. So now that it's, you know, a global economy and we're, we're, you know, getting things from all over the world, this is one way that those countries can at least maintain some of those tax dollars and their revenue.

Speaker 3 (05:37):
Yeah. And so Google is really, if you boil it to simplicity, it's like the giant monolithic classified section of a newspaper. And so those, those newspapers would get taxed by government. And, uh,

Speaker 4 (05:54):
Yeah, if you were on a shelf, you know, you have a person who would be buying that newspaper, there would be a tax to that and the government would collect. Yeah. Yeah. And this is true. Not just for Google, it's any kind of even streaming services. I, yeah, they'll be hit with the same kind of tax.

Speaker 3 (06:12):
So I guess these a Fang companies, Amazon, Google, and apple and so on are mildly annoyed. Cause this is like a headwind in terms of their business operations. Hey,

Speaker 4 (06:26):
Well, yeah. They now have to register as a, you know, at least if they're selling to Canadians, they're going to have to register for GST number. They're going to have to collect it and they're going to have to remit.

Speaker 3 (06:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (06:38):
So, or if you're abroad in European countries, it's going to be, you know, an additional thing that they need to figure

Speaker 3 (06:43):
Out, ultimately sits with the person who's buying the media. So a little bit of your media budgets getting chewed out now by the government going after Google.

Speaker 4 (06:55):
Yeah. And e-comm too, you know, if you're selling to Canadians, you're going to be required

Speaker 3 (06:59):
To, and it's not hit, it's not hit the states yet, but you're saying that, you know, okay.

Speaker 4 (07:06):
Goes in the states. So I'm assuming they collect tax off of Google already because they're an American company and that's true of many of these streaming companies as well. They're based in the states. So, you know, the us is covered in terms of their tax collection. That's the other countries that want a piece.

Speaker 3 (07:24):
So now let's talk about apple. Apple has made moves in relation to its search engine thing. Safari, I believe is what it's called. Is that correct? Yes.

Speaker 4 (07:38):
Yes. Safari is their browser on an apple device. Um, and Google and apple have a, a partnership agreement where Google pays apple a whole ton of money to be their default search engine in safari. Right. Yeah. So they, so that's, you know, if you open up safari, that's, what's driving any search on that browser

Speaker 3 (08:00):
So far is really Google, uh, with

Speaker 4 (08:03):
A research piece. Yes.

Speaker 3 (08:06):
Yeah. Right. And now, um, apple is getting a little more defensive around their whole search engine, like what's going on.

Speaker 4 (08:18):
Yeah. It's a much more broader than search it's. Um, so you, anybody who has an apple device, and this is true of any mobile device that you have, you have apps that you download, it could be the safari browser app that's defaulted. Um, you got a YouTube app, um, Facebook app, you know, all of those sort of things that you use on your phone. Yeah. And, and what's been happening. It's like these apps as part of their terms of use, you agree to like disclose your location. They you're inputting your personal information quite often to like sign up, um, and they can track how you're using other apps. Like it's, they kind of cross-collaborate and gather data on you. Um, and even potentially through like your voice, because there's a bunch of things like your camera, it's pretty much all open source. Um, but personal info personally, identifiable. So, and what these apps will often do is they will aggregate that data and sell it to ad networks. Right. And then those ad networks then kind of match you up into all various places, again, massive, you know, artificial intelligence engines. And then you, you probably notice, you know, you'll be talking to a friend about something and you'll start seeing ads about it. Right. It's just that yeah. Yeah. If I get

Speaker 3 (09:38):
Like on Facebook, I get a lot of ads about golf.

Speaker 4 (09:42):
Yeah. And you might not be searching for it, but somehow it knows in your brain that you've been thinking about it or talking about it. So very insidious, isn't it? Yeah. It's, it's a true seven. So this has been the sort of evolution of digital marketing and as marketers, a psycho grape, or data, it's awesome. And you can really laser in and target on the audience, but it's now being really intrusive. And certainly when COVID hit, you know, people were targeted people that might be in like, um, um, you know, in poverty type geographies, you know, you could target and you know, we've certainly heard about, you know, the election issues and how advertising's played a role in that. And so apple put a stance in about, okay, that's enough. We're not, we're going to basically give our, our users who have an apple device, the option to opt in if they want to use their information. So it was the default, like a negative,

Speaker 3 (10:41):
Yeah. A negative option. Billing is kind of what it is before. Yeah. They automatically assumed that you give away all your personal information. Then now what you're saying is apple set enough. And they're saying, you need to give explicit permission to all these apps, to harvest all your data, all your information

Speaker 4 (11:06):
Size and the language and how it's presented. It, can't be, you know, it's a complete, otherwise if they don't comply at apple, we'll boot the app off of their store.

Speaker 3 (11:15):
Whoa, whoa. And Apple's the phone market. It's like, whatever, it's half the market,

Speaker 4 (11:22):
Some analysis on the impact, just even amongst our own clients. And we found that it was 60%. Like it was very like, you know, at least half of the market is on an apple device. Um, over half were like lead gen. So 60% of our lead gen off of mobile was coming off of that.

Speaker 3 (11:43):
So stop for a second. So what you're saying is that let's say a, a school gets a thousand leads that come in, then 700 of those thousand would be coming by way of a mobile phone and half of those yet again, ballpark would be coming through an apple device. That's massive. Yeah. They've

Speaker 4 (12:06):
Got a big, big chunk of the market there.

Speaker 3 (12:09):
Well, let me just clarify one more thing. So Google is doing the mechanisms for the search marketing, but it sits inside of the apple phone.

Speaker 4 (12:20):
It's protected because they have that agreement. So the Google search. Yeah. We haven't quite gotten to the implications yet. I mean, but yeah. There's, I mean, I could speak to that now if you want it's sure. So

Speaker 3 (12:34):
It's nasty, isn't it?

Speaker 4 (12:36):
Well, it's yeah. From a digital marketing perspective, search marketing is less so impacted. Um, at least for Google, I think because they do have this agreement, they've got that a bit of a monopoly on that and search in an in of itself isn't as much under attack. It's the, um, so it's like the social network marketing, um, the display marketing, the YouTube marketing. So those are off they're dependent on browser and apps to run. And so like Facebook is an example, you know, obviously a leader in the social marketing space, right. Um, for them it was a huge impact because probably the, the proportion of people that are on Facebook, on mobile devices is considerably higher. And if you've got at least 50% of your users, you can now not even track or target.

Speaker 3 (13:30):
I see. So what's happening is the one benefit. If you will, of being able to give up your information to these master manipulator, marketers is at least there's the opportunity to have ads that reflect your interests as a person shoved at you, I guess. So there's a, but now what you're saying is because, uh, a lot of that information will be no longer be allowed to be moved to these master manipulator marketers. Um, the it'll be very sloppy and maybe inappropriate on the types of ads that Facebook, as an example will send. Is that kind of what you're getting at?

Speaker 4 (14:16):
Yeah. So if you think of it as a web, right, the web it's basically been broken. So like we, they used to have all this understanding of like where you were browsing, what the things that you were looking for, what have you searched? What have you talked about? What other apps, you know, and then you would get these ads that of course were highly relevant to you. Um, that's going to become a lot more difficult. It's not to say that it's impossible. It's that's the next thing is like Google and Facebook and all the ad networks are currently working on technologies to fix that. They'd been working on it for over a year. They have yet to have something that's launched and rolled out in a completely public stage. It's in beta right now. Um, but yeah, it's kind of, we're basically rolling back a bit more to like the traditional contextual advertising with, with some audience understanding the machine learning has got to basically figure out a new way of grouping people around interests. It's just not going to be as efficient. Um, it's not going to be, like you say, as relevant. Um, the other piece is like, you know, some, you would see ads that were a frequency cap, you know, so you wouldn't see the same ad over and over and over again. And so it's super important for econ and less important for our sector, but like econ was remarketing heavy so that if you had dropped it on a shopping cart, it could just target to you, um,

Speaker 3 (15:43):
And hassle you forever and ever, or

Speaker 4 (15:46):
At least you could time it. So it wouldn't be like hassling you, or, but now that, that becomes the less, you have less control because they can't always track. If you know how many times you see an ad in terms of frequency, um, or, you know, your geo, if you're not sharing your GL information, you know, maybe that's going to be a problem. There's, there's just so many things like, it's just like the whole internet has blown up as far as what's wrong. Uh,

Speaker 3 (16:13):
It's been kind of broken here and there. Snip, snip, snip, snip.

Speaker 4 (16:18):
Gotcha. Together again, but it's going to be less.

Speaker 3 (16:23):
Yeah. The ads that are making their way to schools will be less pinpoint the ads that come from that schools get ads via Facebook would have, you will become mushir. Um, so as I'm thinking of this, sir, I think it's more important than ever to have really good, clear communication on landing pages. So when somebody is kind of like, ah, foggy, they come to this landing page, the landing page should not be something about sell, sell, sell, sell, sell. It should be really about explaining the opportunity in its full objective manner to allow people to kind of walk away from it before filling out a form. I would think that's kind of the antidote, which is ethical best practice anyway. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (17:15):
Yeah. It's less, I think fair. That's a really good point because you know, when you can laser target someone at the very granular level, you don't have to be as skilled in your landing page to some degree, right?

Speaker 3 (17:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (17:30):
Because you've already got that audience target laser Dan. So if we're kind of reverting back a little bit, it does become more important to be like you say, really clear in your communication and the value that you're offering in a way that's resonant with the prospect that, um, to, to maintain the re the ROI that you have in your

Speaker 3 (17:50):
It's really hard to find really good ethical copywriters to populate program pages on a website or landing pages. So that there's like an evolution of communication, which is, yeah, this is the program. And, and then adding in all the ancillary benefits, including, Hey, if you have back issues, maybe you shouldn't be a cosmetologist. Like that's where that kind of qualification language will find its way more and more like we do that with our landing pages, but we we've noticed most landing pages are all very much hype oriented.

Speaker 4 (18:34):
Are there, there's not a lot of value language in them. You know, they're very much features raw, you know, the not like connecting or resonating with the audience that's reading, right.

Speaker 3 (18:50):
When you're making the biggest decision of your life seems incongruent.

Speaker 4 (18:54):
Well, yeah. You're, you're you feel you're being pitched to not talked to. Right. So that's kind of the, the difference

Speaker 3 (19:01):
Getting explained in a proper objective way. Yeah. Now what about, okay. Changing topics. So, okay. It seems like as we're walking into a little bit of a mess and we have to rely on copywriting to a greater degree to do a proper job, and then now there's buckets, you could choose buckets. Now the obvious ones are Facebook and what have you then Tik TOK is emerging a lot of hype around tick talk, but I also believe that, you know, whatever your image or brand that you want to develop, um, out to the world, those who you associate with are also, they will stain that your reputation for good or for bad. And so I guess my question being like good chunks of Tech-Talk are fine. I assume there's some that pieces of content inside Tik TOK that are, I don't know, less than savory, um, that I I'm, I'm just, I'm going on a bit of a soft editorial. I wonder if certain schools will want to associate themselves with chunks of content inside Tech-Talk that would lead a person to create a negative association toward the school. How's that that's a bit, I'm getting a little bit wordy, cause I don't want to be offensive. You know, when

Speaker 4 (20:28):
It comes to marketing, you you're, you always lean to where your, your target market is. Right. So if you're we know Tik TOK is predominantly the younger generation using it. I mean, it's growing in popularity, I guess, across others, but dominant. I mean, I have teenage daughters, so I know they're on it. Um, more for an entertainment. Um, yeah, that's the main thing they use it for us, not so much a social network. It's it's like watching YouTube videos in some way. Um,

Speaker 3 (20:57):
Yeah. People took talk dancing and telling dad jokes and

Speaker 4 (21:03):
Yeah. So, you know, if you're, if you're as a school of branding is a really big piece to what you're doing and your marketing, and you've found that it's worked for you. I mean, I mean, you could certainly test it out. I mean, we tend to be a little bit more performance driven, so we don't usually take that route in our,

Speaker 3 (21:20):
So if you're, if you're wanting to attract 14, 15 year old teenage people then yay. But if you're a career school where your average age recruiting age is 25 years old, then

Speaker 4 (21:33):
I wouldn't think interesting. Um, but it could be like, you know, if you're in like a Cosmo school or design school and you've got, you've got creators that can do a good job because it is visual, right. It's, it's, they're going to require a video. And, um, that's usually the sticking point for most schools is just the resources to, to do a good job in that environment. But you know, if you've got somebody on staff that can do it then

Speaker 3 (21:58):
Yeah. Yeah. So you can create really high quality content, which is fulsome and objective and move it into that stream then within the tick-tock universe. So it'll be a subset of people that go, oh, that's cool. This is what I think what you're saying. Yeah. So maybe so what, while all these buckets bucket companies are all Joe sting and messing with each other and creating rules to kind of hurt each other, uh, and to protect themselves legally, the antidote for, uh, an individual entity to me seems to revert, to creating really good quality content. This might kind of what I'm thinking and what that means is not being a, a more, a slicker persuader. It really is more of a going to a coffee shop and explaining why the school is really cool in its entirety. And also talking about maybe there's rigor, maybe there's, you know, things that are going to be tough or there almost always is when you're pursuing an education and talking about that too. So the antidote is to be honest and full and objective in the communication, because that's where the juice is. The buckets are the buckets that Facebook for all its glory is a bucket where you put content into that's a,

Speaker 4 (23:29):
Yeah, like you certainly foundationally want your content to be strong before you even look at your buckets. That's, you know, I think so often do the opposite and, you know, spread it out and see what sticks, which is fine if you're just exploring and doing a small test. But if you're investing any kind of money in advertising, which, you know, most schools have no budgets in that area. You do, you do. I personally, I like to put a recommendation out there. You really want a strong search campaign. And then all the other secondary ones, cause search will always be where your return on investment is. And it isn't as impacted by this right now. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (24:11):
And then you can also really, uh, split test and refine how you communicate with different audiences, which then you can bring back out and you can infuse into the other types of communication that you do in marketing and in admissions. So yeah.

Speaker 4 (24:31):
And the search search traffic, at least it's true traffic, right? You, you didn't know the intent behind it. So you can do a lot of your testing there and you have pretty much a truth in those results that then you could then spread out

Speaker 3 (24:44):
There's interruption advertising, and then there's a search advertising interruption advertising. I'm looking at my friend's new kitten and there's somebody over on the right, trying to convince me to buy golf clubs. Yeah. Got it. And that's why the old site is one opt in off of search is equal to 10 likes on social media. All right. Any, uh, final things.

Speaker 4 (25:09):
I guess the only thing that I can say, I mean, given that, you know, we're pretty deep on the Google side of things that, you know, there's a ton of money being invested in, in how the whole artificial intelligence and data collection and personalized ads, um, we'll look, there are solutions currently in the works, um, that Google is rolling out. They're currently in beta. And it just, basically one of, one of the things that they're doing is instead of relying on cookies and really we should state that this whole thing that apple said is like, no, third-party cookie tracking. That's not how historically data has been stored and used and shared. So those are, you know, cookie third party cookies are phasing out. And so they're looking at, um, what they call first party data, which is using your data, like your website, traffic data, sinking it with foreign data, and then feeding that back to your app, feeding it back to your ad networks.

Speaker 4 (26:05):
So that's kind of the, the best practice. The challenge around that, I guess, is you want to make sure you have a pretty strong privacy policy and a good understanding of the responsibilities with your ad networks and that they've got a good privacy policy because you are personally responsible if you're collecting that private information that it's secure. And so if you're sharing it with ad networks, so is that in that burst, you want to make darn good ensure that their privacy policies are the same and that they're hashing that data it's not being stored and collected. Cause then you could be liable, right?

Speaker 3 (26:40):
And as the lawsuits pile up, the precedence will increase over time. It'll be a nasty, nasty thing.

Speaker 4 (26:51):
So Google obviously has privacy things in place, but just be aware

Speaker 3 (26:58):
Of. So, uh, you'd be, um, rather than cookies, which is trolling and most people don't even know they're getting trolled. Uh, uh, they're moving to overt. Permission-based can we use your information to their overt? And then, uh, the overriding quality control is to be, uh, do a better job of communicating the offer, not being afraid to stay neutral in the nature of the communication. Um, that's courageous, but at the end of the day, everything works better when people don't lie. So I guess don't lie everybody. And if anybody wants, um, Tammy to have a look at what you're doing with paid search marketing, split testing, just let me know, let us know, and we'll tee up a time and you can learn a little more about what's going on. So thanks everybody all the best. Thank you.

Speaker 1 (28:03):
This podcast is brought to you by enrollment resources, innovations and enrollment management. Learn more at enrollmentresources.com.