Abdo Mazloum Talks About PPC, Programmatic Ads & SEO

Thank you, Harshit. It’s good to be here with you.

I grew up in Lebanon and the mountains of Lebanon as a kid. I was a shy, geeky, nerdy kid. I liked maths and physics and computers at the time. I also liked sports, more individual sports. I did martial arts at a young age and worked my way up. I got my black belt. Recently, I passed my third dance. I’d say individual sports, lots of analytical subjects, and problem-solving. That’s been my journey as a kid, and I’m still growing up. While growing up and becoming a business owner, I became less shy and probably switched from introverted to a bit more extroverted, or I still feel like I’m in between the two.

Yeah, I moved from Lebanon when I was 17 years old. I applied to universities. I got accepted and did a computer science degree and a business minor. I worked for a few companies. I worked in-house and at agencies, multiple agencies, and multiple brands for ten years before having the courage to optimize my digital agency out of my apartment. So, starting a business took much experience, passion, knowledge, and courage. You’re jumping into the unknown. I didn’t have any investments. I didn’t have a ton of cash. I had saved up over the ten years of employment. But I said I feel like I’m prepared. I did it. And quickly, from one client to the other, it grew organically. Referral is worth it. You build a reputation, a network of people you work with over the years. And within six months, I was like, I can rent an office and take this more seriously. We rented an office. We were four or five people at a time. Fast forward four and a half years, we’re a team of 30 now, and we service 50-plus clients on an ongoing basis.

We have mainly paid media, so we now have Google ads, Facebook ads, or Meta after rebranding TikTok more recently. We do programmatic media buys on DV 360 CM 360 LinkedIn for B2V. We do some Pinterest. We’ve doubled with Snapchat. Pretty much anything literal media, we do that. So that’s 60 to 70% of our business, and then we have about 30% in SEO. The remaining 10% is around analytics, some web development, email marketing, and design for the smaller clients that need a full service and don’t want to work with multiple agencies at the same time.

Yeah, over the years, almost 15 years in the industry, you have become well-rounded and know the benefits of all those channels. I wouldn’t say one is better than the other. They all work well together, and all businesses need these channels. So, I don’t say I have a preference, but they’re all important. We have to give them the attention they need to service the clients better because they focus more on paid media. You’re putting all your eggs in one basket, and that hurts the business in the long run. You could be investing much money and end up paying what? 25-30% of your revenue into paid media? That’s not healthy. You want to be well-balanced as a business.

Yeah, frankly, whatever brings good results. I honestly love both. I love SEO. I love PPC. They both have pros and cons. I look at the results from the channel. I enjoy both. I originally started with SEO only, so I’d say, at some point, I was more focused on SEO. But as paid media started developing and growing, it had more attention. And with the evolution over time, when Google started removing all the keywords on the SEO sites, I’ve seen that evolution. So, naturally, we had to become stronger and better and adapt to the paid media side because it became so important and diverse, and you had more control than SEO. But again, I don’t have a preference because I enjoy working on both.

We’re a strong e-commerce company. Because I worked in e-commerce in-house, I worked for big brands. Essence is a big story out of Montreal. I started with them when we were a team of 15 in 2010. Today, it’s a thousand-plus employees. I was hoping you wouldn’t quote me on it; they’re probably more. They’re doing really well. I was there for four years. I worked for Beyond the Rack. Also, there is a strong story at some point in Montreal before things didn’t go so well, and the company sold. So naturally, my network was really in the e-commerce space. So, any business starting has a lot of potential or established, ideally established brands that make over a million online sales; that would be the ideal customer profile.

Yeah, the first step is getting access to all their platforms going through that. And the next step is checking the setup of all these platforms. Are they tracking properly? Do they have the pixels in place? Do they have a container tag like GTM that consolidates all those pixels? Are the triggers firing properly? And then the reports, what reporting do they have? Most of the time, we need to build and automate some reports. Internally, we extract data into Google BigQuery and then visualize it on Data Studio. The clients love that because they become self-sufficient. You customize the report to them from multiple data sources. You put it into one place in that data warehouse, then visualize it via Data Studio, and the client can change the date range and see exactly what’s going on. We can customize the client based on what they need to see. As long as we have access to that data source, use the APIs, dump and in, and then output via Data Studio.

Yes, Slack has been a common tool internally that we use. A lot of clients are on Slack, so it makes things easier. Competing with the client, we internally communicate with Slack as well. We use ClickUp for our project management. What else? We’re on Google Workspace as well. That’s a lot of things.

Yeah, I’d say giving a good service to the client, being truthful to yourself and your client, and operating with high integrity is the best way for client retention. That served us well because you give a good service and the client would refer you to more business. They come across their businesses, and their business owners always meet other business owners.

Yeah, nine out of 10 times, a happy customer will refer to at least one customer throughout the lifecycle.

Yeah. We often see tracking needs to be better set up. Sometimes, clients have two conversion tags in place or two sources. They’re importing the transaction event from Google Analytics and the GTags event for transactions, so they’re double counting. This is a classic mistake that we see. We don’t know if it was done by mistake or intentionally to increase the revenue per client, whether done by agencies or in-house. That’s a common one that we see. Another big one, we see it less and less now. There’s a shift in which clients are more savvy than they used to be, where the agency owns the Google Ads account and won’t give ownership of that account to the client. So you have to start somewhere.

Yeah, we’re seeing it less and less. I think clients are becoming smarter. I think the old model of not being transparent with the client is vanishing. I think some agencies are also suffering because of that. For a long time, they weren’t very transparent with their clients, and it’s actually hurting them. It served us well because we were always looking out for the client and never tried to circumvent the client or hide anything from the client. We always operated with full transparency, high integrity, and keeping the client’s interests first.

Oh, yeah. It’s unfortunate. But it’s short term. You can only sustain running a business by being transparent and giving full access to your client.

Absolutely, yeah. If a business is starting, they’re starting, they want to get a proof of concept, but to start up. Our approach is to do the basic SEO first. Ensure the site is crawlable and can be indexed in Google. And do some PPC because you’re going to guarantee traffic. You’re only paying per click, at least on the Google Ads site, to pay on CPM on the support side. Right? Put some money, get some traffic, and establish some baselines. What’s your conversion rate like? And do some models. If you take it further, can you sustain that same conversion rate? You can easily make projections and models based on the cost per click of your existing click-through rate if you’re on a CPM basis. Then, keep iterating and try to improve those KPIs. You can establish those KPIs. And if you have enough budget, ideally, if the client has enough budget, go full force, both SEO and paid, if you can. But sometimes, clients want results immediately, and you won’t give them great results with SEO within a month or two. With paid ads within 30 days, you can have a pretty good idea of whether this is going somewhere by looking at the metrics, traffic sources, campaigns, and what they’re yielding over time.
Then, the businesses that are pretty established, and we usually recommend an SEO audit, if they have a reasonable run rate, they’re already doing over a million dollars online and e-commerce sales, then if they’ve never done any SEO, ideally do an SEO audit, identify the issues. We go through a checklist of items, 40-plus items. You check all that bad stuff. Most of the time, I’d say 99% of the time, there are always optimizations to be made. So, you present that to the client, who appreciates that you’ve looked at it from multiple angles. These are some things that you can improve. The client, sometimes they say, Okay, we appreciate this. We’re going to take care of it. Sometimes, they say, Oh, can you help us with the implementation? We go on with them on a monthly retainer, implementing a certain number of hours to improve their overall SEO and UX content strategy. If they’re missing some content they want to rank for specific keywords, then we get to link building afterward. This is like a step. Let’s clean the house first before we get into external stuff. That’s generally the approach on the SEO side.
If they’re established, the assumption is that they already have a constant flow of paid media. You look at what percentage of revenue it is, like the cost of media. Does it represent 5%, 10%, 20% or more? You can make recommendations there and see how they can optimize the investment balance into media, output, and revenue. That’s generally on the e-commerce side. B2b is different. We have some clients on the B2B side, too. It’s more on the CBA side. If it’s a software company, you’re looking at booking demos, downloading white papers webinars, looking at the CPA basis, what’s the cost to acquire that lead? And then looking at the journey, if you have a platform in a place like a CRM, like HubSpot, we think it’s one of the best for the B2B space, you look at the whole cycle from acquiring that lead, becoming a marketing qualified lead, a sales qualified lead, then becoming a client, and then ideally becoming a champion that’s going to refer you more clients after and look at the ROI over time from that client.

Yeah. For the most part, we have people in-house. Sometimes, we work with partners that we don’t have the capacity or the resources to handle in-house. We work with the consultants with other agencies that support. Ideally, we want to do as much as possible, but sometimes you have expertise that you need in-house. There’s no harm in working with external experts, too.

On the ad side, again, it starts with tracking. You have proper tracking in place. It’s solid. We all use it as a source of truth. Whether it’s looking at the platform pixel, you’re looking at GA to look at the overall MER, the marketing efficiency ratio, you determine those primary baselines. You have your source of truth. You established that with the client and said These are the business objectives. And then you start constantly testing and learning. You test different types of campaigns. There’s always new betas coming out from Google, from Meta. And are we meeting at KPI? Yes or no? You keep iterating and adjusting. You have your things that are working; keep doing that.
The Evergreen campaigns, keep doing those campaigns. You have your branded search, non-branded search, shopping if you’re in e-commerce, and remarketing campaigns set up correctly. DPA is enabled on social media. You have all those campaigns, and then you start adding new stuff, like a performance max that just came out, and you test it. You test, learn, reiterate, adjust. If you can keep 10% of your overall budget for experiments and not have a minimal ROI on that 10% of the budget, that would be the best-case scenario. Some clients invest even more in experiments.

Yeah, this is a great question. With the shift that’s recently happening around privacy, the cookieless browsers, iOS 14, and all that stuff, it’s made it difficult for marketing. One thing for sure is that the client will still be able to see the overall top-line revenue, and the overall leads are coming through, but you can still see that. So, internal reporting, whatever platform you’re using, whether it’s HubSpot or B2B or Shopify for e-commerce or Salesforce, Magento, whatever, you still know what the total revenue is at the end of the day and the number of clicks. We’re slowly shifting more and more towards an MDR focus where this is how much media you’re investing, and this is the overall output. Because things are becoming more and more complex to track, what we see today on Facebook differs from what we saw before iOS 14. And there are also obviously double counting platforms. There’s double counting.