The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – John Horn, CEO of Stub Group on Surviving the Google Ad Jungle: Protect Your Business from Compliance Issues

Episode Date: September 3, 2024

John Horn, CEO of Stub Group on Surviving the Google Ad Jungle: Protect Your Business from Compliance Issues Stubgroup.com About the Guest(s): John Horn is the CEO of Stub Group, a digital advertising agency recognized as a Premier Google Ads Partner. With over a decade in digital marketing, John has spearheaded Stub Group to help over 2,000 clients across 15,000 campaigns, generating more than half a billion dollars in revenue. His expertise spans a variety of verticals including e-commerce, lead generation, B2B, B2C, and local services. John is also an active content creator on YouTube, where he shares valuable insights into digital advertising and Google Ads strategies. Episode Summary: In this compelling episode of The Chris Voss Show, Chris Voss interviews John Horn, CEO of Stub Group, a leading digital advertising agency. Celebrating 16 years and over 2,000 episodes, Chris continues to bring top-tier professionals with groundbreaking insights. This installment is no different, as John discusses mastering Google Ads, managing advertising spend effectively, and navigating the complexities of digital marketing compliance. John delves into strategies for leveraging Google Ads, even for companies with limited budgets. He highlights the importance of understanding Google's policies to avoid account suspensions and emphasizes the necessity of hiring professionals to navigate the intricacies of digital advertising. John also shares how Stub Group helps businesses by managing over 15,000 campaigns and generating significant revenue for their clients. He warns about the pitfalls of non-compliance and offers insights on how artificial intelligence is shaping the future of digital marketing. Key Takeaways: Expertise in Digital Advertising: John Horn shares how Stub Group has become a top-tier Google Ads partner, managing over 15,000 campaigns and generating more than half a billion dollars for clients. Importance of Compliance: Understanding and adhering to Google's advertising policies is crucial to avoid account suspensions and maintain effective campaigns. AI in Advertising: Artificial intelligence plays a significant role in optimizing ads, targeting consumers, and adjusting bids automatically to enhance campaign performance. Combatting Click Fraud: John discusses methods to identify and mitigate click fraud, ensuring ad budgets are spent efficiently. Customized Marketing Strategies: Tailoring advertising strategies to specific business needs and budgets can maximize lead generation and sales, even for smaller businesses. Notable Quotes: "Ultimately we help businesses find and connect with customers online, and we do that primarily through paid search and paid social platforms, Google Ads being the platform we spend most of our time on." "It's very competitive. There's so many people competing for things and so a lot of businesses, if they have average or below-average understanding of just how the platforms work and the nuances of the platforms, it's hard for them to stand out from the competition." "Google has a lot of policies you have to comply with, and it's incredibly easy to accidentally fall foul of things or sometimes, you know, get flagged for something you didn't actually do." "Artificial intelligence is already a massive part of things at this point. It's a part of everything from the backend deciding what ads are gonna show to people to how much you're gonna be charged when someone clicks on an ad." "If you're going to, you know, if your sink is leaking, you can DIY it, you can figure it out. Or you can hire a plumber who's probably gonna do a better job. It's going to cost some money, but you might not lose the first floor of your house if you do the wrong thing."

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.

There you go, ladies and gentlemen. Thechrisvossshow.com is live coming at you. Live from our Chris Voss Show studios. Wherever the hell these are at. In Las Vegas, Nevada, I guess. We, of course, have an amazing show for you. As always, for 16 years. This month, we've been 16 years old.

We've been bringing you 2,000 episodes plus of The Chris Voss Show. We're just going to keep bringing you more until eternity ends, whatever the hell that is. Anyway, guys, refer to the show, your family, friends, or relatives. Go to goodreads.com, 4Chance Chris Voss,

linkedin.com, 4Chance Chris Voss, Chris Voss, one of the TikTok, and all those crazy places on the internet. Today, we have an amazing young man on the show.

We're going to be talking to him about ways you can market your business and the different things that you can do to get better Google ads and run Google ads successfully, how to do it within a budget. And he's done a lot of that. John Horne joins us on the show with us today.

He is the CEO of Stub Group, a digital advertising agency and a premier Google ad agency. Stub Group has helped over 2,000 clients across 15,000 campaigns with their paid ads and suspension issues. They have generated over half a billion dollars of revenue for their clients across many different verticals, including e-commerce, lead generation, B2B, B2C, local services, and more. Welcome to the show, John. How are you? Chris, thank you so much for having me. I'm doing fantastic. Thanks for coming. It's great to have you as well. Give us your dot coms. Where do you want people to find you on the interwebs? Best place, stubgroup.com, or if you want a bunch of free video content, just go to YouTube, search Stub Group, and we put out a lot of content on there.

There you go. Find it on the YouTube, as the kids say it. That's not what they call it. They call it the YT, I think is what they call it. Give us any of your places on the internet you want them to find you specifically. Me specifically, LinkedIn, John Horn on there. YouTube is really where I spend most of my time as far as content creation goes. And then just working directly with people who reach out through our website.

There you go. There you go. YouTube's a great place. So give us the 30,000 overviews in your words of what you guys do there. Yeah. So ultimately we help businesses find and connect with customers online. And we do that primarily through paid search and paid social platforms, Google ads being the platform we spend most of our time on along with platforms like meta ads, et cetera. And yeah, it's about, about hey how do we steward ad dollars to go

out and help clients make more money than they are spending in advertising and do you guys just focus on google ads or do you do you know all the different other variations that are out there we work with really all the all the primary what they call you know ppc pay-per-click platforms so google ads facebook ads instagram ads linkedin amazon etc but google is still i'd say the see pay-per-click platforms. So Google ads, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, LinkedIn, Amazon, et cetera. But Google is still, I'd say the predominant for certainly it's search. So we spend a lot of time with Google. Yeah. Who do you find are most of the clients that are trying to really tackle Google ads? That's one of the fun things is every business model you can imagine. I like saying every couple of days I learned there's a new way to make money that I didn't know,

and then we help them use Google Ads. I mean, it's everything from a big clothing company to a tiny little plumber, local plumber to weird niches that, again, I didn't know existed until we started working with them. There you go. Yeah, I'm trying to get one for my OnlyFans. No, I'm just kidding. I don't have an OnlyFans. It's a weird niche, though.

But imagine there's people like that. I know that there's a local game. I know the game for attorneys is really big. Having that locale power when somebody says, hey, search for something around me. I'm always searching for stuff near me, like where's a local chiropractor I was searching for yesterday? Where's local this? And being able to capture someone looking for that near me, I think, is a big fight a lot of companies engage in, right?

I mean, it's gold. It's how so many businesses get a significant amount of their business in coming because, I mean, you and me, we need something. Like you said, go to Google, see chiropractor near me, and see what comes up. And you've got to be coming up there to be competitive much of the time. I'm always looking for who's open now and who's near me. And I've gotten quite lazy with it, actually. I'm just like, I'm not going to look through the list.

I'm just going to type in near me and see what comes. So there you go. I mean, that tells you how I behave as a consumer and what you need to do. Now you guys title yourselves a premier Google ads agency. Is there something special about that makes you unique at that level? Yeah. So Google has a program for agency partners like Stub Group who help advertisers manage the Google ad spend and they have different tiers. There's regular Google partners, and then there's kind of special Google partners. They call it premier Google partners. Really what that means is that we have a high level of customer satisfaction,

of adoption of best practices, of client retention, things like that. So you're not probably doing black hat stuff, maybe? Nope, not doing black hat, doing it by the book and helping businesses comply with Google's policies too, because Google has a lot of policies you have to comply with and it's incredibly easy to accidentally fall foul of things or sometimes, you know, get flagged for something you didn't actually do. And so we spend a lot of time helping people figure out those types of problems. Yeah, I mean, you can lose your account. You can have your account suspended if you do things wrong.

You got to play nice with the Google or else Facebook is the same way. They just kind of shut your account down if you don't behave, I guess. A hundred percent. Yeah. Tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get in this business? How did you start being an entrepreneur? Tell us kind of your journey through life.

What influenced you and got you here? Yeah, absolutely. So I've been with Stub Group for a little over a decade at this point. Pre-Stub Group did some various digital marketing type things, but really got into the digital marketing space with the beginning of Stub Group. And Stub Group was started by two guys. One of them's my brother and a good friend of his. And they brought me on as employee number one at the beginning. And we kind of bootstrapped and built things and figured out how do you make it work? How do you make Google Ads work? Ran it for ourselves, ran it for our clients. As we grew, found the right team members to bring on board

and be able to keep providing high quality service to clients. And then ultimately, I took over the CEO role about five years ago and I've continued building it since then. There you go. So what is it that drew you to marketing and ads and stuff like this? What got you into that field or interested in that field? I would say communication is very interesting to me, which is ironic because I would call myself an introvert, but the idea of communicating, whether that be through the written word, through video, whatever, is fascinating. And ultimately, marketing is about communicating in a way that drives action. I want you to

purchase this product. I want you to see that I am the solution to your need, et cetera. And in the agency world, it's a lot of fun because we get to work with so many different types of businesses. So there's no boredom of, all right, another day selling plumbing. It's all right. Right now I'm working with plumbing. Tomorrow I'm working with clothing, fill in the blank. There's always something something new but ultimately it all comes down to psychology and it's you know finding people's pain points solving those pain points for them and doing so in a cost-effective way with a client's advertising budget yeah i grew up in the days where it was all about the game the game was all the yellow pages you know that five pound brick the book stop yeah the book

stop you could use it for you know if your table wasn't sturdy you usually use the residential one for that one yeah i remember i remember the the whole game of business was you wanted to you know some people named their businesses abcd so they could be at the beginning everything was triple a this triple a that so you could be at the beginning. Everything was AAA this, AAA that. So you could be at the beginning of the thing. And then, of course, people would buy the biggest ads, the one-page ads. And usually there was always some attorney firm that owned the back of the deal. But, you know, those are the days.

And it was hard to, if you didn't have a good position in the Yellow Pages, it was hard to get there. Now you have, you know, a better game you can usually play, or at least you can if you know what you're doing. What do you see a lot of companies that come to you, what do you think their big pain point is in trying to get advertising to work for them on Google? What do you see their big pain point is lately, or the top ones? It's a very competitive space you know google it's not like not like the good old days where you could just throw an ad out there and you had tons of people click it was really cheap and you know things would necessarily be amazing because there wasn't other games in town it's very competitive there's so many people competing for things and so

a lot of businesses if they have you, average or below average understanding of just how the platforms work and the nuances of the platforms, which can get very complex, very detailed, it's hard for them to stand out from the competition and to run profitable campaigns. And so a lot of it comes down to just nitty gritty of, okay, what match types for my keywords should I be running? What campaign types? What's my bidding strategy? How do I feed data into Google about what's converting what people who click my ads and then are filling out forms or placing phone calls? And so a lot of businesses just don't have the sophistication to put those things into place in a way that lets them compete in a profitable manner these days. It sounds like it's one of those things too,

where you need to hire professionals that really know what they're doing. You know, as an entrepreneur, you can only do so much. You've got to delegate and, you know, you've got to be able to identify that there's certain things that I'm not huge on and SEO and marketing and stuff with Google ads, Facebook ads, different things like that. Yes, that's something I'm good at. I'd be probably the first one to get suspended for our account for doing whatever the wrong thing was. I'll be like, oh, yeah. And they're like, yeah, Chris, you went right for it.

You got it. You nailed it right. You hit it right from the beginning there. You've suspended everything. So yeah. So hiring professionals, I think, makes just all the difference, really. Yeah. I mean, I often talk to clients. to clients obviously i'm biased i run an agency so this is my world but you know genuinely look if you're gonna you know if your link is if your if your sink is leaking you can diy you can figure it out or you can hire a plumber who's probably going to

do a better job it's going to cost some money, but you might not lose the first floor of your house if you do the wrong thing and it floods with water. So you can do DIY Google ads. It's there. The tools are there. But again, is it worth the potential mistakes, the potential wasted money, and just the time investment too of doing that versus focusing on other areas of business that you're better at and where you can leverage your time more. Yeah. I mean, you delegate people. That's the hardest thing to do as a, I think it's one of the hardest things to do as an entrepreneur is you just want to control everything and do everything, especially when you're small and that you have to learn to delegate

and put that off and hire people that are smarter than you. Because I mean, that's really the trick. What are some other things that we haven't touched on? I think there was something I wanted to ask you about. Why is it important of clump compliance when running Google Ads? What is the compliance thing about? So Google is, I want to call them, they're a very finicky system. And what I mean by that is some good things and some bad things. So some good things is Google has a lot of things in place to try to

protect you and me when we go on google.com and do a search from not clicking on a malware in an ad, not clicking on a phishing scam or going to a website to purchase a product and we just pay money, we never get that product etc etc a ton of bad actors who are trying to use google for nefarious purposes and google thankfully cracks down on that unfortunately because of the scale with which google operates they also accidentally crack down on a lot of completely legitimate advertisers who aren't trying to do anything wrong sometimes they have technically violated Google's policies, but it's an accident.

Oh, I didn't know we couldn't have a redirect in my URL. Just things that aren't nefarious, but they just didn't know what not to do. And sometimes they didn't actually do anything wrong and the algorithm just flagged them incorrectly and said, oh, this looks suspicious when really there's nothing suspicious. That's great.

And fortunately, Google, when they do this, when they suspend your ad account and say, you can't run any more ads with us, they don't have a good process in place for you appealing that and fixing things. They have a process. You can submit appeals, et cetera, but they won't tell you with any specificity what you did wrong or how to fix it. They'll give you kind of these very broad policies that you can read through, but it's like, you know, I don't know what to do. And so we go to bat for a lot of advertisers, kind of describe ourselves as lawyers for a lot of advertisers where they,

in Google's eyes, they are proven, you know, they're guilty until proven innocent is kind of how the approach goes. And so we come on board and because we've done this for so long, we've learned a lot of the things that Google likes to see, Google doesn't like to see. We know their policies, we know how to comply with them. And so we help advertisers fix everything that could be a problem since Google won't really tell them exactly what the problem is, and then appeal that in a way that we know Google is going to be favorable towards and ultimately get them out of Google jail and get their ads running again.

Get out of Google jail. I've been to Facebook jail. That's where I usually end up. It was fun. Yeah. I've, I've, I've learned that Facebook has no chill. So like jokes, even if I put a lot on it, they, they just don't, they don't get the chill.

Don't get the jokes. But, and I imagine AI is going to make it more interesting. How do you see AI changing the game of Google ad business and some of the work that you guys are doing? It's already a massive part of things at this point. So it's a part of everything from the backend deciding what ads are going to show to people, deciding how much you're going to be charged when someone clicks on an ad and whether you bid how much for this click versus that click. There's a vast amount of AI machine learning that goes into that. And then in terms of what you and I as consumers see, the most obvious new manifestation of AI is AI overviews. You go to Google many times,

you now see an AI overview is the first thing that comes up that summarizes information. And that real estate is gold because that's what a lot of people are going to for answers. And so the websites that are cited and sourced by that organically, as well as I think as Google continues to evolve, I think they're going to be putting more and more ads into that location as well. And those advertisers, those websites are going to see an outsized amount of traffic flowing to them as opposed to even what, you know, quote unquote is the first organic ranking on the page.

So ultimately it comes down to, again, providing value to people, providing relevance, relevancy for your content. That is what those AI overviews are looking for to try and find helpful information that they think they can point people to. And so it's still about optimizing for people, but keeping in mind how you're connecting with those people through Google. There you go. AI is going to be interesting to see how it does a lot of things. I know one of the problems that's in the business, I imagine it still is, is click fraud. Sometimes, you know, you have competitors that are, that will click your stuff so that

they run up your costs. Do you guys, do you guys combat any of that? You guys deal with any of that? Is that still a big deal? It's definitely an issue. Google, they have a lot of built-in things to try and catch it and not charge advertisers for it and so forth, but they're certainly not perfect.

For example, we had a client we were working with who their competitors were very aggressively going after their ads. We could clearly see, and we were seeing, hey, like 50% of the traffic they were getting was clearly fraudulent from competitors. And we're talking about, you know, a very,

very expensive, a lot of money that we're talking about. It was going to fraud and Google really wouldn't help us. You know, we reported it and said, look, this is clearly here's what's going on. And the answer was basically, yeah,

we looked at things and things look normal, nothing to do. And so we figured out some ways behind the scenes through some creative, like audience targeting and things to create a situation where we were excluding people from seeing our ads who didn't have much background of doing any searches and things at Google. So you know, bots are people who just had weird patterns, and they didn't match the audiences we were targeting. And we were able to, to largely fix that problem for that client. So there's still ways around it, but yeah, it's definitely still an issue in the industry. Yeah. I imagine it's one of those things. One of my things that I find

always annoying is, and I see it a lot on Facebook. I don't know that I pick it up so much on Google. They might be better at it. But I know with Facebook, one of the problems I have is if I buy something, I'll see ads on it for another week. And I'm like, I'm not going to buy that again. I bought it. I bought some expensive gaming chair. I'm not buying that every week. And I'm just like, why am I still seeing ads for this?

I already bought my purchase. Yeah, and that's the advertiser not doing a good job frankly because what they should be doing so it's called remarketing where you see ads for things you've already gone to and what they should be doing if they have an expensive product like that where there's not going to be a repeat purchase near in the near future they should be excluding you from seeing those remarketing ads after the purchase so that they're not wasting money and annoying you most definitely i mean it's mean, when I see it over and over again, I'm just like, man, somebody's spending a lot of money for their ads and they're marketing the wrong person. I already bought it. You help agency or you help companies

with limited budget and resources to run their Google ads and succeed even though they are limited. What's the low range of clients, you know, to clients that need to have a certain net worth or a certain ad spend to work with you guys? There's no minimum as far as raw dollars go. What we do is we look at where are they targeting and what is a sufficient budget that we believe can get them good results. So for example, you know, if you're a national clothing brand and you're like, hey, we've got $500 monthly budget, that's not going to accomplish what we need to accomplish.

We're not going to be able to get enough data to say this is working, this is not working, et cetera. But we have a client, we have a cemetery as a client, and they have a $500 monthly budget. They're targeting a very small geographic area, people who need to purchase burial plots and, and that can work. So it really just depends upon the targeting side of things,

not, you know, raw, raw minimums that we make up. Target people who need to die. No, I'm just kidding. I don't need to die.

It's, it's an interesting one. But yeah, it's a, it's a tough sell, selling cemetery plots. No one wants to talk about, yeah, it's a tough sell in Cemetery Plus. No one wants to talk about being in the ground, I guess, or whatever the hell happens. But it's a fact of life.

Death and taxes, ladies and gentlemen. There you go. What haven't we talked about? Or how can people onboard with you? I noticed there's some free consultation. How can people onboard with you to handshake and get to know if maybe you guys are a good fit with each other? Yeah, the way we like to start is have initial conversation. Like you said, we do free consultation. And usually when a business is

coming to us, either they're already running advertising and they're looking to make it better or they're new to it and they need help starting. So if they're already doing stuff, first thing we'll do is, like I said, a free consultation. We'll dig in, look at what they're doing and put together a pretty comprehensive perspective on the good, the bad and the ugly of what we see. And then the opportunities we see if we work together to help them. And then if it's a new business or a business that's new to digital advertising, we'll put together projections and kind of strategy and say, all right, here's roughly how we would go about working with you. And then if those things make sense, if they sound logical to the business, then we just get an agreement in place and start putting the work in and driving track to the website and hopefully

driving leads or sales or whatever that goal is. How soon can someone, if they onboard with you, how soon can they get up and rolling and have ads running and start seeing results generally between 10 to 12 business days after we get things started with a client we'll be we'll be running campaigns will be running now there's always you know process early on of again figuring out what works and what doesn't so just because we're running doesn't mean you're getting you know your optimal performance from day. That takes time and data collection and optimization. But the beautiful thing with the paid ad side of things as compared to more the organic side of things is you can start getting traffic and results very, very quickly.

It's not, hey, write this blog article, wait six months, and hope that it ranks on Google. It's, no, we're going to do this right now, and we know today or tomorrow whether or not we can get traffic at this bid. And if not, we can adjust. If so, great. Let's see how it converts and then build from there. There you go. And you know, get it all going on. Well, this has been very insightful. Anything more we need to know before we go out? I think we covered a lot of good stuff. Yeah. I just, the way I would end things is if you're listening to this watching this and

you're running google ads or want to run google ads again on that compliance side of things go read google's policies read as much as you can on our youtube channel we have a lot of information about policies and there you can check out because you just you do not want to get suspended and it happens more often than you think 12 million accounts last year google suspended so it happens a lot and you you don't it's it sucks because it locks you out of that account too especially if your gmail is attached to it what was the there was something and i noticed you guys have a podcast you want to get a plug in for that and you guys do webinars as well absolutely yeah clicks to customers podcast

we have a variety of guests in kind of the the business and marketing space come on that we think would be interesting for our clients and similar businesses to hear from. There you go. Well, it's been fun to have you on the show. We learned a lot, John, and how we can all be better at advertising because we all need marketing. Thank you for coming on. We really appreciate it. Thanks, Chris. Pleasure to be here.

There you go. And thanks, Ron, for tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com, 4Chats, Chris Voss, LinkedIn.com, 4Chats, Chris Voss, Chris Voss1 on the TikTok and all those crazy places on the internet. Stay tuned for more great material we'll be bringing for the next 16 years after this month we hit 16. So stay tuned for that. It'll be 32 years we'll bring you.

And then we're just going to quit after 32 years. That sounds like a good idea. I'm just going to do that. I'll probably be dead by then anyway guys thanks for tuning in be good to each other stay safe what a dark ending chris jesus thanks for being here bye