Dr. Jeremy Sharp (00:00.568)
Hello everyone and welcome to the Testing Psychologist podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Jeremy Sharp, licensed psychologist, group practice owner and private practice coach.
Many of y’all know that I have been using TherapyNotes as our practice EHR for over 10 years now. I’ve looked at others and I just keep coming back to TherapyNotes because they do it all. If you’re interested in an EHR for your practice, you can get two free months of TherapyNotes by going to thetestingpsychologist.com slash therapy notes and enter the code testing. This episode is brought to you in part by PAR, the Personality Assessment Inventory Bariatric.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (00:56.241)
Hey folks, welcome back. Glad to be here with you on the Testing Psychologist Podcast. Today is a business episode and I have a return guest today.
I’m very grateful for. got John Sanders. John is an expert in paid search, specifically Google Ads. Used to be called AdWords. He holds a bachelor’s of business administration and a master’s of business administration. And he put this education to work in a variety of positions in the marketing field, including sales, purchasing, e-commerce, and marketing management. But once he found Google Ads, he was hooked.
And now as the founder of RevKey, John enjoys helping businesses generate leads through Google Ads that will help their companies grow. He specializes in mental health practices and being married to a testing psychologist, he has a special specialty in running Google Ads for testing practices. So John’s a friend and sponsor of the Crafted Practice event this year and the previous two years as well.
So I’m really glad to have him back. treat this as like a Google Ads 2.0 discussion. John came on the podcast about five years ago and went through basics of Google Ads and the landscape at that time. Things have changed a lot in the past five years. And so we cover what those changes have been, how that impacts testing folks and mental health practices and what we can expect from ads these days. We talk about nuts and bolts like
how much ads should cost, what we need to do from our practice side to make the ads quote unquote work, what pitfalls we can avoid or mistakes we might make in running Google Ads. We talk about AI and its impact on ads and search and many other things. if you are thinking about Google Ads, have tried Google Ads in the past and didn’t think they worked or had any dealings with Google Ads,
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (03:02.072)
This is a great episode for you and there’s a lot to take away as usual. So I will transition over to my conversation with John Sanders from Revkey.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (03:27.032)
John Hay, welcome back to the podcast.
Thanks man, appreciate it.
Yes, I’m glad to have you. can’t, were just talking before we started to record and it has been five years since the first time you came on, which seems impossible, but I’m having more and more of these moments as I get older.
Yeah, and everything has just changed. And that podcast came out right before COVID hit, think, think it’s like January 7th, 2020. So everything after that went completely haywire. And so we live in a very, very different world.
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (04:02.286)
Yeah, a little bit has changed in the world and in the world of private practice. So I’m glad to have you. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I know even prior to all that, Google is updating the algorithms and, you know, policies and procedures and everything for Google ads anyway. But since then, in five years, I’m guessing there have been a lot of changes and updates. And I am glad that you are willing to spend some time with us and walk us through all those things and just the state of Google ads at this point in time.
Yeah, absolutely. How I ran Google Ads five years ago is completely different from how I run them today, specifically for testing psychologists. Like, the ad style that I’m running today didn’t even exist five years ago.
Well, that’s a fantastic teaser that I’m just going to pick right up on. Why don’t we talk about that? And we can work our way backward from there. But what is so different now than it was five years ago?
Sure, so five years ago, we were talking about search campaigns. And if you’ve ever been into Google Ads, you have probably seen this where you put in some keywords and you make some groups and send ads to certain places on your website. Some of the disadvantages of that were you were spending about $3 to $4 for each of those clicks. And we’re spending a lot less than that today. The second thing is that that was very much
based off of just keywords. And specifically within the testing space, I always had this problem of I would put in the keyword ADHD testing or autism testing. And Google, in its infinite wisdom, would truncate that to ADHD test, autism test. The problem we found with this is that those people who put in test almost never converted across a number of clients’ websites.
John Sanders (05:53.57)
And so the idea is I think that those people were looking for internet quizzes. They were not looking for actual assessments. So we wanted the word testing, assessment, diagnosis, evaluation, something along those lines. And so it had a hard time picking that out. So you’d put in maybe a negative keyword for test, but you’d still see some of that. But it was so you would definitely have some weirdness with that.
Overall today those search campaigns we don’t have near as much control over those keywords as we used to even within the last year that has changed not only for testing psychologists but for for everyone where Google is showing you know, even if you’re saying only show my ads if this keyword comes up it is really showing your ads on a lot of different searches that maybe we don’t want to want to be on so it was very keyword based today were
running what are called performance max campaigns. Like I said, this is a very new style. These actually kind of out of some of the Google shopping ads. but we have really found how to use them particularly well for testing psychologists to generate leads. The difference between these and your traditional Google search ads is these can show up not only in that traditional search area, but they can show up on YouTube. They can show up in Gmail and they can also show up on other.
websites as well. So we end up paying actually less for these and they’re much more intent based. What the client or what the user has been searching overall and are they a good fit for what we’re doing as opposed to just like what keywords they put into one search. It’s kind of looking at the user behavior overall and whether we would be, our ads would be a good fit for that.
That’s fascinating. Yeah, I know you talked about Performance Max a little bit when we were working together a couple years ago. Yeah, it honestly sounds like a new jet from Boeing or something, but it’s a Google ad approach. And back then it was brand new and I’m glad to hear that it seems to be working.
John Sanders (08:01.826)
Yeah, and it’s really worked for specific segments. We have found that it works particularly well for testing psychologists. And then also we found that this works well for like people who are doing treatment of like eating disorders and nutritionists. It’s worked particularly well there. And I think it’s, and because it’s so much of it is drawn from, know, draws a little more from interest and demographics than the search campaigns really.
really ever did. And I still use search for a lot of my traditional therapy clients. It’s kind of a mix. Some of them, they work well in some markets more than others. But really for some of these niches, we’ve found that Performance Max ads just work so much better than the traditional search ads.
Nice.
Nice, nice. Well, like I said, I had to follow that lead right from the beginning of our conversation, but we should probably go back and lay just a little bit of groundwork in case folks are totally clueless about Google Ads. So give us like the 60 second version. You know, what are Google Ads and why could they be helpful for testing folks in private practice?
Well, specifically if you’re starting a new practice and you don’t have any of that juicy search engine optimization. Because when we look at a Google search page, the first three to four results, those are going to have, depending on what Google’s doing that week, it’s either going to say add, or it’s going to say sponsored. That is from Google Ads. As you go further down the page and you don’t see those tags, that is the organic results from Google. And that’s the SEO.
John Sanders (09:39.778)
side of things. And despite the fact that they both appear on the same pages, those are two completely and utterly different disciplines. I am no SEO expert and I, when it comes to SEO stuff, I have SEO people that I refer to. But for Google ads, you know, this is really what my team and I do on a very regular basis. and typically within Google ads is that when your ad is clicked is when you are going to get charged. And when your ad is clicked, we’re going to send it somewhere on your
website with the idea of getting people to spend some time on your website, read your content, and then ultimately take that next step as the goal of calling you, filling out your form, or if you have some sort of schedule or on your website, getting them to do that.
So essentially, Google Ads are a way to pay your way to the top of Google search results. Is that a good way to think of it?
Right. Absolutely. Well, and especially with now that Google is putting the AI overviews at the top, and then you’ve got ads. So those organic results keep getting pushed farther and farther down the page, much to the chagrin of my SEO friends. But so it really is, especially once again, for new practices, if you just started and you just put up your website, you know, it can take six months to a year, depending on where you are, to really start showing up organically really well.
Yes.
John Sanders (11:02.296)
but you really can’t wait for that because you need patience yesterday. So this is a way, especially for newer practices to do that. And then also for existing practices as you continue to grow to continue to keep caseloads full.
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (11:17.63)
Yeah, I like that you made that distinction. It’s a great way to jumpstart people being able to find you. Because like you said, I don’t know that, you know, this whole world of search engine optimization is a mystery to a lot of folks, I think. And a lot of us, you know, I talked to a lot of consulting clients who build a website and publish it and then are sort of disappointed that no one can find them in the first month or so. And it really does take months, months and months for your website to rank in Google if it’s done well.
That’s assuming it’s done well and it will rank.
Absolutely. And I think that that’s an important point to make as well is that you can do everything right in Google ads, but if you’re taking it to a website that doesn’t have good content for what you’re trying to do or is laid out badly, or it’s really hard to fill out that form, that’s going to cause a lot of problems. And so, you one of the first things, you whenever we talk to a potential client is look at their website.
And in a lot of cases we have to go, well, you have this one page that says services, that says ADHD testing, autism testing. And that doesn’t work. All of those things essentially just need to go out and become their own page, usually with 500 words on it. And because not only for the SEO side, for Google, but when we push people to those pages, we want them to be able to read the content and go, oh yes, this is exactly what I need. This explained what autism testing entails.
and ultimately to get them to take that next step, you’re gonna need the content on your website to support those ads.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (12:54.218)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. I like that we’re talking about this again, just pulling from real life stories. I hear from a lot of folks like, I tried Google ads. They didn’t work. And my question is always, well, what part didn’t work? You know, like, because there’s, I don’t know, I like to break things down and be super concrete as people know, right? So I think of it as kind of three parts to Google ads, quote unquote, working. You know, one is the ad actually being written well and getting clicked. The second part.
is your website being a good website that people want to read and spend time on. And then the third is making it super easy for people to then contact you from your website once they’re interested and engaged. And if any one of those components is not in place, then Google ads quote unquote, don’t work. Is that fair?
Right, and I would even add on to that, it’s really also who your ads are being put in front of. If you had back in old search campaigns, if your ads were being shown to people who were typing and things that were irrelevant to your practice, no matter how many people accidentally clicked on those ads, it was never gonna turn out well for you. And so it really is who is actually seeing your ads, what your ads say, what’s on the website, and then getting them to take that next step.
and ultimately to become a customer for you.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. While we’re on this topic, I think it’d be great to be super explicit about how we can know if the ads are working. So what are y’all looking at? What could we look at to know that they’re doing what they’re supposed to do?
John Sanders (14:29.816)
Sure. So in the current times when I’m running, like I said, performance max ads, the first thing I want to look at is actually what that average cost per click is. And in a very strange way, because usually you would want that to be lower, right? The problem is that if you’re paying 55 cents per click, your ads are probably showing up on a bunch of garbagey garbage websites. This is one of the big
criticisms of Performance Max is that if you do not have all of these exclusion options checked or load a big list into Performance Max that says don’t show my ads on these garbagey websites, then you will get a bunch of ad clicks. So I’m actually looking for my cost per click to be higher. I grabbed a list of current clients and looked at them over the last seven months in preparation for this. And so we were paying
Mmm.
John Sanders (15:29.198)
about a dollar’s click for the average testing client. In some places it’s gonna be higher. If you’re in New York City or if you’re in California, you might be paying two to three dollars per click, but for the most part it’s 177. We wanna see that be over at least a dollar is kind of the first thing that I’m looking for. Second thing I’m looking for is how long are they spending on your website is I’m usually looking for this to be at least 40 to 50 seconds and then
The next thing is how many people are taking that next step of filling out your form is probably the most common one or calls. We don’t see automated schedulers on most testing psychologist websites. So it’s usually going to be that form and what that percentage is. For the most part on P maxes, if I’m just looking in general, I’m looking for 3 % of people.
to take that next step, what we have found, looking at that data from our clients, we found that our average was more like 8%. And I actually, had to throw one campaign out because it was, it’s doing ADHD and autism testing, but it’s doing it in very remote areas where there’s not a lot of service, where we were getting up 20 to 30 % conversion rate. I just threw that out of my data.
A little bit of an outlier.
completely unrealistic, but 8 % really, really is. And to put that in comparison, you know, for the most part, when we’re talking about people running ads just across all industries on websites, average, that average conversion rate is only about 4 % on average of people taking the next step that that company is looking for. So to be able to get an 8 % is really outstanding.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (17:17.474)
great. And you’re talking about 4 to 8 % of people who actually click on the ad and make it to the website?
Right, and make it to the website. Like I said, a lot of cases I’m looking for 3%. And you can definitely do fairly well on that. And I think that this is because testing psychologists have a lot of advantages on Google Ads. And I think one of those is there’s not near the amount of competition that there is, say, in that therapy space, where if you’re advertising for couples counseling or
anxiety therapy. You know, there’s a lot of people that do that. Very, very few testing psychologists. So you definitely have more of an advantage there. And one of the things I’ll also share, and you can put this in your show notes, is I have a return on investment calculator, and I’m actually going to put a lot of the numbers that I pulled out of our Google Ads for our testing clients. So you can kind of calculate like what that return on investment is. And because
Hmm.
John Sanders (18:23.414)
You guys are, you you’re doing the testing and then you’re getting paid. And if it’s private pay, I think in the calculator, I put $3,500 for the average test. You know, you’re getting that money much faster than say somebody else in the mental health profession who is, we have to ask the questions of, well, how many sessions will this client come? And then what’s that pay rate and trying to figure out that average. I really just think in a lot of ways, testing psychologists have some really big advantages.
on kind of the business side, like after people have made that Google Ads click, I think you guys have a lot of advantages.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. mean, I would imagine it’s easier to measure return on investment because if someone clicks and converts, it’s bird in the hand, so to speak. You know, you’re getting $3,500, whatever it may be versus is this person going to stick around? Right. the number of sessions we need them to. Yeah.
Absolutely. Yeah, there’s, yeah, the therapist said they have to deal with like that retention side, which is, you know, something that you guys don’t even have to worry about.
Yeah, yeah. Are there other major differences, I think, between running ads for testing folks versus therapy from y’all’s side as far as how you write the ads or strategy or anything like that?
John Sanders (19:37.422)
Yeah, there are a couple of differences when it comes to like a local therapy practice. And especially if they’re just like an office, I’m usually like trying to keep that within like 20 to 30 minutes of the office for testing. will usually go out to an hour, although I regularly hear, you know, stories about people coming to see testing psychologists, you know, from five States away because they took their insurance or for other reasons.
but I don’t want to bank on that. So I usually keep that at about an hour around. The practice is one of the things that I’ll do there. Actually, much like therapy, one of the questions is, you taking insurance versus not? And fortunately, much like the old search campaigns, one of the main things that we want to use is that household income targeting. So if you are in Brooklyn, New York, and you’re charging $8,000 for an assessment,
I only want to show your ads probably to the top 10 % of household incomes. So make sure that the people who see your ads are actually going to be able to take the next step. And I think that that’s one of the greatest advantages that Google has, slides has, versus SEO or so many other things is being able to really dial in on the clients that you’re looking for.
Right, right. Yeah, I was surprised the first time I heard that. Others may be surprised as well, just to hear that you can target Google ads pretty explicitly toward different groups.
Yes, and in other industries, like there’s some restrictions, like I think in housing, there are some restrictions. And that Google ads household data is based on a combination of zip code data and probably personal data. Google does not like to talk about where they derive those. But that is the best explanation that I have gotten out of them. And yeah, they don’t want to talk about it.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (21:23.948)
Yeah, that’s fair. That’s fair. Let’s see. Just while we’re on the topic of logistics, this question comes up a lot. You know, how long should I wait before Google ads kick in, so to speak? What do you see in, in that regard in terms of the ramp up period for Google ads to really start working?
That is a great question. like when I’m talking to potential clients and they ask, well, what’s a question that I haven’t asked that I should have? That’s usually the one. And we kind of look at it in three time periods is that that first 30 days after you turn on your ads is very much kind of a shakedown period of, you getting like a bunch of bad placements from Google that shouldn’t be there? Were some options not checked?
is something not working correctly on your website. So that’s the first 30 days. The second time period is probably at that 90 day or three month window where we can say, okay, you’ve gotten 800 clicks on your ads. How many of those converted to becoming leads? And then how many of those leads ultimately became clients to start thinking about what is that return on investment? That’s probably the first time that you can think about that.
And then it’s probably at that six month period where you can really take that hard look and say, okay, now we’ve had six months, now we’ve had several thousand clicks. How many of those filled out the form on the website? And then how many of those people became leads? And then figuring out, you know, what, that looks like. And that’s also something you can do with that return on investment calculator that I, that I’ll put up where you can change the percentage of how many of those leads will actually end up becoming clients. I hear.
numbers that are all over the place for this. hear 20%. I hear 90%. So think on the return on investment calculator, I split the difference. I think I called it 40, but you can play with that. You can also put in like your different pay rate of, know, how much you think the average test is going to cost. Because once again, if you’re doing testing in Arkansas versus Brooklyn, those are going to be very, two very different numbers.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (23:20.428)
Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely.
I’m mapping all this to the question of how much we can expect to spend. I’m gonna make an attempt at doing some math on the fly and bringing this ROI calculator to life for folks who can’t wait to download it from the show notes, right? So let’s just say you have a conversion ratio of, we’ll call it,
I’ve heard 30 % for private pay practices, give or take, and then 70 to 80 % for insurance practices. So let’s just say 50 % doesn’t make it a nice round number and make the math easy. So you’re converting 50 % of the leads, like the people who actually go to your website and call. So if you need 10 referrals month, that means you need 20 people who actually click the form on your website.
And you said that the average conversion ratio of people who come to the website is what, 5 %? We’ll call it 5 %-ish. You said 8 %? Maybe on the high end?
8 % is kind of what I’m getting on average right now. And like I can look at the websites where I’m all like getting, I’m kind of getting actually less than that 5 % and I can look at them and go one, I know has a website that’s got some issues and then the other is in a really, really difficult market that’s highly competitive.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (24:55.694)
Gotcha, gotcha. Okay.
So 5 % is definitely fair.
Okay, so 5%, so then 20 % or sorry, 20 people is 5 % of 400, right? So you essentially need 400 clicks from the ad to your website. And you said each click is costing what, $1.70 is what you’re hoping for?
Yeah, 177 has been our average over 2025 so far. that should lead us to a number of just like punching stuff into my calculator here. About $700 is what you’re looking at. If you’ve got your website set up for those conversions and you can get that 8%, then ultimately you can spend a little less, hopefully.
Yeah.
John Sanders (25:48.667)
The minimum that you should probably be spending on this is probably $500.
Yeah, that’s always a question on people’s minds. I don’t know if you get this, I get this in my informal conversations through consulting. know, people are like, oh my gosh, $500 to $1,000 a month seems like a lot. Then we go back to the ROI though. If you’re getting 10 converted booked evals at $3,500 a piece, you know, that’s $35,000 and you spent $500 to $1,000 to acquire them. That’s pretty good.
That’s some impressive mental math, sir. Very good. You are right on the calculator.
Right, right, thank you. That’s all this. This was just an exercise to show my math, mental math skills. But that’s pretty good ROI.
I mean, to put it another way, like, and I’ll actually, when we post this, we’ll post this with these numbers is the idea there is that for every dollar you spend on ads, you will make almost $50 back in revenue. you that make that deal every time. Once again, for the therapy side of things, that’s usually like eight to one, 15 to one, 50 to one is, so once again.
John Sanders (27:06.062)
You’re testing psychologists. You guys got some advantages.
Nice, nice. Yeah, that’s great to hear. What are some of the things that you’ve seen that can sabotage this process for folks?
That’s great to hear.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (27:19.374)
Let’s take a break to hear from a featured partner. Y’all know that I love TherapyNotes, but I am not the only one. They have a 4.9 out of five star rating on TrustPilot.com and Google, which makes them the number one rated electronic health record system available for mental health folks today. They make billing, scheduling, note taking, and telehealth all incredibly easy. They also offer custom forms that you can send through the portal.
For all the prescribers out there, TherapyNotes is proudly offering ePrescribe as well. And maybe the most important thing for me is that they have live telephone support seven days a week so you can actually talk to a real person in a timely manner. If you’re trying to switch from another EHR, the transition is incredibly easy. They’ll import your demographic data free of charge so you can get going right away. So if you’re curious or you want to switch or you need a new EHR,
Try TherapyNotes for two months, absolutely free. You can go to thetestingpsychologist.com slash therapy notes and enter the code testing. Again, totally free, no strings attached. Check it out and see why everyone is switching to TherapyNotes. The Personality Assessment Inventory Bariatric or PAI Bariatric compiles the results of the PAI into a useful report just for bariatric surgery candidates. Log in to PARICONNECT.
PAR’s online assessment platform, where you can administer the PAI and select the bariatric score report to view results based on bariatric presurgical candidate norms. Learn more at parinc.com backslash paibr.
Ooh, so we’ve already talked about website problems within Google. You know, you get into Google and you don’t know what’s going on. Google’s going to make a bunch of recommendations that don’t always work. and in a lot of cases they are trying to get you to beta their products for them. One particular thing that
John Sanders (29:24.614)
I am avoiding right now is a new style of campaign that Google’s releasing called AI Max. The problem with AI Max particularly is not even on the targeting side is that it’s going to write your ads for you. And I, in any industry that has any legal issues around advertising, I do not ever want to do that. So I’m just avoiding that one, you know, at this point.
That’s fair. Yeah, maybe speak to that a little bit. know that, and I’m not sure if this is exactly what you’re getting at, but I know that mental health as an industry does have some nuances with Google ads in terms of like using certain words or terms. Is that kind of what you’re getting at or is that a separate?
Well, you know, in particular, probably about, actually it was about six years ago. This is a very early version of Google’s AI. I let Google write some ads for a therapist and I called a master’s level therapist, a psychologist. And I was like, we’re never doing this again. Until it it can, it can prove that it doesn’t do that. And like I’ve got, actually I’ve got like two legal clients and like, there’s definitely things that I had that I can’t say on that side of things as well. So I’m just going to avoid that.
As far as like some of the keywords, fortunately, Google has not been as harsh on the this year. We still run into some issues, like if you are looking to get into doing things around addiction services, it’s very tough. Or if you’re looking to do ketamine therapy, also very difficult. But in terms of a lot of got a lot of the health and personalized advertising errors that we saw. It was really bad in 2022, 2023 has gotten a lot.
better now. Originally in Performance Max, there were definitely some areas where you couldn’t advertise to certain groups, but Google seems to have lightened up on that in this last year. So I think that that’s gotten a little better, but it definitely comes and goes in waves.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (31:26.412)
Hmm. I hear you. hear you. Do you have any thoughts on strategies for small practices versus group practices? Or is it largely the same? think
Within the testing space, there’s a lot of similarities. It’s really just kind of the amount of budget that you’re going to spend. And like you talked about it correctly earlier with, if you have got an idea of how many open appointments you have in a month and you need to fill, that can definitely inform your ad budget. And if it’s just you and you just opened and testing one person a day and so you’re doing maybe 20 tests in a month.
you’ve got a pretty good idea of how many leads you’re gonna need versus if you’re in a practice of 10 or 15, you’re gonna potentially need a much larger budget to cover some Google ads. And then of course, you’re gonna have things from other sources, you’re gonna have people come in organically, maybe if you’re running some social media stuff, you’ll have some people come in from that. So I think that that’s one of the big things specifically for testing psychologists.
Then if you add a therapy portion to your practice or, and I would say probably about 50 % of the testing psychologists I’m running for, about 50 % also do therapy. And so in that case, you know, we might do a more traditional search campaign where those still in some cases work better than performance max campaigns, just depending on what you’re advertising for and what area you’re in.
Yeah, I hear you. How about the ad content itself? This is a big question. How do you determine what’s going to work for each person? Like are you tailoring the ad content? Say if I was a solo practitioner, are you writing a more informal, personal ad copy versus for a larger group practice, it’s maybe a little more, I don’t know, I’m not sure what the opposite of that is. Not impersonal necessarily, but just.
John Sanders (33:26.766)
So one of the things that we’ll do when we get a new client is really kind of look at the website and like try to mirror some of the language that they use. was, we were recently working on some content for a testing site website where the owner very much said, I want to make sure that this is neurodivergent affirming and things along those lines. so that’s definitely something that we want to take into account.
when we’re writing our ads. In addition to what we’ll do is, within that Performance Max group, or Performance Max ad, we will have a group that’s specifically working on ADHD. And so most of our headlines are gonna be related to ADHD testing. And ultimately, when people click on that, we wanna take them to the ADHD page on your website.
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I’m personally very curious about the role of AI and how this is going to impact ads and future search results. This is a big can of worms to open, but I think it’s important and it’s top of mind for folks. I myself just started to look around as far as AI search and AI search, I guess, search engine optimization in the past month or two.
So yeah, I’m curious from your perspective, how is AI influencing the Google Ads landscape?
So it’s still very early on that side of things. actually pulled some numbers from this. So from April 2024 to March 2025, there were 55 billion uses of AI. Sounds like a lot. During that same time, there were 1.86 trillion searches within search engines. So search engines still are the big gorilla in the room, but it’s definitely increasing.
John Sanders (35:15.426)
The role of this ultimately I think comes down to ChatGPT, which has about an 80 % market share when it comes to AIs. Your Microsoft co-pilots and Google Gemini and all of those others are down in the single digits. So ultimately it’s going to depend, I think, on what they do. And there’s been a lot of talk about like their structure. It seems like they’re going to stay as a nonprofit for right now, but we’ll kind of see where that land.
Forgive me for being skeptical.
Yeah, I you know, I don’t know what Sam Altman and all of the guys on the board over at open AI are gonna do but that’s that’s really the one to pay attention to on that Google is already starting to integrate some of Google ads into Their AI side of things which they’re definitely going to do Google makes 75 % of its revenue off of Off of ads, so they definitely don’t want that to go away, but still they’re
They are also a small player in the AI world right now.
Right, right. Yeah, I guess it goes both ways. I mean, there’s this question of how to embed ads into AI, I suppose, but then there’s also the other side of it, I guess. I don’t know, maybe it’s just another facet of the same thing. Is AI gonna, are ads even gonna be relevant when people are searching through AI?
John Sanders (36:43.306)
Right, and ultimately so many of these internet business models come down to one question of how you’re going to make money. And the answer is either A, you’re going to put ads on it, or B, you’re going to charge a subscription. And so it’s going to depend on, especially as AI gets more adopted, a lot of people right now who are using it are very much on the early adopter side and are very much willing to pay for it.
But is that what it is going to look like when everyone else actually starts using it? Now, of course, there’s free versions of ChatGPT and Gemini, and then there’s the upgraded pros. But I could definitely see a world where, within Google’s Gemini’s free version, and you’re probably going to start seeing this over the next six months, where you’re going to start seeing some ads ultimately on those results.
Yeah, yeah. So do you feel like I’m going to try to expand and formulate my previous question a little bit better? mean, do you, so it sounds like there’s this dimension of, how can we embed ads in these existing platforms as we know them now? Like maybe ads are going to show up on the side of chat GPT or, you know, on the sidebar of Gemini or whatever it may be. But then there’s the other side of, yeah, like if people are just using AI to search,
Are we still going to be able to run ads, I suppose, and kind of direct AI to that content, given that AI is theoretically vetting content a little bit better? And I guess can we break through the AI firewall to get our ads in front of people, given AI’s means of choosing quality websites? That was a terribly convoluted question, but hopefully someone out there is understanding what I’m saying.
It’s so hard to know and I think maybe in a year we’ll have a better idea of what it looks like on the Google side. My assumption on the chat GPT side is because Microsoft is such a large investor there that if they ever put ads on chat GPT, it’ll be run through Microsoft’s ad platform, which is not a huge deal because it’s very easy to export a Google ads campaign and put it right into Microsoft as a CSV file. It’s actually very easy.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (38:54.529)
interesting
do that for all the clients and Microsoft always tries to keep up with Google. If Google makes like a big change in terms of like how their ads show up, Microsoft will then kind of quickly make that same adjustment so they can keep importing those campaigns from Google. But yeah, so for chat GPT, I think ultimately it’s gonna be that corporate structure at NIDIL. I’m definitely not the person to be able to tell you how that’s gonna end up going.
Yeah, yeah. So I guess the ultimate question, at least at this point, and this could change next month or six months or next year, do we as testing practice owners need to do anything different with Google Ads right now, given that AI is an increasing part of the mix?
I don’t think right now, I mean, if we look at the stats that I gave earlier where, you know, if you put all of AI and all of the search together, AI is only like 3 % of it. So not yet, that number is going to need to drastically increase. And I think that it will over time. And then, you know, these large tech companies will kind of adjust to how they’re going to do things with their ads. And then ultimately, we will make adjustments to how we’re advertising.
Ultimately, much like, you know how five years ago I was mainly running search campaigns. If you told me five years ago, I’d be running these weird PMAX campaigns, I probably would have told you, were nuts.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (40:16.798)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Things change, always. There’s also the question for me of social media, and I know this is detouring a little bit, but Google does have a foot in both worlds, right? Because there’s Google Search, of course, and there’s Gemini, which is the AI thing. But then there’s also YouTube Shorts, which is kind of a TikTok competitor, but is linked to YouTube. So how do we tackle that? Do we need to worry about that?
TikTok YouTube shorts, like is that having any impact on our ads or something we need to be concerned about?
It’s very much something Google has been pushing to Google partners like myself for years is, hey, you need to have a client who’s got to have some short form videos and be shot correctly so they can show up in YouTube shorts, which is also something that Performance Max Ads can do. The main thing there is, are even within Google, there are video ad creators that you can use. mean, that’s really expanded the amount of inventory they have for advertisements like that.
I don’t know that I have a lot of testing psychologists who have like video content. know actually most, most people in the mental health profession are pretty camera averse at and want absolutely nothing to do with being put in front of a camera. So I think that that might, might be kind of using some of those, those programs to put together that, you know, for YouTube shorts.
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. So we’ve talked about what it would look like to run Google ads, how much it would cost to actually work with a firm like yours. But there are always folks that are myself included, honestly, I’m always trying to find a way to do it myself and spend the least amount of money and share.
John Sanders (42:01.944)
Jeremy, you own big practice. You know better.
I know, I know. just can’t, I cannot learn this lesson. I will always try to do something myself. But I’m getting better. I’m getting better. Okay. We recently hired somebody to come and put up pictures at our house. Okay. So that’s a big step for me too. Okay.
Yeah, I found that like in life as I’ve gone forward it’s it’s really knowing what you’re good at and what you’re not good at and Outsourcing things that you’re not good at
It’s just very humbling because I’m not very good at most things, you know, and I like to pretend otherwise.
Right, because we’re very specialized, right? And do Google ads really well for mental health people, but you know, don’t ask me to hang a picture and I might hang it correctly 50 % of the time. The other question was that it’s not gonna be good.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (42:42.691)
Hahaha
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (42:54.51)
Yeah. So that’s a disclaimer and I’m totally on board with that. Pay for something that you’re not good at. Don’t try to do it yourself. But there are going to be plenty of people who try to do it themselves and or just get lured in by those offers that Google puts out. They’re like, hey, here’s $500 to spend on Google ads. It’s really easy to click that and try to throw an ad together. you know, so I mean, from your perspective,
If someone is going to insist on doing that, is there any best practices for self-designed ads that can at least keep them from being totally terrible?
Sure. So a lot of those are now really kind of pushing you towards that performance max ad style. And in those cases, I think searching out the options under settings where you can limit where your ads are showing up. You don’t want them showing up on any mobile games or anything like that or questionable content. So there are a bunch of those. I was looking before we came in, we have a list of like 250 websites that we standardly put on every account.
And that grows constantly. And we’ve actually had to start a new list of that. And so we’re continually growing that because we might see, and this is one of the advantages of an agency has, is we might see the same website show up all of a sudden in several Performance Max ads just out of nowhere. And it’s like, OK, we can take that and put that on our negative list.
think that that’s probably the main thing. then also using that household income targeting is really effective, especially if you’re not an insurance practice and making sure that you tune that correctly to where the people who are seeing your ads are ultimately going to be able to pay for your services.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (44:46.21)
These are good ideas. Good ideas.
And also, I’d say the last one I’d throw in there is, in a lot of cases, you will have, under demographics, a lot of options to say to include unknowns, people that Google doesn’t know. I would probably just take most of those off for the most part.
Okay. Fair enough. Yeah, I guess that’s power of Google is knowing things about people. And if you don’t know things, there’s probably a good reason and you don’t want to waste money on them. Right.
Yeah, I think we’ve found that as we take those unknown options off, that those website placements usually get a lot better. And the main thing that we’re looking for on those is, in an ideal world, the number one place that our ads are showing up is what Google calls Google-owned and operated, which is your YouTube and Search and Gmail and all the other products that Google adds.
sense. As we start to wrap up, we’d love to hear any words of wisdom, any advice if you could share some thoughts with folks about might be considering Google Ads.
John Sanders (45:50.776)
think the one thing that I put out there is think like a customer would. And I think that this can be hard for testing psychologists because most of the people who are listening to this podcast have PhDs and you know what, say, psychoeducational testing is. I see this a lot of places. You call it psychoeducational, most people don’t know what that is. Whereas maybe when you title that page, maybe call it dyslexia, like learning disability testing or like
you know, combine that with psychoeducation. But to kind of think like your clients, especially if you’re trying to write your own content, I would run that through some sort of grade readability and, you know, try to keep that at that ninth to 10th grade level. I have number of times had people write content and they’re very proud of it and they send it to me and I run it through one of these and they have to go back and tell them.
you have to have a master’s degree to understand any of this, this isn’t gonna work. And so ultimately thinking like your customer, one thing I occasionally run into is people will say, well, I don’t think people click on Google ads. I think that that’s very much a, maybe you see the sponsored ad tags, but most people don’t really pay attention to what they’re clicking on on Google in a lot of cases. So really just trying to put yourself in the customer’s shoes.
especially with the website and making sure that you’ve got those service pages and how would somebody, they themselves needs testing or a child of theirs needs testing who doesn’t know a lot about this stuff. And what does that website look like and what does that ad content look like to get them to be able to understand what it is you do.
Hmm. That’s great advice. Yeah. Yeah. And just another instance of writing for our audience and not getting caught up in jargon. I think that applies to the reports that we do and it applies to our website copy and any
John Sanders (47:48.382)
And I am definitely not practicing what I preach on that because sometimes I will go off into Google Ads jargon and a team of Murph Mine will be like, so what John’s trying to say is because I’ve spent too much time on this side, it’s hard. So I understand that it’s hard to turn off all the tech language and bring it down to a level that most people can understand.
Yeah, it is tough. is tough. It requires deliberate thinking and action, I trust, I trust that we can do it. I believe.
Yeah, I think it just requires a conscious effort to kind of reframe your view of your website and say, would somebody not understand what, once again, psychoeducational is my favorite example of this.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. It’s a great example. One of those words we use probably almost daily for a lot of us, and it just doesn’t resonate with the audience.
And if you put the word psycho in front of almost anything, it makes it sound a little scary to some people. So particularly for that one, it’s, know, trying to communicate what that actually means to means to the average person.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (48:46.894)
does.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (48:54.55)
Yes, yes, definitely. That’s what I’m going to do for the rest of the day is experiment with putting psycho in front of all kinds of different things.
Let me know how that goes out for you. I’m sure that won’t be an HR issue.
Well, this has been awesome. Thanks for coming back and just talking through updates to Google ads, dispelling some myths and hopefully walking people through it and bringing it to life a little bit for anybody who might be considering it or wondering what it’s about. Always glad to have you.
Yeah, absolutely. I love always getting to talk to my testing psychology people.
Yeah, yeah. And if people want to reach out, get in touch with you, what’s the best way to do that?
John Sanders (49:29.678)
Just go to my website at revkey.com, that’s R-E-V-K-E-Y dot com and fill out our form and become a conversion and then we’ll set something up with you.
Love it. Full circle. All right, John, good to talk to you as always. Take care. All right, y’all. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode. Always grateful to have you here. I hope that you take away some information that you can implement in your practice and in your life. Any resources that we mentioned during the episode will be listed in the show notes, so make sure to check those out. If you like what you hear on the podcast,
Thanks, Jeremy.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (50:07.116)
I would be so grateful if you left a review on iTunes or Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts. And if you’re a practice owner or aspiring practice owner, I’d invite you to check out the testing psychologists mastermind groups. have mastermind groups at every stage of practice development, beginner, intermediate, and advanced. We have homework, we have accountability, we have support, we have resources. These groups are amazing. We do a lot of work.
and lot of connecting. that sounds interesting to you, can check out the details at thetestingpsychologist.com slash consulting. You can sign up for a pre-group phone call and we will chat and figure out if a group could be a good fit for you. Thanks so much.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (51:09.858)
The information contained in this podcast and on the testing psychologist website are intended for informational and educational purposes only. Nothing in this podcast or on the website is intended to be a substitute for professional psychological, psychiatric or medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Please note that no doctor-patient relationship is formed here. And similarly, no supervisory or consultative relationship is formed.
between the host or guests of this podcast and listeners of this podcast. If you need the qualified advice of any mental health practitioner or medical provider, please seek one in your area. Similarly, if you need supervision on clinical matters, please find a supervisor with an expertise that fits your needs.
Click here to listen instead!