Ameet Khabra is founder of Hop Skip Media, a PPC agency based in Surrey, British Columbia where she oversees account strategy and execution for clients across various industry categories, including leisure, food delivery, automotive, and heavy equipment. She recently presented at the Brighton SEO Conference in San Diego, an event which I also attended.
I was eager to catch up with Ameet to learn about her career journey and trade notes on a number of issues germane to contemporary PPC advertising, including best practices for using Google’s Performance Max (the topic of her talk at Brighton), a system which uses machine learning models to optimize bids and placements to drive conversions.
Ameet and I agree that marketers should never regard automated systems such as Performance Max as autonomous “magic boxes.” As she notes, “nothing in digital marketing should ever be “set and forget.” Furthermore, while Performance Max is “smart” in terms of being powered by AI, it must be “spoon fed” the correct kind of data for it to function effectively. Furthermore, as Ameet observes, getting acceptable results from systems such as Performance Max fully depends on supplying them with adequate information to optimize ad campaigns effectively, including audience signals, customer lists, and data feeds.
Ameet highlights the common mistakes she’s observed when conducting PPC account audits, including inadequate conversion tracking and overreliance on auto recommendations. We then discuss the importance of connecting backend CRM data to Google Ads to enable accurate bidding decisions.
I wanted to get Ameet’s take on the GA4 migration from Universal Analytics that happened this year and learn about how she’s handling GA4’s reduced functionality, along with its navigational issues.
Our conversation then turns to AI’s role in digital marketing, including its current prowess in terms of being able to generate content whose quality exceeds – or is at least on par with – that generated by human beings. Ameet notes that in all the tests she’s run, human-generated content has won every time, but this favorable result is no cause for complacency given the breakneck pace of development in the generative AI space.
