Somebody in the agency world once said, "you have to adapt at the speed of culture," which I think is such a great thing. That's the speed at which we, as CEOs or leaders of specifically startups, have to change and adapt. And I think the agency world has toughened me up to be able to do that.

Adbot does is takes over the tasks of a campaign manager and the magic part is that Adbot does it on a continuous basis whereas a campaign manager can only log in a few hours a day. Adbot monitors the progress or the activity on a 24/7 basis.

A lot of people will tell you, you can't be effective with a small budget, but you really can. If you focus on an area, look at your distribution and where you're selling and making the most impact, that's where you're going to get the best bang for the buck, rather than spreading it thinly and trying to cover too much. 

You can start for as little as R1000 a month. If you go to a freelancer or agency and you say you only have R1000, a lot of them will say a small budget is just not effective. And that's true if you're a human trying to do this thing on Google's platform.

We did a survey and asked small business owners, "How do you create your budget for your marketing?" What we found is that because these businesses are so small, there's no specific cost to marketing. But we need to start realising that growth comes when we can get access to new markets. And access to new markets is easily attained through online advertising if you start seeing that as part of your business costs.

When you have a small budget, make sure that you choose the right channels and choose a targeted area. You want to be in the lean forward channels, you want to have the opportunity to engage with somebody who's ready to make a decision.

I usually say that you have to look at it like this: in the Google search structure of the ad, you have a title and a subtitle. Again, just put yourself in the shoes of your customer - like you are trying to find a plumber or find a birthday present.

Google is a business that is focused on building software, so their target audience is developers and people who are really tech-savvy. We understand that you don't have time to learn a completely new skill set to be able to advertise.

The first one for me is Auto Guard, one of our clients. They are essentially an insurance company and they started out with us. At some point they said, "No, this is too easy. We could definitely do it ourselves". 

I think that they'll always be a part of search. Google is so dominant but I think Google is not going to be dominant for the rest of time. I think other search engines will take over, but the search function will always be there.