[Top Agency Series] Mastering Google Ads and Scaling Agencies With Sean Grabowski of Keepers Digital

Sean Grabowski is the Founder of Keepers Digital, a Vancouver-based digital marketing agency specializing in Google and Meta advertising. With over a decade of experience in pay-per-click advertising, he has managed over $25 million in ad spend, achieving top 1% status on Upwork and becoming a Google Premier Partner. Sean’s expertise spans various industries, including SaaS, e-commerce, and professional services, where he has consistently driven profitable results for clients. He is recognized for his data-driven approach and commitment to transparency, ensuring clients receive measurable and impactful marketing solutions.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [03:16] Sean Grabowski talks about Keepers Digital and its PPC marketing services
• [04:33] How Sean got started in Google Ads and digital marketing
• [05:34] Working with nonprofits and managing Google Ad Grants
• [09:11] Lessons from working at Group M and handling large ad budgets
• [16:34] The importance of managing client expectations in paid advertising
• [21:53] Sean shares his journey from working in agencies to launching Keepers Digital
• [28:23] Hiring strategies and building a remote digital marketing team
• [41:13] Common mistakes companies make in Google Ads campaigns
• [44:24] The structured sales and onboarding process at Keepers Digital

In this episode…

Google Ads campaigns can be complex, and many businesses struggle to optimize them effectively. Common mistakes include outdated campaign structures, failure to leverage AI-driven optimization, and unrealistic expectations about immediate results. How can companies refine their advertising strategies to maximize return on investment?

PPC expert Sean Grabowski says digital advertising success requires a data-driven approach and a clear understanding of performance metrics. He explains that AI has transformed Google Ads, making it essential to consolidate campaign data for more effective targeting. To improve ad performance, businesses should focus on strategic ad placements, continuously test creative assets, and ensure their sales processes align with their marketing efforts. By setting realistic expectations and refining campaign structures, companies can achieve sustainable ad growth.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Sean Grabowski, Founder of Keepers Digital, to discuss the evolving landscape of paid advertising. Sean shares insights on scaling digital marketing campaigns, hiring a remote team, and optimizing ad strategies for long-term success. He also breaks down the importance of managing client expectations, the impact of AI on PPC campaigns, and key lessons from working with major global brands.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Sean Grabowski on LinkedIn
• Keepers Digital Marketing

Special Mention(s):

• Second Bite Podcast
• Dynamite Circle

Related episode(s):

• “[Sweet Process Series] How to Save Hundreds of Hours a Month Using Top Productivity Tools with Adi Klevit of Business Success Consulting Group” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Agency Series] Most Valuable Advice When Selling Your Agency With Todd Taskey of Potomac Business Capital” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• David Bitton on LinkedIn

Quotable moments:

• “Google Ads don’t work like a light switch — you need time, data, and testing before campaigns become truly effective and scalable.”
• “Managing client expectations is key — ads won’t deliver overnight success, but a well-optimized strategy will create sustainable long-term growth.”
• “Hiring isn’t just about skills — it’s about curiosity, ambition, and finding people who truly care about solving problems in their role.”
• “AI has completely changed the way we run PPC campaigns — understanding how to structure data for machine learning is now essential.”
• “A great marketing campaign can drive leads, but if your sales process isn’t optimized, no amount of ads will fix that.”

Action Steps: 

1. Refine your Google Ads strategy regularly: Continuously test different creatives, keywords, and ad formats to identify the best-performing elements and optimize for conversions.
2. Manage client expectations upfront: Clearly communicate that paid ads require a ramp-up period for data collection and optimization to achieve sustainable results.
3. Leverage AI-driven campaign structures: Consolidate ad campaigns to allow AI to process more data effectively, leading to better targeting and improved return on ad spend.
4. Hire based on curiosity and ambition: Prioritize candidates who are eager to learn and problem-solve rather than just those with the most experience.
5. Align your sales process with your marketing efforts: Ensure your business has strong lead nurturing and follow-up strategies in place to maximize conversions from paid advertising.

Episode Transcript

Intro: 00:00

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 00:22

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here founder of inspiredinsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Sean Grabowski of Keepers Digital. Sean, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out, since this is part of the top agency series.

Let’s think of some of the fan favorites. I had Adi Klevit. Adi Klevit is an agency Sean that does done for you SOPs. So she goes into a company. Someone wants to smooth out their onboarding process with a client, with a staff member, or just document get stuff out of the staff’s head makes that repeatable process. That’s what she does.

So we geeked out on her favorite software productivity tools. So that was a really good episode. Another one was with Todd Taskey. Todd Taskey helps pair agencies with private equity. So he helps sell agencies.

He has got the Second Bite Podcast. Second Bite because he’s found sometimes when people sell their agency and the private equity sells again, sometimes those founders make more in the second bite than they do on the first. So that was a really good one. The valuation space agency space and just M&A business in general. More episodes on inspiredinsider.com. This episode is brought to you by Rise25.

At Rise25, we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you run your podcast, or an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the strategy, the accountability, and the full execution. So, Sean, we call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background to make it look easy so the host can create amazing content, amazing relationships, and most importantly, run their business.

For me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships, and I found no better way over the past decade to profile the people and companies I most admire and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you’ve thought about podcasting, you should. If you have questions, go to rise25.com or email us at [email protected]. I’m excited to introduce Shawn Grabowski.

He’s the founder of Keepers Digital. And Keepers Digital is a top Google Premier partner PPC marketing agency. They specialize in ads on both the Google and Meta side. They help companies scale their businesses by managing ad campaigns that are profitable, data-driven and measurable. And he has worked with brands and companies such as Nestle, Hugo Boss, Calvin Klein, Tiffany Public Storage, Deloitte, Spotify, Goodyear. I can go on and on.

There’s a laundry list of these. Sean. But thanks for joining me.

Sean Grabowski: 03:01

Yeah, thanks for having me. Happy to have to be here and have a conversation.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 03:06

So why don’t you start us off and talk about Keepers Digital. And what you do is you’re doing that. I’m going to pull up the site for people to see.

Sean Grabowski: 03:16

Yeah of course. So Keepers Digital is a PPC agency. I wish we had the new website up, but this is the legacy one that’s been around for a while now. We basically specialize in ads on Google anywhere, any platform within Google Ads. So that includes Google Display, Google App Network, Google Shopping ads, YouTube and search.

You know, Google owns a whole bunch of different places where you can advertise. We also run ads on Meta. We do a little bit of ads on TikTok and LinkedIn and of course, Bing for anyone who’s in the marketing space. Bing. Essentially, you can duplicate campaigns from Google into your Bing bank account.

And yeah, we help companies either maintain a consistent lead flow or sales flow with self-owned ad campaigns or grow. You know, a lot of companies come to us when they’re looking to scale naturally. When you’re trying to grow, there’s a lot of organic and other ways you can do it. But ads is one of those methods that helps you have a cell phone channel where you can pull the dial back and forth on how much you want to invest, and you can have a predictable outcome, as long as you have a mature account that you’ve dialed in. Well.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 04:27

How did you get into Google Ads?

Sean Grabowski: 04:33

Great question. So I actually got into marketing through the creative side of it. Funny enough, I used to write quite a bit in the early days of my career. I was writing quite a lot. I was really into videography and photography.

A lot of my close friends are still in that industry, and I started working at a local agency in my hometown where I did everything. You know, it was kind of an entry-level, paid internship, entry-level type job, and I did a little bit of everything. I got really fascinated with Google ads pretty quick. It’s not that.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 05:07

Agency do what was the specialization of them.

Sean Grabowski: 05:11

So we ended up specializing. It was a pretty small local business. They didn’t even have a niche at the time. Once I started working with them, they actually ended up launching a software company that took off. But they specialized about halfway through my time working there in helping nonprofits.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 05:29

Got it. And so were you starting to experiment with that company, with Google ads?

Sean Grabowski: 05:34

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So fortunately for nonprofits, Google gives them a $10,000 per month ad spend grant. It’s something a lot of people in the nonprofit or the marketing space have heard about. And what that allowed us to do is go after nonprofits and as clients and offer a package that was really beneficial to them, where we helped them manage that, that $10,000 ad grant.

And that gave me my first kind of exposure to Google ads. And I was fascinated by how analytical it is and how leverageable it is. That might be a strange word to describe it, but you can really make a difference for a company. If you can master ads, they can make a massive impact. So that really fascinated me.

Just the potential of it.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 06:24

I’ve heard before, Sean, that sometimes these nonprofits, it’s even sometimes hard to spend the $10,000 a month. Did you find that to be the case?

Sean Grabowski: 06:34

It absolutely is.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 06:37

That sounds strange. Like. Okay, just I mean, especially now, maybe it’s a little different animal when you’re advertising for nonprofits.

Sean Grabowski: 06:46

Yes. So There’s a bit of a catch-22 in that Google says, okay, we’ll give nonprofits 100 or sorry, $120,000 broken into $10,000 a month. But there’s a whole bunch of restrictions on those accounts. There’s rules. You can’t spend it on display campaigns.

You can’t spend it on single keywords. So, for example, you know, lawyer just making that up. Not that any lawyer would really ever want to target something as broad as that, but essentially there’s a lot of restrictions, and it’s very hard to be able to work with those restrictions and still be able to spend effectively. So that is something that over the years, and it has changed. The tricks that allow you to spend ten K efficiently have changed over the years.

There’s always a trick though. So usually if you’re working with a good PPC expert, they can spend the $10,000. But it’s not something that’s easy to do without somebody who knows what they’re doing.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 07:44

Do you work for the smaller agency and then what was next in the journey?

Sean Grabowski: 07:52

So. So I’m Canadian. You know, I grew up in Ontario, near Toronto. Toronto is the big, big city near me. And I met several people there from my university.

I met up with them, and a lot of them were working at bigger agencies or bigger companies. So I initially ended up through one of them getting an opportunity at a company called Group M. Group M, for anyone who hasn’t heard of it, is one of the biggest ad companies in the world. You know, they have companies there, they have offices and several agencies that they own in almost every major capital city. And in the developed world.

And I was able to very fortunately, from basically my second position onward, be working on household name accounts with really large budgets, literally going to the Google headquarters, getting training directly from the source and being exposed to some of the biggest, most complex ad accounts that are in North America.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 08:51

What were some of the things you learned at Group M? I’d love to hear not just from like, the ad perspective, but from the infrastructure perspective, right. Because most people don’t get to experience that type of infrastructure and the management and the meetings. Talk about the infrastructure piece that you learned.

Sean Grabowski: 09:11

Yeah, there’s a lot of different things I learned there. And I think some of them were about downsides of working at a big corporate company. And I’ll explain those too. It’s not all perfect. But ultimately, when you’re dealing with big enterprise companies that are spending a lot of money, they really communicating and keeping them happy is a whole political game, right?

There’s customer service mixed with how do you give them what they want while also being allowed getting their permission and blessing to do what you need to do in their ad accounts to actually get them good results. So I think the thing that I would say I learned the most was probably management. I ended up managing a team, a small team, and then a bigger team through my time at Group M, and you get exposed to learning about people and how to work with people and how to manage things and how to check in with them while also getting your own work done. I got a lot of exposure to that, which has helped me a lot nowadays with my own business. And the other thing I would say is, is really navigating clients.

You know, you get a lot of exposure to clients, and they’re not just clients spending small amounts of money. These are clients where they’re literally — their bonus or their salary is dependent on the outcome of what their agencies are being able to produce. So you really have to learn the fine art of talking to clients, giving them what they need, pushing back. You know, you do have to push back and inject your expert opinion. And there’s a fine balance between all of that.

And I felt like that was something. Those are probably the two things I learned the most there. Truthfully, the technology, the technological side is stuff that I’ve continued getting better at actually, since leaving, I would say.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 10:57

Talk about the management side for a second. What are some — it could be mistakes that you learn from, maybe someone else or that you made, you know, lesson from the management side that people could take home. And they’re thinking, Sean, I would like to be a better manager in my company.

Sean Grabowski: 11:16

Yes, I would say, you know, maybe being too nice and I’m a very I think anyone on my team would say I’m a pretty, pretty great manager. I don’t even mean to be cocky. I don’t mean it like that. I just mean I have a good relationship with everyone. I explain our boundaries, I explain our goals, and it allows us to be completely aligned.

But in the past, that was a lesson I had to learn a few times. There were employees that, you know, maybe I was. I let things slide for too long as I was learning how to manage people. You just kind of assume that people are doing things, assume they know what they’re doing. And that was also because I didn’t know what I was doing as a manager back then.

But you need to make sure that everyone you need to make sure that you’re that people are getting what they need to succeed, and you need to be able to have some kind of mechanism for monitoring that. And it’s not about being a strict manager, it’s just about workability. For this to be a well-oiled machine that runs smoothly. Workability is the baseline, right? We just need things to work.

And if things work, then the clients are happy. The team is happy. The upper management is happy, everyone’s happy. So how do we just remove the emotion out of it, remove the perspective out of it, and just get down to the brass roots of what allows things to work. So.

I would say nowadays what I do is I support the team extremely well, especially when they are brand new. When people are new, I give them tons of attention because you need to give people the opportunity to learn and feel supported so that they don’t feel anxiety. In those moments. We don’t make our best decisions when we’re in a state of anxiety and stress, and through making them comfortable and know how to do things, we also will be it. That’s usually how you end up with them being more independent later as well.

So I could talk about that for a long time. You know, SLPs are also something that I think the corporate world, there’s a lot of SOPs in certain areas, but there’s also a lot, surprisingly, in the world of small business, since becoming friends with tons of other entrepreneurs and business owners and agency owners, I truly think that the corporate world, there was a lot of lack of support lacking on my old mild teams of specific processes. So again, when the team doesn’t know how to react to a client, instead of them having to figure it out and be in the dark and just guess because they don’t know, how do you create a resource for them where they can always leverage that resource so that they don’t have to make mistakes? That’s something that management that’s management’s job. If your team is making errors and making mistakes or feeling stressed and anxious, it means that there is something missing in your systems that allow them to do what they need to do.

It is on you to take self-ownership and responsibility for whether you’re a founder or an operator or a manager. You can put better systems in place to support your team.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 14:17

Did you find that there were strong SOPs at the larger agencies or not?

Sean Grabowski: 14:25

To be honest with you, not so much. There were in some capacities, you know, I’ll say onboarding. Onboarding had strict, regimented protocols. These contracts needed to be signed.

All these training documents need to be done. After you’re done this module, then you’ll get a company email that has access to all the other things. And there were these very regimented processes. But for work delivery there were certain things that were just laid out like, this is what we do at this time. This is what we do at this time.

This is what we do at this time. And there was a lot of gaps in between that were actually pretty subjective. And I don’t think it’s that. I just think it’s not really the word SOP is something I didn’t even hear until I left corporate. I literally never even heard it. So I think that mentality of like entrepreneurs, we’re always thinking that that is something that I think would it I know a lot of people who have talked to this stuff about they’ve brought it into their corporate workplaces and they’ve been absolutely thriving as a result of it.

I think that’s something that employees often — we often think that things are laid out for us, but if you can come in and create a process that makes things better, the company will appreciate you for it. And not many people are going to be willing to do that.

[Continue to Page 2]