5 Ways to Dominate Holiday e-Commerce

Episode Description

Everyone loves a list, especially when it shows you a concrete path to victory.

Every year, people start shopping earlier and earlier. And every year, the most lucrative sales period shows up sooner than we expect it to. We talked to the guys from OMG Commerce, who shared a five-step plan to conquering any holiday season.

This panel covers:

• Changes in 2020 that affect prep for Q4 e-commerce
• How Google advertisers can get started advertising on Amazon
• How to take advantage of all stages of the funnel to grow sales
• Best way to connect PPC goals with business goals (like profit)
• The anatomy of a winning YouTube ad

Episode Takeaways

Changes in 2020 affecting Q4 e-commerce preparation: The unexpected advancement in e-commerce due to 2020’s unique challenges has shifted traditional timelines and strategies for Q4. Retailers are encouraged to prepare earlier for increased online shopping and anticipate changes in consumer behavior due to disrupted supply chains.

Starting with Google advertising on Amazon: For Google advertisers venturing into Amazon, the focus should be on understanding the distinct differences between the platforms, leveraging Amazon’s massive traffic, and optimizing product listings to compete in a crowded marketplace.

Leveraging all stages of the funnel to grow sales: Effective e-commerce strategies involve engaging customers at all stages of the sales funnel, from awareness through conversion. Utilizing a variety of advertising formats and channels, including YouTube and Google Shopping, can enhance reach and conversion potential.

Connecting PPC goals with business objectives: Aligning PPC campaigns with broader business goals, such as profitability, requires clear communication and setting realistic expectations about what PPC can achieve. Discussing and adjusting key performance indicators like ROAS with stakeholders ensures campaigns support overall business objectives.

Anatomy of a winning YouTube ad: Successful YouTube ads require careful consideration of content and delivery to stand out and resonate with viewers. They should capture attention quickly, convey a clear and compelling message, and include a strong call to action to drive viewer engagement and conversions.

Episode Transcript

Frederick Vallaeys: Hello and welcome to another episode of PPC Town Hall. My name is Fred Vallaeys. I’m one of the co founders of Optmyzr, and I’m your host for today’s session. So today we are right in the middle of Amazon Prime Days, and some might say this is actually the start of the holiday season. It’s sunny outside here.

You know, October’s barely started, but yes, it is that time. We are actually thinking about buying stuff for the holiday. And part of that is obviously because 2020 has been an unusual year. We don’t really know what’s going to come next. Supply chains are sometimes in a mess. Sometimes they’ve been great.

So people are just buying earlier than usual. The deals are happening earlier than usual. And e commerce has really been. Abandoned in many ways, but it’s also ahead of where we expected it to be in actual number of years, right? So a lot of e commerce companies are seeing that their sales right now are two years ahead of where they were projecting them So all of that I think makes for some interesting stuff to talk about when it comes to to ppc and e commerce so I thought I’d invite Brett Curry from OMG commerce.

I’ve been on his podcast a couple of times and he’s an absolute expert in e commerce. So I thought he’d be a great person to talk to. He’s also brought on some other people from his team. So we’ll get to meet them in just a minute. But let’s get started with this topic.

All right. Welcome guys, Brett and Greg.

Brett Curry: Hey, glad to be here. I mean, that intro was, that intro was awesome. I’m, I’m, I’m really cool. I’m inspired now. I’m ready to go.

Frederick Vallaeys: That’s the whole goal. Get the guests like. Hey, so yeah, Brett, we’ve we’ve done, or I’ve been on a number of your podcasts. So thanks for having me on those, but it’s really good to have you.

On my show this time. So tell, tell the listeners a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Brett Curry: Yeah, it’s fun to be a guest. Usually I’m the one posing the questions and running the interview. It’s, it’s good to be the one answering the questions. That’s, it’s going to be fun. So I’m the CEO and co founder of OMG commerce.

We’re a digital marketing agency. We really focus in two key areas, the Google ads ecosystem, which I know we’ll talk a lot about. Per day. And then also the Amazon ads ecosystem. And so we work exclusively with e commerce companies, growing brands. And I’m also the co founder along with, with my business partner, Chris Brewer.

And so, yeah, we’ve got a team now of. 42 and growing, we do a lot with, of course, search and shopping and display on YouTube and display on, on the Google display network, but we’re also for agencies, our size, we’re one of the top spenders on YouTube ads. So we’ve got kind of a unique perspective there.

That we are excited to share today. And then I thought, you know best person I could bring on to, to, to be on this show with me is our senior Google strategist and really one of the smartest Google. Specialists and strategists. I’ve ever been around Greg Maycock. And so we did, we did give you a fair warning though.

Greg, occasionally when he and I are talking together, we’ll nerd out and get into the weeds a little bit, but I think, I think your audience will dig that for Warren would get a little bit nerdy.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. Well, we’ll scratch the surface, but then go really deep right after. So yeah, good tips. Hey, well, Greg good to have you on and quite the praise there you’re getting.

So yeah, I’m looking forward to nerding out with you. On the topic of PPC. So tell us a bit about your background and how long you’ve been doing Google ads and stuff.

Greg Maycock: I’ve been running Google ads since 2003. Originally in the lodging industry and travel space. I’ve been with OMG now going on three years, actually next week.

And just really dove into e commerce and love that. It’s a lot of leading edge work that we’re doing and, and really helping a lot of great brands grow really looking for companies that we can help scale.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. So were you doing PLAs when they were actually still PLAs?

Because now they’re, I guess, technically shopping ads.

Greg Maycock: I’ve first PLAs I’ve done were with OMG commerce. Wasn’t, wasn’t really applicable for travel space and lodging. But it’s, so that was a new experience for me. And I love that. And then of course, YouTube is really growing for us.

Frederick Vallaeys: So you’re one of the lucky ones who didn’t have to deal with those really painful feeds in the beginning.

Brett Curry: Right, exactly. So I, I definitely experienced that though, Fred, we, we started as an agency, we started with Google shopping or PLAs right when they transitioned from the frugal days of free listings to exclusively a paid channel. And that that’s kind of was our, was our obsession. In the earlier days of, of OMG commerce and how he’s really got some recognition in the e commerce space.

In fact, in 2016, which that’s several years after the transition to Google shopping. I wrote the ultimate guide to Google shopping that Shopify published was a partnership with, with me and Shopify. I just completely rewrote that guide. And yeah, there’s a link right there that you can check out.

So this is fully updated for 2020. We talk about. Now kind of the, there’s some new free listing options inside of the Google shopping results, which is really cool. Talk smart shopping campaigns, smart bidding, how to, how to really approach and think about Google shopping. So there’s kind of some beginner info in that, in that guide.

It was designed to help people get started, but also we get into some, some strategy and some deeper things in that blog post as well.

Frederick Vallaeys: Okay. Now we should talk about some of the more advanced strategies, but I’m curious, I mean, so obviously you just published this recently. Did you start writing it before 2020 or the 2020 just know the whole thing for a complete loop?

Brett Curry: Yeah. So my initial thought was I was just going to take the old outline. So, so when I got together with Shopify and we agreed, Hey, it’s time to update the guide cause it’s pretty dated now. It’s four years old. That was in 2020, but it was early in the year. And so I started looking at, okay, how do I, maybe I could just, Update it.

Maybe just tweak some things here or there. And then the deep friend guy was like, man, I just got to rewrite the whole thing. So it was a little bit painful, but it was a complete rewrite. Yeah.

Greg Maycock: A lot of big developments. That’s just in the time period that I’ve been working with e commerce and shopping campaigns, so last three years, big developments and improvements in shopping overall.

Frederick Vallaeys: So what’s your I guess maybe one of the biggest things is automation. Right. And so if you guys as a, as an agency, you’ve been doing e commerce for 10 years and you came in Brett, when everything was very manual, very painful before Google had a somewhat easier shopping ads and definitely before they had smart shopping campaigns.

So how’s that like cause to evolution in the agency? And Greg, maybe, especially in your role, like. I’m sure you used to do a lot of things very manually. Now some of that is being automated. So how has that shifted your, your role?

Greg Maycock: Right, definitely. The smart bidding strategies have created opportunity to scale in terms of having multiple campaigns with multiple strategies and, and easily managed.

We do a lot of segmentation with that and still, setting the smart bidding goals at the ad group level within campaign. So definitely a lot of opportunities with the automation In terms of managing more

Frederick Vallaeys: and so smart bidding the bids at the ad group level Okay, so that’s a really good piece of advice.

How often do you go and change those targets?

Greg Maycock: So we’re looking at everything weekly at a minimum But as far as changing them You know, the one thing about the smart bidders is they like consistency. So consistent data, not big changes in, in terms of settings or traffic and that. And so, you know, I’ll make incremental adjustments of, you know, maybe 10 to 15% as needed, unless there’s something significant going on, but weekly observation and then adjustments as needed.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, that makes sense. And so one of the biggest challenges that we sometimes face is people say, Oh, well, Google’s automating my bid. So, you know, I set my target. And I’m done. Set it and forget it. But clearly that’s not the strategy that you guys are taking. And I’m sure that’s because it leads to better results when you actually keep managing it.

Brett Curry: Yeah. It’s so interesting. And one of the things we did early on, and then you kind of talked about the transition from, you know, Manual bidding to smart bidding. And as an agency, back in the day, we were really good at manual bidding. And we, we had some, we had some non automated options. This was pre Optmyzr.

So we were just doing things with spreadsheets and stuff, but we can add, we had formulas we’d use to, to sort our products and look at, you know, creating recommendations for bidding up and bidding down, and we were doing that frequently, especially for high volume campaigns. And so in the beginning, you know, when Google launched target row, as we were Hesitant and rightfully so it kind of, it wasn’t very good at the beginning and actually it was pretty terrible.

But then as it got better and better and we thought, okay, we need to test this with more campaigns. A few of our specialists resisted it. Greg wasn’t one of them, but there was a few that were like, man, but I’m good. Like, I’m good at this. I’m good at the annual bidding process. I don’t want to switch.

And so it took a little bit of convincing, but ultimately I think as an agency, we’ve done a good job of getting everyone to buy into, Hey, there, there will always be something for us to do. And if, Automation or some new tool is better than what we can do manually. Great. Let’s embrace that. And then let’s shift our focus to something else.

But, but yet to your point, none of these campaigns, even smart shopping, none of them are set and forget, right? You have to look at and, and, and Greg’s spot on like looking at, at, at targets at the ad group level, but then. Then as you dig in and look at your products, we found that the smart bidders, and this applies to Google shopping, but also applies to YouTube.

They’ll pick favorites, right? They’ll pick, ah, we can really get our target. We can hit the ROAS with these products and they’ll end up getting. 90 percent of the impressions and clicks in a lot of cases. And so we have to look at often shifting our segmentation, breaking out campaigns, changing our targets to really get, you know, the full product line visibility and enough sales.

And so I’m thankful now that we don’t have to, to, you know, run spreadsheets and do, you know, bid up and bid down and crazy stuff like that. But we still have to think strategically and we still have to dig into the data regularly.

Frederick Vallaeys: And one of our frequent listeners, I don’t know if he’s listening today but Larry, he, he was struggling with exactly this sort of a thing where Google has picked favorites and those products may not necessarily be the highest margin products or the ones that they actually want to prioritize.

So there’s, and then you have smart shopping, which basically sucks in everything it can. So you have to completely segregate and have some regular shopping campaigns. There’s the Martin Rutgerding three campaign structure with the high, medium, low priority. Like what’s been, if anything, have you found an effective way to actually tell Google, like this is the product I want.

And my personal favorite example was I was working with a t shirt company at one point and on the generic query for t shirts, they kept showing the orange t shirt. And I was like, I know my orange t shirt is not my best seller. In fact, I mean, like, it’s so hideous that I can’t understand why anyone’s clicking on it, but they kept showing that one again and again and again.

And I just wanted that white or that black t shirt to show up. How do you do that? So smart bidding has definitely changed the way we approach campaign structures. In fact, I can’t think of any accounts that we don’t have at least three or more shopping campaigns. So it’s more of how you organize the campaigns and how you segment campaigns or ad groups for products.

Greg Maycock: Back in the day with manual bidding, we were, you know, running a lot of campaigns with single product ad groups. So we could basically be focusing our optimizations manually at the skew level. Now it’s more about. Basically creating campaign structures that feed the smart bidder the data and focus it in where you want it to optimize for.

Frederick Vallaeys: Let me pause you on that for a second, right? So are you saying you use conversion tracking and conversion value to sort of like help the system prioritize the products you want?

Greg Maycock: It’s a combination of that and campaign structures and separating different product groups into different campaigns.

And then using different settings, whether it’s a, you know, prioritization or The target settings for your row as goals from between one campaign and product group to another. So basically the new form of optimization is basically setting the smart better up for success with the best campaign structures and organizing that for the to focus it on the products that you want to feature.

It’s various levels of performance.

Frederick Vallaeys: And so you mentioned spags, I won’t talk about that more, but I think the other theme you sort of touched on was, you know, setting different targets. One thing that’s kind of a pet peeve of mine is people pick one target and they kind of forget that different products have different margins and that at the end of the day, we care probably more about profits than hitting 400 percent ROAS.

Greg Maycock: Exactly.

Frederick Vallaeys: You know, how do you get clients to sort of like go to that next level of, because I’ve literally seen clients, they go to an agency and they say, Hey, your guys target is 400%. And six months later, they’re like, well, 350 percent would have actually given you more profits. Like, why did you ask us for 400%?

And they’re like, well, the last agency had 300%. So just figured we’d up the number.

Brett Curry: Yeah, it’s such an interesting topic. And we, you know, we do a lot of YouTube as well, which more focuses on cold traffic or, you know, higher in the funnel traffic. So I know, I know we’ll get into that later, but that really causes us to have pretty in depth ROAS conversations with our clients.

And usually we have to ask the question about three or four different times and in different ways. And then we have to illustrate what the projected results could be in three or four different ways. We have to create visualizations. So we talk a lot about portfolios, you know, where All of your campaigns work together.

They’re not silos because 80 percent of people when they’re shopping for a product bounce back and forth between YouTube and Google or bounce back and forth between video and search when they’re trying to research products. And so it’s not just that someone’s going to see one ad and then, and then purchase.

So we talk about portfolios and how the campaigns work together. But then we also, also ask probing questions like, okay, You want a four hundred percent row as great. What about during the testing phase? What about early on? What, what’s your, what’s your risk tolerance that we’re trying to find the right combination of campaigns and, you know, the right combination of high in the funnel row as combined with low in the funnel row as, and what that, what that portfolio metric should look like.

And often it just, I’ve found that if you ask. The same question, a whole bunch of different times in different ways, then the truth will come out. And then, and then they’ll say something like that. Well, yeah, I mean, my, my previous agency had a 300, but I mean, really two fifties profitable. And we’re like, okay, great.

Well, look, look at a two 50 because we may be able to spend 40 percent more and you’ll have 40 percent higher profits if we, whatever, you know, we, we can kind of map that out for people, but I think it’s just a matter of kind of over communicating and asking a lot of questions because I think as agencies, we were so in this, we’re so in the weeds that it’s just like a nature to us.

And we think that asking one question or talking about row as in one way to a client is going to be enough for them. And it’s not. We have to overcommunicate, in my opinion.

Frederick Vallaeys: And so in the book that I wrote, Digital Marketing in an AI World, I equate the future human role in a more automated world as the PPC doctor.

And I think that’s exactly what you’re describing, right? It’s having that conversation, really probing and getting to understand What’s the issue? And it’s so funny, too, because nowadays with the Internet, how many patients walk into the doctor’s office and they’re like, I’ve got this disease.

When I looked it up on the Internet, WebMD

Brett Curry: told me so. I know it. I know it.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly right. It’s funny. Like one time I, I had a little rash and so I took a, I wanted to make sure it wasn’t getting bigger. So I took a Sharpie and I drew around it. So I go into the doctor and I’m like, I think I have this.

And she looks at it and she’s like, Hmm, that’s really unusual. I’ve never seen that black marking. Sharpie. Amazing.

Brett Curry: That’s so

Frederick Vallaeys: funny.

Brett Curry: Yeah. And, and so, yeah, it’s, it’s really important. I think our, our role is to, to think strategically and to ask questions and then to, to revisit and just to give you a, another little illustration, we have a.

A client in the beauty space and we’re doing a lot of YouTube ads for this client and they’re, they’re profitable, but we started with them and I’ll just kind of throw out some numbers. These aren’t the real numbers, but they basically said, Hey, we want like a 40 cost per acquisition from YouTube. I think that’s going to be profitable.

And then as we dug in and as we looked at kind of the halo effect and total sales lift and view through conversions and other things, and then as they looked at the. Lift they were seeing on Amazon and on other channels that came back to us and said, Hey, you know, really, I think we’re profitable like a 50 CPA and they’re a client that gets it because they want to scale and they’re all about customer acquisition.

And it’s also a consumable product. So repeat purchases and LTV, you know, lifetime value are important to them. But I think that’s the thing. Like you, you ask a lot of questions and get, try to get as much clarity as possible up front. And then you’re constantly revisiting, constantly evaluating, and then eventually, and so hopefully this is helpful for all the agencies out there.

Eventually, then you and the client become aligned.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. So I think a lot of what we’re talking about here is part of what you covered in the holiday readiness blog post that you did. So we’ll put the link in the comments right here, but this is on the OMG commerce blog. So why don’t we talk through this for a.

A bit. So five ways to dominate cyber in 2020.

Brett Curry: No,

Frederick Vallaeys: I was just going to make the point, like, so with prime days now being in October, like, have we really started the holiday shopping season? Like, what are you guys seeing?

Brett Curry: Yeah, I believe so. I mean, we’ll, we’ll start to really see that clearly in the next couple of days.

So now we’re day two of the prime day event on Amazon. And I believe this will be the kickoff of holiday shopping. You know, it’s so close to holiday that I believe there’s people that are, you know, shopping for those holiday gift right now. In this, in this article, I quote a Google study, a Google survey that they did a month or two ago.

That showed that, you know, 72 percent of holiday shoppers plan to shop more online this year than last year. That’s no real surprise. Well, one stat that I thought was super interesting is that 41 percent of in store black Friday shoppers. So those crazy people that get up early and try to do the door busters or they stay up all night and they, you know, wait in line at target forever to get in and get their deal.

41 percent of those people say they’re going to skip it and just shop online. This year. And the other thing we’re seeing is that people are planning on shopping earlier. You know, we, we all know what happened back in March, April and May in a lot of places where we’d order something and, and shipments were delayed.

So there is kind of this trend where people will start shopping earlier this year. So I think, I think what we’re witnessing right now is the kickoff of, of holiday shopping. And so. We’ve been advising clients is plan on shopping happening earlier. Get your deals ready. Ideally those deals have already been ready, but be ready to launch your black Friday, cyber Monday deals, maybe November 1st or maybe at the end of October.

You know, get, get ready, get your assets ready, get your ads ready, all those things. So that so that we can be ready to push and, you know, likely last days to ship, you know, for like a guaranteed delivery in time for Christmas. As an example, you know, those are likely shifting earlier. So. In the past, maybe that was like a December 17th to December 21st cut off to get it in time, you know, for Christmas.

Now that’s probably going to be like the 14th or maybe even before, you know, to get guaranteed delivery for the holiday. So I think there’s several things around shopping behavior and delivery and, you know, shipping constraints that, that really drive.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right.

Brett Curry: The strategy here.

Frederick Vallaeys: So definitely keep an eye on things and set up some alerts because things are happening earlier than they used to happen in the past.

And so if you’d been. Saving budget for black Friday, for example, maybe it makes sense to front load that a bit more.

Brett Curry: I think so. I think start, start dabbling now. I mean, what, you know, kind of watch your account and look for when, when do conversion rates start to increase? When, when do my normal search campaigns start to increase?

And I think just get ready to, to accelerate, you know, press the gas pedal pretty quickly.

Frederick Vallaeys: So Sarah’s asking us a related YouTube question. So. What structure and formats do you prefer for YouTube campaigns to help lift e commerce? And I think you have a separate blog post on that. So I’m showing that on the screen right now.

We’ll put the link in.

Brett Curry: Great.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, talk about that.

Brett Curry: Yeah. And I don’t want greater time in here too. But, you know, we, we primarily focus on TrueView for action campaigns. So those are the, you know, the in stream pre roll video ads. But the true view for action part, that’s where we can bid on a target CPA.

And we found that, you know, if you give Google the goal of conversions, the smart bidder becomes pretty good at finding people that convert. If you use like CPV as your bid strategy or cost per view as your bid strategy, Google is pretty good at finding people who watch videos. And so, so with the CPV bidding, your views will go up.

Your view through rate will go up. But your conversions will go way down. Clicks will go way down. If you transition to true view for action, you’ll get more clicks and certainly more conversion. So that’s what we look at is, is primarily true view for action. And so, but we’re doing a few things. We’re looking at those direct conversions from YouTube.

We’re looking at view through conversions, but then we’re also looking at brand lift. So we’re looking at how the branded search campaigns grow. And also we, we look at things like Google trends and see how does volume for our clients brand. How does that increase after we launched YouTube? And we’ve seen some pretty, just to take the, the Google trends as an example, we have worked with a big automotive client and they were spending.

A lot of money on Facebook prior to us starting in on YouTube. And we can still see this distinctive point on Google trends where their brand name really spiked in volume, you know, a week or a couple of weeks after we launched their YouTube initiatives, which was really interesting.

Frederick Vallaeys: So that’s a good tip.

So use something simple, something free like Google trends to measure brand lift as a result of YouTube campaigns.

Brett Curry: Yeah. And there’s other ways to do it. You want to, you want to chime in a little bit on, on brand lift, Greg, cause there’s a few ways we measure it, but.

Greg Maycock: Yeah. The new brand lift 2. 0 feature in Google ads is very interesting.

It gives you and it’s, it’s, It’s not an additional cost now. It does require certain ad spend levels, but basically it’s an automated system for doing surveys to measure various metrics, whether it’s awareness consideration, purchase intent. And so that’s one of the metrics we’re looking at.

And then talking about the different types of campaigns. Types or structures with YouTube thinking in terms of retargeting and remarketing will also retarget viewed video audiences if we’re still in the customer acquisition funnel with the true view for action campaigns. To re engage people who saw the initial video and maybe did not convert.

But then we’re also running YouTube for shopping campaigns re marketing to people who did engage and maybe went to the website but didn’t convert.

Brett Curry: Yeah, and one final piece that’s really interesting that I think some people miss is if you take those viewed video audiences. So the audiences of people that actually engaged with your video and watched it, and then layer those into non brand search and shopping and watch the, the growth in those accounts or those campaigns, rather that’s really valuable too, because we see it time and time again, where.

Someone will, you know, watch a video to the billable point. So they’re watching to the 32nd point or beyond. But then maybe they forget the name, right? They, but they just remember something about the video and something about the product. So then if they’re interested, their next step is to go and Google it.

And so when we layer in those views, video audiences to search and shopping, it’s interesting to see the keyword that, well, it was interesting to see the keyword data Fred, now that we’re losing search term data, curse you, Google love, hate but anyway, so, so yeah, we’re also layering in those view video audiences, we can at least see the performance of how they do, especially in your non brand search and your shopping campaigns

Frederick Vallaeys: and personal example here, but on Instagram, I saw an ad, I was interested but then something happened and I got distracted and I could not remember the brand name and went back to Instagram, hoping the ad would come back, but it took three months before it reappeared.

And I finally made that purchase.

Brett Curry: Yeah. Yeah. We see this a lot with a boom by Cindy. Joseph is, is one of our bigger YouTube ad spenders and Ezra Firestone, who’s the CEO. He also had run some training and stuff. So he’s happy if we share a little bit of data from their account, but they sell skincare primarily to older women.

It’s, it’s a pro age line of cosmetics. So they’re more about like, Hey, embrace your age, look your absolute best. But Anti aging, that’s a, that’s a a crock, like embrace who you are. You’re powerful in this stage of life. Anyway, we run some really effective top of funnel YouTube ads for boom, and then as we layer those audiences into search and shopping, we find people that you can tell they don’t remember the name.

They’re looking for like makeup for older women. Skin care for older women. They’ll, they’ll, you know, they’ll try to remember her name Cindy Joseph. And so it’s interesting, but then they convert, right? And so they’re people having that same experience that you had where something in that video resonated.

They were interested, but you know, lots on their mind. So they had to go and search. So

Frederick Vallaeys: now you mentioned audiences quite a bit here, right? So that kind of ties into the five ways to win the cyber five this year. Point number one is build audiences now and then maximize budgets and cut through the clutter later.

Brett Curry: Yeah. I think right now, you know, we’re still seeing, and we don’t do much with, with Facebook ads, but we do talk to a lot of Facebook advertisers. It seems that CPMs are starting to rise a little bit on Facebook. We’re not seeing that yet on Google. It’s going to happen. It’s going to happen soon. And it’s, it’s going to probably be different for certain clients and certain audiences that we’re targeting.

But. Now’s really the time to get your message out there. Try to drive some conversions for sure, but also build your viewed video audiences, your all visitors audiences, your card abandoner audiences, and even, you know, your PDP, your private detail page viewer audiences, build those audiences now because then, you know, as CPMs do go up.

You’ll have those audiences that you can target and you’d be more likely to cut through the clutter because these will be people that you’ve reached now more than one time and then, you know, results are usually better with those audiences too. So I would also recommend that we don’t do email marketing or SMS or messenger marketing, but.

Build those lists too. Like that’s, that’s a great way to cut through the clutter, you know, with email and SMS and messenger lists.

Frederick Vallaeys: As far as like practically building those lists. I mean, there’s a question for Greg, but what do you like to use? Do you just use the Google analytics system or you have something better?

Greg Maycock: Well, actually, Google Analytics as well as Google ads particularly for the custom audiences. So and we, as Brett mentioned, we have a deliberate strategy this time of year for the most cost effective conversions to focus and heavy up now on top of funnel awareness, building those remarketing lists, getting visitors to the site, and and in that case, we’re using the Google Analytics audiences and then and shifting budget to that.

And then when we get into the peak period, when costs go up, then we’re shifting budget more towards remarketing, retargeting those lists that we’ve we’ve created and built in order to get more cost effective converting. So as

Frederick Vallaeys: one, one of the big complaints about smart shopping campaigns in Google is that they include YouTube, they include remarketing, but there’s no transparency into the budget allocation.

And so it’s funny because you guys are saying basically like these are all the right pieces of the puzzle to put in place but you just want that control and you wanna shift these budgets. As you get closer to the holiday event in this case.

Brett Curry: Yeah, for sure. And I think this is where, and this is also another point in that, that article looking at, we call it a four pronged.

Remarketing approach, right? Where we see really good results with discovery ads and maybe a lot of clients, discovery ads are now our most effective remarketing ads. So, you know, those are the display ads that show up on YouTube and Google display network and Gmail. And so we’re often seeing that CPAs are 30 to 50 percent lower.

For discovery ads and for standard GDN we also run Gmail ads. So separate Gmail campaigns and, and I know the discovery also hits Gmail, but we’ve found that separate Gmail campaigns can also be effective and you can run the two side by side. So run Gmail campaigns, YouTube remarketing, as Greg mentioned.

And we often will run YouTube remarketing, both with TrueView for shopping. And that’s as a side note where we’ve seen TrueView for shopping work the best is in remarketing. We haven’t seen a lot of success with TrueView for shopping to cold traffic. I’m sure it could work for some products, but we haven’t found, we’ve never found it to outperform TrueView for action.

We’ll also run TrueView for action at the remarketing. And then of course, standard GDN remarketing. And we, we prefer responsive ads there because, because Google strongly favors them. And then kind of the fourth prong there then is and actually that may have been four, but we also look at the RLSAs, and remarketing audiences to, to search and shopping.

Frederick Vallaeys: Nice. And that’s a lot of detail there, but people can read it. It’s pretty well covered here in the article that you had. Okay. So let’s see point number two that you had in the article was develop compelling offers that support the brand.

Brett Curry: Yeah. It’s interesting. We, I’ve even talked to some, some experts, some merchants that say, Hey, it’s going to be more, this season’s going to be more about, can I get the product, can I get it in time?

Is it really what I want? Those may be more important. I think that’s yet to be determined. I think we can, we can still safely say most people want to deal, right? Most people want sales and want to save prime day as a great example of that. But I think you can offer a deal that doesn’t negatively impact your brand.

So we’ll go back to the, the boom by Cindy Joseph example. And again, that’s, it’s higher end skincare and really targeting older women. They almost never do fails almost ever. And so, but around the holidays, they’ll do a 10%. That’s actually enough to move the needle. That’s enough to get people excited and say, Hey, I know there’s no other time of the year that I can save.

So 10 percent is great. And so, so there are ways to do this, you know, without impacting profitability. You can also look at, at free gifts. There’s a, Client that we really like and follow what they do in other, in other channels, but groove rings where they are doing like this free mystery gift.

So order a silicone wedding ring, get a mystery gift, right? That it’s great for a stocking stuffer type of thing. And so I think you can do stuff like that, that that’s, That’s kind of like discounting, you know, and we don’t know this for sure, but I’m pretty confident they’re probably taking unsold inventory or, or, or products that are not moving as well.

Let’s use that as the mystery gift. It’s a nice perceived value. And so they’re, they’re using that as a mystery gift. So I think really being creative right now is super important. Discounts are important, but I don’t think that’s the. Only way to promote for the holiday. And so, yeah, but, but, but thinking about what is your message?

What is your deal? That’s super important.

Greg Maycock: Also having a kind of a layered strategy for. Multiple offers throughout the holiday season can also help with a couple other issues. So, for example, we’re recommending that clients have some offers that are available throughout the holiday season, November through December.

Maybe it’s a special holiday only product offering, some value added offers, things like that. So it’s not your deep discounts like you’re going to see on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Provides an opportunity to offer something of value or more unique throughout the whole holiday season. And then they’ll layer on top of that the higher discount or whatever additional offers they have for Black Friday and Cyber Monday during that peak period there.

And so the benefit is you’re getting someone’s attention that’s starting early and not waiting until Black Friday, Cyber Monday or the week of to really have your Holiday offers in the front of your audience and then you’re also mitigating some risks so that you don’t have everything happening just in those three to five days in case there’s some other potential issues there.

Frederick Vallaeys: Any tips Greg on how to get all these promotions lined up and ready to go at the right time and the promotions feeds and.

Greg Maycock: Yeah, we’re basically setting those up. The last week of October, the first week or two of November, depending on when they land. But we basically are communicating with clients in August about, you know, planning for the Q4 and particularly the holiday shopping season.

And getting initial plans in place, reviewing those, making recommendations. And so it’s having everything in hand the last week of October.

Frederick Vallaeys: Do you feel so sick of Christmas by the time it’s actually Christmas? I never be so sick of Christmas.

Brett Curry: Yeah, but it does feel like we’ve been talking about Christmas forever, but that’s, that’s just the nature of retail.

But yeah, I think that in addition to that, you know, having that clear calendar and then getting all like say your merchant center promotions, getting all the names spelled out, coupon code discounts, getting all that ready and even putting it into a spreadsheet or something so that it’s ready to upload when the time is right.

So really just getting it all, getting it all ready now so that you can mainly just. You know, enable and, and then also, you know, spot check for issues and errors and disapprovals, cause that’s always going to happen to a couple of in the weeds, tricks and tips for some of the listeners there is one is we’ll make sure that landing pages are live because you can’t get an ad approved unless landing page works, but maybe we’ll have the client just make sure it’s not navigable on their site.

Greg Maycock: We’ll also actually have campaigns built and ready to go enable them with a dollar budget and penny bids so that while they’re not going to get any traffic or exposure, they’re getting approval so that we’re not waiting to last minute. Find out that there’s a three to five day time frame on getting display ads approved and and it’s approved when the sales over.

So basically a few little things like that to get ahead of the curve so that when game day arrives, basically, we’re ready to roll.

Frederick Vallaeys: Good tips. Let’s also talk about seasonality, but adjustment for a second. So I think Google recommends not to use that for a longer event like, Holiday shopping and it’s more for like a weekend sales.

Do you guys use any like bit adjustments to TRO and then all of that?

Brett Curry: Yeah, we haven’t used the seasonal bid adjustments too much at this point, but yeah, they’re the Google’s recommendation is if it’s going to be a short event and if we expect, you know, more than a 30 percent increase in conversion rate.

And that, that happened very quickly. That’s when you use the seasonal bid adjustments. We don’t use it a whole lot. We’re, you know, during the holiday or even before we’re in accounts on a daily basis. And so we’re, we’re manually bidding up on, you know, adjusting that target row as frequently, but I think we do have a couple of accounts.

We’re going to look at, you know, what is the seasonal bid adjustment do, especially for a few clients that are, they want to be super aggressive. Like there’s probably not a whole lot of risk in using that seasonal bid adjustment, but I don’t have a lot of experience with it at this point. Do we, Greg?

Just limited.

Frederick Vallaeys: And I suppose the other benefit is that it discards any of the data from the seasonality event that you set. So for those clients where you get super aggressive and then that performance may not reflect future performance, it’s just nice to get that out of the learning system, if you will.

Brett Curry: Right, right. Especially if it’s really concentrated. And again, it seems like if it’s over the whole holiday season, it’s pretty easy for the smart bidder to adjust. But, but but yeah, we’re, we’re interested to test that a little bit more this year. Yeah.

Frederick Vallaeys: So point number three and the top five here to get ready.

So fill in the gaps in search and shopping. And I think it’s talking really about some of the new shopping listings and freeways to get shown.

Brett Curry: Yeah. And so, I mean, this is really easy. This is just a setting you enable inside merchant center surfaces. Across Google that allows some free listings free shopping listings on the shopping tab and the images tab and a few other places, and they don’t have prime real estate.

So still at the very top of the shopping tab and on at the top of the images tab, and then of course on the main search results, search engine results page, that’s all paid, but there are some free listings now. And so all you have to do is really just click that surfaces across Google inside the.

Feed and merchant center. And that, that opens that up for you. And then now shopping actions, you know, which, which powers buy on Google that used to be commission based. So it used to be five to 20 percent commission, almost the way Amazon works, where someone could click on that listing, check out with Google, Google, then collects that fee keeps five to 20 percent since the merchant, the rest.

That’s now commission free. And so I really think that’s a, that’s a an effort. By Google to try to compete with Amazon and try to attract more sellers to increase more products available through Google shopping and shopping actions to, you know, cause there is that, that compounding effect of more products, the more shoppers and then it all kind of,

Frederick Vallaeys: I actually wasn’t quite aware of that.

So is that a longer term thing that Google is doing? You don’t know

Brett Curry: yet. It was announced, I think in May, maybe April or May that yeah, shopping actions is now commissioned free. My guess is it’s going to be a short term thing that, you know, Google’s using it just to kind of help people through this.

Some sellers are having a rough patch. Do the economy, although some sellers are exploding, but yeah, my guess is it’s going to be short term, but we’ll, we’ll see, there was no official announcement on when that would transition to a paid back to a commission based.

Frederick Vallaeys: And so these are shopping actions. Is that also the thing that feeds into the voice assistance?

Brett Curry: I believe so. Yes. Yeah, it is. It is for sure. And yeah, so that’s another opportunity there. You know, we, we heard talking to our reps or Google reps about, you know, Okay. What, what kind of volume could we expect here? Right. Because most people that are searching for a product search on Google and they click on one of the paid listings on the main SERP, right.

But, but basically what we were told is if someone’s already advertising on, you know, paid Google shopping that surfaces across Google and or Shopping actions combined could be another three to 5 percent increase in clicks and conversions. We’ve seen this kind of vary a little bit. We have one client that sells the resales, other major brands, and they’re doing quite well with shopping actions with the buy on Google program.

Others, it’s, it’s pretty small. But I think it’s still totally worth doing. It’s toggling

Frederick Vallaeys: one switch and then you get 3 percent for free. Yeah. Yeah.

Brett Curry: I mean, why not? You know, if the feed’s already built, it’s already set up now to do shopping actions, you have to fill out a form and you have to like get approved.

But surfaces across Google, that’s just a button that you click. And

Frederick Vallaeys: you mentioned feeds are for for a moment. Like the funny thing with shopping ads is that really the ad creative itself, you can’t manage. Yeah. But you do have control over the feed, which ultimately shows the title. So how much do you optimize for that?

Brett Curry: Yeah, we’ve, we focus on that a lot. And that was one of the early things that we talked about, like with the initial ultimate guide to Google shopping. And then, you know, we, we even have a dedicated feed specialist, Chelsea on our team, that’s all she does is feeds. And she’s, she loves it, which is an odd thing to love, but she’s really good at it.

And so, yeah, I mean, you think about like, Hey, the, the title is the headline and there’s still some SEO components, right? Where Google is trying to figure out what is this product relevant for? And when should we show it? And all that comes into play inside the feed. So we, we do a deep feed analysis. When we start with a client, we compare that to our keyword research.

Usually our specialists and strategists like Greg do the keyword research or evaluate the keyword research. And then then talk strategy with Chelsea, the feed specialist to really craft, you know, the perfect. Titles and descriptions are important too, but not as important as title. Google product category is certainly important, but then also one of the overlooked areas is product type.

Product type is kind of a freestyle form where you can put essentially anything you want. It’s not very visible to the shopper, but Google does pay attention. And we found that the optimizing product type can move the needle in terms of what, what products you rank for. So yeah, we’re big believers that the feed is important and, you know, getting the right feed is what’s going to power those free listings as well.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And so are you saying, I mean, basically put in the most specific product type, or is there a risk of going too deep into the hierarchy and actually keeping it one level below the other? Higher would be better.

Brett Curry: So the product category is something that’s based on Google’s taxonomy, right? So Google has these categories and you have to pick from their taxonomy and yeah, you want to go as deep as you can.

So if you’re, you know, selling handmade wrist bracelets as an example, you know, you want to choose apparel and then accessories and I’m making up these categories that I can’t remember off the top of my head, but you know, you choose apparel and then accessories and then handmade or whatever. Like, so get as specific as you, as you can with Google product category, but that’s based on their taxonomy.

Product type is really just a blank field. Basically you can choose it. You can do, you put whatever you want in there. And so that’s where we want to get creative. We want to think about, Hey, what are some things we want to rank for? Like if we want to, or do we want our ads to show for. And so we’ll often get pretty creative with the product type because there are no real rules there.

Frederick Vallaeys: Nice. All right. So let’s go back to the tips. I think we’ve covered. All five. So the fourth one was the four pronged and the remarketing approaches. The fifth one is get a YouTube top of funnel efforts dialed in now. So I think we talked about that, but anything else left to say on YouTube?

Brett Curry: Any, any thoughts there, Greg, on, on what to do with top of funnel right now

Greg Maycock: with regards to.

Getting ready for the holidays. Oh well, primarily increasing awareness and getting the viewed video audiences and immediately to build up those for retargeting. That’s primarily what we’re focusing on right now. And then yeah, we, we use customer acquisition funnels for our high growth clients.

So that’s basically starting that whole conversion path process to. move them from awareness to consideration and then down to the purchase.

Brett Curry: And one kind of final thing I’ll, I’ll chime in there is that if you’re just getting started with YouTube and you’re looking at that as a top of funnel strategy, we do recommend custom audiences first and what used to be called custom intent.

Now it’s just part of custom audiences, but basically that’s where you’re. Building a list of keywords that people are searching for either on Google or on YouTube. And that’s kind of a recent change with that audience type where now if you give Google a list of keywords for them to build an audience around they are selecting people who search for those keywords on Google.

but also on YouTube. And the, the YouTube is the, the new edition used to those audiences were just based on people that search for those search terms on Google. We’ve seen those, those audiences have always been, some of our most efficient, some of the most focused, you know, lowest CPA audiences, but now we’re seeing that they can actually scale as well.

And I think that’s, that’s a, You know, because of the new the new, the new change with the with that audience type. So start, start with custom intent or what used to be called custom intent. That works pretty well.

Frederick Vallaeys: And so I’m curious with this new capability and how well it scales, if you have a completely new account that you’re setting up for a new client, would you just start with keywords or would you immediately later on?

Audiences or even to custom intent.

Brett Curry: Yeah. So we actually prefer, so, so just a little nuance there. If you, if you choose keywords inside of the campaign builder for YouTube campaign, that’s more contextual. That’s where YouTube is trying to match your video ad. With content related to those keywords. So a lot of people think if I choose keywords inside the campaign builder, then I’m choosing people that search for those keywords on YouTube.

That’s actually not the case. It’s actually contextual. So what we, but those, those campaigns often work really well. It’s one of the things we, we launch with pretty quickly. But there with those campaigns, you have to look at, you know, adding negative placements, you know, placement exclusions and stuff.

Cause a lot of times, just as an example, we’ll be trying to target mom. Right. Or something or family related things. And we’ll show up for, you know kitty YouTubers and stuff like that. That it’s clear. It’s the seven year old watching the video and they’re not, they’re not going to buy. So those are great campaigns, but we actually prefer to start with the custom audiences where we’re picking based on someone’s active search behavior.

And that, so that’s the, what used to be called custom and tab, but now it’s just a section inside custom audiences that we’ve found to be the best place to

Greg Maycock: start. And in general, starting with you know, remarketing audiences, audiences that we’ve engaged with moving to the top of home audiences that have indicated purchase intent in one form or another.

So to have those signals. In market as well. And then eventually as we scale, looking at the more the interest based broader audiences moving up the funnel,

Frederick Vallaeys: right? So we’re getting close to the end of the hour here. So it has been a great conversation and great tips on e commerce. Anything that we didn’t cover that you guys think is important?

Brett Curry: Well, I think we can, you know, there’s the one resource I think we show, but I think we were actually kind of talking about a specific subset of it, but if you look at creatives, so, you know, we’re, we’re big believers in YouTube and we believe that the YouTube is still really in its infancy in terms of being adopted by e commerce.

Cost clients. And so lots of room to grow there, but getting the right ad, the right creative for YouTube is really important to kind of that anatomy of a winning YouTube ad is that’s something we need to think about because a lot of times our agency will have people that. Our big advertisers on Facebook and using Facebook videos.

So they come to us to see if they can achieve similar success on YouTube. And usually they can, but it’s very rare that we can take the Facebook video and run it on YouTube. Because on Facebook, you know, short form videos often work. Six to 15 second videos we we’ve heard are converting well on Facebook.

And with Facebook, you’ve got the, you know, big block of text above. The video and then the section below the video with YouTube, the video has to kind of stand alone and have to tell the whole story. It has to set the stage and overcome objections and hook the right people and convince someone enough that they should click through.

So we found videos that are 45 seconds to three minutes. And often with that sweet spot being about 90 seconds to three and a half minutes, those videos usually work better on YouTube. And, and there’s not that there’s a, a secret to how long it has to be, but. It has to be long enough, right? Long enough to, you gotta hook people in the first five seconds, but then demonstrate the product and provide some social proof and, you know, really convince someone that, hey, this is not your ordinary deal, right?

This is not your ordinary product. And then, you know, specific strong call to action. So there’s some examples in that article. Recommend that people check it out. And then also a, a great resource is we, we have a guide. That, that really has some of our favorite YouTube ads in it. So if you, if you look at the guide section on omgcommerce.

com, there’s a YouTube ad templates and examples guide. It’s free, but it has, you know, kind of our, our top YouTube ads that we’ve seen either from our own clients or just people that we know in the industry or that we’ve observed in the industry and it kind of, yeah. So under resources and guides Fred, you’ll see it.

It’s the, the YouTube ad. Templates and yeah, so scroll down a little bit. It’s the top YouTube ad examples and templates. So if you really want to see like, Hey, I want to dive in deep to what ads work on YouTube, what video ads work, check out that guide. Lots of good examples, lots of actual videos to watch, but that’s something that’s really important.

Getting the right creative is often more than half the battle for

Greg Maycock: winning on YouTube. Yeah. And to add what Brett was saying, the, the other thing you need to keep in mind is to, as you’re building a full funnel strategy to tailor the message to the audience at where they’re, what stage they are in the acquisition funnel.

So what works for awareness is not necessarily going to work for direct conversion. So the right, the right message to the right audience at the right time. Yeah, that’s the key.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, that’s what Google ads has always been. Right. So even after 20 years, that’s still what we’re saying.

Brett Curry: Yeah.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah.

Slightly different approach to how we get there. Well, good gentlemen. This has been a fantastic. So Brett, I also think people might want to check out your your podcast. Right. So I’m going to put that up on screen.

Brett Curry: Yeah, I would love that. Yeah. So it’s all e commerce, you know, we get it. We talked to, to really, really smart people like Fred and just get into, we talked to merchants as well, really smart merchants What they’re doing, how it’s working.

We get pretty tactical and practical on the podcast. We also talk strategy, but yeah, we’d definitely love to have you guys check that out. And one just kind of final point I’ll make Fred, you and I, we were all talking about this before, even as, and sometimes especially as. Technology advances and AI plays a bigger role and there’s more machine learning and all these advanced things, just good marketing, just good marketing basics of thinking about what your customer wants and delivering it to them and getting the right message.

Like all of those things are becoming more and more important. I think it’s, it’s, you know, hacks and tricks and tips that they have their place, but like good, Marketing strategy, I think is going to win the day now, but also in the future.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. So bad news for all those people who got into PPC because they figured it was a lot of spreadsheets.

Brett Curry: Exactly. Yeah. Spreadsheets are so important. Hey, long live the spreadsheet. We’ll always be looking at spreadsheet to a certain degree, but that can’t be your only claim to fame. Yes.

Frederick Vallaeys: Well good. On that note, thank you both for joining us, Brett and Greg. So folks you can check out OMGcommerce.com, connect with Brett through LinkedIn is his preferred way.

And then if you go to OMG Commerce. You might be lucky enough to to work with Greg as well. Greg is not on Twitter though, so we’re not going to put him on there. But thanks everyone for watching and we’ll be back next week with another great episode. Next week we have Martin Rutgerding another PPC geek, so it’ll be another deep in the weed session.

But thanks for watching and we’ll be back next week.