Digital Marketing Lessons from Australia

Episode Description

The episode focuses on significant changes in consumer behavior, digital marketing strategies, and the transition to remote work. Industry experts share insights on adjusting to new consumer interactions with brands and optimizing digital marketing efforts to remain pertinent. The discussion also covers remote work’s impact on businesses, offering tools and strategies for effectively managing remote teams and preserving company culture.

• The panel discusses:
• Shifts in Consumer Behavior and E-Commerce Adaptation
• Impact of COVID-19 on Various Industries
• Role of Digital Marketing Agencies
• Future of Work and Remote Operations

Episode Takeaways

Shifts in Consumer Behavior and E-Commerce Adaptation

• Rapid Adaptation: Businesses quickly adapted to new consumer behaviors, such as the increase in online ordering and home deliveries.
• E-commerce Growth: Many businesses, including restaurants and retail, pivoted to or expanded their e-commerce capabilities to cater to the new demand for online services and contactless pickups.

Impact of COVID-19 on Various Industries

• Varying Impact: Industries like tourism and hospitality saw significant declines, whereas sectors like online retail and digital services experienced growth.
• Creative Solutions: Businesses found innovative ways to keep operating, such as gyms moving to online classes or restaurants shifting to delivery and pickup models.

Role of Digital Marketing Agencies

• Supporting Transition: Agencies played a crucial role in helping businesses transition to digital-first operations and adapt their marketing strategies to the new economic environment.
• Beyond Ads: Agencies found themselves advising on broader business strategies, not just focusing on advertising, to help clients survive and thrive during the pandemic.

Future of Work and Remote Operations

• Successful Transition to Remote Work: Many companies transitioned smoothly to remote work, maintaining or even increasing productivity and communication.
• Permanent Shifts: Some businesses are considering permanent remote work policies or hybrid models, recognizing the benefits and flexibility it offers to their operations and employees.

Episode Transcript

Frederick Vallaeys: Welcome to another session of PPC town hall. This is the eighth one we’re doing. So started it in about mid march and we’ve done one every single week But heard from our friends in australia that these were had a slightly inconvenient time for them So we decided to do one that’s actually nine o’clock in the morning in sydney and I believe none of our panelists today join us from sydney, but they do do join us from australia so we’re really fortunate to have three very different and interesting people so we’ve got the Founder of one of the largest, if not the largest digital agencies in Australia.

That’s Ben. We’ve got the rocket scientist who converted into a digital marketer. That’d be Monty. And his accent is not Australian at all. So he’ll he’ll get to tell us where that’s from. And then we have Mike. And Mike is an author of one of the leading AdWords books. And of course, he’s been helping a lot of agencies and clients through Web Savvy and Agency Savvy.

So welcome all of you. Great to have you. So Ben, tell us a little bit more about yourself before we get started here.

Ben Bradshaw: Yeah, sure thing. Well, you know, I, I for my, my background was a magician. So I, I, that was my initial job and I discovered Google ads or AdWords at the time probably when you were deep in there, Frederick.

And you know, at first it was overture. I put an ad on overture and after doing all sorts of offline media, it just wasn’t working. Yeah. Put an ad on Yahoo, got some results, put an friend of mine said put an ad on Google. All of a sudden I had a business. I got a 4, 000 booking in Melbourne from ANZ.

And yes I came across Perry Marshall Mike, he’d probably be, and he was the, he’s the guy I owe it all to, to be honest. You know, without Perry Marshall’s definitive guide to Google AdWords, which I downloaded, printed out and looked like this and read most of that started applying it and you know, 30, 40 percent savings on what I was spending helped friends and family and, and so that they got the same results.

Got a passion for it and I was listening to Perry’s audios and wanting to drive to do a gig and didn’t want to get out the car because I was so passionate about all this analytics and all this sort of good stuff. So that, that’s sort of how I fell into the game. So we started that 14 years ago and, you know, it’s been a big journey.

You know, we’ve now got approximately 4, 000 customers across two countries. And yeah, you know, we, we sort of have been through the fires, floods, all of those things. And You know, crisis went through the GFC and you know, it’s sort of interesting to see how, what, what we’re seeing here.

Frederick Vallaeys: Nice. And I love that origin story. It’s so my origin story was that I was a digital wedding photographer after having lost my job as an engineer at Sapient that was in 2002. And I also needed customers. Right. I had a great service. Like you were a great magician, but just like who’s going to hire you?

And I found this adwords thing at the time and I was like, yeah, that’s that’s pretty cool and then i’m sure you used your magic to turn a little bit of money on adwords into much much more money so we all got to love adwords for the magic. It makes happen Monte You were not a magician, but a rocket scientist, right?

Tell us a little bit about how you got to be in this space.

Monte Huebsch: Yeah, well, I was in the aerospace industry where, where you are, Frederick, just across from Lockheed Martin, where the blue cube used to be in Sunnyvale, California, which is no more. And I came to Australia because they wanted to build rockets and launched them out of Cape York.

That project never went ahead, but as is always the case, there was a woman involved and I ended up staying in Australia. And At the time, and Ben probably remembers this fella, Julian Prasad was the one of the managers for Google in Sydney, and he kept trying to get me into a partner program with Google, and twice I told him no.

He has subsequently left Google, he went to Singapore, and now he works for Airbnb. But I’m their longest serving partner, I think Ben’s probably their biggest partner, but I’m their longest serving partner because my company’s 24 years old. And was doing AdWords as you put in the thing, I, I pivoted a little bit.

I was an early investor in a company in the Philippines called Cloud Staff, which is an outsourcing company. It just announced on the wall street journal the other day that Navigar invested 20 million us in them and they bought me out of my IPO. Thank you very much. So I’ve got a checkered past, but and Ben to your to you might remember I brought Perry Marshall out here.

15 years ago for the 10x seminar up at Coulomb. So there were a lot of the early. Early people. So I’m familiar with Perry as well.

Frederick Vallaeys: Nice. And then Mike, I think you wrote the book with Perry, right? So tell us a little bit and you’re back here on this BBC town hall for the second time. So a lot of people already know you but tell us again a bit about you

Mike Rhodes: Yeah, I did the intro the other day, but I actually have a bizarre mix of Ben and Monty’s Origin stories.

So I met Perry for the first time at X10 in Coulomb. Went back to my mastermind with my hair on fire. Like, there’s this cool thing Google ads and a mate of mine in the mastermind said, Look, I don’t want you to like try and teach me this stuff you’ve learned. I’ll give you half my company and let’s figure this out as we go.

And we sold a hundred grams worth of stuff in the next three and a half weeks. And I went, oh shit, this stuff works. And then started the agency, yeah, I don’t know, 15 odd years ago. And then caught up with Perry again in, in Maui 10 years ago and ended up, yes, writing or co authoring, I should say.

The the ultimate guide to Google ads with him and stayed in Australia, just like Monte because of a girl moved here. Oh, I don’t know. It must be close to 20 years ago now. And met Gab and now have two awesome little Rugrats that woke me up at five o’clock this morning, just in time to come in for this and Yeah, I’m here in Melbourne, rainy Melbourne this morning.

So we’ve got Web Savvy is the, the agency side of things done for you. Nowhere near as big as Ben’s outfit, but we have been going at a very long time since those early days, not quite as early as Monty. And I teach a whole bunch of agencies how to do what we do, both on the, The Google side of things, the Google ads, shopping, analytics, data studio, all of that side of things as well as some Facebook, but also how to build and scale an agency.

That’s, that’s where my passion is these days, helping other business owners build up their businesses.

Frederick Vallaeys: Nice. Well, thank you all for being here. So in the conversation we had a little bit before we went live here, one interesting thing that Ben was saying was that This is a tough time, but it’s also an exciting time because we’re really getting to help our clients in maybe somewhat unexpected ways.

Ben, tell me a little bit more about what you’ve been doing in these COVID times.

Ben, you’re muted.

Ben Bradshaw: Sorry about that. Yeah. So, you know, we, we get a lot of clarity about what, what our mission really was and vision as a business as when it was really to serve and help small to medium businesses succeed online. And you know, there was no better, you know, when COVID hit, they needed our help more than ever.

You know, we, we sort of immediately thought about All of these industries that were going to be affected, coffee shops you know, restaurants, et cetera. And how do we help them from stopping shutting their doors? And so, you know, we, we applied we, we developed some e commerce packages we brought them at a cost price that we didn’t have and 7 a week, no set up fees.

And just, and we, we could build them in two days. So we felt that that was a really good solution to, you know, a coffee shop that can now sell coffee beans online and sort of weather the storm that way and adapt and evolve. So we sort of you know, a lot of our, our client managers, we sort of really make sure that they’re seeing themselves as digital marketing business coaches, really where they’re there to sort of not just, you know, Talk about Google ads, but what else we can be doing with their businesses.

And now more than ever, we’ve really been put to task on that. So yeah, you know, it’s, it’s been a challenging time, but it’s also been a rewarding time to sort of. businesses that thought they had to close down. We, we had a blind company that sold blinds and they were going to close and just turn their ads off and cancel with us.

And you know, we, we said, Hey, let’s do the e comm. That afternoon it went live. They, they sold 5, 000 worth of blinds and they were stoked. So, you know, there’s, there’s all sorts of good stories like that, but I yeah, you know, that’s why we’re in, that’s why we’re in this game. I think he’s, it’s why I started the business.

When you hear things like that, it’s sort of, it’s a good thing. And we’re, you know, we’re in a really good position. We’ve got a sense of responsibility you know, to the market, to, to small businesses in Australia, because. Digital is without doubt one of the you know, in my view, most businesses should be doing a level of Google ads and doing it well.

And you know, the small businesses affect our economy and the, their success is the economy, success and employment and, you know, jobs and stuff like that. So, you know, we’ve got a, we’re in a huge seat really to, to help You know the Australian businesses there. So we, we sort of did a bit of a wall cry across that company and said, let’s really, let’s go to go to task here.

Frederick Vallaeys: That’s really cool. How quickly you got that together. So one thing I’m always curious about, and maybe Mike, you can weigh in on this one, but that shift to e commerce to different behavior and, you know, maybe getting your meals from a restaurant delivered or picked up as opposed to going to the restaurant.

What’s going to stick after all of this? What behaviors are going to stick and what’s going to change longer term?

Mike Rhodes: I hope a whole lot of stuff sticks. I mean, I’ve been amazed at how quickly everybody has adapted. I mean, this is definitely a pandemic of two halves. I think we shouldn’t forget that we are the incredibly lucky ones, both in terms of the fact that we can work from home.

We’ve got businesses where our teams can work from home. Our businesses are still going. There’s a whole bunch of businesses and a whole bunch of jobs gone. So it’s definitely a game of two halves. But you know, buying behavior, how much does that shift and stay the same work from home? How much does that, you know, this was impossible two months ago for, for most of the big end of town, at least, you know, you’ve got hundreds of people, maybe thousands of people.

It was impossible for people to work from home. No, it just can’t be done. And now of course it can be. How much of that sticks and how much of it stays around the knock on effects of all of that. Obviously, you know, less time in the car, less pollution. What does that do to property prices? There’s all kinds of interesting things that that leads to.

But consumer buying behavior, I think Amazon come out of this particularly strong or stronger than before. The cloud companies come out a bit stronger than before. I don’t know yet what sticks. I’ve got this really nasty feeling that a lot of stuff just, we just roll back to how things were done before, because we’re not sort of consciously going to design.

differences into our lives, which would be a real shame to lose this opportunity. What’s that political saying, you know, never let a crisis go to waste. I think there’s a lot of stuff that we, we could consciously keep, you know, more local, more regional changing supply chains food security. which is a big thing in many countries.

I don’t know. I hope a whole bunch of things change, but I don’t know how much will. I certainly don’t know which ones will, which ones won’t.

Frederick Vallaeys: Which is why we’re all here. So let’s hear from the former rocket scientist as a scientist. What do you think? And stick there.

Monte Huebsch: Well, Frederick, what I’d like you to do is, is for you to update me a little bit because and Ben may might be more attuned to this as well, but my understanding was that Google was gonna make Google shopping free for a while, and that that’s rolled out in America.

It hasn’t rolled out here in Australia.

Frederick Vallaeys: That’s what, if that’s what you heard, it did an amazing job of positioning that one.

Mike Rhodes: Yeah. just a little bit of free.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. So Exactly. Just a little bit of free, so Mike’s got an opinion on that. Right. But basically it’s the. Shopping tab is still going to have paid ads shopping ads that you pay for But it is also going to include some complementary shopping listings and so technically to turn that on you do have to have a google merchant center account You have to go into it choose the option to show your listings on all surfaces Once that’s enabled that’s the merchant centerpiece.

Then it depends on for that country that people are researching from Have they actually added these free listings to the page? And mike you may have more insight into whether that’s happened in australia at this point

Mike Rhodes: No, I know like Monte says it hasn’t rolled out here yet. It’s just us as far as I understand

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, and actually we’ve seen us india And so the option can already be set.

We believe in most countries. And again, I won’t speak for Australia because I’m not there. I’m not seeing this myself, but you can choose the option. And then at least that way, the moment they turn it on you’re going to get those free listings. And just to give people some perspective too, on like how meaningful this may actually be.

For existing shopping advertisers, Kirk Williams from Zeta Marketing was saying he sees between. half a percent and eleven percent of the traffic coming from those free listings. And kind of like both of those being outliers, he was like five percent is probably what you can realistically expect.

And I’m actually also curious Ben, so like you’ve helped a number of companies get online. Start selling online and that kind of makes sense when it comes to blinds, right? Because if a consumer is going to go shopping for blinds, they’re probably going to do their research online but what about a restaurant where you used to walk down the street maybe pop into it?

Like, how do you communicate to people? Is that all through digital channels or are you guys looking at radio, TV, flyers? How do you get the word out that, Hey, we’re still around and we’re doing something different?

Ben Bradshaw: Yeah. Well, firstly, I think Google’s obviously still the first thing people use as a media to, to find anything and to, to search stuff.

So that’s still relevant. The you know, there is a lot of search. The first thing that we sort of saw big time in April was, was those, those, those go through the roof and they’re still remaining there. You know, my view is there’s only two ways out of COVID, right? There’s, there’s a vaccine and there’s an herd immunity.

Every time lockdowns open, there seems to be spikes again. So it’s, we’re probably in for a bit of a. You know, a period of time here with this will be a new norm, and that will change people’s buying the psychology of people’s of people, you know, 30 days to form a habit, 60 days to break one. So, you know, I think here there’s going to be some, some longer term impacts, but yeah, you know, deliveries might be one of those categories where, you know, working from home, hybrid.

You know, my view is I think there’s going to be some, you know, an all for the better, right? Innovation moves forward faster you know, businesses that we’re thinking of doing things and they’re going to do them and in some cases, and it’s, yeah, I think it’s all good, but yeah, deliveries, I think is a category that’s going to be quite strong for a while.

And, and restaurants yeah, I’m not. I’m not fully clear how restaurants can go back to their original models for a little while yet. It’s going to have to be a hybrid model.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. I’d like to jump in there

Monte Huebsch: just with a comment to back up some of the things that Ben has said and maybe a pivot as well.

And this is a positive plug for Google. They’ve done a lot for Google, my business and people’s local listings during covert with the ability to say that, you know, you’re, you’re open, but you can’t come in and you can pick up delivery and and that or that they have a delivery service. So for a lot of small businesses, restaurants, cafes, been things that you’re talking about.

I think the Google my business did some very positive things. So I was I was pleased to see that. Having said that, and having knowing a lot of people in the restaurant and catering area, they’re trying to move away from the Uber Eats and and the other one that started well here in Australia, which is Deliveroo, because their margins that they take are, you know, between 20 and 30%.

And most restaurants don’t operate on a 20 to 30 percent gross margin any time. So they’re finding some some new apps including I’m trying to figure out the one that I use It’s Bopple, I think, which my local barbecue restaurant uses because they have their own staff that used to wait tables now driving and delivering food in their cars, or you can arrange for a drive through pickup.

And and it’s kind of like Eventbrite or something. They just pay a flat, flat fee, not a percentage of what the the purchases are. And I think that that needs to come around because these 20 and 30 percent delivery services aren’t sustainable for small business.

Frederick Vallaeys: And that’s really cool how they’re keeping the employees employed just in a different way.

Right. So, and what kind of shifts have you guys seen? And in terms of like a GMB and extensions, are you using any of those technologies to get the word out about? What’s different, how you can still get your deliveries for food and what’s operating. Like one sense that I’ve gotten from the United States is that some agencies, basically they can’t operate at the bottom of the funnel anymore.

It’s not about that immediate sale, but it’s about just building the awareness that certain services are still operational. It’s about letting people know, Hey, you might not be able to walk into the store. But you can do a local pickup and that’s one of the flags that Google is adding, by the way. So if you do a shopping search, they will now did a little mark on an ad that says you can pick this up locally.

You know, a drive up, basically the drive up and they toss it in your trunk.

Ben Bradshaw: Yeah, I think definitely. And, you know, display and and remarketing and all those things, just making sure that, you know, that awareness marketing definitely makes sense, obviously, as models are changing and getting in front of them as a strategy.

And, you know, we have a few specific case examples of that. But it’s definitely a further being if this is Yeah, you know here for a little longer than that would be definitely a make make a lot of sense

Frederick Vallaeys: Hey, let me share my screen here for a second. I want to show you a piece of research that came on search engine land That’s really interesting.

I want to get your take on it. But so this is a research. We’ll put the link up in the chat here for anyone who can’t see this. This is from adobe adobe And it is the growth and buy online pickup in store searches so they’ve seen a 200 increase in that this year so that really speaks to the fact that e commerce or local commerce is still happening But people will drive to the store to do that pickup so that’s one piece that I thought was really interesting By the way, is there a lot of buy online pickup in store?

happening in Australia?

Ben Bradshaw: Absolutely. Yeah. So we’re seeing a lot of the similar trends, to be honest, like in our you know, we, we did some analysis, so we’ll do analysis on our top level MCCs and stuff. And we, we, we see similar, similar data and Yeah, it’s, it’s consistent with that.

Frederick Vallaeys: And then let’s see here.

What was the other interesting piece? It was about the shift here. So this section right here, it’s the digital economy index, but they see that e commerce grew sequentially by 49 percent and individual categories like electronics were up 58%. And daily online grocery sales were up 110%. So pretty much the categories that are in that are necessities for people to eat and to be able to work from home and needing an upcam, needing a new monitor, needing a new computer.

So those categories, categories are extremely strong. One thing I’m, I’m curious about any issues with supply chains or anything happening with bid management, where you’ve had to sort of shift the strategy based on this huge influx in demand. Yeah,

Ben Bradshaw: so we, we’ve, I guess one example of a supply you know, obviously stock was an issue in March, really end of March around there, and with all the businesses great.

Toilet paper.

Monte Huebsch: rar.

Ben Bradshaw: Yeah. . Exactly. Yeah. So, you know, we had, we had big retailers that online retailers couldn’t, couldn’t get stock and, and gone from huge revenues to, to virtually thinking about having to close the doors. And you know, so we, we shifted more to making sure they could do pre orders and yeah, just making sure what was in stock was getting, you know, Getting advertised, et cetera, and just, just basic stuff that you’d expect.

But you know, it’s amazing how just little things like that and a bit of common sense you know, really helps, helps those businesses out.

Monte Huebsch: Yeah. It might not be common knowledge, but large organizations that have dedicated logistics transport companies with their own aircraft were able to maintain their supply lines.

But a lot of small businesses that might be importing from China particular products for distribution in Australia, they, that, that logistics chain is usually in the belly of a a commercial airliner that’s carrying passengers and they’re selling the space underneath the plane to bring it in.

Well, that all came to a halt. And as a result, a lot of people who supply was from passenger airline aircrafts, even from Europe and, or China or Japan, for that matter they found that their supply chain had collapsed for a while. And so they, they weren’t able to get supplies. And so we had some clients that were putting their e commerce stores on hold because they just didn’t have inventory.

Frederick Vallaeys: And did you see any other interesting pivots? So like that new food delivery app where the debaters are now the drivers. Did you see anything happening in e commerce where people just figured out how these planes aren’t flying? Like let’s manufacture locally, let’s do something else.

Ben Bradshaw: Yeah. So, so we, we we’re lucky enough to sort of help introduce a few clients to other clients and things like that to try and say well, why don’t you try and speak to this guy that’s making stuff over here.

But you know, more broadly, it was about You know, we saw other, other e commerce categories, you know, selling gym equipment, things like that going through the roof. So you know, some, some e commerce businesses were, were really winning and others were really sort of scrambling, but you know, for us, you know, we, we, we have no contracts.

So our whole business is about keeping those businesses thriving and having a good experience. So yeah, we went really hard on trying to figure out creative sort of ways to you know, just sort of help them and assist them in any way we could. But it was you know, I’ve actually, I’ve actually got some data here on which I might be able to share.

Let me just figure out how to share my screen here in a sec. Oh, Ben’s

Monte Huebsch: doing that. Let me just jump in there for a second. Frederick as well. As of in Queensland, where we are, I don’t know what the situation is, Mike, down in Victoria, but our restaurants and cafes are quasi going to open on midday on Saturday here with a maximum of 10 people in the in the restaurant.

And I know one of my clients is using open table because it will track the reservations, how many seats you have, it’ll limit them to 90 minutes and it will, and you’ll be able to do that reservation online. And most of the restaurants won’t be allowing walk ins either for that same reason. So they’ll have 10 people from 12 until 1.

people from 1. 30 until three and onwards. So again, from a behavioral point of view, I suspect you’re going to see more people using that online reservation system and access to their opportunities because we’ve all been inside for quite a while.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right, that’s really interesting and that’s an opportunity then for marketers, right as Those walk ins are gone and everything has to happen online That’s that whole consumer segment that is never considered making an online reservation for a restaurant that we now get access to by the way, I do want to see we’re going to share but kind of to monte’s point another interesting piece on search engine lane.

I will put the link up in the chat but the question here in the u. s has been You If stuff reopens, will they show up? And actually the news is not great necessarily. So here’s a measure of stores where consumers feel safe and grocery stores are at 54%. So 54 percent of people would feel comfortable going to a grocery store. But when it comes to stuff like. Department stores. It’s only a 37 percent shopping malls, 33%. So there’s sort of a sentiment that people aren’t comfortable going to these places. There is a little bit of contradictory data now from the check in apps, like Foursquare, where actually people do show up in larger numbers than they say they will show up.

But, but, but I guess that’s one of these things that we as marketers now have to help. Our clients were right. It’s a, why don’t you feel comfortable coming into a clothing store? Very interesting here, but in the U S I heard that Macy’s when they’re reopened, anything that goes into the fitting room gets taken off the floor for two days to be sanitized.

And then it goes back on the racks. Right. And. All these new rules and like you were saying restaurants with dining on the clock And then I don’t know what to do in between sessions, right? But but how do we communicate that it may actually be okay to to go back to these old behaviors

Mike Rhodes: I I it was like christmas here last weekend.

It was insane the local shopping center. It’s not a huge department store, but sort of grocery store and a few other shops, the car park was mental. And just people everywhere. And, and some shops were slowing down people going into the store and queuing systems and everybody stand one and a half meters apart.

But then once you got in there, it was just a. Free for all. So, yeah, I, I do think there’s a bit of, people will say in a survey what they think they’re meant to say and then they’ll act in their own best interests afterwards.

Ben Bradshaw: Yeah. You know, my, my view’s a little pessimistic on probably what’s, what’s ahead of us.

I, I, you know you’ve got the herd immunity thing. You’ve got the vaccine are the two only rule good solutions outta this. And you know, this is the, I speaking to Harvard professor yesterday on economics and everything else, and he, that was his strong view, so. Yeah, if that is the case, then those sort of you know, I think we’re very lucky here in Australia, one of the luckiest countries in the world to be riding the COVID wave.

And we, I think our country has done an amazing job. We’ve got JobKeeper to help, help businesses, et cetera. And but that said, I think there is going to be some longer lasting, in my view, those, jobs. Things you saw those stats of people being hesitant to go back and go to back to business as usual.

I think it’s kind of going to be a little longer yet to before people, but yeah, there’s also situations like Mike just said, we are, you know, we’ve seen people in parks and they’re just crowds of people and they just go, wow, you know so yeah, it’s, I think Australians are a little bit more she’ll be right sort of thing.

Yeah.

Frederick Vallaeys: If you guys survive a day in Australia with all the sharks and crocodiles and poisonous snakes and spiders, like I’m always impressed by you guys.

Ben Bradshaw: I’ll quickly show this data here just to, so just to cover it off. And hang on a second. And so hopefully you can see this graph here. Yep. So this is some data that we have collected on, you know, our New Zealand and Australian clients churned by industry.

And this is people joining the business in green and people leaving the business in those categories. And, and what we found is interesting with some of the biggest businesses that were leaving in, in like cafes, dining bars. Yeah. Also the biggest joiners of the business at the same time. So, you know, a lot of people were trying to advertise the way out of it.

And you know, we saw that a lot with even just traditional media with you know, airlines initially when it first hit trying to trying to advertise flights, you know, so you know,

Frederick Vallaeys: Data that you’re showing so In red, you’re showing the percentage that have stopped doing AdWords.

Ben Bradshaw: So this is, this is approximately, and without getting into too much detail, you know, we’ve got a large client base and you know, this is the associated churn by industry and then acquisitions across our sales team in green. During this is over and the period is this is April. Yeah this is, this is March versus April. So it’s, it’s from March three to April three. But you know, it’s interesting data. I think is it sort of, you know, obviously accommodation, cafe dining, cafe, bars, sports, leather, hob hobbies tourist activities, transport, obviously, as you’d expect.

Right. But similarly you know, some of those categories were quite bullish about joining and doing things too. We actually applied machine learning to our sales efforts to figure out what was, what was more likely to become a customer and things like that. And based on some of this data, but yeah, I just thought I’d share it with you guys, cause for Australia, at least in for our you know, what we’re seeing, it’s, and I’m happy to share this offline too, so we can get it.

Frederick Vallaeys: And it’d be really interesting. We’d love to put that on our blog so people can see it afterwards. Kind of interesting though, because like we’ve been through this a number of weeks now, right? And obviously when somebody comes to you and says, Hey, listen, we got to shut down the AdWords account. We’re not going to do this anymore.

Some people stayed on, some people didn’t like, Oh, what have you seen after like six, seven weeks of this now? And our people who stayed online doing better than those who went offline briefly and then came back. And just for context, some of what we heard last week from. Nava Hopkins was that anyone who reduced budget but kept the campaigns alive and then re upped the budget was doing far better from an automated bidding.

And a cost per acquisition perspective than someone who had just said, shut it down. And then a couple of weeks later said, okay, we’re back. Let’s do this. And it felt like there in those cases, they just had to kind of start from scratch again at some level and spend a bit of money to get the machine learning systems from Google to learn what was the new normal.

Mike Rhodes: I loved Nava’s chat last week. I’ve always been too scared to pause campaigns. Having done that in the way distant past and had bad experiences with it. I almost never do that now. The team never does that. So we’ll wind stuff down to. one cent budgets and leave it there. Like if we think a client is coming back in a few weeks, we’d rather do that and spend a little bit.

Interestingly enough, I was going through some data yesterday and there’s some, some European campaigns for one of our US retail clients. They’ve been on one cent budgets and they’ve had this deal, this little trickle of one cent clicks come through. The ROAS was like, 500x because you got this little trickle of one cent clicks and then every now and again you do get a sale from those.

So excuse all your stats, which is going to be a pain to report on later. We’re going to have to exclude all of that from reporting. But yeah, it’s so yeah, I can’t sort of offer any advice. Insight on what happens when you turn it off completely and then come back on because I’m just too skittish to do that.

Ben Bradshaw: We’ve seen some really negative results at our end on that. So yeah, it’s yeah, our client managers have learned the hard way. I’ve heard a few interesting stories. It’s just really, just really can just, it’s just, yeah, we’ve had campaigns, it’s just been really hard to get back up again. You know, from the clients wanting to pause.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, that’s really interesting, right? So if people are still coming to you now and they want to pause stuff, I think the argument that we keep hearing is that that is a bad idea, don’t do it. Keep something running, right? Because there’s a thing you may not be able to deliver the service right away, but that consumer demand, the long term need for it is still there, right?

You want to be top of mind for when you can actually deliver again.

Ben Bradshaw: Sorry. Yeah, I guess from a, just, just a high level, you know, we’re seeing a lot of close. So one of the things we offered our clients during COVID was to pause their accounts and that kind of thing with, with, with recommendations, how, you know, let’s try and figure out how to.

Keep your business running and, and in the meantime, we’ll just lower your budgets. But the resume, we, we’re seeing a lot of, you know, just generally speaking, we’re seeing everything returned to normal. You know, our request to cancels back to where pre COVID our sales are the same. We, we you know, we took about a, roughly a 20 percent hit broadly, but you know, we’re now seeing some really positive signs and even the automotive industry.

I saw some really good insights there. Which an industry you wouldn’t expect to people have been rushing at buying cars, right? When in isolation there’s some really positive signals I think coming through there. So you know, it’s, it seems quite optimistic in a, in a, you know, the reduction that we saw.

In spend largely in March and then coming through again in, in April. And it’s particularly within Australia because the environment that we’re in here, it’s and I think other countries, maybe like Germany is seeing similar things as particularly in the auto industry I’ve saw. So. Yeah, I think it’s, it’s quite optimistic at the moment from our view, at least.

Mike Rhodes: Yeah, same here. On that last week of April, like around about the 24th, 25th, and sort of since then it’s been pretty backed, pretty much back to sort of pre COVID levels. Everything sort of went down mid March and then sort of five, six weeks. But it, it feels, I mean, just even the traffic this morning feels like things really getting back to, not normal, because I, I, I agree with you, Ben.

I think it’s a very long road out of this. Yeah, everything I’ve been reading. We’ve all turned into epidemiologists instantly, haven’t we? But everything I’ve been reading sort of says like, you know, even a year and a half for a vaccine is ridiculously optimistic. There’s some really good stuff in New York Times and Nature.

If you shorten this bit and you shorten this bit and you shorten this bit of the cycle of creating a vaccine, stuff that normally takes 15 years, a year and a half is crazily optimistic if everything goes right. So yeah, it’s a, it’s a very long road out of

Ben Bradshaw: this. I think people have emotional immune systems though, you know, people hit the COVID wave hits and there’s all this negativity and adjusting and lives get flipped upside down.

adjusting businesses. It’s a, it’s a crisis. And then, you know, people just, you know, people normal and in some ways you know, I know working from home for me, there’s some really good parts of that, you know, the dogs love, love me being around kids and stuff like that. So no, it’s good. But Yeah, I agree.

I think there’s, there’s only two ways out of this and you know, that vaccine, we’d be very lucky if it’d be the, it’d be a history making timeline if it was even in early next year, you know, so Let’s talk about the

Frederick Vallaeys: working from home thing for a bit. So as agencies and employers, what what are you doing with your staff?

Are you seeing work from home is working well? Any techniques you’ve used to make it better? You think you’re going to keep doing this? And, and then for context again, so the news locally here is Google announced that they’re just not gonna go back to their offices for the remainder of the year.

Mm-Hmm. .

Ben Bradshaw: Yeah. Yeah. So you know, we, we were lucky enough as a, as a business to I was following Covid. There’s a guy called a Peak Prosperity Chris Master, I think his name is, and another guy, John Campbell. And I was following them early January and. Getting, you know, daily updates of what was going on with COVID.

So I was pretty lucky to, to, to, to be people thought I was crazy. He’s been guys or something is he’s going to hit, you know, this is we’ve got to have a work from home plan here or and you know, after the fact it unfortunately turned out to be the case, but for that reason, we, we, we didn’t get we were worried that how do you run a sales function that needs a.

a real vibing environment. Usually how’s that going to work from home? You know, and the, the, and we’re going to keep disciplines in place and visibility on what people are doing. And and surprisingly our sales kept this, we, we took a few days of bump and then it, it was the same client management, talk time increased.

I couldn’t believe it. So people were talking more and more active from home. So you know, we don’t have all the right systems now that we’d like to, to, to do this long term, but it made me really think, you know, geez, if you take the physical box away of the office that we’d normally think about things with you can now employ people nationally, globally.

You can, you can geo expand it quite easily. It really changes the mindset and the landscape. Certainly how I thought of the business, but you know, I think there’s a lot of positives here and staff. We did a survey recently on, on, you know, who wants to kind of get back into the office and who’s happy, you know, and for the large part, people have adjusted initially to the, to, to to it, but yeah, I think we’ll move forward.

We’ll probably have a hybrid model where We’re a lot more comfortable with having people work from home. I’ve got

Frederick Vallaeys: a friend he just closed on a house, bought it close to the office Twitter, and then Twitter announced that nobody ever has to go back to the office ever. I mean, crazy, right? So but what you’re saying, but it doesn’t matter where you are anymore.

So long as you get the work done and still have the occasional opportunity, I suppose, to, to meet in person and If you have a onboarding potentially to me, sounds one of the hardest things. And that’s where I’m concerned for Optmyzr. I mean, there is a lot of camaraderie and culture that gets absorbed by being together with the other people.

So what, once you’ve been around long enough, we’re okay. Like our engineers are hyper productive. Our support team is doing an amazing job. But it’s like those new people, like when they joined and they do an amazing job in the beginning too, but like, how long can that last until they’re like, they feel isolated.

Ben Bradshaw: Yeah, we rolled out our Facebook workplace and because that is just an amazing culture tool. The biggest concern we had was losing the culture. You know, we invested a lot of money into our offices and fit out and make them all very googly and, you know, all that stuff. But now we don’t need it, you know, really, in a silly way, as silly as it sounds.

So yeah there is definitely we’re still learning how to do it, but we’ve found like after this call, I’m doing a town hall with all the staff on workplace, a live Q and A and stuff. And you know, and culturally it’s really working well, you know. We do a wins of the week with all of it, all of the team and, and talk about client’s results, et cetera.

So it’s, we weren’t doing any of that stuff before COVID hit and it’s improved our business because of it. So it’s just I think there’s some positives here. Recruiting is the, is a challenge. I think, how do you recruit, but there’s video AI stuff. Now you can do. Leverage technology and you know, do, do stuff that way.

And you know, hang out interviews or zoom interviews and things like that. I actually recruited at EA during this time just cause I had so much going on and I’ve never met, met her physically and it’s, it’s, it’s worked out really, really well. So Yeah, I’m, I’m quite human. I dunno, she could be a deep fake or something.

I’ll

Frederick Vallaeys: yeah, for the folks who emailed me at some point to schedule a meeting with Clara, my admin, a lot of people really got to like her and find her so personable. And then eventually I’d be like. Sorry, she’s a robot. She really was not real. But now we have Jackie. Jackie works in Texas, an actual person.

Ben Bradshaw: That’s fantastic. Yeah, it’s It’s incredible. I think, you know, the technology, like if this hit, if the pandemic hit 10 years ago. Totally.

Mike Rhodes: Yeah. Different ballgame. Different ballgame. Zoom and Slack and yeah, it would be totally, totally different.

Ben Bradshaw: Yeah, we just, it’s we’re so lucky in the scheme of things that these technologies exist and they’re only going to get better and everything’s going to get expediated.

I think the interesting businesses, what we’ll see here is a new ecosystem of low end disruptors. into incumbent businesses and, you know, people that are kind of using technology to serve the same jobs to be done of, of what’s needed to be you know gyms, for example, personal training, and they’re using technology to do that online or whatever serving the same thing, but doing it in a different way with technology and doing it more efficiently.

They’re, they’re the businesses that I think are really going to succeed.

Mike Rhodes: Peloton’s share price is on a tear. I’ve gone from about 25 to 40. Yeah, just ripping it.

Ben Bradshaw: Wow. Wow. That’s incredible.

Frederick Vallaeys: And another interesting thing about Peloton is that everybody kind of assumes it’s the bike thing or now they’ve got the, the, the thread, the running machine, but they actually have yoga classes.

They have strength training, training, they have meditation. So even if you don’t have any equipment, they can still sell you a subscription.

Mike Rhodes: And they’re building this amazing. Library of content to say like some people just go through the same track over and over again. You find your favorites and you stick with it.

So

Ben Bradshaw: I’ve been living under a rock here. So what are they called? Peloton.

Mike Rhodes: They started as a, as a, yeah, as a stationary bike screen. And you do either a live class with your instructor. And so sort of getting that feeling of, of being in a spin class, but doing it.

Ben Bradshaw: Like a swift or something. Yeah. And

Mike Rhodes: bloody expensive.

Right. Fred, I mean, like the bike itself is it’s, it’s, it’s for the, yeah. I think the target market is people earning over a hundred K they stay in the States. Yeah. I think people have been amazingly. Resilient and amazingly adaptable. My team have been bloody brilliant. Everybody had worked from home typically one day a week mostly across the team leading up to this. And now obviously we’ve been fully worked from home. We went pretty early early March. And just, yeah, relaxing everything a bit. So, yeah, it’s fine if a kid runs in and sits on your lap during a Zoom. Or, yeah, we do Friday drinks and trivia nights and that sort of stuff over Zoom. Just, just relaxing.

Things a little bit more. I’ve been very lucky. Yeah. Sorry.

Frederick Vallaeys: No, I mean, as far as the relaxing, so I’ve worked from home for quite a long time, most of my team is in in our India office and we have a Santiago operation, but I put my webcam facing the back corner and I’d have the screen back there. So nobody would see it was my house and now it’s okay.

Like the camera, I’m like, there’s what I care about. Like I’ve got a poster of some astronauts, my bookshelf. Like I’m able to bring my personality into things without it being like. Oh, why does he work out of his house? Yeah. It’d be

Mike Rhodes: interesting though, like you said with your mate with the buying the house, I would imagine quite an expensive house given where you live.

I think, you know, what happens to property prices, I wish you’d probably keep this vaguely PPC, but you know, what happens there, I think we’ve all got the mindset that working from home is fine. And certainly in our industry, it’s, it’s normal. And you know, many mates that have remote only agencies Ralph Burns is a, is a particular one there with tier 11 in the States.

They’ve got 40 people. They’ve, they’ve always been remote only shout out actually to his VP Deakin. Who’s just, they’ve just launched a podcast to help people work remote. So I don’t know the name of that off the top of my head. I’ll try and find it in a minute, but that’s well worth. Checking out, if you search tier 11, you’ll probably find it.

But, you know, at the big end of town, you’ve got all of these companies that have got 5, 10, 20 year commercial leases. That’s, that doesn’t get unwound instantly. So there’s going to be this weird shift there where they’re still going to have to pay for all of that office space. But meanwhile, you’ve got a workforce that’s maybe questioning, do I really need to spend two hours a day in the car?

We, you said it was impossible before, but we just proved we can do it. Why do we need to come back in? So yeah, I think there’ll be a lot of hybrid models in the interim. And I suspect probably, I just think this whole thing accelerates a bunch of trends, stuff that was going to take 10 years gets squished into the next six, 12 months.

And I think there’ll be a lot of white collar. layoffs. A lot of bigger firms will use this as cloud cover to, you know, accelerate that automation and getting rid of a bunch of white collar positions over the next, I don’t know, six, 12 months, I suspect.

Ben Bradshaw: Yeah. I think there’s also, there’s bigger businesses or bigger, even traditional media or ones that were transitioning and they’re turning it, turning it and turning it.

And then they’ve been broadsided by this, this way. I think there’ll be some really, you know yeah, a year from today or six months from today, even we’re going to see some pretty big, big names. You know, that, that aren’t there anymore. Well, yeah, so I think staying nimble and being more like the jet boat and applying the technologies and.

You know yeah, I think our business will look completely different in a year’s time than it does today. And it’s, it’s not just weathering a storm, it’s learning to dance in the rain and come out of the storm really strong and, and, you know, how do we, you know, how do we take advantage of this?

Frederick Vallaeys: Michael, there is two people to also think a little bit about what is important and what you need to support, even if you’re not getting the value from it today. And so one of the industries, Ben, that you, I think you’re referring to is big media, right? Like newspapers, and they’re in such a tough spot right now because they’ve got tons of news to cover, but nobody wants to advertise against this type of news.

But at the same time, like getting good, solid news and reporting is so important to us. So. Like I’ve got my subscriptions going. I want to support that same thing with some of the local gyms, like as they transition and I’ll keep paying because I can, I’m one of the fortunate ones who has a job whose industry is fine.

Right. So kind of a call for all of us to put our dollars behind the things we want to have access to five years from now.

Ben Bradshaw: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a great point.

Frederick Vallaeys: But Hey, great conversation. We got about 10 minutes left, so I just want to give each of you a chance to maybe Have some closing thoughts or bring up something that was top of mind that we haven’t talked about. Whoever wants to take it first, I’m not going to call names because I did that last time. And all right, Mike, I see you and you got

Mike Rhodes: crickets. Yeah. Yeah, I just wanted to shout out all of our clients, I won’t mention names, but they did this wonderful remarketing campaign just to say thank you and not to patronize their customers and say, thank you to them, but to say thank you to the essential workers.

They work in food. So they, you know, they thank the farmers and, and the delivery drivers and just six second bumpers. Not trying to make a sale, but to Ben, your point before about, you know, money shifting between awareness and performance at this point. I just thought it was a brilliantly, they just nailed the tone of it really, really well.

It’s not going to cost them much at all, but I think it will buy them a lot of money. Goodwill. That was really well done. Yeah, that’s awesome.

Ben Bradshaw: Yeah, I guess my, my takeaway here is, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s time for us to really go above and beyond, you know, I think we always do that and we always should do that, but.

You know businesses are hurting and they’re struggling. They need help. They need guidance. And that’s certainly why it’s where we see our sort of place. And you know, it’s, it’s, we’ve got a duty of care to, to not just think about, you know, their Google ads as such, but, you know, other solutions. You know, how do we get a personal trainer that didn’t know how to use them to use them or whatever it is and go a bit above and beyond the day to day digital marketing, probably the thing to kind of help these businesses adapt and apply either e commerce or whatever it might be to survive you know, and the impact that we can have if we do that well.

is, you know, it’s, it’s it’s, it’s meaningful. So yeah,

Monte Huebsch: I’d like to just comment. I, I follow Bob Hoffman, the ad contrarian out of America. And, and I’ve watched the advertising agency and whether it’s Google or Facebook, and we’ve talked about AI and machine learning and Frederick, I’m not saying this to blow smoke up your backside, but I really appreciate the scripts that you make available through Optmyzr.

So that we can use some of those scripts to gain control back from all this automated bid and smart campaigns and everything else, where I think, and Facebook does it as well, you lose the transparency of the control of the, of the ad spend and, and what you can and can’t do. And you’ve built some excellent scripts that allow us to pull that back in.

And and not just trust whether it and I’m not going to pick on Google, but they’re a good target Anyway, whether you trust Google or Facebook to say, wait a minute. I want control of this. I want to see what’s going on in my campaigns and I want to I’m, not just going to trust the machine learning and ai anymore bring me back that control and to that end Like I say and i’m not blowing smoke up your backside frederick Your scripts are brilliant and being able to control that and so you know Appreciate that.

And I think that I think that’s more important, even with the, you know, dynamic search ads and just trust Google to do line one, two and three submissions and switch them around. And I’m like, No, you need to be creative. You need to have your U. S. But you need to have a message and you need to control that because it represents your brand and what you’re doing.

So I’m not convinced necessarily that all of the added automation tools and all of the A. I. And machine learning haven’t denigrated the marketing Traditions that have been around for a long time. And so regaining some of that control I think is very very important anyway, that’s just

Frederick Vallaeys: well, no, and that’s a great point because it’s funny right because on the one hand automated bidding gives us time to be marketers.

But then, like you said, now they want us to do RSAs and just have little components of ad text. But how do we craft a message that actually speaks to the consumer? And I was talking to someone earlier today, like every time you turn on the TV, every ad you see, it’s like, we’re all in this together. Like we feel your pain.

Thank you to the first responders. Right. And there’s nothing wrong with that messaging, but it becomes so stale so quickly. And it’s like let’s find solutions, like let’s get beyond this, right? And that’s a little bit the role that we have to play as marketers is what is the messaging that people One here, what’s going to move them right.

What’s going to get it back to as close to normal as we possibly can. And so automation can free up the time to let us do that, but it can also take away some of that control. And so if you want to see these scripts that Monty’s talking about, most of them are on search engine lens, search for my name.

And there’s actually a really cool one that I just wrote. Monty, you’ve probably seen it, but it’s the geo anomaly detector. And one thing that’s so challenging right now is I like, I’m talking to all three of you. In Australia. And I have no clue what’s happening in Australia. Like whether you can go to a restaurant.

I mean, I don’t even know between the three of you, you know, if you could go to a restaurant in each other’s cities right. And these very local impacts and differences and everything’s changing from day to day. How do you stay on top of that? So this geo anomaly detector is looking for anomalies in the combination of a specific geography.

And day of the week. So it would look and say, Oh, on a typical Tuesday, we’d expect 500 impressions for for this restaurants campaign. But yesterday we saw a thousand. Okay. It doesn’t change any bids, but it just tells you. Something may have changed in Melbourne. Go and take a look at that, right?

Something changed in Sydney, go take a look at that. And now you can make a decision. You can say, maybe we got to split that out to campaign because things are more stringent in this city versus that city. And now, you know, right. And to your point, Monty, it’s about not just letting the machine go wild, but knowing.

Mike Rhodes: And shout out to, for for Martin’s script. Although you’ve discussed it on a previous town hall, but For those in Oz that maybe haven’t seen that Martin’s script also on Search Engine LAN was a fantastic one too, to help you get a good overview of, you know, your numbers during COVID versus before.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, Martin Rotgerding wrote that script. I

Mike Rhodes: can never pronounce his last name.

Frederick Vallaeys: I, I sort of figured you weren’t going to go there, so I, I tried. I’m Belgian, so. His last name that one I’m actually a bit afraid of. Monty, how do you say your last name?

Monte Huebsch: Hipsch. Phonetically, H I P S H. Hipsch. But it’s a, it’s a German word actually spelled with an umlaut.

It’s Hupsch, which is the German word for pretty. So that’s a misnomer. I got a head made for radio, not television.

Frederick Vallaeys: Looks like you did get a haircut recently though. Unlike

Monte Huebsch: my COVID crew cut. Yep. All right guys,

Ben Bradshaw: there’s only two haircuts, right? It’s like you let it grow out or you do number two in COVID.

That’s a

Monte Huebsch: good call, man.

Frederick Vallaeys: Hey, well, Ben, Monty, Mike, it’s been a pleasure. Thanks for sharing a bit of what you guys are doing to make things work down under. Thanks for joining. So all the listeners will be posting this on YouTube. It’ll be available as a podcast. Please subscribe to that. We’re also going to do a roundup.

It’ll be on the Optmyzr blog soon. And I will try to include some of the links that we talked about as well as the data from Ben. So thanks everyone. Stay sane, stay safe. And we’ll see you for the next one. Thanks Fred. See

Monte Huebsch: you

Frederick Vallaeys: guys.

Monte Huebsch: Thanks all.