Ecommerce PPC: How to Stand Out in a Competitive Industry

Episode Description

The 2020s are already shaping up to be the decade of #eCommerce.

Whether your brands or clients are new to the game or looking to revitalize your presence, we’ve got experts on hand to show you how to stand out. Duane and Andrew have been running top-quality eCommerce campaigns for years, helping brands exponentially grow revenue and smash prior financial records.

This panel covers:

• How Duane’s team took one client from $650K annual revenue to $500K+ per month
• Andrew’s role in enabling one client to hit $200 million in annual revenue
• The secrets to standing out online in a cutthroat industry
• How to turn your brick-and-mortar store into a successful online business
• The right way to vet agencies, vendors, and 3rd-party service providers

Episode Takeaways

How Duane’s Team Took One Client from $650K Annual Revenue to $500K+ Per Month

• Duane highlighted the importance of building a solid advertising foundation on major platforms like Google and Facebook before exploring other channels. This approach ensures a stable influx of conversions and allows for scalable growth.
• He emphasized the role of comprehensive ad copy and strategic campaign structuring in driving successful conversions and significantly boosting revenue.

Andrew’s Role in Enabling One Client to Hit $200 Million in Annual Revenue

• Andrew discussed how leveraging local and personalized approaches, even in the digital space, can significantly impact a brand’s growth. He shared how infusing local culture and personalized service into the client’s strategy helped differentiate them from giants like Wayfair, fostering substantial revenue growth.

The Secrets to Standing Out Online in a Cutthroat Industry

• Both speakers underscored the importance of brand differentiation. Whether through unique product offerings, superior customer service, or engaging local culture in marketing efforts, distinguishing your brand is crucial in a competitive marketplace.

How to Turn Your Brick-and-Mortar Store into a Successful Online Business

• The transition from physical to online stores must include a robust digital marketing strategy. Andrew and Duane recommended starting with core channels like Google and Facebook to build a reliable customer acquisition funnel before branching out.

The Right Way to Vet Agencies, Vendors, and 3rd-Party Service Providers

• The discussion highlighted the necessity of choosing partners who align with your business goals and understand the intricacies of your industry. Agencies should not only manage accounts but also contribute to strategic growth and operational efficiency.

Episode Transcript

Frederick Vallaeys: Hello and welcome to another episode of PPC Town Hall. My name is Fred Vallaeys. I’m your host today, and I’m also the co founder at Optmyzr. So for today’s session, we we just started Q4. So we thought, let’s talk a little bit more about Q4 PPC. And that really means e commerce brands going into their strongest, biggest, and busiest quarter.

So we’re actually very fortunate to have two experts who’ve built amazing e commerce PPC. Campaigns driven tremendous growth. And somehow they found time at the start of Q4 to still come and talk to us and share some of their secrets. They also happen to be both in Canada, so we’re gonna call this the Canada PPC Town Hall episode.

So really excited to talk to our two guests today. So welcome to PPC Townhouse.

All right. Welcome to Andrew and Duane, both of you are returning guests. So one thing we like to do on these shows, as you both know, is tell everyone where you’re calling in from and everyone watching, please say hello and tell us where you’re at today. So why don’t we start with with you, Andrew?

Andrew Goodman: Okay, well, I’ll get out of the way. You can see the sign behind me. So if you get off at Jane station there you could Go to the car park, which apparently in 1951 was the term they used to use in Canada, as well as the UK for parking lot. No, but I am actually today in Atlantic Canada coming to you from a Fredericton, New Brunswick.

Frederick Vallaeys: Oh, Fredericton. I like that name. I’m in a Andrewville today. No, I’m in Los Altos. And Andrew, tell us a bit more about yourself. So you run page zero. You’ve been in PPC basically as long as I knew as PPCs existed, right?

Andrew Goodman: Yeah, that’s right. I actually wrote the world’s first ebook and full length book on Google ads.

And at some point met Fred when he was the AdWords evangelist at Google we were on panels together and so we built a growing, but still small agency that has focused on largely paid media, especially Google ads, especially shopping, and especially e commerce and, and that

Frederick Vallaeys: just kind of keeps on chugging.

Nice. Well, you’ve done some amazing things. So we’ll find out about that in just a minute here. Welcome back. Duane, this is your third PPC town hall. Good to see you again. Where are you calling us from today?

Duane Brown: Well, last time I was in Montreal, we did this right last year at this time. And I am now back home in my original home, Toronto, Canada, in the West end.

Andrew Goodman: West is best.

Duane Brown: You know, it’s all good in Canada. I’ve lived in a few places and it’s all amazing. Really.

Frederick Vallaeys: And now tell us a bit about your business story.

Duane Brown: Yeah. About five years ago, almost I started an agency cause a lot of friends were just frustrated with hiring people to run, you know, Google ads, shopping ads, Facebook, stuff like that.

So we mostly deal with a lot of American brands and we’ve got a few Canadian and a few clients out in the UK and Europe and brands will come to us for one or two reasons, either they struggle to crack a channel, you know, we get a lot of brands who are only on Facebook and like, we need help with this Google thing.

Cause we don’t get it. Or a lot of brands are like, we figured out how to make this work at 000. But how do we get to a hundred or 200, 000? And that’s where a lot of our team spends their time. But in the summer we hired someone to help with growth or intention, which really is like SMS and email marketing.

So we’re taking that on for clients as well, because it’s one thing to acquire customers, this paid media, and even use that paid media to try to upsell. But to combine that with email it’s like back in the day when it was paid and SEO, well, these days it’s paid in email. It’s a two one, two punch for helping brands grow.

Frederick Vallaeys: Okay. Awesome. So yeah, we’ll talk a lot about when you want to hire someone to help you, why should you hire an agency? What should you look at? But maybe let’s start with some of the success stories and Andrew. I know you’ve got like an amazing story to share but the question that’s out there is okay Everything’s changed right?

We know that now maybe you’ve been a traditional brand not doing a ton of stuff online but online has existed ppc has existed for over 20 years like Is it just too late to be in this game or can you still go from nothing to something really amazing? I think you’ve proven that it’s doable. So i’d love to hear a little bit about what you’ve done

Andrew Goodman: Is that for me fred?

Yeah, sure. And hello, johannesburg. Yeah, I so before going to the end of the spectrum, which is one of our larger clients. That’s a great question there. And you know what? There’s a segment of that business that they do play in that you could be specialized in. It’s a new client we have very small in confections and kind of little luxury treats, including some skincare.

But the it’s, it’s treat yourself world here. And chocolate would be an example, a cocktail bitters and all of these kinds of hipster treats that aren’t good for you. So this client is doing just fine. And we were bootstrapping and I actually know his physical store. It was outside a an apartment I kept In West End Toronto, small condo and it was a new pop up kind of bodega with little treats and healthy dinners.

So they have healthy food in the store, but not on the website. I think they’ve got a great positioning and a great customer service orientation. And so, at least in the Canadian market, no, I think the growth is, is in front of us. For the right choices the right the right positioning just case in point as to where the growth and innovation can come from I heard a nice interview, on cbc actually, Radio driving across the country about subscription boxes North america wide and how many new subscription box services there are and how addicted consumers are getting to Choosing just to have stuff come to their house every month.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah subscription fatigue, right? I think I spent thousands of dollars on various subscriptions at this point and You can get it

Andrew Goodman: for your dog. This, this one lady got a thing now, there’s a new one, I don’t know if this is true, but they said the pet pig, she got subscribed to all the treats and food and toys that your pet pig might want.

I, I have no idea.

Frederick Vallaeys: Hey going very niche is good because it makes it easier to pick the right keywords and find your target audience. So okay. So you took the confectionery business and what was the story with that? I mean, how did you grow that online?

Andrew Goodman: It’s extremely early stage, but it’s a nice story.

The same person who is managing that big account which we will refer to as not Walgreens is managing this account. So we have the expertise. And the knowledge you know, you focus in on the keys as I’m sure Duane would agree. I mean, Google shopping will drive the kind of behavior that we need.

And so we make sure that’s being done, right. And we build out the categories we feel are hot because it’s bootstrapping. We can’t afford to spend too much. But also there’s the strategy aspect, the coaching of, Hey, this guy is completely new to these channels. He’s got a great rapport with brick and mortar customers, and they’ve been enjoying packing up the boxes themselves like a picture of Bezos in 1995 or whatever it was.

But so from there we opened his eyes to what Duane mentioned email is on the team of channels. He hasn’t really considered it because he just thought it was outmoded. We talked about the difference between you know, whether you care too much about your organic Facebook presence versus getting into a paid program.

And then we talked about, yeah, remarketing and Facebook. It’ll be your first baby steps. So, so the focus is definitely Google ads and some, some normal conventional keyword campaigns and shopping. But now he’s aware of how the growth will kind of play out and that there’s a lot of it open to him. And, and that’s useful because you’re going to be overwhelmed if you’re not planning for customer service hires for a better logistics and to think about, well, when your business triples in size.

Where will you be? And then when it doubles again, where will you be?

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. And that’s the thing that was always fascinating to me when I worked at Google is that the PPC, it’s like, it’s this massive scale that you can get to. And if you’re a small business, you can actually get into those problems that you said, where your level of service and quality goes down, your delivery times get slower because you’re just not prepared to deal with that volume.

And so I think for the last 20 years as PPC experts, we’ve just lived in this world of infinite supply and infinite customers. But now we’re actually in a situation where the supply is no longer infinite. And we’re looking at supply chain crunches and we look at shipping containers costing five, six times what it took before.

Product mix is changing as a result of that. I was just reading in the wall street journal today that I believe it’s a whirlpool. They’re basically saying, Hey, we don’t sell. Cheap dishwashers anymore because when we put those on the container and we have to pay, you know, 40, 000 to ship that instead of 20, 000 instead of 4, 000, you know, per cheap dishwasher, that’s too much money.

That’s too much of our margin. And you know, dishwasher, whether it’s expensive or cheap, it’s the same size, right? It has to fit in the same hole. So it’s much better for them to sell the expensive ones. And so it’s like all these new questions that we have to deal with in PPC. And I’m kind of curious. Has that come, you know, in play with any of your clients, the product mixes that you have and kind of like how you deal with that?

Andrew Goodman: Well, I think it’s Duane’s turn, but I, I, I will, I will definitely chime in. Duane, you’ve been given the floor. Okay. Well, I will comment before Duane Yeah,

Duane Brown: go Andrew, go.

Andrew Goodman: Fred, it now feels a bit like we’re on the financial News talking about these global trends of the supply chain as an example of what could be leading to inflation and there’s this denial of of inflationary pressures in the global economy right now.

And that being said, if Chinese demand collapses due to the property lender meltdown, then that pulls us back into no inflation. But but when it comes to everyone has to buy a dishwasher that’s 50 percent more expensive. Are we factoring this into the consumer price index? There is so many costs for the consumer that have risen in the past year or two.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, exactly. And then, and Duane, I mean, pipe in here whenever you want, but it’s fascinating that, you know, there’s so much pressure on pricing right now. And so. And I wrote an article about this, right? But basically as a business, you can do one of many things. You can raise the prices for your consumers, or you can have less profit, or you can say to your PPC agency, well, Hey guys, you guys have been running like at really good margins, but make your cost per acquisition.

Much lower, right? So is there a lot of pressure coming to you as part of this equation? Where everything’s getting more expensive and they don’t want to I mean the last one you want to piss off is your consumer like Yeah, go ahead and piss off your agency. I mean, they’re just working for us, right?

Like does that happen?

Duane Brown: Yeah I mean we have that pressure Across all those three different touch points, I think we’ve got like, we’ve got a couple different toy clients who sell obviously toys for kids, you know, one’s like, well, you know, three used to be good a couple years ago. Now we need a five just because of the supply chain issue shipping is a lot more expensive, even though what they sell is a lot of third party toys that six to 10 other, you know, third party ecom sites sell online.

And You know, there’s sell toys that are North American based APAC based brands from Europe. So there’s definitely challenges there, but, you know, as their agency, we accept that that’s just part of the course. You know, when you see news articles earlier this year in February, come out and say, there’s a supply and chain issue, or you can’t get X, you know, I assume at some point I’ll get an email from some clients saying we need better numbers.

You know, even a couple of years ago, we started to take on clients that sell more expensive products. And when I say more expensive, I don’t mean, you know. Gucci or Vivian or Burberry, which are all expensive products. I mean, expensive products relative to the rest of the market, you know, i. e. We sell 150 pajamas when most brands sell pajamas for 20, 30, 50, and maybe Amazon sells it for 90.

And so really talking with clients over the last couple of years of, you know, what are their costs? How much profit do they make? How can they afford to give away, you know, 10 percent on someone who signs up for the first time? You know, where do we want that? You know, ROAS or CPA or revenue goal to sit month on month so we can reinvest in the business, you know, these conversations are not normal for us as an agency, because we don’t just run accounts, you know, lots of agencies will just run accounts, but we want to try to understand like how our clients business works because most of our clients and I don’t know if Andrew experiences as well.

Most of our clients are creative people. They’re not business people. They’ve made a product, whatever it is, and they’re really great at that. But running a business is maybe not their strength. And so as an agency, we want to help support them. Port them, make sure they operationalize their business a lot more, make it more effective so that there’s more room to do what we need to do, which is like spend money on paid and grow the business.

And so that means, you know, for some clients, they waste a lot of time and money on apps that don’t make sense or apps they don’t need, or they buy services because someone was really quick at, we still like at sales. And so helping clients like clap the distance and the tech stack they use and be more efficient, allowed us to like.

Pull more money out of the business and dump it into advertising and mitigate some of the issues that we see now with supply chain also our Canadian clients make their product in Canada. So we don’t have to worry about things coming from China, but for clients who do, it’s one of those just hurry up and wait and just wait for stuff to come in and other clients, like we have a mountain bike client who sells mountain bikes every month.

It’s like, well, we didn’t get it this month. So we’ll get it next month or two months from now. And that’s just the way it’s been for the last, you know, two years that we had them as a client, even before the pandemic happened. So I think it’s like.

Frederick Vallaeys: Challenging,

Duane Brown: but not new.

Frederick Vallaeys: And the other question that raises for me then is like with these mountain bikes, right, so it takes two, three months to get these mountain bikes, so if you look at car dealerships, they’re basically sold out for all their future allocated inventory.

Yep. So, why advertise?

Andrew Goodman: Oh,

Frederick Vallaeys: the why

Andrew Goodman: advertise was a big big problem for us. Fortunately we don’t have car dealers or car, car manufacturers as clients. And by the way, I I decided to get my car a couple months ago and because they were running out and I’m so glad now I’m, I’m, I’m set.

Frederick Vallaeys: Here I am stocking up on toilet paper and Andrew is stocking up on cars.

Just

Andrew Goodman: the one but it is white, so it matches your toilet paper, I hope.

Frederick Vallaeys: I actually got the pumpkin spice yeah, paper,

Andrew Goodman: Right. So this, this generally hasn’t affected us, but it, it’s scary affected us just after the pandemic hit. When are are not Walgreens big client in Canada. And by the way, I have to give a shout out to the account manager, Megan and, and Allie.

They’re the ones that do this and have grown these clients along with myself and the team. So they stopped advertising entirely. And it, it was a big budget that grew every year for 10 years for us. And has resumed growing, but they stopped advertising all advertising, all channels due to the, through the roof ROAS and their supply crunches, warehouse problems, COVID outbreak in the warehouse have to raise wages in the warehouse.

Um, they, I think it was six weeks, so just a dead stop for six weeks. And you know what that that’s a hiccup in the grander scheme of our business But a we didn’t have much to do for them during that time But b, you know, it’s like any Crisis, you don’t know when you’re in it if it will evade soon when you know fix itself.

But other than that, There’s enough balance on many of our clients businesses that, indeed they, like Duane alluded to, they become I’ve never seen anything like this, after all these years of pressures downward on, Conversion rates on ROAS higher CPCs, the buying behavior and the ROAS that clients got suddenly during and, and still during the pandemic is like this treat, they, they get to get accustomed to this new normal of Incredible economics.

And I think the, the big issue for me is that to prepare people for that return to normalcy, right? Like, well, what the hell is wrong? You know, you’re only getting a 10 row. That’s what, what are you doing wrong? So every, every party has to come to an end and I’m sure it will soon.

Frederick Vallaeys: And I’m curious for Duane.

So when you were looking at ROAS, do you guys measure it as. Basket value or do you measure it as a margin? Do you account for returns because I can imagine in certain scenarios like you had the consumers flush with cash from government handouts and Spending a lot of money But then at the same time The profits are going down for some of the brands who you know have to spend more to make it spend more to ship it So how is robust actually like?

Used by you guys to make it true

Andrew Goodman: Yeah, I think you have to look at all of the metrics. You have to be driving towards understanding Average order size as a feature of the whole business and lifetime value as a feature of the whole business So it kind of works on two tracks the roas Thing is just kind of a shorthand in different campaigns For this client, the big one also they took the savvy move early on and we’re so grateful for them.

They’re analytical after they were kind of got some funding and got new board members and brand new you know, sort of seasoned management, Harvard MBA people with McKinsey consulting experience. So this is a high powered team. Cost per new customer and genuinely pretty much new customers.

We’re pretty sure that, and it’s not some Google analytics. You know new it’s the unique new identifier in in the back end that that’s the most important thing to focus in on arguably for a growing business If someone’s trying to whether it’s Google’s algorithm, whether it’s an agency that’s lazy, whether it’s anyone that’s lazy, if all you’re doing is is growing slowly and, and you know, getting a high ROAS from half of them are already your customers versus accepting the pain of paying up for growth and then reaping the war, the reward many years down the road with with a much, you know, higher customer base and And of course, lifetime value that

Frederick Vallaeys: right.

So you heard it here from Andrew focus on the right goals and have a smart business people from Harvard and those actually should be. And then that kind of like,

Duane Brown: I just don’t want to say though. So to your question earlier though, about like, why still advertising when you have cars, I’m actually dating someone who sells cars.

And so. The true answer is because everyone’s going to buy used cars and used cars cost as much as a new car right now, but I think it’s no different. I think for Andrew’s clients, at least for ours is like, even if you don’t have product. Hey, you’ve got product X to sell, you know, you’d only really turn things off if you had nothing to sell or like a by client last year, I had to move to a warehouse that’s three times the size because of growth.

And so they had to like shut down ads for, you know, the month of August. So they could move things. Cause you couldn’t like move a warehouse and try to ship stuff. Cause customer service is important overall.

Frederick Vallaeys: You want to have like a nice. Pause on that one customer service is important overall No, that makes sense. And so like with these car dealers what I find fascinating too then is like say that you’re a ford dealer so you got your whole campaign built out around forge, right? And that’s what you sell That’s what you know, you’re going to sell but all of a sudden that’s the thing that is basically sold out.

It’s allocated Yet the thing that you still have to sell are used cars And you never know what used car is going to drive onto your lot could be a tesla could be a gm That could be a lot For all we know I don’t know if anyone’s ever seen a lot in this country, but my mom used to drive on back and Oh,

Andrew Goodman: there were a lot of them.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, we’re there But yeah, so so the problem with that is now you get this like this constant flux, right So, how do you prepare your campaigns to be running for those vehicles that you don’t really know until the day drives onto your lot That that’s the thing you have to sound like do you constantly sit in those accounts?

Updating it. So I, I, I’m curious, like in previous Q4s, do you find like your campaigns were set up and you were like, okay, this is going to be what it’s going to be for Q4. And we’re just going to run with that. And the only thing we change is maybe budgets and bids. Do you find that this year you’re more prepared for changing product lines when something goes out of stock, something else has to replace it, or do you think it’s mostly status quo?

Duane Brown: I think we’ve always changed product lines in the sense of like, if something sells out early, or a client doesn’t have anything anymore, we’ll stop running ads, you know, i. e. One client sold out of candles at the end of October last year, because we just sold so much in September, October that we had to Like pull back on that and switch to other products.

You know, I said this last year and I say it the last couple years in general, you know, I think what we do is really like the housing market in the sense that like if demand and supply are increasing at the same level, you know, during black Friday, there’s no reason to spend all day during black Friday change in bids.

You should focus on like what you said, Fred is really what your budget is and where your budget is going, whether it’s, you know, Google, Microsoft, Facebook. platform that’s going on and making sure you’re optimizing your budgets, the right platforms where you can maximize your revenue, you know, agencies and brands who spend all day fiddling with bids during Black Friday or wasting their time because a data isn’t in real time, never will be in real time.

Google can’t and Facebook can’t predict what’s going to happen in the future because every Black Friday, every Christmas is way better in the sense of more sales than the year before. I’m reporting is always delayed 24 hours, 24 Two days, whatever it is, depending on like what platform you’re on. So we focus on optimizing our budgets and just making sure we have the right product in there and have close communication with across our clients of like if something sells out, let us know if we don’t notice it and we’ll Push spend where we need to push spend and then eventually just turn off ads if we sold out early like last year We turned off ads Sunday afternoon because our client sold out of all their toys like there’s nothing you can do about it Really?

I mean, it’s a good problem to have obviously, but there’s nothing you can do about it

Frederick Vallaeys: But here’s a really good question from Rossini how do you approach e com clients that have been kind of stuck with the same budget for years And maybe don’t acknowledge the fact that ppc in general the marketplace has gotten more expensive the opportunity is there But you also need to put more budget against it.

How do you have that conversation as far as You know, maybe forecasting budgets and telling people how much they should allocate to this.

Duane Brown: Yeah. I mean, we had a question asked with a client the other day, like they’re like, Oh, we want to double our revenue from last year. So let’s say, you know, as an example, get to a million dollars over Q4, you know, I’m like, okay, well that’s fine.

But you have to realize if you’ve got. You know, the report we built last year and the report in 2019, you know, you easily see from September, October to November, your CPCs and your CPMs are just increasing every month. So if you want to do more of this Christmas, you’re just gonna have to spend more money now.

It’s fine not to want to spend more money. We’re okay with that, but you can’t have this expectation. You’re going to double your revenue without changing your budgets. You know, we try to really set expectations, at least with our clients before we sign someone that if you come with us, you’re going to want to have to spend more money in the long run, right?

You starting out at five or 10 or 20 and never moving the Budget there. Unless you’re talking to a small country doesn’t make sense financially for an agency like ours because we really limit the number of clients we take on. So we want clients who want to grow their business. And that could be from like half a million to a million, half a million to 5 million.

But you want to grow it somewhere to at least in the low seven figures so that you can like Build a business that makes sense to have like an agency and maybe like a marketing person internally or an email person in turn or some sort of team to support you. Because unless you want to be a half a million dollar business and just be yourself, it’s hard to run a business just by yourself.

Andrew Goodman: Yeah. We’ve faced a mix of of scenarios and I, I can probably break it down into three types of clients. The one that is moving into PPC and moving into digital more and is going to require a year or two to, to digest it, including a year or two to trust that we drive performance there in the middle somewhere.

And I’m, I’m so pleasantly surprised because when you draw a scenario up on a playbook and, and you know, you’d always think for an agency growth might be hard to achieve or new client growth might be hard to achieve, And you say some of these middle range clients are the meat of what could grow for us and then they turn around and grow.

That’s great. You know, it, it diversifies us away from reliance on our bigger clients. There is that other type that we’ve, we’ve actually had clients, very few, but they have been very. Slow to grow for over a decade. I think that that’s characterized in some cases by they have other things going on in the business and and so their e commerce, let’s say it’s e commerce component is, is not make or break and maybe it’s a family run business and they just feel like they want that hyper profit, you know, they want that cautious view.

Normally we would get eventually impatient and. In this case, it doesn’t cost us too much to, to keep running it. But but, but our recommendation is your, your targets should be shifting. They enjoy a huge ROI on these campaigns and then there’s everybody else, especially the pure plays where they really like growth.

And and so I guess my answer to Rossini would be definitely that client, like Duane said that client might not Be one that you should focus on. Because you will become

Frederick Vallaeys: stagnant. Right. So keep doing the basics for them. Keep them happy at the budgets they’re at. And then the education portion as well, right?

Like Duane was saying, I mean, if you want to double your business with the same budget, that means half the CPC. Which means probably dropping to a much lower position, probably getting a lot of junk traffic and probably something that may not even be possible. Likely not be possible. Good. Another question from Al coming in here, but they’ve got an online flower delivery.

And now I’m curious if you are an agency or you are the flower delivery service potentially looking for an agency, like our two panelists here but so the average 50 orders per day over the past couple of years, so it seems like pretty steady, and the breakdown was 75 percent on search, 25 percent on Facebook social.

Should they do shopping ads?

Duane Brown: Yeah, they should. I mean, we worked on a shopping client last year. I can tell you what it is. It’s FTD for flowers. So like the biggest shopping brand there more or less is, and obviously you can’t say what they spent, but they spent a lot of money on shopping. If you’re in e commerce and you’re not running shopping ads You should try it out.

You should test it out. There’s no reason not to. You know, the only challenge where it’s hard to run shopping is if the price point of your product is obscenely more expensive than the other average products in the marketplace, then you might not get tons of traffic because obviously Google Shopping is a marketplace and the cheapest price is what rises to the top.

Hence why we see lots of Wayfair ads when you do searches for furniture. But if you’re not running it now, you definitely should. Because, you know, it’s not just search. It’s not just shopping. It’s search and shopping together. If you want to scale and just make some really good profit.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. I mean, dominate everywhere, right?

Like have your SEO, have your PPC, have your Shopping ads,

Duane Brown: even discovery ads on Google does really well for a lot of e commerce brands if you have a very visual product

Frederick Vallaeys: And so al is an agency their client is cheaper than ftd. So he looks like they’re in good shape Let’s talk about feed optimization for a second, right?

So because when we talk about going into shopping ads like when you were just saying the thing that Convinces the consumer to buy is no longer the beautiful pros that we’ve written in the ads. It’s the picture and the price point. And so how do you optimize for that? Like, do you guys use tools to monitor prices and like go a penny below the the next lowest price or what do you do?

Duane Brown: Andrew, do you want to go first this time?

Andrew Goodman: Why not? I’m glad we’re still on shopping. First of all, that 50 orders a day sounds like a healthy volume and you could grow that and volume is part of the equation with shopping as all of us on this panel and many of you know Google shopping is a machine learning environment that works on a large data set much better than when it can’t learn on a small number of SKUs.

So, for anything that scales, we learn, we’ve, you know, finally came around to understand what kind of animal the feed is. There are a lot of fields to optimize and, and, you know, data governance, if you will, policies, it’s pretty specialized realm and at scale, I can’t see us manually optimizing so many you know so many titles and descriptions and, and categories.

Manually at scale which is why we use the partner and I’m happy to say who they are. It’s Feednomics. They’re, you know, kind of a combined expert service and, and technology that that allows it to scale and optimize a very large feed and and also strategic advice. So for us. We work with feednomics.

We work with the partner to obviously to drive the process and, and to, to bid accurately and so on in terms of testing around price and things like that, I don’t know that that’s necessarily the key. If you have a large number of SKUs, they’re in different colors. You have good images. And your display URL has some positioning to it and it’s short.

I mean then I’m, not so sure that you need to come in at the lowest price Google seems to and fred you you might have a view on this I’ve seen Google testing the waters deliberately, you know, using their obviously it’s not manual, but the testing is happening by presenting a, a menu of where the price point is ambiguous, where it could be a cheap or an expensive product.

Usually there is a range. And we’re getting away from that single business kind of running the table and having their products all five or six showing. So I think Google is, yeah, is trying to, trying to offer that as a testing point. So I’m not too concerned about impression share being through the roof.

As long as we maintain our prices, as long as we maintain good margins.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. I mean, not too much of a perspective other than obviously Google’s all this testing and they put different things in the algorithm. And I think what I was alluding to a little bit more was the fact that consumers just by and large are very price driven.

And then I’m not saying that the lowest price is going to get the best position in the ads automatically. You have to have good reviews. You have to have good site quality. I mean, obviously Google cares about click through rates, all of that stuff. But then, you know, when you have those eight ads on the page or whatever the number is You know, consumers are pretty price sensitive and it’s interesting too, because I suppose in flowers, every bouquet is a little bit different, but if somebody’s shopping for a Nike t shirt, well, you know, it’s that specific t shirt and Dick’s Sporting Goods has one price and Nike has a different price and Amazon has another price.

So why wouldn’t I go with the one with the cheapest price? Right.

Andrew Goodman: Unless you know Dick’s Sporting Goods and you have a, a, Golf club in your mind that you also want to buy that day, which happens, right. But, but certainly the small to mid-size business, if, if they are going to just join the fray in a race to the bottom and have no positioning that will allow them to winnow their way into a consumer’s mind and heart and mind, then they probably shouldn’t launch that business.

‘cause you’re gonna lose the race to the bottom up against Walmart.

Duane Brown: Yeah, I mean, we’ve never taken a client that won a race to the bottom on price. It’s unsustainable. Costco, Walmart. equivalent in your own home country. If you don’t have either of those always went out at the end of the day or Amazon as the case may be.

So we’d never do that. I think in terms of optimizing, you know, shopping feeds, you know, like Andrew, we’ve been in feedonomics. We’ve been with them since 2017. It was one of our early bets as an agency because we realized, you know, to spend all day to optimize by SKUs or 10, 000 SKUs, you know, Not that it was a waste of time, but it was inefficient of our time and use a tool to help automate a lot of that would make more sense.

Now, not all our clients value us using a tool to do it. Something we should just do it by hand, but we only take on clients who understand that, like, if we spend all day on this, we charge you a lot more money for our services because it’s just, it’s a grind, you know, it’s like when Shopify hires 2000 engineers, they are brute forcing their way to success.

Well, we are not going to hire. 20 interns to optimize your shopping feeds by hand because it’s a waste of our time. I think even if you’re a small business though, you know, our experience tells us that if you want to beat your competitors, have a better shop and feed. Most people spend all their time or 80 percent of their time in their campaigns when they should be spent 80 percent of their time in their shop and feed.

And so even if you’re not a large brand, you can still beat them as a small brand by having a better shop and feed. If you’re in apparel, that means filling out things like gender, color, age, pattern, material, things that your competitors won’t. Do because quite frankly, they were lazy or and or too busy.

If you’ve got a better shop and feed, you will outrank your competition. If you’re price competitive and you’ve got a great bid.

Frederick Vallaeys: And that’s, what’s so interesting is that when we talk about optimizing Google ads, that used to mean go into the AdWords front end and do everything in there, but nowadays there’s so much structured data coming in and optimizing your feed is one thing, right.

And optimizing how you report conversions and value and how that Ties to your TRO ads target. Those are the things that are sort of at the boundary of the ads ecosystem, but those are the optimizations that actually have much more meaning in this machine learning driven automated advertising.

By the way, I mean, since I am the CEO of Optmyzr and everybody’s been saying Fibonomics so we’ve actually built a a feed optimization tool. Cool. It’s in beta. So anyone who wants to test it out, just email the support team. And we have some automation capabilities there as well for someone who hasn’t who hasn’t done feed optimization before.

Duane Brown: Even Fred, your, your tool also lets you build shopping campaigns really quickly and efficiently. We love that as an agency, you know, so you don’t want to not mention that as well. Exactly.

Frederick Vallaeys: No, I had to do the shameless plug, but I appreciate it coming from a customer as well. And Andrew, you guys are customers too for full.

We are. So thank you. Um, okay. U. S. marketing is asking about Etsy. So let’s talk a little bit about new platforms. Has anyone experimented with Etsy? Like TikTok, very, current is that something we should be on and what do you do on instagram and facebook and whatsapp stop working for a day

Duane Brown: Yeah, I mean we’ve got clients on snap and tiktok and these are clients You’ve maxed out what they can do on google or they’ve maxed out what they can do on facebook as well And they want to like just test at other platforms or try to do a lot more top of funnel stuff and go for awareness I think You know, a lot of brands want to jump on Tik TOK or platform because it’s hot and popular in the news.

And they really need to focus on building the fundamentals of their business, i. e. If they’re building the house, you’ve got to build a basement first. And for us as an agency, we say the basement first is building a really strong ad platform that works really well, whether it’s Google or Facebook or Google and Facebook together, you know, obviously depending on what you sell, maybe the rules won’t let you be on Google or won’t let you be on Facebook, but if you can be on both, you should be on both platforms and have the confidence that when you go.

Away from work on a Friday and you come back on Monday, you’ve got an idea of how many sales are going to come in because you’ve built a machine that just brings in business on a consistent basis. And then you can worry about going on snap or tick talk or Etsy. We don’t have anyone on Etsy, but we have clients who do run ads on Amazon.

And then obviously Amazon runs shopping ads to direct people to the Amazon site. And so we compete with our shopping ads that go to the website. And so the challenge always is. You know, how do we get more share volume, click share volume than Amazon? And, you know, it’s a conversation we have with the client because we quite frankly can’t beat Amazon.

And so we know that like when we run shopping with these clients, we set expectation that your ROAS will not be better than Amazon. Amazon’s us and it’s pretty much guaranteed. And so our goal is to acquire as much. of the extra market share that Amazon doesn’t have and beat out the competition and competitors to be like basically second place, if you will.

I don’t always think that’s the right strategy. I think people should direct more people to the website because when you direct to Amazon, you give Amazon most of your, most of your money. You also give them all your customer data. You give them all your pixel data. You know, you can’t upsell this customer in the future.

And so I think more brands should direct people to the website, but every brand has different goals. And so I’m one, I direct. more people to their Amazon store.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And so US marketing was clarifying that question. I think you just answered it, but is it okay to, you know, pay for ads and have it drive traffic to Etsy where you are now one of the many options and probably the ad goes to you, but then consumers might actually not buy it from you.

Andrew Goodman: This this question got me thinking about the business models of not just Etsy, but companies that you wouldn’t think are the same or similar to Etsy. And I just checked it because I know like as a consumer, you know, I started running across more custom crafty things for the house pandemic mind. I got it. I threw out my soap dishes. They were plastic and they’re awful. If you need soap, some people don’t like soap. But if you use the bar you need a dish. And so I got a stone soap dish, eight colors. You can choose your color. Fred will get pumpkin spice. So at Etsy stock price soared five full during the pandemic and it stayed at that lofty level.

The same thing happened to Wayfair. And, you know, to some extent, companies like Wayfair aren’t as different from Etsy as we might think. I mean, they are middlemen to some extent. Etsy is just positioned differently. And beyond what we see in terms of being a distributor or retailer, we also see marketplaces being attached to. So that’s a whole topic for the next session. PPC town hall, right? Amazon has a marketplace. Well, so does Walmart, Best Buy, and and, you know, so does that Houseware site, House, and, you know, 400 marketplaces. So, that makes the answer even more obvious. That this etsy would be an add on for most businesses.

I know many craft businesses became etsy first And kind of like let them take over but no way Absolutely not. If there’s any bandwidth at all To learn about your own direct sales in any channel, including Google shopping, definitely take that opportunity.

Frederick Vallaeys: And speaking of Wayfair, it’s come up a few times.

So say that you’re not Wayfair and you want to compete against Wayfair. Andrew, any thoughts?

Andrew Goodman: Yeah. So are small and let’s, let’s mix this together with the fact that this is. The Canada episode so both those two clients that I refer to not Walgreens and not Wayfair are both not American also.

And, and that’s been an important almost impossible to underestimate the point of that in terms of launching an e commerce business in Canada for Canadians. And maintaining that growth, maintaining that positioning. The reason that not Walgreens was a favorite was in part because they were the only non conglomerate, non sorry pure play, non bricks e commerce startup in Canada.

They, they were funded before anyone was getting VC. They started with 200, 000 seed money and so on and then got other investment. So people know that and they know the same about the Knott Wayfair, the tiny originally one retail location, modern furniture store we took on. So, yeah, how do you, by saying you’re not Wayfair, that’s a good start.

And then, so what do you do? You here are a few things that they did. And, I don’t know, there’s a lot that we did also, because we managed every channel. Every all channels and helped with the website too. So we really ran a lot of things. But what they did was, of course develop a cache similar to how you might if you imprinted your own style and relationships with distributors in one retail location at where you’re consulting with clients and designers, a lot outfitting the house with a certain branch of modern, helping them pick and choose.

So you know, what’s interesting is Wayfair will have people probably like automated, kind of almost robocall people consult with you on your choice and so on. But Helen and Anna were real people. It was like watching one of those shows where it’s like a, not a Martha Stewart, not Martha, Martha Stewart.

You almost feel like you know them and that they’ve decided to replace all of the traditional or used or gross furniture in your home with a branch of modern.

Frederick Vallaeys: So that’s the planning element to that, right? So you’re kind of saying that there’s a huge brand element to it, that you have that brand that’s beloved in Canada because it’s Canadian, it’s homegrown.

So, so when you put that into play, I mean, does it, is it about your messaging? Do you have to message that in the ads or is the brand so well known that once people see the name, it’s like, Oh yeah, that’s those people we want to buy from them. Yeah, so it

Andrew Goodman: plays as a team in multiple channels and to be aware of that profile, that positioning to some extent, and I was actually running this campaign.

It was a friend of mine. So it took on a life of its own. Yeah, I used some playful verbiage so you could tell it wasn’t somebody just spinning their wheels at an agency. We got into the product detail a little bit but you know, so it is more about what the website says and what they do on social than it would be about the ad verbiage for sure.

But some of the ad copy would talk about what kind of help you might get in deciding, and that sets up unrealistic expectations as you scale. So you really have to, you know, bridge the middle ground between talking about how you, You will have really really friendly design Help on the phone if you want it or if you drop into the retail location, but uh But you can’t just promise the world.

You can’t, you know, promise an immense amount of touch points. Uh, yeah, I mean, we for the agency, it was more like how to be aware of that. It also played into our promotions. So let’s, we have not talked about e commerce and how driven retail is by promotions and sales. Which in our world have a playbook, right?

You have multiple ways to to promote a promotion Facebook’s obvious especially remarketing email is obvious. It should be And Google countdown ads on you do all of those things and then the website and so on. Now we theme the promotions right so consumers are looking for an excuse. So if it’s seasonally apt, and it’s about lighting or about the bedroom like people just want to buy and they like that you chose that, but one we chose that was early on that I came up with the idea.

I’ll just, you know, to my own horn here was a uniquely Canadian without saying so. And it was in the created their second big month ever. It was in September of, of 2020, they’d only had one big month. It was August for some reason in September, we ran the, if I had a million dollars promotion and we called it that this is a name of a bare naked lady song.

And everyone in Canada knows that that’s a kind of a favorite. And, and no one came from the record company or Stephen Page, his personal corporation and come and try to sue us because we, you know, got in and out quick and most people you know kind of got it and we moved on, but, you know, that actually really resonated.

It’s like, Oh, okay. You speak our language. So that’s not a one off. It’s not an event. It’s a process. And it’s a, it’s a conversation you’re having with your customers.

Frederick Vallaeys: I love that. Duane I want to go back to something that you said. So the agency as a machine was kind of a reference you made, right?

So you have to have the agency as a machine so you can leave on Friday and know that you’re going to come back to the office on Monday morning and you’re going to have your sales and no problems. Talk a little bit more about that and processes that you put in place you know, and tools that you put in place and, and, and especially I think in the context of, you know, we all know that we need to do Google and Facebook and the big ones, right?

But do you plug new stuff like TikTok, like Etsy, do you just plug that into the machine or how much of that becomes manual? How much experimentation do you do manually before you make it part of that well oiled machine?

Andrew Goodman: Well, for us, we talk about this a fair bit, but I would say, no, we, we we are very considered when we go into new channels and and because of the immense impact that multiple aspects of Google properties have, And Facebook and obviously Instagram’s attached to that. Organic is a thing. It’s also Google, by the way, for the most part. And email dates, dates way back. And we just learned that, fortunately, we have a team that likes to do that channel now. We’ve learned that it ain’t going away. So no we We will do tick tock if a certain client really really wants to do it But we don’t see that as driving the business for our clients, by and large So we’re not looking for novelty because we have enough on our hands And there’s enough novelty right within those core platforms.

But I will say that because of those core platforms are monopolies, and they have some gaps and holes and shortcomings that, you know, the big The big shift for us is to take a hard look at programmatic. So for now we’re working with the partner, you know, him, Mark Poirier at Clever and down the road, we’ve talked with them and our clients would like us to to run that if you want to call it a channel, many, many channels.

So that’s our push is programmatic as an add on. Not so much with. And if someone forces us to go into LinkedIn, we’ll, we’ll have to.

Frederick Vallaeys: Well, we’ve talked a lot about B2C, right? So LinkedIn, probably not that important, but yeah, B2B gotta do LinkedIn.

Duane Brown: I think that’s like, I think that’s a really great question and like how to build a machine. I think the way we think about it is, you know, obviously whether you like it or not, everyone’s got to pay the brand tax for Google.

So we think about, okay, like what is going to convert if a client started from scratch? And that might be, Looking in the Google search console to see what keywords are coming to the website. It might be looking at like what products sell really well in Google Analytics and really building out an account based on what we think is going to convert on non brand and really focus heavily on the ad copy.

I think a lot of marketers sometimes. Think that as long as they throw up, you know, a great campaign, a structured creatives just can convert, but you can always improve things by writing better ad copy, add a copy is what the customer sees of what it’s, what gets them to convert, especially on search, obviously on shopping ads, the challenge you have after 40 or 50 characters, whatever it is, depending on device, you’re going to see things truncated.

So really focus on, you know, figuring out what’s going to give her on search, what’s going to convert on shopping and put her energy there and really just optimize it to the point that there’s, you know, consistent sales and ideally A roughly consistent Ross, whether it’s two or three or four or five, whatever the client needs, and then we start thinking about, okay, well, this is all converting, you know, brands doing fine.

What do we add on top of that? We just keep on layer on more and more. It’s kind of like building the Sunday. You’ve got your first scoop, then your second scoop, and then your third scoop. And then you’ve built out an account where it’s spending. You know, for some clients, it could be 20, 000 a month. For other clients, it could be a quarter of a million dollars a month.

You know, you started to build out Facebook so you can do retargeting or remarketing, you start to build out, you know, prospecting campaigns. And then once you have that built out, you know, clients don’t want to put all their eggs in one basket, or at least we tell them not to for, you know, Just focus in on Google or just focus on Facebook or both.

And so, yeah, we look at Tiktok, look at Snap. It could be, you know, LinkedIn, like Andrew said, you know, the other day, it could be a client talking about, like, why don’t we do something on Reddit for based on what they sell? Because they’re like a fintech brand. So we’re just figuring out how to, like, layer on more channels and more opportunities.

You know, it’s what I told a client the other day on Monday. We didn’t get a lot of sales from Microsoft, but it’s still an opportunity to go there. So why wouldn’t we set up campaigns in Microsoft and do it? You know, there isn’t going to be. a large channel outside of the Google, Facebook and Amazon right now, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t explore other channels out there.

You know, you’ve got 400, 000 or 400 million or whatever it is, people on 400 million people on snap. You’ve got a billion people on Tik TOK. You know, it isn’t just for teenagers. It isn’t just for sex. And so why not use those platforms, whether it’s brand awareness, performance based to drive more sales for your business.

I think we sometimes get. Tunnel vision and just focus on Google and Facebook. And as we saw on Monday, there’s an adage for six hours. What do you do if your business was just relying on Facebook? If that didn’t get you to change things, I don’t know if anything will, but you really shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, we sent out our holiday playbook during that outage and we recommended people spend some time reading that instead of wasting time on Facebook and Instagram for those six hours. So gotta be nimble. Another question for you here, Duane, and then we’ll wrap up with some final thoughts maybe.

Duane Brown: Sure. Yeah.

Frederick Vallaeys: Do you cross train people at your agency on these platforms or do you prefer people be specialists?

Duane Brown: Since i’m old I hit 40 next year. I’ve been doing this for like 15 years So i’ve been trained across both of those platforms and all the ones we’ve talked about right now in our team because our team is young from sense of Since they’ve joined the agency, we’ve got people who just do social.

We have people who just do search, but everyone I think has expressed interest to learn, you know, the other side of the business, if you will. So if you’re doing all the search stuff, you want to learn Facebook. And so that’s one of our goals next year is to at a low level, get people who are doing Google and search stuff to learn a bit about Facebook and to get our paid social people to learn a little about search.

So if we take on a client, that’s like, I think someone had example in the chat. There’s 75 percent Google and 25 percent Facebook. Why don’t they just take on the whole thing versus trying to divide it among Two people you know, that’s what our team likes to do. But not everybody wants to learn Facebook and everyone wants to learn search.

And so we wouldn’t force them to learn something if they didn’t want to do it. Cause it’s just going to make for an unhappy relationship.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, exactly. Do what you’re passionate about. And by the way, Andrew, I think he just called people over 40 old should be. Yeah,

Andrew Goodman: so I used to worry about like things like like I’ve got multifocal contact lenses, so I don’t have to use reading glasses.

And then that was because I was afraid people would think I might be old. And now there’s no question, like, there’s no doubt anymore. Like, there’s not, it’s not like I could fool anybody anymore. So it’s actually. You know, it’s very liberating now,

Frederick Vallaeys: you know

Andrew Goodman: Well, you’re

Frederick Vallaeys: still the og right? So that’s something. Okay. Well good. This has been a great session. Thanks for sharing so much about Your thoughts on growing e commerce in Q4 Any final thoughts, anything we haven’t touched on or anything you’d like our viewers to do to follow up with you Duane, let’s start with you. I think you have some great training resources that people can access.

Duane Brown: Yeah, we just watched an Academy last month. And so I know there’s a link in the chat, but it’s basically if you go to agency website, take some risk dot com, there’s a link at academy at the top. And so we really focused on people who are running, you know, shopping ads and google search. And so if that’s an area that you’re struggling with or want more information, I want to make sure you’re on the right track when you buy a class, you get the access for life.

So we have a class on everything from like managing, optimizing your shopping feed to a class launching next month on just like managing your campaigns and structuring campaigns, your class on Google Merchant Center, how to set it up launches this month. We have a class devoted to just the rank and factor in shopping because it seems weird to still say this, but there’s lots of people who don’t understand how ranking works on shopping ads, and that’s really important.

If you’re going to run shopping ads so that you can. Outrank it out, beat your competitors out there in the market. And then obviously, if you have questions like I spent a lot of time on Twitter, I spent a lot of time on Reddit or if you want to hire us, just shoot us an email and we’ll chat and see if there’s a good fit.

You know, we’re always looking to take on a client or two because we always have capacity on the team. We don’t want to overwork our team because our mental health is really important. And it’s an agency market right now and we get to be picky about who we want to work with.

Frederick Vallaeys: All right. So they can reach out, but no promises that you’ll actually want to work with them.

Duane Brown: No promises. We can’t take on everyone, right? It’s, it’s just not, it’s not the way the world works. Makes total sense.

Frederick Vallaeys: Well, thanks Duane, Andrew any final thoughts from you?

Andrew Goodman: I am still promoting my my content resource called thescienceofppc.com. There are 48 parts be finished after about a year’s hiatus soon.

But what I plan to do is completely condense the whole series down into a digestible 80 pages or 70 pages. So if you go to the site, the science of PPC. com you know, sign up to be notified by email and then you’ll hear when that that little book is done.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, that’s a great resource. I’ve read not all of them, but many of them. And as one of the original ebook writers in PPC, Andrew always has good thoughts. You have a writing background now, weren’t you professor? Not,

Andrew Goodman: not writing per se, but yeah, I was nearly a professor of political science, so that that’s a lot of time in libraries studying the same thing over and over.

I could tell you which shelf my specialty was on in the Library of Congress.

Frederick Vallaeys: That’s awesome. Well, good. And thank you everyone for watching this episode of PPC town hall. So I wish you lots of success in Q4. Take some of the tips that we heard from our panelists today. We’ll announce the next episode very soon.

I am traveling for the first time in two years to an actual live conference in Europe. I get to see my family next week. I’m very excited about that, but then we’ll be back the week after with the next PPC town hall. So thanks for watching the next one. Thanks, Fred.