GML 2023 Recap (Shopping Ads & Performance Max) with Kirk Williams

Episode Description

Google was caught in hot water recently when it was reported that 80% of YouTube ads have violated its own terms of service.

You’d never want your ads to be mismanaged like that. Brand safety is extremely important and advertising is very expensive. So how can you protect your YouTube campaigns?

In this episode of PPC Town Hall, I spoke to Cory Henke and Joe Martinez to discuss all of that. They also shared tips on how to prepare your campaigns for the upcoming Q4 shopping season, plus how to make use of generative AI for YouTube campaigns.

Tune in to learn how to:

- Prepare your YouTube campaigns for Q4

- Use generative AI for YouTube campaigns

- Protect your video campaigns from brand safety mishaps

Episode Takeaways

Prepare Your YouTube Campaigns for Q4:

• Start early with promotional content to capture consumer interest ahead of peak shopping times. Leverage in-feed placements for broader reach at lower costs, and consider exclusive deals to differentiate and drive engagement.

Use Generative AI for YouTube Campaigns:

• Utilize generative AI to create diverse video content formats (like vertical and square videos) for cross-platform use. This approach can help maintain freshness in ad content and ensure compatibility across various media channels.

Protect Your Video Campaigns from Brand Safety Mishaps:

• Regularly review placement reports to avoid undesirable or irrelevant ad placements. Implement strict guidelines and use available controls to ensure ads appear in suitable contexts, thereby preserving brand integrity.

Additional Takeaways:

• Emphasize video content for its higher engagement rates compared to other ad formats.
• Consider audience behavior trends and preferences when planning video content, ensuring relevance and timeliness.
• Use platform analytics and performance data to optimize campaigns and refine targeting strategies for better ROI.

Episode Transcript

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: It’s funny, like every time I said a word like tech stat or feeds, I feel like the two of you are looking at me like, come on, you’re talking to the video guys, like what do you want? How about your videos?

JOE MARTINEZ: What’s a great way to build a trusted brand? Cory, do you know the answer?

More video, right? That’s all video, but I was hoping he’d say that.

CORY HENKE: Humans talk to humans. What we have found through our analysis is that when you look at the three areas you’re going to run in either YouTube proper websites or apps, right? You begin to see that a lot of the engagement earned views, subscribers, shares, likes happens more in platform.

And for some advertisers at scale, 20 X. When you compare it to websites or you know, apps and what that has me thinking about is that like that social engagement potentially means I’m reaching, I’m reaching a reach, a richer audience, right? I might catch a conversion on this website. I might catch a conversion on this app, but those 10, 000 other impressions, you know, maybe nobody saw.

And so shifting things more in platform. Really educating advertisers to have this organic as well as this paid synergy, you know, on YouTube is kind of what we try to help advertisers with and what we’ve moved to as we’ve seen them begin to, you know, make it a mandatory that you have display on YouTube together.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Hello and welcome to another episode of PPC Town Hall. My name is Fred Vallaeys. I’m your host as well as one of the co founders and CEO at

tmyzr. So for today’s session, we wanted to talk about a piece of news that’s recently been broken by the Wall Street Journal. Fairly reputable, Newspaper and they said that 80 percent of ads on youtube are violating youtube’s own terms of service And that is not a good thing for advertisers because that means that some of these ads are running in places that really aren’t high quality And as we all know youtube has previously gotten into trouble for showing ads next to Somewhat offensive websites offensive placements and brand safety is a big thing for advertisers.

So none of this is good news So we wanted to talk about that, but I wanted to bring in two experts on the video topic, because I’m not the video expert myself. So we have Joe Martinez and Cory Henke, who will share what they have heard, what they’re doing and share best tips and practices. So let’s get rolling with another episode of PPC Town Hall.

CORY HENKE: You know, focusing a lot on YouTube, actually. You know, we’ve had, I think, an influx of YouTube organic and YouTube paid strategies. And I’m also seeing more in the, in the realm of entertainment, you know, more in the realm of influencers, you know, wanting to do more, you know, ads on the platform. I think you know, even in our world of agencies.

We’ve seen a lot of movement in YouTube in terms of, you know, brands in our industry, bringing their expertise to the platform. So I think it’s just an exciting time. And I think YouTube is finally getting, you know, a share of its alpha pi

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Joe. When did we last see each other? I think it was hero called when that conference still existed, which is also.

JOE MARTINEZ: Yeah, the last one. Yeah. That’s at least it was after COVID.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: So yeah, I’m going back on the road for quite a few things here coming up soon. I’ll be in Portland. I’ll be in Austin New York. So am I going to see you anywhere on the speaking circuit?

JOE MARTINEZ: You know, this, this has been an odd year. Everything that has popped up, like my wife has had.

Work trips that coincide. And these are like mandatory ones for her, not like optional speaking ones for me. So I’ve had to take the back seat. This will be the first year in a long time where I’ve had. Zero speaking events this year. I know it’s been, it’s been crazy. Everyone

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: watching today. You’re so lucky because you actually get to hear from Joe and even though you can’t see him in person.

Yeah.

JOE MARTINEZ: YouTube channel is still there. So that, there you go. That’s my weekly speaking.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Well, and it’s interesting, right? Because actually these things do scale. Significantly better than going to an in person thing, but it’s nice to be on the road And it’s nice to have that drink with someone and kind of like hear what’s really going on.

So let’s drop some of the inhibitions here today and let’s like talk the truth and it might actually be tough because we’re going to talk about google and what they’ve been doing with youtube, so to give context again, there was this Wall Street Journal report. It was based on some data from analytics and they said something along the lines of 80 percent of the ads that people are paying, advertisers are paying for on YouTube may not actually be on YouTube itself.

There may be low quality placements. And so they are in a way violating YouTube’s promise to advertisers of what they are paying for. You know, fill people in a little bit more on, on what’s happening and Cory, let’s maybe start with you.

CORY HENKE: Sure, I think you know, the report by the Wall Street Journal was was interesting, but I think when you look at the Adlytics report, that really went in depth.

It was it showed a lot of the things that, that we always had worried about, you know, it just never had hit YouTube until video action, you know, started when video action campaign started, they really began to couple, you know, YouTube and the, and the, what they call the video partners network, or they change that name all the time together.

And before you used to just run on YouTube, but now you had both. And so you kind of had to, you know, deal with the additional placement outside of, you know, the YouTube platform. Now, what I find that is interesting is when you go through the Adlytics report, you find that a lot of the brands that they’re using are bigger mainstream, right?

And not necessarily some of the stuff that I work on that is more direct response driven. And so I think when you run these conversion video action campaigns, you have less of a. I guess, worry about where the placement is, is placed if the conversions and the, and the performance is there. And so when I saw the bigger brands and I saw their discomfort, you know, with with the placement, I began to sort of think that, you know, if you put it in a cost per view campaign, you can segment.

You know that to YouTube and that was sort of Google’s response. Whereas like, you know, if you do wanna segment, you can segment in a cost per view campaign. It’s not necessarily a conversion campaign, but you do have the ability to just run on YouTube. And I thought, you know, Google’s retort with that gave them sort of a, a pretty good out there.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Joe, what do you think?

JOE MARTINEZ: Yeah, I mean, Cory nailed it. It’s with the video action campaigns. I mean, when those came out, those are the objectives of sales leads and website traffic. When you’re creating a video campaign those objectives have been there forever, but when they’ve defined them specifically as video action campaigns, we used to have the ability to turn off display network with those.

Eventually, Yeah. Through the video action campaigns, they’ve removed that function. So if you want to run any video campaigns with those three objectives, you now have to be on the display network. You can’t turn it off. If you want to, you have to create a campaign without a goals guidance and then build the custom one, like Cory said, you know, the peer kind of CPP model.

So the option is there. So I completely get Google’s retort that campaign objective that you can customize your own campaign has always been there. But to someone. Brand new into this who was like, yeah, of course I want more leads. They, they may not know that that option is there. And especially if you’re brand new and you don’t have a ton of conversion history for a conversion focused campaign.

We have seen that been kind of wasted spend. I mean, for the longest time, and even my presentations, I’ve always told people, always test out your campaigns, turning off the display network. If you want more reach, you can always turn it back on. But it is something that we have definitely seen hurt client accounts when we have to be forced into that display network now, if their, if their goals are very, you know, So sort of set a baseline on the highest quality.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Networks and content and in search that was always google search itself And then you’d go on to search partners perhaps and then you’d go on to the display network But even there historically we’ve seen things where google opted everyone in and then has like campaigns that combine the two together and there’s still good level of control But like with anything google ads related the the push towards simplification Often doesn’t actually make things more simple but pushes people to, to accept an automation on the premise that machine learning has gotten better.

It’s going to get you those good results, but along the way of getting there, it might make mistakes that you’re not going to be super happy with. And unless you’re an expert. You don’t know what those settings are to kind of bypass or accelerate that learning phase.

JOE MARTINEZ: And it’s loosely related, but with video action campaigns, you can’t use manual placements anymore for specific YouTube channels or YouTube videos.

That specific content placement part is also now pulled from video action campaigns. So when you also remove that setting, Where you lose that specificity and now you have to be more broad with video partners. We’ve seen certain accounts just blow up in a bad way. Where we’ve just had to recreate it with the campaign without a goal’s guidance and do the best we can there.

CORY HENKE: I think also in in, in Google’s defense, Right. Like when I look at, when I look at the report and I see them go to different websites and find these ads that are in the corner sound off, right. Again, sort of the terms of service that they mentioned with some of these placements, I guess from their perspective, I’d probably check the change history to see somebody looked at a placement report.

We analyze so many YouTube like ad accounts where we find that like a DR advertiser is still running in music where somebody is not probably even seeing their ad. And I know Joe speaks on this and I speak on this a lot. It’s like to make sure you check your placement report just like you check your search terms report.

You know, like you shouldn’t be running in things, you know, that don’t necessarily make sense for your brand. And so from Google’s perspective, you know, I’d love to see how much cleanup these brands did. And if they did, they might’ve noticed, you know, some of these problems. So in a way,

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: I mean, what I’m hearing is this is forcing advertisers.

To start understanding some ads will play with the music and the sound off. Some ads will be below the fold. The reports are there to dig into that and you need to take action on it. So, so what has that, has that meant anything for your specific clients in terms of how you’ve, I’m assuming that you already did all of these things.

Right. So did anything change after this, or is this just like a come to Jesus moment for everyone else?

JOE MARTINEZ: Yeah, I think the actual task of reviewing placements has always been there. It’s just the quantity of different things. Now that we’re seeing showing up, you know, like we can easily pull, you know, there, there’s certain terms I look at of within YouTube channels, like, you know, Vivo for the music one and everything.

So you can try to find as many artists, music ones and mass, mass exclude them at the same time. Same thing with specific foreign language ones, like now that we starting to see display network in there, we’re seeing a lot of, you know, I’m pretty much my clients usually based solely in at least North America area.

So when we start to look at different. Spending of domains that are purposely in other countries that they know are either junk or just people that they can’t do business with. We easily looking for a lot of those domains right off the bat to exclude ’em in the mix. And that’s something that, you know, we can kind of automatically pull now, but there’s just more.

Right. And so I

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: remember writing a script at one point, which would look at placements and the country domain for those. And you could have a list and say like anything RU or dot Russia. Exactly. If you find those automatically in the daytime. Because with the, the placement exclusions, there is no like wildcard sort of a thing to say by default excluder.

So you have to wait for it to happen so that you know what the actual placement is, and then you can negate it. And then it’s cool because you can have what, like 65, 000 ish negative placements across an account. And then we even built a tool and Optmyzr is basically like the smart exclusions tool.

It was neat as we look across the whole network of. All of the advertisers that use Optmyzr. And if we start finding placements with lots of spend, no conversions we can automatically add those proactively to all of the other accounts. So, you know, you might be getting that bad traffic for a while, but everyone else is protected based off of what we learned from, you know, a handful of advertisers.

JOE MARTINEZ: Yeah, I guess the, probably the area where I’d be curious to hear what you have to say about this, but like, we’ve always been more open with the placements for any sort of remarketing campaign. Cause you’re right. You’re not targeting

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: placement. You’re just wanting to show it to the people.

JOE MARTINEZ: Yes. Yeah. It’s definitely for, for the person.

And I probably more stringent, even if it is something like it’s in market full top of funnel type of reach thing. But for. Remarketing, especially a lot of our lead gen clients that. Longer sales cycles, you know, they need to see your ad X amount of times like cool if they want to watch a Saturday night live video and then they’re on espn and something like yeah I’m gonna hit them a couple times and if i’m Swinging a miss because you know, they’re not fully paying attention to it at the time.

It’s like i’m gonna still hit them And ultimately it’s

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: all about the bottom line. And I think if you’re, if it’s direct response and you can measure what it costs and you can tweak your bids up and down along the way, and you can have automated bidding handle much of that for you, like ultimately you’re still achieving your goal, right?

And Cory, how has it changed things for for your clients?

CORY HENKE: I think we’ve taken a very unique approach and tried to really focus on cost per view campaigns, go a little bit further higher in the funnel, leverage things like PMAX, display retargeting with a very short leash search to really drive that like down funnel action.

And so we’ve kind of gone away a little bit. You know, from conversion campaigns specifically for our bigger advertisers. I think some of the advertisers that do well on YouTube, you know, don’t really have brand safety, really looking to drive conversions with YouTube. Yes. You know, we’re still using it there, but I’ve kind of educating our advertisers to focus more on cost per view campaigns and focus more on the YouTube platform, especially with the new infeed placement.

You know, cause you’re not going to get that, you know, on the web. Right. So it kind of guarantees you in the platform for the most part. I think, you know, things change all the time. But that’s what we’ve done. Try to go a little bit more, you know, top funnel, give the conversion campaigns a little bit shorter of a leash and kind of, you know, really focus that way, because what we have found through our analysis is that when you look at the three areas are going to run in either YouTube proper websites or apps, right?

You begin to see that a lot of the engagement earned views, subscribers, shares, likes happens more in platform. And for some advertisers at scale, 20 X, 30 X, when you compare it to websites or you know, apps and what that has me thinking about is that like that social engagement potentially means I’m reaching, I’m reaching a reach richer audience.

I might catch a conversion on this website. I might catch a conversion on this app, but those 10, 000 other impressions. You know, maybe nobody saw. And so shifting things more in platform, really educating advertisers to have this organic, as well as this paid synergy, you know, on YouTube is kind of what we try to help advertisers with and what we’ve moved to as we’ve seen them begin to, you know, Make it a mandatory that you have display and you see, you’re

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: taking a really holistic view and sort of acknowledging that the consumer has a much more complicated journey than they used to.

And Joe, it’s what you were saying too, right? Like, they’ll be on the SPN. They’ll be on Saturday night live. They’ll be on YouTube. And that’s just the nature of how people behave. You’re not going to stay just on one platform. But then in terms of measurements, let’s talk about that maybe for a minute, right?

So, because I think at the end of day today, we’re still talking mostly about. Direct response of some sort. Do you measure that upper funnel, more brand sort of engagement in some way? And do you correlate that to the eventual action and how do you do that?

CORY HENKE: Yeah, absolutely. We’re doing a great job of burying organic and paid, like putting them on the same dashboard.

So we’re seeing how they work together. I think one of the biggest impacts we’ve seen in the SAC in the last six months is in feed having an impact on growing organic, so in feed from a paid perspective. Growing organic because of the amount of impressions that you get. And then on the reverse side, you know, shorts on the organic is now performing for the majority of the brands I look at better than long form, but only organically, not necessarily from a paid perspective.

And so it’s almost like you want to use shorts as a great way to bring your audience in. And leave your long form when they want to engage and watch like long form content. But that’s like what we’re seeing right now. Again, things change, you know, consistently, but that’s how we’re, you know, looking at things.

And then in platform earn views, subscribers, those engagement metrics matter a lot because of the halo effect. And so we do look at, you know, attribution coming from Google analytics, Shopify, if you’re, you know, an e commerce brand. And you know, seeing how YouTube, when active from a paid perspective, when the posting cadence is perfect and things are really fired up on organic, what does that do to our direct volume or organic volume on the website?

And that’s how we’re really measuring it. But I’d say that the engagement metrics matter a lot to us when it comes to YouTube. It’s not just a, Oh, it’s not getting a, you know, positive raw as I got to turn it off. It’s let’s look at a variety of different variables and see how, you know, people are engaging with us because I want people to understand, like, what is the difference?

Like, what is better? Somebody watching one minute. Of your ad or your video or coming to your website for 15 seconds, right? Like we got to kind of look at that as, you know, a pretty interesting comparison. What, what is better? Oh, I mean, you’re talking to the video guy,

it’s going to be a minute with your content. And the reason why I believe that, you know, Fred is because. I think as humans, the same way that we run away from display ads and we have display, you know banner blindness, I think we also have like website blindness. Like we don’t want to go to websites.

Like we want to engage with their content on a platform, you know, like I want to go watch your videos. I want to see what you did yesterday, you know, on a place that I’m comfortable with that. I go to every single day. If I go to your website, that’s a new experience. That’s a, it’s a risk with my time. So I think there’s a little bit of behavior.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Exactly. I mean, there’s so much sketchy stuff happening on the internet. You’re right. If it’s not a trusted platform and maybe that’s part of the complaint that advertisers had a little bit. Yeah. You know, if you’re buying on YouTube because you assume there’s brand safety in YouTube and now Google’s like showing you in these different places.

And again, it’s that balance, right? Of you have to be where the consumers are, which is not always on YouTube. But if that’s what you thought you were buying, then yeah, I can see where you might be. Somewhat angry.

JOE MARTINEZ: And that was like the main benefit of infeed of what Cory was saying. Like it’s still so cheap to get someone to interact with your video content.

And then you could see if they continue to watch other videos, like, yeah, I’ll pay 15 cents for someone to watch my video and then snowball them into a playlist. Absolutely. I’d pay for that all the time. It’s just making sure that your clients have the cadence to have updated. Cause if you want to drive them to your channel, drive them to other videos, make sure that you have other videos.

consistently coming out. Otherwise you drive them to a dead end, which is not what you want to do, but you can use all those engagement metrics for future remarketing campaigns. And that’s, so that makes

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: me think about generative AI, right? If you don’t have enough video content Google basically puts out the promise that give us any long form video and we’ll make these little clips from it.

But I think a lot of advertisers are worried about what’s that going to look like, what’s going to be in it. So so advertiser generally want control. Have you guys used generative to, to create more video content? Yeah,

JOE MARTINEZ: I haven’t personally because almost all of our client from the vertical side are doing so much influencer UGC type type content and that’s the one where we we’re more focused on making sure that we have enough ad sizes because I have seen YouTube will crop your videos. They’ll try to make a standard video vertical and I have been too slow While watching it to take a screen grab, but some of them look absolutely horrible when they’re cropped by Google.

Some, not all it’s just words are cut off. People are split in half type of thing. So we’ve honestly been lucky enough that I have clients that have invested into it, that we’re using this video, not only for just YouTube, but you know, the vertical formats on Instagram, Tik TOK and everything we’re, we’re doing a lot more outside of YouTube now, because.

This vertical video is way more easy to share on multiple platforms. So it’s probably hurt some of the ad spend on Google because now we’re spreading it to one little

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: tool tip here. But so we use StreamYard to record these sessions and now there’s a capability to do recording of individual video streams.

And we do it exactly for the reason that you said, you know, we have this great view of us three on this side by side, but you want to take a great nugget that one of you guys said. And we have to crop it out. It’s really hard because we might have a bottom third and now you get like half a person’s name on that.

And like, Cory’s half over Joe’s face. So we try to have all the videos. Still be beautiful. You can just leverage it and make something that works well. Yeah. Oh, seriously, we should like. What would a baby look like if it came from Joe and Cory? It’d be gorgeous. Oh gosh. Oh my gosh.

JOE MARTINEZ: Dangerous. Hair.

Shave that baby’s face.

CORY HENKE: I’m sure we can get some AI platform to put that together. Yes.

JOE MARTINEZ: Someone’s going to watch it and pull it together. Let’s see. Another fun one that I played

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: with and I want to hear from you next, Cory, but Midjourney, so you can feed it an image of yourself. It’s basically what Lenza does, right?

Lenza is the app and you give it a few of your headshots and then say like, make me look. The most recent one is you can look like a Barbie or in my case, Ken. And it’s great. It’s fun, but you can also go to mid journey and you can just type in, like, use this as a reference image and make me look like a Pixar character.

And then it gives you a bunch of variations and it’s just like, Oh my God. I, That I don’t like the way I look, so make me look like younger or less wrinkles and plastic.

CORY HENKE: I think the beautiful part of AI is being able to take like a style, make me a cartoon style, make me, you know, like you know, any sort of, maybe make me a Disney character.

Right. I just think it’s beautiful in terms of, you know, the creation that you can, that you can make, but yeah, I’ve been a fan of mid journey, huge fan of chadgbt. Everything AI has been super helpful. The other one I

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: tried was sorry, Joe, we’re going to do next, but D studio, so D studio, you can take a static image of your face that you’ve just made into like a Disney character.

And then you can give it a voice recording and it’ll animate your lips and your like eye movement and your head shaking through that text. And now it’s like you, and that’s kind of what I’m talking about, right? Like if you’re at a loss for video content. I mean, yeah, you could get GPT to write a couple of 30 second scripts.

You can have a voice generator, clone it in your voice. You can have your AI character have the face and now you put one and one and one together and you’ve got unlimited content by you.

CORY HENKE: I think it puts the premium on the human. When we start to see more and stuff, more stuff like that, we will start to fall in love, you know, I think with, with humans, with live, you know, when we start to see more of that, but I will say, Fred, your presentation from SMX, what you did with you know, your AI capabilities in terms of creating that video the animation of yourself, I think was top notch.

I even tried to. You know, do the same thing and it didn’t work out, you know, a fraction of as well. So if you ever decided to come out, of course, it’d be nice.

JOE MARTINEZ: I mean, I’m sure everyone’s been in the boat of getting ad variants from clients can be pulling teeth. Sometimes, you know, the video can go stale, you know, pretty quick.

If you’re not hitting with the right message and creative right away. So to have those options quick, especially for anyone on a low budget.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Well, I’d love to do another session and maybe a course with the two of you on, on some of the generative capabilities, it’s certainly the hot issue these days and everyone’s I mean, we’ve all seen great examples, but then it’s like, how do we actually make that work and make it work at scale?

And that’s the presentation I gave that Cory is referencing. Yeah. It’s really about how to do generative at scale for PPC because we cannot go to chat GPT and ask it for more headlines. But yeah, and I got to do that for a thousand ad groups. Like where’s the plugin for Google sheets? How do I feed that back into my Google ads?

That’s where it’s really going to pay off for people like us.

JOE MARTINEZ: I definitely use the chat GPT for the call to action extensions, call to action extensions for the video ads, because those character limits are so short. Where I struggled, like, what can I do with 10 characters? Do it for me. There we go. Now I have some options, industry specific that fit, boom, makes it a lot easier.

CORY HENKE: All right. I think my most recent thing that I did was that was really cool. Is I had a, I had a YouTube audit and you know, they have a million subscribers. They spend like maybe a quarter million on YouTube a month. And I had chat GPT go through all the placements. And so that’s YouTube channels websites, and then like apps.

Right. And then I said, give me topic categories. You know, for all of them, like put them all into like categories. And then it says, well, we can do it this way. We can do it this way, or we can do it this way. And I said, okay, give me the placement in column one and give me each of the categories in the next, you know, three columns, the way that you want to categorize it, and then it does it.

And so now I have three pieces of information that I can go to the client with in terms of consumer, you know, research that we’ve done. And I can now organize it in a way to say like, Hey, this category, if you create more content here is going to drive more conversions, this content category does have the highest click through rate, does have the longest view time, but doesn’t convert as well.

And then when you’re able to combine that information with what you find organically, You can then start to really create content that drives the action that you’re looking for, because we’ve worked with enough clients to know that that is the thing that changes so often. One, one month it’s, I won’t return ad spend.

The next month is, you know what? We need to fill that retargeting bucket. Let’s go after more reach. Right. And so being able to access the information to drive that conversation or to have that creative, I think is you know, super important. It was beneficial during the audit that I just ran, but I still think we’re at the beginning stages of this.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah. I love that just using GPT or generative to categorize things and figure out what’s most and least relevant. So that’s and I know we talked about this before, right? But that’s what I was doing with search terms. I was basically saying here, I’ve got a website for Optmyzr. We do PPC management software.

Here’s a bunch of queries that Google has shown my app for rank them from most to least relevant. And then, you know, thousands of queries. But now I look at the least relevant, like 50 and it’s like, Oh, these might be good negative keyword ideas. And it’s not. It’s not 100 percent accurate, of course, but it just helps you focus in the places and helps you, like you said, have a conversation with the client, kind of steer it because as we all see, the more that automation takes over, you’re not going to get 100 percent accuracy and everything you’re going to have to, you know, take some of the, the low quality stuff with all the results that, that it can produce

JOE MARTINEZ: And we started to lose cute, our search term data.

Let’s see if we start to lose placement data.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, maybe that leads a little bit into performance max, which I know everyone loves talking about. So let’s go there for a minute. But sort of that vision from Google, like everyone should do performance max all the time and it’s replacing smart shot or it has replaced smart shopping campaigns.

It’s looking like it’s going to replace DSA ad groups. You know, what’s next, right? Like, and how do you. Use that the video capabilities of PMAX vis a vis maybe the unique or the YouTube video campaigns. Do they have any benefit?

JOE MARTINEZ: We’ve had the best success for, we just ended one automated rule. We’re shutting things off.

Yesterday at the end of July, we had a client, you know, for those short sprint. Hey, we want to do this holiday in July, you know, or Black Friday in July type campaign short run. If people are searching for something like this, we also want to build awareness at the same time. We have videos for it here that we’re not going to run evergreen, evergreen clearly, cause it’s going to end at a specific date.

So those short sprints, we really have used performance max form. Cause it, one, it saves us time from building up three, four different campaigns that we would need to. It all has the same goal and objective to build awareness and hopefully drive, you know, sales for it directly from it. So that is honestly where we’ve really capitalized.

Performance max the most anything evergreen. We’re still keeping in separate youtube campaigns And display campaigns, but that’s where i’ve seen with video being a big part of it. That has been Probably our biggest success with performance max

CORY HENKE: and building off of that too. We do see the most success Of a P max when video is included, when we are getting video impressions and video views.

We used to tell advertisers, you know, 16 by nine, you know, we’ll run their YouTube or we’re tossing in performance max. We now go to advertisers and ask for 16 by nine, nine by 16 and one by one for every single creative that they have. And we put an importance on it. You know, is that like to Joey’s Joe’s point earlier?

You don’t want. You know, I’ll Google to optimize your video. You want to give it the exact assets that it needs. But also we see that it works better. I just think that performance max is just so new. We don’t have a lot of history on like campaign set up. Like, how do you really like maximize. You know, like the product sets and like, how do you organize your asset groups in the right way to really drive performance and then also, you know, all brands are different and they keep launching new features, like excluding your brand terms.

You can see this, but you can’t see that. So it’s a, it’s one that I’m still giving a very short leash to, but when it comes to video, nine times out of 10, 9. 5 times out of 10, it’ll work better than not having video.

JOE MARTINEZ: Hey, you said something, Cory, that reminded me of, you know, we, we still tell our clients now we’re not going to run a performance max campaign for you.

Unless you have video because Google did say at one point, if you don’t have video, they’re going to create some slideshow looking video, From your images and it just looks like garbage. So I don’t, I don’t know if that’s still true, but that is exactly why we haven’t run performance max for anyone, unless they had a video that made sense for it so we can at least control that aspect of,

CORY HENKE: and I wanted to ask you a question, Joe, about that, that campaign that you ran where performance max, you know, did well black Friday, like in July and you had everything else like off, did that start that way?

Like brand new ad account. Or was it a, or was it in a place where you turned everything off and just was running PMAX and a little bit of YouTube? Well, we still

JOE MARTINEZ: had, I’m sorry. I turned off that campaign. I said yesterday, just for like short sprint, it was for that campaign. I didn’t turn it all off the other campaign.

So they were still running some evergreen stuff. They’ve always had remarketing up. They’ve always had display remarketing up running a long time for, but just for that campaign focus, it was only. That we did God

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: and then cannibalization is often a big concern for advertisers. So when you had that short duration P max campaign, did you find the other campaigns kind of dropped in volume or was it pretty steady there?

JOE MARTINEZ: It was maintain the most of the, most of the traffic that we could. Pretty much say it was coming from top of funnel awareness type of traffic because it was more additional for it. We didn’t see any traffic getting hurt from it, but that was the benefit because this is not something that this is not a e com company that has t shirt deals all the time.

So this is just a rare thing that they wanted to build awareness for it. And that’s where it benefited from driving more traffic. And then we saw not directly from performance mass campaigns, but we saw via. Other channels either people come and direct email was a big part of it, too People get on the email list and then they’re coming back and converting we saw lifts there that couldn’t normally be attributed To the performance max campaigns, but they weren’t doing any other advertising for these landing pages So it’s we can kind of see those lists from there.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Nice. So it was incremental and then it also kind of makes sense, right? So if you’re trying to build awareness for a thing you’re not generally known for, PMAC seems really good because it’s got discovery ads, which is a bit of a social kind of, it’s similar to a social experience. It’s got video, which is more upper funnel.

So that all that all makes a ton of sense. What we see, though, is if you’re really an e commerce and you have different product categories, there’s a lot of benefit to setting up separate P max campaign so you can have different T row as goals based on the margin of each product category. Otherwise you’re going like super extreme into really portfolio bit management where the the crap subsidized is subsidized by the really good stuff So you might still get overall good results, but you’re not really seeing where the optimization opportunity would have been and then for a lot of advertisers, that’s fine, right like you like you were saying too it might be An agency relationship, or it’s like, listen, your agency already has so much work maintaining evergreen campaigns, making new video content.

Like they just can’t take on this additional thing, but thanks to DMAX, you actually can and get reasonable results. So then it’s definitely a win win. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, Black Friday in July, the actual Black Friday is not that far away. So did you learn anything from that campaign or anything that you guys were thinking about?

Heading into Q4, that’s related to video that advertisers should be doing that.

JOE MARTINEZ: We have still seen that the earliest they can get the deal, they’ll buy it. So it’s people aren’t waiting anyway. We’ve still seen that since COVID, I don’t know if it was for all the panic buying that is still stuck in people’s heads, but inflation, whatever, you know, if there was a good deal out there.

People are going to capitalize it because the offer we were showing was something that was good to use in Q1 of 2024. So it’s get it now because by the time the actual Q4 comes, this deal’s not going to be around anymore. So we’re kind of pushing that kind of aspect of it. So we’ve had clients now that are starting.

You know, we hear it every year anyway. Right. Black Friday is just earlier every year. I mean, to me, that’s still I was

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: stressed last month. I was like, shit. Christmas is like literally tomorrow in my mind, six months away. We’re about as far away from it as we can be. But I felt stressed because my campaigns weren’t ready.

Like I wasn’t, I haven’t bought gifts yet. So yeah, I mean, people will be buying in January for Christmas.

JOE MARTINEZ: We, I already have one Christmas gift for my daughter purchase. So, you know, like it’s, yeah, no, right. Oh, shoot. No, no, no doors closed now. But I mean, it’s, it’s that if I see something. That I want, or I know somebody else is going to want, I think nowadays people are just going to get it and hold on to it.

So we have plans in motion for certain clients. Not, it’s not applicable to all of our clients and a lot of B2B lead gen type stuff, but we have plans in place to really start pushing deals early. It doesn’t matter if it comes in December, October and their eyes are like, if we can get it all in October and just make the end of the year a lot easier and we don’t have to panic and rush at the end of the year.

Fine. We’re going to do it. And we’re going to, what’s the strategy

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: around deals? Are you using any feeds to push those deals in? Are you updating the video creative with deals? Is it the, the associated text? Like, how do you push what the deal is?

JOE MARTINEZ: Video specific video for it for sure. And then very ad specific one.

So I, I just have a habit of creating different campaigns for them. I’m not, I don’t honestly don’t like to just. Mix in my promo ads with my regular ads. I like to fully have a dedicated ad campaign for it. That’s typically how I’ve always done it. So then I have control, give it the dedicated budget at the campaign level.

And then from there, that’s what I’d prefer.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: It’s funny. Like every time I said a word like text ad or feeds, I feel like the two of you are looking at me like, come on, you’re talking to the video guys, like your videos,

JOE MARTINEZ: I do, I do really love messing with page feeds though. That’s. That’s, that’s one of the dork search things I do.

I love doing it and using just dynamic insertion within Anacapi. I do love it, but I don’t do it as often as I want to. Cory’s like, no, no,

CORY HENKE: the feed is like the bane of my existence. Shopping, you know, it’s a, any feed man, except for infrastructure data.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: A few for Cory, what are you doing?

I think that the relaxed part of the always, I think this Q4 is a different Q4. You know, I think infeed is one of those placements that all of our advertisers are running and I’m letting them know that, like, I don’t know how things are this cheap or how they will stay, stay this cheap. So that’s your greatest way, I think, to build a large audience that knows what your brand is.

CORY HENKE: Before you get into that, like late October, early November, we decided to really say like, Hey, this is the product for you. And to Joe’s point, like all of our advertisers for a while have been, you know, doing their black Friday deals, either the first week of November, the second week of November. And it’s very strategic because CPMs and CPCs are cheaper.

They get to own that week, own that audience, you know? And so we’ve really tried to help advertisers understand to go before black Friday. See what those results are. And then now you have still have the actual black Friday to see what you want to do. And then we work with them over those days to like really educate them on, you know, how expensive things are, what that return on ad spend is going to be.

And you know, how hard they want to push with what they have left over from You know, the previous sale, but you know, to Joe’s point, all of it includes video. I think video is only advanced. And to Joe’s point earlier about like being able to take some of the assets that we have that are vertical and stretch them across multiple platforms.

I mean, reels stories, Tik TOK in shorts. Right with one video and then being able to see like where it works, what type of reach, what is the difference in CPM? I think it’s a, those are great comparisons, you know, to have. And so it’s different this year. You know, I think the thing that I said about like the nine by 16, 16 by nine and one by one, we got to have this for every creative.

If we’ve got something for prospecting and retargeting, we got to have that set of three for each, you know? But that is, you know, video is just more of a, more of an important thing. It’s mandatory now. You’re not going to get away without it. But from a YouTube standpoint. Cost per view campaigns leading in broad reach, like really bringing people into your brand is what, you know, I want to advertise.

And even on the search

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: results pages, I don’t know if you guys have an opinion, but with the generative system that Google now has, it feels like the whole traditional SERP is being pushed to the bottom of the page. But then the videos are still fairly prominent that this, this seems to be a shift towards people wanting to consume video content, even for, you know, usual text searches, can you hear the rooster in the background?

JOE MARTINEZ: Oh, yeah. I thought I was like a phone alarm or something. It was

CORY HENKE: amazing.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Chicken for dinner. Cory said something too that

JOE MARTINEZ: just made me think of, you know, look at your analytics, look at your CRM, like that Q4 time, like when do people really start to buy? Well, now you have that main purchase peak and hopefully you can find consistencies, you know, throughout the years.

If you know, like, when’s the main point that people buy, then we like, cool. Well, we need to, for this year, we need to really get in front of that and build the awareness. So when they’re looking to buy at that moment that you’re there, you’re top of mind. So you’re planning your video strategy to have the awareness there for weeks before they’re actually making that decision.

So. And not only are you building new awareness when most people buy, but for the people who already know that they want a product like yours, that you’re always on top of mind. So when the time comes, it’s you that they think of. So try to look, if you have that historical data, try to find out when people typically buy your product.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. There’s also the Merkle RKG report just came out. The the one that has like the industry benchmarks on CPCs and, and speaking of things like try to advertise when it’s cheap and build your audiences around that. That report was actually saying that CPCs are up and in large part, it seems driven by Taimou, the new Chinese e com company that’s competing with Amazon.

It’s now apparently competing on more searches than even Walmart. So that is a significant change in the landscape that you know, unfortunately for advertisers makes things more expensive. So even what you saw last year, you know, look at the. To date wise trends, but keep in mind that there are new competitors that are just checking up prices

CORY HENKE: I’ve been i’ve been watching these search cpcs and it is a consistent conversation with our clients Is do we pay the premium, you know, for the intent and, you know, I believe it’s an interesting, you know, conversation as they begin to rise and I’d love to ask you, Fred, like, have you seen it, you know, like on your end, the way that the search results, you know, are being pushed down, you know, like, will we begin to see, like, all websites, like, just have less traffic.

And, you know, does that put a premium with less searches on these, you know, keywords and search terms. And so therefore, you know, what can you do, but let’s start to look elsewhere. If things become inefficient.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah. I mean, you get zero click searches going up because generative is basically answering the question right there without you having to go to an organic website.

So it certainly talks about what’s the value of even having a website. That’s just informational. Right. Transactionally, obviously there’s a lot of reasons why you want to have your own website, but even that is being challenged by Amazon’s prime buy now button, which you can now basically put on any website.

If you fulfilled through Amazon Right. So Amazon is just usurping more of those consumers. And again, with that trust element that we’re talking about, prefer to click on the Amazon button where I know what’s going to happen with my credit card and trust it to another website. But, yeah, I mean, I think it’s to be seen what happens.

The other big question is, what is Google doing inside those generative? Sections there just is less space for ads, but they are starting to show ads, but it’s again, it’s that drive towards, we used to have 12 ads on the page and then it was like the top four on the page that mattered. And now it’s like, not even those are really seen anymore.

It’s maybe the one or two that make it into the generative section. So like owning it and owning it because you’re most relevant. Most trusted. And that’s where I think the move towards authority, right? Like the people you trust, the brands you trust, they’re gonna have a leg up because they’re gonna have an easier time getting to be those one or two that Google shows.

Microsoft’s approach to the whole thing is a little bit more conservative, which is actually funny because you would think that Microsoft being the number two. In search would be able to be more aggressive, but they make the generative component be, it’s on the right side of the page. So the, the, the traditional SERP is still much like it was before.

And Google is just like messing with it. Like we’ve never seen before. Yeah.

JOE MARTINEZ: What’s a great way to build a trusted brand? Cory, do you know the answer?

More video, right? All video, but I was hoping he’d say that,

CORY HENKE: you know, humans talk to humans. Right, you know, I, I think I think it’s a great way you know, I was on a consulting call for like for, for, for YouTube organic and you know, the client asked like, Hey, like, should we still have like me as like the face of like the channel, you know, like, does that like make sense for like a brand?

And I’m just like, I don’t see when it doesn’t. You know, like people want to know like who’s running a company. I think the The companies and the things that we don’t like is when we can’t, you know, talk to somebody When we don’t know who’s at the top of it when we don’t know who is, you know Really at the helm or what they created and so I think it’s one of the most powerful pieces Is having that figurehead but when you combine it with video, yeah, that’s going to be that accountability That’s going to be that trust and so and so, you know, fred, is there is there ever a time?

You We’re like, you know, video is important, you know, to search where like, if I search for something, you know, and they’ve got to figure out, well, I got to show this brand or this brand, but this brand has a channel and I can see a face on it. So let me show that instead. I completely agree. I mean,

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: unless like we’re a PPC management company.

But like our whole marketing strategies around building trust and I mean the videos we’re doing today Like we’re not going to sell anything directly from this but people are hopefully going to hear like yeah These guys have thought about the industry and how things work and they kind of have a decent opinion on it And at some point maybe they’ll have a need for something like what one of us does and they’ll remember that face And they’ll just be inclined to Like you said, it builds the brains, it builds the trust, and then the transaction becomes that much easier.

That’s why we do it.

JOE MARTINEZ: That’s why we do our channel. Never, never, never have hired a salesperson.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, we have an extremely small sales team. They’re not aggressive. It’s basically, Hey, if you finally decided that we have a tool that might help you, we’re happily, we’re happy to show it to you. And then if you decide it’s right for you, buy it.

If not, like you come back when it is right for you or tell us why it’s not right. And we’ll go and maybe make some product updates. We’d love doing product updates. But, but like one of the things you were saying to the, like the benchmark CPC. So we have this new tool now where we show you Your CPC is up 10%, but in your country, in your vertical, maybe it’s up 20%.

So that’s hard data to get, right? But now, you know that, Hey, maybe I’m not doing as poorly as I thought I was. My, my work on my PPC account is actually. Making us go up less in cost than everyone else. That’s valuable. Right. And so, and, and these are the types of things we look at the feedback from these videos.

I, and that’s why I love going to conferences because you get to talk to people in person and actually figure out like what, what really matters. What’s really the pain point. Cause you hear these great.

JOE MARTINEZ: I was just about to say, can you do that with CPVs too?

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: See, I see Cory space. Okay, there’s the feedback.

Hey, Optmyzr team, when you see this video, add CPV to the industry. Benchmarks, . Yeah.

CORY HENKE: There we go. Well, we need a little bit more. We need actually like primary and secondary benchmarks for you too. .

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: So yeah, Cory, you can talk to me. Anyone else? Put it in the comments, what you’d like to see in terms of video benchmark data.

And if we have the numbers, if we have the data from Google, we’re happy to put it on the dashboard. Yeah. Well always really fun to talk to you guys and thank you so much for sharing all the the wisdom and what you have seen you know, very broadly, not just based off of this this recent Google report, but how you’re managing campaigns, people love learning from you.

So Cory can people catch you, you in a session somewhere? Coming soon. Follow you.

CORY HENKE: I don’t have anything booked yet, but I will be speaking at the the smash conference in October. And so that’s in Las Vegas. It’s more of a health focus conference, you know, kind of verticalized, not something, you know, specific to our industry, but that’s it.

But if they want

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: to follow you, otherwise.

CORY HENKE: It’s at, yeah, it’s at Cory Hankey on Twitter, YouTube, and variable. media website.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Do people still say Twitter?

CORY HENKE: Oh,

this is the same. This is the same problem with that meta rebrand. Right. Like we say Facebook ads for like every little bit. And so I think that, I think that this Twitter thing is going to live for a little bit.

JOE MARTINEZ: We still call all of our Facebook related videos, Facebook ads instead of meta ads. Cause.

Look at the search history. No, one’s searching meta ads. They’re all still searching Facebook ads. So that’s what we’re still going to name our videos. We know we’re wrong, but we don’t care.

CORY HENKE: See, and that’s, that’s why you go with the paid media pro man.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: And that makes you sound like an OG, right? When you’re still talking the old terms.

So

JOE MARTINEZ: I don’t say AdWords anymore though, which is

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: occasionally.

Okay, Joe, where can people get ahold of you?

JOE MARTINEZ: Personal on the X it’s Milwaukee, PBC. Also on the X there’s at Paid Media Pros. That’s the YouTube channel. And then just Paid Media Pros. On YouTube as well. That’s probably the best way to get ahold of us.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: And then you can find me at Silicon valleys on the X.

I love how you did that. And yeah, if anyone wants to try out Optmyzr, we got the two week free trial. So check that out on Optmyzr. com and subscribe to the channel. We’ll have more PPC town hall soon with other PPC pros and paid media pros will be back on again, I’m sure. So Joe, Cory, thank you so much, everyone.

Thank you for watching and we’ll see you for the next one.

CORY HENKE: Thank you.