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Episode Description

Join us for an in-depth PPC Town Hall discussion where experts dive into the evolving landscape of digital marketing amid the challenges posed by COVID-19 and societal issues. The episode covers a range of topics that reflect the current state of PPC and digital marketing strategies, emphasizing adaptation and innovation.

The panel discusses:

• Necessity of PPC Town Hall Amid Current Events
• Evolving Digital Marketing Strategies
• Importance of Community and Expert Discussions
• Future Directions and Innovations in PPC

Episode Takeaways

Necessity of PPC Town Hall Amid Current Events

• Frederick Vallaeys emphasizes the importance of continuing the PPC Town Hall as a platform for sharing expert insights despite ongoing global and national crises.
• The discussion reflects on the role of digital marketing leaders in addressing both the pandemic and societal issues, highlighting the need for change and adaptation rather than returning to the old normal.

Evolving Digital Marketing Strategies

• Panelists discuss how businesses are adapting their digital marketing strategies in response to COVID-19, with a shift towards messages of hope and resilience.

• The conversation covers the rapid adoption of e-commerce by traditional businesses, facilitated by platforms like Shopify, and the importance of maintaining a strong online presence.

  Importance of Community and Expert Discussions

• The episode highlights the ongoing need for expert forums like PPC Town Hall to discuss real-time changes and strategies in digital marketing.

• It points to the importance of community engagement and the sharing of knowledge to better navigate the challenges posed by the pandemic and other societal issues.

Future Directions and Innovations in PPC

• The discussion briefly touches on new innovations and features introduced by Google, aimed at helping advertisers understand and improve their PPC campaigns.
• Panelists reflect on the integration of advanced tracking and analytics to enhance campaign performance and emphasize the importance of adapting to new tools and platforms for better marketing outcomes.

Episode Transcript

Frederick Vallaeys: Thank you for joining us for PPC Town Hall this week. So we’re in a very unusual situation again here in the world. Lots of things happening and many events like this one are getting canceled at the very last minute. So, I just wanted to address the reason why we decided to go through with this particular PPC Town Hall.

So, PPC Town Hall, we actually started it about, 11 weeks ago now. And it was specifically in response to COVID 19 and with COVID 19, the world was changing in a way that none of us understood, and we felt we needed a forum to have experts come together and discuss what they were seeing. And hopefully that would be useful to the whole PPC community, the digital marketing community, and we could all.

Learn as much as we could and make the best of a bad situation And at the time there was a lot of talk about we need to go back to normal And I think at this point we realized that going back to normal is just not going to happen There’s going to be a new normal and that’s the best we can hope to go to But I also think that when we started talking about going back to normal or what the new normal would look like We’re often thinking about How do we not have COVID 19?

How do we have a vaccine? How do we deal with that? But now what we’re seeing in the United States and a lot of the world is that even if we went back to normal It’s not a great place for a lot of people. There’s police brutality. A lot of people cannot go out onto the street without fearing that something negative is going to happen Even if these are people doing absolutely nothing wrong, right?

So I think many of us in a privileged situation You Wanting to go back to the old normal. I think we need to aspire to better, right? We need to protest police brutality. We need to ask for our leaders to step up and act like leaders, bring countries together, find a common solution to COVID 19. COVID is not a political problem.

Police brutality is not a political problem. It’s a problem of human rights basic rights, equality. And that’s something we should speak up for. At the same time, we started PPC town hall because we wanted to be leaders and step up as leaders in the industry. Of ppc and digital marketing and so I think we can do both and that’s what we’re trying to do today We stand for equality.

We are going to speak up. Our team is free to go to protests So that can happen but at the same time we can still have a ppc town hall and discuss ppc So with that I wanted to introduce two of my friends from europe who are going to be joining us as guests today And we’re going to talk about all of the things that google has been launching in the last quarter So we have two great panelists.

We have Anne Stanley from Laska and we have from Gianpaolo Lorusso Italy. So I’ve known both of them for quite a while from the conference circuit. Both of them are international PPC speakers. So some of you may have seen them in person back when that was still a normal thing to do. So we’ll talk to to Anne here first.

So, Anne, you’re the founder and managing director at Anika Digital coming to us from Leicester. And it looks like you got pretty sunny weather there in the UK today.

Ann Stanley: No.

Frederick Vallaeys: So what’s the umbrella about?

Ann Stanley: It’s the third cloudy day in about three months.

Frederick Vallaeys: Okay, well we’re coming up to it’s reputation now. Do you get it?

Oh yes. It’s only a bad reputation.

Ann Stanley: Yeah, it’s been sunny for three months and yesterday I was in the garden all day working. But today I’ve been inside with a jumper on. So yeah, no, it’s not a sunny exit, it has been unfortunately, but it has been very pleasant.

Frederick Vallaeys: Thank you for joining us and I look forward to getting your perspective.

On a lot of things. And then we have Gianpaolo Lorusso. Usually I meet Gianpaolo in Bologna at his annual conference. Where are you today, Gianpaolo.

Gianpaolo Lorusso: Hi. Hi. I, no, I, I’ve been to to the Sea yesterday. So I was on a sailing, on a sailing trip, a perfect day. So very

Frederick Vallaeys: Italian of you.

Gianpaolo Lorusso: It’s better, it’s better than than the uk.

Point of view. Yeah, fine. Fine. Everything is fine. And we met once even in California, actually.

Frederick Vallaeys: We did, yes. We met in downtown Palo Alto at what is now a co working space. But back then, I believe it was the Borders bookstore. Yeah, those were the days. Anyway, so we all go back a long time and both of you are experts in in PPC.

So so let’s talk about all the stuff that Google has been up to, right? So I’ve got my list here and Ashwin from the production staff, if you want to load up some of these topics that we’re going to talk about, but we’ll start with I think the first thing. You know even though we don’t really want to talk about COVID, we’re still going to talk about COVID.

Right. So, and COVID and curfews and police brutality, like from a messaging perspective, I think we see these studies, people are overwhelmed by the negative messaging and the negative stuff happening in the world. 40 percent of people surveyed said they really want to see stories of hope and inspiration and to talk to me a little bit about what you’ve seen with your customers, like how.

Our strategies around digital marketing shifting in these times when it comes to messaging specifically

Ann Stanley: Well, we’re a little bit behind italy so maybe italy should go the the italian should go first and and say what your experience is because You’re you’re probably two or three weeks ahead of us.

Gianpaolo Lorusso: Yeah Yeah, that’s true. In fact I have a lot of clients or our experiences are are experiencing a sort of Take off. Of their performances. Of course, it depends a lot on on the on the sector on the field. You are walking in because a lot of e commerce is a sort of chiropractic in during this During this lockdown but but now the, the things seems seems to, to get better again for all for all sectors, for, for the general sectors, a lot of people is going around again.

Frederick Vallaeys: Let’s talk a bit about the state of e commerce in Europe and in Italy. So in the United States, all the big companies have e commerce, right? And it’s very common and it’s very expected, but I think the pain point was with the small business that wasn’t, they were fine having people come to their stores, but all of a sudden people can’t come to the stores.

And they quickly shifted to, you know, maybe putting up a Shopify store, maybe taking advantage of the free Google listings.

Gianpaolo Lorusso: Yeah, I think we have it’s, it has been a couple of years here in Italy Everyone wants an e commerce. Yeah, every single business wants an e commerce. They don’t even need it, actually.

So when you say they

Frederick Vallaeys: don’t need it, what do you do when nobody can come to

Gianpaolo Lorusso: you? Because, because when you, when you, you know better than me, that the, the, the, it’s, it’s only the beginning to, to open an e commerce. You cannot think when you are, when you are, when you open the comments, you are done, you’re, you’re, you’re just, you’re just begun to work.

So that’s, that’s something.

Frederick Vallaeys: More difficult to talk about that. And maybe and can chime in here, too. Right. But so I think what you’re saying is, listen, it’s not just because you build an e commerce store that they will come. However, I think what you have as the benefit as a small business is you have your loyal customers that have been coming.

So how do you get them to know that now they can buy from you online or come and drive up and you’ll throw it in the trunk?

Ann Stanley: Well, I think we’ve seen some interesting cases where because Shopify and BigCommerce and EKM, all those sites can be put up so quickly. People were able to put up e commerce sites very quickly.

But what they did to start with was I’ve read a couple of case studies on this. People got their Facebook communities, which if you’re an established business, you’ve suddenly got to go to e commerce. They What happened then was that they were able to put their products up on Facebook and then that gave them enough time to actually physically get the e commerce store up.

And then now they, and then people that were desperate for their products could get it. So there’s a sort of a mixed scene. We had, we had three types of clients really. We had clients that couldn’t get stock. So we had a couple of people that were buying in from Asia. And So they weren’t able to sell as much.

And also we had people that couldn’t handle the warehouse because of distant, you know, the social distancing. And then you’ve got the people that were able to just go for it and massive expansion. And we’ve had a few, particularly home and garden that have had brilliant success to four times more sales.

Even though they couldn’t go through their retail branches and then you’ve got all the newbies. I have a sneaking suspicion. There’s going to be a massive industry. Of new e commerce, sellers who are going to need support who’ve never really done digital marketing before because they had a retail store And now they’re going to need digital marketing for the first time So I think it really does they do do fall in different categories going back to the original question, which was about are people fed up with the messaging, you know I do think that some messages have just been played to death, you know how to do how to do a virtual conference How to spend your day on zoom How to you know All these sort of and so a lot of that, I think, is now people are getting fed up with that.

And I do think messaging is changing. I think people want to see because screen routes are starting to show and people are now able to do certain things that they couldn’t do before. Certain shops are opening. People are trying to get back to normal. And we’ve been UK because our furlough rules are furlough grants that we get to keep people in jobs has been very good.

So, a lot of people have still got salaries, so they are still spending. So I think being constantly reminded is I think it is definitely time to come out the other side.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, and so speaking of grants and support Google obviously has announced that they are supporting. Certain businesses with ad credits they’ve started rolling out in new zealand.

I believe in the u. s They may be rolling out. I don’t think you’ve seen them yet.

Ann Stanley: No, we haven’t i’ve checked

Frederick Vallaeys: but so they seem to be capped at about a thousand dollars you know, which is not a huge amount of money but I think we’ll take any money we can to to regrow business and

Ann Stanley: team as well.

Cause a lot of our clients are using page social and search together. So a lot of them, you know, we’re hoping to get something from Facebook and although there’s a page there where you can register your interest, I’ve not seen anything from that either. So I don’t know whether that’s been rolled out in the USA.

Frederick Vallaeys: That’s interesting. Paid social plus paid search. So one of the topics of discussion here is you get 1, 000 extra. That’s kind of, kind of extra, right? You weren’t necessarily expecting this. What do you do with it? Do you just put it towards the same old or do you experiment? And I want to share some quotes from some other experts.

They put this up on search engine land, but Julie Friedman Bikini of Neptune moon. She basically says, try something new.

Ann Stanley: I agree with that. I mean, I think one of these quotes is about using YouTube. And we’re finding the most, some of the most powerful techniques at the moment is video views followed by remarketing.

So if you, for example, LinkedIn today allows you to create an audience based on 25, 50 percent of your audience view. Now we’ve been doing that in Facebook for ages, but if you think if you can link With your AdWords account because the video views are so cheap. We’re talking sort of less of 10 cents sort of price then if you then follow up with our LSAs or shopping ads you can get really really good sort of filtration of your audiences And then hit them when they’re active actively searching so sort of cross channel remarketing strategies Would be something I would be spending more money because there’s so many options now to do you Video ads in all the other in all the different channels and then you can then hit them With a secondary sort of sequential campaign So I think that’s what i’d be spending my money on if I had an extra thousand

Frederick Vallaeys: Gianpaolo, you do a lot on youtube, right?

What do you think?

Gianpaolo Lorusso: Yeah, it’s, it’s a good, good suggestion. Anyway I think everything else to, to, to go out of this situation. And even if one, 1000, cannot change your, your, your landscape. It can help. Of course. I, I would suggest to do if you found something that was working I would suggest simply to, to put again something back on that.

And and then of course you can try something. Something new. Personally, my, my approach to the situation has been not to stop campaigns, but lower budgets and CPCs to the, to the minimum possible. So now you can What was the thinking

Frederick Vallaeys: behind

Gianpaolo Lorusso: that?

Frederick Vallaeys: Sorry? What was the rationale behind that?

Gianpaolo Lorusso: Because you have slots to cover and Google have slots to, to a lot. So keeping them by spending one tenth on what you were spending before, it’s always a good solution, especially in search, in search campaigns, because if someone is searching for something maybe not now, but they are going to, you know, Converting some in some time after.

So why, why don’t, why, why losing your hyper competitive slots if you can keep them once spending one 10th of what you were spending before. So

Frederick Vallaeys: what you’re saying is reduced budgets, don’t reduce the bits, right? So stay competitive on those things, but maybe do a little bit less of it throughout the day.

Gianpaolo Lorusso: No, reduce both. But, but, but it’s a, a sort of natural movement. At least I’ve seen it in several accounts because of course if less competitors are bid your, your CPCs are going down automatically. Unless you have some machine learning harassment on your, on your, on your campaign , we’ve actually seen,

Ann Stanley: The opposite problem in some accounts.

So I did an analysis for a presentation where I was looking at cost per clicks, cost CPMs, and in Facebook the CPMs are much, much cheaper. LinkedIn is the same, but Google, interestingly, the cost per clicks weren’t. And a couple of our clients, there were in some, but most of them weren’t, but a couple of clients what happened was they weren’t managing it anymore because they wanted us to pause.

So they were trying to manage it themselves and they weren’t keeping an eye on it. And what happened was, was so much less. Searches and so many less customers that the other their competitors started to completely outbid them So they ended up with hyper bid inflation and their visibility just dropped through the floor and they they you know They they’re because they weren’t managing it the same way we would have done I won’t name names or anything.

But basically what happened was they, they thought we were still, there was a bit of a lost communication, but they actually thought we were still managing it. And I said, well, no, we’ve not managed it for two months. And then they realized that nobody had been managing it. And consequently they’d fallen off the first page because they just weren’t keeping up with competition.

Frederick Vallaeys: So I love this as a case study, right? So managing PPC actually makes results better.

Ann Stanley: I think it showed, I think they did ask us to restart pretty much straight away. And I hope they’re not watching because they’d be quite upset that I’m saying this. But I think it just proved the point that if you are in a competitive sector, it just goes to show how much time you do actually need to optimize and keep an eye on what’s going on.

But they weren’t, of course, they weren’t aware of. You know, auction insights. They, and when we showed them what the competitive activity was, they suddenly, you know, lots of lights went on. But yeah, that’s what happens when half of your staff in a company are not there anymore. They, you know, you get that because that’s been a problem, of course, because our account manager, a lot of account managers have been furloughed.

So, you know, you’re not necessarily talking to the same people. that you were before.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. And now we’re in a time where we actually need more communication rather than less. So keeping that consistent and, and I think then that goes into shifting strategies, right? So what may have worked previously may have completely shifted.

And so hotels, I think are a great example when hotels may expect business travelers to fill the majority of rooms. That may not be the case until at least the end of the year. So but people are still looking to travel maybe more locally with their families. So you can still advertise. You just have to.

Go ahead and make that shift.

Gianpaolo Lorusso: I, I have some evidences of, of, of the fact that even international travel they’re still looking for them and and the, the CPCs in, in this specific sector. A big now at least one tenth of, of before now they’re getting they are growing again. But if you add some cool blood and cool blood and, and let them, then go lowering your budget and lowering your CPC, you will have I’ve never seen in a couple of accounts I manage, I have never seen that level of CPC Never.

Never. No. Of course of course the lower competition, of course, played its game.

Ann Stanley: I mean, the key here is It doesn’t matter how much you spend as long as you spend more than or you’ve got more visibility than your competitors So basically as long as you out market whatever your competitors are doing And you get more visibility than they do as long as people are looking and searching and actually there are some You know conversions around as long as you do more the issue is with things like shopping This is a lot of people.

They just buy on price When they actually come to buy in a month’s time, if they’re not buying now, then you may be wasting your money because you’re not necessarily going to get any brand recognition. Whereas if you can, you know, depending on your sector, if you can do branding and keep, keep the lights on us, I’m sure people heard it, then that’s it.

That’s a good strategy. And you know, you just need to be. You need to be more visible than than relative to everybody else.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And so it’s not just about getting those leads right away but about visibility in this day and age. So

Ann Stanley: one of the things that we are trying to do with clients is fill their their audience cookies up.

So if you can get lots of cheap, Traffic at this point, even if it’s not in Google, if you can, you know, if they’re doing videos or they’re interacting with educational pieces and awareness pieces, if you can, then once you’ve got them engaged, then put them into an audience ready for remarketing later on.

Then of course you can then hit them. So a display advertising is working really well for that because the targeting is so good at the moment or so much better than it was. So anything where there’s a sort of an audience intent, we actually finding that we’re getting great filling up the bucket ready to target them when they’re actually ready to buy later on.

Frederick Vallaeys: Sorry. I couldn’t hear me so a little break here from the regular content I wanted to talk a bit more about the two panelists that we have. We’ll start with Gianpaolo first I will play a little video about your events, but you’re you’re on ad world experience You produced the paid search organization show tell us you know in a minute You What you’re working on for the next year.

Gianpaolo Lorusso: Yeah actually for, for the next year we are, we are we first want to, to bring in the elbow this, this year, because we have to to, to reschedule if it, of course in October but our, our focus is. Always been on real case studies. This is the peculiarity of the event and this will be the peculiarity of the event.

Unless until I will be I’ll be the the organizer of the event

Frederick Vallaeys: And it’s a great event. I’ve spoken at it and the cases are really good. And the food in bologna is very good So check out the discount code right there if you want to get some of the virtual content, until the next one returns You And Gianpaolo, if I may, I will play a video that shows people a little bit about what your event is about, and then we’ll come back to the next segment and do some more new Google updates.

Gianpaolo Lorusso: Okay.

Frederick Vallaeys: Very good. Let’s get back to what’s new at Google. And let’s shift away from COVID. Let’s talk about the actual product releases Google has done. Now to frame this, a lot of people in Europe don’t actually have access to these things, so Google please I know people in Europe want these things quicker and what were you saying about why do you come to the U.

S.?

Ann Stanley: Yes, the reason I come to conferences in the U. S. or go to every conference where half the speakers are from the U. S. is that, You get everything six months before us and that’s the best way of finding out what the hell’s coming into europe Because you guys always a couple of months ahead and we can learn from what you you’ve already learned So yeah, we’re the beaters.

You’re the alphas i’m afraid in this in this case

Frederick Vallaeys: Alpha beta that’s a topic for a different discussion, I think But hey, here’s the first one. So in april google announced that even if you have call only ads You can now put a website link in those Yeah, we have it. You have it. Nice. Has anyone been using it?

Gianpaolo Lorusso: Not really, because I I have very few customers who who have the for which Call, call only campaigns have, have since so I’ve seen

Frederick Vallaeys: it. Is it because the calls convert so much better than the website? They just want more of those calls or because they don’t have a website?

Gianpaolo Lorusso: No. They they, they all have websites.

But, but the, the matter of the business is is not, so, not, it doesn’t. Call only campaigns. It’s something it should be a service. You can that doesn’t really need any explanation to walk with. Call only. Campaigns. So it’s not so frequent, at least in Italy to have this kind of services, this kind of campaigns.

I don’t know if, and as

Ann Stanley: Yeah, no, I concur. I had a, I upset Larry Kim at a conference about five years ago when he was talking about call extensions and not having a web link. And I said, I thought it was a real, really a bad idea. Our experiences is that very few people actually ring the number from the directly from the ad because they always want to click in to check the customer out.

And so therefore, if you look at call tracking technology and the actual, you know, the dynamic you know, the JavaScript code dynamic on the actual page, That gets the majority of the calls. I think there’s an exception if you’re just bringing in a local locksmith or you already know the brand. So I think it would work well for brand and local traffic who, you know, just want to call to find out something, but very different because I’ve done comparative work for tech support in the UK and the USA and the proportion of people that were happy to read from the ad in the USA.

There’s something like five time. I mean, this was a while back mind was over five times higher. So I agree. I agree with one pilot that there’s just not that tendency to ring from an ad. We want to, we want to go in and check the company out.

Frederick Vallaeys: And and you’re talking about tech support companies, those get into hot waters with Google quite a bit, right?

That might speak to this next thing that Google starting to do, which is requiring all advertisers to verify Yeah,

Ann Stanley: yeah.

Yeah, you are right. That was Indian tech. I don’t know if you remember, there was a blanket ban of all the Indian tech suppliers about five years ago, and they came through us to try and get round the rules and do everything, you know, ethically.

And I’m actually very much in favor of this. I feel that There’s so many spammy agencies and other people out there that rip people off. You know, I’ve been in the industry nearly 20 years now and I’m sure both of you have as well. We are, we’re the old, we’re the old gurus in this, you know, we’ve been around for a while and I’ve seen so many spammy stories and spammy agencies that I actually am in favor of this.

I think it’s a good thing. This was one of the reasons why I was upset with the new partner badge, which we’ll talk about in a bit, I’m sure.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right.

Ann Stanley: But No, I think I I’m in favor of this and I think it’s Listen,

Frederick Vallaeys: I I was on the quality score team at google for a long time I was on the team that instituted landing page quality scores to try to get the spamming us out of the system yet when the olympics came to london my aunt who lives in london She asked me for help getting some tickets to the archery event and I was like, yeah, here’s a google ad I found and just go to that website and she bought tickets and You know They were fake, right?

So even I fell for that kind of stuff. And sometimes it’s just really hard to identify what’s real and what’s, what’s not also a huge problem on Amazon, right? So one thing people don’t understand is that the way that Amazon stocks products on their shelves say that you have real Gucci bags and fake Gucci bags to Amazon, that looks like the same product.

And if somebody buys it, they don’t necessarily disclose it. distinguish and say, okay, we’re going to pull the one from Gucci, the vendor, as opposed to some third party vendor, because I think it’s the same thing. So they’ll just pull the bag that’s easiest to ship to that specific customer. Right. And so there’s a lot of issues around reliability and knowing who you’re dealing with and getting real product.

So I’m in favor of this one too.

Gianpaolo Lorusso: Yeah, me too. I think everything that adds some transparency to the market with, we’ll favor PPC professionals to, to, to the legitimate work. Of course the legitimate legitimate advertisers would never be against something like that.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. And those are the ones we all work with.

So We like it. All right. And you brought this up, right? So let’s talk about it right now. If I can get my head under this PPC town hall logo right there and actually I’m producing the show, so I could just remove that thing if I wanted to, but the partners badges

Ann Stanley: Yes, much, much more contentious.

There was a massive storm. When this actually came up, that’s better. We can see all of us now. There was a massive storm about this because as an MCC owner, we’ve got so many accounts linked to us. And it required us to, I think 70 people take the exam. in organizations that have got absolutely nothing to do with us, which is absolutely ridiculous.

So we put in a complaint and so did many, many other people when they realized what mess they’d made of it. So I’m hoping that they’re going to have a bit of a second thought about the way that they do the exams and the qualifications, because there’s no way that we can police. All the organizations that we’ve got we are linked to and some of them are Heretic, you know legacy and we’ve not we can’t even necessarily, you know, just just disentangled them the other thing I don’t like about the The requirements of partner status is it’s very very much based on volume And the growth in the account and if you’re an agency like us, which is premium, we only have about 50 clients.

Not all of them are on PPC. They’re not always looking for massive growth. And in some cases, the first thing we do is cut a load of wastage out. We get a new client and there’s a load of crap in the account. We want to get rid of that spend. So sometimes we actually take the spend down. And then we’ll be penalized because we’re trying to improve the quality and make more money for the client.

So the client’s objectives are definitely not aligned with Google’s objectives of what makes you a partner. And I think it’s encouraging the sausage factories, which are the, you know, the, the, the, the accounts where they’ve got a thousand traders and plumbers and it’s all automated. I don’t know if there’s a place for that in the market, but it’s a very different market from the sort of work that we do.

Okay.

Gianpaolo Lorusso: I think I’ve just had a discussion about it with the Google partner manager for, for Italy last week about the, the, the program. Tell us

Frederick Vallaeys: secrets, tell us secrets Gianpaolo.

Gianpaolo Lorusso: No, no, not really a secret, but I told more or less what I’m saying. And he said, but with this new with this new program partner actually the weight of the increasing budget, the increasing number of customers is, is going down.

So this, this This growing budget, budget necessities is decreasing in the new, in the new, in the new and when I told him, when I told him, Oh, okay it’s okay for, because I, I, I understood this way when I looked at the new requirements that the general audience of partners will will not have any longer.

This Requirements and only premium partners. We love it. He told me. But are you sure about it? Because we because I don’t I don’t think it’s this way. So he he said that this this increasing budget requirement is not so important. Is it’s a sort of it’s of the last of the last program is not in the new one.

They they lifted this this kind of pushing.

Frederick Vallaeys: And I think there’s also a fundamental difference there between the United States and Europe and I was born in Europe. So hopefully I may speak on behalf of both continents. But one thing I do notice in the U S and especially in the Bay Area, it’s always about You’re successful by growing your revenue.

Always bigger, bigger, bigger, more, more, more work, more higher, more people make more revenue. And in Europe you go to villages and you know, there’s a candle maker and the candle maker is like, why would I want to advertise online? Like I make a thousand candles a month and I sell them in my tourist shop and I make a good living for me and my family.

And I don’t want to become a multinational and like have to ship via DHL and have all those new worries. Right. And so I, I think if there’s a balance there that Google and. Bigger companies can find to still reward those shops getting online and doing something even if that’s not always pushing for more revenue, I would love that I

Gianpaolo Lorusso: mean,

Ann Stanley: I’m just relieved that they delayed it because there were so many unknowns in there I think I mean, you know, they sort of started to roll it out So you could see whether you got the optimization scores and things The exam thing was just ridiculous.

And it’s like some of the awards that are out there that are based on how many reviews and testimonials you can get, you know, if if you’ve got 1000 clients, it’s quite easy to get 40, isn’t it? But if you’ve only got 40 clients, then you know, you’re not going to get quite so many reviews. So I, I think, I think that all of this accreditation and trust factors need to be based on performance and technical knowledge.

So that’s, you know, that’s really our focus is, is to. Is to try and do work that’s of a good quality and that’s going to get the results for the clients because at the end of the day, that’s what’s most important is, is the results and the money you make for the clients.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. And the results in like what the business actually cares about.

And I think that’s even still a big problem we face as agencies is getting the client to properly communicate a goal that we actually act on. Cause yeah, most people want to spend less money and get more sales, right?

Ann Stanley: I mean, fortunately, some of the projects that we’re doing now are very much more about data and integration and understanding more of the funnel and that sort of stuff.

So yeah, it’s, you know, a lot of integration work with things like, Oh,

Gianpaolo Lorusso: I do.

Ann Stanley: But integration with things like Salesforce alternative. analytics, which is first party cookies, you know, all that sort of stuff, which I’m working with a team which are trying to look at an alternative tracking system.

So it’s all about trying to understand the full journey. And also understands, you know, where there’s issues like new users because of cookie cookies being shut off after 24 hours by the browsers.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, you tell him. Bring up two good points, right? So the first one here is the new look for the attribution reports in Google.

So understanding how long it takes for a typical consumer to convert. I mean, my worst example, but before I started Optimizer and I was consulting, I had this client and we would talk, you know, two, three times a week and he would always yell at me because he was like, why are my conversions down so much?

And I was like, it’s because you have a 14 day average time to conversion, right? If you look at the reports from yesterday, yeah, they’re always like off by 30, 40%, You know, look two weeks back or to look two weeks from now and we’ll be great. So Google is trying to make it easier to visualize that. And I don’t know.

Are you guys sharing some of these visuals with clients to help them understand kind of the broader

Gianpaolo Lorusso: picture? Not not this one, but to, to, to all of my clients, I I made them which will be the default last click attribution model to, to the linear one or the time, time time decay one because I think it’s more a variant to reality.

A lot of people today is going around a lot of time before they convert. So if you keep last last last attribution, you will have only a partial site of the reality. You want credit all the keywords or the placements or the display targeting options you you have in place. But not, not, not that they go.

So in inside insights with, with with my customers. Yeah,

Ann Stanley: we’re the same. I mean we try and use data driven if we can, but it depends on the number of conversions et cetera, but we’re particularly Anti last click because of all the sequential and cross channel stuff that we do So if you’re driving loads of traffic from I don’t know facebook or display or youtube and then then they’re converting with Rlsa then of course google’s always going to get all of the credit.

So that’s quite important. Our early results with using this alternative Alternative tracking system an analytic system is that a lot of the first day conversions are over You Allocated to get Google because Google is cutting the session short. And so we’re actually getting more a much higher percentage look like they’ve happened in the first day than they really are.

So that’s, that’s quite interesting. I think those results. Perhaps we can talk about that another day. I’ll win. I’ll win. Interesting. And so I put

Frederick Vallaeys: up a little banner here about your agencies. And so you’re the founder and the managing partner. So a lot of this credit probably it’s to you and your amazing team.

But tell us a bit more about Hanukkah and agency and the awards that you want. And then I will take a quick look at the video of something you’re working on.

Ann Stanley: Okay, so I’ve been in the industry since 2002. I think we met Austin PPC Hero, ooh, a long time, even before, I think you were just building Optimizer at the time,

Gianpaolo Lorusso: and then

Ann Stanley: I caught up with you, I caught up with you at SMX.

I think you asked me a question about shopping ads, and asked me how, if there’s any Yes, I do

Frederick Vallaeys: remember that. You were the shopping panelist, and I sat in the back of the room, and I was like, She’s going to have an answer. She’s going to tell me a bit because I had just started building shopping campaigns and I was so frustrated by how difficult it was and I came to your session and you were going to give me the solution to make this easy.

And I was like, and what tools do you use? And she was like, there is no tools. And I was like, I didn’t go. And I went home and I built it and now optimizer can do it all for you.

Ann Stanley: Absolutely. I think you were one of your first clients actually as well in the UK. So I’m a big fan of course, but yeah, there’s only 20 of us.

We’ve got about 40 clients. The work that we do, we use this sort of poet idea of pay don’t do. But the bit that we do that other agencies don’t necessarily do, we do a lot of technical, which is the T and S is the strategy. So we do a lot of training. We’ve got qualifications. We’ve been doing training for years.

We run a weekly webinar, which I think there’s a link for later on. And we run the conference, which I think you’re going to talk about, but the award actually, I was at Adworld presenting the case study. As grandpa has said that, you know, they do a lot of case studies. And then literally as I finished the presentation, this is the switch, my business.

presentation, the integration of Salesforce data back into Google ads to optimize using actually optimizer. We actually use your tool. I think there’s a case study on your site about that. And then I got a text message to say we’d won three awards and I thought that was really good timing. I I didn’t go to the event, the award ceremony because I was in Italy.

And then I present on it and then I got the awards afterwards, but we actually won the grand prix in 2019. So that’s

Frederick Vallaeys: congratulations. I think you must be good luck because we We’re shortlisted for best bpc tool at the uk search awards

Gianpaolo Lorusso: But we couldn’t

Frederick Vallaeys: make it and we said hey, let’s have our longest standing customer in the united kingdom go and represent And we won

Ann Stanley: we did

I got quite drunk that night. I met up with some of my other agency colleagues and we weren’t expecting to win. Well, I wasn’t expecting to win and obviously you weren’t expecting to win. And you, and you won, so I came and collected it for you. for

Frederick Vallaeys: doing that. Hey, so you do put together an event. Should we take a quick look at a video for that?

Ann Stanley: Yes. And the last one was in October. So do you want to show the video and then?

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, we’ll talk about it.

Ann Stanley: This is actually our fifth conference. Originally it was e commercial, but this year we decided to rebrand it as Leicester Digital Live because we wanted to get more of the community involved and more of the clients involved so that we could cover both e commerce and lead generation. So it’s been a great day.

It’s very difficult to keep up to date with everything. So, coming along here where we’ve got, you know, Mars, SEMrush, Sky, I can absorb a lot of information in a really short period of time and connect with lots of different people here. So, yeah, it’s been excellent.

Alex: The guy from Sky was really interesting, I thought.

Yes! Yeah, it’s like a really interesting new technology, a really way of revolutionizing television, to compete with digital, in a way.

Callum McKeeferey: I do loads of regional, like, digital conferences up and down the country, and definitely this is one of the best. Leicester’s a great place to do a digital conference, and Annika and the whole team do a great job here. Really good, really good.

Ann Stanley: Yes, so that’s Leicester Digital Life. We are, as I said, we are the fifth year. Unfortunately, because everybody else has had to move their conferences, we’ve had to move ours. It was originally planned for October the 8th and we think we might have to move it because I think Brighton SEO has been moved at that time and quite a lot of other conferences have been moved.

So what we’re doing is we’re gradually building up our weekly webinars. So we’ll probably try and do a virtual conference in October and then move over and maybe do it in the spring next year when the conference season, but it could be that all conference ended up virtual, you know, I’ve been on OmniConvert with Valentino.

He’s another Italian and he had over 4, 000 people at his digital marketing conference on e commerce just as the lockdown happened. So virtual conferences can be very successful and reach a much bigger audience. Yeah, we’ll

Frederick Vallaeys: see what happens, right? But lots of content out there for people to consume.

So let’s go to some audience questions. So Asim here is weighing in. And I think we probably agree with this point, but any comments on what he’s saying?

Ann Stanley: I do agree. Not all clients look at it. But because we’ve got a lot of spammy agencies in the UK that don’t do very good work having the premier partnership badge does at least you can turn around and say you’ve had to take the qualifications. You’ve got a reasonable amount of spend going through your account.

I do think it depends on how competitive you are. It is. I mean, there’s so many agencies in the UK now. You do need something to be able to differentiate yourself. So awards and accreditation, the tech you use, the case studies, the clients, otherwise.

Frederick Vallaeys: Sort of the, the education component of it is always behind because it’s changing so quickly, but I think you made a really good point about the spend qualification.

And if others trust you with millions, In their spend that probably means something about a prospect And we find the same at optimizer. I mean the bigger we get the more spend we manage it’s a value of credibility, right like we take it we have to take things seriously because With the amount of money running through our system like it’s it’s very very meaningful and so then it becomes easier to sell new customers because of that patch

Gianpaolo Lorusso: I I personally think that this new program It would be better than than it was before.

, I left it, actually. The, the, the, the past one. I was partner, I was even a premium partner. But I didn’t like what Anne said. I didn’t like the fact that I wasn’t, I shouldn’t be I shouldn’t think of myself free to suggest to my customers, the, the, the, the tool or the platform I, I think was better for, for him, for, for was the best for him.

So I think the new the new program will be better. I don’t agree on on all the bus. They didn’t because they simply have more transparency to it. And they if the criteria or increasing number of customers and increasing budget are really being lifted up, I think it’s a good thing. I think it’s a it’s a way to say, Okay I’m a recognized operator of this sector.

It’s not a perfect program. I, I can agree with, with all the detractors on many points.

Frederick Vallaeys: What do you think, Anne?

Ann Stanley: What I was saying was, is, is that just before they sort of changed it and started to, you know, roll it, the old one down, they got rid of the directory. And so there was no way that clients could actually validate And there was another wannabe agency in lester that was actually advertising themselves as a premier program Now at that time there wasn’t a directory But if you followed the link you could find out and they were And I was thinking well There’s lots of people pretending to be a premier partner when they’re not because they’re just literally sticking the logo on their site And so the only way this will work is is if there’s a database Foreign from Google with those partners in there so that you can actually validate that you really are a partner.

Otherwise, it is. It is. All you do is just copy the logo and put it on his side.

Gianpaolo Lorusso: Actually, they have it. But in, I think, 15 years, I’ve got to two leads from the from the

Ann Stanley: I agree with you on that. I just want to keep out the cowboys. That’s

Frederick Vallaeys: difficult, right? It’s difficult. And so Admission the first qualification program, the gap program, they called it back then.

Like I actually wrote most of the questions for it. And then after I had to take the test, like I couldn’t get a perfect score. And I was like, that’s impossible. Like I wrote the questions, you know, none of these programs are going to be perfect and you know, you do your best. And but Chumpola looks like Adrian is a fan of your sentiment and so, Hey, let’s shift topics here real quick.

So Craig. I know it’s been asking in multiple places about shopping campaigns, impact, I don’t know if you guys have an opinion on that. I would love to hear it, but Craig, we will be talking specifically about e commerce and shopping ads next week. We’ll have Andrew Lalk from savvy revenue. And we have Kirk Williams from Zato marketing is joining us.

So I’m sure they’re going to have a lot to say on this. We’ve

Ann Stanley: not got it over in the UK. So we haven’t got any data to share. We were hoping maybe Fred could give us some answers on this.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And listen, what I’ve seen is that it’s anywhere from half a percent to like 10, 15 percent additional clicks that you get out of the program.

So certainly valuable and extremely easy to opt into it, especially if you already have your shopping campaign running. So no reason not to do it. But, but

Ann Stanley: Sorry, does anybody actually go to the shopping tab? Do we know? Is there data on the proportion of people that go to the to the shopping tab?

I think it’s quite small.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, yeah, I think so. It probably is. You’re, you’re right. But the small, very tiny, very big company is still meaningful.

Gianpaolo Lorusso: Yeah, it’s, it’s they can, I think it’s a smart move by, on the side of Google, for Google because they want to be a starting point for As much as Amazon is for, for, for shopping but it’s not going to really to, to revolutionize the, the, the numbers in the in the normal shopping, shopping campaign.

Scenario which is not the shopping cart,

Frederick Vallaeys: right? And I think we’re also sort of saying like listen Putting up an e commerce store is not a magic bullet to solve all your problems You’re still gonna have to put effort and money behind marketing it I think this is actually a very timely introduction from google because a lot of businesses have to for the first time Legitimately think about e commerce Given everything else that’s happening I mean, my local Target store, one of the few stores that was open during COVID is now shut down because of the curfews and the looting that’s happening.

Right. So but all these small players getting online. And so this is a good introduction to get some free clicks, like start to understand there is value. putting your products online and advertising them and doing e commerce. And then, yeah, obviously like this is Google’s play to make more money by having more advertisers and making for a more competitive auction.

But

Ann Stanley: yeah, I, I agree with you there, Fred, because there’s so many of these platforms have got direct integrations now, haven’t they? Cause there’s a direct integration between Shopify and Google ads, which I think they announced either last year or the year before. So it just means that you can, you know, you don’t even need to almost go into Google ads and with the Google smart shopping as well.

There’s so much you can almost do without knowing what you’re doing. And there’s this sort of polarization of the people that it’s all automated. It’s just set up for them or they just set it up by pressing a few buttons and then you’ve got the really, High tech stuff which is the sort of stuff that we tend to get involved in so there’s you know So that I think a lot of the smaller smaller retailers will test it for the first time And then they’ll get a certain way with it and then they’ll then need to use ads and then they maybe need to use an agency So there’s sort of like a almost like an easy entry into the market,

Frederick Vallaeys: right?

And so therefore agencies that means maybe working with some smaller customers kind of shepherding them up Into the bigger customers that we tend to work with. And then tools like optimizer actually make it really easy to do a lot of this management yourself. Obviously agencies, and so that’s sort of the difference, right?

An agency will take you from mediocre results to amazing results. And Google and machine learning and artificial intelligence is sort of making the base level acceptable for everyone if you do very little to manage it, but then you overlay tools and do automation layering with optimizer and you bring in smart people that create strategies through agencies.

That’s how you kind of like set yourself apart

Ann Stanley: in a very competitive market because you know, you can’t just do the baseline anymore. Otherwise you won’t get return on ad spend and you won’t make any money.

Frederick Vallaeys: It seems that you know what your return on ad spend goal should be. And then you get into, you know, longer conversion cycles and lifetime value.

And that’s sort of where you can make it. So many people come in, right. And they are advertisers and they say, Oh my God, like I have to pay 4 for a click for this. Like there’s no way I can have a positive return on ad spend, but then, you know, what you really have to think about is your CPC is partly determined by your quality score.

And so that’s your optimization of your products. It’s the optimization of your ad of your landing page. Do those things well. Your 4 CPC might become a 3 CPC to achieve the same thing. And even then you might say, well, that’s still too expensive. Right. But who are you competing against? Amazon with amazing logistics infrastructure, right?

So they can actually make money at those levels. And so many times, and that’s what Gianpaolo was saying, like, it’s, this is not a magic bullet, right? You have to have a really solid business, really great business strategies, and then digital marketing can be a driver. Of growing that business, but it’s not going to solve all of the fundamental issues that you may have today.

Ann Stanley: Yeah, I agree too.

Frederick Vallaeys: So Adam X 12 M was asking about these Google account credits for COVID. So we’ve talked about these at the beginning, Adam, but the one thing I’ll add here maybe is they are rolling out country by country. Google is basically announcing which countries have gotten them. You should have an email about that.

If you do not have an email, it means you’re not getting the credit For your country and there were some criteria around which companies would qualify and which ones wouldn’t so that’s how I understand the program to work

Ann Stanley: Yeah, I checked last week to see whether we would be eligible You’ve got to have advertised 10 months last year and then january and february this year So if you took it off Two months or two and a half months last year, then you might not get it.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, exactly. And so there’s a help page about the ad credits. Here we go. And it’s, it’s primarily for small businesses. So we’ll load us up here. This link is not yet on the website for PPC town hall. We’re putting all of these on. So we’ll have this after the show. But that’s where you can learn more about it. Going back to the partnership program for just a second. So a seam is making a comment, so we’ll show that here. But we’re kind of close to time here, so I wanted to introduce one other cool thing that Google has just done, which is telling you why conversions are changing. Okay. So I believe it’s this updates that you see on my screen.

No, I can’t

Ann Stanley: change it. So how many could they also change from. The time scale as well, so it matched more with what was going on with analytics. So you’ve got two options there and then this is what you expect to get, isn’t it? I think from what I was reading before.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, exactly. So so, and then they will point out stuff like your conversion tracking is broken or your conversions are down because you have a really long time to conversion those types of things.

So under the announcement, it’s actually an announcement that just made what is that yesterday? Okay.

Gianpaolo Lorusso: Yeah,

Frederick Vallaeys: so you can find it right here. So basically now they will explain why your conversion might look a little wonky.

Gianpaolo Lorusso: Why? Why? You should trust the machine learning. All

Frederick Vallaeys: right, stick with us. It’s gonna get better.

But but I do think it addresses fundamental issues, right?

Gianpaolo Lorusso: It’s only on manual CPC and enhanced CPC. It’s only on this, this in these cases. Otherwise they’re not saying anything.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. So it has limitations. As far as bid management types they also did introduce portfolio bid strategies for maximize conversions and maximize Conversion value. Right. So bidding, I was hoping to talk about it more today, but we’re kind of out of time. But that is obviously a very complicated field. With lots of different interactions, we should wrap it up here. So I’m going to give each of our great panelists a big thank you and also give you a A moment to share a final thought, maybe something we haven’t covered that you think we should talk about.

So

Ann Stanley: I just wanted to mention something that’s coming in the UK, which is, has been launched. It’s called Sky AdSmart, and I’m sure as sky’s in Italy. And also I think they’ve got been bought out by one of the big corporates in the USA. And it’s basically programmatic TV. So the audience targeting is quite similar to what you get in Facebook, but at the household level.

It uses something called the Experian Mosaic, which is based on postcode, but it’s got all sorts of other criteria. And it works out about 12 pence five to 12 pence a view. And you only pay when they’ve watched 75 percent of it. So it’s really interesting because it’s quite relatively low cost to actually do TV ads.

You’re talking about 3, 000 pounds, which I suppose is just sort of under 5, 000 euros or dollars. And I think it’s going to be massive going forward. Obviously you’ve got to have a TV quality ad. So I think that’s really interesting and I just like to mention our webinars. So you can see the link on the slide.

We run a webinar every Friday morning at 9am, 9am, 9am, a little bit early for the States, I’m afraid it’d be in the middle of the night, but it is recorded and you can go back and see it. You can register at this webinar address and you can see all the old recordings and this week I’m doing digital marketing.

You can do in your pajamas. So I think that would be a great topic and we cover lots of different things.

Absolutely,

Gianpaolo Lorusso: but I don’t wear pajamas

Ann Stanley: to do a guest guest talk.

Frederick Vallaeys: All right, thank you, Anne, for joining us. Gianpaolo, we’ll we’ll give you the floor.

Gianpaolo Lorusso: Yeah. I would just suggest suggest you to keep an eye on Microsoft audience network because they are they’re integrating it with linking targeting options.

I don’t know if it is a little of topics but but I would I would keep an eye on on it. I would, it’s something I would I would try to, to, to test even more. deeply when when I have the occasion to do it, because I think it’s one of the most it’s the first time probably in his history that Microsoft is a little ahead of Google in something, and it will be on people on business to business campaigns in display network in audience network.

Sure. I’m, I’m happy they did it and I’ll I will trust I, I’ll do some, some tests on it.

Frederick Vallaeys: Sounds like great advice, Gianpaolo, and thank you so much for joining us and everyone, we’ll see you for the next episode next Wednesday.

Gianpaolo Lorusso: Bye-Bye. It was a pleasure, ciao Byebye.