How to Prepare a Successful eCommerce PPC Strategy for the 2021 Holiday Season

Episode Description

Already, 2021 is shaping up to be unlike any other holiday season we’ve seen.

It may feel too early to be talking about Q4 shopping, but with the busiest shopping period of the year just a few months away (and many having already started), today is the best time to start preparing your #eCommerce PPC strategy for the holidays.

This panel covers: •

• How consumer behavior in 2021 changed from previous years
• New tools and capabilities from Google that you may not have had in 2020
• Tips for Smart Bidding, conversion tracking, audience targeting, shopping ads & more

Episode Takeaways

How Consumer Behavior in 2021 Changed from Previous Years

• Increased Uncertainty: 2021 continued to experience significant shifts due to the pandemic, impacting consumer confidence and shopping behaviors.
• Early Shopping Trends: Consumers started their shopping earlier in the year to avoid potential supply chain delays and out-of-stock issues.
• Digital and Physical Integration: There was a greater blend of online shopping with physical store interactions, such as increased usage of services like curbside pickup and buy-online-pick-up-in-store (BOPIS).

New Tools and Capabilities from Google that You May Not Have Had in 2020

• Enhanced Smart Bidding: Google has made improvements in Smart Bidding strategies, offering better handling of real-time data and more effective bid optimization.
• Data-Driven Attribution (DDA): Google has expanded the accessibility of Data-Driven Attribution to more advertisers, providing a more nuanced understanding of the paths consumers take to conversion.
• Broadened Integration: New integrations across different Google platforms (such as YouTube, Discovery, and more traditional search and shopping ads) allow for a unified approach to campaign management.

Tips for Smart Bidding, Conversion Tracking, Audience Targeting, Shopping Ads & More

• Smart Bidding Adjustments: Advertisers are encouraged to actively manage and adjust their Smart Bidding strategies rather than setting and forgetting, especially during high seasonality and sales periods.
• Conversion Tracking Enhancements: It’s crucial to ensure conversion tracking is accurately capturing all user interactions, including adjustments for offline conversions and returns.
• Dynamic Audience Targeting: As consumer behavior shifts, audience targeting parameters should be revisited and adjusted to align with the latest trends and data insights.
• Optimizing Shopping Ads: Keep shopping ads updated with current inventory information to avoid advertising out-of-stock items, and use feed management tools to dynamically adjust campaigns based on available stock levels.

Episode Transcripts

Frederick Vallaeys: Hello and welcome to PPC Town Hall. My name is Fred Vallaeys. I’m your host. I’m also the co founder of Optimizer. So we’re just about to go into Q4. We’re just a few days away and Q4 is obviously a huge time for retailers and e commerce. And that’s been the case for decades and decades, but the last two years have not been anything near normal.

So we expect Q4 still going to be huge, but it’s also going to be different. And to talk about how it’s going to be different, we decided to bring in two guests, one from Google and one who runs an agency. And we’ll have a great discussion hopefully today about how Q4 is different, how to prepare for making the most of a Q4 that can be very interesting, see a lot of change, see very rapid changes from what you’re used to.

So that’s that’s going to be our PPC Town Hall today. So let’s get rolling with it.

All right. So welcome to the show. Welcome back, Andrew. Welcome. First timer, Chris. Andrew, let’s start with you. How’s it going today?

Andrew Lolk: Oh, first. So good. I’m really excited to talk about the Q4. It’s it’s been a wild year. It’s been a while, a couple of years. So it’s it’ll be interesting to to discuss to discuss Q4.

We have a ton of ton of thoughts for for this holiday season. So it’ll be interesting.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, I can’t wait to hear what your thoughts are by the way, so you were just in denmark, I believe back in on the west coast

Andrew Lolk: Yes, we were so I I just visited the the team. We just moved into new offices, over the summer So just just visited.

And and I like I came from la And I wore pants and a shirt and everything, and it was hot on the entire flight there. But I was like, okay, I usually always go in shorts and I arrive and I’m so cold. And then I, when I arrived, it was like 25 degrees. What is that? That’s like 80 ish in Fahrenheit.

And it was just great weather the entire week going again on Saturday and it’s two weeks of rain. So now we’re in in the right kind of weather.

Frederick Vallaeys: Nice. And one thing we like to do is ask all the attendees to say hello from a, wherever you’re calling in from. Let us know where you’re at today. And we’ll pop those on the screen.

We’re using YouTube live. We’re using a Facebook live and new. We’re also on LinkedIn live, so you can use all those platforms in the comments. We see those comments in real time. That’s a great place to say hello, but also ask your questions for the panelists. And we’ll take the discussion. Whatever direction people want to take it.

Let’s bring in Chris right now. Chris, where are you calling us from?

Chris Moreno: I am in the Bay area. So also California but a very different part of California. So it’s still, still a little early here. You might see me sitting on my, my coffee as we go. But it’s a nice, a nice brisk morning. So I am also in, in long sleeves enjoying just the, the brisk, fresh air today.

Frederick Vallaeys: So are you in San Francisco or in the, on the peninsula?

Chris Moreno: I’m in the East Bay. So neither.

Frederick Vallaeys: Okay. I’m on the peninsula and I am wearing the short sleeves, but I am a little chilly actually. Hey, but Chris, so you work for Google, right? So tell us what you do there.

Chris Moreno: Yeah. So currently I lead one of our e commerce and DTC teams focused on mid market clients.

So really, really focused on hyper growth clients with an emphasis on e commerce. I’ve been leading this team for about a year now. I’ve been at Google for about nine years and I’ve covered all different areas, mostly retail focused. And prior to Google spent some time as a marketing manager across different retailers, such as Saks and Nike.

So been, been in the retail space, I’d say on and off for about 12, 12 or 13 years, seeing all different sides of it.

Frederick Vallaeys: Nice. All right. So, and then, yeah, we got people calling in from all over the world. Again, that’s awesome. The recent thing we started doing is we’re doing a few giveaways. So if anyone else needs some coffee, we’re doing a 15.

Starbucks gift card. Figured if you’re watching this show, you should have something warm to drink or in Chris’s case, something cold. And also a copy of my my digital book digital marketing in an AI world. So the winners for that, we’re going to announce them at the end of the show. But I also think we should give away a prize to everyone who engages with us on the comments.

So if you even just say hello, or you ask a question, we’ll pull out another winner from that at the end of the live show, and we’ll also pull a winner from people who watch on demand. later on. I know we have friends in Australia. It’s not a great time for them to watch right now, but they do watch afterwards.

Okay, good. But yeah, Q four expectations. How are things different? Let’s let’s maybe start with that. And Chris, I’d love to hear from you and Google sitting on troves and troves of data. One of you

Chris Moreno: know, it’s funny because we do sit on troves and troves of data, but I actually don’t think It requires our data to see how things are different.

I think it’s, it’s all around us and everyone was chatting last year or about how different 2020 was going to be. I think the only thing that’s really even more different than 2020 is 2021. I think there’s a lot of uncertainty coming into Q4 this year even coming into the second half of the year, right?

The great reopening, you might’ve seen headlines around hot vac summer. All these kind of anticipated trends and themes. With that came a lot of consumer shifts, right? In terms of consumers are finally leaving their house for the first time. Are they going to put on real pants, right? Are we going to reenter the world in our yoga pants?

Are we going to go back to the office? Are people going to dress up? Are they going to get new clothes? With that came a lot of category shifts around things like beauty and apparel, and then. Travel coming back online. So there was all of this, these expectations in terms of what would happen, right?

And I think in reality, right, it was kind of a mixed bag in terms of What actually did happen. Part of that is certainly due to the Delta variant and just a lot of uncertainty. So what we’re seeing really going into Q4 of this year is expect more of the same, except more of that uncertainty, especially as we’re seeing other factors at play, like supply chain.

If anybody here has tried to shop for anything recently, like you’ve probably run into supply chain issues, whether you’re. trying to buy lumber or a bicycle or a car, like whatever it may be. So with that, we’re seeing a lot of shifts, a lot of turbulence in the marketplace itself. What’s that? What that’s leading to is a lot of shifts in terms of how consumers are reacting, making their purchases and even even kind of driving their consideration set.

And one last thing I’ll mention, and I can go on and on. So, you know, afraid you’ll have to stop me at some point, but

Frederick Vallaeys: I mean, since you offered, I’ll stop you right there for a second, right? But it’s really interesting what we did. I was just reading an article. We have a huge team and we’re not a huge team, but our support team is mostly in Santiago, Chile, and that’s one of the hottest economies.

And so you were speaking about supply chain issues. And I was reading that someone in Santiago who wants to buy a vehicle right now basically has to wait for a whole year. Right. So it creates consumer shifts, but it’s also interesting because advertisers respond to that in interesting ways, right? If you have a one year backlog for people wanting to buy a vehicle, like, why would you even advertise those vehicles?

Right? So does that cause a shift? And we should talk about that too. But what’s the shift for advertisers and how they respond? To these consumer trends,

Chris Moreno: we, we most certainly should. And we most certainly will. There’s, I’d say a bunch of different strategies and really depends on which one is going to be right for your business, right?

There are certain advertisers that maybe have hundreds of skews in a very large catalog and then it’s okay. How do we shift and prioritize? There are other advertisers who maybe have, you know, four key products, which if two of those are out of stock, it’s a very different situation. Right? So I think the strategy certainly shifts and evolves depending on the shape or form of your business.

But we, we should chat about that. And then the last thing I just want to mention kind of going into this, this perfect storm of uncertainty for Q4 is, Okay. data, right? We know with I. O. S. 14, we know with privacy that we’re seeing lots of, let’s call it limitations or changes in terms of the types of data we can collect.

And with that comes maybe changes in our need for measurements or our needs really rely on first party data versus third party data. So that’s just like 11 other elements in terms of this process. This massive shift in terms of how approaching Q4 this year will have to be different than how it approached Q4 previously.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, you said it’s a, it’s the perfect storm. Hey, but I do have to thank you and you as a representative of Google for bringing back so much of the the search query data. So that was a re, PPC town hall, but data all the way back to, I think it’s February for queries has been returned.

Chris Moreno: I’d like to take credit and say I went to engineering and made it happen, but I most certainly did not, but I’ll, I’ll, I’ll say you’re welcome.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, exactly.

Andrew Lolk: And when I was like, I think, I think the I think the supply chain issue thing is going to be really interesting. I just wanted to pull that up again, because if there’s something that we haven’t like. We’ve just seen, we’ve had to talk about now is what do we do with, with the supply chains in in Q4, because we saw it last year across, across the world, we, we worked with us advertisers and European advertisers.

And we just, we saw it across the world that, that some items went out of stock. The people bought for gift purposes. So last year, a lot of people had air had issues when buying things online. For their gift purchases. And that’s something that I think people are going to be a lot more worried about this year.

So when we send a, we try to figure out advertising plans, then we’ve never talked much about what’s in stock this year as versus what’s in stock last year, as we’ve ever, we’ve never, we’ve never talked as much about it. So that, that part of the advertising strategy is going to be a huge, what do we advertise?

How aggressively do we advertise for things? How much do we anticipate to go out of stock? Because we’re just not, we’re not getting anything back if it’s December 2nd. We’re not, we’re not having time to put in an extra order. If you put in the wrong order for black Friday and you don’t have anything left for the December sales.

So that’s going to be interesting.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. As a retailer. I mean, if you haven’t gotten your stuff on the boat at this point, like it’s just not going to show up. Right. There’s a huge,

Andrew Lolk: and there’s even, there are concerns that they will even show up like so. And so, so the guesswork in the amount of stock and.

The order quantities you’re making this year have been pushed back a lot sooner and you are going to have to make much bigger guesses. And many people will be most likely be wrong. So we’re going to have to navigate something where, where a lot of the advertisers we work have an unlimited budget and unlimited products we can sell.

We’re going over to something where we. Do not have an unlimited quantity of products we can sell. So we have to take that factor, that variable into our advertising for Q4. And something we’ve already started to discuss now, which we haven’t done in earlier years at all.

Frederick Vallaeys: And by the way, the no’s that we’re seeing on the screen right now.

So quick little poll, but have people started shopping already for the holidays? I’m a yes. I started, I think sometime in summer.

Chris Moreno: So Fred, we, we have data and I, I don’t know if it’s our internal data or secondary source, but the stat I’ve seen is 31% of folks have said they’ve started shopping. So cur curious to see how our chat respondents match to that 31%.

But I, I think to, to Andrew’s point, part of it is like if you’re not buying early, the product might not be there later. And I, I think you’re seeing a, a mix. Kind of result in terms of consumers understanding that or fearing that maybe fear is the more powerful motivator there, but I, I do think it’s gonna be like a very real scenario this holiday and the other set I saw, I think was actually in a, an insider article was shipping costs are up 450%, right?

And like that cost has to go somewhere. So I think what’s your big

Frederick Vallaeys: cost for the retailer, right?

Chris Moreno: Yes, right. Not for consumers. We’re still getting our, you know, two day free shipping for now. Remember last year, there’s questions on like, well, those costs be passed down. I don’t think we saw that. But 1 thing we should certainly talk about within the hour here is like, just thinking about profit, right?

Thinking about ROI. And how that might have to be different this year.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. I mean, let’s jump into that or Andrew, go ahead.

Andrew Lolk: Yeah. Just one, one thing I think Chris pulls it up greatly. And that’s, that’s the whole reason why we’re having those conversations about what is actually how much stock do we have?

Because if we push it all at a ROAS, let’s just say a 500 percent ROAS. Or a lower profit margin for black Friday with discounts and everything. And we have nothing left to sell for December for those three weeks where you can usually get away with selling things on full price. Your profit looks completely different.

And that’s where we, we really have to be careful about how much we sell up to black Friday, if we can’t get more out of it, if we can’t get more yeah. If we can’t get more in stock.

Frederick Vallaeys: To the blog post which I’ll show on the screen right here. So it’s on the Optmyzrblog. The title is why the shipping delays are such a huge deal for PPC.

And I think we’ve talked about like, are we going to have enough stuff to sell? And like Andrew saying, we just don’t have an unlimited supply of stuff. So we may not need to advertise or push quite as hard. And then like Chris was saying, a 400 percent increase in shipping costs. So. I ran some numbers just for fun on how many Christmas trees you can stuff into a shipping container. And what was it? I think I could put roughly 150, 000 worth of trees into a container. But I can put in a million and a half dollars worth of Christmas string lights in that same container. Now, those containers went from shipping cost is 4, 000 to shipping cost of 5, 000. You know, 20, 25, 000. So obviously that’s 25, 000 on 150, 000 worth of trees.

That’s a big impact, right? That’s really going to push on the margins 25, 000 on a million and a half in string lights, much less of an impact. And so that’s where I think it’s going to be interesting and it’s going to be passed down to us as a, you know, when we do PPC, but what’s the target ROAS that we’re going to have to hit and what’s the shift in the target ROAS based on these you know, hugely increased shipping costs.

So if you want to, if you want to run through some of the math and see how it might impact things you know, check out this article,

Chris Moreno: Andrew. I’d love your take on something as you’re obviously discussing this with lots of clients is there’s been this kind of back and forth between how should we think about promotions this year?

Right? Because why? Why necessarily discount something if it’s going to sell out? And I think that’s where I don’t necessarily have a official stance on this, but that’s where I just think it. The dynamic nature of this year, we’re going to have to be like so much more hands on and reacting to what we’re seeing in our advertisers performance versus maybe previous years, right?

Maybe promotions make sense up until the point that they don’t, and they don’t make sense up until the point that they do, and just being so much more dynamic curious, like how, how those conversations are going and if you’re having them and like, if you’re seeing any solutions.

Andrew Lolk: It’s actually funny.

It’s, it’s, it’s been a core core strategy that we share with clients that we don’t really like, there’s certain things that I’ll gladly talk about, but I don’t put in a blog post, but I’ll gladly talk about now. So one of the things that we are advising everybody to do is to at least push a black Friday their black, black Friday sales for an entire week, meaning you run it like the entire black week where a lot of advertisers in the past have been against that because like, especially in Europe, it’s, it’s not quite gotten to that point where it’s.

You think it’s the coolest thing in the world, but the tipping point this year is we don’t know, we don’t know what’s going to happen. We don’t know if a 10 percent store wide is enough or it usually, it usually isn’t, it needs to be 20, 25%. But this year, if we don’t have that much in stock, can 10 percent do the trick?

And that’s what we, if we start with 10 percent on a Monday and a Tuesday, then we can actually start figuring, seeing if that moves the needle compared to last year and the year before. So, so we’re trying to get advertisers to. Run their promotions for a longer time. So we have time to actually course correct instead of it just being Friday midnight bang.

So that’s, that’s what we’re trying to get everybody to do. And so far we we’ve done it with all appetizers.

Frederick Vallaeys: And the question on that, right. So in past years, would you just basically go in and say 25%, that’s the benchmark. And we’re just going to run that no matter what, because like you said, there’s unlimited supply.

So it doesn’t matter if I sell a whole ton. Like, how are you going to deal this year? With being ready to go from 10 percent and being like, Oh my God, we sold out way more than we thought. So let’s go to 5 percent or let’s remove it or let’s go the other way. Like the 10 percent didn’t do it. And we’re still sitting on this inventory.

Like we need to go back to 25%. Like how, how are you putting systems and things in place to really respond?

Andrew Lolk: So, so we can’t really, like we, we could put systems in place to, to, to, to respond to it, everything that we run are feed based. So technically we could have a feed, a feed value that pushed the inventory.

And when it ran, it came below a certain inventory level. Then we’re good over a certain amount of sales. We could easily get that. However, we’ve seen that, that it’s just, we need some quantity and like qualitative input as well. So simply just seeing that our guys only work with three to five advertisers per person, then, then they can easily just jump on a call per day with with each, with each advertiser.

And then just see, okay, how well did we sell yesterday? Because the, the advertisers we work with also is not. Solely PPC base. So if we were just looking at our data saying, Hey, it’s doing great, but maybe their email is failing, their social is failing or whatever is not selling as well, or it’s completely exceeding the numbers that we’re seeing on the PPC side.

So having that daily context to see, let’s try to push it a little bit further, or let’s try to pull back a little bit. I think once you have that week, then you can, you can pull back and push a little bit on a daily basis. Again, it’s all about having enough stock for all of December.

Frederick Vallaeys: Chris,

Chris Moreno: sorry, Andrew, you mentioned two things there that I think we should touch on at some point. Number one, if I’m hearing correctly, and I think I am like just getting a really strong sense of like that, that quantitative input and output and also the qualitative and like what we’ve been seeing of our advertisers across the board is like, you have to start early because like, there’s so much more to test this year, so much more of that quantitative and qualitative feedback that we need that like, you really need to prove that out.

Honestly, I’d say now, maybe up until mid to late October, because you don’t want to be getting those learnings really in November, right? You want to have those learnings and then like figure out how are we going to maybe be a little more dynamic, but like, this is the time to test new things. So that’s number one.

The second thing you mentioned around, you know, different channels. I’m the Google person, so I’m not going to necessarily talk about other channels, but I do think it really highlights the important of good measurement and attribution. Right. I think that’s also we’re making sure you have like a really strong sense of the apples to apples kind of comparison in terms of how do you understand like the value of each each platform?

Not just lower funnel, right? But like assisted conversions you through like, obviously we have solutions like DDA now, but like thinking about that to get that holistic picture. Yeah.

Andrew Lolk: It’s it’s absolutely crucial to, to get that part. Like we, we usually see with advertising that that’s, that’s like, we can all get to a certain level with just pushing like the PPC side or pushing overall.

And then the, the, the numbers from an attribution standpoint, but, but whenever we come to a certain point, it is the holistic approach. How do we actually measure that in? And what is the, sorry, what is the attribution supposed to look like across different channels? It’s always hard. But it’s, it’s where the mat, the next growth lies with most midsize e commerce.

Frederick Vallaeys: And so the cross channel attributions, certainly very complicated, but in channel attribution, a little bit simpler. We should probably talk about the fact that Google just one or two days ago announced that DDA is becoming the standard default attribution model. Finally replacing last click attribution after what?

25 years. It had a good ride.

Andrew Lolk: No, it didn’t. It’s horrible. Last click, last click has always been horrible. I wrote an article like three years ago. I was like, Latently, like this is awful. I guess it’s nobody’s best interest to run last. Like

Frederick Vallaeys: yeah. But I mean, like to our defense, like it was the only way to measure it back then.

Andrew Lolk: It was awesome. Like originally just the way that you could measure something was just like, wow, this is amazing. So, so I think, I think. I think it’s like, we, we’ve been running it for a long time, not to just run last click. There’s of course purposes for it. And that’s where I think most of the attribution talk in channel for Google have been like, there has been a case for when to run last click and when to run first click and also maybe choosing one method over the other and then using.

Analysis using the different methodology to, to say, okay, these campaigns could actually run at a lower ROAS target, et cetera, et cetera. I’m just glad we’re not putting new advertisers default into last like, because it is hurting their growth.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. Especially the new ones who don’t know quite as much yet.

They just, it’s the wrong thing. I’d love to hear from you, like DDA. It’s fantastic, but it was not accessible to so many advertisers based on the volume being too low. And all of a sudden it seems like Google figured out how to make happy, happy

Chris Moreno: holidays. That’s a, so. In terms of the feedback around last click, I do think the biggest challenge is once an advertiser gets accustomed to last click, like they become so laser focused on last click.

And I think that’s the biggest challenge. Historically is you kind of. Train like from a from a like learning perspective that last click is the way to look at something and then it’s really hard to take somebody inside who actually don’t look at it that way. So that is why I’m really happy that especially for new advertisers DDA is more of the standard now and they can start with that view because it’s so much easier to start with that correct view of things versus and trying to bring them onto something else in terms of DDA.

So data driven attribution. To me, the biggest success here is the fact that it now looks at all of our platforms, right? So search, discovery, YouTube, because you need that holistic picture, right? You really can’t measure the value or success of something if you don’t understand how it’s working in conjunction with everything else.

And like there’s, There’s so many, you know, good analogies here in terms of like, whether you’re a sports fan or whatever, like if someone is, is giving an assist, right, like you still get that stat for the assist versus only seeing what’s happening, like with, with the score at the end. And that’s where, as we’re understanding, like the value of investment or understanding how to maybe move that media mix, that investment mix, you need to understand, like, what’s driving things, not just the day somebody purchases, maybe the first day they’re considering something right.

I was recently shopping for a bicycle and this is like a, a true story, like with supply chain and everything else. And it took about four or five months for me to actually find a bicycle. And in those four or five months, I started to consider a bunch of different advertisers that I would never have considered before.

Considered advertisers who I never even heard of before, right? Maybe it was like seeing a YouTube ad for, for an online bike shop, but again, I’ve never even, was never even in my awareness set. Thank you. I didn’t actually make that purchase until two or three months later when I finally decided, okay, it’s not worth waiting due to supply chain.

Like, let me look at these other options. But like it, it all started with seeing one kind of awareness generating ad that I then converted on about two months later. Right. So. That credit never would have been there if we weren’t looking at more of a data driven attribution model.

Andrew Lolk: Actually, actually, I actually think that that’s a nuance that, that, that of the data driven, it didn’t get as much attention as the data driven change.

At least in my feeds, it didn’t get as much attention, but that, that it pulls in different channels or different campaign types, like. Search and shopping have been able to pull across each other. But when some, when a consumer or a user went from a shopping click to a display click, it hasn’t been able to make that leap before.

That was actually something that I found out most people didn’t know. And, and I didn’t know that until like, I think 2018 or something like that. When we started. Pushing all retargeting for display and all display in general over to separate campaigns. We even took branded terms and put into separate campaigns to make sure that that they wouldn’t catch like that even 50 percent of the credit for a, for a conversion.

So that’s something I think will be very interesting to see how much credit does DDA attribute to what we know is low funnel. Like, like really bottom funnel keywords like a branded term, like in this case, optimizer, because historically I feel that it has been overweighing some of these keywords in general, if the last click, well, if it’s a Nike.

Running shoe and then Nike running shoe was the last click. Awesome. Needs a lot of credit. I think there’s some, some input from, from us where a branded term should either just be disregarded or put completely in different campaigns. Like I would love to see that as, as part of TDA. I think that’s the next, next step.

So that’ll be interesting.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, that is interesting. Good product feedback. Yeah. Let me see. You have attribution and how like that one conversion gets split out. And the other place where we still need to do a good job is. Reporting the value of that conversion and that that goes to it a little bit as well, right?

So if you would say hey something the value of a branded conversion is maybe less because it was Someone who looked for my brand probably knew my brand may have been an existing customer, right? So how do you split new customers from existing customers and value them differently? And Google is introducing a number of good options to help with that.

Chris Moreno: One one last plug for DDA, Andrew, I think you actually mentioned this earlier, is the ability to retroactively model things, right? Because it’s never a one size fits all. So it’s like, let’s look at everything that’s happening. Let’s look at all the data and figure out for a given advertiser, like what mix and what model makes sense, right?

Because it’s not going to be the same for everybody. And you’re going to have to figure out How, how do we want to give credit here? And honestly, like there is no right answer. Like certain advertisers might intrinsically like value things more than others in terms of who we know that this is driving brand awareness.

Therefore, like, let’s give a little more credit.

Frederick Vallaeys: Okay. Okay. There’s the attribution model blog post from Andrew. We’re already half an hour in. I feel like we need to talk about some other stuff because we did promise playbook. So let me show a couple of other things. Actually in the playbook.

So Google put together a four week playbook. We can share that with everyone afterwards who’s registered so register on the landing page if you want to get a copy of this but Chris at a high level, talk us through maybe this four week game plan from Google.

Chris Moreno: Yeah, so the four week game plan really starts now.

If not, I’d say, you know, has has started already. It’s a four week playbook, but I really think that. One of the themes this year is everything is going to happen earlier. So we really should get ready for that. So I mentioned earlier, you don’t want to be testing too much or tweaking too much like in in the thick of holiday, right?

Like this is really the time to make sure you’re getting ready. And we do have like this, this growth formula that we look at in terms of how we want to approach this. Success. Like this is very much the get ready phase of things where that means like, make sure your website is ready. Make sure your, your feeds are ready.

If you’re using shopping, like make sure everything is in place right now. So you’re not fixing things later on. So that’s really weak one, right? Figure out is your, is your website where it needs to be is your feed, where it needs to be. Do you understand your consumer, right? So this is the time to figure out what’s happening.

With my category, what’s happening with my customer? Also a good time to start thinking about maybe lifetime value, start thinking about profit and ROI, because those are all really the inputs you’re going to need for a successful strategy, right? Especially as we think about automation and we think about really.

The, the peaks and valleys of demand that we’re expecting, like we’re going to need really good targets, so to speak, so that we know like what we’re trying to achieve and all that really needs to be figured out now. So that’s, that’s quote unquote week one, but I think week one is really this larger kind of get ready phase that stands multiple weeks leading up to, I’d say like where we are today.

Weeks two and three. And again, like, I do think this spans a little further is we are expecting so much. Let’s call it volatility and unpredictability with demand. Right? I think the notion is in previous holidays, like, demand was kind of linear and really spikes from Black Friday. Cyber Monday kind of tapers off.

And I actually think the Transcribed by https: otter. ai 5th, 6th and 7th shopping days are actually like mid December. So it’s like we see a linear rise, a spike drops down a few weeks later, another spike this year we’re expecting is more like this, right? Lots of peaks and valleys and that could be driven by honestly inventory, right?

So when am I seeing things in stock that I want to buy could be driven by market factors, could be driven by What’s happening in store, meaning offline versus online. We are expecting lots more unpredictability with when that demand is there. So if it’s less predictable, that just means we have to be really on top of things to take action and capture that demand in the moment.

So it’s not about just raising your bids and budgets during black Friday, cyber Monday, like you might want to raise everything now to get ready for the If those spikes are there so that’s really figuring out like, how, how are you going to make sure like you’re present? How do you make sure like you’re in that consideration set, not necessarily knowing like when the consumer might be ready to buy, so to speak.

And then week four, week four assumes again, like this is more like that black Friday, cyber Monday approach. This is, okay. Like that is when demand should be its highest. So what are the things you should do and the things you shouldn’t do? So the last thing you want to do is, You’re just running out of budget, right?

You’re just leaving ROI on the table. Like if consumers want to keep purchasing and you’re running out of budget, then that’s just missed opportunity. I think something else here is thinking about like that supply strategy, that inventory strategy, where like what is, what is your kind of shopping strategy if some of like your, your largest margin drivers are out of stock?

Like how are we thinking about driving profit across like the entire catalog? Or emphasizing certain products or Maybe it’s even more of that lifetime value gift card retention type strategy if we’re not going to have the inventory. So that’s just making sure that like where we’re set up for success in those peak moments, but also having a couple of different plans depending on how those moments might go.

Frederick Vallaeys: Cool. And so display book, I will be sharing with everyone again. And so the link for registering to get that is right there. Let’s talk a little bit about week one, right? So understanding your customer is part of that. One thing I don’t know if people still look at this a lot, but Google Trends.

So I think Google Trends is really interesting, really useful in these uncertain times. Just figuring stuff out, like how has Yeah. Consumers looking for free shipping deals, coupons like what’s relatively speaking, the most important thing to win a consumer’s a purchase. Andrew, any thoughts on, do you guys use Google trends in any way?

Andrew Lolk: Oh, we, we, we use it a ton. It’s, it, it can be hard to scale. But it’s, it’s definitely good to understand like, okay, let this last month, what have we, especially like when we get the, how are we, Are we exploiting the market just as much or why are we not seeing as many sales this year as last year within a certain category, then we can start pulling out Google Trends from the last month and compare it to, to the year before because those numbers are like.

They don’t have any impact on how well we’re doing from an advertising standpoint. It’s simply just how many searches are there. So using that to know whether or not you need to change your your efforts which is one of the things I’ve talked about for years. It’s like sometimes you make changes to your marketing setup.

Based on the wrong data, based on the wrong insights. If something’s going wrong, try to find out if it’s actually a marketing setup, or if some conditions that have changed like now, where in Europe, we saw that moving into like July is usually the worst month of the year for e commerce because most people are on vacation this year, everybody pushed their vacation to get good Corona passports to get, see how close you would get to the start of the school year and still go on vacation.

So we saw August actually turning into . The new July. July wasn’t that good, but August was just as bad as, as July. And using Google Trends, we could, we could sell that after the end of of August, say like, you know what? We, we didn’t hit some of the revenues that we had seen. In some of the markets that we had and search volumes were just much, much lower than we than we’ve had in the past.

Especially compared to last year when big parts of Europe were locked down in August. So it’s, it’s nice to have here now where you can’t use this year over year data that us as marketers usually live on. It’s like the guide in the, it’s the North star in terms of KPIs. And we can’t use that. So we need to pull in more like Google trends.

So I think it’s, it’s under you, it’s underutilized. Yeah.

Frederick Vallaeys: And another interesting way that I’m thinking maybe using trends is as you find these new things that consumers want and the way they talk about your product. I think one thing we all struggle with is making great RSAs. What do you put into the 15 headlines, right?

Like, how do I speak the language that resonates with the consumer today and using trends to figure out, like, what are some trending queries? What are some trending ways they talk about my product and putting that into an RSA and then letting Google figure out how to match that to the right query. One little thing on RSAs that I hadn’t realized, and hopefully this is helpful to people watching, but.

There’s a lot of talk about pinning stuff. I always thought that you could pin exactly one thing to one position. And I think that was the case in the beginning, but there has been a change. So now you can pin multiple things to a position. So if you say, want to test different promotions or different ways you talk about promotions, you can actually say, I’m going to pin these four headlines to position two.

And they’re all variations of promotion. So one is going to talk about free shipping. One’s going to talk about my 10 percent site wide offer. The next one is going to talk about guaranteed two day delivery. And then I can basically have those rotated by Google and they still don’t show me great stats on each of these components, but at least I can look at the combinations report to get a sense of do any of these seem to play more, have higher impressions than some of the others. So that’s that’s one way I would use trans as well,

Chris Moreno: right? It’s a great point The other thing too is like we’re just seeing so much like Dynamic queries these days. I think part of that too, is again, like people might shift their consideration very, very abruptly versus previous years. I do think RSAs give you a much better shot at like staying on top of that, that dynamic search behavior and making sure like the most, I guess, relevant or most enticing text ads are the ones being served.

And then in terms of trends, like I mentioned queries as well, right? Like this is where. There’s so much unpredictability where we don’t know what our best queries might be, right? We don’t even know who our best customers might be with those kind of rises and falls of demand at certain times. That’s where I think we’re really leaning into anything that’s responsive, dynamic automation really gives us a better chance because if you’re If you’re trying to manually adjust too many things, you’re always going to be behind.

Frederick Vallaeys: There’s an audience question, actually, I’ll take this one before we go to this next topic. But Jason’s asking, speaking about margins and all this uncertainty and inventory, right? And maybe this is directed mostly to Andrew, but would you advertise less and bid less on high volume searches that have low, low in inventory?

Andrew Lolk: It’s it, it’s, it’s definitely a tactic we’re pulling in where normally we, we, we should have a poster in Savvy that’s just that, that that just says increase your bids. We usually do all of Q4, increase bids push, push harder on seasonality, bid adjustments, lowering ROAS targets, anything to just expand, expand, expand.

This year, it’s something we’re going to be a lot more, a lot more careful about, and this could definitely be one. Taking the high the high volume items out of your existing campaigns and pushing into Maybe, maybe regular manual campaigns with lower bids. So you can control them. And if you see you have plenty of stock left after black Friday, push them into your, your, your smart shopping campaigns or your, your campaigns that are running smart bidding and just go, go, go, go, go.

So let’s pause on

Frederick Vallaeys: that. And like, maybe repeat that for people watching, but we’re talking about account structures now, right? So you’re, you seem to be using smart shopping campaigns in some cases, but in trying to be nice

Andrew Lolk: here. I’m trying to be nice.

So, so, so it’s, it’s mainly an audience thing. So, so, so we don’t use smart shopping that much just because we need some, some, some more leverage to push one or the other. We use smart bidding a ton, but smart shopping less because we have less of an ability to push bestsellers over low sellers. Push high stock versus low stock and all these like factors that variables that we use in, in advertising for the stores that we work with.

But if we’re talking to, to in house advertisers, then we, we highly recommend smart shopping across the board for most of them actually. And this is where pulling out products out of smart shopping and run it manually. If you need better control of how much they should be exposed is, is one way of doing it.

Frederick Vallaeys: And do you kind of have like a preset structure built based on the granularity that you think you will need? Or is it truly like, Hey, we’ll start with these like bigger groupings of things. And then as we see things changing, we’ll restructure on the fly.

Andrew Lolk: So we’ll, we’ll usually do it on the fly. I don’t think we have any accounts where it’s, it’s pre already ready.

We have a low volume campaign structure or campaign. Or low priority campaign with, with the campaigns that are products that we don’t want to expose as much. We don’t have it ready, but it’s one of the things in the arsenal that we do find products that we want to push less than we’re ready to just hit the button and create them.

So yes and no, it’s, it’s in the playbook, but it’s not in the actual campaign accounts yet.

Frederick Vallaeys: Interesting. There’s another question from Joey. I’m saying it the French way because it sounds like a bush in a French last name. So but so would one way of tackling the margin issue due to the higher shipping costs?

To the retailers be to focus more on bundling instead of doing discounts.

Andrew Lolk: Well, I hate like, so, so yes, maybe like from my point of view, maybe but it’s as Chris have said, like a ton, there’s so many things changing this year. I’m not sure this is the year to go with bundling over discounting. Like it’s definitely something you could test.

And like, like, like Chris says, maybe you want to test that now. Like we, you do have singles day coming out on the 11th of November. You do have some, you can call some Halloween sales. So depending on where you where you are in the world and what industry you’re in, like testing it out to see what the data would be on such kind of changing it from, from discounts to bundling.

I would not do it. Like, Oh, now we’re going to do this for black Friday. I would be, yeah. Then you don’t know if it’s because of the circumstances have changed or it’s your, your, your offer that has changed. And I, I, I try to as much as possible to lower the amount of variables. So we know what the different variables have what the each.

What the effect of each variable is.

Chris Moreno: I agree. So I, I fully agree. There’s also something in there around rising CPCs. Like we, we do know costs are generally going up and again, like not, not to the CPCs costs are going up almost everywhere on everything right now. Right. Inflation is certainly a hot topic, but one thing I think about is.

Andrew, you mentioned smart bidding. Like that’s where getting really, really smart, no pun intended around our targets. Cause if, if we, if we have the right ROAS, we have the right CPA, like whatever that looks like, and then really cast a wide net, go broad, cause figure out where those efficiencies are.

Like the efficiencies might be in places that you’re not seeing, whether it’s across certain products in your feed or certain keywords we are seeing some success. Around like a broader strategy in terms of targeting, letting automation really do its thing to find those efficiencies.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And that’s the other interesting thing is you have to combine automations, right?

So the ideal formula seems to be RSA plus broad match plus smart bidding, and then let the machine figure it out. But that really only works if you’ve done a good job at your attribution models, you’re not running last click attribution, and you’ve done a good job with actual value reporting. And I don’t think we’ll talk about it much today.

There’s other episodes we’ve done on it. But basically. Use value adjustments. Like one thing that scared me, Chris, when you were like, Hey, I know it’s going to take me several months to get that bicycle, so I just went ahead and bought this one because I’m like. You know, by the time I’m really decided, I want it to be there.

Right. But you probably have free returns. So I would just go and buy five bikes and then just returns the ones I don’t want. Right. And so if you’re not doing value adjustments, reporting, if you’re not saying, well, this was a sale, it looked like a sale, I told Google it was a sale, but it actually was returned.

Now Google is finding you more of those buyers who might be the wrong buyers. Maybe they’re the right buyers. And that’s actually a whole other discussion. Right. But we do have to be thinking about how do we report correctly so that these automation systems can find you the right type of consumer.

Andrew Lolk: It’s a very funny thing. Sorry. Cause I just had like, the numbers are absolutely insane in some markets around the world, like fashion in Germany, you see like 50 to 70 percent return rates. It’s insane.

Frederick Vallaeys: I heard Germany’s like 70 percent of those are returned.

Andrew Lolk: It’s, it’s insane. So if you don’t build that, like everybody has a built into their analytics or should.

Yeah. So, but it’s, it’s, but it works on a lot of markets. It’s, it’s crucial to have to have that insight with them.

Chris Moreno: Totally, totally agree. And that’s where making sure like you have that two way feed of data is super important. It’s not just, oh, Yeah. The sales came in, the conversions came in, like, they’re great.

You know, like you, you need that ability to look back on it.

Frederick Vallaeys: Another question here from Nicholas Nicholas Villeneuve. I think we have a lot of French or French Canadian watchers today. Nicholas, please do tell me where you’re from, because I might’ve butchered your name. But what about tips and tricks to automate inventory management and campaign management?

So segmenting shopping with label based on inventory is already done. Anything else besides that, that you would do? I

Andrew Lolk: would like, like, I’m glad he, I’m glad you put, put emphasis on it’s already done because I was like, yeah, like that’s just, that’s built into shopping when it goes out of stock, it’s done.

So I think the, I think it depends on how far you’ve taken your campaign setups. So I can say that in, in savvy, we run everything on feeds both search and shopping, everything runs. Of course, shopping runs on feed. But it means that we take feeds very, very far. So building additional data into our feeds and run start, stop products based on feed data is very, very easy for us.

Sounds like Nicholas has this under control too. So I’ll give him one piece that I would do is, is try to try to work in instead of it being a black and white thing with availability, In stock, out of stock then having that, like, what do you call it? Like Oh, there’s a word for it. Velocity. If you, if you can actually create a value that’s that showcases, okay, you have, you’re currently selling this much of this item, so you will be out of stock in seven days.

14 days, 21 days. Then you can create some value, a campaign structure or some automation in place using rules, et cetera, that simply just closes down products or decreases bids for products that where you have a sales loss. So that means you’re going to go out of stock in seven days or 14 days. So you decrease it.

That’s what we would do. If, if we had to go that direction. So definitely. And it’s, is it. So I

Chris Moreno: would say plus one spot on there. I think the other thing too is just thinking about volume, but also margin. So thinking about what are the products you really want to move? And Andrew, you mentioned some savvy kind of like segmentation tactics and advice, right?

Like. Let’s make sure if there are products that you, you have stronger margin on and you really want to move those, like, how are you emphasizing those, maybe getting them their own campaigns and different bids and making sure that they’re, they’re a like emphasized part of your shopping strategy, pairing that with like, we’re going to run out of stock on something.

Maybe we pull back on that a little bit. And like, just figure out, is it a volume play, looking at the velocity, looking at the margin, and that’s where, like, really reacting to what’s happening in the markets can be important.

Andrew Lolk: And actually, I just have one more point, seeing that you mentioned margin, Chris one thing that we’ve, we’ve had, that we spend a lot of time on is, is trying to remove glass ceilings.

There’s actually an article coming out about it, I think today, last week, next week, one or the other. But this sort of thing with, with looking at the e commerce side of things. So right now we’re talking a lot about the, the advertising side, but it, this could just as much be that the e commerce store that Nicholas runs, that they go out and they actually increase prices by 10%.

That could also like increase their margins by a ton. Sales might go down, but they’ll make more. So it doesn’t just have to be an advertising thing. You go in and tweak here, can also be in the backend. Hey,

Frederick Vallaeys: and since I’m the host of the show, I can do a shameless plug, but if you need any automation tools to do what Andrew is explaining, check it out.

That’s true. That’s true. There’s a rule engine in there. Hey, and it connects to your own data. So if you want to build velocity as a column in your spreadsheets, feed it into Optmyzr and say, Hey, here’s how we’re going to bid based on that easy to do.

Andrew Lolk: Actually, one of the guys runs that. So that’s actually true.

I’ll do a non shameless plug.

Frederick Vallaeys: Good. Thank you. All right. So, oh yeah, I was going to ask about buy online, pick up in store or curbside pickup. Like, are you thinking that’s equally powerful as like your discounting or your free shipping this year? Is that something consumers are really going to look at?

Chris Moreno: So what we saw last year, I don’t have the numbers in front of me. I’m sure I could find them, but it was certainly a triple digit increase, right? Like we saw so many consumers taking advantage of that for, for the first time ever the question in my mind is how much of that was because things were sold out online or.

So those shipping delays really started to hit us last year. Again, like I don’t have the stats in front of me, but I know there’s a lot, a lot of consumers who usually it’s like that one week shipping cutoff. Now all of a sudden it’s two, three weeks shipping cutoff where they were more or less forced to buy online, pick up offline.

And I do think this year consumers are maybe planning ahead a little more. So it goes back to just the theme of like starting early consumers, buying early. I do think there will be strength, right? We are seeing queries rise around things like buy in store, pick up in store near me, all that, but to me, it’s a question of how much that is naturally happening because things are just more open this year versus is that really going to be a buying behavior?

What I would say is like, if you as an advertiser have an offline presence, like make sure you’re ready, right? Make sure that your, your local presence is as strong as your online presence in terms of near me type type ads, local ads making sure that like that option is present for consumers. Cause I actually think it’s more about in that moment.

Will a given consumer say, Ooh, I don’t want to buy this online. I want to pick it up in store for whatever reason. Maybe it’s the urgency of the shipping cutoff. Maybe again, like to the bicycle, like maybe that bicycle is only available locally and it’s not available online. And that’s a consumer who never would have considered you before.

Maybe it’s a consumer who would prefer to buy online, but like they don’t really have a choice. So as, as an advertiser, You just want to make sure you’re always present and ready if you’re, if you’re going to be on the winning side of that conversion.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. And Google has some great stats on the increase in searches for near me and how much that’s gone up.

And it’s pretty incredible. I don’t know the number off the top of my head, but Fred, back

Chris Moreno: to Google Trends. Any, anybody can, can take a look and just see what, see what’s going on.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. And then the other thing that was interesting that you said was if you assume that the free shipping cutoff is going to be much longer this year, say two to three weeks rather than, you know, a week that it used to be in the past, that is actually a long period where your by online pickup in store curbside pickup would be a more.

Valuable value proposition. So have those ads ready. And that’s a generally the advice as well, right? Like don’t wait until the last minute to create those ads, make them now, have them reviewed, then pause them. And then they’re ready to go. And the moment you need them, it’s going to be instantaneous.

You just flip the switch as opposed to have to wait for the reviews to happen. Here, so Nicholas is weighing in 58 percent of Canadian consumers say they will finalize their purchase in a store after starting their journey online. And then the fun part is, how do you measure this? How do you report it back to Google, right? So there’s store visits, but that’s all based on the modeling and machine learning.

It’s quite a bit harder to do it. Otherwise, Andrew.

Andrew Lolk: Yeah, it’s just, it’s, it’s guesswork. It’s better guesswork than, than, than not having it. We use it a ton as I’m not saying I’m not, I’m not nagging it, but it’s, and I think that’s one of the things like Chris started this talk, we’re talking about IRS 14 as well.

That’s also something we can’t control. It’s just like, there’s more and more things we can’t control. So we. Everybody has to get used to like, get over this like 15 year thinking that everything we’re running online can be measured a hundred percent. I think we we’ve been off that train for a while.

But I think it’s missing a general consensus that whatever numbers you’re seeing in. Analytics and Google ads and Facebook ads, et cetera. That is not exactly correct. It’s one side of the truth. There’s like the data isn’t wrong, but there’s, it’s just one side of the same coin when we’re looking at all of it.

And store business is another one. Again, it’s, it’s an, it’s an, yeah, it’s an input into the big machine. And we just need to make sure that we use it all properly.

Chris Moreno: Andrew, I agree. I think the other thing is back to the last click conversation. I feel like we’ve. We’ve gotten to this point where we think everything has to be perfect, right?

Everything has to be, this is the data it’s fully accurate. Like there’s very, very little margin of doubt here. I think that actually gets in the way of success sometimes, right? Cause when it comes to things like store visits, Buy online, pick up offline. You’re not going to get perfect attribution data.

But having good data is way better than having no data, right? Like don’t let great get in the way of good in an instance like this. I think the most important thing is as, as a, a retailer, figure out some way to model that. Like, okay, we know based on like a subset of our customers and a customer study or a customer survey, That like this many purchases tend to start on Google or wherever online, let’s build a model somehow.

Therefore, we should be giving maybe non brand search a little more credit in the upper funnel, even when conversions aren’t there. So again, like finding, finding some way to get a, a good sense of things is way better than not having any sort of model whatsoever. If you’re, if you’re waiting for perfect.

It’s probably not going to come, not, not right now, at least.

Frederick Vallaeys: And that is one of Google’s 10 core values of innovation, core principles of innovation. Don’t like great, get in the way of good. And then the other one, like you said, experiment, right? So you do want to get great eventually, but the way to get there is lots of iteration.

Well, good. So I’m going to ask both of you for a final takeaways or like the one thing we haven’t talked about that really, really important. But before I do that so the winners for the giveaway. We got Robert from Verizon, Jenny from Ambition it is a, she’s in Denmark. There’s always the Danish connection.

Andrew is here. We got a winner from Denmark.

Andrew Lolk: No, like I know Jenny and Ambition is a very good friend of mine’s agency. So it’s just such a small world.

Frederick Vallaeys: Jenny, I promise you Andrew had nothing to do with you when you were randomly selected. But it was probably Andrew who told you to sign up for this.

So. Thank you, Andrew, for that. And then we have Alejandra from POD Marketing. And then from the live viewers today Jason Rios. So if you want to direct message us, we’ll we’ll get your information and make sure you get the Starbucks gift card and a copy of my book. All right. Awesome episode, really good insights.

Andrew, I’ll start with you. Any, any final thoughts?

Andrew Lolk: I think if, if, if we have to be a little bit practical about all these things, I think like, like Chris has said, like smart bidding is really, Like a lot of the automation from Google is, is getting better and it’s working really, really well. I’m not going to beat the point to death about when you should run one or the other, but I just think that most people these days should be running smart bidding in one iteration or another.

And I think the biggest mistake that, that most people do is that they set and forget it, like going into Q4 and going into any high season, really working with the targets, changing the targets, having multiple targets or portfolios. Using seasonality adjustments, using blackout days, using all these tools.

Can really take smart bidding a lot further, having that additional insight that can, that can help it out. So when, you know, you’re running into a big, a big sales push lowering your target, which it works so well, it like, it’s like smart bidding works as like constrictor to hit your, your raw target.

And the second that you. Release that target role as a 500 percent and it takes it on. Let’s say it’s 300. It’s like, it just opens up again and just releases all these additional search terms that works. It’s it’s, it’s crazy. So well, it works that we usually don’t talk about

Frederick Vallaeys: a lot of visual popping from,

Andrew Lolk: I need to do it.

I need to do a gift one day on the, on that and put it somewhere. Like, all

Frederick Vallaeys: right, Chris, what about you?

Chris Moreno: I’ll, I’ll keep it simple. Watch this. Don’t assume that anything that’s worked previously is necessarily going to work this year. Like, challenge all your assumptions and, like, get ready to redefine your objectives, right?

Get ready to net, Andrew, like the, the 500 versus 300 ROAS explosion there. It’s like, you might want that 300 because there’s no volume coming at 500, right? But you might have to play with that a little bit just because. 500 work last year doesn’t mean it’s going to work this year. And I think the, the challenging thing about that is it fundamentally causes you to like reevaluate like your profit and your ROI, but the worst thing you can do as an advertiser this year, and like, this is my biggest fear, especially for, for smaller medium businesses is they’re going to stay on the sidelines for so long, like waiting for that moment to come.

And then they’re going to miss out. Now they’re going to stay on the sidelines waiting for that 500 percent and it’s not going to be there and it’s going to have to be at 300%. And that means less ROI, but it means ROI versus staying on the sideline and you get nothing. So that’s where like, I just would really encourage everybody.

It’s like really reevaluate those objectives, really make sure you’re getting ready with your strategy, start early, test early, and then in the moment, like take action when the demand is there.

Frederick Vallaeys: Well said. Smart bidding. It’s kind of automated bidding, but it still needs a lot of help to make it better.

Well, good. Both of you thank you for joining. Thank you everyone for watching. I know we’ve gotten a little bit off schedule, but when we do these town halls, they are always on Wednesdays at 9 o’clock in the morning. But which Wednesday? Sometimes hard to figure out. But we will be back next Wednesday and it’s kind of, kind of pretty busy.

Kind of going to be a Canada episodes. We have two Canadian speakers, Duane Brown and Andrew Goodman, and they’re going to go a little bit deeper on what we just talked about today. So they’re going to take case studies from really doing amazing work in e commerce taking relatively small companies and to like, Millions and millions and hundreds of millions of dollars, and we’ll hear from them how they did that.

So I really look forward to chatting with them, sharing some of their secrets with the PPC community. And we’ll continue doing the giveaways. So if you join us live, then you’ll have a chance. Winning a few goodies, but thanks everyone for watching and we’ll see you for the next PPC Town Hall.

Chris Moreno: Thanks, everybody