Let's Solve Problems Together

Episode Description

Join our latest PPC Town Hall discussion as we discuss the impacts of COVID-19 on the advertising landscape. Discover effective PPC strategies, learn how businesses are adjusting to consumer behavior changes, and gain insights into which automation techniques are proving effective and which aren’t. This episode features expert perspectives on adapting to new market realities and leveraging opportunities amidst unprecedented challenges.

The panel discusses:

• Impact of COVID-19 on Business Operations and Advertising Spend
• Adjustments in Marketing Strategies and Consumer Behavior
• Response to Changing Conditions

Episode Takeaways

Impact of COVID-19 on Business Operations and Advertising Spend

• Many businesses, especially in travel and hospitality, have seen drastic reductions in advertising spend due to decreased revenue and uncertainty.
• Some businesses are shifting focus towards preparing for recovery and eventual growth, emphasizing the importance of maintaining visibility and communication with customers.

Adjustments in Marketing Strategies and Consumer Behavior

• Businesses are adapting their marketing strategies to focus more on local and drive-by areas due to travel restrictions and changes in consumer behavior.
• There is a noticeable shift in online consumer behavior, with changes in device usage and demographic engagement, influencing how marketers target and communicate with their audience.

Utilization of Technology and Automation in Response to Changing Conditions

• The effectiveness of automated bidding systems is variable, highly dependent on the specific circumstances and changes in consumer behavior due to the pandemic.
• Marketers are encouraged to monitor and adjust automated systems closely, as prediction models based on pre-COVID data may no longer be accurate.

Episode Transcript

Frederick Vallaeys: Hello, everyone, and welcome. We’ve got another PPC Town Hall this week. We’re going to cover the topic that’s probably most top of mind for everyone again. So it’s what’s going on with COVID and any changes that we’ve seen in the last week. I’m based in the Bay Area, in the San Francisco area, and we just had COVID 19.

Some new restrictions come in as of last night, so can no longer take the kids to the park. So that cooped up feeling that I have just going to get worse. And I’m sure a lot of us are suffering you know, in a variety of ways, business, personal things are just very different. So that’s why we’re here.

To talk again like I said last week, this is fully meant to give people some advice on how to, you know, get business through things. But at some level, it’s also a therapy session, right? So this is a forum for us to talk, kind of hear from other people what they’re seeing, even if we don’t have solutions, it’s kind of good to know where we stand.

And like I mentioned last time as well. So when I was at Google, one of the tenets of being a successful and innovative company was to share all of the information. And so I think we’re in an unprecedented time these days where, you know, we’ve never been through this type of crisis which impacts business in the ways that this COVID thing is doing.

And so. You know, we don’t have best practices necessarily that we can share with you. We don’t have all the answers, but just by us sharing all the information you know, assuming we’re all smart people here on this call, right? So we can all kind of draw conclusions and the more information we have, the more we can all come to the same conclusions and hopefully the best ones that help our businesses get through all of this.

So thank you very much to all the great panelists we have. So we got Jeff Allen from Hanapin. We got Benu Aggarwal from Milestone Internet and Andrew Goodman from Page Zero Media. So you should see all of their videos, hopefully. If you don’t, you can chat in the questions box. And I’ve got a team member of mine who’s going to help out with some of the logistics and make sure everyone can see this.

We’re also recording this. So this is going to be shared to everyone at the end. So if you have to drop off in the middle, don’t worry, you’ll get a recording sometime tomorrow. And each of the speakers will we’ll say a word in just a minute, but you know, I wanted to start it off with something maybe a little bit on the funnier side.

So one thing that. I heard was that in Walmart, they’re seeing an increase in sales in tops, but not bottoms. And so now that our lives have been reduced to doing webinars in person meetings, I guess who needs a pair of pants, right? So speakers, I am wearing pants. Are you guys all wearing pants today?

Andrew Goodman: You bet stretchy pants. You need, you need work from home pants. That’s, that’s like a whole category. In fact, we had had some fun with that. One of our clients sells apparel and, Oh, I can’t tell you the keywords.

Frederick Vallaeys: And this of course, coming from Andrew, the man who didn’t turn on his video camera, right? So pants, but no top today, I guess.

Andrew Goodman: Shout out for the Lulu lemon pants, a male version of that.

Frederick Vallaeys: Good. And so each of the speakers they’re kind of going to free form it, but really what we’re looking for is what has changed in the last week? What tips and tricks are we seeing to help us deal with the situation? And a big question that came up last week was what sort of automations seem to be working well, and which ones don’t seem to be working so well.

So that’s kind of like the guideline for what to talk about. I did want to start out with a couple of thoughts of my own since last week and what has changed. So I think we’ve seen things like Airbnb. So Airbnb is a huge advertiser client of optimizer, and they reduced marketing spend by something to the tune of 800 million dollars per year in response to the crisis.

And so Benu , I think, is going to have a lot to say about the hotel and the hospitality space that is her vertical and I think what’s interesting here is, again, that notion of it. It’s not just the 1st order impact, but the 2nd order impact. So I guess we can all sort of guess that advertising for Airbnb and hotels is gonna go down.

But sort of the back end of that story is that nobody at Airbnb, none of the employees are now expected to get bonuses for 2020. I work in Silicon Valley, so I know how big the bonuses can be here in this area. And so, obviously, People not getting that large portion of their income that they were sort of expecting is going to have a huge impact on the types of things that they will buy, right?

So anything from delaying the purchase of a new vehicle to maybe not being able to move out of their rental and buy a home to being more more conservative about some discretionary purchases, right? So that’s one thing we’re seeing. The the other thing I wanted to talk about was automated bidding, right?

So I don’t think I have the full answer for you here. And I think the answer really is. Automated bidding. It depends. It might be good. It might not be good. It really depends on the account. But one big question that we have, and and thanks to my CTO Manas Garg for this thought, but he was basically saying, listen, the way that the Google prediction models work, is they look at factors like what is the location?

Where the searches are coming from, where we see a lot of conversions, where we see high value conversions and just to take my local area as an example. So big employers in my area are Google on the Mountain View campus, Apple on their Cupertino campus. You know, and all of these companies, basically, they’ve sent all of their workers home.

So if Google’s prediction models for conversion rates were based on saying, well, listen the employees who work over in Mountain View at that Mountain View campus using their laptops or desktops, they tend to buy pretty expensive stuff. While they’re at work, right? They’re supposed to be working, but we all know we, we go and do some e commerce from work.

But now all of these people have gone to their homes. So instead of being in mountain view on a desktop device or a notebook, they might be using their mobile device out of their house in Sunnyvale in Fremont and Los Altos, and so kind of these prediction models that we’re expecting certain geographic signals, certain device type signals, they might actually be confused for a little while because what used to be a pattern is no longer a pattern.

Right. So I think that’s why it’s so important to take a look at how automation is performing because the models that it used to rely on may not be so valid anymore. And I don’t know if any of the panelists have anything they want to chime in here on the topic of like automation.

Andrew Goodman: Well, I’m happy to get this one out of the way.

I thought it was coming later. But generally speaking, you know, our philosophy is to be cautious with automation. So I kind of like to say that I, in a perfect world, you know, enhanced CPC would be kind of it in a way, because imagine having predictive power being supplied to each and every keyword bid.

But at the same time, you kind of manage other things more manually. So, you know, a lot of the automations definitely would have gone haywire, and we’re pretty hands on with accounts. Every account is performing differently because of different verticals that we’re in. So in terms of some of our clients that are either emerging, they’re still, you know, doing well, recession proof, or whatever you want to say there’s some interesting, you know, Uses of automation that we’re just getting into.

And one is related to some, some media properties that we’re working with for a partner. So there, I can’t nearly say much more than, you know, their TV shows and things like that. Some of the sales do seem to benefit from display and YouTube and and our conversion action. To use if we use smart bidding our revenue actions are too high a bar for the bots to learn.

So that’s an example of one where you can take the, A new opportunity to set a different conversion action by campaign. So in this case, using a lower bar conversion action. You could say maybe added to cart. Or you could say something even engagement related. Something much less stringent than revenue.

And then let the bots learn to that. So that’s an example of one that we, we would be interested in still using for, for our travel client. And I was using some smart bidding and sometimes not depending on the campaigns. That’s the hardest client. I mean, they’re, they’re done. They’re like, they’re shut off, but the automations were taking this, they were doing what they were supposed to do.

And they were taking it down to zero. So I did watch them closely, but the spend gradually drifted down to nothing.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. And I think that’s a really interesting point, Andrew. So basically saying look more at. The micro conversions like the steps along the way to the thing that you actually care about.

And especially because we’ve only really seen a couple of weeks of this behavior. We haven’t even had a full 30 days, so it’s hard for the prediction models to really be solid until we get more longterm data. And actually, hopefully we don’t have a lot more data, right? Like hopefully this thing is over soon and go back to normal, but that’s a really good point about using a different conversion action.

Okay. So go

Benu Aggarwal: ahead. Oh, okay. So it’s, we actually turned off our automated bidding. What happened is we had some soft conversion and hard conversion. And funny enough, when we started looking at soft conversion, we had phone call as one of the metric for soft conversion. And we all know areas like New York and Seattle, they’re badly hit, but number of phone calls was still the same.

And we had used that as one of the, one of the conversion model, one of the way to decide if it’s performing well, but number of phone calls were not going down, but clearly these are not the right phone call because people are calling to cancel or push their travel, not really calling to make a reservation.

So we, we had a lot of we had put in a lot of automation, but automated bidding, but we removed it and made it very strict and I’ll go through some of those things, what we see currently working for our clients, like you said, travel category was hit really badly. But we’ll talk about what we are doing in our vertical.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. Thanks Benu. And Jeff, did you want to add as well?

Jeff Allen: I mean, on the point that Andrew made about automation, running things kind of down to zero, we have had clients that want to stay as active as makes sense, but have very tight, you know, cost per sale targets. And so for some of them we’ve left it on, but the same effect is kind of happening as conversion rates have dropped.

And then other places, yeah, just to reiterate, there’s just, there’s no sense of normal. There’s no sense of history right now. And even day to day things are performing differently. And we have some accounts. That are like record pace. We’ve had several that have had to pause for opposite reasons as most people and that conversions are so high that they’ve got to slow down to be able to fulfill all their orders and everything like that.

And in those cases it’s the same thing. We can’t just put it all in automation. We have to manually control it.

Frederick Vallaeys: Okay. So I’ll show one more slide and then I’ll hand it over to the panelists. But so for users of optimizer, we do have a new dashboard that we launched just yesterday. What we’re doing here is we’re taking the governmental regulations around COVID restrictions, like business closures, shelter in place.

And you can now map that on top of your PPC performance. So we haven’t seen a ton of correlations here, but it’s something that you could take to a client and sort of help explain why. There might be you know, big shifts and impressions, conversions, any metric that you want to look at. And this is down to the region level, right?

So you can plot us, California based actions or UK actions. Any regionality that you have, we have the data for that. So we only have it as an optimizer tool right now. But I am working on the free script version, so that’ll hopefully be on search engine land very soon as well inside optimizer. It’s inside the data insights tab.

It’s the first thing in there and it’s labeled as new and we can help you find that. So with that, let me open up this slide again and let’s maybe go left to right here. So. Jeff, do you want to share a little bit more and also actually properly introduce yourself because I just realized I did a very poor job of introducing you and my apologies for that.

Jeff Allen: You were perfect as always. So I’m Jeff Allen. Formerly president of Hannapin, now SVP at BrainLabs. So we underwent a merger about four weeks before all of this hit, it was a three way merger between Hannapin, BrainLabs, and Distilled. So imagine being them and to this point we have postponed three conferences just a month into What is still a very exciting merger time?

I’ve been in the industry for about 20 years I was working at an agency at a desk when 9 11 happened. Obviously also worked through the recession in 2008. Not seen anything like this. The way that the the kind of faucet has just been turned off on everything all at once I mean the impact is just is is just tremendous.

So Yeah, I mean some of the stuff i’m seeing and some of the things that I think may be helpful. One of the big things is it’s important a critical time to be talking to your clients if you’re on the agency side Thank you but you also have to take what’s being told to you with a grain of salt because a lot of folks also don’t know what’s happening both externally, what the market’s going to look like, but also internally, there might be conversations happening that they’re not privy to that, you know, that hasn’t been rolled to them in terms of what’s happened with marketing spend or what their strategy is or how long things are going to last.

And so we’ve really taken a concerted effort to elevate our conversations. Up to C suite as much as possible, but also have very realistic best case, worst case scenarios for literally every single one of our clients that we update anytime we get new information. So several clients are getting updated daily and we have a daily all hands or all executive team meeting where we go through and review it and we say, what’s changed, what’s different, how are we going to react?

How does the plan that we’ve been working on from now need to adjust? Luckily, most days it’s not, you know, dramatic that we actually have to change day to day. But as part of staying aligned and making sure that we have a consistent message to our team and our clients of what we’re seeing and how we’re going to react and a large part of that is because it’s just, it really is legitimately changing

Frederick Vallaeys: last week was a

Jeff Allen: little,

Frederick Vallaeys: I was going to chime in on that.

So my wife runs this mom, Jim, local kids, business, kids, Jim. And it’s very interesting because so I get the perspective to on the small business and how much of this changing. So in the bay area, we have the shelter in place order, but it was slightly changed yesterday. And there is a ton of confusion, right?

It’s like, we’re looking at this text or like, wait, was that in there last time? And like, are we already doing that? And how does it exactly impact their type of business? And so I think a lot of businesses, like you said, are guessing what those regulations mean until the police shows up and says, well, it’s actually this what you’re supposed to do.

But even then the police is wrong, right? We’ve had situations where they shut down the playing fields. And the next day we get an email from the school that says, actually, the playing field is open. We heard that they kicked you out, but we told them not to kick you out. Right? So it’s like this constant, nobody knows what’s happening.

So totally get what you’re saying there.

Jeff Allen: Yeah, that’s, that’s totally true. And, and the interesting thing from like last week, or I guess maybe two weeks ago now, time’s kind of lost meaning, but the first big week, there was a lot more urgent knee jerk reactions. Travel companies saying literally our revenue has gone to zero.

We, we just can’t do anything right now and hitting pause or other companies just saying, you know, we’re going to take a hard stance on this and not do any marketing for, you know, at least another month to this week, it’s much more considered it’s here’s our strategy. Here’s how we’re going to approach it.

Here’s. you know what it looks like for us. And so it’s less, I guess, dramatic, but it’s still happening. Like it’s not like the impact happened in week one and everyone made the decisions and now everyone’s holding their breath. It’s,

Frederick Vallaeys: it’s very much far ahead. Are your clients looking when they’re like getting to be strategic?

Are they sort of assuming that May is the end date of this or are they looking end of summer? Like what are you typically hearing?

Jeff Allen: That’s a fantastic question. The most, the most consistent is towards the end of May, so June might be the first month of kind of being normal. We certainly have a handful in travel that are like, hey, we’re, this year is going to be really tough, and so we’re going to put together plans really for 2021 and do what we can to get something happening this year, but we’re not really optimistic about it.

So it has been all over the place, but yeah, like, End of May, early June is the most common. We hear

Frederick Vallaeys: Benu. You have any thoughts on that from the, sure,

Benu Aggarwal: sure. Yeah, go ahead. Sure. So, you know, of course, we have mix of travel and B2B. So travel industry is badly, badly hit literally within a week or week and a half. We had 80 percent of our clients saying no paid search. Now we are omnichannel and what we, what we felt is, or what was really helpful.

And I’ll talk about a few strategies we deployed and worked really well for clients. It’s even though you’re not investing that much in paid, how do you pivot and how do you make sure that you just completely, you’re not shutting off the fourth tap completely. So we kind of came up with this crisis recovery and growth plan.

And crisis man Last from April to me, what Jeff just said, and recovery is somewhere starts between May and goes till June, July, and then growth plan. And as part of the crisis plan, we, we kind of recommended and what we did for clients is ensuring that it’s safe.

And and what does it mean to you, what is the, what are the significant efforts being put in order to facilitate that certainly, I think it’s very important and I look forward to that your feedback. so much. part. Or some of some of the clients we have the kind of close portion of their hotels, but they still have it open.

Some of them have really attractive packaging to attract local businesses. So there are a lot of things. clients are doing and what was really critical right away across all channel updating what they are doing for to fight with this or what is their overall strategies, right? So what is the communication pattern?

So that is the first thing we did. Second thing which was really critical is to update all the local channels, right? So that is something we did on GMB to local extension, ensuring that wherever they were getting local business or local information that was all updated. Now we are seeing that we are still 20 30 percent of our clients still running paid and it’s really interesting that You know, we do see still there is there is some sort of there is activity But this is interesting that our mobile conversion have gone down And our female so searches coming from female target audience have gone down in last two two weeks Now I still have to analyze that why that is happening But since you asked for some fun insight that you know, overall mobile conversions are down and female overall search patterns are down and people are a little bit more focused around the area rather than really going national.

So we have reduced our campaigns. We make sure our campaigns are really focused within driving distance. We have some branded campaign, but we have put in a lot of day partying to ensure that we are not, our budgets are very targeted. And they’re focused around either brand or nearby drive by areas.

Did we lose you?

Frederick Vallaeys: You, you lost my audio. I self muted. So this is really fascinating. And one question that I had, and it’s sort of leading into this, but with your clients and kind of across the board of agencies, reducing spend and many agencies billing as a percentage of spend. What kind of contingencies are you putting in place?

Because it sounds like Benue, there’s actually. This is the time when your client needs you most because there’s so much like Immediate updating of the local listings of the messaging of all these things that you can’t stop doing so how have you dealt with that?

Benu Aggarwal: So, you know, of course, you know, I won’t lie, but it’s definitely had a huge impact even clients like, you know some of the biggest brand I cut down their page span.

But yes, this is the time. That’s why we put in our crisis recovery and growth growth. You know, care kind of a package where we are making sure that all our customers they are getting daily communication. We have a very robust. To Jeff’s point, very robust customer success team, which is almost reaching out to customers, updating their hours, updating all the information attributes, and even some of, some of our really big clients in financial sector, we have seen phenomenal increase just updating their hours.

And you know, again, this is some of the banks, national banks, where we just updated the hours. And we have seen like literally triple digit increase in impression and click just by updating hours of operation. Right. So. Yes, absolutely.

Frederick Vallaeys: And then we have a great comment from Fabian, who’s listening in, and you’re welcome to speak up and we can turn your mic on if you want, but saying that it’s good to stay in and actually build some audience so that you have something to target later on.

Benu Aggarwal: Yeah,

Frederick Vallaeys: I guess those people who are most itching to go on a trip, like, the moment the doors open, they’ll probably be the first ones on the plane into into the doors of your hotel, right?

Benu Aggarwal: Yes, yes, and we have we have done that we’ve created our audience list. We have also created audience list within that drive by area because just for whatever reason, if they if they shut down international travel or airline travel or whatever.

You’ll still have drive by area. So we have done some exclusive packaging based on business insight, what was happening within the state drive by area and created exclusive lists just getting it ready the moment it opens up.

Frederick Vallaeys: How have all of you and Andrew can speak up here too, but how have all of you worked with your clients to bring messaging, not just to the ads, but to the.

The website in general to ease people’s fears, because what I’m hearing is, you know, some people don’t want to get packages delivered because there might be something on the box and they don’t know what warehouse it’s coming out of. Some people don’t want to do take out food because who’s in that kitchen, you know, speaking to their colleague and getting stuff on the food.

Right. And I think if some of those fears were alleviated and people understood what businesses were doing, they might actually sell more. Have you worked on any of that? So, Fred yeah, that that starts to put a fairly high bar on the agency in the if we’re starting to be afraid of boxes on. I understand.

Andrew Goodman: We all think about that as well. As as people stuck at home. Our clients, by and large have enough now we have plenty of strategic thinking that we’re willing to Bring here even if they’ve had to shut down temporarily. You know, there are a lot of moving parts to different parts of their business that might need to be just worked on.

But when it comes to that, so just to talk about quickly how this feeds into the mix of some of our clients who have had to completely pause others who are doing better than they ever have. So it’s a real mix and some of the interesting help we’re providing isn’t for the people who are paused necessarily, although it depends it’s for the ones who are overwhelmed. So like our, our large Canadian retailer clients now they are not a they’re pure, pure online play. And they shut off advertising now 15 days ago, and that’s all channels, every single channel. It had very little impact on their direct and organic traffic to the point where their warehouse is so backlogged that, that 14 days from order to delivery.

And, and so they have a, they have a, you know, a plea on their website to only order what you need that they will not process beyond a certain number of orders per day. And this is across pretty much, it’s a very large and diversified product base, but some of it is food and some of it is the long sold out hand sanitizer.

So don’t keep coming back and looking for that, but it’s made very little dent. So all I can say about that is we don’t help them warn people about. Boxes and things. It’s just it’s starting to get out. You know, that’s beyond what we do. But what we have talked about is the psychology where we’re repeat business and direct and organic traffic won’t go away.

It’s almost like the the panic based homepage takeover. Please don’t order is sending away the good customers who might be ordering baby clothes and so on and say, well, I can wait. And then all of the the selfish people are ordering more of everything. So, you know, we’ve had some conversations about that.

About how to how to get back to normalcy there. But then one day that will all be over with. And we’ll just, you know, the ads will come back on. So I didn’t directly address your question, I guess. But, but we just see a lot of demand for deliveries across our you know, that’s the strong part of our business.

And others have not shut off and they’re, they’re seeing record results. So Fred Frederick, let me try what we did in our, and again, it was badly hit, but still. Okay. We pretty much went to every single client and created one page plus FAQs on GMB and all the local listing specifically around COVID, right?

Benu Aggarwal: So what are we doing? What is our sanitization policy? What are we doing in terms of cleanliness? And we came up with that verbiage, ensured that we worked with every client. If they were open, and most of 80 percent of them are open, they’re just, they want, so we wanted them to be right up front center saying, this is what you have, you are doing and ensuring that’s also updated across all local channels.

And that did have a good impact because if somebody is just looking where there is not very tight rule, having this kind of a messaging is also what’s really helpful. A lot of different brands also did that. They kind of said pre arrival, cancellation. There’s another kind of person. This is really interesting.

They, they actually introduced gift certificate. And said, okay, if you buy gift certificate now, you can get it half off two months from now. So that was a really good way of getting cash, but the same time you are kind of selling for future. So, So, and this, these pages included check in policy, no cancellation, waiving fees, all the things related to cleanliness and hygiene and all of that.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, and that makes sense. And have any of you guys tried putting those types of pages in site links or directly in the main ad messaging?

Andrew Goodman: Yeah, I think I think this would would certainly depend, on the client, I think the biggest thing we have to avoid is talk some clients out of some of their ideas.

So we have a bricks and clicks, fairly good size retailer of we’ll just say hardware and auto equipment. They were getting a lot of phone calls. To ask if they were still open, which they are, we primarily drive online sales, which have been a sticking point. They’re a fairly traditional business.

So that’s been our, you know, we look forward to that future where more and more customers are learning that they can order online. But there are actually people around that company and their other agency that that wanted to, you know, come up with with custom messaging that they’re actually still open.

So, you know, our stance was don’t do that. You don’t don’t want in a crisis. You don’t want to be seen to encourage people to come to the store. That’s just not a good idea. It doesn’t look good. Especially since it’s almost all available online.

Jeff Allen: Yeah, we haven’t tried anything like that with site links as well to be like specific mention of it.

We have done a lot of custom messaging, but everything Andrew just said is true for us too. It’s been about being mindful of like how it’s going to be perceived. And you know, we have some clients who are doing some pretty creative things. We have one apparel company who, His is like their, their dog is like a, the logo on all of their shirts and, you know, dogs have cone of shames.

And so they do the human cone of shame on to encourage social distancing. And they’re selling these shirts like crazy, but they’re actually giving money to charity to kind of show like, Hey, this is cool. It’s a kitschy idea. It’s something fun. You know, like, have fun with, but like, we’re not going to try to just profit off of, you know, selling this to, to all of you in this time.

So, like, we kind of worked with clients in those types of ways to be mindful of how things are perceived and everything, but yeah, not specific to, like, safety around COVID or anything like that.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And maybe that leads us into the topic of like, where’s the opportunity and all of this, right? So with every crisis and Jeff price in this the best, but with nine 11, new companies were born with a recession in 2008.

New companies were born. Google was born sort of in the, in the. com bubble bursting. Right. So where’s the opportunity that you guys are seeing? And we have some questions from a seam. He’s unfortunately a new freelancer in this space. And obviously struggling given that the crisis hit right when he was starting.

Yeah. And I think we’ve already heard a couple of good ideas on how you can be strategic for your client and still provide value to them. How do you charge for that? For that is probably a question not for this forum, but what is the opportunity that you Rossi?

Jeff Allen: Yeah, I mean, I think part of it’s being a real.

Insightful partner to these businesses that are undergoing something that’s, that’s really never happened before, at least not in any of our lifetimes. And so we have clients who are trying to work with to your, to your script, to your tool, very specifically of like, when do we actually start trying to ramp up?

So if everything’s, Down now or we’ve paused some certain aspect of our campaigns. When should we expect to start seeing a ramp up? No one knows But if we can be on the forefront of that of both the timing of when people are ready to start making purchases again And when it’s kind of the right time from a pr perspective They’re gonna gain an advantage during that how to pay for it’s a tough one So like one of my things right now is cfos are ruling the world, right?

Right. They’re the ones coming in making tough decisions on what to cut and what to keep. And they’re going to be the exact people on the other side who are going to be making the tough decisions on when do we ramp stuff back up? When do we start giving money back to marketing and whatnot? And so if the companies don’t have cash to pay you, like they’re just not going to.

They just don’t have it and they can’t get it. And so what we’re doing is being mindful of we’re in this for long term, not short term. We can’t just give away our services nonstop, of course, but where we can provide insights for clients who, you know, we’ve had for a long time and anticipate having for a long time.

We’re really trying to work with them to understand the market and update them as much as possible. Maybe not daily, but as much as we possibly can.

Andrew Goodman: I’d love to speak to the the two aspects of this. One is, yes, the sort of secular changes stair step increases in some businesses that we’ve seen now, people who are forced to be at home, and so even the stock market says so, right, that Zoom, until the security issues became obvious Zoom stock went up, and you know, digit docu sign went up, and so any of our clients that are like a docu sign, That that feed into something people should have done years ago.

Stop stop going in and signing things. We’ll, we’ll now have a kind of a new influx of customers. So various digital goods or, or local like snack delivery and things like that, where they’re, they’re, they’re just They’re just flooded with business right now. That’s a whole new set of people discovering that, you know what?

I could have done this before, but I didn’t. And now I see that the value of, of changing with the economy as it changes and all the work from home stuff. So those things we are bullish on not to feel like we’re, you know, taking advantage of a crisis. These are long-term trends. They’ve always been there since, you know, 1996, you know, the, the, the fact that a full service stock brokerage with a commissions of, you know, a hundred dollars on a, on a trade and all those things went away years ago.

But, so a lot of that’s. Just continues to change. But as far as, you know, starting out on the cusp and Jeff spoke to this 9 11 I I was in limbo between graduate school and being interested in this industry, which hadn’t even, didn’t even have paid search outside of a go to and overture. When I started I, I did some study with, with some money in the bank from a lucky venture when, and just before the bubble, First, because I wanted to study the, the opportunities in consulting and I was interested in SEO, didn’t really know what I wanted to do, figured a few things out and launched on September 10th.

We literally went live on September 10th the day before nine 11. So what I, and I was also trying to attract us customers from Canada. Well, that didn’t happen. So I really didn’t have a lot to do. And so what I did know that I could do was to learn. Because your best your best kind of asset long term is to be given jobs to do and to learn them.

So I took small SEO and small paid search and other consulting gigs for, you know, 500. whatever people would pay me. And at a certain point I was the first guy to know some of these things and, and then it made it possible to kind of stagger upwards into having full, you know, full fledged, full priced services.

Frederick Vallaeys: So I’ll tell a story about Andrew, but when I started working at Google in 2002, quality score and like the whole auction mechanism was this whole mysterious thing. And Andrew had put out an ebook explaining all of that. And that’s sort of the point, right? Like, and that, that to me was how I got to know him and how a lot of people got to know him.

And he sort of built a brand around that. So, and I think that that is a great opportunity. PPC. He’s getting more complex by the day. Like there’s always new options being added. And and now we have this big unknown of how do you deal with PPC in a crisis like this. And clearly there are some answers, but somebody needs to sit down and sort of figure it out, write it down.

And that could build your expertise and set you up for decades of you know, being a thought leader and having lots of business in this space. So I love that answer, Andrew.

Andrew Goodman: I think a lot of us who are experienced, I talked to Mark Poirier and you know who he is. He, he founded a Quincy, co founded everyone seems has a story about, well, before this, you know, and before I even had the agency, I was I was doing the gangbusters on affiliate marketing, you know and you know, in my case, I had affiliates that I still remember who you know, made 25 percent on, on sale, selling my book.

You know, it’s pretty interesting how we all kind of, we know a little more about the street stuff we let on.

Benu Aggarwal: I guess, I guess one thing I would say is I think this is and again, I’ve always strongly supported that, that as a marketeer, we should think we should think about channel, but we should think omnichannel. And we should think about customer, but we should think about what stage of customer is in. So this is a new normal, right?

This is, it’s not customer journeys, all of a sudden disrupted, and it’s completely changed the last three weeks. And what I would say, there are companies who are going to do well, who will pivot to this reality. Now, anything you’re doing, if you have an offering, which is Thinking through entire all omni channel opportunity in digital and number two, thinking about customer to journey touch point and their mindset.

What are they thinking during crisis time? What are they thinking during recovery time? What kind of content, what kind of a website, what is their mobile flow? Yes, it is hard, but if you had just one channel specific, It is really hard to get the insight. I, so my recommendation is think through omni channel customer journey and think through this is a new normal.

And now let’s reset our entire industry towards new normal. What are we going to do now, two months from now and six months from now? You muted again, you

Frederick Vallaeys: know, I don’t want you to hear me typing answers to the attendees here. I mean, the thing that, you know, that vision for the future and I’m the channel and figuring out the consumer journey and that message of hope that there is something for us to do here. I almost feel like that’s a fantastic wrap up. Do any of the other panelists want to share a final thought? I mean,

Jeff Allen: for me, we didn’t talk about the, like, emotional side so much, but, like, this is to me a heartbreaking time, right? Like, I walked through my city and I see hardly anybody. As I’m walking my dog, not going places. And it’s just very lonely and disconnected.

And there’s a good part of that in that there’s a ton of people who are reaching out, making one on one connections with folks I’ve loved all like video chats and webinars and everything like that, and I’m going perfectly because kids are running in the room and, you know, you pray for my dog barking a few times and I feel like it’s really humanized a lot of.

Folks and level the playing fields in a lot of ways. I mean, I can sit on a call with our CFO and see him get interrupted for help on homework while he’s trying to answer questions about a cash forecast or something like that. And that’s to me like the glimmering light and all this, but you can’t, you can’t, like, it’s not just going to happen naturally, like you need to be the, like we each need to be the person reaching out to other folks, being in on them, making sure they’re taken care of.

And yeah, we don’t, we don’t forget about any of our people, whether the folks that work with us, our clients, friends, whatever it is.

Andrew Goodman: So I think some of the funny and lighthearted stories are needed to balance out what is obviously an unprecedented hard time for everybody. The hardest thing you hear is that people will die alone.

You can’t go to the hospital regardless of why you’re dying you can’t visit that person. But for me, the people who need me at least occasionally to visit them are my mother and my mother in law. Could use that right now. And it’s terrible shame. You know, you can’t, you cannot risk it. So that’s the hard part.

Now it’s for a lighthearted interlude. I give you a choice. You can vote on whether you want the social distancing walking in the park story or the the only liquor store left in town open story liquor store

Jeff Allen: every time liquor

Andrew Goodman: store every time. Okay. So and one of the things I’m, I’m barred from doing I, I could technically do this by driving but I wouldn’t, of course, and that is going to my One of my two home bases, which is Toronto, where our offices and I full time live in a in Atlantic Canada in Fredericton, New Brunswick Metro area is about 108, 000.

And when you get to the edge you you’re in the forest pretty quickly. So the hours begin changing on things are official liquor stores cut back their hours. But the big grocery stores in my case, Sobeys and real Atlantic Superstore, so, so the liquor store suddenly went from 9 p. m. to 6 p.

m. So that’s, that’s closed. And people are going to the grocery store for beer and, and, and it’s closed at 8, which is an hour earlier than it was supposed to. And it’s 8. 02. And the one place that’s left is the official authorized outlet. On the outskirts of town. It’s a gas station with the same products.

So I’d seen it though and I had enough shame that I didn’t go the first time I went by there because they had it all closed with a window you had to stand and wait and they’re just young guys and I said no way. And this time is like well shame is kind of gone now. You know, I’ll, I’ll get in my six foot distancing lineup in the freezing cold and just, you know, stand behind the all male panel 14 of us, six feet apart waiting for, you know, some beer or wine well, that was my order.

Most of them are ordering Jack Daniels, but so 98 feet of lineup. So a local older, good old boy comes along, gets out of his car and begins to march into the store. Now, I guess he’s. He’s not aware. Just can’t fathom why this man looks at all of us standing out there and thinks maybe this is some kind of male synchronized swimming practice.

This got diverted to the outdoors, but I could go in and, you know, what? And you just, you can’t believe it. So we have to explain you do like us stand in the great outdoors. So People don’t always take the social cues even if they’re pretty obvious. So that’s him. And the only other observation I had was that it appears that no female would ever be caught dead in this line. And I was about to share that insight with all of my friends when two young women parked next to me, grinning from ear to ear and they, one draws a short straw and takes a little walk of shame to stand as the, the number 15 person in line while her friend Gets to idle in the red Chevy Cavalier listening to, I’ll just say Nickelback.

And I think of them as a shining example of, for all women.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. It’s changing behaviors and it’ll be for the long term and hopefully for the better. We’re good.

Benu Aggarwal: We always have hope.

Frederick Vallaeys: Thank you, Jeff, Benu and Andrew. It’s been great having you. Thanks for everyone who attended. I know there’s a few questions that we didn’t get to but I want to be mindful of the time we had scheduled to end here.

So we’ll follow up on those questions over email. And we might do another 1 of this because people still very much other. So thank you all and stay safe. Stay sane. I will see you next time.

Benu Aggarwal: Thanks Fred.

Andrew Goodman: Stay safe. Everyone.

Benu Aggarwal: Thanks Jeff. Thanks Andrew. Yeah.

Andrew Goodman: Thanks. Hi, Jeff.

Benu Aggarwal: Right. Thank you guys.