Maximize Q4 Holiday Sales with Microsoft’s Expert Tips

Episode Description

In this episode of PPC Town Hall, explore effective Q4 holiday marketing strategies with a focus on utilizing Microsoft’s advanced AI tools and data insights.

See how shifts in consumer behavior and new technologies can significantly enhance advertising campaigns for the holiday season.

Episode Takeaways

Q4 Holiday Preparedness and Consumer Behavior Shifts:

• Start preparing for Q4 earlier each year due to changes in consumer behaviors, with purchases beginning as early as September.
• Recognize that consumer journeys are increasingly non-linear, requiring adaptable and responsive marketing strategies.

AI and Automation in Marketing:

• Invest in generative AI to stay relevant and avoid becoming outdated in the marketing industry.
• Leverage AI to improve ad relevance and customer engagement, ensuring ads are shown to interested consumers without being intrusive.

Microsoft’s Advertising Solutions and Data Insights:

• Utilize Microsoft’s broad range of advertising solutions, including newer AI tools and traditional web-based remarketing, to target consumers effectively.
• Use Microsoft’s identity graph and in-market audiences to fine-tune targeting based on real-time consumer behavior and keyword intent.

Seasonal Shopping and Strategic Advertising:

• Acknowledge the importance of starting campaigns early in Q4 to capture consumer interest right from when shopping spikes in September.
• Adapt strategies to changing consumer habits, such as increased research and price sensitivity, to maintain engagement throughout the holiday season.

Future Outlook and Evolving Marketing Strategies:

• Stay updated on advancements in AI and how they can be integrated into marketing strategies to enhance effectiveness and efficiency.
• Despite AI’s growth, maintain a focus on creativity and strategic thinking to utilize AI tools effectively and keep marketing human-centric.

Episode Transcript

Frederick Vallaeys: Hello and welcome to another episode of PPC Town Hall. My name is Fred Vallaeys. I’m your host. I’m also the CEO and co founder at Optmyzr, a PPC management software. So today on the show, we have Joe Dries from Microsoft, and he’s going to walk us through Q4 Holiday Preparedness. Q4 is obviously the biggest quarter for a lot of advertisers, a lot of retail, and the time to get ready becomes earlier and earlier every year.

Personally, I’ve already bought a Halloween decor. In August, and I know Halloween is technically not a big holiday in Q4, but it sort of goes to show that, you know, summer is not even over, and I’ve already bought something for many months into the future. So that’s a consumer behavioral shift. We’re going to hear from Joe what Microsoft is seeing when it comes to consumer behavior shifts.

We’re obviously going to talk about CoPilot and all of the AI efforts that Microsoft is doing, and just hopefully give you some actionable advice to get you ready. for a hugely successful Q4 holiday shopping season. So with that, let’s get rolling with another episode of PPC Town Hall. Hey Joe, welcome to the show.

It’s great to have you on. Oh, hey, Fred. Thank you so much. Happy to be here. Thank you again. So tell us a little bit about your background and what you do at Microsoft.

Joe Dries: Yeah so I’m a tenured Microsofty, also Boomerang, but I’ve been in the industry going on, I don’t want to age myself, but 21 years now.

I’ve worked at a couple startups. I’ve worked at companies like Axiom, which is also inclusive of LiveRamp, Datorama, Oracle. So quite frankly, this is all I’ve ever really done since I kind of stepped foot out of college. And You know, happy to be here and share some of the current updates within Microsoft and what we’re seeing for this holiday season, but also potentially, you know, some of the knowledge I’ve picked up along the way and of course, you know, love getting your feedback as well as one of the more kind of engaged and active CEOs in our industry.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, it’s what I love doing most is be engaged and not just lead the company, but also think about the future. So I recently added a dinosaur to my studio here because kind of one of the points we want to get into is how do none of us as humans become the dinosaurs of the industry by figuring out how to work with all these newfangled tools and generative AI.

And all of these major shifts in consumer behavior that are frankly being driven by what’s happening with Gen AI and just the way that people search is really changing, right? So so really happy to have you on and hear from you and you know, you’re a solutions engineer as well or solution specialist.

So we love it when people bring solutions, not just problems or or random thoughts, but let’s, let’s put this into practice and figure out what we can actually go and do later today to make the most of where we’re at. Love it.

Joe Dries: Love it.

Frederick Vallaeys: So with that, let’s let’s just jump straight into it. Microsoft obviously has a lot of data and you as a company can see quite a bit about where the shifts are happening.

You’ve made a major investment. You keep investing in generative AI. So let’s start with that right as we think about going into Q4. How is the consumer going to be different this year from years past?

Joe Dries: Yeah, I think, you know, as we’ve matured in this industry, the idea that the customer journey is anything close to linear, we’ve kind of thrown that out the window, right?

So one of the things we’re really trying to focus on this year is the idea that as a brand or small business, you know, you’ve kind of got this opportunity to kind of like not, necessarily dictate the engagements, but you have the ability to stay somewhat in like a consistent harmony orchestration. So the, one of the things we’re really focused on too, is not going too crazy in terms of like doing anything different for holidays.

In fact, a lot of the recommendations we have are things we would recommend, you know, you do from, you know, your first onset on our platform. But what we want to do is we want to take advantage of the fact that the consumer is research heavy. Right. The price conscious more than ever, you know, may stem from an initial brand or product search to how do I keep in touch with a consumer who showed signals, right, that they were interested in my brand.

And we have a couple of products that do help facilitate that one, of course, is traditional web based remarketing, but for those really savvy and heavy into retail, it’s that. things like shopping on MSAM where you leverage your retail feed in a more display oriented fashion and leverage that logic of what did that consumer do with a particular product or skew skew within your feed.

So again, the journey can be three months, three weeks. But the idea is you want to have a solution in place that allows you to engage at the most kind of critical

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, that makes sense. And so one piece of research that was put out by Microsoft and we’ll put the playbook in the show notes here that anyone can grab, but one piece of research has to do really with how early consumers are starting to shop for Q4 and Black Friday, Cyber Monday.

And so obviously it’s not Black Friday when they start shopping, right? A lot of these interactions in that nonlinear consumer journey happen as early. For, for a lot of people in September, obviously it happens before then as well for some people, but we really start to see the needle moving in September.

And then in October, it’s like full steam ahead. And in fact, it’s interesting. Amazon just announced their latest prime deal days, which now seem to happen every couple of weeks. But again, early October, and that sort of speaks to the fact that that is going to be when consumers are starting to shop.

So, so talk a little bit more about what, what your data may have shown as far as. How early the consumer is engaging.

Joe Dries: Yeah, it starts now. So, you know, in criticality, I think is more of a kind of a like a better buzz term that we could add to this, which is you don’t have to have everything up and running by the middle of September.

But by the end of September, you should have your strategy in place, right? You should have gone through sort of what do you have already in flight? What’s delivering results? And quite frankly, we just had a meeting with a partner. And one of the things we did in conjunction with, you know, the insights provided by our vertical team, we took their own data.

Right, and kind of showcase the work you’re already doing today is really delivering results. So let’s amplify that. How can we rinse and repeat with other accounts where maybe there’s a gap in terms of a specific product that again, you know, retail vertical probably should be in place. And then again, it’s, it really is all about.

Having that strategy ready to go. So when people do perform brand searches, when they do engage with your ad, when they do land on that website, but maybe they didn’t check out, you’re building those audience pools, you’re getting those signals brought back into the platform and to your point on AI. And what does that do for the customer?

Or excuse me, the advertiser. I mean, one of the biggest things we’re doing is we’re improving our ago, right? Relevancy and customer experience is so important to us. And you know, That orchestration can be done in a really thoughtful way without bombarding a user with, we’ll just say, Unrelevant ads or maybe something that, you know, they’re not interested.

But again, we can pick up those signals and really make sure we’re only engaging with customers that are, have shown interest in, in your offering.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And I love that be thoughtful in how you approach customers because nobody likes to be spammed or see, Messages that just don’t apply to them. And that that’s always been one of the frustrations with remarketing is that there’s no real signal as far as, yeah, okay.

I’ve gone and purchased this thing from someone else. So please stop showing me ads for it. And that’s what generative AI in some form is good at, right? It understands kind of that you’re no longer. Interested in a sort of thing, but it also, as it builds up to you shopping for something, it understands a lot of context about the traits and attributes and value propositions that matter to you.

And what’s really interesting is that we’ve been so conditioned to think about keywords as the main signal of how someone expresses intent, and then you have. Demographic signals, which are useful, but they don’t really let you look deeply into the soul of the consumer, which Gen AI to some degree does because you just it’s no longer about typing stuff on the screen.

It’s it’s a voice assistant. You I’ve got the chat GPT app on my phone. You got copilot where you can talk to it. And so one piece of research that Microsoft put out was the click through rate Is much improved when the ad shows it a generative experience as opposed to the non generative experience.

And that kind of proves the fact that through all of this signal that’s coming in, that’s not really just keywords. Gen AI knows exactly what it is you’re going to want. That does raise some questions then for advertisers. I mean, how do we target in this case if it’s not really purely keywords anymore?

Joe Dries: Yeah, and actually I think this will play nicely to a comment you made, which is When a person actually makes that conversion or that shopping cart purchase, right? Which is our in market audiences do rely heavy, heavy on keywords. They also rely heavily on keyword intent, right? Which is what am I trying to do?

Am I researching best prices? Am I researching, am I really in the beginning of it? But then too, because of our massive identity graph, which by the way is, you know, we are able to. Bring people in and out of audience segments based on activity, right? So I could be, you know, in the market for, you know, in a kitchen appliance for my mother in law, but at some point in time, I might actually convert and I might fall out of that in market segment, right?

So then the pool does change but then you still have access to some of those folks who, again, who haven’t come and of course, there’s things we can do from a campaign perspective of excluding converters and changing some of the, you know, the, the look back windows, but fundamentally, you know, we’re actually updating and optimizing our.

segments are signals on a daily basis. And one of the things, you know, from our top track perspective, is it’s somewhere around 20 billion digital signals are leveraged every single day in order to power our network. So this isn’t a this isn’t rudimentary, right? This is a very complex algorithm that we’re running across, not just owned and operated, but extended through Xander, right?

So again, we’ve got scale, we’ve got the audience piece dialed, and the fact that we own a search engine is such a luxury. But at the same time, we own a browser to Right. So it gives us flexibility and it also gives us again, other activity and signals that you know, you might not get from another.

Frederick Vallaeys: And so for someone who is not quite as familiar, maybe with Microsoft advertising options, and it’s maybe a bit more Google first, talk a bit more about that identity graph and how much of it is just really purely driven by The data Microsoft already has, or what does the advertiser do to enhance sort of that identity graph picture?

Joe Dries: Yeah, I think in general, like the more signals we have, the better our graph is. Right. So you know, the graph is Microsoft owned and operated. You know, if you think about our ecosystem from like a, kind of a broader lens, I mean, they’re massive platforms, msn. com is obviously, you know, one of the, Edge browser is also the number two browser.

You know, we are the PC. And obviously, you know, we take privacy very seriously. But all of our consumer products are consumer and consumer alone. And one of the differentiations we make is, you know, We’ll use outlet. For example, outlook is enterprise. It’s also consumer. So when you think about whether or not you are, you know, is there anything happening in my corporate email?

Absolutely not. So when you go through a pitch with Microsoft or you see numbers related to outlook dot com, those are purely consumer driven, right? So our signals are ours. They go through a very stringent privacy. review. And in fact, sometimes it’s a little frustrating for folks because they see the potential.

But Microsoft is, you know, safety and security first. And if that goes across the board in all business lines. But I think, you know, leveraging first party data is another unique opportunity. Whether it’s through Xander, whether it’s through, you know, partners like lab ramp or through a UI. I mean, the ability to leverage first party data, I think, is a really it’s a luxury, right?

Not everybody has it. But I mean, we have more than enough opportunities to leverage first and third party data. And then of course you even have Xandr curate and the data marketplace. So again, based on a use case or an objective, we really have, you know, kind of a couple of opportunities where we can, you know, take, take this, take that, mesh it together and really have like a cohesive campaign, right?

If we took your first party data, it could be a remarketing list or a Lifetime value list, right? You want to find more folks who look like this certain subset of people and we can take that and go find lookalikes across our network. So lots of opportunity.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, I love that. So a lot of different building blocks and that’s kind of what you were saying that is by the end of September, have your strategy in place for how these building blocks will fit together.

Ideally, you’ve already started building your first party data and you have those high value customers. One of the benefits or the nice things here is that’s kind of internal to your database, right? That’s what first party data means is you don’t have to necessarily go and build it from scratch right now.

That, that data probably already exists somewhere. And then it just becomes a matter of being able to match it back to key that Microsoft basically has about that consumer. So I think that’s all very interesting. And then another. Type of first party data I think is really relevant in Q4 is probably something like profit margin.

So if you’re a retailer, you’re going to run an e commerce campaign trying to sell stuff for gifts. Then, you know, bid to profitability as a bid, as opposed to bidding to ROAS. And a lot of people don’t think about this, but your profit margin is your first party data, and that’s another big lever that you can pull.

Joe Dries: Yeah. Another thing too, like when we talk about sort of the marketing maturity curve, when folks talk about full funnel Omnichannel, the one thing that sometimes we have to spend a little time on is this notion of view through. I think everyone’s so focused on direct conversions and, you know, same session conversions, which again, going all the way back to an initial part of our conversation.

That doesn’t happen very likely. So again, you know, adding in sort of, I would say, a more kind of nuanced and kind of updated like attribution modeling in the back back end, which you can also get from our U. I will also help. And then something that I think is also really critical. We just talk about efficiencies outside of bidding strategies is to one thing, Microsoft network is CPC.

So right out of the gate, we’re already trying to make this media as efficient as possible. And then two, unlike some of our Competitors, you’re able to actually look in reporting and see where where am I running? Where am I getting not just clicks, but where am I also getting conversions? And to your point, I’m actually profitable from like a delivery and conversion perspective.

So all of that goes into play. And we’ve got a ton of levers to pull. And so even when we start with folks from a We’ll say a new engagement perspective. We always start at the bottom of the funnel because we want that quick, quick realization of value. So we’re leveraging shopping feeds. We’re leveraging remarketing.

We’re leveraging in market audience because it kind of does a little bit of the lower portion of the funnel plus consideration. And we think about feeding the top of the funnel, which also includes search, right? As much as we’re talking about the audience network searches at the top, searches at the bottom.

And, you know, to have that all work together, Going back to one user identity and the same network, like it’s super powerful. There’s a lot of insights that are available within the UI. In addition to some of the additional stuff we can do on a unique advertiser level,

Frederick Vallaeys: so talk us briefly through what is the setup look like for that to get that.

Better view through attribution, the attribution across the various touch points that might happen across the audience network as well as search. How does one set that up?

Joe Dries: Yeah. And to be fair, the first step is pretty easy, right? Like literally going into reporting, adding new columns and making sure you’re leveraging all of the kind of the robust KPIs that we have in there.

And then two, should you be working with, you know, a Microsoft representative, you know, there are things we can do outside of the platform. I actually call it like delivering value outside of the UI where we can actually take a, a single advertiser and we can monitor and track and look at the performance over a certain time period and look at things like how did this full funnel solution improve brand search terms?

How did it improve? Click through rate and conversions. And what was the overall lift across the funnel? And then we can move on to things like customer journey mapping, right? Like, what was the actual sort of click or engagement narrative that got this customer to become a customer or a, we’ll say a member.

So there’s a lot of things we can do, but you can start with it in the U. I. And all of that reporting is available. You just got to make a couple extra clicks because sometimes it’s not as obvious as we would all hope. That’s

Frederick Vallaeys: right. That talks about the full funnel. What about going cross platform and understanding the value?

Because obviously people do go outside the Microsoft network as well. And that could be for something as simple as, you know, the time we all spend on social media. How do we also bring in Connected TV? I know Connected TV is an effort that Microsoft is going into, but you’re not the only game in town for that one.

So, so how do you look at that broader picture?

Joe Dries: Yeah, and I think it goes back to, and again, step out. One network, multiple solutions. One identity graph, one version of Joe versus 10. So starting from search, going to display and then connected TV. If you were to utilize a similar targeting a target across all of those, it’s, it’s the same audience, right?

You’re not buying in a disparate fashion. Our CTV offering actually was, came through the Zander acquisition. So we got access to a real robust premium setup that you can deploy from the UI. So whether you’re a media buyer at an agency or a small business, I mean, you could today go and launch a global CTV campaign across publishers like Disney plus Peacock, Hulu, Roku.

Netflix is potentially part of that inventory supply beyond just direct buys. So it’s a very robust platform. The reporting again is all in the UI and it really is all about sort of being able to articulate the value across the funnel while still making sure that you’re getting those. You know, KPIs that everyone kind of sets for sets in the beginning and similar to kind of the native display side.

Where, where am I getting the most run, right? Am I, am I getting a higher completed view on a, on a certain platform? Am I getting junk, you know, not junk, you know, spending dollars on placements, I, or streaming services that I may not want to be on? Or, if you said, hey Joe, I don’t know. I’ve already got a direct deal with, with Hulu, but we can exclude that right from the jump.

So again, we’re really focused on value and efficiency. And again, just like our network, we’re going on cost per completed view. So again, we want that media to be as valuable as possible right out of the gate.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, that sounds exciting. So you offer a lot of reporting into where your dollars are being spent, and then you can connect that to.

The actual production of those dollars and make exclusion decisions where it makes sense now all of this connected TV. It does sound very exciting, but it also sounds difficult and expensive. Who is this for? Like, what sort of the minimum? Monetary commitment as well as how good does your creative need to be?

And how do we get those creatives?

Joe Dries: Yeah, great question. Create creative does come up. Not a lot of folks have access. They don’t have the budget. But I will say if you’re running on YouTube or if you’re running with any other, you know, streaming platforms, those assets should carry over nicely to ours.

We do have a scoring system. So in the event you know, you’re doing, we’ll say a, you want to run a Netflix, it would go through a review where someone would actually rate the quality of the video and depending on how good it is, it would or would not serve. But yeah, all assets, assuming, you know, they’re decent bit rate.

We also, of course, Microsoft advertising, you can find all the details there or game with your rep. But again, there’s no, there’s no fees. You can do it through the UI with support. From us or on your own. The pricing is cost per completed view, which again, very friendly and very, I will say, price conscious right out of the gate.

And we don’t necessarily have any budget minimums except for there are daily minimums, which I believe it’s like 20 a day or 25 a day. So again, not not an overwhelmingly, you know Aggressive requirement to to get in the door and test it.

Frederick Vallaeys: So

Joe Dries: it

Frederick Vallaeys: sounds like the biggest hurdle then potentially is that the creative component.

But I’ve seen some really interesting uses of generative AI. So tools like Canva combined with Suno. Suno will generate a music track for you. You can obviously use something like Dolly or Copilot, which is using OpenAI system, but you can use that to generate images. Then you can put those static images together in Canva.

Canva will loop it into a video. It will be backed with a audio track from Suno. You overlay some text and basically you get a pretty high quality. You know, obviously not professionally produced, but something that looks quite good that might pass muster and and be allowed onto a CTV. So that’s a way that people get into it.

It’s also, for me, it’s really a way to kind of illustrate the vision. So you don’t have to be a video producer to be able to show, this is my vision for what the ad needs to look like. And then if you hit on something that you want to spend a bit more money and add a lot more production value, you can at least have something that’s pretty well defined.

That the team can start working on.

Joe Dries: Yeah, and as you know, with our partnership with OpenAI, I mean, there’s a lot of opportunity in flight now that you can leverage, and at the same time, it’s a growing partnership. So, I would say stay tuned on potential, you know, solutions that Microsoft can offer to our customers, where maybe creative is a roadblock.

So, stay tuned on that one.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, no. And obviously, I mean, Open AI has shown us early previews of what video generation looks like, and it’s quite exciting. I think we’ve all seen hamsters riding bicycles in downtown Manhattan. And so that’s the kind of stuff, hey, it would have taken millions of dollars of production budget and CGI to achieve, but now it’s going to be available soon to everyone.

So quite excited to see how Microsoft fits into that and maybe some of the different angles that you take based on the fact that you you understand the advertising audience quite well.

Joe Dries: Okay. No, I was just going to say it is, you know, as a technologist, one of the first things I do ask when, you know, something’s new to market or, you know we’ll say the new startup is, you know, coming out of stealth, which is, does this make humanity better?

Right? And, and even if it’s something as little as helping a small business create video assets, like in my, in my heart, in my, in my head that, that tech is making, you know, Okay. Humanity a little bit better, right, giving them the ability to, you know, get get into a solution that again could be cost prohibitive just from assets.

So that’s it is really it is really I’m optimistic about it. It’s some of it’s already accessible, but things like that really do make me bullish about how I can actually make, you know, things better for the humans here.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, I completely agree. It’s super useful if you use it and deploy it in the right way.

Thank you. But we keep going back to this quote, Sam Altman says, 95% of marketers will lose their job within five years due to Gen AI and doing that work for them. And that’s a big theme of this show nowadays is what do we then do as humans? How do we not become those 95%, but how do we, how are we the 5%?

So for you in your technologist vision, what does that look like? What should we be doing?

Joe Dries: Yeah, I think for me, like one thing that I’m not giving up is this notion of creativity. So I know, you know, I can copilot can write a really amazing email for me. But as a human, like, I want to leverage what you know, those skills that I have, I think, you know, staying educated to write, like, you know, it’s one of those things where, you know, we talk about leaning in, and especially when maybe it’s not like the Brett, you know, maybe it’s a little scary.

I mean, leaning into those opportunities is where growth comes from. So for me, it’s I actually don’t mind, you know, the challenges. I don’t mind those moments where I’m like, gosh, I don’t know anything about this. And what does that actually mean? Right? Like, I don’t have an opinion because I don’t know enough.

So I will say it’s great. You know, it is on a faster acceleration than I thought it would be. But there’s, you know, there’s quite a few areas where you do need a human, where you do need that human sort of compassion and maybe even grace, right? In order to make sure that The product that’s driven by, you know, A.

I. Is actually, you know, human forward, but it is. It is super interesting. It’s moving at a rate that I didn’t expect. And hopefully it really does just take over mundane, redundant tasks, right? Like data wrangling. And, you know, there’s already some great platforms out there that remove that. But yeah, I’d like to, I’d like to think that the creativity piece will still, still need us humans.

And of course, the human to human component for, you know, really important partnerships, right? Like Those, that won’t go to machines. So I feel good there.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, and I think you also said personal growth and leaning into knowing what’s happening. And that’s another way that Gen AI really helps, right?

It sort of frees you up from the mundane tasks, like you said. And so that gives you time to become better educated, but don’t just educate yourself in the traditional way. Just explore entirely new things because GPT is a great teacher and it can ask you questions and it can sort of distill very complex information.

At different levels. So you could be like, Hey, explain to me what media mix models are at a five for a five year old. Okay, I got it. Okay, now explain it to me like I was a 10 year old. Okay, I’m following. And so if that’s how you like to learn, great. If you like to learn a different style, you just tell GPT how to teach you about this concept that you’ve been wanting to go deeper on.

And then you can even ask it. Hey, can you now ask me some questions like quiz me? Do I understand it? Yeah. You always have to be a little cautious about the hallucinations that come up, but the more that you can also point it to, okay, here’s like the reference material on this topic. So when I write things about, PPC, I will often give it help articles from Microsoft or from Google because it’s like this is grounding you In the reality of how say a performance max campaign would work and then you can start learning about that And so but that applies broadly to anything and then for myself i’m also seeing this as an opportunity to you know become better at scripting script.

I love scripting, but it takes a lot of time. You know, I’d rather be thinking about new solutions and be creative in that regard as opposed to actually writing the code. But I also want to become better at statistics. And so now it’s helping me learn marketing statistics and get to a level that I couldn’t get to before because of time limitations.

So I’m super excited about all of this as well.

Joe Dries: Yeah. And I think also to the notion of, you know, evolving kind of has probably a lot of components, but I think one of them could be be curious, right? So, you know, when you perform a search, you get that information back. Like, don’t just copy and paste like, you know, that’s easy, right?

But what does this mean? What did it say? And do I even agree with and doesn’t make sense? And then to, I think applications really important. One of the things I started doing really early in my career is whether it was a new product solution, something coming to the industry. It was I should go test run this and see, and see how it not only lands, but like, I need to, again, I need to form an opinion.

And if you’re not actually, if you’re just regurgitating something you read, or if you’re just, you know, emailing copy and paste, like you’re not really, You’re not really learning. And so I think those are really, you know, a couple of components, at least for me, I’m going to be mindful of because yeah, I mean, well, it was it.

You can’t always, you can’t always believe what you read, but you can take certain pieces of it. You can add some of those critical insights again. Maybe you didn’t. Have access to add that to your toolbox and continue to formulate your opinion in your POV. Because again, that is an AI driven world. That is something that makes us distinct, which is our opinions are based on more than just binary, right?

There’s there’s things like you’re, you know, Compassion, nostalgia you know, the outputs of joy, right, like those things all go into the decisions we make.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. And that’s also where I think we spoke about the human connection. And I think that’s important because as you go to conferences, as you speak to people, you start hearing, like, what are their real pain points.

And now you can frame your conversations with Gen AI and how you educate yourself in terms of those pain points. Like, so, okay, I’ve heard from a lot of advertisers, they struggle with you know, how to manage budgets in a, in a more real time fashion, especially when the velocity is really high at certain times of the year.

Okay, well, let me go and talk to GPT and figure out, is there a scripting solution that could deal with that specific problem? And, and there’s also this notion that GPT and generative, it just It’s going to be generic if you speak to it in generic terms, but the more that you can box it in and give it limitations, it’s going to actually get more creative about the ways that it proposes solutions.

And so I think what those constraints are. That can come from the humans, that comes from your personal creativity, but it also comes from you having talked to many other people and having sort of digested that into, okay well, a lot of people have told me about this budget problem, but they also tell me they don’t want to spend a million dollars on a solution.

So that’s a constraint that I can put in right there. And so generative is going to come back with something that’s more likely to not be. Highly expensive. One easy solution would be, well, hire a thousand people who do nothing else but check for this. Okay, but that’s out because that’s too expensive. And so these are really interesting ways to work with AI that I think we’re all sort of evolving into understanding and making our lives better through that.

Joe Dries: Yeah, an interesting point. You said work with AI is something I’m actually been conscious of is I perform a query. I now look at what does what does it truncate my query down to? There’s a lot of I think we’re used to being a very like Literature and kind of, you know, verbose, you know, com society, right?

Whereas AI and, and searches like it’s efficiency. It’s, you know, what is the actual, what the, what should the actual query look like? So I’ve been really paying attention to that, like, am and if it doesn’t change it too much, I’m like, oh, that was a good query. I did. At the same time I had this notion of like, is it teaching me now how to communicate with it?

Right, because it’s showing me what my original query was, what it turned it into and then the results. So I do think there’s this mutual learning curve that’s happening. And it’s really interesting,

Frederick Vallaeys: very fascinating to tell me what is your favorite, maybe unusual application. And it doesn’t have to be directly related to marketing, but like what one way or do you think is very cool that you’ve used gen AI?

Joe Dries: Oh, actually this is an authentic moment. This is one rule. I’m a big music guy. So it’s my son. We go to a lot of concerts and I actually use being image creator to create my cover art for my Spotify playlist and I have a good friend who’s former Olympian. He’s brilliant and I made one in kind of his like, you know, capitalizing or sort of composing all of like his key attributes.

And he was like, this is so cool. I was like, yeah, being image creator. So that for me is actually really cool. Now, to your point, the squirrels driving cars does come up. But again, I can’t do it. I think it’s, it’s also really fun. And when you get something that like, this is exactly what you’re looking for, it feels really good.

So Spotify cover art is my thing.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. I’ve done cover art for songs that my five year old composed using Suno about our two cats. And it just like, once you start putting all of these little pieces together, it’s just, it’s amazing because now the, the only reason that she’s not a published musician on Spotify is that I haven’t bothered to buy the The music registration, the ISBN, I think.

Joe Dries: Yeah.

Frederick Vallaeys: But of course, GPT explained to me what I needed to do to get it published on Spotify. And we got the cover art. We got the songs. They’re pretty catchy. So like, Hey, my five year old is a musician. Couldn’t imagine that before. The royalties are coming sooner. Penny’s a day. Penny’s a day. We’re going to be penny on theirs.

All right, let’s shift it back to a little bit of digital marketing. So we’ve talked about the shift in consumer behavior. We haven’t really talked much about what are people searching for in this economy. Is there like it used to be buy online, pick up in store. Bopas used to be big and then free shipping.

That was the thing a couple of years ago. Like, are we seeing anything new that we should focus on in this holiday season?

Joe Dries: Yeah, I think there’s a big shift to not only, you know, competitive pricing and deals, but, you know, we are seeing the buy now pay later Opportunities kind of come up. And again, those are third party companies that power that, the Sezzles, the Afterpays, the Klarna’s of the world.

But it is something that within sort of the user flow, if that’s something you have part as part of your e commerce offering a playbook, it is something that you should definitely elevate, but folks are price conscious. I think there’s a couple of ways to go about it, which is of course, you know, you’ve got to be competitive.

Everyone has margins. So there’s this idea of. Getting as many conversions and kind of early in the process as you can. And then as again, the time goes along, maybe begin to start introducing coupon codes, maybe start introducing price drops or for that matter, you know, these, these options opportunities for buy now pay later, maybe that’s something, you know, it was been on your list to consider, but.

You know, maybe by October, you just decided I need this up and running because this holiday season is so critical. So we are seeing an uptick in that. And then from a conversion standpoint, you know, there is, I haven’t seen quite a bit of like, it’s not that it’s linear, but to your point, when we get into cyber five, or we get into the real crunch time.

Again, you have all these signals and data that have taken place over the course of weeks and months, and by the time that comes, you should be in an opportunity to really see the kind of the results of all your work. So if you have your signal and trigger based solutions running, that’s fantastic. If someone’s been able to come through, but maybe you only got an email from them, I think that’s time where you knew you rely on your email and marketing automation, right?

If you have that set up to still engage with the customer or output a file. Bring it to our platform and maybe make a very unique and specific offer to those folks where you did, you did earn the right to get the, you know, the email address, but now you want to still get that sale. So I think there’s a lot of opportunity this holiday season to have, you know, a better year than last year, potentially.

Frederick Vallaeys: Let me play devil’s advocate here. So great advice. Yeah, I’m gonna go do all of these things in my Google ads account, and then I’ll be done. Why should we do it on Microsoft? And I think the answer on search is pretty straightforward, right? Like a lot of people might be capped out on search volume on Google.

Microsoft obviously has a fantastic search product with a lot of the same similar settings, even some additional settings. So that, that kind of makes sense. But for someone who’s investing on the Google Display Network, which In essence, it’s a bottomless pit. You can put as much money in there, and there’s always going to be inventory available.

Why should they do the extra work to start thinking about the Microsoft Audience Network as an additional play?

Joe Dries: Yeah, I think it’s twofold. The reasons why, I’ll start off with one. So, even if you move past the notion of scale, which, They Google has and we have, there is this, there is an unduplicated audience.

So whether you’re on Pinterest, Amazon, YouTube, Google, Facebook, there are folks who are on our platform that are not on theirs. Secondarily you know, you can think of this as creating a new revenue stream. Don’t think of this as just, you know, more work and more time out of your day. If you’re not running on us, there is a certain sub subset of folks you’re not getting in front of.

So think about this as maybe creating a new revenue stream for your company. And then sort of like, all right, You got me. I feel like there’s a unique opportunity. We do have solutions and tools in place to make that really easy. So something like Google import or one of our or if you, you know, use the what’s it called?

Editor tool. Or if you’re a P I company, you know, you can plug those in really quickly. So the value is there. And if you know you want to get it. Get the question out of the gate of us versus Google. Google is massive. You kind of covered that with the notion of bottomless pit and, you know, the inability to hit budgets.

We’re not as big as Google and, you know, outside of Facebook, I don’t know who is, but we do typically have the most R. O. I kind of say R. O. I. Centric campaigns. We have more typically more efficiency or CPAs are typically lower than that of Google. So yes, you get the fire hose over here, but as you kind of We talked about before.

We’re really focused on delivery of value, and we want that to be a quick realization of value, right? So scale and you could unduplicated audience, a savvy audience. And if you think about our audience in general it’s no different than what Microsoft’s known for, which is the PC. So the PC, the workday consumer affluent, it all boils down to a very efficient network where you know, you typically see really good results from your, your retail campaigns.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, I mean, who doesn’t love more revenue? So I like that angle. And then as far as the easy button. So yes, obviously, there’s the campaign import. Now, personally, I would advocate and I think you would advocate to for once it’s been imported, you can just keep re importing it. But ultimately, the best results are going to come if you look at Microsoft as a separate entity that Google.

And you put in place the unique rules that optimize each platform to the best of their ability. That’s also where my company, Optmyzr, comes in, right? So we can take some of the rules that are maybe data driven or semantic analysis using generative AI to make different decisions between the two platforms so they can start diverging towards the best optimized version for each of the platforms.

So so it doesn’t have to be. Hugely time consuming. You can make it as time consuming as you wish, but obviously that that big revenue opportunity that exists should be the primary decision factor. Do talk a little bit because we have an international audience. Microsoft is often criticized for maybe not being as big in.

European countries, but but they’ve been growing right? And then when it comes to the display network or the audience network, as well as connected TV how does that look like internationally?

Joe Dries: Yeah, that’s a great question. And you know, I, first and foremost, I mean, we are, I think the easiest thing to say is we are global.

So, you know, if you look at CTV, if you look at just our own and operator, I mean, there’s, msn. com es de right. These are all region specific, you know websites and platforms and publishers. Xander is, of course, you know, if this might be helpful to today, whether you access what we call map the Microsoft advertising platform via the U.

I. R. A. P. I. Or third party tool. You do get the ability or have the ability to extend through Zander. So book in our platform, leverage all the in market and the robust targeting suite that we have, but at the same time extend to all our additional publishers and partners that are part of our supply.

And then globally, you know, if you’re moving from North America to Canada and maybe, you know, potentially Japan, you know, we have the insights and details for all these markets. So, Folks can consider. Well, how am I? How am I going to launch this product across the globe? You know, for these three major three major platforms, Google, Microsoft and we’ll say Facebook.

So we definitely have all that information available. And you can run it off from one UI. So again, when you talk about the investment of time and effort to be able to launch globally and in a single platform. You know, single interface, like that’s a big deal. And you know, there is the markets do vary in terms of the size and scale.

But I haven’t had too much pushback in terms of the actual opportunity, right? Like we had to do a little bit of, you know, Compelling, you know, groundwork in the upfront, but you know, once we get, you know, once we get that rolling and we get started, typically folks are really happy with the results and they do want more.

And so, you know, we do have in market efforts to improve, you know, not just acquisition, but there’s this idea of stickiness too. So keep making sure folks stay within our platform. User experience is huge for us. Whether you’ve had an editorial review, you know, you know, get stuck or denied. We to take it really seriously because it’s hard.

It’s not always hard to get a new customer. You got to work on maintaining them right and keeping them happy. And, you know, somewhat nurtured rights and protected. So we take all of our markets with that same kind of mindset, and we just make sure that we’re delivering relevant experiences that generate unique opportunities for the advertiser and the consumer.

Frederick Vallaeys: Great. And so for someone listening to us today and who says now, okay, the Microsoft opportunity sounds ripe for the picking, let’s go and do this in Q4. Do you have any like final advice? Maybe let’s just talk about bid management for a second, right? Because you’re going to now invest a chunk of money into that.

You did allude to the fact that it’s it’s a very ROI positive or. Good platform. But how would you recommend people set this up? Because Q4 does have these very spiky days, and everybody’s, of course, concerned about blowing through the budget without the results. So how soon should people set it up?

What’s sort of the minimum number of conversions? And what bid strategies would you recommend?

Joe Dries: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think, I think setup should be As soon as you’re ready. So once you’ve made the decision, and that’s actually something we really focus on is not just selling things, but helping marketers make decisions.

That’s actually the biggest component of my job is to make sure you have enough information to make a decision from an attribution perspective. If you are a small company and you don’t have a great third party tool, Recommend going with the UI. And when I say the UI, I mean, making sure that you’re actually going through adding the reporting KPIs and columns that are really important to you.

At the same time, you know, if you do work with a third party tool, more than likely they do have access and modules for our platform, which could make it a whole lot easier. During the kind of the lead up to the holidays we do find that folks typically do live in the UI to least to kick off and then they start, you know, working on the backend reporting to make sure to your point.

They’re not just seeing, you know, the Google, Google metrics, but they’re all seeing Microsoft. They’re seeing Facebook and they’re kind of looking at them as their own bid strategies. That’s an interesting thing because I think out of the gate, a lot of folks start with ECPC. But again, if you have a, get a very, very specific focus on your return on your investment, you know, there is an opportunity to TRO as we do also have predictive targeting, which I’ll go requirement perspective does require like, I think 30 conversions within a 60 day window.

I could be off. But again, we have some tools already in place that can support kind of that ease of deployment and then optimize wait 2 weeks. Look at the data, look at view throughs, what’s really driving efficiencies within the business and make those changes. In fact, you can even ask copilot or or, you know, Bing, Bing does this.

What do you think? ai AI here. And then two, like if you have a, if you have a a team as associated with your, your account or your business. That’s what we’re here for. That’s why they haven’t replaced us with robots yet, because there still is that human element. But I think making sure, you know, I don’t have the right bid strategy, but also day parting, I think is also something that folks should consider.

You know, there’s a lot of activity during the nights and weekends and all that great stuff, but typically conversions come during the day. Mobile, I think from a omni channel perspective is important, but based, you know, depending on what you’re actually selling You know, you might want to have that honest conversation with yourself and be like, is someone really going to buy my product on a mobile phone?

Maybe not. So we do actually, in some cases, recommend do like a negative bid modifier mobile just a little bit, right? Because again, we are the PC. We are the workday consumer. And in general, data does support the notion that conversions come in kind of like a 10 hour window. So those are the things right out of the gate.

I would highly recommend. And then gosh, what else? And then patients, right? So again, once you start, let’s let it go for two weeks. Let’s let the data go. Yeah. Kind of accumulate. Typically two weeks is the time period. And then what do you, what do you do first? Where’s your first point of action?

Drive efficiency scale. We have that. So if you need to tighten the reins a little bit. In terms of day partying or even changing targeting, don’t be afraid to do that. In fact, the one thing I will say right now is I don’t ever recommend running a campaign without, without targeting on it. It will spend and you will be like, it will probably take minutes.

So make sure you’re, you’re choosing your audience cause that’s, that’s what the scale does, right? It gives us that ability to like whittle it down to, you know, just the right, the right subset of folks that we want to reach. So those are kind of my recommendations for, for, for this month, if you will, and getting ready.

Frederick Vallaeys: Great. Some some fantastic fundamentals that I think apply really year round, but but you’re right, do them now as well and set things up early because you don’t want to get started with these campaigns when all the shopping activities in full swing, build up that conversion data right now so that the automated systems understand what to bid on, how much to bid, when to spend it and anything that you’re going to do manually as far as day partying Kind of optimizations, geo optimizations, device type optimizations.

You also need two weeks of data. And even if you spend a ton of money and like one or two days, like sure, you have a lot of data, but you don’t have any insights into, hey, people behave differently on Sundays than they do on Tuesdays. Right? So you really need at least seven days at a very minimum. And the more that we get into the Black Friday week, that data can never be used to make any decisions for other weeks of the year.

Because it. Just going to be different, right? So yeah,

Joe Dries: hold on tight for those days and one more plug there too. And then we talked about it earlier, which is run the publisher report. It’s unique to us. You can’t do it in a lot of other platforms. Don’t just look at the clicks, look at the conversions, look at the view through conversions, look at the look at the ROI in the row as and use that as sort of another sort of lever that you can pull.

And again, we’re CPC. So don’t be afraid to see or it. Potentially your click through rate not be ideal. Let’s focus on, let’s focus on what folks are actually doing to kind of, again, to convert to action. That’s, that’s where we want to be, you know, kind of our mindset to be.

Frederick Vallaeys: Great. And a shameless plug for Optmyzr.

We help support campaigns on Google, but also on Microsoft. And we go deep on all of these optimizations. So any of these things that Joe was talking about. We can help you do it more efficiently and to some degree automated if you’re ready for that level of automation. So with that, Joe, fantastic advice.

Thanks for sharing everything you see inside of Microsoft that can help advertisers. How do people learn more and stay in touch with you?

Joe Dries: Just head to Microsoft advertising open your browser, go to Bing. If you, if you want to and perform a, you know, form a query, you’ll find us or again, reach out to your rep or, you know, the traditional channels of support.

We’ve got a lot of folks on hand to make sure our entire ecosystem of advertisers are ready. And we would, I would love to see folks overwhelmed with questions and opportunities.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, and Microsoft Advertising has a great blog on there as well. So do check that out. They share very frequent updates about the industry.

They have playbooks usually by market. So wherever you are, they’re going to have great data for you. That kind of tells you. What’s happening in that region and then Joe, I think you’re also on LinkedIn. So people can find you right there. Everyone who’s enjoyed the show, please go ahead and subscribe.

So you get updates about future episodes and you can find us at optmyzr.com. I’m also on LinkedIn. Thank you everyone for watching. Joe, thanks for being on and we’ll see you for the next episode.

Joe Dries: Thanks, Fred.