PPC amidst the COVID crisis

Episode Description

Learn about latest industry benchmark data, week-over-week and month-over-month changes in advertising, successful e-commerce strategies on platforms like Amazon and Google, and the surprising effectiveness of automated bidding strategies like ‘maximize clicks.’ The episode also delves into the challenges and strategies for adapting to the new normal in digital advertising. Join the conversation to stay updated on evolving PPC trends and practices.

The panel discusses:

• Industry benchmark data for advertising with week over week and month over month changes
• Ecommerce advertising strategies on Amazon and Google
• Automated bidding and how ‘maximize clicks’ has worked surprisingly well
• How to find the new normal

Episode Takeaways

Industry Benchmark Data for Advertising:

• Week-over-week and month-over-month changes: Notable fluctuations across different industries with significant impacts on consumer packaged goods and travel sectors. These shifts reflect changing consumer behaviors and external market pressures due to the COVID crisis.
• Data insights: Leveraging industry-wide data can help advertisers adjust strategies in real-time, recognizing trends and reacting appropriately to ensure effectiveness and relevance of campaigns.

E-commerce Advertising Strategies on Amazon and Google:

• Amazon and Google Shopping: Discussion on how Amazon’s reduction in ad spend may open opportunities for other retailers on Google Shopping by reducing competition and possibly lowering CPCs.
• Diversification and self-fulfillment: Encouraging e-commerce sellers to diversify their selling strategies beyond Amazon, considering self-fulfillment options, or exploring other e-commerce platforms like Walmart and eBay to mitigate risks and capture new opportunities.

Automated Bidding and ‘Maximize Clicks’:

• Effectiveness of automated bidding: Surprisingly positive outcomes from automated bidding strategies during unpredictable times, suggesting that these systems can adapt quickly and effectively to market changes.
• Maximize Clicks strategy: Shared experiences where ‘Maximize Clicks’ has been effective, particularly when coupled with controlled CPCs and clear targeting, providing a cost-efficient way to maintain visibility and potentially increase conversions.

Finding the New Normal:

• Adjusting strategies: Importance of continuously adapting digital marketing strategies to meet the evolving needs and behaviors of consumers in a post-pandemic world.
• Future outlook: Discussion on how businesses can strategically plan for recovery phases, including preparing for shifts back to normalcy and leveraging insights gained during the crisis to strengthen future advertising efforts.

Episode Transcript

Frederick Vallaeys: Hey, everyone, thank you for joining us for another version of PPC Town Hall. It’s April 8th, and this is the third one we’re doing, and we’re going to keep going on the same topic, which is obviously top of mind for everyone. So, the COVID crisis. I guess the sense is things are settling down a bit. The new normal is becoming you know, fairly normal to us.

But we brought back a number of panelists here to to share their thoughts and some very specific advice on what they’re doing. As I have the phone ringing here in the background. Nope, we’re to turn nothing off. So Why don’t we do a quick round of introductions here? So Julie, why don’t we start with you?

Julie Friedman Bacchini: Sure this is Julie Friedman Bacchini from Neptune Moon and the host of PPC Chat, maybe how many of you know me. I’ve been doing this forever, so this is a really interesting time. I have I’ve lived through the dot com burst bubble bursts and also the 2008 financial crisis as a consultant. So I have thoughts on this whole situation.

And you know, things are, things are interesting. You know, being, being at home with everyone and just trying to figure everything out. I think, you know, I’m sort of enjoying the fact that we’re, you know, we’re all in the same boat together.

Frederick Vallaeys: Nice. And how many children are joining us from your side today?

How many do you have at home?

Julie Friedman Bacchini: Oh, I just have one. So that’s a little easy. You know, we’ve got two parents and one kid. So we’re in a slightly easier situation, I guess, than you know, than others.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yes. Kirk, Kirk Williams, thanks for joining us again. You were here on the first one. Thanks for coming back. Tell us a little bit about yourself again.

Kirk Williams: Yeah, definitely. I’m, I’m Kirk PPC Kirk online. And I, I own Zato. We’re just a real small agency. There’s, there’s 3 of us. And we focus primarily on paid search. So Google ads, Microsoft ads with a specific focus in shopping. So we have probably, probably 75 percent of it might even be up to 80 percent now of our clients.

Now our e commerce. So that’s been fun because that’s where my heart is. But yeah, one one story you’d mentioned, you know, stories of potentially this last week. So, Billings, Montana is where I live. As we were joking before we got on, we’re already basically social distance here. But. We are like other cities showing our support for medical people, which is amazing.

Thank you. If you are watching and you are, you know, related to one or married to one or that, or maybe you won’t yourself. But the way that Billings is showing support is by howling, like, I don’t like a wolf or a coyote and I’m sorry because I really want to show support, but it’s really, really weird.

But maybe that’s just me. So I’m glad that our city is showing support. But at 8 PM every night, there’s like all of these howls and it’s kind of funny as well. So there you go. That’s our quarantine story. So I don’t know if that’s our entire city kind of going crazy or what, but.

Frederick Vallaeys: I mean, the sign off phrase these days is stay sane, right?

Clearly Billings, Montana is not staying

Kirk Williams: sane. We’ve lost it. No more clapping. We just howl.

Frederick Vallaeys: All right. And then we had a last minute addition. So Elizabeth Marston from Tinuiti, thanks for joining us. Tell us a bit about yourself.

Elizabeth Marsten: Hello, thank you for having me. There’s, you know, what I last minute.

So, like, what was I going to do? Like, I’m not going anywhere. Elizabeth Marston, senior director strategic marketplace services at Tinuiti, which means that I was started in paid search back in 2006. So, I also saw the, the 2000, some of the 2008 super fun. Google, Bing, Facebook, you name it, and then ended up doing more e com and retailer side at Commerce Hub, and then moved to Tinuiti last year, and now I’m technically Marketplaces, so I work on a lot of the new stuff, so Amazon, working on launching Walmart for Tinuiti and I work with a lot of the retailer media networks these days, trying to figure out what’s new, so anything e com, you, I, I got it.

I am fortunate in that And unfortunately, my husband didn’t happen to be he was taking a break between roles. We had a planned break and then this happened. And so now this planned break break break became an unplanned break of length. So he gets both kids all day every day. And they’re 18 months old and four years old so they’re, you know, big difference in terms of attention spans I think.

My favorite story from the last couple of weeks is I got the live play by play text. He let them play in the kiddie pool in the back deck, and my son decided to be naked and strip through the house and jump on the couch and then pee on it. And I very intentionally did not leave my office. I just looked at that and went, I will just stay right here until nap time has started.

Frederick Vallaeys: Smart decision. By the way, Kirka, how many do you have again at home?

Kirk Williams: We have five. Yeah.

Frederick Vallaeys: Amazing. Don’t know how

Kirk Williams: you do

Frederick Vallaeys: it.

Kirk Williams: So we both win and lose at the same time right now.

Elizabeth Marsten: Is all your furniture just like lawn furniture, like it’s plastic? Cause I’m beginning to think that that’s a good way to go.

Kirk Williams: We just, yeah, we just hose down the entire house every night for cleaning.

Inside and outside.

Frederick Vallaeys: Okay. Well, let’s talk about PPC a little bit. So we’re all in the same boat here. But Elizabeth, I thought we’d start with you. So your atTinuiti I didn’t realize it, but Andy Taylor joined you guys not that long ago. And so he’s one of the premier analysts, I think, in the PPC space.

So kudos on getting him. You pointed out there’s a dashboard. So I wanted to show that to everyone here on the call, but tell us a little bit What you guys are doing and seeing across different verticals, different channels and where people can go and find out more.

Elizabeth Marsten: Absolutely. So on the Tinuiti blog, and you’re going to have the screen share there, but we also, we have a hub, a COVID hub of all of the research.

And so, of course, Andy Taylor, as our director of research is the one that’s pulling together a lot of this information as far as holistically across all the different channels and categories. Our analytics team also created a live dashboard for social media that will update. You can sign up for it and it just updates every day.

It is fortunate, unfortunate. I mean, we have a large book of business, so we do get to see some pretty significant. Trends are things that we can say are trends because we have a large enough data set. Probably the biggest things are amongst the what we would call it the essential categories. Right? So if you were deemed in an essential category by Amazon, then you get to continue as a seller.

If you weren’t, then you had to find other ways essentially to move your inventory. And so that kind of looks back into. You know, how does that affect Google and Bing? One of the things that Andy observed in the last couple of weeks, and then we’ve seen this, we’ve seen Google do this, I mean, Amazon do this before.

We all know that they buy Google shopping and text ads, you know, they have the largest catalog on earth. Of course they do. But they’ve really pulled back on that in the last few weeks. And what’s interesting is what that has, what that does to the market overall in terms of competition and CPC. And then obviously does that make more space for everyone else?

Or is it that you just, that product doesn’t even exist? Like, you know, hand sanitizer. If you haven’t done anything fun in the last couple of days, just Google hand sanitizer and just go through the PLAs for that. That’s, that’s an interesting thing. And then check out the shipping costs.

Frederick Vallaeys: Interesting. I’m looking at this dashboard here.

I hope you can all see it on the screen. But what’s actually fascinating is consumer packaged goods here seems to be a fairly big decline. And I think I’m looking here at week over week spend. And that doesn’t make a ton of sense, right? I mean, so people not being able to go to supermarkets quite as safely as they could in the past.

Like, you think we’re talking here about a supply chain issue or what do you think is going on with that? Elizabeth?

Elizabeth Marsten: It’s probably a little bit of both, right? So it depends on what the product is. So, when we say consumer packaged goods, that could be anything that includes your toilet paper to your, your, your mac and cheese.

Right? So, some of those product lines are obviously. under stress. And then there are some that are doing really, as a result though, also doing really well. It depends people have shifted how they shop as well. So buy online, pick up in store Instacart obviously is that delivery piece, but also people are not buying as much when they, they, they go to the store, they buy a lot, and then they leave.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. And there’s a bit of the whole shopping behavior has changed as well in the store. Right. And I find myself doing this when you go once a week, as opposed to once a day, you load up your cart with way too much milk, way too much, too many eggs. And and you ended up having actually a lot of waste at the end of the week because it’s, people are not used to planning, at least in the United States, this far out.

And earlier this week, I needed something. Urgently from from the hardware store to to prevent some leakage, but because it was actually raining here in California, crazy enough as that is. But so I decided to go at six 15 on a weekday in the evening, six 15 in the evening, and I get to the store and the store’s actually closed.

And I come home and I tell my wife, it looks like a COVID has turned the United States into Europe, right? You have to actually look at your watch before you go to a store because things are, those things are not as accessible as they once were. So. Really changing, I think, behavior is going to be interesting to see to how that pans out in the longer term.

I do want to ask something of the other panelists. So the other 1, I’m looking at travel number 12 on this list. And it looks like some people might not be seeing my screen. So here we go. Okay. There you go. Sorry about that. Here’s the dashboard. So number 12 on that dashboard travel. It looks like a week over week.

There’s actually an increase in spend on that. But obviously, month over month is it’s down the most dramatic of any vertical. Has anyone seen travel advertisers and how they’re sort of responding and how they’re kind of making anything out of the situation that we have and why the spend might be going up on that.

Kirk Williams: I think it might be hopeful purchasing. We’ve seen, you know, we’ve seen some deals and discounts come through just some really low sales for Australia, Hawaii, stuff like that. And so I, you know, my suspicion might be that some people are looking ahead, thinking, ah, this can’t last forever. Maybe we’ll take advantage of this really, really cheap deal.

And in some ways kind of take a risk on this fall or, you know, Or early early 2021 travel so that that that’s my probably best guess. I don’t have proof for that, but I think that’s what’s going on.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, that makes sense. The other thing and we heard this for the folks who were on the panel or on the session last week, but building audiences.

Right? And so, especially because I think this dashboard is Facebook only so anything you can do to. figure out who are those people most itching to get back out of the house, go back on vacation, go and travel use that to build your audiences around it. So that the moment that the gates open up again, at least you’re ready to, to, to know who is most likely to buy from you.

And as you have more limited ad spend, you can prioritize it towards those people, you know, are most likely to pull the trigger most quickly. So it might be another thing looking at the dashboard Anything else that stands out to people?

Julie Friedman Bacchini: I wanted to say something about audiences. Just, I feel like this is a really interesting time for audiences, and you know, we have made certain assumptions up to this point about, you know, this is your particular audience, this is where they are, what their interests are, and that type of thing.

I think that the data that’s going to come out of this and the way that you’re thinking about audiences now is going to continue to shift the longer the longer that this goes on. this goes on. So, you know, let’s use travel as a, as an example. So if you had a certain audience set or people who, you know, were, were ideal for booking different types of travel, you know, at this point you may want to start excluding out people who are in industries that have been particularly hard hit.

So if you’re going to be selling that aspirational travel, you know, there may be people who are going to be completely ruined by this, or it’s going to take years for them to, to recover. So I think starting to think about audiences exclusionary, like some more exclusionary pieces of, of maybe like this core audience still might be decent, but there might be some folks that you want to drop out for a period of time.

I think that’s something that, you know, I’ve been talking with clients about. And, you know, we’re starting to, to think about it, at least if we’re not already doing it, having it in our mind, you know, it’s this thing kind of drags on longer and longer

Frederick Vallaeys: and sort of figuring out the timeline on things is interesting too.

Right? So I was reading about Lufthansa group and they’ve started selling a significant number of their very large planes. So they’ve gotten rid of about 30 percent now of their A380s. They’re getting rid of 747s. And basically these were planes that were not, As efficient as they could be. Right. So they were slated for retirement, but they’re moving up that timeline.

And their CEO is basically saying, listen, it’s going to be months before people start to travel at any level again. But it’s probably going to be years before we’re back to where we were before this whole thing started. Right. So a fairly You know, gloomy timeline, I suppose, in terms of how long this is all going to take to get back to normal.

Kirk Williams: And I think what a lot of people don’t realize is even if they’re not in travel, how much that affects them. Because there’s actually quite a bit of freight that travels on passenger planes and, you know, you look at like Delta, they’re 90 percent down right now. I think I saw they’re losing like 60 million a day.

That laugh was more in shock and awe, not necessarily finding humor in this situation. There that, that, like the supply thing is really right now kind of something to figure out logistics supply. Because again, even if, even if your goods aren’t in travel or you know, very potentially you’re being impacted, maybe even in ways you don’t know by even the consumer travel drop.

And so again, to the point of, you know, we don’t know exactly what’s happening, how, how far this is gonna last, but we do need to continue to have. for if, if our, if our shipments are going to be just still dramatically higher, things like that, the flip side of that being, so I, I heard from one DDC e commerce person who said something about that based upon that they’re like, you know, usually they order and it’s like a 2, 000 shipment and there’s, it was an 8, 000 shipment for them.

So you know, dramatically higher. Prices there, but to me on the flip side of that, I look at a market that oftentimes will self correct at some point. And so you look at that and you say, Hey, at some point, people are going to start. You know travel, travel, things airlines, things like that. They’re, they’re seeing that already.

They’re going to start flying more just for that stuff. That’ll help reduce it. So again, to the whole point of, at some point, I do expect some of that to normalize and stabilize, but probably that’s the big question. Everyone’s mind is how long, because unless you basically are really, really branded or have some, Pretty killer cash reserves.

You know, how long can you last out your competitors? I think it’s just in literally every industry everywhere is probably like the, the core question right now.

Frederick Vallaeys: All right. Yeah. It’s all those sort of unexpected things and the ripple effects and how long it takes for that ripple to kind of pass through the whole system. The other crazy thing I was reading was that. Milk production in the United States, they’re basically the farmers are pouring down millions of gallons down their fields because 40 percent of that stuff was being sold to restaurants and restaurants are just basically not running at anywhere near full capacity.

Wow. But these companies might go bankrupt. And then what happens six months down the line when we might go to a restaurant again and we want a cappuccino, right? Is that not going to be there anymore? Is it going to cost twice as much? And how’s that going to pay off? You know, what kind of long term shifts are we going to see? And then, you know, it’s zoom meetings and people taking virtual or school at home. I’m actually very hopeful that that does change things for the better. Right? So, your cars on the freeway, but also, and again, just sitting with your client, I think, and thinking about that shift. And so optimizers actually thinking about that, and which I challenged everyone to do as well, but.

Right. You want to be sort of defensive in a way, because the worst thing for us to, to happen for anyone to happen is for the consumer to realize there’s a really, really good alternative, right? So in terms of haircuts, I’ve been thinking, should I just shave it all off? Right. Instead of not being able to go to the hairdresser and maybe I like it and maybe I never go to a hairdresser again.

Right. That’s really bad for hairdressers, but, and that’s a really small example and a really stupid example, but I think. You can sort of equate that to to really anyone’s industry. Right? So, is that consumer is that forced shift in behavior going to lead to some long term impacts that, you know, maybe we’re not thinking about today.

And how do we get ahead of that as much as possible?

Elizabeth Marsten: Yeah, especially with the, the hoarding basically or the mass, the mass buying. There was, there was a note in MSN yesterday that, you know, rice prices are going to see a seven year high because people are buying it in bulk, but they’re holding onto it.

And I’m looking at going, but rice lasts a long time. So does that mean in like two years, rice prices will hit a whole, we’ll hit a low because we don’t need it. That and. That in toilet paper, I mean, I still have yet to understand what the hell we’re thinking there, but

Julie Friedman Bacchini: well, I think a lot of this also brings up some questions.

And again, it’ll be interesting to see how all this plays out when this is over. But so many industries have switched to this sort of, like, just in time type of model. Where, you know, it’s like they have everything so timed out, you know, target, for instance, you know, they know, like, on average, how much toilet paper they sell this week, year over year, and they have that data for, for everything.

And so the way that everything has been run up until this point has been very reliant, you know, plus or minus, however, you know, however much, but everything has been. leaned down, you know, in a lot of ways to run that way. And we’re seeing the downside of that right now, which when everything’s humming along and everything’s fine, you know, that’s great and it works well.

I think what’s being laid bare now many things. But one of the things is that, you know, we don’t have a great contingency plan in place to address A major disruption in the external and macro circumstances that allow that kind of, you know, business model to kind of flow week into week, month over month.

And I think it’s gonna be interesting to see what happens with that as this goes forward as well.

Elizabeth Marsten: Actually, that reminds me of something. I always forget. Excuse me. That as a paid search person that kind of started doing marketplaces. But still does paid search, but depends on how you define paid search, whatever but not everybody might understand what the, what it means when Amazon said that they’re temporarily prioritizing this products coming into FBA.

I mean, so here’s a major company that has essentially half the e commerce on the planet, definitely in the US, that is now said, we can no longer meet the thing that we conditioned you to expect, not in the same way. And how disruptive that’s going to be, but for paid search advertisers that have or for clients or for clients that have the ability or they were already doing self fulfillment and they can sell via their e commerce site or via another platform.

This could be a huge opportunity, because as the inventory on Amazon becomes. more difficult and the shipping times become longer because let’s say the example I used like internally to explain it was a cat t shirt like normally like you’re a seller and you sell and you put pallets of your cat t shirt into various amazon fba warehouses so that people when they need it because they’re going to watch james corden and cats they can get their their t shirt in two days.

Well, Amazon is deemed that deemed that kind of inventory, not essential, right? I mean, depends on who you ask, but it’s, it’s really not essential. But does that mean that I can’t sell those cat t shirts anymore? It means I can’t sell it on Amazon the same way and get that two day prime shipping. But if I can ship by my, from my, my own warehouse, or I have the capabilities to ship from my garage and I can meet close to two days, Well, customers still need that cat t shirt.

In fact, they need it more now than ever. So there is a chance there for those that are able to self fulfill to pick up some of those key categories that have been in a sense deprioritized by Amazon.

Kirk Williams: We’ve seen that happen in, in great ways with some of our clients that are exactly in that same position where all of a sudden we are actually.

We are actually hitting the gas on some of those because all of a sudden our revenue and profit for those products that Amazon used to just dominate with their FBA stuff. So at least for, you know, the interim, it’s been, it’s been a great little bit of relief. One, one thing that frankly, I hadn’t really thought of until you were talking, but my assumption is this means there are a lot of brands out there that actually have a lot of stock basically held hostage in Amazon warehouses then.

Huh?

Elizabeth Marsten: It depends on how they’ve done it. So they can get it back in a sense. So one of the things that we have been advising our clients is if you have, let’s say you change branding or whatever, packaging in particular, some of the fees have been relaxed and some of the timelines have been relaxed. So you can get some of that stuff back and then you don’t, and then some of the storage fees have been.

Waived or pushed back. So they are reducing the cost to sellers that have been deemed those non essential categories so that they do get some relief. But you can, you can get it back. It’s a little bit harder, but yes, there could be yeah, pallets of inventory sitting out there and warehouses throughout the country.

And so if somebody buys it online, like somebody buys it through Amazon, they still do it. It’s just not, they’re not accepting new stuff or more stuff. And it may not be prime. It may not get there in two days.

Frederick Vallaeys: And so there’s the short term opportunity that you’re explaining here of like fulfill it out of your garage.

Kirk is talking about some of his clients seeing tremendous amount of profit compared to usual by doing something like that. Is that a short term opportunity or how do you transfer that into Like what happens when things are back to normal?

Elizabeth Marsten: So what’s interesting is we’re never going to have a normal, right?

We’re going to have a new normal. And it’s going to be interesting is we’re going to have a lot of, and this, I think affects more like these third, the smaller third party sellers. So a larger vendor brand is going to have that continued relationship and they’re going to be able to resume operations pretty much where they left off, but some of these smaller guys that.

Let’s say, you know, 80 to 90 percent of their business was done on Amazon. Well, they can’t afford to not. Do that. So they’ve gonna, they’re getting really creative in terms of, do they fill out of the garage? Do they expand to another like to expand to like Walmart or eBay? Do they get a, did they go find out finally what that Shopify thing is?

And now they have an e commerce site, you know, and they can transact online on their, on their own. com. But that is going to. Provide them with those capabilities. And the question will be when this is over or to the, to the new normal, how much more do they want to be dependent on Amazon or stay dependent there?

Or do they want to try and continue to make a. com or another marketplace work? Diversification is something I hear a lot about.

Frederick Vallaeys: And one question I had, so you said like some people might finally figure out what this e commerce thing is all about retailers, right? So. If you’ve had brick and mortar and you’re now thinking about making that transition because it’s the only way for you to still sell, like, what’s the recommendation there?

I mean, is it, are we actually benefiting from some of these lower CPCs as a, as a new entry point? Whereas in the past, I think a lot of these companies just didn’t go in because they thought they were too late to the game already. What’s the advice on all of that?

Elizabeth Marsten: Honestly. So I pull it back a few levels and I would say business model wise, what your new normal is, you’re Is to figure out what are the platforms you need to be on.

So right now I think the array is kind of dizzying. If you look at Amazon, Walmart, jet, eBay, you know, just the marketplaces and on Etsy, actually, I recommended Etsy for somebody recently Etsy and shopping actions on Google, because they were expressing difficulties with Amazon and with Walmart. And I just looked at what he was doing.

I go, shouldn’t be, I mean, shouldn’t make that your focus. Actually. Your, your profit margin is better. Your volume may not be. You know, the expectation that you would have, like, say, with an Amazon store, but how hard do you want to push that boulder up the hill? At what point do you just say, you know what?

It’s better to have medium effort in four places than lots of effort in one place and then be done. Be unhappy with it. So that was one thing was that figure out what platforms it is that needs to be on And then figure out what your assortment is there So if you’re going to be on two or three different platforms if you sell the same thing on all three platforms And also at the same price Okay, that’s you can do that.

That can be your strategy. But then I would also argue Well, is that is that what you want to do? Is that what your brand is for and then or or should you be having in a sense like exclusives? So you can only get this thing at target. You can only get this thing on eBay marketplace, whatever it is, especially cause price sensitivity, right?

Frederick Vallaeys: Kirk, any thoughts on that e commerce piece? And then we’ll shift to Julie and ask you a little bit about strategies for Google ads accounts

Kirk Williams: not. Yeah, I don’t think, I don’t think much to add to what Elizabeth said, you know, you alluded to it. So thinking specifically paid search stuff, Google ads and that yes, we’re definitely seeing a reduction in auction costs.

So, at least in our account, CBCs are, are still down quite a bit. I mean, we’re talking like overall, just like average, I think, I think about 40 percent we’re looking at in terms of our CBCs. So. There’s, there’s a definite, there’s a definite reduction in that. We’re, we’re still seeing conversion rates struggling.

We, we have definitely seen things go up in the last week as opposed to really kind of the bottom. For us, for us, March 12th was, was somewhat of a drop off and that’s somewhat of what I’ve heard from a lot of other people as well. March 11th, you had pretty President Trump give his speech, you had the NBA dropout.

I think there were a few things and all of a sudden a lot of stuff that day, there was a lot of stuff that’s around the time. I forget exactly the I’m not as up as much on stock stuff, but it was around that. It might have been that next Monday then. March 12th was a Thursday, so I have this, I’ll have this permanently ingrained in my brain, I think.

And so it was Latin next week for us that really were struggling. People were just kind of, you know just kind of hesitant. We, we didn’t really have any, like, we didn’t have anyone drop out at the time. We didn’t, we didn’t really even have anyone say, Hey, we need to kill budgets right now, but we also were somewhat pulling back as just buying behavior change, things like that.

We saw

Elizabeth Marsten: a huge spike in a CPG client on March 11th and 12th.

Kirk Williams: Okay. Okay. Yeah. So, and I mean, that’s, you know, so for us then, and then all of a sudden we look at the last week and we’re like, oh, hey, things are really starting to at least for at least in our clients, at least in our council, we’re looking at and so to roundabout way to go back to your question.

You know, I look at that. And if someone is literally just entering. e commerce right now. Like, we’re brick and mortar. Should we give this try? Like I, I am all for positivity and like, yeah, let’s do this. And I think you should try and get a good strategy, but honestly, this is going to be a rough time to just hop right in e commerce.

It is nice at least that CPCs are lower and there might be some benefit. You know, I’m assuming if you’re, if you’re a brick and mortar, you probably have some level of loyal base as it is. I would assume. And so my, my suggestion would be really kind of think through how to continue to leverage what you already have, which would be your loyal customer base at, at, at some level of that use that, you know, who those customers are, right?

Frederick Vallaeys: Hopefully you’ve got their email addresses and right. Right and and even if you don’t just have a specific direct contact, I mean, even leverage it in terms of you probably have some at least demographic idea geographical. There’s probably some way that you can figure it out. You know, with with some help to to really figure out, hey, this is our this is our this is our customer base.

Kirk Williams: And I would suggest, you know, starting from there. And. You know, and, and, and definitely there are, there are some good shots right now, just with things being lower priced auctions and that, but it’s, it’s, it’s a, it’s kind of a tough time for everyone, even as we’re seeing a little bit of a bounce back, so also have realistic expectations of that.

Elizabeth Marsten: And actually on that March 12th, we, we dug into it because we were like, what, what, what happened here? So if we, New York Times has a really great interactive map that they keep updating on a per state basis or per county basis that tells you when a governor or a state official puts a stay at home or shelter in place order in.

And so most of those hit the week after that, which people knew probably was coming. And so we think part of what drove the increase the week before was people knowing that was coming and then they started essentially prepping.

Kirk Williams: Hmm. Interesting.

Frederick Vallaeys: And so one thing that we’ve done at optimizer and it’s part of the tool, but it’s also going to be a script.

I’m going to put it on search engine land, hopefully later this week. But basically it pulls your Google ads data, right? So here you can see a day by day region by region. A couple of the core metrics. And so you can see here on March 12th, that’s when the state of California banned gatherings of more than 35 people, the 15th voluntary self isolation, on the 13th all schools were closed.

And so what we’re pulling from is a data set that’s updated globally, tells you when the government started doing certain things. And then it helps you correlate that to some of the metrics you’re seeing. Right. So to me, it hasn’t made a ton of sense. Like I’m seeing, you know, pretty spiky behavior throughout, which is actually a good indicator.

You have to be very careful with bid management, right? You have to keep. Automated bidding very much in check at this point. But in some cases, maybe if your data sets are bigger for your accounts or you, you work in specific regions might actually help you see what’s going on. And so to Kirk’s point too, like you were kind of alluding to the fact that you can’t remember exactly what day something happened.

Well, this is a nice thing, right? Because it just puts it right there on the chart. And something to take to your clients and Even if there’s no clear signal and or pattern within this, at least you can tell them you did the research and you know, try to make sense of it. We’ll be putting this out on search engine land later this week.

Elizabeth Marsten: Very cool. Thank you. That’s awesome.

Frederick Vallaeys: So Julie we had a question from the audience, I think might be a good one for you, but asking what are some of the measures or actions that you would take in a Google ads account right now to deal with what’s going on? I

Julie Friedman Bacchini: mean, it’s a little bit. Industry specific?

It depends, right? Let’s get the classic answer. I think it does a little bit depend on on what kind of industry you’re you’re talking about, but in in general I think that it’s interesting that you brought up the automated bidding because You know, the machines have zero context for this. Like this is, this is an unheard of, you know, event and everything is unfolding in real time.

So one thing I, I definitely, I’m certainly doing in my accounts and I’m recommending to other people is keep a close eye, whether you’re doing things manually or whether you’re doing some type of automated bidding or you’re using any of the automated features, you really want to keep a closer eye on them now than perhaps you have been in the past.

Even if you feel like something’s been rolling along pretty well. All of the underlying circumstances that allow that to happen may or may not still be in place depending on your industry. So checking in more frequently and, you know, just really, you know, micromanaging a little bit more now, just so that you don’t get caught having, you know, something really go a little bit haywire and, and your cadence previously was like, Oh, I only checked in on this like once or twice a week.

You might want to be checking in on it on a daily basis at this point, even if it’s just, you know, putting your eyeballs on it to make sure that nothing is really. You know, really out of whack. And I think, you know, some other more basic things. I tweeted this, I think it was time is passing really strangely now.

I think it was just yesterday, but I tweeted about checking your extensions and checking some of the other automated things that you have going on, you know, in, in your account. I know I’ve been going through all of that with, with all of my client accounts and there were some that I was just like, Oh God, are we still running that, you know, and, and turning those types of things off.

And then maybe. Shifting, you know, some, some messaging in, in your extensions and your ad copy, just, I think you want to just take a look at everything as, you know, as a whole and make sure that it is appropriate to, to where we are right now, and you don’t have anything that’s sort of accidentally toned up.

on your landing pages you know, in your products, in your ads, in your extensions. Because what might have worked and been fine a month ago, if you go and read it now, it might be fairly cringe worthy. So I think, you know, just taking a look at everything that’s going on and doesn’t hurt to double check everything.

So again, I’ve been doing that in my, in my accounts and I’ve been sort of passing that advice along to, you know, other people as well. I think that’s a really great place to start.

Elizabeth Marsten: Actually, that brings up a question for for me for for you and Kirk. Have you guys played with attribution windows at all in this this last month instead of, you know, by default, like, just looking at, like, one day or trying to work off a one day attributions to the three or 30 just because things are so nuts.

Frederick Vallaeys: Well, what about last click versus different model as well on that. Cause if you, I mean, so maybe I’ll answer that too. Right. But it feels like there’s deferred conversions certainly happening, right? So we might be more in a branding stage of marketing as opposed to like trying to get that immediate sales.

So if you have that last click attribution model or if you’ve been running that for a long time, then you’re not valuing those early stage interactions. And the problem is that the automated bid management systems then really don’t know what to do to get you more of these early stage upper funnel activity.

And that’s why that’s why we’ve been advising people don’t run last click attribution, because it’s really, unless it’s the only thing you care about your reseller or something, you care nothing about branding or building the funnel. Like, somebody else is doing that for you. It’s the only time you might want to be on last click.

And then I think with the longer. Attribution windows. That makes total sense.

Kirk Williams: We’ve not we’ve not done like a real deep dive into that. Elizabeth we’ve kept an eye on it in like a couple of accounts. And so far, at least in those that were running DDA data driven attribution with Google ads, we’ve not seen anything obviously remarkably different, so we usually see DDA reporting under reporting quite a bit and so, and, and we’ll even just for, and if, if, you know, if you’re bored, Hey, you got a lot to do right now, maybe one thing that can be kind of interesting actually is to take like the same seven day window and just keep an eye on it and just screenshot it and monitor a couple of accounts.

You can do it with Excel and stuff too, but I like the visual stuff. And and it’s interesting to see what a same day, give it three days and then give it three days, give it three days. It’s interesting to see if you like, like, do that with like, April 1st. As you start, we did that with the client.

We got an April 2nd, looked at it, then looked at it April 5th. I have a few tasks to keep looking at it. And it’s been increasing by like, I mean, like 13 percent or something. Every couple, you know, those couple of days. So definitely with DDA, there’s going to be a huge surge back. I don’t, Really know if there’s been a remarkable change from before this all happened or not.

One one thought based on what Julie was saying is Aaron Levy one of your coworkers, Elizabeth, if you’ll claim him he wrote a fantastic article on search engine land that I just read yesterday that, that goes along with exactly what Julie was saying, which is in some ways, a great audit checklist for automation stuff.

So he basically walked through like, Hey, what are different, what are Ways that automation could be messing up right now. You know, you alluded, you, you mentioned Julie, Hey, check extensions, things like that. He talks about DSA. Just, just, I thought it was a really helpful, you know, you can just pull that article in and create a little checklist and go through the accounts.

I thought that was, that was a really good. So it’s worth shouting that out. And then kind of noting some of the automated bidding stuff as we’re talking about that. So I went in just for fun and checked our accounts. And honestly, I was surprised but so far I just, I just looked at March, March 12th through, like, the beginning of April, give, give us a few days here, bumper and then compare that to the previous period, just to see what’s been happening with some, like, conversion rates, click through rates, you know, some of those, some of those percentage changes, and so far, on our accounts because we do run both a mix of manual and automated bidding.

So far automated bidding is through this rough terrible period has been honestly smoking our manual bidding. So I did not expect that. That is not coming from a hurrah automated bidding type of a guy. I was actually a little surprised and there’s going to be variables and stuff in there. But, but for the most part the one thing I did notice though was that was very interesting to me was how much worse conversion rates were with automated bidding, but ROAS was much better.

And so my theory on that is that because CPCs are down so much more, automated bidding might be just really gunning to work really hard and is just burning through real low, you know, low cost clicks right now to try to find those ones that are selling. And so in that regard, basically, we had quite a bit more traffic, much lower conversion rate, but actually, because most of our automated bidding is going to be ROAS centered.

But, but actually you know, in terms of at least for e comm accounts that we’re doing with ROAS, they actually are doing a pretty good job of keeping up with all the changes, which. There you go. I’ll give you props on that Google. So, yeah, that’s that’s something we noticed over this period that I was surprised by, to be honest.

Frederick Vallaeys: Interesting. And I’m putting up on the screen right now that article from Aaron Levy. I don’t know if we want to quickly. Look through that. But so he’s talking about bit modifiers must adjust along with behavior.

Kirk Williams: He threw in a really interesting thing that was good about day part in geography.

That stuff has changed a lot. So, so hit that again, day part in, you know, some ways we probably all know that, right. People’s habits are changing, but geography is one I had not thought of, but a lot of people are, Spending the majority of their day in a completely different place than they normally do office home.

That for a lot of people could be completely different cities. You know, that could be, that could be changing behavior and accounts. And that’s where I’m so worried about the whole Google system too, right? Because over the years, it’s just built this expectation that high spenders live in certain locations or work on their computers at the office.

Frederick Vallaeys: And now all of a sudden they’re in completely different places. And how quickly is it catching up to that new reality? And then what happens when people go back to work and maybe At home shopping behavior shifts back to the office. So, and I think that’s to Julie’s point that we have to monitor it.

We have to constantly make sure that whatever automations we have are catching on to how things are shifting.

Elizabeth Marsten: It’s like you need an inverse map when you’re in the shelter in places get lifted.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. So that’s one thing we’re actually putting on that script. So we have the announced start date, but also the announced end date.

We’ll be putting that in as well. Okay. And then hopefully, as we actually get out of the curve and the curve starts to lower, what we’re also trying to do is show you for 1 region that may have come out of the situation sooner than another and what is the time frame until normalcy returns or until the new normal stabilizes so that you can maybe make some predictions for other markets that are still in a different trajectory, but at least know budget wise How long it might be until you can start spending money in that market again.

And here’s a call to action actually for everyone. But talk to your Google rep. So, like, when it comes to geo segmented data, don’t actually give you a lot of impressions here data. So, it’s very difficult for us. Through automation to see what behavior is happening in different cities. Right? So we, we look at cost per acquisition row ass by by region, but we don’t actually know how many people are searching for each of these regions by backing it out of the impression shared with the current number of impressions.

So that was a shift where they got rid of those metrics. I think about a year ago. When average, and so we, we were able to. Guess that through average position average position disappeared. We could no longer make those estimates. So that makes it sort of hard to know how much of what’s happening to our businesses is due to consumers behaving differently.

And actually not searching for this anymore versus something that maybe our competitors are doing.

Kirk Williams: I should note an important caveat though that again supports what you and Julie are saying as well is, we, when I’m talking about this period of smart bidding actually doing better for us than our manual bidding, we were not just, Ignoring smart bidding and letting it run.

We were actually on it. I would say even more in making adjustments that we thought probably needed to be helped with the machine as we saw change data come in. So, again, to kind of the point of being on it and being willing to adjust things It’s not like we just let our smart bidding run and untouched for a month for sure.

Frederick Vallaeys: That’s sort of the misnomer, right? So people call it automated bidding, but it’s really just one aspect of the bid management that’s been automated. It’s converting your CPA or ROAS goal to a CPC bid. So, Kirk, like, what are some of the things you’re doing specifically to, to help the system hit its targets?

Kirk Williams: Yeah. So, I mean, we are like if we’re running TROAS, we are keeping, we’re keeping a close eye both on previous look backs, like a few days, seven days. Maybe it really depends on the client and how much data they have. Right. But then also kind of long term and then we’re definitely willing to make adjustments more quickly, probably than Google would suggest, and Whether that’s right or not, sometimes it’s hard to tell.

Again, I’m looking back at this last month where we had quite a bit of trauma in the ecosystem and looking back at, you know, manual bidding, our ROAS was up overall about 5%. Smart bidding for our accounts was up about 29%. So again, it really, it really destroyed manual. So I’m, I’m more confident in the changes we were making, looking back at stuff like that.

And so we’re just trying to see that we’re trying to read it. Maybe a certain campaign or certain account is struggling with hitting a certain ROAS target, or we’re looking at that. And maybe we know something is happening in the economy there. That’s not always directly translated into that. We need to pull back budget.

Yeah, we’ll be, we’ll be reducing that. T row as goal from 500 to 300 percent dramatically or something, something like that. Those are the type of changes where we’re doing as well. I’ve been experimenting with max click as well during this. I never used to be a fan and max clicks in the right with the right purpose tied to a campaign with the right strategy actually is doing really, really well for us.

So

Frederick Vallaeys: interesting. It’s good to have options. That one option. Nobody liked for the longest time.

Kirk Williams: I think it’s, you got to have it tied to. So like we’ll segment out our shopping campaigns into like the position in the funnel. And so the, the, you know, client will come to us, say, here’s your budget. You know, maybe in this instance, I really want to own brand.

In that case, that’s where we’re utilizing something like a max click with a controlled high CPC. So we, we, we do make sure that it can’t go over a certain CPC, but that’s where we’re telling Google, like, Hey, at this point, We’re, we’re aiming the machine in the right direction. Go after these brand terms, don’t overspend and like, get us all you can within there.

And we see sometimes remarkable success with ROAS with a max click strategy. If it’s, if it’s has those tight. Focused alignments like that,

Frederick Vallaeys: and I guess the broader strategy here is, again, people might not be buying today, but you want to be the top of mind brand when they start buying again. So,

Kirk Williams: yeah, that’s that’s part of it.

Yep. But we’ve, we’ve also seen it working with conversions this last few weeks. So, yeah, we’ll take it.

Frederick Vallaeys: So.

Julie Friedman Bacchini: I was gonna say, I think part of that also has to do with what I was talking about earlier with, with audiences. So the machine also when you’re, when you’re using these other you know, types of bidding, it’s trying to find you people that it thinks are most likely going to convert, you know, at the, at this particular cost level.

And I think that, you know, Who those people are has changed. And so, you know, it could be also that there’s a lag going on, you know, in, in the data, as far as, you know, who really does fit that profile as far as like, you know, Google using all of its, everything that it has access to, to try to kind of figure that out for you.

And some of these automated ways where if you are switching over to the maximize clicks you know, as that. All that information is, is kind of settling out. I could see how that would be that could gain you, you know, some. market share or, you know, because your messaging and everything else that you’re, you know, you’re already doing is perhaps reaching the people that, you know, maybe are more ready to, you know, to hear it at that particular time.

And Google hasn’t realized it yet.

Frederick Vallaeys: So there’s a question about B2B. I want to get to that and I want to wrap up with some thoughts on like how to keep, like, what’s the value of an agency in these weird times. So speaking of B2B first, right. So I think Ben no, Terry. Is saying that a customer type is sort of transitioning.

They’re an e comm usually selling to tradesmen, but now they can’t really go and do construction anymore. So it seems like there’s a shift of who’s buying. We’ve seen that too. Some like high end tea retailers, for example, where you’re like. Don’t I don’t understand why their business is dropping, but then it dawns on you that how actually they price out to a lot of corporate gift givers and that business may be down.

They may be preserving cash. So, yeah, I mean, have you seen any of that? And like, it has a transition of any sort worth, like, shifting from B2B to maybe B2C.

I think it’s a difficult transition to be honest, right? Like, because you’ve probably spent years crafting your message, crafting your audiences but then on the flip side, like, we’ve always heard on calls like this. It’s always like, hey, your advice is great for B2C, but what about B2B? Like, I need to find those customers that are not going to spend, like, 2, 000.

10 on a bag of tea, but 5, 000 for tea for all of their customers.

Elizabeth Marsten: So what I’m seeing from a marketplaces is we have some brands that will do what they call a hybrid approach. So they’ll have that first party vendor relationship where, you know, Walmart or Amazon will order 5, 000 bags of something. But then they realized that there’s this line of inventory or type of product that they didn’t necessarily order as much of.

Or that is a different type. And so they can list that as a third party seller. So that’s one way to make kind of that B to B or wholesale relationship to a D to C. But it does require a lot of, you know, grown up business decisions in terms of what are you going to offer and how’s it going to be different and how do you not piss off your those retailer relationships, if anything else.

But especially now, I’m seeing it more than ever before.

Frederick Vallaeys: And by the way, a comment here from Terry. So basically saying what Kirk was seeing confirming that. So they’ve added a shopping campaign based on the highest lifetime value customers. So a combination there of Julie’s audiences with Kirk’s strategies.

Maximize clicks is smashing, and he says that’s very interesting.

Kirk Williams: Interesting. On B2B, it might be worth, you know, Melissa Mackey is on Twitter all the time, super helpful. All of her company does is they are an agency for B2B. So it might, might even be worth she’s super smart, super great. It might be worth having her on some town hall in the future for, for, you know, if you focus on B2B, but one thing that I’ll, I’ll try my darndest not to get in trouble for here, but this is one of those hard things where Like, we always have to remember that.

You know, at some point you can’t make marketing do what marketing can’t do. And so like, yes, definitely. Let’s, let’s do our darndest to think through, Hey, can we change our position? Can we find a new audience? But in some ways this is a very, very difficult time for B2B. And, and that, I think that goes back to Elizabeth, what Elizabeth was saying in terms of, you know, having to make some real tough business decisions.

I think this goes back a little bit to why I was saying in the, in the beginning, which is in some ways, these are those interesting times that really. Segment out who has who has the cash to survive a lean time as well as who maybe has a loyal customer base or can as Elizabeth was saying can can pivot, not just in a marketing way but really in like a major business strategic way.

And so. You know, it seems to be that B2B is very, very industry centered right now. We have B2B accounts in the right industry that are that are doing well. And the flip side being there as well. And sorry, that’s not great news, but

Frederick Vallaeys: I think what you’re saying is that Levi Strauss the jeans company been around 167 years.

Their CEO yesterday said, This is the time when the e commerce winners will be separated from the losers. I mean, I think that’s a little bit what you’re saying, right? So have some crisis plan in place. And if you survive this one and you kind of winged it, right. We got to be ready for these types of eventualities. And I think like in these types of times, you always get people. Who become creative, like Elizabeth was saying, like, instead of doing fulfilled by Amazon, go ship out of your garage and maybe some efficiency comes out of that. Some new company comes out of that, some new system process. All right, so, and it’s always going to be interesting to see what the world looks like two years from now, based on how people have been forced to be innovative in a new way.

Kirk Williams: I mean, agencies are basically B2B, right? And so we’ve thought about that a lot. And, and I know Julie, you’ve had some good thoughts on this as well. Like that’s where probably you start to look at things like, Hey, do we need to change our offer? Do we need to think through a different offer? Do we need to think through an offer right now?

That’s a little bit different. Should we reconsider pricing? You know, probably some of those are those strategic decisions that that you start to kind of think through in terms of what are ways that you can still get get people to sign on to your, your plan or whatever it might be. So.

Julie Friedman Bacchini: Yeah. So I would say this applies to B2B, but this also applies to consultants and agencies and flexibility is the best skill that you can really cultivate.

If you don’t already have it right now, cause you can’t sell things to people who don’t want to buy it. And so one of the things as an agency or as a consultant that you really should be thinking about now and you really should be listening. I mean, really, really listening to your clients and trying to discern what is it that’s keeping them up at night.

What is it that they’re worried about? What is it that they feel like they’re not going to be able to do? And can you offer a solution in that area? And I think being able to be flexible enough to maybe be working in an area that wasn’t maybe your primary focus prior to this, it was something that was in the mix of the things that you did, but maybe it wasn’t, you know, at the forefront.

Being able to shift around how you’re doing things and how you’re offering things to be providing services that people are willing to pay for. It’s critical to longevity. I mean, like I said, I’ve been through a couple of periods of time where I had to do exactly that and I’m doing it right now. It’s it’s.

It’s the same thing. So it’s being able to be responsive. It’s being able to be flexible enough and not so rigid and married to, well, this is what I do. Well, if nobody wants to buy what you do, you’re going to have a problem. So are there ways that you can take what it is that you quote unquote do and use it in a different way, apply it to a different industry, expand on, you know, what you’ve been doing, put it together in a package.

These are all things that should be on the table. For all different types of businesses, because that’s what it takes to get through times like this. And the companies that are able to do, I mean, obviously if you’re sitting on mounds of cash, that makes it a lot easier, but even for those who aren’t, you can come up with some strategies in that, in that arena and, and change a little bit what you’re doing and how you’re doing it and, and whether it better than those who can or

Frederick Vallaeys: won’t.

Exactly. And don’t sit on your pile of cash, right? Because at the end of the day, I think what you’re saying makes a ton of sense. Like we’re deep experts on very specific things. Most of the time that’s PPC, right? But, and I have no interest in updating some of these Google my business hours, but if that’s what it takes right now to be helpful to a customer, then that’s what we should be doing.

And, and we probably know better than them, even like some of these things like CEO, Google, my business local, right? We’re, that’s not our deep expertise. We know something more than The average customer of ours, and that’s still a huge value. And I think what you’re saying is about being, you know, the book that I wrote is about being the PPC doctor, right?

To your client, talk to your patient, figure out what’s going on. And it’s, so you were saying like, you’ve got to monitor the hat systems very, very frequently, but just as important, check out, checking with your client four times as much as you maybe did in the past, right? Instead of monthly. Talk to them weekly, see how things are changing, what they’re able to do, how they’re able to shift, what challenges they’re facing because ultimately I think if you just get on your hordes of cash that you’ve built up being a successful agency, hopefully, right nimble competitors are going to come in and they’re going to prove value as like, you know, that is the partner we want to have in the really tough times.

It’s easy to have a great relationships when things are going well, but what what happens when things don’t go so well, and that’s where we can really prove ourselves, I think. Absolutely.

All right. So, on that note I think we’ve had a great discussion. Thank you. Elizabeth, Kirk, Julie for joining us. Thank you all the attendees for joining us as well. If there’s any additional questions, I’m going to quickly pop up the slide that has our Twitter handles. So you can reach out to us on Twitter.

On these places, or I look us up on LinkedIn or reach out to me and I can email addresses as a as necessary. But thanks everyone for being here today. You know, stay safe, stay sane and we’ll see you next week. Thank you. Thanks a lot.