PPC during the COVID crisis

Episode Description

Digital marketing experts discuss adapting strategies amid COVID-19, with insights on maintaining campaign momentum, leveraging remote work benefits, and integrating traditional with digital marketing. They also explore the importance of brand positioning during uncertain times, providing actionable advice for businesses looking to navigate the shifting landscape of online advertising.

• The panel discusses:
• Panelist Introductions and Expertise
• Adaptations to COVID-19 Impact
• Importance of Multi-Channel Marketing
• Future of Digital Marketing Agencies

Episode Takeaways

Panelist Introductions and Expertise:

• Brandon Jones from Uncommon Logic highlighted their focus on PPC, SEO, and conversion rate optimization for both large enterprises and SMBs. •
• David Szetela shared his involvement in the Paid Search Association and the upcoming virtual conference.
• Navah Hopkins discussed her transition to Hennessey Digital, focusing on paid media in legal and health sectors, and emphasized the importance of integrated marketing strategies.
• Adaptations to COVID-19 Impact:
• Panelists discussed the necessity of maintaining ad campaigns during the pandemic, citing that those who continued advertising are seeing smoother recoveries.
• Navah and others noted the shift in messaging from sales-driven to community support and empathy, which has helped maintain customer engagement.

Importance of Multi-Channel Marketing:

• The conversation highlighted the blending of traditional and digital marketing, stressing that marketers need to be versatile in both realms.
• Navah and David discussed the effectiveness of traditional media like newspapers and radio, which are integrating digital ads to maintain relevance.

Future of Digital Marketing Agencies:

• There was a focus on the evolving role of digital agencies in providing consultative, strategic insights beyond just managing ad campaigns.
• Emphasis was placed on understanding clients’ broader business challenges during the pandemic and adapting strategies to address these new realities.

Episode Transcript

Frederick Vallaeys: Hello. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us. Once again, this is PPC Town Hall number seven, and we’re joined today by another great set of panelists. So we’ve got two of them here. So far, we got Brandon Jones from uncommon logic and David Szetela who now heads up the paid search organization.

We’re still waiting for Nava. I was just apologizing to the other panelists that I’m the worst host in the world because I did a poor job of sending the correct joining link. So. We think Navah, we know she’s standing by. She’s just trying to find the right link. Oh,

David Szetela: she’s stuck in the audience. Hold on.

Frederick Vallaeys: She’s stuck in the audience. So she’ll be here in a minute which we’re very excited about. So anyway we’ve got a bunch of topics lined up, but before we do that, I thought we we welcome the the panelists and let them introduce themselves properly. So Brandon, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Brandon Jones: Yeah. Fred, thanks for having me. Brandon Jones, I’m the director of client operations. At an agency in Austin, Texas called Uncommon Logic. We’ve traditionally been enterprise companies specializing in PPC, SEO and conversion rate optimization. And we’ve recently, over the past year or so expanded to try and help more small and medium sized businesses grow.

And I’ve been here since Since february and and helping kick off that initiative

Frederick Vallaeys: awesome And so i’m really looking forward to the perspective that I think you’re going to bring on those small medium sized businesses you know, obviously some of those are the hardest hit that we see in the covid crisis So I can’t wait to hear what you guys are seeing over there at the agency All right, and david david’s kind of an old timer in the industry.

I wrote the foreword for his book way back when you know many of us know who he is, but for those of you who don’t David, tell us a little bit about yourself.

David Szetela: Well I do some PPC hands on. I’ve got a handful of clients. These days, a lot of my attention is being drawn to the Paid Search Association.

Which is a industry association just for people who practice PPC. And we have by some miracle put together a conference, which is starting next week, a virtual conference that will feature Navah right here, Fred over here, and several other industry people that you will know and love the registration page is, well, just go to paid search.

org. And you’ll see on the, on the homepage information about registering it’s free and it takes place next Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. So we hope you can join us.

Frederick Vallaeys: We’ll talk a little bit more about live events in just a second but now that’s here. So yeah, Navah was stuck in the audience. I just promoted her to panelist So apologies for that, but good to have you on.

Okay.

Navah Hopkins: Thank you for having me.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, so Navah also goes way back in the paid search industry. Many of you probably seen her speak at many panels. Switched jobs. So tell us a little bit about what you used to do your claim to fame and what you’re doing now

Navah Hopkins: Sure. So just like Brandon, SMBs are very near and dear to my heart with, with my background coming from WordStream.

Excuse me, I’m getting over a little bit of a cold. So there might be times where I mute myself just so you don’t hear me coughing at you all. But I, I started at the beginning of this year, I actually transitioned to Hennessey Digital standing up a paid media agency within the traditionally tech SEO agency of Hennessey Digital.

We predominantly help lawyers, but we actually also help doctors, we have Some clients in the finance industry. And what’s really interesting.

about this new role is that a lot of times we PPCs and to be fair, the SCS as well, kind of, we stay in, in our lane. There’s not a lot of cross communication. So one of the reasons why I actually took that, that role was there was a desire to kind of unpack those silos. So coming from thousands upon thousands of accounts at WordStream and now being far more focused on the, on the legal vertical.

But then also integrated campaigns as cross pollination campaigns. It’s all very exciting. And then

I have to give again another shout out to the Page Search Association but also one of the, the fun initiatives that, that’s been launching is there’s a lot of in traditionally SEO oriented publications more ask the PPCs. So I just, I want to say thank you again To Fred for having us so that we can make this knowledge and experience available to all of you.

We, we, we genuinely love to help people. We genuinely love to empower you all. And, and I’m very excited to, to answer any and all questions and contribute.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. Thanks for being here, Nova. And I don’t know if it’s on my end, but your audio, I think is cutting a little bit in and out, but thanks for being here.

And like you said, it’s, it’s just great to share information. And that’s really what these sessions have been about. Now, I think this being session number seven we actually have found solutions. We’re starting to see people kind of pushing through the COVID financial, economic and health crisis.

And so I want to shift that conversation a little bit more to what solutions we’re seeing that might be working for you. And kind of our take on how we might have done it slightly differently right, if it’s not a company that we work with directly, but but let’s, let’s make that the focus of the conversation today. And of course, we’re also putting this up as a podcast, so I’m going to be sharing some visuals and I’ll try to be as descriptive as possible about those but I’m going to share my screen. And I thought where we’d start today is with this post from search engine and our friend, Ginny Marvin about advertisers seeing.

Glimmers of hope, right? I’d love to hear from all the panelists what they think, but the sort of one of the key points is that recovery slow, but when it comes to advertising that seems to be kind of on the leading edge of the recovery which I sort of assume just means that when we’re ready to reopen business, the first step is to tell people about that.

And what better way to tell people we’re open again than to advertise. Yeah. What, what have you guys seen?

Brandon Jones: Yeah, I can start. I’ve definitely, you know, I think we went through a period there, especially in the SMB space initially where. Where there was a lot of reluctance and a lot of trying to figure out exactly what was going on and that lasted for a couple weeks, but I’ve been really impressed and surprised it and you know, the clients that we have and also some of the conversations I’ve had with other small and medium sized businesses and their Kind of attitude towards getting back out there and maintaining a presence on digital even through this crisis.

And even while a lot of things are still unclear, I think I’ve I’ve seen that more than I expected

Frederick Vallaeys: any particular verticals where you’re seeing. More of the recovery than others.

Brandon Jones: Yeah, I

David Szetela: think.

Brandon Jones: Oops,

David Szetela: sorry, go ahead.

Brandon Jones: That’s okay. Yeah, I think the, the verticals that, that are doing well in the overall economy, we’re seeing the same thing with tech and, and e commerce and things like that.

And that’s really where the majority of our. clients are at this point.

Navah Hopkins: One thing I’ll throw out there that’s really interesting is that the clients that

stayed the course throughout kind of the flux actually are in an amazing position right now. And the clients that pulled back their spend for a couple of weeks, are now having a far more intense recovery. One of the actually really fascinating Things I’ve actually seen in some of our accounts is that where accounts pre COVID pre kind of this flux in the market they were all on automated bidding, crushing Life was great.

Turn the campaigns off and now turn the campaigns back on. The machine learning for those is actually really bad. Like it’s just, it’s, it’s like, I, I haven’t used outright manual bidding in like two years because like, there’s just a lot more trust instead of some of those automated signals where clients that stayed the course, they actually were able to capitalize on those cheaper costs per clicks.

Yes. But they were also able to Really own

what’s it called? Own the compassion conversation. There’s a lot to be said for the marketing and like the folks that kind of stayed in top of mind with, we’re here with you, we’re here to offer support versus just sell, sell, sell all the time. And the brands that turn their budgets off, even those As they’ve been ramping up, like their first touch back into ad spend wasn’t come buy my stuff, come be a customer.

It was, we are with you. It was like a display campaign. YouTube campaign, driving that awareness, driving that support, highlighting like the good of the community and I think a lot of the spend that’s going to be coming back, not, not just like we can talk about like risk averse versus risk tolerant on ad spend, like how you can compare it to like Wall Street but I think the more interesting conversation and the one that impacts more than just, say, paid Is how folks have turned their messaging from sales to compassion and like that, that I think is that is the media spend that’s really coming back into the market.

It’s not just pure sales. It’s

we’re with you. It’s brand awareness and it’s a comfort for investing in brand.

Frederick Vallaeys: I said, I want to go deeper on that. And David, I also want to come to you in a second here. Navah you did this post on Search Engine Journal not too long ago, and I think it’s talking a bit about what you just bring to, so go to Search Engine Journal, look for Nava’s post.

It’s the last one she did, but you basically said, turning your campaign off is detrimental to small business. Oh my god, it’s the worst.

Navah Hopkins: It’s so bad. So, oh, there, and we can debate about this. Like we can have a nice civil debate about whether you should turn the campaign off and turn the campaign back on and turn the campaign back on turn the campaign off versus just keep it on but have it like a dollar or five dollar budget.

I firmly believe you will see better results and it just off of the accounts I’ve seen back of my experience at WordStream and just in general. Leaving the campaign on is apps. It’s worth the like 400, 500 you might spend in the month to make sure that you don’t have

thousands of dollars of wasted time when you want to ramp it back up.

Frederick Vallaeys: Interesting. I, I think we might have to fight a little bit about that one. I’d love to hear what David has to say.

David Szetela: Yeah, I actually pulled some data from one client that really helps to illustrate what has happened and what is happening now.

So if it’s okay with you, Frederic, I’ll share my screen and show a spreadsheet. Okay.

Okay. So this is, this is a really interesting client because They have both B2C E retail, and B2B E retail. Okay, so on the left here we have the B2B E retail. So this is companies that are buying stuff for their, I’m, I’m not gonna go into detail about the client because I don’t wanna reveal their name, but this is B B2B retail and this is B2C.

So you see that each one had these moments of total crises when sales just stopped. And we were all running around trying to figure out why in retrospect, the main reason was the consumer consumer kind of confidence vanished along with a lot of their money, but then you see that it started to pick up and this represents late March, early April.

In both cases. But the interesting thing is that the pickup for B2B has not yet brought them back to parity with what they were experiencing in January and February, whereas the increase for the B2C is way higher than they ever experienced. So I think that’s what I’m seeing in other clients and what I’ve read about in the, in the notes that you prepared, Frederick.

Now, another interesting thing is this kind of tail end. This is lately, this is like the past two weeks, and this is where we decided to pour on the advertising spend. And in, in the past, we had spent much more on advertising for the B2B side because they had a much higher average order of volume value than, than this side, but this side, the volume is going through the, through the roof.

So we decided to shift our ad investment more to the B2C side. And it’s really paying off. This, this side, it continues to grow. So that’s kind of a generalization. Go ahead.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. Remind us. Sorry. I’m like chatting with panelists or other folks here, but remind me what industry or what company this was for.

David Szetela: It’s furniture. Let’s call it furniture. Furniture. So furniture is one of those things that people actually do want to do, right? They were putting their houses now that they’re stuck there all the time. Of course.

So we’re

Frederick Vallaeys: getting Go ahead.

David Szetela: Well, I guess the point is that I’ve seen similar curves in other clients as well. And it’s not just, it’s not just e retail, it’s B2B as well. In other words, there was a point where I think a sinking tide sinks all ships kind of thing. In other words, there was a week or two when everybody ran home and tried to get their home office stuff set up.

They weren’t spending, they weren’t spending too much time Except dialing into their home office, and then it then it started to loosen up, and the stimulus checks came and people became begin being more comfortable in their home situation.

Frederick Vallaeys: So we have Pasha, who’s watching live. She’s saying that she’s seeing the same thing as Navah and David. And this is in higher education. So staying the course had a smoother recovery. The ones that pulled back, not seeing the same results. And I’m going to actually, so, I mean, from the machine learning perspective, right, the reason that I want to argue with the point that you should just keep things on all the time is that ultimately, like the machine doesn’t care that you turn stuff on and off, like the data that it’s analyzing.

Is it’s still going to be the same but I think what’s happening in this case is that you know You turn your campaign off one day And from one day to the next are such dramatic shifts in consumer behavior in local regulation that influence you know what you can do. We’re seeing your email, by the way, David, so you might want to turn that up.

David Szetela: Sorry.

Frederick Vallaeys: So, but there’s something about it. So I think that’s perhaps where we’re seeing that whole notion that it’s actually better to keep things on so that you at least get a little bit of data. That teaches the machine that, Hey, things are really wonky. And then when you turn it back up, you know, you don’t turn it on, but you turn it up by increasing the budget.

At least it has that new baseline of what is the expected conversion, right? So I think that that’s my. Theory on what’s happening.

David Szetela: Interesting.

Navah Hopkins: So one thing I’m curious what would all of you all think and anyone in the audience would love your, your thoughts as well as on the fluctuation of spend just across all the different verticals. Like that, that was my hypothesis on why machine learning was starting to struggle a little bit on the ramp up.

It wasn’t actually there’s that five day window where ad accounts learn. But I actually think the reason why it’s struggling so much, and this, this goes to your point, Fred that there’s so much fluctuation in the actual amount of spend that the data that the machine can have at its disposal is corrupted. So by, by staying on, you have some degree of normalcy versus You turn it off and then things are all are crazy.

And so it

Frederick Vallaeys: has no point of person,

Navah Hopkins: but I’m really, really curious.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. So, so let me give you an example of how this used to work at least when I was at Google, right? So the whole notion was, listen, if you sell Christmas trees, Then obviously that’s a very seasonal thing. You’re going to sell these things sometime between November and December.

If you turn your campaign off for Christmas trees, it doesn’t really necessarily matter because you’re going to turn it back on next November when presumably consumer demand to buy Christmas trees is relatively the same as it was then. The year before so it’s fine that you follow your campaign like nothing has really changed in between Now if you took that same campaign and you turn that christmas tree campaign back on in july And the system expects that you know, 50 percent of people looking for a christmas tree are going to buy one Well, that’s not going to be true.

Right and that’s where it kind of messes up because it comes in with an incorrect expectation. So I’m not fully agree with you on those seasonal ones. I’m thinking about, well, I’ll use Hennessy’s client based lawyers lawyers that, that we’re spending

Navah Hopkins: 30, 40, 000 a month on a conservative legal buy per month, then trying to turn that back on and we’re struggling to spend. I don’t want to bid a hundred dollars a click. I’ll bid five, but that would put them way below a first page bid. So, that need to go back to manual the course correct, that like, I was really surprised that I had to go to manual bidding on those accounts that turned, there’s the ones that were on throughout the course were fine to stay on automated bidding.

So that was just, it was just interesting to me. Like, I, I didn’t expect a non seasonal business would have that problem.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right, and then so I think my point is that something that has been non seasonal is essentially seasonal now because there’s so much flux that’s not based on just the fact that you’re in the legal industry, but it’s like.

You might not be able to meet person to person or your law firm might not be able to, right? They might not have a zoom meeting set up, but I actually want to go deeper on the one point that you made, right? So if people have actually turned stuff off over the past seven weeks and now they’re ready to come back So what you’re saying is go on to manual bidding to build it back up that volume And then you can transition.

But as like, have you seen how long that takes or any more guidance on that? I think that would be really helpful to people to know what you saw.

Navah Hopkins: For us, it’s about a two week period just to get

something. What’s also been useful Is target impression share with with a bid cap just to kind of protect the system? But yeah, for, for manual bidding I don’t go more than two weeks provided that we have good conversion data. Conversion data is obviously the standard to go back into automated bidding. But yeah, two, two weeks is usually my amount. I’m curious if anyone has a different number.

Frederick Vallaeys: No. I can’t tell

Navah Hopkins: if my Wi Fi died or if you all just

Frederick Vallaeys: agree with me. Yeah,

Brandon Jones: I don’t have a ton of insight on the details of the data. I know that what we’re, what we’re definitely doing more of is double checking and making sure. I think we’ve seen fairly consistent performance, but. I know we’re spending a lot more time in the accounts making changes where necessary.

And really kind of adding some oversight where needed.

Frederick Vallaeys: What about you, David? I’m kind of on the other side. I my practice. And I don’t, I don’t have set times or, or set dollar amounts. I mean, it varies so much from client to client. But when, when I sense that we’re going to have to adjust the, the budget severely or significantly I will often switch to manual bidding and just kind of, You know, take the controls and try to steer the airplane to the airport.

David Szetela: Bad, bad analogy. But anyway, I agree with Nava.

Frederick Vallaeys: So Navah, let’s come back to you. So the other thing you put in that post was to do with false positives, untrustworthy conversions. And so I think that’s the other thing that’s really in play right now, right? So I think even if you’ve been able to get away with last click attribution and kind of doing things the old ways has that shifted at all in these more volatile and dynamic environments?

David Szetela: Are you talking to Nava? I think we lost her.

Frederick Vallaeys: I just, I just got back on. Oh, she’s back, she’s back. All

David Szetela: right, great. Right.

Frederick Vallaeys: I don’t know if you heard. But but yeah, so I heard Last Click

Navah Hopkins: Attribution and is it still, like, what are we doing with Last Click Attribution?

Frederick Vallaeys: That’s what I heard. Yeah, pretty much. I mean, so in the post you said that if you have untrustworthy conversion data, then that’s not good.

I think that’s a broader point that applies every time, but now especially the times that we’re in. Is that even more so true or what do you think?

Navah Hopkins: Unequivocally so one of the other things that’s important to note is that for folks that have analytics conversion goals versus native conversion goals, whether it’s Google or Microsoft or Facebook or so on and so forth LinkedIn we want to make sure that we’re auditing, that the, A, we’re not repeating conversions but also Are you inheriting an account that you trust that conversion data?

So a really good example of this. I had a client come on where they did not believe their conversions at all. Amazing conversion data. on the surface. Like it looked like amazing cost requisition even just looking at the search query, but they just didn’t trust the conversions. What ended up happening was the conversion was only tracking button clicks.

It wasn’t actually tracking completion of a form and completion of an application. So the client, had a CRO problem, but they thought it was a lead problem. And so just really making sure that you’re checking conversion quality and having that integrated conversation that you’re not just looking at your ad account.

You’re not just looking at your analytics. You’re looking at the full picture to really understand where might you be losing really valuable people.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. And so that’s about having the right conversion attribution model, whatever you, what’s Hennessy mostly like?

Navah Hopkins: So I have most folks on position based time decay in some cases.

But I, I’m really partial to position based because we are an organic and paid group. Most of our folks don’t have the conversion data for database or the conversion volume for, for a database.

Frederick Vallaeys: So position based just for those folks that don’t know. So that’s basically saying split the weight between first and last.

There’s the last

Navah Hopkins: yeah, 20 amidst all the other touch points. The reason why I like that versus, say, linear is I do believe that there is something to be said for the first, and the first person that, that embraced the, the user into the funnel and the last thing that, that did complete the the valuable action But what’s also really helpful about position based is that for content that you maybe aren’t necessarily able to fully give attribution to otherwise like a really good infographic or a video that you saw when this video goes live and, and, and it gets, it’s put up on the Optmyzr YouTube channel that could lead to a sale, but it’s only going to get credit if we configure Google to think about it that way.

So it’s kind of like how you, you never want to set up your team to only give credit to the, the winner. It’s a team. All of your, your marketing is a team.

Frederick Vallaeys: What about David, as far as attribution, what are you guys doing?

David Szetela: You know, we got burned by the fact that, And I may not express this entirely correctly, but it’s my understanding that e commerce Google Analytics requires that the same attribution model be used by both Google Analytics and Google Ads.

Does that ring a bell? Does that sound true to you, Frederic?

Frederick Vallaeys: I’d have to check the documentation on that one.

David Szetela: All I know is that for that reason, for, for e commerce, we’re using, we’re still using last touch. And

Frederick Vallaeys: I think in e commerce, if if you’re a reseller of something, that probably makes sense.

Let the big brands do the branding, which is kind of that first interaction. We capture that sale when the consumer is ready to put down their money. But, but, but it is certainly. Potentially worrisome in this climate when what we’re hearing is a lot of consumers are deferring spending at least for more expensive things right So we want to make sure that we don’t lose that upper funnel that we kind of prime the pump if you will for when the consumer is ready to Feel comfortable Economically and then there was good data by the way in that post from jenny marvin consumer confidence actually still being quite low despite Advertisers already kind of like spending again and I guess that is making the point that advertisers know that that consumer Confidence will go up and they just need to be first On top of mind when the consumer’s ready to plan.

David Szetela: Can, can I, can I add something to underscore that, that, that real world story? So we have a, a client that is about the middle of, in terms of market share among their competitors, and they noticed that their competitors were drawing back in advertis. So we did a branding campaign for them that was all display ads using a a sneaky little tactic that I call no call to action advertising.

In other words, we would feature their name and their logo and. Something about the position they wanted to occupy in the minds of their customers, and just plastered the web with those ads put them on the websites of every major city’s TV, radio, and newspaper, and magazines, and got many, many, many millions of impressions at almost nothing for impression because Nobody was clicking on the ad.

Well, I’m exaggerating too many people clicking the ad, unfortunately, but it still was dirt cheap and there it was surprising how much it affected their sales. In other words, their sales I can use the phrase shot up. They really did increase. And It’ll be a later conversation or exercise to figure out whether that altered their position in the market or in the minds of their potential customers.

But a lot of those purchases were new.

Frederick Vallaeys: Interesting tactic. So really cheap brand building, basically.

David Szetela: Exactly. Yeah. And in a time of uncertainty like this is a perfect time to do it because You know, markets in disarray, right?

Frederick Vallaeys: And you said even a newspaper, radio, TV, so offline media.

David Szetela: Yes. Was

Frederick Vallaeys: that relatively cheap right now?

David Szetela: Yeah, it was peanuts. Remember, we’re buying remainder space, you know, what the big, what the big agencies call remainder space. You know, they think it’s junk. And you know, I’ll, I’ll take a junkie space on the wall street journal anytime.

Frederick Vallaeys: And let me go on a side rant here, but what’s really concerning is the fact that, you know, for once newspapers and TV and the news basically has a lot of interesting stuff to talk about, but advertisers don’t want to advertise against that content because it’s too negative.

It’s a negative brand association. And so really the only place where you can advertise on display and as a publisher make money for it is the clickbaity community. Junkie fake news type stuff. And then at the same time you’re reading that newspapers were already kind of in a really bad position with advertising now That’s not even you know, it’s actually getting worse now in covid.

So it doesn’t bode well for the future of news. So Personally, you know if you can subscribe and actually donate to a newspaper like we need we need proper news So

Navah Hopkins: what’s, what’s kind of interesting for me a lot of newspapers radio stations, TV stations will offer a paid media by like a straight up, just Google ads by as part of their offering.

And it just, it’s, it’s surreal for me hearing us talking about, yeah, let’s, let’s, let’s go back into traditional media when the traditional medias are. Desperately trying to add back on that digital component. It’ll be interesting to see if we as marketers now need to embrace not as perfect attribution for the sake of this is where our people are.

I will say I’ve been making a bigger push for streaming services. Far more streaming over say a TV spot or, or, or print. And the reason for that is that you’re able to communicate far more effectively and cheaply on a, on streaming. And you, but you can still track it. Like there’s, there’s far more data at our disposal, whereas.

When we look at more traditional media, it’s, it’s, there’s still a little bit of a black box. Now, granted, there are some clients that are going to just, they don’t care. They just, they, they want to have their billboard up there. They want to have that TV spot. Like they, they want those and they, to them that like they’ll hear their customers say, Hey, I, I saw your TV ad, but really what led them there was the digital piece.

So it’ll just be interesting to see kind of how. We become hybrids. Like we, we actually have to embrace more traditional and intraditional is just tacking on digital as an offering. Right. And I totally agree that we’ve become kind of addicted to the perfect measurement and yeah, CPA just by taking credit for every single thing that’s out there, but now that we’re actually forced to maybe expand it a little bit beyond just search ads.

Frederick Vallaeys: And we have to Go on YouTube, go on streaming, maybe put some stuff in newspapers, right? Like I think that’s what you were also talking about is de duping the conversions so that you don’t get credit to Facebook and Twitter and Google for the same thing and basically bidding three times now. Right.

But, but you don’t want to do that because there’s a different team that runs social. There’s a different team that runs this and that, and you want to get as much credit as possible. And even Google was guilty of that when I worked there. I mean, the, the AdSense team and the AdWords team were basically each taking that same revenue.

So by that measure, Google was twice as big a company as we actually were. David or Brennan, I, you wanted to say something.

Brandon Jones: Well, I was gonna, I was just going to ask, I think it’s interesting. One of the. One of the, I guess, learnings or thoughts that has come out of this last few months for me is kind of the diversification and having, having a few more channels at our disposal.

We’re, we’re typically a direct response you know, PPC heavy agency and, you know, connected TV was one of the things that I was interested in and kind of looking at. And I was wondering what, what your. I guess experience has been another and being able to tell that story with the data you’re getting back and being able to, to kind of connect that to the digital marketing side.

Navah Hopkins: So a big part of connecting non digital to digital success and digital reporting comes down to call tracking promotional offers that can be queued in but also Really tracking our users. And being very mindful of what is the story that our people are telling us in terms of how they came to us versus how did they actually arrive.

I need to give a shout out though. I mean, call tracking metrics, call rail, the whole call tracking universe. We, we, our path forward to bridging traditional and digital. Is really at least in the lead gen space because I’m I’m now almost exclusively lead gen There’s a degree of e commerce, and e commerce can have a call tracking component but for lead gen if you are not running some degree of call tracking you you are setting yourself up to fail and it’s really really really important to have those offline conversion numbers that that can speak to your analytics that can speak to That intelligence because otherwise you’re You’re just throwing money down the drain.

Frederick Vallaeys: And that’s step number one, right, is knowing who called and that’s your, I don’t even know if that’s an MQL or marketing qualified lead but right, like there’s nine stages after that and that goes through the CRM. So how much are you doing that? And for me, that’s really fascinating because It goes back to the whole AI and machine learning and smart bidding, right?

We’re kind of telling the machines, give us lots of leads, but we’re not necessarily telling it, what are the leads that eventually end up becoming customers, because that might be six weeks down the road, right? And so how do we help the machine be better?

Navah Hopkins: Are you asking us? I mean, I mean, like my, my preferred method is just uploading conversions. Just like upload who became a customer and tracking that as a higher value. And then you can, we actually can say, Hey, this campaign drove XYZ ROAS. Amazing. Or this campaign did not do better.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. I mean, it’s, it’s not rocket science, right?

But it’s good to hear that that’s actually what’s working. But, but I also, I want to like understand when you have the call tracking system, do you feed it into a CRM down the line or, or do you just. So

Navah Hopkins: in, in the legal space there are legal specific CRMs like litify and lead docket. Those have some degree of exportability.

But I’m, I’m giving contract. I am not paid by call tracking metrics. I swear. But one of the things that’s actually really nice about call tracking metrics and this is actually a functionality we, we recently discovered it was super useful for clients that whether they weren’t big enough or whether they just didn’t have the, the person on staff who could manage a CRM call tracking metrics actually has CRM functionality that you can track that lead and, and, and really start to log Did it become a sale, scoring, so on and so forth.

And so being able to just export that and re upload it in, into the Google ad account or into any ad account to just say, hey, this, this became a customer, value it higher is, is incredibly valuable. For those that don’t know you can upload, offline conversions as business data within the Google Ads platform and, and actually have that attributable bit of data.

You are going to want to make sure that you set, if you do do that, you set it as a higher conversion value than say just someone filled out a form because obviously, like, you care more about someone who became an actual customer. But in terms of CRM tracking, I don’t think, like, it’s only useful if you’re going to make changes off of that.

That data going into the system. Like I think the AI. If you’re going to let the AI do its thing, then yes, it’s a good thing to do but I forget whether it was Aaron Levy or Amy Bishop who said this, but you should only make changes to attribution or make changes to your, your, like, how you track. If you’re actually going to make that speak to action, you will take in the account.

And so, like, we can sit and talk about how to help the AI. We can sit and talk about how to, you know, Manage accounts, but it’s only going to help if you’re going to take action. Like, I think a lot of people get stuck in the, I need to do all of the things mode, and then they don’t actually focus on driving qualified leads and customers.

Sorry, if that was like a bit of a tangent rant,

Frederick Vallaeys: We’re all busy enough. So let’s not do work that ends up not getting used. I do think there’s an element to where you have to kind of set up the measurement to understand. What is meaningful enough that you might want to figure out how to bring it back into the system and start acting on it and i’ve given this example a million times so people probably heard it, but it was like a google for quality score We wanted to know if the lunar cycle had an impact on people’s click through behavior Right.

I feel like you read my, my April Fool’s article. We get the job quality score in in conversation. And so Google and Bing will like you better. I

mean, I did look at your reason blog post there on that quality score exactly. But yeah, so it’s, it’s like, you have to measure it to see if it impacts it.

And then we’re like, actually it doesn’t. So we’re not gonna. Keep tracking it because it doesn’t really matter for quality score. Now, the one side note on that is when Google does these analyses, it does it in aggregate, right? So it says for broadly speaking, most advertisers, this is not an impactful signal to look at.

But what if you were a maternity ward or a psychic tarot card reader, right? Maybe the lunar cycle actually does impact it. So, and that’s where we, as agencies have the power, we can say, listen, we got to bring this data back in. And that’s what you’re speaking to is find something that’s meaningful to your business and then make it actionable in terms of how you make a Google ads and Bing ads work on that. Brandon, what about you guys? What are you doing there?

Brandon Jones: Well, I think as I was said especially in the SMB space, call tracking is, is key. I think it depends. You know, we, we We work with our clients to really figure out what metrics are are going to be important and feed those back in manually like you were saying.

I think maybe even so more now just continuing to, to push. We’ve been traditionally at Uncommon Logic, traditionally lead gen almost in e commerce, but very little call tracking. So that’s something we’re doing new that I kind of, I, I got acquainted with back at at my last job. Where we were dealing with a lot of local businesses, obviously local it’s it’s a hundred percent phone calls very few Lead tracking forms for relevant in that space.

So yeah, we’re definitely doing that as well And I am a huge fan of call realm also

Frederick Vallaeys: And good do blog posting at your affiliate links in there, I guess So but I I want to do two more things here. So You there was a blog post on search engine land three ways digital marketing agencies will change due to the coronavirus So this is a question i’m going to pose to each panelist But the question is what are the new pain points that your clients are facing where you see an opportunity to help them now That might not have been commonly the case We’ll start with that and then i’ll give each of you a chance to See up any topic that you wanted to talk about that we haven’t talked about and then that will wrap it up But david, why don’t we start with you as far as What are the new pain points where you’re able to make an impact for your clients?

David Szetela: Well I won’t bring up the graphs that I showed before, but that was an attempt to help our clients stop freaking out as much about the fact that their sales have plunged and show them that the, there was a light at the end of the tunnel. And that, that really helped them because they, they were at the point where they were thinking, should we stop advertising completely?

Or should we push the gas pedal even harder? So we helped them rationalize spending more money on, on advertising. And by the way, they were also the client that we did the branding exercise for. So a little bit of the upward tail at the end there was due to the branding having pushed more direct to consumer sales than we thought it was going to.

So, in a nutshell we’ve been able to help every client figure out exactly how they were going to be affected, you know, chart for them how they had been affected, and help them understand that maybe not maintaining the status quo exactly was the right strategy for them, but certainly not pulling back completely and folding up shop.

Frederick Vallaeys: Nice. Brandon, what about you? New pain points?

Brandon Jones: Yeah, I think that, you know, to kind of piggyback on that, I think our approach has been really consultative with our clients. And the first thing that we did was make sure that we were having the conversations of, you know, not just what, what are your marketing needs, but what, you know, what’s your business going through right now and trying to adapt our strategy to that.

And, You know, like I said before, we’re, we’re primarily a PPC shop, but we do have expertise in other areas. And when it made sense to shift spend, when it made sense to, to focus more on the longer term stuff, like You know, conversion rate optimization when ad spend goes down and, and really like look at all the levers that we could pull and tailor that to each client.

I think that was our approach and we’ve seen a lot of success with that. I think you know, being able to, to pivot and be flexible. Has been really key for us and I think it’s kind of the the approach we’ve taken And

Frederick Vallaeys: I think we’re in a great position to being digital marketing experts where things literally change month over month Like we’re so used to having to pivot that most of us can do that pretty well now, but what about you new pain points that you’ve been seeing?

Navah Hopkins: so I’m not going to say the same consultative thing because it’s, I will just echo Brandon and David, like that’s, that’s definitely something that, that we have had far more say business conversations than say just digital marketing conversations but in terms of,

I think, I think bridging the gap between traditional marketing people. So, I think media and digital media has, has become, I think, a far more important conversation and digital marketers need to be comfortable interfacing with their traditional media brethren, partners, colleagues with I think pre COVID, we were very comfortable in our tower of data.

We were just happy to live in data and, and have perfect attribution. And COVID, I think has shaken the foundations of just a pure data approach. That like we now need to have things that feel like they are helping, not just things that truly are helping. And so the, the, Clients that we’re seeing in the ways that we’re helping, it’s helping them navigate what media buys make sense, but then also how to translate those messages across the different media buys, and how to position their brand In a way that’s useful helpful, compassionate, not just, I want your money, give me your money, look at me and give me your money.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. And I think what COVID personally has taught me as well is that as a consumer, I build expectations in my head around what I can and cannot do based on sort of what I’m hearing from friends and colleagues. And then that. Makes me not do certain searches because I assume these things are not available or might not be shipping on time but then I read something in the newspaper in traditional media and it’s like oh wait, this is actually operational This is something I can actually do so that kind of spurs me to go and do that digital activity Now that’s just sample size of one.

I still do read a traditional newspaper. I may be a bit old school but I do like that whole point of connecting digital and traditional i’ll actually Share one as well. So a little bit of self promotion here for one of the scripts that I just put out yesterday on search engine land. So this is a geo anomaly detector.

And so I think the pain point that this is addressing is the fact that I’m in Los Altos, California. I’m in Santa Clara County. We have different restrictions in place then statewide in California. Those are different from every other state in the country. There certainly I have no clue what’s happening in Europe.

Yep. Or on a regional level. So as a, as an advertiser who actually markets to the whole world, it’s, it’s very difficult for me to stay on top of how these regional differences are impacting my campaign, right? So what we’ve built is a script that takes the geographic city level, the DMA level data for the day of the week and compares it to typical.

And it will send me a warning that says, Hey, did you know that yesterday In the city of New York, you had far more than usual impressions or costs or clicks, and it doesn’t tell me what to do, but at least it keeps me on top of the fact that something may have just changed in New York and that it may be time to reevaluate my bid adjustments, my messaging to that region.

And so that’s a free script. You can pick it up on search engine land and try it for your own accounts. And I guess that’s also the thing that I wanted to mention that we hadn’t talked about. So I’ll give each of you now a chance to. Maybe wrap it up and anything that we haven’t covered and Brandon will start with you.

Of course.

Brandon Jones: I’m trying to think about the things that That we were going to talk about. As far as like and and this is maybe more of a a question to to the rest of the of the panelists is is how has This affected your company. I mean we talk a lot about our clients and And how it’s affected their business i’m just interested to hear from your perspective, how it’s affected your company.

I think for me, and I’m, I’m barely new on the job. I’ve only been and I’m coming back to, to Uncommon Logic but I’ve just been really excited about kind of our response and, and how everybody’s handled the working from home and, and and working remotely and things like that. And just wanted to kind of hear from you guys, what you guys are experiencing as, as agencies.

Navah Hopkins: So I’m, I’m gonna chime in. Hennessy Digital actually was remote first. We were remote before it was cool to be a remote. And what I’m very excited about with, with this, I think one of the silver linings is kind of unshackling us from the notion that you have to be in an office to be productive. I know I have always gotten more done by being in an office.

In a remote setting than say, stuck in an office. And I think one of the really good things that will come out of this is that the pool of talent that we will be able to, as agencies bring in, bring into our general sphere will grow astronomically because we’re no longer focused on just who, who can come into the office.

In terms of mechanics, our day to day didn’t change very much. What did change, I think, is we. Like, I think we were, we were a lot actually busier than we were expecting. We would be like, we were expecting this would be kind of a slowdown, but we actually ended up with a lot more substantive work because clients were looking to us as partners.

Which I thought was really rewarding. But yeah, like I’m, I’m very excited about the remote revolution and shout out to Alita Solis. Remoters. net. If you need help with re remoting techniques, I cannot recommend her and her amazing force for good enough. What is it? Remoters. net.

David Szetela: Remoters. net.

Okay.

Navah Hopkins: Yeah. Like she, she’s been empowering people to, to live the remote life for years. And it’s, she, she was a very big inspiration for me to chase her a remote kind of lifestyle.

Frederick Vallaeys: And it does a great segue. So let’s. Turn it over to David remote or is like, are you actually on the beach right now?

Or how did you think background?

David Szetela: If you go, if you’re using zoom and you go down to that little camera down on the bottom left corner of your screen, you can choose a virtual background.

Frederick Vallaeys: I knew you could do a photo, but I never knew you could actually put in a video. Is moving.

David Szetela: Yes. Can I do my wrap up.

Yeah, because I prepared some advice.

Frederick Vallaeys: Oh, good.

David Szetela: Okay. First of all, great time for branding. I already talked about that, but a great time to leapfrog your competition, do some competitor research and figure out how to gain a position or two. We didn’t talk much about B2C or e retail. I think it’s a great time to get aggressive there. I think make sure you’re using promo extensions, shopping extensions, but one, one interesting. Fact is that the primary ranking factor for shopping ads is competitive price. So if you can afford to, again, to gain position, gain market share, drop your prices temporarily and know, make it part of a strategy where you’re going to rebuild your margins eventually, but you may be surprised to find that your volume is, is nicely affected.

And then the last thing is, and I actually heard this from another panelist somewhere that I can’t remember a lot of the people that are buying today are doing it for the first time, or they’re relatively new to the process, because they’re stuck at home, they’re using the computer a lot more, they’re using the internet a lot more.

And they’re in a buying mood. And this is a great time to tune up user interfaces user interfaces of sites and especially shopping and checkout processes because well, I don’t even have to say because, because sensible. And last thing is, don’t forget Microsoft ads. Microsoft ads are, are roaring as usual.

And especially if you’re, if you’re a retailer there’s no reason not to use Microsoft ads because you can not only import your whole campaign, you can import your feed automatically from Google with as much regularity as you want.

Navah Hopkins: Google, so it was announced today, Google pulled LinkedIn LinkedIn.

From the SERP like you’re at the LinkedIn. Really? Yeah, so Microsoft And that Microsoft LinkedIn partnership ownership Another reason you got to give Bing a chance. I know that the market share is not as high but man those people they convert They’ll make you money. It’s it’s Bing ads is great.

Frederick Vallaeys: Sorry.

Sorry,

Navah Hopkins: Fred.

Frederick Vallaeys: If you need a tool to help with that, hey, Optmyzr does Bing too, right?

David Szetela: That’s right. That’s right.

Frederick Vallaeys: Very well. No, and so, David, great advice there, like do all the things you should have been doing. Anyway, but doing better keep an eye on it. And really you see this opportunity of declining cpcs as a chance for you to Maneuver your competitors and maybe even like I said gain some new consumers who were not doing any of this before and it also kind of speaks to a broader point, right?

I mean, I think to brendan’s question like what are we seeing? So obviously like everybody’s seeing a little bit of pain. Some customers are not able to pay on time. Some customers have to cancel but broadly speaking I think digital marketing and online is only going to grow because of this. It’s only being pushed faster now.

People are forced to consider this when they maybe have been hesitant for whatever reason in the past. Sadly, I think some of our customers will fall by the wayside. That’s inevitable at some level. I mean, if you look at airlines I mean, I’m sure some of them will make it through, but others simply, you cannot sit idle for six months, 12 months and come out of this.

But it’s kind of like the gold rush, right? Like we are the people selling the pickaxes where the Levi’s selling the jeans. There are going to be people looking for that gold and we will supply them. But I, I also think like. Obviously the more that we can help every customer that we have today, and even someone who’s not a customer, if we can help them make their business successful.

That’s basically the branding that we do and we are all good people, right? We’re here sharing advice. And part of the point of that is like, listen, we, we want to help you. We want to be partners. And, but, but it’s not going to work in all cases. Now I’ll turn it over to you for a wrap up.

Navah Hopkins: And so.

I want to echo everyone’s sentiments. We’re all, we’re all here to do well by doing good. One thing I think that that’s useful to think about is That we haven’t really talked about very much is how we Really troubleshoot all parts of the buying funnel not just the lead acquisition, but like even that pre qualifying piece so in in today’s world where Every dollar every hour that you’re going to invest in in generating sales is precious.

I’m really looking at landing pages really looking at audiences that you’re using to pre qualify that traffic, looking at your ad copy, not just your keywords. And I think there now is more, more than ever a time for the creative analytics, not just the crazy brand creative folks, not that they aren’t wonderful and lovely.

And it’s not just pure sit there Excel spreadsheet, data folks. So we really need those hybrids. And so where I think it used to be really useful to have a single thing you did very, very well. Those, those that differentiated or like are cutting their teeth on something that they maybe don’t feel like as confident in at the moment are actually more valuable now than someone who just was, was really, really good at one thing and just stay with that really, that one thing brands appreciate.

That you are fighting not just for them, but like for their growth and so long as you treat every conversation, whether it’s for a client or the brand that you’re serving as a true partner I think that there’s a lot of success to be had. And I also, I, I really agree with your, your gold mining analogy.

I don’t know that I necessarily love the fact that we’re positioned as the people selling the pickaxes. So like, regardless of whether they make money, we make money. But it’s accurate. We just gotta be, we gotta be good people and only sell when we, we believe that there, there’s value. So just be transparent with your clients.

If someone, if it doesn’t make sense for them to do what you do really well there’s an, An entire Rolodex of folks who are excited to help them and you recommending a friend or recommending a client to a friend who can serve them better, they’ll then send leads back to you. So this, this is really a time for human connection, human partnership.

Frederick Vallaeys: Absolutely. And it’s crazy how we’re getting some more of that connection virtually now through zoom than if we actually had in person. So awesome. It sounds like a lot of content for future sessions So, all of the attendees and people listening on the podcast and watching us after the fact we’d love to have you back.

We’ll have these panelists invited again if they want to be back. We’d love to have you next week is the paid search organization’s virtual conference So we’re not going to be back at our usual time. We didn’t want to compete with that event but what we’re doing instead is PPC town hall down under so it’s going to be the australia edition with three australian speakers Nice we’re going to have mike roads monty hoops and confirming the third speaker now, but it is going to be tuesday next tuesday at four o’clock p.

m. Pacific time which is morning in sydney So thank you all for joining subscribe if you like this and thanks again to all the panelists

Navah Hopkins: Thank you for having us. Bye everybody. See you all soon.