PPC during the COVID pandemic

Episode Description

Join us for the inaugural episode of our PPC Town Hall series, where industry leaders delve into the challenges and adaptations in digital marketing amid the COVID-19 pandemic. This episode features insights from seasoned professionals on shifting consumer behaviors, the impact of remote work on digital strategies, and the effective use of automation during unprecedented times.

Tune in to discover how businesses are navigating these changes and preparing for the future in this dynamic webinar.

The panel discusses:

• Adaptation and Flexibility in PPC Management
• Strategic Business Responses to COVID-19
• Impact on Consumer Behavior and Digital Marketing Trends

Episode Takeaways

Adaptation and Flexibility in PPC Management

• Automation in PPC needs close monitoring especially during unpredictable market changes like those caused by COVID-19.
• Manual interventions in bidding might be necessary to adjust to rapid changes in consumer behavior and market conditions.
• Businesses are seeing varied effects on their PPC performance, depending on their industry and consumer needs during the lockdown.

Strategic Business Responses to COVID-19 •

• Companies are adjusting their offerings and marketing strategies to better serve and engage with consumers who are spending more time at home.
• Businesses that can pivot to offer relevant products or services that meet current consumer needs are more likely to maintain or even increase their performance.
• There is an increased focus on community, helpfulness, and building relationships over transactions during the crisis.

Impact on Consumer Behavior and Digital Marketing Trends

• There’s a significant shift towards online services, home improvement products, and educational tools as people adapt to staying at home.
• Companies need to rethink their messaging and advertising strategies to ensure they are sensitive to the current crisis and not perceived as opportunistic.
• Digital marketing channels like YouTube are seeing increased engagement, offering opportunities for brands to maintain visibility with relevant and supportive messaging.

Episode Transcript

Frederick Vallaeys: Hello and welcome everyone to a very unusual webinar. So my name is Fred Vallaeys. I’m co founder here at Optmyzr. And this time we’re going to do a PPC town hall. So I’m sharing my screen. We’ve got a couple of panelists on the line as well. So all of this together kind of last minute. So it’s been great to see the response from everyone attending today.

Lots of people on the call from all over the world. As well as lots of panelists who did make time available kind of at the last minute, really appreciative, appreciative of them. You know, I’m going to do my best here to kind of be the moderator, presenter, organizer, everything at once. So we’ll go through a few slides first and then we’ll let the co panelists introduce themselves.

So there we go. So hopefully you can all see my screen. If not, just go ahead and use that chat box and we’ll do our best to help you out. But but, yeah, so it’s not really a webinar today is a town hall. And what that means is that it’s not just going to be the presenter talking, but we really wanted to open up this forum to anyone to share what they’re seeing.

And in some way, this is a bit of a therapy session. I think we’re all kind of stressed sitting at home, not having the same connections that we usually do, kind of having a lot of things in flux. And so this is going to be a forum for us to talk. Now, when I was at Google, they had them. Core tenets of being an innovative company.

And one of these actually struck me as really relevant to what we’re in today. So they said that by sharing all the information with everyone, smart people would be able to come up with the right decisions, would make the right decisions. And I think that’s what kind of the situation we’re in today.

Like we’ve all been doing PPC for a long time. And we all know best practices. Ultimately, now we’re in a situation where there is no precedent in the modern Internet age for what we’re seeing. So most of us are flying blind and we’re just trying to get as much information as possible about what others are seeing, what others are doing.

And so the point here today is to share that information. So that as smart people on this call, we can make a better informed decision. And, you know, make the most of not so great situation. So to help me with that I’ll let the other presenters introduce themselves. And I believe Kirk is not quite yet on the line, but Mike, why don’t you go ahead and say a word about yourself?

Mike Rhodes: Hey Mike Rhodes CEO and founder at Web Savvy. So we’re a. Done for you digital agency, but I also teach a few hundred agencies as well on the agency savvy side. So, yeah, how to run an agency and then how to do the technical side of

Frederick Vallaeys: cool. And Mike is down under, so you’re going to give us the Australian perspective on that, right?

Mike Rhodes: Yeah, that’s right. Calling from the future.

Frederick Vallaeys: That’s right. Tell us what’s going to happen. All right, Susan.

Susan Wenograd: Hey, I’m Susan Wenograd. I’m a Chief Marketing Officer at Aimclear. We are an integrated digital marketing agency. I handle paid search, paid social, strategy for clients, email marketing, strategies we do web development, SEO, all that kind of stuff.

So we kind of have a larger sense, I think, in some ways of beyond just paid media, kind of what we’re seeing happen in all the different Digital marketing spheres. So it’s been an interesting week

Frederick Vallaeys: Interesting. Can’t wait to hear more. And then we have As panelists they joined us at the last minute, but we have Chriti olson and lee from microsoft so if you guys want to say hello as well

Christi Olsen: Hello.

I am Chriti Olson. I am the head of evangelism for search, both paid and organic for Microsoft. And I’ve been in the search space for a little over 15 years doing everything in house agency side, and now on the media side.

John Lee: And Hey, I’m John Lee. I’m a learning strategist. So I think about training on these topics all day long.

Much like Chriti old timer, 14 years in the industry. Weird to think about it that way, but Glad to be here. Thanks for having this Frederick.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, thank you for being here. And again, I mean, we are the panelists here, but I don’t think anyone here has answers or complete answer. So, you know, please do use the chat box and let us know what you’re seeing and whether you think we’re right or wrong and that come to the most information possible.

Also do have Googlers on the call. They might ask to speak up at some point later with someone they’re seeing as well. By the way, if anyone wants to speak up after the panelists have gone put that in the chat box, and I’ll try to make you a presenter. So, just make sure you’ve got your microphone ready to go if you want to say something.

All right, so but again, the main questions for this are today. A lot of agencies here. So what are you seeing your clients doing in response to what’s happening? And how is your company reacting to that? And how are you preparing for the future? So you know, I made a few slides. I’m going to start with these and then hand it over to the other panelists.

But one thing that I thought was really interesting is that we’re in a situation where geographically things are. Absolutely crazy. Like, I found out that the Danish government’s approach to the situation is completely different from the US government’s approach. So, for example, they will help all small, mid sized businesses who have a revenue loss.

They will actually cover the fixed costs for those businesses for a couple of months. They’re going to be paying the rent. They’re going to be paying some of the things that have to be paid for those companies to stay in business. The only reason that I happen to know this is because I have a couple of my team who are based.

Denmark. And what’s kind of crazy here is that even within the United States, you can’t think of it as one country anymore, like literally what is happening in my city and what the government is doing as far as making me stay in my house is very different than what’s happening down south in Southern California.

Right? So, kind of the way we’ve thought of the United States as a market, right? That just doesn’t hold it where, like, things are so fluid and it’s really hard to get information about what exactly is happening in each location. And it makes things challenging. Right? And so that’s what I think.

Taking a look back at geographic bid modifiers and geographic geographically targeted ads might have to be very different and putting up solders. So that’s something we’re seeing with different markets as far as automation. I was reading the Wall Street Journal yesterday, and they kind of explained what’s happening with supermarkets.

And I thought it was quite relevant to the PPC space as well. Right? So, you go to the supermarket and a bunch of the shelves are practically empty or much emptier than they used to be. And it turns out that in the supermarket industry, Over the past couple of years, the retailers have tried to get rid of inventory in the bathroom, in the stock room.

So most retailers, even a couple of years ago, they would have six weeks of inventory sitting in the storeroom, but that was expensive. And so they started putting in place really sophisticated algorithms that would help them determine the right product at the right time for each store. And now they have two or three days worth of inventory as opposed to six weeks.

And so this unprecedented event happened. And people were freaking out all of a sudden, like, they just didn’t have the inventory to put on shelves and the automated systems that were spending in the orders to the supporters also didn’t know what was happening. So they were completely broken. Right?

So it’s actually automation. That’s to some degree causing some of the shortages. That you see in supermarkets, and I’m not saying this is the full story, but that that’s part of the story. And so to me, that was really interesting because then you think about PPC, where we’ve started to rely on so much automation.

And we just really can’t rely on that necessarily, right? So this is not a seasonal event. This is not necessarily an event that’s going to be consistent for a number of weeks. Again, it’s so fluid that we really have to be monitoring what these automations are doing. Now I’m sure some of you are going to share, but we’ve actually seen some automated campaigns do amazingly well, right?

So we’ve seen accounts where by and large, the volume is down 20, 30%, but then they have an automated campaign, for example, one doing DSA ads, and that campaign has double spend and tripled revenue. So right. I’m not saying automation is bad in this scenario. I’m just, it has to be monitored because it’s, it’s, it’s, It may not look, it may not understand what’s happening.

And the other piece that comes into play here that we really have to think about is what are the second order effects. Right? So, like, I just talked about understanding the different regional responses from governments and stores being shut down. While we as humans, we, we read the newspaper, we listen to the politicians.

So we have an understanding of when doors in a certain region might open. The automated systems really don’t have that insight. They don’t, they can’t process that. So that’s where we need to guide those systems to get things ready for the day when business is back to, you know, maybe a little bit. More normal. And then also like with second order effects, I was talking to my co founders this morning and they were like, well, you even got to think about stuff like in specific parts of the country or specific parts of the world is the workforce, primarily a workforce that can actually work from home. So in the Bay area where I live, we have a lot of software developers, we have engineers.

It’s relatively easy to make that work from home, right? So these are people who are going to continue to get paid. They’re going to continue to have a salary. So they might actually be spending. More than in other parts of the country that might be more. Service oriented, I mean, if you think of Orlando where there’s a lot of tourism, that’s probably a much more impacted area economically than the Bay Area, right?

And that’s, again, difficult for computers to understand. We as humans can sort of piece that together. All right more so business responses. So a couple of things that I’ve seen that I find interesting was companies are certainly looking to capitalize on this situation by doing some branding, by being helpful to consumers.

And I think Disney. Was one of the earliest examples that I saw. So they said, schools are closed, kids are at home. We’re going to put the movie Frozen 2 on streaming three months before we thought we would actually do that. Now, Disney Plus is none of the leading streaming providers, and they’ve actually gotten some flack over the lack of new content.

But this is a play they’re making today, basically like, listen, people are at home, they’re going to be looking for things to do. This is our chance to put that brand back in front of the consumer and do it in a helpful way. We’ve seen fitness apps. So fitness app like Peloton, I think they used to do a two week free trial.

Now they’ve shifted to a 90 day free trial. So they’re basically saying, for the duration of what’s likely to be this you know, shelter in place type situation, you can use the app for free. And why that’s really interesting, I think, is that In that span of time, people can actually make behavioral change, right?

So people who used to go to gyms, they might actually now legitimately start to use an app and get into the groove of using that. And, and when it comes time to go back to the gym and gym reopens, they might ask themselves, do I actually enjoy the, at home, at home activity? Home and experience more than going to a physical gym.

So and what that says is both companies making an aggressive play to get new customers, but those companies that are affected, even if the gym is not open, the physical gym is open, they still have to be defensive because their lunch is being eaten by others right now. That’s because consumers are being retrained.

I did a pickup at Best Buy yesterday and Best Buy, they have bollard fences make sure nobody goes into the store, but you can actually pick up your online orders. So we all know about buy online, pick up in store. That behavior is now being forced on consumers. So consumers who’ve never done this, they’re getting used, right?

What does that mean when we come out of this all of this? Does that mean that as a retailer, Who maybe hasn’t really focused much on local inventory, that that would be a more important aspect to get ready in your campaigns for when business is back to normal. Also then along the same lines, but telling consumers that you’re actually open.

So, here in the Bay Area, in many places of the country non essential businesses are closed. Best Buy is not an essential business. However, they figured out how to turn their store operation into kind of an online operation. And so they have to tell people, consumers, that yes, in fact, you can actually show up to the store in your car, shout through the window what it is you want to buy.

And we’ll get out of the store for you and we’ll toss it into the car and you’ll tell us the credit card and that transaction can still happen, right? So you could not everyone knows what’s happening with that. So you still have to tell consumers. Right. And so the others will share more, but we are seeing some cheap CPCs.

And so that could set up some opportunities for for some nice brand building. And then I promised my final slide with some thought that I have a consumer response, right? So, in some of the accounts that we see with an Optmyzr, we see travel accounts, complete flatlining, but it’s completely caught.

And that makes sense when you’re an airline, and you’re no longer flying, or you’ve reduced flights by ninety five percent, you’re probably not looking to spend a lot of money to book reservations when you don’t know when people will actually fly again. I think we also see consumers being. Very obviously they want to buy hand sanitizer, even if they find an ad for hand sanitizer that hand sanitizer is not available online.

Right? So our retailers wasting money on things. They can’t actually deliver or even in the case of Amazon or prime delivery. I’ve talked to people who said that things that used to take two days to get delivered are not going to get delivered in 30 days. That may not be okay to the consumer. And they’re going to shop around for some local who might have that online pickup and store type experience, right?

So this could be great for the targets of the world. And then the types of things they’re buying, right? So webcams, computer screens, anything to work from home. That’s basically sold out any household cleaning products that sold out. And people want to buy that stuff, but luxury. Goods, people are delaying those purchases.

Nobody wants to spend money right now when there’s uncertainty around whether they’re going to have a paycheck just a few weeks from now. Okay, so that’s enough for me. I’ll let Mike share a couple of things that he’s seeing with this.

Mike Rhodes: Yeah, so I haven’t focused maybe as much on the on the CPC side and what’s happening inside of accounts.

I thought I’d go a little bit deeper. bigger picture, just for a different look at this. And this is sort of the conversations that I’ve been having with students and clients and friends who run their business. The main one here for me has been just, let’s focus on the long game. Everything obviously is in flux right now.

The phrase I found myself using over and over again, the past two weeks, focus on the relationships, not the transaction. Think about the people on the other side of this. So we just We train a bunch of people how to do this stuff. We just reduce our cost of that from 299 a month to 9 a month just to cover hosting costs, because.

People are stuck at home. They want to learn. Let’s make it more available. Protect your team. I was actually away last week in Australia, domestically. Thankfully, not overseas. I might not have been able to get back in the country if I’d been overseas. But while I was away, they were amazing.

They sorted out everything got the work from home in place, which isn’t too unusual for us. Most of us work from home at least one day a week anyway. So we didn’t need to do practice runs. They worked out what do I have at home? What do I need? They ransacked the office and took a bunch of screens and webcams and headsets and all the plants that we just bought, took all the plants home.

I think the biggest thing there is the psychological safety of that. So setting up schedules with your team’s routine is key right now. And just communication face to face communication. So we are all jumping on as a management team. We’re jumping on every single morning and just checking in. How are you doing?

What are you seeing? And then my team leads are checking in with their teams every day. I think that’s absolutely essential right now. How people are going to get. a bit anxious. The more that this goes on, I’m going to get a bit scared. We in Australia, for instance, we don’t have what the UK has done. So you mentioned what the the Danish government we’re doing in the UK.

I believe they’re covering 80 percent of wages. I think New Zealand just announced something similar yesterday. So hopefully the Australian government follows, but yes, like, winding down all of your expenses as quickly as possible. We were talking to SAS companies, many of them that actually many of the smaller ones have been really good there.

I just saw the email reply from acuity this morning. So absolutely 90 days free. Don’t worry about it. It’s the bigger ones that are slower to act. I’ve seen. And obviously we’re asking our new landlord for a a bit of help. On the rent side of things, obviously hiring gets frozen now, and we offer everybody in the team gets five grand a year to learn whatever they want to learn that’s connected with work and 1, 000 sort of wellness fund to go learn whatever it is that you want to learn or spend on yourself.

Unfortunately, we’ve had to freeze all of that. We still have the library here in the office, but nobody can come in because everybody is stuck at home at this point. And then I’m saying clients. sell the inventory to your point, Fred, you know, they don’t want to be sitting on six weeks or 12 weeks of stock.

The, the smarter, fast acting ones are doing sort of Black Friday type sales, trying to get rid of that stuff quickly. That’ll bring a little bit of cash in, but obviously also reduces those stocks because they just don’t want to be sitting on those and they don’t, how long they might be sitting on those.

Thinking through the plans, I think, you know, as business leaders, as agency owners, this is critical right now, not to scare yourself silly, but we have to think through some scenarios here. Is it a slight drop? Are we thinking 20, 30 percent down? That’s one scenario. Is it most clients are pausing or if they haven’t yet By the end of the month or by the end of April, I know in the States your, shall I call it leadership?

I’ll call it leadership. Your leadership thinks this is all going to, you know, we’ll be back to normal in two weeks. I don’t personally think that’s the case. Looking at what’s happening in Italy and has happened in China. I think this is a weeks long, possibly months long thing that takes the world years to recover from.

So what might happen to Rev? How are you going to. pay expenses, how much cash do you have on hand in the bank? How is that going to get allocated? And that extreme scenario, you know, what happens if you have to shut your doors? Obviously, none of us are planning on doing that. And none of us expect that to happen, but at least be thinking it through at a high level.

Because the worst thing you want to be doing is, is suddenly get confronted by this. I mean, you’ve got to think about your legal obligations in here as well, you know It’s illegal to trade insolvent. So knowing the rules, knowing the legal side of things, knowing what is being offered, we’re being offered, you know, refunds on payroll tax slight that, that there’s some business stimulus packages coming.

It’s, it’s messy because we have state government and federal government. I’m guessing you do too in the States. And that’s a little confused right now. And obviously it’s changing by the day. So just having one or two people on your teams and stay up for that. Yeah. And see what’s happening and playing offense, not just, you know, Oh my God, it’s all happening to me.

I think you said this before, but what can we be doing, thinking about preparing for the other side of this. So again, it’s, it’s another form of contingency planning, but thinking through. What next? We don’t know when next is, but we can at least be planning for that. Do you want to jump to the next slide?

I think I’ve got one other slide with a couple of thoughts on there. So I’ve sort of mentioned a little bit of this, but I just, again, on the people side of things, I think that’s the most important thing right now. Scheduling those team meetings we’re doing. We haven’t done a virtual lunch yet. We’re talking about doing one either today or tomorrow at the end of the week.

But certainly a virtual beer on a Friday afternoon is going to happen. We’re Australians after all. Checking in, talking to people. I was chatting to mates in the UK last night, chatting to a few mates in Australia, and just catching up on zoom and How you do it. Just checking in on people. Many people are working from home for the first time.

I think for many of us, it’s kind of normal. But for a lot of people Susan, you were saying before we jumped on, you know, people are, Oh my God, there’s this thing called Zoom. Which Fred’s mom calls Zoom Us, which is so cute. But this is new to them. So like it’s, it’s basic shit, but just having a separate place.

And I know that Potentially sounds like an incredibly privileged thing to say that we happen to have a house that’s large enough to have a space for work and a space for the kids to run around. We’re very, very fortunate in that. But even if you’re just in a small place, just trying to have at least a separate space and trying to have a little bit of routine where you don’t just crawl out of bed, wander over, open up the laptop or sit in bed on the laptop and work, you know, get up, have a shower, put something other than the jammies on and walk two feet across the room.

And try and do work. And equally important at the end of the day is to shut the damn thing and walk away from it and get some clarity. I think that’s really important because everything’s going to merge and it’s going to be very, very easy to just be constantly online and working while watching Netflix, which is not a good idea. Exercise becomes more important, even if that’s 15 minutes. If you’re allowed out in the UK, my mate last night, he is now only allowed out one hour a day. It’s a bit like being in prison. And he said, when he went to the park, the park was almost full at seven o’clock in the morning, which people are just not taking this seriously.

Please stay at home people. In 15 minutes a day, there is, is key. And there’s so much good stuff on YouTube. There’s yoga, Pilates, stretching, there’s so much stuff that we can be doing. So we’re sort of sharing that stuff around the team. Yeah. Here’s a good video. Here’s a good playlist. The team have set up a work from home Spotify playlist that the guys are adding to, you know, just little things like that, that keep us connected.

And obviously on the education side, you know, again, there’s a ton of free stuff out there. I think being Careful what we stick in our brains right now is is really important and a whole lot less social media and media in general turn off the TV or have a, a. Small amount of time for that but don’t be watching all of this craziness all the time My favorite thing that I shared last night was the italian mares I don’t know if you guys have seen this the italian mares responding to people not taking things seriously Oh my god, they swear so well in italy.

It’s fantastic. You’ve got to go check this out on youtube If you haven’t seen it, I will get you with flamethrowers. Your dog has a prostate problem. They are amazing like It doesn’t translate but you have to watch this. You I’m going off on a tangent. Right, on the, on the B1, on the wellness side. I just wanted to cover these four things if that’s okay.

I know we’re a long, long way away from like how much clicks are costing right now, but I think this is pretty good. He said like, what are you seeing? What’s important? Add lots of information so that we can all make informed decisions. This is where my brain went. Four things very quickly on the mental side of things.

Sleep is more important than ever. I know it’s difficult. I know we’re all lying awake at three 30 in the morning. What’s going to wondering what’s going to happen to our businesses, but sleep just got more important. Scheduling out your day. We’ve even done this for my eldest daughter, who’s obviously now home from school.

Gav’s put up on the whiteboard, you know, from 9 to 10, we’re doing this, from 11, 10 12, then we’re going out for a walk, then you’re playing with your sister for a bit, like we’ve got that scheduled just to keep a little bit of normalcy, I guess, going on. The physical side, I mentioned exercise already, but just eating and drinking healthily, like now is not the time to find solids in the bottom of a bottle, and if you can buy them at your local supermarket, I think supplements are probably a good idea right now with lettuce is like ten dollars here right now.

It’s it’s going a little crazy emotional Be kind not just to other people but to yourself. It’s good I think we all need to be reminded of that. Go help someone, go wander down the road, go meet a neighbor that you’ve never met, go see if the old people that live on your street are okay, and if they’ve got enough food.

I think that stuff becomes, I’m really hopeful that on the other side of this, we’ve, we become a more helpful community. empathetic planet, a more local planet. I fear that that may be a really long way away and it may take us a long time to get there, but I’m hopeful for that. And I think we all have to stay a bit hopeful and optimistic right now and gratitude journal.

We’ve all seen you know, those Ted talks that talk about the things that you need to do, but nobody does it. Do it. It’s awesome. I remember. No, I won’t bother telling stories. It’s all right. Graduate journals. And on the spiritual side of things, meditate if you can. At a minimum, breathe. I actually read last night that just, can you breathe in and hold your breath for 10 seconds?

That’s a really good way to know if you’ve got like the early stages of this thing, how it’s different from, I’m not a doctor, I don’t play one on TV, but how it’s different from a common cold or from flu. It’s a respiratory disease. And so that’s a good thing. So just. breathing exercises. I love box breathing.

It’s just, if you can do this three times a day, you breathe in for five seconds, hold it for five seconds, exhale for five seconds, hold it for five seconds, and then you can work your way up to 10, 20, 30 seconds from there. Or Wim Hof, I think Wim Hof’s a great, funny, crazy guy from your part of the world, Fred.

Who, yeah, his breathing techniques have been shown to alkalize the blood and boost your immune system. Like, now’s a good time to go check him out on YouTube and do some crazy Wim Hof breathing. That’s all I had. Nothing about CPCs in there. I’m sure that’s what he does. Thank you, Mike. Some good advice there.

Frederick Vallaeys: We do have questions. And so I apologize. It looks like folks can’t actually use the box, but I’m trying to replicate what is being asked in questions. So, Susan, maybe when you talk, you can speak a bit about that question, like, shifting from paid search, maybe other channels. And by the way, we had Kirk, our analyst join us as well.

So, we’ll hear from him in just a moment. Susan, why don’t you take it away next.

Susan Wenograd: Yeah, sure. I think we’re seeing a few things as far as how people are moving their money around and paid and Some of us actually going to the marketing piece of it as opposed to just kind of the over reliance on People search for this thing.

So i’m showing them this ad because my product will do that. I’m seeing brands have to think a lot more carefully about how they can be helpful during this time. So Not that they’re necessarily You Trying to find a different angle, but I think that a lot of brands have Marketed the same way for a long time because they never had to market during a pandemic So it’s kind of a different thought process to say well, this is normally You know what resonates with our customers.

This is normally how we sell things and We’re seeing a lot of brands having to kind of give their their Products and offerings a fresh look to say how does this change now that they’re they might not be buying for those reasons but we are helpful in these ways that we’ve never really Marketed on or talked a whole lot about before because it wasn’t a necessity then but now it is so I think that there’s some messaging pivoting that we’re seeing which Doesn’t necessarily align as much with search because there might not be search volumes For those things.

So i’m seeing a lot a lot of thought go into You know, how is it we’re representing our products and services? How are they beneficial to people in this situation as opposed to how they were beneficial six months ago? And I don’t think that that’s something that necessarily comes across easily within a text ad for search so I think that that’s kind of where we’re seeing a shift on the paid social side is how do we communicate the feel of You The, you know, the time that we’re in how our products and services help.

So there’s a little bit more focus. I feel like on the marketing as opposed to the tactics. I mean, the tactics obviously amplify that message, but there’s certain platforms that do it better than others. So we’re seeing. Kind of a more heavy reliance in that way on social from a branding perspective as opposed to It’s kind of the long game as opposed to the you know, the short wins and then we’re also You know seeing a lot of brands kind of take a step back and say let’s take a look at holistically What’s what always kind of works for us that we could make better?

So if we look at like our, you know our Email list and this is typically our open rates our click through rates and how much we sell Is there room there that we’re not going after? Have we kind of just had the same thing going forever? Have we not revisited it in a while? What kind of language are we using in there?

So i’m seeing a shift to the non paid Pieces, that kind of keep the engine room running in the background There seems to be a little bit more focus going towards them where it’s like are we paying attention? Creating the content we should be creating right now are people searching differently for things where we can provide value.

So it’s been interesting because While the kind of the freaking out part of oh my gosh, my roads is down and my cpas are up It’s also I think forcing brands to think more holistically as marketers and you know Not get so hung up on their one channel whether they’re you know Most brands have them whether it’s like organic or it’s paid search or it’s paid social There’s usually like one channel.

They tend to obsess over a little bit. Sometimes to the detriment of others So I think in some ways we’re actually seeing some diversification occurring that probably should have happened a while ago It’s just that they’re being forced to think about it now, you know as from a more global marketing perspective So that’s that’s been interesting to watch.

You Because in some ways it’s like launching a new product, you know, they can’t rely on the stuff that they always did. Cool. And can you also say a word on YouTube if you know about that? So one question was Google’s advising to use you because it is cheaper branding traffic at this point. A lot of questions generally coming in about right now is the time to focus more on brand and also if you have any insight in B2B versus B2C when it comes to this question.

Yeah. So on the YouTube side, I haven’t seen anything shift yet. I, I don’t think it’s bad advice. From Google. In that, you know, it’s certainly from a cost purview. Was that my Sorry, I just want to

Mike Rhodes: interrupt. I was just sort of yelling to Fred that I’ll add something, but I’ll go after you.

Susan Wenograd: Yeah, I mean, it’s certainly from a branding perspective, you know, it’s a cheaper way to get your message out there.

I mean, I think when it comes from a B to B to B to C perspective, a lot of it depends on the vertical that the software is in. So you know, we have a client that does something related to the construction industry. A little scary time for them right now. I mean, there was already kind of the are we in a housing bubble thing to begin with now that is kind of being forced even more so.

So that’s all sort of grinding to a halt. So in their vertical, you know, kind of scary, but if you’re looking at like medical technology or that kind of stuff, that stuff is, you know, Still performing strongly. So in the B2B sector, it kind of is just really more hit or miss. From a B2C perspective, you know, obviously, aside from obvious e comm stuff, we’re also seeing services be affected.

Anything that has to do with in home delivery, in home assembly, any service that utilizes that is really struggling at this point. So there’s kind of those ripple effects of like, you know, the vertical that things are in and whether they are useful during this time or whether or not they can even perform their jobs.

Mike Rhodes: Yeah, I was, I was just going to add, let me tell you this here, session times have increased on YouTube, not surprisingly, yes, CPCs are cheaper there, but I think brands really need to think about what that message is, and is it too early to be talking about themselves? So many brands are completely tone deaf.

At this point and no idea of of the situation that we’re in and just continuing to run Existing material they haven’t changed or responders. They haven’t they’re

Susan Wenograd: making it worse. I mean I was talking to someone yesterday So they saw a commercial on youtube. That’s like make your product more viral than corona.

Mike Rhodes: Oh jesus. Yeah It’s like

Susan Wenograd: I mean, you have to try to offend people.

Frederick Vallaeys: I think folks should also take a look at their drip campaigns and anything that was automated because so much of this, like messaging that seems wrong right now, it’s not that people intentionally do it coming from an automation. Right.

And I think if you do have a good offer, like Disney’s doing or like the gyms are doing, like people very much want that. And so that is good messaging.

Susan Wenograd: I’ve seen, I’ve noticed that with TV commercials, they’re even starting to swap those out pretty quick. Right. They did the hotels. com did a Captain Obvious commercial that we saw last night where he’s sitting there eating popcorn by himself and it was like distance is a good thing.

And so it was like, but then in the same breath, it was funny. We were watching. I think we’re watching Better Call Saul. And when it went to commercial, it was like sponsored by Corona, the beer. And the commercial starts with a whole bunch of people on the beach running together and like touching each other So I was like they probably couldn’t switch it out fast enough, but I was like, oh that wasn’t good

Frederick Vallaeys: So there’s

Susan Wenograd: there’s misses like that.

They might not even be able to help but you notice it

Frederick Vallaeys: bet kirk and Chriti and john are itching to say something as well. So who wants to go next guys?

John Lee: I’ll jump in. Hi guys. This is john I’ve been answering some of these questions that I see as best I can and will continue to do so. Yeah, there seems to be a lot of uncertainty and I’ll be frank.

Uncertainty is the word of the month right for everybody everywhere. And so we’re all in it together. I guess is what I would say. Right? And there’s no, there’s no stupid question either for everybody. This is uncharted territory. And I would push pause there to say. Having worked in this industry through the 08, 09 market downturn search was, was consistent.

Now, granted you had verticals, right? That, that, that went down, dropped, shut off completely. We had plenty of other verticals that ramped new businesses that came about. In that time. And so as digital advertisers, I think there’s a lot of assurance we can take from that and the grant and nothing’s guaranteed, but I think there’s a lot of assurance we can take from that, that search has its place.

And I saw something earlier today. I don’t recall the source, but it was basically, if you think about, you know, the classic phrases of push versus pull marketing, we’re seeing a lot of people positing those. Push mechanisms, right? I think branding, think YouTube and instead doubling down on search, right?

Where it makes sense to do so not a one size fits all for sure, but definitely something that’s happening, obviously just like big picture you know, lots of questions around ads. Like what should I do with my ads? And Susan, I think you made a great point and that is now it’s not the time to be edgy and offensive.

Now’s the time to be respectful lead with kind just common sense folks. Let’s be honest. It’s just common sense. Like you should. Okay. It’s it’s nice to have fun. And right now it’s you have a product or service. But more specifically, if there’s been changes to your business model, but you’re still open for business, make sure your ads are reflective of that.

Whether it’s delivery options, delivery timelines, even a new offering, right? So maybe you just had to completely change things to keep the doors open. Make sure that your ads are reflective of that. Pretty common sense stuff. I heard Frederick, you talked about DSA early on. Dude, I think that’s brilliant.

Particularly if you’re in an industry that is still open for business. Think insurance, think telehealth companies, right? Who have seen just insane skyrocket business over the last couple of weeks. Open the floodgates, be receptive to that. And DSA is a great way to do that. Particularly if you think about those queries that you’ve not thought about and that your current keyword sets aren’t open to, to be receptive to.

DSA is a great way to capture and ride that wave. And then would be remiss if I don’t mention RSAs. Just because that’s both on the Google side and Microsoft side, it leverages machine learning to say, okay, of all these different, you know, cool, nice, kind headlines and body copies that you have, these are the ones that are going to match the queries that we’re seeing right now.

And because that’s automated, right. It takes some of that control of your hands. I know don’t yell at me. It is going to be doing some good things for you. And you know, I can’t say no good things about RSA, but if you haven’t leaned into that just yet, now’s a good time, I think, to give it a go.

Frederick Vallaeys: Thanks, John.

All right. We have a PPC celebrity, Kirk Williams. So you probably don’t need much introduction, but why don’t you say who you are, if you want to be calmer. So and I think people would also love to hear if you have a view on it. All right. Automated bidding versus reverting to manual in situation.

Kirk Williams: Yeah, I apologize for my late or my late entry here.

I was signed in as the viewer, like a, like a noob. So not a, not a panelist. So thank you for getting me the correct link. Yeah, I, I echo what John said. How John started, you know, I’m, I’m seeing I’m seeing posts come out by people saying, Hey, we did, you know, we did some average thing of all of our clients.

And like, this is what we saw with CPCs or this is what we saw with conversion rates and, and literally you’ll scroll down further in your, in your feed and see someone from another agency being like, Hey, here’s what we saw right now. And it’s. And sometimes they’re like completely opposite, you know, all of our conversion rates are going up.

All of them are going down. CPCs are up. CPCs are down. Right. So like reiterating right now, they’re like, this is completely a unique, weird, New situation. And I think it is really, really, really important to be focused on what is your account doing and, and how to directly impact and work in that account.

Because honestly, no matter what everyone’s saying in terms of what averages out there and stuff, yours might be different. We are seeing accounts just do just crazy different things. So that’s, that’s probably 1 of the 1st things is just like, read your individual client, what their goals are, what’s happening and, and, like, make the best decision that you can.

And I know that that probably is kind of an obvious might go without saying, but in some ways, don’t react. To the, the post being written on Twitter, like react to what, you know, as a good marketer is happening in your account. I think that’s really important. A couple of kind of things. So we’re, we’re agency we’re focused a lot on eCommerce stuff.

So that’s usually in my brain. We are, we are definitely seeing some. Obviously concerning things with brands as well as some positives. Okay. So, so again, it kind of goes into an account by account basis. We do tend to see those match at some point, if we see a brand doing really well, and if we put a little bit of thought into it, that’s probably because somehow it can be used by people who are stuck in their house for two weeks.

We had this one client. That it was doing really well and it was almost like the surprise, like, why haven’t they heard? And then I realized, Hey, it has to do with like hobbies. People are bored, you know, so they’re buying more of this, something that can feed their hobby. And, and so right now, one thing that we’ve noticed like very, very recently to capitalize on for brands and retailers, Amazon.

Amazon is hopping out right now and we are seeing some really big opportunities there. So, you know, Amazon has I forget the specifics of what they’ve done. And as, as, as many people say, the only thing that we can know for sure is like that we don’t know anything for sure right now, stuff changes so fast.

But Amazon is basically paused. I think the reception of any non essential things into their, into their warehousing and that. And so you’re actually going to see for people who want to, sorry, the screen changed. Can you still hear me? Okay. Yep. Okay. Okay. So, so yeah, so anyway, so we are seeing that for a lot of things on Amazon, a lot of products right now.

They’re getting ridiculous lead times. I mean, we’re talking like late April to May. And so like we have clients who, you know, Amazon has been a real big competitor for them that all of a sudden conversion rates, bro, as traffic is just shooting through the roof because all those people that used to buy an Amazon are.

Clients. So like, there might be an actual opportunity to capitalize on that real quick right now. So just, just kind of be aware of that. You know, Mike and others noted kind of the, the dead stock thing, making sure to clear that out. If you can, that, that makes a lot of sense. I think also another call out would be Probably worth reanalyzing where your, where your actual profit and your actual ROI lands a lot has changed a lot of stuff with your shipping rates things that you’re sourcing.

And, you know, that might not always think about that translating eventually into your advertising ROAS goals. But in some ways you might need to adjust your advertising return on ad spend, your ROAS goals based upon like what things look like right now in late March that is completely changed from a week ago.

So that’s probably one tip as a, as a brand, maybe it’s time to just get back in, make sure you know your numbers really well. And if you need to do communicate that to your, your account managers, your agencies, or, or your in house, People so that we can kind of adjust things to make sure that we’re not aiming at a target of back when things were a lot different in, in, in February.

Yeah, so I couldn’t remember what was the question you had asked Fred? Oh, was it target ROAS bidding automated? That kind of thing.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, I mean, so just generally automated of any type versus going back to manual.

Kirk Williams: Yeah. So okay. So smart shopping right now, we have, we have some accounts where smart shopping.

So that’s, that’s a very, very, very automated thing in Google smart shopping in some accounts is just on the struggle bus. And as we are running simultaneous standard shopping as well in the same account. Not seeing it. In fact we’ve actually seen sometimes growth in, in return on ad spend for standard shopping and just complete hit in smart shopping row as you know, and there’s, there’s going to be some level of traffic.

Change as well that I think everyone is aware of. We’re all seeing some level of traffic fluctuation. Again, at times being tied back to if probably if it’s a product or service that someone can use, utilize in, in like a. Global quarantine setting, you’re probably seeing those numbers increasing and vice versa.

So that being said for fully automated solutions, there does seem to be early reads that. Yeah, they’re, they’re struggling. I mean, which to be fair again, to the point of everything is changing and there’s just not really any sort of point of this that we can. figure out what’s going on. The machines are struggling as well.

We have found some benefit in having some level of control. I know everyone hates manual bidding. Man, there are times, especially in shopping, we still see it do really well. And so like, hey, we’ll, we’ll still work with that. We, we also at times we’ll utilize things like max Max clicks, believe it or not, if it matches with a strategy that we’re doing in certain things you know, we’ve done target row as again, to the point of be cautious with that and what that looks like as well.

But so far it does seem to answer the question that like super fully automated systems probably are a little bit struggling right now. And if there’s some level that we can assist them or even maybe just kind of I don’t know, freeze things a little bit. With more of a manual or or some sort of half machine half human type guidance that seems to be doing.

Okay. Right now. I’m not sure what others are seeing, but

Frederick Vallaeys: I think to add something to this as well.

Christi Olsen: I’ve been trying, and I completely agree with Kirk in the sense of there’s some going to be some cases where your automated bidding is going to work but a lot of instances if we go back to like, think of the holiday periods when you have this massive peaks and valleys of purchase behavior happening.

That’s what we’re seeing right now is that what people are purchasing, they’re doing some panic buying potentially. And so you’re seeing those peaks and valleys, which the automated systems just aren’t handling super well. So if you want to go back, you think about your attributions and think about what’s happened for purchase behavior over the last, Week two weeks month and how that shifted over your year over year data.

You’re going to want to At least personally I would go and start looking at manual based bidding to sort of make up for where you’re seeing peaks or valleys From what you might not have had previously It’s worth saying that on the Microsoft side of Microsoft advertising, we have a lot of data, and we have a lot of people looking at data right now.

And one of the biggest trends that we are seeing across the board is the fact that the consumer decision journey or the purchase journey has completely shifted and changed in almost every vertical. That what was true a month ago isn’t necessarily true today with the length of time for purchase. We’re seeing it extend out in a lot of verticals where it might have been a two week look to book window or look to purchase window where they’re lengthening and then CPG and goods that a lot of the CPG or consumer product goods are much shorter now on those purchase buy cycles, which means as a marketer we have to think about What is, what is it that people are looking for right now, which is what the DSAs that John, and I’m trying to think, John, Mike, and I think Susan may have touched on DSA a little bit as well as you, Fred, use that as your catch all for what you might be missing from the campaigns.

I like the strategy of using DSAs and or broad and broadians to really try to capture some of those queries you might not have known otherwise. There’s a lot A lot of volume increases that we are seeing as on bang right now and there’s a lot of opportunity to capture that volume Especially as we’re going into this time frame So think about the keywords and using either the keyword recommendations tabs using strategies like the broad answer dsa to really capture those clicks coming through or even The recommendations tab, we have keyword recommendations coming in there.

You also want to think about your metrics. In addition, so as we’re talking about the, the bidding strategies, do you automate or do manual, the metrics you use are also going to be changing a little bit as the decision journey evolves. lengthens or potentially shortens across the board. So what, where you might have used ROAS or target CPAs, that metric, you might want to start looking at where are you at with the market as it stands today with people coming in or coming out of the marketplace pretty quickly.

So looking at those market share metrics are gonna, is gonna be another area you’re gonna want to look at pretty quick. And I will stop there since I could keep on going.

Frederick Vallaeys: And I am muted, so I’m going to myself. Thank you, Chriti. Very useful. We had Amit from Google account strategist who requested to have the floor for a minute. So, Amit, if you want to tell us what you’re seeing, we’d love to hear.

Viewer: Yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me as well today. It’s a real pleasure to meet you all.

Thank you very much. So, I’m an account strategist for the UK market. I deal with agencies in the UK and I, and I help them with their accounts every single day. And I mean, obviously during this time, I’ve seen a lot of changes this week specifically has been a real big challenge for us because as a team because it’s been the transition period for the UK where they’ve gone from being in the office through to actually You know, being at home.

So as a result of that, like it’s, it’s been pretty tough. So I think that that, that volatility has been reflected, not just in doing my day to day job and dealing with my agencies, but also in the in the, the, the data and the search data that we’re getting on the you know, on, on search engine on Google, basically.

I can’t see right now because it looks like the screen’s freeze frozen. I guess when it freezes, I’m just gonna assume that it’s still working. Excuse me. I’m not. I’m new to webinars. Okay, great. Thank you. Thank you for letting me know. I think what I’ve found really is more than anything is that definitely behaviors changing.

What we’re seeing, what I’m seeing a huge increase in is home items and home improvement. And what I’ve seen is that people are nesting basically. So there’s a lot of people who are buying things, buying Things basically for the houses in order to get prepared for being on for a long period of time.

Okay, so Things such as home improvement, which is like home improvement, but things which involve huge cosmetic changes to the house, so things like Double glazing for example and things like that. That’s totally out of the window. Like no one No one actually wants to do huge cosmetic changes to their houses right now because no one wants to be living in their house whilst they’re having their double glazes deglazing changed or you know, things like construction, like if someone’s having construction work done on their house right now, then the likelihood is that that construction work is probably going to be paused.

So I have a lot of accounts in a lot of industries, which is lead generation in the construction industry, which, and also from what I understand with the UK government is that big construction contracts are probably going to be paused as well. So in terms of construction, like, and also home improvement, that’s kind of on pause for big cosmetic stuff, but then other small things.

So things like plumbers and electricians and lead generation for people who actually come and repair something in your home is still quite active and still quite popular. So there’s a lot in terms of. Those services and then what I’ve been, what I’ve been talking to my companies about and my real focus every single day.

It’s sort of more along the lines of with, with Mike, actually, in that I’ve been just literally kind of helping my agencies to weather the storm and just understand what, what, what kind of conversations can they be having with their clients? And, and how can their clients basically be adapting their businesses in order to basically be helping people essentially?

So how, you know there’s my whole team has been asking the whole day, like the whole week. Like, does anyone have any official links from Google about what we should be doing for what should we, what we should be sending our our agencies. Right. And the truth is that internally, they haven’t really been.

Very, very fast to react with, with content for us to send over slowly it’s trickling in and we’re starting to see some more and more content and information that we can send over to the agencies and, and you know, ways in which we can help them strategize. But my main focus has been how can we help your business to adapt to helping people during this time?

How does, how are we going to, is your product and service going to be necessary during this time? And if not, it is, if it’s, How can we keep you under the people’s you know, attention. So I’ve been focusing on smart display campaigns and smart shopping. Those have been like the main things that I’ve been really, you know, encouraging my, my, my businesses to, to, to implement, but it also, it completely depends on, on what products it is that they’re selling and that sort of thing.

But like I said, the main stuff is really. Stuff that people are going to need at home, really. So that’s why I think like Amazon have, you know, gone down to the bare essentials, but things like workout gears and barbecues and curtains and things like that. Those are the things that people are going to want because they want to make sure that they’ve got comfortable houses.

To weather this storm in terms of fast moving consumer goods. Thank you for sharing. It’s a great perspective. And we had one more volunteer, Dan Burak, who wanted to say a word, so I don’t know if your microphone is on, but the floor is yours if you want it.

Hey, I’m here. You guys hearing? I can hear you. Ah, okay. Well, thanks for letting me pitch in here. As a luxury jewelry brand, James Allen, we’ve obviously had some challenges. The Fulfillment is a challenge because it is based in New York, and there’s a total lockdown there. So that’s been challenged. So we’ve had to pare down our.

Our campaigns and basically just choose which campaigns to leave active and pause the rest. I mean, it’s it’s it’s been quite a challenge, but it’s also, it’s you know, to, to try to see what you can do with a small percentage of your original PPC budget. So, you know, choosing, you know, the campaigns that have overall better.

Performance is what I’ve been seeing now. I’d be happy to answer any question. I

Frederick Vallaeys: guess maybe the question on most people’s mind is, have you actually been shifting that PPC budget that you now can no longer expand to other channels? Or are you just basically sitting on the cash because there’s so much uncertainty?

Viewer: Yeah, basically, no, we’re not able to fulfill or, you know, the, you know, the, the fulfillment is so long and the demand is down, which is basically been been paring down budgets, more or less. In fact, you know, next week, we don’t even know if we’ll be open, we’re waiting to see what comes down from the, from the top.

So. It’s it’s quite a certain time,

Frederick Vallaeys: right? We’ve got Mother’s Day right around the corner, which I’m sure is a time when people do buy jewelry. So is that? Oh, yeah,

Viewer: we’re, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re going. We’re going in house with, you know, the insider sales with the email, you know, starting the sale process early, kind of starting the, you know, first with the inside sales with the email and later we’ll we’ll start with the site wide sale you know, sooner than, than, than later. So that’s, that’s what we’re doing. It’s just just holding on, you know, I’m personally taking the opportunity, you know, the, the more time I have, extra time to, to to work more on the feed. There’s always feed projects to do, so I’m taking the opportunity to work more on the feed. So may, may, may, I just, may I just also pitch in.

Thank you so much for those insights as well. I’ve also realized that, like, with B2B specifically, because obviously everyone’s going to be working from home for example, one of my clients, they do online document signing things like, so, online document signing software. That’s just one example of the kind of software which I expect to really see a big increase during this time.

I mean, I’m trying to spend a lot of my time really focusing on understanding which I’ve got a list of new companies that I’m going to be dealing with from Q1, from Q2. Apologies, because it’s a new financial year. So, so I get given a new, So I’ve gone through every single company that I’ve got and I’ve had a look at what industry they’re in to understand and are basically predicting what I think is going to happen with their business.

Right? What I’ve seen is that the companies who are B2B IT tools, apps, which people can use at home, which are going to make workflow a lot easier. That these businesses for me, I’ve been working on them with working with them on how they can help to build their remarketing lists and then use YouTube in order to read in order to really educate the people who are on those marketing lists on how those their apps, how are they going to specifically help.

Companies to work from home. So, because work from home is going to be huge. Not just now, but I think moving forward as well, because I think a lot of companies will not just not only will they see realize that, okay, right now we have to operate from home, but also in the future, working from home will probably become.

More of a thing it was even predicted in the beginning of 2020 before all of this passed that you know This decade will be the decade of people working from home essentially and I think that this has obviously been a real Push on that. Soon soon

Frederick Vallaeys: This is the behavioral change that we’re now forced to make the things that we’ve always put off.

But I think it’s just going to do some great things for the world. Actually, you know, probably less traffic, you don’t have to go to school in the morning because people are learning how to do online education. But it is really pulling the rug out from a lot of people. So but yeah, I also want to be respectful of everyone’s time.

We’re at the top of the hour. I know some people have to go because they only have one webcam in the house and the next person needs to go on the next meeting but thanks everyone for sharing. I think this was great. We’re gonna try to do it again. We’re gonna take some of the questions we didn’t answer, try to do some blog polls around it and just kind of keep the information flowing and help everyone get through this together.

So thank you all for joining us and thank you to the panelists for sharing with us. Thank you. Thanks for

Viewer: organizing it for Thank you.

Christi Olsen: Thank you guys. Bye.

Viewer: Na day. Thank you. Goodbye.