PPC for Ecommerce

Episode Description

Explore expert insights on leveraging Google’s free shopping ads, utilizing TikTok for e-commerce growth, mastering Snap Ads, setting up e-commerce quickly, automating search ads from feeds, and prioritizing profit over ROAS for enhanced marketing strategies.

Topics discussed:

• Free Google shopping ads
• Snap Ads Guide
• TikTok Shopping with Levi’s
• Tips for retailers who need to get ecommerce up and running quickly
• Turning your feed into search ads automatically
• What should be your most important metric? ROAS or profit?

Episode Takeaways

Free Google Shopping Ads

• Utilize free listings in Google Shopping to increase visibility without extra cost. • Optimize product feeds by ensuring high-quality images and complete product information.
• Monitor and adjust strategies based on the performance of free listings versus paid ads.

Snap Ads Guide

• Leverage Snap Ads for direct engagement with a younger audience.
• Consider using dynamic product ads to drive sales with high-quality visuals and targeted messaging.
• Utilize Snap’s unique features like Geo-filters and Lenses for creative, engaging campaigns.

TikTok Shopping with Levi’s

• TikTok’s new shopping features offer a platform for reaching a vast, engaged audience.
• Levi’s testing TikTok shopping highlights the potential for brands to tap into the influencer-driven market.
• Brands should consider creating authentic, creative content that resonates with TikTok’s user base.

Tips for Retailers Needing Quick E-commerce Setup

• Use platform integrations like Shopify for quick setup.
• Consider Google Sheets for creating a simple product feed if starting from scratch.
• Focus on essential e-commerce functionalities: accurate product listings, payment integration, and user-friendly design.

Turning Your Feed into Search Ads Automatically

• Automate the creation of search ads using product feeds to save time and enhance ad relevance.
• Tools like feed management software can dynamically update ads based on inventory changes or promotions.
• Experiment with different keywords and ad formats to find the most effective approach for your products.

Most Important Metric: ROAS or Profit?

• Focus on profit instead of just revenue to truly assess the effectiveness of ad spend.
• Implement tracking systems that measure profit per transaction to make more informed bidding decisions.
• Adjust marketing strategies based on profitability of products, not just overall revenue, to maximize returns.

Episode Transcript

Frederick Vallaeys: Thank you for joining us for another PPC Town Hall. This is the 11th one we’re doing, and we’re really excited to be back and to have you joining us. So we have shifted to a different format. So first of all, you’ll notice that the studio that we have here or at least the framing around it is much nicer. So we’ve also added some interactivity features so that people can really talk to us and engage with questions and questions with the panelists.

The other thing we’ve changed is we’re going more To a topic based sessions. So as opposed to just three people talking, we actually have a topic every weekend this week, that topic is e commerce and PPC. So PPC for retailers, digital marketing for retailers and e commerce. And we looked for some of the world’s best experts on that.

And we found Andrew Lolk. He’s originally from Denmark, but I have a hard time keeping up with what country he’s living in today. So he’s going to share that with us in a minute. So I will bring in Andrew here. So welcome Andrew. And then we also have Duane Brown, who also is an international man of mystery, I guess, and we’ll hear from him what he’s been up to.

But welcome guys.

Andrew Lolk: Thank you,

Frederick Vallaeys: Fred. Glad to be here. Good to have you. And Andrew, why don’t we start with hearing a little bit more from you, who you are, what you do. And your expertise in PPC and e commerce.

Andrew Lolk: So I so I, I started out in PPC working with on on affiliate stuff back in, in 2008, 2009.

And ever since then, I I founded an agency in, in the U S which also had a fulfillment department or a team down in the, down in Nicaragua. So that’s where it came from that I lived eight years in Nicaragua, which is a country I wouldn’t have listed in if anybody had asked me back in 2010 to list a hundred countries where I would go and live, Nicaragua wouldn’t have been on it.

I doubt I would know. Nicaragua, if I hadn’t lived there. So, so that’s that’s great. So in my previous agency, we did a little bit of everything and my, my new agency, which I founded back in, in 2017, all we do is e commerce PVC and we’re heavily skewed towards a retail stores online. That. that have a lot of SKUs, 5, 000, 10, 000, 20, 000, 200, 000, a million it’s, it’s really where we are.

We’re skewed towards so less of the direct to consumer side and more of the I want to say best buys of the world, but best buy as a client, that’s a little bit of a stretch, but it gets the drift.

Frederick Vallaeys: Great. Well yeah, we’ll talk more about what kind of clients you work with. And then there’s going to be a chance for people, of course, to reach out to you and get a little bit of insight into how you could help their business.

And before we go to Duane anyone listening in on the call today and joining us, if you want to put in the chat box where you’re joining us from. So we’ve got Andrew from Tijuana. We’ve got myself in Los Altos, California, the Bay Area. Or Andrew’s in San Diego. That’s like basically the same city nowadays, I guess. And then Duane, tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you calling us from today?

Duane Brown: Yeah, Montreal, Canada. So that’s on the East coast, way past our capital and Toronto, our version of New York or Chicago, depending on what day of the week it is. But I’ve lived on six cities on three continents, including Australia.

I know I’ve lived in the UK for a couple of years in London. And similar, but not so similar to Andrew. Like I started and cut my teeth doing like advertising across the board, you know, email paid, you name it, I did it in the first couple of careers. And then I got a job at an agency and focused on paid and basically doing lead gen for, you know, H and M big Canadian brands who want to like hire people.

And then I just transitioned into paid for like things you could sell online, which has been really good. And then I lived around the world and now I’m here back in Canada and 80 percent of our business is sort of e com. D to C, but a 50 50 split between e comm. Sometimes those e commerce have retailers.

Sometimes they don’t the D to C don’t obviously have any retail. And then the other 20 percent of our business is technology, SAS clients who need help with like lead gen. So we’re working with like a spin tech in San Fran right now, which is really chill and cool. We always just figuring out when I get up each day and the team gets up, you know, how do we help each client make more money, grow their top line revenue, and how do we help them just win against bigger competitors who might have potentially more funding?

Because as I told the client yesterday, more money doesn’t mean more revenue. Some people can easily just spend money, but waste it.

Frederick Vallaeys: Good point. And we have a whole section dedicated to that. So good. But yeah, we, we ultimately like more money, especially if that money is also profit. So we’ll, we’ll get to that.

So but yeah, let’s start with the first topic we’ve got lined up for today. So that’s getting free traffic from Google. So before we even get into spending money. To drive more volume Google’s announced some changes. And now you can show up for free on the Google shopping tab. Yeah, you guys try that and what are you guys seeing?

Duane Brown: Yeah, we’ve got all our us clients into it. You can Opt into it in 79 different countries, but only the u. s Has where you can see the data in your google merchant center. So we have all our clients in we put

Frederick Vallaeys: Important nuance right what you just said is everyone in the world can opt in to do this

Duane Brown: Yeah,

Frederick Vallaeys: only selectively in countries.

Google has enabled it.

Duane Brown: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because I thought it was slow global world so it probably and other than we’ve seen a decrease in the quantity and levels of traffic over the last 34 33 days. Some clients see like obviously a higher conversion rate, but a lower average order value, other clients see a low conversion rate, but a higher average order value compared to organic search.

And it’s been, it’s been interesting, you know, I’ll take free sales and free quote unquote, free traffic. I said it on Twitter. I still think it’s a data play, but people can argue that with me all they want.

Frederick Vallaeys: And what have you guys seen, Andrew?

Andrew Lolk: So, so we, we have a few in on the state side where obviously we’ve, we’ve opted in, we’ve actually also opted in everything in in Scandinavia where we have a good 70 percent of our clients because the whole thing, you can’t, you can opt in and everybody got excited when they got the email, but do anything about it.

But yeah, we try to so see that we work with, with with e commerce shops that have a lot of products, then we try to find the best way to prioritize what products should go into free listing and what should go into paid listings. Part of our previous focus has been a lot on like on shopping with having products that has the highest likelihood to sell the best or at the highest levels to promote them the most in shopping.

Now we’re trying to figure out what is the best what, what, what is the best balance? What should we send over to the free side and what should we send over to the paid side? What should we keep both places? Cause there’s definitely an avenue of. Of categories where we haven’t been profitable with certain clients, where we could do a lot of work with, with pushing those on the free side.

Duane Brown: I think the challenge, Andrew, though, is you can’t guarantee those items you push if you select will actually rank the right. Google hasn’t said explicitly or implicitly what’s going to help you rank. I mean, we’ve done some digging and Google says, add demographic data, add extra like images, you know, age, gender, things of that nature to help you rank.

Wist within free shopping. But other than that, they’re not telling you how to like, you know, optimize your feed, quote, unquote, to rank there. So at least for our clients, we’ve just pushed everything. Cause we were like, let’s go decide what’s going to rank in the free shopping tab, because experience is so different than if you just rank in.

Andrew Lolk: Well, one thing, one, one, one super interesting thing you bring up there is that one aspect I don’t see discussed a lot is this thing that you’re pulling you’re taking away the bid from the ranking aspect. So that whole factor, which is the main factor for Google shopping ranks today is your bid.

Like you can have low prices and all these things, but the bid is the main factor. Increase that, you increase your rank. But by going in and then in the free setting or free listings, we’ve removed that bidding aspect. Then it’s going to be a lot more interesting to see if we can pinpoint what factors actually help with make you rank better because the, the, the bid, bidding factor goes away.

So all the other factors must be enhanced, which might help us out with trying to, to like single out certain factors, like a keywords and title, or having all the available fields populated and all of these things. So that, that for me is going to be really interesting.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And then tell me a little bit about what you’ve seen in the early research here.

So these ranking factors and, and basically. Usually when we talk about PPC and we talk about optimization, it’s like keyword optimization, ad text optimization. But when we talk about shopping, it’s really the feed that is your creative component, right? So what do you do in the feed?

Duane Brown: Yeah, I mean, for us and what we’ve done with and what the Google support help articles, call them what you will, basically, Google says you know, image links, obviously, submit high resolution images, you know, so at least 650 by 850 pixels, if you’ve got additional product images, make sure that’s included in your shopping feed as well.

Does it matter

Frederick Vallaeys: which one you make the primary or does Google now, like, basically rotate between everything you’ve submitted?

Duane Brown: They will show other images if they can. So kind of like when you think of like showcase shopping ads, sometimes a showcase, often shopping ad will show more images. I assume they’ll pull in other images if it makes sense.

But your main cover product images, what shows, so make sure it’s the best product image possible. And there’s

Frederick Vallaeys: a question for Andrew too, but so when it comes to images, right, so. We’re basically picking the image that we think is gonna be best. Have, have you found any good ways to do ab testing of images?

Andrew Lolk: Oh, no. So there, there are, there are, there’s a number of tools out there that allow it. I know both both Duane and I use use feed genomics a lot. But data feed watch out of Holland can do it. And and the wakeup data out of Denmark. Shameless plug. They can also do it. But it’s honestly something we don’t spend a lot of time on because a lot of the e commerce stores that we work with, again, has a lot, have a lot of products and they’re automatically choosing the best images for the, for the, like the hero shot on the product page themselves.

So they take that and use that. So we haven’t done a lot of testing, but the fewer products you have, the more important it becomes to test the images actually.

Duane Brown: Yeah, I agree. I think the other thing I would say is also fill out things like your age and gender demographic data, basically. I know we all got that email.

I think it was like last time Google was like, Oh, you could. Potentially option. We felt these options in your shop and feed. You know, we’re not gonna force people to do it. But even since, you know, last August, we’ve been forcing every one of our clients to fill out all the fields they can in their shop and feed.

You know, there’s no point in not filling it out. If you can put the data in there, right? It’s just a question of being lazy. We don’t want any of our clients be lazy and then filling out things like condition, material, all. product size, if it’s an accessory, basically that applies to mostly apparel brands but build the best shop and feed you can and, and you’ll be successful.

Andrew Lolk: Just to, I just wanted to, I just wanted to expand on that because it’s, it’s one of the things that, that. That we, we see a lot of big e commerce stores coming in and you’re doing really well with a really bad feed because their titles have like, are somewhat optimized for, for, for organic traffic. So their titles are pretty good.

So they, they, they do decently. But it’s like, we’ve seen time and time again, if you take the time and really build out the rest of the fee values and make it so that it is like as good as it can be, then it drastically can improve over time the, the Google shopping results. But the problem is it doesn’t happen from one day to another.

Some of the, some of the stories we’ve taken where they have the, like a horrible feed where the product name, Jupiter, for instance, absolutely horrible and it’s still, when we add the keywords to the titles, it still takes months for it to actually start showing some overall great results. And my very like empirical focus or, or.

What I’ve taken away from all this is that the feed really has an overall quality factor to it. We can’t see it. It’s not ranked, it’s not listed like quality score anywhere, but there is some kind of quality component to it that will boost your rankings and boost how many searches you get shown for, not necessarily boost your rank for a single Keyword, but we’ll boost how, how, how far and how wide Google can and will spread your product exposure.

Frederick Vallaeys: So in this scenario where you don’t really know when the optimization is complete, when Google’s considering the changes you’ve made, like, how do you go about figuring out when is it time to. Evolve the text, the test to the next level.

Andrew Lolk: So we, so, so, so from our end, we we go all in on, on seeing what can we do from a, from a, from an entry point point of view.

So whenever we take on a new client, we do as much as we can to fill everything out with ourselves and on the client side. Many things can be done from just in your feed optimization tool. Like it’s, it’s easier to add the age group. It’s easier to add color in many cases where you can draw it out of the descriptions or titles and all these things.

So we try to get all these things done before we send it over to the client and say, Hey, please do these things. But we get really far with just using our like basic, if this, then that rules in a feed optimization tool get really, really far.

Frederick Vallaeys: And then maybe weigh in on this, right? So. A lot of people right now kind of have to do e commerce because stores are still closed for many reasons.

Apparently where Andrew lives right now, it’s not the riots. It’s not COVID, but it’s a forest fires. Right. But, but if you have traditional retail and you need to get online fast, right, so the quickest way I believe to set up at least some sort of a feed is to just put it in a Google sheet. Yup. And once you have it in a Google sheet, I mean what or what, what?

I get you guys use Shopify, like how do you go from being brick and mortar to being online very quickly?

Duane Brown: Yeah, I mean, 90 percent of our clients are on Shopify, but we have clients on like woo and clients on Magento as well. So yeah, I mean, you could use the Google Shopify shopping app. You could use one of the other apps in the store and then augment

Frederick Vallaeys: integration.

Right. Is that something you guys know much about?

Duane Brown: Yeah. I mean, you could do integrations as well. Like Shopify has an integration. Most platforms have an integration. What I

Frederick Vallaeys: heard was that Google was doing some sort of integration with PayPal so that if you had your products listed through PayPal, they would generate the feed and automatically put it into the Google Merchant Center and then it would automatically be eligible for those free shopping listings.

Duane Brown: That I have not heard, but I don’t have any client that does anything on PayPal aggressively.

Andrew Lolk: I’d heard it, but it’s not like Like Duane said, all platforms, like, unless you’re really in some kind of platform that was built in 2005, which they’re out there and people are still on them for whatever reason it is.

Then, then there’s no integration. So I’d say all major platforms can do it today. And if not the easiest way that we’ve seen some really large stores have problems with producing a feed, go find somebody who can scrape it and off you go.

Duane Brown: Yeah. I mean, feed anonymous can scrape it. You could also do a supplemental feed.

So we have a client on woo. So we just used the woo commerce app. We used a supplemental feed to augment the titles and that’s how we built out their shopping. It’s easier to do because they only have like 74 SKUs. So it only took me. I don’t know, five, six hours just to build out what I wanted in a supplemental feed.

And then from there it’s just, we push clients until they make the change we want. Like we don’t, we don’t let up and we tell clients when we onboard them. If we can’t touch your shopping feed, we don’t want you as a client. Like we’re not going to do just subpar work. If you’re not going to let us use Feedonomics, we’re not going to onboard you as a client.

We just don’t have time to waste time building out feeds when we can think more strategically about how we use that feed to just make you more money. So that’s just kind of our. Our stance on it.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. That makes sense. Use technology to do things more efficiently, more scalably. We’re optimizer.

Andrew Lolk: Shameless plugs, right?

Duane Brown: Oh, we got to do use optimizer. We love it. It’s a great tool. It’s one of our three tools we pay for. Like

Frederick Vallaeys: Hey, but another question here, right? So Mary’s asking us and she’s coming from Finland, I believe, but any thoughts on when to use standard versus smart shopping campaigns?

Duane Brown: You can only use smart shopping if you’ve got enough data in your standard campaign.

So you can’t just launch a. Smart shopping campaign on day one, even if you wanted to. And even with that, I would say like 75 to a hundred conversions a month consistently before you’d move over to smart shopping, but Andrew’s laughing. So that tells me he disagrees with me. He’s going to tell you.

Andrew Lolk: No, I, I generally, I generally, I generally agree.

And my, my, my recommendation is very based on who you are, like as an, as an, as an in house, like if, if you’re an in house marketing Marketing coordinator and you need to run your Google ads because you’ve been cheated from eight different agencies in the past Smart sharpening usually outperforms anything average PVC Managers can do by themselves That that’s what we’ve seen if you’re on the agency side or you’re more in the high end space of things, then you’re typically can, can utilize more of the complex structures to create better, to generate better results than smart shopping can.

So like generally smart shopping is, is one of the best things that’s come out of Google in a, in a long time, in my opinion. But it’s not something as an on the agency side that I would, would preach very hard. But yeah,

Frederick Vallaeys: I’m probably preaching to the choir here. Right. But our thinking on that is Google builds amazing technology nowadays to make a lot of non marketers Into average marketers, average results.

And that’s what smart shopping campaigns do. But if you’re an actual professional in this space and you have your own strategies and you’ve thought about this for a long time, and this is how you make money, you probably want to do something a little bit better than average, most of us hopefully aspire to that.

Right. And so that’s when you still want to go to the standard shopping campaigns.

Andrew Lolk: I think that’s, I think, I think that’s an, I think that’s an excellent point, but but it also showcases how poorly people have managed shopping. Oh my god. It’s so bad the way that people have run shopping like it’s like, it’s just like, okay, we throw all our running shoes in as a product group and we set a bid for all our, all our running shoes, the same bid, and then we bid up and down for that.

There’s like, There’s a million things wrong with that. And that’s really what we’ve just seen time and time again, that, that people make mistakes in, and then, then that’s really where smart shopping has an advantage. People don’t know what they don’t know. I think it’s the

Duane Brown: problem, but also with smart shopping, I don’t think it’s, it’s an all or nothing.

Like for a client we have that sells kids toys, they sell 79 different brands, only put the top brands in smart shopping, and then we use standard shopping for the other brands, because we could probably do a better job manner, managing the, Non top three brands. So you don’t have to do an all or nothing approach.

You can do a hybrid of some smart shopping for some products and then non smart shopping or standard shopping for other products and brands.

Frederick Vallaeys: I mean, a bit the same, the Pareto principle, I guess, what you would apply to your keyword list the top or the 20 percent of keywords that drive 80 percent of your results, those are the ones you probably want to tightly control and maybe do something manual.

And then if time permits you do more, but oftentimes we’re too time constrained and that’s when you put automation on the rest. Andrew, this is actually a quote from you on the screen that I pulled from one of your blog posts. And I mean, it kind of speaks to the whole thing, right? So sometimes people don’t know what they’re doing in your case.

You obviously do know what you’re doing, but then it becomes so, like, massively tedious to do the right thing. So talk a bit about that.

Andrew Lolk: So when when, when, when I started savvy, I’d, I’d obviously not been been creating campaigns for a while because my old agency, I was, I was like three to four levels away from a PPC account and hadn’t actually been active on a PPC account in a year or so. So when, when I got my first client and it’s not the typical first client like, like we were talking a couple hundred thousand dollars and spend monthly as your first client. And, and I had to rebuild the entire like three accounts in three different countries. So it just, it took, for the first account, it just took me, it took me a week, like, and I was like, I’ll, we’ll never make money off this.

And like, it’s just takes way too long. So ever since we started, we’ve really been trying to chase a way to make search ads as Easier to manage as a shopping ads. And especially like with, with e commerce businesses, this whole thing with, with promotions that are dynamic, that change from very frequently from one day to another stock going in and out, especially during COVID days, but also just in general we’ve been, we’ve been really trying to find the best way to use a feed to generate all our campaigns.

On the search side and one of the hardest things we ever had with it was a, the the out of the box feed doesn’t work. Like, it’s like every single campaign turns into a product campaign then. So instead of having keywords like Nike running shoes or running shoe or trial running shoes, you, you, you end up with just having keywords like a Nike air soon Pegasus.

It’s very, very specific keywords, which are great to have, but it’s not the entirety of a Google ads account. It’s, it’s probably just 10, 20 percent of it. The real chunk of the money is in these like mid level keywords. And there, and then we run into an issue with if something, if we have a keyword, like a, like, like running shoes, then that’s also there are many different ways to say running shoes.

And there’s variations of that. There’s cheap, there’s trial, there’s marathon and all these things that we can’t seem to get working with just a basic shopping feed. So we needed, we, we, we, we went back from scratch. Dealing with it for a while. And we, we simply said, you know what the answer to is to create a brand new feed.

So we create a brand new feed from scratch that include links to the categories, links to the brands. And more, most cases also includes the various filter values. So you can get these like colors and sizes and all these very niche keywords in. And get them also linked to the right places. And then the tool that we use on a daily basis also allows us to create keyword variations.

So we can go in and say, okay, running shoes is also training shoes, which is also not running shoes to horrible example. It’s not that many ways to say running shoes. But smartphone cover, mobile cover, a protector, et cetera, et cetera, case et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Frederick Vallaeys: So generate synonyms basically of some of the words that you have.

Andrew Lolk: And that’s, and that’s really where the value comes in because if I, when I create a sentiment, send them for a, for a, for mobile cover. then I will match that with all the different brands of mobile covers, all the different phone models. So every single time I have changed cover for case and for protector, then that will automatically get duplicated out on everything.

So if I find another word for, for, for cover, then that will automatically, when I add that little one word to the synonym list, then that will have, then we’ll have trickle down on, Every single campaign, every single actor that we have and add that extra to every single phone model and brand that we have.

And it’s like the most time consuming thing in the world. We, we had, we had a, one of my personal clients that I had since day one we were coming up on black Friday last year, and I was looking at updating all our ads manually the way we’d always done them because they, these hadn’t been moved over to the feed based format fully yet.

And I was sitting a week before black Friday. I was like, I can’t do this. So it was faster for me to set up 120 campaigns using the feed based format and include the new promotions for black Friday, then it would have been to add the new promotions. That’s how fast it can be once you’ve gotten the hang of it.

And these guys were also great. They gave me an amazing feed. So that really helps.

Frederick Vallaeys: I want you to weigh in as well, but one question that you made me think of here is we kind of shifted from shopping campaigns to keyword campaigns and by using your feed in some way to build out dynamically those ads.

The nice thing with keywords is that you can literally say, okay, if somebody looks for a Nike Pegasus running shoe, Like here’s the exact product to go to. Or even if they say like running shoe, you actually get to determine in the ad, what landing page you go to and what products are on that page in shopping.

We don’t have that. Right. I mean, so I was working with a client and. He sold blank t shirts and somebody was looking for blank t shirt, very generic. They would all, Google would always show the orange t shirt and it’s like, I can almost guarantee you that is not going to be your best selling t shirt.

It’s probably the white one or the black one. So, how do you control that stuff? And do you even bother with it? Or is it, you know, is Google good enough? And is that orange one actually the one that should be up there?

Andrew Lolk: So from, from, from our point of view, what I’ve seen a lot is, is it depends a lot on the industry and that’s really where, again, if we go back to smart shopping a little bit, That’s where not having the keyword data really just kicks you in the butt because you can’t, you can’t, you can’t double check these things.

Like the electronics industry is, is just, it’s known for Google being really bad at matching the right cable to the right search. So USBC to USBA cable, they’re matching that search with any USB cable. And, and not having that insight is really just something that in, in certain cases, we’ve spent, I would say north of a hundred hours over a year.

Just going through negative humors. And it’s, it’s like, it’s stupid to do, but it was the only thing we could do to actually make the products match the search terms. And it really, like it, it had a huge impact on, on performance, but it’s not in every market it’s necessary. So it’s, it’s, it’s a tough best practice.

Frederick Vallaeys: I mean, how do you control it? I mean, if it’s shopping campaigns, you obviously can’t control it. If it’s, you know, a DSA campaign with a page feed, then we’ll build the best page feed we can. And then if it’s keywords I know some agencies just build DSA campaigns, but we still think that keywords have value.

Duane Brown: So we’ll build out keyword campaigns based on the data we scrape from shopping campaigns with the NGAP. Ngram script and then just build out either to collection category pages or PDP pages or product description pages and control it as best we can. I mean, all things being equal, Google is pretty smart.

And so if they’re sending people to a collection or category page for like a DSA campaign and it’s converted in that, I’m not going to really complain, but for DSA campaigns. What we try to do anyways is break down each ad group for specific collection or category page, or for client only has, let’s say 20 skews.

And we’ll break down each ad group for each individual product. So we can see how each product actually ranks and does and looks at SQR at the ad group level. But we try to control what we can and what we can’t. We accept that either Google gets it right. And if they don’t, then we’ll turn it off and just not.

Do it

Frederick Vallaeys: an SQR. So search query reports. And that’s kind of the methodology we use inside optimizer. So we’ll basically find if a certain query has triggered ads from multiple ad groups and each ad group could have obviously have a different set of products inside of it, and then we measure which one actually drove the most conversion rate or the most the most value for those conversions.

And the ones that didn’t, we’ll put negative keywords in. So we, we kind of traffic sculpt in that way. It’s a cumbersome process if you don’t have a tool to do it, but that’s how we take back some of that control.

Duane Brown: Yeah, but even we’re seeing, I think, when shopping there, sometimes Traffic Sculpting doesn’t work in the last 12 months.

We’re seeing where brand searches are going into non brand campaigns. We’re seeing Google ignore negative keywords. So we love the idea of Traffic Sculpting, but In another 12 months, if we were doing this call in a year from now, Fred, I think we’d all agree that traffic sculpting is just not a thing anymore.

And it’s not that it’s a waste of time, but it just doesn’t work. And Google doesn’t want us to do it because they want smart shopping to be the one that we all do.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. So they progressively make standard shopping worse. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. It’s like, it’s

Duane Brown: like your iPhone. You bought an iPhone a year ago.

It’s worse than the iPhone you bought two years ago. That was a year old. It just gets worse every year because they want you to spend more money.

Andrew Lolk: I just, I don’t think that the keyword sculpting is gonna like, I agree that the priority levels it’s not finite, like it’s, it’s not the end all of. Of trying to, to sculpt it and like just having the same bid in a high priority and a mid priority campaign.

It’s not enough. Like we, we see it over and over again.

Frederick Vallaeys: I agree on that because it’s like basically things spill over and it’s very hard to understand when it spills over. And so there’s a lot of cross pollination that happens on that. And I also do kind of agree that if you think about, so there’s a three campaign structure, right?

And for people not familiar with it, basically you said high, medium and low priority campaigns. And then the high priority one has the lowest bits. It’s kind of like this inverse thing. And the whole philosophy is I want to bid less money for generic queries and more money for specific queries because the notion is specific queries are closer to the conversion.

And so that makes sense. So back to the shoe example, right? That makes a lot of sense. If you’re Dick’s sporting goods, you’re just reselling these shoes. You don’t care about building brain for Adidas and Nike and Under Armour. You just want to get the sale of that shoe. But if you’re the brand, you know, you got to own that upper funnel because if you’re not telling people, you just came out with a new running shoe, then people aren’t going to know, and they’re going to go and do that specific search for your competitor.

So there, I agree that that may actually be overkill and a lot of work. I do hope that my negative keywords will be respected still. We’ll see. Right.

Andrew Lolk: I see it more of a priority. Respecting the priority levels on the campaigns, the negatives, negatives, we’ve seen more or less work but only really like with priorities are getting, they get overrided by the bid, which is turns into the ad rank on a product level.

Really just

Frederick Vallaeys: Hey, let’s shift topics here a bit. So directly consumer, right? So, so kind of what I was just talking about, right? Are you Adidas trying to sell shoes directly to the consumer or are the retailer selling Adidas and Nike shoes? So DTC is especially important now that many stores are closed.

I mean, I think it was you who shared an article from Levi’s going more DTC versus through a couple of things that are not Google. So let’s talk about. Other things besides google for a second I mean,

Duane Brown: I love google. I think we all love google. They’ve they’ve paid me a salary effectively for the last 12 years Even if i’m not an employee but I think what we sometimes forget in the world is people just get so focused on google And there’s so much other opportunity out there.

You know, this article talks about levi’s doing a test with tiktok If you don’t know what tiktok is, that’s totally cool. It’s a new app It’s very big with like influencers and people who are content creators. You know, the rock is on it. Will Smith is on it. People you will know familiar with because they’re famous.

Andrew Lolk: Yeah, yeah. A lot of things, people are on it. But they now have a shop is

Frederick Vallaeys: on it too, right?

Duane Brown: Probably. There’s lots of people on it. I mean, like I know our prime minister was on it. Our opposition’s on it. Pretty much anyone who’s famous or not famous is on TikTok. I was just

Frederick Vallaeys: putting you in the category of famous people, and I said Duane Brown is on it, so.

Duane Brown: Yeah, yeah, I am. I am on it. I joined last year because I’m like, I feel like this thing is going to blow up, and so I should like understand how it works. But they have shopping ads now, right? You know, Snap ads has shopping ads, you know, these smaller plays that have I know Snap has 229 million users.

TikTok doesn’t give away the number of users they have, but I think it’s somewhere around that huge. 250 million users within obviously the US. We’re not talking globally because tick tocks on by by dance, which they have apps around the world, including India and in parts of Asia. But I think we need to always think about like, okay, we’re making shopping work on Google, where else can we go, you know, does it make sense to go to snap because snap isn’t just for people under 18.

There’s a good. 15, I would say 20 percent of people who are above the age of 25 and have disposable income. We’ve had clients sell products with an AOV of a hundred bucks, 150 bucks. So easily there’s money there. TikTok obviously only launched it a couple of months ago with shopping, but that’s a potential opportunity, especially if you’re a brand with content.

So IE, if I signed your client or brand tomorrow, you could give me a lack of A folder full of like images and video. If you’ve got a folder like that, TikTok might make sense because it’s a heavily video platform Pinterest might make sense if you’re heavy into parents and things of that nature. So we need to like look beyond Google and look at the smaller platforms.

Microsoft, even though I think Microsoft shopping is it’s not a dumpster fire, but it’s not great. Like it’s not a dumpster fire, but it’s not great is how I’m going to word it. And then even like Facebook has shopping effectively. Well, if you think of dynamic product ads within shopping. But they’re just not, you know, search oriented.

Frederick Vallaeys: Andrew, what’s your favorite go to after Google?

Andrew Lolk: So I see that we it depends if you’re a retailer, a lot of, a lot of different products, we’re Facebook, Facebook, but it also depends on what country you’re in. You don’t get very far in the U S anymore with with a dynamic product that’s on Facebook.

It’s just a creative. It’s not good enough anymore. Just to have a static product image, maybe you are fancy and put in an overlay. But it’s just, it’s just not good enough anymore. You can’t, like, you can’t compete with the direct to consumer brands that have created a hundred thousand dollar video that they’ve tested up and down the wazoo to try to figure out how does, how do we drive the best driving?

And then I come over here with my 5, 000 products and I pushed it all into a Facebook and I, Can’t bid higher for one product over the other. If I don’t create products, that’s like the value of having that push into faith when you have a lot of different products is really tough. So it’s more if you’re a direct to consumer then, then.

We in certain categories own Google and then it’s really important to start owning other channels because you can push certain things much further than you can Google when you’re not at the demand when you can create demand instead of just sitting and waiting for somebody to search for something.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. Demand generation.

Andrew Lolk: Yeah.

Frederick Vallaeys: Brain blast. And so the quote that I’ve got up here, Duane actually comes from one of your blog posts, but. Speaking to what Andrew was saying, right? How do you compete with a 100, 000 finely tuned ad from the big corporation? And I think you found that on Snap, just speaking directly to the camera, in many cases drives the same ad awareness.

Duane Brown: Yeah, I mean, it does. Like people, especially the last 60 days with the pandemic, people don’t care if ads are as, You know, I call them shiny, you know, as high production value. So having an ad that you’re speaking to the camera, or you literally filmed it in your backyard because your partner held the camera for you while you talked about the latest product you just got from the warehouse.

So you don’t always need a high production value ad. What you need to do is have the right ad shown to the right person at the right time, which is not easy to do. You know, I think there’s still tons of opportunity from our experience on Facebook, even if you have 5, 000 SKUs, but what we do on Facebook is we’d only pick the SKUs that have a higher average order value or higher price point, because if you pick SKUs that have a higher price point and or higher average order value, and you only show those in your Facebook catalog and in your feed, nine times out of 10, That feed will attract people who spend more money, thus netting you more revenue and getting you a better return on ad spend.

Too many people just put their whole feed in the Facebook catalog and that just doesn’t work anymore. And that’s the problem with most retailers, third party sellers who are not TTC brands. There’s tons of money out there. I think you just got to. Reoptimize how you think about your Facebook catalog feed.

And the same applies for snap. Like snap has an availability attribute called pre order. So if you’re going to launch a new product, snap could be a great platform to do it on because you can start to take pre orders through your shopping feed on snap. And that’s something you can’t do on Google and you can’t do on Facebook because that attribute doesn’t exist.

There’s tons of opportunity on Google but there’s tons of opportunity beyond Google as well, and you just got to want to go after it.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And think of yourselves as a consumer, right? I mean. When I need something, I go to actually target more than Amazon. Now I go to target and I go to Amazon, then I go to Google to search for that thing.

But I mean, the amount of stuff that I buy just after being on Instagram or Facebook that I didn’t even know I needed. It’s a, it’s pretty amazing, right? It is. Yeah. I mean, even this is not shopping per se, but we find a lot of brands on Instagram don’t do Instagram story poll ads, which it’s great to do a Organic story poll ad, but to do one as like an ad ad that you pay for and put money behind the return on ad spend on that is on bloody fire.

Duane Brown: It’s like just going out back, putting gasoline on a product, lighting it on fire, and then making more money out of that. It’s just, ah, it’s amazing. So if you’re not doing Instagram story poll ads right now for your DTC brand, your e commerce brand, your client, whoever it is that you run ads for, you’re missing out on tons of money because to take that Instagram story poll ad, direct it to your Instagram users.

People who like your Facebook page or cold audiences. You can just print money, but there’s no tomorrow. It’s the best placement within Facebook right now. Okay. And if you don’t know what that is there’s Duane’s contact info. So hit him up and he’ll help you out.

Or, or talk to me on Twitter as well.

It’s just Duane Brown on Twitter. And we’ll talk about it. I love Instagram story, poll ads. I told a brand about it yesterday and their eyes lit up. Like I told him, I’m going to give them a million dollars. Cause they’re like, damn. We want to hire him. And I’m like, yes, you do. No pay me.

Andrew Lolk: Way to set expectations, man.

It’s expectations. Duane.

Duane Brown: It’s okay. I want to set expectations high. I want them to make money. They got lots of competitors. If you want to be average, go to one of those other agencies that will phone in the work. You want to be amazing. Come to me, come to you, Andrew, talk to Fred and his team. But if you want to be like average, just go to one of those agencies that like the claim to fame is I used to work at Facebook.

Everybody used to work at Facebook. That doesn’t mean anything in 2020 anymore.

Frederick Vallaeys: Hey, so anyone in the audience, do you guys have favorites? New things that are not Google new ways to run your ads. So I put those into chat and you know, we got a smiley face. I think people are liking what we’re saying here, but if you have a favorite yourself, put it up there and we’ll talk about it.

But yeah, what I’d load it up here as kind of a next topic was a post that Andrew did. So Duane, you were not starting to talk about spending money in the wrong places Andrew, you feel very strongly that ROAS may not be a smart metric. I agree with you, but let’s hear it from you.

Andrew Lolk: One of the coolest things that we’ve done in a long time.

And we do a lot of cool things. But one of the coolest things we’ve, we’ve done is, is we’ve worked with a couple of retailers that have, have tracked their profit from each transaction instead of the revenue. So in, in like in distant. Like practically from a practical perspective, it’s just, instead of sending in the entire revenue from a transaction, you send in the profit that come came from that transaction.

When when you have a sale in AdWords, Google ads and, and that just, that enables you to be a lot more dynamic in the way that you work with your with with your bidding, because we, we all like, we all sit with clients or, or in house and we try to set what should our, our best. target rows B and when it all, it all comes from like, well, we should, we have this margin on our products, so we should have this this, this target rows.

Some then started working on it on a category level and say, okay, some of these categories actually. Have a higher margin than others. And then we, we try to like work from there, but it’s just, it misses the point completely because some brands have high margins, some brands have low margins. If we’re running a sale, then our margin is severely cut down.

We, we had a case during, during COVID where a category of ours actually started having issues with getting enough inventory. And we declined an increased prices by 25 percent and it was a It was a category we had really had challenges with for a long time. And all of a sudden we started making a profit on them.

And we’re like, how did that happen? It was basically because the profit level was so low. The margin before we increased price, it was so low that we couldn’t compete. Like every time we try to, every time we got a sale in Google shopping, we, we didn’t get enough profit out of it. So we simply couldn’t compete when the increased prices and we got more profit.

All of a sudden we could own shopping because it’s still converted decently. And we’ve had similar cases where we’ve, we’ve changed over to target to tracking profit in our Google ads instead of just regular revenue and roast. And we’ve simply just, we’ve seen the numbers where the profit is I kid you not, it’s doubled or 80 or 50 percent increases.

And when we look in analytics and look at the revenue and target ROAS, then it’s set zero, nothing has changed. So it all comes from changing what products we’re actually pushing. Because we, we can see that, okay. These products, we have a good margin on they’re selling well, great. Let’s push these better and we get a better profit in instead of just selling all of these products that seem to have a decent return on ad spend. But that actually in the end is just empty revenue, just going through the stream. And, and one of those things is obviously that we can start working on it from a, from a profit perspective.

Frederick Vallaeys: And it looks like you might be using custom labels and supplemental feeds to kind of feed that into the system.

Andrew Lolk: Yeah, actually, actually the way to the, the way that we do it is we completely bypassed the custom label part. So we we use a, a SAS software out of Denmark that taps into your entire that taps into the entire, that taps into, to every single, the way that the system was intended to work initially.

Okay. Was there supposed to give you a live dashboard or for profit in your e commerce store? So the founder ran a bunch of facebook ads for a long time and then all of a sudden he found out that He was actually unprofitable. So the the couple hundred thousand he’d spent on facebook Actually had him a net loss instead of a net profit and he has to shut down his business He was like I can’t be the only e commerce guy that has had this issue So you created this the software where you can live, see what your profit is on a daily basis.

And he then expanded upon that into a different marketing channel. So with Facebook, with Google ads, now get the exact profit sent in there. So it’s, it’s really just, it’s. I first heard about tracking profit instead of Google, instead of revenue, actually at a Google event four years ago.

And I remember I pulled up my hand with the, with the nice guy that was super smart. I was saying some super smart things. And I said, so This all sounds super cool, but how do you actually track the profit? And it was like, well, that’s, you have to do it enterprise level. And I was like, okay, we’re out.

Frederick Vallaeys: That’s why you need to hire an agency or a tool because if you just want to do

Andrew Lolk: it. They wouldn’t say that today, but what did we say? It was counting. It’s the reality though. Right. But yeah, it’s like, like using profit, basically tracking the profit enables you to have like your optimal life. ideal ROAS for every single transaction.

It’s it’s that dynamic. So, so think of it that way. And it’s just, it’s super great. The immediate, like the middle, the middle way to that is using your product margin in the labels and shopping. But the problem with that is, is like, Going back to the example that you had before is that if somebody clicks on a product in Google Shopping, it might not be what they’re buying.

We’ve seen a lot of examples of where a client has asked, I have written an email after a great, a great sale and a great sale. They write in an email and say, Hey, awesome work. And we’re like, wait, what? It didn’t like, we didn’t sell the products you wanted. And they’re like, no, yes, we did. And we’re like, well, that’s great.

It’s not our fault. They’re like, well, 90 percent of our traffic is shopping. Andrews, or it can’t be anything else. All right. Not 90%, but you get the drift. And then when we started looking in, in, in lytics, we see, well, yes, they actually did buy, it just wasn’t after clicking the products that we thought we wanted to sell.

So that’s pretty cool. Yeah, that is really cool. I mean, you also think of some strategies. How do you get them in on the cheap products without a lot of competition, cheap CPCs and then actually have a kickoff landing page that says, well, here’s this thing, but you don’t really want that. You want this one.

Exactly. And if if, if anybody’s curious what, what tool I’m talking about, then it’s, it’s the tool is called profitmetrics. io. They’re out of Denmark, but, but running the, they have a deaf supporter yeah, they have English support as well. So a huge, huge I I’m a huge fan. I feel it’s a, it’s a game changer.

Frederick Vallaeys: Nice. Thanks for sharing that. Duane profits are good, right?

Duane Brown: Yeah. I mean, I like profits. I like making money. I think we all do. I think of things a little bit differently than Andrew. I agree that track and profit is a great thing. But we try to look at things from more of a directional standpoint.

So what we track for clients is like top line revenue growth. We know if clients have only been running as an example, only been running Facebook the last four years, and we know what their revenue is month on month. We know what their ad spend is. We know how much. The increase or decrease in Facebook ad spend has increased or decreased their overall store revenue as a whole.

And then we come on the scene and we launch on YouTube, we launch Google or, or whatever the ad platform is. If we start to see an increase in our top line store revenue, even if we can’t track everything a hundred percent, one would have to make the educated guess of what we’re doing on Google is helping drive that increase in revenue for the top line store.

So that’s kind of how we look at things. So. With clients, especially when you run ads on things like TikTok, which doesn’t have perfect tracking yet, or you do things like YouTube, where the intent isn’t always to get someone to click on the video right then and there, but it does drive people to search for your brand.

I think looking at directionally at revenue growth is just as effective as trying to track everything down to one skew and the profit margin. Yeah, that makes sense. I wanted to say, I love that if there’s any direction that I could take Savvian that I would like to do more of, it’s that, like, like, our, our whole, the entire, like, wording on our website and everything is very focused on profit and skill and scaling profits and all that, but it completely misses the point on what you just said, which I completely agree in.

Andrew Lolk: Like, if there’s any way that we’re starting to take savvy and start working more in, and it’s, it’s those intangibles because they’re so valuable, like we all know it, all three of us run content and there’s not one of us that can point to, yes, he read that blog post and he did that except for, I have one client that I know for a fact.

Download a white paper I did and then signed up with me eight years ago and almost ever since. But that’s one of the only things I can say, Hey, content, it works, but we all do it. So it’s the same thing. I really feel there’s a huge intangible aspect of marketing that, that many people are not utilizing well enough.

Frederick Vallaeys: And part of that is the right attribution model, right? So understanding that you’ve got to have a big top of the funnel to get sales down at the bottom of the funnel. What do you guys do as far as attribution models that you like for your clients or, or any tools that you might even be using Andrew? Oh, like that.

Andrew Lolk: It’s really close to that. Like, it’s, it’s just like, you can kind of get into some of the, some of the, all of the aspects, but I think we’re really more towards Duane in that aspect as well as that. It’s just anything you do will be wrong. So, so to make things a little bit easier, we try to just go with each channels, individual tracking, and then we try to work that together into a holistic target somewhere.

But really, if you try to do Facebook advertising without using the Facebook pixel and only using the Google analytics data, it’s then, then you can’t really use that for anything. So it’s like trying to say, okay, we’re working with each channel to try to maximize how that reports, but being very aware of how the overlap is and you still have an overall marketing spend for an overall revenue that you need to hit.

It’s the way that we look at attribution because it’s like, I, it was one, right after we try to fake right after we fix the feed based keyword campaigns in Google. That was my big push internally with us. And I just, after nine months, I gave up, couldn’t find anything that was affordable and good enough that we could roll out across the board.

Frederick Vallaeys: All right. So we’re coming towards the end here. So I wanted to give each of you a moment to cover something that you think is important, or tell us a bit more about your company and where you might be able to help some of the people watching. So Duane, why don’t we start with you?

Duane Brown: Yeah, I mean, agencies called takes a risk.

Most of our clients are American. We do have some Canadian clients. And we don’t necessarily have a sweet spot. We have some clients that have like 100 skews. We have clients that have thousands of skews. We more want clients who Want to zig versus zag clients. You want to do things beyond just doing Facebook or just doing Google.

We don’t think you should put all your eggs in one basket. And so if you’re not happy with your current service, you want that sort of, we call it that high touch service where like we care about your business as much as you do then shoot me an email, reach out to me on Twitter and let’s chat and see if we can help.

We don’t. Take on everyone. We can help because we want people who are super nice people who have an opinion, people who trust our opinion outside of paid. We sometimes will consult with clients about things about email marketing or ways to make their website better from CR perspective. Or one client had a sale from Mother’s Day.

We told him, send an email on Sunday because everyone forgets what day of the week it is. And on that day, they made 50 percent more revenue than they did on the Friday when they launched the site. sale and we’re talking about revenue in the five figures here. So this is not like two or 3, 000. We’re talking about tens of thousands of dollars more by sending out one email that’s not even paid related.

So that’s who we are. Take some risks. We care about you as much as you do. Cause if you make money, we make money and everybody’s happy.

Frederick Vallaeys: That’s right. Andrew, what about you?

Andrew Lolk: I don’t know how I can, I don’t have a heart and compete with what Duane just said. So I’ll just I’ll, I’ll just say the opposite.

So we, we. We really work well with the, with retailers that have more than 5, 000 products and really are looking to, to scale their existing program. We’re, we’re less focused on taking e commerce stores from the ground up. We’re more that middle scale when you file a managed in house, or if the agency that you started out with is not really having really scaled that much lately.

Then then we’re typically getting the ones that get taken in and I start working on it from that and scale it to the next level. And we only hire the best of the best that then can work within our framework. So what we do is seeing that everything is, is focused on scale. We we put a performance guarantee or a performance clause because they can’t, can’t guarantee anything.

So we put a performance clause in all our work. So if we don’t hit the targets that we’ve agreed upon, typically within a ROAS or profit level. Then our fee will, it will decrease by, by 50%. That just, it ensures that we have to pick the right clients and that we can work with. So we really do a lot of work on the retail side, a lot of products, a lot of Google shopping, very heavily skewed towards Google ads.

So so going directly opposite of of doing here.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And your affiliate days. Pay for performance, right? So taking some rest.

Andrew Lolk: I like, I, I, I love the, I love to pay for performance part so it’s it’s it’s, it’s lovely. It puts a lot of pressure on selecting the right clients because you will always have track days where tracking doesn’t work and all these things, which are issues from performance based compensation scheme is really, really hard to work with.

But if you choose the right ones, we all know what’s fair. We all know what to do.

Frederick Vallaeys: Well, gentlemen, thank you for joining us today for sharing some of your wisdom. We’re going to be putting this up in a blog post and a podcast. Thank you everyone for watching. I will be back next week with another episode of PPC.

Duane Brown: Bye everyone. Bye.