Q4 Shopping & e-Commerce

Episode Description

Google might be the biggest search engine by volume, but Bing still registers billions of searches.

Microsoft Ads is one of the more underrated ad platforms. With more control for advertisers and a healthy user base to advertise to, it can be a powerful tool in the right advertiser’s hands. With the holiday shopping season around the bend, find out more about how to use Microsoft Ads in Q4 2020.

This panel covers:

• Microsoft’s expectations for e-commerce in Q4 2020
• Best practices and tips to win big this holiday season
• How leading agencies can prepare to help clients crush sales

Episode Takeaways

Microsoft’s Expectations for E-commerce in Q4 2020

• Microsoft forecasts significant e-commerce growth during the Q4 holiday shopping season.
• They highlight how COVID-19 has accelerated the shift to online shopping, making the e-commerce sector more critical than ever.
• Microsoft suggests that retailers prepare for higher than usual online traffic and sales.

Best Practices and Tips to Win Big This Holiday Season

• Experts emphasize the importance of preparing e-commerce platforms for increased traffic and ensuring that the supply chain can handle an uptick in orders.
• Strategies include optimizing website performance, ensuring inventory is well-stocked, and using targeted advertising to reach potential customers effectively.
• It’s recommended to start marketing campaigns early to capture consumer interest ahead of the peak season.

How Leading Agencies Can Prepare to Help Clients Crush Sales

• Agencies should focus on data-driven strategies to target consumers effectively, using insights from past holiday seasons to forecast trends.
• There’s a strong emphasis on using advanced analytics and machine learning tools to optimize campaigns and improve targeting.
• Agencies are advised to collaborate closely with clients to understand their specific needs and tailor strategies accordingly to maximize ROI.

Episode Transcript

Frederick Vallaeys: Hello and welcome to another episode of PPC Town Hall. My name is Fred Vallaeys. I’m your host. I’m also the co founder and CEO of Optmyzr. So we’ve been off for about two weeks. I had a chance to finally get out of the house. I took a road trip down to Santa Barbara. I live in California. And that was really refreshing, but really happy to be back now towards the end of Q3 here, because we’re almost at Q4 and we all know Q4 is a huge holiday shopping season.

So we wanted to come back with another episode. And tell you a few of the things that you can do to get ready for that big holiday shopping season. So we’ve done one of these sessions with Google, right? But Google is not the only game in town. So today we decided to bring in Microsoft and see what Microsoft is forecasting as far as Q4 holiday shopping trends.

And we also have another great guest. The first timer to PPC Town Hall. His name is Anders. And he does a lot of research about the industry. He’s got research reports on Amazon about trends in artificial intelligence. So I think it’s going to make for a really lively conversation between those two panelists.

So I’m going to bring them in right now. I’m going to bring back the person who’s been with us before. So Purna, welcome back. Purna from Microsoft, of course. So most people know who you are, but tell us where you’re calling us from, whether it’s Smoky outside of where you live and what you’ve been up to these days.

Purna Virji: Awesome. Well, thanks for having me back, Fred. It’s such a pleasure. So I’m Purna and I sit on our Learning and Engagement team at Microsoft Advertising. I am on the East Coast, so thankfully I am clear skies, chilly fall weather already, and all my thoughts and hearts to the West Coast. It is horrible to see what’s going on there.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, it’s pretty bad. I hear that All the way on the East Coast, though, you are seeing some of the smoke that we’re generating here on the West Coast. You haven’t seen

Purna Virji: it? It has been very cloudy. And I must say, though, that my outdoor time has been limited. But it’s holiday season. I’m on my computer all day.

Like my little, I’m in my cave.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. And maybe when you live in a cloudier climate, you can’t really tell the difference between when it’s smoke or clouds, right?

Purna Virji: Yeah.

Frederick Vallaeys: All right. So the other guest we have welcome to the show is honors your first timer on PPC Town Hall. Where are you calling us from?

Anders Hjorth: So I’m calling from Paris in France. So it is six o’clock in the afternoon. We have summer has come back. I don’t know. Maybe maybe people were staying too much in house because they were afraid of going outside because of the virus. But at least we know we have beautiful sunshine, actually a little bit too hot for my for my preference.

I am Danish. So I come from the north of Europe and we’re used to sort of more lower temperatures and more wind and things like that. So

Frederick Vallaeys: yeah. So interesting fact about Denmark. I’ve been there a couple of times myself and the main square in Copenhagen, they have a thermometer in the main square and I think the temperature only goes up to about 35 degrees Celsius.

Anders Hjorth: I think the temperature historically has never been above 30 something. I don’t, I mean, maybe I think you’re, you’re in Fahrenheit most of the time, but, but 30 is quite, it’s quite hot. It’s quite, it’s what we have in France in summer. And I think in Denmark it’s never been so high, but it’s increasing actually Denmark is becoming a new holiday destination because of global warming.

Scary fact there. So yeah. No, it’s just half a joke.

Frederick Vallaeys: And I mean, I mean, and that’s very interesting. I think that’s a little bit the topic here for today. Right? So we’re all quite used to the holiday shopping season and seeing big increases in consumer shopping that time of year. But obviously this is a different year and there’s a couple of factors in place.

So let’s talk about those first. That may be honors. You can lead us off with what you’ve seen in terms of covid related changes.

Anders Hjorth: Yeah. So it’s been a crazy, it’s been crazy times. And I, I think, I think you should show you should share that. That’s that slide of mine. Which is not which is not, which is not Microsoft, which is Amazon.

Can you see the screen?

Frederick Vallaeys: I can see the screen.

Anders Hjorth: So you’ve got the growth of e commerce in Amazon which I’m showing here, I’m showing the various so this just came, that comes out of the the Amazon quarterly reports. So you can actually pull out these these various sectors they have.

And if you look at the top one was e commerce is it’s third party sales and it’s it’s their own sales and you’ve got, you can see Christmas, I put Christmas is really Q4, isn’t it? So every year. You have this spike. It’s a pattern. It’s a pattern every year. It’s Christmas. And then suddenly in 2020, it’s Christmas in May.

So, so looking at the Data you’re like, well, this is the trend for q4. Did

Frederick Vallaeys: I just hear you say it’s christmas in may?

Anders Hjorth: It’s christmas in may. Yeah, it was christmas in may, wasn’t it? Because because of all the shopping that you know, if you look at this the beta you’re going to see the kind of trend of q4 which you which you suddenly had in q2

Frederick Vallaeys: now you guys heard on like how much has e commerce grown compared to what it was expected to grow before covet

Anders Hjorth: I don’t have any figures in mind, but it’s it’s like we’ve we’ve accelerated several years of e commerce penetration.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. So that’s what we’re hearing here as well. And Purna, I don’t know if you have any insight from Microsoft on that, but we hear that it’s we’re two years ahead of where we were supposed to be. At this point.

Purna Virji: Absolutely. Technology has just had to evolve so much quicker than it would have otherwise.

And it’s been really interesting to see how traditionally non. Online retailers had to adapt to this online world. Yeah, it’s grown tremendously.

Anders Hjorth: And if I can show a couple of screens more, this is what, so this is my co author on the last report about Amazon. And this is what he saw during lockdown.

You’ve got the toilet paper you’ve got coffee cleaning products, and this was Pepsi max. And then he grabbed another screenshot when it was finished. It was all back to normal, but anyway, so basically the point that I wanted to make is that Consumer consumer behavior has necessarily changed.

You don’t book a flight two weeks or three weeks ahead. So when when airlines are doing yield management and saying, shall we Do this fight or not? Well, they if they cancel the flight, then maybe it’s because they have misinterpreted user behavior. Users will book the planes later because they don’t know if they’re allowed to fight.

So So those are some of the challenges I that I that I see out there. I mean, if we’ve already had, you know, Q four in Q two, then what’s going to happen? So we’ve got again, if you know, if I look at look at it from the Amazon angle that Yeah. Prime day coming up. It hasn’t been fully announced. Well, they haven’t announced at the date at which it will be

Frederick Vallaeys: technically canceled, but I guess it just postponed.

Anders Hjorth: Well, I I’m hearing October and yeah. Not sure if it’s going to happen here in France, they’ve, they, we don’t have black Friday or actually. X rider is not a. European phenomenon, but it’s, it’s penetrated Europe. And so it’s, it’s picked up over the past five, six, seven years to become something.

So there’s the commercial event of, of Black Friday in Europe as well, even though we don’t have Thanksgiving. But now the here in France, where I’m sitting, I just noticed they, they’re doing something called French dates, which is like the French Black Friday, and they do it every day. And September I see retailers that are now saying we don’t do sales anymore. So it’s very

Frederick Vallaeys: interesting too, because let’s talk about that for a second. The climate in Europe is that you’re not allowed in many countries to have whatever sale, whenever you want.

Anders Hjorth: Oh yeah, that’s right. That’s been legislation about that. And it’s also opened up. So this is one of the reasons why you have all these private, you know, VP the the private sales networks where you basically sign up to get a specific discount on, on Bitstock.

So the sales. The dates at which you could do sales have regulated in most countries. And sometimes they’re, you know, they’re changed or expanded or, or, or or reduced. Now, something like Prime Day doesn’t fall under that. And something like a private sale doesn’t fall under that. And a sales event, commercial event doesn’t necessarily fall under that legislation.

So yeah, maybe that’s a big difference with the U. S.

Frederick Vallaeys: You always got your loopholes in the. Smart marketers are taking advantage of those.

Anders Hjorth: Absolutely.

Frederick Vallaeys: Absolutely. Bruno, what are, what are you guys seeing in terms of you know, sort of the uncertainty and Anders is talking about there’s uncertainty when you’re buying airline tickets.

So you don’t know what, what’s going to happen. But I think when it comes to Q4 and I mean, Christmas is basically a global phenomenon at this point in different stages of commercialness, right? But we all know we’re going to be giving gifts at some level. Are we going to be giving more or less?

Purna Virji: Well, pretty much the same amount. Can I share my screen, Fred, and I can walk through, cause I think what we’re seeing this year is that there’s three proverbial elephants in the room. Like we’ve got a, the impact to the economy. been happening. We have still the COVID 19 concerns. And then in the U. S., we also have a really big election coming up and that falls right in the middle of holiday season.

So I wanted to just quickly share some of the key things that hit up each of these areas. So if we started with the economy and yes, you know, the signs that possibly this could be a recession or people are talking about a recession, what does it mean? And to answer your question, I mean, even if we look even if we look at the past recessions that have happened, holiday sales tend to still be strong.

Like people still want to care for their loved ones, for their close family, for their friends, they will still. Prioritize spending money for gifts on there. So yes, we’ve already seen retail Go up, and I don’t think that this Recession period is going to have that much impact at all. People will still spend And search is going to be a big place that they will use to go ahead and find some of these gifts while Retailers, we’ve seen them cut budgets in some of the other channels search has been the smallest hit Makes sense.

People are home more. There’s looking for stuff online. A lot more search just happens to be the first place people look. Overall retail has yet e commerce has done incredibly well with the, with physical locations being restricted more and more people who traditionally wouldn’t have even considered going.

Online for things they have done that a lot more, you know cpg for example might be something that We find people will just continue to keep buying online because it is so much more convenient now also if we think about our top two categories, they tend to be really consistent offline and online So if we think about food and beverage, I mean most people are doing food delivery here as well as health and personal care All right

Frederick Vallaeys: That includes Your uber eats and postmates as well as like grocery deliveries, I suppose

Purna Virji: Exactly.

It includes all of that Then if we quickly talk through covid, I’m sorry. I think

Frederick Vallaeys: honors wanted to come in with it. Yeah.

Purna Virji: No, please go ahead

Anders Hjorth: Yeah, yeah. No, I was just because I I looked when I looked into the amazon dates. I also looked into Microsoft and google and and and the big thing that I saw there was something we’ve never seen before was google actually The They actually had a negative growth.

In Q2 of 2020 compared to Q2 of 2019. And according to, to the, to the, to the, all the stats that I’ve been looking at, this is the first time ever that Google doesn’t grow. Yeah. I mean, that never happened when you were there. Fred did it. Now you shouldn’t have left. Of course . I

Purna Virji: know.

Anders Hjorth: And it, and it feels so, so when I, so, and then when you see there’s the search terms report that’s being reduced and there’s.

Rumors of negative key was being reduced. And what I call the salami method methods of slicing away more and more information to keep the data homogeneous and dense so that you can apply a I

Frederick Vallaeys: let’s back up on that for a second.

Anders Hjorth: But I’m just I feel that they may be panicking.

Frederick Vallaeys: No, I love where you’re going with this because I think we want to talk about this I wasn’t sure about talking when we have microsoft in the room.

Right, but but the whole google thing So what you’re talking about is the fact that search terms have been removed from a lot of the reports And not all of them right but google is just becoming more stringent about what is included So it’s a pretty big deal. Most of you have probably heard about it who are watching us today but there’s been a lot of conspiracy theories.

Why is Google doing this? Is it really for the reason of privacy like Google has laid out in the announcements? Or is there something else going on? And is it like you said, connected to the fact that for the first time ever to have a decline in in, in revenue growth for for the ads platform?

Anders Hjorth: I would support the conspiracy theory, wouldn’t it?

And I’m not sure about that. But I basically I wanted to say to partner that when you say that search is strong you know, there’s been shift from offline to online, but search advertising and it’s, you know, because of all the airlines suddenly stopped advertising, actually Amazon pulled out of the auctions as well.

I think didn’t spend anything in Google and anything. And I suppose I didn’t spend, I mean, anything in Microsoft either. So there’s, there’s, there’s been a lot of movements there,

Frederick Vallaeys: right? And I would argue, I mean, so like. From Optmyzrs perspective, we did see a negative blip at the beginning of March when sort of it hit the fan.

And it was basically a lot of people saying, listen, we don’t know what’s going to happen. And like, to your point with the airline industry, if you don’t know, if you’re going to be able to fly, if you’re not know if people are going to have money to buy your things, maybe your instant reaction is let’s preserve cash.

In any place that we can and let’s stop spending it. But then the moment that you see that, Oh, actually maybe this is a positive for my particular vertical. Like part of a showing, like if you’re selling food delivery, fantastic. I mean, it’s like, there’s been no better time than right now. Right. And so a lot of that has come back.

So I wonder to what degree that negative revenue from Google was a one time blip. And again, granted some of their biggest advertisers travel, they’re still suffering really, really badly, but a lot of it is being made up by. Online learning. Good luck buying a Chromebook. They’re all sold out because that’s what schools want to use, right?

So there’s these huge categories that have completely taken off at levels that nobody expected.

Anders Hjorth: But I’m sorry, I interrupted Purna in the middle of this. Let’s hear what Purna thinks. No, no, sorry,

Purna Virji: Anders. Everything you say is very fascinating. So please chime in any time. But no, it ties back to exactly what you were saying.

Like, because of COVID, we’ve seen different impact to the behavior and we are predicting like double digit growth to online sales in this holiday period, fewer people. Are wanting to go out to the stores or are even able to go out to the stores themselves And so a lot of the shopping is expected to happen Online once again and people are also going to begin to start shopping earlier And because of covid something that’s never happened before has been this strain to the shipping System like if we think about it already The supply chain has already been so strained because people are already ordering so much more and the fact that holiday volume again is going to be expected to hit on online and having things shipped rather than For example, if families can’t get together this, you know, Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, any time during the holiday season, they’re shipping gifts directly to the recipient versus to themselves to a given person.

And this is going to have some impact too, because if we think about like FedEx, UPS, USPS, they’ve already talked about tacking on some surcharge fees for this as well.

Frederick Vallaeys: And I also, I mean, I’m the optimist here. Maybe. optimists, but maybe I’m more of an optimist and the others, but it’s like, I’m getting a little sick of hearing businesses say, Oh, it’s because of COVID it’s because of COVID like any, anything that they don’t want to do.

COVID has become the crutch of like, Oh, it’s because of COVID. And I think that is happening to some degree. And I think businesses do need to evaluate sort of that behavior that’s happening. And obviously COVID is a huge impact, right? I mean, so you can have fewer people in this space. But I’m also feeling like there’s that crutch that it’s becoming.

If they just don’t want to do something for a customer in the past, they would have had like the customer support rep get on the call, try to explain why, why they couldn’t do X, Y, and Z. And now it’s it’s just that easy go to so I think that does raise potentially some opportunities, right? So if as a business you’re actually Able to innovate, maybe use technology.

And now Anders, I’m looking to you to talk more about that, but how do you use technology to be more efficient, to like fix some of these problems that you’re seeing so that COVID doesn’t have to become negative in your business, but actually becomes the opportunity. And we’re seeing that with some businesses.

Anders Hjorth: Yeah, I, I think, you know, to, to, to get back in the game I think people are People have been sort of shaken. They’re not. They’re uncertain about the world around them. They so basically, if you’re if you’re a brand and you’ve got clients, I think the first thing a lot of brands actually just shut down and didn’t say anything.

Well, we’ll wait and see what happens, right? Other brands took the opportunity, like you just said, and said, Okay, this is weird. This is strange. Let’s talk about it. Let’s communicate while, you know, while this is going on. So, so that’s one approach. And I think a lot of brands some brands would have emerged during this, this period, I’ve seen some stats on, on e commerce categories where you suddenly got people pulling out of the auction and other people totally taking over a category on, on, on on the spend side, which is really interesting to see the kinds of shifts really quickly happening.

So I think if you’re a brand today and you weren’t. There and you weren’t communicating and taking that opportunity. I think you just need to start as honest that you just start really early and start saying, Hey, I’m still here. I, I, you know, I’m still alive. I, we didn’t, we, no, we haven’t shut down.

Exactly. You make

Frederick Vallaeys: the shift online, right? I mean, so if you were a brick and mortar store and you can’t have people coming to your store anymore, I mean, make that shift online and maybe you weren’t planning to do it for a couple of years, but then you get online and all of a sudden you’re like, Oh my God, like this thing that I’ve been missing, it’s huge, right?

It can double, triple my business. And so it’s actually a huge opportunity. And it’s again, that shift where we’re two years ahead of where we were supposed to be in terms of the consumers buying, like as a business, you need to jump on that bandwagon too. And we’re actually seeing it in quite large numbers small stores setting up Shopify shops for the first time.

And maybe sidetracking here now a little bit into feed management, right? So say that you’re a small store, you’ve set up your feed for the first time, or you set up Shopify. How do you get onto Microsoft ads? Because I heard that Microsoft ads now has free listings as well on the, on the search results pages.

Purna Virji: That is correct. I want to quickly chime in to one point. You said for physical locations now looking online. I think this is given these stores just a huge competitive advantage now, especially when they use this by online pickup in store or curbside pickup because now suddenly rather than ordering from.

A traditional online retailer. And, you know, even if it’s 24 hours to deliver, I can put what I want in my cart and go pick it up in an hour from the store near me and have it much quicker than having to wait even 24 hours or one day delivery. So it’s been really interesting to see businesses with physical locations trying to compete with the traditionally online only retailers.

By leveraging their physical locations. And I wonder to what degree now that that person actually shows up to the store to pick up the thing they’ve already bought, they actually end up purchasing more from that store. And to me, like I do this with target all the time. I do my drive up order and I’m like, well, here anyway, I might as well go into the store and see what they’ve got.

Frederick Vallaeys: And I walk out with much more than I was expecting. I feel like I’ve never been able to do that on Amazon. I mean, and they’ve got the cross sales and the upsells and everything. But there’s still something to that physical experience. And so it’s like that beautiful marriage of the online and offline experience, convenience of online, but still like the discovery that you get in offline that some retailers like target have done really well.

I think. I agree. I think they’ve done a really good job with that. And a lot of the ones with the physical locations are doing that well too. Like the buy online pickup in store has been seen such a huge surge. I mean, unsurprisingly, cause that ties into what people want to do as well. I had some, so I hear a lot of anecdotes about what’s happening, right?

Anders Hjorth: You have, you’re saying this goes up or this goes down. And there was one, a friend of mine he works in a, in a sports accessories store and it’s out in the open. It’s sort of a, an open mall. Cool. You have a, you’re outside and then you go into the various shops, but it’s a big mall and it’s sort of a bit of an outlet place.

And it’s outside of Paris. And he said, well, we’ve had 60 percent increase in August compared to last year. So 60 percent is just amazing growth for anybody in retail, isn’t it? And when you’re thinking, well, we were just out of of lockdown. And then suddenly, you know this is, this is exploding. So we’re seeing shifts.

Where people won’t go into closed places, they will go to open places on. They still need. They still, I think, to a large extent, prefer this this physical touch and feel tangible retail. As you said, I mean, you’re probably gonna buy more if you’re in the location and you can actually see which is correct.

So I think this this big thing is what I wanted to say earlier is user behavior is changing, whether it’s Looking flights or buying a product or even the relationship you have with the product that you’re buying. You don’t touch it in the same way anymore. You’re thinking like, Well, okay, should I touch this?

And where should I touch it? And should I not wash my hands first or after? And and can I am allowed to how big so? So all of those things, I think, are just there. It’s a It’s a disease in our minds as well. Which is changing user behavior. And I think that so what I want to The thing I said reassurance, I think reassuring sort of a brand.

Communication that reassures now will be helpful for Q4 for for for the big sales. I mean, I’m here. I’m still alive. We’re still up and going. When you’re when you’re ordering online. Sometimes you don’t know who you’re ordering for. You’re wondering, will it ever arrive? Now Amazon was really good at that until COVID and suddenly it was like, well, you couldn’t actually get the stuff you could buy the stuff.

You can actually get the stuff. Right. So I noticed that when I couldn’t buy a Chromebook from Amazon at that stage, because, you know, then there were the warehouses, then there was the sanitary restrictions, and then there was a delivery and all that wasn’t calculated in the way. You know, everything worked before everything was totally optimized before.

And then comes things that weren’t supposed to happen. And so, yeah, going back to the to the algorithm changes and the user behavior. So it’s really interesting how this is going to play off. I think I think sort of differentiation strategies would be really interesting at this stage, and I think they start with communication.

It’s that with building audiences. Now, yeah, as soon as you can, as you know, to join earnest point of view,

Frederick Vallaeys: let’s talk about that algorithm thing, right? So let’s put it in terms that people will really. Connect to, but by toilet paper, why could you find no toilet paper? The reason was that algorithms had been put in place to predict how much toilet paper every store would sell.

And because toilet paper is bulky, they didn’t, stores didn’t want to have a lot of it in the back storeroom. So they figured out ways using. Math to have the right amount in the store every day and then that would be sold and the next shipment would come in and They permanently have toilet paper on the shelves at the exact right level They got really really really good at managing their inventory that way and then all of a sudden things go haywire And for whatever reason there’s a blip and people buy more toilet paper and now there’s a panic on toilet paper This whole inventory prediction mechanism starts breaking so they can’t bring it in fast enough.

They can’t Produce it fast enough. They have no backstore of it. So it’s just it’s this nightmare now that’s basically been created by people trying to make businesses hyper efficient and using Machine learning and artificial intelligence to to sort of calculate the right levels Right the same thing to some level I think you’re saying is happening in PPC.

The inputs that we’re getting into the system are different or weird. How does this react? How, what are our bids looking like?

Anders Hjorth: So we, so for the, for the report that we’re working on, we asked that question. So, so we’ve, we’ve been doing expert interviews and then we’ve been doing a survey of only award winners.

So it’s, it’s like 20 agencies that are all award winners. intelligent and experienced and really sharp people. And so one of the questions we asked him was, what, how does this affect your your bidding strategies? Did you change? How much did you change? So, I mean, the figure out there was that about 25 percent of, of all the bidding strategies were changed during that period because of COVID.

I would have expected it to be higher than what you see on your side Fred but I would have expected it to be higher. To be hired because basic for that reason there of saying the data. No, you can’t predict in the same manner you did before because the world has changed or the world is changing.

And on that basis, you’d have to sort of reset the data or or at least say, Okay, there is a Before and then after and then during Cove it and and after Cove it is now and we need to learn user behavior if done. So maybe there’s some data points. This is the kind of thing I remember from your book, Fred, when you say, Well, you know, it’s all about prediction and you need somebody to actually Let’s take a step back and look at what is it?

What is the data that we have? What other factors the pilot? You know, how do we actually steer through this? What is the right data to use? I think this is this is a time in in digital marketing where you need to do that. Take a step back and say, Okay, the machine knew a lot and was able to predict.

And now maybe that prediction isn’t so reliable. So I need to think about what I can put into the equation as well. Mhm.

Purna Virji: Well, well, well, well, I think that things have changed and yes, you’re right. That the old models somehow broke, but I, there’s still a strong case. Like I would push for automated bidding, for example, right now, because there’s so many of these different factors coming in, like ECPC has been working really, really well.

We recently launched a target ROAS bidding for. For shopping as well. And that’s been seen really good performance true. So it’s so much unpredictability. Lisa, not those additional signals to the machines, but where we can put in our input is analyzing the products that are likely to be most in demand right now.

So things for parents who are still homeschooling, like my son’s still e learning. He’s not gone to school physically. There will be certain things that I need, like maybe I’ll need to get him like a new set of headphones. I don’t have to listen to him, you know, like loudly or his, all his teachers. And have nightmares from my, my school days, but you know, so those things, things that work now, like educational toys for children, some, you know, mock that, you know, that’s going to be high demand, put it in your custom labels, expand the time where you can have the most impact as a human will be going into your feed, auditing that, making sure there’s no errors and giving it the best information.

And then the machine is like, just through like automated fitting to Audiences even layering on dynamic search ads as a page feed. Those are where like, I would leave it to the machines.

Anders Hjorth: Oh. But I, you know, I want leave it to the machines. I don’t want to Yeah, I, I I’m just saying this is a time to be extra careful.

Yeah. That there is data that the machines don’t have and there can be errors in the prediction. And, you know, as, as we’ve been discussing so many times, every time we come to like Black Friday, you can’t. You need to give you need to make an exception in the algorithm. You can’t say tomorrow will be like today because tomorrow is like Friday.

So it’s the same kind of situation where you step back. But of course, I mean, on your recent data and if it’s working, then you’re in the new data set and you’re fine.

Frederick Vallaeys: And I mean, I think there can always be errors in the data, right? Regardless of whether we’re in COVID times or not. So I think if you’re automating something, it’s always smart to put some alerts in place to tell you if something wonky is happening.

You know, I’ve explained this, this example to death maybe, but you know, one day the company’s bids start decreasing significantly and they’re using automated bidding and why is this happening while it’s because the conversion rate has plummeted. So you would think it’s working as it’s supposed to.

But then they look at their website and they’re like, Oh my God, my website is down. Right. Is the right fix to lower my bids or to fix my website? And that’s the thing that the machine doesn’t always it might know, but it just doesn’t really tell us. Right. So I don’t get that email from Google that says, Hey, your, your website is down and might want to fix that.

I mean, while your bid management system, which maybe is not Google’s, it’s another one. It’s just decreasing your bits. And that’s sort of the point is be, be on top of it, monitor it. And then I like what you were saying, which is like put in something about your own business, which is custom labels.

So, so let’s talk a bit more about that. Like what would you do exactly? Feed wise.

Purna Virji: So if I start with the feed, I think the first thing for us to your point about alerts is that put in an email address and in the Microsoft Merchant Center, even if you work with a third party feed management company, which is very common, put it in, it allows for 14 different email addresses.

So this way you can get flagged if something stopped showing or if you’re getting an increased rate of errors just coming from the feed. So I would look at that and the few things that I would audit would be one. Duplicate title and it’s considered duplicate on Microsoft only if it has duplicate title and duplicate price.

So it’s the two conditions have to be met then what’s that’s going to happen let’s say if you’ve got five of your top SKUs that all have the same price and the same title most of them will not show only one will be eligible to show so you want to be careful about another area is to be really careful of your description.

Now traditionally in the past, the description hasn’t really shown in the PLAs, so that people don’t, protesting ads, so that people don’t pay that much attention to them. But I would strongly recommend, because, Descriptions show up on the shopping tab itself. So if you go on Bing, do a search, that’s a separate shopping tab.

Google has their own. So our descriptions in your feed do show up in the shopping tab. So that’s something like pay attention to. Plus what we’ve seen. That is really worth optimizing for the shopping tab because it tends to get a lot better or it can help boost click through age and conversion rate because the people who tend to go into the shopping tab tend to be the ones who are more vested in buying, they are like drilling down to identify what they want.

So putting in as much information on identifiers and all of that within the feed can help a ton.

Frederick Vallaeys: Nice. And I’ve got some slides here. These are from Microsoft. So this is your your guys’s holiday checklist. I think part of that here is what you’re talking about to optimize your shopping campaigns and the feed preparedness column on the right.

So if anyone kind of wants a checklist of what to do, that might be a good place to find it.

Purna Virji: Yeah, I have a new short link for it if you want to pop it on the screen. It’s aka. ms. Front slash shopping checklist, and they can download it there at any time. But yeah, really it starts with the feed and I know the feed can seem sort of boring and complicated and just like a, it’s just a feed.

It’s not the creative in the UI. But the feed is really your ingredients for what’s going to allow you to make a very strong campaign. I

Frederick Vallaeys: mean, we were talking about shopping ads, like we don’t have this control, right? So it’s basically like we enjoyed manipulating the text ads and for keywords, but like that’s what our shopping feed is because the ad comes from showing the image, the headline and the price and that stuff you can control through the feed.

Purna Virji: There’s one more area that I think people sometimes miss out, and I see this so often because like I work with so many of our different advertisers, is people ignore the optional columns. So if I talk about the Microsoft algo and like the key attributes that Microsoft will look at to determine both matching and relevancy.

If we think about purely matching, which means Like, could it show? It would be like titles, descriptions, GDINs, brand, MPN, product category, and product variant. If we think about what’s Involving both matching and relevance. Those are the title and the descriptions, of course, but also product variant. And so the relevance means should it show.

So if I’m looking for gardening tools and you sell a tool set, could it show? It matches should it show no, it’s not relevant. So Product variant and product category for example are both optional But so people don’t tend to put it in but by adding this in you’re just going to give the search engines more Information to help show you show your SKUs at a more relevant Time to people who are looking so fill those in and there’s one more really common error that I see so please don’t do this Which is if you are having a sale Now those who are familiar with their product feed, you’ll know that there’s two columns, right?

One is your regular price, which is the Required field and then we have a second field for sale price Which is optional and if you enter a sale price what happens is you get that beautiful strike through effect on the original price and then i’ll say then the The sale price next to it much more compelling visually, too The mistake I see happening is that people get the sale price.

They’ll update the existing price column with the new price And that doesn’t really You Tell people that, hey, it’s on sale. It loses that compelling,

Frederick Vallaeys: pretty likely discount. It’s basically, Hey, it’s on sale, but it’s still the same price as before. And people have decided,

Purna Virji: well, they don’t, they won’t even know the previous price.

I’d say I was selling something for 99 and then the next day I’ve updated my feed. It is $69. And now people see it there and they’re like, oh, okay, 69. But. Seeing it as 99 crossed out and then 69 is a lot more compelling than just one straight price And price

Frederick Vallaeys: is a huge driver right like even before these times like price is usually determining Which ad somebody clicks on?

How can advertisers see like price competitiveness for your products?

Purna Virji: Well most people are are Have to be relying on the price that the manufacturer gives them or if they do that, but yeah do searches on your own see what’s showing up in the auction like make sure your price is Is compelling and you can set up alerts as well and and see how that goes for you

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, and i’ve given this example before too, but So as an advertiser, you often think about how do I optimize my shopping campaign?

And we’re still stuck about thinking about bidding and bitman. And we’re like, Oh, you know, if I bet 10 cents more on that product, like maybe my CTR is going to go out, my position is going to go up. I’m going to get more sales. But meanwhile, your, your price is like. Actually higher than the next competitors, maybe a 5 cent decrease would have actually put you at the lowest price, which may not be a huge price difference, but to a consumer, it’s like, Oh, that one has the lowest price.

So let me go for that one. And now, instead of bidding up 10 cents, you’ve lowered the price by 5 cents and maybe actually achieve better results. Right? So think more holistically about what you’re managing. And hopefully you have some price control within your company. I’ve got a question to partner.

I don’t know. This might be too technical for you, but let me try it. So what always frustrates me as an advertiser is that say that I sell t shirts and a generic search comes up like t shirts. Now I’ve got purple, orange, black, yellow, white t shirts. How does Microsoft end up? Always picking my orange t shirt to be the one that shows up in the searches.

When I damn well know that that is not my best selling t shirt. How do I control? That’s

Purna Virji: so funny how the algo picks picks that up. I don’t know. I’ll go back to your engineering team and see if I can get you that answer, but yeah, optimize your best selling one even more so you can get it to show up more.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. Exactly. So maybe there, so you talked about product variance and having completeness in the feed so that you can be fine for as many variations as something. But then it’s also like, how do you still structure your campaigns to sort of prioritize your, your known best sellers and how do you put those front and center?

And then, you know, if somebody’s truly looking for the orange t shirt, make sure that that’s easy to find as well. You

Purna Virji: can always do a custom label too and make sure like you can bid that up higher if it has the custom label your best seller so that way, You could be down on your orange, like anything orange, if it doesn’t sell that much put it as orange and their custom label.

And then you can just bid that lower for that condition. So you also have that control.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, that’s a great tip. So use those custom labels to really control what shows and negative keywords as well then. Right. So if you structure things in multiple places, you could at least for the product group that has the white t shirt put in a negative keyword for orange.

Purna Virji: Yeah, you can do that query level funneling to like Martin Rutgerding had kicked off.

Frederick Vallaeys: So I’m kind of like in two minds about Martin Rutgerding’s. I used to love it. The Martin Rutgerding that you brought up here, his thing is basically have high, medium, low priority shopping campaigns for your low priority.

You have the highest bids and the most specific queries and the low priority one, you put in like negative those specifics and you have your lowest bids and I’m probably fumbling this quite badly here without the visual in front of me, but basically the point is bid conservatively. For generic queries and bid much more aggressively for very specific queries that tend to be lower in the funnel and are more likely to lead to a sale.

And so here’s my opinion on that. And pardon, I’d love to hear yours and others, you too. That works really well if you have a strong brand and if people know to look for those specific products, but if you’re kind of a newer entrant in the space, then bidding down for the more generic queries, I think may cut your upper funnel traffic and make you less discoverable and people might not even know to do the more specific query down the line if you haven’t been early in that consumer journey.

Purna Virji: It can work and we’ve seen it work for some of our publishers But there’s lots of different ways to slice and dice or structure your account And I think that’s where also people don’t realize if there’s lots of different ways And it’s really important to think about that from the beginning Like if I if you’re an agency and you’re working with a big retail client, let’s say you’re working with the department store And they may sell Sportswear and they may sell outdoor furniture if you set up your campaign based on brands Such as oh, do you sell nike?

Do you sell adidas? Do you sell? Converse but they they don’t care about how each individual brand performs. They more care about overall category Well, that’s an issue then because then you’re not going to be Aligning with them. So look talk to your clients Look at their goals and see which is the best one that can suit and you could use multiple different Brands Structure types, you could structure by profitability, for example.

So if you knew, let’s say if I was a furniture store, I could, you know, maybe a mattress is probably going to have a bigger profit margin than the table side lamp that could go next to it. So, you know, I could segment my profitability for that. Whereas I could also segment by audience. If I was looking for, you know, just different ROAS goals for new versus existing customers, for example,

Frederick Vallaeys: that’s really important, right?

So have multiple campaigns one with each target ROAS depending on your profit margins that’s going to help you get better results And then the other thing I didn’t quite get as much but so talk to me about that again Like what’s the audience thing you want to do?

Purna Virji: So you could segment some of your product with your product groups by audience as well.

So we’re in each. You show products based on the audience you’re looking to reach. So if I was a retailer and if I knew that a returning customer higher had a higher sort of lifetime value than a first time customer, then I could and I would have different role as goals for each of them. I could segmented differently.

I could also

Frederick Vallaeys: so here’s a here’s what I think you’re saying. So Basically, if it’s a new customer, be more aggressive with your ROAS and be willing to take less profit on that initial sale, because if you lock that in as a new customer, the lifetime value, that’s going to come down the line is much greater.

Purna Virji: Now that’s not the advice I’m giving. I’m saying, if you were in the situation where you wanted to do that, then you’d structure it differently.

Frederick Vallaeys: I mean, if that’s what you believe, right. But

Purna Virji: exactly. That’s what you believe. If those are your goals, like I would say, start with the goals of the business. Like, what do you want to do?

How are the. How do lifetime values vary by different cohorts, by different tenures within, within the, within your audience, then you could choose if you see substantial differences, hey, it’s worth segregating and segmenting your campaigns. By those audiences if your brand versus non brand goals were different in that case Then maybe a query level funneling is for you if you wanted to look by Oh, go ahead.

Frederick Vallaeys: No, no So I get I get the thing on like if you have high lifetime value And a new customer is more important than an existing one. Like that all makes intuitive sense. And I think if you’re a big company, you probably have the data scientists to get you those answers of exactly how much is that worth.

But if you’re like small, midsize, like, are there some level of assumptions that you think are safe to make to at least put you in the right direction and not just. Base everything off of like last click attribution and more immediate value

Purna Virji: then for them I would recommend like look this is probably the easiest way is to segment by product category where you essentially Copy or reproduce your website structure And that would be a good approach to setting up your product groups and your campaigns to align closely with your product structure And so, you know, especially good for anyone who sells Lots of different types of products.

That makes

Frederick Vallaeys: sense.

Anders Hjorth: Yeah, I would want to give a little bit of a different perspective on this. I think what you’re I think what we’re talking about is different stages at the funnel. How difficult it is to get people to convert. And once you’ve learned the bottom of the funnel, how do you move up the funnel, which is, I think, one of the Most difficult exercises that they’re just not as are trying to trying to, to do so in the so we’ve done a number of interviews with the latest report and I see very like you for a very optimistic.

Yeah, we’re starting to see people who are moving away from the vanity searches where they want to see their own brand of the top 100 percent of the time. And that’s a key metric. And we’re starting to see people who are not only looking at It’s not in that last click, it’s moved away from last click, but they’re not only looking at conversion.

They’re also sometimes looking at other signals, like the behavioral signals in the user journey. It becomes more complex, requires more data, requires something, you know, one of the guys we interviewed called the secret sauce. He said, yeah, what do you need to do? And so this is, this is really interesting.

Maybe it’s not. It applies more to bigger companies and it’s sort of the dream of the dmp the data management platform where you’re you’re You’re dreaming of having a platform involved with all your data all your client data You know, it’s connected to your crm It’s connected to your campaigns, but you don’t give away the secret source You keep the secret source for yourself and only give the audiences to Microsoft and then some other audiences to to Google and to Facebook.

And then you drive everything back into your, your own client database. I think there’s this really interesting, really interesting concept. It’s if you’re talking about sort of a small family business, this is way too complex. But then what I wanted to do is to, to say, these are concepts. I believe in the funnel.

There are people who don’t believe in the funnel. I believe in the funnel. I believe you need some kind of awareness. Other product before you will end up eventually buying it. Now, giving that awareness, you don’t give that awareness. People are never going to search for you. That’s sort of the easy thing here.

So as search is not expanding now, search has reached its top level there. I know this is maybe controversial, but search is not increasing anymore. Okay, now that search is not increasing and that Google needs these double digit growth. And so does Microsoft. And so does Okay. I don’t know, Baidu, Yandex, everybody.

Now what, what do they do? And so there’s an opening up towards the wider user journey about influencing people so that they can be prepared for search. So, so all these, you know, communications approaches where you try to trigger search and you try to feed the top of the funnel so that you will get more people down the bottom.

We’re very much and very often Looking at the bottom of the funnel, taking a fierce fight with everybody else and being ready to pay very expensive to get to win at that stage, you know, there is a different approach of actually widening that funnel and maybe knowing those users in a better way and tying them into your into your database since you’re applying knowledge.

I think this is sort of the exploratory territory that we need to go into and be Better at, it’s really complex, but there are there are tools and sort of audience approaches that allows you to do that. I, you know, I love the, the approach from from Purna the one you presented in Berlin, Purna with the, the broad

the, the broad targeting where basically you use search, but also as an awareness tool. And you, you, you, you sort of, it’s, it is very much, it’s closer to the. to the gut feeling. You know what? Some of us, some of the guys that we interviewed said, Yeah, I mean, hopefully people will stop looking at the data soon so that we could they can get the real feeling about things out.

Sometimes the gut feeling is just as important as the data that you can see, because there’s other data you can’t see. So, yeah, maybe I’m going off on a limb here, but I just, you know, I believe in data intuition. I believe in in sort of the methodology or the The approach of saying, I do need to influence people.

I do need to get the word out about my, my company in order for them to search for my products. And if, if they do search for my products, if I’ve already influenced them, and if they know my brand, they’re more likely to convert and all of these things and things that, you know, When we have all that conversion data, we forget it.

We get carried away and you know, and especially the CFOs are going to say, Oh yeah, no more of this because this keyword is converting. Oh, it’s your brand. Okay. Yes. People search for your brand. And that’s sort of the end of the funnel and something else actually motivated the search. Something else actually triggered.

These are things that I think are very important right now, because if you don’t Build that awareness. Now, when it comes down to due for now is the time to buy. They may buy the products of other people who have been doing this.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. It’s a great time to build that awareness because we have all of these people searching online for the first time, pure necessity.

And we’ve seen that the numbers that we’ve shared today. So we’re coming close to time here. So I wanted to give everyone a minute to maybe cover some of the things we didn’t get to and that you think are really important. And also tell people how they can get in touch with you, how they can learn more about what you’ve been talking about.

So Purna, why don’t we start with you?

Purna Virji: Awesome. And Anders, I just, can I just say like a plus 1 million to your last whole point? And I love how you’re pushing people just to think broader and think beyond just. The trees, like the old cliche, you’re like, look at the whole forest. So that, that is really important.

And please keep putting that message out there for me to sort of, to tie into what I had done with broadians, which is broad match plus free marketing. I have found a new addition thing to do with shopping feeds, which is layer on. A DSA page feed you can create your page feed for DSA from your shopping feed because the feed exists, right?

Delete all the unnecessary columns keep the custom labels keep the url Upload it as a DSA page feed and what that’s going to help you do is get any coverage between text ads versus anything that the PLAs may or may not show up or you’ll just tend to get both And we’ve seen data that shows that you know if you have a text ad plus a product listing ad, it’s more likely that you’ll earn the click as well.

So that’s my last tip. And if you want to get in touch with me, you can always hit me up on Twitter at Purna Bhirji or on LinkedIn. And I have one last gift for you, which is a shopping checklist, aka. ms, front slash shopping checklist. Awesome. Thank you very much, Purna. Honours, what about you? Yeah, so I, so I’m, so as I mentioned, and as you can see on the screen behind me, this is the, you know, the report that we’re working on.

Anders Hjorth: I have a co-author Lucas Adamek based in the uk. It’s digital marketing in a VUCA world volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. This report is gonna come out in October and it’s gonna be free for a number of people, the ones that have subscribed to my newsletter. And I think, Fred, we need to figure out.

You know, a way of getting report to people who are on on the show and people that you, you reach out to. So by subscribing to my newsletter, you’ll, you’ll get a chance to get us for free, otherwise it’s for sale anyway. So that’s, that’s

Frederick Vallaeys: where folks need to go to subscribe to your newsletter.

Anders Hjorth: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So interval. com slash report dash alert. Yeah. So that’s where you go. And basically, you know, we’re treating data like we’re asking very advanced people. Do you think a I will be performing your current job in the future? And on this 10 percent of them say yes, right? So so you’re we’re good there.

I’ll give you another one is smart hitting the end of bit tools. We’ve got 40 percent of these people saying yes. Wow. Smart bidding is out there to get them. Do you feel prepared for a post cookie world? You know, the cookies are being phased out in time. We’ve got about 35 percent feeling that they’re prepared.

We’ve got two thirds not feeling they’re prepared. And I think none of you guys should Should feel that you’re prepared for the end of cookies So these are some of the subjects that we’re that we’re trying to address and share and we’re going to present some pointers for where we think people should be going in the future.

So Please subscribe. I mean we’d love to get the we’ve got a sponsor on the report So so they’re happy to get it out to as many people as possible And i’d love to get it, you know distributed by all of you guys as well So looking forward to that you’ll hear more about it. I think

Frederick Vallaeys: yeah sounds like we got a lot to talk about smart bidding ai Cookies.

It’s never a boring day in the world of PPC, right? So thank you both for coming on and sharing your wisdom. So definitely everyone check out the resources that Purna and her team have made available. They’re from Microsoft. Some really great stuff in there. We only covered a handful of the slides they have.

Lots more great data. So please, please, please check those out. We can also share that with you if you email us. And then honors his report. So I’ve contributed to many of them. I’ve read them. They’re great. That’s great stuff there. So definitely subscribe to his email list and get the latest and greatest on sort of the broad picture of what’s happening in the industry.

So with that, thank you for joining us for a PPC town hall. If you have any questions, we have a great support team support at Optmyzr. com. They’re happy to address any questions you have. And then we will be back with a PPC town hall next week. So next week we have Kirk Williams and Aaron Levy. So I should be another lively conversation.

So thanks again to the panelists this week for being here and we’ll see you for the next one. Take care.