Running a PPC agency during COVID

Episode Description

Explore the vital strategies digital agencies use to support clients affected by COVID-19, adapt services to a changing landscape, evolve pricing models, and assess the impact of Google’s free automation tools on service-based business models.

Topics discussed:

• How digital agencies can help clients hurt by COVID-19
• How to quickly adapt services to a changed landscape
• When to test a new Google feature and when to go all in
• How agency pricing has evolved and what works today
• What matters most to PPC agency clients
• Does free automation from Google help or hurt agencies who sell services

Episode Takeaways

How Digital Agencies Can Help Clients Hurt by COVID-19: Agencies have adapted by understanding clients’ changing needs, offering flexible payment terms, and modifying services to help clients navigate economic challenges.

How to Quickly Adapt Services to a Changed Landscape: Agencies have shifted focus towards more digital and remote solutions, emphasizing online presence and e-commerce to align with the new consumer behaviors influenced by COVID-19.

When to Test a New Google Feature and When to Go All In: Test new Google features in smaller, controlled campaigns to evaluate their effectiveness before fully implementing them across all campaigns to mitigate risk and optimize outcomes.

How Agency Pricing Has Evolved and What Works Today: Pricing models have become more flexible, with agencies offering customized solutions based on clients’ current financial situations and changing market conditions.

What Matters Most to PPC Agency Clients: Clients prioritize clear communication, transparency about the impact of campaigns, and adaptability in strategy to respond to the rapidly changing market conditions.

Does Free Automation from Google Help or Hurt Agencies Who Sell Services: While free automation tools from Google like Smart Bidding can be beneficial, agencies add value through strategic oversight, customization, and leveraging advanced tools that optimize beyond what free tools offer. Agencies should focus on demonstrating the value added by their expertise and personalized service.

Episode Transcript

Frederick Vallaeys: Welcome to PPC Town Hall. My name is Fred Vallaeys and I’m your host today. So for today’s session, we’re going to talk about PPC agency management during COVID times. And so we’ve been talking about COVID a lot, obviously things are getting better than they’re getting worse. So it keeps on being a topic.

And as an agency, when you deal with a lot of clients there’s certain to be some clients impacted by some of the economic downturn as a result of this. Some of your clients may have had to shut down their businesses for a while. Some of them may be coming back. Some of them may be operating in multiple states where different laws and rules apply at different times.

So it’s certainly making agency life a little bit more challenging when you’re working with clients like this. So what we’re going to talk about today is how have agency evolved to first of all, help their clients survive the economic downturn. What has that meant in terms of how you run an agency?

When you have remote employees, which maybe you already had, maybe you have more of them now. What has it meant to pricing models? Have you put clients on reduced payments? Have you actually lost clients? What happens when you lose clients? And then also let’s talk about how you become more efficient as an agency or as a PPC manager.

So how do you do more with potentially fewer resources when people might be working from home or perhaps they’re not quite as efficient? Maybe some people are getting sick. Maybe there’s just more work to do during COVID times. So for all of these topics, we have two great panelists and that’s going to be our show today.

So let’s get started.

All right. Our first guest I want to bring in today is Matt Umbrough from Hennepin formerly now Brain Labs Digital. So welcome to the show, Matt.

Matt Umbro: Thanks, Fred. Thanks for having me.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, it’s good to have you. So do you, you go back way, way back in PPC you’re the founder of PPC chat. Tell us a bit about what you’re what you’re up to these days.

Matt Umbro: Sure. I know. I feel I’m dating myself. I’ve been in the industry now. It’ll be 14 years or actually 13 years, I should say in August. So Industry veteran, so to speak. But these days I work at BrainLabs formerly Hennepin. We, we merged with BrainLabs and Distilled SEO. So we’re doing that.

I’m the key account director there. Perfect topic for today because we’ve been working with a lot of clients and during COVID and really spending Figuring out how to you know, be compassionate and understand the circumstances everyone are in to find an ideal solution. And you know, the other note is that my wife and I are having a, our second child in August.

Frederick Vallaeys: Congratulations, more children you can send to a school.

Matt Umbro: Thank you. Yeah. We’re the first one where we’re thinking about when he’s going to go back to daycare, the daycare just opened back up. So we’ll see when that happens.

Frederick Vallaeys: Welcome to the show, Matt. It’s great to have you. Can’t wait to hear what you talk about.

And then we also have Brittany Swenson. She’s calling in from Florida. Hey, Brittany. Hi,

Brittni Swenson: Ben. Thanks for having me.

Frederick Vallaeys: So tell us a little bit about what you’ve been up to. So so Brittany is in Florida with Tandem Interactive. So she’s another one of the people we frequently run into at all of the search marketing shows.

And your team is heavily involved in one of the South Florida shows as well. Yeah. So tell us what you’re working on these days.

Brittni Swenson: So these days just maintaining everything that’s going on with COVID and making sure that all of our clients, especially anybody that’s in the travel industry, is maintaining or finding alternatives to the historical ways that we were doing advertising for them.

I’ve been in digital for about eight years and i’ve been in marketing for 12 I’m from the beautiful florida keys, which i’m actually in right now But our location and our main headquarters is in fort lauderdale and we have a secondary location that’s in california.

Frederick Vallaeys: Cool And you kill adwords while wearing lubotans.

Tell us more. What are lubotans? The red bottom heel even though the majority of the time you’ll find me mostly in converse But I do wear red bottom shoes every once in a while. I don’t know why you put that statistic up there, but I guess you pulled it from Twitter. Hey, it’s a, it’s a fact from Twitter.

So you know, we had to bring Twitter into the conversation, but it’s great to have both of you. So yeah, let’s talk a little bit about agencies and how those have shifted now. Right. And so we’ve been talking about COVID for quite a while and. We seem to be going through waves here of closing and reopening and then reclosing.

What has that really done for your agencies in the past? And not so much from the beginning, but how have things shifted now that like things were starting to look up and maybe now they’re starting to look down again and How are you guys dealing with that?

Matt Umbro: Yeah, so it it’s really been this roller coaster of Up and down a bit. I mean we’ve been You know during april may june More so April, May, we’ve, you know, we’ve been working with clients. We had clients pause a lot of their efforts or significantly cut budget because of a lot of these restrictions that were in place and just that their businesses you know, weren’t sustainable at the time.

So, We we’ve worked with clients to you know figure out solutions where we can still remain working together, but at somewhat of a reduced agreement or something you know that works for both parties and over the past month. We have seen some clients come back, especially more in the Hospitality and travel vertical as places have started to open up It’s not full forth by any means at this point, but we are seeing a shift with, with some of our clients starting to come back and you know, and get back to business a bit.

Frederick Vallaeys: Let’s talk about, like, clients coming back, right? And Brittany, I want you to weigh in here as well, but are they coming back full force? So especially in travel, or is it more of a guarded approach? Are they bringing back the same campaigns they had in the past, or have they just completely rebuilt with a different messaging, different targeting?

Brittni Swenson: I’ve definitely seen different messaging and different targeting for the clients that we have. So what we saw internally was a lot of the clients shifted from doing paid advertising to doing SEO or doing local, but we are seeing that shift coming back now that things are reopening. So they’re coming back a lot more with paid advertising and reallocating those dollars towards paid efforts But the approach is a lot more different A lot of the campaigns and a lot of the assets that we’re using are promoting coveted safety And the different precautions that these clients are taking to maintain the safety of their customers So that’s been a really big push and we’ve been doing a lot more with visuals to help to show that We also have had some clients that have introduced Selling products for covid and for promoting that type of safety, which is something that they weren’t doing in the past They were focused in other types of retail But it’s something that they have introduced to try to get those clientele’s coming back in those purchases, right?

So you’re

Frederick Vallaeys: saying existing clients who have covid safety solutions have added that to the mix So basically they’ve asked you to help advertise a wider set of products. Have you actually brought on new clients that are covid related?

Brittni Swenson: That are COVID related, no, but we did see really big spikes in, like homeschooling.

Homeschooling was one thing that we got a really big spike in, as well as anything that had to do with ammunition or firearms, or firearm protection. There was really big spikes in both of those, and that was a little bit of a hurdle, just because there are restrictions in paid advertising when it comes to any type of gun or gun safety or ammunition.

So that’s been a little bit difficult, but those were two big industries that we saw a really big push, even through COVID, that they weren’t backing down.

Matt Umbro: It’s interesting because we saw, we have a client who is in the off road vehicle industry and You know, they have a, they have a big manufacturing area and they actually ended up creating some of their own safety products like partitions and, and cough mass and so forth and started selling those as well.

And those did really well for them. So I think it’s a sign of, you know, clients certainly adapting to what’s going on and trying to make the most of what they can.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. And Brittany, you were mentioning. Difficulties on Google search, for example gun related products. Have you done any, have you seen any shifts to new advertising channels?

As a result of this

Brittni Swenson: for the gun related one

Frederick Vallaeys: well gun related or just in general like Because some of the other talk we’ve had over the past couple of weeks is that Certain cpc or certain channels have gotten cheaper. The ppc the cpc has gone down so have you jumped on any new channels? You might have been not playing in in the past

Brittni Swenson: As far as display, we’ve been doing a lot more with, like I said, with visual.

So YouTube has been a really big push for us. We focus a lot on GSPs building brand awareness through any type of display advertising and using a lot more of the HTML5. Images and just showing like the person and the person with the mask

Frederick Vallaeys: So

Brittni Swenson: using like that type of dynamic insertion is something that we’ve been trying to promote.

Frederick Vallaeys: We’ve shifted Youtube the new ad builder beta that they launched a couple of weeks ago that makes it much easier to put up video ads Matt is that something you’ve Oh, yeah, I was gonna say. So off of Brittni’s point, we have a couple of clients who started YouTube advertising who had who hadn’t either done it before or who had little experience in it you know, put some budget toward these video ads, whether it be the bumper ads or longer videos.

Matt Umbro: And we actually did just have a client get used to use the ad builder And actually get some creative services done through Google, and we’re about to launch those imminently. So that’s something that with this pandemic and, you know, again, Brittany’s point with search not working as well. We’ve been focusing a lot on on YouTube and getting that awareness out there.

And clients understand that even though you’re not going to see conversions right away, Or you’re not necessarily going to see an overall impact on the business right away. It’s great for, for building, you know, what everyone calls the awareness, but also getting subscribers to your YouTube channel more users coming to all your other social channels in general, and just building up those audience lists for, for down the line.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. Building the audience. That’s obviously a huge portion here. And, and then. As far as like measuring the success of maybe those more upper funnel and early stage interactions, are your clients okay with using something besides last click attribution? Do they even know what attribution models are or is that like a hard thing that you keep having to explain again and again?

Brittni Swenson: Attribution models are something that’s a little difficult to explain BuildTown Data Studio reports that do show the first, the first click. Versus the last to be able to show everything and all of those different touch points through the system. So that’s been a little bit helpful. We’ve been able to use paid advertising in the Google ads to change the modeling system from linear to time decay, to show again, like those different levels of attribution.

So clients can get a better visual and an understanding of it. It’s still a challenge to help them to understand because a lot of the clients that we deal with are lower funnel lead generation, and they want to see that you’re right. Result and impact from paid advertising and a direct correlation with sales and ROI.

So. It can be a challenge, but I do believe that using those different models and showing levels of attribution and trying these different systems do have their benefits to them. And clients are able to see that, especially through COVID.

Matt Umbro: And realistically, I mean, you could have a whole PPC town hall on attribution in general.

You could probably have a few of them. I, I, I think what it comes down to is setting expectations with clients. I like the idea of showing all the different models and how they how they’ve been performing. But at the beginning of any of these engagements, it’s good to really be truthful with clients about what, what you expect them to see and what the primary metrics are going to be and any goals related to those metrics, you know, right away, especially if, if they’re, you know, lower funnel lead gen campaigns or e commerce accounts, they, they just won’t see the same return or the cost per lead.

And that’s a given. And We have to find, we have to work with the client to determine what’s going to be an acceptable goal to hit that we can both work toward.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And getting a client to even know what the goal is sometimes can be hugely challenging. I’m also curious, like as an agency, when you pitch to a potential new client, do you run into cases where the other agency that’s pitching is just like, you know, Using a different model, kind of attributing things differently and hence saying like, Oh, we’re going to have way better results, but it’s not really comparing apples to apples.

And because one of my favorite stories was like a client who comes in and. Tells their new agency, Hey, you got to have a row as a 400%. And the team goes and does it for six months and hits that goal. But then eventually one of the people on the agency team is like, well, you know, if we had a lower row as you’d actually make more profit.

Like, why did you ask us for a 400 percent row as, and the client said, well, because the last agency had 350, so. You know, we just needed you guys to be better because you’re the new agency, but they were measuring things completely incorrectly. It was the point of that story, right? They were looking at ROAS as a metric instead of profits as a metric.

When you run into that, like, how do you educate?

Brittni Swenson: So with clients that when we’re taking over a new account from a previous agency, and we do ask for those KPIs or those benchmarks, it can be a little difficult, especially when clients have unrealistic expectations to what they’re looking for. ROAS can be one of them. So if you’re looking at a four time return, and you are able to hit that number, but you’re only spending 100 a month, and you’re getting 400 in sales, that’s not going to be as beneficial as spending 2000 a month and getting 400 in sales.

And incrementally increasing that return on ad spend so that you are hitting those numbers. So, again, trying to find that balance with what clients are looking for and actual obtainable goals, I think, is really important.

Matt Umbro: Yeah. It, you know, it’s It’s really what do they want to do with their business and you know, what do they want from us? I think a lot of this too goes back to clients who do they want you to really help them formulate strategy? And work together and be a partner or do they want you to just pull levers?

And if it’s the former where they want, they want you to be a partner, then I think this, this discussion should be encouraged and debated. And if, you know, ultimately if the client doesn’t agree to what you’re thinking, then that’s fine. It’s just important that you going back to that expectations talk, you lay it out all out on the table so the client understands where you’re coming from and ultimately can make an informed decision to best manage their accounts.

Frederick Vallaeys: And at some level, I feel like as an industry, we’ve dug our own hole and being so focused on metrics like CPC and CTR and quality score. And so I guess Matt, you get two classes of clients, right? You get the ones who say, pull the levers for me because I’ve done PPC and it’s just too much time and I need to focus on something else, but then they might be so narrow minded on like, I just need my CTR to be better.

I need my ROAS to be better. And they lose sight of the business goals and the margins and the profitability. But it’s preferable to work with the client who says you guys are the experts and it can address with the strategy.

Matt Umbro: We so we actually started with a client in January who They, they didn’t really have any strong goals per se.

They had ranges where they want it to be for the metrics, but one of the main holistic goals was to acquire revenue from new customers who didn’t know the brand. So as we’re creating new campaigns or determining which platforms we want to be on, that’s always the main point in what we’re thinking.

How do we get new users who haven’t who don’t know the brand and we can get them to get new revenue there. So I think that’s an example of of a good discussion and a good point that both agencies can work together towards to find an answer.

Frederick Vallaeys: And that’s a tough one, right? Because if you say we’re going to go after these new customers, like that’s completely the opposite of we’re going to do remarketing where we know your SEO team is already invested in getting that client.

And basically we’re just going to buy it back at the cheapest cost possible. Right? And that’s sometimes the issue that you run into. So an agency can say, listen, we’ve got these great results, but To your point, it’s not new customers, it’s existing customers who were just reengaged. And obviously that’s cheap and obviously advertising on your brand terms.

That’s cheap. But it’s doing the hard thing, which is finding new customers. You’ve never even heard about the brand. That’s, that’s a challenge.

Matt Umbro: And I should say that they weren’t mutually exclusive. We’re, we’re optimizing toward existing customers as well. But on our last business review, One of the key items we pointed out was both overall new versus returning visitor revenue from PPC and overall to the site.

And we, we saw success there where even though returning visitor revenue was still a large percentage of the overall revenue, we did see some really nice increases year over year in new visitor revenue.

Frederick Vallaeys: I want to shift topics here for a second. So Brittany, you explained that, Answer very well. And I think there’s part of it is clients will believe you if you have the thought leadership and you know, as both of your firms in the industry and being at all the search conferences, like you have that thought leadership, but talk a little bit about someone who maybe doesn’t have that thought leadership or that credibility quite yet.

Like, how do you go about building that? How did you guys build it?

Brittni Swenson: I think through a lot of it comes down to partnership and just time and patience. And once you start to show growth and success and a client is able to have that trust and that confidence in what you’re doing with time, they’re going to give you those levels of referrals.

And then those referrals and those partners are going to be able to trust you and you can help guide them through their strategies. And I think just That’s a flow system that’s built for tandem. A lot of our clientele doesn’t come from advertising or sales or anything like that. Like we’re strictly, everybody that’s a worker bee at tandem is kind of what we call ourselves.

So everybody’s doing something for all of our clients. And we all have a sales team that’s going on and pitching. And that’s allowed us to build a lot of that reputation and that retention with our clients.

Frederick Vallaeys: So the elephant in the room who here has a good PPC account for their own company? Microsoft Mechanics

Matt Umbro: I, I, I, I don’t see it. So I,

Frederick Vallaeys: it’s sort of funny. We sell a PPC and digital marketing. And there’s many pieces that we do. For, for Optmyzr, the problem is often that our own account is also the playground for testing all the new features. So even just yesterday I looked inside and I was like, why is my brand campaign turned off?

And some engineers had been testing a new feature and the feature turned it off, but didn’t turn it back on. Right. So that’s how it goes. You know, I, I think another big thing is the agency in general and, and who they pair you with as a client. So if you’re a fairly new hire and you’re getting a new client and you don’t have a ton of experience in the industry, You know, obviously you go through the training, but when you do get your own client, is it a client?

Matt Umbro: That’s a little bit more either low touch or, you know, the budget isn’t as high or it might not be as complex. And certainly you don’t know the answers to all of those items right away. But I guess the main point is making sure that the agency sets you up for success as well beyond the experience.

And as, as Brittany mentioned, the confidence that you’ll, you’ll possess as you, as you go on these accounts.

Brittni Swenson: Yeah, so within our actual team and the CPC managers that we have, I believe that if you’re capable of running a successful campaign on a very limited budget, especially in an industry that is not a beautiful industry, such as tires or movers or grills, those aren’t really things that anybody wants to sell.

No offense. But when you’re looking at something that’s not so glamorous compared to selling cosmetics or just selling high end luxury goods or with a brand that already has that awareness and that customer base. And you can make something that’s not so glamorous extremely successful, especially on that limited budget I think that’s when you show and you prove that really strong sense of strategy And you can build that confidence with that client

Frederick Vallaeys: and so that raises the question, right?

So the non glamorous things to sell where people are probably the consumers far more price conscious than anything else what, what has worked well for you? Like, do you actually sell through your own website if you don’t have the brand, or do you go through the marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, target? Do you do all of them?

Brittni Swenson: You’re talking specifically for retail?

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, I mean, so sort of to I, I guess it could be anything, right? But for retail, it’d be the marketplace example. So if you have a non-glamorous product where price is usually the main the main driver for the consumer. Do you even set up your own Shopify site or do you just skip that?

If you haven’t really been doing much e commerce quite yet, then you go straight to a marketplace.

Matt Umbro: Well, you know, I think in the context of COVID, you know, if you do have a client that really they don’t necessarily have any major. Sticking points when it comes to price, it’s the same as others are a little bit higher.

That’s where items like, you know, curbside pickup, contactless delivery, all that is so much more important these days and what consumers are looking at. You know, I mean, to your point about the, the additional platforms to get into, you know, that, that’s something that, that definitely does work.

And, you know, clients should look into, I think in this case, I just think it’s more about beyond price. It’s more about what are you offering that’s unique especially in the time of COVID when people have these.

Frederick Vallaeys: That’s really interesting. So you’re making the case here that people are less price sensitive than they used to be, and they will actually pay more for a safer delivery method.

Matt Umbro: Yeah. I, you know, I, just personally speaking, we never used Instacart before this and we, we ended up paying, you know, probably 20, 30 bucks more per grocery run, but it, you know, it’s because we, we feel safer doing it.

Brittni Swenson: Right. And live on Instacart.

Frederick Vallaeys: Instacart for a Costco order. And after, so they’re not supposed to leave the invoice with the delivery, but this one person did.

And I looked at what I paid versus what they paid. And it was, I think it was 50 or 60 difference. And I was like, okay, maybe I won’t Instacart my Costco anymore. Maybe for the little stuff. But yeah, I also find myself doing more food delivery and just going out less. The

Brittni Swenson: way to pay for convenience and safety and peace of mind, I think, are things that people are now taking into account when they are making those levels of purchases and if they are seeing that, That price point that’s substantially higher than doing something themselves, but they’re thinking now more in terms of is it safer for me to go with this alternative, even though it does cost us much more.

And I think we’re seeing a lot more people’s mindset changing there with that price point.

Frederick Vallaeys: And then I think there’s also the economic equation that people do of like, how much time would I have spent going to that store? And if that was only 20, What else could I have done with that 20, right? Or my time is more valuable basically than that. And so a big question then too is, does that, what’s happening today, looking for the safety, does that persist over the next decade, even after COVID is maybe fixed, or do you guys have an early sense on that, or is this like a blip? Until we have a vaccine.

Brittni Swenson: I think this is going to be the new norm. And if it’s not the new norm, I think it’s going to take a very long time until we do see things going back to normal without the level of social distancing or with people feeling like their safety isn’t going to be jeopardized if they don’t wear a mask in a public place.

So with that in mind, I think keeping up with those levels of promotion as a brand. And making sure that customers do feel comfortable or that you are taking those precautions, especially if we’re doing any type of in home sales, like for instance, with our movers, our movers going into somebody’s home, where they do feel that sense of safety in their home.

And they do have an outsider that they’ve never met coming in, taking those levels of precaution and safety and emphasizing that. So that way you can get those books and you can get those jobs and you can continue to grow your business even through COVID.

Matt Umbro: And I think it’s a balance between the messaging you use because I agree that, you know, this COVID isn’t, you know, going anywhere regardless if we get a vaccine in early 2021.

I mean, it’s, they’re going to be, you know, before everyone gets it or tries to get it, it’s going to be a major talking point for the next several years to come. And, and, you know, consumers are going to be caring about their safety now more than they ever have. I think there’s also that balance of being too too COVID messaging, so to speak, in your message, in your content.

In other words, you know, early on in the pandemic, we saw all these commercials about, you know, how we care, we’re doing this, we’re, we’re making sure that you know, we’re working much harder to get you the supplies you need. And that was good for the first month or two. But I think people are a little bit tired of that too caring messaging per se, in the sense that yes, we get it, you’re, you’re doing good for the community, but where’s that balance between you’re, you’re being safe, but you’re not saying you’re not, you know, you’re not shouting it out loud that you’re doing everything you can to, to make all these precautions for COVID.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. People want to have maybe more positive messaging and not constantly be reminded of the negatives. And then, of course, it’s COVID, but there’s so many other things happening right now, and we’re coming up on a presidential election, so I think people’s heads eventually are just going to explode from Slumbering Orange

Matt Umbro: Hunter.

You know, I, I was gonna say, Fred, and this, this is a kinda good segue, and I won’t spend a ton of time on it, but it’s a good segue into a topic you know I love about the Dynamic ad copy because there are so many floating items going around with all this, you know, dynamic ad copy becomes that much even more, more relevant you know, based on the person viewing.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. I mean, so tell us what you guys are doing for that.

Let’s talk about the dynamic ads, right? So the ad parameters, the business data, is that the solution you, you still prefer or you move it on to something better?

Matt Umbro: You know, we’re, so what we’ve been doing in certain cases is. Based up or geo add customizers, you know, based on a user’s location. You know, it’s much more accurate to say what the shipping details will be what the costs will be, how soon it’ll get to them, all that.

And that, that’s been extremely relevant in this time. I mean, when I, when I say add customizers, I do generalize a little bit. It’s not going to solve everything, but it helps solve some of these issues that are going to be unique to, to each person. And I just want to pull up here a script. So I know I’ve showed it before, but it’s kind of relevant in this context.

Frederick Vallaeys: And you guys can promote something too, by the way, if you want, right? So don’t be shy, but I’m going to show you my script here. Hit the load up. So this is a script that detects anomalies at the geographic level. And this is, so this is not going to update your messaging necessarily, but what it will do is it will tell you if your messaging for some reason is off and you didn’t know it.

Know it. So if from one day to the next, your CTR conversion rate really declines across one region to another, and it looks very granular at least. So it goes down to the city level, but it can also look at the state level, country level and this is so important. I think in these days when like I was saying before we started the show, but like I can go to.

The county line between the county I live in and the next county over and whether I’m standing on one side versus the other side literally determines if I can dine inside a restaurant or I can only do take out from the restaurant. And so it’s very confusing for consumers equally confusing for agencies.

And I believe you guys work with so many clients across. The whole, I mean, they’re not just operational in the city that you live in, that you know. So it’s really difficult to stay on top of what’s happening and what you need to do to respond to that. Anyway, that’s my script. So we have a couple of audience questions, so I want to pull those in as well.

So let’s start with my She’s actually on my team. Thanks for putting in a question here. In the beginning when they were asking questions, I was like, well, they’re just putting in questions to be nice. But then they told me we actually want answers to those questions. So she’s asking based on your experience, how do you communicate to clients, the level of uncertainty that still exists within the new normal in terms of PPC

Matt Umbro: go ahead, Brittany.

Brittni Swenson: Sorry. I would say just explaining to clients that the benchmark KPIs that you were working with historically are going to be different and that these are unchartered times. This isn’t like a new projection, and we’re not saying that these numbers are going to be the new normal, but we have to give ourselves gradual time and that whatever is happening in that particular industry and that vertical, that customers are shifting in their thought process and in their buying patterns.

So just explaining that again, it’s going to take some time, hopefully. And, you know, we’re praying that we’re going to go back to like that, that, that seat that we were performing historically at. But as of right now, we are doing the best that we can, given the circumstances and that these are changes that we are seeing.

That’s not vertical specific that has changed in terms of like those buying and those purchase patterns. And

Frederick Vallaeys: I’ll put in another scripter and then Matt, you can say but this script basically. Plots specific COVID events on top of your PPC performance. So Brittany, to your point about like, are these metrics what we should expect going forward, this kind of overlays what happened related to COVID and what were the metrics in your PPC account at that time so that if there is a sudden shift up or down maybe this helps you explain what it was related to.

So that’s another script that we’ve got up. We’ll put it up on the resource page after.

Matt Umbro: So what I’ve been doing in, in weekly calls or bi weekly calls with clients, whatever the cadence is I’m, I’m making it an intentional talking point. So I’ll add it to the agenda each time. And it seems like we’re all already talking about it with clients, but I kind of set the expectation that, you know, COVID is now, it’s now a part of life.

And it’s essentially now a part to a much lesser scale. It’s now a part of our meetings and our account management. So we try to look at To your point, Fred, with the, with the script about all the different you know, events with COVID, we, We look at items like that. We look at how we talk about, you know, their inventory and how it’s being affected by, you know, global issues.

We talk about, you know, with lead gen clients who rely on trade shows and that, that have been canceled. We talk about the effect that that has had on them. So I think it goes back to just being. It’s more of a framework of how we approach account management now. So it’s not so much you know, a surprise when we talk about it, but it’s just part of how things are now.

Frederick Vallaeys: And so with how things are now, there’s another question. And this goes to the pricing discussion we haven’t really quite had yet. But Brittany, you were saying you’re doing more stuff on YouTube. Obviously video production, I would assume, takes more time than writing a few lines of text ad. How do you price that in?

Brittni Swenson: So with the shift and with everything that was going on with COVID and people staying more at home, we did see an uptick in streaming services and on people spending more time in front of their televisions and on Netflix and Hulu and all those different channels. So when we’re doing price modeling, a lot of it comes down to if they have the assets already or if our team is going to be developing the assets for them, if they will be original, if we’re writing the scripts, if it’s going to be provided.

Okay. If it’s going to be cartooned or if it’s going to be actual footage. So all of those different things and those different factors, if the client already does have assets, we try to use those first, just because again, with everything that’s going on and everybody is struggling a little bit more with COVID and like those decreases in sales, if they have assets already, we’d prefer to use those rather than giving them an additional invoice.

So we try to work with whatever we can. If we don’t have things, we have been trying to give things at a more discounted rate. Again, we are your partner and we want to make sure that you are still staying afloat during this time. So that’s the approach that we’ve taken. So our price modeling system has definitely changed since COVID.

Just because it

Frederick Vallaeys: sounds like you’re saying it’s kind of on a project basis. If you need to create the ads, that’s a separate, let’s create that. And then putting them into YouTube and managing it. That’s more of the traditional. agency cost model that you’ve had.

Brittni Swenson: Yes, but keep in mind because like we do work with some smaller clients as well as larger clients.

So depending on the impact that people have felt and depending on the shift and like certain aspects like that and those different variables, that’ll determine a lot of the pricing structure just because we want to be somebody’s partner and we want to help them during this time.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. There’s an interesting and Matt, I’ll let you in as well, but there’s an interesting article from Kirk Williams.

I’m going to load it up on the screen here. Support tips for running an agency in a time of crisis. I think it was this article, but he was talking about discounting your services and not doing that during covid because you don’t want to set to new normal. And it’s kind of like weighing between you do want to be helpful and make sure your partner, your client stays in business and is able to.

But you also don’t want to. You know discount too much because then it’s kind of like what we’re seeing with black friday, right? there’s articles right now saying black friday is basically dead because The last four months have been black friday and now consumers may come to expect that on a continuous basis.

Matt Umbro: Yeah the one of the important items to consider through all this is The the compassion portion of it. I know I said that early on at the beginning of the This live stream, but just working with your clients to find compromises slash plans that are going to work for, for both of you to your point and to Kirk’s point, ultimately about not discounting services.

Agreed, that makes sense. I think you can, you know, if clients are willing, if clients are spending less than they were, then that’s a little bit easier to justify because that’s, you know, if you’re, if you’re an agency who does, you know, kind of the spend, then if a client spends less, then you’ll ultimately take less of that.

But I mean, there’s stuff like deferring payments you know, allocating budget later on in the year. So you can spend less right now. But, but there are areas that you can do to, to work with the clients and figure out what’s going to be the best solution for, for both of us. Because I think on the other hand to the client needs to understand that, that you’re a business as well.

And I do think clients have understood that, but it’s not just about, it’s not just about them or just about you. It’s how both of you can figure out the best solution together.

Frederick Vallaeys: Brittany, any, any final thoughts on pricing?

Brittni Swenson: I agree. I think it’s a client to client basis is whenever we’re making like those levels of decisions.

So at our agency, during normal times, everything goes off of a flat rate or percentage, which is a sliding scale for ad spend. So like, those are the two different ways that we model out our pricing. And it does take into account the amount of time and resources that are required for more visual aspect platforms.

Like Google display or like YouTube ads or GSPs or are things that are going to be a lot more time intensive. So that’s the reason why we’ve modeled like those two different ways. But as far as like right now with COVID and everything that’s going on, we try to be a little bit more compassionate with the clients that we have and understanding like their businesses and just the fact that we’re strategic partners, so we’re trying to do whatever we can, given the circumstances.

Frederick Vallaeys: We’re going to shift topics one more time here. So you know, pricing I think is closely related to how efficiency, how efficient your agency is. And a lot of that can be due to tools and automations. Yeah, well, we can talk about, thank you. I wasn’t going to go down there, but yes, Optmyzr can in fact help you with that.

But let’s talk about. Google, right? So Google is coming out with smart campaigns, smart bidding. Do you face pushback from potential clients, existing clients who are like, well, you know, all of these things can now be automated using free tools from Google. Like what are we paying you for? So where does automation fit into this?

And especially again, in COVID times, like to me, it sounds like having more of that automation in place protects you for when staff become sick. Some customers can’t pay you quite as much anymore. So you can, you should be devoting less human time, which is the most expensive time we have. So thoughts on automation.

Matt Umbro: Yeah.

Brittni Swenson: Oh, sorry, Mac. Go ahead.

Matt Umbro: Oh, yeah. I was just going to say, you know, this is something that has seen a radical shift in my career. When I first began. And, you know, quite frankly, until a couple of years ago, I really wasn’t a huge fan of automation, but I’ve had a drastic shift in it. I mean, I think you should automate everything you can.

So. Fred’s point, you can use those human hours more effectively. You know, when I go into accounts now, I make sure there’s a core set of, you know, seven to 10 scripts set up depending on the client. I always try to utilize automated bidding strategies. When I have enough data, I set up rules. Certainly, you know, tools like Optmyzr and and super metrics make it easier to automate reporting and various tasks.

So. It’s ultimately, if you, if you know how to look at automation and think of it as more of a way to compliment your own efforts, then I think it works wonderfully.

Frederick Vallaeys: And I mean, I love to hear so, but automation, the free automation from Google versus the automation that you pay for, like the, you mentioned super metrics brain labs is obviously.

So Dan Gilbert, Daniel Gilbert, a founder of that agency. He’s one of the other big scripts guys in the industry. You know, his approach has been radically different from the Optmyzr approach. So Optmyzr became a software vendor as a result of scripts. Daniel built a big agency now together with Hennepin.

So yeah, I mean, we all believe in these free automations from Google, but to some degree, we’re also building our own. Do you guys like talk about smart campaigns, smart shopping campaigns? Do you use those or do you feel like they take away too much control? And, and I’ll tell you my opinion. My opinion is they are for.

More novice advertisers who are not interested in doing it to the absolute best of their ability But who need a good enough solution that’s inexpensive so Myself and joe who’s the owner of tandem interactive have always been against a lot of the tools So we’ve always been pro do everything manually, do everything ourselves.

Brittni Swenson: Computers are never going to be as smart as humans. When we signed up for Optmyzr, I cannot tell you like the degree of difference that we’ve seen within our team and the ability to manage and manage more effectively. And on a larger scale and to be able to complete tasks faster, which to me is more beneficial as a manager because then I can delegate more tasks to them because they’re able to complete those tasks a lot faster.

Within Optmyzr itself, we’ve been able to see a lot more recommendations for changes that has given insight to our team for different techniques and tips that they should be doing that they were unaware of. Prior to using a tool or a solution like Optmyzr that did help them and educate them more on how to like make those levels of changes.

So I personally am a huge fan. I know my team finds it to be extremely beneficial. Anytime we’ve ever stopped using Optmyzr, my team is very upset with me. Because they find it to be extremely useful and we’ve been able to see the dramatic difference that it’s made within the campaign For all of the clients that they use it for that’s very kind Brittni.

Frederick Vallaeys: Do I have to send you a pair of lupitas now? No, you do not but if you could ask anybody on my team everybody on my team absolutely loves the software system And we’ve used multiple systems like we use kenshu. We’ve used Marin software and even with all the different solutions that there are out there The team always says like Optmyzr provides the most amount of suggestions and the most amount of recommendations changes Tip information just across the board that they find to be most beneficial, especially from beginner to expert level for old CBC managers that we have at Tandem.

It means my team is doing an amazing job. Glad to hear that.

Brittni Swenson: They are. And Jeff, we love Jeff too.

Frederick Vallaeys: All right, Matt, any final thoughts on that? Or should we jump into the news here?

Matt Umbro: I would just echo what Brittany said. I mean, Optmyzr is a wonderful tool, and again, it goes back to complementing the manual efforts that we’re doing to make sure our accounts are in the best position to succeed.

Frederick Vallaeys: Thank you. And really, I was not asking for Optmyzr, Love, but thank you for giving it. You can send us some shirts if

Matt Umbro: you have them.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, exactly. Steeper than Louis Vuitton. Okay, let’s talk about the news.

All right, so let’s load up the news here. So and I’ve just picked a couple of articles that have been on search engine land, search engine journal over the past week or so. But are you guys seeing this? So Google finds that SEOs are working harder due to COVID 19. And I would just sort of shift that question to, are you guys working harder than before COVID?

In pbc and scm

Brittni Swenson: i’ve seen a shift of pbc Budgets where clients have decided to stop buying leads or have shifted that budget towards more seo or local seo effort But as far as slowing down slowing down isn’t something that we’ve seen

Matt Umbro: Yeah, same thing. It’s it’s been fairly consistent i’ve actually i’ve actually seen clients who are are doing better during covet And i’m sure we all have instances of where that’s the case, but you know, whether it’s, you know, tactical work within the account or more account strategy or long term planning it’s been going along as, as it normally would.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And I would say even if the account is not doing better, there’s still more work because you just sort of have to prepare for in travel, for example, right? When people are able to travel again. So it’s about building audience lists. And so it’s kind of a shift in the type of work that you normally have been doing.

Right. And that just means re educating your whole teams. And we didn’t get to talk about that much, but let’s maybe bring it up right now. You guys being managers and leaders at your agencies, how do you train a large team when things shift quickly?

Matt Umbro: You know, so similar to what you’re doing here whenever there’s an article out there that I think is relevant for the team to see and, And really educate them on and say, you know, this speaks to the larger trend that we’ve been going over on our accounts or you know, this notation here, like, for example, the free shopping listings from Google the, the notification was that there you go right there.

Google shopping ads are free to display main search results. You look at that headline and. The novice advertiser is probably thinking wow, this is great news. This is this is really going to help me But then you dig in deeper and it means that it’s really only on the shopping tab and it’s below the paid listings And I know that google just started Putting some free listings directly on the search page as well in the knowledge graph but nonetheless it It’s understanding the wider scope of what’s happening in the industry and comparing it to events.

So you know, Google take it for what it’s worth, but Google said that they were showing more free listings to help advertisers during this COVID issue. But when you look at it a little bit deeper, You know, it’s a way to compete with Amazon. It’s a way to get advertisers onto Google ads, starting for free and then getting them to do more.

So, I, I think it’s just identifying those patterns and trends when you see this news and communicating that to your team overall.

Frederick Vallaeys: What is, oh, I opened an ad by mistake, so that is definitely not news. So Google is piloting a new program that shows ads within the local business listings. Brittany, you mentioned you work with some some smaller clients as well as the large ones. Is this something that they’ve noticed and that’s impacting them?

Brittni Swenson: Local does make a very huge impact for them, especially with everything that’s been going on and shifting from paid advertising. They have been relying a lot more on local and on SEO overall. So the ability to you know, utilize a lot of these different tools and these new releases is something that our team has looked into.

Thank you. So we try to meet as leaders on a daily basis, between Joe, myself, and my higher level team. And we go through any type of opportunities that we’re seeing like this or suggestions or clients that are struggling. Especially like those, those smaller clients or we’re seeing decreases in sales or conversions or conversion rates just look a little out of whack and we’ll try to strategize like what we believe we can do differently.

I use my mom a lot of as an example, because my mom is not very tech savvy. So I say, if we’re trying to sell this to my mom, like what would we do? And what would you do when you’re trying to speak to your mom? Or what would you do if you were trying to speak to your sister or to your grandmother? How would you convince these people to buy your program?

Or how would you be able to sell them whatever service it is that you’re selling? So that way we can try to think in a different way. Because us as PPC people, since we’re so familiar with the system, sometimes we look at things and we do things a little bit too advanced. That we don’t have to be so advanced in some of our tactics.

People are very simple. So if you’re trying to use a very complex message, sometimes it’s easier to just simplify what you’re trying to do.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. And we have a tendency to look at a search results page and overanalyze it and be very calculated about where we click and where we don’t. And that is not the average person reminded of that every day. CCPA. So I am based in California, so my rights are now protected. You guys, Matt, where are you located?

Matt Umbro: I’m in Massachusetts.

Frederick Vallaeys: Okay. And Brittany’s in Florida. So this doesn’t apply to you as. Consumers, I believe, but the CCPA. So this is the California consumer protection act. Basically the equivalent of GDPR for California. So enforcement of that has begun. Is that I don’t imagine it has had much of an impact on either of you and your businesses but just wanted to. Mention that have you guys actually with gdpr and what have you guys done around that? So my question is really about if you had campaigns where it was maybe legion and collecting consumers information do you work mostly with companies in the united states or do you apply gdpr?

globally Has it been something that you have had to spend time on? Doesn’t

Matt Umbro: not, not a ton. You know, specifically for CCPA, I know Facebook recently made some announcements about that. We’ve sent those over to our clients to understand what they are. But you know, with, with both Personally, I, I haven’t had a ton of issues or having to do, do much with, with either.

Brittni Swenson: We haven’t had a lot of issues with GDPR, but something that we, our team does work a lot with is any type of HIPAA restriction. Because we do a lot in the addiction space, so that’s kind of tiptoeing in the area of trying to make sure that client data and that we’re in compliance for this particular industry.

Frederick Vallaeys: And do you guys have dedicated people who monitor the ongoing legislation in different, different locations

from our perspective? I mean, so basically at Optmyzr, we have one of our people who has sort of been tasked with keeping an eye on this because I mean, literally now we’re talking about the California act and it’s like, listen, we’re a global advertiser are we missing the Luxembourg legislation, right?

Luxembourg being part of GDPR, but God knows what they’re doing specifically. And so there’s always these unknown risks that you run into. And it just becomes massively complicated sometimes to stay on top of what is the evolving legal consumer privacy space.

Matt Umbro: Yeah, I was gonna say, I would say we, we, we do have people who kind of have the specific niche of the industry.

You know, similar to how someone would keep up with shopping news, search news, display news. We do have people that look at kind of this industry level and legal news, so to speak. Yeah.

Frederick Vallaeys: Okay, so this is the the bigger news, I suppose. So, there’s a Facebook ads boycott going on. But here the news is that most people don’t even know about this boycott. And then there’s also, of course, some thinking that Mark is not taking it, Mark Zuckerberg is not taking it very seriously. And maybe he’s on to something that people don’t even know other than Gen Z. Does this come up with your clients? Have any of your clients pulled off of Facebook?

Brittni Swenson: The clients that we have that are running Facebook ads have not.

It is circulating in terms of television and the news and media, but none of our clients have actually said pull off because of what we’re hearing about this boycott. Same for you, Matt?

Matt Umbro: Same here. You know, our, our clients are aware of it. We’ve let them know, but, I think this is more something that really affects, and I’m saying this unofficially per se, but more the top 25 to 30 brands in the world where it, you know, if they’re off, then it’s more of a statement versus a company that you know, it was nowhere near the annual revenue that some of those larger brands make.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. It’s being positioned by some as it’s a public relations play. And in some cases these advertisers weren’t even spending all that much on Facebook. So it’s They’re not really putting their dollars behind the message or taking off those dollars is not really as meaningful as they pretend it is and so also what we’re then asking is, does this impact the cost per click on Facebook because some of these advertisers are off, but that’s also doesn’t seem to be the case because they’re in a very different space.

They’re very brand focused, which is typically different than Facebook. The majority of the clients that we directly work with. Let’s see here. So this isn’t really news, but I thought it was an interesting one, right? So an article about why Google ranks singular and plural keywords differently. And the context for me is we’ve certainly seen instances where the keyword plumber and the keyword plumbers, the plural have drastically different quality scores within the Google system.

And oftentimes that doesn’t make sense to the advertiser. They can’t understand because they’re basically synonyms. They’re basically the same thing. So why would they have different performance indicators? Why would they have different qualities for but John Miller from Google was basically explaining that there’s a slightly different intent, right?

So if you look for the plural of something, you may be more inclined to look for a comparison, a directory. And so the type of results that does well in organic would be different. Very organic focus, but I think the same thing applies to PPC search engine marketing Because quality score is that measure of relevance that ultimately does go into the ad rank And how much we have to pay for that click

Matt Umbro: It does the the issue complicating with PPC is the close variance. So Yeah, I mean there are campaigns where I I do have both the singular and plural version and there are campaigns where i’ll just have one of the versions but inevitably the search query Will show in the singular or plural version whether it is whether the keyword is indeed in singular or plural

Frederick Vallaeys: We’ve got one of our viewers dave.

Sorry facebook all ads off for july. Okay. So dave, are you a top 25 or or not? But thanks for weighing in today we actually let’s bring up another question here So, adam was asking how much time if any do you correlate google ads and analytics for campaign optimizations? And

Brittni Swenson: do your customers even care? I don’t think the customer understands the amount of time that you’re actually allocating towards optimization, so it’s not that they don’t care, I think it’s just that they maybe don’t realize the amount of time and, like, the extensiveness that things go into as far as research and being able to make those changes, but as far as, like, our team, it really depends on the amount of spend, the amount of targeting, how large the client is, how big the campaign is, what they’re selling, what the price point is, So all of those different variables will go into how much time is actually being allocated for campaign management and campaign optimization.

Larger spend clients obviously need a lot more resources in order to maintain Those KPIs that we’re looking for and those goals that we’re trying to hit when it comes to slower or smaller spending scaled clients not that they’re not going to get as much love But if the campaign is not as elaborate and if it’s a lot more simple Then it’s not going to take as much time time should still be being dedicated to make sure that it’s maintaining those KPIs But it doesn’t need as many resources

Frederick Vallaeys: Great.

And we’re, we’re getting close to time here, so ready to wrap it up. But Brittany, I wanted to let you say some final thoughts anything we haven’t covered anything you wanted to share from tandem interactive. And we’ve got up on the screen right now that you can email info at tandem dash interactive.

com. If you want to speak with Brittany or her team the website is tandem dash interactive. com. So thanks for being our guests. Any final thoughts from you, Brittany?

Brittni Swenson: Keep a lookout for COVID credits within Google ads. They’ve been rolling them out for small to medium sized businesses and you should be receiving a notification if your account qualified for it to be able to get that credit and it’s automatically applied to your campaign.

Frederick Vallaeys: Great. Matt, thank you for being on the show. Final thoughts from your end.

Matt Umbro: Thanks for having me. Glad to be a part of this with, with both of you Brittany and Fred. No, no, no real major magic bullet final thoughts, but. Just to go along with that, with COVID, but just, you know, within your accounts, just review your negatives, review your messaging.

The, the rollercoaster of the pandemic has gone up and down throughout these past several months and some messaging or negative keywords you use at the beginning might not be relevant anymore. So just keep a close eye on, on what you’re doing and make any adjustments as necessary.

Frederick Vallaeys: Wise words from both of you.

So thanks again for being on. We’re going to be posting this up on our YouTube channel. The podcast will be live soon. Any of the websites we talked about, you can find them on the ppctownhall. com website and we’ll be back next week. Next week’s episode, we’ll have the leading ladies of PPC. The top two most influential PPCers of the year.

We’re. Two women. So we have Michelle and Purna. We’re going to be joining us next week. Matt, I know you work at the company that produces the list, so I believe you remain ineligible. Even should be on that list.

Matt Umbro: That’s all right.

Frederick Vallaeys: I, I, I’m fine in the background. That’s until we get haircuts, right?

We’ll we’ll just, but everyone, thanks for watching and we’ll see you next week.

Brittni Swenson: Thank you.