Shopping & e-Commerce for Q4 2020

Episode Description

In this episode, we explore strategies for Q4 e-commerce success, focusing on early shopping trends and Black Friday. Experts from Google and leading agencies share smart bidding techniques and stress the importance of channel diversification. Learn actionable tips and best practices to optimize your digital campaigns for the holiday sales peak. Join us to maximize your advertising impact this shopping season.

Topics discussed: •

• Google’s expectations for e-commerce in Q4
• Best practices and tips to win big this holiday season
• How leading agencies in North America are preparing

Episode Takeaways

Google’s Expectations for E-commerce in Q4

• Early Shopping Trends: Google predicts increased online shopping starting from October, as consumers aim to avoid holiday crowds.
• Increase in E-commerce Adoption: Due to limitations in physical stores, there’s a significant shift towards online shopping with many retailers boosting their e-commerce capabilities.
• Promotions and Discounts: Traditional discount events like Black Friday will remain crucial, likely extending to accommodate the higher demand.

Best Practices and Tips to Win Big This Holiday Season

• Leverage Automation and Smart Bidding: Utilize Google’s automated bidding strategies such as Maximizing Conversion Value and Target ROAS to optimize ad spend effectively.
• Focus on Feed Quality: Ensure product feeds are current and optimized, including using Google’s free product listings and enhancing feed integration with inventory systems.
• Prepare for Varied Customer Interactions: Be ready for a mix of online shopping and alternatives like curbside pickup, adapting quickly to inventory and distribution changes.

How Leading Agencies in North America are Preparing •

• Diversify Marketing Channels: Agencies emphasize not relying solely on platforms like Google or Facebook. Expanding to other platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, or Snap can capture wider audiences.
• Data-Driven Decisions: Emphasize analytics to understand consumer behavior changes, adjusting strategies based on new shopping patterns and predicting future trends.
• Client Collaboration: Agencies are intensively working with clients to rapidly adjust strategies ensuring readiness for the holiday season, emphasizing flexible and responsive marketing

Episode Transcript

Frederick Vallaeys: Hello and welcome to another episode of PPC Town Hall. As you just heard one of our panelists thinks my office is really nice. Thank you very much for that. So, in being in this day and age, I figured home offices, we need to spend a little bit of effort sprucing those up. And you know how I bought all this stuff.

I mean, maybe you can see my, my shoe, my floating shoe in the background right there. If I can get my finger in the right place. But yeah, I’ve been buying a lot of stuff online and I think a lot of people have been buying a lot of stuff online. And the question that we have here for the session today is how much more can people buy, especially when it comes to Q4 and we’re going to have Black Friday again, that’s for just around the corner.

At least it’s just around the corner. If you’re a PPC practitioner, right? It seems like Black Friday is happening tomorrow and we’re just struggling to get everything ready for it. If you’re a consumer, you don’t know what’s happening behind the scenes and how much work goes into getting everything ready here, but that’s what we want to talk about today.

Do we think it’s going to happen in in the year 2020, a very strange year, what’s going to happen with Black Friday, with Q4, with e commerce, and who better to ask than the company that has a tremendous amount of insight into consumer behavior, and that, of course, is Google. So we have some experts from Google who are going to be joining the call today telling us what they see, what they’re predicting, and they’re also going to share what they think we should all be doing in PPC to get ready for this this coming Q4.

And then we didn’t want to just keep it to Google. We also wanted to have the practitioners weighing in. So the people who are actually running these campaigns, we’re setting them up at agencies. And so we have a couple of folks joining us on that end as well. So with that, let’s get ready here to get started with PPC town hall about Q4 and e commerce.

All right. And we’re back. Let’s bring in our first few panelists here. So I’m going to show them on screen all at once. So we’ve got Katie Wilson from Google. We’ve got Duane from Take Some Risk and Elizabeth from Tenuity. See. Welcome everyone. We’ll, we’ll let everybody introduce themselves. Katie, why don’t we start with you?

Tell us what you do.

Katie Wilson: Sure. Hi everyone. I’m Katie Wilson. I work in our LA offices here at Google, but I’ve been at Google for 13 years. Most of my time has been devoted to retail and e commerce. So really excited to talk about that today. I had up Our sales teams and retail efforts in the Southwest region.

Frederick Vallaeys: Nice. And a little fun fact there.

Katie Wilson: I did. I performed at Disneyland three times as a kid. I grew up in Southern California, so they had a partnership with our schools and we would go and sing at Disneyland. And yeah, that’s a more fun adult one. Is that on my 24th birthday, actually, I played blackjack with Axl Rose.

Frederick Vallaeys: And how did that go? Did he win or did you win?

Katie Wilson: Yeah, he was winning. He was at like a higher stakes table. I was in a vicinity of him, but I did get his autograph for my 21st birthday.

Frederick Vallaeys: Nice. Well, for, thank you for joining us, Katie. And then we have Elizabeth from Tenuity. This is not your first rodeo on PPC Town Hall.

So welcome back. Tell us a bit about what you’ve been up to these past couple of months.

Elizabeth Marsten: Thanks for having me back one. What I’ve been up to, not, not much in general. My son turns two next week, which is a strange time to have a, obviously a birthday, but you know, he’s two, he won’t know the difference really.

He’ll remember cookies and toys. That’s what we’re going with. And I work for Tenuity Street, so I’m the senior director of strategic marketplace services, which means that I work on a lot of the new stuff. Started originally in paid search classic, I guess, as you would call it today. So Google Microsoft, then being, then Microsoft advertising, even some Yahoo in there and some of the, the older ones, and then kind of moved over into marketplaces in the, in the last few years.

So, paid search, however you, whatever name you call it, it is, it is a CPC model and I work on it.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. So that’s why you’re on the PPC town hall. How long you been doing this?

Elizabeth Marsten: Oh, 14 years now.

Frederick Vallaeys: 14 years. Katie, how, how long have you been in PPC?

Katie Wilson: For 13 years now.

Frederick Vallaeys: 13 years. And 13 years at Google.

Katie Wilson: Yeah.

Before that I did work on an agency, but it was more on the nonprofit side for agencies. So not so much PPC, but more email

Frederick Vallaeys: marketing. You were maybe stuck on the Google grant side. Yeah,

Katie Wilson: we were a Google grants partner and I still have a lot of my old clients that I’ll try to hook them up with that team.

It’s a great program.

Frederick Vallaeys: That’s a whole other topic, right? As if you are a recipient of a Google grant, it’s great because you get a lot of free advertising money, but you do have some restrictions that make it a very unique experience of how to run the app. All right. And then we have Duane as well. So Duane also welcome back to PPC town hall.

What’s new with you? And by the way, that six degree black belt, I think that was Elizabeth’s, but do you do Japanese martial arts? And I think we may have lost Duane. All right. Duane got a little scared there when we talked about martial arts. Duane, you’re back. I’m back. Yeah. My internet dropped for a second.

Duane Brown: Sorry, buddy. So tell us what’s going on. Anything interesting with you in the past couple of months? Yeah, I mean, I think I’ll get what else is just working on. I mean, I’m grateful for all the work. Can’t complain one bit, but it’s still trying to like come down from the pandemic, but also start to ascend up to Black Friday, you know, I think a lot of people think it’s good.

I think about Black Friday, but I think with stores closing on, you know, Thanksgiving, Black Friday in America. Some people giving their employees the day off, you know, this year, we always say it’s going to be different, but I don’t think it’s going to stop until well into 2021. And we just signed like a global brand in 42 countries and four continents.

So we’re all just a little exhausted trying to like onboard them. People are their clients happy. And then figure out how to just like. Make sure they have the best Q3, Q4 possible.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And that’s why we’re here today to help everyone learn from you know, what’s happening in Duane’s brain. A

Duane Brown: lot, a lot

Frederick Vallaeys: these

Duane Brown: days,

Frederick Vallaeys: right?

Where are you calling us from today?

Duane Brown: I’m at home in Montreal, so it’s, it’s a sunny day. We’ve had a lot of rain the last three or four weeks, like just downpours, like you think it’s spring, but otherwise it’s nice and warm. And so I’m just in my office cause we’re in a corporate space. So I just hibernate in here eight hours a day and then.

Go home and probably work some more because there’s just a lot going

Frederick Vallaeys: on. How good were you? At least you get to see people. I’m stuck in California where things are still, I can’t say the word on air, but but yeah, don’t see a lot of people been stuck in my house for a while. And we have a few other folks on the line.

We also have Emi and Peter is going to join us here in a second. So thank you for joining. Emi and Peter. Actually help optimizer quite a bit. So whenever I have questions, they’re great at helping us put stuff together and get the right answers so Emi and peter say hello. Tell us who you are what you’ve been working on

Emi Wayner: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Hi everyone. My name is Emi Wayner. I’m a platform partner lead at google Looking forward to this conversation. We’ve we spent a lot of time with Fred to help customers to be prepared for the holiday. So thank you for having us.

Frederick Vallaeys: You’re welcome. Thanks for being here.

Peter Oliveira: Hi everyone. I’m Peter.

I work closely with Fred and Emi as well, as well as a couple other platform partners on their product strategies. So making sure that the products that they’re building for their user base is incorporate the best of Google’s best practices. And You know, that we’re staying up to up to date with the latest and greatest products.

Frederick Vallaeys: Nice. Hey, and I usually ask you for Google advice, but I’m getting a nice close up shot here. This is actually my first self done COVID haircut before I had it done by my wife. I bought a bunch of clippers another big e commerce purchase. What do you think? Not too bad, right? For clipping. Not bad at all.

Emi Wayner: Impressed.

Frederick Vallaeys: All right. So thanks for joining us. So what we’re going to do right now is we’re going to start off with Katie. And Katie has a few slides to tell us where we’re headed in Q4. Again, we generally know. Q4 is going to be big, but 2020 is a very strange year. So is it going to look the same or is it going to be different?

So Katie, take us take us away.

Katie Wilson: Yeah, absolutely. The only thing I think we know for certain is that it’s going to be different, a different kind of holiday, but we’re preparing on all fronts here at Google and what we’re seeing in e commerce right now is really positive. So I’m going to share with you guys a little bit of what we’re seeing early on for the trends and really some tactical things you can do to prepare for the onslaught of traffic that we think is coming.

Cool. And then we’ll leave it more conversational too, excited to hear what the other folks have in terms of trends. So the first thing to show you all, which I know some of you might have seen this is popular in, I’ve seen it quoted in Forbes and McKinsey studies, but e commerce has grown in the last two months more than it has in the past 10 years.

So just let that sink in as a number. It’s off the charts. We’ve been seeing this penetration of e commerce on all fronts right from traditional e commerce retailers that prepared some actually getting out of stock for high in demand items. I just bought a desk. I bought it three months ago. It just got here.

So there’s a high demand for items during the pandemic, like home goods and other things that we’ve seen. But I also think this is a really good test to know about it. Holiday and how we can prepare traditional retailers who were doing store pickup or relied a lot on in store have shifted very, very quickly to e commerce over the last two months.

And we’re seeing that in the market and in terms of competition. So something to be aware of. I’ve also seen recently quoted that there’s potential that we will have holiday levels of demand and user shopping. Even as early as October. So being prepared for this demand both on inventory and logistics front, I think is incredibly important as we go into holiday.

Great. And then from the Google side, in terms of consumer behavior, we do a lot of third party research, research with a company called Ipsos. And we look at Google data, right, in terms of shopping behavior and trends. And then they also individually Survey consumers to get a sense of their buying behaviors.

So this is in conjunction with that. Some things we’re seeing major shifts from last year to this year, right? Last year, primarily shopping in store. Think about how you might have shopped for holiday. Did you go to several stores? Did you have lists that you take to a store to get things done? I know that’s what I do.

That’s not happening this year, right? Primarily shopping is going to happen online and we have to be prepared for that. 72 percent of holiday shoppers are going to shop more online this season. That’s probably not a surprise to most folks, but in terms of the volume it’s going to produce, we should be prepared.

Retailer loyalty. So people have their go to shopping destinations for holiday. Maybe people, as Duane was saying earlier, line up for those Black Friday sales. They love their Target. They love their Walmart sales. If we’re not doing in person sales and people are not going to be wanting to aggregate in big groups like that, Loyalty is starting to become a thing of the past.

So people are discovering new brands online. Maybe they’re seeing things through social media, through Google, through other channels and being more aware of these new purchases and new brands that they want to discover and refer to other people. So be prepared for that. If you’re a new brand and you want to get yourself out there, this is a great time for discovery.

Increased year on year spending. I said it before, people are going to buy earlier. 80 percent of consumers are going to plan to shop earlier for 2020 holiday gifts to avoid crowds. So I would, I would assume even as early as October, we might actually start to see some of this traffic starting to happen.

And Cyber Week, it’s still going to happen. We’re still going to have Black Friday deals and promotions. Retailers are getting ready for that. They might even start extending promotions beyond cyber week, but people are still looking for a good deal. So it really important to get that out tactically in your messaging for ads as well as any promotions you might have on your website or in your shopping cart.

So definitely don’t forget about the promotions.

Frederick Vallaeys: Okay. Thanks, Katie, for walking us through the expectations there. So, I’ll bring in the other panelists as well. And I’d love to hear from Duane and Elizabeth. So, Tenuity has actually been running a really cool dashboard. COVID dashboard. Sorry, I said the word.

So, now my SEO ranking is going down. So did you guys know that whenever you use the word COVID on YouTube, you can’t promote the videos on Google. There’s like all sorts of stuff happening. So there goes this episode. I just said it. But yeah, what do you what do you guys see at Tenuity in terms of Q4 expectations?

Elizabeth Marsten: So similarly, so across the board, not just like Google, but Very, very much what which Katie is alluding to, which is earlier, right? So if you look at what Amazon’s, the rumor is on one prime day is going to be, it looks like it’s going to be October, which just to Katie’s point, like people are going to start shopping earlier.

What does that mean? And then of course, with prime day, what are the, all the other retailers going to do? So. Historically during prime day, we’ve had, you know, Walmart will do their summer savings event. Target does a deal days. What are all the retailers going to come up with? And that of course, in, in turn will reflect within what we’re seeing.

So we just released our Q2 benchmark report. It was like two, three ish weeks ago that Andy Taylor works on. And, you know, he always tried, he’s tracking like shopping growth and spend and, you know, CPC, and obviously we would expect to see within the, the Google auction and the. Additional competitors this year as well, right?

Within the Google search. And we know that some of the retailers are also getting in there. So we’re also tracking, for example, how much Amazon buys in Google shopping ads.

Frederick Vallaeys: That makes sense. Yeah, and that’s a really good research report there that Andy puts together. So if you haven’t seen that, go to the Tenuity website and And download it.

We’ll try to put one of the links to it in the show resources afterwards. Duane, you work with a lot of interesting brands, big brands. I call them, I don’t know why I call them interesting.

Duane Brown: They are interesting. I love my clients. You know, I think. If Amazon, you know, let’s say they pick October 5th as Prime Day, I don’t know if they’ve actually announced today, but let’s say they pick October 5th, you know, is that early enough? You know, I heard some stuff from New Zealand, as most people who know me on Twitter, I heard about my peanut butter from New Zealand.

It’s been stuck in customs for like three weeks or something from like New York, which is really not that far from where I am. I mean, you could drive from Montreal to New York and it’s taken three weeks to get, I don’t know where it is. Maybe it’s stuck at the border, maybe it’s entered Canada, but it’s taken three weeks to get here.

And so we’re already seeing these huge delays still, even though people say we’re past the pandemic, you know, we’re not really past it. the pandemic. And so if Amazon Prime happens October 5th, is that really enough for people to get stuff for, you know, Black Friday or for Christmas? Like if we’re already still backlogged and then people pile on in October or even late September, is that enough time to get your shipment to the person you need to get to?

You know, someone said on Twitter, don’t know if it’s true, but they, they mailed something within their own city a day. This thing took three weeks to send a letter across the city. So I don’t think you can be too early this year. If you really want to buy something from someone, you want them to have it for, you know, black Friday or Thanksgiving or Christmas because waiting for a deal is all great.

But if you’re waiting for a deal and wanting to get it for Christmas, that’s a bad idea. Yeah. And in fact, I mean, there’s so much demand on the, on the supply chain and especially the shipping side. Yeah. They’ve already announced huge surcharges on shipping fees. So I think last year was something like 10 cents per package.

Frederick Vallaeys: This year is going to be as much as a dollar per package. I’m also curious to see if that’s going to be reflected on you know, longer shipping times the consumer might have to pay for shipping, which would be really strange after so many years of free shipping. But yeah, definitely changing things that way.

So I wanted to show another slide here. So Katie, as I’ve hidden myself behind my logo. Talk us through this slide a bit. So this is kind of like a usual timeline of when to get ready.

Katie Wilson: Yeah. So on the blue below there, that’s the shopping demand we see at Google during a normal shopping period. This was last year and then 2020 is there in red.

So you can see we’re already above demand levels from last year. Plus 27%. So getting ready for that demand as we get into November, December. And like the folks were saying, even as early as October is important right now, what we’re advising our clients, we’re really in this plan stage right now. We’re discussing goals with our clients, things like logistics promotions, they’re going to run the shipping criteria inventory.

Super important to talk about right now and plan for any scenario to doings point. There could be delays. What are you going to do in that case? How are you going to, Pass that on to the consumer or maintain your promotions. Very important to talk about that. I also think from an advertising side, this is the time to get the fundamentals down.

Do you have tracking set up correctly? Have you looked into automation solutions? Have you looked at your feeds? from the shopping side and really polish everything and make sure you’re ready to go. And it’s as up to date as possible during these few months in the summer, because we’re going to start that demand is going to start picking up.

That’s the time to evaluate in demand, see what’s working, what’s selling out. Work with your teams to, to figure out the best plan. Place to promote things. And then in the last time, I’m

Frederick Vallaeys: sorry to interrupt, but like a question for the practitioners on this, right? So in terms of like getting everything set up in that early planning Duane, especially with you, like, are your clients like actually, do they have conversion tracking properly set up?

Well, how long does it take to get it set up the right way? Like in practice, what’s the, what’s a reasonable timeline to get these things up and running? I

Duane Brown: mean, Fred, of course, it’s set up properly. I mean, I can’t do my job if it’s not

Frederick Vallaeys: you know, that’s a given. Let’s say, hypothetically, you got a new client who didn’t quite do such a good job and didn’t have your help before, right?

So, what would a new user look like? You know, it could

Duane Brown: be like a couple hours. I mean, if we’re just going to import a goal from Google Analytics because it’s on Shopify. You know, that’s like a couple of hours just to see if it’s working. Cause if they have enough sales going through, you know, Google and Shopify and everyone do their thing and ping each other, you know, if it’s a client where I’ve got to work with the developers, cause the new client beside is actually on big commerce, which is not a platform we’ve worked on a lot.

It’s usually Shopify or Magento, you know, that’s us working with a point of contact who works with the developers. And that may take a few days. It might take a week. But that’s something we always check. Like part of our processes and agencies, we’re always checking like is tracking working or things.

Correct. And Google Analytics or whatever the analytics package is, you know, cause our job is, is, and it’s not easy, but our job is trying to be proactive and stop that stuff. Like last week, a client did have a tracking issue and I’m trying to switch my hat from being like a founder CEO. So I let the person who’s managing that account, like, like, like come to me and it took them like a week.

I’m not going to lie. And I’m like, I’m glad you told me, but like come to me earlier because like the client looks at the account every day. I know the CEO looks at the account every day and they see this stuff. So it’s like part of our process is to check stuff every day to make sure it’s working.

Cause all it takes is one person to make one change somewhere and not tell us and things just break down.

Frederick Vallaeys: And we should talk about automation there as well and how you stay on top of things not breaking. You did mention Shopify. And so there was an interesting stat. I was actually talking to another Googler and he made the point that. If you maybe don’t have the right foundation yet and you’re for the first time putting your stuff online. So say you know, main street USA, you got your store prompt, you’re going to start shipping. So do you go with Shopify or do you just go with a homegrown sort of a system? And he made a point to that with something like Shopify or something that people have actually invested a lot of thought and effort into.

The systems are faster, the landing pages are faster and just having the landing pages load fast can have a tremendous impact on your results. And so here’s some stats that were on the Shopify blog, but a one second delay in load time is going to decrease your conversions by 7%. So let’s say let’s talk about tools for a second.

And Elizabeth, I want to bring you in on this one. Like attenuity when you’re dealing with these companies that are going on to multiple platforms. I mean, is that a manual effort? Do you use tools? Do you use in house technology? How do you get everything working the right way? Yes. Yes. So the bigger the company, what we’ve noticed is obviously the more complexity, but also there’s a lot of legacy systems and or new systems, right?

Elizabeth Marsten: So depending on where they just are in their e commerce life cycle. So one thing that recent events have done is obviously accelerated that. So whether or not that was investment in additional tools or technology or you know creation of one thing that we’re doing at Sanuity is we’ve started to package our, the way that we look at things.

So we’re very tool agnostic. So that’s what we used to say. If you came and you had a bunch of stuff, we’ll use what we’ll do with that. But now we are starting to put together. More holistic packages, reporting, kind of like across the board, kind of, so more, a little more plug and play in particular on the Amazon side, we actually have a tool.

We have a bid management tool for specifically for Amazon and Walmart that we are also using to do holistic reporting. So it just depends honestly, but it has been very customized for sure. Especially as you know, let’s say the client has multi brands. Yeah. You’ve used two brands can complicate everything.

There’s two X, but it’s not even just two X. It’s like having, you know, how you have like one kid and then you have two kids and it’s supposed to be twice the work. So it’s kind of like that.

Frederick Vallaeys: Wait until you have three. I mean, you saw them all coming to my office, right? Lovely.

Katie Wilson: That’s it for me to

Frederick Vallaeys: know. I even have a lock on the office, but they figured out how to pick that.

So next thing I’m buying a deadbolt, I guess. All right, Katie, let’s, let’s look at those slides again that you had.

Katie Wilson: Sure. Yeah. I was just saying, I think you guys have hit the nail on the head with the platform. Plan and polish, prepare for every scenario from your website, your feeds to getting ads set up.

And then really it’s about capitalizing on that opportunity in September, October, even with prime day, right? That increases the overall traffic for everyone in e commerce, all ships rise with, with prime day. Cause people are in that shopping mindset. So that is a great time to really pressure test for holiday.

I think. And then when we get into the peak days, you know, all bets are off on what the volume is going to be on those days this year. We are not going to have the same drive and promotions for in store. So I can see things even leveling out for a week or so and having a cyber week. So let’s look at those days and make sure we understand even the shipping cutoff to the points earlier about shipping.

That might change this year. It might move up sooner if the timeframes are taking longer. So being really flexible with your planning and really capitalizing on all the traffic Is what we’re really working with clients on right now to try to look at that demand and make real time changes as quickly as they can.

Elizabeth Marsten: And actually to tag into that, like when you start to think about just not even shipping, but like the, the rise of pickup and deliver, pickup, right? So in store pickup, curbside pickup, every major retailer has some sort of solution where you can at least drive up to the curb and they’ll, they’ll bring it out to your car.

I’d be, I’m really interested to see how we. Whether that in Q4 is basically the parking lots filled with people who don’t want to go in the store.

Katie Wilson: Totally. And we’ve seen that with grocery, right? So there is a precedent for people getting more comfortable with that pickup scenario. Because I know a lot of folks are doing, choosing to do that for groceries.

So do they carry that over to holiday, right? People are getting more comfortable with these new behaviors.

Elizabeth Marsten: And it’s, and it’s always been. And so you, so what I’ve seen in particular is like the rise of the retailer app. Right. And so as a result, also kind of some drops in Google shopping. And so we start to see like, you know, does that in the, but then again, we see the retailers start to invest in product listing ads as well.

So it’s kind of like, it’s almost like it just moved. It’s not necessarily like the demand is higher in that scenario. It’s just. Moving around.

Katie Wilson: Yeah. And speaking of product listing, I would be remiss to say we’ve made a lot of changes on Google. You guys can see that from our commerce announcements. We have free product listing ads for folks.

If you haven’t explored it before. And if you’re using third parties like Shopify, it’s very, very easy to set up. Really important to be there and have your inventory aligned. from both the paid and unpaid standpoint, we find that they work better together when you’re covering all bases. It’s a very powerful tool for research.

To Elizabeth’s point, people are going to be researching what are the deals, what are the prices you can integrate if you have a physical store and say, I want to pick up in store or have a buy on Google option. So there’s a lot of things you can do with feeds and that’s going to be a really important thing to consider this year.

Frederick Vallaeys: No, I’m kind of curious on the free listings. Katie, you might not be able to say, but how much volume has that driven? And Elizabeth and Duane, what have you guys seen? I know Kirk Williams numbers out there that it was like between one and 10 percent of overall volume, which is not insignificant.

So it’s certainly a nice boost for many retailers. What have you guys seen? So I can say, I can give you the tenuity report if, if can you declines to comment? So we have, what we see more in particular in, in energy part was the number of brands featured in the results. So there are more. folks entering.

Elizabeth Marsten: So the great selection is is higher. 41 percent higher for desktop computers than it was beginning in 2018. As far as the shopping actions report was what is starting to show us a number of competitors, 17 percent higher in phones, 15 percent higher in tablets. So definitely a rise in desktop in terms of what makes sense.

More, more, more real estate, but it’s definitely something that folks are out there taking advantage of, which is, you know, great.

Katie Wilson: Yeah. We’ve seen great results from, I think the free listings are a great way for people to dip their toe in. If they were curious about feeds, haven’t done it before and then we’re seeing our team is particularly outreaching to those people to educate them on how do they implement that.

And we’re doing a lot of work with the third parties like Shopify to get those people easily online when it’s a one click. Opt in for Shopify, very easy for them to do so. So our team, you know, is outreaching proactively to a lot of folks that are on the free product to show them, hey, this could work better because we are seeing when you can cover both angles that it’s going to prove better performance over time.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right, I’m seeing a question come in there like on feed management. So I think that’s a bit what you’re talking about, Katie. So it’s one click to get on Shopify. But do you already have to have a feed? Or will Google sort of figure out what your site structure is and based on that generate a feed? And what, if any, code would you like for feed management to follow via code?

Katie Wilson: Yeah, so it can be. I’ll let other folks talk to because they work with a variety of different clients. For most of my clients, they’re able to manage it themselves either. There’s a lot of ways you can upload that to Google manually. I would say automating the feeds is where you want to get to get the most up to date inventory.

So that can be integrated in a variety of ways. And we have that information available on our help center. I can provide a link for afterwards where you can look at how it easily set that up. Or I do have clients that they have a massive feed or if it’s something that That is changing daily. Like think of someone who is selling out of inventory, have a high turnover inventory, not the same inventory every day, like fast fashion, they might want to hire a third party to do it because it is so labor intensive to, to basically link that with your inventory management system as a retailer.

So let the other folks speak to what they’ve seen as well.

Duane Brown: Yeah. I mean, for our clients, we use feedonomics for our feed management for fiber clients, like maybe. 99 percent there’s a couple. We do it manual. So one client, they only have like 50 or 60 SKUs. So we just built something to Google sheets and connected it and it’s not hard because their SKUs, you know, change once every four to six months when they like retire a product and bring a new one in.

I think it’s definitely makes sense to have a feed management tool if you’ve got, you know, thousands of SKUs or like Kitty said, you have your SKUs changing often. You know, I’ve done it by hand. You can do it by hand, but I think it’s a question of where do you spend your time? There’s only so many hours in a day.

And if it’s Black Friday, the last thing you want to be doing is working on your feed. You want to be working on other things within your business. Because if you thought last year was crazy, this year is going to be 2x what we had last year, I think in terms of both traffic, sales, revenue, and even just people having questions of like, you know, what size is this?

Coming. Is this good on me? What? Whatever those customer questions are that you get on the holidays. So higher people have inventory being prepared for what will be the craziest year of our lives, but also make tons of money.

Elizabeth Marsten: So I was going to say there’s one thing is, of course I had the horse. I would give you the, the holiday.

We actually had a client one year, not necessarily That, I guess the developer got bored on Black Friday and he decided to clean up various tags and pixels, including removing ones that he didn’t know what they were, which of course was the Google information. So he lost all tracking on Black Friday.

Oh man.

Frederick Vallaeys: So

Elizabeth Marsten: that is not the day to do technical.

Frederick Vallaeys: We created ourselves because we don’t want to do anything in Q4 because we’re like, Oh my God, what if we break the holiday traffic? And now we’ve created a situation where developers are bored and they actually go and break it anyway.

Elizabeth Marsten: And, and, you know, and to Katie’s point about the, about inventory updates.

So, you know, working with multi, multi channels, like, so let’s say, you know, I have, you know, you happen to be on Amazon, you happen to be on Walmart, you happen to be on Google and you’ve got, you know, you’re on site and everything. Being able to understand those inventory levels in real time almost is critical because if you oversell on one of the marketplaces, they will penalize you and heavily if you cancel an order, your order defect rate goes up and you know, you basically lose a channel.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And so that’s about keeping your feed in sync with the actual inventory you have. And that’s why it’s so important to automate.

Elizabeth Marsten: Yeah. Or tool for sure.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. And when you sort of brought this up, right, so you can decide to, you can do anything manually. And it’s funny. I mean, I talked to people who are potential optimizer customers and they’re like, but why would I buy optimizer?

I mean, I can do this manually. And I’m like, yeah, of course you could, but it takes you six hours. I is, is that worth, you know, 99 or not? So people have very strange equations about how their time is valued. I think now actually people are busier than ever. So maybe they are looking at tools more than before, but when it comes to automation, obviously the the first level of automation anyone should look at is what Google puts out there.

Right. So let’s talk about that for a minute. And when we think about automation, generally bidding is the first thing we think about. So Katie, tell us a bit about what’s new and automated bidding from Google.

Katie Wilson: Absolutely. I think, you know, we’ve always had some more of automation. I think we’ve really put a lot of efforts into automation from the engineering side, and you’ll see that roll out with the options we have now.

A couple of things here to consider if you haven’t looked into it or to talk with the team at Optimizer maximizing conversion value again, very great way to tie your actual conversion value. To the tool, the automation tool. So we will start to bid towards the value that you have. So if it’s a high value item and that’s selling great, we’re going to, we’re going to preference that.

Another one is target ROAS target on return on ad spend another great use of that. So again, it’s just passing that data back to us of the cost of goods sold so that our system can make better decisions. And I think that’s a key thing for retailers to be aware of. If you’re not already doing that. These are really great options that have come a long way and are providing credible results to our partners.

And then the last thing up there pairing up with smart bidding, dynamic search ads. So to your point, are we thinking of every keyword out there? Do we want to spend our time thinking of every keyword out there? When a lot of the Google queries are new every day. And even in this, this time, queries are going to be new.

People are going to be searching for new things in a new ways than we would have prepared. This lets us dynamically look at your site and then automatically generate with a keywordless system. So I would definitely look into this as a really great catch all to get traffic that you might not be thinking of through your, your traditional keywords.

Elizabeth Marsten: Katie, I have a related question on the, the new query. So, you know, a couple of years ago, I want to say it’s like, probably like four. It was like 30 percent or something like every day. It was something high. Is that still very high?

Katie Wilson: Yeah. I haven’t seen an update. I know the last one we were sharing was 30%.

And I think in, you know, I would expect, I think Duane said this before people are searching, like, does it fit me? You know, queries that we haven’t seen before due to the pandemic shipping timeframes will be a part of the query, right? Probably return. Maybe people want to know about that. And the items that they’re looking for are different.

So I would definitely recommend in having this as a catch all review what’s coming in through the dynamic ads. And then maybe you place that in your traditional campaigns. That’s a great practice. Or I have clients that are 100 percent doing dynamic ads and seeing great returns. So definitely something to experiment with.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, and I think Duane maybe talk about this a little bit more. But how do you bring DSA into the mix? Right? DSA is very automated. But if you find some new keywords that might be successful. Do you just keep them in DSA? Would you move them over? Like, how do you have that balance between control, but also automation to help you find new stuff?

Duane Brown: Yeah, I mean, for our clients, we’ve done both, you know, usually DSA for us as a sweeper campaign, we’ll take all the keywords already bidding on applied as a negative to that campaign and what Google try to find things we wouldn’t have thought of or didn’t think would convert. And then if there’s enough, you know, data conversions or traffic, we’ll break it out in its own campaign.

I will say at times that we found we’ve broken those keywords out. Sometimes they don’t convert their own campaigns. So we just like shoving back in the DSA campaign, what it run there, where it converts.

Frederick Vallaeys: Why do you think? I don’t know. They convert in DSAs, but they don’t convert elsewhere. I assume it’s the headline

Duane Brown: that Google is serving the people.

Like the headline is just a better headline than what we would serve. Because obviously with DSA, we can customize a description line, but we can’t customize our headline because it’s dynamic as well as the URL. So we assume that experience is better than what we would customize. And usually we take our best converted ad from our account, whether it’s on brand or non brand campaign.

But that was like an anomaly. It’s not like it’s time. It’s like, you know, one out of, let’s say one out of 50 or one out of 20. We have to make all this fun, right? Is that there’s not like one answer that always works. So we always have to figure it out a bit. Yeah.

Frederick Vallaeys: And here’s another slide. This is part of Katie’s deck.

So I want to show this one as well. But when it comes to automation, right? So the first level is automated bidding. And by the way, when it comes to automated bidding, make sure you use seasonality bid adjustments, make sure that you evolve your targets, make sure that you maybe even do something sophisticated and you actually bid for profits, not just for ROAS by bringing your margin data into the mix.

Right. I’m talking to a bunch of optimizer customers right now, and they’re like, great. Google selling my products. But not the ones that make the most profit. Like, how do I prioritize those that are most profitable? Right? The only way to do that is to somehow have margin data in the merchant feed and use that to structure your campaign so that you’re prioritizing what actually makes you money. So that’s kind of like level one, right? Level two. And I think Duane, you brought it up as well, but it’s about knowing when things change and Things might be very volatile this year. So how do you quickly account for changes in demand? So tell me, Duane, what kind of like alerts do you primarily look at to make sure things were going the right way?

Duane Brown: Sorry about that everyone. I didn’t realize it was muted. Besides looking at accounts, you know, the last 24 hours or the last 7 days, we try to keep a last 7 day average as long as that’s sort of on track. We’re okay for a lot of our clients. You know, beyond that, it’s just, can the systems handle it?

You know, during Q2, There’s some accounts where smart bid, you know, did amazing, whether it’s Google or other search engine, other times where the system just spiked the CPA. And you know, as much as I’d love to, you know, hold on tight and, and see that CPA keep on spiking, you know, we found it just made sense to move things back to manual.

So it’s really just like a case by case basis. You know, what’s the last seven days, what’s the last 30 days? You know? Do we think it makes sense to stay here? You know, all automation is great. Within the right context. But I think if we’re seeing too much data being feed into the systems that maybe not every system can handle it, whether it’s Google or just another search engine in

Elizabeth Marsten: general,

Duane Brown: even Facebook, you know, can’t predict what’s going to happen in the future if it’s got so much data that it hasn’t had before right now.

Frederick Vallaeys: So I’m going to put Peter on the spot. So Peter, I’m going to bring you back in here. But tell us a little bit about when smart shopping maybe isn’t going right. And, you know, What might be some causes, what you need to make sure you set up to to make things move in the right direction.

Peter Oliveira: Yeah. I think there are a few cases, a few of the top cases that I’ve seen smart shopping, not going right is one setting a robust target.

That’s a bit too aggressive. Sometimes if you’ve tried smart shopping for the first time, you’ve set that target, that’s your ideal target, but you know, to get things started out, sometimes it’s better to work up to that target and not to just go straight after it. If it’s a bit aggressive, cause smart shopping may have some issues.

Serving in that case, feed health is also just as important as it is in a traditional shopping. But a lot of times we expect to set something up like smart shopping and have Google take it the rest of the way. But it is important that we’re feeding the algorithm with the right information and that our feeds also have the proper information for that, right?

So making sure that we’re updating all our products, that all your products are in there and at the head, and that the, all of the, Feed categories are reflective of the products that you’re currently selling.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. So have all the, your conversion tracking set up correctly so that the attribution is happening.

Do not use last click attribution because that’s going to break your upper funnel. And then think about search as a holistic game, right? It’s not just, Hey, I’ve just automated my bids. Now everything’s like rosy. But use the capabilities instead in terms of responsive search ads. The different match types for keywords so that the system really has as much flexibility as possible to put all the right pieces in the Right place and maybe take an approach as an advertiser.

That’s a bit defensive So as you do see google maybe making some questionable decisions on certain queries make those negatives, right? so maybe have more of an exclusionary strategy as a As opposed to just very limited definition of what you you want to go after. Yeah, and peter there’s a question here.

I don’t know if you want to take this one, but michael’s asking How do you manage search terms on shopping campaigns where there is overlap in non converting terms costing money? But also creating sales basically off of a closed variant or a broad match variation of it

Peter Oliveira: Yeah, I think if it’s at the end of the day if that term is creating sales down the line It’s it’s probably bringing value and we don’t want to exclude it as a whole Our algorithms, they bid at the query level and not at the exact keyword levels.

So even if that exact variation keyword is not bringing in the right results, as long as we’re trusting the algorithm to make those adjustments when it comes to broad match, we do see some pretty good results with that. But if there are specific variations that you’re not seeing good results for leveraging those negative keywords is a good way to do that as well.

Frederick Vallaeys: And I brought me onto the call here also from Google. So Luis is asking about some changes to showcase shopping ads. Any thoughts on that? And that’s also a question for Katie. But let’s start with you. Yeah, let me get back to you on that. And I want to get a little bit more details of what question is Is it all about?

Emi Wayner: I’m checking it too. Yeah. I

Katie Wilson: know that we’re making some improvements there. And I think you might be wondering if it’s going to affect the volumes of regular shopping or how that will, how that will play. I do think it’s a more visual platform. So if that, if you’re, if your brand is aligned to that and something that you want to show more visually, I would definitely look into the more image based format, but yeah, we can follow up with more detail.

Let’s get more details

Emi Wayner: on that question.

Frederick Vallaeys: Thanks, Fred. Sure. And now we got a question from Michael. So why would agencies use a tool optimizer or another one? We’re smart shopping where Google doesn’t necessarily share a lot of the data. Right. So one idea is that even with smart shopping campaigns, you don’t necessarily have to have just one smart shopping campaign.

You can have multiple smart shopping campaigns with different targets that could obviously be connected to margin data could be connected to what is it, what are the products you want to prioritize selling first? So building that out, but also keeping it dynamic, right? If you have thousands of products, manually restructuring these campaigns based on how your sales and margins are evolving is very difficult.

So tool like optimizer can certainly help with that. And then there are still certain things you can do here and there. And, you know, I don’t have to look into the details, but negative keywords generally do work. You can well, with smart shopping events, it is somewhat limited, but, but even if you’re just thinking broadly about smart bidding Right?

A lot of people might say I set my bid and I’m done, but no, it’s just that bid is now not a CPC bid, but it’s a cost per acquisition. But it’s still something you need to evolve as your business changes

Elizabeth Marsten: and you

Frederick Vallaeys: still have all the other components. So the bidding might be done somewhat more automatically than before, but you still need to look at your queries.

You still need to look at your attacks, right? Because it’s a holistic thing and you can’t just say I’ve bidding is done. My work is done. I don’t know if anyone else has any opinions on how the tools fit together.

Katie Wilson: Yeah, no, I agree. I think working with your optimizer to analyze the data and to make decisions that’s best for you.

I think the idea of, you know, for some folks with limited inventory, maybe smart shopping makes sense to have a one catch all. But I have seen folks with more advanced implementations where maybe it’s more You know, brand on brand. Maybe it’s category level to Fred’s point. Maybe it’s the cost of goods sold the way you break it out and how you want to bid and how you want to automate.

So doing a lot of experimentation again right now during this time before we get into the peak of holiday is key. So talking to your team and and maybe doing some tasks or a B test right now. To figure out what works best on shopping is a great time to do that.

Frederick Vallaeys: Elizabeth automation.

Elizabeth Marsten: Well, obviously I’m a big fan of more than anything else, but when it comes to specific, so right, it’s the machine is only as smart as the information that you feed into it.

And so if you don’t continually go back and prune and, or. Revisit. And, you know, again, like margin data, right. Or is it the right product? What do you have an excess of inventory of? What do you what are you more interested in from a, is it a new product launch, that kind of thing? So taking consideration, all those pieces, automation is great for the, for big, but I also look at the fact that, you know, optimizers can have one set of information and they’re going to And then Google is gonna have a different set of information that they use in their ways.

It’s best of both worlds.

Frederick Vallaeys: That makes sense. I want to show another slide here. And this is about audiences, right? So shifting topics here a little bit. But And Google gave the five tips in the beginning. This is basically one of those tips is use audiences to your advantage. Google obviously started as everything was keyword driven.

Now there’s much more of an audience component as well. And actually, when it comes to audiences, there’s a lot of stuff you can do. So Katie walk us through. This slide is quite dense, but what are the buckets?

Katie Wilson: I think it’s quite dense, but looking at the bubbles is a great way to start. So at that bottom, you know, traditional marketing funnel, what’s going to be the bottom of the funnel?

Most ROI for you as users you know, reach people you already know, right? That’s remarketing. That’s customer match, importing your own systems of customers to us so that we can make a group of that. For instance, do you have an email list? Do you have a previous software list that you can import to us?

That’s great and powerful data from your own CRM. So I would say starting at the bottom, absolutely have those things covered before going into holiday. And then when we look up the funnel, We’re starting to get into more behavioral and demographic based targeting. So similar audiences, you know, some people call that look alike, similar to folks who’ve converted in marketing, custom intent.

This can be very specific to who’s in market to buy a specific thing. An example we always use in the past is people who are moving, right? They’re in market to buy a house. They’re in market to rent. They’re in market now to, for moving services. That’s a, that’s an audience segment we have, and we have a lot of those segments.

Just to see if that maps up to your business from a retail perspective. We have several as well. Oh, they’re listing them here. Look how great so back to school that’s happening right now. I’ll be it in a different way for Christmas. We have great holiday segments and Black Friday as well. So this is user defined data based on their previous behavior.

And then lastly, we’re getting a little upper funnel when we talk about affinities and demographics, right? This is your traditional demo targeting based on age and gender, but also people’s behaviors and passions and the data we have in terms of their user behavior at Google. So think about things like, you know, folks that are you know, fitness enthusiasts, yoga enthusiasts.

We have all those different kinds of categories that you can play around with. But again, something great to set up right now as we’re building this data. And for remarketing and customer match, we get into October and things start to peak. Your lists are only going to grow. So really important to working with your team to, you know, make sure you have the correct data in there right now and the correct setup.

Frederick Vallaeys: So whoever has the best data will win Q4.

Katie Wilson: And I think we all have the opportunity to with the volume that’s coming, we’re going to get more user data. We’re going to get more shopping behavior from our clients. So use that to your advantage to really get the folks that are going after your brand, find similar users to those that converted. It’s a great opportunity right now.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. And so what’s so interesting is that you can’t rely on what’s happened in the past years because you just have this whole new segment of customers who might not have considered online. They are going online. If you can somehow map them to your existing customers and sort of commonalities and start to predict lifetime values.

Let’s actually talk about that for a second, right? So how do you bring lifetime value into the mix? How do you account for eventually people might go into stores and buy things? Right. My, my, my thinking is if you’re the company that actually assigns more value than just this specific sale to the conversion, then you can bid higher, right?

Because you, you know, that customer is going to be worth 5, 000 over the next couple of years, as opposed to the 50 that they just purchased from you right now. Elizabeth, that’s annuity, like bigger agency. Like how do you help clients put that together?

Elizabeth Marsten: Bunch of different things. So it depends on one brick and mortar presence.

So, you know, we do use live ramp for example, to kind of help close that that loop Amazon attribution is a new beta that’s been out for brands in particular, where they can track Google where someone starts on Google, but converts on Amazon. So you have some sort of idea of how those two pieces work together.

We actually have a couple of case studies on our. Website about those two, turning two words together, and especially important if you don’t have a transactional, you don’t have a transactional website. So let’s say it’s more of a brand presence, and then, you know, you use Google to drive traffic to it, but then you drive them to find a store, right?

So, helping some of those CPG brands in particular, figure out drive to store where they went. So there’s again, it always depends right on, on the brand and how they’re set up, but some are more sophisticated and we’re able to do things like live ramp and, and, and audience matching. We use like Pantar is another one.

We use to help kind of tell this full story to get to LTV. And, and of course we are very dependent on the client to fill in some of those gaps too, for like, we don’t see their financials. What are, what are, you know, what did they, how did they look at their business? Some of them have been very good at starting to move to this Omnichannel understanding and knowing that it will take six touch points for someone to finally convert and what that starts to look like in terms of costs and what it A desired return on ad spend is, you know, we have one client where the desired return on ad spend, you know, it, it doesn’t really make sense, but we’re still going to try that kind of thing, but it, you know, cause they have a price point as low.

But then we have to, okay, so we’re going to, we’re going to agree to disagree to meet here and then we’re going to use that to try and figure out, okay, that LPB for that channel for that price point, how that eventually starts to make sense, because it is like trying to hit a moving target,

Frederick Vallaeys: right? Duane, what about you?

Duane Brown: I mean, Elizabeth’s answer was amazing. I don’t know if I can top that answer, really. I have to be honest and say we don’t look at it. Clients talk about and they want to look at it, but it’s either like they don’t want to spend money on tools. Let’s be honest, what client really wants to or maybe they don’t spend enough money on paid for us to build some sort of like fancy, fancy cohort analysis data.

But what we have done, because a lot of our, like 90 percent of our clients are on Shopify, and we pretty much tell clients we want access to everything in Shopify, is we can download all the customer data, put it into Google Sheet build what’s basically called a helper table, and try to start to figure out when each customer made their first purchase.

First purchase, the second purchase and third purchase and figure out the days between each of those purchases and what the total value of all those purchases were, and that sort of helps us start to figure out, you know, when can we do retention campaign because our goal with every client is not just get that first purchase, but to have everyone come back and make a second and third purchase.

More importantly, we can start to see if customers who make three plus orders, you know, What is the average order basket of those three orders? You know, every customer makes three orders, you know, we can afford to spend X on, you know, this price point to acquire this customer. So it’s not as fancy as Elizabeth’s, but, you know, obviously bigger agency, more tools, more money.

But we’re trying to just download as much data from Shopify and like pivot tables, helper tables, and just do it that way. Not the ideal because it’s manual, but I’ve not figured out how to wait automated yet Maybe that’s because it involves a macro and I just don’t know how to code macros. I

Katie Wilson: think that’s very common I often say there’s no silver bullet to lifetime value right now because of the complexity of the We’re journey and the multiple platforms people are interacting with and the multiple, you know, platforms for advertising and frankly, so it is really like doing an Elizabeth.

We’re saying, getting that data to your partner teams, whether it’s optimized or the teams are working with and sharing as much as you feel comfortable sharing with us so that we can put those cohorts together. We can analyze that for you and we can give you a better Best case, I think cohorts is a great strategy.

I see very traditionally in retail. Even in my time in email marketing, that was, you know what we did. But I think we want to bucket those people. We want to track them over time and then we want to make some decisions based on the data we’re seeing, right? It’s not going to be a silver bullet, but do we see some trends?

And then we say, yes, these users are best in class. Let’s segment them differently. Let’s find similar audiences to them. Let’s find similar people. What do we know about those people? And then use that to inform your marketing strategy.

Elizabeth Marsten: Yeah, we call it the convince the CFO argument, right? How do we get away from last click?

How do we, how do we, how do we show like that, that mid to upper funnel does pay off over time? Yeah.

Katie Wilson: Yeah, and I think you mentioned like the retention and lifetime value of customers. How do we reengage our best customers and upsell them is a really, really important opportunity. We don’t want to focus all our efforts on acquisition because then we’re missing out on on this ecosystem of customers.

We see that with the best brands, right? They have very loyal folks that are going to come back. Those are the folks that are going to recommend you to others. So really important

Frederick Vallaeys: wise words. So we’re we’re coming to the end of the show here. So I’d like to give everyone an opportunity to maybe touch on something that is important to you that we might not have covered here.

I can take a volunteer of who wants to go first, or I can, you know, I can choose. I’ll go first, right? That’s correct. Yeah, you know, we’ve talked a lot about this, you know, all summer with clients and, and everyone thinks I’m crazy to start planning for Black Friday right now. But I think the big thing to take away from all this outside of everything we said is, you know, a lot of people will spend all their money on Google and Facebook and I love both of them.

Duane Brown: Bless Google’s heart, you’ve given me a job for the last 14 years and let me live in six cities on three continents, but I think we need to think beyond just like Google and Facebook. People spend a lot of time on like TikTok and Snap, and so if all your money is on just Google or just Facebook, you will lose this Christmas holiday.

You need to be on another platform and diversify your spend. I understand it’s easy to manage one platform, but if you need to bring in like a part time or a contractor or work with an agency, that’s The only way you’re going to win Black Friday and Christmas is you’re on more than one ad platform. 20 brands think that if they’re successful on Google or successful on Facebook, that’s it.

But there’s a world out there. Even Google owns YouTube. YouTube is a whole world different than Google and you need to be there if your customers are there. And if you’re not there, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to win a Christmas and Black Friday.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, well said. And maybe feeds a little bit into a slide that Katie had actually had, which is, yeah, strategy.

Katie Wilson: And I can close out with this too, because I know we talked a lot about automation and audience, which are great strategies, and we absolutely should be using those in holiday. But I will say to Duane’s point, like there’s a larger ecosystem at Google.

We think about social, I think about the amount of time people are spending on YouTube right now. Being at home. Think about that as a channel for customer acquisition and discovery as well. That’s our new platform. That’s more feed based, more native looking, right? It’s integrated into all of the Google platforms.

I’ve seen a lot of success with discovery with customers that, you know, have success on social and native, have great content and creatives. They want to get in front of people. So explore these as other options as well. When we’re talking about customer acquisition. Think about it really holistically and really do the work now.

I can’t say it enough to prepare and make sure you have these foundations in place before the volume comes.

Frederick Vallaeys: Make sense? Elizabeth, that leaves you.

Elizabeth Marsten: Thank you, Duane, for giving me the you’re muted on my Zoom bingo card, which is, this is not, but close enough. But yeah, piggybacking on, on both, like, what’s coming for Q4 in particular, what I’m excited about.

Retailer media networks. So, you know, that diversification, it’s not necessarily, I would, it would choose at least to be on three to four platforms this holiday in particular, you just need to be where your customers are when they’re ready to convert. It has, you know, you need to kind of check that ego.

They are where they are and they’re when they’re ready to buy. Be there and have that consistency, but it is interesting as the Third party cookie starts to crumble as we say that first party data and retailer media networks and what they’re starting to do So what walmart’s starting to come out with this is literally my job.

I keep track of who’s doing what so walmart instacart Kredio as they partner with, you know places like target, ships Who else is out there now that’s got a big one Kroger, Home Depot, all of these sort of would I say specialty retailers too? If you were in there, let’s say you’re in the cookware category, you probably saw some significant growth this year.

Maybe you’ll be able to see that again through Q4. Signs are pointing to yes. So make sure that you’re on the places that you need to be where your customers are.

Frederick Vallaeys: Makes sense. Katie, actually, you didn’t get to tell us about another event that you’re doing. So yeah,

Katie Wilson: I know I gave you the info for this. There is another event on ads on air with Google think retail think with Google is our platform run by our marketing team that shares a lot of consumer insights.

We have an event specifically focused on retail that is a great kickoff to Q4. That’s happening in the next few weeks in early September. So you see the link there. Take a look if you’re interested RSVP for that. It’s both for e commerce and omni channel companies. So you’ll get a lot of great data around how our products work together.

And that’s very specific for e commerce and retail market. So I’d highly recommend it.

Frederick Vallaeys: Great. Hey, well, thanks everyone. This this was a great show. I’ve written down a few notes of things that I just learned. So that’s that’s amazing. Thank you for joining us. If anyone wants to get ahold of the panelists use reach out on Twitter.

We’ll also be putting all the sites in the show notes. Katie, there was one specific question. Somebody was asking if the slides can be made available.

Katie Wilson: Yeah. Emi was saying yes, she’ll reach out. We, we can note that and we’ll make those available to Fred.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, exactly. So why don’t people just email support at optimizer dot com?

Ask for the slides from Google from this PPC Town Hall and we’ll send them out. Or if you need contact info for any of the panelists, we’re happy to provide that as well. So thanks again, Duane, Elizabeth, Katie. It’s been great. Stay safe. I will see you for the next PPC Town Hall.

Katie Wilson: Thank you, Fred. Bye everyone.

Frederick Vallaeys: Thanks, Fred. Bye.