The Tariff Crisis: PPC Survival Tips and Advice from Top Experts

Episode Description

The 2025 trade war is here, and advertisers are feeling the heat. In this special PPC Town Hall, Navah Hopkins speaks with Duane Brown (Take Some Risk) and Casey Gill (Web Savvy) about the ripple effects of tariffs on Google Ads, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon.

From shrinking margins to campaign testing strategies and cross-border messaging, this episode is packed with tactical advice you can apply right now. Whether you’re managing a $10K or $100K ad budget, these insights will help you survive and thrive during uncertain times.

Episode Takeaways

Speaking from different corners of the globe—with Casey joining from Melbourne, Australia and Duane from Toronto, Canada, both of these seasoned professionals elaborate on how they’re adjusting their business approach while delivering measurable value for their clients.

1. Business climate and economic uncertainty

Navah Hopkins, Casey Gill, and Duane Brown talk at length about the current business climate and economic uncertainty affecting PPC advertising globally.

Casey, speaking from Australia, highlights that economic difficulties are affecting businesses differently across regions. The Australian market is experiencing particular challenges with maintaining expected growth rates.

“It’s been an interesting period I think for businesses across the world. But I know in Australia as well, it has been tough, like economy wise, for a lot of businesses especially, we’re already coming into the calendar year, second quarter. Which is unbelievable. We’ve had a very mixed bag in terms of growth” shares Casey

Meanwhile, Duane discusses the interconnected nature of the North American economies, where decisions made in the US have significant ripple effects in Canada.

They find that:

• There is a disconnect between expectations and reality in the current climate with clients still expecting 20-30% YoY growth despite challenging economic conditions
• Duane also notes that there is a decision-making paralysis among businesses, as companies are reluctant to commit resources when the future seems unpredictable
• The tariff situation is also creating complex operational and strategic challenges for PPC professionals and their clients across different global market

2. The impact on advertising spend patterns

Both Duane and Casey agree that there are subtle shifts in how budgets are currently being allocated as there should be. Rather than dramatic cuts or increases, clients are making more strategic adjustments to maintain profitability.

Profitability is becoming the north-star metric for advertising decisions with reduced spending being tied to profitability metrics rather than being simple ‘budget cuts’.

“If we have less spend today in April versus January, it’s more because of profitability numbers. We just need to spend less to get that profit number back where it was.” said Duane

There’s also been a shift in how advertisers are leveraging different ad platforms. While Google still takes the lead, Casey and Duane share that they encourage their clients to test the waters with Microsoft in a selective way.

“We are seeing a lot more who are interested in testing the waters with Microsoft. Maybe not like a full campaign import, but maybe selecting some of those high margin type of campaigns. Looking for the opportunity, especially depending on the type of product or service.” says Casey.

3. Doubling down on performance metrics and client education

Although most clients do look at a variety of metrics to track performance, some of them are hyper-focused on certain metrics like ROAS. In these cases it is important to bring home the message that campaign performance is multidimensional and cannot be adequately captured by a single number.

One such metric is the lifetime value. Focusing on customer lifetime value over immediate transaction value encourages a longer-term view of marketing. It helps agencies and clients recognize that some customers are worth a higher upfront cost if their long-term value makes the investment worthwhile.

Casey also emphasizes the importance of client education. It turns client meetings into collaborative sessions that go beyond just reviewing numbers—helping clients understand how digital marketing works and how to interpret results effectively.

“I think the conversations really have to start just by getting down to basics, and it’s almost like having a scratch pad and a pen and pointing at the chalk board and saying, look, here’s the number. This is how it was.” Casey shares.

4. Diversification and strategic adaptation

Duane’s agency has a diverse client base differentiated by region and industry. Serving both B2B and B2C clients across different geographies helps protect against local or sector-specific downturns—a smart way to manage risk, especially in uncertain times.

“Business is good and we try to work hard to diversify our client base, both geographically and what clients do. We’re not like some agents that might have only skincare or only fashion or only X, Y, Z category. We’ve got everything from B2B and B2C to selling things you wouldn’t think of that gets sold online.” said Duane.

He also notes that it is worth focusing on what drives client success, not what’s easiest for the agency—a shift toward choosing platforms based on value, not convenience. He emphasizes taking an incremental approach to any kind of expansion rather than dramatic changes to minimize risk. It’s particularly valuable in uncertain economic times when experimental budgets may be more limited.

Episode Transcript

Navah Hopkins: Hi, friends, Navah Hopkins from Optmyzr here with PPC Town Hall. I am joined by the exceptionally brilliant Duane Brown and the brilliantly clever Casey Gill. Both of these amazing forces for good joined us for a very special PPC town hall focused on— not only how can we do our best work in PPC post the tariff impositions, but also how can we be more mindful when doing business on the international stage?

What sort of things do we need to be mindful when doing business in Canada, in Europe, in Australia, Asia? Really think about how can we message appropriately, how can we target appropriately, and how can we do business in a way that helps us? Helps our neighbors and ultimately be profitable while being good.

Duane, Casey, thank you so much for being here.

Duane Brown: Thank you.

Casey Gill: Thank you for having us.

Navah Hopkins: Before we get into questions, do you each want to take a turn, introducing yourself, sharing why you invested the time in talking about this topic, a little bit about your firm.

Casey Gill: My name is Casey Gill and as you can probably see, it is dark outside for me.

I’m in Melbourne, in Australia at the moment right now, and I have experience in PPC advertising for many years now. I’m currently working at an agency and so that experience is not only focusing with companies that are in Australia, but company globally. So that means throughout Europe and also the United States.

So this was a really great topic. I’m excited to be asked to join today, and I definitely have a few ideas about what’s to come.

Duane Brown: Awesome. Yeah, my name’s Duane Brown, based in Toronto, Canada, but we got about half our clients in America. Either half are split between Canada, to the UK and Europe.

Whether we like it or not, America’s involved in one of those scenarios, whether we buy products from America or we sell products to Americans, or we manufacture, or we bring products from overseas to make the final product. Whether I like it or not, America’s involved in one of those ways, and whether I like it or not, tariffs impact me.

As do you know, recessions, deflation. So it’s a hotly topic because everyone wants to know what the hell are we gonna do next.

Navah Hopkins: So before we get to the technical stuff, how are you both your businesses? Are your clients okay? Is everyone okay? Are we not okay but finding our paths forward? I would love to get a temperature check on how you are.

Casey Gill: I’ll go first. Yeah. The business— it’s been an interesting period I think for businesses across the world. But I know in Australia as well, it has been tough, like economy wise, for a lot of businesses especially, we’re already coming into the calendar year, second quarter.

Which is unbelievable. We’ve had a very mixed bag in terms of growth. I think that a lot of the expectations on some clients are still to have this 20, 30% growth year-on-year, which has been really tricky to maintain. However, we have been seeing, for the most part that we’re continuing to get consistent results.

But it is definitely a lot harder, in my opinion, to continue achieving that, especially on platforms like Google ads.

Duane Brown: Yeah, I’d say I feel personally less stressed than I did probably six weeks ago, only because I know the wait and see. We will change our mind every two weeks seems to be how we operate in this current environment.

It’s this day we’re gonna launch something and this day, and then no, we’re gonna change our mind and we’re doing that. We’re doing this. And I understand that both what the American government wants to do and our government in Canada, it is, I guess like a tennis match. It’s very much a back and forth.

There’s no endpoint other than when in theory, somebody will be re-elected or someone newly elected will enter government in three years and change. I think clients are obviously stressed ‘cause they don’t know what to do because there’s no concrete plan or there’s no, this is what we’ve done and this is it.

Now I can plan around that. There’s very much a wait and see. And so that I think is frustrating because do you raise prices, do you chop products? Do you fire people? I think for the auto sector in Canada, I know they’ve already started to lay off people. I know in the American auto sector, they started to lay off people because our country is so intertwined that to make a car, it’s gonna ship between Canada and America, like eight times before the car was done.

People are already losing jobs, which is not great. I feel a lot better than it did six weeks ago, but not a hundred percent great because I don’t know what clients are gonna do, but business is good and we try to work hard to diversify our client base, both geographically and what clients do.

We’re not like some agents that might have only skincare or only fashion or only X, Y, Z category. We’ve got everything from B2B and B2C to selling things you wouldn’t think of that gets sold online. So we feel good from that perspective. But I think the other thing, I think anyone who owns the agency, freelancers, clients who were gonna sign probably aren’t making a decision yet, which means that all in signing a new business have to work hard. They’ll keep the business you do have because you don’t know when people are gonna feel comfortable enough to say, I want to commit to 3, 6, 12 months with you because they don’t know what’s going on.

Or they don’t want to commit money that they may not have in 3, 6, 9, 12 months.

Cast Gill: That is a really interesting point because it is all of the uncertainty, and I think as we all learned five years ago when we were on the cusp of going into a season of uncertainty, we all felt very uneasy. Businesses were pulling back.

But then off the back of that, I think people did start to innovate and improvise, and we did see a lot of really good things come out of the back of that. But right now that is the type of thing because none of us know. It’s like when Google kind of makes an announcement that something’s gonna happen, we’re all waiting and like there is no documentation about what’s gonna happen.

We’re all speculating and that has been really difficult.

Navah Hopkins: For what it’s worth on the American side, I’ve actually seen a lot of folks aggressively look to do business externally and try to recapture some of that international business, because there is so much fluctuation on auction prices, there’s so much fluctuation on what is happening, what are we gonna do domestically, that the international stage seems like it’s a safer bet.

Granted, there are no safe bets right now. We’re gonna have a whole other episode on the economics of tariffs. Look for that as well. But one thing I think is really interesting is that I haven’t heard yet, and I’d love for us to dig into it— what channels are people consistently saying on? Are there any channels that people are pulling back?

I think one of the tells I’m looking for is, does Google ever drop below say that 90% bull work market share that it tends to have. I’m curious, are you guys seeing spends shift more or less staying the same on ad channels or is it pretty consistent?

Duane Brown: Yeah, I’d think for us things are pretty consistent in the sense that no one’s spending more money.

Some clients, a couple clients might spend more money, but as a whole, on average, no one’s spending more money and I see no one drop spend. If we have less spend today in April versus January, it’s more because of profitability numbers. We just need to spend less to get that profit number back where it was.

I don’t know what’s gonna happen in the future, but we’ve been consistently spend a lot of our time and money on Google and on Microsoft. And then about half our clients we run Meta and paid social. The other half we do it in house, but no one’s really dropped spend there either. So I think the big two, the big three, people consistently spend money on, I know some people have said they’re bringing like email marketing in house.

Some people said they’ve found a way to make Pinterest work, which God bless their soul, I’m happy for them. At least for our clients, we’ve stuck to the bread and butter, so to speak, and it’s just a conversation of what we can afford to spend within the paradigm of maintaining profitability.

Navah Hopkins: I’m curious, before Casey, you chime in, I really wanna hear, are you finding that clients are more or less tolerant of efficiencies in spend?

So are you finding that clients get it, that this is a time of turmoil or are they holding you accountable? And if they are holding you accountable, what are some of those lines that you’re using to push back against the, it’s the market, not the management.

Duane Brown: Yeah, we try to talk about that in general when we onboard a client, like part of our pitch is like, we don’t control your site. We don’t control the market and the market’s usually Google, but even competitions, those are out of our control and they have a huge impact on our success or our failure. We lost the a client the other day ‘cause they were not as efficient as they wanna be and they believed someone else could do a better job.

And God bless their soul, I hope they can get that at the end of the day. We don’t generally push back on it’s you or the market, yada, yada. I think we just try to focus on client wants to hit X, what can we do to hit that? And usually it’s either cut the fat in ad accounts that other people can run or spend less so we’re not spending 30,000 anymore a month or spending 25,000 more a month.

That usually helps it. I try to emphasize to the team, if we’re not in what the client wants at a certain spend, then spend less money. That’s probably the easiest way to get to where we want based on where the market condition is and then hope for the rest.

Part of our pitch to sending clients is about spending money in a profitable way. I need to treat your money like it’s my own. So we don’t have to train clients, so to speak. Their clients are already looking for that sort of efficiency and we’ve been doing it that way for six or seven years. It’s been on our website, but I’m glad to see more people in the last three, four months think that profitability is sexy and like Justin Timberlake bring it all back in style.

Because if you’re not running stuff profitably with your biggest ad spend next to, or your basic expense next to let’s say rent or office or salaries, then I really dunno what you’ve been doing for the last four or five years. I know the pandemic was great, don’t get me wrong. But to spend tons of money and not be profitable and that money just seems silly to me as a business owner.

Casey Gill: So just going to your first point in terms of where we’re seeing a client wanting to invest their marketing budget, and we are still seeing the majority of them are putting a good chunk of their budget into Google. We are seeing a lot more who are interested in testing the waters with Microsoft.

Maybe not like a full campaign import, but maybe selecting some of those high margin type of campaigns. Looking for the opportunity, especially depending on the type of product or service. So obviously if it’s a certain older demographic, then it’s almost a known brainer to put it into Microsoft and give it a bit of a whirl there.

We have the seen better returns there for some of our clients, not for everyone, but for some of them. And it also depends on the type of business. So what we tend to be really good at as an agency is we will constantly be monitoring where we’re getting the best bang for the buck, so to speak. So if we see that we’re getting a much better return on Meta, then we will divert.

We’ll pull some of that budget from Google, work off some of it from Microsoft, put it towards some of the other channel and test until we get to that point that the client is happy, that we feel like we’re meeting what our budgets are for the month, and that we are hopefully getting as close as possible to those targets.

I will say that the majority of the clients are really great at being able to look at a variety of metrics and not just having that one ROAS metric that they need to look at. We do have a couple of clients that are very focused or almost hyper-focused on that metric, almost to the point where they don’t even consider things like lifetime value, which is what we are trying to get more in a habit of having a discussion about very early on so that we can agree on how best to approach that.

But I think going forward, especially as we are looking at the potential for margins to shrink, we’re looking at a potential for shipping costs to go up. I think it is going to be really important to be having that discussion with clients and talking about how we wanna set those campaigns up, what products do we wanna be focusing on? And really making them go further, focusing just on those regions that are delivering the most result. And that tends to be our approach. It tends to work really well, but I do think it is just an ongoing discussion. So it’s not just something that you talk about once and then you move on.

It feels like every couple of weeks you are almost revisiting the same topic, the conversation there.

Navah Hopkins: I’d love to dig into that a little bit deeper and then once you share your answer, Duane, I also want your answer to this question. You mentioned talking about margins, you mentioned talking about lifetime value.

That is my love language. It is so important that we are thinking about the pragmatic metrics, the pragmatic math that goes into running PPC. But as you mentioned, these margins are gonna start to shift. I’m really curious, how are you having those conversations with clients where maybe there was pretty consistent growth or consistent performance. And then now how are we thinking about testing new channels?

How are we thinking about how the margins influence us? So for example, I know from the Optmyzr perspective and we help people with Google, Microsoft, Amazon Meta, LinkedIn, Yahoo Japan. But the Lion share is Google.

No matter what amazing tools we launch, the lion share is pretty consistently Google. One of the things I’m really curious about is to see if some of those kind of pragmatic, scrappy marketers start looking at Microsoft simply because the competition isn’t there or looking at Meta because maybe there’s a little bit easier rules of engagement.

So I’m super curious how you’re having those conversations.

Casey Gill: Yeah, I think the conversations really have to start just by getting down to basics, and it’s almost like having a scratch pad and a pen and pointing at the chalk footage and saying, look, here’s the number. This is how it was. Not quite that basic, but an example today I was talking with a client and we were looking across sort of the metrics from the campaign, and he was going down his column, looking at his cost per acquisition, and he said, this campaign is, costing us way too much money.

I said, look, we need to not just look at one metric, and that one is costing you a lot of money if you look at the cost per conversion. But then if you back it up and if you look at your conversion rate, and if you look at the conversion value to cost, and if you look at all of the other revenue that’s coming through, the reason why your conversion, your cost per conversion looks so high is because you’re selling really high priced items in that campaign. So you’re selling fewer items, but your revenue is like one of the biggest out of all of the campaigns that we’re running. And then once we walked through it that way he was like, ah, okay, that makes sense. We were just looking at this column here.

So I think sometimes it really takes just you walking through and sharing a screen or somehow walking through a report together and just getting back to the basics and getting back to the whole structure and why you’ve set the campaign up that way and why you’re targeting the product that you’re targeting.

Duane Brown: Yeah, that’s good. Good job Casey. Yeah we gotta sometimes show clients a bit of everything. I think for us, we do work towards whether it’s a ROAS or some clients do an ACoS, which for those who don’t know who are listening, that’s like the reversal of a ROAS from Amazon, but a lot more brands looking at it across the whole business.

So we do work towards what that one number is, we do need something to work towards or be more guideline in Google and in Microsoft and stuff like that. In terms of our opinion on Microsoft. It’s just a no-brainer. So if a client’s been with us for two or three months and things are going well and their stability, we know like what campaigns are top three, top five campaigns, then we’ll just pitch the client Microsoft, let’s test it out. You’ve not tried it or you did try it, but it was a year ago. It was two years ago. I didn’t see how it goes except for a handful of new clients have come on board this year. Heavy clients in Microsoft. I think not to do Microsoft is a bit silly really at this point. Yes, it’s sometimes a bit more work than maybe you might get in fees and stuff like that.

But I, from my perspective, I can get clients 5, 10, 20, 50 more conversions a month. ‘cause we’re talking in America. We’re target all of North America and Europe and part of like Australia. Then why not do it, right? We’re more or less importing stuff from Google. That makes sense. We’re doing the tweaks we need to do and then we just manage it as it goes and stuff like that.

Meta’s a lot harder to be the blunt answer. My clients don’t wanna make ad creative, that’s just the blunt answer to it. They don’t enjoy it, they don’t wanna do it. Not that they think it’s stupid, they just don’t wanna do it. So I think out of our clients, find clients who both wanna invest the money into that process and have a designer spend their time doing that stuff.

We have some clients who I think they would do amazing on Meta, but they couldn’t be bothered to make great if they just don’t want to do it. And so I think that is the hardest challenge as an agency. We have clients who sell great products that do well in paid search, but to get the Meta or anything paid social, it’s definitely more of an uphill pedal, but it’s a thing we take on a client by client basis and try to say like, why don’t we do this test for three months or do this test.

For two months or whatever it is, and see how it goes. You’re not committed into the next year. Just come in the next two months to see if we can get it to work. If you need to work. You do it more. If you don’t, that sucks. But at least we give it a shot and try stuff like that. So if a lot of clients, it’s often just saying, let’s do a test of two or three, four months, whatever it is, depending on what they sell, get them to commit to that short term thing.

And if we can prove it works and it’s profitable and it makes sense and you like the type of customers coming in, either the people from Microsoft or very similar to Google, not, they’re not gonna like bombard your customer service team for example. Or they’re not gonna buy the worst product you sell for whatever reason I think clients are usually, yeah, let’s continue to spend a thousand dollars on Microsoft or $2,000 or $10,000 in Microsoft, whatever it is at the end of the day.

Navah Hopkins: Before we, we move on to more the humans and the ad platforms, I’d really love to get both of your takes and we can start with Casey. What are some of the tools within the various ad platforms that you really care that marketers are aware of and are thinking about, just to give some ideas. One of the tools that I tend to recommend, I was recommending anyway was conversion exclusions to actually help Google understand that a period of time isn’t worth factoring in. I think that’s gonna be incredibly important right now.

So I just wanna throw some ideas out there, but would love both of your takes. Again, starting with Casey, any tools that you really care folks are paying attention to.

Casey Gill: Yeah, I thought a really good one as well, though I like the conversion inclusion one as well, but one of the other ones that we’ve been talking about a lot lately is the conversion lag time.

So when you’re looking at the attribution and you’re looking at the conversion lag, we have a few clients that the products are such a high price point that we can just see that research phase and just think about the way that you shop. Never make, it doesn’t feel like I ever just go straight to a website unless with the product I’ve purchased before.

I always do a little bit of comparison and I might sit on it and I might add it to my cart and wait a couple days and go and look somewhere else. But there’s just that lag time. And we had one client that was anywhere between 17 and 25 days on a lag time. And then just educating about what that means. So why does the data change from month to month?

Last month you told me that we made X amount, and this month that has grown by a significant amount. So it’s talking about and educating about the conversion lag time. Then I also really, what I think a lot of businesses don’t tend to do very often is going into Google Merchant Center and looking at the store quality and looking at all of the factors that contribute to how they’re performing.

Are they competitive on the delivery times? And if there’s something that I think is gonna be really interesting to watch because those shipping time will be affected whether we like it or not, there’s probably a lot of reasons why that’s gonna happen, and I’ll go into that maybe in a little bit. But I think there are gonna be some gray market.

I think that people are gonna start, there’s always gonna be loopholes. There’s always gonna be workaround. So this is gonna spawn a whole new level of shipping workarounds. So now we’re saying, okay, products might not come directly to the US. Are they gonna ship to another country that has a lower tariff and then go into the US? Or are they going to start to become issues where people are going to be crossing borders into Canada or into Mexico to get products they can legally cross in, get some products? How are they gonna monitor carrying products, the goods that have been brought outside?

Is there gonna be shopping tourism going on? These are all of the things that you know, that are potentially on the horizon, but just getting back to the tools, I think that it is so valuable using all of those analytics tools within Google Merchant Center just to make sure that you’re able to compare your store, who are your search competitors?

They’re not always who the brand think the brand might tell you, or the client might tell you five competitors that they think are their competitors. But when you go and look at who’s actually showing up next to them in the auction, it’s completely different set.

So it is really important to take that into account and also I suppose people will start to look at where those competitors are based as well, because that will have an impact on the price, which we know is one of the signals that Google uses and the shopping auction.

Navah Hopkins: That was so much gold and I know you made Duane’s heart so happy with the call out from checking Merchant Center.

Duane, what are your go-to tools right now?

Duane Brown: Yeah, I mean I definitely do love GMC. I spend a lot of time there. I think the two that I find the most interesting, I don’t like, I’ll say what a traditional PPC agency is. They just run accounts. We spend, I think 40% of our net new revenue was one of brands and some agencies hired us one off to do account audits or do some consultants, stuff like that.

And so I think the two things that I think more brands should get into, or just whoever’s running the account, Google, you have reports. People generally don’t love to build reports, but I think the reports is like an underutilized section to figure out, like if you’ve go you know more than a hundred SKUs or you have multiple SKUs and campaigns, figuring out like what money you spend and what SKUs really quickly because you can save reports, change the date range really quickly and look at stuff. I find it easier at times I’ll at reports in Google if I wanna look at something and there’s sometimes we can look inside of the campaign itself. And then beyond that, we’ve been talking about a lot as a team.

So we’ve got a client who sells cameras as an example, and they sell across 12 or 15 countries in Europe. The usual suspects if you’re selling in Europe. The client says, as an example, they made 500,000 European dollars last month, whereas Google only shows 300,000 revenue in terms of Euros and the client says but the only thing I do is Google. I don’t do anything else. We can look at, service side tracking with hands enhanced conversions to turn on. We turn that on, and so I think. People just reevaluate should they use service side tracking, whether it’s done by hand or you do it through GTM or you use something like STA or profit metrics and stuff like that.

So I think it’s a time to reevaluate their conversion tracking and what they’re doing. And the other thing, I think that’s come out last year, and though it’s not a feature per se, when you’re in Google Ads, you can go and break down your traffic by device. And even though this isn’t 10 years ago, we’d have a campaign that was mobile and to have a campaign that was desktop and you thought you were the shit ‘cause everything was working well.

I think brands have not realized always in the last year how much more and more traffic comes from mobile device. I see sometimes brands spend 90% of their money on mobile, but the conversion rate of mobile app is like a hundred percent less than what it is on desktop, and so they are just light money on fire.

And so I think we’re in Q2 right now. You’ve got Q2, Q3. If you’re not reevaluating how to make my mobile experience better, and sometimes it’s easy stuff, sometimes it’s get rid of all the popups and only have one. Sometimes it’s increased the text slightly larger, so it’s easier to read on a mobile device.

If you’re not on Shopify, it’s sometimes making your checkout experience a lot nicer on a mobile device, because that’s gonna look way different than it does on your desktop. So if you’re not looking at mobile experiences and how to make sure your conversion rate is better going into your peak season and or Q4, you’re asking just to lose money if you want profitability, that probably where your profitability is being drained right now because less people can run a mobile device because your expensive mobile device, it’s just not as good as you think it is because you’ll get your website on your desktop when you’re at the office or on your laptop, which is not the same if you’re an iPhone user. And I can say iPhone because I don’t know everyone’s got an iPhone but me these days, it feels like.

Navah Hopkins: I’m with you Duane, fellow Android lover. You brought up something. Alright, we need to talk a little bit about the consent modals and the impact that’s gonna have. One of the biggest killers of mobile experiences is that you use the same sort of modal for consent as to on desktop and on your mobile device, and it blocks everything and it’s horrible and people hate it.

The other thing that’s really important to note is that when you are checking your landing page flow, you can inspect the page and see what the mobile and desktop experience is. There is zero reason for you not to test your landing page flow, especially now that Google is requiring or strongly suggesting a navigation at the top.

So some of your PPC landing pages, very focused pages with just a form, you wanna be careful there. But a hundred percent agree on the mobile desktop thing. I think we all have that bias, that mobile is the best and mobile is really good for engagement and impulse. But on some of those higher ticket items with a longer sales cycle, we absolutely wanna be mindful about desktop.

We wanna be mindful about the different sort of consent forms and consent experiences that are gonna pop up along the path. So we’ve talked a lot about the ads. Let’s now talk about the humans, because ultimately the reason we’re on this episode together is we wanna help you. We wanna help the humans that are being impacted as much or as little, hopefully as little as possible.

And I’d love to hear both of your takes on what is your advice to marketers that are in the US trying to do business internationally? And then what is your advice for marketers at home doing business with the rest of the world? We started, I think, with Casey last time, so we’ll start with Dwayne this time.

Duane Brown: If I was American and based in America and trying to sell an American made product, I would definitely probably feel like it’s a struggle right now, because you never know what it is. Maybe a large swath of America might think it’s too expensive to buy the product. And maybe you found Canadians, Australians, the British, some people in Western Europe or even Central Europe will have to buy whatever that product is. Maybe it’s like a bougie wallet or something like that. So I think obviously if it’s a Made in America product, you probably don’t wanna mention that. I know my fellow Europeans have taken a stance I’m gonna buy from whatever my country is. The Danes buy from Denmark and the British buy their British.

So you probably don’t wanna emphasize the Made in America part, but you maybe wanna emphasize it’s a good quality product, it’s gonna last you a long time. It’s got this protection, this warranty. It’s all the other attributes you’d want. And I’ll be the first to admit, there’re gonna be lots of Canadians who don’t give a shit at the end of the day.

They just buy the product from wherever it is the cheapest. ‘cause they, they don’t wanna buy Canadian because it’s real expensive. You know, I’ve been shopping, buying Canadian the last 10 years. The last time I bought an Amazon was May of 2019. I bought the TV that I still owned to the day and that was the last thing I bought. And so I worked real hard to buy. Canadian, even though it’s really expensive as a single person. ‘cause I say that I pay the single tax for everything. So I think if you’re an American marketer and you’re trying to sell an American thing, I think just emphasize America less than try to emphasize the qualities.

And then beyond that. Try to figure out what different countries want. I often tell people, if you’re gonna go from Canada or the UK or Europe to America, it’s often like gladius. It’s the most expensive place you can run e-comm ads and things are way more expensive. You can’t just take your cozy ads you’ve got over there and just coop it into the Americans.

They can be very price sensitive as an example, and so you gotta make sure that if you’re not price competitive, how are you gonna convince people that would buy to buy your product? I think from the people from abroad, some have decided to not just sell in America anymore. ‘cause maybe America is a small part of their market and stuff like that.

Those who can’t just exit out of America, ‘cause maybe it is a big part of your market, I think figuring out why people buy your product. So like the use case or the reason, a good way to do that is read customer reviews. People often don’t read customer reviews, but it’s a treasure trove of data in terms of I bought this product from my son or bought this product from my boyfriend or girlfriend or partner or cousin or whatever.

And figuring out like why they bought in that use case is stuff you can start to talk about like in your ads and your ad copy and try to attract more people. If we’ve bought your product in the last 60 days, the last 90 days, who will most likely continue to buy your product and they come in 60, 90 days?

That’s a big thing we do with clients. And then realize that if you were spending, let’s say, a hundred thousand dollars a month last year. You might always spend 60 or $70,000 a month this year because just West people are gonna buy than they would’ve before for a host of reasons of maybe there are lots of Americans who do wanna support buying American made stuff, and so that means they’re gonna buy west stuff from Canada and Europe, and that’s okay.

We all wanna support our own country during these challenging times, as we should. So I think people just need to readjust their expectations around everything. And I think sometimes easier when you’re in agencies and freelancers do that than if you’re like an owner or a founder, and stuff like that could be really hard.

So I think as marketers, we also have to be patient with our clients who can be stubborn at times and not wanna change things, even though the writing’s on the wall that we need to make this change or we’re just not gonna get the thing that we want, which is spend a hundred thousand dollars and make 500,000 or whatever your return ad spend was gonna be.

Casey Gill: Yeah, I think for, I agree with the, obviously Made in America is going to be a huge USP that’s going to be even stronger than it has been over the years, but I think that applies to any country. I think that now, at this point in time, a lot of countries are going to be taking that same stance of buying direct from your own country.

We’re already seeing it here in Australia with people saying, Australia made Australian and businesses. People are really focusing on that sort of level, I guess you would call it, that level of pride of origin, like where the products are made, but also, we are in a little bit of an interesting situation here because it it for the most part business as usual because we don’t really know what’s going to happen.

I do feel that there it potential because there are going to be so many tariffs, especially on businesses that are shipping from China and Hong Kong into the US. I do feel like that will potentially increase the level of advertising for those businesses in places like Australia, because just geographically we’re closer.

So there may be some increases in competition that we will start seeing there. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is yet to be seen, but I do think that it might add fuel to the fire and some of the fast fashion areas that we see, whether it is a lot of cut prices going on. But the other thing that we have been talking about quite a bit is what is going to happen.

For example, I was talking about a business today that’s headquartered in California, and they do have various locations across the US where they have warehousing and already they are starting to look abroad for that warehousing because with components that are coming from all over the world.

And already they’re starting to try and minimize their risk or when this does come into play to that, they’ll have a factory elsewhere that can ship into different countries. And this is one of the things that we’ve been talking about a lot is one of the USPs, if you will, but a lot of brands are focusing on is things like sustainability.

That’s the big here in Australia, probably more than it ever has been, but there has been some discussion around what is this going to be doing to us environmentally, what is the environmental impact of all of these changes that are going on? People are gonna be shipping more. They’re gonna be shipping to one place to get it to another place, and then via another country with lower tariffs into the United States.

So then all of a sudden we have more planes and more trains and more boats and all of that coming into play as well. So thinking about how we can localize the product, make it feel more meaningful, make it feel sustainable, and then also just gearing up for one of our busiest times the year here in Australia, which is the end of financial year from the end of June, roughly. Most of the sale that you might hear at E-O-F-Y, EOFY people call it here, and that tends to start from anywhere between end of May, all the way through to June, and that’s where people discount. It’s almost like a Black Friday for us here. It’ll be really interesting to see what happens, whether it continues business as usual or whether we start to see some diversions of other businesses coming in to market their products.

Yeah, because it’s more affordable to ship.

Navah Hopkins: You made such a good point that I don’t think enough people are talking about on the environmental impact. We tend to think about this in terms of margins, in terms of infrastructure, and I’ll be really interested to see if one of the points of differentiation that really sells it, at least for Gen Z, the millennials is the lower ecological footprint or whether that ends up being, we don’t care, we just want the thing as cheaply as possible because we’re trying to survive. I think this will be a very interesting time just to see how much does survival versus my principles matter.

There’s no judgment here. It’s just it’ll be something to keep an eye on. I’m curious and this may seem like it’s coming out of nowhere, but I’ll give it a little bit of context, especially since we brought up environmental impacts. There were some really fascinating hearings talking about AI and how do we regulate, and one of the things that was brought up is that the US for a really long time was a very big bastion for innovation and for startups.

There was a lot of venture capital there. Europe had it stifled. China, super competitive, but very questionable how it’s being directed. So I’m really curious, looking into the post tariff world as however it shakes out, do you see the same sort of AI principles and AI questions of high regulation, low regulation, coming to bear on how marketing dollars are spent, where innovation dollars are spent?

Do you see AI at all come coming into play in terms of what is useful or interesting? Do you see it being a point of differentiation? Any part of that question, I would love, we’ll have Casey kick it off.

Casey Gill: Yeah, that’s really interesting. I haven’t really thought of it from a AI standpoint, but I do reckon that fairly soon there will be all sorts of formulas that you can plug in and start to make that calculation on what the right bid is, where you need to be finding those loopholes, how you can get around it.

And it will be not very long before, like I mentioned, the beginning of that. There’ll be this. Some gray market services. I reckon that will be coming out of this. Almost like I think back to when we first started shipping. I worked at an eCommerce company when we first started shipping in Europe. And there were a lot of challenges because of the differences in that, the differences in tax between different countries there.

And you would start to find, people would try to find a home address that wasn’t really their home address. They would sign up for a service that would almost give them a home address or like a PO box type of thing where people would then be able to almost spoof a billing address or spoof a delivery address.

I guess like a VPN in a way for shipping. And I think that we will start to see some of those type of things come up, and I wouldn’t be surprised if AI is the assistant or the enabler for that to happen.

Navah Hopkins: Duane any thoughts on that?

Duane Brown: I think AI, it’s interesting ‘cause people, I think from a selfish standpoint, just want the, whatever the AI tool does, I don’t think they really think about the environmental impact.

I’ve read a few articles on it now, the energy consumption around running these tools more than it should be and it’s making things worsen up. But I think the vast measure of people probably don’t care if, I was gonna guess and we took a survey off. A hundred people off the street or 50 in Melbourne and 50 in one to where I am right now.

I don’t think AI is a bad thing, but I’ve said this on LinkedIn before. At times I feel like it’s basically baby food is where it is, but people are talking like it’s a steak meal at a restaurant we’ve gotten. It’s such an early stage. I don’t think we should be as impressed by it as what it is. It wrote some ad copy.

Great. Sure it saved me some time, but it’s not like it, it built me a, an Oscar winning movie or something like that, or made a piece of creative that didn’t look quite, had an alien it with a fifth hand or a fifth finger or something like that. So I think we need this level set of what this thing is actually doing.

And not to be so over hype. I get it? There’s a LinkedIn bros and YouTubers and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah who hype this up because that’s how they make their money and stuff like that. But I think people need to be a little bit more pragmatic around the AI and what it can actually do. Because the question comes, would you actually run this ad copy of this image or this video as an actual asset about your company and put that out in the wild?

I think more times than not, people wouldn’t, people just think the thing is cool and it’s great to be cool, but if you have to say it’s cool, then how cool really is it? ‘cause usually the cool things you don’t have to say are cool. So I look forward to seeing where, where AI goes, ‘cause obviously it’s gonna impact your job.

I’m not denial about that. But the question is, what parts of our job does it impact and where and stuff like that remains to be seen, and obviously the Microsofts, Open AI, the Googles, they don’t care about it at the end of the day because they see it as a way to maintain their dominance, which per respect them to run a business.

I’d probably do the same thing if I was Larry and Sergei Page and stuff like that, but it’s not a great time if you’re just an average person who doesn’t want the world to get hot and blow up one day.

Navah Hopkins: I wanna make sure we finish with go dos. This has been such a useful, insightful, truly helpful session and the best way to end those sorts of sessions is with Go Do.

I’d love for each of you, what’s your main go do for American marketers doing their best to sell wherever they’re selling. And what’s your go do for marketers in your home market? Duane, you wanna kick us off?

Duane Brown: Yeah. My advice is really the same, I think, for both is. We don’t always get this granular, but if you’re doing things outside of your home country, let’s say multiple countries, I think it’s just reevaluate your ad copy, your site links, stuff like that.

Maybe your keywords, ‘cause maybe you built, maybe you bid on made in x, Y, Z country. And then obviously the other hard part is reevaluating your website. Maybe if you agency of freelance or I get your frustration of clients don’t wanna make changes or listen to you. If your website or landing page, your product page says a thing that is probably not gonna help you sell more, then maybe we need to find a way to remove that.

If you’re an American brand, you’re trying to sell to us, Canadians or Europeans, maybe Made in America is something you don’t wanna have everywhere on your website potentially. So I think the big thing is re evaluating the copy everywhere from the first thing people see the ad all the way to the website, check out stuff like that, email flows, and then I think just continually to readjust as things go.

I think things will get a lot worse before they get better. Obviously also coming into the slow days of summer, unless do you have a product if it does really well and summer, beach wear bikes, stuff like that. So it’s a good time I think to prep and think about like how do you adjust things for Q4 as well.

If you haven’t put your order in for like product merchandise. I don’t know if Black Friday be really good, maybe it will. Maybe don’t order as much stuff as you ordered last year potentially. ‘cause it’s better to sell out than order too much. The stims gonna be amazing because I don’t think this tariff thing is gonna end tomorrow and I think it’s gonna really impact how Q4 goes, but I would’ve rather sold out than order too much stuff and have SKUs of products sitting somewhere at the end of the day.

Navah Hopkins: Amazing. Casey, what are your go dos.

Casey Gill: It’s funny because they lie outside of the PPC realm first started. We have really open and honest conversation that you need to be running a really tight ship when it come to just being aware of your user experience on your website, looking at things like conversion rate optimization, making sure that your SEO is on just on fire, and even if you’re not working with an SEO agency, just using common sense just, or even doing SEO in health, just making sure that you’re using common sense, that you’ve got your landing pages that are well laid out. You’ve got your call to actions in place. You’ve got your newsletters and your emails doing all of the work for you. Because at the end of the day, if we do get to a stage where budgets are getting tighter and people are spending less.

It makes more sense to be focusing on how you can try to help that conversion rate increase. We can only do the much in platform when we’re working with PPC to drive people to the site. We can work on conversion rate and to our heart content by looking at things like the ad copy we use, looking at the call to action that we use.

If somebody lands on the website and the experience is awful or it is lacking in the service department, or you see no return policy, or you’re not seeing a social proof, I think that is just a surefire way that you are not going to have much budget for long or your PPC channel. So it’s just making sure that all of those are in place.

And then also getting a really good grasp on which products are the products that are earning you money. Because we still talk to businesses that are, they have an idea really of what the best margin products are, but sometimes they might be a little bit unsure about what the medium to low margins are.

And when you’re looking at your bid strategy, that’s so important because obviously you can afford a lower return on a higher margin product than you can on a lower margin product, though if you adjust the bid strategy, that accordingly. That’s really where we want to be looking. And then just keeping an eye on all of those analytics that we talked about, the optimization that can happen in Google Merchant Center, so it doesn’t even have to be SEO going through and making sure the product titles are up to date, making sure that the product types are well optimized, making sure that the Google product category, which is supposed to be driven by AI and automated, it’s not always right. It can be a little bit less detailed than ideal, so you can go through and update those things pretty easily.

Navah Hopkins: Those are amazing. I’m going to shamelessly plug the Optmyzr perspective for my go do. Go check your automations, your scripts, your roles, every single one of them, I promise you, they are not tuned for the market we’re about to hit. You might have ROAS goals that are too aggressive. You might have bid thresholds that are out of whack.

Like really take the time. Give yourself a solid hour to go through every single one of your automations, really confirm that they are doing exactly what you intend for them to do. Obviously if you’re an Optmyzr customer, this is super easy. We make it super seamless, but regardless of whether you’re using free tools or not, absolutely go through and check those automations because a lot of times you’ll put a script in and you forget about it, and then all of a sudden that script is adding budget upon budget or that script is getting you up and up.

And this is not the time to have those latent sleeping dragon scripts or rules. You really wanna make sure that you’re super sure about what’s there. This has been such an amazing session. I wanna make sure we finish off with letting both Duane and Casey share how you can get in touch with them.

Duane and Casey, we will have Duane go first. How can people get in touch with you if they wanna get your amazing advice or sign up for your wonderful agency?

Duane Brown: So our agency is called Take Some Risk. It’s gotakesomerisk.com. I also spent a lot of time on Reddit and LinkedIn, so those are probably two places socially that you could find me.

But yeah, if you wanna get an audit done, you wanna consult, you wanna fix your server side tracking as we had a couple reach out last week for, then let’s chat and let’s get stuff ready for either your peak summer or what will be a crazy but weird Black Friday.

Navah Hopkins: Casey, how can someone get hold of you?

Casey Gill: Yeah, so I can be reached through LinkedIn, obviously.

Look me up. I am a senior search specialist at Web Savvy, which is an agency in Australia and we have heaps of experience. We do focus on paid media and we also work very closely with Reform Digital, who also does SEO as well as email marketing on top of paid advertising as well. So there are a few opportunities there and I do thank you for having us on board.

And I do wanna say one thing about one of my favorite Optmyzr tool that has saved my bacon more than one and it’s the geo heat map, and I suppose that’s one that will come in really handy for anyone who is just curious about where their conversions are coming from. I really like to lay two of ’em next to each other and have one that’s showing my cost by city or region depending on how granular I’m getting, and then also showing the conversion value next to that as well because I can sometimes see some big discrepancies that gives me a big aha moment. So I think that one is really great.

Navah Hopkins: I am so happy to hear that. We are constantly trying to make things better, so just knowing that it helps you is amazing.

Casey, Duane, truly thank you so much for investing your time. You both are the perspectives that I really was hoping we could amplify in this conversation. You did not miss the market. All this was exceptional. If anyone has any questions that did not get addressed in the chat, please reach out. All of us are more than happy to help and know that you were not alone.

There are so many people out there ready to help, and we are gonna get through this. We just have to be pragmatic and we have to give ourselves grace. So thank you so much for investing the time. This has been PPC Town Hall with Navah Hopkins, and we’ll see you on the next one. Cheers guys.