Day 2 Session 1 Google Shopping by Kirk Williams

Unknown Speaker 0:12
All right. Well, welcome everybody. I’m so glad to have you joining us today. I will, as David mentioned, be moderating our, our sessions throughout the day. And I a little bit about me, I am on the board of the paid search Association, I was until a couple of months ago, editor at Search Engine Land, and have been sort of taking a little bit of a breather, but keeping up to speed as best I can on the paid search news of the day and and been doing some consulting and managing some accounts in the meantime. So I am very excited for today’s lineup, we have a really great mix of content today. So we’ll be hearing first from Kirk Williams of zeta marketing. He’s going to be talking about Google Shopping. And then we will be hearing from Lisa Ressler, who’s going to be talking about Pinterest ads, Dwayne Brown, will be diving into both Snapchat and Tiktok. So that’s going to be really interesting. And then Cora, especially if you’re in b2b, you don’t want to miss the Cora. session with Andrea Cruz. And then at the end, we’re going to have a panel discussion with everybody. So as David mentioned, feel free to put your questions in that q&a panel in the bottom of your screen. And if we speakers don’t get to your your questions during that session, we’ll try to loop back and get your questions answered at the end during that panel discussion, and of course, keep the chat going through out the day, you can message individuals or the whole group and keep that conversation going in the chat. So without further ado, I think I’ve checked off everything. Oh, just a quick thing about the paid search search organization. So this is a industry organization that was started a couple of years ago now. And it is dedicated to serving the search advertising field. And a lot of the people that you’re going to be hearing from today are our bar board members. And we just this week, thanks to Melissa Mackey have kicked off a pilot program for mentorship. And so if you are a relatively new to paid search and paid social, this is a really great opportunity to learn from some more seasoned practitioners. And, and Kirk actually is part of this pilot program. So if you want to learn more about that, and about membership, you can find that at paid search.org. All right. So let’s kick off and welcome Kirk Williams of zeto marketing is going to be talking about Google Shopping. Welcome, Kirk.

Unknown Speaker 3:19
Thanks, Jenny. And in typical fashion, so as the first guy of the day, I’m having tech issues already. I apparently can’t my screen. And I apologize. I’m not sure what to do about that. It says that attendees cannot share their screen and I believe I used the proper login that was sent as okay.

Unknown Speaker 3:40
Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 3:40
we try to fix that. So that there you go classic Kirk, I guess. And if, if we can’t figure out the next couple of minutes, I can at least get started while we are while we were figuring that out.

Unknown Speaker 3:57
Try it now. Kirk, I

Unknown Speaker 3:58
just elevated your status. Oh, there it is. Status elevation completed. Right.

Unknown Speaker 4:09
Yeah. Excellent. Cool. Okay,

Unknown Speaker 4:12
well, yeah, thank you so much. We’ll be talking shopping ads today, which is awesome. Because that’s like my favorite thing to talk about.

Unknown Speaker 4:22
However,

Unknown Speaker 4:22
I will say that there’s gonna be a giveaway at the end of this time. So make sure you stay around because I’ll be giving something away as it pertains to shopping ads in my very last slide. So hey, if that’s not a way to bribe people into sticking around, I don’t, I don’t know what is. So so as we think through shopping ads, if you are newer to this, or you are an econ, what we’ve typically found at this point, is if you’re not spending the majority of your budget, on shopping ads in terms of search and shopping ads, that that probably you’re missing out already. So one of the first things I think to focus on is if you’ve not taken shopping ads real seriously up until this point, your competitors probably are and so it is worth investing more into it and figuring more out as Google really does shift a lot of their ecommerce SERPs more and more to to focus on shopping ads. Now as we think about shopping ads, this is like what we know and love, right? We, we see the shopping ads that we’re used to there, and it’s an it’s in Google search results, Microsoft ads search results. There’s it’s this visual ad unit that specifically on a text space search result is is really attractive, it’s clickable, you see what you want, there’s the price, there’s all the information that you want. This is what we know about shopping ads, this is what we’ve come to know. And this is what needs to change in our thinking. Because shopping ads, I think we are in a transitional phase. And I think shopping ads, more and more is not what we’re used to. It’s not just simply referring to the entity on Google search results, it really does encompass the product listing ad as it appears on multiple channels really on really on all surfaces, Microsoft is moving into this sphere as well. And I think this is going to continue. And that first started with this entity called Smart shopping. Now for those of you who have maybe heard me speak or write on smart shopping before, I’ve certainly been no significant proponent of smart shopping, there are definitely concerns that I’ve had in the past. And I still have. But you know, if you’re new to smart shopping, basically smart shopping is is, is begin as a Google entity, Microsoft also has this now. But it is this is the shopping campaign type by which Google or Microsoft controls the majority of the optimization abilities, the majority of the targeting then and the control, and it appears on nearly all of their surfaces that they have, it’s still not quite on Discovery. But that is coming as well. And if it’s on the roadmap for Google. And so basically, Google determines how and where they’re going to show the shopping ads across their surfaces. Now, there’s gonna be a couple of parts to this to this talk to the session. The first part is simply me like surrendering this caffeine. So So here’s the deal. I’m, I’m I like smart shopping more than I used to, I’m on board with it more than I used to, we use it more in our accounts than we used to. And oftentimes, the number one concern that I’ve had in the past, and people often have, of course, is is something like keyword intent. So shopping ads, really has focused in the search realm as people will search on keywords. And then we will determine which shopping ads should appear on those keywords. Right. And again, so this isn’t just a shameless plug for my book, but hey, maybe a little bit. So go buy my book. But I actually have a whole chapter devoted to the value of keyword intent. So like, this isn’t coming from someone who doesn’t know and love the timely personal individual intent, power of the keyword. And yet, almost 50% of Google search terms are one or two words in length. And that was, by the way in 2017. And I’ve been desperately trying to get updated numbers just to see what’s what’s happening, to see if that’s changed. And I have not been able to see that. But my my theory is that is actually probably even more so because as you have more, more and more personalized search results that Google is providing our own search behavior is actually shifting over time. But in 2017, so now almost four years ago, almost 50% of terms are one to two words in length. So if you’re if your obsession is to purposefully identify the intent in one to two word keywords, like that’s going to be kind of hard. Right. And again, I think that’s getting harder. And we’ve certainly seen this in the

Unknown Speaker 8:58
slash painful joke aside, search terms that we can actually still see in our accounts, right. We’ve seen this already, in terms of you know, as people are searching for that we see those search terms coming in, you know, how much how much we can actually identify intent, and that’s been changing. So if you are focused primarily on what you can target in terms of those keywords, those those individual keywords, or the one or two words, it’s getting harder and harder to even determine what what what are those what how, you know, what value is there. And so one of the things that I think I’ve grown to appreciate about smart shops is that it does in this somewhat changing world, it does allow us to be user targeted, rather than simply placement targeted. And and I think there is a value to that, but there’s especially a value. And I’ll I’ll cut in real briefly, I think there’s someone who doesn’t have their Mic muted and if you wouldn’t mind muting that, that’d be great. I think we can still hear, hear some, some entity things happening. So thank you. But But basically, smart shopping is focused entirely on the user. And not as much on the placement. And I do think there’s value there. And one of the biggest values that you’ll find from smart shopping campaigns is these low low auction costs. And if you really kind of think that through, and we’ll look into some of this of where smart shopping is pulling this data from, but if you look into this, what they’re doing is they’re finding this user that they’ve determined through all of these other signals to be valuable. And now instead of you paying $2.50, on a click in in the shopping, SERP, you might be paying four cents for a gmail click, or two cents for a YouTube, click right. And so there is a benefit. And so that’s part of what we’ve seen is there’s just there’s just more reach than we can get with standard shopping, even when the users even if it is starting to dig a little bit more at times into you know, remarketing and things like that. There’s far more reach. And we’re getting far more ad exposure for the same cost that we could have with standard shopping. And that’s just been hard for us to compete with. Also, you look at just the power of computers, and what they’re able to do with these machine learning algorithms. And again, they’re they’re looking at these millions of auction signals to identify this user and like their browsing history and their search history, and what they’ve done on your site, or what they’ve done on other sites. And they’re all utilizing that in order to identify, you know, the value of this user across all those channels. And that just goes beyond what we can do, even with standard shopping with some of those limited things. So what does this look like for us with strategy stuff? Well, I think PPC marketing had this, this blip of an era. That was that was a long time, you know, a couple of decades in some ways. But the focus for us during that time was like being the machine like button crunching and button pushing, and number crunching button pushing. We were in some ways that machine that we’re we’re hashing out of that with that we’re hashing all that out with our deep excels things, and we had fun with it, right? That’s changing. And I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, either. So one of the things that we found, as we’ve started to shift more into embracing automation, for instance, in this instance, more smart shopping campaigns, is that it has allowed us to actually save time on the button pushing and invest that specifically in strategic thinking. And that has had specific ramifications, we win, we are no longer focused focusing our time on Hey, going in there and adjusting a few product group bids to this, that or the other bid based upon Well, you know, the past 60 days of this hour of the day, like let’s go ahead and raise that 10%. And then we might look at the data again, and adjust that in the future, when we’re letting the machine determine that adds an auction based thing based especially on the user and all of those signals. And all of a sudden, we have time to talk more to the client to get more of an idea of their strategy. And to really think through what I like to call the magic wheel of optimization. All right. So this is how we think and I think this is how we need to start shifting our thinking specifically shopping ads, but really, in automation in general. And that is that we are consistently, strategically thinking about how the machines can work implementing that and then re analyzing it and resetting the machines. And I really do think that’s important. That’s why there really is not a set it and forget it even to something as automated as smart shopping campaigns. Because there’s there are always things that we can do to analyze it and kind of refocus the machine whether on a different custom label or or what have you. And we’re gonna we’re gonna discuss some of that. So, as I near the end of this first section of the be part one, the I surrender part of smart shopping. I also want to note though, and man, I would love it if there’s a Googler in the audience, audience listening and even if there’s not, maybe as all of us are having conversations with Google and Microsoft, we can be communicating these sorts of things. There’s still two huge issues that smart shopping campaign has, that I think are important and big. And and that I would hope change before things really do continue to transition more towards this. First we have the data for business growth needs to be back into those campaigns. And not simply because we might not simply because yeah, we want to use that only for to optimize this smart shopping campaign because that’s that’s been part of the reason that Google has communicated that we don’t have that data because, well, hey, you can’t use it in this campaign. Anyways, let me give you an example that literally just happened. And this isn’t even just smart shopping campaigns. This is like any automation being able to see data right? There are different reasons why we utilize data and an account. One of those, we just received the lead, which by the way, we landed this week, I probably based on stuff like this that we brought to them, we received the lead, whereas we got into their account. And we were able to access that data and see, we identified that, not that the machine learning was messing up that they were using not not that the bidding algorithm was messing up. But it was really how the bidding algorithm had been implemented, and then was being watched, it wasn’t being watched. And so they were spending upwards of $283 per click on people, employees of competitors, or like completely unrelated businesses, who wanted to find their HR services, like their own internal HR called phone numbers. And they were spending like $280, a click on this. And this is not a shock. This lead had paused Google Ads a good year and a half ago, well, in like, Who of us wouldn’t have right? If you’re spending almost $300, a click on, on crap clicks, right? on stuff that is not for you. And so we took the data that we had, and we were able to convince this lead into basically giving Google another shot. And it was for Google’s benefit, it was for our benefit, it was for the leads benefit. There, they’re going to give Google ads in their shot, we would not have had access to do that, without that data. So that’s just that’s just one example of a way that we use data. You also can use data, a ton of other ways to inform your SEO, title building and form your landing page building. We probably all know that, right? But data really is important. And so we do need that back in smart shopping. And so one one takeaway from that if you are in shopping, and you’re, you know, thinking about getting rolling, especially if you have like a new brand, I actually would not suggest you start only on smart shopping first and simply in some ways only because you really do need data for broader business decisions and growth, you need to think that through. So I would recommend beginning a little bit more with an advanced some advanced standard strategies, along with some s some smart shopping SFC testing as well, because you don’t have that data. And then just the second thing I’d love for smart shopping to, to change would be giving us separate targets for visitor type. So oftentimes, we have real as targets that are gonna be separate based upon just a completely cold audience. And then and then a warmer audience. And I’m not even necessarily talking about remarketing or not, I’m not talking about the new customer acquisition goals within Google smart shopping, because those are still based upon purchasing, I’m just saying, Hey, we want to be able to target and to tell Google, hey, if this is a cold audience, then aim for a 200 rows. And if it’s a warm audience, aim for a 400 row s, right, just give it basic different signals. I think if we can have those things, I think smart shopping would really be ready for primetime. Okay, so based on what we do have, though, how should we manage shopping ads in 2021, and we’re going to start getting into some practical tips real soon here. So first 2016 account strategy. And before it was like standard only is really all we had, I see 2019 and 20, as like standard plus, so it was standard shopping. And that was still working great. And our advanced strategies were working great. But we were beginning to layer on smart shopping, what we are beginning to do, and what I would encourage you to begin thinking about would be to begin incorporating a smart plus strategy. So we’ve started to lean more and more, we continue to test and we’ve just seen smart shopping continually outperform even exceptionally complex and great standard strategies that we use to see outperformed smart shopping, we’ve started to see that reverse and flip. And so we’ve begun to begun to transition to most of the time, like a smart shopping focused strategies, as well as Larry non then standard as well. And what I would recommend is figuring that out before, like Google, Microsoft do transition to smart only, I’m not a profit, it’d be great if we maintain some sort of control. But the fact is that smart shopping and standard shopping campaigns have separate engineering teams and a separate code base. And so at some point, like the probably the best advice I can give to you would be Hey, if you’re not really focused on smart shopping, I think it’s time to really begin investing in that and thinking through that before that transitions away from you, and you and you’re caught off guard. Okay, so part two, then, let’s actually look through some specific smart shopping tips that I have from you. And I’m gonna try to blaze through these. So I don’t go over time here. I’m like, I think I’ve got 10 minutes left. But so here are a couple of here here a few thoughts. So just basic random tips. If you want to do smart shopping better. The first. The first is just how you think about roles and budget needs to be this balancing act and it needs to be more like the pirate code. Remember that and Pirates of the Caribbean where the where the cabin says the pirate code is more general guidelines than actual rules. Anyways, I love that and that’s that’s how you need to think about realize targets and budgets. And it’s really frustrating and it’s stupid. But that’s the way it is. So as well like once you can start to transition to thinking about balancing your AWS budgets rather than like aiming at a specific target, I think that’s really important, because those are the levers that you do to like to, to increase your spend or, or your traffic or like to decrease it. And as long as you kind of think through it, as they’re not the exact, they’re not the actual entities that you’re likely going to be hit, I actually think you’re gonna manage smart shopping better. When you are first starting out by setting your roads targets, do expect your CPC users traffic to fluctuate quite a bit, you’re gonna see some really crazy traffic numbers. But oftentimes, that’s because you know, Google might be like digging into a bunch of Gmail, ads, or whatever it might be, where your cost actually might still be right on track with what you want to spend. But you’ll see like traffic spikes, you know, you can check with Google just to make sure you’re good with your rep. But more often than not, that’s just simply then testing in that learning period. And then do think with your Russ targets, as you’re thinking through account structure, do you think about how you’re grouping your products together to make sure that you are thinking well about about the account structure, and we’ll talk a little bit more about that. But it is allowing you with the mechanism that you do have, which is primarily budgets and realize targets. So allowing you to group those those together. Alright, so another thing that you want to do is to balance, stability and experimentation. I think this is a broader machine learning point, not simply smart shopping campaigns. But like when you when you get an account, especially a new account that you’ve just been handed, like, there’s a time for maintaining stability, and not necessarily making changes, even if that’s what needs to happen. And there’s a time for blowing up the account, if you will, if you’ve run PPC, you know exactly what I’m talking about. And this is one of those times where you as a human expert is that you’re actually essential, because sometimes you got to make that call, like sometimes shocking the system and completely changing that feed is like going to kill the account. And sometimes it’s going to save it. And I think this is the value of someone who knows what they’re doing in with automation and machine learning. One rule that I like to follow that I think is really helpful one is, if the account that you’ve just taken over is currently performing well, then my biggest recommendation to you especially in the shopping ads realm would be to not completely overhaul the feed and the campaigns all at once, like you might be tempted to do even if they’re not set up the best way they can be. But my recommendation would be to be testing and shifting things over time. And one of the one of the ways to note that would be something like product variance. So you might be tempted in an account to take, you know, maybe they’re running parent products, and you say, hey, there’s a ton of product variants, that would be good to focus on. But in switching over the feed completely to those and potentially resetting item history within Google Merchant Center. Like, again, you’re you’re kind of shocking the system there, which sometimes need to do, sometimes you need not to do. So one tip I have for you there is this is the way to think about I think shopping ads and kind of maintaining that stability as you do that experimentation is to keep your parent IDs as your original item IDs, lump those into a custom label. So attach a custom label and those that you’re still sending in the feed and leave those in the original campaigns that were there. And then so you kind of have this consistency. And then you take the new variant item IDs, add them in, and you have these new campaigns that you’re testing and transitioning to more and more budget over time. So that’s just that’s just one example of really kind of using this, this the wheel of optimization of kind of rethinking and resetting and adjusting handy more budget off to it or time to kind of be continually rethinking about that. Okay, so custom labels, then custom labels are probably no shock to you. So we won’t spend a lot of time on it. But here are some of my favorite custom labels. So you know, definitely if that if that is something you’re interested in screenshot this, you can refer back to it. One thing I will point out is that this zero click custom label, I’ll just note that one because that’s not a super common one. But that is really awesome, because you can grab those products within Google Merchant Center that have not accrued any clicks. And possibly the reason for that is that the machine has determined that that those that those click products are sorry that there are other products maybe that are more valuable for them that they see with your role as your budget targets. And that’s what they’re trying to show on. This allows you to see those products with with only zero clicks and they kind of give them another chance to hit it. And you might be surprised how that how that performs. Again. I keep going back to it but that’s because I do think that’s the way you think about this. You try custom label with some other campaigns. If it doesn’t work, you try another custom label, kind of consistently rethinking and re strategizing is key. Dynamic prospecting, dynamic prospecting is part of the smart shopping ads. That is really an amazing thing that, if you’re not familiar with might blow your mind a little bit. We are familiar with dynamic remarketing, which identifies returning users and shows them specific products based on their visit history on your site. So if they visit that specific Nike trainers shoe, then that specific shoe will show to them on those ads across the web and their display campaigns. Dynamic prospecting, like goes goes one further, and it’s not returning visitors. It’s not visitors who’ve ever been to your site. But it’s utilizing these, these amazing things that they grab on the user to show them those specific products that they anticipate will be interested in that. So for instance, they’re looking at things like this user’s recent browsing history, and their demographics, and even the current page they’re using to determine which specific products they’ll show in those display ads and those dynamic ads. And it’s, it’s just remarkable that they can do that. So it’s a really oversimplified example, you might have someone who is very interested in like yellow trainers, right, they’re super interested in that color. They love yellow trainers, so they’re on Nike and their own ideas. And if, if a newer brand is running smart shopping, then Google is looking at that user’s browsing history. And they say, hey, this, this new brand, we should show this, this person, we should show them the ad of your shoes. And since we know that they love yellow trainers, we’re going to show them all your yellow trainers. And we’re gonna that’s how we’re going to select the the products for that dynamic app. So it’s just this really remarkable utilizing that information about the user. And that’s on completely new Cold audiences. So really, really cool there. And then looking at looking at an sp SSC, so single product smart shopping campaign here. If you’ve, if you if you are able to test this, I think it’s worth a test. But just just be cautious about that. So single product smart shopping campaign we have tested and we have found sometimes it works great. And sometimes it doesn’t work great, but just a test idea I have for you. So if you do you see that you have a product that really does well, and it has 100 conversions, or more, at least that much per month, maybe test it in its own campaign. And that’s because you can target the machine specifically at that key product. But also you can design the ads, the ads around that specific product. And the ads are really this this crucial thing. And here’s where we’ll end. I apologize. I’ve been talking fast, but because I’m trying to fly through this stuff. If I didn’t have those tech issues in the beginning, you know, I would have started on time, but apologies for that. But let me close here with the smart shopping ads. So this is where I think part of how we need to start reframing our thinking about smart shopping campaigns, we need to stop thinking of smart shopping as a search entity, we need to start thinking of smart shopping as a social entity. And that is in large part because the things that we are able to control are primarily pointing the machine in the right place, and then controlling the creative. And so I think the creative is actually more important than most of the time when most the time when I hear people talk about smart shopping, they’re not even talking about the creative in my opinion, that’s one of the most crucial parts of smart shopping. So as it even goes into things like how you structure your account, I think you need to think about the creative when you are structuring your smart shopping campaign account. I think you need to be willing to change your smart shopping creative like you do for social ads for promotions, for holidays, for seasons for events, be thinking about that specific client and and like you know how changing the ad creative in their smart shopping campaign would assist with that. If your client doesn’t share their assets, go to their social pages and grab assets like images and that do in terms of smartshop or in terms of social do be willing to swap out your images as well every 30 to 90 days for sure that’s that’s going to be a fairly common thing to keep that creative fresh because again, we are thinking about this distraction based marketing on on display in in in front of people as they are on other things. Be aware of the fact that Google actually might utilize your product description in their in their smart shopping ads as well. So that’s that’s important. And that’s something that is newer as as well that can especially happen if you’re running a single product, smart shopping campaign. And then finally the video you can have a video on that ad as well. And a few tips. Only YouTube videos are allowed. So make sure that you’ve uploaded that that video to YouTube. It’s got to it doesn’t have to be but definitely recommended. People with short attention spans keep that under 30 seconds, hook them in the first three seconds because they’re not on that page to see your your ads. So you need to engage them right away. And if you do not upload a video, Google may take your assets and create an auto generated video. So just be aware of that and I did just see an option recently in I think it was a responsive display ad actually that you could

Unknown Speaker 30:05
opt out of that which I thought was interesting, which probably will come to smart shopping, as well. And then there’s a couple of different reports that I’m actually going to blaze past because I’m starting to get out of time. These are cool reports, go check them out in the ad with a click type, you can see headline, or shopping product segmentation of in terms of clicks and spend. And then also you can see free interactions like videos, video, pause, video play, which just communicates to us that, again, kind of in that branding way, Google is showing these things and you’re getting brand new awareness, even when you are not being charged, you’re getting in this example for this client, hundreds of 1000s of free interactions that we were not charged for that is sticking in people’s mind across the web. And there is a value to that that goes beyond simply a search. So thank you so much. I’m from the state of Montana, and go to Canada and go south. Basically, it’s it’s cold here, but I guess it’s cold everywhere else right now. Six kid arriving and actually on tax day. So yes, that’s crazy. But also fun. I told you this before, go buy my book, no time to talk more about that. We are zeto we do mostly pates, we do all paid search, but a lot of shopping ads. So do please check us out if you’re interested in that. And then finally, let’s get to the free thing that I told you about. And then I will finally shut up. And that is I’m giving my course away for free only to you who are watching this. So if you’re watching this and you want to learn more about smart shopping campaigns, there’s five more hours. If you hate hearing me talk then don’t get this because then you’ll hate it. But if you want to learn more about smart shopping, use this code, please don’t share it. This is just for you. It’s gonna expire in two days. So go grab it. And thank you so much. I am done.

Unknown Speaker 31:52
Awesome. Thank you, Kirk. That’s really great. I have captured the questions that were asked in the chat and in the q&a. But Kirk, if you want to if you have time to respond to any of these, feel free to go ahead and do that. And yes, and then if you want to pop the link to that course. That’d be great as well. And thanks so much. Lots and lots to think about.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai