Tips From the Playbook of a PPC Expert | Phil Byrne

Matt Edmundson: hello and welcome to the eCommerce Podcast with me, your host, MatT Edmundson. The eCommerce Podcast is all about helping you deliver eCommerce well. And to help us do just that, today I'm chatting with Phil Byrne from Positive Sparks about tips from the playbook of a PPC expert. Oh yes, we're going to pick his brains all about PPC and Google and all those kind of things.

We're going to get into it. But before we do, let me remind you. Dear awesome listener, if you haven't done so already, sign up to the newsletter. On the [email protected]. All we do with that, by the way, is we just send you the show notes and links straight to your inbox. No spam, no messing, no nothing.

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You also get access to watch these recordings, the podcast recordings of eCommerce Podcast Live. You get to ask the guests your questions if you do and if you are watching this episode live, I know a couple of you are, do apologise for the mess up at the start again. If you're just listening to this, you'll have no idea what I'm talking about, but I did severely mess up the start, but that's okay.

We're back on track. More information about Cohort can be found, like I said, at ecommercecohort. com, or just follow the links from ecommercepodcast. net. Be great to see you in there. Now, before I get into today's conversation, let me give a bit of a shout [00:02:00] out and a mention to Alan Gormley, who has been on the show, and Alan is an absolute legend.

And the reason I want to do that, Alan from Shopbox. ai. He introduced us he introduced me to Phil, who is, who has who is and has been diving into the digital realm since 1999 with a melody in his step, he pioneered one of the world's unique commission based PPC Agencies in 2008. This vintage digital aficionado has collaborated with top notch entrepreneurs and propelled numerous projects to the skies.

He is a treasure trove of secrets and tales and we're going to get into all of them. Yes, we are. Phil, great to have you on the show, man. Thanks for joining us. How are we doing today, good sir? Hi Matt,

Phil Byrne: it's great to be here. Feeling good, hope you are too. Looking forward to the chat.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah, feeling good.

Now we've actually got the conversation underway and we've moved past the blip. [00:03:00] But yeah, whereabouts in the world are you?

Phil Byrne: I'm based in Cornwall, there are three of the team in Cornwall, including myself, so every day, pretty nice life, I get up, look at the sea, and then come back and do some pay per click, or help the team do their pay per click, as it is these

Matt Edmundson: days.

Whereabouts in Cornwall are you?

Phil Byrne: I live in a village called St Agnes. The company main office is in Truro, which is about six miles away. But I spend most of my time working from home, walking down to the sea, mixing my kids really, with the

Matt Edmundson: digital life that we have. Yeah, no doubt. You don't sound like you're from Cornwall though, I'm not being funny.

Phil Byrne: No. Originally, I come from... A small Cumbrian village near Carlisle. Yeah. So it's really a town, it's not a village, it's called Maryport. So if ever you're up that way, yep, you'll take a visit. It's a place that doesn't get the same amount of traffic as Keswick and Windermere and [00:04:00] all the more famous places around my

Matt Edmundson: hometown.

Maryport. I can't say as I've been, I've obviously done Windermere, I've done Keswick, I've done the lakes many times, it's an hour and a half away from me. But it's, so Maryport's a place worth looking at. It's,

Phil Byrne: It's a lot different than Agnes, it's a town that needs some kind of look, to happen to it, but it's a beautiful view of Scotland, it's a beautiful view, go down to the seafront, you're looking right across the water at what is Dumfrieshire, Dumfries and Galloway.

That's worth seeing, Matt. Yeah. And the fish keeps a go too.

Matt Edmundson: Okay. I'll bring them all then. Good. It all, it's funny isn't it, English tourism. What's it based around? Is there a good pub or a chippy? We just want to know. That's

Phil Byrne: it. Got those things covered, you're great.

Matt Edmundson: Wow, absolutely. It's good to talk to a fellow Brit.

So welcome to the show. And interestingly, I just finished recording a podcast about an hour ago for another show we do called Push To Be More with a lady from Cornwall. [00:05:00] She was from Essex originally. She now lives in Newquay. And she just said, you know what, I'm coming to Newquay twice a year because we love it over here so much.

I'm just moving. And so they just moved over about five years ago and never looked back since really. Is that what happened to you?

Phil Byrne: We came nine years ago now, so we've been here a little while and we're actually living abroad at the time. We're living in Ireland before we came to Cornwall. And my wife is American.

Okay. So we spent a long time trying different places. Yeah. So when you're in international family, there's no perfect place to live. That's true. Where the world opens up to you. Yeah. And we try different countries and then. We just wanted to come back to the UK. Some of that was career opportunities, and we chose Cornwall because we'd heard it was the sunniest, it was the warmest.

Some days, that is true, Matt. I wouldn't say it's the truth overall, but it's a beautiful place to live. We've had kids here now, so that's...[00:06:00]

Matt Edmundson: That's awesome. I like that. They the sort of the borders opening up to international families and actually also being in digital now, you can pretty much do your job anywhere from the world, right?

Phil Byrne: That's right. Jessica, my wife and I, we started remote working. It didn't have that name back then, but we started that back in 2011, so it was quite a long time ago, and it was her PhD that made it happen originally.

So she did a PhD in the music of the tango, so we went to Buenos Aires, and we had some time there. Wow. That started the whole thing off.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah. That sounds amazing. To do a PhD in the music of the tango, I think it is quite, I'm a doctor, what are you a doctor in?

Phil Byrne: Music of the tango. Because what actually happens for her is everyone thinks she's a medical doctor, and they ask her advice, my leg's hurting, I'm not feeling good, and she has to explain.

Matt Edmundson: Just go do the tango and everything will be alright,

[00:07:00] yeah, it's fascinating isn't it, absolutely, so does that mean you're very good at the tango? We

Phil Byrne: tried the dance and neither of us were that good at it, and probably even worse altogether. Because you have to, the one thing I learned from the tango, is all of your relationship things come out in that dance, Matt.

If you don't have an argument that day, it's not going to go well.

Matt Edmundson: Wow, okay, fair play to you. So how did you get involved in PPC then?

Phil Byrne: A long time ago, as you said, I've been online for a long time, so I've always been into music. As I can see, you are, with your... Drums behind you. I wish

Matt Edmundson: I could claim credit for those. They belong to my son, who is yeah. It just makes a really cool backdrop.

But the drums that you see belong to my son who's buggered off to university now. So Sharon, my wife, is I'm converting his room into a guest room. And she moved the drum kit, and we decided to just put them in the studio. [00:08:00] Because it would just make a great backdrop. And if he ever wants to play them, it's away from the house.

I wish I, I don't play the drums, Phil, but I do play the guitar and keyboard.

Phil Byrne: There's that musical heritage. So you do have music in the family, apparently,

Matt Edmundson: maybe, but yeah,

Phil Byrne: still there. So it all began for me back in the late nineties. I just left university. I've been involved with bands at university, and I ended up helping the other university in Leeds, which was called Leeds Polytechnic

Matt Edmundson: at the time. Yeah. I remember those days. Remember

Phil Byrne: those days?

Yeah. To put on their bands and do different things. So from there, we began to promote the events with very early websites. Netscape Composer was the first thing I ever did. Remember that? Yeah, I do, yeah. Yeah, totally. websites for bands, and that grew into promotion. So SEO was the first thing that I really discovered as a marketing channel.[00:09:00]

And then that moved into my own affiliate sites, doing websites for other companies, in and around Leeds and beyond. And then... Suddenly, pay per click arrived, and then a few years after that, I don't know if you remember, the first big SEO change was It was Panda, Google Panda, which came through, changed a lot of the rankings for sites.

So pay per click was about 20 percent of my life until that happened. At the time, I had all these hotel comparison sites, which were really affiliate sites, using different SEO techniques to be ranking high for hotels in whatever town. And that was my main source of income at the time. And then Panda hit, and overnight...

That income went down by 90%. So after getting over the shock of that, I also realized at the same time, what Google had done was, Panda was the big story, but Google ads had gone through quite a transformation. [00:10:00] Around about the same moment and he offered me these new opportunities. So that's what really took me into pay per click.

And then the client side of my life was beginning to grow at the same time. So those opportunities I would look out for them too. I Still live near Leeds. It was before we really left that all the pay per click world began. And Leeds had a Google office. So I could meet it with my rep.

It was a lot different then, your rep wanted the contact from you. Whereas these days, it's so hard to go up to Google support at all, and it all grew from there. And then as for me, as SEO changed and became perhaps less powerful, pay per click became more powerful.

Matt Edmundson: It's really fascinating. Yeah, and here we are.

It's fascinating listening to your journey because I started in websites in 98. First website ever built[00:11:00] was for a friend. His church wanted a website and he came to me and he said, Matt, do you know anybody that builds websites? And there's some friends of mine do them, but they're thousands of pounds.

Cause you know, no one had a clue back then. And I said, but if you want. I know there's some software out there, buy the software for me, I'll figure it out because I was busy selling saunas and steam rooms at the time, and as you do, I just said, I just saw an opportunity and I said, I'll do it, just buy the software, and he bought, do you remember Dreamweaver?

I used to use it. Yeah. Dreamweaver and one of the very Dreamweaver and what was the graphics one? Was it fireworks?

Phil Byrne: Was that what it was called? Fireworks, that's right. Yeah. The same company, wasn't

Matt Edmundson: it? Macromedia. Macromedia, before they were bought out by Adobe and they and so they were like yeah.

So they, and I did this website for them. And I did a website for Sharon and I who were just about to get married. So this was 25 years ago. So we did these websites back then. So I'm just listening to your journey. I'm just remembering all of this going, geez, man. So yeah, going back to the old days, the polytechnic [00:12:00] days as well.

So trip down memory lane. So here we are Phil, all these years later, you're still involved in PPC. You didn't obviously get totally wiped out when your hotel websites. Wow. And so you've obviously learned a thing or two about PPC over the years. What are some of the big sort of changes that you've noticed that maybe are for the good or maybe not for the good?

Phil Byrne: It's definitely a mix of both. One of the big changes Originally was the rise of more ads. So every platform, whether it's Google, Meta, TikTok now, they're all going to generate their income from ads. So what really happens to the platform? It is out to begin to dominate the space. Now, is that a good or a bad thing?

It creates opportunity for eCom brands, if we want to promote their products. But at the same time, I think it does always take a little bit of the soul of what the platform is. And it's how successful the platform is [00:13:00] going forward, it's how they balance that mix of income versus sales. I think Google Shopping has been a massive change for eCom brands.

Yes, it has. The fact that shopping came into being, um, off allowed us the opportunities to promote products in a very different way with an image and offer price. At the same time, the Google Shopping feeds are. A whole opportunity in themselves. Really they have a lot of similarity with SEO in our ability to manipulate which products are shown and which ones we want to put less attention on.

I think that's changed things dramatically. YouTube. Yeah. Beginning to launch their ads, that is really a big part of how Google is growing now, certainly through Performance Max and all the smart campaigns, which mix all of the different platforms that they own. YouTube is just such a rising force.

It's perhaps the part of Google which has the most opportunity. Yeah. Whereas search is so congested [00:14:00] now, shopping the same, it's a bit tougher to find your gap. Then of course, social media, Matt, when you and I began, there was no social media. That's right. And now, we have a world that's pretty much driven by social media.

Yeah, we do. And there's good and bad to that as well, isn't there? But in terms of pay per click, all of those platforms, Meta especially, has opened up new ways of reaching people that should potentially adore what you create and promote. So those things, I think every year we can say that some new opportunities come.

Yeah. I don't see that changing for a while.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah. No, that's very true. So much there. Phil, do me a favour. For those watching on video, just step slightly to your right so you're a bit more central. There we go. There we go. We're starting to lose you. I was talking to a white wall for a little minute there.

How was it? No, not at all. [00:15:00] Fascinating you're talking about YouTube. And the reason why I picked this up straight away is we had on the show a few months ago a chap called Brett Curry. And Brett Curry hosts an eCommerce podcast. OMG Commerce is his company. and... he's an absolute legend, Brett. He, I met him in Austin we had some food together, we caught up.

Stayed in touch. Really nice guy. Tall guy. He's got eight kids. Eight kids. Yeah, that was my response as well. I was like, dude, have you figured out what's causing this yet? Do you need... But he's awesome. Him and his wife, totally in love. Love having a big family and just an absolute legend of a chap.

But he was saying like you, that YouTube ads for him are the big... Opportunity of the moment in a lot of ways, if you can get them right. Sure. Is that what you are? Is that what you've found as well? Have you done much with YouTube ads?[00:16:00]

Phil Byrne: For the right brands, it's a great channel. So it has to be a visual brand.

One thing I think Meta and YouTube have in common is they are great places to promote the positive things in life. So travel, some product which is going to make you look better, feel better, those are fantastic for video fronted. Ads. Things which are a bit more, stuff we don't want to think about. Health insurance, remedies to things which are not great.

It's tougher for those kinds of products. But certainly YouTube, because it keeps growing so much, and people are drawn there for all kinds of reasons, it just has such a huge audience. So if you can find that way to place your ads on the right channels, on the right videos, that have already the audience that you seek to reach.

It's a good channel. YouTube recently brought out their own version of lead ads. Yeah. And I think that's what I would say [00:17:00] it really offers a massive opportunity to generate subscribers, whether that's email, SMS, and then it's all down to the rest of your funnel as to how great those ads are going to work out for you.

Yeah. And you know that, that's where we see the opportunity most of the time.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah, that's interesting. You talk about the sort of the positive life brands doing well with those kind of places I, and it's interesting you use that phraseology because I've not thought about it like that. And actually you go with that makes a lot of sense.

Yes. Why would he, why would I try and sell life insurance? I'm dare say some companies don't do it successfully if they find the right audience that they're trying to target. Is YouTube rephrase it, are YouTube ads tied into the Google Ads platform or is it a separate distinct platform?

Phil Byrne: So it's all part of Google Ads, part of their network, so if you run a Performance Max campaign, which is the newest type, the Google campaign, [00:18:00] then they will automatically run your ads across everything.

So you've got search. You've got the Display Network, which is when your ads appear on a third party site. And you have YouTube. So even if you have no video content, your ads can appear within YouTube search results, as a normal text ad. And all of those things will happen for you. And, Google is pushing us all into using everything on their network.

And some of that is because, on the positive side, it does increase the opportunity. At the same time, we're going to spend more, in their point of view. Watching what happens and keeping an eye on which YouTube channels your ads appear on, assessing whether they're right or wrong, is all part of optimising your spender

Matt Edmundson: as much as you can.

Yeah, it's fascinating, isn't it? It's interesting to me how big YouTube now, for the longest time we've been saying, I say the longest time, I'm trying to think in my head, [00:19:00] for the last five or six years I know I've been saying to people YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world and you can't ignore it, right?

Brands can't ignore YouTube, you've got to be on YouTube in some form or another. Because it is so massive. But going back, Polytechnic days and all that sort of stuff, do you remember that announcement that Google bought YouTube for a billion dollars and we were all utterly flummoxed by why they would do that?

Have we looked back

Phil Byrne: now? It's a fantastic move.

Matt Edmundson: One of the best business moves you've seen for a long time and it flummoxed everybody because no one saw it coming. A billion dollars for that. Are you mad? But look at what it's turned into and the money that it generates is unbelievable.

Phil Byrne: Absolutely. And this is you and I, Matt, sounding like old men.

Look, a billion dollars in today's world is not that big anymore. Yeah, it's true.

Matt Edmundson: It was back then, right? I don't, I'm trying to remember, I don't know if I'd ever heard of a [00:20:00] billion dollar company buyout before that. I think there must have been one. But it was so new and it was so surprising.

And yet here we are all just going, whoever made that decision is an utter genius, and um, and then everyone's going. How did Google have a billion dollars just to spend on a company like that and not even, where did it get that money? And you just think Google in itself is a pretty genius money making machine, isn't it?

So hats off to them. You love them or hate them, they've done an amazing job. So tell us a bit about you've mentioned Google Max Performance Max a couple of times. For those that might not know, just explain what that is, cause that's a fairly recent event, isn't it? It's a...

Phil Byrne: So Performance Max is a new type of campaign, which Google is continuing to grow the options within this type of campaign, what we'll call a Google smart campaign.

So what we're doing is we're giving Google more license and freedom to spend our budget on our target [00:21:00] market, keywords, audiences as it sees fit. Yeah. That was what we used to do in pay per click is we would control every keyword. That Google would approach, we might control every third party website if we're doing Google Display.

And the same on YouTube, we would control every channel and video that the ad would appear on. In PMAX, it's different. We're allowing Google this ability to spend on our behalf. The theory being that Google is able to track our potential customers better, cross network, understand, for its own larger dataset, where our audience sits.

And in the end, give us more return at lowest cost per acquisition or lead, whatever we're seeking to do and make our campaigns work better. Google also claims, I think is correct on this, that it reaches more people. Yeah. And on all of these [00:22:00] advantages. Allow people who can make Performance Max work. Yeah.

It does allow them to scale to a higher level. Yeah. On, we had some before. If we cannot get Performance Max to work and not everybody does, then we still have to be able to go in there and optimize and learn what did work and what didn't. And the downside to performance marks is the data is much more hidden, so we're not able to go very granular.

Okay. As we did before, the raw ways. to Research a bit deeper, often using third party tools, which help us dissect what happened on Performance Max. But it's really a trade off between having less data to look at, but having more opportunity in the end.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah, it's interesting. And before, what do you think personally, Performance Max, does it achieve what Google set out to achieve or not?

Phil Byrne: I think it has to a large extent, [00:23:00] we found for a lot of our clients. It's helped them grow. We do lots of shopping campaigns. Where Performance Max has really brought success is when we've broken it down to promote the best selling products. So one thing that works out in eCommerce, to dissect that a bit, is the 80 20 rule.

Yeah. So 80 percent of our income comes from 20 percent of the products, sometimes less. Yeah. Every campaign. Whether it's Performance Max or Standard has a better chance of success if we focus on the 20%. That's how, that's where we're going to grow. Performance Max I think has helped most brands grow who do that.

Yeah. If they try and use Performance Max to sell things that didn't sell so well before, it's tough. Yeah. The pace that tends to scale. What's happening already with issues with a product, with the business itself, it'll scale up. [00:24:00] We have to make business focused decisions to make PMAX work. I think another difference is a performance max needs what we call signals.

So a good signal is a segment of your audience, which is exactly who you want to reach. And that's different to keyword optimization that we traditionally did on Google Ads. So the better we are at segmenting out our audience and sending just the portion that has bought or added to cart or done something positive around the specific products in that campaign, that'll help us make Performance Max perform better.

If we give it everyone that's here at the site, then the signal is not strong. We have to think of it in a different way, too.

Okay.

Matt Edmundson: So what's performance max? I'm just thinking Phil, for people that are maybe starting out in eCommerce and they, they've not got the [00:25:00] budget necessarily to go get an agency involved.

Working from their, the back room, as it were, selling the products online. Would Performance Max be worth looking at or not really?

Phil Byrne: I think it's tougher. So it's a brand new ad account. You better off starting with standard shopping or standard search and then getting a few conversions and other signals in that ad account.

Yeah. So the more conversions, the more data it has, the better you're going to expand into Performance Max. Yeah. That's probably the best advice for something,

Matt Edmundson: Yeah, fair enough and then, I guess to spring it on from that, if I'm just starting out, at what point from your experience does it make sense for the startup to reach out to an agency and say, please help us with PPC now what point on the trajectory should I be thinking about that?

Phil Byrne: I think when you've done [00:26:00] at least three to six months worth of pay per click, sometimes more, since when you're seeing sales happen, people show interest in what you're selling, and you feel that you don't have the time, As well, that's another factor. Run all of your ads yourself. I think if you are quite technically minded, you can learn how to run pay per click and you can do it.

You should do it yourself for as long as you can. I think a brand owner always understands their products better than any agency can. But when you start to see sales, your time begins to diminish. You feel like you can scale, but you're not able to with the techniques that you've used. Great

Matt Edmundson: time to go to an agency.

Get an agency involved. Yeah, no fair play. It was, I remember the day that because we used to do PPC in house. Because when PPC first came out, it was the easiest thing in the world to do. So easy. It was [00:27:00] just ridiculous, really. In fact, we built an eCommerce brand just on the basis of the fact that PPC was really easy.

Okay, let's just buy the ads for this because they're so cheap and we make so much. Why would we not do this and to scale it out, right? Those days didn't last very long, Phil.

Phil Byrne: Wild West days.

Matt Edmundson: Such is the shame, but you're like, oh, geez. But I remember our default. We just did them in house and we were spending like 20, 30 grand a month on Google ads.

And they were like, at some point we looked at it and went. We have got to be better off outsourcing this because people are now, they're experts and we've got enough budget and enough data to get the experts to tweak what we do because we just weren't doing it. We were so busy doing other things and I remember when we moved over to an agency, the difference it made was night and day and we spent half as much but got four times the amount of sales.

And it wasn't because we [00:28:00] didn't know what we were doing, we just were not experts in that field. And so when, like you say, budget and time allowed, it's I'm going to step aside and let the experts loose. So even today, even in our eCommerce companies now paid media. is for me and is outsourced.

It's always a specialist thing that I get. I don't need to figure that out internally, we internally we can do whatever email marketing or we can do the website maintenance and all that sort of stuff. But yeah I just think you need the experts. Personally, it's my experience.

You need the experts on with when it comes to PPC, just mainly because it changes so quickly as well,

Phil Byrne: it does. And I think what does happen when you work with many clients, You begin to see the same problems, but with different products, different brands, different countries. Sometimes, they're network issues.

So sometimes the whole network has a problem with a certain type of ad, and as an agency you can act in the day to save all of your clients some spend if there's an issue, [00:29:00] or if we see that suddenly this month pay per click is really cheap, January for example is a cheap month for pay per click, then if we're selling, let's up the budget, let's do something about it.

All of that ability to react and to bring in the latest techniques and the latest changes. We have a new type of Google campaign launch in this month called Demand Gen. It's a really a reboot of their Discovery app, but it'll bring change and opportunity. Yeah, and just you experienced with your own eCom brand.

There's always that time That kind of two, three months where something new that everybody catches on to, until you have opportunity. And then six months down the line, everyone's talking about it, and that space has gone. And because pay per click is an auction, really what we're doing is trying to find space.

Yeah. We can control. The Cost Per Click, where we can reach an audience that no one [00:30:00] quite now is, or not enough people are reaching to push the auction up

Matt Edmundson: too high. That's really good. That's awesome. Cause that's actually one of my questions was, there were these sort of wild west days where you could just, almost write your own check.

And part of me, part of my question is what's the next wild west? Because there's always going to be one, and as eCommerce entrepreneurs, we spend hours trying to figure out what it is. Is there something here that we can capitalize on? frOm a PPC point of view, is that what you think is the next Wild West?

Phil Byrne: Demand Jan . It could, it will be for a little while, Google is so big and so many people are now very aware of something new that Google does. Yeah. All the places, all the networks. Are also developing their own pay per click too. So TikTok, a year ago, became the new Wild West. A little bit more than a year ago.

The networks right now who are pushing new pay per click platforms through are [00:31:00] Quora and Reddit. Both of those, if your brand is questioned, informational related, or you are a company who sells something relevant to something which is discussed often, both of those hold opportunity. Yeah. Pinterest is pushing very hard to take some of the audience away from Meta.

So right now they have a pretty good offer where they'll do all your creative for free. And if you spend more than 2, 000 in a month, they'll give you an extra 50 percent of that credited back. So you know, it's a good time to test Pinterest if you feel it's relevant to you. bUt then, things like that.

New platforms, meaning you need a profile, you need to have an account that's updated, enough to show presence. So they all create work. And so it all again, Matt, comes down to time. How much time do you have in your team, in yourself, [00:32:00] and which one's right for you? But there's always an opportunity. The other one that I think, especially if you're targeting the American market, that has some interesting things going on is Microsoft.

Okay. They've been buying so many other sites and, they bought LinkedIn. A couple of years ago. So they are the only place that you can reach people on LinkedIn via ads outside of LinkedIn. If you're selling B2B, there's probably opportunity there too. But all of these networks constantly buy things, constantly bring new things out, and each one of them creates that opportunity for a little while.

And then we have to find the next opportunity.

Matt Edmundson: I'm loving this. I especially I'm loving this because I we jumped on Pinterest recently. Because again, I, we've mentioned it on the show before, we just thought Pinterest was a really interesting platform for our brands right now and that there is some great opportunity there.

And yeah, we've definitely been playing around on Pinterest and getting some good results so far. I think we probably should [00:33:00] throw some more money at it and scale it maybe a little bit quicker not thought about Quora or Reddit. So look, I got that in my notes. We'll be having conversations tomorrow with the team, Phil, no doubt.

And then obviously Microsoft in the UK in the US is, you're never going to get rid of Microsoft, are you? It's always going to be there and so why would you not do that? Now there's some fascinating information there. Phil, listen, one of the questions we've got in from cohort um, if you were starting an eCommerce business today from scratch yourself, it's just you and let's say, I'm just looking around my desk for anything that's interesting pens.

I'm going to pick up a pen, right? So you've got a passion for pens, the website passionforpens. com, by Phil. Phil's a passion for pens. But a product like a pen or something like that, and you were starting up, how would you, how would PPC be part of [00:34:00] your strategy knowing what you know? So that if some, obviously someone's starting up here, if they.

I guess they just want to piggyback what you would do a little bit if that makes sense. So what would you do there?

Phil Byrne: Definitely do Google Ads, because Google Ads is the place we reach a customer who's furthest down the line ready to buy. We want to find the most relevant searches, so our type of pen, plus colour, so it's very relevant.

Shopping feed, get Google Shopping running. And what I would do is monitor the traffic from shopping and search and watch what they do on the site. The main two sides of optimization nowadays are the ads, also what's happening on the site. Yeah. So people drop out at the cart too often.

Yeah. They reach a page and they disappear because it's not quite what they're after. aNd that traffic, because it's the most intentional. We want to watch that traffic a bit more. Yeah. What I would [00:35:00] also do is run remarketing on Netta because it's the best place to run remarketing online. The ad is the biggest space we get online.

iF we can find a relevant YouTube channel or YouTube presenters who reflect something about our pens, which we want to connect with, so whether that's calligraphy or something else that we might want to connect to, I think that'd be a great place to run some lead gen. I would do the same on Meta, so Facebook lead ads, which in turn generate email for us, that we can, or SMS, that we can begin to nurture across time.

And then when we have a Google shopping feed, like I think one of the underutilized things online is a shopping feed, because once we have one, we can then take it to other places. So all affiliate networks take a shopping feed. Okay. So a great place for us to try affiliate marketing is to just upload our shopping feed and let those stream onto third [00:36:00] party sites that are gonna send traffic to our site and help our remarketing.

'cause really a lot of the way we see external third party marketing traffic in terms of pay per click is we can remarket to it. You had a really good interview with a, an influencer marketeer who was really asking everybody to see influencers as a storefront. Yeah. And I think that was a great phrase, that's also what a shopping feed allows us to do.

We can go beyond our affiliate partner sites, we can go to third party sites. One of our clients, um, put his shopping feed on DIY. com, which is owned by B& Q. And that brought a whole new source of traffic onto his own website that generated sales, gave us traffic to remarket to. And just get even more traffic in general.

So in the beginning, with Pay Per Click, we want to generate highly relevant traffic, [00:37:00] watch what it does on our site, but we also want to use the assets we create for Pay Per Click, the feed, the images, the videos, in as many places as we can, all within the budget that we have, which is the tough part. So that's what I'll do.

And I think every eCommerce site has to try and grab subscribers nowadays. Yeah. To make the most of that click that we've just paid for. So if people aren't ready to buy, can we get them to sign up? Yeah. Can we do something to give us the opportunity to market to those people for the next six months or more?

And that's how I would play that. All in all. Top

Matt Edmundson: tip, top advice there. I love that getting the subscribers the email addresses, especially so you can re, re target them, re market them. Would that... Those things you talked about, the Google ads, the remarketing on meta, YouTube channel lead gen meta lead ads and distribution of your shopping [00:38:00] feed.

Would that apply for say, a digital product? So we get a lot of people listening to the show who are doing now digital products, like the online courses or the like the memberships fitness would be a classic one. I'd come join my fitness group and all that sort of stuff.

Would that apply to those as well?

Phil Byrne: It'd be slightly different, so Google really does not want us to sell digital products through shopping feeds. People do find third party ways to make that happen, but but digital products is all usually need driven, so usually a digital product fixes a problem, a question, an element of training that we need.

So really we want to target, search is our most important thing in terms of Google ads. YouTube, again, can we find channels, spaces that address the audience we're trying to reach to hit the same issues. Meta is a great place to sell things which are educational or resolving a health issue, if it happens [00:39:00] to be that.

And you would just play it slightly without the shopping feed there. The affiliate side... It's a bit tougher, but the influencer side is highly relevant because we do have lots of influencers pushing. Yeah, you have certain things that we're trying to learn. The one thing I missed out of the eCommerce side is Amazon because Amazon is such a huge part of the internet now.

They are actually the biggest buyer of Google Ads. So often our biggest competitor is in Google Shopping can be our product on Amazon.

Matt Edmundson: Ha. Yeah, beggars belief, but yeah, no, fair enough. That makes a lot of sense. So how do we deal with that? With the Amazon side.

Yeah. Amazon buying Google AdWords a lot cheaper than IMI, I've no doubt. Selling the same product, competing for the space. How do I guess if I'm an established brand, this could be a problem. It's definitely been a problem for us in the past, you're how do I.

How do I compete with that? Or how do I what's our [00:40:00] strategy for getting people to click us rather than Amazon, even though we're going to pay more money, probably be slightly lower down what's some of your tips there?

Phil Byrne: First thing is to bid against them. Because your Amazon sale is going to cost you 15 percent for whatever their commission is.

Yeah. So you have that budget to beat. Probably the most important thing is to have something that's different about the product purchase on your site to Amazon. Amazon is tough to compete with. Yeah. On price. Often they are actually cheaper than a lot of the same products on a company's site.

But this is something else that we can offer. Whether it's additional freebie or something additional to that product itself, which is only available on the site so we have to give it some kind of uniqueness. So then it's real choice. Yeah. It's not just price And people really, and I would say a lot of consumers actually trust [00:41:00] Amazon more than the do end brand, cos, they tried and trusted. They know they're going to get a refund. They're going to be here tomorrow. Yeah. All these things are strands. So we have to create something on our own side. Yeah. Differentiators.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah, no, absolutely. That's that was our strategy. You've got to, you've got to create a compelling difference, right?

You've got to increase the value in the mind of the perceived the perceived mind of the buyer. And it's interesting, all these things you now have to think about, because again, I'm going back to when it first started, so I'll just set it and forget it. But now it's, you've got to be on top of it a little bit.

You've got to be watching this every day. You've got to be checking the budgets, the performance, what's working, what's not working. Plus, you've then got to stay on top of things like what the latest trends are, where's all this sort of stuff coming out. What sort of some of the publications or feeds or sites you followed stay up to date with the whole thing?

So

Phil Byrne: On the Google ad side. There's a great American company called Solutions Aid, you might have heard of them. There's a brilliant UK [00:42:00] Google Ads guy called Ed Leake. So he has a Facebook group on Google Ads. He also has his own app, which can help you run your ads. And then a lot of the things I tend to stay ahead of outside of that, because I'm really a Google Ads guy.

Some of my team are more meta, more social media ads focused. so I tend to stay ahead of Google for heritage's sake, as much as keeping up with trends. But then I follow a lot of business blogs, a lot of business sites, which keeps me, keeps my mind ahead of what's actually happening out there.

In the economic world, and my role these days is a lot about steering the company in terms of new things we bring through, what's happening in the landscape, where do we want to be, and keeping ahead of that stuff, but I think solutions A to

Matt Edmundson: I've got one more question [00:43:00] for you, Phil, because time has just flown by, a thousand miles an hour. I'm just slowly working my way through the list. We've talked again, we've talked about a strategy for eCommerce startups, you've talked about where some of the hotspots are. If we're already doing well on Google, we should look at we've talked a little bit about digital products.

So one person or one organization that I do want to touch on partly because I serve on some boards, partly because I'm just genuinely interested, is charity. Now, um, Google have this system for charities, don't they, where you can get a 10, 000 credit towards your ad spend every month. That's only, as far as I understand that, that's only on the, it's only Google search ads.

It's not to do with YouTube. It's nothing to do with Google Macs and all that sort of stuff. It's just literally Google search ads you can spend up to 10, 000 on. Have you had any experience with that? So if there's a charity listening. Maybe just explain [00:44:00] what that is, because not every charity knows about it, and then we'll talk a little bit about, for a few minutes, about how charities can exploit this.

No

Phil Byrne: problem, Matt. So the scheme is called Google Grants and there's a page which I can supply you with, Matt, where you can make an application. And what Google will do is they'll look at your status as a charity and most of the time they will award a grant and that can be credited to an ad account for you to run search ads from.

I think what a charity has to do is think about in the same way we do in eCommerce. What do we want that ad spend to do? Is it sponsors? Volunteers? Is it donations? And each of those different things that we want to happen, we need to make sure we have a proper landing page for. I think where, where that spend can just disappear is if we just send people to the...

Mindset and not give them an intention, but it's a good thing that Google do. They've given out [00:45:00] lots of those grants we do look at those organizations. We'll actually help them But no charge if they fit with something that we sit with too and I think it's a good scheme

Matt Edmundson: Yeah, no, it's really powerful it's One organization I'm involved with is using it that probably spending about one to two thousand Dollars of the $10,000 allowance.

Part of that is because of I think effort for want of a better expression. 'cause it's a bit like running any gap ads campaign. You've gotta know what you're doing a little bit. 'cause there are certain terms and conditions like you have to have a certain engagement rate or something as best I understand it.

Where's. If someone's sitting in a charity and going we'd love to get agency involved, but we've not got the budget for agency, unless they come across people like yourself who are okay, if they can, we'll do work voluntary. Where's a good place to learn the basics about that type of thing so they can maximize the charity spend?

Phil Byrne: Yep. So [00:46:00] Google themselves have a lot of great training courses. So you can actually get the Google Ads certification. That's why I think it's worth anyone. Involved in Google Ads, whether you run them yourself, or you manage someone else who does, or an agency who does, to do that training. I think if they did the Google search modules, they would have enough to start running their own ads.

And then go at it from there. I think another thing for them to try, if they want someone else to run them, is to join some of the Facebook groups geared towards Google Ad techniques. And there's often people on there, Who say, I just want to have a couple of trial clients, test my techniques out on, and see if I can help.

And that, for a charity, can be

Matt Edmundson: great results. Yeah, absolutely. Top tip. Loving that one. We're going to get into some of those Facebook groups for some of the charities. No doubt whatsoever. That's fascinating. And just [00:47:00] again, just worth pointing out, if you are part of a charity, there is Google Grants.

It is something worth looking at. It does extend beyond just the Google Ads spend, like you get free Google accounts. So I know that the ones I'm involved with, for example, all the emails, the calendars, all that sort of stuff is not something that they charge you for. It is a great thing they do. It is a bit of faff to get the account, but it's worth it in the long run if you get it.

But I like this idea. I'm My final question, I know I said that before, Phil, but this is genuinely my final question. Phil. Would you recommend eCommerce entrepreneurs maybe who use Agency to do the Google AdWords certification just to give them that background knowledge? 100%.

Phil Byrne: I think they should do Google Ads and Google Analytics.

Okay. Really what's helped us become a commission based PPC partner is the data. Yeah. More than the ads themselves. [00:48:00] So I think for every entrepreneur, knowing your data and your ability to look into it and manipulate it so you see what you want to see. Yeah.

Matt Edmundson: Yeah, that's fantastic. Commission based agency.

This is this intrigues me now. We'll talk about that because I want you to tell people how people reach you and you can talk about what you do Because I think this is fascinating what you do traditionally Agencies, which I've worked with either have charged a flat fee or they charge a percent of ad spend like 20 percent So if you spend 10 grand on ads, they're going to charge you 2 grand So your total spend is going to be that 12 plus sorry the 10 plus the 2 which is 12 You work slightly differently and this is quite unique and I did want to give some time to this.

So just explain what it is you do and why you have gone slightly bonkers with this whole thing. It could

Phil Byrne: be bonkers. We've been commission based for about five years now and it was the advance in data tracking. [00:49:00] That made it an opportunity. I think that you've used and I've used the word agency in our chat But I hate using that word, I've always wanted to be with everything I've ever done a partner It's how I describe it.

Yeah, so I want us to be on the same side of the fence Whereas when you're charging a flat fee or you're charging a percentage of spend You're not on the same side of the fence in my opinion There are still some great agencies who do that and if they're working for you Brilliant. I think that's fine.

But I want us to all work and benefit together when things go great and us all to work together and look at what we're going to change when things are not performing too well. So we want to be commission based with every client we work with. There are times when we have to do something different for a short period, so when data is not there, to base this off, or when it's a brand new company, we don't even know yet if this is going to work in the market, then we [00:50:00] do charge, as a normal agency does, a flat fee, for generally around 90 days.

We want to go commission based, and if we're growing, it might turn into a half, so it's half a fee, plus an element of commission, but every client that we work well with is commission based, that's how we want to be, and it works well, it's been brilliant for us in some instances, it's taught us a lot, it means that we are more sales focused than brand focused, So depending on what you want your company to be, choose the right partner, but it's what we are, what we've become, and we're tried and trusted in that area.

We, we've got to work with some amazing companies because we have that approach, and and it's, we don't tie anyone to long contracts, so people can try it, see if it works out. If it doesn't, if it does work out, everyone's

Matt Edmundson: happy. Everyone's a winner. No, I love that. I love that model and I love that idea and it's [00:51:00] wonderful.

So Phil, listen, if people want to reach out to you, if they want to find out more about what you're doing or want to get in touch with you about maybe how you can help them, what's the best way to do that?

Phil Byrne: No problem. So you can look at our site. Positivesmarks. com. All the contact forms there will come to me at the end.

We'll go through the great team we have and then come to me. Very active on LinkedIn. So feel free to reach out LinkedIn, direct message me if you want. Mention the podcast and I'll know that you've come from this chat I've had with Matt. There's two things we do, which are my interest people.

One is a free audit of current ad status and accounts. And the second one is our tracking. If you want to try our tracking setup. And you run an eCommerce store on Shopify or WooCommerce, then you're welcome to try that for 30 days and see if it shows you something that you didn't see before. I'd love to hear from people.

It's always fun to chat like this, Matt. So anyone who's in the digital space, you always have a fun chat with.

Matt Edmundson: Absolutely. Phil, listen genuinely, man I, I'm always surprised how quickly time goes, [00:52:00] but on this occasion, I'm even more surprised and just really appreciate you coming on. Thoroughly enjoyed the conversation.

Thank you for sharing the wisdom and the insights. And I think we should probably get you back on again at some point in the future just to give us an update on the industry. And I can ask you all the questions I didn't get to ask you. But but yeah, Phil, listen, appreciate it, man. Absolute legend.

It's been a pleasure. Thank you. whAt a great conversation. Huge thanks again to Phil for joining me today. And in fact, I've started doing this. Huge round of applause. Yes, go for it. Ha. Also, big shout out to... To today's show's sponsor, the eCommerce Cohort. Remember to check them out think about come join the membership.

It's not actually that expensive ecommercecohort. com for more information. And of course, be sure to follow the eCommerce Podcast, wherever you get your podcasts from, because we've got some more great conversations lined up. And I don't want you to miss. Any of them. And in case no one has told you yet today, let me be the first person to tell you you are awesome.

Yes, you are. Credit awesome. It's just a [00:53:00] burden you have to bear. Phil's got to bear it. I've got to bear it. You've got to bear it as well. Now, the eCommerce Podcast is produced by Aurion Media. You can find our entire archive of episodes on your favorite podcast app. The team that makes this show possible is the wonderful Sadaf Beynon and Tanya Hutsuliak.

Our theme song was written by Josh Edmundson. And as I mentioned, if you would like to read the transcript or show notes, head over to the website eCommercePodcast. net. That's it from me. That's it from Phil. Thank you so much for joining us. Have a fantastic week wherever you are in the world. I'll see you next time.

Bye for now.[00:54:00]