Why You Should Stop Using Facebook Ads and Start Google Advertising

welcome to the ecommerce podcast with matt edmondson a show that brings you regular interviews tips and tools for
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[Music]
hi and welcome to the ecommerce podcast with me your host matt edmondson all of this week's notes and links can
be found at ecommercepodcast.net forward slash and you are going to want them
because this week we get to hear from john horn and johnny's going to explain to us why
you should stop using facebook ads and start using google advertising instead i know
i know a little bit contentious so don't go anywhere hey there are you a business owner here
at oregon digital we know firsthand that running an ecommerce business can be really hard work
as the online space gets more competitive it is becoming even more challenging to stay ahead of the curve
we totally get it so we want to help you succeed by offering a wide range of services from fulfillment marketing
customer service and even coaching and consulting just so that you can do what matters most save yourself the time and
the money and let us handle the day-to-day tasks this way you can run your business without having to worry
about the boring stuff so what do you say are we a good fit for each other come check us out at oreodigital.com and
let us know what you think
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there were some big changes uh this year uh well actually last year isn't it now
uh apple made certain it all blows into one doesn't at the time um but apple made some big changes and there's been a
lot of conversation even on this podcast about facebook ads you may have even heard that facebook ads are dead
in fact you may have heard this a million times before but is it actually true
and are you better off to start using google advertising well
this week's guest john horn actually believes this to be true so he joins me
to talk about why facebook ads are no longer worth your time and how google advertising can actually help you make
more money and i love this a slightly contentious title a slightly polarizing
view but an interesting topic none the less john is in fact the ceo of stub
group a digital advertising agency and a premier google ads partner for almost
the last decade with stub group he has been working with companies around the world managing marketing for them with a
keen focus on pay-per-click advertising what you are going to hear is basically
how passionate john is about this topic of digital marketing uh he loves to speak with folks like us uh with clients
and with other businesses and helps helps people navigate the world of digital marketing and make the landscape
look a whole lot more calm and decent and profitable oh yes he loves to geek
out over how to convert more leads get more ecommerce sales and grow revenue
so it's going to be a fascinating conversation you're going to love it so without further ado here's my interview
with john horn uh john thanks for being on the show great to have you uh great to have you
John Horn
you you still hasn't again great to have you here uh it's um you're the first
guest that i've spoken to because we recalled these um interviews ahead of time from from the
podcast and so you're the first person a guest that i've spoken to interview wise in so a happy new year happy new
year i am honored and i will do my best to get the new year off to a good start here that's fantastic because if i look at
the schedule this episode's due to come out in several months time so people are going to be like march april and they're going to listen to the session what are
they talking about new year uh just like you know we are slightly ahead of schedule here which is
great so um it's great john where abouts in the world are you dialing in from
i'm in fort worth texas where it is currently not your typical sunny weather it is cold and so if i shiver a little
bit here it's because i have texas blood in me okay
yeah i'm not i'm just not buying this whole thing it's cold in texas i just i just don't think it is compared to what
we're going through here in the uk um as you can see i've got my very thick hoodie on um uh today uh which is fur
aligned ooh that looks so yeah i'm i'm super warm right now uh i was that we we've
literally just uh the last few weeks we've moved our warehouse over the christmas break so i was down there this morning hence the reason i'm dressed
like an eskimo i'm just not so i am quite warm now i'm not gonna lie [Laughter]
so john we are talking about google adwords that's your um area of expertise
how did you how did you start how did you get into google ads yeah i really got into google um
How did you get into Google
close to a decade ago at this point my company stub group company which i
work we have been really focused on pay-per-click channels for a long time google being definitely one of the
biggest of those and you know back in the day this is before google shopping was anywhere close to
what it is now this is when mostly it was text ads and display or marketing and whatnot just got into it realized
hey in the marketing space there's already a massive market here of businesses who need to use google to
reach customers because google obviously is where customers are searching for products and solutions and so we saw this market need where
businesses were getting into it but there just were more businesses getting into the market than there were experts
who knew how to help them steward their ad spend effectively so really we just got into it learned
from trial and error figuring out what works what doesn't work which is still how you learn it today because it's constantly a changing environment and
there's always a new feature to figure out a new policy to comply with a new strategy to try so yeah
How do you deal with Google changes
how do you how do you deal with that you know google changing the policies and everything all the time
it seems you know almost every week something is different something has changed so do you find it
hard to keep up with with what's going on i wouldn't say hard because that's obviously our job what we're getting
paid for so we spend a lot of time in in monitoring those things and monitoring both you know communication with our
teams at google where they can say hey here's something coming up prepare for it sometimes we'll even have access to
betas so these may be features that we've been able to test out even before they've been released publicly to
everyone and then of course monitoring the community as well there's a very active page search community where
people are saying hey you see this do you see that and you can ask questions answer questions and just keep on top of where
the industry's going what what so if i'm starting out i'm doing google adwords myself you know i've got my
Where to find information on Google changes
little woman and where would i go um to sort of keep abreast with some of these things that are changing on google
adwords what would be a good place to look at i would say one of the best resources is
going to be searchengineland.com they do a fantastic job of just bringing together and collating information from
across the web that pertain to search engines in both the ppc and the seo side of things so that's a really it's a good
go-to resource google of course they have their own blog where they'll announce big changes that they're
releasing so that's something you want to monitor and then there's on twitter for example there's
ppc chat is a great place for kind of experts to hang out and uh and learn about what's going on or or say hey have
you seen this terrible thing what's going on or hey this thing's working fantastic for me help exactly
What is Google Ads
yeah no i'd say uh we'll put a link to those in the show notes thanks for that because i'm always curious you know where
where you get your information from because you know it's um there are so many sources isn't there of
of information what are some of the best places so thank you for those tips we will put those in
so can we start at the beginning um because you know the beginning is always a good place to start i think with google ads i don't want to make any
assumptions because the proliferation of people now uh running their own e-commerce
businesses you know starting out in e-commerce or um wanting to do some kind of digital businesses is yeah i don't if
you've noticed this i've certainly noticed a boom uh since the pandemic right
yeah good as long as it's not just me all right um so let's not make any assumptions let's start right at the
beginning um just define quickly what a google ad is
and how that's different from maybe some of the other ads or how it's different say from just google rankings or google
listings yeah absolutely and what a google ad is too has changed a lot over the years because a lot of
people still think of it as a text ad that shows up when i search for something on google and that is still
certainly an aspect of google ads but google owns so many properties so you have google search you have youtube
google display google shopping etc and
when i think of google's ad platform and offerings
it's looking at those different channels that google offers and figuring out okay which of those are the best fit or which
combination those are best fit for the advertiser at the end of the day it's you know an advertiser saying okay i
want to reach people either new people to potentially make them customers or existing customers even of my own i'm
trying to cross-sell or upsell or remarket to or whatever and so google has different resources that would fit those different use cases
google search is still the best place in my opinion to get in front of people who are actively searching for a product or
a service they're typing into google exactly what they're looking for and you have that opportunity right when they're
looking for it to say hey here we are come come get come get it come buy the product come come buy the service and so
you know when because people think about google ads that's that's the primary thing they think about is the text ad or the shopping ad with a picture of a
product and the price and the product name that would appear when someone searches on google and those differ from
organic listings from free listings primarily in that you pay for it obviously that's how google makes an
incredible amount of money as a company um and b what you're typically paying for these days is also
a priority because those ads typically appear above the free organic listings on google search or even the google
shopping tab and so advertisers really have first crack at getting traffic from
people who are searching on google and google's done a very good job of keeping those advertisements relevant so
honestly a lot of people still which amazes me but a lot of people still don't even realize that they're clicking on ads they're just going to google and
oh hey that's what i'm looking for and click through it and google's done a great job of keeping keeping those ads as well as the organic listings relevant
to users yeah now they have and um so i i you know i think
when you're on google you see that you know if you're clicking an ad because it's got the word ad doesn't it in a little bubble next to it and um
and i'm always in i'm always intrigued uh maybe that's this is just me right but i'm always intrigued when i head to
google and i put something in google and it could be a whole bunch of search terms i mean it could be something like
a specific product it could be something like you know really weird like how do i get
better sleep at night i mean it and and somebody somewhere has figured out that actually if you type that in
i want to be i want to be up on that that that sort of search engine ranking i want to be in that position should i
say sorry and they put that as and the first question that goes through my head is if i click this
how much are they paying for that click right yes and that's partly because i have given google way too much money over the years
myself in in paid advertising uh hundreds of thousands of pounds i've
no doubt um which frankly they didn't need but they they took it anyway and i'm
just i'm curious i'm just like and i i don't know if you do the same thing as me but where
where you you you look on google you see something you see okay well they're position number one in in the ad but
they're position number two on the organic i'm gonna click the organic i'll save you the or whatever it is you're
going to pay for me to click this and um and and do that absolutely yeah it's
working in the industry is kind of well i don't know if broken is the white word but definitely changed how i do my
searching because like you said okay i know oh if i click on this it's going to cost somebody potentially a heck of a lot of money um if i'm not planning to
buy something i typically won't click on an ad unless i'm maybe doing some competitor research or something but it's like okay yeah so i see they're up
there cool so they're probably legit they're investing some money let's go give them a free click on the organic and see where we're going
yeah it's a fair point have you have you ever done that i mean we're going to get into google ads a little bit more i'm just
Have you ever done that
kind of curious now these are questions popping into my head um have you ever done that thing where
you've clicked both the paid link and the organic link to see where they both send you and you find that they're
selling you the same product at different prices honestly i've not seen the same price or the different prices i'll definitely do
that cross comparison to see kind of where they send me in the messaging um but i have not personally seen different
pricing that's interesting yeah no i have because obviously somebody somewhere has figured out that
Conversion rate
if they do a specific landing page for an ad with a specific offer their conversion rate goes up which they're
you know they're paying for that traffic whereas the organic they're kind of like well these guys are just coming anyway
i i find it fascinating um how that works yeah i just totally still make sense
yeah yeah have you found um i mean i you know we're talking about
Facebook vs Google Ads
google ads but obviously one of the key competitors for google ads for online is facebook ads um at least it used to be
um and the whole landscape of facebook ads seems to radically change the last six months how have you found um
the changes in facebook how have they affected google ads how has they affected the performance there
i definitely see google themselves really advancing the messaging of hey we still have a lot of let's call it first
party date of hey we can still reach people we can still track and do a lot of things that facebook is now finding
much harder to do with like you said all the changes that have come come about this last year i still see both platforms they have
very different places in a user's journey so google and listed for talking just about google search um
again you're you've got intent you have people typing in searching we know exactly what they're searching for and
typically they're they're often further down the funnel of actually looking for something and being considering making a
purchase so it's awesome for people who um you know have something that someone's looking for right now that
they can sell to them facebook and instagram that is where you can build that brand build that awareness build
that interest in what you're selling like i'll tell clients when they come to us and say oh should i spend money on
google or facebook it's well one of the first things i'm going to look at is do people know to even search
or look for what you're selling if you're a new product if you're or even if you're not just a new product but if you're new to the
marketplace and you're trying to educate your audience that you do
something differently maybe you've disrupted the industry do something differently than the current solutions that are out there
well you're going to be able to get that message across proactively to people and educate them through facebook through
instagram through youtube as well or google display so google has their solutions there as well
but it's still i always expect different results and usually have different goals from campaigns that i'd run on google
search or shopping versus a facebook instagram type of play do you find that
Facebook vs Google ROI
if you're gonna spend i don't know for sake of argument bucks on facebook bucks on
google do they give you a similar return on that investment or is that quite a big
difference it's a good question and it's it's so hard to answer because there's so many
variables that go into it um typically i will so i view google as a lower
funnel higher conversion rate channel so if we have people who are searching for what the client sells
typically i'm going to start with google and look to maxim out the the number of people searching for that getting that
traffic optimizing the conversion rate so forth and so on and then once i've been able to do that and also even
improve the model mc and do testing of okay what messaging is performing best what are people actually searching for
what are the pain points that they're typing in then i'll typically expand to a facebook instagram and so forth to capture
additional audience or to get people into my funnel so you know
every business is gonna be different some businesses google that hundred may be great on google terrible and facebook some businesses vice versa
Pain Points
yeah i think the bottom line is tested isn't it and see what works for you but i thought it was interesting you talked about pain points um
and what people are typing into google and so i'm just kind of thinking um
there's a really obvious thing um with google in fact this is uh we did
this in i'm going back to and this is in effect how we became
quite we grew quite quickly at this point in time um was using google ads right and we
we had specific products that we knew people were searching for and so we did ads targeted on that exact product name
so people typed in that product or even that brand we wanted to be hi and this bear in mind
this is years ago john and it was not like it is it was very very different um
i was paying like one or two pounds jeremy for a conversion it was definitely not uh what it is now
and so we just basically rammed these ads for these specific products so this is this is where
somebody knows exactly what it is they're searching for and they type in a brand product or name
so um i've got in front of me let me grab them real quick um this product here right these are the omega-tablets
that i take right yeah um they're by a company called vegetology full disclosure i am part of
the vegetology team and this brand is called optso um it's
i can go to google and i can say right show this ad if someone types in optibecause it's a brand name and jimmy
never there aren't that many people thinking about that but in terms of beyond that these sort
Other Pain Points
of pain points what else should i think about besides just the brand name because i
think if if i do an ad which says when someone types in omega-oil that's going to be competitive and very
expensive right so i'm not saying that i wouldn't do it i'm just saying that scares me
so how else would you think about this for google ads i said also think through
what is it that differentiates the product from from the market or the product or even the service that you
provide so on the product level some examples could be and we worked with a client who
sold um it was glutathione glutathione i was afraid how you pronounce that but they had they
came out with a product that was um it tasted good and it was liquid which differentiated them from a lot of the
other providers in the marketplace where they were capsule based and often they had a bad taste and so in that kind of
scenario it's okay well a pain point in the market could be people typing in um you know is there liquid liquid
glutathione um is there well the vinyl that tastes good and that would be unique to their products would go for
those types of searches that are still you know longer tail from just someone typing in glutathione seeing every
single provider out there but that are still you know definitely um
higher in the funnel than someone typing their actual brand name so i'd say hey you know thinking about what what
differentiates the product and then b another strategy a kind of competitor
conquesting strategy it can work well or can fail depending on how you approach it and kind of what market you're in but
if you have competitors that also have a lot of brand awareness and people are searching for them by name and again there's
something that differentiates your product it's either it's cheaper or it's better or you know it tastes better
whatever you can go after people who are searching for your competitors and then in your ad copy you can highlight that
pinpoint say you know tastes better liquid whatever and so you're kind of building upon the
traffic and awareness that your competitors have already created throughout their advertising and then you're hitting people who are still
probably low funnel because the fact they're looking for your competitor by name means they're probably ready or close to making a purchase decision and
then you can communicate your differentiator so those those are some ways and then a
third way is with machine learning especially with shopping campaigns but also on the text
ad side of things google is very cognizant that there is a ton of
traffic out there that's i've always knew there are different ways that people search for things i forget the
number i want to say it's like of search terms every day are you know terms that have not been seen before by
google something crazy like that wow um that that number might be a little bit high i think that was a couple years ago they came out with that but uh so don't
quote me but it's somewhere very very high where even if you do all the kind of keyword research in the world you're
not going to be able to predict and guess what all the new ways are that people are searching for today and so by leveraging um you know automated bidding
within accounts and um broad match keywords where it makes sense a lot of caveats say but where it
makes sense as well as shopping campaigns you can have google kind of go out and test some of those different
traffic sources long tail keywords for you that you may not even think of to advertise your product
Competitors
that's really intriguing there's a lot of things john that you said there that i want to come back to if that's okay i've written them all down so we'll just
go through this the first thing um you talked about your competitors now
this is where um somebody goes in and types in your competitors brand name um or their product and you pay to appear
on that um keyword uh i remember quite early on uh the competitors which
i had in the industry where we were planning an awful lot of money into google adwords uh we all made a sort of
gentleman's agreement not to do that to each other and it was quite interesting development uh that we we just called
him said you don't do it to me i won't do it to you how does that work and now like yeah that's great um
so this advertising uh on somebody else's um name
i mean ethics of that aside i'm assuming actually that's possible to do um
that actually even is that possible to do even if your competitor's brand is trademarked for
example yeah it's very possible to do as long as you do it above board and the right way
so the way with google the way it works is you can target any any real keyword
that you want to target so for example let's just pick a company let's say amazon if you want to target people searching for amazon you could target
amazon as a keyword now in your ad copy obviously you can't pretend to be amazon and you can't use amazon's trademark in
your ad copy if you're not authorized to do so by amazon but you can target those people who are
searching for amazon and then show your own ad and so you'll see tons of i'd say some of the
most creative ads that i'll see online are in these kind of competitor conquesting campaigns where you search
for something and then you'll see an ad like oh we're better than them and and the ad won't say the name because you
can't say the name you know in the ad copy but the context of the page makes it clear or there's some clever way or
hey we're cheaper or you know whatever the case may be okay that's quite a clever way of doing it isn't it i i so
you can't so if i was going to run ads for example when someone searched amazon i can't mention amazon in either the
title or the copy because it's a trademark name right but i can put something like you know uh
we're better than them or maybe can you use a zed or i don't know this i guess
there's creative ways around it isn't it that you can that you can do that but it intrigues me
that you said that actually some of the most creative ads that you've seen are in this space in the competitor space
so you know if i'm running an ecommerce business one of the things that matters most to me obviously is conversion and
do you see conversion rates higher in that space or is it more brand awareness
type effects going on i see a wide spectrum it definitely has a lot to do with the type of business
advertising and how they compare to those competitors so if you know if if you have higher prices and more service or
worse products or whatever than your competitor and you do a competitor conquesting campaign it's probably not going to work well because people click
through and say oh why would i pay more for this i'm just going to go back to what i'm searching for but if you have something that's really you know is good
and distinct and is actually a value add that maybe a competitor doesn't have then i've seen those campaigns be very
valuable and successful because they are getting you in front of people who are very low in the funnel it's almost like
um i mean your own brand campaign is always going to have the highest converting results because there's
people searching for you by name obviously but competitor campaigns can be
can be kind of one step up from that because again someone who's almost ready to make a decision they're just looking for that that competitor and if they see
you as an option instead then boom go there that's really interesting and i suppose
if i flip it the other way around if i'm the business and my competitors are advertising on my brand name
um i don't is there anything i can do about that other than be slightly annoyed
yeah step one be slightly annoying step two um and of course this is something that
also annoys advertisers often but the best way you can you can mitigate that is by running your own branded campaigns
to make sure that you're showing up first and that you're taking away a lot of that real estate
that your competitors could take the last thing that you want is someone searches you by name and the first three
or four results are all your competitors you you don't want that so running your own branding campaigns is one way to
mitigate that um making sure that you have your name trademarked so that if a competitor does try to use your name in
their ad copy which i see that happen all the time that you can um you know fight that and tell google hey this is
trademarked you know get have that competitor get that get that out of here we actually have a situation
this week where one of our one of our clients said okay our competitor our direct competitor they're using our name in their ad copy and so we're helping
them walk through that and make sure that ad gets taken down so claiming trademark is is a good thing
and then i'm outside of that of course it's just common sense of make your offer brand
message as good as possible so that if someone does go to a competitor they still have a reason to come back to you
yeah yeah i like that i like that and i i was always intrigued i remember a few years
ago whenever it was now seven or eight years ago where the the google guys came to us and they said listen you really
should pay do google ads for your own brand name i'm like why would i want to do that uh and joe i mean it didn't make sense to
me at the time but as time has progressed i now see the the total benefit of doing that and just going actually if someone
searched my brand name i really should appear um phil i would just get into this don't go
Sponsor
anywhere because we will be right back uh in part two of my interview with john talking about google ads but for now
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[Music] hey there are you a business owner here at oregon digital we know firsthand that
running an ecommerce business can be really hard work as the online space gets more competitive it is becoming even more
challenging to stay ahead of the curve we totally get it so we want to help you succeed by offering a wide range of
services from fulfillment marketing customer service and even coaching and consulting just so that you can do what
matters most save yourself the time and the money and let us handle the day-to-day tasks this way you can run
your business without having to worry about the boring stuff so what do you say are we a good fit for each other
come check us out at oreodigital.com and let us know what you think
Machine Learning
we are back with john talking about all things google and we talked before the
ads about uh how to do well on your competitors uh side of things and you also talked about this idea john
of machine learning and how google you know a lot of people are typing stuff into google which has never
been seen before and google's trying to figure out what that means so you've got this sort of machine learning going on
that phrase either really excites you or it scares you know scares you silly basically and
um and i i think there are sort of these two camps aren't there so how does how did you know how google does it and how
we can take advantage of that machine learning excellent question so a this is where
google is going and has gone so if you don't accept automation and the
realities of automation you're just going to be left behind in the dust because google's not going to give you a choice so one thing that we are spending
a lot of time on as an agency here at stub group and focusing on is okay how can we best understand the automation that
google brings to things and then leverage what google can't bring with automation which is the creative
strategy the reporting of accurate data points to google the helping a client figure out
how much to invest where to invest how to analyze data etc and marrying that with the automation
so there's a lot of automation products that google has on the on the shopping side uh google
shopping so where you send a product feed google and you see those ads that come up with images and prices and whatnot
that's already very automated with what people call smart shopping campaigns where we already don't get to choose
what keywords we show up for google chooses that based upon product titles category descriptions product
descriptions things like that and that's already been the case for a long time and so we've seen a lot of good results from
that from smart shopping campaigns in particular where google because they have so much data such a range of data
they can identify patterns and make decisions that just aren't scalable honestly for humans to do there's no way that we
could look through the number of signals going on and make a decision about every single auction with as much efficiency
as google brings and that's really that efficiency and and dealing with all the different signals that go into every
single auction is where google brings an amazing amount of value and
value add to the situation the problem is that if you're feeding bad data to google or you don't have the
right strategy in place that automation can just exponentially increase whatever bad is going on so if
you're wasting money you've got a bad strategy well google can really waste a lot of money for you very quickly by by
exponentially using that learning um and so that's where the the human aspect the
creative the marketing aspect comes in of figuring out what's the right automation to use in this situation
are we providing valid data points to google as our conversion tracking correct are we reporting you know values
to google if we're an e-commerce website and then monitoring seeing oh if google goes off the rails we need to stop that
nip that in the bud figure out what's going on restart that learning process again and so forth and really it's the
same thing with with facebook and instagram as well where every every major platform at this point is is using
a tremendous amount of automation and pushing in that direction yeah yeah this whole machine learning
thing's a big deal isn't it but i like what you said there in in terms of what it have i understood this right what maybe
Strategy
a good strategy is to is to run an ad that and find out what's working well
there and understand it get the strategy right and and then use that kind of concept and idea with the automation
that that can work very well uh if google gives you the option and again they push you towards um sometimes you
don't have the option to test manually it's okay we're going to throw a bunch a bunch of spaghetti at the wall and then google's going to tell us what sticks
and that can work as well as well it also depends on how much how much budget honestly you're working with if you're a
small business you have very limited budget and you really can't afford to give google the
leeway to really figure it out and figure out what's efficient well then you need to to take that reality and maybe go for
more manual campaigns and realize okay i need to i mean do some more manual changes if you have a bunch of money you
can throw at it and it's worth you know investing that money for the system to learn over time and have more long-term efficiency in scale well then that might
be a different a different approach to take you stay there a bunch of if you have a
bunch of money to throw at it i'm kind of you know i'm a bit long in the tooth when it comes tweaker i i'm fully
cognizant of how much google shopping can google ads and google shopping can cost
but i'm also fully cognizant that actually if i've got my strategy right that that's in one sense you don't mind
paying google a million bucks if they're bringing you five million in revenue right it's just it's just a cost of sale
um if i'm just starting out though right if if you were just i don't know if you are
Budget
john may i assume you're starting an e-commerce business today right yes um and you're gonna and you're like right
i'm gonna start on google ads i guess what sort of budget would you need to have in mind
for this thing to make sense for it to be actually worthwhile going down that road to get some usable data
first thing i'm going to look at is my price point and average order value because if i'm selling a product for
two thousand dollars versus i'm selling a product for twenty dollars that's gonna really impact the amount of data i
need to collect i'm selling a product for two thousand dollars i'm gonna need a lot of a lot of clicks it's gonna take time for people to make a product
decision it's gonna be a long sales cycle before i can even say okay yes here's what our actual conversion rate is so it might be you know several
months down the line before i really start having a sense of how long it takes for people to buy whether they're buying what our conversion rate is
etcetera if i'm selling more of an impulse buy product yeah bucks bucks well then i'm going to be able to
collect data much more quickly because hey if someone gets to the website and doesn't buy and leaves
and this is an impulse product which i don't expect people to come back and purchase well i mean i know within a couple days what my initial conversion
rate is and so i can very quickly iterate and test different approaches at copier landing page and so forth um and
then also of course the average cost per click that you pay that's all determined by the auction so every single time
someone searches for something everybody competing for that search you know they throw their bid in there and that's what
that cost per click pays if someone clicks on your ad well you're probably going to have higher cost per clicks if you have a
higher price point products if i can sell two thousand dollar or whatever if i can sell a pallet bike to you for example i can
afford to pay a lot for people to click on on those ads if that's going to sell a bike and so that's going to require a higher
daily budget to get you know clicks for example for peloton bikes as it would if i'm selling umbrellas i want
clicks for that so typically i look at it a little bit too from the perspective of how many
clicks can i get at what cost per click and that should inform what daily budget i'm going to
need to allocate for it to make sense ideally i would say i'd like to get clicks a day for whatever i'm selling
whether it's you know a small item or a big item sometimes the budget just doesn't
there's just not enough money for that to happen out of the gate and so i'm not going to say i wouldn't you know i wouldn't start with lower i would where
it makes sense but that kind of clicks per day is an ideal benchmark that i try to shoot for as a minimum
where did that number come from is that just trial and error or is a little bit of trial and error a little
bit of just to be frank but it it gives you
it gives you the ability to say okay well whatever my conversion rate is let's say we have a three percent conversion rate i know i should expect
at least three conversions a day if i'm getting a hundred clicks a day it makes it kind of nice and round to some extent
and gives you some data to work with for that analysis yeah that's very good that's fascinating
Pitfalls
the um you talked about creative strategy so if you're um
if you're you know into e-commerce what what are some of the pitfalls that you
have seen in credit because i think it's very hard to tell people what to do sometimes and i think sometimes it's easy to understand what not to do so
what are some of the pitfalls that you have seen when it comes to strategy on adwords
i would say one big pitfall is expecting ad spend to counter balance just a poor
product or poor experience we have so many people who come to us with this this website it looks bad it looks like
it's in the s it's hard to use like yeah just unlimited budget spend as much we're going to make a we're going to make a million dollars and say well no
you can spend a million dollars people's happy to take your money but it's not going to work for you unless you put you
know as much thought energy investment into the actual experience the website side as you do in the ads in the ad
spend so i said that's you know that's that's a big pitfall um
i would say expectation setting is also something that we spend a lot of time working on when we start working with
clients because it's human it's natural you expect kind of the magic bullet okay i'm going to start spending on money on google i
expect to see my sales just soar day one and the reality is going back to that data collection and testing side of
things as you know it takes time to test and it takes time to figure out okay this product's working well this
product's not working well maybe we need to adjust the price point the messaging whatever and so you have to have enough
patience as an e-commerce advertiser to go through that process as well as the
willingness to actually test things um i think one thing with the kind of boom in
the drop shipping world that i've seen like you mentioned since the pandemic started is
there's a lot of people who are being sold you don't have to spend much time at all on your business you can you know
set up a few things hire people to do all the work for you and start making a ton of money and that's just that's that's not how it
works true you have to you know find something that's that's a unique value ad why should people purchase from you
especially with amazon out there why should they trust you and buy from you when they could go to amazon and probably purchase a similar product with
all the credibility and safety that comes from amazon yeah and so um yeah it's we're always looking for
businesses clients we can partner with who are also savvy about their businesses and looking at it for the
long haul and and not just seeing kind of the get-rich-quick e-commerce side of things that unfortunately is is very
prevalent these days yeah yeah very prevalent very wrong
i think if you're listening and you've gone down that road i would stop right now and just sort of rethink life a
little bit because i've seen it go wrong i've never seen i said never seen it gone right for every one person i've
seen it work for there's ten thousand people where it hasn't right i mean the odds are just stacked on me um
so you've talked a lot about um
Differentiation
about differentiating you know and uh and understanding so you you can't sell
using google ads a rubbish product you can't make people buy on a rubbish website doesn't matter how much money
you spend on it so you talk about this differentiation thing that you're looking for um
and marketing on the differentiation side of things which is a slightly more longer what you call a longer tail keyword
and in fact before we carry on just explain what you mean by this phrase long tail keyword for those that might not know yeah absolutely so long tail is
the kind of description of how how long a in actual words is a search term
someone might type in as well as an intent so for example a long tail keyword might be yeah buy a green umbrella near me it's
long long term and very descriptive someone searching for umbrella would be short tail much broader much less defined in
the search intent yeah that's great so yeah and so you talk about the differentiators to
How to promote differentiators
to sort of use on these google ads does that come from what i think is different about my
product or is that something that's based on research is it something that's based on both how do i how do i start to
i guess what i'm asking here john is how do i promote my differentiators in a way that works yes
i would say one great place to look and see how people think your product is different or how your product should be
different is a your own reviews and be competitive reviews so if you're looking at your own reviews see okay what are
people saying about the product are a bunch of people saying it feels soft maybe you didn't even
think about this but you realize oh people care about this all the products are hard in the marketplace let's really you know emphasize this and focus on
this and the same thing too is if you're looking at your competitors reviews what are people consistently saying they
don't like about the products or the servers of the company and then how can you focus on that and communicate how
your product solves that pain point like going back to the glutathione example if you see a
bunch of reviews for for the products in the market saying well this tastes terrible then you can focus both in your product
development as well as you know once you've developed it on well people people care enough to leave a review
saying it tastes terrible that means a ton of people are thinking this let's proactively say as our core
message maybe this product tastes amazing and you know see see what results that
that brings so i think reviews are really under undervalued source for information about your own products and
what they should be and then also looking at searches on google what are people
searching for i mean some of the easiest things you can do is just start typing on google things related to your brand
or product see what are some of the auto suggested searches that come up those things come up that means a bunch of people are searching for that that gives
you a sense of what's top of mind for people you can also do things like google has their keyword planner which
is a free tool where you can look up and see lots of different ideas for search terms
volume of those search terms etc and those are i think all great great resources and then also google trends is
another free tool where you can compare all kinds of different things and see
kind of the comparative interest in phrases or searches or topics over time
and you might realize oh well i'm investing all my time into this aspect of things but like five
people search for that a month versus oh we have searches a month over here for this
let me figure out how i can tap into that market and make my messaging inconsistent with that yeah
that's really so the uh you've kind of answered a little bit one of the questions in my head was
going to be if i wanted to get into this a little bit and start messing around with with you
you talked about keyword planner you talked about keyword trends both of which are google uh
pieces of software is a wrong phrase but they're they're both available on google and they're free um is there any specific software that i
Tools
should look at do i need to go and sort of all of a sudden buy hrefs subscriptions or what you know
jimmy and all those sort of companies out there where's a good place to start from a from a tools point of view
yeah from a tools point of view um well hey definitely you got to know what's going on on your own website so google
analytics is one of the best tools for that it's also free common denominator google data equals free
um but uh that's a great place to see okay how are how are your existing customers finding you what are they
doing on your website because that can also be a great tool to understand where you should double down with your time if there's a particular source where a lot
of customers are coming from well maybe you should go invest into content or advertising or both on that source to
really take advantage of that so that's that's one thing um keyword planner is definitely useful if you're
trying to get a sense for what keywords should we target on google search volume things like that if you're wanting to get a sense for
what does a competitive landscape look like some great tools would be spyfood.com which is spyfu.com as well
as semrush.com those are two of the leading kind of third-party tools that
look at the search engines and are constantly saying okay who's showing up for pay for uh searches what searches
are they showing up for what's their ad copy and if you have a couple competitors that you know these guys are
very similar to me and these are the guys i'm going to be going after you could even look at those particular competitors and those tools and get a
sense for what keywords they may be targeting and try and take advantage of the testing they've already done the
money they've already spent to figure out what works well and then invest your budget into those keywords that seem to
be working well for them that's really cool that's really good we'll put a link to all of those in the
show notes of course so where are where some good places if i wanted to maybe learn about some of the things
that you've been saying more where where would i go to what are some of the good places to learn about about google ads
there are so many resources out there like you mentioned earlier can be kind of overwhelming and everybody has their
own perspective their own take and feel on it i think that when it comes to collating
a lot of the really good stuff out there searchengineland.com that i mentioned earlier is a great tool for that
i'll put in a personal uh pitch here our own website and blog stubgroup.com
try to put interesting case studies things that we've seen work well insights into what we're seeing in the
marketplace on there um but really if you have you know one place to go i'd say search engine lane is going to be
the best collision fantastic and again we'll put a link to it and john i've got one final question
if i can yeah um and you briefly touched on it i mean this
whole episode we've talked about um using google um for with the premise of this is for an
e-commerce business right i'm actually selling a product and this is what we're going to promote on the site or whatever
would you use google adwords to promote content as a you know so i'm an e-commerce business
i've got a blog post and i've written a blog post why amiga is you know every man should take omega-who's age to
years old and lives here or whatever you've written some kind of blog post which you can
which is content which points to your products um would you use google ads to promote that
content which is historically what people have used facebook ads for or would you just actually no just go go
straight and plug the product i would say i would test it often but test it
cautiously in order for that type of approach to work you're going to need usually very low cost per clicks and so
because google ads is so competitive it can be hard to get low cost per clicks for some kind of content where
you're saying okay i hope you know one person out of a thousand who shows up here actually purchases versus you're
going against your competitors who are spending a bunch of money with very optimized conversion pages and so forth so
one yeah i'd say one one type of strategy on google that can be good to test for that type of content marketing
strategy something called dynamic search ads which is it's almost like a marrying of seo and ppc you essentially give web
pages to google and say hey look at these web pages identify what you think are relevant search terms to these web
pages and then dynamically show the right web pages to the right searches based upon you know machine learning
again and if you set very low bids for that and test that out and monitor that traffic that that can work well i've
seen that work well for some for some businesses and clients and i've seen it just tank and we stopped doing it for other clients so like testing it's worth
testing but it's definitely a hit or miss and i would say if you do take that approach remarketing is is crucial and
having a really um strategic or marketing plan of what do you do with that traffic once it gets to you because
most people aren't going to purchase from you initially but you've identified people that are relevant to you and have
are starting to have some brand awareness of you potentially and so how are you going to market to those people via
google via facebook youtube etc to then turn that initial interest into dollars
down the road um that's really very good uh top and advice there so no it's um it's one of
those questions you get asked a lot actually um should i use google to promote content and um
and so i was really fascinated to hear your answer so thank you for that um anything else john that you feel like
Google Policies
actually you're an e-commerce business this is a must-know from a google ads point of view
i would say one last you know one last thing i threw out there is that google has a lot of policies
in the e-commerce space about what you have on your website what you communicate to people on your website
google is very invested into making sure that you're accurate and comprehensive in your policies on both your website as well as
your google merchant center which is where shopping campaigns pull data from and i see a lot of businesses um not
realizing that or just not correctly setting their website up in such a way as to um to keep google appeased shall
we say and so there's a lot of um suspensions that take place where google says you guys violated the policies and
boom your ad account your merchant center account are both are suspended and then once that happens it can be a nightmare of trying to get back into
google's good graces so i would say just invest some time to read through google's policies make sure you've got
everything you need on your website and your account and make sure that it's all yeah easy to understand
comprehensive people know how to return products people know how your shipping works common sense stuff that just is missing
from a lot of sites yeah that's top tip top tip i found um and just again speaking from
experience here we used to do our google adwords internally uh and we did those
internally and i'd always resisted using an agency until i guess about five or six years
ago uh and we had an agency here in the uk came on board um and took over the
adwords and the difference was chalk and cheese because they understood things like the policies which we'd never
thought about we just kind of put these adwords out there and left them because we were busy doing other things
and my experience with um getting an agency involved certainly if
you're not starting out and you're you're starting to get a little bit of success was the money we paid the agency was was paid back literally within the
first month you know in terms of their their ability to balance all you know all the plates uh as it were and make
sure we were in google's good graces make sure the ads were converting and the phraseology and the long and all this sort of stuff
and so um i think if you're listening out there and you're starting out go ahead have an experiment look learn
because i think it's good to get your head around it and to understand it and not just to outsource it without understanding it um because even when
you work with agency i think you still need to understand that uh but if you're like me
or like i was and it's kind of like it's just one of those things that's on autopilot in the background might be worth talking to some expert
because it is changing constantly so much it's so very different like sata when we started in
um so uh yeah all that said john listen thanks for being on the podcast been
great chatting to you and picking your brains if people want to reach out to you if people want to connect with you
want to know more about um what you do how do they do that yeah best place for that is through our
website so that's stubgroup.com and you can see more information you can check out our blog like i mentioned
there and if if you are interested in chatting about your unique business and seeing how we could potentially help or
what our ideas might be for you got a free evaluation just sign up for that through the website and we'd love to
chat so that's stub group dot com we will of course link to that in the show notes uh
i'm gonna go look at your website read some of your articles that's what i'm gonna do uh and find out a little bit more um john listen really appreciate
you being on the show thank you so much for taking the time to be here i learned a lot
and i'm sure our listeners did too so thanks so much thank you man it was an absolute pleasure
Outro
well a big thanks to my very special guest john i appreciate you being with us john uh what did you think
did it live up to the title as built that is the question and of course you
can go back over the notes get the links the transcript everything from uh the website ecommercepodcast.net
forward slash it is there for free you can get access to all of that go over it have a thing mull it over is it
right for you is it gonna work now let me tell you if that's not enough uh good e-commerce stuff then you'll be
pleased to know that i have another fantastic guest next week who happens to be a very good friend of mine mr ian finch
who's actually going to explain to us why technology isn't the issue yes
technology is not your issue did you hear me right according to ian the issue
is you i know all the contentious titles are coming up at the moment they're fascinating and i
love it i love the conversation so if it sounds interesting to you make sure you subscribe to the show so you'll get a
note uh when we're going to release this and to wet your whistle to whet your appetite here's an excerpt from my
interview with ian technologies is so advanced you can do so much
if you literally just switched it all on i went i want one oh it's one of those one of those and i just want to re do my
entire supply chain i want to digitize my business um
and automate everything you could with right people the right time do it
um but it would be so overwhelming
to your organization but we almost have to meter and pace what we do
yes i am looking forward to this conversation let me tell you now if you've enjoyed this week's podcast then
i would appreciate it if you could rate it on itunes or wherever you get your podcast from and even share it out so
we can connect with more folks from around the world as i said at the start
all of the notes links and transcript to today's show are online you can get them for free
no email required ecommercepodcast.net forward slash and whilst you're there if you want to you can sign up to the
newsletter and we will email you and let you know when all the podcasts are coming out who's coming up what guests
we have all the notes they just get emailed to you automatically it's brilliant so you might want to do that
thanks for listening like i said make sure you subscribe come back next week as i get to chat with ian and come and
enjoy that conversation that's it from me so bye for now
you've been listening to the ecommerce podcast with matt edmondson join us next time for more interviews
tips and tools for building your business online [Music]