317: A Methodical Way To Advertise On Facebook And Google With Ilana Wechsler

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You’re listening to the My Wife, Quit or Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. Now today I have my good friend Alana Wexler back on the show, and in this episode you’ll learn a very methodical process for getting started in advertising, whether it be Facebook or Google for beginners who are not quite sure where to start. And even if you are an experienced advertiser, the advice in this episode will be useful as well. But before we begin, I want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode.

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Now if you run an e-commerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your own customer contact list. And this is why I’m focusing a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing. Because I sincerely believe that SMS or text message marketing is going to be a huge channel for my store going forward, and I have chosen Postscript.io to be my text message provider. Now why Postscript? It’s because they specialize in e-commerce stores and e-commerce is their primary focus. And not only is it easy to use, but you can quickly segment your audience based on your exact sales data

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and implement automated flows like an abandoned cart at the push of a button. Not only that, but it’s price well too, and you only pay for the messages that you actually send. So head on over to postscript.io slash Steve and try it for free. That’s P-O-S-T-S-C-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. Now I also want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Now it’s safe to say that most of us have been doing more online shopping lately. And if you’re an e-commerce brand, that means you might be seeing more first time customers. But once they’ve made that first purchase, how do you keep them coming back?

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and it’s free to get started. So visit claviyo.com slash my wife to create your free account. That’s klaviyo.com slash my wife. Now on to the show. Welcome to the My Wife, Her Job podcast, where we’ll teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here’s your host, Steve Chu.

02:23
Welcome to the My Wife, Quitter, Job podcast. Today I am thrilled to have Alana Wexler back on the show. And Alana is someone who I met randomly at the Traffic and Conversion Summit in San Diego a while back. And since that chance meeting, she has spoken at my event, the Seller Summit, twice now. And we actually make sure to see each other multiple times at various events when there’s no coronavirus, of course. Now Alana runs Green Arrow Digital, where she runs pay-per-click marketing for other businesses. And she also teaches a course, or it’s a paid membership.

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on that subject as well. And her bread and butter is all things Google ads. And today what we’re gonna actually talk about is a great process for beginners to figure out how to advertise. And with that, welcome to the show Alana. How are you doing today? I’m good, Steve. Thank you so much for having me back on. I am a big fan of your podcast. So thank you so much. And thank you so much for speaking and giving an amazing talk once again at Seller Summit. It was my pleasure.

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We’ve got a great audience there, so was nice. And I wasn’t going to be able to make it all the way to Florida, but thank goodness for virtual events. And I could tune in all the way from the future because being in Australia, I talk to you from the future. That’s right. And so it all worked out, you know, I got to have you speak and I didn’t have to see you. No, just kidding. So Lana, it’s actually been almost two years since you’ve been on the podcast and just for the audience.

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What has changed with your businesses in just the last couple of years on your end? my god, so much. think that they say internet user like dog use where each year is like seven years or something. yeah. So yeah, as per your intro, I have had an agency, I’ve had my agency, Green Arrow Digital for seven, eight years now. And then pretty much off the back of our the mastermind day last year’s seller summit.

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decided to focus more on teaching people. So I still have my agency, but I sort of scaled it right back. And now I’m really focusing my efforts on teaching business owners how they can run ads. So they don’t need an agency at teach traffic.com. So I’ve got, as you said, an online membership there and a bunch of courses, and I audit people’s account, Google and Facebook ad accounts and provide a whole lot of value for

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business owners so they can run their own traffic without needing an agency. Imagine that it’s kind of funny that you do both. It’s almost conflicting in a way, right? But I guess since you scale down the other operations, not really conflicting. In fact, I would have probably sold 100 % of my agency end up getting selling half of it last year, but I probably would have sold 100 % of it. But I kind of felt ethically, I couldn’t continue to teach if I didn’t still

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do and so therefore I have kept pretty about 12 core accounts, which is, know, so we have a small agency and as I said, I scaled it right back, but I needed like this, you know, the world of PPC and Google ads and Facebook ads changes like daily almost. So I felt like I had to keep managing accounts in order to keep my skills sharp and stay on top of latest trends.

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etc. yeah, that was kind of like an ethical dilemma that I was grappling with in terms of I can’t get rid of all my agency, you know. That makes sense. In fact, that’s one of the reasons why I keep my ecommerce store so I can stay sharp on everything that’s in ecommerce because I teach it. My wife, and I think the listeners know this, my wife’s been kind of burned out from the business. But you know, she’s got it good, right?

06:10
I don’t know, does she? She does. mean, you know, it’s pretty much a good lifestyle business. And so it’s much better than when she worked full time by far. Yeah. And I think also, you know, people change over the time. Like, you know, if you would have asked me seven years ago, would I ever want to leave agency work? I would have said, no way. I absolutely love it. And I do love it. But I think what I kind of grappled with was trying to scale an agency, which I have resigned to. I’m not.

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It’s not in one of my life plans to scale a Google ad or Facebook ad agency. It’s a very difficult business to scale. Too many humans involved. Yeah. Too many humans. It’s very bespoke. It’s, you know, million balls in the air, budgets all around the world. It’s just, it’s a lot. And I think also you, one changes as well, you know, so I just didn’t, it wasn’t one of my life goals to grow a big agency.

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Yeah, I’m sorry. I’m sure your wife is the same. You know, when she first started, she’d be like, Oh, this work life balance is amazing. I’m never going to go back to what I was doing before. love running an online store. But then once you do it for a while, you probably like you change, know, she actually makes up for it by being very involved in the school that my kids are in. So yeah, I mean, it allows her to do that. And so that’s what keeps her keeps her going. Yeah, nice. So Lana, today, I want to talk about puzzles.

07:36
Yeah. probably know where I’m getting out with that, right? It’s true. So for the listeners who were not tuning into your virtual summit, which was amazing, your virtual conference, I spoke about what I call the paid traffic puzzle. Is that where you’re going with it? It is. It is. Although I did start doing puzzles because of COVID-19. Me too! But there’s…

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just so many different ways to advertise online. mean, we’ve got Facebook, we’ve got Google search, we’ve got Google shopping, we’ve got Google display, we’ve got YouTube ads, we’ve got retargeting. How does someone who is just starting out, and let’s use e-commerce in this example, how do you figure out where to start out if you’re just beginning? Yeah, so it’s a good question. And kind of the analogy that I was giving in my talk was that as a business owner, you know, they…

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They come into the world of marketing and they’re quite daunted and overwhelmed with what to do first. There’s a million different targeting options. There’s a million different things that you can do. And it’s very hard to kind of get a bit of a helicopter view of the best place to start. And to kind of go back to this whole pay traffic puzzle that I kind of touched on, I, was a moment when I had, when I was doing a puzzle with my daughter and I kind of use this analogy of,

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She came to me and this did happen to her and she said to me, know, mommy, can we do a puzzle together? said, sure, you know, so, uh, she proceeded to hand me a bag of puzzle pieces and she go, okay, cool. I said, well, where’s the, where’s the picture of, of this puzzle that we’re going to do together? And she’s, oh, I haven’t got the picture. And so we were effectively looking at a blank screen. And so whilst I had a moment of panic of.

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How am I going to solve the puzzle without knowing what the picture looks like? It was kind of then that I drew the parallel to this is the same predicament that business owners face when they’re starting out, which is kind of, said, you know, like what does an e-commerce store owner do if when there’s just starting out and what, know, if I’m looking to solve a puzzle, let’s say what I always do is you start with the corners or the edges. The reason you start with the corners is because the corners will help.

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reveal what is the next piece in your puzzle. And then those two pieces will help reveal what the third piece is and so on and so forth. And it’s kind of the same with online advertising where almost regardless of whatever industry you’re in, whether you’re in e-commerce, whether you’re in lead generation, whether you’re in really anything, as in somebody, something that I’ve learned in the years and all the different industries I’ve done is that we always start with retargeting.

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someone’s just come to your website, they’ve left for who knows whatever reason, maybe they got interrupted or life kind of got in the way and we’re going to lure them back with a retargeting ad on multiple platforms. So if we think about the concept, as I said, that I came up with called the paid traffic puzzle, you’re retargeting on Google search, Google display, YouTube and social are the corners of your paid traffic puzzle. And the reason they’re the corners,

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is because your retargeting campaigns will help reveal what is the next step that you should do to really grow and scale. But if you can’t get retargeting to work for your business, the answer is not to buy more traffic. The answer is to fix your retargeting campaign. There must be something wrong with it. Maybe your offer is wrong. Maybe your creative is wrong. Maybe your landing page or your website’s not doing its job of converting people.

11:25
So you’ve got to fix that first before I believe you really start to spend a lot of money on what’s called cold traffic. So let’s dig a little bit deeper in there. So I have a brand new shop. Which platform for retargeting would you recommend? Or would you recommend doing all of them? I personally recommend all of them because especially when you’re starting out, you really don’t understand where your customer travels online.

11:54
And there’s also a common marketing theory that, you know, people need seven touch points in order to become a customer. Now, I don’t know if the answer is seven for your own business. It depends really on how big of a problem you’re solving for people and how good your product is, et cetera. But you most likely need more than one touch point. And I think business owners, and I see this happen all the time, is they will only retarget on social. And I use this example in my talk at your event.

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Steve where, know, I was looking at it to buy a cleaning product because one of my kids has got sort of allergies and eczema, et cetera. So I was looking to buy like a toxin free cleaning product. And when I left that product page, cause I wasn’t quite ready to buy, I was only retargeted in on social. They only retargeted me in my Facebook newsfeed and an Instagram story ad. And I just thought like that’s such a missed opportunity. Yes.

12:52
retargeting on social is good, but hey, what about YouTube? What about search? What about, you know, when I’m reading an article on the New York Times, for example, you know, luring me back. And so I’m a big fan of using the platforms together and the holistic customer journey. mean, if you have to choose, I would say Google has much more reach than Facebook, right? Totally. And Google are very, what’s the word, forthright with their reach. mean, they said,

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that their platform you can read nine reach 90 % of all us internet users, which is insane when you think about it. It’s funny that you say that most people just jump to Facebook retargeting first, I think because the interface is a lot easier. Right? Would you agree? I guess probably Yes, it is easier. I think also people like the fact that you can comment and they can share it, which is an absolute advantage that

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social has over the Google network that you can and people do, which still amazes me in this day and age, people share an ad or they’ll tag their friend and say, Hey, I was looking at these shoes. Maybe do you want these shoes too? Etc. And I’m not saying not to do social. What I’m saying is that shouldn’t be the only form of retargeting that you do yet. So many business owners only retarget on social. I don’t know about you, Steve, but I

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personally take a social media detox quite frequently because it’s a bit of a productivity killer for me. And so if you only retarget on social, if somebody like me has a detox, then you’ve lost the ability to continue the conversation with them, which is crazy. You also recommended doing YouTube retargeting. That one’s so I don’t do any YouTube retargeting. That one seems a little bit. Yeah, we were just talking about your videos earlier. But yeah, no, I haven’t ventured into it.

14:48
think because it has larger barriers, right? So can we talk about that a little bit? Sure. Anything specifically? Well, making a video for one thing. So what types of videos work and… Sure. Okay. Obviously your retargeting video is going to be somewhat different to if you’re doing cold traffic on YouTube. Okay. So you’ve really got to transport yourself into the mind of your target customer. So with the example I used in

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presentation at Seller Summit with this cleaning product. If I’m to buy a cleaning product. So as I said, this particular cleaning product was for my daughter and it’s this toxin free cleaning product, right? So the objection that’s going on in my head as a mom is, I’ve got three kids. My house is really dirty. It needs to be clean. Am I sacrificing a low toxin cleaning product for an inferior cleaning product? So whilst I want to help my daughter,

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I’ve got to clean my house, right? I’ve got three young children like this needs some serious cleaning going on. So the objection in my head is how sufficient is this cleaning product? So show me a demonstration of it cutting through grease and cutting through grime so that, I will happily forego toxins. I don’t want toxins in my home so long as it’s ultimately getting the job done of cleaning my house and cleaning my kitchen and my stove top.

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You know, some of some kind of demonstration is really, really powerful. And obviously it comes down to what is your product that you’re selling, but you want to demonstrate how it’s used. So yeah, that’s kind of what I Yeah. Does that kind of help? Yeah. I was just thinking like typically on Facebook, a retargeting campaign might consist of testimonials, use cases.

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A lot of times what I do in Facebook land is I take something top of funnel that’s kind of been burnt out from the top of funnel and I’ll turn that into a retargeting ad as well. So totally. And I think you’re right. Using testimonials is the ultimate in proof of your product. And if you can incorporate testimonials, ideally, obviously video testimonials in your YouTube retargeting ad, then hey, that’s the ultimate proof. you do. Yes, there are barriers with

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YouTube ads, but personally, I like barriers because that stops everyone else from jumping on the bandwagon. And YouTube is an infinite supply of ad inventory. So yeah, you want barriers, I think. my follow up question to that is, so we start out with retargeting. What is considered good in your eyes? What do mean what’s considered good? Like, well, you mentioned if it’s working or not, what is considered working? converting. Yes, right.

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What is considered converting? Like what are some metrics? Okay, well for e-commerce it would be sales, but it depends if you’re running some kind of offer. You could totally expect to make sales off the back of your YouTube retargeting ad, maybe not cold traffic. I mean you can, but it probably needs a different video for that. I specifically, I was asking for like metrics. So for example, like if you’re retargeting ad is making like a 6X return or something like that, do you have any guidelines that you typically put?

18:08
What if a returning ad is making sales, it’s unprofitable? Unprofitable. Yeah. Okay. I would have a look at what’s called the view through conversions, be it is it contributing to a purchase, even though somebody has not yet purchased because, because there are multiple touch points. And at the end of the day, you probably would do it. What’s called an in-stream video, which is the video that shows up before the video they’re about to watch. Right. So you’re interrupting them.

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in something that they’re about to watch and I’ll hang on a minute. So they might not buy it straight off the back of that video, but if it is unprofitable on the front end, you could probably look to drop your bids a little bit. So you don’t spend as much. You could delay your retargeting ads a bit. can frequency cap them. So you’re not bombarding people, the same people with the same ads over and over again. There are lots of ways to reduce your costs.

19:04
Maybe you do desktop only, you know, have a look at how mobile versus desktop works. And therefore if you, you know, in your Google analytics, for example, you see that most of your sales happen on a desktop, then maybe you do desktop only something like that. It really depends. So I’m not asking specifically on YouTube. I’m just asking holistically since we’re talking about the corners of the puzzle, right? How do you know when you’re ready to move on to fill in the rest of the puzzle versus focusing still on the retargeting and refining that? Okay. What are some metrics? Yeah.

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your retargeting campaigns from a holistic point of view should be profitable. You should be more than in the money. And once again, it depends on what your profit margins are. know, like some people have 50 % profit margins, some people have more. It should be more than paying. If you’re spending more on ads than it’s making you, that’s a problem. And therefore I would test a different offer. would…

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segment your audiences more, I would test different creative and that kind of stuff. all right. So the bar there is you’re retargeting ads are profitable. Yes, you want your retargeting ads profitable. They shouldn’t be profitable. Nine times out of 10, we can get retargeting ads profitable for businesses. Okay. Okay. And so once you’ve established that, that your retargeting ads are profitable, what is the next step?

20:27
Okay. The next step is obviously you want more traffic, right? Because you know that you can convert your retargeting audiences profitably. The next is filling in that pipeline with more people. Personally, I like starting with search traffic, search or shopping basically, because of the, the, the huge intent based nature of search. You know, they’re at the bottom of the funnel. They know exactly they want to buy these Nike GLX 35.

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shoes, they’re just trying to decide where they’re going to buy them from. you just make that up or is that totally made that up? 100%. So that’s a really good starting point for cold traffic because you want to test that. Can your product page do all the heavy lifting to convert cold tree cold traffic into buyers? It might not be profitable straight away. That’s okay. But really this is a test of

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Does your product page have enough of the elements on it? Is there enough testimonials on there? it, does it do this heavy lifting that it’s got to do? And you test it on search traffic first so that you can eliminate the variable of does somebody actually want what I’m selling? You know that that you want, they want what you’re selling because they’ve literally just typed it into Google and therefore you’ve eliminated that constant variable in your head of is, is this a problem with my targeting?

21:52
You know you’ve nailed your targeting. Now it’s just, can we get this, as I said, product page to convert people? Now I was just going to ask you about Google search ads. There are certain products where the keyword terms are just really expensive. Are you, are you just talking about like longer tail keywords or like, are you structuring your search campaigns? I’m not talking about shopping, just search. Search. do typically go after long tail search queries, namely because they are

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are significantly cheaper. That’s not to say that we wouldn’t go after broad keywords. The extension which is on this is which is kind of the next piece in this paid traffic puzzle is we might test top of funnel keywords but only for our retargeting audiences. So if you imagine a situation of I’ve looked at these Nike shoes for example just continuing with this example and I bid on you know

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would normally bid on very long tail intent based terminology that someone’s typed into Google. But if somebody’s on my retargeting list, I know that they’ve looked at my shoes. know they’re interested and then they go to Google and typed in Nike shoes. Right. Okay. Then I would bid on them, but only for my retargeting audiences. And so we this, uh, well, it’s still retargeting for search, but for top of funnel keywords. And the reason you want to do that is because it opens the door to a lot

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more search volume. Because what’s going to happen is if you can get search to work and most of the time you usually can, you’re going to run out of those profitable keywords pretty quickly. And it’s a really common problem. You can’t make more people search for the Nike GLX 35 shoes, right? There’s limited number of people searching for them. So you need to find more people like them. Does that make sense? So just to be clear for the people listening,

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you can bid on shoes, but it’s if people have been to your site, then you want to drastically increase your bid so that you show up because they’ve been to your website. Did I summarize that correctly? Ish. Okay, complete the puzzle for me. Okay. So people have come to our website and they’ve left. They’ve made the terrible mistake of they didn’t buy they left. Okay, but these people haven’t bought their shoes yet. They’re still looking for shoes. So we would bid on

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Normally we for cold traffic, we bid on the specific product keywords, right? But for our retargeting traffic, we might expand our keywords that we would never normally bid on and bid on, as I said, top of funnel keywords like Nike shoes. And we would only bid on that keyword for people who’ve come to our website. If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter,

24:46
the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now, what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself. Now, first and foremost, protecting your IP starts with a solid trademark.

25:14
And Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copyrighting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult. And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount.

25:44
That’s EMERGECONSEL.com. Now back to the show. All right, and so now we’ve expanded our pool to shopping, as well as search. And are we expecting those ads to be profitable, like the non-retargeting ones? Yes, we would hope. Yes. If they’re not profitable, then we need to determine a few things. And I might get

26:13
go beyond a little bit of the scope of this here, but there’s a few ways to try and make search profitable. One, we might be paying too much and therefore we’re buying too expensive traffic. So you can try and reduce your bids. But if you find that then you don’t get any impressions, you might want to experiment with, would definitely separate desktop from mobile.

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campaigns. So you run a desktop only campaign and a mobile only campaign. And maybe you can get desktop to work really well and maybe try and find ways to get mobile to work. But I would also experiment with what’s called target CPA bidding or ROAS, which is Google’s machine learning bidding. So you don’t actually make the bids yourself. You say to Google, Hey Google, I am prepared to buy a lead for let’s say $15.

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go ahead and you choose the bids based on who you think is more likely to convert. And Google have invested heavily in this form of what they’ve called automated bidding. And it’s actually incredibly powerful and it actually works really well. So we have had accounts where it hasn’t been that profitable and we’ve sort of gone away trying to get it to work. And then we thought, let’s just experiment with

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this automated bidding and Google has made it profitable. It’s quite interesting. And if you understand how it works, so basically to explain it to you, let’s say, um, we use the example of you and I, right? Let’s say I sell a product for, um, let’s just be really stereotypical. I say I sell a product for the kitchen. Okay. And you being a male, don’t spend much time in the kitchen. Hence my stereotypes going on here.

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And me as a female, I do all the cooking. So if you are Google searching for a particular product in your home, you are less likely to buy this kitchen product than me being the person who actually makes the buying decision and the person who actually does all the cooking. Okay. So from an advertising point of view, when you do manual bidding, so say you bid on this product, let’s say for a potato masher, I don’t know, can’t think of anything else.

28:39
You bid a dollar, right? You as an advertiser, you can’t distinguish between if you’re seeing the ad or me, like the male or the female, right? But Google can. And so they will bid 50 cents for you with their automated bidding because they know that you’re not so likely to convert. And they’ll bid $2 for me because they know that I’m the one who actually does the cooking based on my browsing behavior. And I’m the one who makes purchasing decisions. And so therefore,

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They adjust the bids for different people. And that’s how they can make things profitable. I’ve actually switched almost all of my campaigns to target ROAS. But there are, there actually are stipulations. Do you actually know what the metrics are that are required before you can turn that on? You do need, they say 30 conversions in a 30 day period. I think it’s more like 50 personally. Google does need data. So if you’re starting out, would definitely not do this automated bidding.

29:39
That’s why you start with manual bidding, even if it’s unprofitable. You’re buying data, your Google is learning who is the kind of people that are gonna purchase your product, and then you graduate to the automated bidding. How long is this learning period just to kind of set expectations with people just trying this for the first time? That’s a bit of a gray area, actually. We’ve had some accounts where it’s gone, turn it around straight away.

30:08
and we’ve had other accounts where it’s taken a little bit, it can take probably, I’d it a couple, I’d give it two weeks. I mean, if you can talk about it in terms of clicks, maybe, or impressions, that might be more apples to apples. Well, you might get more clicks or you might get less clicks. It really depends, actually. But it does take a little bit of learning. It’s really a function of how much history there is in your account and how well set it up.

30:36
It is like I’ve been in some people like I’ve audited hundreds, if not thousands of ad accounts in my life. Some people have run a whole bunch of traffic and they haven’t even set up conversion tracking. I mean, Google then just doesn’t know what you want, right? Because you haven’t taken that additional step to set up the conversion tracking and therefore it’s very difficult. So it depends on how your account has been set up. Right.

31:03
I’m just trying to set expectations because I know from my class when I talk about AdWords, some people like run it for a week and then they give up. hearing it from you might be different, but you know, how long should be people running these search ads before they, before Google has enough information, like using a brand new Virgin account, so to speak. I’d give it, I’d run it on manual bidding for at least a month and then I would try the dependent once again.

31:33
how many sales you are actually getting. And I would give it at least two, three weeks. It will fluctuate and you will have some days where it’s going really well and then it tanks. once it stabilizes, this is the difference actually I find between the Google ad platform and Facebook ads is Google is incredible. It’s an incredibly stable ad platform. And once you get it working, actually it’s incredibly consistent. And this applies to

32:03
Search display and YouTube actually whereas on Facebook, I don’t know if you can relate Steve, but this is why I love Google But I’ll let you finish. Yeah. Yeah, like on Facebook. You’ll have one day you feel like a hero is my ads going amazingly It’s doing so well the next day like literally tanks and you’ve changed nothing if that doesn’t happen on Google So the reason why I like Google so much is it’s very low maintenance Facebook You actually always have to rotate out creative things get tired. It’s a lot more maintenance

32:33
Yes, a lot more maintenance and Facebook land, you will have an ad that’s doing incredibly well and for no apparent reason, it will just die. And who knows why you’ve changed nothing. It’s working really well. And for some reason it just, the life of it is over and you just, need to bury it for some reason. And those accounts on Google with target row is I don’t touch those. Yep. I know. Yeah. And it’s, it’s incredible. it is worth persevering with. You have to have the mindset.

33:01
that you’re buying data. And once you transform it from an expense to actually an investment, then it becomes, I guess, a different mindset and it’s worth persevering with. Because if you can get it to work and most of the time you can, as I said, it’s incredibly stable and it’s reliable and it’s much better ad platform. It’s a much better buyer as opposed to somebody

33:29
scrolling through their Facebook newsfeed while they’re waiting for their coffee in the line at their barista and they’ve clicked on it, they’ve forgotten about it and then they’ve moved on versus there’s so much intent on Google, be it search, be it YouTube, that not all clicks are created equal, you know? That’s my belief. Let me ask you this question. Let’s say your retargeting ads are just working really well but your search ads aren’t converting that much, aren’t that well. If you look at the accounts in aggregate,

33:59
you’re still profitable. Does that count? Or would you still? Would you ever write off your search ads if you’re retargeting ads are working really well? Good question. Let me think about that. I personally, I take a holistic view, you know, and if the rising tide is lifting all boats, then I feel as a business owner, I’m personally happy. But it’s probably something that you asked 10 people, you might get 10 different answers because it’s

34:27
probably quite individual, but I would think that maybe people just aren’t quite ready to buy straight off clicking on a search ad and that’s okay. As long as we are recapturing them with retargeting ads. And that’s why that’s the corners of the puzzle. Cause it’s so important to get that second bite of the cherry. And so I’m of the belief that if from an account overall point of view, it is profitable. I would be.

34:57
inclined to as long as I’m not spending a huge amount on search, it’s not consuming a huge amount of my budget. My belief is I I’d do a number of steps before I completely resigned myself to the fact that cold traffic search is unprofitable. I would do a number of things and I can sort of touch on them if you want. Yeah. I just wanted to add that it’s funny, my mentality with Google and Facebook ads are different. Like my top of funnel cold traffic Facebook ads.

35:25
I’m happy if they convert it to X because I know the retargeting is going to make up for it. Whereas when Google land, I expect all of my ads to be profitable. It’s different. Tough crowd. But yeah, I’ll let you continue if you want to go further than that. Yeah, I would really try and slice and dice and analyze what is going on with search that we can’t get it profitable. I would have a look at

35:52
a number of things. would have a look at firstly your search impression share. If you’re really appearing, so your search impression share is the amount of times that you’ve appeared in the ad results when you’ve wanted to be. So if it comes in at 100%, that means that you are, your ad is being shown for all the times that you’ve wanted it to be.

36:19
I find those sometimes that can sometimes mean that you’re overpaying a little bit. And so I usually try and drop my bids. I like it high, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t want to pay too much. And we’ve had times where I’ve just little bit by little bit dropped my bids by like 5%, you know, and I’ve still managed to maintain my 100 % in impression share. And I have managed to lower my cost per click.

36:47
So that’s number one, obviously we’ve talked about automated bidding is another way. I often like to split out desktop from mobile because they will convert differently and from an automated bidding point of view, the target CPA will be different for desktop and mobile. I also like to have a look at what the traffic is doing once they come to my site. So we will often install heat mapping software and you can use a free tool like Hotjar.

37:17
That’s HOTJAR.com. I’m not an affiliate or anything for them. I just really and they have screen recordings and these screen recordings obviously you can’t see the person it just records the experience for people going on this site and you can see what they do. So I had an e-commerce client actually they sold home delivered diet meals. So think think about them. I don’t know an equivalent but yep, you’ve got light and easy in America, don’t you?

37:44
Yeah. You mean food delivery services? Yeah. But like, yeah, yeah. So think about like a light and easy, but instead of that’s their competitive, but they’re high end. Okay. So it’s sort of like a chef or whatever. And, um, what we were finding was that people were clicking on the search ads. They wanted that kind of stuff and they’re getting to the product pages and they were clicking on things that they weren’t meant to be. So for example, they’re clicking on the images, right? Which wouldn’t at that point, not clickable. So we thought, Oh, okay. That’s

38:14
wasn’t obvious to me. So we just made those images clickable as in added to the cart and it massively increased their revenue just by doing that. So screen recording and watching the on-page analytics of what people are doing is often a good insight into where someone’s at right at that point. know? It’s funny. I actually haven’t done that analysis in a long time since my last redesign. You’ve inspired me to fire it up again. Yeah.

38:43
Yeah, it’s really cool. And it also, you can see what it looks like on all the different devices and there are a million different devices of different sizes. So yes, you might have a responsive website, but you, still a very different experience watching the recording of what it looks like for someone. What else would I do? I would obviously test a bunch of different ads. It’d be a thing of, I’d have a really, really close look through your search term report, which is what somebody

39:13
typed into Google which triggered your ad because if you’re incurring costs that is someone’s is actually clicking on your ad you want to be sure if you’re buying the right kind of traffic like is this really bottom of funnel traffic if it is then there’s a problem with our problem but you’re going to try and boost your conversion rate on page right which is which is why it’s so good to start with search right because you just want to be able to swipe in front of exactly a target customer

39:42
and see if you can get them to buy. You know, it’s funny. I’ve been, so I have a lot of students in the class and they often have better results with Facebook rather than Google. And for me, it’s hard because my, I’ve been running Google ads for over a decade now and they are always much more profitable than my Facebook ads. But I think, you know, from the perspective, and you probably have a lot more experience in this since you work with people with new accounts.

40:08
Is it because it requires a lot more training on Google’s part before they’re profitable? I mean, have you ever seen cases where you actually had to run it for a couple of months before you saw profits? I think it depends on how people set up their account and Google are quite sneaky, actually. There’s lots of these little sneaky default settings, or I like to call them, know, little landmines, Google landmines that are designed really for you to

40:38
spend a lot more money than for very little return, really designed to make Google more money. I call them Google gotchas and people might have fallen trap for these little sneaky settings, which would be causing their account to be unprofitable. But sure, we have had new accounts come on where it has not been profitable for the first couple of months.

41:02
throughout those couple of months, we’ve improved it, we’ve improved it, we’re getting there, we’re getting there, that we’re testing a bunch of different keywords, testing a bunch of different ad copies, we’re testing a bunch of different offers. And so you don’t, definitely don’t always hit it out of the park. I don’t want to create that illusion for people. You’ve already gotten my interest. What are some of these little secret booby traps? Oh my God, there’s so many. One of them, I’ve actually got a little guide on this. think you can go Oh really?

41:29
Okay. Teach traffic.com slash gotcha. So G O T C H R C. I’ll link that up. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Um, but basically one of the sneaky ones, the default setting is to combine the search network with the display network. Oh yes. Yes. I mean, terrible, right? Like the display network behaves completely differently to the search network, but the listeners that don’t know what the display network is, that’s banners.

41:56
on other people’s websites. think New York Times, LA Times, et cetera. So completely different form of marketing. You’ll be lucky to get a 1 % click through rate. Whereas on the search network, you’ll easily get a 5 % click through rate. So by combining those two campaigns together, you get that this is where averages really lie, essentially. So you definitely don’t want to do that. Another gotcha is actually with retargeting. This is a new setting by Google. It’s so sneaky.

42:26
The default setting is to have what’s called audience expansion on. So that means that your retargeting campaign is not actually retargeting. So you’re by default allowing Google to go beyond the audience that you’ve selected where they’ve sort of under the guise of when they’re more likely to convert. But no, Google, I just want to- that was clicked off by default. Cause I remember when that first came out, it’s on by default.

42:54
It’s on by default. okay. So sneaky. mobile apps is a big one, right? So when you do a Google display retargeting campaign, you want to turn off mobile apps, because it’s like playing whack a mole. You know, there’s literally millions of these mobile apps where your ads will pop up to a whole bunch of little gotchas. You know, what’s funny is, it doesn’t make sense that doing it right, because they want shouldn’t they want people to see results that they’ll spend more money?

43:24
It seems short sighted to have these gotchas make it unprofitable and just have people give up, right? I completely agree with you. Like I don’t understand the long-term strategy by Google here, but maybe they’re playing a short-term game. I don’t know. I agree. Like surely they should not have these default settings preselected. You know, another little sneaky setting is the location targeting. don’t know if you’ve seen this where, let’s say you want to target United States, the default

43:55
setting for the location targeting is what’s it located in or interested in. Right. So if I’m targeting United States, I would think that my ads are only going to be shown in the United States. Right. Well, no, it’s the people who are interested in the United States. Well, that’s not helpful. that could be.

44:18
someone in Australia like I am who’s interested in going to America, which I always am because I’m going there so often. Yeah, so you’ve got to change that setting too. here’s another gotcha. Yeah, the exact match is not really exact match. So phrase match is actually the exact match, ironically. I know that it’s full of them, which I totally agree. Like they should take a long term approach with this and make it you know, not so confusing for people. But I guess

44:48
This is a good thing for advertisers, for the people who actually will take the time to educate themselves on this and reap the benefits. like you’ve had your, as I said, you’ve had your account for 10 years and it’s been amazing. Happy days. So let’s continue on. So let’s say you got your search ads going. What is the next step? Okay. So if we shift gears to a different corner of our puzzle, which would be, as I said, creating a retargeting campaign

45:17
on the Google display network. So if you imagine a situation, I look at these Nike shoes, I then leave, I don’t buy, and I’m reading an article on the New York Times and suddenly I see an ad for these particular shoes that I was looking at. And obviously I don’t just read the New York Times. I read lots of different websites. And so the beauty is with implementing a display retargeting campaign is that Google tells me

45:47
all this information about where my banners were shown. And if you think about it, it tells me where my visitors are traveling online. So it’s kind of like people leave behind what I call like their digital footprints, their sort of their footprints in the sand. So I can see when they left my website, where else did they go? What content do they read? What blogs do they read, et cetera. So I can have a look at all these websites and decide

46:17
Hmm. Do I want to target some of these websites? So the example I used in the presentation at seller summit was for a client that was in the home building industry. So they sold bricks and flooring and tiles and roof tiles and all that kind of really boring stuff essentially. And what we noticed when we had a look through our, what’s called our placement report in our Google ad account, we could see that when they left my client’s website,

46:47
They also were viewing websites like betterhomesandgardens.com, Home Beautiful, El Decor, all these like decorating websites. And it’s like, of course they are. Someone’s looking to buy bricks and roof tiles. They’re renovating. That’s what they’re doing right now. So they’re reading these articles for redecorating ideas when their home is actually finished, then they’re going to be exploring, redecorating, et cetera. So we can expand on our

47:17
display section of our puzzle and say to Google, hey Google, I want to target these particular websites, like as I said, Better Homes and Gardens, El Decor, all these home building blogs and target all their readers, not just for our retargeting audiences because surely not all their readers, but a large portion of their readers will exhibit the behavior of my retargeting audience. They’re also looking

47:46
to eventually buy bricks, et cetera. So when you’re doing this for the first time, do you try to target individual pages or do you target the site as a whole? I’ve actually tried to target individual pages, but I found it’s actually hard to show up on there. Yeah, no, I target the website as a whole. Okay, okay. Yeah. And sort of we’ve used the insights from our display retargeting campaign.

48:15
to then safely go out to cold audiences on the display network. And it’s a really safe way, I feel, of testing display because, hey, you’re saying to Google, hey, I only want to show on this website and that’s it. It’s a really safe way of laser focusing in on your target audience because you’ve used the insight, as I said, from the display campaigns. And it’s a great way to test your offer and your creative and see if you can convert that traffic.

48:43
And then that becomes, I guess, the next piece in that corner from that puzzle, which is kind of why they’re connected. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. What should people, since that one is like pretty much cold traffic, like what are your conversion rates that you’ve seen with your clients of display versus search? Oh, vastly different. I mean, you will be lucky to get a 1 % click through rate. That’s not conversion rate. That’s the percentage of people who’ve seen you add to click on it.

49:13
but you should be able to get at least look, it depends on what the offer is, right? Like are you just doing it for lead generation or you’re looking to actually make a sale? So if you’re just doing to try and get a lead, you should be able to get a four to 5 % conversion rate. So maybe you send them to some kind of pre-sell page or something like that. know, so if you’re- Actually, that was my next question. Like for those display ads, are you sending them back to product pages or?

49:43
Because it’s different, right? Search will go directly to a product or a category wouldn’t send them to a product page, no. I would send them to some kind of pre-sell page. Okay. Do you have any good examples of a pre-sell page that’s worked for you or one of your clients? Well, for this home building client, so they sell products, but we were sending them to a style guide. So a guide with nine different color schemes that they could apply to their home.

50:12
and that was converting at about 8 % cold traffic on display. Nice. then for that guide, from there was an email marketing. Okay, got it. Yeah. It makes it hard to measure the effect of this then, right? Because then you got to factor in your email marketing return. Correct. With your ad spend, right? Okay. That’s right. Exactly. But it is significantly, display is significantly cheaper from a cost per click point of view than search.

50:42
I mean, you’ll pay a fraction of the cost. that obviously you’re spending less, but this is where you can really get growth and volume. And you know, with on the Google display network, you don’t pay for an impression, you only pay for a click. And so therefore you get a ton of free branding. And we often find we’ll get what’s called view through conversions, which is a conversion. Somebody who saw the ad didn’t click on it, but converted through other traffic sources and Google sort of

51:11
puts them in a category called view through conversions. It’s interesting, like I always discount view through conversions, in general, like when I’m doing my ROI analysis, I guess. So essentially, you include it, It depends. It depends on, I think, the cost of the product. Like if it’s a high end product, then I do include it because it’s not an impulse buy for somebody, they’ve obviously needed a couple of touch points along the way to actually

51:42
get them over the line and get them to buy. So yeah, it really depends. But I think they do count. They count for something. Maybe they don’t, not in total, but they should be get some credit for it, I think. then would you suggest that if people have been running Facebook ads for a while, just try that Facebook offer on the display network? Absolutely. Yeah. And an extension from this. So if you find this strategy works, where, as I said, you’ve done the display campaign, you’ve

52:11
cherry picked from the placement report, is where somebody traveled online after they left your site to go, yep, I want to target these, let’s say three specific websites that are exactly my target customer would read this kind of content. And you implement, as I said, the placement campaign and that works. What we’ve found as well, an extension, this sort of why it’s in the puzzle because it’s all connected.

52:40
So for our home building client targeting better homes and gardens and LDACOR, those online publications have a social media presence. So the cold traffic placement campaign was working and it was converting. So great, let’s take that insight and let’s apply that to our social campaigns, our Facebook ad campaign or Instagram and target the readers of them on social because

53:08
hey, we don’t have to wait for them to read an article on the website. We know that’s our target audience. Let’s target them when they’re scrolling through their Facebook newsfeed and not actually reading the article. Does that kind of make sense? Yep, yep, yep. So let’s wrap this up and summarize everything that we’ve talked about, because it’s probably information overload for a lot of people. Yeah, I know. And feel free to correct me at any time. So your advice is to start out with retargeting.

53:36
and get that profitable first because if you don’t even get there, there’s probably something wrong with either your website, your funnel, your product or your offer or whatnot. Correct. Right. Okay. And then once you have that foundation, then you can start doing some more exploratory campaigns and you recommend going through Google search and shopping next. Correct. Okay. And then you will continue to refine those until they are profitable as well. Yes. Okay.

54:04
And then you’ve been taking notes, Steve. This is all from memory. is all from memory. then along those way with the search, one nugget that I got was you can target these top of funnel keywords like shoes or Nike shoes, for example, to your retargeting audiences to kind of further your search reach. Exactly. Okay. And then on the other corner, you have the display network for retargeting. And these are image ads and whatnot that are directing people back to your site.

54:33
And within Google, you can figure out where those ads have been shown and where your customers are actually visiting, and then start placing targeted placements on those websites. Exactly. It’s kind of like having a little birdie on your past website visitor’s shoulder. The birdie is telling you where else they travel online after they’ve left your site. Right. And then the next piece is you know what people are looking at. They probably have social media presences.

55:00
And then you can just run Facebook ads, top of funnel targeting those interests as well. Exactly. It’s all connected. It’s all connected. And it’s the same really for YouTube as well. Often those online publications have a YouTube channel and that’s another way that it’s connected as well, which is the next quadrant of the puzzle. So it’s

55:20
a little bit hard to explain with audio only as opposed to visuals. But I think this is a really good summary. Like it gives a really good foundation for people to start out because oftentimes what I’ve found is people just start out blasting top of funnel stuff. It doesn’t work and then they give up. Yes. And I think also this is a way for people to start small with a small amount of budget and grow and scale safely as opposed to spending, I don’t know, $5,000 on ads.

55:50
and they’ve thrown a bunch of spaghetti in school and they’ve got no idea what worked and they’ve got no idea of identifying what hasn’t worked and they ended up just throwing their hands in the air and going, I can’t do this. This way, starting with retargeting, you’re looking at what, like five, 10 bucks a day, right? It’s a really small amount of money. And then you just, it’s like layers of the onion, you know, the core of the onion is your retargeting campaign. And then we layer on the search, get that working, that layer on the next thing and just build slowly, systematically and profitably.

56:20
And one thing I always tell people also is make sure your email marketing is solid or any way for you to get a customer back like SMS, Messenger, whatnot, before you even start running ads, type of funnel for sure. Absolutely. Alana, where can people find you? Where can people find you? Because if you’re listening to this and you enjoy the way Alana teaches, which I personally love, you can actually find her online and I will let you tell people where they can find you. Yeah, sure.

56:48
So yeah, if you want to learn more about this whole puzzle concept, I have a course on it, walking you through with live walkthroughs and you can go to teach traffic.com slash puzzle. so obviously teach traffic.com is my website as well as green arrow digital.com for agency stuff. I ask how did you get that domain teach traffic? It seems like something that would have been registered a long time ago. Do you know what?

57:17
It was available. Get out of town. a good domain. I know I was like sort of available. I’m like, the front door. That is amazing. I think someone had let it lapse. Like it wasn’t completely brand new. I did, you know, use my reverse engineering skills and I looked at the way back machine and there was something on there a while ago. But yeah, I know what a miracle. I just typed it in and into namecheap and there it was. I’m like,

57:46
I’m just buying this right now. Like I’m not even thinking about this. Had I known I would have snatched it. I’m sorry. would have paid thousands for that. I know. It’s easy to remember, easy to spell, everything. It’s perfect. I know. And it’s two words. I know. Well, Alana, as always, thank you so much for speaking at the Seller Summit. Thank you so much for coming on this podcast and I appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much.

58:16
Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now Alana is one of my go-to experts when it comes to advertising, and I hope you got a lot out of this episode. She also spoke at my conference, The Seller Summit, in 2020 as well. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 317. And once again, I want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned card sequence, a post-purchase flow, a win-back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot.

58:44
So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIYO. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIYO. I also want to thank Postscript.io, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. Now SMS is the next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at Postscript.io slash div. That’s P-O-S-T-S-C-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash div.

59:14
Now I talk about how I use these tools in my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.