493: The Easiest, Maintainable Way To Run Ads For Your Online Store With Brett Curry

00:00
You’re listening to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into what strategies are working and what strategies are not with their businesses. Today, I my good friend, Brett Curry, back on the show. And in this episode, we’re going to talk about a way to advertise your products on Google that is about as hands-off as it gets, and it works really well for e-commerce stores. If you aren’t running Google Performance Max ads yet, you should give it a shot. But before we begin, I want to give a quick shout out to Chase Diamond for sponsoring this episode.

00:29
Chase is my go-to guy when it comes to email marketing, and he runs a successful email marketing agency over at Structured Agency, which caters to many eight and nine figure e-commerce brands. for those of you who can’t afford to hire an agency, Chase offers a pretty good email marketing course if you want to learn how to do email yourself. This course can be found at mywifequitterjob.com slash chase. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash chase. I also want to thank Emerge Council for sponsoring this episode.

00:59
If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, 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. For example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself.

01:28
And the students in my class have used Steve for copywriting their designs, policing against counterfeiters and knockoffs, 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 $100 discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L.com. Now on to the show.

01:56
Welcome to the My Wife, Quitter Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Brett Curry back on the show for I believe the fourth time, it might be the fifth time. Is that right? Man, honored, honored. Brett is someone who I met through Drew Sinaki at the Traffic and Conversion Summit in San Diego a long, long, long, long, time ago. Long time ago. He’s spoken at my event, the Sella Summit, for I believe the past four years, I think. He runs OMG Commerce, which is an e-commerce agency that has helped hundreds of companies with their PPC advertising.

02:25
And it’s been quite a while since I’ve had Brett on the show, probably due to the pandemic, honestly. And because he works with a diverse set of companies, today we’re going to talk about what’s working in the world of advertising today, which ad platforms are converting the best for what type of company. And we’ll also do a deeper dive into Google Performance Max. And with that, welcome to show, Brett. How are doing today,

02:50
Steve Chu, man, thanks for having me back. Honored, think, yeah, this is like the fourth time. And I think Tony maybe said it was the fifth Seller Summit. I’m not sure. She’s the one keeping track, not us. What’s that? That was the seventh. Oh, for you, It was my fifth to speak at some of them. Did I subtract a year from you? Sorry. I realize. you did. I mean, there was one year that probably wasn’t very good. So, I know from my presentation. we’ll forget about that one. It’ll be fine. But yeah, man, doing great. Excited to be here. Love this podcast. Love hanging out.

03:19
And love talking ads, man. Talking ads and business growth, super fun. Never gets old for me anyway. So you know what’s funny is the timing of this recording is interesting because we are on the eve of the sunset of GA3. We are. Yeah, it is being sunset. The curtain is closing on Universal Analytics. It’s about toast. And I have countdown timers on all of my analytics screens because that’s even though I’ve switched, you still get them.

03:48
So my first question to you actually is how important is it that people move to GA4 versus another paid analytics company like Fathom or there’s a whole bunch of them out there. When it specifically comes to running Google ads, like is your ad performance going to be worse if you do not switch? I don’t think so, not directly. and I will say ideally you made the transition to GA4 like a year ago. That’s what we were.

04:15
consulting with all our clients about like, get basic implementation installed so that you can get that year over year comparison because they’re gonna be like two totally separate platforms. So you’ll have to go back and reference, you know, Universal Analytics if you wanna see last year’s performance, if you’re just now installing GA4. So hopefully that’s not the case, but if it is, it’s okay, we can work with it. Inside Google Ads, so if you’re running Search, Performance Max, YouTube, we definitely like to use the Google Ads Conversion.

04:43
and we can get into the whys of that. But basically that’s where the source of truth that your campaigns are using is the Google Ads conversion code or their conversion pixel. Campaigns work better, the machine learning, the AI behind the campaigns work better. But I think you’re gonna want GA4 for other reasons. GA4 is just pretty awesome and I think it’s gonna only get better over time. So you’re want that data.

05:11
but it’s gonna be more for your benefit and more for holistic marketing and more to map out the buyer journey and things like that, rather than, we don’t usually recommend that you feed those GA4 conversions back into Google Ads for the campaign’s benefit. It’s more for your benefit. Interesting. And you said GA4 is awesome with a straight face. Okay, so it’s not perfect yet.

05:40
We’ve got a couple of guys on our team who are rock stars at conversion tracking and analytics. That’s not me. I love data. I love looking at what’s behind the data and why things are the way that they are, things like that. I do think that GA4 is going to be an improvement. I do think GA4 is going to be much more flexible and powerful in the long run. But I know there’s, know, just like with any change, there are some people that are not excited about it, but kind of this event-based tracking where essentially you can track anything and everything in GA4. This can be pretty powerful.

06:09
But yeah, the key is like what we don’t want to do is we don’t want to plug in GA4 back into campaigns for them to optimize off of that data. Interesting. Okay. So one, it does not matter that you’ve moved to GA4 for the purpose of Google ads, as long as you have the Google ads conversion pixel firing. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

06:32
And one way to think about that is just Google, the way Google ads measures is just a little bit differently than the way Google analytics has measured historically. And we want to get as much visibility into what the ads are doing as possible so that we’re feeding the machine, right? We’re feeding the algorithm. And the best way to do that is with the Google ads conversion code. So yeah, just strictly for the purposes of will my ads run better? Will my campaigns be better in Google ads? Use that Google ads conversion code. Okay.

07:01
which is probably what most people have been doing all along anyway, right? For the most part, yeah. We do audit some accounts where they’re using Google Analytics and feeding that back into campaigns and we usually switch that and then see better performance. if you want GAA for, if you wanted Universal Analytics in the past to be your source of truth, that’s great. That’s what you can kind of put business decisions on, but just the campaigns in Google Ads, need that Google Ads conversion code. They need that oxygen from that conversion code. Okay.

07:30
So let’s just talk about some of your client companies. or where have you seen like the biggest growth in ad spend just this past year? Yeah, so it’s undoubtedly performance max. And it was interesting. We actually saw, and I’d be curious to hear what you’ve seen with your community and what people were talking about, but Q1 was a little bit light in terms of ad spend. If you look at kind of where most DTC brands were spending, Q1 was kind of light.

07:57
We saw an uptick in kind of April, May, June, where ad spend is up. Companies are getting more aggressive. It seems like consumer confidence is up, you know, at least enough to drive some more e-commerce sales. And so we’ve seen quite a bit of growth. YouTube ad spend is up for us. Hmm. Pretty dramatically. like May, June, especially, we got kind of completed numbers for May, June as at time of this recording. And we’re about 20 % over last year for our clients as a whole.

08:26
And for a little context, we manage about $100 million a year in ad spend. it’s a decent data set to pull from. But yeah, YouTube is up about 20 % in ad spend. then performance max, like looking at year over year comparison isn’t fair because a lot of people just kind of switched to performance max within the last year. But if we look at performance max spend to say smart shopping, which is what a lot of people were doing pre-performance max, performance max spend is up.

08:55
So PMAX, people are spending more on that than they were on Smart Shopping for the most part. And that varies from client to client, but as much as 20, 30, 40 % more spend on Performance Max than on Smart Shopping. Do you want to just, just in case people listening don’t know what Performance Max is, you want to just give a quick 30 second rundown? Yeah, absolutely. And it’s one those things where a lot of people are divided. Like I’m in some communities, like Andrew Guderian’s community, Ecommerce Fuel, there are people in there that love Performance Max, people that hate it.

09:24
I heard a guy call it performance meh one time, which I thought was pretty entertaining. For us, it has been overwhelmingly positive. We’ve had a few campaigns that didn’t work. We’ve never had like PMAX not work for a client. But what performance max is, it’s essentially seven Google channels rolled into one campaign. So it’s search, it’s shopping, it’s display, it’s Gmail, it’s discovery, it’s maps, if you got any kind of a local type.

09:53
business, and then it’s something else that I forgot. It’s a whole bunch of stuff. It’s like everything that Google offers basically all their channels. And so in the past, you have to create a separate campaign for each of those channels. Now you create one performance max campaign. You give Google your assets, your images, your headlines, your descriptions, your feed for Google shopping. And then Google auto magically puts those ads across their platforms.

10:24
to drive sales and drive conversions. I’ll admit, when I first heard about it, I hated the idea. I thought it’d be black box. I thought Google would have all the control. I thought there’d be no room for creativity. That has not been the case. There’s some black boxiness in it, but it actually does give you quite a bit of room to be creative and the results have been good. I think it’s pretty smart on Google’s part to do this because I felt like Google Ads was just way too complicated in the past. Totally. And performance and I think that’s part of it.

10:53
You know, we, know so many brands that are kind of in that mid tier size that lean into Facebook more. And I think part of it is, it’s just easier to set up and run Facebook ads than it is to run Google ads. And so yeah, that was at least part of Google’s motivation is let’s, let’s create something that’s easier for advertisers and agencies to run. And also it’s more set in, forget it than it’s ever been. At least in my opinion. I mean, I just have one data point from my own store, uh, which I

11:22
don’t like, I actually liked it when I had separate campaigns for everything. But I understand you had this script that you’re giving out that helps you separate and decipher all that stuff. Yeah, totally. And shout out to Mike Rhodes from Agency Savvy and Web Savvy. He’s the original author of this conversion or this script and we kind of modified it and moved it along little bit. basically you run this script in Google Ads and it will break down some of the performance for you.

11:51
Google is rolling out now where you get some performance metrics at what’s called the asset group level. It’s basically the terminology for an ad group inside of Performance Max. There used to all that data was hidden. Google’s rolling out more of it, so more of it’s available in the interface, but this script really allows you to pull in almost any data point you want. Not every, but almost any. So that’s critical to get that to see what’s really working and what’s not.

12:16
And yet, you know, what’s interesting though, Steve is, and I kind of liked it too. Like I love the old days of Google shopping when we were using spreadsheets for our bidding and we were bidding up a penny down a penny, like based on performance. That was fun for me. We were really good at it. But then smart bidding came along, right? And smart bidding was better. And then we had smart shopping and I kind of didn’t like smart shopping, but then smart shopping was better. And now P max is kind of in that boat too, where the performance is better and you can set it and forget it. And it works pretty well.

12:45
but you also have these opportunities to kind of go wild with it and be pretty innovative and you can kind of manipulate Performance Max a little bit. Not a bad way, not in against terms of service way, but you know, get the most out of it. But you can also still run search ads for our biggest clients. still running brand and on-brand search. We’re still running separate YouTube campaigns. We’re still running separate remarketing campaigns. And then PMAX is kind of filling in the gaps and augmenting and making everything else better.

13:14
So I wanna ask you, the people out there listening who aren’t on PMAX yet, let’s say it’s a pretty new e-commerce store, you have products, maybe you’ve been selling on Amazon for a while and you get some sales on your site and you wanna start, would you advise everyone start with PMAX today? I would, I think you could start with Performance Max and then add like branded search and that could be about all you need if you’re just getting started on Google. Now with PMAX, it…

13:42
It usually primarily leans into Google shopping traffic, right? So you’ve got, you’ve got your product feed that you’re giving Google merchant center, and that’s what builds your product listing ads or Google shopping ads. And that’s at the core of PMAX. So when you first launch a campaign, that’s, PROMOS is usually going to lean into branded search and shopping. What’s nice, if you have a well-built out branded shopping campaign, so your

14:09
bidding on your own brand name and maybe that’s divided by category and then there’s some other ways we can divide that. And you got good ad copy there. That separate branded search campaign should get most of that traffic. And then Performance Max will kind of fill in the gaps, get some search traffic, but then also really lean into Google shopping. So as we audit accounts, we audit hundreds of accounts every year, most of the time Performance Max is 70, 80, 90 % of the clicks are going to Google shopping.

14:39
Right. Okay. So there’s no reason to have a separate Google shopping campaign today. Yeah. When performance max first launched, you could run smart shopping and P max together. And we kind of had this deal where we would, and this is, this is a tactic that not a lot of people know about. You don’t have to, or you’re not limited to just one product feed. you know, we, like I said, we’ve all, you know, hundreds of accounts each, each year. And I can’t think of a time when I ran into an advertiser that more than one product feed, meaning

15:09
Multiple feeds the same product as in both feeds, but you’re just testing different titles different images different headlines things like that different descriptions So you can totally do that So in the past we would run standard shopping with one feed and then performance max with another feed and they would both coexist in an account They both run and both work and that doesn’t really work anymore. I’m now Performance max just it’s it’s a bit of a bully It will just it would you know stiff arm standard shopping get it out of the way take all the traffic

15:37
There’s still a few cases, sometimes you can launch a separate account, which is more advanced and probably most people here don’t need to do that. yeah, Performance Max basically steals all the shopping traffic, which hey, if it works better and it’s easier for you to manage, then that’s probably okay, probably not a bad thing.

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17:12
Okay. So let’s just go with the basic setup here. So you’re recommending going with performance max and then a branded search campaign, right? Okay. So, uh, can we just talk about the setup of like a bare bones P max for totally for just like a store, maybe with like, I don’t know, 20 skews, let’s say in three categories, 20 skews, three categories. That’s, that’s pretty easy.

17:37
We kind of have three approaches to performance maximum. We’ll kind of break this down as we go. But the first one I called the Marley. This is Bob Marley. This is the no worries. Everything’s just gonna be okay. And it’s kind of the set and forget it. So in that case, what you gotta think about with PMAX is you got the campaign level just like with any campaign type. But then below that you have asset groups. And asset groups are sort of like ad groups, but sort of not. So the asset group, that’s a collection of all your assets, your images, your product listings.

18:07
listening group or your feed. It’s your headlines, your descriptions, and then videos and logos. And there’s a couple of the little details, but that’s basically the bulk of it. And then audience signals. And these are not true audience targeting we’re used to on Facebook or other channels where we’re like, hey, these are the people that I want to reach. So here’s my audience. It’s a lookalike audience, or it’s an audience with these interests, or on Google, it’s an audience of people searching for these keywords.

18:34
It’s not exactly that, it’s an audience signal. So you give Google these audience signals and Google just uses that as a starting point. So Google uses that as a starting point and then they go beyond it. So it’s kind of like, hey Google, this is the picture of who my buyer is. This is who is likely to buy my product. And then Google goes beyond that. And so you’re kind of looking for this best combination of the right assets that go with these right audience signals. That becomes your asset group. And so if I’m running the Marley,

19:02
approach, so this is kind of the simple PMAX approach. I probably have one campaign. And then in this scenario, I would look at probably three asset groups, So broken down by category because likely I’m going to have different images, different videos, different headlines, different descriptions for those categories. So as an example, Boom by Cindy Joseph, Mutual Friend, Desert Firestone, awesome business. We’ve run their Google and YouTube and Amazon now for years.

19:27
But if they’ve got their mascara line and then they’ve got skincare and then they’ve got makeup, it’s kind of hard. If those were all mashed together into one asset group, how do you write a headline that applies both to makeup, to moisturizers and to mascara? I mean, you could, but it’s not very specific, right? How do get the right image that lines up with all those categories? You could, but it’s not the best. So that’s where you separate those into different asset groups. And then you’ve got…

19:53
headlines that speak to mascara, descriptions that speak to mascara, images that speak to mascara, videos that speak to mascara, and then audiences. And so now there’s a really tightly themed asset group around that category. And that’s how would do it. So one campaign, three asset groups, and then we’re ready to rock and roll. And it should get better over time. If you wanna get in and tinker, can find the worst performing images and pause those and add new ones and same with.

20:22
headlines and descriptions, but you don’t have to. if you just leave it the same, Google is going to find the best combinations and kind of go with that. So that’s kind of the very quick rundown of the Marley approach. would you say that in general, the categories will correspond to your, to your ad groups or not ad groups, uh, asset groups. Yeah, often, but not always. So, so this is where, like, again, with that simple setup, I’d probably have asset groups by category.

20:50
If I wanted to go a little bit more intense with my build out, so it’s bigger build out, a little more work. We call this the Arnold. So it’s like a little more, a little more beef, but better results or a little more work, but you’re getting better results. Then I’d maybe look at like campaign level by the category and then maybe single product asset groups, or I would do like top sellers as an asset group. So as an example, so back to the boom by Cindy Joseph.

21:20
the boomstick trio, basically it’s like three makeup sticks. That’s his drawing item, right? I think. It is, yeah, yeah. So three makeup sticks, it replaces the whole makeup bag if you want it to. So like that would be an asset group. And in fact, in that case, and this would go into another strategy, we make that the whole campaign. So then maybe at each asset group, it’s just one product. And then that way everything is laser focused on that single product. So it kind of depends, it depends on, how logical is this?

21:50
collection of products and images and headlines and descriptions. Like can the machine make sense out of what someone wants and what someone’s shopping for, or do we need to segment further? So it’s usually either at the category level or at the product level is how we do asset groups. So in Amazon land, the best practice right now is to have one campaign per product. Is that overkill for performance max? It can be, but not necessarily. So we’ve got several. And so this kind of moves into, uh,

22:17
The third strategy is what we call the wizard, right? So think about the wizard of Oz, the guy behind the curtain. He’s pulling levers and pushing buttons and he’s just going wild. This is my favorite. I like to tinker. I like to be in control, to do crazy stuff. So this is where probably going to have like a separate campaign for your top products. So just, you know, single campaign for a single product doesn’t fit for everybody. And then maybe you’re going to have some category campaigns that go along with that.

22:44
And then that way you can get creative with bids and with budgets and with, you know, how you’re testing audiences and how you’re testing creatives. so, you know, in that, in that case, so like for boom, you know, we would have a separate campaign for boomstick. We have a separate campaign for mascara. We have a separate campaign for some of the other products. Um, and then we have some category based products for, for, for lower volume sellers, you know, in addition to that. What’s the difference between having them in a separate campaign versus different asset groups within the same campaign?

23:12
for your time. so historically you didn’t see as much data at the asset group level. Uh, that’s still the case, but like I said, Google is showing more and more data at the asset group level. So that’s hopefully getting better. But the main issue is bids and budgets. So if you’ve got multiple asset groups in a single campaign, they all have the same bid. So if you’re using like a target return on ad spend bid, whatever’s at the campaign level, that’s what trickles down to the asset group level. And maybe

23:41
I want to bid more aggressively for Boomstick than I want to for Mascara. Or if I’m selling guitars and guitar cases, maybe I want to bid really aggressively for guitars, but I want to bid really conservatively for guitar cases because it’s lower priced. Maybe I’ve got worse margins, that type of thing. So bids and then budgets. So how do I, if I identify that this product is like my flagship product, and this is one of my favorite things to do with companies is look at like, what is the best entry?

24:10
product for your brand. for, for boom, it’s, it’s always been, you know, boom, stick color. Um, you know, for other like supplement brands, there’s always like one flagship supplement that that’s what people buy first. Like we used to do organifies YouTube and it was always the green juice. Like the green juice was the product that people got introduced to. And then they would buy, uh, the red or the chocolate or the whatever. Right. So, uh, you know, I want to be able to control budget for my top products.

24:39
And so those are the main reasons, visibility, bid control, budget control. So the Marley, the, yeah, the Marley and the wizard and then the wizard. Yeah. Is that meant to be a logical progression? Like can we run all these campaigns? Not necessarily. So it could be, it could be, but you know, a lot of times we’ll, we’ll launch with kind of the Arnold where it’s like, top products and a couple of category campaigns. we’ve got maybe, you know, two to four campaigns.

25:08
where you can really go crazy then if you do stuff like, I mentioned most PMAX campaigns are 60 to 80 to 90 % Google shopping. Well, you can actually run PMAX without a feed. So you could build a PMAX campaign and deprive Google of that feed and now it can’t run shopping. So we’ve actually done this with some brands where if they’ve got really good YouTube assets, we run a PMAX campaign, we pull out the feed.

25:36
And then we really, then the campaign leans into either search or display or YouTube. And it’s going to depend on what assets are really good, right? And that’s another thing to keep in mind. Like PMAX is only going to be as good as the assets you give it, right? You can’t, if you got weak headlines, if you got boring images that don’t sell the product, if you got videos that are optimized for YouTube, like the machine is not magic. can’t just make that stuff work. So you got to have good creators, but if you do, then good things can happen. So we found

26:06
even with accounts that are spending a decent amount on YouTube, if we run a PMAX campaign with no feed and we’ve got these good YouTube assets in it, PMAX can find new opportunities on YouTube as well. So that’s one of those things. Or, like the other side of that coin, is you can also run PMAX that’s only a feed. So then you can not give it anything else and just do feed only. And now you’re like, hey, this is just a shopping campaign.

26:31
And so it’s stuff like that that you kind of layer in that kind of gets you to the wizard approach. Now, what gotta be careful with- What’s the advantage of doing that though, because it’s already doing all that. Are you just trying to direct it more towards a certain style than one another? Yes. You’re trying to get more control, right? Yeah. You’re trying to get a little more control. And this is where it becomes complex. And this is where you can kind of get into trouble if you’re like, oh, I want to go wizard. And then you just set it up and you don’t look at it for a month or two months. And you’re like, it’s probably gonna-

27:01
campaigns will start competing with each other and there’s cannibalization. But what we almost always find, and this was true in the standard shopping era, the smart shopping era, Google picks favorites, right? They’re gonna find like your top 10%, 5 % of products and they’re just gonna focus in on that. And so what we try to do then is we look at, what are the products we wanna advertise that are not getting visibility? And what’s the best way to make them visible? Is it with a feed only campaign? Is it with a

27:29
standard PMAX, but it’s just separated by category. So we’re looking at that type of thing too. So we’re not, we don’t have a bunch of campaigns that are trying to compete with each other. Maybe there’s a little bit of overlap between campaigns, but we’re looking at how do we give all the products we want to have visibility and want, you know, to merchandise and put on the digital shelf. How do we best do that? All right. So let’s, let’s assume that everyone listening here is, is new and the logical place to start is the Marley campaign. yeah. Exactly. So you run it for a while.

27:58
And maybe you notice that these products are getting shafted. They’re getting no, no traffic whatsoever. Would you put those products in a separate campaign just to try to get some visibility for them? Yeah. So one thing you can do, so as long as you’ve got like asset group level visibility, which I think is being rolled out to all accounts, like right now, most of our accounts have it, not all. I would look at, Hey, this, you know, I’ve got, I’ve got these three categories to go back to the original example, but only one of these asset groups, one of these categories is getting, you know, 80 % of the traffic.

28:29
I would keep that in the existing campaign. would duplicate the campaign and separate out those other two asset groups and then see how those separate campaigns. Okay. Yeah. Because now you can, now you can say, well, maybe I just need to bid a little bit differently or maybe I need to budget a little bit differently. Right. Cause Google’s going to always look for like the easiest path to success. So if you you launch a P max campaign and Google finds success with one of your asset groups,

28:56
and you don’t have a huge daily budget, it’s maybe just gonna focus all of its attention there. And you don’t really know that maybe the other asset groups aren’t gonna work. Maybe they’re great, but they just haven’t seen the light of day. So then you need to separate those out into new campaigns. And then that way you can bid more aggressively. can, you all the budgets focus there. So yeah, that’s how I would work it. And you know, if you wanna go just simple, I would build the Marley, the one campaign, and then as it performs, just budget more, right? Budget more.

29:26
mess with the bid a little bit like that. You can maybe get all the success you want from PMAX by doing that. But then I would look at, it’s pretty likely that one or more of your asset groups is gonna get no love. And so then you’re gonna need to separate that out. So by that logic, why not start by keeping them separate campaigns in the first place? You could, but then it’s a matter of budget control and do we know what’s going to work. And so that’s not a bad idea at all.

29:55
to kind of force the envelope or to kind of force Google to give equal credit to those. But then it is more to keep track of, it is more to kind of watch the budget with. so, it’s kind of a pick your poison thing there, but one advantage to having multiple asset groups in one campaign is there is more data. So it’s not very often that Google will give…

30:18
all the traffic to one asset group and none to the others. It’ll just be split. So there’s also something at the campaign level, if there are 30 or more conversions at the campaign level on a weekly basis, that campaign is usually a little more stable, a little more consistent, like the machine works a little bit better behind it. And so that’s another thought too. Like if you’re just getting started, a little bit of consolidation so that that campaign has enough conversion data to really get rolling and then you can separate it out from there.

30:48
And then once you start separating out asset groups, let’s say they’re getting shafted into separate campaigns. Do you turn off that asset group in the main and in the Marley campaign? The original. Yeah. So then you want to, you, you want as little overlap and competition between campaigns as, possible. There’s always going to be a little bit and Google, Google is going to pick whatever combination of image and headline and description they think is best, you know, got out of all your campaigns, but we try to limit the overlap as much as possible.

31:18
Can we set some expectations here? So let’s say you’re just starting out brand new, when should you start to see it getting optimized? Like one month, three months? Yeah, so mean, it sort of depends on, so if you’re brand new, like brand new account from scratch type of thing, you know, the nice thing is PMAX does lean into branded search and shopping first. So it’s not that common that it’s just gonna, you know,

31:45
be horrible and be like a .5 ROAS or something. The only caveat’s there is if you don’t have a site that’s really proven to convert or new product testing, stuff like that. But you’re gonna get to see some results month one, but it will get better over time. And usually it’s in that month two, month three that it really starts to take off and the machine starts to learn. I think this is another reason, Steve White, why Google created PMAX was it’s like the perfect environment for their machine learning and their AI.

32:14
Right? So they bought DeepMind back in 2015, which company full of some of the best machine learning and AI scientists on the planet. It’s been kind of behind the Google ads products since that time running smart bidding, running smart campaigns, things like that just gotten better and better. But this PMAX is kind of like the perfect environment for that to really shine. And so it will get better over time as it learns your customers and learns your products. But if you, if you bid properly and we always do like maximize conversion value to kind of start with.

32:44
It’s usually like worst case scenario is just doesn’t get much volume, right? It rarely comes out of the gate and just as, know, burns all your money type of thing. Yeah. Oh, that’s, was my next question actually. So you start out a new campaign by maximizing ROAS? So, so it’s a, yeah, kind of nuance here. I usually don’t set a return on ad spend value, but I like maximize conversion value. And so what that means is basically Google’s going to look at

33:12
whatever your budget is, and they’re gonna look at your products, and they’re just gonna try to get you the most return as possible from that product group. And then as it goes, then you can layer in that target return on ad spend. I don’t mind if you really know your target return on ad spend, I don’t mind starting with it, but sometimes it can kind of pigeonhole the campaign and make it too conservative or too aggressive. And so a lot of times we just leave that open, but maximize conversion value.

33:37
Yeah, that’s interesting. I think I started out with just maximize conversions period regardless of that work, too Yeah, that can work too. I think it it kind of depends and if like your products are are your products of Bobby linens or is there a wide Discrepancy in price or are they pretty consistent? They’re pretty consistent. Yeah Yeah for the most part so I that I think that’s where it comes in handy or like we have some clients where it’s like Mostly one or two flagship products and then everything else is like add-ons or we sell later or whatever

34:06
Maximize conversions can work better there. The nice thing about maximize conversion value is then the campaign will treat differently a little bit. You your $10 item versus your $50 item and things like that. So that’s the advantage there. But both can work. And so often we’re testing both and kind of reading the performance and then adjusting from there. Can we talk a little bit about the product feed? know for years I didn’t really optimize it.

34:35
at all, I just kind of use whatever was there. Can you just provide some pointers there? Because what you do feed in really makes a difference, right? It makes a huge difference. And this is one of those areas of marketing that can just be like drop dead boring, know, product feeds, data feeds, come on, man, like I’d rather talk about anything else. But what helped me is thinking about, hey, this is just merchandising, right? This is, this is thinking about the digital shelf. How do I line up my products with what people are looking for all across the Google ecosystem? And so

35:05
There’s a few elements here. It’s actually part SEO. I know you’re in the SEO, Steve. I know you know it really well, but your feed creation and optimization is part SEO and part merchandising. So what we’re looking for is, Google really relies on the title, the title of your product. That’s gonna help determine when they show your product, where they show your product, who they show it to. And so the title needs to be first accurate. It’s gotta describe the product. So if I’m selling,

35:34
Jordan one shoes like that needs to be in the title But then it also needs to have other details like details who are gonna be searching for it So these have color these have size these have gender and these have like is it a high top low top things like that? So what are people searching for so accurate title? What are people searching for put that in the title? Because that’s what we’re gonna inform Google as to what it is the image is super important and it’s where I like to test different images because

35:58
you know, aside from the title, the image is what people are gonna click on, right? That’s what they see first. And then they often look at the title and the price to see, okay, do I wanna click on this or not? But the image is really important. So do we want, you what angle do we want? Probably want a white background, cause Google wants at least a few images with a white background. Sometimes we can sneak in a lifestyle image and that still runs, but image is super important. The price, actually believe it or not, the price is super important. So,

36:25
Google knows that if there’s a lot of people selling basically the same product, lower prices are gonna get more clicks. And you gotta understand, Google does want you to get conversions, because then you’ll spend more, and then you’ll be happier and things like that, but they’re optimizing for clicks and click through rate. And so, lower price can get more clicks. That does not mean you should try to be the lowest offering. I know you and I have talked about profit maximization and pricing, and there’s…

36:53
There’s science there, there’s psychology there. So price your product where it needs to be. But just know that does impact clicks. Sometimes though the most expensive product in a category can get some clicks, but sometimes those are just people that are somewhat interested. There’s a few other elements where you can get kind of technical, kind of nerdy, but things like Google product category and product type, and a few other things you plug in that will help Google know, oh, this is where I put this. This is where this can show up. Because the cool thing is, you’ve got traditional Google shopping, which is on the

37:23
main search results page, there’s the shopping tab, but not a ton of people click on what people do. But then also your feed can show up on the YouTube mobile app, it can show up on YouTube on desktop, it can show up in Gmail, it can show up across the display network. And so you really wanna get this optimized because it’s gonna fuel shopping, but it’s gonna fuel these other channels as well. So I’m curious, when you have a client come on and you see their feed and it’s just the name of the product displayed on their website,

37:52
Do you actually bust out like the keyword tools like Ahrefs or what? We do, yeah, yeah, and we use a number of tools. I’m still kind of like SEM Rush, but like Keywords Anywhere are cool. Ahrefs is all, like there’s so many good ones, so whatever your tool of choice is, fine. I’ll give you an example. So a buddy of mine runs Everyday California. you know Chris Lynch? Have you met him? He knows a lot of people in Haven’t met him. Everyday California based in La Jolla, just outside of San Diego, one of my favorite cities that I’ve ever been to.

38:20
So they sell this T-shirt, it’s called the El Clasico and it’s got their everyday Cali logo. It’s the bear named Brutus, the California bear is holding a surfboard. It’s like a flag around it. And so if we just gave Google the feed, the title would just say El Clasico. That’s it, El Clasico. That’s not enough. Like nobody knows what the El Clasico is, not even Google. And so, but we put, know, El Clasico, California bear, T-shirt, black.

38:48
men’s medium or men’s X, whatever. And then we add a few other things too, but like that California bear t-shirt, a lot of people search for that. And so that allows that product to show up for those searches. So yeah, you got to first be accurate, but then we’re looking at keyword data, we’re looking at what’s converting inside of Google ads already, we’re looking at what’s converting on Amazon. And then of course we’re looking at those keyword tools as well.

39:12
Do you, so in that example that you just gave, would you move California bear shirts all the way to the front? Ahead of the brand? Often we would, yeah. So it kind of depends, like if your brand is big enough now where people are looking for your brand, so like Native as an example, Native’s a long time client. Started as just, I used to call them Native deodorant, but now they’re much more than that, right? They’re sun care and hair care and body wash and a variety of other products. launching new ones all the time, which is awesome.

39:42
In the early days, we’d put natural deodorant up front, native in the back. Now native is something people look for, right? So it’s okay in that situation to put native at the front of the title. You don’t necessarily have to, but you could. For like Air Jordans or something, I’m putting that brand at the front, because that’s what people are looking for. But if you’re not that, which a lot of us are not, then I would put more the keyword or the descriptor at the front, brand at the back of the title.

40:10
And in terms of keyword, what are your boundaries in terms of stuffing? Do you do keyword, comma, keyword, or? 100 % black hat. I’m keyword stuffing. I’m just pushing the envelope. Roll the dice. But bring it on, Google. No, I’m just kidding. No, you generally, so the thing you want to think about with titles is there is a character limit. So take 150 characters, and give or take, maybe that’s been adjusted. But I think it’s 150. And so Google does weight what’s at the front of that title more.

40:36
So like your first 75 characters, but even more like your first 40 characters, 50 characters, that’s what Google’s really gonna wait. So that doesn’t give you a lot of room. So typically we’re looking at like a couple of keywords, right? Like so name of product, couple keywords, brand, you know, that’s pretty much it. Or couple keywords, the attributes, if that’s important, you’re gonna wanna include those. So for apparel, attributes are really important. For other things, maybe not as much. So.

41:01
Yeah, usually just a couple keywords. And no, we’re not stuffing. We’re just putting that in there. If you want to add additional keywords, you can put those in your description. You can put those in your product type. And then also Google is crawling the page. So Google is looking at that product listing page or the product detail page. And then they’re using that to kind of inform them as to what this product is. So, Brett, I kind of want to conclude this interview by just saying when someone comes to you, a lot of times the site isn’t even ready to…

41:29
to be running ads yet. So what’s like your checklist? Yeah. So it checklists in terms of, you ready for Google? Are you ready for ads before you even launch and that sort of thing? Yeah. We talked about the feed just now. Yeah. Yeah. So the feed is going to help. So if it was my side, my company, I would, and I’m a Google ads guy, so would say this, I would still run like branded search and a little bit of P max right out of the gate just to start getting some traffic. And I think it’s going to convert and you’re going to learn and stuff like that.

41:55
But when it’s time to maybe bring on an agency or bring on a freelancer, hire somebody, that’s what I want to know. Like I’m getting predictable conversions from cold traffic, right? So I’m looking at resources on my wife quit her job. I’m looking at things like unofficial Shopify podcast, Kurt Elster, looking at some of those. We’ve got some resources on product detail pages, but.

42:20
I want to know, I converting like in that acceptable range of e-commerce, which is kind of in that one to three percent, you know, one to three percent of cold visitors or people that don’t know you should be converting from your site. If they’re not, man, maybe I want to improve my site a little bit. Maybe I want to look at how am I positioning this product on my product detail page? Do I have reviews in the right place? Do I have a strong call to action? Am I answering the shipping question? Like all, what are all the questions people have?

42:49
that they need to feel good about before they buy, am I doing that? But if I’m converting, if I’m converting in that one to three range for cold traffic or beyond that, now I’m thinking, all right, let’s start feeding this machine a little bit and let’s start driving more traffic to the site. So for search and PMAX, like you can launch those really quickly, we do a lot with YouTube and I still like separate YouTube campaigns, not just PMAX.

43:18
But usually there we like for someone to have success with Facebook top of funnel. So if they know, I can drive top of funnel traffic on Facebook to this lander and it converts cold traffic. That’s a really necessary starting point in my opinion to say, Hey, we’re ready for some YouTube tests. Now let’s see if we can ramp up YouTube to attract new customers. want that page that converts. So those are a few things, right? We really want to know does my product.

43:47
does my page convert, my site convert, do I have a good product market fit? Because then once I have that, then Google Ads is gonna work way, way better. So what you’re saying, because oftentimes it’s hard to figure out what to blame the website or the ad. So you’re saying just start with branded. Branded and like basic performance max, yeah. Where maybe, maybe I’m just doing a feed and a couple images and stuff like that. Yeah, I would start with those. Or maybe it’s a simple non-brand search campaign, but you gotta be,

44:16
pretty careful there because that, if you get some broad match keyword clicks, those likely don’t convert a lot. So I want branded search and PMAX running kind of right out of the gate. Now, that branding campaign may not do anything if you’re not running Facebook or some other traffic source or if you don’t have SEO or if you don’t have any organic content, but I would kind of start with those, yeah. And you then just said, I think in passing, maybe just pick your best products that you think are just

44:46
gonna sell and then put those in the feed first. And if you’re not converting it between one and 3%, that means something’s wrong. Usually means something wrong. Yeah. And you know, maybe the caveats to that is if it’s a high AOV and the ROAS still works. I like to look at conversion rate because that’s gonna be informing. It means one or two things and you kind of nailed it. Either it’s bad traffic or it’s my site needs work or there’s just not a product market fit, right? So kind of combination of the two.

45:13
And so then you need to know that. So conversion rate is important, but you can’t take conversion rate to the bank. So we’re still looking at conversions and revenue and ROAS. If those are good and I’m at a 1 % or lower, then I’m maybe gonna keep spending, but I’m probably looking at ways I can improve that conversion rate too. And if you’re not getting as much traffic as you would like, you would probably look at the feed maybe? I would look at the feed. Yep, absolutely. Because that’s going to be, should be…

45:41
the primary driver of PMAX traffic. It’s just good, relevant traffic to your store, likely gonna convert. so, yeah, if the ads aren’t showing up, so if you’ve got a feed you’ve submitted to Google, PMAX isn’t showing, it’s likely the feed needs to be optimized or you’re not bidding aggressively enough or there’s something like broken in the campaign, conversion tracking isn’t turned on, things like that.

46:08
Cool, well hope that’s a pretty good guideline for anyone listening who wants to get started with Performance Max. And if you ever want to meet this guy in person, just head on over to Seller Summit. Actually you speak at a lot of events. I speak at decent amount, yeah, Seller Summit, I speak at a of Ezra’s events, at SellerCon, I try to do like seven or eight a year, like that’s a good mix to still be a family first entrepreneur. But I like jumping on planes and going speaking on stages, so yeah, love to connect with anybody here.

46:37
talk shop if that’s useful. Yeah, where can people find you? Yeah, so I am on the social, Steve. So I’m not to your level on YouTube, but I’m working that way. So I’m on LinkedIn. That’s probably the best place to find me. Do a little bit on Twitter. I’m on Facebook, of course, YouTube, OMG Commerce on YouTube. But then the best way to get in touch is omgcommerce.com. So if you want second set of eyes on your account, if you have PMAX questions.

47:02
If you’re trying to decide, I hire an agency or go in house or freelance or whatever, reach out to us, but omgcommerce.com is the place to go. Awesome, Brett. Well, thanks a lot for coming back on the show. Awesome, man. Thanks for having me. Ton of fun.

47:20
Hope you enjoy that episode. Now what I love about e-commerce is that it’s getting easier and easier every day and most ad platforms are now incorporating AI and learning algorithms to make everything less hands-on for you. For more information about this episode, go to mywipedcoderjob.com slash episode 493. And once again, I want to thank Emerge Council for sponsoring this episode. If you sell on Amazon FBA or your own online store and you want to protect your IP from theft and fraud, head on over to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

47:49
mention my name and you’ll get $100 off. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L.com. I also want to thank Chase Diamond for sponsoring this episode. Chase is my go-to guy when it comes to email marketing. And if you want to learn how to run your own successful email marketing campaigns, check out his class over at mywifequitterjob.com slash chase. That’s mywifequitterjob.com slash C-H-A-S-E. And if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com.

48:17
and sign up for my free 6 day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.