6 Essential Google Ads Strategies for a Profitable Holiday Season

[00:00:00] Richard Gaffin: Hey folks, welcome to The Ecommerce Playbook Podcast. I'm your host, Richard Gaffin, Director of Digital Product Strategy here at Common Thread Collective. And I'm joined today for the second time by Mr. Tony Chopp, of paid media here at CTC. Tony, what's going on, man?

[00:00:14] Tony Chopp: Richard, it's a pleasure.

Twice in about a month or so.

[00:00:18] Richard Gaffin: yeah, twice in as many weeks.

I know it's more than we usually see each other. That's for sure. But so what we're piggybacking off of our conversation last time, which was around what we're thinking In terms of paid social as we move into the holiday season, what our strategy is specifically for that. We're now going to move into the realm of paid search, which Tony was sort of, this is kind of your bread and butter.

This is where you came from originally. Isn't that right?

[00:00:42] Tony Chopp: Yeah, long history with the Google Ads platform for sure. Yeah.

[00:00:46] Richard Gaffin: Google, Google ads expert here. And essentially what we want to talk about is the same thing, approaching your paid search Both in terms of budget, in terms of content, in terms of everything that you need to have, kind of, or having all your ducks in a row, so to speak, as you get into the holiday season.

So, Tony's prep for is six things that you need to prep for as far as paid search goes, as we go into the holiday season. But before we get into that, do you want to set up maybe sort of an overall perspective on paid search, both going into the holiday and maybe Sort of generally. So

[00:01:17] Tony Chopp: Yeah, sure. Yeah, I think, a couple things are interesting about the search category specifically in the holiday. Search is obviously driven by demand and Every year we see incredibly sharp increase in the demand for both our clients brands and the categories of products that they sell leading up into the holiday.

So while for most of the year, we lean heavily on meta and social advertising for our acquisition based efforts. This time of year is probably the most important time and most. And possibly one of the most effective times. To really push the gas pedal down on search advertising. And if you've spent any time around CTC content you know, that we're going to talk about particular types of ad units on Google search.

Notably feed based ads that either serve in shopping campaigns or performance max campaigns. They need to be a core part of your holiday strategy. So we'll expand a little bit more on what that means. But if search is not necessarily a huge piece of your advertising stack throughout the year in general during the holidays, it's definitely something that you want to consider based on the intent nature of the channel.

[00:02:43] Richard Gaffin: I think that kind of plays into a theme of both of our last conversation about paid social and this one, which is that not necessarily here to talk about things specific to the holiday season, as much as it is. These are best practices throughout the year, the importance of which becomes super, super dialed up when the holiday season hits. And again, maybe it sounds like particularly Google search and demand capture becomes of critical importance as BFCM rolls around. So,

[00:03:09] Tony Chopp: Yeah, yeah, 

right. 

[00:03:11] Richard Gaffin: so we're going to. So I'm going to go ahead and lay out the six things that you laid out for us kind of name them one by one, and then we'll jump into them in more in depth.

So, one is promotional visibility. is feeds. Three is conversion tracking. Four is at AI five, of course is incrementality and six is search demand. So that may be all great to you at this point, but we'll go through the one by one and kind of dig in a little bit more. So let's start with promotional visibility.

Tony talked to us about, the importance of that particular element as we go into the holiday season.

[00:03:44] Tony Chopp: Yeah, there's some unique unique tactics in the Google ads platform as it relates to making sure whatever offers or promotions that you're planning to run. For your holiday period are visible to your audience on search audience audiences on search So there's the obvious place which is to put your offers in your ad copy and we for sure do this for all of our clients and typically we'll we'll make a duplicate set of Ad copy that has promotional messaging in it and sometimes we'll run it in the same campaign, and sometimes we'll run it in a separate standalone promotional campaign, so, logistically, there's not a huge difference that way, but getting your promotional content into your ad copy, sort of obvious, duh.

A couple of the other things that might not be as obvious are, Number one promotion extensions. So extensions are a little subcategory within the Google ads ecosystem that can additional elements to an ad. So I think the easiest one to picture is I'm sure everyone's seen a Google ad with the stars next to the product.

So those are, those are extension. So there's another extension called promotion extension, and it's a, another place where you're going to want to add your promotional copy. One of the cool advantages of. Promotion extensions as you can set them with start and end dates, which is kind of cool and allows you to do some good forward planning, get all that stuff set up well ahead of time.

And they show up particularly prominently on mobile devices. So we see when we run promotion extensions, which we do for, for every sale. We'll see really good click through rates on the promo itself. So that's one little added bonus place that you can, that you can and should add your promotional language.

Similar to the promotion extension, which is available in the Google ads platform there's another offer extension available in Google merchant center and it's called merchant center offers. So you can use both of these. And they're just configured in different places, right? So if you have a site wide sale, you might add a promotion extension in the Google Ads interface.

And let's say that site wide sale is for 20, let's say 30 percent off all SKUs. You might also add that same offer into the Merchant Center. One small caveat around Merchant Center promotions, like all things in Google Merchant Center. Merchant Center promotions are subject to approval. The approval process, also like all things in Google Merchant Center, is relatively stringent and it can be a little bit difficult to get the promotions approved and actually running.

So the, the best plan is to get everything set up ahead of time. But what you need to know is that it won't be approved until the promotion is actually live on the site, right? So Google goes through the, goes through a process of crawling All the way through the checkout to make sure that the promotion that you're offering is actually available to a customer.

So, get everything set up ahead of time, but just note for yourself for your team that you're going to have to check on the approval status after the promotion is actually live on the site. Sort of interesting over here in the Google ads. UI, you can set promotion extensions and there's not a super difficult approval process for that or here in Merchant Center, as with almost all things in Merchant Center, there's a much more elaborate approval process that's involved,

but all three of those places, the name of the game is if you got a good offer, Let's get the word out as far and wide as possible, putting it into your ad copy.

Great. But also look at promotion extensions and Google Merchant Center.

[00:07:33] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. That makes sense. And so as far as like, maybe for the merchant centerpiece, maybe you already mentioned this, I don't know, but the pre, pre, pre, Prep period or maybe what I should say is like how far in advance do you want to have those set up? So that you make sure the approval goes through

[00:07:48] Tony Chopp: So we'll get everything set up in the first part of the video. Well, the caveat is as soon as we are, have clarity around what our offer is going to be. So that's always the gating function for us on media that we have a clear understanding of what the offers are going to be. So we do a bunch of work in partnership with our clients to get as much clarity as possible about that.

But assuming that, let's say we have clarity on November 1st of what the BFCM offers are going to be, we're going to get all of those the promotion extension set up in the ad account right away, immediately cause we can schedule it. We'll get the setup in Google Merchant Center set almost across the finish line.

We'll get everything wired up, but we won't know about the approval status until the day the site, the offers actually live. So there's no way to actually. Move faster than that because it has to, the, the crawlers have to be able to actually check out and see the offer at the checkout stage for it to be approved.

[00:08:46] Richard Gaffin: gotcha So it's in that sense It's a little bit of a gamble do as much as you possibly can and then kind of see what happens

[00:08:52] Tony Chopp: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Assuming, assuming though the, the contingency is. The, the Merchant Center offers, we've seen all sorts of funky things happen, but the Merchant Center offers, the easiest way to think about it is whatever you're saying, if you're saying 20 percent off as a, for example, that 20 percent off has to be represented on the checkout page.

So price has to be listed as a hundred dollars and then there has to be a second sale price listed as 80 in that scenario. And if those two things aren't, aren't in that, configured in that way, you won't get a Merchant Center offer approved. So there's some work that you can do ahead of time thinking about how the offer is going to be represented on the checkout page, which there's a bunch of different ways that that could happen.

But that that's the pre work to do is to think about. Be clear about how, how it's actually represented at checkup.

[00:09:43] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. Yeah. And that plays into the larger theme, of course, which is make sure your offers as visible as possible, wherever it can possibly be visible. So let's let's roll it into the second point. Cause I think that one, the first one is fairly straightforward which is feeds and note here is suggest daily monitoring.

So unpack that for us. Like what how does our approach to this change or rather, I mean, kind of, what are we talking about here as it relates to holiday?

[00:10:07] Tony Chopp: Yeah. So for anybody that's had any exposure to Google Merchant Center one of the things that you will be familiar with is how frequently products can be disapproved without a lot of warning or context or sometimes often in fact erroneously. So the, the whole approval process.

process in Google Merchant Center is driven by crawling, website crawling. And there's a multitude of different things that they're checking for. So one of the things that we see semi regularly is an error called mismatched price. So what that's saying is that there's. A different price that's showing up on the PDP on the, on the landing page for the product versus what's in the data feed.

So now the reason I, that we're suggesting daily monitoring is because we, we know that this system at this point requires a fair amount of human intervention to keep it on the rails. And it's an easy place to not be looking, right, to go like, Oh, what I'm, I'm in Google ads. I'm doing all my work in Google ads.

It's easy to miss. that you need to go over to Google Merchant Center and look at the approval status of your products. Technically, you could see it in Google Ads as well. But for our buyers, for our teams, we build the habit of daily checks into Google Merchant Center for the key holiday period. Similar to how we do our, our one map, our daily notes, where we're, we're looking at our accounts each day and understanding where we're at, where we're at against our target.

This is the same exercise that I would recommend to anybody that's running Google Ads in the holiday. Go get your Google Merchant Center account loaded up both Market and Chrome. Look at it every morning. Don't be surprised to see unexpected changes or potential disapprovals. And sometimes these things are valid, and sometimes they're not.

They're a miscommunication between what the crawler is looking for and what you're trying to present.

[00:12:15] Richard Gaffin: So what's the I have a couple questions here, but the first one will be, so what's the process or let's say that somebody has gotten disapproved erroneously. What's the fix there?

[00:12:25] Tony Chopp: Boy, that's a big question, Richard.

[00:12:27] Richard Gaffin: I'm sure it is. so if

the type of issue that you could stumble into is it being erroneous or not erroneous, even an issue because it's such a difficult process to get it approved again, or what are things you can do?

[00:12:40] Tony Chopp: so, Google Merchant Center, okay, so here's the first thing. First, Google Merchant Center has a separate help system than Google Ads. So if you're going into in Google Ads and it goes request support there's a similar functionality in Google Merchant Center to request support, but it goes, it goes to a different team.

It goes directly to the Google Merchant Center team. Now how helpful that squad is in resolving. Whatever issue arises is debatable. And what I think this is a really broad category of like potential disapprovals, but I'll give you one. I'll give you one example of that. Something that we see commonly that is worth investigating and interrogating and making sure you understand what's going on.

So Google merchant center, by the way, there's a whole nother layer to this, to this idea because Google merchant centers in the process of transitioning to an updated version of the platform updated to the extent where they're renaming it, Google merchant center next which is it's Same idea, but it's pretty different.

Anyway, contained within Google Merchant Center is a number of what they're called, what they call automatic improvements. Okay. It's under the settings menu and under automatic improvements. And so there's automatic improvements for things like price and availability and disapproved images. And these automatic improvements, while they are the oftentimes useful, they are actually not infrequently cause more trouble than they're worth.

And so one of the first things that we do when we're troubleshooting any sort of Google Merchant Center issue is we'll start turning, we'll start making sure these automatic improvements are turned off. Okay. Because it removes one layer of complexity from the troubleshooting process. And the way that, the way that information flows it starts with information on your website in Shopify, for example, it comes out of Shopify and it may go through some third party tool like a Go Data Feed or a Feedonomics for some data manipulation there.

Then it goes over into Google Merchant Center, that feed ends up over there and there's another set of data transformations that can happen there, like feed rules. And then the very last piece of that sequence is this automatic improvement thing. So part of the challenge with troubleshooting disapprovals or things not working correctly in Google merchant centers, you have to identify where in this sequence of systems, the errors actually coming from.

And so the automatic improvements being the very last thing in the list. Is a good place to check off the list and say, well, we know it's not this that's causing whatever the 

place. 

[00:15:33] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. And then also, I think, like, just to sort of give a little added context around this the merchant center, sorry, rather the, the merchant feed is the thing that feeds the Google shopping. Add is not

And that's, and at least our stance for a while, anyway, it's been that the Google shopping ad is some of the most important real estate on Google search. And so it's sort of the connection here then, of course, is that, look, if your feed is sort of firing improperly, let's say, then that basically like kind of cripples your ability to show ads in the most important place that you could possibly show them, which is why this is so fundamentally important.

[00:16:12] Tony Chopp: Yeah, that's right. And like data feeds are like the probably maybe one of the least sexiest portions of digital advertising. However they are, they're critically important. So whether we're talking about a data feed, that's going into Google Merchant Center and and then feeding shopping ads.

Or whether we're talking about a data feed that's going into Metis Commerce Manager and feeding catalog based ads like DABAs or TPAs. Regardless of the ad platform, regardless of the media platform, catalog driven advertising is really important. And it's all built on the health of your data feed. A

bunch of different ways to do it, and there's a lot of different, there's a lot of different ways that it can go wrong.

So we, we have a service that we, that we're offering now called FeedMap, which is basically go in there and do all the dirty work for everybody and make sure that it, make sure that it is articulated clearly from start to finish. So start being, data's in the store, finish. Being there's ad ad units showing on the various media platforms.

But if you're going to go, another thing that you, that you can and can and should do today, no reason to not do it today is draw, draw it out for yourself. Okay. Here's my Shopify store. Where does my data go from there? How does it get from Shopify into commerce manager? How does it get from Shopify into Merchant center.

And what, what you'll likely find is that there's a bunch of different weirdly wired connections. So for example, the the Facebook sales channel on in Shopify will automatically connect to commerce manager, right? So you can send a product feed that way. So you might be making your, your product feed connection for commerce manager one way that you might be making it with a different tool to get to Google merchant center.

Richard, you would be, maybe not surprised, but you'd be Appropriately startled by some of the rat's nests that we have encountered, we sort of go poking around and what the wiring looks like under the scenes. So go, so go do that today. Like how, if you're using an agency partner. How do my, how does my data get from Shopify into Google Merchant Center?

How does it get from Shopify into et cetera, et cetera.

[00:18:38] Richard Gaffin: That totally makes sense. I would say, yeah, I've heard enough horror stories about Merchant Center in general to totally believe that that's the type of thing that could happen. But when it comes to,

[00:18:48] Tony Chopp: Another thing about, another thing about merchant centers of, of all the media platforms that have a quote unquote merchant center or a home for product data. I would say that Google's is the most stringent on the, the approval process, what, and what they check, what they check, how, how much, how much they check and how frequently they'll disapprove things.

So, and I think it's probably built on the, built on top of the fact that the whole, the whole system is just a giant crawling mechanism. So they kind of, yeah, that's what they do.

[00:19:24] Richard Gaffin: sense. So I was going to say, this is actually a good pivot point for our next point, which is about conversion tracking, as long as we're talking about clarity of data. So this is something we talked about a little bit. In the, our paid social conversation which is the performing an audit for enhanced conversions, or thinking about how your conversions are being reported and whether or not that's trustworthy.

So talk to us a little bit about how that applies to, to paid search.

[00:19:46] Tony Chopp: Yeah. So enhanced conversions. I think the easiest way to think about it is enhanced conversions is similar to CAPI on meta in the sense that they are both mechanisms by which conversion tracking is supported without cookies. Okay, so cookies are tracking. I guess they're going to stay around now. So, that's okay because this is, it's.

Both of these systems serve to enrich the conversion tracking pipelines. Okay, so Cappy does it without a cookie through matching of various potential fields like email phone number. First and last name. It's all hashed and encrypted. It's just not based on a cookie. So, Enhanced conversions is the Google cousin to Cappy and there's a number of different ways to configure it.

It's not, the configuration isn't quite as seamless as it is on the meta side with the, the Shopify integration, at least. But it's really important. It's important to, for the quality of the conversion data, it's the exact same thing as the conversation that we had last week or two weeks ago, whatever it was around meta that the whole, the whole premise of CTCs media buying philosophy is get really smart about the unit economics of what we're selling use that to be smart about how we're bidding in platform and then rely on the conversion data to feed back into the algorithm.

So that's it. The, the enhance, the easiest way to think about it's enhanced conversions is the cousin of capi. And, and I'm sure everybody knows how important CAPI is, so the, you, the Google piece of this is, is just as important

[00:21:40] Richard Gaffin: So for those of us who don't know, is this a simple matter of like, is enhanced conversions flipped on or off, or is there something else sort of involved in,

[00:21:49] Tony Chopp: there. So there is an automatic configuration button but I would say. that it works maybe 20 percent of the time. Um, so, the way that we've gotten it to work more consistently is by using the CSS selector function. Which allows us to feed from the checkout process, allows us to feed those data attributes into the Google ads platform.

So, and we can choose email and phone number and basically any of the attributes that are collected at checkout, you can then go pass them over to the Google ads platform. So your mileage may vary with the automatic configuration. But it's worth the effort to get, to get it dialed in for sure. And if you have trouble with it you can call us, we'll sort you out.

Or you can contact your Google partner and they should be able to point you in the right direction as well.

[00:22:47] Richard Gaffin: Okay. So let's let's keep rolling along then to our, to our fourth point here, which is add AI. Check it out. So what what exactly is add AI here? And and how does this play a role

the ramp up to holiday?

[00:22:58] Tony Chopp: So at, at AI is a, is a, is a product by a company called Revim. And I don't think I've ever been more excited about anything in the, Google ads universe and maybe ever it's a really fascinating piece of technology. So they integrate data from the Google ads platform itself. They also integrate data from Google search console.

And it's a really simple premise. If you could picture a Google search result and you picture your, your brand and in some cases, You'll, if you're running brand search, let's we'll use APL. For example, one of our clients is shoe brand. You run a, you run a brand campaign. You run ads for APL, or if people search for athletic propulsion labs, you show an ad up there, right?

Well, in some cases your ad exists and right below that ad is the organic unpaid listing. So, add an ad AI language. They would call that a cannibalistic ad. And the premise is that when no competitors are present, and that situation exists where there's paid ad and an ad for the brand, an organic ad below that we don't actually have to buy that placement.

So the ad AI platform allows us to control dynamically in real time, almost real time, whether or not we show that ad based on the competitive landscape. And this tool is going to be. It's been really important to us for this year, but it's going to be extra important for the holiday as the competition increases for for the limited real estate on the search results page.

But we're seeing some really, really incredible results from using this tool. The output of it is 10

X higher returns on our brand app on our brand investment. Yeah. It's been, it's been really profound. Now there's a, there's a little side note here. We've had it deployed with one of our clients for the last three or four months. Pretty large brand and pretty significant. Advertising on brand.

And we have incrementality that helps us understand how much of that we want to capture. And we have good targets to go along with it. So, but we saw something really fascinating with the add AI tool. Over Prime Day, leading up to Prime Day. So we saw the Ad AI tool was sort of operating at kind of a status quo.

And it was it was basically about half of the volume of our brand search was flowing through Ad AI at 10X lower CPC, really good. All of a sudden, about two or three weeks leading up to Prime Day, we saw the Ad AI tool taking less and less of an effect. as Amazon was increasing their competitive bidding on this brand's terms.

All the way down to the actual prime day dates, the two days the sale ran. The Ad AI tool took no action whatsoever, which means that the landscape became so competitive during those two moments because of, because of Amazon's, Amazon's presence that this tool was not able to, there's no situations throughout the U.

1. where there was cannibalistic brand advertising. So having this sort of resource available to effectively, I think the best way to say it is spend the right amount on brand at the highest potential possible incremental return. It should be a core part of your holiday strategy. It certainly is for, for all the clients that we work with.

Yeah, it's,

[00:26:46] Richard Gaffin: it's a button you switch on to eliminate wasted spend more or less, which is, yeah, it's a hell of a tool. So is it that there's, there's like, so maybe it sort of begs the question, which is to say that like, as competition ramps up into the holiday period, The, the effectiveness or usefulness of that AI goes down in the sense of it's going to be competed against more and more and more, I guess that's no reason not to turn it on, but I guess my question is, is there like a cost associated with it that wouldn't, is there some risk analysis to do there?

I guess.

[00:27:19] Tony Chopp: it's probably the coolest. Not only is it a really cool tool, it's got a really cool pricing model. So basically they charge up what they call a percent of reclaimed media. So on the, on, in our example of the two days, it didn't, It didn't take any action as a result of prime day, they didn't also didn't earn.

There was no fee for that period. So their, their pricing model, it's really great product. I I'm, I'm stoked on it. The way they do the pricing makes a lot of sense. And they, they basically say, they basically say, Hey, listen, we said we saved you X amount on this ad buy that you didn't have to make essentially.

And we take a piece of it. So if it, if it has a big impact, then they earn more, they earn more as a result. If it has no impact, they earn nothing.

[00:28:08] Richard Gaffin: So All

[00:28:09] Tony Chopp: We've been, we've been working with way at this point, we have it deployed across like 75 percent of our portfolio. And our goal is to have it deployed a hundred percent of our portfolio before before the end of September.

So. 

[00:28:22] Richard Gaffin: That's awesome. Well, at AI, check it out. I mean, it sounds like it's sort of a win win. There's no reason not to, particularly as a go to through season where volume gets higher. So, okay, let's roll into our last two points here. Number five and six and five will of course be no surprise to anybody because we always talk about, and that's incrementality particularly during peak moments.

And so let's talk a little bit about how we're measuring or thinking about incrementality on, on search in this period.

[00:28:48] Tony Chopp: Yeah, I mean, what we're really excited about is getting some incrementality reads on the search channel during a peak moment because the channel is so intent driven. Some of the best incrementality reads that we've seen from the Google channel have been for brands that are gift oriented during gifting moments.

So we had one really compelling incrementality study from a brand that had They have a gifting product that's relevant during Mother's Day and Father's Day. And we saw a really strong ink mentality read from Google's non branded search product. During this period so the recommendation that we're, we're making to our clients is to get a read on Google's incrementality, specifically during peak moments.

So, different than where we think of, like, obviously we use meta to push awareness during seasonal periods. But we, we believe in what we're going to go out and test. And what we're looking forward to testing this year with our clients is. That we're going to get significantly different incrementality reads on the Google channel during this point of the year.

So, now, I'm going to, Back up a step and talk about how we're doing incrementality testing on Google in general so that everybody's clear. So first of all CTC thinks about Google through the lens of two cohorts, branded traffic versus non branded, technically three, branded traffic, non branded traffic, and what we call acquisition traffic.

So Let's define each of those branded traffic. Pretty simple. Somebody searches for your brand name. Non branded traffic. Somebody searches for something that's not your brand name. Those two categories, brand and non brand, both apply to you. Ads and traffic that come from the search results page.

The other category acquisition is reserved for campaigns that are being run on, we use YouTube as a, for example but it also applies to display network or ad products like demand generation that run ad units on display network and YouTube, et cetera, et cetera. So, So, you got brand and non brand.

And then you have the ads that show up on the search page and then everything else. So CDC's Google ads accounts are all structured in this way, where the number one principle is a campaign is named brand or not, or acquisition. If we're on YouTube display discovery demand, what we're finding and then, and then our incrementality tests are the place we always almost always start with incrementality on Google ads.

Is to interrogate the incrementality of the brand cohort. It always represents a, most of the time it represents a decent chunk of spend. And what we really want to get to is what is the incremental contribution of brand. We have some benchmarks and baselines that we use anywhere between 20 and 30 percent as a, as a benchmark.

And then the second question is what is the incrementality of non print? Okay. So if you're going to do if you're going to do, a couple key things before the holidays for your Google ads account, aside from. Making sure your feeds are clean. I've been arguing, complaining about for years. It would be to structure your Google ads account in this way.

We have brand and non branded acquisition campaigns and to get an incrementality read now for the categories of brand and non brand specifically, and then if you're going to be like us, you're going to do another read during the holiday because you really want, we really want to understand the difference.

With this super high intent traffic source during this holiday period. And

we anticipate is that we're going to have higher incrementality for both brand and non brand in this period. And it's going to cause us to become it's going to cause us to behave in a way where we're more competitive.

We fight for more of that real estate. And we accept higher customer acquisition costs during these peak moments as a result.

[00:33:08] Richard Gaffin: So real quick, to be clear, when the first point that you made, which is about splitting your campaigns into branded, non branded and acquisition, what we're talking about here is is about naming convention, right? Because I would assume like, you have to, you're doing that. Anyway, you're setting those 3 types of campaigns up, but this is about naming them in a certain way.

So that actually doing the incrementality study. Becomes easier on the back end. Is that correct?

[00:33:30] Tony Chopp: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I suppose there's other ways that you could do it. You could use, like, there's like labels in Google Ads accounts. You could use you could use, I mean, you could have like a magical, like, secret key that only you know about, like, somewhere but we use naming convention as a way to orient around this way of thinking and, and really, if you think about it what we want, what CTC wants from, what we want as a result of using this naming convention is a really clear way to communicate.

What this campaign is what it's about and this connects back to One of the things that if you ever talk to me, you're gonna hear me say the same thing I'm gonna say CTC gets really clear about the unit economics of what we're selling so that we can get really clear around our targets, right? So When we have a campaign and we name it non brand and we've done all the work to make sure it's non brand, which is not necessarily an easy thing to do in the Google ads platform.

But when we've done all of that work, then it becomes really clear for us to communicate with our partners and growth strategy or with our client. And we can start to say things like, hey, we we didn't, we ran an incrementality study on this non brand cohort. We found. It was pretty close to one to one incremental, and all that means is that whatever conversion metrics are reported in the platform, like if it's a three to one ROAS or a 50 CAC, we're confident that that's quote unquote representative of the truth.

And so if we have a good incrementality, good naming convention. Then our, and our growth strategy team is telling us like, Hey, we need a 50 CAC. What that leads to is the Google buyer, when they see a 45 CAC in that campaign. Scale it. 60 CAC, don't scale it. So the whole, the, it sounds really simple when you say like, it's the naming conventions, but what the naming conventions represent is a system of communication that, that we use throughout our organization.

[00:35:52] Richard Gaffin: no, no, no. I mean, it's certainly our naming conventions have been critical for us across everything, both meta and, and then particularly to like my understanding of like the merchant center, particularly your product feed is the naming convention there. This is a whole other conversation, but.

That's, that's an entire kettle of fish, but like naming things correctly is fundamentally important to understanding what it is you're doing. Let's quickly, let's jump into our last point here we have to jump off, but let's talk about search demand. So this is really maybe specific to the various peaks that are going to occur throughout this upcoming season, but talk to me a little bit about what you mean or what you're thinking about when, when you talk about search demand over this period.

[00:36:31] Tony Chopp: Just that the just this, this scale with which this particular channel changes during the holiday. So. It's not the same as, it doesn't behave the same as social. So there, there is I, I think an easy way to think about it is you need to dig a little bit deeper, but if you want to just use a rough estimate, the search demand for your brand and for your category is likely to increase somewhere between five and 10 X during the peak buying.

Okay, now you can evaluate that a little bit more critically. If you use tools like Google Trends, which is the front end of the, the Google Keyword Tool. There's also the Keyword Planner in the Google Ads Platform, which is really helpful to understand, like, what sort of volume increase you can expect.

And then there's a third tool that we like to use on the Google team called Keywords Everywhere, which is a Chrome it solution. Chrome extension, which gives us another read on keyword search query volume. So, and what, what we what we're always in the game of playing is how much of this volume can we capture at our at our efficiency target?

I have a little bit of a, So this is kind of the anecdotal story about this particular game. We saw the same brand that I was talking about earlier that we saw a really great performance from non brand search during the Mother's Day and Father's Day period. The results look so strong for Mother's Day that and in the demand curve is so sharp.

So the, the demand curve like went to almost 20 X by Mother's Day itself. What we actually did for Father's Day. So Mother's Day, when we learned about the demand curve we did for Father's Day is we use something called the seasonality adjustment in Google ads, which is a way to feed the algorithm a bit of extra contextual information.

And what we were able to do is tell the algorithm, Hey, we expect the conversion rate to triple, possibly quadruple on this day. And what that allowed us to do is spend significantly more dollars at our target on that one day. So one thing for anybody that's run media on meta and Google ads. One thing they will know is that Meta is fast at pushing media dollars through.

Google's more like steering the Titanic.

[00:39:12] Richard Gaffin: Hmm.

[00:39:13] Tony Chopp: This is slower, right? So this seasonality adjustment can be a really sharp tool to use, especially if you pair it with, Some good solid research ahead of time around what the, what you anticipate the demand curve to look like. Is it going to be 2x? Is it going to be 5x?

Is it going to be 10x? If you're approaching a demand curve that looks like 5 or 10x, Without using the seasonality adjustment, it's very likely that you'll leave good volume on the table because the Google ads platform is not fast enough to respond to it.

[00:39:49] Richard Gaffin: Interesting. One thing you mentioned here too, is that it's the best time to get contribution margin from Google. maybe unpack that a little bit. I it sort of makes a certain amount of sense, but yeah, go for it.

[00:40:00] Tony Chopp: Yeah, I think, I think it's just, it's more of this idea about the whole channel is intent driven. And there are I, I can't think of any project that we, that we run that doesn't see the highest contribution margin. From the Google channel all like throughout the year on this Black Friday, Cyber Monday period.

So it's just, it's just a function of what search is. It's people going and looking to buy something paired with this cultural moment that happens every year. Of going and buying a bunch of gifts. So the, I think the takeaway here is for most of our advertisers for a lot of our advertisers, it's sort of a 75, 25 split majority of whether that's energy or resources or budget or whatever else it is, meta to Google.

That's not true across the board, but as a general principle, this moment in time around black Friday and cyber Monday. If you behave the same way you do all year long, you're very likely to leave a meaningful opportunity on the table.

[00:41:11] Richard Gaffin: That makes a ton of sense. So let's I want to kind of like summarize real quick because we're, we're almost at the time here, but I think like a couple of themes have popped out as we've been talking about. Talk to you. Right. And so one is that like the Google ads platform feels like it's sort of held together with like strings and duct tape or whatever, you know what I mean?

It's like, there's a lot of opportunity for communication to break down within it. So one thing that's critical is just making sure that prior to the season, everything's in place. And then you have sort of maybe the protocols in order to, let's say, monitor the merchant feed as you go into it. But then the other element of it too, is like you use the analogy of the Titanic, which you have to steer. Early to move out of the way of the iceberg. So you don't stink, stink, sink. And so I think those two analogies are kind of interesting when, when we frame up, like in summary, how do we need to think about this one is like keeping your data clean and the other is to. Essentially be prepared to anticipate peaks before you actually hit them. That seemed fair. Is there

you'd add to that?

[00:42:12] Tony Chopp: Well, the only thing I would add is that, that last thing I mentioned, that seasonality adjustment is is, it's like rocket fuel for the Google Ads algorithm. I've never seen anything quite like it. So with You know, handle with care because it will make the Google ads platform spend more like meta.

But, but generally speaking, like, I agree with everything that you're saying that the metaphor is true. Facebook is like the fast metas, like the fast little go kart Google ads is like the Titanic. So, doing the annoying, maybe if you left this conversation, if you left this, you listened to this whole thing.

And you went to your agency and you said, how does my product data get from Shopify to Google marketing center? And you, you understood deeply how that system works. You're going to be better prepared to deal with potential curveballs. If you investigated at AI and got a handle on your brand spend and paired that with incrementality, you'd have a better idea about how to get your targets set ahead of time.

If you do the research on the keywords that you think you're going after versus the using the keyword planner and Google Trends and possibly keywords everywhere, you're going to have a better idea of what the peaks and Of what the demand curve is going to look like. And if you get the ship pointed in the right direction, sooner rather than later, knowing that the, knowing that this channel is almost entirely intent driven, you're going to put yourself in a really strong position to capture what this particular channel has to offer in this particular moment in time.

[00:43:51] Richard Gaffin: Love it. folks. Well, that'll do it for us for this week. And of course, if you want somebody to do that boring, unsexy engine room work for you, we of course, always available. Tony's there. He's waiting for your call. So just go comment, thread, co. com, click the hire us button. Talk to us. We would love to start that conversation. All right, Tony. Thank you again, everybody. Thank you for listening. We'll see you all next week.