Chris Burres·00:12

Hi and welcome to the SEO podcast.  Unknown secrets of internet marketing. My name is Chris is one of the owners of EWR digital. 

Matt Bertram·00:19

And my name is Matt Bertram. I’m the head strategist at EWR digital. 

Chris Burres·00:23

Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast.  We’re glad that you have joined us again.  I’ve got notes here and I should probably pull them up.  Oh, we have a sponsor.  We’re going to read the sponsor.  This is you.  If you’ve been listening last couple of podcasts, you’ve been hearing us talk about this sponsor.  So we’re pretty excited.  And here we go. What can AWT make for your website?  Scan your website for a hundred plus common SEO issues that might be hurting its performance and search engines.  Browse your websites, backlink data, and get actionable insights from your inbound and outbound link profiles.  Learn what keywords your website ranks for and compare how you stack up against competitors in the SERPs.  That’s the search engine results pages. 

Chris Burres·01:11

A search engine journal wrote about AWT.  It’s hard to believe that something as useful as this free H refs webmaster tools is a killer service for free.  You just go to a H refs.com forward slash a w T. And that’s A H R E F S.com forward slash A W T to check out that tool. 

Matt Bertram·01:37

So for those watching, we should have some, like some kind of graphic zoom in or something like that because you actually started off. And I was like, Hey, dress, it’s a dress AWT.  Not everybody like, thinks about it like that, but AWU T which stands for something that’s elongated, but basically it’s their free component of their service.  The free component has a bunch of features, the paid components.  Fantastic.  It’s a great tool for a lot of digital marketers out there.  It is something that we use.  It’s part of our workflow.  We are very happy to be a sponsored by them and ready to get into this podcast. 

Chris Burres·02:19

Absolutely.  All right.  So Matt and I, we are broadcasting live from Houston, Texas.  And before we jump into this article, I just want to ask one brief thing.  Could you go to EWI digital.com forward slash review?  That’ll pull up our GMB page.  Is it, did I say it right?  You had to Google my business page and leave us a review.  Hopefully you make that review.  It is so hard to do that on a, 

Matt Bertram·02:48

I actually, this is what we’re gonna do.  We’re gonna take this to the next level.  We’re doing a lot about our well, YouTube, you know, our YouTube, like we have actually two channels.  So we gotta like, you know, get all that cleaned up and like getting real serious about this.  But I want to get where the sounds like where you have a sound pad and I have a sound pad and we can like, you know, like add some flair to this, this podcast, 

Chris Burres·03:17

Audio flare. 

Matt Bertram·03:18

Is we used to have a lot of fun.  I mean, I actually saw this podcast recently where they had the camera looking like where they both looked like they were looking at each other and they pulled up like a similar background, but you could tell, like, it wasn’t like, it didn’t line up perfectly.  It actually looked like they were in the same place at the same time. 

Chris Burres·03:43

So we might have to do that all, although. 

Matt Bertram·03:46

Our office, we’re getting a ton of new office furniture and it’s taken forever.  Okay.  Yeah.  The supply chain issues.  And this month we’ll be up and running.  We have a full podcast studio that really excited about to get back in there and get gone with it.  Yeah. 

Chris Burres·04:07

Hopefully there’ll beer over there.  And then I’ll be there on every Thursday. 

Matt Bertram·04:11

There, there will beer and food.  And that like the web 2.0 companies offer, I think, you know, the web three companies are going to one up the website.  Like I saw this thing on actually Facebook when it started and like how Facebook used to be when like mark Zuckerberg was working there and like, it was pretty cool.  Like they did a lot of stuff that a lot of companies are pretty commonplace now and PRetty cool.  I know people knock them, but I think, you know, I mean, look what he’s done.  So Metta and did you know that Twitter?  So he Jack Dorsey built out a Twitter.  Did you see that? 

Chris Burres·04:47

Yeah, I did see that he was replaced by the previous CFO or CTO. 

Matt Bertram·04:51

Well, he went all in with square and then he changed the name of square to block long name. 

Chris Burres·04:58

Yeah.  Interesting. 

Matt Bertram·04:59

Yeah.  You can’t deny it.  It’s a big deal.  Yeah. 

Chris Burres·05:01

Yeah.  It’s definitely a big deal.  All right.  Well, let’s jump into this article.  This article is for data driven insights to optimize your smart shopping campaigns.  We got this off of search engine journal, smart shopping campaigns and Google ads offer a number of benefits that advertisers find attractive, particularly those trying to manage product promotions at scale.  That can be a challenge.  It’s a format that puts Google’s machine learning to work for you.  I hear a little feedback on your side.  I think using your product feed to display ads across the Google search network, Google display network, YouTube Gmail, and more having Michelle.  I like the highlight.  I couldn’t say. 

Matt Bertram·05:47

So.  So the feedback just so you know is my caffeinated drink.  That was bubbling near my very powerful microphone. 

Chris Burres·05:55

Oh, interesting.  That is, That is not the technical answer.  If I’m honest, having machinery machine learning do the heavy lifting has potential downsides, smart shopping can be something of a data black box for marketers.  Once you better understand the inputs and outputs of that black box, you can tinker with the input more effectively in this article, you’re going to learn how to do just that.  So smart shopping is really powerful.  Yeah.  You want her to add something? 

Matt Bertram·06:29

Well, so, you know, for those of you that are logging into Google or Facebook, you know, that they’re constantly changing things and they’ve really started to change the format of what kind of ads you can do.  You can’t do a lot more static ads.  They want you to basically provide a bunch of different ad components and they’re going to find the best combination.  And then there’s like, considerations.  Like your brand logo might need to be on the image because it might not show up because the text might not all your texts might not have that and the different kind of formats, but we’ve been doing a lot of campaigns. 

Matt Bertram·07:03

Like I have a client right now and it’s like 48 stores and we’re running in each geographic area and it’s like, well, each, oh, I’m hearing the feedback now.  Sorry.  So you hear the feedback. 

Chris Burres·07:18

Yeah.  I felt it went away with the removal of the can.  But again, that surprised me significantly. 

Matt Bertram·07:26

Maybe I’m getting other feedback, but definitely if you’re going to run things on a campaign level versus a regional level versus a national level, and you’re going to track stuff, you know, making sure that each say store location gets the right amount of ad dollars.  You can’t leverage the machine learning as well.  Right.  Because you don’t have as much data to put into it.  Right.  And so there’s a lot of things to consider spin wise, how much reach or, you know, I mean, how many people are going to see it to determine how to best use the machine learning.  So there are certain times when you want to use it. 

Matt Bertram·08:06

And then there are certain times when, you know, maybe a custom audience or a look like audience or really you want to just maybe focus a little bit better on targeting.  But again, it’s like another tool in the tool belt.  And so, but the machine learning is awesome and powerful.  If you spend enough money and you kind of spend at the certain thresholds, we brought a cost per store visit when we started with the client about eight months ago, from over $60 to under $5, Chris. 

Chris Burres·08:40

Wow. 

Matt Bertram·08:41

And that’s a lot that, I mean, there was other things that were doing, but also machine learning had certainly a big part of that.  So. 

Chris Burres·08:50

Let it do it, let it do its job. Or before we jumped into this and I’m getting a little bit of feedback still, but do you have another window open or something?  Let’s talk about different types of data.  So the three things, three types of data talking about in this article is Google data.  And that’s data.  You get back from Google, that’s conversions, it’s costs, it’s impressions, and then company data.  And this is going to be more specific to your company, the particular products, that’s the KPIs you want to focus on it’s insights, such as margins, how much stock do you have?  Because obviously you don’t want to run ads on something that you’re going out of stock.  And then of course, all sorts of customer data.  And then finally, you’ve got competition data. 

Chris Burres·09:33

This is data about what is happening in your market.  You know, a good example of this would be like SEM rush data. That that type of data is the customer data also age refs data.  And then I don’t know if that’s included in the free AWC, but on, at least on the paid version, you absolutely have amazing competitive data about, again, your competition that felt redundant for examples on how turning data to insights can give you a headstart.  And again, this is with your smart shopping campaigns, number one, and they call this P O H S.  So we’re familiar with Roaz right, R O H S return on ad spend.  And they created something called P as or PO as a, which is profit on ad spend. 

Chris Burres·10:21

You could also call this ROI like that’s what you could call this more and more advertisers are now using POAs.  Again, profit on ad spend understand profit by combining Google data.  That’s the cost data of the ads with company data. That’s the margins data.  And they went into some particular details about a situation where really the ROI, the focus on the ROI is significantly better than the focus on the row as, and in their example, they’ve got really, it’s a, it’s a name brand purse.  And then they’ve got a purse that they actually manufacturer.  Well, the margins are typically much higher when it’s your own brand versus a brand that you’re just selling. 

Chris Burres·11:08

And the reality in this example is that from a return on ad spend, you, they ended up with about a 755%.  Roaz again, return on ad spend for the branded bag for the custom bag or for the in-house bag.  They only had a 400% return on ad spend.  And remember, return on ad spend is how much did I spend and how much revenue did I generate?  And then when you broke out out POAs again, profit on ad spin.  The branded PAG only had like a 69% and the actual custom bag that the in-house bag had 137. 

Chris Burres·11:48

So you can imagine, you may be spending, you may not be generating as much, which could potentially give you a bad Roaz, but if you’re making a lot more profit, then you’re going to go with the ROI or the POAs.  Hopefully I explained that, well, you’re muted.  I think it happened to me too earlier. 

Matt Bertram·12:11

No, I did it because you said the feedback.  Right.  But no, I, I pulled it up a little bonus for those that are watching and, you know, by the way, I know people that are listening right to us, like the majority of people listen to us, but you know what I’ve started to do, Chris, like, I know this is a total tangent, but I paid for like the YouTube, whatever, where there’s no ads.  And then I can do everything on YouTube.  I can do videos, music, movies, whatever.  And so I’ve started listening to podcasts too.  And then, you know, someone could pull up a little diagram like this and you can see it, and then you can go back to doing whatever you’re doing.  So just saying, yeah. 

Chris Burres·12:52

And in my case, I have so many tabs that are open.  I have to like go find the tab where the YouTube video is playing and going.  Oh, okay.  I see that row as POAs.  Okay.  I get it. 

Matt Bertram·13:03

You told me, you taught me about this, the little down arrow that you can just scroll all the way down and see what it is like.  That is a game changer.  And I’ve also started at, well, I have three screens.  Well, I have four screens, but I have a screen up top now that I like pin stuff to.  So I don’t get lost as much.  So that’s been helpful, 

Chris Burres·13:22

But yeah. 

Matt Bertram·13:23

Back to the article. 

Chris Burres·13:27

Yeah.  So it just makes sense.  And really we’ve been talking about this forever and a day, which is, you know, we like to ask the question, what do you sell the most and what makes you the most profit, right?  Because they may be very different and you don’t want to lose the cells or the revenue generated from the thing you sell the most.  But you do want to have a significant focus on the things that actually make you the most money.  And we’ve been saying that, you know, since the Dawn of this podcast, which is, you know, a long time, all right, number two, cross sell and upsell insights. 

Matt Bertram·14:02

Chris, I w we got a, were going to have to make a, like compilation video for you.  Like we did the 10 year anniversary.  And, you know, I want to see how well you’ve aged, like wine.  I’m sure.  You. 

Matt Bertram·14:17

No. 

Matt Bertram·14:18

I think you probably look very similar to that.  How you looked, would you agree with that or disagree with your wife group?  That just, 

Chris Burres·14:25

I think it’s, I think it’s similar.  Yeah.  I it’s probably, 

Matt Bertram·14:28

Well, you still look like, I mean, like, I. 

Chris Burres·14:32

Mean like a 19 year old, I know. All right.  So advertising on products, like this is the, what are we talking about?  I got lost here, cross sell and upsell.  And. So when you’re talking about on product a, it is also possible that in addition to selling product a, you also sell product B or actually do not sell a product a at all, but only sell product C.  So you want to be able to track those ad campaigns from the point where you actually have the click through, into what actual revenue is created.  Right.  And we’re talking about ROI product C can have a very different margin than product a, so again, back to actual profit and the upsale to product B may also be interesting from a margin technical point of view. 

Chris Burres·15:28

And one of the things that we haven’t shared data is this article is sponsored by a ad chief.  And they’re really kind of promoting the value of seeing this specific data as it relates to smart shopping with ad chief. 

Matt Bertram·15:41

So what is your connection to add chief?  I mean, this is promotion on top of promotion And they got a good article.  Like we’re not hating on anything.  Like it’s a great article and we want to promote it.  We have no connection to add sheet. 

Chris Burres·15:58

Edgy.  Yeah.  They just have this good article.  And it’s good to be thinking about Google smart shopping and how you can manipulate that kind of black box experience that you have.  All right.  Number three, the effect of your price on rankings.  So it’s not surprising that how you price your product.  Certainly everybody’s aware of this in Amazon.  You can sort by price lowest to highest or highest to lowest.  And so what these guys did was focus and pull a bunch of data on, Hey, here’s a price, here’s a product, and we’re going to put it on Google and we’re going to use smart shopping.  And we’re going to price it between seven and 15% lower than the average price for that product. 

Chris Burres·16:42

And then seven to 1% lower than the average product.  And then right in the range of minus 1% to plus 1%, I’m just kind of defining these data points and then one to 7%, and then seven to 15%. And they collected data in all these categories.  You could imagine the difference in price would adjust how many clicks and there, Matt has the data on the screen for us, maybe zoom in on that.  And so as they adjust the price, the lower price gets a lot more clicks, right?  And a lot more impressions, and then ultimately a lot more clicks.  And what I found, which is interesting.  And again, this goes back to staying focused on ROI.  If you scroll to the next one, it isn’t exactly the same in terms of conversion rates. 

Chris Burres·17:27

So it’s possible that you might have a higher price, which would result in less impressions, but ultimately a higher conversion rate, or at least a conversion rate on products that ultimately give you a higher ROI.  So you really want to be breaking down this data on an ROI basis. 

Matt Bertram·17:50

So, Chris, this kind of reminds me almost back to like some business coaching that you were doing a while back.  Yeah, that was a lot.  I keep hearing this feedback, sorry, but it talks about, well, you know, at a certain price, you’re getting to a certain result.  And then if you raise your price by whatever it was, you want 15% of your prospects to say it’s too expensive, but you’re basically for the same amount of work or for less work, you’re getting paid the same amount.  Right.  And so this is, I think, a loose analogy to that of basically there’s like a sweet spot that you’re trying to find on how much you should be charging versus what you’re getting back in return.  Right.  Or, yeah, I don’t know. 

Matt Bertram·18:39

Maybe I butchered that pretty bad, but in my head it made sense. 

Chris Burres·18:42

No, I mean, there’s some really good points in that, right?  So it, I, I, I do like the concept and the numbers 30%, if 30% of your customers, aren’t saying no, because of price, you’re probably too inexpensive, right?  At some point you want to be kind of maximizing profitability so that you’ve got a profitable business.  And what that ultimately will mean is that some people are gonna say no, because the price is too high.  So that 30% is very interesting.  The other one, and I was trying to pull something up, which is, I think it’s typical that you can raise your price 30%.  And if you lose 50% of your customers, you’re still at the same profit margin. 

Chris Burres·19:24

I don’t remember exactly what it is and I’m not going to do it on the fly, but there’s a surprising ratio where you can raise your price a certain level and you actually have to lose a whole lot of customers to reduce your income.  And what you end up doing is the same income, less work and better customers. 

Matt Bertram·19:47

Yeah.  All I could think about was something called up public math, that I was watching a podcast and people wouldn’t be public.  But no, I, I just, I don’t know.  I think that this kind of highlights that you really need to be thinking about, not just two dimensionally, Hey, we’re going to spend this, we’re going to get this right.  There’s different factors at play.  I mean, we’re not even talking about the perception of your price.  Like sometimes if you price something to, oh, or two, I, people will associate with value, right?  Like different things that factor in when you’re making these kinds of determinations.  And I just love being able to look at data and reading into that to see like what it’s saying. 

Chris Burres·20:38

Yeah.  Yeah.  And our, and our fourth point here is really entirely about ad chiefs.  So it’s talking about the insights that the add chief could provide based on like keyword insights.  So based on the keywords, and you do get this data because it is Google ad, so that, you know, the actual keywords that are being used, you can understand the effect of the keywords on.  So to guide you, to adjust your ROAS, your return on spend return on ad, spend changes in your pricing proposition, the effects of improvement in your product scores, right?  So you want to be improving the product score.  So we will understand that customers like the product, the adjustment of the titles and the impact of newly added products on your rankings, right? 

Chris Burres·21:24

So other people adding progress products, how are those going to affect your rankings?  And ultimately, how is that going to affect your ROI? And I, and he had an actually a really good summary of this and it’s success factors for managing campaigns differently.  And we’ve been talking about this.  This is really almost at the, well, really at the enterprise level, step one, get clear on your business objectives.  Like we’ve talked about this, you know, ad nauseum, you know, I love the phrase, which is, if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re probably already there.  Right.  And if you don’t want to be where you are, then you’ve got to have a target for where you’re going.  What are your business objectives?  And make sure you get clear about those. 

Matt Bertram·22:07

I have absolutely never heard that phrase said that way. 

Chris Burres·22:10

Oh yeah. 

Matt Bertram·22:10

But I like it.  Right. 

Chris Burres·22:12

If you don’t know where you’re going, you’re probably already there.  Yeah.  So get clear on your business objectives.  Never just throw money against the wall and see if it sticks.  Make sure you’ve got, you know, I liked the phrase there’s test and measure.  I actually like measure and test, which means you gotta know what you’re going to measure before you start to, so before you even again, start throwing money at the wall.  No.  What is it that you’re going to be measuring so that you’re actually have a plan, understand that these tra these marketing decisions that you’re making in this case, like smart shopping, it transcends the marketing department. 

Chris Burres·22:54

And we’ve talked about this in probably the last five podcasts where we’re talking, Hey, this is the confluence of all the departments in your organization.  It’s Hey, you know, how much inventory do you have? It’s what pricing structure works the best.  It’s how do we reach out to the customers?  Where do we find them?  All of those have to work together.  It’s the it department.  And we did a whole podcast just from your article on speed, Matt.  Like all of these things have to work together well, in order for you to have a successful campaign, be open to experimentation and learning, and then not just taking directions.  Right. 

Chris Burres·23:30

And I know that with some of the campaigns you’re managing right now, there can be some challenges about like, Hey, we just want to do this.  And you’re like, , that may not be the right decision because of other factors.  And you’ve got to have still this holistic view, put everything into practice with the right software.  Of course, they’re going to mention that.  And we know that like, yes, software is incredibly important and it gives you amazing insights.  Make sure you go check out a w T H refs webmaster tools.  And I think that we have the link and that link is age refs.com forward slash a w T you have anything to summarize this? 

Matt Bertram·24:10

Well, I really do like this article because they added some true value and some true gems, as well as data to what they were talking about.  And it went in depth and it really outlined some stuff.  And I really love it when you read articles and you’re like getting something that you can take away from it.  And it’s not just bare bones or it’s like rehashed or something like that.  But I think a lot of the tips that they’re sharing are true words of wisdom that you should really consider.  And a lot of these things is likely just kind of figure out what you’re wanting to measure, man, I’m getting it back.  So knowing I thought this would fix, 

Chris Burres·24:54

It’s not too bad on our end.  I know you’re probably getting a, just try and ignore it. 

Matt Bertram·24:58

We’ll just see how hopefully when it like, you know, wraps it all together.  Hopefully it’s pretty good.  But no, I, I think there’s a lot of software out there that helps you get helpful insights.  And it certainly sounds like this tool does that, but really measuring, like you said, and then testing.  So you gotta know what your business objectives are.  You know, you gotta know what the campaign objectives are and you got to know how do we track this, where the data is clean.  Right?  And so getting the analytics set up is completely important.  What are the goals?  What are you trying to do?  How does it roll up into the bigger business situation?  These are all very important things. 

Matt Bertram·25:36

And to just sum all this up, I guess I would sum it up with a somewhat of a testimonial for you, Chris.  So we have a long-time podcast listener.  That’s been listening to. 

Chris Burres·25:50

Approximately 10 years. 

Matt Bertram·25:52

For 10 years.  And he’s been a client for going on.  I think four years, he’s an enterprise level client.  And he liked what were doing so much.  He was learning so much from our team.  He put in his official notice yesterday and he will be joining the team as one of our account managers starting in January. 

Chris Burres·26:18

Yes it’s, it’s pretty exciting.  I had lots of conversations with him over some good period of time.  And then when you kind of joined and took the helm, you know, you started having good conversations with him and had been working with them.  What’d you say like two years now or something, 

Matt Bertram·26:37

Or actually four years. 

Chris Burres·26:39

Wow.  On fast.  And what a great you’re.  One of the things I shared this with you, Matt, is when you’ve got a customer who’s great at marketing, right.  It’s harder to deliver, right?  Like it’s not harder for us.  Cause that’s what we do.  But you’re held to a standard that a lot of companies can’t survive.  And then when that same person who’s got great skills, it’s like, Hey yeah, I think I would like to join your team.  It says a lot about his understanding and the quality of work that’s being delivered to him and his team at that position, it was just a, a phenomenal result and so happy to have him joining the team. 

Matt Bertram·27:19

Yeah.  So I thought that was a good summary. 

Chris Burres·27:25

All right.  Well, this has been podcast number two, five hundred and twenty eight.  That’s pretty amazing.  Hopefully you guys enjoyed it.  If you did get some value out of this one, we’ve talked about, Hey, there’s, you know, some video elements to it.  Now go check it out on YouTube.  If you’re on YouTube, make sure you subscribe, make sure you hit that notification bell, smash it, do whatever you gotta do so that you can get notifications of when we launch our next podcast.  And please go to AWR, digital.co.com forward slash review.  And that’ll take you to the review site.  And we really appreciate all of you all until the next podcast.  My name is Chris Burris. 

Matt Bertram·28:07

My name is Matt Bertram. 

Chris Burres·28:09

Bye-bye for now.