If Google isn’t within your top 2 channels for new customer acquisition - 2024 should be the year you change that.

In this episode, I interview Matt Slaymaker on the latest and greatest from Google.

Here’s a look at what we cover:

• What are the best brands doing on Google that others aren’t?
• What are the keys to a better, more productive relationship with your agency?
• How has PMax evolved, and how can you fully leverage it?
• What about Demand Gen - Google’s newest campaign type? Spoiler alert: it’s not great... yet. But we see potential. 
• How should we think about AI with Google ads?

Transcript

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the eCommerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO OMG Commerce, and today we are laying the groundwork to have a very successful 2024 with Google Ads. Now, I'm a believer if Google Ads and the Google Ads ecosystem is not a top driver of new customers for your brand and profitable growth at that, then something is wrong. We still know a lot of D2C brands that get most of their new customers from Meta and Instagram, but we're also seeing a lot of brands that this combination of Google plus YouTube equals that or exceeds that. If that's not you, then you have work to do. Now, what are some of the trends happening on Google? Well, Google is competing on a lot of different fronts, right? They're competing with chat GPT on the generative AI side of things.

They're competing with meta on the best ad solutions. And how do we make it easier for advertisers to attract new customers at a profitable rate? They're competing with Amazon, right? So how can we get e-commerce search and e-commerce activity to start with, or at least touch Google at some point in that process? So we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about Performance Max and how it's evolved over the last couple of years and what to expect this year. We're going to talk about Demand Gen, the newest campaign type on Google. We're going to talk about Google and AI and what you need to know there. I've got on the show again for the fourth or fifth time, Matt Slaymaker, senior Google strategist and specialists here at OMG Commerce. We're going to break it down for you, talk about what the best brands do that the rest don't, and talk about the latest and greatest to help you crush it in 2024. So please enjoy my chat on Google Ads with Matt Slaymaker.

So I've got Matt Slaymaker here, AKA Slaymaker, the Playmaker, talking about Google Ads and what we can expect this year. How do we get the most from this channel, or better said this collection of channels that is the Google Ads ecosystem. It's likely your number two source of new customers or your number one source of new customers, but our belief is wherever it falls, it can be better, and that's what we're going to talk about. And so Matt, to kick things off, let's look, I want your perspective on what do the best brands do as it pertains to the Google Ads ecosystem that other brands do not do?

Matt:

Yeah, I work with a lot of brands, as you know, and I love all the brands that I work with, but some are definitely more successful than others, and it's a lot of times it's because of the things that they have control over themselves. So the things that come to mind for me, let's start with the brand owner and the marketing manager themselves. So first of all, as a brand owner, you have to have a very clear understanding of what your goals need to be and what you're telling your marketing agency that those goals should be. So that needs to come from things like your profit margin and also what's your goal in terms of profitability, is it more about scale? All that kind of stuff feeds into what we need to know. They also need to be great communicators of what those goals are, and they also need to very early on establish what their source of truth is going to be.

Very often we get to a point where we're three months down the road and the client will tell us, Hey, we don't trust Google Ads data when it comes to reporting. Facebook's telling me I made a million dollars. Google's telling me I made a million dollars, but I only made 1.2 million in total. So having some sort of source of truth so that we can know are we hitting goals or not? Are we successful or not? That kind of stuff is super important. The other thing I've also noticed is a lot of times brand owners are super busy. You're focusing on supply chain, branding, website stuff, marketing. That's a lot. The best brands that we work with oftentimes have a dedicated marketing point person that can handle that whole relationship and everything marketing related. And to me, some of the elements that make for a really successful marketing manager are people who are really willing to try and test new things.

They're not stagnant. They want to learn and they want to break things and figure out what's going to work well. And so there's that willingness to test and take a little bit of a risk, but at the same time, they're not micromanagers and they're also not completely disconnected. So if you're as a marketing manager telling your Google Ads person, pause that campaign, we need to scale up this campaign. At that point, we're not doing much. We're just pushing the buttons at that point. But at the same time, being completely disconnected and not checking in, not asking, Hey, what do you need to be more successful? That is also a problem. So those are the kinds of things I think of from a personality and client perspective. What are your thoughts on some of that?

Brett:

Yeah, really well said Matt. And it's kind of difficult to strike the balance of how can I be engaged either as a marketing manager, marketing director on the brand side, or how can I be really engaged and effective as a brand CEO or brand owner, but also allow my team, allow my agencies to do what they're best at? And so a couple of thoughts there, and you're right there. You can either be, and these are the tendencies, either I'm too engage and so then I'm just embarking out orders, and now the whole team is just an order taker and their skills and talents and creative ideas aren't coming to the surface, or you're so hands off that nobody really knows what they should be doing. And so there's a couple of concepts that I really like. I like this idea of commander's intent. It's a military term, but it's where a commander comes in and says, Hey, we need to have control of this hill by this date.

That's very clear. That's my commander's intent, this hill by this date. I'm not telling you how to do it. I'm telling you I need this hill by this date. I'm also saying, Hey, the way we're going to measure the standards of measuring, if we have that hill, and this is our standard, we all agree on this is how we're measuring, this is how we're communicating. We're using the same language. We're not confusing each other by communicating with different language. And so that kind of creates that unified source of truth like you talked about. And then the marketing managers, I think one of their job is to protect the core. So the core of the brand, how do we protect existing customers? How do we protect the brand message, how to protect the integrity of the brand, but how do we also stimulate progress? How are we also looking at some of the new things and what are we testing? What are we trying, what am I allowing and empowering my agency to bring ideas to me that will allow us to really grow our agency? And so it's not easy. I think once you learn kind of how to do it, it becomes a lot more fun and a lot more effective and a lot more productive, but it's really easy to get in either micromanage or to be laissez-faire and hands-off and not paying attention. And really that middle ground is where you need to be.

Matt:

One of the brands we work with that I think does this really well, what we do, we meet with them biweekly, but we also have a monthly agency Roundtable where we meet with their Facebook ads agency and every month he gives us a status report. Here's how we did this month and here's what our goals are for next month and the quarter as a whole. And he is very specific in terms of this is what our CPA needs to be, and for new customers, here's the number of new customers we need to see. And we're measuring this using a third party tool called North Beam. So that's our source of truth that checks every box. We have a dedicated marketing person who's, like you said, take that hill giving us very specific orders, and at that point they allow us to be the specialist and go get it done,

Brett:

Which is perfect. And you kind of need that update from the brand because there's pieces that your agencies don't see potentially unless you give them access to everything. And so you got to say, here's how we did globally, here's how we did retail and everything all combined, and here's where we need to go really, really effective. I mean, when you do that, then you've got everybody rowing in the right direction, everybody using their strengths to the to full capacity. And Matt, you and I are both sports fans, and so here comes

Matt:

The sports analogy. Yeah,

Brett:

Yeah. Sports analogy. You knew it was coming at some point, right? But you could take a quarterback, let's say, and you take someone like Patrick Mahomes, I think he's going to be great no matter where he plays. He's just going to be great. But there's something special about when he is in that system with Andy Reed. And I would even argue before when he had his old offensive coordinator, Eric Pmy, things were really shiny. It was just like perfect. Everything was perfect This year, get a new offensive coordinator, it's maybe not quite the same. Patrick Mahomes is still awesome, but there's some things that are not fully clicking. And so it's just a reminder that we need the right structure. And I think that's your role as a brand owner, marketing manager, brand manager, is assembling the right team and giving them the right structure and the right information and the right kind of framework to be successful. And then let them do their thing, and you'll likely be very pleased with the results. Yeah, well put. So love that. Super, super great. Matt, any closing thoughts on that piece?

Matt:

No, I mean, the only other thing I would say is what makes for a great client relationship as well is their ability to take our feedback and input. So if we are telling them, Hey, everything on the targeting side of things, bidding side, everything's looking good on our end, but we really need new creative. We really need new landing pages. The willingness to invest in that kind of stuff is huge because those are the next big elements in terms of what's going to drive success for you and being willing to make that investment. It does cost money and time to develop that kind of stuff, but makes a huge difference as well.

Brett:

And so we're about to move into some new things that we're seeing on Google. We're talking about performance max and demand gen and AI and a number of other really cool things. But one of the things we're talking about a lot at OMG is a little bit higher level. What is our approach to Google ads and to growing e-commerce brand in general? And so we talk about brand demand amplifier and how do we create consistent growing demand for your brand? And so this is where I think we're moving away from the era of just where I've got little hacks and little tricks, and I'm deploying this little tactic here and that little tactic there and just kind of seeing what happens. Those days I think are over now we look at this brand demand amplifier approach. It's really got three parts. One is strategy. So this is where we're finding the right balance of demand capture, capturing existing demand, people that are actively searching either for a problem you solve or they're searching for a product in your category.

So how are we capturing that existing demand? How are we generating new demand? So how are we effectively running campaigns that are attracting ideal customers, but maybe they're not shopping yet? And you can get wildly inefficient there if you're not careful, but you need some element of demand generation. And then how are we just using all the pieces and all the channels strategically that we have at our disposal? So there's a strategy piece. Then you've got the creative piece. What are we saying? What story are we telling? How are we telling this story? Is it resonating? Is it landing? And are we telling it in lots of different ways because some people consume better by reading or some people need an image and then a landing page. Some people need a short form video, some people need a long form video, but how are we telling the story in a compelling way and from lots of different angles?

So how are we nailing that creative side of things? And while AI is really helping to kind of fuel growth and speed things up from a creative testing standpoint, we still need that creativity. And that usually comes from the brand or from a great agency, but you got to have creative and then execution. So then what's the campaign structure? What are our bids and budgets and all the mechanics that then can just multiply everything else. So write strategy, write creative, write execution, that's what allows things to take off. And so it is more than just little hacks and tactics, and it always will be more. And even as AI develops, you still need those pieces. And so that's what we're seeing on this end. Let's talk a little bit, Matt, about performance max or P max as they like to say in the biz. How has that shifted, changed, evolved here over the last year or so?

Matt:

So for those who don't know exactly what PAX is or have heard it around the grapevine, what Max is, it was developed about two years ago in Google ads. And the goal of it is to create a consolidated AI driven campaign type that essentially houses every ad type available to us in Google ads. So performance max ads can show as a search ad can show as a shopping ad. They were actually an upgraded version of what was previously called smart shopping. So people typically think that it's going to show mostly as a shopping ad, but it can also show as a display ad, YouTube ad, that kind of stuff. When it was first released, we were apprehensive in a lot of ways. I think the biggest concerns when it came to Performance Max were the issues that we had in terms of a lack of control in terms of campaign structures, lack of transparency, reporting, all that kind of stuff, made it difficult not only to structure these campaigns, but also to learn even if we are seeing success from Performance Max, why is that?

What is truly driving that success? So Google has actually made some really good updates on the Performance Max side, especially in the way of reporting that has allowed us to see that and think about how we should structure these campaigns. So in the past how performance max campaigns are structured as you have a campaign and then within that you have asset groups. And previously we weren't able to see performance at the asset group level. So if you were trying to test in different asset groups, different audience signals or creative, you could test all that stuff, but you're not going to know which one's doing better than others. You'd have

Brett:

Limited data points. You could see like, hey, this asset is good or above average, this asset is performing poor. But if you had a thousand conversions in a campaign, you couldn't see where those thousand conversions were coming from very

Matt:

Clearly. And in the early stages, the only metric that it would give you is saying that this asset is good or best or low. It didn't give you actual numbers to go along with that. So now we do get data at the asset level that's not just best good low, it's also conversion numbers, click-through rates, stuff like that. So now in the past when we were testing this kind of stuff, we had to think maybe every element that we're going to test has to be its own campaign. So different audience signals for bottom of funnel top, it was a mess, but at this point, we're at a point where we can now consolidate that into singular performance max campaigns and learn a lot better. So that stuff is also great. We also used to have to submit all negative keywords. So the stuff we don't want to show for in performance Max to your Google rep who would then submit that on the backend.

And that's a lot of work. Now you can in some ways add some negative keywords in the form of brand list. So if you don't want to show up for your competitor terms or for your own brand name, that kind of stuff you can do in platform. And another huge one that I think is worth mentioning is in the past you weren't able to see not only the search terms that P Max was showing for, but you couldn't see any historical search terms. So I had a client come through recently where last year, last September, their performance Max was crushing it. They were doing really, really well and this year it wasn't doing as well. And they were wondering what happened, why was it doing so well last year, but not this year. And because historical data wasn't available for last year, it's really hard to analyze that and say what happened and what led to that decrease in performance. But now starting in March, 2023, Google has made that historical data available all the way back to that date, March, 2023. So from a reporting perspective, transparency, a little bit greater control, it's gotten a lot better in a lot of ways, and they're continuing to make good strides in that direction.

Brett:

And we're kind of at a point now where if Performance Max isn't a top campaign for you in terms of driving new customer acquisition while hitting your goal, whether that's a CAC goal, cac, CPA, or it's a ROAS goal, if it's not performing at that level, then there's probably some work you need to do. Either it's a restructuring or a reconfiguration of the campaigns, or it has to do with your creatives and what you've deployed and way that's set up, or it could be audience targeting and all those things. But we're big believers in P max. Obviously we've created courses. Matt, you and I did a full course, you and I in Savannah with Smart Marketer, and we got a Max Blueprint that I did. And so we are big believers in P max. I think it also really underscores, and this is something we were talking about when it first came out, like, hey, this is the future of Google Ads. How does Max inform, or what else have we just seen in terms of how is Google ads shifting in 2024?

Matt:

In general, Google Ads is shifting more towards AI and a more consolidated approach where rather than getting so granular where you have a campaign for every different type of ad where you really have to understand every single one of those campaigns and what those ads are used for, max and demand gen campaigns, which we'll probably talk about here shortly, are all focused about just give us your assets, tell us what your goal is and we'll get you there. There's things to know about that. Obviously you really need to do a good job of guiding it. So for your max campaigns, for example, if you want it to be going after non-branded searches and you only want it pursuing new customers, then you need to tell it that you need to apply all that stuff in the form of those brand exclusions, not new customer bidding, that kind of stuff.

If you don't, then it's usually going to start with the easiest conversions possible to get. So Brett, one thing you were mentioning I think earlier was how does it play with shopping, for example? What we've actually seen honestly is that there's more overlap with search campaigns than there is with shopping. And the reason for that is because when you launch a PAX campaign, like I said, it's going to go after those easy to get conversions, which are typically branded searches. So that's where it first starts to play, and then it works its way up from there. Then it gets to those non-branded search and shopping searches, remarketing top of funnel. But if you want it to start at top of funnel, there's ways you can do that. You just have to know how to structure it.

Brett:

And that's where I think it really bleeds back or really it goes back to the strategy, creative and execution. And now on the execution piece, it's less about pulling small levers and doing little tweaks and changes and kind of worried about every minute detail, but it's more about how do we structure this to fan the flame that the campaign structure the campaign has, and how do we feed the ai, the right data and the right information? How are we allowing the AI to succeed and how are we getting the right combination of campaigns to really take us to next level? And so it's certainly not hands off, it's just maybe a little higher level now than it used to be, which is super interesting. So Matt, did you have a thought on that? I

Matt:

Was just going to say, in talking about the way to work with AI in general, I think a lot of people are apprehensive about AI and the role that it can play in advertising. What AI is really, really good at is finding new customers and bidding appropriately for those new customers.

Brett:

That part it is absolutely nailed. Yeah,

Matt:

There was a point I would say even as shortly three, four years ago where we heavily used manual bidding strategies where we were trying to outsmart the computers and outsmart all of our competitors. Let's set a specific bid. I'm going to pay $1 for this keyword, but if they're a female, I'm going to pay 25% more. If they're in the top 20% incomes on their desktop, I'm going to pay 50% more and really try to get super granular with it. That is not only super time consuming and a bad use of your time, but even if you spend all your time doing that and you're making all the right decisions, you're probably still not going to do as well of a job at that as the computers going to do totally. So instead of using your time on stuff that the computers can take care of and do better than you anyway, spend your time on things like creative developing messaging. That's kind of stuff that AI is working on and trying to get better about, develop messaging, ideas, things like that, but it's still not there. So in terms of how we can work together with ai, let AI find new customers, bid for those new customers, and you speak to those new customers in the form of creative landing pages and messaging.

Brett:

So good. So good. Let's talk then. You mentioned demand generation campaigns or demand gen campaigns. So what are those? Those are the newest campaign, that is the newest campaign type that Google offers, but what is it? Why is it there and what do we need to know about it?

Matt:

So demand Gen campaigns are formerly called discovery campaigns. So discovery campaigns in the past, these are image ads that could show on Google feed placements. So YouTube feed, if you're scrolling on the YouTube homepage and you see an image ad up there at the top, that was a discovery ad gmail, the Google Discover feed, which if you're on the Google app, you scroll down, you see some image ads there as well. So those were discovery ads, demand gen ads are showing in all the same placements, but now a video ad placement is also available. So in addition to just image ads that were only available through discovery, now, you can run some video through there. So I kind of think of it like Performance Max in the sense of it's a more consolidated approach, but for those demand generation focused ad types. So it's chopping out things like search shopping that's more focused on middle of funnel, capturing search and search demand that's already there. This is all about generating that demand. So that's the biggest change in terms of how it's evolving from discovery. What I will say is this started rolling out in September where people could start beta testing it in the early stages. It was definitely not ready for prime time. It had a lot of bugs, which is

Brett:

Usually the case, right? Google is really good at let's launch something while it's incomplete and imperfect and we're going to get lots of data and lots of testing and lots of feedback, and it's going to become something pretty great or we'll shutter it, but hopefully it'll become something.

Matt:

So at this point though, you're getting upgraded. I like when they say it's upgraded. It's a more positive way of saying being forcibly transitioned to demand gen campaigns from January to March of this year. So if you've got discovery campaigns rolling right now, those will get automatically transitioned into Demand Gen. You'll notice some differences, but if you're just using image ads for your discovery campaigns, those will continue to run as is essentially you'll just be at a point where you can add new creatives into there, such as video ads.

Brett:

Yeah, it's super interesting and I think the way, and you talked about this, I'll riff on it just a little bit. The way to compare P max and Demand Gen and the way these fit together, performance Max is really great at finding new customers, new to brand customers. It is full funnel in that you can run video ads inside a performance max. It will lean into search. And like Matt, like you said, for a lot of clients, a lot of campaigns, it may lean into search in the very beginning, it still kind of has as a centerpiece this shopping component. And depending on the way your brand is oriented, maybe Performance Max is going to lean mostly into Google shopping or the shopping placements, but it's designed to be full funnel, new customer acquisition, but in general it does lean mid funnel and thereabouts. We've been able to creatively based on the nature of a product and the right creatives, we did this with Lawn Care and we did this with a supplement brand and a few others where you can get Max to actually lean into YouTube and lean into some of those demand gen type channels.

But it's designed to be more full funnel where demand gen is really just like the name implies. This is more the demand generation channels that are available on Google. And so more of product discovery awareness, things like that, it can all be tied back to trying to hit performance goals and drive a certain CAC or ROAS goal, but more on the demand gen side. So ideally, once demand gen gets a little bit better and Google improves it, it could provide a pretty powerful combination max and demand gen.

Matt:

Yeah. Brett, I have a question for you. Yeah, please. We've been talking about the shift in terms of just the Google Ads landscape and with all these different campaign types, are we shifting more towards Performance Max? What's working, what's not? Let's see how plugged in you are. Let Google Ads and OMG clients in 2022. What was the top spending channel for OMG clients?

Brett:

20 22, 20 22, 2

Matt:

Years ago,

Brett:

Almost certainly it was Google Shopping.

Matt:

It was actually Google search, which made up 44% of overall ads spend 44% shopping was actually at 11%. Interesting, that obviously smart

Brett:

Shopping, I wonder if you check out branded search what that would do, but that's a pretty big gap. Okay.

Matt:

Interesting. Search, huge part. And then in 2023, what do you think was the top spending channel? Well,

Brett:

I mean I think that the right answer should be Performance Max, but based on those percentages, maybe P max and search kind of there pretty close.

Matt:

Yeah, yeah, exactly right. What do you thinks first?

Brett:

I'm going to go P max.

Matt:

P max at 35%. So year over year from 2022 to 2023 p max went from 19% of overall ad spend to 35%. Wow. So that just kind goes to show all the different things that Max can do. And then search went from 44% to 32%. So it's still huge. And that's where one thing that I'll say for people, because there's a lot of things that are changing in Google ads, and if you've been seeing success with YouTube and search and shopping, one thing I'll say is if you've been seeing success with that, you'll probably continue to see success with that. Just because there's new things coming along doesn't mean that search is going away or that it's not going to work for you anymore. If anything, you just have more options available to you in order to hit your goals and ways of approaching it. That might be easier for some brands to accomplish than others. If you don't know the proper way to segment and structure a search campaign, a Performance Max campaign can accomplish all that for you.

Brett:

Yeah, really well said. Where really, we still run a lot of individual just search campaigns. If you're going to scale on YouTube, we run specific YouTube campaigns. We don't just allow YouTube to live inside a Performance Max or Demand Gen, although it can do that and there can be new opportunities that are there. Being very specific with specific campaigns is still important. And now that you said you talked about 2022 and 2023, makes sense. 2022 p max was huge at that time. Shopping probably would've been the biggest platform back in 21 or something, or 2020, somewhere in that neighborhood really, if you look at 2022, you said 19%, 19% p max, and 11% shopping. So you kind of combine those two together. But anyway, super, super interesting. And yeah, I think it's just one of those scenarios where I think the way Google Ads is going is if you want to be really hands-off and you don't really want to do much and maybe you don't have huge aspirations with the platform, there's going to be some tools where you can be pretty hands off and it's just going to work.

Okay. If you've got big goals and you really want to grow and you really want to expand, then that's where you're going to need to have either hire some real Google expertise, work with an agency with real Google expertise and get the full benefit, the full horsepower. Totally agree that the Google provides. And so really cool. You kind of talked about Max, you talked about AI and how it powers Google ads. Anything else that we should be aware of with ai? I know it is nailing all of the targeting, bidding some of those things. There's some though help that we're getting, and we're starting to see this with the generative AI experience inside of Google Ads. And we want to talk about Bard in just a second very briefly, but any other thoughts how AI is helping on the generative AI side of things?

Matt:

Yeah, I mean it's getting better in terms coming up with ideas for you based on the messaging that you've been testing in Google ads and in addition to what it sees on the website, what it sees just out in the ether of the Google Ads landing state, what are your competitors saying on their ads and supplying those as ideas, at least for headlines and descriptions as you're writing them. So those are getting better and better, and I appreciate that. I enjoyed those. But in general, the things that I touched on earlier, finding new customers and bidding for those new customers is still what AI does the best. And you could set it up, talk about Bard and the generative AI experience in Google search and what that looks like.

Brett:

And so before we into that, I want just highlight one thing. We talk about this a lot where AI plus smart humans, that's the present, that's the future. People that understand marketing and understand data and understand how things work paired with ai, that's where it's headed. And that's actually where it is right now. And I think you can make parallels or comparisons. I remember hearing about when Google was first launching search or in the early days, they had mountains and mountains of data, but it was so early. And they'd go to big ad agencies and big ad agencies would be like, we know advertising, you don't know advertising Google. And they're like, well, we got millions and millions of search touchpoints, and we know the ads people click on and we know the ads people don't click on. And so the interesting thing about that is actually if there was this way to marry both of those worlds, which did happen where you got all the click data and the insights from Google plus people that understand human psychology and how to write creatively and effectively and things like that, you combine that, that's really powerful.

I think that's what's happening now too, where there's data behind like, Hey, why did this image outperformed that image? This headline outperformed that headline. And so now AI is going to riff on that and give you suggestions. You're still probably going to need to polish it. You're still going to need to touch it and make it human and make it good and understand that, hey, this does line up with who we're trying to be as a brand, or this doesn't line up who we're trying to be as a brand, but you combine those two things and man, you really got something powerful that you can harness. And so then related to that is kind of the AI experience of Bard, and this is kind of Google's solution or counter to chat GPT. I've got some podcasts I listen to that are not Google base, they're just tech type podcasts. Some of them are saying Bard is way better than chat GPT. I know more people using chat GPT than Bard. Bard's going to have a really integrated search component. So Matt, I know you've played around with it a little bit and probably not a ton of takeaways at this stage, it's very early, but any insights as you've used Bard or used the AI search experience that Google offers?

Matt:

Yeah, I really like chat, GPT and Bard. I think what it does a really good job of is giving some ideas and inspiration. That's chat, GBT in particular, what I think Bard does well is giving a more concise view for the user of the information that they're searching for. So as opposed to needing to into individual articles and dig around for that information, Bard gives you a quicker answer. And then the ability to ask follow-ups there. So to drive in a little bit deeper and what it's doing is not just looking at one article, it's looking across all the content that's available on Google search, for example, and then compiling that into the answer that it provides. So I think from a user perspective, it's a really cool step in innovation and moving us into the future. So I think it's really cool. I don't think necessarily it's going to fundamentally change the way people search.

I still do think people are going to engage more just with regular Google search than they will with the chatbot. But that said, I was looking before this, just chat GBT, how popular is it? Is it still as popular as it was a couple months ago? And it is, there's still a lot of search interest and people visiting chat, GBT, especially with some of the updates that they've been making to it. So I do think it's here to stay, but I am not convinced that it's going to fundamentally change the way that Google search engines are structured.

Brett:

Yeah, I'm really, really curious and really interested to see how Google further integrates and develops it. And I've heard some people talk about this is going to completely upend Google's revenue model. Google is 80% of their revenue is from ads and a lot of that driven by search. And so, hey, this new AI experience is going to totally upend that. I don't actually think that's true. So I would totally agree with what you just said. Especially right now, if I'm looking for a product, if I'm looking for a new jacket or a new pair of gloves or new shoes or whatever, a new tool, new gadget, I'm going to regularly Google search. I want to see all the listings, I want to see ads and other things. Maybe I ask the AI experience, Hey, what's the best gloves for working outside and subzero temperatures or whatever, which I try not to do if I'm outside in Sub-Zero temperatures, it's I'm sledding or walking from my truck to the house or whatever.

But maybe I ask that specific of a question. But here's the thing. I believe Google's going to figure it out to be able to, if you do ask a very specific question, you're more like having this conversation with the AI about a product that you want to buy or about a problem you're trying to solve. I think they're going to be able to surface ads in that. I think they're going to be able to say, Hey, the best experience probably for you based on the question you had based on your shopping behavior, is you need to see a product listing ad or Google Shopping ad, or you need to see a search ad because you like to read or you need to see a video because of the way you like to interact with things. And so they're showing that, and I think that's going to happen.

And one of the trends that I see happening in the future and we're already kind of prepping for and discussing here at OMG is there's going to be this kind of blending probably of paid ads and organic type efforts and not like organic SEO. And we did SEO way back in the game, and I know you're very familiar with SE O2, Matt, where we were writing tons of articles and trying to get back links and doing other stuff. Not that per se, but more like do we have clean data? Can Google really make sense of what is on our product detail page? What are reviews? What are the prices? What is this about? What are the reviews about? Are the reviews about this pair of gloves? Are they more for working? Are they more for skiing? Are they more for other things? Google being able to make sense of that and then to provide the recommendations.

And so I think it's going to be kind of the understanding how to use these new campaign types as they come out, but also having really clean data and a really clean structure and then really clear messaging and some of these things. And so I'm excited about it. I'm optimistic. I'm pretty bullish on Google being able to figure this out, and I'm not too concerned about chat GPT running away with the show and leaving Google in the dust because I think Google's working on it. Google also has, they have access to more data than anyone else does, and they've just proven, they usually are able to figure things

Matt:

Out well, and they just have a natural headstart when more people are visiting Google than chat GPT. And when you visit Google, the very first thing you see is a Let's Chat option. There's naturally going to become a point where more people are using that than chat GBT. And like you said about the advertising being blended into there, it has to be, why would Google want to invest shifting people towards this chatbot if it means ads aren't going to be sprinkled in there? Yeah,

Brett:

It's going to have to be

Matt:

Right. So it's going to have to be, the question you just asked though is what's that going to look like? And you gave a few examples what I think it's definitely going to look like. There's going to be search ads in there, there's going to be shopping ads, some YouTube ads as well. I don't know how they're going to put display and discovery ads in there. I think that'll be a little more interesting. Maybe you make it kind of a feed that you scroll through and some of 'em are ads. But yeah, it'll be really interesting.

Brett:

It'll be very interesting. And I think we just, all we have to do is really look at the Google experience now and are people searching more on Google now or less than they did five or 10 years ago, way more than they did before. Are there now more ads shown on Google searches or less? There's actually more ads. And so as Google becomes better at rewarding advertisers for creating great ads, as Google becomes better, or as they have become better of the recent history of just providing really relevant ads, it's a great experience for users. I get my question answered through an ad. I solve problem through an ad. I find the product I'm looking for through an ad all delivered based on a search. And so yeah, I'm excited about seeing where this goes and seeing how it develops. But Matt, if you were to give some advice to a brand as they get into 2024, how should I be thinking about Google Ads and maybe how should I know if there's a problem inside of Google Ads? Any practical advice or takeaways you'd leave people with?

Matt:

Yeah, the main things I would say is from the very beginning, make sure measurement is locked in. And that what we were talking about at the very beginning was having some form of a source of truth. If you have that source of truth, whether it's Google Ads or North Beam, if your performance isn't there, it'll tell you that it's not there. And your backend numbers will also verify that we're not growing or we're bleeding money that will be obvious to you. So from there, we could have a whole conversation and encourage you to check out our course on Smart Marketer about how to troubleshoot your Google Ads if it's not working. But there's so many metrics to look at. The main two though, if I were to say there's only two metrics that you should pay attention to all the time would be conversion rate and CPC, because those are the two numbers.

And then I'd throw in one more, which is a OV. Those three metrics together are what's going to determine what your CPA is going to be and what your ROAS is going to be. If you can find any sort of ways to improve your conversion rate, which is typically going to be by improving your creative testing, new audiences, testing new landing pages, that's going to be the most impactful thing you can do in Google Ads to see better performance. If you can find ways to reduce that CPC by delivering higher quality scores, which are a score rating for keywords and Google search that can pull down your CPCs. And then what are some ways you can increase your A OV? Is it something on the website, some popups, some bundling or cross-selling that's going to boost your roas? So those would be at a very high level, the three metrics I'd say to really focus on with conversion rate being the one you really have a lot of control over.

Brett:

Yeah, really good, Matt. And a couple things I would say is if you're a brand owner and you're trying to evaluate, do I need to do something different with my Google ad strategy? And again, when I'm talking Google ads, I'm talking about the whole ecosystem. So display, search, shopping, YouTube, and all of it. I would say if it's not growing and if it's not growing at a healthy clip, if it's not growing at about the same pace as your other channels, then there's probably a problem. We still know a lot of D two C brands that meta is their number one source of new customers, but if Google is not a close second, or if it's not beginning to rival meta, then there's potentially an issue that needs to be looked at. And hey, we're running into now and we work with D two C brands where this Google YouTube combination is as big or bigger than meta.

And so a couple of things you can look at there to understand, Hey, do I need a different strategy? Do I need a different approach here to make this work? And with that shameless plug, we would love to chat with you. If you're spending over a hundred thousand a month on ads then, and you're a D two C brand that's growing, might be a good time to talk to OMG commerce because you could end up working with somebody like Matt Slaymaker driving the ship on Google Ads and helping you make more money and generate consistent demand for your brand. So if you want to chat, go to mg commerce.com, click on the Let's Talk button, you can request a strategy session. We'd love to chat with you. And with that, I think that does it slaymaker, any parting thoughts? Any new things? If you've got any more Google thoughts out there, if not any goals or specific things you're trying to do in this new-ish year? We're a little ways in now, I guess, but that you're trying to do to better yourself or to grow this year?

Matt:

Oh gosh. One last Google thing I'll throw out there is I'll say Google is improving privacy standards across the board. One of the biggest things happening in 2024 is the deprecation of third party cookies on Google Chrome. It sounds scary. I wouldn't panic too much. Google is putting out solutions to mitigate the impacts of this. But biggest piece of advice I'd give you for that is make sure you're collecting first party data. So email list, customer list, that's going to be stuff that you own that you can continue to use into the future in terms.

Brett:

So good. I don't want to just key in on that, Matt. Yeah, a couple things to that. I know the privacy changes that that's a big fear that people have. A couple things to think about there. Third party cookies have been deprecated for a long time on Safari and Firefox and every other browser that's not Chrome. Chrome does have the biggest market share, but yeah, we believe this shift is not going to be as big as it may sounds or as potentially detrimental as it sounds. Google's been working on solutions and they were not going to make a move until they were confident in their solutions. But this is where you need to have enhanced conversions set up. You need to have the first party data, and if you have those things going, you'll still be able to make sense. You'll still be able to engage in remarketing and you'll still be able to grow.

Things will go well for you. And if you look at Google, Google can still target based on interest and based on search data, based on behavior and stuff like that because it's third party trackings go away, not first party. And if you think about as you're conducting a search on Google, that's first party data you're giving directly to Google. If you're watching videos on YouTube, that's first party data that YouTube has now because it's you interacting with their platform. And so there's still going to be a lot of data at our disposal. We are not suddenly going to go back to the early two thousands or anything like that. But you do need first party data. You do need to understand the changes so you can really make the most of it. Yeah. And then on the personal side, Matt, what do you got?

Matt:

So I'll give you two. One a more vanity. One Avis of mine is anytime I go to a gas station to get gas, I always go inside and get a sugary drink or some snack, gardetto or Takis, whatever. I am giving that up. And if anything, I'll go outside and get a water and cut out all the sodium that I get from Gardetto's and

Brett:

Those shit. Love it. Love it. So that little tweak and man, it's so interesting as you look at, we can even tie this back to ads if you want to, right? This is just finding little areas of waste where, okay, you make this cut, does it make a big difference today? Maybe not a huge difference today, although you probably feel better if you don't eat a full bag of goos. But over time, over the course of the year, think about how less sodium and garbage and stuff you're putting into your body. And the same is true with ads. We make these little cuts of waste over the course of the year that really adds up. So good on you for that. Snacking less at the gas station. What else?

Matt:

The other one is just to be bold, and I think this was something that was huge for me in 2022 and 2023, honestly, where in the past growing up, I was always very shy and I was afraid to do things that I know I would enjoy. If someone invited you to an event, oftentimes I would say no because I was too shy or I love to play basketball, but I was always too shy to go to the court and actually play with people. And I got to a point in the last year and a half where I was like, if I am 40, 50, 60 years old and I can no longer play basketball at a high level, I'm going to look back on my twenties and regret that I didn't put myself out there more. And it's the same with all sorts of different situations, whether it's work related or in your personal life. Just be bold, live life to the fullest and try to make the most of ever experience.

Brett:

Dude, it's so good, so good. Yeah, you'll always remember positively the times you were bold, even if something crashed and burned, you'll remember with fond memories, mostly times you were bold. You'll probably always regret the times you pulled back or were too afraid to do something right. I do believe the biggest regrets we'll have in life will be the things we didn't do, not the things we did do. And I do want to push back a little bit, Matt, as someone who just turned 44, we can still play basketball in our forties. You'll still be able, if you do the right things, give up the guards and soda. You'll be playing basketball at age 40 as well. And for me, as far as that goes, I'm like, dude, I'm not slowing down. So I'm hitting the gym in a little bit different way and try to do some strength training. Not try to bulk up majorly, but I want to be able to move things around. I want to be able to have energy and to be able to continue to go, and so love that. But it takes bold action, man, and to be successful in business, the D two C world and life, it takes bold action. I'm really glad you mentioned that. What's your

Matt:

Resolution for this year?

Brett:

So I don't really do resolutions per se. I look at how do I set goals and intentions for the year, where do I want to go? Almost thinking about that commander's intent to a certain degree, and then what are the habits I need to build to get me there? And so then it's more like looking at my life in buckets from a relational family standpoint, what are some of the habits that need to be tweaked or adjusted there? And so one little thing there that my wife and I are doing, we have eight kids who we're very, very busy and they're involved in sports and all kinds of stuff. We're doing a weekly date night, and so we've got a great relationship, good marriage, we really like each other and stuff, but we're going to do a weekly date night, so that's on the Google calendar.

It's scheduled, it's there, right. That's great. Yeah. On the personal side, I've got some different diet things I'm doing. I do not believe in really strict diets or fad diets. I think all that's unsustainable, but there's some little things that I'm doing there to make things easier. My breakfast is consistent. Lunch is usually just a handful of things that I choose from, and then I'm hitting the gym four days a week, minimum four days a week, sometimes five, just doing that. I'm trying to regulate sleep a little bit, although I'm a really high energy guy, and so sometimes I don't sleep well, but try to regulate that as well. I know there's big benefits, mental health, physical health and stuff right now, but I'll into the future. So I'm more thinking about overall direction of goals and what are the habits that need to help me get there.

Matt:

Yeah. Love it, man.

Brett:

Awesome. Matt Slaymaker, ladies and gentlemen, Matt, this was awesome. We'll have to make this a little more regular in the new year talking Google ads with you. So thank you so much. Thank you for your bold actions as it pertains to Google and OMG and our clients and keep with the good work.

Matt:

Yes, sir. Thank you. And happy birthday.

Brett:

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, the recording on my birthday, fun times. But as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. What would you like to hear more of on the show if you have not done so? We'd love that review on iTunes or wherever you consume this podcast. That helps other people discover the podcast as well. If you found this valuable, share it with somebody that you think would enjoy it. And with that, until next time, thank you for this.

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