Why Switching to a CSS Can Instantly Boost Performance - Martijn Explains All (Producthero)

Boost Your Google Ads Performance with a CSS! 

In this episode, host Jeremy is joined by Martijn from Product Hero who explains why switching to a Comparison Shopping Service (CSS) can instantly lower your CPC and boost your ad rank. 

Discover how Product Hero’s data-driven tools and AI-powered optimisations help e-commerce businesses maximise Google Shopping performance. Don't miss this insider strategy for increasing visibility and reducing costs in your Google Ads campaigns!

Get your free 30 minute strategy session with Jeremy here: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/

Sign Up for Producthero: https://producthero.com/en/google-css

Contact Martijn directly on martijn@producthero.com

Get your free 30 minute strategy session with Jeremy here: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/

Scale your store with 1:1 coaching: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/1-2-1-coaching

Transcript

hello everyone, and welcome back to Google Ads unleashed. I hope everyone is doing fabulously this Monday, and today, it's another special guest episode. I know you like the specialists and special guests on there, so I'm trying to deliver and today I've got Martin from product hero on, so product hero is a solution, primarily a CSS solution for for Google ads based businesses and operations and for E commerce stores. But you know what? Why don't I just give the word straight to you, Martin, and you can introduce yourself.
Cool. Thanks. Yeah, thanks. You already introduced Proxy A nice way. So yeah, my name is Martin. I'm one of the co founders of product zero. I used to work in PPC myself on agency sites and on client side, doing freelancing. Started out in 2010 which actually I started off in SEO, and then I moved over to PPC, because it was
the from the dark side to the light side, then from the
dark side to the light side. That's what they always say, right? But I like to go from the SEO side to the PPC side, because SEO is really about it's more like magic, I think, in certain sense. So how you can rank inside the organic rankings, but PPC is more about making a direct impact on on on E commerce stores, with the advertising itself, there's a lot more data that you can actually see, which I really like, because I like to be on the strategical part, but also on the data and technical side, and at price zero, I can combine both to really, yeah, make our the things I've done for E commerce advertisers, more scalable in a certain way, and that's what we do with our platform, of course,
yes, how did you, how did the idea come about then? So obviously you've just told me you've come from SEO start in PPC. I mean, 2010 was while that's actually roughly when I started 2011 so it's quite, quite a long time ago now. It's more or less half my life. And yeah, a lot has changed. And clearly you've had bit of a brilliant idea, because you guys been going for a long time now. And, yeah, tell me how that idea came about. Yeah.
So actually, when I was working in SEO, and I actually created my own websites and WordPress and made them rank, which worked very well, but I felt a little bit like a one trick pony, so I started, I was thinking about like, Okay, how do I develop myself even more? And then I decided to work at a digital marketing agency. And there I learned a lot from different senior people, which were already in the field for for a lot longer, worked for really nice clients, and learned consulting so like going from A to B and how to get there by having good tactics in your in your search engine marketing strategies. And during that time working at the agency, I felt like, Okay, I really want to be an entrepreneur, but I didn't know exactly what
was that. By the way, at the time, was that in? Yeah, that was in 2012
I think so after two years, so I was working on doing freelancing and creating those websites, and then I decided to join the digital marketing agency, because, like I said, I felt like being a one trick pony. I learned myself something, but I was like doing the same thing over and over again, and I wanted to develop myself more as a consultant and really understand businesses and how you can make an impact through advertising and through SEO and PPC. And there I actually get to know one of my co founders, and we stayed in touch after working at the digital marketing agency, and in 2018 so I did some freelancing in between. And in 2018 there was an EU ruling of Google having a monopoly on shopping ads. And so Wouter back then my colleague, my former colleague, was already working on product zero as a performance marketing based platform where we did, like affiliate marketing to get people to find products and buy them and then get, like a fee for performance, for their sales. But because Google got the fine for having a monopoly in shopping ads, they needed to open up shopping ads for other comparison shopping services.
Do you do actually know how that came about? Because I'll be perfectly honest here, I know the story that they got in trouble with, I think the EU cartel, something like that. But she don't really know what happened or what triggered that and when, when exactly that came about.
Yeah, I don't know the exact days by heart, but yeah, in 2017 I think a few. Of the bigger comparison shopping services decided to start a lawsuit against Google because they were actually losing traffic from their own comparison websites. Because when Google launched shopping ads, they weren't even asked for at first, but yeah,
organic, well, yeah, it was also 13. I'd like to say, Well,
yeah, 1213, yeah. And what actually happened? It was a really good invention, really good product for the search and the results page, because a lot of people clicked on those listings. So it were organic listings back then. But the thing that happened is most comparison shopping services, like Goku or like other services, they live by organic traffic, yeah, and the thing that happened is that everybody started clicking on those Google results which sent traffic directly towards the e commerce website instead of to a comparison website. So they were losing traffic. And losing traffic also means losing money for them, like losing revenue, and Google decided to change the organic listings into paid listings. And even more, e commerce stores started to use those that ad form, that ad format. So a lot of people searching for products decided to use Google Shopping ads instead of the comparison services themselves. So in that sense, they felt like Google was pushing traffic towards those more image based ads with a high CTR and not to your organic listings anymore. When it came to e commerce, searches
never like happened in the US or somewhere else. Why just Europe? You'd think that the US, they'd be more trigger happy. They love a good lawsuit. Maybe my American listeners might not like it, but,
I mean, I've, I've talked to a lot of different European advertisers and agencies throughout the years, also to some from the US, but not that that much. So I'm not that familiar with the US market, but I think in the EU we are more about like protecting European companies against American companies in some way, and also trying to make sure that there's not a big monopoly for big tech players, right? So there's more like, it's a different approach, and I'm not too into like, the whole law thing around that. The only thing I know is that that this has opened up for other services, and I think that there has been a great opportunity for those CSS, for those comparison shopping services, and for ourselves, of course, because when that happened, I remember my so Walter was on holiday, was sitting in he was camping in France, and he sent me a WhatsApp message, and he said, like, Okay, can you test out whether or not like the benefits for the comparison shopping service actually work. So if you advertise to a comparison shopping service other than Google itself, you are getting a discount on what you paying inside Google ads,
yes, 20 and tried for which
is Yeah, which is 20% and I actually tested that because yeah, I couldn't believe it when I heard it. So we were testing like a retailer. We set one up, we set a Google Merchant Center, count up on Google, and we set one up on product zero, and we were testing them against each other, like an AB test, and we saw, like, the CPC for the product zero Merchant Center going down while the impressions were going up. So we saw there was a higher ad rank for those for the products that were being served from the break zero merchant center, then the one from Tesla.
Basically you had two duplicate merchant centers, one listed through Google, one through the other. Yes, the same feed on both. And you just set up two campaigns, interesting. So the so
the exact same feed, the exact same products. We even created a new Google Merchant Center on Google CSS and a new merchant center on proctor CSS, because there's also historical data stored in the Merchant Center which actually influences the ad rank of a product inside Google ads. So there's, there's like, some magical Ad Rank, like, like, like, you have keywords in Google Ads itself which have like, a historical historical quality score. That's also the same for products in in the Google Merchant Center on the item ID level, there's information stored for for the historical data, which influences your visibility on a positive way. So we really wanted to have it like as clean as possible, an AB test. So we created a new Google merge sensor on Google CSS and a new merge sensor on proctor CSS, and then we ran the test against each other. So we split up the country in two different regions and then just put in the same bids, because back then you had manual bids also for where we use manual bids for shopping ads with normal shopping campaigns. So. And yeah, so. And then we saw, like, wow, there's a massive difference in the ranking and a lower CPC. So this is going to be something big for every advertiser in E commerce. And then we sat down, we said, like, okay, let's, let's do this together. Let's start it. Let's, let's start the company product here in the way we know right now. So
it went from basically a failure platform that you happen to have, and then this came about, you pretty much straight away, registered, if you like, as a CSS, yeah, this out, saw an impact, and now said, Okay, we have to jump on this, yeah, we'll need to know about that cool. You got your saw an opportunity. You took it right up, yeah,
yeah. And I think in the meanwhile, yeah. So moving from 2018 till now, a lot has happened. So throughout the years, we started out with just CSS and the comparison website, we looked at different business models, and we saw that every CSS has the same advantage, right? So everyone has the same discount in the CPC. So we needed to do something differently. So we decided to do two things. And one was a very low flat fee for the CSS itself, because, yeah, there's no competitive advantage on that. So a lot of CSS in the beginning charged, like, really crazy amounts, like percentage
of ad spend. And so, yeah, it was crazy. It was I actually remember it happening because I was working at an agency in Cardiff at the time, in 2018 17 ish, and that came out, and I literally couldn't believe what I was reading. It was like, and we were still in the EU then as well. So
I've changed in between. Stop bringing
that up topic for another time, but I literally couldn't believe it, like we all couldn't believe it. And it was, like the Wild West a little bit at the time. I don't know if you remember that. Feel it was literally anything was up for debate. It felt like, like this. This was a big opportunity at the time, yeah, yeah,
yeah. Especially in the beginning, there was also, like, something called ad spend match. So Google gave advertisers that use another CSS than Google itself, they gave them, like, additional ad spend budget in their accounts when they were using, like, something like product zero or another CSS. So it was really incentivized to look at other other solutions than than than Google solution. But also, yeah, there were companies that saw like, okay, we can also benefit more from from that aspect. So take a take a part of that, for example, as a business model. But we said we want to be very transparent and to just create a predictable cost for the advertisers themselves. But also, on top of that, we saw that we needed to do something with SaaS So, and we had a lot of knowledge on shopping ads, so how they worked, and how you can influence the results by doing the right optimizations. So at first, we created a framework which is now the product zero framework, which consists out of three different pillars, so the bids, the relevance and the market, which are the three main ingredients for ranking inside shopping ads. I can tell a little bit more about that later. But also, we created our first tool, which is, which was a title optimization tool, and we found in the Google Ads API, we found a secret field where you could see, like the exact search terms that triggered your products, but also the conversion data connected to that. So we could give like very relevant suggestions for optimizing your title based on data from your own account. And what we saw that when you added a specific word that was working very well for your account, if you added that to the title which wasn't there yet, you got a higher Ad Rank because of the relevance part, and then you got more volume, and you paid less per click for those specific searches. So that was a really nice find, and we added that to our proposition, which was very successful. I remember doing sales calls myself in the beginning, a lot with different digital marketers, and everyone's like, Well, where did, where do you get this information from? And they really wanted to use that. So that was, was a really nice first start for for becoming a SaaS platform as well, which you are today.
Yeah. So when was that? Roughly, I
think there was 2019 probably in the first year. We started out with our business model, with with everything around that, and then we really wanted to move towards the, and, yeah, the SAS
framework. But let's get to that in a bit. I've got a few questions regarding the CSS, because this is actual genuine questions from myself as well. So because sometimes I get this as a I suppose, like an objection, because there's still a lot of people probably you know this yourself. Where you because I do quite a lot of teaching on Google, not only through the podcast, but for instance, one to ones group coaching and so on. And I mentioned how you get 20% off click cost. First of all, blows people's minds, still, yeah. But I often get questions like, do you actually lose organic traffic through Google Shopping because you will not be listed on the shopping CSS anymore. So is there like some sort of trade off where you can decide, You know what, it's worth it to switch to Vincent's product hero and basically screw any organic clicks that you get through through Google? Or can you have both is like a magic way to have best of both worlds. Yeah.
So there is a so when you so there's a few things you can do, right? So you can always have organic listings where you're on another CSS than Google Shopping CSS. You can still have the listings on Google itself, so there. It's not like when you go to Procter or you lose your organic listings, because they still stay there, so you can still have them there. The thing I would always suggest you to do is to have, like, a merchant center on product zero, for example, and have a Merge Center on Google Shopping CSS so you can have both. And in the Google Shopping CSS merch center, there's a setting step where you can say, like, I don't, I want to have my organic listings on product there, CSS Merchant Center, or on your Google Shopping, CSS Merchant Center. And you can also say like, because there's like in the UK, for example, you also have CSS that advertise on a performance based business model. So they they do like, affiliate based advertising, and some people want that, some some people don't want that. And there's something to say for both cases. So, but you can decide in your Google Merchant, your Google merchants from Google Shopping, you can say, I don't want that CSS to advertise on my behalf. You can also turn off their advertising for you, because sometimes they just get your affiliate feed from from one of the affiliate networks, and they upload them inside the Google their Google Merchant Center, and then they start advertising with that. And that has an impact on your your own campaigns, because you're losing data. You're losing conversion data from your own Google Ads account, which is going into like the new account, is also advertising on your behalf, and in a whole new smart bidding AI world, you want to have as much conversion data in your own account as possible to get the best possible results. So
and simply cuts out the middle man as well, right? Yeah, sometimes pay an affiliate fee for potentially even just a brand search you would have converted anyway, right? Yeah, yeah. Does happen? Is it also available in the UK? Like, is still because we, I know I, like, semi like, joked about it before that, not in Europe anymore, but we're still in the European Economic Area, and I can actually asked a lot. And you know what? There is no information on that on the internet. Is it still, does it actually still work for the UK, and does it work for Switzerland and Norway as well?
I actually, I don't know if there's no information on that, because I think there should be a depth on the comparison shopping portal where those countries are available to filter on Adventure CSS, which says, like the program is active there. But that's just something that pops into my head right now. Like, okay, whether or not there's information available, so it should be there for us. Of course, when the news came that UK was leaving the European Union, we also like, Oh, wow. Does this mean that our time, we have invested in UK advertisers, that the whole program is going to disappear there, but Google has confirmed us that it's still active in the UK, and we still have a partnership in the UK as well with with the comparison shopping service. So it's still there, yeah, so it's
still there. That's good to know, genuinely, even put my own team on it to research it. There is no like official resource which confirms or denies it from Google itself, which is, well, I guess they wouldn't advertise it anyway, right? Why would they?
Yeah, I think, I mean, in I think for Google, it's also important to show that the program is active, because, yeah, there's also been a ruling, of course. So, so there should be information. That's a good question. I will look it up. And if we, if we, if we find something, or if we can share something, we can definitely, I don't know if we can put in a link somewhere in the podcast subscription.
Or I'll definitely, I'll put it, put it on LinkedIn, or something brilliant. So that is definitely, so maybe final say on it. It's a no brainer after all, right, yeah, yeah. So go do it. Guys go on to a. I think, well, it's product hero.com or product hero.de two of the core domains. Go there and have a look. And have a look at that. But also, let's talk about the next solution, which you've already teased, and that is the title optimization bit. So yeah, so title optimization, I think it's no secret that it's one of the core things that you should be doing if you want to rank for the relevant search results. And you guys help with that by using well AI and by using data from the ad account. Does that also work with p max? It should now as well, because naturally, search terms will become available soon for that and happen to a certain degree. And how is that used? How does that work? Tell me a little bit more about that.
Yeah. So just to like, I already introduced the procure framework, a little bit like, so the bid relevance of market part. So the OPT so we got it the title optimization tool. We called it the optimizer, and so, yeah, it's really important for shopping ads. Shopping ads is a bit like SEO, right? And performance mechanism, yeah. So that's also where my experience with SEO came in handy with, like, creating tools around around this. And the thing I learned throughout the years is that PPC professionals can be quite lazy compared to SEO people, because they are really like in SEO, it's really important to create content and to be very, very strict on, like creating good titles and descriptions and everything around it, right. And in PPC, we're more used to like filling out some keywords, creating text ads and making sure we're sending the traffic to the right page, setting up budget and the ROAs goal. Well, shopping ads is for most advertises, 80% of the of the ad spend these these days, and also most revenues coming out of the out of that channel. So, but I do notice that people can become, like, fine title optimization a little bit cumbersome, right? So it's it's just a lot of work, but the actual impact is really, really big on your on the results from your campaigns. And what we saw is we to be to have people optimize that content and to get a competitive advantage in shopping ads, we needed to make that really easy, and that's why we created the title optimization tool, where you would have like, we'd pull all your product data from the from the Merchant Center. We get the Google Ads data from your Google Ads account. We put it in our interface, and there we created a functionality where you could look at every different product, and see like, search term suggestions and AI suggestions based on your information, and to optimize that by hand. So it was quite cumbersome because you needed to do it by hand. There was there's also a bump, bulk functionality in there, where you can do more, do multiple products at once, but we always suggested like, start with the products that have the most conversions. Start with the products that have a lot of conversion, but not a lot of impressions, for example. So if you optimize those products, they are very high potentials, if you can give them more volume, just as the way you would look at keywords, if you have a keyword that's converting very well, you would want to have more volume come over those keywords by raising the bids, right? So in the so in our interface, you could really easily add, like, very generic search terms, or more long tail search terms to make it more relevant. And we saw advertisers have a really big change in volume coming from those products, and it also triggered us to create the thing that we did later on with the labelizer, so with the automatic product segment segmentation, because there's just a few products doing most of the conversions, and those products need to be optimized in the best possible way. And there's also products that look like those products that you want to optimize, for them to become heroes, right? For them to become like your best performing products, because your assortment is going to change over time. So updating product content is something that needs to be, needs to happen like over time. It's like a chore that you need to do that gets you really good results. And if you, if you put in that effort, and your competitor doesn't, then you have a competitive advantage. It's as simple as it is, right? Yeah,
I was, I would say this. Saw my favorite saying Google ads is actually a bit like building a house. The more sort of you invest in getting the right tools, the right concrete, all the stuff, better the basis, the better your you can build on top right? Yeah, and that is doing all of the groundwork and all of the dirty work, which I know is, as you say, cumbersome, very good word. But, and it's boring, right? It is boring, but boring wins, unfortunately,
yeah, I think also, that's like what you see more and more. When, when? When I look at my LinkedIn feed, for example, it used to be like, Okay, you need to have the latest shiny thing that's that's been released in PPC. And now people are, are more talking about like, getting the fundamentals right, because I think that's, that's something you overlook. It's like, when you're going to the gym, then you need to eat properly. You need to have your proteins and you need to look at the basic things instead of trying to correct yourself towards certain results. And so, yeah, so the tight optimization, we try to make it very easy for people to do boring things and make it a little bit less boring, because we created a nice interface around that and find some secret fields to get the data that's really relevant for your for your product, and on top of that, so we added the AI part, and right now, like, I think, six months ago, or a little bit longer, we released, like the products AI. So we actually made a tool where you can do everything in bulk. So it's just, it's like filtering the right products, and then click on a magic button and it optimizes the title, but also other attributes from your feed by using AI. And that really works well for people that don't like to do the boring things manually and to speed up the process a lot. So that's why a lot of products, right? So yeah, sometimes it's quite hard work with 10,000 plus SKUs, right? So yeah,
how does that work? Then, does it like edit? It like? Genuine question, does it edit on product level, or does it like, just pump something like a sub feed in into into your Merchant Center to override the titles and all of the Yeah,
that's a good question. So if you look at the fundamentals of the tool itself as well, it's like we were so we take the data from the Merchant Center and we optimize it inside our platform, and then we upload the supplemental feed on top of your primary feed to optimize the data. So we're not going to change like the primary feed itself, because there's also information like stock data, like pricing and those kind of attributes that you don't want to you don't want to change, because we won't optimize that, so we're really using a supplemental field to safely synchronize only the changes and the optimizations towards the Merchant Center and to leave the rest, like intact in the way that it's always has been working. Yeah, amazing. Cool.
That's that. That's class. And then, of course, the third thing you realize, you know what, which, by the way, is, I know it's so simple that so many people, like just seem to not get it. Google is a price comparison engine in the end, right? Yeah, large degree, yeah. I think I've never felt this clearer than a couple of years ago, I had a client who sold suitcases, but it was like a very expensive, like specific suitcase, and we could just not get Google ads to work. And this was like, sort of, I'd say, about seven years ago now, and I was sort of racking my brain, what else can we do? And in the end, it was just, we had to drop the price, right? I was the only thing. And I feel like this is starting to become again, as people are searching for what other levers can we pull up? More important than ever as well, to be able to have good understanding how to price your products properly and even dynamically right, depending on uh, dependent on the auction. So how does that work?
Yeah, so there's a few things I can say about that. So firstly, I think, I think Google, there's no official documentation around this, but I think Google has, like, a sort of an index for search terms and products that can be matched against that search term, and those are actually based on information, like CTR, for example. That's the main driver for that, I think. So let's say you're selling suitcases, and you have the search term suitcase, and Google can choose out of like, I don't know, hundreds of different suitcases, right? And there's only six shopping tiles in the search engine result page, yeah. So how do, how do they decide which product they are going to show? That's mainly about historical CTR as well, right? So it should be like a good offering that people, that users already clicked on like. So it's very difficult to get inside that window if you're a new brand, for example, with really high prices, because if somebody looks for a suitcase, chances are high that they look for something affordable. So let's say someone would look for search for a luxury suitcase, very expensive, then you might come inside the shopping cart, right? Only the search volume is very low on those kind of search queries. So in order to get inside that auction, you. Need to have something that that triggers people to click on it. So that's something for new brands. That's very difficult, especially if you're selling your own products and not the product that another resellers is also selling, because then you have more data. So that's on, that's on one answer. I feel like there's two options, which makes sense from a technical point of view as well, because if you want to give a result in one second, you can impossibly go through like, 10s of 1000s of products from different advertisers to showcase those. Yeah, and I was really blown away by, I mean, at product zero, we have, like, these days we have 15,000 advertisers on product zero. And, yeah, it's crazy. It's been like, I mean, going from 2018 to 22,025. You can imagine how much people we have on we have onboarded, over time, how much energy there has been put in there to get everybody up and running and everything around those massive like thing to accomplish. But I've also seen a lot of cases throughout the years of people like saying, like, Okay, I see my performance going going down, for example, and then, and they cannot explain what's happening. And then, if you look at the data inside Google ads, just so normal things, you don't see anything strange, like, very strange. So all settings are correct. Everything's working well, the tracking is still working properly. But if you look at the price benchmark column inside Google Ads itself, then you can see like, oh, wow, the pricing changed. And when the pricing has changed, volume goes down. So we did like a study looking at different accounts and making an overshoot for that. And we also did a test where we had like products on the same prices as everyone else, and just by going one euro down the price of all the other competitors, we saw an instant rise in impressions, and it is an instant rise in clicks. And we also saw the conversion volume going up. So you can imagine that a lot of your the results coming from your shopping as campaigns is about pricing, while most PPC specialists don't have influence on pricing. You're running campaigns inside Google ads. Pricing happens outside Google ads. It happens at the at the e commerce Store itself, right? So it's very important to have those insights and communicate with your with your client when you're when you're an agency, or communicate with your job, yeah, with your other departments, when you're working at clients, right to to make sure that you have competitive pricing, and you advertise on products where you can make a difference. Because, let's say, the price goes down one euro. So you're selling something of 100 euros or 100 pounds, and you're going down one pound. It's 99 pounds, then that can mean that you see that your actual CPC is going down, the amount of clicks is going up, the amount of sales is going up. So it's a it's like a compound effect on the results of your campaigns by just changing the price a little bit. Yes, and it also happens the other way around. So if you get one pound more expensive than your competitors, your your impression volume will go down, your CPC will go up, and your conversion volume will go down, which is also a compound of a, like, in the in the wrong, in the wrong, uh, direction. So that's something, yeah, I think, has a massive influence, a massive influence. And also, yeah, it's also outside of the Google ads platform itself, and that's going to happen more and more with the whole automated AI platforms like Google ads. The direction Google s is going is that you need to communicate with your with your customer, or you need to communicate with internal departments to get better results from your campaigns, not just clicking inside Google ads and setting up the right structure or strategy and
percent? Yeah. I mean, we recently had this. I actually did a podcast episode about it as well, just because it again, sort of, you know, it's been it's such an obvious thing that sometimes people forget about it. We've had a client who exactly that happened in January. So performance suddenly tanked out of nowhere. What had happened was that a competitor who's quite a lot more expensive has actually a better product, but it's definitely a lot more expensive, but they had a sale on right? So classic sale price showed they were suddenly 50 euros or something like that, cheaper. And they were winning every auction. So we had done no different other than suddenly they dropped their price. They had a lot more visibility on their product. Their product was actually better, in fairness, in terms of what perceived value as well. And they just won every and this one of them sort of products or companies, they've got one keyword, right? There's just one search term you have to dominate, and there's no other word for that product. And what we did was improve, of course, the landing page, improve the offer. And that has helped a lot. But what has helped the most is when. That said competitors stopped their sale, and suddenly their price was like 5200 euros more expensive again. And the problem evaporated overnight, right? They basically disappeared from the auction overnight after raising their prices. So you can see it has the opposite effect. Sometimes, yeah, yeah, and nothing to influence that, yeah, but they've done me a massive favor. Let's put it like that, yeah,
but it's more like, if you if you think about like, being a PPC specialist, and you want to showcase your value, right? So you want to show like, Okay, I mean, we did really cool things with the campaigns. We optimized everything, and then you want to show the results coming out of all the effort, right, and what people are paying for. But if it's outside of your control and you don't see it, then it's also very difficult to optimize, right? So it's very important to make sure that you have that context and that you look into those kind of options as well to explain like a change in performance, and it's also the other way around, right? So you can create, like, a whole new structure and say, like, wow, we did the best work possible. Results have gone up like 100% but maybe the price has just changed. So that's also in your in your favor. So it's also the Yeah, so it's, it's important to have those insights,
yeah, a lot, a lot of different parts. And I think one part of that as well is, well, sometimes the right strategy does help. And I've actually been praising your labelizer Strategy for very, very long time. And I think it's a real game changer, especially for product or stores or sort of, yeah, stores, I'd say, in general, who struggle to develop, like a good account, strategy slash setup based on a larger portfolio, right? If you have one product, then it's simple. I just run a couple of campaigns. That's the end of it. Brandon, brand, blah, blah, blah, blah. But if you suddenly, let's say you've got 1000 products and pretty much all the same margin, right? So it's fine more or less throughout the bank, and you realize over time, anyway, there's a couple of products which make 80% of the turnover and the rest is sort of just dangling in front of it. And anytime you launch something new as well, it seems you can't knock off your winning products, off the throne, if you like, because they just don't get any ad spend. You clearly realized this a couple of years ago and did something about it. So tell me about it. Martin,
yeah, so I think like I was also quite lazy when being a PPC specialist myself. So it was actually the, I mean, before break zero, I already created, like a script where I would take out the product data and the performance data, and said, like, everything with a higher conversion rate in a certain percentage I want to put in, like, a separate product group, when it was still manual bidding inside your shopping ads, in your shopping campaigns, I took, let, like, let's say, everything that had a conversion rate of 6% or higher. I gave it a bit of one pound everything with a conversion rate of three to six I gave a bit of 50 pounds of fence. How do, how do you say, Yeah, thanks, yeah, yeah. So that way you can, like, differentiate on your bidding, right, based on performance, because you're not going to take, like, you're not going to look at every single product and say, Okay, I'm going to raise the bid here, I'm going to lower the bid there. So I like to control so I did it manually, but I also created a script, because then I then products would segment automatically between those, those, those product groups inside your shopping campaign, and bits were always set in a, in a, in a good way. But with product zero, we were actually developing new tools, and we were looking like, Okay, should we go for shopping ads like the regular shopping campaigns create like a tool which does non brand brands and all the other campaign structures with negatives, etc. But smart shopping was introduced, and we were like, Okay, this is Google's going in this direction. We can create something that's more old fashioned, which we can do very well, which we can also like, not go for the legacy things, but go for the new things. So we were looking into smart shopping, and we were looking into all the product data and performance data from all different advertisers, and we saw, like, yeah, every account has the same challenge. It's like, for everyone, it's the same like, it's like, the 5% of the products doing 80% of the revenue. There's like, new products coming in which are quite promising, but don't have the impressions. Yet, there's a big chunk of products that have a negative impact on your overall performance. So they are, some are just spending money, not doing any turnover. Some, some are spending a lot and a little bit of turnover. And there was something new with smart shopping. There was, like, new products, if you. Put them in a separate campaign, like the zombie products, it would actually kick start them. And we felt like the two different auctions that are there, so there's the first auction, whether you're not eligible for search terms, and products being shown for those search terms, and then designing the ad rank, we felt like there was like something secret superpower in smart shopping, that if you put products without impressions in a new smart shopping campaign, it would enter the first auction quicker so it would Google would test it more often to match it towards search terms and to speed up the process of becoming heroes or villains, as we call them later on. So we started testing that, and we saw that with a regular shopping campaign, putting those products in a regular shopping campaign, nothing really changed. Nothing really happened. So it didn't do a lot while putting them in a smart shopping campaign, all of the sudden they started collecting impressions, and they and we could kick start the whole process. So in that way, we're thinking about, okay, how can we create a framework which is easy to use, which everybody would understand? So we came up with the basic Hey matrix, as we called in Dutch, so the Boston Consulting Group matrix, which is about the cash cow stars and all those things. And we said, Okay, on one axis, we're going to put the volume, so the amount of clicks, on the other axis we're going to put, like the profitability, so the lowers and a products that have a high ROAs and a high amount of clicks, those are on the top right. Those are the heroes. Those are your most important products that need to have unlimited budget. Always on, always there. Yeah. And then on the top left, so not that much clicks, but a high ROAs. It's the sidekick. So products that should be having more clicks, but don't have those yet. So we need to do something to get more impressions, to get to give them more visibility. They have your product with a lot of volume that are performing below your ROAs threshold. Those are your villains. Those are the products that take away your money, that steal your budget, but don't actually perform
the old matrix. I think they refer to as dogs. And yeah,
dogs, yeah, yeah. Those are dogs, yeah. And I don't remember, like, the ones that that are in the which is
unfair, really, because dogs are brilliant. But yeah,
yeah, we have a lot of dogs in the office here, actually. So, yeah, it's really nice. But yeah, so those so we actually came up with that framework, and we saw that, like, if you look at the mechanics behind smart shopping, like, when it was introduced, the Bid Strategy was maximize conversion value by default, right? So it actually, it was about maximizing conversion value but also giving it a ROAs limitation inside Google Ads itself. So what it what it does is it takes your budget and tries to create as much conversion value as possible for that budget. So we also saw that if you, if you give it a lower budget, then it doesn't have a lot of room to spend your money, right? So we said, like, Okay, if we take the hero products, we put it in a separate campaign, give it unlimited budget, have as much visibility as possible, because those products are doing revenue. We take the villain products, which also get a lot of click volume. So Google says people like to click on the on those products, but they don't like to buy them actually, which is good for Google, but not good for the advertiser itself. So we said, like, Okay, if you put them in a villain campaign with a low budget, then it's still going to be triggering searches, but the searches have to be highly attractive for your for your advertising account, yeah. And the cool thing is, then you will also be found more on long tail searches instead of generic searches, so there are more specific which means the chances being higher that you're doing a CEO which influences your
large in volume, right? That's what I was trying to explain. People scale on Google ads. It's not just pushing up the budgets in the end. It's all about existing search volume. And typically speaking, search volume increases the less specific a search term becomes. Right in for, let's say the beds industry, the number one search term is bad, right? Absolutely fucking anything, right? One could have a red bed, King size in their head, and they just put in bed and things. But that's the most competitive one in the largest volumes, and that's where you want your heroes to show, right? Because they can compensate through their conversion rate, yeah, for being maybe, you know, on less specific terms, yeah,
yeah, that's the whole, that's the whole concept, I think, I mean, and in that sense, it's, it's like, it's like, basic, fundamental. Terms of performance marketing, I would say, like doing more of what works and doing less of what doesn't work, and try to raise the volume on things that work and lower the volume on things that don't work, and then try to optimize them to become something that does work. So yeah, and then combining it with with, like the those zombie products, putting them in a smart shopping campaign back then and now performance Max is actually the same as smart shopping. The only difference is there's additional channels inside ads itself,
assetless, right? Which is sort of, yeah, yeah. Find an emulation. Yeah. It's
kind of an emulation, but, and I mean that's also more like, yeah, we can talk for hours about p max as well, but maybe that's not, that's not the scope for this podcast. But yeah, so the whole concept was really nice for us to explain to people. Like, okay, how do we think you can influence your like, your shopping campaigns in the best possible way for you as an advertiser. And the cool thing about it is everyone has product data. Everyone has ads performance data. So every advertiser has that data when you're running ads. So everyone can use it as well, and can, can, can make a positive impact on their account performance by doing that. And yeah and, and those labels are being updated on a daily basis. So if a product is performing well and over time, let's say pricing is getting worse, then the conversion rate will drop and the product will go from hero to villain automatically, which means also budget is going down for that product, which means less impressions, which means less waste in your ads account, which is better performance. And that's the goal for most advertisers, right? It's getting more turnover, more revenue or more profit. So
yeah, as clients, they want all at the same time. Usually, yeah. I mean, always the easiest, yeah,
yeah. I mean, that's always a discussion. I really like those discussions. And when I when I worked at the digital marketing agency, those were the most fun things, because then you have an advertiser which is really ambitious, right? If you want to have both, which is perfectly fine, but that means that you either need to do something with your pricing, then, then your revenue will go up, and your profit might, might, might go up, because if you change prices a little bit. You pay less for a click, you get more volume. So that's the conversation we're getting. So it's more strategic than just running your ad campaigns. So I personally like those conversations a lot, although it's a stretch, like you cannot have both then.
So do I. Unfortunately, it's sometimes fighting wind bells, right? But that being said, it can be massively Well, I remember many years ago running meta ads for my own store. I used to run a Shopify store myself, and you know, you'd actually make more profit sometimes running a sale for those exact reasons, because engagement metrics are better, your CPMs go down as a result, you drive in actually more sales. Maybe the profit per sale is less, but generally, overall, you're a lot more profitable because you drive more volume. These are sort of numbers schemes, which not many always people can wrap their heads around that. Where do you think the next couple of what's going to happen the next two, three years with product zero. What do you think?
Yeah, I think, like, what we see happening is that, I mean, I've seen, okay, there's a few things I noticed when looking at different accounts. Advertising goes from advertisers. I mean, when you work at an agency, you see 510, maybe 50 accounts, maybe 100 if you're lucky, right? So then, then, then you're seeing a lot of different ad accounts, but I mean, in almost every account, conversion tracking is not working well. So conversion tracking is a pain in the ass for everyone, and it's getting more and more important in the fully automated world that we're going to live in with ad platforms. So I feel like that's a direction that's very interesting. I also think that next to the labelizer, the labelizer, so the product segmentation tool we created, which is a good always on strategy, and it influences the Google Ads accounts in like it helps you control Google ads a little bit in your in your favor. But I think it's also getting more important. To add additional data to do the strategy. So add more first party data, like returns or profits in a certain sense, which you can already do in our platform, but you need to upload the data separately, like through custom labels, for example. But I would love to have an integration with data coming from that side, because it has a massive influence on your on your on your business.
And yeah, I've copied you your ideas in that regard. Right? Not to advertise any other products now here, but for instance, in. You're probably well aware of profit metrics. For instance, they have very similar labelizing strategy, and they've combined that with profit data, right? So which is more useful if you have a lot more margins, right? Like very, very different or different buying patterns. So yeah, so you want to venture down that with, like, as an optional feature, I would imagine then as well.
Yeah, yeah. I know Frederick. I've spoken him quite sometimes, like the founder of profit metrics, really nice guy, yeah. And I think, I mean, I think he really did a cool thing with with with profit metrics itself, which has he really laid the foundation for profit at profit on S, band, bidding and those kind of things. I think the major thing with that is that you expect e commerce stores to have all that data in place and to have it available very easily. But that's something that's that's not really there yet, I think so that's also the difficulty for for for launching a tool like that. But Google also is incorporating the cost of goods sold, of course, in the Merchant Center itself. Yeah, and they are also, they, they updated the conversion tracking for Google ads, where you can do like the announced e commerce tracking, and then you can, you can send data from, like, okay, from an order like, these products have been sold for this price. The cost of goods sold in the Merge Center was like, half of that price. And then you can, you can optimize on profit inside Google ads.
Yeah, you know, I'm a little bit torn on that one, because I like profit metrics for the fact that it just pumps in a random conversion value in Google Sites. It's just Google doesn't actually understand what turnover is, right? It just does. Here's conversions. Is conversion value? It's a machine. It doesn't understand what conversion value is. It just does, oh, yeah, 1.1 row. So go for that. Fine. I said it's in such a fashion to achieve that, and it doesn't do that. Whereas I'm a little bit cynical Martin and I feel like, if we actually start telling Google really itself, what the profit, or what the product, what our products cost, they will know. Oh yeah, we can squeeze them as much as we can even raise bids even further to, like, squeeze our customers even more, right, if they actually know, and the next step of that will be lifetime value, right? Lifetime because then they will, they will raise auction prices even more, right, because they know how much click is worth to you. So I Yeah, so I'm not looking a bit sort of skeptical cynical today. I love Google, but sometimes, yeah, I mean, and the thing is, I'm not making this up, right? Like they have actually admitted to that manipulating auction prices. So, yeah, yeah, I don't know the double edged sword that one,
yeah, I know. And I think it, I think it's more like, I feel like, of course, you always need to be hesitant on what you're going to share with Google. It's more like, also what you said is that the bidding system itself is very efficient at getting certain results right. And for a lot of E commerce retailers, especially smaller ones, profit is really important to make sure that you keep exists and that you can scale right. And this tool is actually it's a free tool from Google. So it's free that you can add that information to your tracking, so the actual order and the cost of goods sold is also free to upload it inside the Merchant Center, and for an additional tool to bid on profit you need to pay extra. So I think it's going to be a trade off for a lot of advertisers, whether or not they want to implement an additional tool to hide the profit data, versus use something that's free and then add the profit data in your campaign so you can steer on profit, and that's, I think that's going to be a decision for a lot of advertisers to make, but I do see advertisers adopting like the cost of goods sold part and also the new conversion tracking. And I do expect that, especially in the last few years post COVID, a lot of E commerce stores are more focused on profit instead of growth, growth, growth, because they have invested a lot during during COVID, because everything went very well for E commerce, of course. So I do feel like there's a big need for a solution like that. And Frederick has created a nice solution for that, and I would definitely recommend people using his tool. But yeah, if you think, some people might think it's too expensive or too complicated, and they might go for another solution. And that's the that's that one. Well,
cool, if you, I'm very I'll keep an eye on it. See, see what happens. Is there any any further things in the pipeline with you guys?
Yeah. So next. To that. So we feel like, I mean, you talked about Google wanting to raise their share or shareholder value, of course, by inflating auctions and and ad spend. I think Google and also other platforms are going to make it a lot more easy to advertise inside the platform itself. We've, I mean, Google also released the keyword plus campaigns like the dynamic search words, but they also are coming up with a new, new solution. Yeah, I think it's going to be less about optimizing within the platform, but more about feeding AI algorithms. And for us, it feels very logic to go multi channel as well, so to not only be like the Google platform, but also like doing meta and also doing Microsoft and other platforms, because everything is moving in the same direction, which means lower barriers to enter more advertisers inside platforms, because then you have more oxygen pressure, which means more value for for those companies. And there is, there's going to be a new need where you have, like, one platform, where you can see which product is selling where, well, in which platform, and then you can optimize across platforms. So you could say, like, be
helpful for DPA is right? So dynamic products in just automate, like, upload different feeds, yeah, practically update with your best sellers. So if you run a DPA, you just advertise your best selling products, for instance, yeah,
yeah. So that's so that's the direction we're we're looking into, and we're also working on already and also combining the products AI parts. So we have the we have AI for optimizing product content for Google, which you can also use for Microsoft, of course, but you can also use it for meta, like for shortening your product content to fit in, like the dynamic product ads and those kind of of I think so there's a few different directions, but it's a very interesting time, I think, especially for companies like break zero, yeah, yeah.
I feel, I feel there's a lot of opportunity. And I think that's a good word, because if someone wants to take the opportunity to test you guys to see if the right tool. What they have to do?
Yeah, so if people want to test us, they can go to proctor.com and they can sign up through our sign up form, and you can take a trial, so you can test out the discount yourself, so you can see whether or not you're paying less for a click also in the UK, Norway and Switzerland. And if and if people want to, we can also help them analyze the data, and so we also have a service for that. And when you sign up for the platform, you can also use our pro package, which has the labelizer the products AI, so you can also play around with optimizing your content in a more fun way and get better results from your campaigns. And we also have a price benchmarking tool where we take price benchmark data and we show you, like, okay, whether you're more expensive or cheaper than your competitors inside the shopping as auction. So, yeah, I would definitely play around with it. Whether you're on Google Shopping CSS still, I know in the UK, there's quite some advertisers still on Google Shopping says, which is mind blowing to me, because everyone's paying too much. But yeah, there's like, and I don't know, because you, you guys feel like, like being like, first movers with, with a lot of things when it comes to Google, when it comes to feed management and those kind of things. But on that end, it's still lacking.
Otherwise. So there's a lot of people. It's, um Yeah, it's, I do actually feel like it's mad that, as we just see many auctions where people are still not using it. So, yeah, yeah.
So let's hope we reach them and they they feel convinced and start start a trail and start testing
it. 100% brilliant. Thanks. Thanks very much for doing that. That's been very, very insightful. How can people find you on the internet? If they want to connect with you, you're LinkedIn and, yeah,
so I'm on LinkedIn mainly, and if people want the information, they can also email me directly on martin@prairieth.com Yeah, that's a way to reach out. Amazing.
Thank you so much, guys. This again, another episode of Google Arts unleashed. Thank you very much Martin for popping on if you want more Google Ads advice, follow Martin. Follow myself. Obviously, you can find me on the famous LinkedIn platform as well. You can also just book a one to one with me if you want to deploy any of the strategies that we talked about today via the website as usual. Thank you very much all for listening. It's been Jeremy Young, your Google Ads expert, and I wish you a happy and productive week ahead.