Did you know that mastering Google Shopping Ads doesn’t have to be complex?
To show you, we’ve interviewed three Google Shopping Ads experts to give you their opinion and viewpoint on how to be successful with Google Shopping Ads.
From scaling to fine tuning, we hope you enjoy this deep dive.
Subscribe to BoostSauce to learn even more marketing and sales knowledge, faster…
When it comes to Google Shopping Ads, there are only a few people we turn to for amazing advice that works across the board for different goals.
Whether you’re in SaaS, eCommerce, or lead gen, you’ll be excited to learn that the recipes these experts will share will all help you hit your goals faster.
In Order of the Guests Below:
Kirk Williams: Owner @ ZATO
Kirk is the owner of ZATO, a Paid Search PPC micro-agency of experts, and worked in Digital Marketing since 2009. He has been named one of the Top 25 Most Influential PPCers in the world by PPC Hero for 4 years in a row, and has written articles for many industry publications.
Nuggets Dropped x38
“Product title is the best optimization that you can do”
Brian Roizen: Co-Founder and Chief Architect @ Feedonomics
Brian loves designing and creating websites and apps that make people’s lives easier. His latest venture, Feedonomics, tackles the most difficult challenge of eCommerce advertising – dealing with shopping feeds. He used to work as a SEM manager, and literally tried every single legacy feed system that exists, so he’s all too familiar with how bulky and time consuming it was to set up and optimize feeds.
Nuggets Dropped x28
“Match Wherever you’re marketing with how people search”
Reese Garcia: Director of eCommerce @ KlientBoost
Reese is passionate about helping businesses grow through paid search – Especially with eCommerce. Since starting at KlientBoost almost 3 years ago, he’s not only been responsible for growing his own client accounts, but also been the thought leader, coach, and trainer when it comes to anything eComm at KlientBoost.
Nuggets Dropped x22
“Everything is defined by the feed and your product titles”
Google Shopping Ads With Kirk Williams
Kirk: Hello this is Kirk.
Johnathan: Hey Kirk, Jonathan and Reese over here at BoostSauce. How are you?
Kirk: Very good, how are you guys?
Johnathan: Awesome, we’re excited to talk to you man. Wanna give you a quick shout out. This is, for people listening, this is Kirk Williams, founder of, I’m gonna not pronounce this correctly, Zato? Is that correct?
Kirk: Close, close, Zato.
Johnathan: Zato.
Kirk: Although curiously, most people do pronounce it Zato the first time they ask me. So maybe I missed the boat on that.
Johnathan: All right, Zato Marketing out of Billings, Montana. And we’re gonna talk about Google Shopping.
So, wanted to like kinda give you the floor and give people like the lowdown, maybe like the fundamentals and start with you know, what is Google Shopping?
Kirk: Yeah, sure definitely.
So Google Shopping started just on the Google Search network and the idea was rather than just the text-ad, especially back in the day which was, you know, the way Google rolled, they identified kinda a need for consumers to see a visual representation of that product as well as get vital information for that so pricing, things like that. 
And put that in this, you know little ad format, put that into search results on E-commerce searches and really they’ve seen that become just a really popular ad type, obviously.
You know rather than kinda have to root through the text ads and that, you see the product that you’re searching for like right? A picture’s worth a thousand words, you see it you’re like–
Johnathan: Yeah.
Kirk: Yeah, that’s the product. You see the price, you can you know usually there’s six or so depending on you know, depending on which of the shopping ad types it is and those keep expanding, you know there’s a few different price points that you can see and kind of compare and get an idea of how much this costs and all that.
So it’s basically just a way that Google, Bing does it as well now, have a way of displaying products and they’re easy to see, get your information, so you know exactly what you’re doing, so.
Johnathan: Love it, and I think, like from a very, very oversimplification of it, like you said before too, in the past it was just text ads where there wasn’t a visual of the product, there wasn’t, you could mention the price but then you kinda like have these more serious buyers coming through cause they’ve kinda already been filtered out by seeing the visual, by seeing the price, versus just a text ad.
Would you say that’s the case?
Kirk: Yeah, I think so. There’s also that level, you know you alluded to this, there’s that, there’s also kinda that the requirements thing that’s a really good thing that encourages trust too as a shopping ad.
So you know, a text ad, someone can see a text ad that says you know, “Hey, buy these pair of Nike shoes.” Right? But then you click on it and like they can, they can dump you anywhere, you know you could–
Johnathan: Right.
Kirk: You could land on winter coats or something. And sure, Google’s developed things like Quality Score and stuff to help whatever, but for the most part, that can still happen.
Like a shopping ad, that landing page has to be that product that was represented that has to be easily added, you know that you can add it to a cart. That kinda thing as well.
So I think that just helps with the product-type as well. You see it, you know that when you click on it, that’s what you’re gonna see and find. And I think that’s also part of why people do like them. They can trust.
Johnathan: Didn’t even remember that. That’s so true.
What, let’s say that you’re a retailer and you’re about to you know get into Google Shopping like what kind of things do you need to have ready as like a mental checklist?
Kirk: Yeah, so I like to say there’s kind of three crucial steps and sure there’s gonna be a lot of detail within those steps but the first is you gotta have a Product Feed and that– You know, kinda think like a spreadsheet right? That’s what a feed is. It’s just a list of products and specific data points that Google asked for. 
You gotta make sure you get their data points. And the way that then you, you have to take that feed then and then you upload it to the second thing to know, the area, which is the Merchant Center. So Google and Bing both have their merchant centers and what that does is that processes the feed. And that’s where they make sure that hey you entered the data correctly into the spreadsheet or you know into the feed. You have that information, it’s correct, all that.
Once they see yep, this product looks like it’s a good one, this looks like, you know, this is what we want to see, then you, then you’re eligible to show, you’re still not able to advertise it yet because now you have to do step three which is taking the Google Ads or Bing Ads platform, then you have to sync that with the merchant centers, and then that’s where you actually– Place and bid on the ads for Google Shopping.
So again, without any one of those three steps, you’re not going to be advertising for shopping– But with all three of those, you’ll be on your way.
Johnathan: All right, cool, let’s, let’s, is it a good use of time to break those like three main things down a little bit and see what kinda nuggets we can get out of them?
Kirk: Yeah, yeah–
Johnathan: Okay.
Kirk: I think that’s a good idea.
Johnathan: Let’s start with the feed. You mentioned there’s some like specific requirements that Google has, are, you know, let’s say that you follow them, are there any additional things you can do to, I guess make your feed perform better? Is that the right way to say it?
Kirk: Yeah, so, and this is worth pointing out, maybe at this time is, so the way that Google, the way that Google and Bing match your ads to the search queries, the search terms, so right?
When a user goes into Google and they say, “I want the best pair of Nike shoes.” Which I’m not necessarily a Nike lover, that’s just the first thing that keeps coming to mind.
Johnathan: Sounds like you are though.
Kirk: I did read “Shoe Dog” It’s a really neat book–
Johnathan: Oh nice. Nice.
Kirk: By the way. Yeah.
Johnathan: Nice. I love Nike,
Kirk: I–
Johnathan: Everybody can attest to it, but I have not read that book. That’s, I’m not true, I’m not true like you Kirk. I’m not a true fan.
Kirk: Well ironically, I loved Adidas growing up and ever since I read that book, I don’t think I had realized that Nike was actually kinda the underdog in that story, so–
Johnathan: Back in the day?
Kirk: Yeah, it was a good book. Yeah, yeah, I hadn’t really realized the story until seeing that, it was really cool, really cool story.
Johnathan: Cool.
Kirk: Anyways, we digress. But yeah. So someone types, “I want a pair of Nike shoes” into Google, so with a search ad right, what they’re doing is is they’re matching that up to your keyword.
So you probably have some variation of “Nike shoe” that you’ve entered as a keyword and this is kinda old school ways, right? With Google changing everything and everything going automated, this might not last forever.
But still the idea of keywords and search terms, you bid on the keywords, you assign some sort of value to that, with Shopping, it’s not that way, you’re not bidding on a keyword.
You’re bidding on your product in essence, your product group. And so how Google takes the search terms and says hey what would be a good product to match with this? That information is a little bit of the bid that you enter and then a lot of the feed data that you’ve sent. So they’re–
Johnathan: So more the–
Kirk: Gonna look at that feed data.
Johnathan: Is it more the feed, like is there a percentage of like how much is the bid, how much is the feed data?
Kirk: I don’t know and they’re, you know that’s the kind of thing that where Google’s not gonna say that, probably ever–
Johnathan: Yeah.
Kirk: Because they’re always concerned about people not gaming the system. I’ve definitely found that there’s some level of, it’s kind of one of those like yeah, you have to have at least some level of correct information in there, right? In order to be eligible to show.
And then you definitely can see some jumps for sure by editing some things that we can discuss like Title and stuff, but for the most part, once you have basic information, then bidding smartly is really, really a crucial aspect to all that.
But, yeah, but I mean, But I mean the feed aspects are definitely true and I alluded to that, so you know if Google is utilizing your feed data to match the search terms then obviously it goes to, it stands to reason that hey if you have, if you’ve done some research and you have some solid, some solid keywords, some solid ways of describing your products in your product title, your description, things like that, then yeah, you should be more eligible to match up cause Google’s able to see hey this product really is, does have to do with that search term that you know.
So yeah, optimizing feed definitely is a part of that.
Johnathan: Okay.
Reese– Are there any go-to optimizations in the feed that you usually look for?
Kirk: I think Title is probably the most significant best bang for your buck— Optimization that you can do. So just because it’s kind of, it’s both, it’s both the Google algorithm, you know, bringing that into their algorithm, to play well with that, but then it’s also like users can see that as well.
Like if you’re showing for that and you have a good title and it’s more clickable, you can increase your click-through rate in that. So definitely title and what, you know what we like to say is kind of at the base level, figure out your ideal title formula for your products but even different segments of your products.
So maybe that’s something like and this is to me where you test titles, you try these things. Maybe that means something like, hey, we’re gonna try product brand and then like product color and then size and then maybe some modifiers describing it. See how that does.
And then maybe you switch some of those around in your formula. So maybe next time you say, “Hey, we’ve seen in our Search Terms Report a ton of people search by color, right, for this product brand. Let’s try to put color at the beginning, right?” Red Nike Shoes.
And I think that’s where you can actually start, once you start testing on, that’s when you can start to see that you do see some impression or click-through rate jumps in that, that aren’t directly related to, you know as much as you know, things in the market or your bidding or that. And that’s when you can start to identify you know title test improvements and make them.
Johnathan:– Are you mostly using the search terms to decide on what like title formula you’re using? Does that kinda dictate it mostly or how do you come about that?
Kirk: Yeah, so we’ll use the Search Terms Report, especially, I mean when we have that data, right? Especially if it’s a new account, you know, we’ll do some, just using some basic viewer-research type tools.
Honestly I like Keyword Planner in Google. Doesn’t cost anything and it’s there and it works and it gives some level like– To me what it does is it gives some insight into hey this, these keywords about this product that you’re researching, these are more often how people search, so that’s probably how they and Google see it.
So let’s think initially about doing that as our title, as part of the title, especially in the beginning, and kinda see where it goes from there. Title testing and other, like feed testing in Google is not an exact science.
Johnathan: Yeah.
Kirk: Because, you can’t make a perfect test. You cannot test elements you know, at the same time.
Johnathan: Right.
Kirk: Which is a real, really problematic .
Johnathan: Too many moving parts?
Kirk: It really, yeah. It’s kind of an art cause you might think, “Hey, well, this really changed something.”
And then you might realize, oh, actually, looking at option insights, competitors were doing some weird things, so actually I have no idea if that title test I did actually changed that or if it was just the market, you know?
Johnathan: Yeah. Can you–
Kirk: It’s and art.
Johnathan: Can you put emojis in titles? I don’t even know. Just a question.
Kirk: I don’t know that.
Johnathan: If it just like looks different–
Krik: I do not know.
Johnathan: It comes through as like the results on Google and like that stands out. I wonder what the click-through rate difference would be? We’ll come back.
Kirk: That is–
Johnathan: To you guys. We’ll test that to see if it’s possible . Okay, anything else on that before we go like you now, moving on. I’m sure there’s a lot more we can talk about from like the feed perspective. You mentioned Title, like what’s the next important thing? Is that the Description? Or is that the Visual?
Kirk: I think probably the Visual is where I’d go next. You know the description is– Is important too, but as I’ve talked to this different feed, you know Product Feed Specialist at Google and Bing and Mac, it does sound like, I always get the sense that like, yeah, keep descriptions updated and good but also it’s not like it’s that important.
It’s just always the sense I’ve always gotten from them and from past use, so. So, I do think the image is Visual.
Some of that, you know a big part of that being, here’s where again we get into the messiness of Google’s algorithm and then them not really telling us anything except bits and pieces of information but with Shopping, this is something a lot of people maybe do not know but Shopping actually has a Quality Score, just like Google keyword search term, search keywords.
But it’s not, it’s at the product, the Item ID level is your Shopping Quality Score and as far as I know, that’s never like shown you or said anywhere. It’s kinda this entity that’s just known but it’s not actually, it’s not, like you’re not told hey your Quality Score for this product is blah, blah, blah. But–
Johnathan: But you can actually see it? Inside the account or–
Kirk: No.
Johnathan: No.
Kirk: No, no.
Johnathan: How do you figure it out then?
Kirk: Yeah. You don’t. As far as I know, maybe that’s one of those things that, or maybe there’s some listener who’s like done some reverse engineering–
Johnathan: Yeah.
Kirk: Or something. I don’t know.
But it is one of those things, and some of that, by the way, where that has really come into conversation with like Googlers that I’ve talked to and stuff is like, let’s just go really, really deep specific for a second, you know let’s say we had products in Google Merchant Center that really has an issue with getting through some random stupid policy filter and that is, like there will be times when there are aggressive filters in Google Merchant Center that actually are not accurate.
So for instance we’ve had restaurant equipment parts that were disapproved for nudity– In the images, which you know it’s like, it’s an electric timer, you know what I mean? So that–
Johnathan: That turns some people on. Don’t judge.
Kirk: Right, right. I have no idea, you know?
So, but there, you know Google’s concerned about that right? And so you, even going through manual, requesting reviews and all that stuff, and we’ve had Google specialists tell us, and this works, hey you know, the last thing that you can try unfortunately is change your Item ID, and they’ll note as part of that is, that’s always the last resort though because that resets your Product Quality Score. So there is some, there is history tied to these Item IDs–
Johnathan: Yeah.
Kirk: That’s part of it, in terms of how well have these products done in the past as well and that’s part of the algorithm. All that going back to images is because, my understanding is that similar to keyword that you know, there is some level of click-through rate as well, in there, in kind of that history.
And so, some of that being you know hey getting some great images that can help just increase, increase traffic, increase click-through rate, in a way that obviously is still you know attractive, and you know accurately represents your product and all that. It’s just always a good thing too.
So, yeah, I think.
Johnathan: Okay.
Kirk: So definitely, definitely give images a try, testing them.
Johnathan: Awesome. Awesome.
Reese: You know I was really curious. I don’t wanna switch gears on this too much from talking about the feed but I know you mentioned that the feed is really important and so is setting bids the right way.
And I was really curious about how you go about that? If you prefer a more manual approach or more of a smart bidding approach? Really curious what that looks like.
Kirk: Yeah, no, good, yeah that’s a great question.
Yeah, that kinda gets into that third realm which is you know the Google Ads aspect of it, right? And, I mean that’s totally up to you Jonathan, we can move, we can shift there if you want, Cause that’s kind of a big–
Johnathan: Let’s talk about, yeah let’s–
Kirk: Conversation.
Johnathan: Well, is there a lot to touch on on the Google Merchant Center side or is that kinda like the lesser of the three?
Kirk: It’s the lesser of the three but there are maybe just a couple of things to note with Merchant Center. Like one, one just would be, especially if someone’s hearing this and they’re like, “Hey, what do I even do, like how do I get started?”
Johnathan: Yeah.
Kirk: You know there are different ways to upload your feed. If you’re especially if you’re just getting this rolling, you’re trying to bootstrap this business and you’re doing this yourself and you don’t have a very big product you know database yet, you can actually just use Google Drive, just Google Sheets, they even have a template and everything for you and just fill that data in.
I’ve assisted someone once, I think they had like five products, and I just like here, just get me the information. I grabbed the information from their site and then and I had it up and running in like 15 minutes you know?
Johnathan: Wow.
Kirk: And so it is really, really easy if you don’t have too complicated; otherwise, you might need to look into a feed provider like a Feedonomics or DataFeedWatch is that they can assist with some of the more complex aspects of that.
Johnathan: And some–
Kirk: And just kind of being aware that–
Johnathan: Some of the stores, right? Like the storefronts too–
Kirk: Yeah.
Johnathan: Have some built-in like Shopify and things like that. And so if you are on one of those platforms I think it makes it easier too, right?
Kirk: Yep, yeah. They just connect to the API and then get you up. The only thing I’ll say with that that I, so especially like from a beginner thing, absolutely like click that Shopify button– And get into Google Merchant Center and get rolling.
The only thing I’ll note is that you do have limitations with what you can do in terms of editing the feed in that, with sometimes with some of those API connections, although now, going a little bit deeper, again with even Feed Rules and stuff, Feed Rules’ working better with API than they did in the past.
Where you can go in and run title tests and stuff correctly in Merchant Center. But Feed Rules, you know hey, that’s, again that’s not as problematic as it used to be. But, but yeah, so yeah, they have, you can do the API connection through exactly like you said Shopify’s little app, you know, so, so there are many ways to get your feed up kind of depending on how much work you wanna do or how much money you wanna pay someone to do it.
The only other thing probably that’s really worth calling out, I like call out on Merchant Center is watching your disapprovals actually. So– This was explained to me by a couple Googlers and it took me like awhile and some questions to kinda really understand what they were saying.
Basically with your Google just approvals in Google Merchant Center, there are actually these differing levels of filters and basically in terms of how aggressive they’re gonna be watching your account. Which, that really sounds like all crazy Illuminati. You know for you it kinda does for me too.
But basically, basically if you just, if you’re like the problem kid and you just have disapprovals all the time, and there’s a lot high percentage of your products are disapprovals, stuff like that–
Johnathan: For nudity.
Kirk: Google’s gonna be much more aggressive, what? Yeah, yeah, but yeah you have you know, restaurant equipment parts nudity, I mean they’re just gonna have these various, these increasing, increasingly focused levels of filters which also explains sometimes why you might have products where you’re like, “Hey, we’ve been running this product for a year and all of a sudden, why is it disapproved now?”
You might have shifted into another level of filtering of them kind of focused on your account. And so, as I’ve been told, keep, as much as is possible, keep those disapprovals cleaned out, basically. Like play nice with Google, let them know that you’re kind of a White Hat. Like hey, trying to do everything right here. And stay out of their focus.
Johnathan: Yeah.
Kirk: Otherwise they can make life hard.
Johnathan: I believe it. All right we got some, like five minutes left. Let’s talk about the bidding side and what you prefer on that. And then we’ll see how far we can get.
Kirk: Yeah, yeah, okay, five minutes.
So, okay, so, there’s the manual bidding and automated bidding and especially now, there’s new Smart Shopping, which I’m sure a lot of people who have been listening to it have been hearing as well, which is kinda like the aggressively automate everything. Black box.
So, kind of on the manual bidding, what we’ve done and found successful and we still are finding this successful is as much as possible, we try to break out our product groups, similar products, kind of broken up by different things. Whether that’s categories or categories, brands, we’ll even throw custom labels in there in terms of Pay a Specific Price-Point product because the more similar products are especially in how they’re gonna be purchased, the more you want the match you’re bidding up to those.
You don’t want to bid the same amount– on a $20 pair of sunglasses as you are like a $5,000 fur coat or you know whatever it might be, right? And so I think you gotta be smart in how you segment out your campaigns, first of all.
And then, kind of a bidding method introduced to us years back by a guy from Germany Martin, Martin Roettgerding is his name is one that I’ve used for years and it still works great, and that’s to basically segment out your campaigns so that you can do a little bit of a hack way of bidding according to search term find intent. And the real quick version of that, since I probably have like a minute left. Is basically–
Johnathan: 20 seconds, just kidding.
Kirk: Basically it’ll– Yeah.
Johnathan: You got time.
Kirk: Basically it allows you to say, Hey, I’m gonna segment out these campaigns so that I can bid you know less aggressively, and save budget on someone typing in the word “Bike”, “Bicycle”, right? Cause there can be a lot of different intent there and there’s a lot more search volume.
So you can blow a lot of budget if you’re selling, let’s say, Trek bikes on the term “Bicycle”, and, but you might not necessarily want to exclude it completely, and so this allows you to pull out, with the same product, pull out those search terms so you can bid less aggressively on bicycle and more aggressively on someone typing in I want to buy specifically the Trek FX-Two Bike, right?
Because basically them already communicating your brand and maybe even that product number, that model number, is a person who is showing you by their search intent that they’re much further along in the search funnel.
And therefore, more likely than not, you want to give them a higher bid, and with this kind of strategy, you can do that. So for the person listening who’s like, you know, what the heck did he just say? You can go and check out the video by Martin Roettgerding online and–
Johnathan: We’ll find that.
Kirk: And you know maybe that–
Johnathan: We’ll add that to the notes too.
Kirk: Fantastic, that would be fantastic.
That might be easiest. and then I wrote a Search Engine Land article on that, on search term bidding through Shopping, a few years back. But it’s still is very applicable.
And it’s kind of a direct walkthrough that walks you through this is exactly how you set that up and both of those should be helpful.
Johnathan: Awesome, awesome. Anything, any, what your thoughts on the whole Smart Bidding side and the whole Smart Shopping campaigns? Like them, hate them, love them? Indifferent?
Kirk: Like ongoing testing, ongoing testing still haven’t not, not hate them, I don’t hate them and I don’t love them.
Johnathan: Yeah.
Kirk: We so far just have seen times where Smart Bidding, especially key row ads, truthfully I’ve just not done a lotta TCPA, like of TPA bidding with Shopping. I know some people that do.
But we tend to be a little bit more on thinking in the row ads mind cause we tried a few row ads, you know we’ll see it work, we’ll see it you know struggle at certain times and that, we’ve definitely done a lot of testing with Smart Shopping too lately.
And a few just you know thoughts, would be with Smart Shopping, that’s basically Google’s Black Box where you kind of push it live and say, “Okay, go Google!” And they find anything anywhere on any of their properties, YouTube, Gmail, Search, Display, anything and show Shopping Ads and then try to hit your– target row ads.
We’ve seen that work and we’ve seen it struggle. We’ve seen it work real well in number of campaigns and then start to struggle over time, we’ve seen it be too aggressive on the remarketing side so we’re concerned about you know, losing out on, you know kind of the top of funnel you know demand creation type side, too.
And then there’s still just not a lot of data that they give which is also concerning. So you know just to be blunt, I mean let’s say you ran Smart Shopping campaigns for the next year, you shut everything off and just ran Smart Shopping campaigns, that would be one year that you would look back on and have zero search terms–
Johnathan: Yeah.
Kirk: To be able to have any insight into, for any reason–
Johnathan: Right.
Kirk: Negative or positive in Shopping. Zero, well there’s a little bit of a hack way to see placements now that I wrote a blog on, but still not all the placements that they’re on, you know YouTube videos, audiences, even network. You can’t even see what network–
Johnathan: Yeah.
Kirk: Is doing. Like, how YouTube’s doing at spend compared to Search. You can’t even see that. So some alarming data transparency that needs to improve as well.
Johnathan: Yeah, no, we’ve seen the same thing, felt the same way. Same thing with like Display, like you said it’s a Black Box.
But, Kirk, we’re running out of time man.
We wanna thank you for giving us some solid fundamentals on Google Shopping. And we’ll probably bring you back for the evolution of different types of shopping campaigns, maybe on Facebook. We talked about you know Bing and all that stuff so we’re super appreciative.
Kirk: Cool, yeah, definitely. Thanks so much for having me.
Johnathan: All right, talk soon man.
Kirk: Yep, have good one.
Johnathan: All right, bye.
Kirk: Bye.
Google Shopping Ads With Brian Roizen
Johnathan: All right, Brian, can you hear us okay?
Brian: Yeah, I can.
Johnathan: Awesome! So everybody listening, we have Brian, and let me know if I pronounce this correctly, Roizen?
Brian: Yup, that’s right.
Johnathan: Awesome. The co-founder and chief architect at Feedonomics. Didn’t even know you guys were based in L.A., a little bit north from where we are.
But we’re gonna be talking to you about Google Shopping ads, the importance of feed optimization, and with us together here today, we have actually, Reese, our own director of eCommerce on our side. Brian, can you give us a little bit of a breakdown instead why people need Feedonomics in their lives?
Brian: Yeah, absolutely. So we basically exist to help retailers optimize their product data before it goes to marketing channels like Google Shopping, Facebook, and even marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, and eBay.
What we do is we basically take product data maybe living on your website, whether you’re at Shopify, at BigCommerce, or really any kind of store and we optimize it.
So we make sure that all the right words are in the right places that we categorize your product, and then send it off to Google Shopping, and Amazon, and hundreds of different marketing channels.
Johnathan: Cool, awesome. When you look at your feed, there is obviously a way that you can do it manually, and as you get more products, more SKUs, it becomes harder to do that and manage that skill.
Can you take us through the beginners of Feedonomics users to the advanced ones and what they find great use of with the product?
Brian: Yeah, absolutely. Before we even started Feedonomics, I was actually in the agency space managing feeds for about 50 eCommerce clients. So I got to experience every kind of e-platform out there including doing it manually in Excel.
And when you’ve got a couple of products, you can open it up in Excel, it’s a feed so it got rows and columns You can see, what are all the titles? What are all the brands? And you start to see these problems that happen over and over and over again.
You might have a brand name that is Nike Corporation, instead of just Nike, but there’s no way that’s how people actually search for it on Google or on Amazon. So these are all things that you wanna fix, you wanna normalize these or fix these attributes that might otherwise not match how people are searching. So, for example, you might have titles.
If you go to Nike’s website, you might find a title that just is Air Jordan, two words. It doesn’t even have a noun in there, it doesn’t have the work Nike in there, and oftentimes we find that retailers have websites that don’t have these really rich key attributes. Because if you’re on Nike’s website, you already know this is a Nike product.
You already know what the brand is, so they’re not gonna include it. But, when you’re sending that data to Google, to Amazon, or wherever else you’re marketing, you wanna make sure it matches how people search. So what I do when I encounter a new retailer is I look at, sometimes a one-by-one, we forced on a more automated way of doing this in Feedonomics. So if you’ve got tens of thousands of products, or even millions of products, it can analyze your feed in a very systematic way.
So we can see do you have titles that contain your brand, titles that contain your noun? If you’re selling dresses, do you have descriptive words like color and size in your product title? And those are all really, really good things that you wanna try. If you don’t have a feed operation, still definitely check them manually. And you wanna fix those. You wanna make sure that the way that people search for product data matches what you have in the feed.
So, one example is, let’s say we wanna start running. We might wanna buy some running shoes. So your very first search on Google might literally be running shoes. But as you do your research, you’re gonna narrow it down to specific brands, to specific color, you probably know your shoe size. Your product search is gonna change over time. So it might go from running shoes to Nike Air Max 3 running shoes, size 12, black.
Johnathan: That’s literally what I’m wearing right now. Almost!
Brian: I read your mind. When it changes like that, someone who has that far more detailed search is far more likely to buy. And that’s when you wanna get them and that’s why you wanna make sure that the data you send to all these marketing channels and especially Google Shopping matches what people are searching for as they get further down that purchase funnel.
Reee: Gotcha. It sounds like we wanna make sure we have as complete and accurate a feed as possible. Are there any values that you feel, any values in the feed that are especially crucial for advertisers to really nail?
Brian: Yeah. I would say the most important ones start with your title because at a very high level, and I don’t wanna pretend like I know all that how Google Machine Learnings and AI work, but at a high level title, brand, and descriptive attributes that are in product type are some of the most important when it comes to relevancy.
A lot of times, we see people completely neglect product type. They just use the word clearance, for example, or seasonal, or something that’s too general. But we’ve found through extensive A/B testing that product type actually is included in relevancy. So if you’re selling running shoes, you’d want those words in there because it will help you.
One, spend less than you have to with Google, and improve your impression chart. So those are the key ones I would say to optimize. And then if I had to name a fourth, I would say make sure that you categorize your products correctly.
A lot of people, with product types, take the easy way out with Google product category, and they basically make it just the word clothing if you’re selling dresses. They don’t get granular enough so they don’t get all the way into, is it a wedding dress? Is it a normal dress? Is it a bridesmaid’s dress? But those are really important ones because if everyone else is doing them, you’re probably not gonna show up if you’re going into that most general category.
Those are some really important ones for Google Shopping in particular.
Johnathan: Cool. In regards to the split testing or being experimental when it comes to your feed, obviously, you have the main core things that you’ve been talking about, the four main points that make it higher quality so that you can get a higher impression share and win more auctions, is there anything unknown or things like that that’s really not common that you found pretty surprising that people were using to their advantage?
Brian: Yeah, that’s an interesting question.
Johnathan: Give us the good stuff.
Brian: It always surprises me.
Johnathan: Not that the other parts weren’t good.
Brian: It’s really interesting. One of the questions that I’ve had ever since I started messing around with product feeds and data is it better to put brand at the very begging of your title or at the end of it? And the answer is really surprising.
It depends, it depends on the vertical, it depends on what category is the product you sell, and it depends on what your brand name is. The best way to test, ’cause we can do all sorts of A/B testing for titles and images inside of Feedonomics, but the best way to test this is to see how are people actually searching for it.
So are people searching for Nike Air Jordan shoes? Or are they searching for Air Jordan shoes by Nike? In general, the best approach is to structure it the same way that you anticipate people will search for it. We came out with this interesting product that we call Etelligence that does exactly that. What it does is it marries actual converted search terms from Google Analytics and Google Ads into your actual feed data. So you can see, on a one-by-one product basis what are rich words to insert into title.
And we recently did this with Barney’s of New York, where we tested a few of their bestsellers, and it was crazy. By inserting one, sometimes two words, you could literally improve a product’s impression share by 2x, and a corresponding drop in their cost per acquisition or CPA. So that was a really, really interesting one just by messing around with A/B testing and looking at converted search terms and inserting them into some of your product data attributes.
Johnathan: That’s crazy. When you say depends, does it depend on how well the brand name is known? Like the Nike example, right?
Brian: Yeah.
Johnathan: If that is more well-known, you have it in front. If it’s less well-known, do you have it in the back? Is there a soft rule that you can maybe guide us towards?
Brain: Yeah, that’s exactly what it is. So if you’re a well-known brand and you’ve got a lot of branded searches, which you can easily verify in Google Ads or Google Analytics, in the Search Query Reports, you should absolutely in general try at the very beginning. But, if you’re just starting your brand out and you’re not seeing very many branded searches yet, the hope is one day you’ll get there, but you should start off by putting your brand at the end.
It could also be interesting, putting a brand for some product variance in the beginning and then for some, putting it at the end, and just seeing what the results will be ’cause that way, you can cater to the best of both worlds. But it’s definitely something that can be tested.
Johnathan: Is there, and this is just me not knowing, but is there value to having different feeds for different platforms? Because Google Ads is one, Amazon can be another one, eBay can be a third. They behave differently, right? Like the intent of searches, or are they pretty similar?
Brian: Yeah, some of them are pretty similar. For example, Google Shopping’s and Facebook’s are almost the same exact one, and the same with Microsoft Ads. I keep wanting to say Bing Ads but they renamed it.
Johnathan: I know, us too.
Brian: But there are others that are very, very different. For example, Amazon. Their feed specs are totally different than what Google Shopping requires. Some of the most important differences are around product title length. So on Google Shopping, the character length might only be 80 characters that show up initially before you start to see those listed. You wanna pay very close attention to that because if you’re stuffing a lot of very good attributes that people may be searching for but they’re not even showing up, people are not as likely to click on your ad.
And on the flipside, Amazon has a lot more character space. So you often see on Amazon searches people are including far more attributes in their searches because the titles are far longer. And then the other one is, even though Google and Facebook have a very similar feed specifications, one important difference is the images. So on Google Shopping, the images don’t necessarily have to be square.
But on Facebook, when you ultimately see that image on your Facebook newsfeed, whether you’re on mobile apps or on desktop, the images are going to actually be very, very square. So if you have rectangular images, which happens all the time with fashion clients where you’ve got a vertical dress, but it’s not a square image, it’s not gonna look great.
The one thing we’ve done for those kinda cases is we’ve padded the images, just for Facebook and not for Google, so that it looks much nicer and richer when it’s actually in the news feed. So those are some interesting optimizations that you might wanna do differently for some channels.
Johnathan: Okay.
Reese: For sure. A little bit earlier, we were talking about how your data structure in your feed for Google can affect anything from impression share to your cost-per-clicks, and ultimately your cost-per-conversion.
I’m really curious if you’ve seen anything similar with how data in a Facebook feed can be structured in terms of how it can affect your cost per thousand impressions, or how certain audiences might be served, or if more the value there is in the image rather than product titles, for example.
Brian: Yeah, it’s also a great question.
What we’ve seen on Facebook is, because no one’s necessarily doing a search on Facebook, they’re just seeing an ad of a product that they’ve potentially added to their shopping cart or viewed at some point, so the key thing you have to realize is people need to be reminded of that product as much as possible and you of course have a very short attention span of the user to do it so you wanna include attributes that not something that they would necessarily search for, but attributes that remind them of that product.
For example, if your product on your website is a magenta dress, for example, you want, and maybe magenta is kind of a weird word, you might wanna normalize that color to purple so that they don’t have to do mental math, ’cause you literally have them for less than a second. So you wanna very, very quickly remind them of that exact product. You wanna include very rich attributes like nouns. If you don’t have the word correct in your product title, you should probably add it there.
You also wanna make sure that your images, like I mentioned earlier with the rectangular versus square, that they look really good. So what I recommend doing is always checking your products that’s on Facebook to make sure that they actually look good across their different categories ’cause if you sell multiple categories, you might have products that might be T-shirts that look fine but the dresses look terrible. So definitely check. Trust then verify is a good slogan there.
Johnathan: Always, everything. What haven’t we asked you, Brian, that you think is important to know for people listening?
Brian: Sorry, could you repeat that one more time?
Johnathan: Yeah, I was asking what haven’t we asked that you think is important for the listeners to know?
Brian: Speaking of slogans, one things we say a lot at Feedonomics is don’t have a set-it-and-forget-it approach for feeds. If someone were to tell you, that’s what I do for campaigns, I set it up once and I never look at it again, you’d probably laugh at them. There’s no way you can compete in today’s eCommerce environment with that kind of a strategy.
But, surprisingly, we find time and time again that that’s exactly what people do with products and their product feeds. What’s crazy about that is even your feeds are always changing on the campaign side, but when it comes to your products you’re constantly adding new products.
You could be a fast fashion retailer who’s constantly coming out with new products. Maybe 20% of your products are new every week, and yet people are not really going back and optimizing not just new ones but existing ones. So what we find when we look at Google Merchant Center and look at the product errors and warnings, is an account can have somewhere between 10 and 40% on average of what we see just completely disapproved.
And oftentimes, those are bestselling products that you just can’t sell. So some people think that they’ve totally saturated Google Shopping, when in fact they just haven’t really optimized for it. Then we see the same thing on a lot of different other channels too like Microsoft Ads and Facebook and Amazon as well. So definitely don’t have a set-it-and-forget-it approach.
Constantly check, constantly test too. It’s very important to make sure that you’re constantly watching for Google Merchants Center errors and warnings, that you’re also testing to make sure that as changes happen, or if Google can’t call your website landing page, that you resolve it because otherwise, these could be your bestsellers that could result in easily thousands or tens of thousands of dollars of lost revenue over a few weeks that might otherwise not be tested.
We actually dealt with a client, a pretty large retailer, who had a team of two people who were alternating checking the Google Merchant Center every other day and if one of them forgot to do it, they’d have to wear a dunce hat. So when we heard about, we realized, wait a second, that’s such a manual path, so what we created is an API connection that can automatically check your Google Merchant Center for you.
So that’s what we use internally at Feedonomics to constantly be vigilant of any kind of errors in the system, others are customizable features that allow you to say, ’cause GTINs, for example, have been a super thorny issue ever since it became more or less a required field. So you might be able to say it won’t alert me on GTINs but it’ll alert me on every other kind of error reporting.
Johnathan: Got it.
Brian: And that’s really key to not having a set-it-and-forget-it approach because there’s so much lost revenue in just products that are not even eligible to be listed or seen. So that’s one component that I can’t stress highly enough, we see it time and time again, and it’s a really important one we’re seeing today.
Johnathan: For sure, for sure. Awesome!
Well, Brian, we’re super, super thankful for your time, man. We hope that you guys get some new users out of this as we’re gonna put some resources behind getting the word out. We may do a followup, more deeper dive, and we know who to call.
Brian: Awesome.
Johnathan: Cool.
Brian: Great meeting you guys, too. It’s been awesome working with you guys so far. I’ve heard only great things from the account managing team.
Johnathan: Awesome, appreciate it.
Brian: Yes! Thanks so much for inviting me to this.
Johnathan: All right, we’ll talk soon.
Reese: Thanks, Brian.
Brian: Thanks, guys.
Johnathan: All right, bye.
Brian: Bye!
Google Shopping Ads With Reese Garcia
Johnathan: All right everyone so today we have an in-person hello, hello, meeting with Reese Garcia our own Director of eCommerce. I cannot even see your eyes when I look across because like the filter’s right like, right above like your entire face.
Reese: Yep.
Johnathan: But thanks for being here, man.
Reese: Yeah, excited to be here.
Johnathan: Cool, cool. So, I just came back from a John Mayer concert, last night, so, I’m a little tired, got the John Mayer t-shirt on Curfew Boys. What does it say here, too, it says, “We hit it to the minute.”
So, what I basically mean by that is that I’m just happy that you’re here, that you can do most of the talking, I can just like smile and nod. And then hit this chicken sound button as many times as possible.
Reese: I’m down.
Johnathan: Cool. And being on brand, too, thank you for that, you have a Chick-fil-A drink as well.
Reese: I do, yeah. I wasn’t sure if I should move this or not since we also have the cameras recording and if it’s free advertising or whatever, but…
Johnathan: It’s free advertising, everybody likes Chick-fil-A.
Reese: Yeah, that’s true. Here, let’s show the camera.
Johnathan: The only downside is that you did not have nuggets I noticed, right, you had a burger. A chicken sandwich.
Reese: That’s right, not even the fried one, just the grilled one.
Johnathan: Oh my god, that’s not on brand, so…
Reese: No, it’s not.
Johnathan: Maybe we will take this out. So, with the other segments that we had for this episode about Google shopping, we talked about some basics. We talked about feeds as well, too, and the importance of that.
We’re gonna dive into a little bit about like what you’ve helped create for our own best practices at KlientBoost for our eCommerce team, too. So I know that we have some different things that have been around that we’ve kind of like accelerated in regards to putting a name on it and things like that, too, so, of all the things that we’ve cooked up over the time, which one do you want to start with?
Reese: That’s, you know that’s a really good question. So I’d like to start off by talking about the Gold Pan technique.
Johnathan: Okay.
Reese: And I feel, honestly, like, if you’re really trying to figure out you know what’s the best next thing that I can do for my shopping campaigns, if you’re like a big 80/20 person, I honestly think that’s the next best one that you should go after if you’re not doing it yet.
Johnathan: Okay.
Reese: So –
Johnathan: So not to be confused with the Gold Rush back in the day because if you Google the Gold Pan technique everything out there is going to show you how you actually use a Gold Pan, literally. In regards to Google shopping, like give us a break down.
Reese: Yeah, so basically with the Gold Pan technique we’re really trying to eliminate the big problem that we have with shopping which is, you know, why can’t I target a specific search term?
Right, like, we deal with search campaigns all day where it’s, like, we have no problem deciphering the search intent because we know exactly what we’re going after, we define the exact key word.
Johnathan: Exactly.
Reese: With shopping campaigns because everything is defined by the feed and your product titles, your other data in there is going to affect the kind of traffic that you bring along side your bid, of course. The Gold Pan technique helps us cut past all that ambiguity and say like, I want to target John Mayer t-shirts, or Kit concert t-shirts.
Johnathan: Yes, there’s quite a few of those.
Reese: Yeah, exactly, yeah. So, basically, to do that we set up a two-campaign structure. So, we’ve got two shopping campaigns as opposed to one.
Johnathan: Okay.
Reese: And the next important part is campaign priorities. Basically, a priority tells Google if you have the same product in more than one campaign, which one does it pick first? Yup, high, medium, low.
So, if it’s high Google’s gonna say, “Okay, well, we’ll prioritize this campaign first. Medium, second, low, third.” So what you do is you have those two campaigns set up and you can force your lower priority campaign to pick up the exact search terms that you want by excluding them from your higher priority campaign.
Johnathan: How do you do that?
Reese: So, basically, the higher priority campaign’s gonna serve first for everything, right? So, like let’s just say we sell a whole bunch of t-shirts. And, so, we want – John Mayer t-shirts are our top-selling item.
Johnathan: Yep.
Reese: So, we’re gonna say “Okay, well, let’s add this as a negative to our high priority campaign.” It’s gonna be forced to go down to our duplicate lower priority campaign and we’re actually gonna bid higher on it there because we know that John Mayer t-shirts are so profitable. That negative means there’s no where else for it to go but that lower priority campaign.
Johnathan: Got it. Got it. And so, is that because the higher priority campaign that it was excluded from, is not allowing the like specific John Mayer, ’cause like the other one, the other campaign is performing better for the specific John Mayer?
Does that mean the bigger campaign, or the higher priority campaign is doing like bidding on just like t-shirts in general? How does that set up?
Reese: Yeah, it’s basically going to capture everything else that the feed allows us to except for those exact negatives that we’re pushing down to our lower priority campaign.
Okay. And the way that we make sure those two are always gonna be in sync is that we have a shared budget.
And so, the shared budget means that they’re always gonna stay in the same auction together ’cause you could look at that and you could say “Oh okay, well if our lower priority campaign is where we’re harvesting everything that has better returns, then why not just give that campaign a bigger budget and our high priority generic campaign that captures everything that we’re not explicitly calling out, give that one a small budget to minimize our lower turns?”
So, sounds great in theory, but what would actually happen there is, let’s say we’re doing that, we have a small budget for our generic campaign running separately from out really good campaign meant to harvest the good stuff.
So, what happens is that generic campaign’s capturing a much broader group of search terms, if it exhausts it’s budget early in the day there’s no where else for all that other traffic to go to except to be picked up by a lower priority campaign. So what you have now is basically just a campaign that says it’s like for really good search terms, but it’s actually picking up everything.
Johnathan: Okay, cool. Another example, ’cause it’s very, very timely, so ’cause you mentioned two levels to this, right? The other example that I want to talk about is we just created our KlientBoost basketball team, and I went and went bananas on like the swag, and we’ve done a lot of like intramural like kickball, volleyball, nobody gets anything cool, but because I like basketball we like just go all out.
So, I went to Nike store, I got like basically matching tops, like jerseys, shorts, and then on the basketball shoe side, I wanted to see if we could make an example of this. Basically bought the Paul George 3, all black, because that was, literally, the only Nike basketball shoe that actually matched the rest of our outfits.
Which, anybody listening, we’re gonna be looking completely ridiculous as the only team that is completely from head to toe matching, making sure that we are on the same part, but can you also do this with three levels?
Meaning you have somebody searching for basketball shoes generic, then Nike basketball shoes is a little more specific, and then, third, you have like Paul George Nike basketball shoe.
Does that still work that same way?
Reese: Yeah, you can totally do that third level. And so, basically, it’s really just kind of level up everything by one that we talked about in the last example.
So, instead of just a high and medium priority campaign or a medium and low, you’re gonna be using all three of those priorities in conjunction together and in your high priority campaign you’re gonna be excluding your brand stuff, and let’s just call that third level SKU, so you’re excluding both of those from your high priority campaign.
Your second one’s gonna capture like those Nike shoes, like you mentioned, as opposed to just shoes. From that one you’re excluding just the SKU, and so you’re third one’s gonna be the one that picks up that Paul George Nike basketball shoe.
Johnathan: So, when you say excluding the SKU, like you’re meaning like the Paul George specific, right?
Reese: Exactly, yeah. Like, product names, SKU, however you want to call it.
Johnathan: Okay, cool, cool, awesome. Anything else on the Gold Pan technique, other than, like, I think people actually understand the analogy now too, like you’re sifting through and you might even have like three Gold Pans that are going through and at the bottom you’re actually getting to the point where you’re routing the search terms that have the highest ROAS capability to go to the correct location ’cause your bid’s gonna be matching the likelihood of them actually buying.
Reese: Exactly.
Johnathan: Right, cool, cool. So, anything I’m missing? Is that it?
Reese: So I’ll mention one thing, this might segway into another way that we could talk about SPAGs. So something that we’ve also been doing, lately, is we’ve been doing, kind of like multiple levels of the Gold Pan technique.
And so, as opposed to just having you know two or three campaigns running as a Gold Pan across the whole board, we’ll actually say, “Okay, well, what are the top-sellers for this client? What are their maybe, you know 5% best products or like top 10 best-sellers?” And, so, we’ll actually create a Gold Pan just for those.
Johnathan: Okay.
Reese: That way we know we’re maxing out impression share for these best-selling products. And then everything else, we might segment by category or brand or product type.
Whatever makes the most sense. And everything else is kind of pushed out as a secondary Gold Pan. So, we’re basically trying to answer two main questions with that structure, which are, how can we maximize revenue, profits, visibility for our best-selling products?
Johnathan: Yeah.
Reese: and then how can we do that for our best converting search terms?
Johnathan: Got it. So, the Gold Pan technique isn’t just only reliant on the levels of search terms coming through. It could be, like you said, the product category, things like that, that you decide on, that you can be creative with it.
Reese: Exactly. Like it’s a strategy that you can kind of plug into other aspects of campaign structure.
Johnathan: Cool, awesome. Let’s talk about single product ad groups.
Not to be confused with something that we all like from a control perspective, from a granularity perspective which is single keyword ad groups. How do you even manage single product ad groups?
Reese: Yeah, so I think the trick right there is it’s kind of a balance because if you’re a huge retailer, like if you’re you know Target, I don’t even know if I could count how many SKUs they have, like, a hundred thousand SKUs or something,
Johnathan: Yeah.
Reese: you don’t want to manage a hundred thousand SKAGs. That’s a nightmare.
Yeah. So, for like the structure I mentioned earlier, where we carve out like the top 10 or top 5%,
Johnathan: Yeah.
Reese: that’s if you’re a bigger retailer and you have a few that you really want to call out.
Okay. If you’re a small retailer you have maybe like 20, or not even small, but just a smaller product catalog, if you have 20, 25, maybe 50 products, max, then, sure, you can SPAG those out
Johnathan: Yeah.
Reese: And like you mentioned, some of the benefit to that you can get very granular, you can set the exact bid, buy a product, exactly how much you want to pay per product.
The thing that I like even more is that you can see the exact search terms that are being triggered for each of your products when you look at the search terms at the ad group level.
Johnathan: Yeah. And that kind of gives you… there’s no deeper level of control out there right now, Is there?
Reese Right. Yeah.
Johnathan: And so, that makes a ton of sense, too. People really want to make sure that they are getting enough impressions, they’re maxing out, as long as their ROAS is something they’re happy with and they can control the bid, which is sometimes a little all over the place if they don’t have like that type of granularity.
Reese: Exactly.
Johnathan: Yeah.
Reese: And you could manage like item IDs at the product group level for big granularity there. I think the extra big lever is do you want to see the exact search terms that are bringing in those sales?
Johnathan: Right, right.
Reese: And do you need to funnel stuff to a more specific version of that product?
Johnathan: Yeah, and ’cause a lot of times what we’ve seen and this might lead into our third thing that we want to talk about, is when there is ambiguity or inconsistencies with the search terms and where their going for which products it leaves us something that reminds me of Al Capone. What do we call that?
Reese: Yeah. The mob effect.
Johnathan: The mob effect. We should have machine gun, but we don’t, we have a chicken .
Okay, keep going.
Reese: Yeah. So, the mob effect really just seemed like the right way to phrase this thing that I was looking at.
So I remember you know, this is a while back when we kind of came up with the term, and looking at some of the really early eComm clients that we were bringing in and just seeing the initial structures that were set up.
A lot of times, I feel like it’s less common these days, but a lot of times I would see, they’ve got one shopping campaign, one ad group, and one product group for all products.
Johnathan: Yep.
Reese: And so this particular example I’m thinking of, they had at least like three hundred products in their catalog.
Yeah. And these are things ranging from like you know, a 20 dollar pack of cables, to like an 8000 dollar, like multi, like multi-camera security system.
Reese: Oh okay. Yeah, and so it’s like, do you really want to bid a dollar for everything from 20 bucks to 75 hundred bucks?
Johnathan: Yeah, doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Reese: Exactly, yeah. And so, what ends up happening is when you have one product group for all products like that you’re bidding the same thing for everything, but a lot of times there’s a couple of products, maybe one or two, a few that stand out from the pack that just happen to be the most searchable or they happen to get a little bit of favor by Google’s algorithm, and so, you’ve got 300 products now, but you’re spending like 90% of your ad spend on this like handful of products, like literally, numbers you can count on your hand, and you’re getting like 30% of your sales from 90% of your ad spend.
Yeah. The equation ends up totally lopsided and that’s how you see you know like, “Oh, I’ve got a ROAS of like .5 or something like that.” If you have a bigger catalog it’s just those that happen to be searchable eating up almost all of your ad spend.
So, we call that the mob effect, because it’s basically like you know you’re paying out all this money, you’re not even really getting –
Johnathan: To run your little pizzeria that you’re not even making that much. You’re not being that efficient or effective with it.
Reese: Exactly, yeah. You just know like, “Oh, well, you know my ads are serving.” They’re like yeah, like just pay into a you know, it’d be unfortunate if you’re product wasn’t seen.
Johnathan: Oh. I like that.
Reese: Yeah.
Johnathan: You already have a great voice, but that was a whole other level Reese, thank you. Very, very cool, and like you said too, it’s not as common as you see that anymore. And I was gonna make a joke earlier, but I’ll attempt it now. It’s like, well you don’t really see as many mobsters anymore, either, in real life, right?
Reese : Yeah.
Johnathan: Ba dum chhh.
Johnathan: Why don’t we have that button? Cool! Anything else that we’re missing on the things that we just spoke about, the three top things?
Reese: No, I mean I feel like that’s a pretty solid rundown of all those things. I think I have like one more nugget I could through in.
Johnathan: We’re ready, let’s go.
Reese: Sure. So, I wanted to throw this one in just because I feel like it’s something that comes up a lot. This kind of goes back to our conversation with Kirk about feeds, but a lot of times people will ask like, “Oh should I be including my brand name in my product title?”
Johnathan: Yeah.
Reese: And so, there’s a few answers to that question. It just depends on what your business is.
So, if you’re brand is relevant to that product, like, if you’re Nike for example, and people know your brand, it’s directly related to why they want your product, then, yeah.
Johnathan: Right, like Paul George sneakers.
Reese: Yeah, exactly. Both of those, like we described them as “Nike Paul George sneakers.”. Those should all be at the front of that product title.
Johnathan: Okay.
Reese: So, for example, like let’s say that, the, that your John Mayer shirt, if it came from premiumconcertees.com,
Johnathan: It definitely did.
Reese: Yeah, definitely did.
So a lot of times people are going to be like, “I want a John Mayer shirt.” Like it doesn’t really matter where it comes from.
Johnathan: Yep.
Reese: So, in your product title you want that to be about a John Mayer shirt, it doesn’t need to be like, premiumconcerttees.com John Mayer Shirt.
Johnathan: ‘Cause nobody associates those two together basically.
Reese: Exactly.
Johnathan: You can buy it from a lot of different places, but it doesn’t need to be from premium whatever .com you just said.
Reese: Right, so at that point you could fall into one of two buckets where, are you a reseller where people, basically you’re selling a lot of goods of different brands.
People are usually gonna care more about like that first-party brand rather than the reseller brand. So, make sure that the product brand is front and center. And you know if you do get like traffic for your brand-name, like if you’re in Nordstrom,
Johnathan: Yep.
Reese: people are probably gonna search Nordstrom.
So, you can have that like either at the end of your product title, or you can just rely on your domain being in the feed. And the second one is if you’re a start-up. Like for example, like imagine if we were talking about Away Luggage a few years ago.
Johnathan: Sure. By the way, let’s like really quick, Away Luggage is that start-up that has a lifetime warranty with a battery built-in to charge your phone as you’re going abroad or whatever, right?
And like I don’t know what else is different about them, but that’s apparently like, they’re crushing it. And like you know about them, I know about them, but we didn’t even talk about them before this episode.
Johnathan: There you just go, there’s your point. Okay, keep going, sorry.
Reese: Exactly, yeah and if this were you know a few years ago, we had no idea who they were yet. They weren’t big. Then, we might say like, “Oh okay, well put the people are searching for luggage first, right? So, put Away toward the end of that product title. That way it’s not obscuring the actual product search.” Now, if it, we’re talking today, for example, definitely have Away at the front of that product title, ’cause they’re huge now like you just said.
Johnathan: yeah. Exactly
Reese: But it just depends on whether or not you’re a known brand or a start-up at that point.
Johnathan: Makes sense. So, if we ever sell any eComm products we will be making sure to put Reese Garcia at the beginning of that because Reese is becoming more well known. Reese, appreciate you man, thank you for coming by.
Johnathan: Yeah. Give me a handshake, give me a pound. Sorry, that was a little awkward. We’ll figure it out.
Reese: Okay.
Johnathan: We’ll get back to it. But you guys, thank you for listening. We’ll have you back on another segment.
Reese: Cool.
Johnathan: Appreciate it.