Gaining a Competitive Advantage in PPC Search Marketing
April 5, 2022
In episode 105 of the Customers Who Click podcast I spoke with Frederick Vallaeys, the CEO of Optmyzr about how you can get ahead of the competition in the PPC space, despite everyone having access to the same tools, the same ability to set up campaigns.
The human element will help you stand out and beat the competition.
It’s all about the human element, and this is where being a real marketer is worth its weight in gold. There are so many platform experts out there, or less experienced business owners who just set their campaigns up and let Google do its thing.
But real marketers who understand customer behaviour have a huge advantage.
Frederick is the CEO of Optmyz, a SaaS tool allowing for smarter automation in pay-per-click search. Prior to that Frederick spent almost 10 years at Google , half as their Adwords Evangelist. You can connect with him on LinkedIn or head over to https://www.optmyzr.com/.
In episode 105 of the Customers Who Click podcast I spoke with Frederick Vallaeys, the CEO of Optmyzr about how you can get ahead of the competition in the PPC space, despite everyone having access to the same tools, the same ability to set up campaigns.
The human element will help you stand out and beat the competition.
It’s all about the human element, and this is where being a real marketer is worth its weight in gold. There are so many platform experts out there, or less experienced business owners who just set their campaigns up and let Google do its thing.
But real marketers who understand customer behaviour have a huge advantage.
Frederick is the CEO of Optmyz, a SaaS tool allowing for smarter automation in pay-per-click search. Prior to that Frederick spent almost 10 years at Google , half as their Adwords Evangelist. You can connect with him on LinkedIn or head over to https://www.optmyzr.com/.
Key highlights:
01:18 - 03:47 - Biggest Opportunities for D2C Growth - eCommerce, and shopping online has been exploding, heavily influenced by the pandemic. This has changed consumer behaviour away from that once a week shopping trip into the city, into just buying things as and when you want them. Brands don’t have to wait for that one shopping moment anymore, it can happen at any moment instead. PPC is still a huge opportunity, not only because its easier than ever to get setup with, but also because the vast majority of advertisers just do the basic setup and let Google do its thing.
04:30 - 11:19 - How Can You Stand Out in PPC? - So much in PPC is automated, which makes it really easy to get setup, but then you’re not doing anything to stand out, not doing anything to be better that the competition, because they’ve done exactly the same thing. As an expert in your category, and someone who understands the behaviours and changes that happen through the year, you’ve got the ability to go into your account and make changes that will manipulate Google into performing better for you. If you know demand is about to explode, you can tell Google you’re willing to take a worse ROI, meaning Google pushes you more to this increased demand.
Google can’t really measure some of this stuff, so if you can bring your external knowledge into the account to make those changes you’ll reap huge benefits.
11:19 - 25:56 - How to Communicate Conversion Value to Google - Make sure you’re reporting conversion value back to Google regularly. You can send this data back over the next 55 days after a conversion with restated values to give Google a better indication of what is actually happening. If you have a logistical issue and have to cancel orders, you have to push that back to Google otherwise the algorithm thinks its sent you loads of great customers.
In fashion inparticular, people will buy multiple colours or sizes, and send back what they don’t like. You need to adjust this value to Google or it thinks your customer values are 3-4x higher than they really are. But similarly, you can do this the other way. If you’ve got your own machine learning in place and can predict customer values well, then you can actually push back to Google higher values for these customers, so Google goes off and tries to find more of these high value customers for you.
29:51 - 33:45 - Rethinking Assumptions about Campaign Types - A lot of this comes down to experience, and ability to interpret data. It may be tempting to prioritise the higher converting ad, but if its higher converting because it gets 10% of the impressions, is the lower converting ad more valuable to you because its bringing in far more customers. This can be common with Responsive Search Ads in particular where Google gets a lot of freedom to test with your ad content and targeting.
It’s really important to dive into the data yourself, really understand how different campaign formats are performing, not just accepting what someone has told you, or continuing to do something the same way you were doing it for years before.
34:18 - 38:25 - What are the Upcoming PPC Challenges - Google is continuously making changes to campaign types, removing some, adding others, combining etc. So its really important to assess these changes and really understand how theyre going to perform differently. Whats also important is to understand how these changes impact your existing setup. Which ad campaigns are actually incremental and which are cannibalising each other.
Frederick talks about being a PPC Doctor. Doctors prescribe medicines, and they’re careful to ensure no clashes, and its the same in PPC. Making sure you don’t have clashes and negatively impact your own setup.
36:54 - Fredericks Ideal Lunch Guest
Someone from Nike as they’ve made a huge shift recently from retail to D2C.
41:17 - Frederick’s Must-Have Ecommerce Tools:
- Optmyzr
- Adwords Scripts / Google Ads Scripts
If you’d like to hear more from Frederick, you can connect with him on LinkedIn or head over to https://www.optmyzr.com/.