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- [00:00]
A
There are some pitfalls I see a lot of brands encountering on the Google front, specifically due to the nature of Google comparative to socials being a much slower platform to adjust. If you're looking at Google Ads on Black Friday Cyber Monday, you're not getting the full picture. It takes a lot of time for that data to come in. You're going to be at least three hours, if not more behind the data that's already flown in. So generally what I'm using for real time data is if you tell Google, hey, this campaign, I've given it $100 a day budget, they can spend up to double that budget in a singular. That's actually a fact that not a lot of advertisers even are aware of. Raise your CPAs early and cut them quickly after your promotional activity. Same goes for budgets.
- [00:50]
B
It's all killer, no filler. I'm Eric Dick and we're here with Dougie from Pilothouse's Google Ads team. We just finished our Q3 town hall. We're all psyched up for Q4 in 2025. Great meeting with everyone. What are we talking about today on the Google side, Dougie?
- [01:08]
A
Yeah, I think it'd be good to give the people a bit of Google specific color around kind of the next few weeks leading up to Black Friday, Black Friday itself, and then post kind of how to navigate that on the Google end. Because there are some pitfalls I see a lot of brands encountering on the Google front specifically due to the nature of Google comparative to socials being a much slower platform to adjust. We're using these 30 day look back windows and stuff there. Right. So having those kind of micro and even macro adjustments on an immediate basis during Black Friday Cyber Monday can be much more difficult on Google than it can be on other platforms. So maybe just trying to prepare people a little bit for the lead up, the period itself and then how to kind of rein things in afterwards as well.
- [01:57]
B
Very cool. We were just hearing from the, I believe it was the meta team talking about how they're starting to see activity, sort of Q4 and like sort of sales activity already. Google is a bigger platform, takes longer to get going. But are you seeing that as well on the Google side?
- [02:11]
A
Yeah, October was actually a surprisingly strong month for most brands that we oversee. I remember 2023 in particular. October was definitely a soft spot and we definitely had a strong Black Friday Cyber Monday. But I think it was much tougher for a lot of E com brands in October 2023 compared to this year. Where we've seen a lot of that year over year growth within a lot of those brands that we oversee specifically on the E. Comm side. So yeah, we are starting to see maybe a bit earlier that kind of consumer intent to purchase sales activity, promotional activity. Obviously brands are starting to mimic that earlier intent. Have had good success in a few brands with very like hyper limited sale periods. We're talking like only a few hours kind of thing. So definitely seeing that as a general kind of trend in the space right now.
- [03:03]
B
And then just also generally we just. This will air probably in a couple of weeks from now. But we just finished the US Election this week. Have you seen anything in the campaigns either before, during or after the election that was noteworthy?
- [03:15]
A
Yeah, I would say that the impact at least on search and shopping is never going to be as significant in terms of we don't see the CPMs rise as significantly because I mean the campaigners there aren't really spending a ton on keywords. Right. It's more reach awareness marketing. That's why you see things rise a little bit on platforms like meta. I would say YouTube probably sees a little bit of that as well. But generally it's not quite as impactful for specifically the intent based platforms like Google and Amazon as well. I would lump into that category.
- [03:49]
B
Okay, well then lead us off. Where are you at with Q4 Black Friday Cyber Monday preparations right now and where should brands be? What should they be thinking about and avoiding?
- [03:57]
A
Yeah, so I think the, I guess maybe my preamble will be a little bit around budgets and bids on Google. So budgets are set so that they're not really like I'm only spending $100 a day. So if you tell Google, hey, this campaign, I've given it $100 a day budget, it can spend up to double that budget. In a singular day it is going to average over a 30 day span spending $100 a day. So keeping that in mind, that's actually a fact that not a lot of advertisers even are aware of. They get quite upset. They're like, oh, why, what's going on here? I set a budget of $100, it spent 200. And another fun little anecdote is if a campaign does spend in one singular day more than double the budget, you won't be charged for anything over double the budget. But if you ran $100 a day campaign and it spent 200 bucks, you'd be on the hook for that 200 bucks.
- [04:47]
B
It makes sense. You've got to just know You've got to go where the intent is. Right. This is not interruptive advertising. So when there's more intent during a period, you got to be able to go for it.
- [04:56]
A
Yeah, for sure. And so just wanted to leave that little bit of color. And as well, I think for most of our listeners on the E. Comm side of things, if they're driving enough traffic, we're probably using algorithmic bidding strategies where they're using target CPAs, target return on ad spend, which definitely I recommend for the majority of campaign types out there. And I would just say as you're ramping up into Black Friday Cyber Monday and aware that this is going to come out closer to Black Friday Cyber Monday, we'll just advise people to start loosening those targets earlier. Google, certainly during Black Friday Cyber Monday has some back end adjustments they make to say, okay, there's going to be a lot more demand on these days. Right. Like a lot of people are going to be shopping through the Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend. But still those budgets and those bid strategies are going to be using the entire 30 day look back window. So if you want to ramp up to where you want to get to in Black Friday Cyber Monday, you actually have to start to give Google a little bit of leeway earlier on. So what that tends to mean is not necessarily adjusting budgets, but adjusting your constraints when it comes to efficiency. So start to loosen up the tcpas that you've got on your campaigns. The target roas as well. Generally I'm not a big fan of being limited by budget. So when you are limited by budget on Google, that's Google telling you, okay, you've set me a target of a $10 CPA. I actually think I can get more conversions at that exact CPA that you're targeting now. You'd have to make sure and analyze your data and make sure, okay, I'm actually getting the desired CPA and then maybe I'll look to increase. But that's what Google's telling us when it flags a campaign as being limited by budget. So I don't like having a campaign that's limited by budget because I think if we're not happy with performance, say we've given it that $10 CPA target and it's getting me a $20 CPA target, well then obviously I'm not going to give it more budget because it's not, it's already not reaching the goals I've set out for it. But at that point, rather than give Google more budget, I would actually dial Back your target CPA or your target return on ad spend, make things more efficient so that you're still spending to your budget. But Google is not trying to take more than the budget that you've allocated to it. It tends to get a little bit pickier. We're essentially narrowing down our focus. We tend to see CPCs come down a little bit. So just an aside there, but generally leading up to Black Friday Cyber Monday is the one period where I'm okay with campaigns being limited by budget. We need to hone things in so that we're ramping up towards Black Friday Cyber Monday. Because if we don't ramp up to Black Friday Cyber Monday, if we don't have looser CPAs and target return on ad spend, we're going to underspend on those kind of core demand days. So I would start loosening things up early a week, two weeks in advance. You don't have to be super aggressive kind of incremental change, but generally want people to get that in their minds that you've got to start before Black Friday hits. Because making that huge macro change, say you're trying to capitalize on all that demand, you're trying to go from $20 to $40 target CPA to kind of broaden your audience in the amount of targeting. Google's going to take too long to react again. It's going to have some of that backend information just from Google saying, hey, these days are going to be really strong, but generally it won't be strong enough just if you leave campaigns the way they are.
- [08:22]
B
Good advice. What else should we be doing?
- [08:25]
A
Well, I would say during, when you get into the core period. So Black Friday Cyber Monday itself, of course you want to be aligning your creative and your messaging and what have you. I would say maybe a couple quick sales call outs is I tend to see stronger performance from strike through pricing on PDPs as opposed to providing automatic codes and the like. So that also allows you to look a little bit sexier on the shopping listings. Right. They get that strike through pricing and you don't quite get that same direct level of showcasing. Okay, here's the actual dollar amount you're saving when you use just promotional discount coupon codes. So that's one area that I try and push most brands towards if they have the back end capabilities to do so. The other thing to really watch out for during Black Friday Cyber Monday, and I've seen a lot of people do this part of it comes from not ramping up earlier but People try and make really big sweeping changes during Black Friday Cyber Monday or they try and launch a completely new campaign during Black Friday Cyber Monday and it tends to just be a recipe for disaster. On Google, because of all the reasons I've already mentioned, we're using 30 day look back windows. We're launching a campaign on Black Friday Cyber Monday. That campaign's going to take a week or two even to adjust and learn. So definitely you don't want to make any huge sweeping changes to the account during that core period, which goes against maybe what you would consider being the best practice on Meta. Right. You, you want to flux spend and what you're doing there based on intent. But Google, because it's so much slower to adjust, you really end up kind of getting, getting behind the ball. It doesn't really have a strong effect. And then you're trying to after the fact Black Friday Cyber Monday ends, you're trying to reel everything back in, which also takes a bit of time. Right. So the major call out being you want all your work throughout the year to be set up so that you're in a state for Black Friday Cyber Monday where you don't have to make any significant changes, little tweaks here and there for sure. Again, we want our ad copy to be relevant, some incremental bid adjustments for sure. But we don't want to be launching a new test or a new bid strategy or anything of the like during Black Friday Cyber Monday. Or kind of, we run with a target CPA on a campaign for three months now. And now we're doubling it. Like it'll just take too long to react and then you're going to have certainly a poorer efficiency than you would have if you were getting that going much earlier on.
- [10:49]
B
I'm just looking at the calendar. This is going to be out on November 22nd, so this is going to be like basically one week inbound. So a little bit of this if you haven't done some of these things already, but maybe any other tips for what people should be doing that week before?
- [11:04]
A
Yeah, the week before definitely would upload your ads earlier just so that you don't run into any disapproval issues. For sure. I mean, some of this is just straightforward, but definitely those incremental bid adjustments so that you're ramping up again, you don't have to raise your budget earlier on because that week leading up to Black Friday Cyber Monday, you're not going to expect a ton of sales to be coming through. People are going to hold off a little bit, but Definitely lead up period. Make sure that you're in a state where you won't have to make any huge sweeping changes during Black Friday Cyber Monday and you've got everything in place so that you can kind of run things smoothly. Also recommend if people aren't using scripts, they're fairly straightforward scripts you can set up to automate some of the processes of launches and start and stop of certain ads. Right. Rather than doing it manually. So would recommend also looking into those to try and save you some efficiency as well.
- [11:55]
B
And those are scripts you just run within Google. They're just like Google scripts.
- [11:58]
A
Yeah. So Google's got a function, Google Ads has a function where you can upload scripts of varying nature, just basic JavaScript that perform different actions in the account. So a simple one would be to turn off this tagged ad when Black Friday Cyber Monday ends and start it when Black Friday Cyber Monday starts. So if you've got like you're trying to launch something at midnight, I think most of our brands are probably staying up to launch that sale. But in theory you can automate that so that you're not kind of prone to human error on that front.
- [12:29]
B
And when it comes actually to the days of Black Friday Cyber Monday, I remember in talking with Clifford and Rob on the Amazon team, there's a sense that, that the late bird gets the, the early bird and the late bird get the word because you, because if you're not, if, if you are on that those platforms and you blow through budgets early on, there becomes big opportunities later in the day for teams that are online, for chronically online following things through midnight and taking advantage of when other companies budgets might drop off. Is that something that's, that's realistic for the Google team as well?
- [13:03]
A
I think it's probably not as significant for the Google team. Again, just the, the slower nature of Google. Right. Like an adjustment you make midday Black Friday Cyber Monday, it probably will take a few days even to fully take hold. Right. So that's why we've got to start when this pod is coming out, raising these targets and making those adjustments like turning things off and on. Sure. You can kind of make that argument that okay, if we're trying to preserve a bit of budget, we might want to only launch this partway through. But that would hopefully be a campaign that you've already established in some way, shape or form. You're not launching something completely new. It's going to try and gain learnings in a very short span of time. So I would say less so. Generally for Google because of again, the general cadence of having that 30 day look back. And again, we've got those signals from Google but they're not perfect. I've seen on many brands that we kind of leave things the way they are and then the brand comes back and they look at Google and they're like, oh, we underspent so much because there was so much additional opportunity that we didn't make those prior adjustments and prepare for.
- [14:08]
B
Are there any third party tools that you're enamored with these days or using as a big part of your process?
- [14:13]
A
Yeah, good question. Generally, at least during Black Friday Cyber Monday, I used to, I liked Universal analytics a bit more than GA4 for this, but definitely cross referencing a lot of real time data because the platform itself doesn't have strong real time data. So if you're looking at Google Ads on Black Friday Cyber Monday, you're not getting the full picture. It takes a lot of time for that data to come in. It's not going to look very good for the most part. Right. You're going to be at least three hours, if not more behind the data that's already flown in. So generally what I'm using for real time data is cross referencing J4 and just actually looking at the bottom line in Shopify. It's not perfect. Third party attribution can help out a little bit there. The triple whales of the world, there's a million of them out there that you can use that give you a bit quicker performance indicators. But generally I would just make sure that you're using a variety of signals to look at performance for Google. Because if you just stare at the data in Google for Black Friday Cyber Monday, again, you're going to be too far behind when you need to make a pause or adjustment or what have you. I would say that keeping a close eye on budgets and then trying to cross reference your different attribution platforms to determine, okay, are we seeing enough opportunity in Google to raise the budget? Because we're currently at budget cap partway through the day, so not necessarily any individual third party tool that I would specifically recommend, but would just recommend using multiple data signals for your attribution and not just looking at Google Ads in that point in time because again, similar scenario, you're just going to fall behind.
- [15:49]
B
Any other tips or pitfalls to call out?
- [15:52]
A
Yeah, I would say maybe. The aftermath of Black Friday Cyber Monday is one I commonly see. Again, if we use the example of someone who has set up their campaigns, they didn't make any changes through Black Friday Cyber Monday or afterwards. What's going to happen is you're going to not ramp up fast enough for Black Friday Cyber Monday. Google's still going to be trying. Like, it's going to see those past couple days of strong performance during the promotional period, but after your sale ends, it's going to be taking that into account and saying, hey, things are really good. So it's going to actually try and inflate your spend. And I've seen this many times, if you don't limit things by budget, Google's going to actually spend more. I've seen more spend the day after a promotion ends than the day of the promotion itself. So like, which obviously is not very efficient at all. So really reining those campaigns in after the fact. Harsh cuts to your target, return on ad spend, your target cpa. Again, another area where I'm okay with being limited by budget for the couple weeks after Black Friday Cyber Monday. But again, I've seen quite a few brands go in and they don't make any changes. They're too late to the party when they're trying to spend, and then they've had their biggest spend days when their promotion is actually over, which obviously makes no sense. So you have to play a bit of a game with Google, making sure that you're prepared in advance. Otherwise you're going to end up in that kind of scenario where you underinvest during Black Friday Cyber Monday and overinvest after the fact, which is obviously a place no brand wants to be in.
- [17:24]
B
It's kind of that reverse effect of the Amazon where because everyone else pauses their budgets, yours gets that much easier to spend if you don't have the guardrails on.
- [17:34]
A
Yeah. And Google is obviously going to try and spend as much of our budget as we are willing to allocate to it. So the onus is on us to put those restrictions in place to make sure that we're not underspending in those prime moments of opportunity and not overspending when we're through the promotional period. And demand takes a pretty significant dip after the fact. So if I was to give one call out, I would say Definitely raise your CPAs early and cut them quickly after your promotional activity. And the same goes for budgets.
- [18:10]
B
I think that's a great shout. Are you using AI? Are you using ChatGPT in any facet of your work these days?
- [18:15]
A
We do use it a little bit here and there, I would say. For copy in a lot of cases is probably the easiest one. Just because Google has 30 character headlines, 90 character descriptions. There's not as much room to be playful with ad copy on Google compared to other platforms, so giving it those restrictions and providing it the host of keywords that you're targeting has been quite fruitful. You obviously don't use them all. Some of them aren't super pertinent, but picking from a list that ChatGPT spits out can be pretty handy. I have also used it for various points in keyword research. I would say not super extensively, but have found some good areas where it kind of dug up some clusters that we wouldn't have otherwise been able to find just because of the pure volume it's able to spit out and the data it's able to provide and not need a ton of digestion and inputs for comparative to more manual keyword research strategies.
- [19:15]
B
Nice. Well, I'm very excited for Q4 Black Friday cyber Monday this year. Of course, you can always work with Pilothouse. Work with Dougie. Just come on over at Pilothouse co. Any closing words to our Google advertisers out there heading into 2024?
- [19:32]
A
Black Friday Cyber Monday I'm pretty bullish on 2024 being a pretty strong promotional period. Black Friday Cyber Monday just given the insights we've seen from October, I guess maybe the curiosity there would be okay, are consumers just purchasing earlier and then not following through on Black Friday Cyber Monday? Or are they purchasing earlier and also capitalizing on that promotional activity? So I lean into the camp thinking that this Black Friday Cyber Monday is going to be bigger than last year just given the comparison from October, but we'll be curious to see how it plans out.
- [20:09]
B
Yeah, it's a weird time, even just in the broader economy right now where there are some people telling us that it's like the best economy we've ever had, and other people are saying it's this terrible economy where it's hard to make ends meet. And now you've got this big, big Trump election. It's going to really be interesting to see what, especially in the US what consumer sentiment is like this holiday season.
- [20:29]
A
Yeah, definitely. I wouldn't completely discount the fact that the election has a decent impact on consumer sentiment. Like if people are bullish on the direction of the economy in the states, tax cuts, this, that.
- [20:44]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [20:45]
A
Then they'll be more loose with their spending. Right. But if they're a concern, then they're going to be more conservative. So certainly that's a variable that's pretty hard to quantify, but one that you would have thought at Least we would have seen some of that even in October if that was a concern as well. And since we've already seen some of that bolstering at least under our portfolio of clients within October on Google, I'm pretty optimistic about the performance for the back end of November here.
- [21:15]
B
Super cool. What about the performance of the Vancouver Canucks and your general thoughts on the NHL season this year?
- [21:20]
A
I love talking hockey, so I've actually gotten into collecting hockey cards very recently.
- [21:25]
B
Okay.
- [21:26]
A
I'm a Toronto guy, so I haven't been watching the Canucks super closely. I heard Pedersen's having a bit of a he still have a start gamer.
- [21:34]
B
That's what I learned about him is he's like a highly ranked gamer. And I think whenever you find out that these elite athletes are also elite gamers, it's like, ooh, they're, they're having problems.
- [21:43]
A
Yeah. So I don't have as much context to Vancouver. I hear Lankan has been a good pickup for them.
- [21:49]
B
Great. But you got Morgan Riley just lighting it up playing like Norris caliber offensive.
- [21:55]
A
He's been strong. He's. He's going to be in the conversation for the four nations cup for Canada coming up. Right. Like that'll be interesting. Yeah, Toronto has been kind of up and down. They, they gave Winnipeg their only loss of the season but they're still kind of working through early season growing pains with the new coach in Beru Bay there, so.
- [22:15]
B
Love it.
- [22:15]
A
Yeah. Yeah. I think it'll be a classic story of, you know, Leafs make the playoffs and get bounced after seven games in the first round. But I'm, I'm on board every year, so.
- [22:24]
B
Very cool. And thank you for listening to this. There's probably, I think we're definitely bigger US audience than we are Canadian audience, so there's probably a very small fraction of people who care at all about NHL hockey. But when Dougie comes on, he's in my hockey pool and I think, I think I'm beating him right now. But we're both in rebuild so it's not looking good either way. But anyways, thanks for sticking around. Thanks for coming on today, Dougie. Happy Q4.
- [22:45]
A
Alright, thanks for having me. Eric.
- [22:53]
B
Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you're not getting the D2C newsletter, you can subscribe for free at directtoconsumer. Co. And if you want to learn more about Pilothouse's all killer no filler services, take off to Pilothouse co. I'm Eric Dick and this has been the D2C podcast. We'll see you next time.