← The Paid Search Podcast | A Weekly Podcast About Google Ads and Online Marketing
The Paid Search Podcast | A Weekly Podcast About Google Ads and Online Marketing
Big Changes Coming to Shopping Campaigns in February (Episode 498)
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Hello, and welcome to the Paid Search Podcast. My name is Chris and today we're going to talk about Google Ads. Specifically. I have my friend Joey Bidner on the show today and he's going to give you an update about shopping campaigns in one very important mandatory change that Google is forcing on many advertisers. So if you're using the Shopify system, if you have a Google Ads shopping campaign with a data feed, a merchant center and all of that, this is an important update that could be very critical to your performance and the continued performance of your Google Ads account. So I'm going to have Joey Job in here just a moment. Before that, I want to remind you about optio.com PSP there is only one software in my mind to get more done in the limited amount of time that we have day to day, and that is Optio. Optio is a tool that is integrated into a massive platform that covers every aspect of Google Ads. Google Ads is a big system and you sometimes don't even know what questions to ask, where you've gone wrong, what's wrong, or even what to look at. This system is like having a Google Ads expert looking over your shoulder and telling you, hey, you should look at this. Did you notice this? Did you notice that? And it doesn't stop there. It helps you with campaign creation, writing ad copy, looking at things, sending reports and all kinds of alerts and reminders about what you need to do. It's a great backup backup system. Whether you're running one campaign or a hundred campaigns, it works great. You're going to like it and you can try it for free at my special link, optio.com PSP special link right there. To try the tool for 28 days for free. There's big changes, even more coming from Optio this year, I guarantee it. I'm just waiting to tell you about it. I can't tell you about it yet, but it's coming. Really exciting stuff, so jump in. Now try the tool for free. You'll keep trying it, you'll keep, you'll, you'll like it, you'll keep wanting using it. I guarantee it. And I appreciate their sponsorship. All right, so before Joey jumps in, I want to remind you that you can email the podcast, paid search podcastmail.com Send in your questions. I'm going to be discussing more about my recent episode about the home service industry dying on Google Ads. I will be discussing that. I have some questions that I want to cover. So if you have some comments about my episode from A couple weeks back. Send those in. If you have questions about your Google Ads campaign, send those in and I will get to them very soon. All right, without further ado, Joey, what is the big update that everybody should know about Shopping?
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Hey, what's up, Chris? So today I want to talk about a pretty major update to Merchant center that likely is impacting most advertisers who use Shopify accounts. And this change and update seems simple enough to achieve, but if done without consideration and just jumped into it, could result in losing the historical data associated to all of your products. Now, I'm talking about an email that went out to most advertisers over the last couple weeks, one of which seems a little bit mystical and has some language that, that's maybe foreign to a lot of users, but it's got a big headline that says, API users must switch to Merchant API. And it's got deadlines and it's got action must be taken in big bold letters on the title and description. And it's, it's shaken up the community because it's. It's a pretty major change. So I want to talk about what this change is and what considerations you need to make before taking action, because I'm going to discuss again how the action they recommend will wipe a lot of data. So first, what is this API connection they're talking about? If you use a Shopify store and you use the Google YouTube app connection, like the native integration connection to Merchant center, that sends your product information to Merchant Center. This is what's called the Content API. And this is the system that we've used for years to easily integrate Shopify to Merchant Center. And this is what switching to Merchant API. Now, the switch is easy. All you have to do is unplug the connection and plug it back in. But what happens when you make that change is what's really interesting when you make that change, when you unplug the platform and plug it back into Merchant center, your product IDs change. One of the big changes with this Merchant API upgrade, without getting too detailed, is it's making one ID for all markets. So previously your product ID from Shopify had a country code in it. It said Shopify underscore, had a little country code, then had an underscore, and then had your parent ID variant ID. So if you're in the US it would say ShopifyUSID. If you're in Canada, it'd have CA. This new update is basically making all countries use one ID. So it's actually a little bit Simpler. You don't need to have different country codes. But the problem is, is it's going to switch your IDs to all have this ZZ in between or in the place of where that country code used to be. And this means when you do that, the historical data associated to that ID will be gone. It will reset. Now, there's a few things to consider when this happens. It's not the end of the world though. It's not a good thing. And I'm going to explain how to avoid this by using some third party feed management tools. But what happens when your item IDs change? Because it usually sends shockwaves. Oh, I'm losing all my historical data, which is true, but you're not losing your account structure. You're not losing your negative keywords, you're losing, yeah, the sales data associated to those item IDs, which means the algorithm is going to have to learn again from scratch on what performs and what doesn't. And this could really impact performance in the short term. Now, because you have an account structure that you know works again, negative keywords, good structure, like, it will catch up quick, quick enough. But when this happens, expect volatility, expect the algorithm to not necessarily know what performs. And what I would do in that case is likely remove constraints to the algorithm right away. Like, you don't want to have a really high target ROAS if the campaign doesn't know what products perform. So if I had to deal with the loss of product level data, I would lower my target ROAS goal or switch to maximize conversions, depending on campaign you're running. But this is pretty major, right? Like it is a pretty major change that took a lot of people by surprise when they, you know, went ahead and did this seemingly simple change. So what you can do to avoid this data reset. What I'm doing with my clients who use the content API is switching to a feed management software like Data Feed Watch is the one that I use because Data Feed Watch will allow us to control the item id so you can make it the same as your previous ID and the, and the historical data will transfer over. So you can say I want my item IDs to be write the word Shopify, underscore, put your country code there, underscore parentidvariantid, it will match it exactly. And this is actually the exact same process that we would always take when migrating from this content API system to a third party feed management software. We always want to match the id. So we're using this historically proven tactic on preserving data, in this case when they are going to be changing your IDs. Now, if you don't use the Google YouTube Shopify app content API to manage your feed, if you're already using a feed management software like Data Feed Watch, you don't have to worry about this because you're not using the Content API system. So what I'd recommend you do first is verify if you are using the Content API system. If you don't know, maybe somebody else manages your feed or you, you set up your product feed years ago and you haven't looked at it since and all you got to do is go into Merchant center, go down to Settings on the bottom of the far left panel, click on Data Sources and this is where you will see your product feed. And under the name of your product feed, if it's Content API, it will say Content API. It will say it right there. If it's from Data Feed Watch, it'll say URL because it's like a URL link and it'll say something else. But if it says Content API here, this applies to you and it's a mandatory change. So I wanted to mention this to make everyone aware of the implications of this forced change and maybe to reassure you that if you do have to go down the route of just updating the app, it's maybe not the end of the world. But there will be some growing pains because I will mention these third party management softwares are not cheap. Right. There is a monthly cost that is usually dependent on how many SKUs you have. Starts at around 50 bucks a month kind of thing and they're tricky to set up. It's not necessarily a plug and play. It requires time to set one of these feed management softwares up. So there are considerations on both sides. If anybody has any questions about this because it is kind of a touchy, complicated topic, feel free to hop in the comment section. I'll be happy to answer them. So, all right, I'll pass back to you, Chris. See you next time.
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Okay, thank you, Joey. All right, so I have something completely different that I don't think I've ever done on the show before. So I'm going to share an experience that I had recently where I was on a part of an interview process where I was having to interview and ask questions of people that were looking for a job in the PPC market. They're a marketer, they're trying to get a job in house somewhere. And I was asked to be a part of that process. And interview these people and ask questions to help facilitate someone becoming an in house manager. And this was something I'd done before but it was a unique experience because, you know, hadn't been a part of it to this degree. And I want to share three things that after the interview is over that I think if you ever have an interview for marketing, most specifically, I'm going to talk about Google Ads or PPC in general. But if you have an opportunity to do an interview with a new company, a new job, going to give you three things that really stood out to me that made this person, you know, not, not stand out, you know, that made them less of a candidate, something that was less appealing to the people that were receiving the interview. I mean the candidate was great but there were, there was some specific things that we were looking for that this person didn't shine on and it made it very evident that it wasn't right. So I'm gonna give you some tips on how you can make your interview better and stand out and provide more value. So before I do opteo.com PSP to try their amazing tool for free for 28 days. That's o p t e o.com PSP all right, so here we go. Number one, I really think strong opinions and giving the reasoning for those strong opinions will help you to stand out. All right, so what I mean by that is I asked this person specific questions and these questions were designed to get an idea of how, how much they really knew about Google Ads, how much they really knew about ppc, manage IT Management, and this, you know, these, these questions were, were not tricky questions. I didn't design them to be something that would trick them or, or you know, I didn't want to stress them out. I didn't want to try and be an enemy. I just wanted to kind of poke and prod a bit and find out, you know, how much they knew. And to my surprise, the answers to these questions just weren't opinionated, they weren't firm, they were just kind of sprinkling across different areas and didn't really stand out in any particular way. To show that I have experience and this experience has helped me to form opinions and these opinions have led me to success. And here's why. I mean that's what we want to hear and we weren't. So one of the questions I asked was do you have a preferred bidding strategy in Google Ads search campaigns and if so, why? So an example of how I would like to hear this answered and I'll just Answer it in my own voice, like I was interviewing myself and I was asked this question, do I have a preferred bidding strategy in Google Ads and why? So my answer is yes, I actually prefer three bidding strategies and the rest I don't prefer. I do not. I think there are three bidding strategies that are superior to the others. I think manual bidding is a far superior bidding strategy for many campaigns when they're getting started. I think Target Target CPA is an excellent bidding strategy that can really take a manual PPC campaign that's been optimized and take it further and launch it beyond the capabilities of what can be done manually. And in the case of more advanced campaign that's using, you know, value based bidding and has value in the conversion tracking itself, potentially target roas can be a good option. It can be, I'm a little less on that one, but that is another excellent strategy and those are absolutely my preferred bidding strategies. And that's, that's a very different answer than one you might be tempted to, to give, you know, a preferred bidding strategy to show reasoning behind it. You know, I've done this enough to solidly pick an opinion in the way I like to approach things. She, she could have said, you know, the person being interviewed could have said something completely different from what I thought and I would have respected that. What, what I want to hear is that you have opinions and you have experience that's brought you to the point of forming these opinions. And even if I don't agree with him, I, you know, I would respect that you have them. I'm looking for experience. Okay, so another question, this one was a, I thought a toss up, an easy one. Do you think it is important to maintain a 100% optimization score in Google Ads? So this is a bit of a trick question because 100% optimization score I think is a bad choice. Anyone who's been in Google Ads long enough knows that if you follow every recommendation from Google, you're likely to spend a lot of money on things you don't want to spend money on. So 100% optimization score is never something that you want. It's not ideal. So an answer that I would give, again, this, this is strong opinion. I would say absolutely not. Optimization score I find is largely ineffective to measuring the performance of the campaign itself. It does not show any relation to the success rate or performance of the campaign, whether it's in conversions or traffic quality. That has no bearing on the performance of the campaign. All right, that might be an opinion you disagree with, but the point of this first, this first thing is strong opinions and strong reasoning behind it really make you stand out as a candidate during an interview. And that can be applied for no matter what you're interviewing for. But showing that experience, showing those examples gives you an authority that someone who can't answer those just would not have. So number two, if you had any time in, in the industry, you should give examples of your work. So one question that I had asked was, what campaign types do you have the most experience with? Okay, so what I'm getting at is there's search campaigns, there's performance max, there's display, there's YouTube, there's shopping, all these different campaign types. Which ones do you mostly work in? And instead of just saying, oh, I work in performance max and YouTube and search and display and shopping, I mean, great, you just repeated what I said back to me. A much solid, more solid answer would be, well, I, I have the most experience with search because I find that that is the best campaign to drive the best relevant traffic from. If I'm going to spend money, if I have $10,000 to spend, I'm going to use, if not all of it, most of it on a search campaign because it's the most controllable, most val relevant traffic that I could get. People are looking for an answer, they're searching on Google for something in that moment. And I can drive traffic to those very interested, highly responsive searches straight to my site. Therefore, they're more likely to convert, more likely to close. That is an example of the work that I had done. I would, I would give examples of what I had done in the past and it would be, you know, it'd be great because I'm voicing not only an answer to the question, but I'm giving an example of how I've accomplished that. Another question that I had asked was, do you work in the campaigns yourself or have you directed other team members and they do the management and changes? So a good answer here is to immediately give an example of a campaign that you built. So. Oh, no, I, I do all the work myself. I manage the campaign myself. And this campaign that I built, you know, last month or previously with another client, I did all of the keyword research and ad copywriting and, and chose all the geographic settings. And, you know, it was a very difficult industry because it was a, you know, a really specific type of thing. It was, it was, it was H Vac for server rooms. You know, that's becoming very important with AI, the launch of AI and everything, you know, More and more server rooms are coming out. So this was a really important thing where, you know, AC systems, H VAC systems, designed to keep server rooms cool. This is a very important type of thing. So I had to build a campaign and I built it myself and I made the choices. You know, I mean, this is, I'm kind of just chattering at this point, not really giving examples, but that's the direction that I would go, right? I would use that opportunity to give examples of something that I had built, give examples of the work that I had done. All right? And then last, if you're going to give an interview and you're going to show your value in some way, I would suggest using language that demonstrates your success or language that demonstrates your experience, at least. So what I mean by this is using terms in your examples, terms in your opinions that show that you know, the talk, you can talk the talk, and if they hire you, you'll prove that you can walk the walk. Right, but at least show that you can talk the talk. So an example of this is, I asked a question. Do you work mostly in consumer market or in the business to business market? Okay. And so immediately there's a toss up there. You could, you know, you could use the phrase B2C and B2B. You know, business to consumer, business to business. You know, I mean, right there you can show that you, you understand that differentiation, that's a, that's an easy one, right? But you might give the story. Well, I, I work a lot in business to business, and what I find is that business to business is very different because you're trying to reach a very small percentage of the market. You're trying to reach 10% of the market, as opposed to all the other searches, the 90% of searches out there that you don't want, that are consumers that are searching for other things that are not business owners or decision makers within a business. So therefore, a B2B campaign might have a much lower CTR. And you know, what you would expect is the CPC to be much higher because the auction insights are going to be very competitive on a, on a very small scale of searches. So if you're only going after 10% of the market and you have 15 competitors, the CPC is going to be very, very high. And then hopefully you, even though you have a very lower, you know, a lower CTR and you know, people are a little less likely to click, you can also have a very high conversion rate and very valuable traffic, even though the CPC is, is very high and the and the response rate in the ads is low. That's an example of, of what I've done in the B2B market. There we go. So you can see I tried to weave all of those points in, in that one example, you know, I gave language, I gave examples of what I've done and I gave strong opinions and reasoning behind those opinions. I mean, that is a solid answer that would demonstrate my worth, my knowledge, my technical understanding of an industry and make me a great candidate for a Google Ads job in house at an agency. What are we trying to get hired for? So I hope that's useful to you, those of you I know you know are climbing the PPC ladder, working in agencies, starting agencies, or just, you know, working in house somewhere or whatever. Hopefully that's useful to you because I'm sure you'll go through many interviews and discussions yourself and I hope that that helps you to bring yourself to a, to a higher playing level there with, with your potential employers. And with that, I am going to end the podcast here. If you'd like to reach out to me, you can do so@chrishaefer.com you can also reach Joey B. Bidner at joeybidner. Com and appreciate you guys for listening and we'll catch you guys next week.