Today in Digital Marketing - You're (Probably) Doing Creative-Testing All Wrong

Starting point is 00:00:00 Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today,

Starting point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, the secret to one DTC brand's huge improvements at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. and how to forecast future demand in the PPC auction. It's Friday, October 29th, 2021. Happy International Internet Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, episode 494. It's not easy to be in the ad market these days,

Starting point is 00:01:02 especially if you're a DTC brand. You don't have to tell that to Jones Road Beauty. A month ago, all their ads were struggling. Clickthrough was at an all-time low of around 0.6%, cost per click climbing up to nearly $4. So the company made some changes, and today they have more than doubled their CTR, slashed their CPC by half, and now enjoys a 35% lower cost per acquisition. So you might be asking, okay, what changes? And for that, we're joined by Cody Plofker, the director of e-commerce at Jones Road Beauty. Hi, Cody. Hey, thanks for having me. Excited to be here. So what did you do? Really, the answer is really simple, but it's not everyone's doing it is testing everything. But I think testing in a really methodical way. You know, we just got away with not having ideal

Starting point is 00:01:53 creative. And it's funny, because everybody is now it's like, Oh, creative is king. And, you know, you got to invest in creative now, like, it's always been important. It's always been super important. It's just like, we could get away with not having it be ideal. So we could just media buyer our way kind of through it. And now it's like, we don't really have that that opportunity. So definitely creative testing, having that be the main focus. However, I see and I've totally made this mistake myself, so many brands and agencies like testing really small things like testing colors or testing, you know, like font or like frame versus no frame. And instead, we've kind of taken the approach that like, let's test really big things. Let's do less tests. Let's work on making better creative. And then when we do test, let's test things that are drastically, drastically different than what we've done before.

Starting point is 00:02:42 So take big risks, basically, when testing, I guess. Exactly. Take big risks, be willing to play on the outskirts of the brand guidelines a little bit. Were you running traffic to different types of pages? We were not previously. Everything was going to pretty much homepage or PDP before. And that was definitely one of our tests is different kind of pages that we're going to because with ad costs going up, I mean, I was looking at just our year in review and like ad costs or clicks are pretty much doubled. So it's like to get the same outcome or similar, like you, if you can't get that pre-click cost down, your CPMs down, you just have to figure out how to get your post-click value up. And so to do that, obviously you got to focus on LTV, all that kind of stuff. You know, you have to focus on conversion rate and AOV.

Starting point is 00:03:26 And traditional PDPs are not always optimized for that. So sometimes people need more content, more experience, more engagement. So we've tested going to some articles, going to some advertorials, and going to a quiz, especially in retargeting. And it's just been great for our conversion rate and our average order value. So that's one thing that, especially in retargeting, has really's just been great for our conversion rate and our average order value. So that's one thing that especially in retargeting has really helped to get us back up there. Thanks for jumping on the show today, Cody. Of course. Thanks for having me.

Starting point is 00:03:52 Cody did a fantastically detailed tweet thread with all the creative and we have created a short link for you to find it and check out the fantastic creative one of which features your mom, I think. Is that right? Yes, my mom is the founder, family biz. The tweet thread is at b.link slash ad tweets. So that's promoting your product. But what about if you can't even get your product and are caught up in the supply chain issues, forcing your online store to show a lot of out of stock messages? That's bad for your customer experience, but it might also be hurting your ranking in Google. In one of his weekly SEO hangouts, Google search engineer

Starting point is 00:04:29 John Mueller shared four tips for handling out-of-stock products online that won't affect user experience and are SEO optimized for Google. So should you leave your out-of-stock products listed online? The short answer is yes. Here's John Mueller. What works best for us is if we can keep the URL online for things that are really temporary, in the sense that if the URL remains indexable and with structured data you tell us this product is currently not available,

Starting point is 00:05:03 then we can at least kind of least keep this URL in our index and keep refreshing it regularly to pick up that change in availability as quickly as possible. However, if you decide to noindex these pages or if you decide to just remove the internal linking to these pages, then when that state changes back, we would try to pick that up fairly quickly as well. And we try to understand these state changes

Starting point is 00:05:32 through things like sitemaps and internal links. So especially if you add a product back and then suddenly it has internal links again, that helps us to pick that up again. Mueller also suggested adding a back in stock link on the homepage to make Google crawl and rank the pages more quickly, especially if the site had been down for a while. So, yeah, lots of things out of stock. And this year, it may not be the Grinch who stole Christmas, but the supply chain. According to a new study, supply chain woes of retail executives are not likely to ease anytime soon.

Starting point is 00:06:08 98% of retail executives in the survey say they are experiencing supply chain issues. And 100% predicted that disruptions in their supply chain will affect their holiday season significantly or somewhat and last through 2022. To mitigate costs from the challenges, 59% of executives increased pricing or shipping costs, and 36% took a margin hit to maintain prices. It is not the same for every retailer. Target, Walmart, and Amazon have highlighted efforts to mitigate the challenges, promising shoppers they will be stocked for the holiday season. The study was conducted by First Insight and the Wharton School's Baker Retailing Center.

Starting point is 00:06:55 Although that said, despite the supply chain woes, holiday sales are predicted to rise, according to the National Retail Federation. Holiday sales during November and December are forecast to grow between 8.5% and 10.5% compared to last year, up to $226 billion expected to be generated by online sales and other non-store sales. According to the NRF, consumers are in a very favorable position going into the last few months of the year as income is rising. Retailers are making significant investments in their supply chains and spending heavily to ensure they have products on their shelves to meet this time of exceptional consumer demand, unquote. Do you have business insurance? If not,

Starting point is 00:07:39 how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Google today announced new features in Merchant Center to support retailers running promotions, sales, and price drops, including a deals feed in the Shopping tab. Additionally, the company plans to integrate with Shopify and WooCommerce so that merchants can showcase their deals across Google's services. Here's what you need to know about the new features. First, the deals feed. Deals badged products will now appear in a new tab in the shopping section.

Starting point is 00:08:26 This feed can be found by selecting deals from the menu or by searching for terms like deals or Black Friday. If a product has a deals badge, it is automatically included and will be highlighted based on the offer and discount. And there's some new ways to track in Merchant Center. Merchants can view which of their products are eligible for a deals badge in Google Merchant Center's Products tab. And a new dashboard provides impressions, clicks, and click-through rate data for shopping ads featuring deals badges.

Starting point is 00:08:54 With the new features, e-commerce marketers now have multiple places in Google to showcase deals. Retailers running promotions, sales, or price drops need to maintain their product feeds to be eligible for these organic ways to reach shoppers. Well, as you know, one of the big components of an online ad campaign is how you handle bids and budgets, both of which can be impacted pretty dramatically by competition in the auction. This past week, Google Ads consultant Jill Saskengales joined us for a weekend edition both of which can be impacted pretty dramatically by competition in the auction. This past week, Google Ads consultant Jill Saskengales joined us for a weekend edition in which I asked if that platform has a way to forecast demand increases, especially as we get closer to Black Friday.

Starting point is 00:09:37 There actually is, and it's been made much more intuitive this year than in years past. So if you are a Google Ads advertiser, of the many options you can choose in the Google Ads interface, there's something called the Insights tab. It's right next to the Recommendations tab. And in the Insights tab, it'll show you right now and forecast over the next few months demands in your category and for your keywords. So you can go in there right now and Google Ads will say, you know, right now you're capturing X percent of impressions or X percent of clicks.

Starting point is 00:10:10 And this is what we expect it to look like over the next month, over the next two months. And so based on that, you can get an idea of how much you may want to increase your budget or increase your bids to capture that additional opportunity, which is really great. So that's only available if you are already spending money in Google ads so that there's enough data to go off of.

Starting point is 00:10:32 If you're not currently spending money on Google ads and you want to know that as well, top resource. Actually, there's two. One is Google Trends is great. While it won't forecast for you, you can see what happened last year. And given how crazy last year was, you may want to also look at the year before. And then another tool that's from Think with Google is called Rising Retail Categories. And it's sort of like Google Trends, but specifically for retail and lets you see kind of week over week or month over month,

Starting point is 00:11:01 what are the top trending products, product focus for the US and about a dozen other countries. Canada's not on there. But yes, so you can see, and it's about trending. So what is top searched for this week that wasn't last week or top trending this month that wasn't last month? It's sort of like a very curated version of Google Trends. That's just a clip from the very detailed interview. So if you missed that, just go back to our October 23rd episode and be sure to check

Starting point is 00:11:30 out Jill's website at jill.ca. That's J-Y-L-L.ca or follow her on TikTok. She is the underscore Google underscore pro. And finally, new words are out. Well, new words are being defined, at least, by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. 455 of them, to be precise. They include deplatform, which means to prevent from having or providing a platform to communicate. They've also provided a new definition for the word because.

Starting point is 00:12:02 And the definition is now this. Often used in a humorous way to convey vagueness about the exact reasons for something. The preposition use of because is versatile. It can be used, for example, to avoid delving into the over-technical, such as the process works because science, or to dismiss explanation altogether. They left because reasons. And a word close to my own heart, dad bod,

Starting point is 00:12:30 a physique regarded as typical of an average father, especially one that is slightly overweight and not extremely muscular. But tomorrow, another weekend edition is coming your way. The head of international expansion for Amazon ads joins us to talk about new formats, the relationship between his company and marketers, and more. That is tomorrow. And I'm going to tease this now.

Starting point is 00:12:56 December 1st. Big changes coming to the podcast that I think you will like. Today in digital marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of the Sunamic First Nation on beautiful Vancouver Island. Scripting and production support by Steph Gunn. Music licensing by Source Audio. And our theme composer, Mark Blevis, is a freshly oiled bike chain.

Starting point is 00:13:19 I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful weekend. I'll talk to you on Monday. Put the bang on me I love it, I love talk to you on Monday.

Today in Digital Marketing - You're (Probably) Doing Creative-Testing All Wrong

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