Material Retail Dumps

Welcome to the Material Retail Dumps podcast. If you've listened to us before, thanks so much for coming back. If it's your first time listening, welcome Material Retail Dumps is a short form podcast with briefly valuable content for independent retailers. As business owners, we don't have time for a 30 minute lesson with a ton of banter. We get straight to the meat of the topic and aim to give you actionable information and will help you optimize your retail operation and make more money every day. Welcome to Material Retail Dumps, episode 25. This episode's gonna be about paid ads and specifically Google Performance Max Ads. So without further ado, let's jump right in. So first, a few seconds on what are paid ads. Paid ads are any form of digital marketing that you are running on the internet, whether it be social media, ads through Facebook, AdWords, through Google, Pinterest ads, Reddit ads, anytime you're paying for placement on someone else's platform so you can reach their audience.

So first, let's jump in. You know, one thing I want to caution you is you gotta be careful with paid ads because a lot of times it's very easy to just throw a lot of money at the wall and see what sticks, and that could just be a quick way to, to burn some money and, you know, never really get what you're looking for out of paid media. The way that paid media is supposed to work is that you're supposed to, you know, test and continue to test different platforms, different audiences, different types of ads, and continue to see what has the best return on investment. And what works for One Baron might not work for another brand. For example, if I'm a clothing company targeting 18 year old women, I'm not gonna wanna advertise in the same place as a used car dealership who is targeting 60 year old men.

Now, the maybe for the fashion business that is targeting younger users, they're gonna want Instagram, they're gonna wanna go on TikTok and Instagram. For the used car dealership who is targeting an older audience, maybe they're gonna wanna go on Facebook or Google or even Yelp. You gotta be careful to have a predetermination on what is gonna work and what is not gonna work. You have to let the stats speak for themselves. Um, another super important thing that you need to make sure that you set up before writing you paid ads is how are you gonna attribute sales to those ad dollars? So if you rely exclusively on the, the platform that you're actually putting the money behind, you're gonna get probably the best results possible because those stats are maybe a little bit skewed in their favor. For example, if you advertise on Google and you're trusting only Google to tell you how those ads are performing, you gotta know that, that they're going to do everything in their power, most likely morally to show you that those ads are working. Whereas if you were to use another platform to measure how those Google Ads are doing, maybe the attribution would be a little bit different. So that being said, I want to talk about a really powerful program that Google has, um, called Google Performance Max. How it works, what is it and why? I think it's a great place to start if you are, uh, a fashion business or any business selling, you know, small physical goods. So what is Google Performance Max?

Google Performance Max is is an ad program that Google set up where you connect your product catalog to Google Shopping, and then Google will take your catalog and the budget you set up and they'll try to find you buyers. Google will use its own algorithm to figure out who to show your products to and it'll keep getting smarter and smarter. So the longer you're in the program, the more money you're spending in the program, the more data that Google has to work off of and the the smarter it'll be. So, you know, how does it work? On a very basic level, the way it works is you connect your product catalog to Google. So however you're hosting your website, you should be able to connect your product catalog to Google. You may need to use like a Google Pixel to verify your site or something like that.

But you just go to Google Merchants, Google Merchant Center and you connect your catalog, Google walk you through the whole thing. Then once that's connected and you see that your products are being sent from your website to a Google, your products are now live in Google shopping. Once the products are live in Google shopping, there's two ways to get people to view those products. Number one, it could, you could just use their free platform that allows, you know, your products to get discovered and you'll get clicks and it's great cause it's free. The other is you can start paying for clicks and this is the real way to get sales out of the Google Merchant Center. Um, and you just basically the way it works, you set a budget and Google goes out and does its thing. Um, and they try to get you sales at a, at a cheap cost per customer acquisition.

So, you know, why is it cool? Well, it's cool because it's only the only paid ad options of its kind where you basically don't have to do any work other than uploading your product catalog, making sure your website's great and setting a budget and then you just watch, you watch as Google does its thing and you see, okay, this week I spent $200 and I got 10 customers, so it costs me $20 per customer. And if you're happy with that, you can spend a little bit more. If you're not so happy with it, you can wait maybe next week Google have better results cuz they learn more about you. Um, but it's a good way to just see exactly how much is it gonna cost me to acquire a customer through Google Shopping. It's also really cool because you don't really have to do any work.

You don't have to create any banners, you don't have to create any videos. That's a big, one of the big issues with Facebook marketing is you have to create the creative. So not only do you have to rely on Facebook to go and find you the right shopper, uh, which they're really good at, they're really good at putting your ads in front of the right people. But you also have to create a very inviting advertisement for those customers. So you can't just throw an ugly picture into goo into Facebook and expect it to be good, because at the end of the day, the customer needs to see something they like and wanna click on your image or a video. And that just takes work. So if I were to sum this up with a quick action item, I would go ahead and, you know, create your Google Merchant Center account, get your product catalog uploaded, and set a $20 daily budget into Google and see what happens. Let it run for a week, let it run for two weeks. It'll cost you a couple hundred bucks to get that going. And let's see if we could start acquiring customers off of Google for cheap. Well, that's it. Thanks so much for listening and I'm looking forward to the next.