Your product feed is what could hold you back from actually scaling. And today I'm going to explain you why that is from two examples of consultancy projects that I've had in the last week. Welcome back to Google Ads Unleash, guys. I hope everyone is doing fabulously this Monday. Um, with one eye on to Q4 already. It's the last week of August. Crazy how quickly uh it's gone. Um, we are actually going to go on our team retreat next week. So, I'm going to have to pre-record a couple um in the coming weeks whilst we're sipping a couple of drinks in the sun before all the craziness starts. Um and why am I saying this? Um because now is not too late to really think about Q4. And if you experiencing this problem, I've seen this problem which I want to share with you today. Now is the time to put all the stuff in place so that you actually can reap the rewards in Q4 and beyond that and today I want to discuss something that's quite unusual or h can happen and uh something you need to consider uh when you actually build your site and you build your product feed. So what am I talking about today? So in the last two weeks I've had two consultancy projects. Uh one was quite a difficult very technically specific client which I'm not going to go into detail because I don't think it's it's very like sort of specific motor engine parts and so on. It's a bit boring and not really easy to understand, not great for podcast. The other one, however, was much easier to understand. They were making parts for bikes that they 3D printed 3D printed themselves. Hence, they were a lot cheaper and all the parts are approved as well so that you can actually pop it into your Honda, into your Yama, into your I am whatever your um uh bikers and that's great but they have been struggling to scale and when I looked at the ad account I'd seen a pattern that I've seen over the years over and over again in several industries that I want to talk about today and it just goes to show why most of Google ads work nowadays actually happens outside of the platform. Let's dive into the case. So in this case it was the media buyer of said motorbike part company reached out to me for a consultancy session and we had a look at everything and within half an hour the session was pretty much over because we both basically what I told her really sort of flicked a switch in her and that was that the entire website wasn't actually laid out to capture the right traffic. Why? What was going on? So the as you can imagine the website had hundreds if not thousands of SKUs uh with loads of different products for you know like replacement parts indicators to replacement parts for um god knows what your uh chains your I've don't really know bikes you can obviously tell but basically replacement parts for all sort of things and what I saw absolutely astounded me when you actually were on the website first of all it was very difficult to actually even locate the part that could be interesting for what uh you need. So, let's say your bike is broken and you're looking for a specific part for your bike. What would you do? You would go into the search bar, for instance, and search for the model of your bike, for instance. Or you would search for the year of your bike and your brand and so on. And then you would go maybe to the problem zone. Let's say um it's the steering or something like that. And then go into whatever suits that section. Okay. None of that was happening on the website and so that's number one. So that's just a UX issue. So clearly conversion rate was quite low because of that. All other stuff was fine, right? The feed as it was was already optimized. Uh conversion tracking was perfect. Custom lists uploaded. Uh the reviews were good. Everything was was done. The campaigns were set up nicely which produced okay clickthrough rates to not not extraordinary but okay. Okay. to lower CPCs uh but at a cart rate and from then on everything more or less s*** the bed. Okay. And then I looked at the product pages and although the product pages looked fine, something jumped out to me. So it's a Shopify store and the products weren't all um like proper variants of sort of the the the part. So let's say you needed a So this is quite difficult to wrap your head around now. So let's say You needed a part for a Triumph from the early 2010s and you need an indicator and you need to put the model number in there. This wasn't its own product, although of course the replacement part may fit several models and it listed several models within like an umbrella product. They were all just umbrella products and not products specific for the bike, for the model, for the serial number, etc., etc. And that was the conversion rate killer. Why is that? Because you have to think about what Google is intending to do. So if you have umbrella products, right, which are capturing five ranges of models, which are capturing two or three different brands at the same time, which are capturing two or three problem zones at the same time, and you get people onto the site, onto the PDP, and they have to configure the f****** product themselves that is then for their use case. First of all, that's much too much work. Secondly, you can't actually attract quality traffic that way. And an indicator of that was that DSA campaigns weren't working. Okay. So, further down the down the line, this would be AI Max was the thing, but clearly the content on the site wasn't actually tailored to the individual products that they were selling, nor were there actual variants for all of the various products models and the its combinations. Okay, so essentially One umbrella product should have been 15, 20, 25 individual products to be found on the website with potentially even their own SKUs, with their own um written content, with their own photos, the whole the whole shebang, okay? Because what happens as a result is Google starts crawling all of the products. I know you have to avoid duplicate content and all that sort of stuff, but Google actually then starts that's crawling the the content of those sites individually. Understanding that this particular part is actually not for five uh brands and for five uh models. It is for that one model for that one from that era from that particular brand for this problem and matches the search queries accordingly to this product. Of course, you will inflate your product feed from maybe a,000 products to 15,000 products, but that's not a bad thing because with big data and how people search, this is what you need to build as a customer experience to effectively answer the the to effectively answer people's search queries. Essentially, what this ad account was doing is it was trying with these umbrella products with tried to catch little fish and the net was cast far too big. It needed a much finer mesh and a much finer net. in order to more effectively capture how people searched because we had a look at the search volume and essentially that's exactly what people were searching right people were searching something like um exhaust pipe replacement part XY Z for Yamaha or for TR uh Indian whatever right 19 from 1999 okay super specific search term which needs a super specific answer and not an umbrella product that is why It's a bit of a been a bit of a chicken and egg problem, right? Because um of course the their client was arguing, oh, the campaigns not working, but the campaigns couldn't do their job. They couldn't find or match the right traffic to the right product because the product information was missing. Okay, so imagine that specific search query I just sent and you sent it to a mother product and they have to configure the bastard product for 10 minutes in order to get uh the the the the part that they need. Of course, the conversion rate is going to be low. That's never going to work. So, my suggestion is to always understand how people work. How do people search for my stuff? And what kind of system architecture can I create around the Google Ads account in my shop on my customer journey that feeds the right data into Google Ads and to helps and that helps me design a campaign structure that effectively captures and categorizes the searches and and converts it effectively. And by the way, the other client I just mentioned, I'm going to say it anyway. Screw it. So, basically, they were making a very specific replacement park part for VW engines. Okay? But they had the same thing. There's like two or three engine types that VW makes. I don't know. I'm not too deep into it, but they had sort of two or three mother products for those engines. Well, but that's not what people searched for. People searched searched for the specific replacement part plus VW Caddy TDI engine 2.5 or something, right? Or whatever. That's how people searched for this product. They don't want to land on a specific generic product. They want to land on a product page with this product that is exactly for the TDI engine that their VW Caddy has. Right? So, if you adapt the product titles then for because you again you've got more space instead of having to stuff five different brands or five different VW models into one product title where you've got one product with one product title specific for a search query should it ever happen that sends people onto a page where even all the content the images there's a VW caddy on there's all the descriptions about the that that product that is what effectively converts right and um with that client actually we've been able to increase their revenue by 20% month of month and we've not even done anything and we're out of season with this particular product. Right. So, I didn't do anything by the way. So, they they're just consultancy. Uh I just told them to do it. They executed the plan and it's worked off the bat. And I can't wait what's going to happen further down the line in terms of SEO and all of the other stuff once they've adopted AI Max and and more things further down the line. But yeah, it just goes to show you have to think creatively about how do I solve making the customer journey as relevant as possible even if that means that you have to change things significantly in your shop. Just thought it's interesting and I just thought I want to share the story with you and to be honest if uh you like this sort of creative thinking more than happy to have a chat with you. Jeremy and Digital.marketing is the email address. You can also find me on LinkedIn, Jeremy on Google Ads. You can also um go on the website young andandigital.market marketing and you can book a one-to-one call with me. Um, we've got a new section on there. We are going to launch a couple of new services. Have a look on there. Onetoone time with me which you can book. You can also book a Google Ads coaching. Um, basically we treat you as our client, run your account and then design a structured program where we hand it over to you bit by bit. Of course, we do classic Google and you um Google YouTube and Microsoft ads management. you as well. Um, but essentially we try and to creatively think about what we need to put in place in order to make your business grow. Let's have a chat. And if you like the episode, like and subscribe and I'll see you in the next episode.
