How to Get Traffic That Buys to Your Website

welcome to the inaugural podcast season two on face book life it's a real treat
to be here real privileged I'm joined by Chloe who lets go Chloe on the screen
Chloe's next to me there hello thanks for joining us very cool to be here
thank you for inviting me oh it's great thanks for being the guinea pig because you know what this Facebook life thing
is is quite fascinating and it's it's it's fun recording a podcast and it's
fun recording podcasts with guess but this is the first time we've ever done it on Facebook live so if it all goes
horribly wrong we may never do this again but if it all goes horribly right we may well I take my virtual hats off
to you because recording a podcast successfully as I know myself is challenging enough without adding video
and without and without adding Facebook so thank you very much and actually
let's plug your podcast well we're here because I can see the sign Robbi aren't you there you can't miss it yeah so
ecommerce masterplan podcast yes we've been going for five years now it's just
ridiculous and every week it's an interview with a different retailer from those who've just started right the way through to
those who've been going for years and years and years you know from the biggest to the smallest basically and
we're currently putting live our January groceries where we double up and every two episodes a week and every episode is
all about getting your getting your business set for growth in so so
busy cost at the minute and people can find your podcast the same normal places iTunes stitcher it's on all the usual it
should be everywhere if there's somewhere you can't get it let me know and I will make it happen
so yeah it's on all the usual places quite easy to find great well definitely tune in and having like
this is season two of our podcast so the fact that you've been going for five years I'd take my hat off to you because that is some serious length and
commitment on the old guess there yeah there's anyone who's got you know a long flight there's an
awful lot of me and my guess you can listen to that well actually in a few
weeks time I'm flying over to New Zealand so I might do a bulk listen and catch up yeah I'm not sure that does
it's good for your sanity to listen for odd hours straight maybe mix it in with something else but yeah if you want
it well listen if you're joining us live on the show it's great to have you here
I'm Matt Edmondson and this is the guest the wonderful guest Chloe and welcome to
January welcome to the curiosity podcast season we do have I believe comments
so if you have questions comments you can throw them in as we go and live - unless you're listening to the audio
podcast in which case you can't I'm not
sure when the audio for this will be published but we are trying with our podcast to stream them on Facebook live
when we record with the guests so if you like the show and you want to interact with the guests come on Facebook live join us as your
comments and we'll try and do maybe a QA either as we go through all maybe towards the end we'll see how we get on
but Chloe for those of the audience that don't know who you are that haven't listened to your show what's a brief bio
for you Wow so I've been in e-commerce for over years so brief is
challenging but I will do my best if it's short go for that yeah so I started
off working client-side for a UK high street retailer so I did omni-channel years ago which is those of you who are
trying to get omni-channel right right now it was considerably more difficult back then and considerably more expensive to then I worked worked for
and ran an agency for years focusing on the marketing side of things and these days I helped ecommerce business
owners work out how to make their business more successful by helping them solve their marketing problems most of
that I do by giving them the tools to solve their problems themselves so that's why the podcast
and also via my books and I speak events and various bits and pieces so I'm kind
of more about education these days than consultancy I mean jeez you sound busy right you've got your podcast going on
I've actually got a copy of your latest book here which we're going to get into in this podcast as we talk about how to
get traffic that it buys to your website which i think is a great title by the way and we're going to come to why I
think is a great time but well I mean so
you've been around e-commerce for a while whole bunch of experience with agency and with coaching and with consulting
and all that sort of stuff we mentioned the book let's jump into it shall we why
so why did you write this book I listen let me actually the first question is how many books have you written because
it's not your first time at their roadie no no it's not I mean you can see kind of see them behind me so there's there's
climatic placement maybe a slide on the screen there's a kind of five and I say
kind of five because the very first one I wrote was ecommerce master plan which is about the strategy of e-commerce then
I wrote the first version of e-commerce marketing which has now been rewritten so I kind of it's it's twice as long now
it's got almost twice the number of chapters and it's really expanded but the first version of this came out in
so it's kind of book kind of the same but kind of not the same book then
there's one called customer persuasion which is about the customer journey there's bb e-commerce master plan which
is about bb e-commerce strangely enough as it says in the title and then there's a teeny tiny one somewhere around here
which is called ecommerce delivery which is about getting your delivery strategy right and that one's due for a rewrite
at the moment but yeah and do you rewrite them because everything is changing so quick yes basically well
changing so quick not so much because I've written each of them from the
perspective of trying to give you the background and the structures and the strategy and the understanding you need
as an e-commerce business owner marketing director marketing manager to make the right decisions so there
not click here do this there this is why you might want AdWords this is what you
need to think about before you need to do AdWords so actually when as I said the precursor to this one is five years
old and having read it very recently you know last year because I was rewriting
it there weren't any inaccuracies in it right there were just things I could
improve upon so and it's second and explain yeah exactly it's kind of like mmm am I still proud of the fact it's in
that is it in that format what does it do I feel I can give more is more the angle for when I rewrite them rather
it's necessarily wrong I suppose because I find those fundamental pieces the
strategy and the what the tools are for and how you make decisions actually doesn't change a lot year-on-year
but the noise and the options expands massively okay so it's quite a
comprehensive book I really enjoyed reading it actually and so what why what
I kind of think I know the answer berm ask it anyway what was the problem you were saying that caused you to write the
book it's that people in e-commerce and outside e-commerce because I've had
experience in other markets somewhat some experience over the market as well they struggle with what marketing they
should actually be doing and they struggle with it not because they don't necessarily the ants but because they
don't have the confidence to know the answer so most of the questions I get asked by retailers are Chloe is what I'm
doing what I should be doing so have I make good decisions am i doing the marketing that I ought to
be doing my business and this is probably the biggest one these days because we're so bombarded with noise
and new ideas all the time it's should what should I be doing that I don't know
about it's kind of that FOMO effect the constant belief that you're missing out
on the number one thing you should be doing everybody's being told all the time you you just go onto Facebook and
your feed is saying you know this is the latest killer form of Marketing use this super trendy you know
platform or whatever it is yeah and are you right is an e-commerce business owner myself every man and his
dog is telling me I'm doing marketing wrong and I need to do it they're special in unique way and it gets really
confusing right I think my my favorite example of that is it's quite a large
you know really successful business you know multi-million pound turnover and I was working with their e-commerce magnetics they did a lot of wholesaling
and bits and pieces and she came on to one of our coaching calls this was a few years ago and she'd been to an SLI
systems which is a business which no longer exists but they did purse on site personalization so better site search
better merchandising that kind of stuff all automated for you this is pretty about four years ago and she she'd been
to on there eventually I think I need this software I think this would just create such a great thing I was like you've got four
SKUs you have one product and four color options Wow Wow they are solving a
problem you don't have and she's clever lady doing some brilliant marketing you
know sometimes we come on the cause and she told me about something like wow tell me about it cuz I wanna know about
what you're doing and you know look you don't need it yeah do not I mean I mean
take the hat at my head off to them for doing such a great job at their conference for convincing her she needed this this solution but you know it's
it's very easy with the amount of information we get bombarded by to think there's a bright shiny object I need to
go and do that whereas actually it's not necessarily the right thing although some what it is and so you talk about
that in the book right and so some of the things that you mentioned in this
book you say right at the start that this book is based on an equation yes we
run through that because that's quite important for to understand your thinking and why you've sort of gone
down this road I thought yeah so it's um it's traffic times Oh see I'm gonna get
it wrong now cuz this I've usually stopped working by this point time so I'm going out to the first moment because I don't want to get this wrong for that there okay guys here we go I've
got the book in front of me I know the answer traffic times average order value time conversion rate time sales how could I
possibly forgotten that because it is at the heart of every single ecommerce
business because and I think it's helpful to think of it that way because
all the decisions you make drill down to this equation if you want to increase your sales you have to improve your
traffic your average order value or your conversion rate those are the only three ways you can do it it's that simple but
of course each of those three I'm guessing this is what you're what you're getting at has a different power as a
lever you can pull and I'm never saying you should ignore all three but there's
only so far you can push an average order value there's only so far you can push your version rate yeah but there's
kind of limitless ways you can push the traffic plus in my experience from the
stats I've seen and for the reports I wrote from how I've worked with clients over the years traffic can have a huge
impact on both average order value and conversion rate so those of you watching
and listening will probably experience the fact that your google shopping campaigns have a considerably lower
average order value than your other marketing methods because it's exactly
so if you put double the budget into google shopping campaigns successfully
say you double the number of orders you gets people shopping campaigns your average AOV is gonna sink yeah because
you're driving a loaded lower AOV traffic that's not necessarily a bad thing but that's a way in which traffic
can have a positive and or negative effect on average order value you know you can turn off your google shopping campaigns tomorrow I do not recommend
you do this and your average order value overall will go up yeah so traffic has an impact on average order value
it also has now an impact on conversion rate you know email marketing tends to convert really really well
you double the number of emails you said oh look my conversion rates gone up but it doesn't necessarily mean your website
is converting any better so to the site yeah exactly so your your traffic has a
big impact on the other two which is why I think it's an and it can be grown
infinitely therefore it for me it's the really key lever and that's why the book isn't
about the whole of e-commerce marketing it's just about driving that swirl like you've focused in on the traffic thing
is and actually the reai said to you earlier that i thought it was a clever title like you i've done a lot of
e-commerce coaching over the years with various people and by far the most popular question you get asked is how do
i send more traffic to my website and I like short idle because you've got here
how to get traffic that buys to your website and that's critical right because I see probably the biggest
complaint people have especially with Shopify sites and there's a reason why I think is for Shopify sites which I won't
bore you with right now but the biggest complaint I've got traffic but no sales
in other words one of the key problems is you're not sending the right traffic - yep site or you're selling an entirely
the wrong product and you know there's questions about both but I like the fact that you're talking about targeted
traffic traffic that buys which is great so in the book you stayed quite early on
that traffic optimization is the most important skill I'm just reading this so
I get right the most important skill for e-commerce growth right that's what yes you make why do you say that I say that
partly because of what you just said actually about the fact it has to be traffic that buys because I can drive
anyone listening double the amount of traffic very very quickly but it ain't
gonna buy and if your and I would do that by spending a huge amount of money
on your behalf to double it if you're spending money and time on that traffic you have to make sure it's working for
you and that's the process of optimization is the process of looking at each of your traffic sources and
going which bits of this because it's never email it's never Google Ads it's
always the nitty gritty under it and how do you make that matter how do you take the bits which aren't working and either
make them work or turn them off and how do you take the bits which are working and improve them so they bring you more
traffic for less cost or more traffic that buys I should say for less cost and how do you then take lessons from that
bit to them roll it out to all your other marketing methods and if you're not constantly optimizing
then you're you're wasting money you're wasting time and you're not getting the results you should and it's you know you
said you've done quite a bit of coaching with ecommerce businesses as well a lot of what I do for actual ecommerce
businesses these days are audits so I get my hands into their Google ads account into their Google Analytics
account and one of the saddest things is looking at the two saddest things are
going into a Google Shopping campaign and they've just got one ad group with one product group that's caught
everything in it and they're like we've done it you so haven't done it and they haven't serve any negative or anything
it's just like oh you just paid so much money to Google the new shirt and the
other one is he's actually just the Google Ads account overall they turn it
on and and I talked about a client in the book who who I've helped I've been
coaching them through through some AdWords improvements over the last few months and last year there as in
there are Christmas focused business they put their ads live and they didn't make any changes they just put it live
and you can see in the change look what happened they put it live in October and they just left it live till the last order day well and this year we spent a
huge amount of time and optimization and we've improved the ROI something like % we spent because there was
opportunity and the sales have gone up and we're in the process of analyzing that now but if they've done that the
year before they'd have happen in fact yeah it's just a case of getting used to
on a Monday login look at your Google Ads make the American yeah it's interesting you say that because actually it's funny you know I go and
help other people and I don't profess to be a Google AdWords expert I really don't but I know the basics and last
year throughout the year we got so much better as one of the key strategic aims we've got so much better at Google
Adwords and Google AdWords spend is a quarter of what it was but it's
generating more sales awesome well done which is phenomenal when you think of
the cost of Google AdWords it's not an insubstantial line budget is it you know
it I mean at the height of it we were spending probably about fourteen fifteen thousand pounds a month with Google
AdWords which for some is a lot for some is not a lot but that's just what we were spending we even did an experiment moment where we just shut it off
completely to see what would happen to say was that was that was squeaky berm time as we liked yeah yeah so I'm
hearing you talk about this sort of skill of traffic optimization and doing
that so I'm making the assumption here and I just want to clarify for people he's listening traffic optimization is a
skill you think people can learn and develop and grow in yes I do
is that right very much so is it or is it it's I've put here in my questions is
this something we need to leave to the pros or do you think people can learn it themselves I think there's a I'm gonna
keep think if you want to be successful
in e-commerce and you have any involvement in the marketing side of it you have to understand optimization as
the skill set because your whatever level you're at you're making decisions about what you spend money on and what
you spend time on and the people you hire and the skill sets you want and if you're not looking at the results and
going is this worth doing is this not worth doing and then looking at and then if you're not sure then looking at what
you're actually doing and seeing if you can improve it then what are you doing
quite frankly you know you're missing a huge trick so there the general skill of optimization we should all be capable of
doing whether we should be the people who are doing the Google Ads optimization the Facebook Ads
optimization the email marketing optimization or any of the other marketing methods that come into this
and and those would be listening I will keep referring to Facebook as Google Ads and that because it's just so much easier it's such a good example what
we're talking about but this counts for everything including influence of marketing and SEO and the soft weather
you should be the person in house doing the Google Ads or the Facebook ads is another question because as you love
experience over the last year of getting good at Google Ads it's a minefield of complexity there's an awful lot to learn
an awful lot of places where you haven't even read the settings hidden somewhere
and you haven't realized and then with Facebook ads it's more a case of there's an opportunity you're not aware of
because there's new stuff happening all the time because I always think Google Ads is set up to take money off you
without you realizing it because they hide they hide important settings in places and they default to settings you shouldn't really be choosing here
whereas Facebook Ads is set up not to do that it's set up to help you want to spend more money but that means it's
also equally complicated no straightforward no platform saying
you've got to get your head around it and I mean you know I just to be totally transparent one of the key things that
we did to reduce AdWords spent was we we got involved in the team a chap called
Ross so I'm hoping it's gonna come on the show one day and he he actually was an expert in the nuances and the
subtleties of Google AdWords in a way that we weren't so yeah it I appreciate
it's a mixture right as the owner I need to understand need to get my head around it but it I think it depends on the
spend job as well you have it it doesn't it doesn't hurt to get an expert in but again I've come across self-professed
experts who well yeah Bertie's is
questionable let's just put it that way it's um have you come across people like that Oh plenty plenty and it's it's one
of the reasons why I've written the book is to give people like you the owner the
marketing manager who is hiring people who is hiring suppliers the knowledge enough to be able to hire the people the
right people you know if you read my chapter on Google Ads and you're speaking to a Google Ads
consultant you'll be able to ask them questions that if they don't know the answers do not work with them yeah
totally right I like that and I love it you make it accessible which is great so well doing I'm doing that
thank you so in the book again you talk about the three main core marketing
methods yes from your point of view that there are the three core marketing
methods you talked about many more in the book but you focused a lot on these three yes one being SEO the second one
being search engine advertising and the third one being email marketing yes
right that is oh I love this little statistic you put in your book you said that these drive about to percent
of e-commerce traffic in how did you how did you come about that thinking all
that it's kind of a revelation there's three ways that I came about that not all of which I mentioned in the book so
the first is my experience when I'm logging into accounts that's what of successful businesses that's what I tend
to find unsuccessful businesses they're underplaying in one of those three the second one is there's a company called
cust store in the USA who used to publish this combined stats from all the
eight from all the ecommerce businesses they had access to so you could see their quarterly where the sales came
from charts and inevitably in that it was about percent email about
percent SEO about percent paid search and that's where the actual sales were
coming from from all the e-commerce businesses they had going through their system unfortunately they don't provide
that data anymore which is really annoying because either I didn't feel I could put it in the book because the stats are about I think is about
the loss but I managed to get my hands on which is two years ago and it's not really relevant enough to put in the
book and so the third one is in preparing for this book I was like how do i duplicate the Castoro stat so I
went to a similar web yeah awesome free tool for anyone who wants to find out what their competitors are up to you
plug in the URL yes it's just the information they give you is unbelievable
and thank you thank you for doing that similar web that's very kind if you yes yes thank you saleable web please carry
on down up and don't stop there free accounts please don't no no
so what what similar web do is they look at where the traffic's coming to all these different websites so wheat
I got my virtual assistant to do this and she went through I think over the top UK top u.s. and top
Australian ecommerce businesses and we looked where their traffic was coming from and from those three channels
combined it always comes out somewhere between and percent I mean back in I just said all three of them need
to be between and percent if you want a balanced business these days it
emails sometimes isn't working for businesses as well as it used to because
of the plethora of other things we've got so so yeah that's where the stats came from interestingly enough speaking
yesterday to a guy who's going to come on the podcasts he's the CEO of pure
which is an email marketing platform I'm really really looking forward to him coming on the show
and some of the stuff that he was talking about why email marketing is concerned was just fantastic and so he's got some really really interesting
insights to share all its going to be sharing a bit about that so I like you I
think you've done this research you've got the to % rule which I think I
would have hit the same numbers which is good so that's good as reassuring
so SEO let's dig into that right one it there's a number of things in your book
that I like and I know I keep talking about you book and I'm I hope I'm not over plugging it but do you buy the book
what are the things that you talk about in there which I really like and you do it quite early in each chapter when you
talk about these things you talk about SEO and you say write for SEO this is what you need to measure this is how you
know if your SEO is working for you which is super super cool
so having how do you measure your sd that the value of your SEO me it's less
about ranking and much more about traffic and money which given the books called traffic they're boys you could
kind of guess that everybody and we're in the e-commerce business that's sort
of different sorry no no that's okay I mean when you're working with an agency
you are spending a huge amount of time and money on SEO then tracking those rankings is worth doing to see the
minutiae to see the theme improvement but fundamentally if those ranking improvements aren't bringing you the
traffic that buys then what was the point in doing the activity so for me
it's really all about looking at the the Google Analytics data and seeing how that changes and improves over time
which unfortunately you can't really drill down to keyword level although you can get certain amount of keyword data
the privacy reasons mean we can't get that much of it but it's really about how much traffic are we getting from SEO
and how can we improve that and how much money is that actually talking turning
into because it should be one of your certainly your highest return on investment channel and it should be one
of your best converting channels - yeah yeah the organic traffic thing is it's critical isn't it it's free and I I
notice in my own businesses I notice it with clients businesses when your rankings go down your but your your
sales go down quite quickly and it's not always that quick is it to read get the
SEO to go back up so some of the strategies that you found that works with that well there's three key parts
to SEO one is to be relevant another is to be in the index and then
the third is to be important so being in the index means Google's allowed into
your site and they know you exist basically it's usually a couple of tick boxes and you're done and you can move
on and worry about the other two but there are some sometimes a platform or a system just causes you massive
index issues and that's where you really need to speak to an indexing specialist once you've got that sorted out then for
an e-commerce business being relevant and so getting the right keywords and
the right places on your website is pretty easy because most of your pages at product pages so you can set up some
automation that will put the right words in the title tags product name - title
tags product name as htags continues to frustrate me how many e-commerce
platforms did not automatically have that so that few bizarre isn't it it is really bizarre there are and this is an important point
when you're researching your e-commerce platforms there are things which I don't think you would you would know to look
at unless you were an expert right in it and one of them the simple thing that do
they put my product name in htags yes or no because that has a big impact on
us you and you should definitely check that out when you're looking at different platforms and it's incredibly
easy to check out as well you just look at one of their clients websites hit ctrl you when you're on a product page and search for hI think the worst one
I ever found was where the Buy Now button was the htag which was ridiculously awful just awful
yeah it's getting these things right but you're right just so you would go to a
product page that is in that e-commerce platform yep so let's time to pick on
Shopify because everyone knows Shopify so you find a Shopify website you go to the product pages yeah and you look at
the source code by hitting ctrl you alright yep and then go and down to
views depend on what browser you're in and then to search for the product title and if it's surrounded by htakes what
we mean by htags is it's going to have the less than the more than sign and in the middle of that it's going to say h
and and that's going to work well for you is now I think yeah just searching
for that is super super important top tip there yes top top tip ok so I get it some of the
basic rights what are some of the other tips so you talked about relevancy and importance yes so relevancy quite
straightforward set up and the good thing is if you've never done an SEO when you actually bother to get your
right keywords in your right place on your product pages because all the rest of your marketing will have made you fairly important you may get some very
quick overnight results from just letting just telling Google properly what your site's actually about and but
be important is the bit the ongoing drudgery
the ongoing building links essentially to your site I shudder to use the phrase
link building but is the best one available but be very careful if you're going to do link
building because these days you can get bad links and bad links penalize your website when you've heard people get you
know destroyed by a Google algorithm change it's because they had bad a bad link profile so the mix of Link's coming
to their website were from bad places or they appeared at bad times and all that kind of stuff it's very complicated but
they connect the basic guide to it is if you see a site you think it would be really obvious for your business to have
a link from then it's worth pursuing a link from that website which is where
SEO now hugely overlaps with PR and
partnerships and influencer marketing and lot and content marketing and lots of other areas so if you're busy with
influencers and PR and content then you can probably let your SEO take care of itself
to a to a certain extent because you're actually building up all the important stuff with the other marketing that
you're doing what sort of time frame have you discovered works well for SEO
you mentioned some things can happen overnight but that's not typical right I mean no I mean the overnight stuff
pretty much only happens if you know if every single title tag on your website is literally this is us this is a
website and then you change it to be Khloe's perfume shop or something and then you actually put the right things
in place then you can get a bit of an almost but generally you're talking
about several months which is is one of the reasons why people often ignore it
is because they're busy with the ads they're busy with the emails and the things which bring in that immediate result whereas the SEO does take several
months to really see the impact it's a it's a long-term game and over those months you have to keep investing
because one of the things Google is looking at is is this website consistently getting mentioned in places
they track when a link first appears to your website so getting twenty links tomorrow is a terrible idea
getting one link a day for the next twenty days is not a bad idea as long as then you don't not get any more links
for the net for the rest of the year so isn't it you know idiots
you know the same thing with social media the day the same thing you know should override a blog it's can you do
this consistently yes or no if you can't don't do it yes is always the top thing
and it's the same with that link building all that sort of stuff isn't it really yeah so we know what we're
measuring we're looking at Google Analytics we've got to be relevant important and index index in the index
and when it comes to SEO I mean I always
used to be sort of scared by it is there any software that you use other than Google Analytics so is there anything
that people should look at maybe or not really yeah there's a couple of really
good ones Google search console is a must because that's your way as a website owner of talking to Google about
what's happening on your website and it gives you some more stats and you can integrate it with your Google Analytics to get more stats so it's a bit of a
no-brainer it's also where you submit your sitemap which is another way to be in the index so yeah yeah Google search
console absolute no-brainer you have to do that one console it will come back
yes it's very simple it's free it's yeah it's it's it's essential yeah
then I mean I love the stuff that Moz do that's mo z.com they are geniuses in the
space of SEO they have some really nice free tools that you can use to check things like domain Authority which is an
estimation of how important Google thinks another website is which is useful for when you're trying to work
out where you want to get links from and then the guys over at SEM rush have
another suite of really useful tools that will check rankings and various things so there's an the good thing
about SEO is there's an awful lot of useful tools out there that will do the time-consuming stuff for you oh well I
should say all the time consuming stuff about part from actually getting the links yes but they don't had a lot of
data you can get for free and you're right with Google Mars and they they
give you so much I mean obviously they're trying to you in with some paid software but actually what they give you for free is
extraordinary and their blogs I find and the content on their blogs is super super helpful I mean like the Moz white
board or blackboard whiteboard Friday it's just they do like a little video that covers one SEO topic every Friday
and it's just brilliant yeah you know the SEO community is very very
interested in sharing ideas because Google won't tell them anything so there's a real community of sharing and
updating and telling you just on this really cool thing here it is so there's those huge amounts of free information
online about the nitty-gritty of SEO yeah that's great listen if you're tuning into this
Facebook live broadcast we are getting a few people liking and loving what we're doing which is great but if you've got
any questions do you type them in the comments and we will come to them hopefully at some point so Chloe let's
we talked about it which is great yep and let's talk about search engine
advertising okay so yeah same questions what am i measuring what are your top
tips okay you on okay now you are
measuring money spent and money earned that really is the only important things
I love this is rocket science I do because people overcomplicate things and
the simplicity of this is great yeah I like I like practicality with my my
lessons yeah basically that's the two numbers you are constantly looking at and you need to work out before you
start doing anything on them you need to work out what your profit target is which usually comes down to a robust
roas which is your return on advertising spend all your CPA which is your cost
per acquisition and depending on how much your average order value fluctuates depends on which one of those you need
to be worrying about because CPA doesn't take into account any fluctuations whereas Rojas does that's essentially
the practical discount to them if you need to know how to calculate them google it I'm not getting into any more
equations today I think every industry every industry in the e-commerce
industry is by far no exception likes to abbreviate everything we like rowers CPA yeah you know it's just CP we
can just go and if people are just tuning in right now they might think we're talking about Star Wars characters we're not so no it's great okay so there
are the things that we're measuring mm-hm so what are some of your top tips for
doing better and better at search engine advertising and go granular I suppose
would be the basic one well you if you want to get the best out
of Google ads whether you're doing Google shopping campaigns or you're doing keyword advertising the more
focused you can make your activity the better it generally performs so if you
have an ad group that has you're selling I don't know we'll go with mugs mugs
always a good example if you're selling mugs then there we go we got we got and Ferrari mug and a grey mug so if you
have one ad group that has the keyword Ferrari mug and the keyword grey Pantone mug in it yeah with an advert that talks
generically about mugs because you can't talk about the Ferrari although the great Pantone it that add that then goes
to your homepage this will perform badly yeah it will perform badly because
you're not really helping Google help you because you've created quite a disjointed set of things but it also
will confuse the customer because if a customer who wants to he wants a Ferrari mug he's clicked on an ad for a Ferrari
mug he's then goes through to a landing page that's not about a Ferrari mug where they go and then go to search for
the Ferrari mug they ain't gonna convert someone who's searching for great Pantone mug who sees an ad that just
took generally about mugs they're unlikely to click on that and click through rate is one of the ways in which Google analyzes how strong your ads are
because on the Google ads platform for each space on every search someone does
Google is running an internal auction to work out who deserves to be placed in
those search results and one of the most important factors in that is your quality score which is something which
Google calculates and they tell you about you couldn't add it as a column in Google Ads and it will tell you how good your
quality score is and if you've got a really high quality score you will pay less for position one than someone who
hasn't got a high quality score and you're more likely to appear in position one and on page one and a large
influencer of quality score is how likely someone is to click on the ad when its position next to that keyword
yep so by being granular what I mean is you should have two separate ad groups
one for Ferrari mug that has the keyword Ferrari mug in it and has an advert that
talks about the Ferrari mug and goes to the landing page for the Ferrari mug and then a separate ad group for gray
Pantone mug has an ad for the gray Pantone mug and then goes to the gray Pantone mug page and that's how you
should be structuring your ad group so if you're starting off or you're you've just had it live and you ain't really
done anything with it then start off by looking at your best-selling products and build the ad groups around they're more your best-selling categories and
start small and then expand it out and if you and if you find that with you
know with great with Ferrari mug that keyword when you're looking at the search terms people are actually using
you find you've got people who are some reason other Google showing it's people are searching for Porsche mug and you
sell a Porsche mug and you're getting a lot of clicks on that for some unknown reason despite the fact is a Ferrari ad then it's time to create an ad about
Porsche so it's starting small and then looking at the data to work out how you
build you know it's so tempting to create keywords for every single
product and spend weeks building this massive Google Ads account where is
actually what you'll be doing is you're wasting time and you're not learning from the data so it starts more learn from the data and then keep it granular
as you build it up and that's brilliant and I love that and but the bottom line is you
be in it every day to understand and watch the monitor the data right that's that's a pretty cool thing you've you've
really got to begin to look at it and we found actually with Facebook advertising
you can take it one stage further so if I'm selling Ferrari mugs I may have an
advert which goes to Ferrari enthusiasts I may have an advert which goes to f
enthusiasts I may have an advert which goes to fenthusiasts in the UK and you
can really break it down and see which ad sets convert the best for you yeah
by getting that granular thing but only do with products that actually sell any of the critical thing which you said
which I I just want to emphasize and because I think it's so important is
when you do an advert for your Ferrari market there's going to be a plethora of
people now selling Ferrari mugs online I think do I think Khloe and I want Commission but if you're if you're
running a face a face book heir to Google like whatever to Ferrari mugs
take them to the Ferrari mug page on your website and you'll find that your
your Google AdWords will be much better as you have said and I think you also
find they're cheaper right because if I was doing google adwords mugs yet bots car mugs and they they always cost more
than if I do campaign around yellow Ferrari mugs which is much more niche and talkative which is actually what I'm
selling but the keyword cost will be much slower yes it's something which we
did an awful lot of Google ads when I was back in my agency days and I'd often have the team coming out to me in going
the client wants us to bid on this like like we were we were did some work for a
company who sold silk flowers and they wanted to bid on flower arrangements and we were like
it's really terrible idea because it's an expensive keyword and most people looking for that are not looking for
what you're selling so it's going to be expensive and it's not going to convert very well and we must have spent six months
various meetings where the owner would bring this up really nicest possible way not that we
put it this way but it's a really stupid idea but you know you put it in all kinds out of your terms and it got to
the point where just like right I know the guy the camel she came up to me I'm gonna get they still want to do I said
right fine even the back tell them we will turn it on on Monday and we will report on
Monday afternoon how much it sold and that we take no responsibility for the return on investment achieved and they
the client came back with yeah that's fine great do it so we reported back on Friday and it's spent a grand and we'd had one sale for
quid we suspect that you were like I make the numbers up but it was something of this magnitude and they came back yeah they
were it was something along those lines and they went okay you can turn it off and then we had like our next quarterly
catch but they went why are we bidding on flowers oh really we have to just
waste another like two grand this time for you so so yeah it's yeah it's you
can you can lose a lot of money going after those vanity terms so we used to post some is vanity turns which
sometimes if that's what your brand is trying to do and you're trying to break into that space and you're thinking
really top of funnel then it can be worth bidding on those terms but it's got to be at least you know look at the
prett entelechy at these type of terms go and search that term on Google and
see what Google brings up yeah and quite often you'll get quite a confused page
where you've got maybe some pictures of flower arrangements and you've got some
ads for Interflora and then you've got some videos on how to do flower arranging and then you've got some
flower arranging products like scissors or something and some bowls and then maybe some random YouTube channel and
it's like Google doesn't know what someone's searching for that term once so the chances that they want your
product and they're going to convert and buy a really really low so so often
looking at the search page can be a really good way to decide if it's a keyword if you're not sure about a keyword if it's a girl but you should
okay yeah and do calculations carefully right in terms of return on investment if you're only making a percent
profit margin that those big keywords are not going to work well fee you're gonna spend a lot of
money on customer acquisition that's not going to convert ya in and he got you
know product margins that low you probably want to start off with Google Shopping campaigns where because then
Google does all the hard work setting up all the ads for you because you just plug in your product feeding away you go
and you can learn from Google Shopping campaigns what products sell on Google
and then go and create the keyword campaigns around them which saves you an awful lot of time but of course you also
need to optimize your Google Google Shopping campaigns just as intensively as you optimize your keyword campaigns
because you know you put if you anything you put live on Google you don't really know whether it's going to work or not until you've done a good couple of weeks
of solid optimization and it's not really gonna come into its own until maybe a month or two later and you have
to spend money that whole time which is kind of one of the big differences between it and Facebook Facebook you can get a steer after quid worth of spend
but Google you have to put in more like the optimization slide yeah no comment
let's I'm just gonna cut that off right there
because we could talk about this for a long time clearly we both got you know
lives really so let's talk Chloe about
email marketing yeah which is the third key pillar isn't it in your book that
you talk about it so same thing what are some of your top tips for email
marketing that you could share with us I guess the two obvious ones the two I'm
telling people most often at the moment are the days of batching blasts are over where you just send one message to
everyone every week amen yes it may work for you and there's still a place for it
but you need to be cleverer and if you're not putting in place welcome campaigns abandon basket systems post
purchase whatever it is your customers expecting to hear from your like customer journey you are missing out on thousands of pounds and the other one
would be I will say across businesses and I kind of alluded to this earlier where email isn't really
working for them anymore and that is usually because they've not found the right strategy so maybe
they've been around for ten years and they're still emailing their entire database and they're paying a cost per thousand and it's like well let's
segment it and see how you know here's the date of the later and
backward you go now oh look below you've got on your list and only one of them purchased in the last six
months let's stop mailing them but we've got the data maybe we know really please let's stop mailing them or it's that
they're only doing batch and blast and they're not they're not doing a welcome
campaign so they're not really warming people up or they've stopped stopped trying to get hold of email addresses in
the first place just blows my mind so you you can't we used to get we were
very very lazy with email back in the day we just created an email each week pinged it out and we made tens of
thousands of pounds it was a lot easier and but if you're clever with your data
and you're looking after your customers and you're sending them good quality information good quality products and
good quality messages and using it as a way to build a relationship with the customer so you build that trust you
know so you've got reviews and Trust scores in every email and you're responding to what they're interested in
then you will find email works it's a lot more work than it used to be but the
good thing is once you build those automations then they deliver for you week in week out and they bring you
those sales so it's you really do have to have a strategy these days and think about what you're going to build and
what messaging you want to get out there and to who you want to send it to you and when you want to send it super
critical so if you've got a favorite piece of software or what service do you
use for emails me personally I use aamna send for my emails which is one of the
the email marketing the email the e-commerce that's the word I was looking
for yeah just what we do is just written all around me that's the way that you
converse I can't remember do you guys tonight or not Kiku's I don't - it just can't be
bothered anymore - - ooh life's too short for - - so in the word email or in
the word exactly exactly so on this end is one of the email marketing platforms
I have quite a close relationship with them so I use use their platform I'm
hearing English American or Lithuanian okay yeah great did you come across them
oh no you're asked to be straight to my right I think they got in contact about partnering on some content or the
podcast so they're sponsors of my current January groceries at the moment I also do quite a lot with krabi oh yes
mavey wavey oh oh is it I know this
because did you get one day yes I'm gonna be doing quite a bit with them
this coming year great and now like them very good company actually I really like what they do clever yeah they are expect
to hear a lot about them in the UK this year they're getting quite aggressive in their UK positioning this year so yeah
clay vo very popular and a lot of people are doing great things with that and then pure I like not digital
I like I think it's a bit like website platforms you have to find the right
email software solution for you and by that I mean you need to look at what you
need what you need to integrate with what you're planning on doing what their pricing structures are and find the one
that will give you the support and the options that you need and these days that oh that's not just integrating with
your website that's integrating with your search and izing system that's integrating with maybe you're doing push
notifications you want to test SMS you doing whatsapp Facebook Messenger marketing you need if you can manage
them all from one hub man life is easier just as everything it does and there's a
lot of them about now and you know it like you say clay vo Clay vo and pure they're all good activecampaign
MailChimp we've used HubSpot we've used all the hoods what's quite expensive for e-commerce companies
yeah there's a whole bunch from and like you say if you know what it is you want out of your email marketing it's much
easier to choose your platform accordingly it is you've got a it's a it's as important is it a decision as
what and as what software platform your website sits on and because these days
even affects your advertising because you want to link the audiences you've set up in your email or customer
management system with your ads so you're putting Facebook ads in front of people that keep buying key parts of the
buying journey and all the rest of it so if you don't have that happening you are losing money basically you are totally
and one of the things that I've found actually I don't know if you can comment on this and people always ask you what
kind of email should I do for my industry or the market that I'm in I always say some listen go sign up to
like ten people in that industry sign up to their websites see the newsletters of
they're sending out what are they doing what do you like what do you not like and and see what happens have you got
anything to throw in to that I think anyone who hasn't got an email inbox you
know a gmail inbox that they are watching their competitors and brands they they think do a great job with
email or any other marketing method you know if if your competitors send out catalogs and you're not on their mailing
list and you haven't bought from them so you make sure you get all the postal stuff they send out then you're missing a trick because you you need to know
what they're up to and you're also going to take great insight from them I mean I started my career in the mail-order industry and we would keep and the
buyers and the merchandise is in particular would you know really focus on what our competitors were putting out
in their catalogs because we knew everyone knows in the catalog industry that your best-selling pages are /and
your next best-selling pages are the back page and then the one is the page inside that and then it's the middle
spreads so you can work out what someone's best selling products are by doing that and you should be able to do
the same thing with email to see what's working for them what trends are working what messages are working and then you can you know take ideas from that but
also don't just copy the competition make sure you're doing some some good content
too so yes an email watching account competitive account is is so important
though it is totally and I I must get a hundred hundred and fifty emails a day I don't read emails a day but
these are deliberate companies that I've signed up folks I want to see their trends I want to see what they're doing over time I want to see their frequency
I want to know what they're doing in their subject lines I mean it's like a whole master class of email marketing
that you don't yeah before right it's especially with some of the bigger brands that have invested millions into
trying to understand this it's it's it's it's very good free learning definitely
definitely do that please everyone listening if you're gonna do it set it up on a separate gmail account don't do
it you're on your own account one because it's just you're gonna get bombarded but also because then you can
give that login to everyone else in your team so all of you can go in and look at
what people are doing there's no point in each of you creating your own list of competitor emails share the knowledge
and it will make all of you better marketers right - great great - and you can do that with Gmail quite easily
coming you decide yeah yeah yeah no straightforward okay well listen and I'm
aware of time can I ask you about one more thing in your book and yeah it's
it's nothing to do with the three things that we've talked about already or that you have mentioned it briefly and that
is its I think everyone's talking about it and it's a question I get asked a lot
at the moment and that is about influencer marketing how do I it's a
trendy phrase isn't it which basically means the guy over there who's got a bit of a social media following is talking
about my product on his social media platform yeah god bless him and that's sending people to my website and there's a lot of stories coming out at the
moment people who have been super successful with influencer marketing building their business and I don't mean to talk about
everything in your book in this podcast because I don't want people to buy it and really but I was curious about
influencer marketing your experience with it any tips you've got in that whole area things to look out for I
think and I'm home aware it's a term which was a bit like Marmite I have one
good friend who runs a very successful e-commerce business he says influencer marketing doesn't exist I think that's taking it a bit far I
think it's very easy to get kind of blinded by that och I must do influencer marketing it's all lovey lovey but it's
it's it's hard and fast numbers and what you need to do is you need to is to find
maybe maybe people who you want to test a message with because you want to
look at the results in those or people and see which one did best and then work more with that and then find
more people like that person and a lot of so there are those very search tools
you can use to find influencers and to recruit imprison to manage them one of
the the best tactics I've heard a number of retailers talking about is going out
to your best customers and saying to them we're willing to do X if you'd like
to promote our products on Instagram and so kind of creating a real relationship with some existing customers who love
your product and rewarding them for recruiting it so it's a really cool kind of Mike what they call micro influencer
strategy customers first it's kind of
it's like oh what an obvious thing to do let's that's not you know because you you want someone who gets it you don't
want to go out to some influencer and be like please oh I'm really worried you're going to do something bad with my product because what you do need to do
with influences is allow them to create their own content which actually makes it really cool marketing method because
you can just go here's some product create great photos you're not having to do a photo shoot you're going you go so
and you know if you've got physical stores you can invite them around to do an evening while they take loads of photos and all lots of up bits and
pieces there's a really clever and creative ways you can do it so start with the micro room for this
start on you cuz what could you do with them have you got any examples the spring to
mind I was gonna put you right yeah yeah and
we're only what three days into my working year and I've had three weeks off so I'm really struggling I've had
several people come on the podcast and talk about it but as does to who my brain is during a total utter blank
which is true in that comments when you think about it yes I will I will find it for you I'll
let you know tomorrow but but I guess that the key thing is start with small you don't have to hire Beyonce test the
only people I think you think they have to hire a Kardashian is like you'd really please don't curse tree you'll get way too much money
yeah and you'll get way more engagement from someone who truly loves your product and you know maybe has a thousand followers and test with
multiple don't just test with one test with multiple at the same time make sure you can find a way to track it which is
challenging on Instagram because the lack of links but there's ways to do track the results and optimize and allow
the influences to create their own content their brand and they can use it
be nice to the influencers like you you're building a partnership it's not like you're putting an ad in a magazine
you really want this to be a two-way piece so listen and find out what you can do to help them you know if you want
to promote your shorts but they're currently all about dresses give them a dress no I can't think about an exemple
a shoe this come to my mind we talked to a guy called Sam at Praia which is a
clothing company they make cycling gear you know row for road bikes yes
that's basically if you listen to the podcast it's in season one that's how he grew his entire business through
Instagram letting his customers take photos putting them on there sending them free stuff they then took their
photos put it on there and it grew and it grew and grew as a result of that so there's an example prior dot CSE I think
is his website and you can check that out on Instagram and you'll see the kind of stuff he's doing he's doing a
cracking job with that so so no that's great Chloe how do people
get hold of Lee how did we stop that since how do people get hold of you how
do people reach out to you how do people connect with you okay best places to connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter you can find all
the links to me on those ecommerce master plan comm just go to the contact us page where you that's also the
website where you can find everything else about what I'm up to including the books and the podcast and she says
completely losing the book she wants to wave in front of all your faces if you want to grab a copy of this then head to
Amazon where it's available as paperback and kindle all over the world it's also
currently in the process of being published as an audiobook you spend
hours recording this as an audiobook which I I have to go to some intrigue to listen to how you describe the tables in
the book yes but it's great that it's on audiobook as well and I can definitely
definitely recommend the book if you want to go that way and if you want to
know how to get traffic that buys to your website by Chloe Thomas head on over to Emma's and for some of you that
may pain you to buy from Amazon but just you know swallow your pride a little bit buy the book it is good good reading
reach out with Chloe there was ecommerce master plan calm was your ecommerce master plan calm reach
out with to Chloe I'm sure she'd love to connect with you and yet any specific questions that you have got doesn't
gonna call it time there for the actual audio version of this podcast so Chloe thank you so so much and I really really
do appreciate your time your wisdom and given as a benefit of all that good stuff it has been fantastic talking to
you thank you so so much thanks Matt it's been really cool being on your show and get a chance to tell
everyone about some of the lessons in the book and hopefully we've helped some people today because I think we've shared between the two of us we shared a
huge quantity of great advice so maybe we should charge for this yeah I think
we should have saved people for hours and a pal and increase their sales by tens of thousands of pounds so so thank you it's
always great it's great to help people isn't it and if you have benefited from Chloe's tip top advice today then we
would love to hear your stories and your testimonials about how that has benefited and helped you we always like
to hear from you guys about how actually these things have helped because often
we don't we just we just believe that it has helped somewhere down the line and it means the world to us when people do
bother to connect with us and say listen it was fantastic I really appreciate it so do get in touch Chloe thank you so so
much my thank my thanks to you Matt it has been an absolute pleasure to be on the show
you