71 Growing Business Through Google Ads - John Horn Aug 22 2024

Tim Curtis: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Digital Velocity Podcast. Today we are excited to welcome John Horn, the CEO of StubGroup, to the podcast. With years of experience in digital advertising, John is a leading expert in helping E-commerce retailers maximize their growth through effective Google Ad strategies. John, welcome to the show.

John Horn: Erik, Tim, thank you so much for having me.

Erik Martinez: Yeah. Thanks for joining us.

Tim Curtis: John, why don't you give us a little bit of your background? The listeners like to know kind of a little bit about [00:01:00] maybe your story, how you've arrived here, maybe a little bit about StubGroup as well.

John Horn: Yeah, absolutely. So, personally, I got into the digital advertising space a little over a decade ago at this point. I was doing some other marketing and various stuff at that point and two people, one of them, my brother, which is how I kind of got into things, and a friend of his started StubGroup back in the day. And really from day one, it was pretty focused on the digital advertising side of things and paid search and paid social as well, seeing that as an area of opportunity.

Obviously, it wasn't new even then, but there was still such a movement of ad dollars from traditional over to digital and so many businesses that needed help with stewarding those ad dollars and figuring out, you know, how on earth to operate in this digital world. And so, that's where Stub Group came into being is to help businesses with that.

And I came on board with them as employee number one, and we've grown since there. I took on the CEO role, I think about five years ago at this point. It's just been a matter of bootstrapping, figuring out how to [00:02:00] do things, how to be successful for clients, get more clients on board, building the right team to work with those clients. It's been a fun journey over the last decade to where we are today.

Tim Curtis: Employee one to CEO, that's kind of a fun little story. Not everybody gets to tell that. So, current landscape of Google Ads, brands are experiencing pretty significant price increases year over year on the rates. That's been putting pressure on brands for quite a while. But you've got that unique vantage point of obviously understanding what the current state of the ads are, but also looking across clients and seeing consistencies and perhaps, things you're noting across the spectrum. Can you share some insights on some of the most effective strategies that people are deploying now, or you're deploying on their behalf to help them maximize ROI even with these price increases?

John Horn: Absolutely. And you're a hundred percent right about the price increases. Cost per clicks seem to always be going up and always getting more expensive to get the same traffic as we used to get. Especially in E-commerce [00:03:00] when often margins are very, very tight and there's not a lot of wiggle room, that has a big impact on things.

And so, I'd say one of the things that I see a lot of the more successful E-commerce advertisers doing right now, and something that we help them with as their agency is looking beyond just the metrics within their Google Ads account, just the directly attributed ROAS, ROI, et cetera. And also understanding how the money they're allocating on the Google side of things and other paid channels as well as impacting their overall revenue and their overall return or media efficiency ratio is what we like to talk about a lot.

So, we do focus a lot on what we can track, what we can see in platform, but we also look at how much total revenue is the company making, how is their ad spend changing over time, how is that comparing to past years. And when we test different things, like for example, if we test YouTube for a client, we allocate a percentage of their budget to YouTube. We know that we're probably not going to see a lot of in Google [00:04:00] Ads attribution of revenue to those videos, because it's very top of funnel.

A lot of people are really just kind of watching, seeing, and then they're going to engage and convert down the funnel. So, we look not just in platform, but we look at, okay, do we see a bump, an increase in overall revenue and new customers coming in as they spend more money. Or are we just spending more money, the efficiency rates coming down and we're not seeing revenue bump.

So, long answer, but the short of it is looking not just in platform, but trying to understand the bigger picture and what the actual value of the advertising is having, or is not having on the bottom line.

Tim Curtis: Let's just follow that YouTube example. When you're talking top of funnel and you're really getting little to no attribution back to anything coming from that. How does that work with the client? Are they open to continuing to test it? Are you looking for measurement in other areas that perhaps that lift may come? You mentioned down-funnel activity. Walk me through kind of what that looks like with a client following that example.

John Horn: Yeah, that's a great question. So, we definitely [00:05:00] want to be able to measure some impact from those ads and clients want us to be able to measure that. So, because that's usually not in app, generally what we're looking at are a couple of things. We're looking at overall revenue. Are we seeing bumps in revenue that correspond with spending more on YouTube? Are there any other factors as well that might impact that? Did they also start spending money on Facebook or something else? You know, are there things that could skew that? But looking to see, do we see bumps in that?

Also looking at new versus returning customers. Most E-commerce advertisers that we're working with, they want the majority of their ad spend oriented towards new customer acquisition, getting new people in the door. And so, YouTube in particular can be a great way of creating brand awareness, getting new people into the funnel that didn't know the brand existed or didn't know the product existed, weren't necessarily even searching for it on Google right now.

And so, looking at the new versus returning customer volume and percentages as well is something that we look at. We want to see those numbers increasing, we want to see more new customers coming, more [00:06:00] revenue from new customers coming. If we're not seeing changes in that, then that's obviously concerning saying that the YouTube investment may not be working well.

Lastly, definitely looking within platform at things like search behavior for their brand name. So, are we seeing an increase in people searching for their brand after the video ads? Which would tell me, Hey, the brand awareness is working, it's creating awareness, and then we're capturing it down the funnel. Those are some of the top things that we look at.

Tim Curtis: Yeah. Good example of you look for lift or you look for measurement in a correlating area. Search terms, for example, a great way to do that. See if that traffic is bleeding over. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me.

Erik Martinez: John, as we talk a little bit about this, one of the things I've been digging into recently, we have a number of clients that are in marketplaces. We have a number of clients that are not in the marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart. We talk a lot about them because one of the trends that we see is increased pressure from the marketplaces. Obviously, Google has made a fair amount of [00:07:00] changes to the search results page that is also having some impact, as well.

We're seeing more of a convergence between the organic efforts, the feed effort, especially in E-commerce, right? Shopping is a huge component of what we do. What we're seeing is that those marketplaces because of their efforts and getting clients to optimize their shops on their platforms and spend digital marketing dollars there, we're getting more and more pressure.

I guess one of the questions for you is, in terms of where a niche business, maybe not a broad-based business, but a niche business or a specialty retailer can focus. What is your recommendation in terms of like combating that specific issue, both as a merchant on some of these platforms and for those who are not merchants on those platforms?

John Horn: Yeah, it's tough. We definitely have clients as well who are in the marketplaces and who are seeing those [00:08:00] squeezes of those challenges. Some of them are in the marketplace to kind of reach a different audience. So like, we've got some clients where they have more price-conscious products on Amazon and they have more higher price point on their own website and they kind of target different audiences. That's one strategy that I've seen work. The advertisers to kind of saying, okay, different audiences. Let's go after them in different ways.

Diversification is something that I've been talking about a lot recently, had some conversations with people really focused on the Amazon selling side of things. They're feeling that pain that you mentioned and saying, we are beholden obviously to this one algorithm, to this one marketplace that can make or break our life. And of course, Google is kind of the same thing. If you're advertising on Google, you know, there's only so many big algorithms out there that you can't fully get away from that.

But being able to go direct to consumer in addition to marketplaces, being able to capture that customer data, and then look to increase your lifetime value so you have more margin to work with, that is something I talk about a lot with advertisers now. Which is you might actually end up paying more [00:09:00] to acquire customers through, let's say, Google advertising than Amazon, depending on the unique business and what the market looks like.

But if you can strategically figure out a way to then do more cross-sells, upsells to get more value, more lifetime value from that customer you own versus you're just another seller on Amazon, then you can afford to go after people more aggressively and rely less upon just Amazon or Walmart or whatever the marketplace is.

So, I would say, diversify and also really think through what are the audiences that you're reaching on the different platforms and potentially change your product allocation and your approach depending upon who you find you are reaching on those marketplaces.

Erik Martinez: Sure. That totally makes sense. Let's pivot over a little bit to something a little more, maybe a little more tactical, but is a big part of the conversation, Google's use of AI, PMaxspecifically, right? When I talk to clients about it the way I try to explain it to them is say, in the old days, which wasn't that long ago, [00:10:00] we had to set the time for delivering the ads. We had to pick the keyword and determine whether we wanted the exact match or phrase match. We had to determine whether we wanted to be in the display network and all that stuff.

In Google with their PMax product, and certainly, over the last nine, 10 months, it's gotten a lot better. It's making those decisions for us. But the downside of that is the way we have to go about implementing your program is very different today. One of the things that it's creating the need for, and all of our clients should be doing this and I talked to him about doing it, is developing more content. So, can you elaborate a little bit on the shift to the AI model, the need for more content, and how it actually impacts what we're doing from a paid media perspective?

John Horn: Absolutely. Yeah. AI, of course, is the name of the game for Google. They [00:11:00] say it dozens of times in each Google Marketing Live. It's the constant buzzword. Obviously not new to them, but what is probably more new is how much people are thinking about it and kind of maybe understanding a little bit more of how AI works in the context of Google, but Performance Max is a fantastic example of probably the type of campaign right now that most leverages AI machine learning in serving ads.

I usually tell clients you love it or hate it because I see it work really well sometimes and I see it bomb sometimes. There's definitely factors that play a role. So, I see it work better when it has a lot of conversion data to work with, generally speaking. When you're trying to kind of kick something up, whether it's a new website or a new product line or something, it can be really hard to get Performance Max to do well with that because Google doesn't have conversion data to work with, and then it's kind of scattered going all over the place, and it's not cost-effectively capturing that conversion data to get to where it needs to be.

So, often those scenarios, we might start with standard [00:12:00] shopping, and then once we have more conversion data, kind of expand from there. Sometimes we'll even run standard shopping alongside of Performance Max because sometimes we see that actually make Performance Max do better for whatever reason is going on with the AI.

But to speak to content, like you mentioned, content obviously is very important in Performance Max campaigns because images and video are now an aspect of that. The more you provide to Google, the more Google likes your campaign, and the more likely it is to perform sometimes. I will say that's a double-edged sword. I've also seen instances where when you provide video and images to Google in a PMax campaign that from Google's perspective is performing well, people are engaging watching, therefore Google's making money from. Google likes to spend more of your money there.

But sometimes that's not actually what's ending up converting into customers. And you look at things, you know, use third-party data to try and see what channels your PMax campaign is running on, and you realize, Oh, most of my ad spend is video and display, not what I wanted, which is shopping and [00:13:00] search and showing up for people who are searching right now. So, sometimes it can be strategic to not give Google a lot of content from what I see in Performance Max campaigns to try and guide the system to give us the quality traffic that we want. And sometimes, we'll see content perform very, very well.

But I think it's important to obviously test as with all things. So, testing different content, testing different video content, seeing what's working, what's not working. Testing what products are being advertised in the feed as well, whether you're focusing on best sellers or going after zombie products that aren't moving or whatever the case may be.

So, it's a lot of moving parts that I wish worked more consistently. I wish it could be like a template of here's exactly what we should do for every single E-commerce advertiser. But usually we find so much nuance for each of our clients that we end up with a little bit of a different approach for each one.

Erik Martinez: We're seeing exactly the same things that you're seeing. One of the things I have been researching a little bit more is also shaping the PMax campaigns, but the products that are in the campaign, kind of honing in [00:14:00] on it. Going back to a strategy that we've had for a long time, like put every product out there. We'll get it in a free shopping. It's not converting in the main campaigns. We'll keep it in free shopping.

Now Google has really kind of made free shopping irrelevant again. They did that very quickly. And now popular products are way more prevalent and it's not necessarily a paid thing, right? There's other user experience variables. So, can you dig in, tell me a little bit about what do you guys think about the merchandising side of Google Ads? And then maybe expand on some of these things that we're starting to see in the search results pages where competitive searches are also now surfacing these popular products and how do clients get on that.

John Horn: Yeah. I'll start with segmentation in the Performance Max side because that is something that has really changed a lot over time, and I'm sure we'll continue changing. But it used to be Google's throw everything into one place. Basically, the [00:15:00] more you have in one place, the better. Don't segment things out. Trust the system, trust AI. It's going to figure everything out. And then their tune kind of started changing.

It's like, actually, no, let's segment by category of products. So, if you're selling clothing, cool. Let's put all the t-shirts in here. Let's put all the shoes in here and kind of tell Google and give Google assets that are more specific to those categories. Or Hey, if you've got maybe some different buckets of margins, and so you have different ROI goals, break out by that.

Generally speaking, we're doing more segmentation of Performance Max campaigns at this point, where we are more breaking things out by, for example, category and therefore having more control over just seeing. I was talking to the client last week. It's like, Hey, these three categories of products, working really well. This one, super below ROI. Let's figure out why. Is it a product price point issue? Is it that people are getting through and not converting? Is a conversion issue. Or is it something on the marketing side in terms of how the ads are structured, et cetera? And it's easier to dig into that and kind of see categorical differences as well when you break campaigns out like [00:16:00] that.

There's always exceptions to that rule. There's also clients where we have everything together in one place and it works well. So, again, that's where the nuance comes in. One thing that I've been focusing a lot recently on with clients and seeing, kind of going back to that competitor comparison side of things that you mentioned, Erik, is just how important price points are right now and the other things that impact price point.

So, a lot of people think about price point. They don't think about what their shipping cost is that they're providing to Google. A great example, I was talking with a client who sells a pretty high price point, kind of more of a B2B item, but it is E-commerce people purchase through their website. And so, they have their price point is here and I'm saying, Hey guys, first of all, competitive price points are here like $50 lower for the same product. So, first of all, let's talk about that.

But then second of all, when someone adds this product to their cart on your website, you're adding a $150 handling charge and suddenly the product is almost double the cost. And then you're adding shipping charges on here. I showed an example where the [00:17:00] same exact size of product and weight of product on their website cost about $1,000 to get to them between the cost of shipping and handling. And it was about $450, I think, on a competitor's website for the same thing.

And so, I see a lot of E-commerce advertisers just not really doing that competitive research and thinking about that and just focusing on the ads. You're like, Hey, performance is down. Well, why don't you have better performance? How come your ads aren't performing as well? And so, on the advertising side, whether you're an agency, whether you're in-house, whatever, you've got to be looking at what is that customer experience. How do your price points line up? Are there issues with that?

People are clicking through initially thinking, Oh, this looks interesting, and then they're leaving because they're going to pay, you know, three times what they thought they were once you add in all the fees and whatnot. So, I don't know if that specifically answers your question, Erik, but some of the top-of-mind things that we've been dealing with recently on the competitive landscape side of things.

Erik Martinez: We're seeing some of those same things. If you bring it back to the 30,000-foot level and you're talking [00:18:00] to the CMO and trying to explain to the CMO or the director of marketing, or whoever's in charge of that budget, that it's not as clear cut as it looks and there is still a lot of nuance in terms of how we go about deploying the campaigns, what the return metrics look like.

Do we actually report on what's coming into Google ads versus what we see in GA4 or coming into the back end of our systems where, to a certain extent, we've seen an increase in the gap of what we're seeing on the first party pixel side versus second, right? So, I think one of the questions trying to resolve is how do we make sure that there's a reasonable amount of attribution so that we can directionally say, yes, you are measuring performance and you are getting an ROI with the caveat of this is not a precise business.

Tim and I've talked about this a fair number of times is that there's this [00:19:00] illusion that digital tracking should be perfect.

It would make all of our lives so much easier if digital tracking were perfect. You know, you talked a little bit about measuring outside the ecosystem of Google Ads, and of course, GA4. Are you guys using any of the other tools? You know, are you using Adobe's platforms? Are you doing something internally that's helping you bring some of that data together? I'm just kind of curious what you guys might be thinking about or approaching to help answer those questions when you're talking to the CMO.

John Horn: Yeah. Yeah. Great question. We've played around with some of those third-party attribution tools, like, you know, Northbeam, things like that. Currently, we don't push them as an agency. We don't say, Hey, you should use X, Y, and Z third-party attribution tool. Generally, it's more of the more mature clients who are already using something or open to that and then working with them on that and having conversations with them.

It's tricky because I see a lot of [00:20:00] the same issues in those third-party tools that I see looking in app. Which is the numbers still don't quite add up. You're missing revenue, or it doesn't make sense that if I look at, you know, view only, you're giving all this credit over here. Once I had clicks for here, it completely changes. But we should only look at clicks on Google, not Facebook. It's just things that don't always make sense. So, I'm not gonna down talk any of the third-party attribution tools. I think there is a value to them. I'm excited to keep exploring more of them and hopefully I can find one that I'm really excited about.

But what we do right now, generally speaking, just very tactically is, we use Google Ads conversion tracking from within the platform itself. So, not just importing GA4 data into Google Ads, but actual Google Ads data. And the reason I make that distinction is because I very routinely see Google Ads itself capturing more revenue and what looks to me like more accurate revenue than GA4.

Well, generally you set up GA4 so that we also have it, and obviously that so we can see what is capturing about non-Google Ads platforms, and also so we can compare it to Google [00:21:00] Ads and contrast and see what the difference is. But I don't like just importing from GA4 into Google Ads because I see us missing a lot of data when we do that.

So, usually, we're looking at Google Ads and then looking just at the bottom line. You know, if clients using Shopify or Magenta or whatever, source of truth, the actual revenue coming in, the actual new versus returning customer information within there. And then, comparing that to Google data, comparing that to GA4, looking for trends in time. Are we seeing things go the right direction, the wrong direction, and seeing how that correlates to some of the bigger picture moves that we might make in platform.

You know, if we're trying to see of two ads, which ads working better, I'm going to look at in app attribution for that, and then probably going to have a pretty good sense for which one's working better. But if I'm like, Hey, what happens when I add, you know, $10,000 of YouTube ad spend this month? I'll look at in app to see what I can see, but I'm also very much going to look at their overall revenue media efficiency ratio to see how is that being impacted by a big strategy [00:22:00] change.

Tim Curtis: So, I have an observation, if I will, kind of going back to PMax and kind of using your examples of how Google can take rich content, rich multimedia content, and kind of leverage it for its own benefit. That's really consistent with what I think a lot of people are saying. So, you see brands who really probably haven't adjusted a lot of their strategies or their approach since the last 10 years and now with AI and like PMax, the only way that they can keep up with the bidding is to turn it over to Google.

As a result. they're spending more and more and more and they are seeing decline, decline, decline in terms of that revenue coming out specifically out of PMax. You bring up some really interesting points about how you have to kind of monitor or oversee what's happening in PMax.

So, as brands are turning to leverage Google Ads for growth, what's your advice? You just went through a myriad of things that you're [00:23:00] doing, but what's your general advice to people who are maybe not even aware that PMax can really purposely or unintentionally, I guess you can be the decider there, can really work to Google's advantage and not to the client's advantage? You know, I just would be curious what your thoughts would be on that.

John Horn: Yeah, I would say on that, I kind of look at PMax, even though it's not certainly not brand new at this point. It's still in, Google's mind, it's still kind of the shiny object syndrome. It's what they're pushing everybody towards. And again, sometimes it works great. I'm not saying don't use it by any stretch of the imagination. But there's also still some tried and true, quote-unquote, old approaches that can work well.

Standard shopping campaigns, they are not dead. There are some things I really like about it. You have more levers that you can push. You can set bids per product. You can have a lot more visibility into search terms. There's just more you can do. And you know, your ads are showing on shopping, not just video and display and whatnot. So, things like that and things like, dare I say it, not always smart [00:24:00] bidding. The Google reps are probably groaning right now as I say this.

Tim Curtis: Yeah. They are.

Erik Martinez: You are going to get a phone call after this.

Tim Curtis: You are rejected.

John Horn: Exactly. I'm still in many cases a proponent for smart bidding. I've seen it do really, really well in many situations. It's doing really well for a lot of our clients right now. But I'm also seeing some situations, I've seen conversations about this in the industry at large, I'm seeing some of this in our own accounts as well, where when we switch away from smart bidding, whether that be target ROAS, target CPA, et cetera, and we do straight up manual CPC bidding and we tell Google, look, there's some limits on what you can spend, it's kind of surprising how suddenly we're getting a lot more traffic and our cost per clicks are cheaper.

Sometimes the quality of the conversion rate is dropping. We're doing a lot of testing right now. We're seeing different results, different places. So, conversion rate may be dropping. Google may be accurate that, Hey, smart bidding is better at getting higher converting traffic. But if I have to pay 2x more for that traffic and the conversion rate is not 2x better than what I can get [00:25:00] manually, I'm actually missing out on traffic and my ROI is worse.

And so, we're doing a lot of experimenting right now with more kind of back-to-the-basics manual approaches sometimes to just jolt start things. Because we see that a lot, especially with target CPA campaigns, they'll kind of optimize themselves down and then you have to run manual or maybe enhanced CPC for a couple of days sometimes. It depends on how much budget is, but to just kind of have a new influx of data into the system.

And you have some pain during those days because it's not profitable, but you get that data into Google system and then Google's like, Oh, actually, yeah, there's all this traffic we haven't been giving you that actually is relevant. So, you switch back to target CPA, but you have a lot more traffic coming in. So, thinking outside the box, not always accepting Google's best practices for gospel truth, so to speak.

Erik Martinez: You are going to get a phone call now. You are really going to get a phone call now.

John Horn: Oh yeah.

Tim Curtis: You're right though. It's interesting. It's sort of that analog and digital, right? In the AI community, [00:26:00] it's known as augmented intelligence, right? It's that human component plus the AI and it's the two of them really together working and refining something as opposed to AI only running through a scenario because there's still a tremendous amount of context that AI just doesn't get.

You know, anybody who's worked with AI can tell you, no, it's not perfect. It's alarming how some of the more basic context things it struggles with as opposed to higher context. So, it's a bit of mystery to me that still is not ironed out and doesn't appear to be close to being ironed out. You're watching all this, what are you seeing in terms of trends or what you think is going to happen next with search? You know, obviously, we're watching on the SEO side just how much AI is beginning to dominate search. What about Google Ads? What are you seeing there for the future?

John Horn: So, the way I like to think about that is looking at incentives and in particular, Google's incentive. Google, obviously, you make money as a business. That is a number one incentive and driver, and they make money [00:27:00] through advertising. That's really the only proven way that they've found to make significant money up to this point is through advertising.

And so, as I look at what's going to happen even as they implement AI overviews, as more people use things like Gemini, Google still has a massive incentive to allow advertisers access to those queries in order for Google to make money and for advertisers to capture that traffic and those, hopefully, customers.

So, I believe Google is going to continue to be very ad kind of focused and oriented and figure out ways how to do more and more of that with AI overviews with how they provide recommended products or recommended services and Gemini, et cetera. That is going to continue to be hard on the SEO side because SEO is always kind of second in terms of Google's incentive structure.

What I'm really interested to see is from a search behavior standpoint, how many people start doing their searches from LLMs as opposed to the Google search box, going to google.com. My [00:28:00] personal view, I am nowhere close to the smartest person in the room, but my personal view on that is I think most of us are so habitually accustomed to how we've been doing things and going to Google as the start for most of our questions that it's going to be a long time before a very significant percentage of people are not going to Google search to get their answers solved, especially when we're talking about answers where there could be commercial intent.

I'm starting to love ChatGPT. If I got a quick math question, I'll throw that in there and get an answer. Hey, if I search that on Google, I'm never going to buy something from that search anyway. So, no advertiser is losing because I asked, you know, what's the square root of X, Y, and Z in ChatGPT versus Google? But if I'm trying to find a solution, if I'm trying to find an answer to a problem, just habitually, I'm still usually going to Google as my first place.

Tim Curtis: That's a good point. It could really almost refine the search to where those nonshopping searches, you don't want to serve up ads, right? Their intent is not to shop, so let the search engines [00:29:00] handle those that are shopping or have commercial intent. I hadn't really thought about that. That's a really good point.

John Horn: It's one of those things where, it kind of goes to the knowledge graph to like for things where people just need to know, what's the name of the capital of Connecticut. It doesn't really matter if they do a Google search for that or put that in ChatGPT, or whatever. No one's really losing out on that, generally speaking, except the publishers who have AdSense on their websites and we're trying to get traffic that hurts.

Tim Curtis: You're right about Google's intent to remain focused on shopping. I think this week's announcement that they're going to keep the third-party cookies after all the delays and saying we're going to get rid of them, just is a large signal about their priority. And I think when people tell you who they are, I think we believe them. And so, Google's telling us we are an ad platform. That's the primary driver of our business. I just think that's a clear indication of that, and it'll be interesting to see how that all shakes out.

John Horn: It's been quite the cookie rollercoaster.

Erik Martinez: Before we move to close, I just want to get your thoughts on this. You were talking about people using LLMs versus the search engines. And I think the search engines are [00:30:00] rapidly trying to roll the LLMs into their platform so they don't lose that really targeted audience. But I heard something very interesting the other day. I heard an ad from Meta talking about their LLM and how you could go use Facebook to answer all your questions. And I thought that was a very, very fascinating ploy by Meta in terms of we're trying to now get into this search market.

And, you know, people do search for things within the Meta platform, right? Hence the marketplace and all those other things. But we had a conversation not too long ago, about social commerce and how there is a segment of the population that is headed that direction. So, the question is, is it just the young people that are doing this or will that adoption rate massively increase over the next three or four years? I'm just curious your perspective on that. That's kind of the first thing.

The second thing was, there is [00:31:00] data suggesting that most of the young audience, and I'd say this is sub 25, are starting more of their searches on the LLMs. And obviously, those platforms haven't yet figured out how to monetize those searches yet. So, you know, on the one side, we've got the social commerce thing that's kind of booming over here. It's still a small piece of E-commerce, but it's growing. And then you have this other interesting piece, which is search related, but not quite because they're separate platforms. You know, what's your perspective on how those things are going to play out? Obviously, we're prognosticating and nothing we say here today can be taken as fact, but what do you see happening with that?

John Horn: Yeah. According to my crystal ball. I agree with you that social commerce is taking more market share. I think the adoption rate is going to continue growing there. Just looking at what some of the platforms are doing right now, TikTok, they're now making it easier to connect with [00:32:00] creators and give those creators a commission directly within their platform when they advertise your product, making that as seamless as possible and kind of bridging that gap or playing that role that, you know, a lot of agencies and companies more in that content creator kind of, you know, influencer world I've played in the past trying to connect brands to creators.

Now it's like, Hey, come straight. They can make you send them product. They make the video and we handle the commissions all within platform and it's seamless. So, I see them doing that. I believe YouTube is bringing shopping to YouTube as well and as usual copy TikTok and their approach and what they're doing. So, I think that's going to continue to be a big thing and we're seeing shop on Facebook, for example, be a significant percentage of sales for some of our clients already who are in more of that, you know, kind of paid social push marketing standpoint.

So, of course, the million dollar question there is what's going to happen to TikTok? Is it going to still be a thing? So, whoever's watching this in the future, you probably know more about that than us. In terms of the other side [00:33:00] of things, in terms of the younger generation starting from LLMs and things, I would say one thing I do definitely see and even see in myself as I do searches is, there is some niching of search behavior based upon what people are looking for.

So, for example, for me, if I need a local service provider, I need a handyman to come out and do something. It's a good chance I'm going to look at NextDoor and search on there. It's that social proof. I think I changed my trash service two weeks ago because I was searching on there. I saw other people vouching for a trash service that's 10 bucks a month cheaper than what I've got right now. Like, all right, cool. People are, you know, vouching for it. Awesome. I wasn't searching on Google for that until I had that experience on there.

There's still definitely opportunity for LLMs or whoever to become experts in a particular kind of niche and try and give Google a little bit of a run there for their money. Obviously you've seen Reddit is now kind of in step with Google, but you see [00:34:00] so many people go to Reddit for information. So many people go to Google just as a search engine for Reddit.

I searched for something and the suggested search is what I searched Reddit and like, Oh, okay. People are searching for that often. So, you definitely see those kind of other niche or types of search behaviors. And like Facebook, like you mentioned, getting to that space as well. I don't know what will happen, but fascinated to see where things go.

Erik Martinez: John, thank you. Thank you so much for all the thoughts and insights today. Before we close out, is there any last piece of advice that you'd like to leave our audience with?

John Horn: Last piece of advice. Pay attention to your Google advertising. It sounds really straightforward, but so many businesses who reach out to us looking for help, looking for audits or something, we look at it and it's not always that hard to see massive opportunities or massive waste. So, just take the time to understand what's going on.

If you're a business owner, you have an agency, awesome. Just understand what they're doing for you. Understand kind of how to ask them the right questions. What are you doing in my accounts? Where am I actually [00:35:00] spending my money? How are you measuring success? Things like that. You will probably find opportunities to improve your ROI by doing so.

Erik Martinez: Sound advice. Well, John, thanks again for coming on the show and we appreciate all the great tips and suggestions and recommendations. I think that a lot of our clients spend a lot of money in this platform and it's not as clear-cut as a lot of people think it is.

It's great to hear some of the things that we're seeing are being validated by, you know, other people who are doing and practitioning, but also giving the similar types of advice to their clients to really pay attention, look at where it's spent. Don't always believe what Google tells you.

If you take one thing away from this whole conversation, don't always believe what Google tells you. Don't believe everything you read on the internet, I think was the phrase when we were a lot younger. So, I appreciate that. Well, that's it for today's episode of the Digital Velocity Podcast. Thank you for listening to the program [00:36:00] today. I'm Erik Martinez.

Tim Curtis: And I'm Tim Curtis.

Erik Martinez: Have a fantastic day folks. Thanks.