At Google HQ Sydney
Was fortunate enough to have spent three days last week on a Google business-coaching program organised specifically for Google Business Partners at their HQ in Sydney. Met some fantastic people and gained some incredible insights into the future development of brand.
What I learned
- You should be getting at least 10-1 returns on ad-spend
- Some CMSÕs cannot create ad feeds
- Google is working on ad automation directly from landing pages
- Ad-spend will explode by 2020
- 5-second ads will push your brand
- Be direct with your brand message
Video Transcript
Hey. Welcome back, Rankers. Just got back from Google HQ, in Sydney. I was up there for a Google business-coaching program, organised for Google Premier Partners. They do a couple of these a year, I think. There was about eighteen of us, so there was about ten from Sydney, five from Melbourne, and about five from New Zealand. Hi to everyone that attended. I made some really good new mates, and learned a hell of a lot. I just wanted to share a couple of things that came through from what they were saying. Don’t worry, it’s not a Google echo chamber. I’ll just tie it back into some of the other developments we’re seeing out there at the moment in relation to brand.
Are You Getting a Healthy ROI on Ad Spend?
One of the big things that will make a lot of people happy, that we were told more than once so I’m hoping this is imminent because this is effecting a lot of our retailers, if you are a retailer and you love Google shopping, and you should because for the clients we see you should be getting at least a ten-to-one return on ad spend for anything that’s a standard item, anything basically that has a serial number, a ten-to-one return on ad spend is not unusual. We just did one the other day, had 3000% return on ad spend, so it’s not unusual. One of the hardest things, though, is getting this right. It can be a whole variety of reasons, and sometimes not just the data it’s just the actual content management system itself is incapable of creating that feed, and we’ve got one of these at the moment, and the CMS has actually got the name ironically ‘retail’ in it, but it won’t do these auto merchant feeds to set up your Google shopping ads. That is coming. When? I don’t know, but stay tuned and I’ll let you know, because we’ve got a lot of people that want to get on board with that. Google’s been saying the same thing for a while now. It seems to come out in a lot of their messages that everything is getting about automation now, right? So and this is where we’re heading with ads, and even to the point where they’re saying that they’ve got something that’s going to dynamically build display ads. So basically what’s going to happen is you’ll create a landing page, and then you’ll point Google at that landing page, and it will create a display campaign based on that information that you give it. So automation, automation, automation, AI, which is all very interesting given a story this week out of Proctor and Gamble, but I’ll get back to that.
The Rise of Video Ads
One of the big things that were interesting was that video spending is going to be around $42 billion, with a ‘B’, by the year 2020. Now I ask the question, well, surely this is the most clicked link on the Internet these days, “skip ad”. Well, we can’t with this one, as you can see. There’s gonna be a whole bunch of these that we can’t skip. As we’ve learned from Facebook and now YouTube as well, your five second ad is killer. So if you can nail that, not only are you going to cut through, but also you’re going to be able to do some great brand messages, I’m thinking, in those five seconds. Which brings me into the next point, because I see a lot of stupid video ads. I hear a lot of dumb radio ads. You’ll probably think the same, but if it’s used wisely and properly, and there’s been a call for that this week by this bloke, who is the from Proctor and Gamble, Marc Pritchard, wants to stamp out mass marketing waste, and certainly I think TV and radio can be very powerful for brand building, but I don’t see them get used a lot for that, and certainly some of the copywriting that you hear on radio certainly leaves a lot to be desired, but what Pritchard has said in this article, it’s about getting back to brand, getting the brand message out there, and they found in their own research that a lot of their users found the advertising repetitive, like frequency too high, and also that it just follows them around the web too much. So the things that you and I hear, probably socially, about, “Oh this ad just followed me all around the web!” people are actually getting sick of that sort of stuff, according to Proctor and Gamble, anyway. You’re better off doubling down on building your brand, and going a little bit more direct with these individuals than sort of this mass market medium. Having said that, I would say that still television and radio, and this might seem odd, have a role to play in this, but I just don’t think we’re quite there yet to see how they are going to play out. But think of the places where you can be doing those five-second ads. Have a look at the three minute video ads, some of the likes of Purple Mattresses, which is just gold, that whole campaign that they created. You can start to see some of the opportunities around growing your brand rather than just trying to look at the numbers and throw a big fire hose of advertising out there. Let’s get specific. Let’s use that to help not only build your brand and awareness, but actually deliver real sales. That’s it for this week. Hopefully that’s helpful. More next week. See you then. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
