Andrew: Hey guys, I say welcome to another episode of masters of e-commerce entrepreneurs I am joined today, with Pamela Wagner the amazing person, I mean, I don’t even know where to start with her, she’s got a list that goes down my arm of things that she’s done, I mean she’s next Googler, she’s a paid ad expert, analytics expert she’s helped more than 2,000 advertisers grow their business which is like I can’t even think about that, she was on the list of Forbes 30 under 30, she’s traveled through more countries than I don’t I’ll never get to, she just got back from Atlanta which is awesome and she made it our thing, she’s been featured on ABC News, Mashable’s many other types of things and she not only that she speaks, if I could do that, seven languages!!. I can only speak one really and she actually chops wood with her bare hands.
Pamela: Still to get there, but thanks for that input.
Andrew: Now fill us in on anything that I have missed and then we’re gonna cover today goal-setting with Google Analytics and then remarketing because they think they’ll big topic that people just don’t even know what’s going on so, you listen with anything I missed and uh and then we can go and dive into our subject.
Pamela: Sure, so I’ve been running my own company since soon three years now and we focus exclusively on paid ads or PPC there is a couple of names for that mostly on LinkedIn Facebook Google, Google of courses majority of it and also Amazon so it’s really niche there is no like homepage management or anything else.
We’ve been doing that for companies literally from Hawaii to Australia and deficit up come campaigns in will attend languages, so it’s been quite a quite a while with during a one that I absolutely love and in terms of the clients that we usually work with, it’s it’s really not too much of like company specifics or how many people work another budget it’s more like, it has to be a good fit so it would never be a company like a tobacco company or alcohol companies it has to be a company that does something good that makes people’s lives better.
There has to be some sort of knowledge of digital marketing so they can’t be in to really be in a very beginning of it right so like a lot of times I would also get advertisers that have done Google ads before but are just disappointed like I don’t know where my money’s going I’ve just been wasting my money in the past months, I have no idea what my conversions it going right goal setting and they don’t even know how to use Google Ads because it’s such a complex platform you know so difficult as an outsider to know it very well and so that’s really where yes the piece comes in from us.
Andrew: Yeah for sure it does take a long time to master you know from display ads to regular PPC ads it’s a big thing and especially I think people with low budgets or don’t understand what it takes to get something going I mean that’s yeah that’s always a challenge especially with people who are have not started been in the digital space so that’s a good threshold level to be added
Awesome so let’s go let’s dive into Google Analytics in terms of goal setting, and then let’s talk about like how that is really important for them to do the remarketing side of things and what you know the steps go to that what you should look for you know all that kind of stuff in we can just dive into there and I’ll probably have more questions to ask as we go through these things.
Pamela: Sure so, I think important to mention at first is that goals are called goals and analytics and in Google Ads it’s called conversions so whatever we talk about goals its conversions and AdWords but we need we mean exactly the same.
How why you want to set them up by dealing with Google Analytics and not in Google Ads is because if you set them up in Google Ads you only measure the conversions that are coming through your ads but if you set them up in analytics you actually also get all the conversions of the fulfilled organic traffic, social traffic, email, you name it everything pretty much so by setting it up in Google Analytics you can get a much more holistic view of, where’s your money going coming from and how do you want to distribute it and how this affects pretty much the overall home page data and business performance.
Andrew: Sure, so in terms of that like so, as people are going through there and they’re you know they’ve got there when you’re setting up what your goal is an analyst, I mean you know how many goals should one set up what types of pages should you be like targeting you know of on that type of things?
Pamela: So, in general for each Google Analytics view you have 20 goals available, so depending on the size of the website you probably really want to think about what do you want to track so an e-commerce what’s probably interesting.
How I usually split it up is the product page, view putting products into a cart, getting to the checkout and then the order confirmation page. if you have any other page in between those four then you definitely want to add that too because then it really gives you a good overview of where do people drop off? how many drop off and what’s your conversion rate from each step to the other?
Andrew: Right so if you are seeing a drop off from the say homepage to the cart you know, what would that kind of tell you in terms of issues with your site?
Pamela: So, I mean first of all its normal that people drop off so like I would say it’s people like don’t worry it’s not a hundred percent, in this case, you’re a hundred percent with everybody else because nobody gets the hundred percent, you know.
There are awesome industry averages where I would suggest to just google it, so just Google like e-commerce conversion rates a drop-off rates from card to checkout whatsoever, and if you realize that let’s say a hundred people put a product in the cart but you only have one person that gets to the checkout that actually gets order product, you want to change, what’s wrong you want to have a look at what’s wrong along the process.
For example if they drop out on a checkout process are there any payment options they’re not working or where do the requests come from and is he a payment option actually available there is your shipping option available there is there any bug so it always helps to test a whole checkout process from time to time and let this be done by somebody who’s not familiar with your business because you want to simulate the whole process as if it was an actual client
Andrew: Right, so if you have it so if you’re a store and that you have like multiple different categories just one goal work or you set it up for the different categories to see where things are going, or you just kind of like the visualization on that side of things?
Pamela: Yeah so the process would you choose here the type of goal did you choose here is the destination so, you would put in the URL of the page that people get to so, for example for an order confirmation page that could be example.com/thank you so you would enter the slash thank you and then usually it’s like slash checkout for checkout slash card for card and so on.
Now the thing is there are certain shop systems, for example, Shopify where you get a URL with a whole bunch of numbers and then it gets a little bit difficult to track it because the number comes before to checkout you can do in this case is what my clients at least have done is they contacted Shopify and then with their help they can actually change it to have this standard URL pretty much that’s the easiest way to go about it there are other ways to work with, changing URLs but it’s better to just contact the parties the third-party system you’re working with.
Andrew: In heaven yeah because I know that there is a lot of things with like Shopify and things like that that become like a little wonky when you’re when you’re trying to get your analytics cuz they throw in all those numbers at the end rather than just a regular page type thing so like, if you are so if you have a site that does dynamic URL kind of generation how do you track that with your goal setting is that like just a real pain?
Pamela: And let me tell you as much as much easier if you just standardize the URL
Andrew: Standardized the URL.
Pamela: Yeah, go for the standardization I’m at least in the beginning that you get the first Tracking’s and numbers in and once you’ve had your analytics run for one to two months and everything is running correctly so really like cross-check than what you see in analytics also reflects it backend in once everything is running correctly and you want to get into a more sophisticated way of measuring like you want to maybe measure it you maybe you want to see if that person had already made a purchase
If it’s a returning customer or maybe you’re connecting the order confirmation page to like an email funnel so like everybody who’s just ordered something is gonna be pushed into a certain email funnel right so once the marketing gets more sophisticated behind that it’s important to look at the different platforms that he use and how you can best connect them together it’s a really advanced topic that I usually look at the other platforms that are being used and then we see whatever is best right
Andrew: Right! Right! and then in terms of like numbers like when you should really start to be kind of concerned or optimizing like is like if you’re a new site or some site like what is that threshold of like transactions or numbers that you should start to really start to see and then start to tweet your landing page or your checkout page or things like that?
Pamela: Yeah, so a usual or an average conversion rate of an online store is two to three percent so out of every hundred people that get to the page you want to have ideally to the straight converting and now to get there that’s a different story
It’s important that when you set up the goals that you first give it a little bit of time like it always give it at least a week or — to get enough data and to see if it’s actually working because there’s different attribution time frames so it’s like let’s say the customer gets to your website on Monday but he only purchases the item on Wednesday if you look up um if you check it on Tuesday you’re like oh they have to buy anything but it’s a Thursday you’re gonna see that they have bought something so always like give it a good time frame
In terms of abandonment statistics um there’s really there’s a couple of them on average will one ceases like 70% abandonment rate so anything that’s lower than that is good and, I’ve seen really good functioning e-commerce stores with like 10 percent conversion rates or more like the thing is there’s so much more to it than just like Google ads or Facebook ads. It’s how are you capturing the users when they drop off like do you capture their email do you then send them a reminder that hey you left something in your cart or hey here is voucher-like how do you bring them back to your website and so that’s really where marketing gets you.
Andrew: Yeah so I have one thing I wanted to ask you about Amazon but I also want to like talk about going into this remarketing piece because that’s like you spent the money to get them there right however you did it either through a remarketing kind of a lot of remarketing but some sort of content that you did or you did a paid search to get them over there right and so you want to write like not waste that money and capture that back in some way.
I do want to touch on because you do this stuff with Amazon how did you are you running search I mean how do you track how successful if you’re running a paid we’re gonna add in your analytics to know what people have bought through Amazon because it’s like you can’t put a pixel onto Amazon so how do you even do that magic?
Pamela: Yeah, so it’s still it’s still very early in to choose and that despite the fact that Amazon is made I think a billion dollars an address in q1 of this year and even we are still in the very beginning of it so like we’re just testing a lot around it now and so what you do is you just use the platform itself Amazon to measure all your data your statistics.
I honestly, I think at one point there has to be a connection with analytics because Google is just one of the biggest things for free and it’s really good oh I think it’s just a matter of time.
Andrew: Time before they allow yeah because I know that that whole like search platform that they’ve been building has just become a juggernaut for them to just make a ton of cash because like you know the gone are the days where you could just put a product up on Amazon and sell it right now it’s all about paid search you know you got to do some promotions you get to get reviews they cut off the reviews.
I mean it’s just like it’s crazy right I mean it’s like a real dogfight in that thing for you know that certain user I mean it’s I mean I played in that game before and I just like I’m done it’s like the competitor is just like going after you shutting you down, I mean it’s not you know it’s it is a whole different beast and that’s not what we’re talking about but I mean your clients must be like.
Pamela: Yeah, I mean there’s actually one way to see it in analytics because so what do you have analytic system referrals so in the channels via traffic comes from, and then the roads would be shown Amazon traffic that purchased and something but that’s only if people purchase a product or the website.
Andrew: Right yeah so yeah, I saw your kind of that so how okay so let’s get into that remarketing side of things right so now that you’ve sort of tracked and you’ve got them coming in how does one how is the best to remarket to those to those people?
Pamela: Yeah so, we have to consider that on average 97 percent of the users that gets you home but you’re not gonna take an action the first visit so the question is like do you want to lose out on 97 percent of potential revenue? I’m or what imagine what he could do if you would just capture like 3 more percent you know what that would do and so there are really a whole bunch of different ways and especially in Google you can remarket through ever campaign yes, so you can create a search remarketing campaign you can create a display remarketing campaign present this remarketing campaign is the one that usually people refer to.
You can do YouTube app and also shopping remarketing so shopping there’s a new type of smart campaigns that you can apply, it’s super in your stolen it’s crazy how fast it changes, what I would usually do here it’s the same as with goals I would set up the remarketing audiences in analytics and you find that when you go to the admin view and then in a property column you scroll down a bit then you have audience definitions and you click on audiences like on the plus new audience and then just get guided through the process and that way again you can remarket to everybody who got to your website and not just the users who came through an app
Then you can again create different audiences list like with the goal so you can say I want to create a remarketing audience list of everybody who got to the cart but, did not complete a purchase what exactly we want to avoid is these kind of type of Illinois ads where I just bought a flight to Tokyo, and then the next days I keep seeing ads of flights to Tokyo right and I’m like companies you don’t know how much money you are wasting because this little set of excluding an audience is missing.
Its super crucial and in terms of the type of remarketing campaign it you want to do I usually prefer to search campaign the dynamic remarketing campaign for shopping ads okay you’re late store shopping apps because a search campaign you only your ad is only shown to people that type in terms that are the keywords that you put in but you leave them a broad match hey it already has been to your homepage it’s like Wendy look again for something that is kind of like your product you’re really close to a purchase, it’s so much more efficient than the display campaign because it’s just these images and input you’re gonna see the conversion rates it’s gonna be much higher with search and marketing with this late.
Andrew: Okay so, on that so basically so uh the way it would work is that you don’t have to run a google ad word campaign it’s just your remarketing to people who have landed on these pages right or on your site and then your remarketing to them or you are you in conjunction with the Google hours that you’ve run prior to getting them to reach to do the remarketing to?
Pamela: I’m gonna give you a little bit of a secret sauce, of what I usually do okay so, in general, you don’t have to run any campaign for creating your remarketing audiences, you can just create them pretty much now what I actually commend because the remarketing audience needs to start collecting the data
For search campaigns they’re at YouTube and Gmail I think you need at least a thousand cookies and then for display need a hundred but usually with e-commerce I definitely do a shopping campaign because they have they tend to have better conversion rates than normal search campaign but it still have a search campaign and a display campaign set up for like branding purposes, catching people in search we’re gonna have separate search campaign for remarketing the catch them bring them back and then, of course, I adjust the budget accordingly to whatever brings me the most money.
Andrew: right so in those remarketing campaigns that you do run for clients I mean what do you see from that like 97 percent abandonment rate I mean where what are you seeing in terms of your expertise getting them to come back and complete a purchase?
Pamela: So usually with remarketing campaigns they get a five to ten times higher return and with the normal campaigns you know, and the click-through rates are of course much higher because it’s a much more targeted thing sure yeah so it’s usually getting a traffic and then remarketing to it as soon as possible
Andrew: Right okay and is there as particular types of ads that you have to run like is there like you know hey if you leave something in your cart kind of stuff when you’re gonna remark like what is that ad kind of copy that kind of draws those people back in?
Pamela: So yes I’d like to adjust it to the kind of stage where I’m targeting the ad and it’s also ideal if there is some sort of email campaign it’s in place that always helps because then I can look at how what’s the language of you’re using like are you offering people a discount code or what’s the language you’re working with then so is it more playful than of course it’s hey we’d love to have you back or anything we can help you with any technical problem encountered so pretty much the easier you make it for a user because you have to assume they’re super lazy the better it is.
Andrew: Right for sure for sure and what about on the social side of things do you see like face I think is Facebook a good way to drive traffic to your site and then use Google serve to remarket you know and using it that way or I mean how do you find those social channels work for remarketing?
Pamela: So where I like Facebook the most is if you take an email list and remarket to that of course it can also take like website traffic and remarket to that um normal Facebook product Ads I haven’t really had the best experience with them so I usually don’t try to say a little bit away from them and only work with remarketing and of course Instagram so when you use Facebook also make it use Instagram make it separate ad sets so you see the performance and Facebook is the thing is if we have normal campaigns on Facebook we are catching the users in, probably sometimes not even the stage of research but maybe not yet even knowing that they want a product, versus in Google search I already know that they want the product cuz they’re looking for me.
Andrew: Yeah you know that’s the one thing about those types of things that you know they all say well you know Facebook has got great targeting you can get this very you know interest base things you can get down to really nitty-gritty but you don’t know if these people really have a need it’s more of a broadcast right and we’re with Google you know with AdWords you kind of know like red shoe Nike, right you know that that person really is looking for a red suit I can they had that buyer intent right and that’s where if you pop up for that longer trail keyword you know hasn’t much thing so you know — I guess what two or three words I mean probably is really good buyer and then I would assume for if you’re running Google AdWords type things.
Pamela: Yeah and I mean any product-based business should definitely highly look into Instagram and also like what are they doing with influences so definitely always do a bit more and it just ads
Andrew: Right and then and the same thing goes for the shopping display the Google Display or the shopping feed types up have you seen good success in that as well with?
Pamela: Yeah, so the so shopping and display of two different campaigns so the shopping ads are shown usually next to the search results, so the good thing is if you run a search campaign and a shopping campaign then you haven’t even higher permeability if your ads going to show up because either one of them will know is probably show up,
Display campaign I really only use that for creating brand awareness um, of course, you can use it with like certain bashes and so on but most of the times display ads are just for creating awareness, that’s it pretty much so, you can measure it you can usually measure it by how much more people are looking for your brand term, for example that’s indicator of how effective a display campaign is and for a shopping campaign, that usually has about the cases it has higher conversion rates than a search campaign because it combines image and text in a very powerful way,
Andrew: Okay right, and then that all gets tracked out to your goals in analytics to see how well those remarketing campaigns go and everything else and that you can kind of track and see awesome cool well this has been really like amazing like there’s so much stuff and I can go deeper and deeper but I know I value your time so I don’t want to like go too crazy here but I do want to ask you a couple other couple questions kind of like easier ones like so of your top like what are your top 3 tools if you were to talk to our users and ask them you know and say hey these are my what my go-to tools are what are those for you?
Pamela: So for ads or measuring traffic for it yeah for you know yeah exactly traffic and ads and things so I like to keep it rely to the basics so Google Analytics to measuring cuz it’s free and it really has a lot to offer and there are a lot of other measuring tools out there which basically originated in people being very confused with Google Analytics and not knowing how to use it and trying to simplify it, but what then happens, it’s just collecting third-party data and then it gets confusing the data is missing and so on so I always recommend to really take a little bit more time maybe for Google Analytics to get it set up properly gonna save me a whole bunch of money.
Google Ads, Facebook the platform directly so I don’t use any third-party apps I don’t really like them what I’ve there’s several like keyword or competitive research sites like SEMrush and so on but I’ve had rather interesting experiences with them where sample I was just searching and checking on my clients and was seeing what it said about my clients and it showed me that somewhere advertising with budgets, said were in like couples of thousands were like right now everything was paused it shows you like this and everything so or then it showed me somewhere not advertising we were like well we were actually doing all that campaigns.
Andrew: Right so would you say like think the Google Keyword tool is a good tool for doing keywords and then Google Trends would be two ways to use those.
Pamela: Yeah but with that and you’re all covered
Andrew: You go really welcome, yeah as much as people don’t like it you know, or they say that they think that data is not true, but I think you got to go with the source right so,
Pamela: Yeah just shortly because um what most people I think don’t understand was like tools like SEMrush there are party tools the thing is they can’t look into an advertiser account, so they never have the real data everything to do is like a guess to me.
Andrew: Right true that’s exactly what’s right are there like three tops like books or websites or how you stay current like how do you stay current with like yeah things?
Pamela: So there is thinkwithgoogle.com, that one’s a good one and then slash tools also gives you a ton of different tools to use by Google I’m there is because I’m a Google partner, I also get the Google partner and newsletters and everything okay in terms of training the Google has an AdWords channel on YouTube and also the think with Google.
I think they have two different ones so Google ads and then they think with Google Channel could be same ones, but they usually have very good training resources and other than that, it happens to me that I’m in the training and like I’m training people and I an seeing your stuff in the account.
Andrew: Right cool so let’s see so if people want to get in touch with you, I want to hire you for your services things like that where can they what’s the best place they can find you and getting it to hold you.
Pamela: So, the best place is probably to home page so that’s www.ajaladigital.com, oh yeah simply like click on a contact button and shoot me a message or reach out on LinkedIn and yeah there’s also Facebook page so if you click on a Facebook page and you messages then you’re also gonna get a response so yeah.
Andrew: Pamela’s very active and very responsive so don’t feel like if you put in your contact you’re never gonna hear from her but she’s very responsive what’s great about you know I reached out to her and we got together on this thing so awesome, well I really do appreciate you coming on giving your time I know that it’s a holiday where you’re at so you can help you relax although nothing’s open you’re saying but anyway enjoy the rest of your day and we’ll chat again.
Pamela: Yes, thanks Andrews so much for the call and I hope the information dropping was useful for everybody who’s listening
Andrew: It was great thanks we’ll see you.
Pamela: Thank you, take care bye.