Claude or ChatGPT? Which should ecommerce marketers use?

Transcript

Charles Travers: Hey guys, welcome back to another week of e-commerce marketing chats with myself, Charles and Jimmy. Jimmy, how’s it going, mate?

Jimmy Dalgleish: Good, good, good to be back for another week. feel like some of these chats, they’re almost becoming a cross between e-commerce and what’s happening in the AI space as well. But funnily enough, I think they’re both pretty interconnected at the moment. think a lot of, think a lot of e-commerce business owners are looking to integrate AI into certain parts of their business. And a lot of them don’t even know where to start. So I think it’s good that we’re touching base on some of those AI things that are And how you can use them and where people are using them because I think it’s just the right at which it’s kind of developing is crazy. It’s funny. Like a, few months ago, I’d say majority of people that I was talking to, know, still testing AI and they use AI as them. ⁓ sorry. Chat. GBT is their main kind of chat channel and You know, it’s got all the data on them. So they’re comfortable using that it’s shifted completely. Now, everyone that I talked to and everyone I know is on Claude now. So it’s, ⁓ yeah, it’s one of those things when, when people ask, ⁓ which is the best, which is the best AI platform to use? Like it’s very hard to answer because depending on when you’re listening to this, if it’s a couple of months down the track, the answer may have changed completely. So I will say at this moment in time, think Claude is, winning the race in terms of.

Charles Travers: Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: marketers and people looking to automate tasks. I think it’s, I think it’s a long way ahead of chat GPT at the moment, but they’re still, it’s still, it’s still coming. Open Claw is kind of got acquired by open AI, but we haven’t really seen that jump yet. ⁓ for them integrating it into their own software and then perplexity is bought out. their own version too, which is worth testing. And, ⁓ yeah, think Gemini is just improving constantly all the time too. And you got Manus coming through from Meta. ⁓ there’s a, there’s a lot happening in the space and it’s why I don’t like recommending AI platforms because yeah, whichever, whoever’s taking the lead in the moment and in terms of who can do what is changing at such a rapid rate. crazy.

Charles Travers: Yeah, for sure. For sure. It’s funny enough, actually, I so I canceled my chat GBT pay plan last week because I realized I just wasn’t using it anymore. Having said that, when I look into my client data for my e-commerce stores, the number one driver of referral traffic from those AI tools is always chat GBT. So it’s interesting that probably from a marketing perspective, Claude’s being used more, but perhaps from a search perspective, when people are navigating for products, maybe even services, that ChatGBT seems to still be the dominant player. yeah, everyone’s got a different, you know, there’s a different purpose for each AI platform. And as you said, it’s shifting pretty much every month. So we could be having this conversation next month and it could be…

Jimmy Dalgleish: I don’t know the answer to this Charles, but how, so if you search on Google and there’s kind of the AI little top bit at the start and there’s reference links to the sources they use, if you click through one of those links, how’s it tracked in Google Analytics, do you know? Obviously it’s not going to show from Gemini, I wouldn’t assume, but… ⁓ Do you know what kind of referral source it uses? Like, you able to distinguish the traffic that’s come from those AI snippets from Google? The only reason I ask is because you’re right. ⁓ ChatGBT is high on the referral side, but even myself recently, I find myself clicking those links in those AI snippets from Google more than I’m going to chatGBT to research things at the moment. But ⁓ I actually haven’t looked into how that is shown on the referral side or how it comes through yet or not.

Charles Travers: Yeah, that’s a very good point. think you I’m I don’t know if there’s a way that you can distinguish between, you know, traditional organic search traffic and those AI referrals from Google. There may actually be a way. So something that I will certainly look into because you’re right. It might actually be the ⁓ referral traffic from say Google search from the AI section. is actually higher ⁓ but because it’s not being tracked accurately we can’t kind of compare that against say chat gbt we can with you know i know with like gemini for example from gemini the native you know app you can see that and you can see you know from what i’m seeing it’s still less than chat gbt but we’re not i’m not too sure from the you know look the referral traffic from Google search the AI Pacific, you know those AI overviews because you’re right I think that’s yeah, there’s certainly more people clicking through that anticipated and I am Certainly seeing you know with my clients and getting them more AI overview ⁓ rankings So yeah, it’s there’s a lot there’s a lot out there ⁓ And like I said, every AI platform has a different use case. ⁓ But yeah, I’m seeing the same Jimmy Claude is Claude seems from a marketing perspective, Claude seems to be number one at the moment. And I very much focused a lot of my processes and systems with learning about Claude.

Jimmy Dalgleish: think, um, actually be interested on your, your view on this child. So for the group coaching call that I had today, we really kind of focused in on optimizing the meta title and description for their products. Mainly, and people might think, Oh, on a group coaching call, tailored around Google ads, why wouldn’t you be focusing on that? The reason that we focused on that is because how the app that is taught in this course is to use SimProcess, which is like a feed manager that sends your products from Shopify through to the Google Merchant Center. But what I was finding is a lot of the product titles and descriptions like weren’t optimized for the Google shopping experience. Now, what people don’t want to do is they don’t want to over optimize their product title on the title bit that’s going to show up on their website. So What I’m getting people to do is to put more keywords and more descriptive titles for their products in the meta title and do better meta descriptions once. So it shows up better organically, but what we do in Sim process then is we say to Sim process, Hey, I want you to take the product title from the SEO title and the SEO description. So it pulls the meta title and the meta description. And it makes the quality of the feed better for Google ads. So that’s how they’re intertwined. So when I’m talking to students about, let’s optimize all these organic things. This is how it feeds into Google ads by making sure you have kind of a higher quality data feed. people are always saying, always hear on, need to optimize your data feed. You need to optimize this. This is part of that. So part of optimizing. your product feed is making sure you have really good titles, really good descriptions. They should be the first two things that you’re looking at. But one of the exercises that I got everyone to do was to type in sites and then the two columns and put in their own website just to see, ⁓ all the pages that Google was indexing and what they look like organically. And I think it, I think it shocked a lot of people. They’re like, what, this is how my site shows organically. This is what the homepage looks like for people that are searching my brand. I’m like, yep. Um, so if you, if people listening to this, haven’t already done this, it’s a really good exercise. So what you do is in the actual Google search column, you type in sites and then the, the two dots, this, I think it’s called the semi-colon or whatever it is. And those two dots, and then your website with no space in there, and then just hit enter. And when I say your website, so it might be Nike.com. So it’d be site Collins, Nike.com, no space, hit that into Google. And then Google will show you every single page that it’s indexing for your website. And I like to, we almost do this as a health check. And then if you want to bring up your focus products or whatever, and you don’t want to scroll through the whole, ⁓ stagnation of every. ⁓ And then type in the keyword and it’ll bring up every page on your website that has that keyword in it. which is another way to say, how are all my pages for this keyword indexing as well? So this probably plays into your space. I’d say Charles more than mine, but it’s kind of the exercise that I’ve got them doing just to see. How, like if it’s not showing up organically in Google, then it’s probably going to be pretty average data going to their product feed as well.

Charles Travers: Yeah, that’s a really good point. It’s something that, you know, similar to how I would approach it. And the thing that’s worth noting is, yes, it’s important to optimize those meta titles and descriptions, but actually Google often change them as well. They like, they, you know, they almost, so you, you could do all the work to optimize them, which I would still suggest you do, because you are giving Google a reference to focus on say a particular keyword phrase. But just bear in mind that that often is changed by Google sometimes as well. So if you’re wondering, I’ve got this particular meta title and description and I know I’ve written it like this, but you go to Google search, you do the check that Jimmy just mentioned and it looks different. It’s because Google often change those as well. So yeah, unfortunately with SEO we we’re getting less control over time on what can show up. But it’s still super important to optimize.

Jimmy Dalgleish: What’s the, ⁓ this way, this, this is what I wasn’t a hundred percent sure on. What’s kind of the, what’s kind of the lead time when you change your meta title and description for it to show up in Google, I kind of, I said to students, you know, expect, you know, upwards of two weeks, like you can take to show up, but, ⁓ and I did show them the search console, how you can reindex pages that you’ve edited. But even when I’ve done it myself, I noticed that Google haven’t picked it up for kind of a week or two. ⁓ so just in your experience, Charles, like how long, if people are making these kind of organic changes, what’s kind of the lead time that they can expect to see that reflected on Google.

Charles Travers: Yeah, it’s usually a couple of weeks. I’ll do the same, Jimmy. If I really want to get Google to ⁓ index it quicker, I’ll always re-index that page in Google Search Console. And typically I do find that if you do that, you’ll get it. not always the case, but it will typically re-index the page quicker or get it indexed if it’s not already indexed. ⁓ And that’s actually something I noticed certainly with the larger e-commerce stores that have got a lot of product skews is when I’ll do like a monthly audit and I’ll look at some of their latest product pages that they have released, they’ll be live on the website, but they won’t be indexed because Google has just not got round to actually indexing them. So I’ll often go in and prompt. ⁓ you know, to basically index that page. So that’s just something to bear in mind. The larger your site, the longer it’s going to take Google to crawl that site and potentially. So if you can add that into your process, if you are launching new pages to actually just go into Google Search Console and index that page, I would suggest doing so.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, it makes sense. just, ⁓ yeah. And, like, feel like I’ve played, like I’ve talked a lot about organic stuff today, but it’s really, it’s just scratching the search surface for organic stuff in the hope that it’s going to impact things for them on the paid side. it’s one of those discussions you get asked a lot, like how can SEO and PPC work together? Cause they’re both kind of on different spectrums. do different things, but This is where you can work together, like having a good process for product titles and meta descriptions, sharing data on the paid side on the kind of the keywords that are coming through on search that can be replicated in, ⁓ organic, even, even something simple. Like I was talking to someone about this the other day. was like, ⁓ a hydra light product and whether to use zero sugar or sugar free in the titles. So, what we looked at was. First, we looked at the Google Keyword Planner to find out what search more electrolytes, no sugar or electrolytes, zero sugar or electrolytes sugar free. Turns out electrolytes sugar free search like seven times more than the other two combined. So it’s like, okay, well, that’s what’s going in the product title now. So, but it’s little things like that. And I don’t think people realize kind of the impact. And I’m like, I have no idea what any of this means because they’ve used kind of abbreviations and acronyms in the title. it makes sense to them because they understand the industry. But if you name your products like that, your, only ever going to get purchases from people in the industry that understand exactly what you’ve just put. So you kind of cutting yourself off to an audience that is looking for your product, but have no idea what you’re talking about in your product title when you’re using these acronyms, basically.

Charles Travers: Yeah, no, absolutely. mean, keyword, that’s where keyword research comes in. It’s fundamental. can’t, you know, you need to know what people are actually searching for. Otherwise, the only time you’re really going to drive traffic is probably from people that already know who you are. Or like I said, people who are within the industry. Or you’re running, you know, even with paid ads, you’re going to need to target the right keywords. So, yeah, super important. super important and I’ve certainly come across that before.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, this, this, but this particular one that I was referencing, it was like in the building industry. And it was like a four letter acronym that I’d never heard of ever. And I just said, but he said to me, ⁓ I’m going through and changing all these now. Cause I realized that no one knows what it means. But, but him saying that, ⁓ like he was aware of it, but there’s so many business owners that just aren’t aware of it at all. And, even when I’m watching. other podcasts and stuff. If I’m like a first time listener to that podcast or that particular, ⁓ industry or whatever. And I hear an acronym and I have no idea what it is. So they’ve like almost lost me straight away. Cause I have no idea what they’re talking about. So, we try not to do it here. And if I hear us talking in acronyms, I try to at least explain what they are, but yeah, you definitely can’t do it in your product titles for your website. because if someone’s searching for your product, you want them to understand exactly what it is before they fully even get there. yeah, another, another good tip for you, for your product titles, but yeah, there’s so much, the reason I’m big on optimizing your product feed at the moment is I just think AI is going to use more and more of that data. And the more comprehensively you can build out your product feed, the better. ⁓ I think it’s going to become a lot easier because I’m actually, ⁓ I’m testing some things at the moment with, with Claude, which will can optimize like thousands of products and your product feed via AI. So we’ll fill out all those missing categories and the missing labels that you’ve got across thousands of products for different things. But yeah, it’s something that is going to become a lot more important. think, especially with this AI wave, because the AI is going to have so much information that it can reference. If you’ve got all the data in there and it’s accurate and it’s, it’s referenced well, it’s going to give you a leg up on everyone else.

Charles Travers: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. think. Yeah, like we go, we keep talking about AI, don’t we? But it is super, super relevant right now. You know, even, you know, even in the last week, I’ve been going through and I’ve been using schedule tasks, schedule tasks in ⁓ Claude co-work. And like, there’s just so many things probably within your business. which you can systemize and automate. One thing that I’ve started to do as well is I’ve set up like Claude Cowork to run a weekly report on my client’s competitors. So every week I get a report on Monday morning of some key metrics regarding say SEO, social media presence, any new pages that they’ve released, any new blogs. So ⁓ it gives me an opportunity to see what my competitors or what my clients competitors are doing. you as someone that listening into this podcast can do the same if you’re running an e-commerce store and you know who your top competitors are. You’ve got all that data and you can get ahead of the competition and see where your strengths are, where your weaknesses are. Because I think most stores… ⁓ Yes, it’s important to focus on your own product and deliver a good service, but it’s also you’re not operating in your own market, like one in a market. You’re operating against other people and there’s other competitors in your space. So if you could take inspiration and see how your competitors are doing, then you can spot those opportunities easier than ever now.

Jimmy Dalgleish: think that’s a good point. And a lot of people hear that, you know, they need to be using AI, but they don’t know where to start. And I think what a lot of them are missing too, are just those real world, real world examples of how people are actually using it. So, I mean, you just provided the perfect one, Charles, you just explained perfectly how you’re using Claude Cowork to do competitor research. So that’s one thing that anyone listening to this could go and implement tomorrow. Just, And if you’re not sure how to, this is a thing. People don’t know how to do it. They’re like, ⁓ I don’t know how to do that. You literally go to Claude and you say, I want to do this. How do I do it? And it will explain to you exactly how to do it. There’s no excuse. Like the Claude, anything that you can’t do it, it will explain to you step by step exactly how you need to do it. And it’s, ⁓ like, I think the service in just everyone’s like, ⁓ You know, SEO is dead SEO, this or PPC is dead. The AI is taking over. think it will eventually like, I’m, mean, I’m a Google ads manager. and I’ve seen what’s coming and it’s, it’s pretty insane. I think, I think the people in the industry that are leveraging it will do really well. but I also think it’s going to get to the point where clients can do it extremely well internally. ⁓ well. So I think, I think this next wave is this going to be a lot of jobs lost because especially in, especially in places like Australia, like in a, in the state that I’m in, they’re about to mandate you being able to legally work from home two days a week. And all companies are like, what, how can the, how can the government mandate like tell us that our staff gets a work from home two days a week? It’s just. It’s just insane. And it’s going to fast track them bringing AI and just making those jobs completely redundant. I don’t think they can quite see what’s coming, but it is 100 % going to fast track that. Cause if your staff can work from home, AI can do it.

Charles Travers: Yeah, no, for sure. No, do think I think the we’re to see a big shift. It’s certainly in the agency world where you’re not going to see these large scale agencies with a huge overheads, you know, in terms of headcount, you’re going to see more probably like me and Jimmy like one or two man operations that are able to service more clients and leveraging AI. So I do think that the you know, clients will depending on, you know, the size of your e-commerce store, you may want to try and learn, you know, SEO or Google ads yourself. However, you’ve got to be realistic of, you know, how many tasks you’ve got going on during the day. Is it does it make more sense to hire someone like Jimmy who’s got 10 years of experience plus has now got that AI knowledge, you know, skill set on top of that. that’s going to be able to get faster results quicker, that you can trust a handoff and you’ve allocated that budget already, you’re making good money. That probably makes more sense for that type of e-commerce store owner. But if you’re starting out and you haven’t got the budget to hire a specialist and you’ve got more time on your hands, then yeah, you can leverage these tools for sure. So I think it all depends what situation you’re in. And for me,

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, I think there’s a little bit of a learning curve at the moment to get AI to get you to do those things like manage a Google ads account. I still think you need at the moment, there’s a bit of a high technical barrier just to enter that with setting up everything on AI. I think that’s going to be reduced significantly in the next couple of months.

Charles Travers: Yeah, personally, Jimmy. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I think it, I still think it all depends on how good the inputs you give it and how well you’re able to then interpret the data to see if it’s accurate or not. Because those are the two things that I’m seeing make the biggest difference in terms of the results that you can get from AI. So, you know, yes. Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah.

Charles Travers: That would be my opinion on it. Do I think that all marketing agencies overnight are just going to die out? No, I don’t believe that. So it’s, yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: on it I think it’ll be a gradual phase out, but I do think that I do think most agencies will be on the way out. I don’t think it’s going to be immediate. think it’d be gradual phase out. Um, but I’ll give you an example of AI, um, something that I tested the other day and how, if you don’t know what you’re doing, it can go the wrong way. So for example, I did a, I did a negative keyword analysis on a brand. Um, there’s about

Charles Travers: get.

Jimmy Dalgleish: half a million keywords in there. And I ran this AI negative keyword analysis and it looked great on the surface. So it’s like, okay, add all these negative keywords. These are your competitors. You don’t want to be showing up for those. So I actually dived in and had a look at the competitive keywords that they wanted us to take out. And I ran all of them through the data. Those keywords that they wanted us to negative, we’re actually running like a 17 return on ad spend on. So this is where. If you don’t understand the data and you’re just following AI blindly, it could probably have a pretty big negative impact because straight away you’re just taking out this chunk of traffic that you’ve got like a 17 return on it’s return on ad spend on. Um, but if you’re just looking at the data, how AI is presenting it, you’re like, Oh yeah, I don’t, if someone’s searching for my competitor, I don’t want to be paying the shop for that. So, I mean, that can be fixed with training the AI, but with if you’re just starting out and you’re testing this stuff and you’re following it blindly without the knowledge and experience behind you, there’s a chance that it could go badly for you.

Charles Travers: Yeah, yeah and also you’re up against specialists that are leveraging AI. So yes, you will get some better results and I say that in regards to in my particular industry SEO, like it’s not, it’s player versus player in that respect. can get, know, yes if you do certain things you’re going to get results but equally you’re up against someone who has got a certain amount more of experience ⁓ and it just means it’s a bit more of a learning curve. If you want to do your own SEO you’ve got to realise that you have to put the time and effort into it. That’s all it is.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Do think, ⁓ do you think you’d ever entertain entering a drop shipping business, Charles? Just to test your AI skill. I’m not your AI, your SEO on kind of a small scale store of your own.

Charles Travers: Bye! Yeah, potentially, potentially, yeah. I think the fact that we’re in the e-commerce space, kind of makes sense to venture in at some point.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, I’ve been thinking about my, I’ve been thinking about it myself a lot too. It’s kind of like, I’ve been working on other people’s stores for, you know, the last, I don’t know, 13 plus years. It’s like, ⁓ I wouldn’t mind. Like, I don’t want to have a big store or anything like that, but I would just love like a little niche store that I could have as like my testing playground. basically. yeah, I think I think I might put a little bit of effort into it in the second half of this year and mainly to show people that it’s possible like, hey, if you do all the basics and you do it well, this is, this is what you can spit out. This is what you can do.

Charles Travers: Yeah, no, definitely. Well, yeah, certainly if, if, you know, the SEO space becomes more challenging as companies decide that they, they want to leverage AI, then yeah, it’s good to diversify your business and skill set. And, you know, there’s many times I’ve thought, well, why don’t I leverage, use my skill set that I’ve helped other companies. to build their businesses and do it for myself. Not to say as anyone listed.

Jimmy Dalgleish: The other thing, the other thing that I’ve also considered is like, um, you know, buying and buying into an already existing business and taking an equity share. Um, and then using that to basically do everything that I wanted to do. My problem is I don’t like logistics. if I found, if I found a good partner that was really good on the logistics side, um, that needed help on the marketing side, that would be like a really good fit for me. So. ⁓ yeah, something that I’ve been kind of toying with as well, whether I might even do both. I might even just start my own little thing, but then get a, ⁓ buy into an existing business that I can see is like well underserved on the marketing side, but the product’s fantastic. That it’s got, that it’s got potential. So Yeah. A couple of different avenues that I’d probably look to explore in the e-commerce side. yeah, I love like, don’t get me wrong. I love seeing my clients businesses skyrocket, but, I want one of my own that’s going to skyrocket too.

Charles Travers: Yeah, yeah, that for sure for sure. Well, if there’s any e-commerce stores listed in that need more help on the marketing side that are open to a partnership, you know, but me and Jimmy might be interested. ⁓ reach out. you never know who’s who’s listed in. So good stuff.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, right chat. Yeah, right chat. We might, we might leave that as the final message. So yeah. ⁓ just so it sticks in people’s mind, if you are looking for, ⁓ marketing help in terms of offering equity share potentially then yeah, reach out to Charles or I, and we’ll see if it’s a good fit. And, and yeah, but another good chat. there’s a lot of things that people can implement, especially ⁓ if you just to recap the start of the episode. Go into Google type in sites and the colons and then your website and then see how Google’s indexing you. See if it’s how you want it to be indexing you or not. Or I think it’ll be pretty eye-opening to the things that you need to update on your own website to one, make it look a lot better and get your website to stand out a little bit more. yeah. And if you’re going to test AI at the moment, the current recommendation is to jump in and test Claude and yeah, think, ⁓ it’s pretty. Quick recap just from us about everything that’s been happening in the space for us this week. But if you want to hear more, go check us out at e-commerce marketing chats on all the podcasting channels. And we have a Facebook group that we haven’t commented in recently, but if you want it, if you comment in there, we’ll definitely respond. It’s that Shopify marketing secrets on Facebook and then. Until then, we’ll catch you guys next week.