Why is relying on one traffic channel risky?

Transcript

Charles Travers: Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of Ecommerce Marketing Chats with myself Charles and Jimmy. Jimmy, what’s going on, mate?

Jimmy Dalgleish: Just another wonderful week in e com and getting stuck into it. So it’s it’s been good. I will I well I’ll I’ll start straight off the bat today. Like I’ve I’ve had a lot of calls this week about a lot of the students that I’m coaching using Claude inside of Google Ads and kind of the results has been interesting and I think three out of four of them, I don’t even know how, but they completely just tanked their tracking. So yeah, there’s there’s definitely a Couple of things to be wary of still when I think I think we’ve we’ve touched on this before, but if you don’t understand how thing work things work, sometimes you can get yourself in trouble with AI because you’re just relying on AI to do it, and there’s no pushback on anything that you ask it to do because you don’t understand what you need to be asking it or you don’t understand what you need to be pushing back on. So yeah, I think just a very like straight off the bat. Quick lesson, like just be careful with how you’re using AI. It’s a fantastic tool, don’t get me wrong. It’s amazing. You can do in the coaching community that I’m a part of, they’ve just built out like a meta tool to audit your account and it’s great. You can get some amazing insights. But I will say just don’t proceed blindly with AI when you’re especially when you’re working on your marketing like kind of the the main lever of your or sales in a lot of cases. So There are some there are some things that can go wrong. So 100% use it as a tool, ha do some audits, have a look what’s working in there, get the get the data, but don’t just follow it blindly. Cause yeah, I th I think three three out of the four that I had a look at, they had issues. So, and things that were working quite well, and now dropped off a cliff. And it’s kind of why they’re booking a chat with me. Jimmy, you we’re following this AI stuff and now like our results have just tanked. So Yeah, there there are some there are some things to to be mindful of. I don’t think there’s any like definite lessons like don’t do this. I think it’s more the the lesson is is if your level of knowledge isn’t where it needs to be to have any kind of pushback with AI, then don’t just go implementing things wildly because you’re probably you’re probably gonna see a few negative results, unfortunately. So yeah, just a word of warning. Amazing tool, but Yeah, make sure you have some level of understanding where you can push back on it a little bit.

Charles Travers: Yeah, no, I can’t agree more, Jimmy. think this is where, you know, experience really comes into play. You know, I see, you know, I using AI on a daily basis and, you know, the amount of times I’ve had to push back and say, okay, yeah, this is not right. We need to go in this direction. And I do worry for brands that I kind of like you said, they’re like, okay, we can just do… Google ads ourselves or we can just run an SEO campaign ourselves using AI. I think my prediction is in the next one to two years, we’re gonna get a lot of brands coming to specialists like ourselves and be like, look, we tried to do this ourselves. And yeah, we made a lot of mistakes. And I think that’s, that’s where the value of consultants and coaches come in. that have got the experience to be able to guide you in the right direction. Because it’s all well having the tools, but like you said, if you don’t have the knowledge or the experience, you’re taking the AI’s direction blindly. And I think we’re gonna see a lot of that. Or we already are by the sounds of it, based on your conversations that you’ve had recently.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, the thing is like I’m I’m encouraging people to use it, but there’s I think I use bit I think I’m encouraging them to use it because I don’t really use it on the implementation side. like inside a Google Ads account. I’m using it for more the data analysis side in the in the Google Ads. But yeah, I w I think I was a bit blind to people just wanting to make changes directly into their account. and the thing is the AI will probably read the Google recommendations that are in there. it’s very rare that I would actually implement one of the Google recommendations, especially if it’s around bidding strategies or budget or things like that, because you’ve got your goals. Google has its own goals and its goals are to get you to spend as much as possible. so sometimes and this is a I don’t know who quoted this and I’ve used it a few times in the podcast, but So I don’t want to claim it as my own quote, but Google’s goal is to sell you clicks, and your goal is to buy profit. So and sometimes those things don’t align. Google will spend as much money as it can, and you might not get anything back from it. So your goal is to buy profit, it’s not to spend as much as you can on Google, which is what Google’s wanting you to do. Hey, you can get more traffic here, hey, there’s more impressions here if you spend more. Hey, your your campaigns is limited by budget. like constantly people see that. Even on high spend accounts, they’ll always Google will always say, Hey, your campaign is limited by budget, or it’s limited by bidding strategies. Like, yes, that that bidding strategy is in place for a reason. so

Charles Travers: Mm-hmm.

Jimmy Dalgleish: yeah, it is but when AI goes in there, it’s gonna go and probably have a look at the Google recommendations and like, yeah, this makes sense, and then just implement probably all of it. So

Charles Travers: Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: and that’s where that’s where people can get in trouble. So AI’s coming in a massive way, don’t get me wrong. I am not discrediting AI in any shape or form. I’m just saying just be careful with how you’re using it when you’re implementing it on kind of your main marketing levers, I guess.

Charles Travers: Yeah, yeah, makes sense, makes sense. On the organic search side this week, actually Google Search Console released another new feature. So now you’re actually able to connect your social media profiles as their own

Jimmy Dalgleish: Okay.

Charles Travers: properties. So what you’re able to see now is what search queries are driving traffic to your social media content. specifically within Google. So someone types in a search query and lands

Jimmy Dalgleish: So so do you so do you mean like do you mean like Google’s tracking like to meta or just its own properties?

Charles Travers: to its own properties. So if someone types into Google search a particular search query and then a YouTube video shows up and the user clicks on that YouTube video, it will show that as a click and it will show you the exact keyword search query that that user found your video from. So yeah, it’s a nice.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Okay. What other what other social what other social medias are there? Are there any are there any outside the Google kind of bubble? Is it just the Google properties?

Charles Travers: So YouTube, X, TikTok and Instagram. So there is, it’s not just, it’s not just.

Jimmy Dalgleish: okay. So that so there are some there are some out of the yeah. Okay, interesting.

Charles Travers: Yeah, yeah, so it’s quite simple. We basically when you log into Google Search Console where you see your Your property of your website on the left-hand side. You just click on that and you’ll see add property Which will then allow you to basically add another website or it will show you the the four social media Channels that you can you can add so you’ll have to obviously go through that process log into your social media account so that Google can access that. And the data will propagate in about 48 hours. So I’ve done that just on

Jimmy Dalgleish: Nice.

Charles Travers: my own social media accounts. And also I’m gonna tell my clients about this as well, because a few of them have got pretty big YouTube channels, which I think would be useful to see some of the data on.

Jimmy Dalgleish: I just had a bit of a brainwave because it’s it’s it there’s something that I discussed with someone else recently, but I’m curious like maybe we can just list off some different like traffic channels that maybe people haven’t explored because I have seen a lot popping up lately and people ask me if I’d tested it, and I’ve been asking other people have they tested this. So I think two that have popped up for me this week, and we’ll we’ll go over like a fair few traffic channels just quickly and maybe the pros and cons of each, but one that’s popped up is Reddit is actually doing a lot of advertising now that I’ve seen on Meta and they’re really promoting to Shopify e-commerce stores that hey, use your dynamic product feed for remarketing on Reddit. So and I actually haven’t tested this yet, but the fact that they’re integrating directly with Shopify now and you can use your product feed to remarket, it’s interesting to me. I’m thinking, like, how wrong could you go with remarketing? So That’s a that’s a traffic channel that I haven’t tested yet, but I’m keen to to test that and see if there’s some results. The other one is obviously ChatGPT and I I’ve seen I’ve seen mixed results for this. I still think it’s I still think it’s more of a service play at the moment, like service business play, just with the cost per click. I think you’d need some really high price products in the e-commerce space to to make it work on Chat GPT, but it’s getting better. Like they’ve just added the conversion optimization goals. So they are improving the platform. But some other things that I’ve had some discussions around for for traffic and generating traffic to your store is we’ve talked about it a lot on previous episodes, Charles, but push out as a a push notification channel. I think it’s really good for like abandoned carts and sending reminders back to the device where they were actually on when they got to your cart and didn’t proceed. I think it it brings back a fair bit of revenue for how much the app actually costs. the other thing that I’m asking a lot of my clients and students to implement is getting their product feed on Bing. I know it’s a I know it’s a painful process, but I mean, if you if you can push through and get it on there in front of your competitors, you’ve like Bing probably brings in ten percent of the traffic, potentially less of Google, but that’s ten percent that you can get that you wouldn’t have had previously. So and and it’s free. You can get on the shopping network for free. You don’t even have to run ads. So Bing’s another good one. Some ones that I’ve thought about too for like the creative industry that hardly ever gets talked about, like like Pinterest ads and being on that Pinterest platform. I think I think the purpose of this discussion is a lot of people are a lot of people will come to me and say, Jimmy, I need more traffic, but they’re looking at traffic as two levers, basically. They’re looking at it as I need to spend more on Meta, I need to spend more on on Google. Like that’s like that’s the thought process

Charles Travers: Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: a lot of the time of people generating traffic. They’re like, Okay, I need to spend more in one of these two platforms where You’ve got so many avenues you can go to get traffic. Like, Charles, for you in the organic space, I’m thinking like you know, guest blogs still can generate traffic on the right places. getting found on listicles and reviews and like all these things compound. It’s not just when you need more traffic, like if your only solution is I’ll spend more on Meta and Google, like. You’re gonna clap out at that at some point, meaning that you’re gonna get to a certain spend and realizing that your return on ad spend is starting to drop off and you need to get traffic somewhere else. So I think another massive one, this is probably the most important one in e-commerce, is your email marketing. I still think, even though I’m Google bias, I still think email marketing is like the cornerstone of an a healthy e-commerce business.

Charles Travers: Yeah, no, absolutely.

Jimmy Dalgleish: you set up your flows correctly and email campaigns, it’s just like revenue on tap. It’s crazy. And not enough people spend enough time on it. And I’m guessing that a lot of people listening to this, they probably set their flows up like three or four years ago and haven’t looked at them since. So for

Charles Travers: Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: such an important channel, the the amount of attention that it gets is massively undervalued in terms of how much time and attention goes to that platform.

Charles Travers: For sure, for sure. And the one thing that I’m also looking at or changing my mindset on is understanding that moving forward, certainly from the organic side, traffic will not necessarily be the main metric that we’re gonna be looking at. And what I mean by that is with a lot of these AI search platforms, the click through rate is very low. So really it’s about being sighted and building brand visibility. The problem with that is the attribution model is broken. we can’t, you know, with traffic, certainly from like SEO perspective, you’re okay, let’s rank for this keyword. And we know if we rank in the top one to three, it drives this amount of traffic and we… and from that traffic in Shopify, it shows that it’s generated X amount of revenue. So we can see a clearer picture of the attribution model, but with things like AI search, you know, could be doing your, researching a product on ChatGBT, you see a brand, but you don’t click through to their website and then maybe a week later, you go over to Google or even, straight away and you search for that brand and then the the attribution is is shown up in indirect traffic. So we need to kind of factor these things in. I’m looking at thinking, okay, what sites do we need a presence on in order to also build that AI search visibility? Because if we look at things like ChatGBT, know, they’re they’re redics being cited a lot. Trustpilot is another site. So, you know, in the SEO world, we’re calling it kind of building these kind of entities of information, of proof and credibility about your brand and being consistent across these different platforms in terms of your messaging. So one thing that, you know, I’m doing with some of my clients is I’m searching their brand and seeing where they’re. what platforms they’re visible online and making sure the information is correct throughout these different sites. Because if you’re working with an established brand, you know, they might be on various different, even directories, guest blogs, and some of the information might be inaccurate. They may have done a rebrand and they might have positioned themselves slightly differently in, in the past, or in the present. So the information is not consistent across all of these different entities. And this is what, you know, ChatGPT in particular is looking at. It’s looking at, okay, this brand is mentioned in this particular way across numerous different entities or websites. Therefore, we’re gonna show this information about the brand. But if it’s inconsistent, ChatGPT doesn’t, it doesn’t recognize. that consistency and therefore it’s not going to show you. yeah, that’s just something that I’m kind of looking at. The challenge is being able to kind of measure all these different things. You know, literally just this week

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, and

Charles Travers: I, yeah, sorry, I was just saying.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, I was about to say it’s it’s gonna get harder too. With the with the click through rates on AI that you mentioned, the first thing that came to my mind was how it’s gonna become more agentic anyway. So,

Charles Travers: Mm-hmm.

Jimmy Dalgleish: like for example, you might end up on the Google shopping network and it’s gonna get to a point where they don’t even have to visit they won’t have to visit your website. They’re gonna be able to purchase your product directly off Google and Shopify’s just gonna act as the back end framework. They won’t even end up on your website. So, that’s where some of these platforms are going, especially Google, they’re doing a lot of work in that space. Like, hey, we want you to purchase directly from this shopping network. They’re testing it a lot in the US at the moment. So there is a world where your websites are going to come less important because the same thing’s going to happen in the the AI chats. Like you’re going to be able to buy directly through Chat GBT at some point. They’re not going to have to go to your website. Like for all those, for all those agents and everything that are being built, like there is a world where you’ll look up the product and it’ll it’ll show up in Chat GPT and you can just buy it directly from there and they won’t actually have to go to your website. So that just sprung to my mind when you mentioned about, you know, AI and different metrics to look at with the the click through rates being down. Like it’s probably they’re probably gonna go down more when the agentic side really kicks in.

Charles Travers: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s why, you know, brands need to be aware of this and not be as fixated on traffic as the main benchmark. Yes, I think, you know, it’s still converting, you know, traditional, you know, Google search, Google ads, you know, we’re kind of in this transition period at the moment, aren’t we, Jimmy, where, you know, we’ve got

Jimmy Dalgleish: Hm. Yeah.

Charles Travers: this, we’ve, we’ve got this tried and tested methods. of marketing, of digital marketing on both the organic and paid side. But equally, we’ve now got this, you know, AI emergence where more and more people are using, you know, these AI platforms, AI search, and they’re not necessarily clicking directly through to the website straight away. So it’s almost like online branding and marketing merged and meet together and, We need to be looking at both basically, even with my clients now, I’m providing them with, you know, rankings reports on what keywords they’re ranking for, but now I’m also providing them with how they’re showing up for like AI search prompts. The challenging part is how personalized those prompts are. You know, there’s so many variations that we can’t track everything. And even if we did, it’s not. 100 % accurate, there’s always going to be variances. So it just gives them an idea of, okay, if we track certain different prompts, they can kind of see roughly what they’re showing up for in terms of topics and what they’re not. So we need to obviously work on that as well. So yeah, it’s, it’s interesting. It’s an interesting time for sure.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, even on the attribution side, I mean, people are using different devices constantly, iPads, phones, computers, and privacy browsers now, like Brave and other browsers. So so things are getting harder and harder to to track accurately. That’s why like those marketing reports should always just be used as as a guide, I’d say. And they never match up one hundred percent accurately. You can get pretty close with server-side tracking, but even even with server-side tracking then the numbers might add up to your back end, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that like if they came from Google that that was the only marketing touch point that they had throughout the journey. So yeah, there’s a few things to keep in mind on the attribution side. But yeah, I think back on the topic of just traffic, do you have any other like good ones, Charles, that you’ve been using to like generate, I guess traffic. Another one is like blogs. We’ve talked about that a few times. I’ve been able to generate a lot of traffic just from the high quality blogs. so I know we mentioned before just

Charles Travers: Yeah, mean dishes.

Jimmy Dalgleish: about going on guest posts and stuff like that, but just having your own high quality blogs too.

Charles Travers: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I would say the other one that we’ve, we’ve not mentioned is probably digital PR. That’s that, that’s,

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah.

Charles Travers: not only helps from a kind of branding and credibility and proof perspective, but also, you know, that’s in terms of kind of backlinks and, not so much referral traffic, but more as a kind of high quality backlinks, which has a knock-on effect with your own rankings and AI search visibility, there’s multiple benefits to doing that.

Jimmy Dalgleish: We’ve got a we’ve we’ve got a really good we’ve got a really good show on that one too, don’t we, Charles? With it was with was it with Chris? Yeah, so

Charles Travers: Yeah, Chris. Yes, Chris Pantelli.

Jimmy Dalgleish: yeah, so go back and watch that one ’cause I actually learned a lot just in in that episode chatting to Chris and I think going into going into that chat, I was just because I didn’t know like a whole lot about digital PR. So the whole the whole episode is basically me How many increased questions and he answered every single one of them and I had a really kind of good understanding of how you could use it going forward after that show. So if you’re looking for information on like digital PR and building backlinks through that process, that was a r that was actually that’s probably one of our best in terms of informative episodes on a topic, I’d say Charles. So yeah, that one that one’s was definitely worth

Charles Travers: Yeah, Chris is one of the best when it comes to that.

Jimmy Dalgleish: checking out.

Charles Travers: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, Chris, he runs his own digital PR agency and he’s, yeah, he’s very knowledgeable. Definitely one of the best. He puts out a lot of content as well. So yeah, go follow him as well. go back and watch the, episode. Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: He was just he was gen he was genuine and honest too, which is hard to find in that industry sometimes. So he just genuine, honest and answered all the questions honestly too. So yeah, I have no problems mentioning him even in this chat because yeah, I I I haven’t used his service personally. but I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend a client having a chat to him, that’s for sure.

Charles Travers: Yeah, absolutely. In terms of other platforms, yeah, I think you’ve kind of, you’ve touched on a number of them, Jimmy. I Reddit’s, I think Reddit more for the fact that

Jimmy Dalgleish: yeah, a good one.

Charles Travers: it’s being cited. I think there is a real benefit in potentially looking at building a community on Reddit. I do know that, you know, brands are… trying to manipulate Reddit by, you know, finding threads where their brand is mentioned and then getting people to comment. You do have to be a little bit careful. I don’t know how long that’s gonna last for. And I think the more that kind of SEOs manipulate a platform, you’ll find eventually the less it will have an impact. as chat GPT starts to realize, actually maybe we shouldn’t be citing Reddit as much for certain, you know, products and services. But yeah, yeah, exactly. Marketers always ruin it, don’t they?

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah. What do they what do they say? Marketers ruin everything. you actually I I just had I read an article yesterday. Apparently MySpace is making a comeback as like the yeah, as the

Charles Travers: I like to take that as well,

Jimmy Dalgleish: anti algorithm social media platform. And I don’t know I don’t know how you felt about just even reading that headline, the anti algorithm social media platform. I felt a wave of calm. come over me when I read that. And then like nostalgia too. I was like, yes, I just want to see the posts and things from my friends. Like not an algorithm and all this other crap. I just I just want to see stuff from the people that I actually follow and I have a connection with. So like I don’t know how brands can l could leverage that when it comes back. But I don’t know. I’m keen to check I’m keen to test the Check out MySpace and see what they can do. I know there’s been a lot of money dived into kind of helping it make a resurgent, but a resurgence. But yeah, it’s it’s interesting to me. So keep that on the radar. Like MySpace has been in the wilderness for what twenty years, but yeah, who knows? Might make a comeback.

Charles Travers: Yeah, don’t think I… Did you have a profile on Myspace? I don’t think I was ever… I think Facebook for

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah. Yeah.

Charles Travers: me was the first. But,

Jimmy Dalgleish: I think I think I think B I think MySpace the the equivalent in the UK was Bebo. I don’t know if you used that. over in B B E B O.

Charles Travers: Yeah, I think we did have MySpace. Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard of that one as well, but…

Jimmy Dalgleish: But yeah, like I didn’t I I was on I was on MySpace all the time, just swapping my my top however many friends it was, top five friends or whatever. And you know, you have a disagreement with someone at high school that day, and then you move them lower and your friends tally and you know the politics was insane. yeah, that too. Imagine advertising on

Charles Travers: The only one I remember is MSN Messenger. Yeah, yeah. That’s, that’s,

Jimmy Dalgleish: that now. What a imagine that is a great platform, like if you’re just chatting to someone and then the MSN algorithm picks up like the topic that’s being discussed and then just puts an ad under there. That would be fantastic.

Charles Travers: God, you can imagine, yeah. that’s, yeah, it’s crazy.

Jimmy Dalgleish: I was surprised I haven’t done that in Messenger yet. It for Meta, like picking up on key words in your your chats with someone else and just having like a an ad pop up in your in your Messenger conversations.

Charles Travers: Well, yeah, I do think it’s quite, I’m certain that these platforms are listening in because the amount of times I’ve had a conversation, you know, with someone and then about something and then literally about 10 minutes later, the ad pops up related to that topic. And I’m like, that’s, there’s no coincidence there. There is.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, I know. Hap happens happens a lot as well. So I it

Charles Travers: Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: happened to me today. I was talking I was talking to my wife about removalist companies and all the ads I’ve seen this afternoon have just been removaless companies. I haven’t I didn’t search anything or anything, so it’s a hundred

Charles Travers: crazy in it.

Jimmy Dalgleish: percent picking up yeah, something on something on the microphone. But yeah, no, it is it is all interesting, but yeah, the well I just I get dumbfounded a bit sometimes when people say I’ve got a traffic issue, I need more traffic, when you’ve got so many options to explore in generating traffic. social like organic social videos like can drive if you get a moonshot video or a video that goes viral, you can blow up your business overnight. So I just I don’t want people to think that when they need more traffic, the only levers they can pull is spending more on Google or spending more on Meta. So There there are other options. Some of them aren’t as instant as paid ads. but there are other platforms where you can spend money too. So yeah, experiment with all those and see see where you can drive some high quality traffic. Experiment with some blogs. see if you can do a really good digital PR campaign and get something out there as well. So you don’t don’t limit yourself to two levers that you can pull, Meta and Google. It’s not a great moat to build around your business and If you can start to generate traffic from multiple places, it just has an overall lift on the whole business. I can go on the back end of numbers and in the stores and just have a look at the attribution. And if they’re o if they’re from just one channel, like if all your traffic’s from meta, I’m like, this is a very risky business because something goes wrong here in meta, then your your business has got to take until you sort it out. So the healthy businesses, they have a They have traffic sources from everywhere, or organic, paid, blogs. And then if something happens to one of those platforms at any point, then all the other platforms are still there. So you’ve got time to fix a lever that’s dropped off. If your main lever drops off and it’s the only lever, then yeah, you’re in a bit of trouble until you can get that sorted out.

Charles Travers: Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah, think from the businesses that, you know, I’ve worked with that are successful and they continue to grow. They’ve got really paid organic search and then organic social. Those kind of three core pillars. And then obviously you can include things like email as well as additional levers for your existing. subscriber list, but I think when you’ve got those three in the mix, you’re certainly more in growth mode than survival mode. I think you’re right. Relying on just paid ads to grow your business consistently is a little bit of a dangerous strategy long-term.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah. Well we we’ve just hit the half now, so I might leave that with the audience for now. Have a have a really solid think about other places where you can generate traffic. Don’t just go to the main stayholds. explore other options because there are some really good options out there. And just to recap on what we touched on at the start of the episode, don’t follow AI’s advice just blindly. I’m seeing have it some impact in some businesses detrimental. So yeah, make sure you have a a kind of a solid base level of understanding before you’re getting it to like go in and change things in your ad account. but yeah, other than that, you can check us out on all the podcasting platforms on e commerce marketing chats or check us out on Meta at Shopify Marketing Secrets. You say we a mini we got an Instagram too now, Charles. Is that right?

Charles Travers: We have got an Instagram, but we’ve not done anything with it yet. So we are on Instagram. give us a follow. Yeah, yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Well follow follow anyway. What it what is it? E commerce marketing chats, is it on Instagram?

Charles Travers: We’re on e-commerce marketing chats on all socials. Well, not all social, Instagram. Obviously, if you’re watching on YouTube and then obviously, yeah, all the major podcast platforms, e-commerce marketing chats. And we’ve also got a website as well. ecommerce marketing chats dot riverside.com so yeah we’re expanding we’re getting our entities yeah

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, going global. Yeah, perfect. All right guys. Well we will catch you guys next week. Enjoy your week and go crush all things e comm. Take care.