Which numbers do you need before you can tell whether your ads are working?

Transcript

Charles Travers: Hey guys, welcome back. It’s another week of e commerce marketing chats. I think it’s I think it’s been a couple of weeks now, hasn’t it, Jimmy? We’ve we’ve been off. We had a little break, but

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah. I I think yeah, two week two weeks ago it was my birthday and then unfortunately last week you weren’t you were you were a bit under the

Charles Travers: yeah, yes. Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: weather. So now we’re now we’re back into it. So yeah, it’s it feels like it’s been a little while, so it’s good to be back into it.

Charles Travers: Yeah yeah. Good stuff, good stuff. Well yeah. what’s been happening then, Jimmy? What’s been happening since we last spoke? From your side?

Jimmy Dalgleish: Well well to be honest, we’re in what September now and the co the community that I coach in. This whole month is about Black Friday, like getting prepared. So we’re we’re at that stage of the year now. So like the the masterclass that I run later this month, the completely on getting your Google ads specifically ready for Black Friday, how to prepare depends on what you’re doing, if you’re doing promotions or just wanting to promote certain SKUs, like this whole month is basically preparation for Black Friday. another thing that’s come up a lot this week is like business owners that just don’t know their numbers. it’s just crazy to me. It’s like what what how much do you need to get like what’s the return that you need on like your advertising to be profitable. I don’t know. It’s like, well if you don’t know, how am I supposed to know? Like I

Charles Travers: Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: don’t like I don’t know what I don’t know what your business expenses are and everything that’s happening under the hood. Like like for for example, let’s take this for example. Say you’ve got like really high price products. Let’s say you’ve got like two thousand dollar products. Now if you’ve got like a if you’ve got like a 10 return on ad spend, it might look good on the interface, but your margins might be really thin on those. Potentially, if it’s a retail product that other businesses are selling too and it’s like a a race to the bottom type thing. Think about like, I don’t know, like aquarium setups or something, like the tank and the full setup. So you’ve got all that, you might have thin margins on that. the return on ad spend might look good in the ad account, but once you factor in your expenses and everything else, you might be losing money. Like the and that’s that’s what’s happening with some of these e-commerce owners. They just They don’t know their numbers and the ad account looks healthy from whoever’s, you know, managing it based on the product margins, but they don’t have the other factors about where like what other expenses that they’ve got they’re running through this business. And then when you factor in all their other expenses, like potentially warehouse costs and potential staff that they’ve got, like if you start adding in all these business expenses, and this is their this is their business, all of a sudden you realize that they’re losing a lot of money. It’s just and it it it is it is crazy like I don’t like when when I run my own business, right? I know pretty much what’s happening down to the dollar. and I would know the cash flow for that month that’s coming through. I would know every expense that has to go out. I know what’s coming up. and then when you’re dealing with e commerce, a lot of the a lot of the business owners that I I speak to on like you you know, introduction calls or scouting out calls, it’s just like, well, before we even see if whether it we’re a good fit to work together, I need to know what the goalposts are. Like I need to know w where we need to be in terms of return to to get you guys profitable. So ’Cause I’m very much when I take on a client, if I know it’s not going to be a win-win, like I just won’t take them on. because one, I don’t like the sales cycle. So if I go after the clients at a win-win, I know they’ll potentially r refer other people or you know, have a good experience. So it’s good for the reputation, it’s good for the brand. It’s the ones where you’re like, they don’t know the numbers, like. I don’t even know if this is going to be good or bad. And it’s the ones where you get on the call that just say like that they have had a horrible experience with every other agency. Sometimes there’s a genuine reason that they should be mad that they’ve had a bad experience because the account’s just been managed horribly. But sometimes I have a look at the accounts and it’s actually not managed too bad. It’s just like the business owner is like, Yeah, we were getting these results, but we’re still losing money. I was great, well. Tell me where you need to be not to lose money. And they can’t tell you. It’s like, well, how am I gonna make you money

Charles Travers: Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: if you don’t even know where you need to be to like be profitable? Like, help me help you. So it’s yeah, I think I don’t know. I just gotta I wasn’t that I got frustrated about it. It’s just like it’s like a almost now, it’s a red flag for me. It’s like, Okay, well, let’s work out your numbers first before we even consider working together because I I need to know where it’s at before you know, we even look at kind of having your Google ads managed from, you know, myself. So yeah, I think I think if you’re if you’re if you’re not already if you’re running an e commerce store and you don’t know exactly where you need to be or or your like your your E R, your marketing efficiency ratio, like If you if you don’t know where those are, what your return on ad spend needs to be at certain platforms to at least be profitable, like that’s a massive problem. Like and especially if you’re running on tight margins, the if you really dived into your numbers and you’re running on tight margins and you don’t know where you need to be to be profitable, I can almost, almost guarantee that you’re probably running at a loss.

Charles Travers: Hmm.

Jimmy Dalgleish: So yeah, there’s yeah, there’s definitely that side, like knowing your numbers side of it has popped up a lot this week for me.

Charles Travers: Trusting. Yeah, no, it’s it’s a really good point. I think also now with with AI as well, it it should make things a hell of a lot easier. You know, you you’ve got you’ve got previous data there, and you’re able to pull in like you said, I’m the same as you. I I I know exactly what goes in and goes out for my business every month and Even before AI I’d always have, you know, a clear picture of that and I would update it every month. And now with AI it becomes far more easier. You can just input all of your transactions and data. and it at least gives you a you know, like I said, with your finding the ROI and and it’s a little bit different to just maybe with agency business its ingoings and outgoings a little bit less challenging to kind of get those numbers. But I think you know, you can certainly find them even if you’re not a hundred percent sure, you know, with a little bit of brainstorming to give you a clearer picture. Because you’re right, it’s like they’re coming to you asking, we need to spend money on ads and if they don’t even know what the what they’re trying to achieve, what their current numbers are, they could just they could be losing money. so yeah, no, it’s it’s certainly an interesting one. talking about Black Friday, you’re saying about you know getting your clients prepared for Black Friday. I big I think it’s probably worth us touching on that because it’s something that I’m starting to look at for my SEO clients is is making sure that they have their like a dedicated Black Friday collection page set up before Black Friday and building that kind of process that’s worked well for me for my clients in in previous years. And I I think if you if if you go back a year on our podcast you’ll see some episodes around, you know, Black Friday strategies, but I think it’s always good to readdress those. what are you looking at, Jimmy, in f in terms of your side of things from the kind of paid angle?

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, so Google Ads, I mean there’s there’s a few main things. There’s one, so if for example, if you’re if you’re running a a brand search campaign, and when I’m talking about a brand search campaign, just say your brand’s Joe’s Fish and Chip Shop. you’re literally bidding on the keywords Joe’s fish and chip shop, and then an ad comes up for your brand when someone searches for your brand. That should be a billboard during Black Friday. It’s something that people miss. they just keep their standard text ads. And what happens in a lot of Google Ads accounts is people write their text ads and they don’t change them again for like some of them wrote them three years ago and they haven’t changed. so there’s no split test of ad copy happening or anything like that. But during Black Friday, that branded search ad should be a billboard for your business. letting all your customers know what’s happening during that period. so using that as a billboard. On the on these shopping ads, you really want to get if you’re you want to work out if you’re doing a promotion, how you’re doing it, whether it’s automatic discount, whether it’s coupon code. because all these things play into how you tell Google how your promotion’s working. Now I do have a preference. My preference is coupon code and the reason is because of All the testing that we’ve done. If you run a coupon code and you plaster it still all over your site, only fifty-two percent of people even use the coupon code out of millions of data that I’ve looked at, it’s around fifty-two percent. So you’ve got about forty-eight percent that don’t even use it, even though it’s plastered everywhere. so that’s forty-eight percent of like sales margin that you’re saving by not By people not taking you up on your discount. So if you go the automatic discount route, straight away you’ve you’re giving up a lot of your margin that you

Charles Travers: Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: wouldn’t necessarily need to. Now the pushback I get from that strategy is, I don’t want to deal with all the emails from people saying, you know, we didn’t use the coupon code. Last Black Friday, the one specific client that I’m thinking of that had over 1500 orders had one email. To say I didn’t use the coupon code, they just refunded them that amount that the coupon code would have saved them. So in terms of the margin that they saved by using a coupon code over automatic discount, it’s pretty astronomical. So that’s a that’s a good place to start. The next thing on the Google Ads side too is creating, if you haven’t got one already and you’ve got a lot of products, creating creating a best sellers kind of category.

Charles Travers: Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Because you’ll you’ll definitely want to push those products harder over Black Friday. and it depends. Like some people might not have a site-wide discount, they might have like a certain category is discounted. you want to have that category in its own campaign during Black Friday. So there’s a there’s a lot to look at on the on the Google side for Black Friday, but I was saying this to the other e-commerce coaches that I was talking with recently. Like Google is probably the easiest one to get right over the Black Friday period. The one the most important one over Black Friday is your emails. Like without with like without a doubt. It’s getting your email campaigns and flows during that period like ready to go.

Charles Travers: Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: And trust me, if if you do it, if you sort it out September, October and you just know it’s ready to go in November, and then you can let all your other freelancers or team members know, hey, this is when the email is going out for this promotion. We need to link it up with socials. We need to make sure that on Google, like we’re covering these products on this date, because this is when the email’s going out to our list. just makes everything so much easier having your email campaign for Black Friday sorted out as soon as possible. So I’m gonna be doing that for one client this period and yeah I’ll be I’ll be starting I’ll be starting that this month. and then you’ve got like your little one percenters like push out for example start collecting

Charles Travers: Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: your list now. If you haven’t if you haven’t got that on your site already put it on there start collecting your list because it just gives you another another traffic source that you can promote on during that period as well. have a look at some other apps

Charles Travers: Well it

Jimmy Dalgleish: too. So sorry, you go Charles.

Charles Travers: Just on that, Jimmy. So for th those listening in that that aren’t aware what push out is, it’s related to push notifications. And we’ve we’ve talked a little bit about this, haven’t we, in the past? It’s basically notifications that can pop up on your typically on your mobile device, also within your browser on your desktop, and you can effectively create these push notification campaigns, as well as set up in the background just some automated automations like abandoned car and effectively grow this subscriber list. It’s almost a separate subscriber list to say your email. and actually Jimmy, you you were the one who got me onto these guys and I set this up for a a client. I think it was It was either last year or the year before and you know, they saw some really good success over the Black Friday period and that that list I think the last time I checked, they were at like thirty five thousand subscribers, forty thousand subscribers, and they attributed revenue was at around it was nearly a quarter of a million US dollars in terms of of revenue and most of that they don’t they don’t actually run regular campaigns they just have the automations in the background. So yeah, it’s definitely what you mentioned, definitely worth adding. I actually tried to contact

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah.

Charles Travers: Push Ow the other day. I had some contacts and one of them actually left because I wanted to see if we could get someone on from Push Ow to basically run through how to get Push Ow set up and maybe give us some you know valuable up to date insights into how to get the most of it, you know, the best from from using it during that Black Friday period. ’Cause they they do often release some good resources around that time as well. So we’ll see what’s

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, I’ve still got like I’ve still got my account managers. So if you want someone on from them, I can reach out to them and see.

Charles Travers: Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: But I think so push out for for those that haven’t used it, you can you can use the free version just to collect your list. The money is in though in the paid version, having the automation on the abandoned cart. That’s the one that’s bringing back all the revenue for the clients that use it. But like if if you just want to use that abandoned cart feature over Black Friday and you just want to start collecting a list at the moment. to send like a campaign to, you can do it for free. So but yeah the the real money in that app is the capabilities of the and cart messaging I’m finding definitely. I think on that too like some I don’t know if you’ve got some other good apps that you’re using Charles but one for retention over Black Friday that I really like is the it’s called Redeemly. It’s run by an Australian guy named Ty Chapman and what it does is every time someone makes a purchase, so during Black Friday, you’ve got a lot of sales coming through, they actually get like a percentage back of their order in store credit. So it’s a good way to capture all the people that are purchasing over Black Friday and the store credit you can put a limit on like you can put a an expiry time period on it. So you might so it might last for like two months or something, like sixty days. So all those people that purchased from Black Friday at around sixty days, they’re gonna be getting automated messages saying, Hey, your your credit that you got during Black Friday is about to expire. So then it’s a good way to like bring people back. They’re like, like, you know, I’ve got a you know, five to ten bucks or whatever sitting there. I’m gonna go there and, you know, spend it again. So it’s a good way to bring customers back. I really I really like that app too for for that. Think of some other good ones that they’re probably the two main ones that I focus on, but up up remote for affiliate stuff. So depending on what you’ve got for heading into Black Friday, you may want to if there’s someone on social media that’s promoting products or you think would be a good fit for your brand, like try to work out an affiliate arrangement with them. And the one that the one that we use is up remote. So it’s really good for kind of affiliate marketing. but yeah, I I think those three would probably I’m sure there’s some others that I’d have to just look at. I’m just having a look

Charles Travers: Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: quickly look in the apps list so there there’s anything else that kinda

Charles Travers: While while you’re looking at yeah. Yeah, while are you looking at that, Jimmy, just on the organic search side, so obviously showing up for Google and AI searches, whether it’s you know, AI mode on Google or Chat GPT, I like to at this stage, in the calendar year, what I like to do is build make sure that my clients have got and you’ve got a Master Black Friday collection page. So at least at least you’ve got one. You can build out sub collections of different categories. but what I would do firstly is do a little bit of keyword research and see are there any searches related to your industry? So what I I would be looking at like for example you know if you are I don’t know selling table tennis tables like is there any search volume are people looking for table tennis black friday deals so if you find that keyword and then you build a collection with that keyword in the URL, in the in the H one, in the headline of the page, in your your SEO meta title and description, and you have that as a holding page, So you do it in three stages. You just do get the page live but don’t have the deals live yet, obviously, because it’s not Black Friday and just say like Black Friday coming soon and maybe add a you know, sign up to our email list to be the first to be notified when sales when when sales are live. And then closer on to Black Friday, once you are launching that, switch that to your live Black Friday collection page. and what you’ll find is because you’ve got that page live earlier on, you’re gonna start showing up and ranking for relevant keywords and also showing up for AI searches. So you’re gonna be effectively ahead typically of your competitors that don’t have this strategy set up and you’ll be surprised how many stores don’t have anything or they’ll at the last minute they’ll switch their standard sales collection page to Black Friday deals and they don’t you know, they’re not generating any search authority or they’re not ranking for any quick keywords because of it. And then after the the sales end, then basically switch it to a you know s the lat the holding page again which just says Black Friday sales have ended, you know, sign up for future sales and therefore you’ve got that page effectively live throughout the whole year. And really all you’re doing is you’re changing the content of the page based on the time of the year and also you can change like the meta title and description to reflect where you are in that sales process. So, you know, if if the sales are on, then you can change your title to Black Friday Sales Are Now Live. and then when it’s ended, say Black Friday sales have now ended, and that just gives Google an idea about you know, are your sales currently live or are they not? or are they coming soon? So that’s kind of my three step process is pretty co it’s relatively simple, but you’d be amazed at how many brands don’t actually execute on on that and they’ll just throw something together at the last minute which will not build up any rankings or visibility in AI search.

Jimmy Dalgleish: think a lot of people are like they’re almost trained to hold out for bigger purchases for Black Friday. Like even myself, so I know that I’m gonna need probably like a ride on lawn mower in November. So without a doubt, I’ll s I’ll be looking up lawn mower Black Friday deals because you know they’re

Charles Travers: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: they’re they’re anywhere between like five or ten thousand dollars. So if someone has a if someone has a a good sale on during Black Friday, I’m gonna get it from there. So I think a a lot of furniture companies really push Black Friday to anything where those larger purchases are and there’s some really awesome deals to be had. I think yeah, I think Black Friday, you wanna be well covered for that. And while you were talking about that, Charles, I I just looked up some like Black Friday lawnmower deals and there are there are some brands that still have like their Black Friday page live from last year. So yeah, it’s Yeah, it’s strategy that obviously a lot of people are rolling out, but yeah, some of these it’d be interesting to see what they do with these like and a big brand in Australia like Kogan, they’ve already got Black Friday Sales 2026. They’ve already got the page kind of collecting they’ve got the they’ve they’re ready, basically. Like it’s already there.

Charles Travers: Yeah, yeah. You could do pre sales as well. Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: They’re just putting they’re just putting their products already in there. They’re just not discounted yet. So it’s they’ve got the page there

Charles Travers: Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: ready to go. And but yeah, so it’s yeah, you should be g you should definitely be getting ready for Black Friday in in some in some regards there. But yeah, we’ll probably we’ll probably talk a lot about Black Friday in the next coming weeks. So I know just before the call, Charles, you mentioned about some of the some of the systems that you’re running to better run like workflows and stuff like that. So yeah, I’m actually I’m keen to hear a little bit about those. we could talk about Black Friday the whole episode, but I I think for the

Charles Travers: Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: next coming weeks it’s gonna probably gonna be pretty heavy on that stuff. So yeah, let’s

Charles Travers: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: let’s cover yeah, I’m keen to hear about some of the workflows that you’re implementing, what kind of time they’re saving you and how they’re working out.

Charles Travers: Yeah, for sure. So what I’m trying to to do recently is integrate more processes and tools into Claude, Claude code specifically. So

Jimmy Dalgleish: Mm-hmm.

Charles Travers: what I have set up now at the moment, and this is very valuable, particularly with e commerce stores that have got large product categories. You know, they’ve got lots of collections, they’ve got Yeah, maybe thousands of of products and there’s lots of changes going on throughout the week. So I have set up weekly audits that effectively crawl my client’s site and establ establish what new pages have been built, what pages have been for forward. you know what what you actually find as well is So this is an issue with one of my clients is they They don’t understand c necessarily like the impact that a redirect can have on a site. So for example, if you’ve got a page that’s ranking well and but for whatever reason you’re not selling that product anymore and you don’t want that collection, you know most people would just effectively unpublish that page and the Shopify automatically often redirect to the home page. So it’s an automatic thing that’s set up. What you should do is is redirect to a relevant product or collection so you don’t lose that s potential search. you know, it’s what we call kind of SEO juice. You’re kind of passing authority through to another page. and you know, before I’m I’m I’m kinda waiting on my client to tell me, we’ve we’ve redirected this page or we’ve I wasn’t aware of what was going on basically. And when you’re deal and you know, when

Jimmy Dalgleish: Mm-hmm.

Charles Travers: you’ve got thousands of products and there’s hundreds of collections, that becomes an issue and there’s lots of different departments working on different pages. so now I can automatically see that every single week. I’m effectively running an SEO audit on a weekly basis automatically, which also now pulls through to I have like a master Google sheet which monitors everything. So I can see now all the new pages, I can see when it’s logged, I can see pages that are that are four forward and I can then execute a lot faster. So this is great because it just gives you a a bird’s eye view of what’s going on. And, you know, even if you’re the eco you know, the equiver store owner who’s like you’re g You get even if you don’t fully understand the process, you know, I would certainly whoever’s responsible for your SEO, I would be asking them the question, you know, how often are you auditing the site? What’s your process? Because you know, in my experience, like just doing the old way would be doing like a monthly or quarterly audit. That’s just not enough now. And actually, we’ve got the tools available to not have to do that. So building out these what what they call Claude routines within Claude code, automated processes, that’s one. The other is managing a blog content schedule. So I have a content sheet set up on Google Sheets and every week Claude goes in, it checks checks Slack to see where the processes which are have been approved. which are still with, you know, the writer. it’ll check the client’s website to see which articles have been published and then it’ll update that that sheet. So something that perform may have taken me an hour, two hours to complete. It can be done in, you know, five five, ten minutes running in the background.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah.

Charles Travers: it’s just simple things like that that just that just speed up the process. And I’ve also kind of tied I I had I was using an app called Todoist, which is basically just

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, I use that too.

Charles Travers: yeah, to do it’s like a checklist, a little bit like Trello, and I’ve integrated that now into Claude as well. So I’ve it it talks simultaneously. Rather than me going into the to Todoist and seeing what my what I need to do, it pulls through to Claude. I can assign While I’m doing work within Claude, it automatically sets up the task within a to doist. It’s just little things like that makes makes a big difference in terms of workflow. and I have like a I think I’ve talked about this before, I have like a kind of SEO command what I call command center which pulls through different accounts, whether it’s Google Search Console, Google Analytics, you can do this with with Shopify as well, but If you’re working on a client account, it’s not as easy to s to get set up. But if you run a store, it’s something that I would highly suggest doing because you have that admin access and you can you can do that. I don’t know I can’t remember the full process on how you do that, but yeah, it’s it’s certainly worth doing ’cause then you can pull through more and more data and then you’ve got you know, you’re effectively using that as your your hub rather than have to log in and check all your different tools. You’ve got you’ve Claude also then builds context around what you’re doing. So every time you’re not having to explain, okay, this is what we need to do. It already knows and it has background. So I feel like it’s my second brain at times, you know. It’s like my memory when I’m when I’m

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, well that’s what people are calling them.

Charles Travers: Yeah, yeah. so yeah, those are just a couple of things that I’ve been looking at in terms of just improving automations and integrations with with AI.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, we should do a master class or something on it. I’m always keen to learn more about that stuff. I’m doing a little bit of it myself. I think I’m I use a little AI a lot to like build the scripts that I use in Google Ads accounts. So especially for SKU-based performances. And the one that I really like that is quite good. It takes the price benchmark for all your product SKUs based on where you are in the market. So that data sits inside Merchant Center itself, but essentially, like for one of the supplement companies I work with, we because they’ve got like four thousand products, what we do is we run this price benchmark script that tags all the products where they’re like really competitive on price. And then we just set up a campaign and advertise those because we know when they go into the shopping network, they’re probably gonna be the the best price competitive option in that shopping network and they just convert so much better. So yeah there’s so many things. We we need another call on AI specifically because we’re running out of time for this

Charles Travers: Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: show. But yeah we covered it covered a little bit. I think just to recap it a little bit start of the show like know your numbers. You need to know where you need to be at to be to be profitable basically. And then number two, like if you can if you can work on systems to improve your own like output and your effectiveness and save time. start to experiment with that a little bit. Start thinking about Black Friday too. We’re gonna be chatting about Black Friday a lot in the next kind of coming weeks because it’s a topic that everyone wants to know about this time of year and especially like what we’re doing and what we’re testing. And yeah, if you’ve got any questions, you can always feel free to reach out to us. comment on the YouTube videos at e-commerce marketing chats or join us in the Facebook group at e-commerce Shopify Marketing Secrets on Facebook. and Yeah, until we might call it a wrap this week. It we could have kept talking for ages. I feel like ’cause we haven’t caught up in a couple of weeks, Charles, this one probably could have gone for an hour. But we will

Charles Travers: Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: check back in with you guys next week and give you another value packed episode then. Take care. Speak soon.

Charles Travers: See you next time guys.