The 2024 holiday season is full of challenges and opportunities for the strategic marketers. Watch Amsive and Google experts discuss audience segmentation, promotion balance, and multichannel marketing strategies for eCommerce success.

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Ruben Quinones (00:02): 

All right there. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Whenever you’re watching this, wherever you’re watching this. My name is Ruben Quinones. I’m the SVP Client Strategy here at Amsive. We’re a performance marketing agency and every three weeks we are putting together a livestream, particularly around eCommerce and retail. And we are heading into one of the most busiest, hectic times in retail. So we thought it would be great to actually have a conversation about what are the essential things to know going into the season in Q4.  

And I’ve got two of some of my favorite people to actually have this conversation with Inna Zieger and AJ Magali. If you want to comment on LinkedIn, we’re on LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook. Or now they call him Meta. I guess you can comment there. We’ll keep an eye on it. So today we’re going to go over essentials going into Q4, but also talk about different personas and how to market to them as well. So my first guest is someone that I’ve known well over a decade and is now the SVP of Digital Media Inna Zeyger. Hey Inna, how are you? 

Inna Zeyger (01:24): 

Hi Ruben, how are you? I didn’t see you there. And you can drop the S, just the VP Digital media. Yeah, but thank you for the promotion. 

Ruben Quinones (01:33): 

Is that right? Did I put it down there? Right? I just want to make sure. Sure. 

Inna Zeyger (01:36): 

It sure is really excited to have this conversation. For those of you that don’t know me, hi, I’m Inna and I oversee our digital media team. So anything paid, search, paid, social, programmatic, OTT, CTV, I can go on and on with the list of acronyms because there are so many. But really anything that you’re putting media dollars behind.  

And I love eCommerce, the Super Bowl coming up of eCommerce. So this is a very exciting time, a very busy time, but so, so much fun if you’re really living in the world of eCommerce and also some late nights too, but really excited to have this conversation and talk to Ruben and then AJ as well. 

Ruben Quinones (02:20): 

Very good. And our second guess is special because he’s at Google now, but he used to work with us. He was our one and very own AJ Magali. I’ll bring him into the room. Hey aj, how are you? 

AJ Magali (02:33): 

Good morning, Ruben. How are you today? 

Ruben Quinones (02:36): 

Doing good. Doing good. Are you feeling okay today? 

AJ Magali (02:40): 

Well, I’m a little under the weather, but it’s not, 

Ruben Quinones (02:43): 

We had a very interesting pre-show. You guys aren’t brave enough to talk about it now. How are you now that you’re on a live stream? You guys are quiet. 

AJ Magali (02:55): 

I manage the Google and agency relationship for Amsive, but as Ruben alluded to, I spent 10 years in digital media and three of those wonderful years was unfortunately working alongside Ruben, but it was great working with Inna, so. 

Ruben Quinones (03:10): 

Did you say fortunately or unfortunately, I didn’t know if I caught that. 

AJ Magali (03:13): 

Unfortunately for you. Yes. 

Key Themes for Holiday Shopping 2024

Ruben Quinones (03:18): 

Well, thank you for coming on again. I know you did our very first live stream a couple of months ago, and here we are again continuing to do this and this conversation is about talking about the challenges in the marketplace and what do we see from an agency perspective, but also from a Google perspective. Obviously a great partner with us. 

So I guess we’ll dive right into it. I guess going into Q4, what are kind of the elements that we need to be aware of that would be different I guess, than prior years? 

AJ Magali (03:57): 

Yeah, there’s three large themes that we look at when it comes to the holidays this year. The first one as evident through the economy and things that are happening from a macroeconomic standpoint, interest rates are making it very, very difficult for Americans to purchase. There’s a lot more financial stress. So from what I’ve seen, for example, people will be using credit more so than any time in the last five years when it comes to their holiday shopping. And that’s going to put a lot of undue stress on the families that are trying to make things great during the holiday season.  

The second part of that is we have five fewer days of shopping during the holidays this year. Thanksgiving unfortunately is a little bit later this year though. I feel like it kind of happens like every other year or so this kind of thing happens, but you’re facing a more condensed holiday season and therefore there’s a lot more pressure for retailers to really make it count with less days in the year. And then, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s a really, really big thing happening in November around the election.  

So oftentimes what ends up happening during the holidays when people, their attentions are a little bit more fragmented, some of them could be thinking about the balance in our country and more so than what I should be buying for Christmas. So it’ll delay some of the holiday shopping, but we do think that there’s going to be an uptick in about a week or a week and a half after the election. 

Ruben Quinones (05:25): 

And I think we have a nice slide showing the trend from 2020, right? That’s obviously the last reference that we have versus last year that we’ll certainly look at. So I guess with that, any thoughts on how that changes the trajectory of marketing to this group in general? 

Inna Zeyger (05:48): 

It sure does. So one of the more impactful challenges with fewer days during the post cyber, I guess Monday, Friday, we all know that that whole timeframe has been extended. It’s sort of like Halloween right after Labor Day. Everybody’s pushing candy corn the second that Labor Day ends.  

The Cyber Monday, cyber Friday period is really more of a cyber month, maybe longer, but with it still being condensed and with the bulk of that spending and also purchasing happening between Cyber Friday, cyber Monday still occurring, where we see those peaks, typically there will be more competition in the auction. So it just will have to be kind of condensed into a much smaller period. So do expect CPCs to increase quite a bit, but what I’ll say is there’s plenty of ways to combat that, which I’m sure we’ll be able to talk about that. A lot of it is audiences and also other areas of opportunity, but we can talk quite a bit more about that. 

The other thing I’ll add is with an election coming up, while there are people that are less likely to make purchases ahead of the election, it’s the types of purchases too that matter because you’ll usually see people not purchasing big ticket items or more expensive items ahead of the election. So we’re talking about cars, appliances, couches, things like that, that typically are going to be just more expensive. They want to see what happens when the election is decided and then start making those purchases again. So you typically will be a pretty consistent trend in the regular items that people would be buying. So that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to be extra careful about investing media dollars ahead of the election. 

It just means you have to be mindful of the vertical that you’re in. And one more thing, there’s always one more thing. I know we talked a lot about the us, but with e-com you have a lot of international clients, so there’s different considerations, especially if you’re advertising outside of the United States.  

We do see impact of the US election across the world in terms of purchase decisions, but obviously less so if you are an international e-com reseller, retailer, whatever you may be brand, there’s areas of opportunity there too where we won’t see the same sort of behaviors and other shopping holidays as well to be mindful of not just Cyber Monday and Cyber on Black Friday. 

Ruben Quinones (08:30): 

And actually I do put that graphic up here as far as expectations. So that AJ,  correct me if I’m wrong, that blue line is the last election period, the average. And so the idea is that there’ll be a delayed spike, right? Seven to nine days after voting day. 

AJ Magali (08:52): 

Yeah. But it doesn’t mean that the consideration around that time doesn’t make sense because as you probably all know, to get into the minds of people to get them as part of their considerations that you still need to market to a certain degree. But there will be a little bit of a downturn around election times in terms of the actual shopping behaviors. But we do expect that to grow, let’s say like a week, a week and a half after the election. So be ready with your promotions, be ready with any incentives that you might have during that time period. 

Understanding Shopper Personas

Ruben Quinones (09:23): 

Yeah, very good. I guess with that information in mind, you shared some slides with me as far as how Google thinks about marketing to the different seasons, and you guys came up with these great personas. I’ll put it up here, but maybe you can kind of give me some color as to, Hey, why these individuals and where they fit in the different seasons, and then we’ll do a deeper dive in each one of them as well. 

AJ Magali (09:51): 

Yeah, totally. We can start off on the left. So as the name suggests that it’s very, the deliberate users are the people who are purchasing at the very, very beginning of the holiday season. I’m admittedly one of those people because I really, really hate the mad rush of people going into the mall. I don’t like waiting for things I would rather get it over with as much as possible.  

But that being said, those types of folks shop early, but they always spread their purchases throughout the entirety of the October to November time period. Part of that is to conserve all the dollars that they currently have. Part of that is to also do some research on what gifts are available for them. Once we get into that cyber, what we like to call it in Google Cyber 12, that’s when you really get your deal seeking motions. 

Those folks are looking for any and any possible promotions that are out there. We found out that 74% of folks last year during the holiday season chose what they purchased based on the best deal that they received. So this is a really, really great time to make sure that all your promotions are available. Inna is one of those folks, and I will say as a gift giver, Inna is amazing.  

So make sure that you try to fall into  gift giving list once you get into the holidays. The next one is you have your determined folks. I like to call them, like, Hey, my bad, I totally forgot it’s the holidays and now I have to shop for everybody, my family—Ruben falls into that position, but that’s actually your December purchasers. One thing that’s really standing out to me and looking at all the statistics, so I kind of wrote this down, what I found out was the 12 days before Christmas generated 22 billion in actual spend per day. 

You can’t sleep on December. December in its own, I believe had almost doubled the demand that Cyber 12 had. So you don’t want to sleep during that time period, but you also want to make sure that you’re talking about the urgency of the matter of having your gifts on time. There’s only one weekend of ground shipping during that time period. So it’s really, really important that anything that’s related to get it as quickly as possible, omnichannel becomes a really, really big one as well. Making sure that buy online, pickup in store options are available for you.  

And then once you end Christmas, this is when you get into the devoted time period. Going back to me a little bit, I saw the holiday season, I kind of did some research, what kind of new brands I kind of want to try now that they’ve been shopping for other people, it’s now time for me to stop shopping for sisters, and that’s where the devoted folks kind start. So you want to try to this a really, really good time as a brand to create a relationship with your users so that in 2025 you can hit them with as many promotions as you can. 

Strategies for the Deliberate Shopper

Ruben Quinones (12:38): 

No, I mean this is a great way to kind of look at it. It’s always pre, it usually was in three parts. You can correct me if I’m wrong. I always thought of it in three parts. It’s like pre-holiday during holiday, post holiday. But this kind of puts more, I guess more emphasis on, hey, in 2024, how are we seeing it based on previous trends? And again, some great data from Google as well. So I guess we will dive into each one. I don’t know if you had anything to add to this, but I think it’s pretty self-explanatory and AJ kind of killed it. 

Inna Zeyger (13:14): 

He really did. 

Ruben Quinones (13:16): 

Yeah. I wanted to do a deeper dive into each one of these personas at least a little bit as far as what trends we should consider, like the deliberate folks, right? The October, November. Is that the Inna folks or is she November? 

AJ Magali (13:33): 

No, that would be more me. 

Inna Zeyger (13:34): 

Deal shopper. I’m like, show me the deal. 

AJ Magali (13:40): 

For these guys. You want to make sure that– 

Ruben Quinones (13:44): 

You before, but just for those, because Cyber 12 is more of a Google term, right? Can you explain what Cyber 12 is? 

AJ Magali (13:50): 

Yeah, I feel like we’ve called it several different things. They called it cyber week Cyber five, and now it’s expanded to Cyber 12. The reason why we call it Cyber 12 is that we’ve started to realize that the Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday days are no longer just the top days of the holidays. It is also inclusive of the shoulder days that are leading to the Thanksgiving holiday and the days after that.  

So for example, the two days, the three days before Thanksgiving, that Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, it becomes a heavy shopping period as we see large numbers of retailers are starting to get in there promoting their Thanksgiving sales that kind of get capped off into Thanksgiving and Black Friday. But that being said, people are purchasing during the time period and then once he hits Cyber Monday, people might think, okay, that’s when all of the demand goes away. It’s not necessarily true. It goes all the way up to Super Saturday, if I’m not mistaken. 

I think Super Saturday in itself had generated more demand. Black Friday did, sorry. Then Cyber Monday did. So there’s a lot of demand in the shoulder days around holidays. But that being said, cyber week, cyber five is really, really crucial for the holiday season. 

Ruben Quinones (15:03): 

AJ, that blue line there is that the brand searches relative, I guess to generic, I don’t know, generic searches.  

AJ Magali (15:10): 

Generic searches. So anything that’s related to where you would get the brand is people already know who you are, they already think about you as an option, but that doesn’t mean that that’s the only thing you need to protect during the season. You want to make sure you’re showing up for core products like the sweaters, sweaters on sale, wherever you want to purchase. This is a really, really big important thing, especially the more niche your product becomes, the more it’s imperative that you need to show up for those searches. So for example, I don’t know, sorry, I’m going down an Etsy rabbit hole as I’m planning, 

Ruben Quinones (15:44): 

And again, we’re just, so for the audience talking about Google search specifically here, right? 

AJ Magali (15:49): 

Yeah. 

Ruben Quinones (15:50): 

Yep. 

AJ Magali (15:51): 

Yes sir. I think you wanted to add on a couple of things around the brand and generic searches around that. 

Inna Zeyger (15:58): 

Sure. But I think one thing, what I want to talk a little bit about is, I know you’re on the Google side, but there’s similar trends that we see with retail.com as well. So one thing that you noted AJ, was that people are much more open to new brands or areas that they may not have previously purchased during this period.  

So if you are an Amazon shopper in you’re advertising on Amazon, I think I’m sure many of you see or behave in this way, you will just add random things to your cart during the cyber period just because they’re probably low cost, you’re already spending quite a bit of money, and so what’s a couple of dollars more? So we do see quite a bit of that behavior that occurs not just on Google, but in general for any sort of retail.com or even just on sites especially.  

And then again, this is not tied to the paid media side, but we often see that from a site perspective, this is a really good opportunity if you don’t have this feature already available on your site too. If somebody is adding something to cart upselling or trying to add complimentary products or offering those or deals on those items when somebody is at checkout. So not necessarily tied to paid, but really is a good prime time to have that function available because people are more likely to just add to cart. 

AJ Magali (17:26): 

Actually, I wanted to add something to Inna’s point about the retail dot com’s trend. A really cool stat I saw was that during the time before cyber, that cyber week, people spend around there, spend 6 billion minutes spent in shopping apps before the season, like doing research favoring things, A big favorite person because I want to return back to the cart at some point. And then around that time there’s also 16 million shopping ad downloads that happened during that time period.  

So this is a really, really good chance to in’s point retail.com, if you’re one of those and you have apps that are currently available for you, this is a really good time to become part of the consideration set for these users. 

Ruben Quinones (18:12): 

The way I’m reading this guys is if you’re not a well-known retailer, it looks like your opportunity is before then, right before people start thinking about the brand. So it’s good to kind of, alright, well if I’m a new retailer, it looks like there’s a good window of opportunity because the deliberate folks might be, again, being deliberate about researching and comparing products, solutions, et cetera. This is great. I guess we’ll transition to, 

Inna Zeyger (18:45): 

Before we do that though, add some very practical applications of how to target those users, especially 

Ruben Quinones (18:53): 

My next slide. You took it out of me, but go ahead. 

Inna Zeyger (18:58): 

Well, yeah, but this is just a super practical action item that you can take. So this is where if you are running on generic keywords, and it’s critical to get that traffic to your site from those generic keyword terms, because those do spike up quite a bit in that earlier period. So getting them to the site when they’re in that sort of shopping around consideration phase, things like remarketing lists for search ads, that’s a pretty big and solid tactic if they start searching for those keywords. Again, remarketing is pretty critical because you do want to stay quite top of mind. 

Ruben Quinones (19:35): 

I wanted to simplify that, right, because explain what RSA is. So someone who has previously searched, you’re bucketing them into their own audience within Google. 

Inna Zeyger (19:48): 

So it’s like keyword based remarketing on Google, but then you can also do more traditional remarketing to users who’ve been to the site. And a really good way to do that is, again, you can use UTMs, you can use other ways to differentiate those shoppers that have landed on your site that maybe have never visited your site previously. That’s their first visit. Like Google Analytics is a really great place to create those lists so you can target those users in a different way than maybe you would be remarketing to a user who is already a current customer or has engaged with your site previously. 

Ruben Quinones (20:31): 

So there’s efficiencies there, number one, but number two, multiple touches with that audience as opposed to just broad-based marketing. So good stuff. Anything else to add here as far as marketing to the deliberate audience? I mean, there’s a few bullets here. I just want to make sure you do this AI powered video, is that within the Google search platform or Google provides that? 

AJ Magali (20:53): 

I believe that is getting available into the platform. I believe it was rolling out as a beta as Google Marketing live, but I can send some confirmation around that later. 

Targeting the Deal-Seeking Audience

Ruben Quinones (21:03): 

But in general, I mean, just seeing how just the dysfunctions of creating for display over the last few years in the platform are amazing. You actually not need a creative department, but it’s evolved where you don’t need, you can have standup creative to actually run display until you can actually get creative that you would want ideally. So it’s not a barrier to be in the market essentially. Alright, so that’s the deliberate audience. How about this next audience, which is the deal seeking audience that is the Inna audience, and again, we talked about Cyber 12, but it’s being led by digital. AJ, a little bit about this. 

AJ Magali (21:52): 

Yeah, so what’s great about the fact that it’s being led by digital is that the stat that jumps into me is two thirds of the people who wanted to purchase something during the holiday season waited until promotions were available. A lot of them did their research during this time period. They spent, I want to say 20% of their spend was around this time period.  

So it’s really, really important that you try to align, if you’re a retailer, you want to align your promotions around this time period about when the demand is, because oftentimes I’ve seen a really good or big pitfall that I’ve seen from some retailers is that they’ll have promotions when the demand is not there to try to generate false demand, whatever it might be. You want to try to align your promotion based on protecting your margins.  

So when the demand is there, that’s when you want to have the highest amount of promotion possible. That usually falls around like your Thanksgiving, black Friday time period. But let’s not forget about those torso days that are around them. Having a blanket promotion that either goes up and down depending on the day is really, really important. I’m sure Inna you’ve probably tested something very similar from a creative standpoint on some of your search ads as well as digital media campaigns. 

…She nods approval. 

Inna Zeyger (23:14): 

I know that’s an affirmative. 

Ruben Quinones (23:16): 

I’m very looking at this chart. I was surprised to see that three days, is that three days after Cyber Monday a dip in store? That’s interesting to see. So it’s like this heavier reliance on digitally leading digitally in marketing. Very interesting.  

AJ Magali (23:33): 

There’s also the convenience factor to that, right? A lot of people, for example, myself, I hate going to shopping malls. It’s nothing against that going to a brick and mortar. I just don’t want to be stuck in a rush of people. I hate having to deal with traffic, I hate having to find parking and all of that. So there’s a certain level of convenience that comes to that. I think that’s when the promotions are available, even as little as free shipping or something along those lines.  

Anything that increases the convenience for the user and as well tied to a very, very strong promotion, people will gravitate towards that and hopefully they’ll buy from your store more than the next guy. 

Optimizing Campaigns for Profitability

Ruben Quinones (24:14): 

So I think this next slide talks about the three year average. So for this particular audience, what is this telling us, right? 

AJ Magali (24:23): 

Yeah, so this is telling us that if you’re a retailer, I alluded to this earlier, your promotional point of view should be aligned where the demand is. So for example, in this specific case, black Friday, cyber Monday as the biggest shopping days of the year should have the highest level of discounts. But as you see, there’s a tiered strategy when it comes to this going into early November.  

You start providing a certain level of promotion to try to ease people into wanting to purchase. A lot of people call it their pre-Black Friday sale or extended Black Friday sale, whatever it might be, but it’s a good way to get people into the store. Maybe if the need is really, really important or they think it’s a deal that’s really good, they’ll go ahead and pull the trigger. But sometimes you’ll also get people who will put it in the cart and wait until the Black Friday, Cyber Monday Day to purchase since when the majority of the promotions are. 

That being said, there’s still going to be some demand on that December time period, which is where we’re starting to see some of that promotional timing kind of taper off a little bit. It’s really good to kind of check out there’s those two little spikes on the average. From a demand standpoint, you want to try to still be there because people are wanting to purchase your product. They’re wanting to get, they have a need for your product, especially during the holiday season. What’s the best way for us to get them to purchase our product compared to somebody by providing them with a promotion? 

Ruben Quinones (25:51): 

Right. So—sorry.  

Inna Zeyger (25:55): 

Yeah, and I definitely want to add to that because I think I work with a number of clients currently over the years who also are a little bit averse to having heavy promotions or just really don’t want to undervalue the brand with promotions and work with the ones that are always on sale versus the ones who never want to be on sale. So there’s also ways to handle that to make sure that you are keeping your average order value on the higher side, because I think the more we discount, you start seeing people buying fewer products or buying the one thing or maybe buying multiple things, but you’re trying to essentially put yourself in a position where the amount that you’re discounting is not going to drop your return on ad spend too aggressively or your average order value.  

So just promotions that can be very effective to keep your average order value up and have that balance like a buy more, save more type of promotion is very effective. Or having a minimum level of spend to get a certain promotion really does help and still incentivize people to purchase. They still get an offer, but it really can offset some of the discounts that you may be putting out to customers. So that’s one way to really not decrease your return on ad spend, even though you’re getting quite a few more orders coming out of it. 

Ruben Quinones (27:20): 

I put this one up because we’re talking about spending and shifting and spending, go ahead. 

AJ Magali (27:27): 

No, actually one thing I wanted to add. To Inna’s point, one of the cooler things that you can play with in the Google as far as the performance max campaigns and the shopping capabilities of it, one of the cooler things that you can play with is the merchant center feed. Like having worked in retail for the first couple of years that I was here in Google, we would play with the merchant center feed to group products based on their margins, for example.  

So if you want to increase the exposure of your margin based of your lower margin product, or sorry, higher margin products to make the most out of your profit, there’s some bidding strategies that you can employ can leave them in their own smart shopping Performance Max campaign. You can set the level of efficiency to something a little bit lower, it’s going to increase the total amount of exposure, hopefully leading to more conversions. 

But since the profit margins are going to be a little bit wider, hopefully there’s more money in your pocket. But for things that are going to cost you a lot more to produce or market and to sell, you might want to put them into a separate campaign, maybe lower or sorry, increase the efficiency of the target ROAS that you’re currently using so that you’re really making it count as much as possible where you’re only paying for things that are for a fact, they’re going to generate a certain level of revenue. 

Ruben Quinones (28:47): 

So headline from that, if I’m just more the marketing director type is, Hey, if I’m working with an agency or in-House, person is ask the right question is, Hey, are we segmenting our higher margin campaigns versus lower profitable campaigns at the very least that at least start the conversation and or get them to start thinking about grouping those campaigns. I always tell marketers that are like, think of this as buckets of money, right? 

AJ Magali (29:16): 

Yeah. 

Ruben Quinones (29:17): 

Separate the buckets out so that you’re saturating your more profitable campaigns essentially is what you’re alluding to, AJ. 

AJ Magali (29:25): 

Yeah. One of the bigger issues I’ve seen is that you’ll see a marketer who will tell you, Hey, for my entirety of my business, I need to maintain a ROAS of 10 or a ROAS of five. 

I like the fact that they really care about the profitability of their business. I question whether are we looking at the business as proper as possible? Because a aurora as a five may just plateau you to a certain level of conversions on a monthly basis or prevent you from showing up from things like people could be buying higher ticket items that have a higher profit margin, and sometimes there could be just a situation where some marketers may not know exactly what the profit margins are on a product by product basis.  

What I love about eCommerce is that there’s the added benefit of the instant result. I don’t know if that excites you guys too, but I love looking at the return on ad spend when I’m running a paid search campaign because I know for a fact how much money I’m bringing back to the client. Now, if you throw in the profitability with that, it’s a much better conversation. You can say that at the end of the day when it’s like, Hey, I brought you $3,000 in revenue, or Hey, I’ve given you $10,000 that’s going straight to your wallet.  

It becomes a much more powerful conversation. So understanding what the profit margins are, being able to create multiple campaigns that will hopefully increase your ability to drive profit home into your wallets are usually the best strategies that I like to employ for my clients. 

Ruben Quinones (30:59): 

Yeah, no, good. 

Balancing Traditional and Performance Max Campaigns

Inna Zeyger (31:01): 

Yeah, this is such a common, I mean, but the other, there’s two things a lot to that I know we keep on adding because I feel like this is just normal conversation of this. So to AJ’s point, the profit margin is pretty critical. What I see structurally, especially more recently, like auditing accounts and inheriting structures that have existed for a long time is typically I’ll see clients have just category based groupings, whether it’s PMax or whether it’s shopping campaigns.  

So they’ll just do like, okay, here’s this specific product category. All of my products are in there. There’s assumptions that because it’s the same type of product that they’re all going to have the same profit margin, but that’s not always the case. So I see so much of that where when you really start digging into the weeds, you’ll start seeing, well, some of those products have a much higher cost of goods sold even though it’s the same product category. 

So to AJ’s point, grouping by profit margin is one way. Another way that we’ve been grouping is, and it’s pretty much recency of purchase, especially with Performance Max. So for example, you’ll have products that sell very, very frequently and they sell at a high volume. So those should be grouped together. They may have different profit margins or they might have similar ones that’s sort of less relevant at that point, but they just sell it quite a bit.  

And you want to be able to control how much you’re investing in, how many media dollars you’re investing there, but then going to have another group of products that sell at a medium frequency, and then there’s the ones that rarely sell, and so that’s less tied to the product category and tied to giving those products that sell quite frequently, a better chance of selling more of those products, and then also maintaining that profitability by using TROAS bidding with those products so that way you’re not missing out on the fact that they sell at a high frequency.  

You can also make sure you’re setting those guardrails around them becoming unprofitable. So that’s been a really successful way of structuring campaigns in addition to just structuring by profit margin as well.

Ruben Quinones (33:17): 

So on a kind of 30,000 foot view, we’re talking PMax, so performance Max newer I’d say last couple years. For those that don’t know it, it’s basically a combination of display search, really the ecosystem of Google all in one campaign. But Ian, would you agree going into Q4, since we’re talking about essentials for Q4, we’re still leveraging both the traditional channels within Google as well as 

Inna Zeyger (33:51): 

Yes. 

Ruben Quinones (33:51): 

Even though Connect is a combination of all that retailing. 

Inna Zeyger (33:55): 

Yeah, so I don’t know. I might get my hand slapped by Google for this one, but it’s also, I can only speak to what I’ve been seeing throughout accounts or accounts that’ve been auditing recently. And it’s been interesting because we still look at PMax as a supplement to other campaign types, not a replacement. And so I’ve been seeing a lot of accounts that have traditional paid search campaigns and they’ve sunsetted shopping campaigns, or maybe they’re only running one shopping campaign and then everything else has been replaced with PMax. I am totally aligned that advertisers brands should be testing PMax and should be using it, but I really think we need to make sure that we’re not completely eliminating traditional shopping campaigns or traditional video campaigns because it does give us finer control of where we’re serving and allows us to really determine for things like PMax, which products maybe should be going into Max or which product category should be going into PMax. 

Because again, not every advertiser will also have all of the assets needed, so like video image assets needed for Max and may also have very restrictive brand guidelines where some of those AI features or auto created videos or images might not be an option for them. So that’s why you definitely don’t want to just eliminate some of the traditional campaign types in favor of PMax or Demand Gen.  

I think there has to be a balance between the two, but Google has told us like PMax demand gen, those are areas that they’re very clearly moving words, but don’t ignore the traditional campaigns. They’re quite useful, and again, it should be used as the primary and PMax demand gen as a supplement. They have different goals. 

AJ Magali (35:57): 

Yeah, 

Ruben Quinones (35:58): 

Sorry, go ahead. 

AJ Magali (35:59): 

No, I was going to say like bottle on that one. I’m just kidding. Inna is right for me. 

Inna Zeyger (36:06): 

Yay! I love hearing anyone say that. 

AJ Magali (36:09): 

To give a sports analogy in this situation, I like to think of paid search as your first, second, and third baseman. PMax is your outfield. They’re outfielders. They’re there to catch anything that your traditional paid search campaigns are designed. It’s designed to be work in accordance to your brand search campaigns, your generic search campaigns, because at the end of the day, you still have a better idea what your product is, who’s buying your product. 

Hopefully there’s a lot of psychological points of view that you have as a marketer to understand here, this is the kinds of queries that are driving the searches for my product. Here is the mindset of the people that are currently going after my product. And then you can’t even stress the importance of brand. You want to make sure that you’re still as fortified as possible when it comes to brand search. That being said, you’re not going to be able to catch every single keyword out there.  

There are what, a hundred thousand new keywords on a daily basis every single day that gets created, and that’s where Performance Max kind of falls in. We’re here to make sure that those types of terms are not avoided. 

Ruben Quinones (37:15): 

Did “they eat that Cats and Dogs surge” this week? 

AJ Magali (37:20): 

Wow, you really did go for it. Wow. No. So the other avenue, and Inna kind of alluded to this too, it’s how the campaigns also get measured because sometimes I’m a full 100% somebody who supports the Performance Max campaigns. I think there’s a lot of, the great thing about the AI tool that we currently have is that we are designed to find people who are likely to convert for whatever it is that you’re trying to do on the site. That being said, there’s a certain level of limitation when it comes to Performance Max in terms of the exposure.  

There’s going to be your marketers in the world who maybe rely on marketing mix modeling as the number one basis of truth for them, where a normal shopping campaigns would do. So my suggestion is just work at this with your Google account leads. I’m sure they’ll have some solutions that are available for you. 

But that being said, we are moving to a place where understanding the audience behavior that’s leading to the purchase and hopefully making a predictable assumption as to when they’re going to purchase and when we should be bidding more for those types of people. We are moving into that space, especially with the growth of AI and all of that. So that’s what things like Performance Max is trying to take care of at some point.  

Demand Gen, the great thing about Demand Gen right now is that you can still control the audiences you’re going after, but Performance Max, as the name suggests, it’s designed to close the deal. So 

Ruben Quinones (38:51): 

Headline, I guess headline would be for this Q4, diversification is key, at least within the Google ecosystem. That may change in the next year or two, but that’s key. I did want to land the plane on the personas, right? We had two. 

Inna Zeyger (39:03): 

Oh yeah, that’s right. That’s what we were talking about.  

Capturing the Determined Late Shoppers

Ruben Quinones (39:06): 

So what we need to know about the determined audience, this is the, I think my audience. 

Inna Zeyger (39:12): 

Yes, that’s you.

AJ Magali (39:12): 

Yes. This is what I think of. Also, for some reason, Ruben, you just reminded me of Sinbad in that movie where Arnold Schwarzenegger was it Jingle All the Way? Just reminded me of that. For some reason as we talk about that I want to say about determined audiences is that you cannot close the gap on December. December is still by far a very, very important time period because exactly like people like Ruben who don’t want to do any research or get prepared before Christmas is ready, you want to make sure that you’re capturing those users as well. For example, shopper spend in December is actually almost double than what it is on Cyber 12.  

There’s a lot of demand currently generated for this. The one downside is that you really have one less shopping, sorry, shipping weekend that’s available in December because it’s a later time of the year. 

So you’re going to see a lot of omnichannel strategies kind of go into play. There’s especially in the five days before the holidays, you want to make sure that if you have the ability to buy online, pickup in store, provide an omnichannel experience, this is the right time to do that. There’s a certain level of convenience to it. There’s a certain level of promotion that’s available to it, but most importantly, the person is getting the product that they’re looking for before Christmas so they have time to wrap the presents.  

Or if you’re Ruben, you’ll just buy a ribbon that you’ll just put on top of the product and then here you go, Merry Christmas, kids. 

Ruben Quinones (40:46): 

Disappointed family, either way. Inna, anything to add. 

Inna Zeyger (40:49): 

Well, Ruben used to have people that helped him buy all of those things, but now he’s alone remote. He’s all alone, all alone. He has to figure it out on his own. 

Ruben Quinones (41:01): 

Last, oh, I’m sorry. 

Inna Zeyger (41:05): 

I do want to add something. So this is me coming from the omnichannel on the media side. So, we often see that a lot of advertisers clients have a shipping cutoff halfway through December. December 13th through 17th is usually the last stretch to be able to get it with regular shipping. Then you start going into overnight, two day and so on. We often advise, especially for advertisers who are on Amazon or on retail.com, like a walmart.com, you can actually shift over your advertising on Google or on Meta or other areas to drive to Amazon or to Walmart so long as they have those two day shipping options that might be extending their ability to send things out.  

So it may not be on your own dot com, but you can definitely sell more product if you are on retail.com and there’s still more of a bigger window to be able to get the product out to the customers before the holidays. So something pretty easy to do, but definitely something you should plan for and obviously you would need to be selling on Amazon or another retail.com. 

Strategies for Post-Holiday Shopping

Ruben Quinones (42:22): 

Great. Last but not least, we’ve got the devoted audience. What do we need to know about these folks? 

AJ Magali (42:27): 

All I’m going to say about this is that there’s 47, as of last year, there was $47 billion that was spent after Christmas. Part of that is you could be looking for your New Year Eve outfit or whatever that may look like. Part of that is that you’re trying to make a large purchase after the holidays. Maybe the things that are left over from an inventory standpoint that you want to get a large number of high ticket items. This is usually where it happens. Appliance is a really, really big one for this gym.  

Equipment always a big one because as you’re trying to get into the new year, new you type attitude, this kind of falls into that as well. But this is also a really, really good opportunity for advertisers to create a relationship with their clients. This is the time when you want to build, Hey, here’s some promotions that we have available for you. Check out our products. If you think our products going to be really, really good for you, send them, put them in an email list. Make sure that you’re marketing to them over and over again so that you can get the lifetime value, but this is the best time to kind of do it. 

Inna Zeyger (43:29): 

Also a really good time to build awareness as well. So we typically see, obviously everybody is in the auction just right ahead of Christmas, so I know if Google Stroll a refers to it that way or it’s more universal, but Q five pretty much leading up to Christmas and then immediately after through the new year CPC is dip competitors remove themselves from the auction because they don’t want to be in the auction. They’ve sold their stuff.  

So it’s a huge opportunity to be able to still get in at a significantly lower cost than you would’ve gotten in if it was during the big holiday rush. So that’s a big area of opportunity, big area of opportunity for brand awareness efforts and to AJ’s point, retargeting, building that relationship. One thing I’d also add is for international, it doesn’t really end. We have a Boxing Day on the 26th of December. You also have large swats of people and populations that it’s not just Christmas.  

So I’ll give you an example for me. I’m Eastern European. We exchange gifts on New Year’s Day and have been doing that. So there’s going to be some of those last minute shoppers that are going to be trying to find gifts for New Year’s Day and then further down in January for other groups. So there’s still plenty of areas of opportunity, not just with the traditional sort of Christmas shopping timeframe, 

Ruben Quinones (45:03): 

But I would say it looks like this probably more favors the branded retailers. So if I’m going to spend money as a retailer that’s not well known, maybe this is not as relevant. Maybe the first audience might make sense. 

AJ Magali (45:23): 

This might be a really good opportunity for you to create people who visited your site but didn’t convert because you never want to close the door on somebody who could potentially purchase with you. So this is being mindful of your audience strategy and how you choose to remarket to them based on promotions. What type of products do you want to call out? By the way, Ruben, around this time frame, I’m going to expect a gift card from you because you’re late in purchasing my gift. So I would expect a really nice gift card from you around this time period. But that being said, this is a really good time to revisit your audience strategy. What are the cost of action? What are the value propositions that you want to build with these users? I wouldn’t necessarily close the door for this for a smaller brand. 

Ruben Quinones (46:07): 

And I guess to wrap this all up, maybe this. 

Leveraging Audience Segmentation for Future Campaigns

Inna Zeyger (46:10): 

I got one though. I got one more. So I want to wrap up something around holistically around all of the audiences. So if you haven’t done so yet for this holiday season, might be a really good opportunity for advertisers to do this for I guess next year or if you have email lists or anything of this sort.  

One really effective way to sort of segment these users or these types of shoppers is you can build audience lists based on when people have purchased. So we went through these different shopper personas. You can go back in GA4. You can go back into your email lists and find people who were early purchasers ahead of block Friday, Cyber Monday, create a list of those users, create a list of shoppers purchasers who shopped only during Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Then create a list of those that chopped afterwards for up until the Christmas shipping cutoff deadline and those that chopped after Christmas after the main holiday push. 

And it’s a great opportunity to pass those audiences into Google ads, into meta, into really into any sort of CTV, OTT, programmatic platform and build lookalike audiences off of those users. So then that way you’ll be able to leverage those because hopefully, fingers crossed, I know it’s still a little bit black box with how those are determined and your audiences are large enough, you can, they’ll have similar enough characteristics and then you can essentially find people who are more likely to purchase during those timeframes and analyze the differences in their behavior.  

So if you have email lists, if you have purchaser data, great opportunity to do that. Now you can also do that from a pixel based basis, but obviously you’d have to do that for this upcoming one if you haven’t done it yet, and then to use it all in year. So that’s how we typically like to at least define some of those audiences and how their behaviors change the shopping period. 

Ruben Quinones (48:24): 

Good stuff. I have a wrap up I guess for all of these audiences, how we should be thinking about each audience and between researching when they’re spending. aj, is there a good wrap up to this.

AJ Magali (48:41): 

It’s about timing. Most of these audiences are based on the time period that they’re going, but I feel like Inna alluded to this earlier holiday season starts earlier and earlier every year. So if you haven’t yet, this is a really good time to start building some of that strategy that’s available. It’s not when during the deliberate time period, start creating that relationship with these types of users as early as now even should have done this two weeks ago, three weeks ago. 

You want to make sure that you’re in that consideration set as we’re getting into the deal seeking time period, provide previous of what your sales are going to look like, you won’t entice them with promotions and all of that in the time period leading into the holidays. And then as we get into determined slash the December time period, be mindful that there is still a decent amount of demand during that. We’re working on a much more condensed holiday period. 

So be weary of the promotions that you’re currently providing during then the offers that are available. And then once you exit December, capitalize on the loyalty demand that you’re getting. 

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Ruben Quinones (49:51): 

Good stuff. Yeah, I got to thank you. This is a lot of information that we were just went through, so feel free to, and actually AJ, are you okay if I share some of these slides? If people just reach out to me, just a modified version, that’d be great. So I wish you guys a lot of success going into Q4. We’ll be doing this again in three weeks, not with AJ, but probably in a few months. Thank you, AJ. I appreciate it. Any, I guess, did you come in first, I forget? 

Inna Zeyger (50:20): 

Sure.

Ruben Quinones (50:20): 

Yeah. Any parting thoughts before I let you go? 

Inna Zeyger (50:24): 

Can’t wait for eComm. It’s the super, it’s super fun. I dunno, I love it. It’s like seeing all the conversions roll in is so, so exciting and I’m really excited to work on our clients and meet more people in the e-comm space. Feel free to reach out and ask if you have any questions or you want to pick one of our brains. That’s it. That’s my statement. 

Ruben Quinones (50:47): 

Alright, thank you AJ. 

AJ Magali (50:52): 

I’m really, really looking forward to the holiday this year. I hope that everybody stays safe during this time period, but also be able to spend some time with their family and the people that they love. And Ruben, I wanted to thank you for having me as well. And you are singlehandedly bringing back the Jerry Curl look from 1985, so I like it. 

Ruben Quinones (51:13): 

Thank you AJ. Appreciate it. Alright, we have another one in the books, so hopefully that was insightful. A lot of information there, so feel free to play that back. Reach out to me if you want the slides. But guys, we have another great one coming up in three weeks. Again, all around retail in eCommerce, we’re going to be talking about CRO secrets for eCommerce and actually might do it on anyone who reaches out to me. We might take your website.  

If you guys are interested, you can reach out to me and we will not tear it apart, but we’ll certainly look at it and from an objective perspective and talk about how you can make some tweaks to optimize for conversions, whether it’s a PDP or a checkout. So don’t miss that one out. Go to our LinkedIn page or follow us on LinkedIn or Facebook or just in general. I’m sure you’ll see this coming out on October 4th, so that event is already up. You can go and click attend. You don’t have to register, you just put it on your calendar. You’ll be good to go. I want to thank you for your time and that you’ve spent with us learning like I’ve been learning about some Q4 essentials.  

With that said, I want to wish you a good morning, good afternoon, good evening, whenever you’re watching this, wherever you’re watching this, and I’ll see you next time. 

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