Hello and a very warm welcome to you. My name is Uzair and today I have a very special guest and a dear friend with me. His name is Kasim from Solutions 8. Kasim is based in Scottsdale, Arizona and runs his agent agency along with his partner John. I'll get him to introduce himself. So, hi Kasim, how are you?
And who's there living the dream? How are you? Yeah, very well. Thank you. Thanks for joining in. Yeah, I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to be on your channel specifically. You've got like the most prolific Google Ads channel on YouTube. So, famous. Not quite. I'm trying my best to just keep on updating fresh and new content for everybody and help everybody as much as we possibly can.
Like you do as well. Which is great. I have seen your content as well on your channel which is brilliant. Yeah well, you are my inspiration. I'm just copying. I'm just copying you. Absolutely copy the best. So, before we get started and dive into some questions and go through some Google Ads stuff. Please do introduce everyone in a bit more detail as to who you are, what you do.
Sure. I've got a Google Ads agency called Solutions 8. We're one of the top-ranked agencies in the states and we're been Google Ads specific for 4 to 5 years. Which has been phenomenal. Niching down for us as an agency has been shown quite a bit in the way of success. Personally, I'm a miserable failure which I like to tell everybody that every marketer is really just a failure that failed at everything else and then and then landed in marketing and I only say that tongue and cheek like I've, you know, been a serial entrepreneur my entire life and I took a lot of lumps and I found out that marketing was one of the things that I did best and so that's how I kind of ended up where I am.
Brilliant and so you guys specialize mostly in eCommerce and smart shopping. That's probably our largest segment. We have some lead generation clients. I've got 160 someone clients and 50 of them are eCommerce specifically. Brilliant. Cool. Okay, so let's get started and talk about your favourite topic. Well, one of them which is smart shopping and many Shopify owners, drop shippers and people who have got an eCommerce store.
They struggling a lot with shopping ads. Because with smart shopping you can't do much with it. Neither you get any search queries as to what it is. Google is showing what they all ask for. So give us a basic overview as to how you would structure the campaigns and how you can optimize it so that you can scale it at a profitable as.
Sure. Can I maybe briefly talk about what smart shopping is? Yes. I think the context should be helpful. So people view Google as an inbound mechanism. They think like, you know, someone's going to search for something and then you can you can trigger your Google ad and that has historically been true. The reason I think so many people struggle with smart shopping is because smart shopping is largely an outbound mechanism.
What smart shopping does is it monitors the conversions taking place on your site already. And that's a good sound bite. So, a real quick tangent, smart shopping works better than more purchases you're already getting and it's difficult to make work if you don't have pre-existing purchases. Google's education says you need 20 conversions before smart shopping really starts to roll.
I've seen it work with less. I've seen need a lot more. It depends on your products but smart shopping is viewing who's buying from your site and Google has I forgot the data point. They have more data on every single human being on the planet than you know any government. I believe it is about 70 million. Yes, okay.
Thank you for that. Is there 70 million demographic and psychographic data points and what that means is they know things that are granular like what verbs appeal to you and you know what you do on Sundays like really ultra-specific profiles. So, if Uzair comes to my site and he buys, then Google goes, oh, who looks like Uzair?
Demography and psychographically speaking and it's not just about who you are demographically it's also about where you are contextually like you bought these shoes you know a few days after you invited to a wedding and that's the type of signal that Google would pick up on and if you think about that in like nine dimensions because that's the way that machine learning moves it you know it's so fast what Google begins to do is it begins to push your ads so outbound, display based, it begins to push your ads throughout the entire Google ecosystem in front of people that Google thinks will buy.
What's insane is it works. It's unbelievable. We have clients that range, you know, anywhere between 300% ROAS. I've got one client that has a 15,000% ROAS. He spent 12 grand and made 2 million All on the backs of smart shopping. The issue though is you can't follow Google's advice. So, if you read Google's education and training, Google says, set it up this way, it's all wrong.
It's all a catastrophic error. So, anybody who says like, I've tried smart shopping and it didn't work. Well, that's because you tried Google's way, try it my way, it might work. So, I'm gonna pause there. Uzair, Is there any questions before we get into like interesting because I know what you are about to say and I've seen you guys, the way you structure your campaigns and the way you go about it.
So, I won't steal your thunder. Okay, awesome. smart shopping with the analogy that I'll offer people is everybody views Google as driving a Formula One race car and I think that has been true in the past. You know, I mean, you look at the dashboard and it's just like, oh my goodness, there are so many things supposed to do.
Smart shopping and most new automated biddings, you know, like you take dynamic search ads, for instance, most of the mechanisms that rely on the machine, you have to change your paradigm. You're not driving a Formula One race car anymore. You're now sailing a boat and when you sail a boat, you know, you may one minor decision and you start to see the shift and then you have to sometimes adjust or correct or whatever and then more importantly it's not just sailing the boat that's important it's everything on the paraphysis you know it's making sure that you've got like your life jackets and all that stuff you know set off to the side there's a bunch of things on the outer edge you've mapped your course you know what the weather's like so it forces you to look at things that Google Ads managers aren't used to looking at I'll be really specific here a couple of notes when you're setting up your smart shopping campaign, you wanna make sure you're running standard shopping alongside smart shopping.
Google says not to do this, that's wrong. You need standard shopping because standard shopping is going to feed smart shopping. Now, smart shopping will begin to take away from standard shopping, that's okay. So, don't worry, if you see your standard shopping campaign dip down, that's what's supposed to happen. But your standard shopping campaign is going to feed your smart shopping campaign.
At the same time, you wanna make sure that you're also running a dynamic remarketing campaign. Google says not to do that either and the reason for that is because your dynamic remarketing campaign is gonna get no play but what's interesting is and I don't know why this is and I'm hopeful that Google fixes these dynamic remarketing campaigns capture users better than smart shopping campaigns do.
So, if you run a dynamic remarketing campaign, your remarketing audience gets bigger and then the smart shopping campaign looks over and goes, oh, I'll take those. Thank you very much. So, running dynamic remarketing gets you zero impressions and you would assume, oh this isn't working but if you don't run it, then your remarketing audience gets much smaller and smart shopping is a heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy remarketing display-based network.
So, it's critically important that you have some of those pieces and then you also wanna do all the things that you would normally do and you know, run a brand campaign, run a competitor campaign, run Facebook ads, like anything organic traffic, YouTube, anything that you can do to feed the search algorithm. We have clients that run Facebook at a loss because the loss in Facebook gives such an up taking conversions in Google that it actually ends up making sense.
And I'm glad you said this and you mentioned all these other campaigns assisting because smart is going to take all the credit for the conversions without the shed of doubt. So, the analogy which you've given about, you know, sailing is great. And the way I say this to my clients is if you look at a game of football or as you guys call it soccer which it isn't.
The striker gets the credit. But if the other team members don't pass the ball to the striker, he'll never score the goal. Right. So you need to have that and what you said earlier on just now that DSA and the shopping will not get any conversions but those signals are going to help improve the ROAS or the conversion rate in smart shopping.
And this is very difficult to explain to a client because the first thing they say oh shut these down, shut these down because they are not getting any conversions. They don't understand the whole analogy as to how this works. How this game is played? And this is the biggest mistake I think and you will agree with this is most people just run smart shopping, they bleed cash, and they switch it off after turning.
And they turn it off. Yeah. And I've seen it over and over and over again. I've been on stage speaking on this topic and I've had people, you know, like heckle me basically like oh we tried smart shopping and it didn't work and it's the best thing you can do to me. It's a gift because all I'll do is I'll pause and I'll be like, I'll bet you, you did this, you did this, you did this, you did this and they're like, okay, yeah, that's what we did and I'm like, well, you should have done this, this, this, and this, and by the end of it, they're converts.
Yeah. So, let me ask you one thing. So, if you're running smart shopping at let's say $100 a day, what sort of budget would you allocate for DSA and the shopping? In the very beginning, smart shopping and standard shopping, I'd probably go 50 50. Okay. And just initially when you're trying to grease the axle. But over time, you want smart shopping to have 80% to 90% of your budget, that everything on the prefaces is meant only for signals and the assumption is going to be those expenditures are inefficient.
So, if you're running standard shopping at a loss, that's okay. If you're running, you know, I mean, honestly, anything that's running at a loss, what you wanna do and the way to do this, it's really easy. Turn it off, see what your ROAS dips too. Turn it back on, see what your ROAS raises to. There's no, how do I say this?
Those there’s no correlation attribution setting in Google Ads. Yeah. You know, Google's not gonna tell you what the things ancillary to what you're currently running cost you or make you. So, you have to pay attention to those things yourself. I do like in 50 50 by the way is very aggressive to take away from smart shopping but I do like giving and I don't just mean standard shopping.
I mean, anything that would drive conversions. When smart shopping first starts, you need it to see purchases. So, if you can get those from standard shopping, great. If you can get them from YouTube, great. If you can get them from Facebook, I hate Facebook. If I could set it on fire tomorrow, I would. I think Mark Zuckerberg's a petulant child thief.
I can't stand him but it has quality traffic. So, if you can get conversions from anything in the very beginning, invest in those conversions even if it's an inefficient acquisition cost because it's not about, it's not about efficiency in the beginning. It's about figuring out who buys from you. Yeah. The other thing that's really interesting is when your smart shopping campaign plateaus and it will all the time.
Find a new traffic source like Reddit Ads or whatever and you'll notice that when you find a new traffic source, you just broaden Google's horizons. They're like, oh wow, the people buy it from me too. Interesting. I and you, the Google Display Network is the most prolific thing on the internet. It reaches 90% of all internet users on the site. 65% are reached on a daily basis.
Google can't in front of everybody. The issue is teaching Google who these people are. So, the cool thing about smart shopping is every new traffic channel just became your best friend. Hmm. And even though shopping and smart, you're putting 50 50. Shopping is only going to kick in once the smart shopping budget runs out because. Smart shopping gonna steal everything from standard shopping.
It will steal everything and everything. As soon as it in 100 bucks is spent then the shopping will start to get some impressions and some clicks etc. Yup. Well and I mean so there's merit to and what's interesting is I can't prove this but I have seen anecdotally historic conversion data before smart shopping campaigns are built seem to give some predictive indication to Google as long as the conversion action is the same.
So if you're running standard shopping and smart shopping and you're getting enough purchases, clients that already have functional Google Ads campaign pains can just switch smart shopping right on. And now it's gonna take a lot away. So you're gonna notice that there's quite a bit in the way of cannibalism. But it's much more efficient. Yeah. In its reach.
The other thing to do and I have clients that fight me on this all the time. It's so infuriating. Run a brand campaign protecting your own brand. Because what happens with smart shopping is you get hundreds of thousands in some cases millions of impressions and it's your brand, it's your logo, it's your favicon, it's a product names, it's your face potentially and it's your URL and what we've seen every single time is ubiquitous truth.
You know, almost 60 successful smart shopping campaigns. Now, every single time is ubiquitous truth, as we run smart shopping more, the number of brand searches increases. Yeah. And smart shopping can go and capture those searches, convert them. Now, our clients that know are like, oh, I don't wanna pay for that traffic. I would have gotten that anyway.
Number one, maybe not. Number two, even if you would have the click is cheap and pay for your data, damn it. Because if you don't get to see the whole conversion path, then Google's not gonna be able to properly optimize. And don't let your competitors hog your top spot. Because that's the very first thing I do is I go start bidding on competitor key phrases.
I've built entire businesses off of the back of a competitor that gets really aggressive with radio, television, newspaper and has no idea how to do digital. So we can swoop it and steal your traffic overnight. Yeah absolutely. Yeah, I was just about to say that brand is one of the most important ones to run. So do you put any budget into dynamic remarketing or remarketing or we don't need it as such if you're running smart shopping.
From a setting you need the budget enabled so that it's running so that it's on effectively but it doesn't matter because it's not gonna show. That's right. Yeah. So you can put it at whatever you want and yeah I have had some accounts and I don't understand why but I have had some accounts for dynamic remarketing for whatever reason like Google just I don't know if it's the GTM setup or whatever but it doesn't get as expensive as it does for other clients.
And in those instances, we've tried to like well what happens if we ratchet up the budget and see you know mild and Improvement there. Google loves it when you give it a signal like, hey, I'm willing to spend more here. You know, that seems to like, I don't know what. It's conspiracy theories but I've also seen it enough to where I feel comfortable saying that you know, you can just, you watch them get greedy.
You can see Google salivate digitally whenever you're adding budget to things. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. With regards to smart shopping and the structure of the account running. Can you tell a little bit about the expectations? What you tell your clients to set up because everybody wants instant results right now. It's like the McDonald's or I want it right now.
Right. It doesn't work like this especially with smart. It does take a bit of time. Yeah, so first of all, there's no guarantee that it works. Like I'm up here selling smart shopping at you but there are clients that smart shopping has failed for generally in my experience it's just a handful of reasons number one your product is difficult to understand at a glance so we had a Girl I loved her she was a phenomenal entrepreneur brilliant person she created a new baby swaddle invented it and this I was a new dad at the time so I'm looking at this thing you could change the diaper without unswaddling the baby had all these like the breathable fabric was amazing it was brilliant but it was more expensive than every other baby spot on the market and all of the features required like a six, seven-minute explainer video before you even understood.
Well, with smart shopping being heavy display based and you know, pushing out in front of people, all people saw was a really expensive swaddle. So, that's issue number one is smart shopping isn't gonna do great. You know, for that, you need YouTube Ads. Yeah. Or Facebook ads or something that gives you the opportunity to do some thought leadership.
Now, smart shopping coupled with those things over time, could it have worked? Yes, absolutely but she didn't have the budget to find out. the other thing that you'll run into if you can't compete like if you're low margin low dollar products with one-off purchases if you're selling cell phone cases God bless you I have no idea what to do for you because I mean you're selling this thing for eleven bucks you make two they're never coming back your cost for acquisition, is gonna be 3x 4x 5X that so you know you want something if you can't profit from 300% ROAS you're gonna have a hard time and what's interesting about that is I've seen the same Inside of Google's ecosystem, it's almost like it doesn't wanna give you the traffic unless you've been able to reach a certain degree of proof of concept because Google wants to know that you're relevant.
So, to answer your question directly, we need 90 days. When smart shopping fails, what's nice is it fails quickly. So if it's not gonna work for you, we'll know pretty quickly within that 90 days period. Interestingly, Google's education says that you need to run smart shopping for 45 days untouched. I have found that to be true. That's one of them, it's one of the few times Google has told us the truth.
Do not touch your smart shopping campaign within 45 days. Also, do not apply Target ROAS. Okay, can I just ask one question and yeah that's the bidding bid. You can't do much with smart shopping anyway. So are you referring to changing the budgets? Changing the budgets, changing the bids, changing the products, changing your feed. What one thing that people like to do is they like to take different they like to trade pick their products.
And you don't wanna do that at all because I have a quick anecdote and hopefully this isn't annoying or irrelevant. We had a client. She sells medical device equipment basically. For a specific type of medical technician. She has like 8,000 skews let's say. I don't know what it is but it's close to as close to 10,000. She goes, these are our 400 products that sell.
Nothing else ever sells. We have them in our catalogue because every now and then, the doctor needs a light bulb or whatever but these are the 400 we're like, alright, we run. We did okay. 400% 500% ROAS. We finally, months later, talk her into throwing the whole product catalogue after it. She's tracking 3000% ROAS now, I believe or something close to it and not one of those 400 products she gave me are on her top-selling List.
Everything that you sell is a self-fulfilling prophecy because that's what you've positioned yourself to sell. Google will figure out what's going to sell for you. A, B, a lot of the products that perform for you on acquisition products that don't actually, they get to click, they don't get to sell. So, when you're looking at your data, you look at a product that has, you know, a significant amount of ROI attached to it but you haven't sold that much of that product and the reason for that is if somebody, you know, if they click on an ad for this pen but they buy these glasses, The pen is what gets the ROAS attribution and so you're gonna say, I didn't sell a $1,000 with the pens.
It's like, no, but you sold a $1,000 using the ads using the pen as the ad basically. And that happens all the freaking time which actually leads me to another structural issue and this was a mistake that we made. In my early education, if anybody's ever seen any of our videos, we would tell people to segment their accounts, segment their campaigns by the margin.
So, you know, Google would say, don't segment your smart shopping campaigns at all. We would say, no, that's wrong. Segment it by low, medium, high so you can do, you can attribute your budget accordingly and make sure that you're pushing your budget to the products that you wanna push. The issue with that we found out later is smart shopping campaigns don't share traffic.
So if they come in on product set A but buy on product set B, that wall that you've built, causes some drop off where you just can't cross-pollinate the way that smart shopping would need to. So, you can still split your campaigns but only do it if you have products that are very different and you're never gonna get any of that cross-pollination.
That's not most businesses. Most businesses have cross-pollinated products. Even low margin products that you don't wanna sell run them because you don't know what's gonna bring somebody in. Yeah. And this is the exact conversation I had this morning with the client. And he was saying oh let's split the high-profit margin products from the low I said we first of all we haven't got the data.
We only got like 39 conversions in the account. And they were they started Google Ads very recently. And I kept telling him don't do it and he is adamant. No, I want to split it out. So, okay, what now what can you do? I mean, I'm very much I'm going to tell him after a few days that look we can't carry on working with you.
Because you bought me in as an expert to manage. And if you're not going to listen to me then I can't offer my best to you. And this is what most people don't understand the technical things which is behind these campaigns which most people don't understand. But we talk we covered quite a bit on smart shopping. One last thing which I would like love you to touch on is most advertisers, business owners first of all don't understand the customer lifetime value.
And how it can play a huge and massive part in the profitability of your Google accounts. Because what they look at is the first transaction or I'm making a loss or I'm not making money. I love consumables and I like the high tickets. I like anything that has tendrils, tangents. You know you bought, you bought this medical device and now this needs a new switcher every 6 months or whatever.
We have a client who sells a very specific type of industrial tape. Ultra niche and he only sells it to HVAC companies. That's it. And you would think like that is the most niche product in the world. Here's what's interesting. Is his Ecommerce campaigns lose money if you look at it from a single purchase perspective because a roll of tape is like eleven bucks and all of his first purchases are from the company, all of his paid advertising first purchases are from companies that are testing his tape.
They don't believe that it's actually gonna do the thing that he says it's going to do. They pay $11 for the tape. He's lost money. The lifetime value of a customer last time we spoke and I'm asking a number up again because I don't remember but I think it's around five grand. Like, it's insane. So, he might pay $50 for an 11$ purchase which means he's haemorrhaging money but then make five grand over the next two or 3 years because once these HVAC companies realize, wow, you just made my life way easier.
They buy in bulk and so the key there is making sure you pipe that data back into Google so Google knows oh this is actually functional and profitable. You wanna be careful. This gets really weird is there and I'd love your opinion on this too because I respect a few people's opinions more than yours when it comes to Google Ads and I need you to put me in a check if I'm going crazy.
I'm afraid now to tell Google what we make. And I'm afraid because in the past we had manual control. We could control these things but now you're telling Google what you're willing to pay. You're telling Google what you make it’s not hard for them to go, well, I know exactly what your margins are and I know that if as long as you're making this much, you know what I mean?
And so, in the offline conversion tracking, all I'm doing is piping in enough, enough data to show profitability and then I stop because I don't want Google to see, you know, 5000% ROAS because when they see that, then, all of a sudden, my you know, CPC start going up. Going up and our starts to come down and it's well, they know, I mean, I tell this to everyone.
They know, Google knows more about me and you and everyone else than we know about ourselves. Yup. Exactly. As simple as that. As simple as that and it's pretty scary and the way the algorithms and the machine learning is heading. It is crazy scary and it is becoming not simple but it's easier for business owners to make money because if they do the right things in Google Ads right now unless something like the iOS thing for Google comes up and it's all going to be doom and gloom.
Yeah. Well, the iOS for Google is gonna be self-imposed. It's Google's flock. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's a couple of years of it I guess. Yeah, they pushed it back again. Yeah. 2023 now. The death of third party cookies. Yeah. I bet they pushed it back again after that. This is like the ninth time they've pushed it.
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So and this is why you know the customer lifetime value what you just mentioned is that they don't understand it's not the eleven bucks they are selling for is the how many transactions they're going to get recurring for the next few years. Yeah, you gotta know your numbers. When I encounter entrepreneurs I don't know the numbers in my mind I'm like you can't run paid ads.
You don't know you know and it's not just eCommerce if you think about lead generation to taking a step back. Yeah. You need to know what a client is worth to you long-term net profit because if you're, if you're banking on gross, then, you're in the dangerous territory there too and then, once you know that, you need to know how many leads you close, you need to know what a lead, what you can pay for a lead, and if you don't know those things, then you have no idea if your marketing is efficient.
I've had clients that bulk it like, you know, $400, $500, $600 leads but when I do the math for them, I'm like, this is not only efficient but what you have to pay because this is what all your competitors are paying. There's no way to pay any less. Yeah. It’s an interesting conundrum to see been really smart like really vetted tenured business owners that don't know their numbers.
Yeah. Blows me away every time. Yeah, I know and there are some very big businesses who are flying blind. Yeah. Yeah. I have a close friend who's also a mentor in a different capacity and he laughs at it. You know, he's got a $30 million business and his self-deprecating joke is looking, I put money in, more money comes out and I'm happy as long as that's happening and I'm just like, no, he's super old school but I'm like, dude, you can't, you know, just don't teach anybody that.
And the best one, the best company is for this is GoDaddy. How they make money from a 99¢ domain and the domain CPC's you and I know how many the CPCs are so high. Yup. The funnel and the back end sales they have and the upsell is amazing. Oh, they're so sticky and once they have their hooks into you, you know, it's not just domains, it's the hosting and the email and the web builder and yeah, they've done a really good job that.
I met Bob Parsons. I pitched him on something. He was cool. He was a really interesting cat. It's really kind of eccentric but once you meet him, everything makes sense. You're like, oh, I get this. Like he just zeroes in on something and yeah, GoDaddy's done a phenomenal job. What a good example. Yeah, it is. I mean, this is what I always say to everyone.
Look, you know, you look at how can they afford to sell a 99¢ domain. You see is like fifty bucks. Right. And that's not like on 100% conversion rate. Their conversion rate will be quite low. So to acquire a customer they are willing and able to pay and this is how this game is played. Whoever is able and willing to pay the most wins.
Yeah well, you know whose worse is right. Salesforce. Yeah. Salesforce I forgot the exact data point but I was listening to a webinar with their head of marketing and their lifetime value of a customer is calculated over 20 years. Meaning, they're willing to pay And I'm not gonna say this properly but they're basically willing to pay up to like 19 years and 11 months and 28 days’ worth of profitability because they know that basically once you're on Salesforce you everybody that works with your organization is going to be on Salesforce for everyone never gonna lose you.
Yeah. Because their retention is just so good and once people on Salesforce you know they just get in gear but then they blow it up to there. Yeah. So their expenditure and I've competed against Salesforce in a different contexts. There's the way. What they're willing to pay is it's absolutely insane. Yeah, and the same is for HubSpot.
Once they get you, that's it. You cannot leave them. Yeah, I hate how much I love using the HubSpot application. But you know, there's something about some of that too like HubSpot pisses me off. I hate clicking around the dashboard and seeing a little lock symbol. Like, oh, you can't use this, you have to upgrade. I'm just like, come on.
You know, so much of this, you could just make available. The in a part of their ascension model, I think is. Yeah. There's too much complexity there. Yeah, brilliant. No, thank you so much, Kasim. It was lovely to talk to you and thank you so much for your time. Yeah. And so where can anyone find you? At home usually.
I'm just kidding. Solutions 8 is sol8.com. We got a YouTube channel. It's not nearly as good as it was Uzair’s but it's something. Wow, it is there and I'll put that link to your website and to your channel under this video as well. Yeah, I appreciate you, sir. Well, one last step before you we call off the call.
Yeah, don't give up. Everybody stops three feet from gold. Yeah. And you just keep failing forward. Absolutely. Brilliant. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure always as always and hopefully catch up soon sometime. Yeah, looking forward to it. Brilliant. Thank you Kasim and thank you to everyone for watching this and if you have any comments for myself or for Kasim, please do put them under the comments and we'll try our best to answer them for you.
So, till then, take care and God bless. Bye for now. Thanks, everyone.
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