Welcome to the Paid Search Podcast.

Today, I am your guest host.

My name is Joey Bidner.

And we are going to be talking about Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, Q4 sale season.

And actually, I'm going to go into sales in general.

I want to talk to you today about my methodology of how to approach a sale.

Welcome to the Paid Search Podcast.

I am your guest host, Joey Bidner.

And today we're going to be talking about Google Shopping, specifically optimizing the product feed in Merchant Center.

Because I need to bring you all up to speed on a whack load.

of updates.

Google is going through this like a steam train.

Um, and what is your biggest fear with this change? Because you hear a lot of people saying, "Just adjust your, just adjust your targets and you'll be fine." So what, to you, makes this a real deal people need to consider and think about?

Yeah.

So if I could take, like, a, a couple steps back just to really explain, like, who this will impact, in my opinion, and it's all of the ads managers that are using tROAS bidding with the same methodology as what, um, John Moran kind of made really famous, right? John Moran, a number of years ago, came forward with a ton of data and proof to show that tROAS or TCPA smart bidding, the lever, is not necessarily a profitability lever.

It is more of a traffic funnel lever.

When you have, let's say, tROAS low, that is telling the system, "Okay, go for more exploratory traffic," and your good results comes from your first-party data, your account structure, your, you know, your merchant center data.

And then when you crank up that tROAS, it is trimming down into the lower funnel, right? Trimming down into the lower funnel.

And the thing that I fear most to happen is, um, when we are forced to raise our tROAS up to our targets, what happens in the background, um, when our ROAS drops below our tROAS, right? It's going to remarket a lot.

Do- y- you're on the same page as me, as like there has to be a flip that changes, and now we almost have a new flavor of smart bidding, correct?

So without further ado, Joey.

Hey, what's up, Chris? So today I'm gonna be talking about AI Max, and this is particularly important right now for, for two reasons.

One, the depreciation of dynamic search ads, um, AI Max is taking over, but also what Google officially announced at Google Marketing Live not too long ago, where they said the only way for your ads to appear in AI-related searches is through either P Max or AI Max.

So I've gone through a series of, of rigorous tests with AI Max, and when I first tested it, it was pretty terrible.

[chuckles] I was getting pretty bad results, especially in comparison to DSA.

I love DSA, especially for e-com.

I've done a whole episode on it.

So without further ado, let's jump straight in and, uh, Joey, take it away.

Hey, what's up, Chris? So today, I wanna talk about something related to AI.

Now, as you know, I am a big fan of using AI for n- for management.

We did a whole episode on how I like to use ChatGPT for digging into my data, for talking to my data.

But there is something happening in the industry right now that is massively impacting not only ads managers, but also business owners managing their own accounts, and we're being impacted in a... and I believe to be a very negative way.

And it's this trend that we're seeing across the industry related to these, um, AI account audits, or what's commonly being coined as a claudit.

And these are, uh, becoming more and more widely used because of integrations like how Shopify has-- now has, uh, an AI integration, and people are finding more tools to connect their ads data to a chatbot to then basically blanket ask it, "Hey, how are my ads doing?" And if you're a manager, uh, managing a number of accounts, you've, you've probably gotten one of these long AI analysis of a, of an account, or you've maybe been a little shocked when you as a business owner have, um, done these, uh, sweeping audits.