Drive and Convert

Announcer: [00:00:00] You're listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e commerce growth engine with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Jon MacDonald: Ryan, clients are starting to plan for 2025. We're seeing it across our client base. I'm sure you guys are as well. 24 seemed like a big focus in social selling. TikTok shop is something I continuously hear about now. And I know there's others that kind of have blown up for selling online this past year.

A lot of that's been happening for a handful of years, but it really seemed to take off this year. So I know you want to talk about this. I'd love to get your thoughts on it. So it seemed like a good topic for today. What do you think?

Ryan Garrow: I agree. It's, I have mixed feelings on TikTok. I'm not on there because I'm, I just don't have time.

I'm maybe too old to get new tricks going. All of our clients, it does feel like everybody had to have some insights or [00:01:00] questions around TikTok. Do I do it now? When do I do it? I have to be involved. What does it look like? Then on the other side, I hear a lot of people burned out from TikTok shop and influencers doing nothing but peddling products and pushing it.

TikTok may have gone too far. They're really in tight with Amazon. And there's a lot of stuff on there from trying to sell products and which is fine. Influencers have to make some money, but we saw a big decrease in social ads through the pandemic because of the Apple iOS issues in 21 and changing tracking for all of us.

Which was painful for somebody that's been doing the same thing for a long time. For me, it feels there's even ancillary data around that, but social ads really did make a comeback in 24 meta stock price alone would be proof that social ads are doing fairly well. It's gone bonkers.

And so I think that everybody here's aware of social, I don't have to talk about, why you need to be involved in social ads or Just a presence on social media. What I think is missing [00:02:00] is a good discussion around that other social platform out there called YouTube.

Jon MacDonald: Oh, the other, huh? I would have said the main one was the first.

Not the first, but it is a big dog for sure.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. Google had their little foray into what's called, what was it? Google plus, or that they tried to have, what did they call that? Yeah.

Jon MacDonald: Was a mess. Yeah, that

Ryan Garrow: was, I was one of the, I had one of the first ones and I thought it was going to be great.

And then they, it was terrible. But historically YouTube is not really fit into the Bucket of social marketing. I'll say that it wasn't necessarily social. People have comments on it, but it's not like there's a lot of two way interaction. At least that I see, it's like you're posting to be seen, but not get feedback really.

Or yeah, it's not like LinkedIn

Jon MacDonald: where it's a conversation every post.

Ryan Garrow: There's a conversation or I follow my friends on YouTube so I can remember people from high school or my family. Wait, that used to be

Jon MacDonald: Facebook. Wasn't that what Facebook was for?

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. And so it's [00:03:00] now it's I don't know what Facebook's for now.

My mom's on it and there's a lot of politics essentially, which is why I don't get on there anymore. Yep. Yep. But YouTube wasn't really doing that. It was like you would go there, I think, to be entertained or follow somebody who created content that you liked. And so I think Tik TOK had an impact on that to a degree, but there weren't people going there to maybe get influenced to purchase.

It was, my dad uses YouTube a lot to fix stuff and I do as well. If I need to solve a problem in my house, cause I'm not a fix it person. I'm like, I don't know. How do I change? Every time, man, this is funny. I just did this last week. My wife's expedition. She's the back windshield wiper needs to be replaced.

I'm like, okay, great. I think I'll figure out and get the wiper. And I'm like, I get back in the truck. I'm like, I gotta, you gotta Google the same video. I think every single time. Replace the windshield wiper on the back of the expedition. That's what I use YouTube for having worked with Google for 15 years now.

I've seen them try so many different ways of selling my clients on. They need to get on spending on YouTube. Like it's [00:04:00] every year. It seems to be like, this is the year, Gerald, you've got YouTube. They're missing out and for 15 years, they've not spent on YouTube and they've not missed out with a few exceptions like our team does really good stuff on YouTube.

We've won awards two years in a row for our work on YouTube, so there is some really good things happening there, but it just hasn't felt like it got critical mass to really be like everybody needs to be on YouTube and everybody knows it and they're asking us questions about it and just saying, Hey, what do I need to do?

How do I scale YouTube? I think 25 is going to be that year. I just

Jon MacDonald: so this is the year Google got to you

Ryan Garrow: if I'm making a prediction now in 24. Yeah, this is the year that I'm going to listen to Google. And I'm going to be like, Yes, we are doing it is we are going to get people spending on YouTube because it's going to have an impact.

Jon MacDonald: Okay, so you're saying that my teams are going to actually be looking at landing pages this next year, and we're going to have to optimize them for YouTube traffic. That's what I'm hearing.

Ryan Garrow: I'll say this. I'm not going to stand on a battleship and say [00:05:00] the battles one and everything. YouTube is success.

But what I am saying is I finally believe YouTube has a compelling reason to be looked at much deeper. And I'm betting some of my own time and money on the fact that it's going to work. It's rare that I would do that with a Google property that I haven't seen a lot of traction at scale. There's, Blenjet did some amazing things with our team and grew their brand really well there.

There have been wins, but I think it's going to be a lot of wins in 2025.

Jon MacDonald: Interesting. I've always looked at YouTube as the second largest search engine. So under that kind of line of thinking, it would make a lot of sense to be there. So why is this time different? What's different for you?

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. So I think that I agree, second largest search engine, if you looked at it that way, which is always how they put set it, but it's like Google has, you What 95 percent of the search volume in the US and being has 30 percent so like beating being wasn't exactly this great amazing thing, but YouTube as a search [00:06:00] engine is interesting because yes, I search YouTube, but I'm searching for a video to explain something or to entertain me, not like I'm going to say what's the best.

Headphones. Maybe there is a YouTube video, but that's going to happen on Google. And then they're going to drive me to YouTube to watch a video if I don't want to read it. And for my personality, I like reading rather than watching or listening because I can do it quicker

Jon MacDonald: but unless you're changing a wiper.

Ryan Garrow: Unless I'm changing a wiper, then I already know I've got to have somebody show me how to do it or even change you. It's always cars for me cause I'm not a car guy. I enjoy cars, but I don't work on them. And so even changing the battery in my remote, I'm like, I forget how to change it again.

And I've got to figure out how to get into it.

Jon MacDonald: I had to do that for my Audi remote. And I will tell you, it was a pain in the butt to get the battery out. And I'm glad I had a video show me how let's do that. I would have broke the key 100 percent

Ryan Garrow: me too. Like every time and I'm like, at some point, I probably should be like, it's worth 300 for a new remote.

We're going to trash it. The battery's dead. It's not worth it. Historically on YouTube. [00:07:00] We've really had one way to measure. And that was through a brand list study. And if you can only get that if you spent seven grand a month or more. And so most of the scale on YouTube was large brands that could say, Hey, you, Google's going to do this cool study for us.

And we're going to be able to use that and say it worked and obviously not perfect, but functional, but it's also. Like going to the IRS and saying, Hey, did I do my taxes? They're like how much did you pay us? Oh, you paid us enough. Therefore you did it. And so it's always been a struggle when it comes to YouTube, because you had to do it outside of what we normally looked at as a source of truth, where I can't just go To analytics and see what it is now meta has a different side of that where there's been They are able to tell us whatever they want And it's always different than google analytics or what we've seen in the past as our social truth for some reason As advertisers, we're always like that's all right Okay So I think they broke the that glass ceiling to a degree for youtube to say It's okay if we're showing numbers that are different as long as it's true We're seeing the growth.

It can't be like [00:08:00] meta is saying they drove a million dollars in sales last month when the site only did 20, 000. Okay that's obviously not working.

Jon MacDonald: I think I hear about that all the time. And as marketers, we have a hundred percent been conditioned, if you will, to the fact that data is never going to be the same across platforms and you've got to have that single source of truth.

And I think that's why we're just okay with. Like each platform being wrong because you don't know which one's right. So you just assume, you know what? They're all biased and they're all wrong. We will find what that, what go in the corner and do your numbers. I'll do what I need to do and we'll just work with it.

That's pretty much the attitude, unfortunately.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. And the problem YouTube had in that world is it's being run in a Google ads account with like next to a campaign where you're trusting. That data in Google ads and Google analytics matching up and Oh, I get it. Yep. Here's what they're saying then you've got this YouTube campaign.

That's like what the heck is this? It doesn't not even close to matching up or making sense based on what we're looking at from a Shopping or text [00:09:00] ad standpoint because the intense a little different on those and so lots of issues from tracking My wife even brought this up to me. She's think about YouTube like our kids have our YouTube login like yeah You Why not?

She's I have yet to give our 11 year old my Instagram login. Oh good point when it's on Instagram or meta, they know exactly whose eyeballs they're looking at. Yeah. When it comes to YouTube, we have YouTube TV. We have YouTube like for video game solving problems. Like my son needs to figure out how to build something on Minecraft.

Guess where he goes? I can't answer the questions. I'm like, I don't know. I'll just YouTube that and figure out somebody else has done it. Change is coming, which I'm excited about. They're bringing in shopping feeds, which is exciting because it's putting it more into the flow of okay TikTok has shopping feeds.

Meta has shopping feeds. Everybody has shopping feeds of YouTube. Hasn't really leaned as much into the shopping feed and now they've got some cool stuff coming up with that. And so I think that we're really going to start seeing the e com brands lean in a lot more because of it's going to feel and work a lot more similarly to [00:10:00] what they're used to on meta and tick tock.

Jon MacDonald: Are you saying that Google had to come up with its own YouTube specific tracking?

Ryan Garrow: Pretty much Google's realized that I think in 24 that. All right we can't beat them, join them, let's understand how we get meta advertisers because that's the same place they want to play in from a social standpoint

Jon MacDonald: okay

Ryan Garrow: see YouTube in the same way.

So if so, we've got to learn how to track it the same, but also in Google's, we got to be different because we've got to somehow be able to show we're better and get that. So YouTube now has four different things, I say for tracking, which. Again, makes it somewhat complex, but we're getting a lot of really cool points that tell a story.

I say you've got to use multiple different data points and our team's going to talk about, you're going to need to have some to help measure the impact and say, Hey, when we do this, what else happens and using all four of these things together, it should create a much cooler picture than just saying.

[00:11:00] Spend a million on meta and they 3 million and analytics says half a million. We're going to meet somewhere in the middle. Two of the YouTube more things that are currently in process are in closed beta. So I can't get into the super details on that from

Jon MacDonald: okay

Ryan Garrow: summary standpoint. They're going to give you the geographic impact of ads and just think a way to scale blackout tests without having to do it manually.

Interesting. And it's show ads in Seattle, but not in San Francisco and then see what happens as far as sales to the site. And then they have three different lifts that they do. Conversion lift, brand lift, search lift. And generally speaking right now, those are for larger advertisers because you need volume of conversions to really see it.

You can't be doing, 50 conversions on the site. Okay. Go spend on YouTube and see the impact through their measurement. I think there's going to be ways that we take a lot of those enterprise strategies in 25 and boil them down to somebody that only wants to spend or can only spend a thousand or 1500 on YouTube to be able to say, great, we'll black out, or we'll only run it in one market to see, what's going [00:12:00] on.

What is that having an impact on and then we can run some of these tests individually in each account to make it work for that merchant.

Jon MacDonald: Interesting. So with all this stuff, YouTube's coming out with, you're able to prove the ROI a little better. It sounds do some testing with the data. Do you think that's going to pull money and budget away from meta and tick tock?

Ryan Garrow: I doubt it. I think those platforms have done a good job in 2324 of showing what they can do. And they're probably going to get more spend this year. If anything, my guess is it's going to pull more from television buys and display buys from large advertisers. So if you've got a, 2 million a month display budget, it's probably going to make sense to lower that half a million to a million and throw that on YouTube if you haven't been there yet.

And I think if you're a smaller advertiser, I'll say six figures or under a hundred thousand or less. I see. You're probably going to be seeing YouTube as the logical flow up the funnel. Like you're covered a lot of your Google search and shopping. [00:13:00] Now it's going to make sense. How do we get to that next layer?

That mid funnel, that's going to have an impact and that's going to be some in meta, but it's probably going to be some in YouTube as well.

Announcer: You're listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on e commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers. And Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, a digital marketing agency offering pay-per-click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Ryan Garrow: What I found interesting, we had this big event in Boston. It's one of their Google office by MIT. We had some of the top YouTube talent inside of Google come and talk to us. Some of the numbers are fascinating in explaining how under invested in YouTube it is. [00:14:00] Facebook had, I want to say 130, 31 million or so advertising revenue in 23.

YouTube, I think, had 30, 32, somewhere in that space. So roughly 25 percent or just under 25 percent of Meta's ads was YouTube and YouTube actually had just a super small fraction less time on the platform than Facebook did include Instagram and WhatsApp in there too, but it shows the Delta in investment in YouTube from an ad standpoint. Is dramatically less as a percentage of available inventory than meta has, and so it should be cheaper and have more scale.

Jon MacDonald: Do you think that's, to me, the way that was, I'm hearing this and correct me if I'm wrong, though, is that is Google cannibalizing their own ad spending. Cause you had mentioned like people pulling from display and maybe even search into YouTube, that would be mostly Google just moving their budget over to YouTube, which as an end user, it seems like it [00:15:00] makes sense to me because they're rolling out the AI answers is not a lot of clicks happening on ads.

Inside Google these days, at least for me, I haven't, I don't remember last time I got past the AI answers because they're actually getting pretty good. None of them have told me to eat something that's going to make me sick or anything like that, which was like the early answers we're doing.

I remember some of those examples, but I do think there's good opportunity for them to move that budget. People were already spending with Google to other channels and I can't help but wonder if that's part of the play here.

Ryan Garrow: Google's hoping, I'm sure, that they keep search and shopping there, and then YouTube would be the next layer up, that mid funnel that would help feed some of that down the funnel.

So it's like when I talk to a meta advertiser yes, you should be spending some money on meta, but if you haven't covered the searches on Google at the bottom of the funnel, you're likely investing some money in meta to your competitors. And so make sure the [00:16:00] bottom is solid, that you know you've got it covered, then move up a layer.

I think too often, especially smaller CPG brands, I see this a lot, where they really just want to be like I heard this brand did really well. Like Nick Sharma had a brand that spends 2 million a month on social, so I should do that. I'm like, what? Probably, but maybe let's take some steps to get there and build something.

Cause they don't hear about some of that kind of nitty gritty yeah, you do have to cover it. And the best social brands really do have a solid bottom of funnel. If you search their brand on Google, you're going to see a almost monopoly on the shopping ads. You're going to see a well built text ad, usually taking up real estate to keep the competitors off of that space. Cause they will be there and they should.

Jon MacDonald: Interesting. Yeah. So that's fair. You're not going to. As a brand, you're not going to move on from it. You might just not iterate as much or invest as heavily, but that definitely makes sense. You don't want to give up ground. So to date, when we're recording this episode, there's a big boxing match coming up.

I believe that's tonight or very soon with [00:17:00] Jake Paul and Mike Tyson, which is going to be amazing to watch. I can't wait to see it. Yeah,

Ryan Garrow: I, me too. I'm excited. I've been excited about a boxing match for probably 15 years, maybe 20 years. Like

Jon MacDonald: we could probably do a whole episode just on this because I really only see this going one of two ways and a older gentleman is going to get the legacy knocked out of him or a young person is going to get seriously hurt.

It's going to be one of the two. Yeah. There's this not and that's why this is going to be entertaining. It's not for the boxing itself. I'm not worried about the skill here. This is just a rough match, but

Ryan Garrow: no,

Jon MacDonald: I am thinking about how Jake Paul got here. And I'm thinking about how there's been so many influencers, especially in YouTube.

And not that much on products. So I'm wondering what the play is for YouTube with products.

Ryan Garrow: It's true. YouTube, the biggest influencers in the world are generally [00:18:00] got their start on YouTube. If we look at Mr. Beast, like the billionaire influencer started by posting YouTube videos over a decade ago.

Same thing with Jake Paul. Like it was pranks and stuff and about, getting information on YouTube and people following there, that's where they made their money and their impact and those same influencers. I think there was a crazy stat when Tik TOK released their creator fund in, I want to say 21, 22, Mr. Beast was massive in 21, 22, just like he is now, I think in 10 months, he made something like. 14,000 despite having yeah, almost a billion views. And then while YouTube is paying him disgusting millions of dollars from an influencer standpoint, just creating good content. YouTube has generally been way ahead of the game.

When it came to we're going to get people to watch and be entertained and have eyeballs here. But what they haven't necessarily done is say, how do we bring products into that? Whereas TikTok and Meta, it was really simple. Yeah, there's a feed. And [00:19:00] so you're going to ship this influence or a product and they're going to.

Talk about it on TikTok and people are going to buy. Like it was pretty stupidly simple, actually. And TikTok and Meta didn't have to pay their influencers really. Whereas YouTube didn't have that. So it was always like, Hey, we got to pay for this content. Looking at it almost like Netflix buying movies or having their own creative thing.

If they're going to pay for that, it costs them money and then people pay to be there. YouTube's advertising funneled it. And so all that to say YouTube. Adding product feeds for creators to tag products and enter more into that, what we expect to see on social now, like I, it doesn't bug me when I'm scrolling through a feed now to see somebody talking about a product or being pitched a product.

And so I think in YouTube shorts now, their competitor to reels and tick tock.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah,

Ryan Garrow: I think people are going to be just used to seeing products. And if the targeting is done right, which if you've got a good advertising agency, hello, come talk to me. It should drive some decent traffic and [00:20:00] conversions because it's now set up to handle that.

Yeah. It's cool. Cause it's cool in beta. So there's not a lot of details I can share publicly, but there's ways now for brands to go in and from an affiliate standpoint, incentivize these creators to talk about you. And there's a discovery thing in there. For both creators and brands. I think this is going to be big.

I do. And brands can bring the creators in. So if you've got a decent amount of creators on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, you should be able to move a lot of those in to the YouTube environment. And there's going to be some incentive for those creators to come make sure they're creating content for YouTube.

And so we've got some larger brands are going to be hopefully moving their creators into the system that we'll be able to hopefully maybe towards the end of Q1, I'll have some really cool data to share that'll be like, Hey, I'm Here's the actual numbers that I talked about, at the end of 24 that are now going to be real and tangible.

Jon MacDonald: Okay. I'm convinced our listeners are convinced. How should they get started with YouTube in 25? Because that sounds to me like that's going to change. Based on what they have been [00:21:00] doing.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah, I think that kind of scrap what you used to think about YouTube. I think it started Hey, if pretend it's a brand new social platform, then you're like, all right, everybody's moving there.

Let's get excited. Let's participate. You, every brand will be different. I'll say that you're going to have to establish it what makes sense for your brand because it's probably going to be different than your next door neighbor's brand, but you have to have a YouTube channel. You have to have, that's just base practice.

If you don't have it already, go get your YouTube channel claimed, get it designed, right? Have a plan for creating content. It's what I talked about in Tik Tok, I don't know, a couple of years ago, when we saw some really good success from some of our brands, you had to have a voice on there to participate.

You couldn't just run ads on Tik Tok without actually putting some of your own content out there and being a part of the community. It was, it created a feeling of inauthenticity. Like you were just weren't, you were there just with your money, not. to participate. I don't think that's as important on YouTube because of how ads run and it's because you can run pre roll on your competitor's sites if they haven't [00:22:00] blocked or your competitor pages if they haven't blocked it.

I just want to have a landing page that people can research you and make sure that you're a legitimate brand more than anything else. So you don't have to probably regularly create content. I think it's a benefit if you do, but just at least have a presence there controlled. That's you. And then for most advertisers, I'm going to say, you're probably going to create a separate Google account for YouTube.

Not all the time, but for most of you out there, separate accounts going to make sense. Cause it keeps your tracking cleaner. Cause what happens is if you have YouTube as a separate campaign and where you're running shopping and search and all the other various things you can run in Google, you will have, we'll call credit stealing, where they're going to have multiple touch points.

And Google's data driven algorithm is going to say that hit shopping there and it hit a text ad here. And then YouTube was here. So it's going to get 10 percent of the credit. It's going to be more difficult to see the full impact. So the similar, the way you would have your meta account is separate from Google.

They're both claiming credit for some of the same sales. And you realize that as an [00:23:00] advertiser, look at YouTube as a social channel, be able to be comfortable with it, measuring the full impact and then deleting credit where you see fit. But you're going to be able to see a better holistic picture of.

What is it actually doing? All of our larger advertisers have separate accounts. When you're doing some of the cool studies with Google, it's helpful to have a separate account. Again, when you come to shopping feeds, I get this question. So I'll address it now that you can have two Google ads accounts targeting the same website, one with YouTube, one with all the shopping and also connected to one merchant center.

Jon MacDonald: Okay.

Ryan Garrow: So you got one merchant center running all of your product feeds. And you can have that going to two, two separate Google ads accounts.

Jon MacDonald: Interesting. Yeah. I would have thought that wasn't possible, but what do I know? Yeah. Interesting.

Ryan Garrow: And then I'll say you're going to have to go out and have a goal for it.

That makes sense. What is it? What is, what do I need YouTube to do? Look at some of the data and then make adjustments to either how you're looking at it, if it's not performing that way, not to say you have to justify it, but say, Hey, we expected it to do this, but in reality it's doing. [00:24:00] This down here and maybe we just need to accept that and say hey, how is that benefiting the brand?

Let's still continue to scale it But know that it's accomplishing a goal slightly different than what we wanted it to be and keep testing You know, you're gonna have the audiences can be again super creepy and awesome from a marketing standpoint like meta I would say you can't give up on it that's been one of the things you have to have a really hard head because It's not gonna for most of you listening.

It's not out of the gate going to be boom We spent 50 grand on youtube and our business grew half a million dollars that month. That was amazing Hopefully that happens but understand that it's not and it's going to be a commitment to making it work Just like for most of you meta wasn't perfect out of the gate and it was a commitment to saying, okay I have to make this work, the eyeballs are there, I want to get first mover advantage over my competitors.

So we are going to make this work. Let's keep trying, keep iterating, test the content, test the landing pages, test the algorithm, test all the things that can go into making the system work just like [00:25:00] you would if you were iterating on Meta.

Jon MacDonald: Awesome. So 2025, the year of YouTube I'm hearing. And.

Ryan Garrow: It's as of now,

Jon MacDonald: as of now, Ryan is convinced subject to change on what actually happens

Ryan Garrow: always

Jon MacDonald: what he finds, but I think it's really interesting. I would not have guessed that you would have come here today and say that. So

Ryan Garrow: two months ago, I probably wouldn't have thought that either.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah, I do think there is a lot of opportunities still out there and all this stuff goes in cycles. I remember years ago, they're talking about adding clickable shoppable moments into YouTube videos with overlays, et cetera, to highlight products and be able to clip one click to a page to buy it.

And that never really came to fruition. Now they're like, you know what, we need to do this because everyone else is doing it and it's coming back around. But at the same time, e commerce especially has been really hurting this past year for some time now. And I think they're all looking for this new place to shift their marketing [00:26:00] dollars to some degree that's going to get them back to where they were.

And for no other reason, I think there'll be some more investment in YouTube just to try something else, right? And see if they can be the first mover to take advantage of it and ride that wave. So this is really interesting. I appreciate you sharing that today.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. Thanks for the time, Jon. Let me stand on my soapbox.

Jon MacDonald: All right. Thank you, Ryan.

Ryan Garrow: Thank you.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert. com.