Optmyzr PPC walkthrough 2021 - by @todmaffin

With me here in another little box on your screen is Jeff Clear from Optimizr. Hello, Jeff.

Hey, Tod, thanks for having me on.

Not at all. And I should say Optimizr is spelled like you think it is, except without the E. So Optimizr, kind of like this, still, still in the old days of the Flickr kind of, right, kind of thing. So I like it. So Jeff, tell me about Optimizr and what, like, the 30-second summary of what it does. And then let's kind of go through a little walkthrough of the tour.

Sure thing. Optimizer was founded about 8 years ago by ex-Googlers, and we've created the tool that will help PPC account managers save time and improve performance in their paid search accounts by being able to do a couple things: visualize data a little differently than you can see the data in the engines to gain better insights and deeper insights into the data, and also to be able to quickly optimize their accounts by doing things like changing budgets, changing bids, doing ad copy testing, things that are more tedious, the more tedious tasks inside of Google and Bing and Facebook. So we're going to help reduce the tedious tasks and being able to automate those tasks to save time, improve performance, and be able to do things like improve client strategy, which is typically higher value. Than doing the tedious tasks in a paid search account.

Gotcha. All right, well, let's crank up your screen and see what it looks like.

Sure thing. All right, so hope— tell me if you can see my screen okay, Todd.

Yep, I can see you fine.

Okay, can you see the Pro Dashboard?

I can.

Awesome. So yeah, here is the Pro Dashboard. And if we start over here on the left-hand side, you'll see the different platforms that we connect to. We connect to Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, also Yahoo Japan, as well as Google Analytics.

Why Yahoo Japan in particular?

Because we've got some partners in Japan. Typically, yeah, in the US and most of the world does not use Yahoo Japan. But we've got some partners in Japan that do use it, and so we've built some tools to help optimize that particular platform.

Fair enough.

It's kind of, yeah, obscure platform, but over in Japan it's, it's very highly used.

And so the idea here, I guess, is that we— is that you're able to, uh, correct me if I'm wrong, but you're able to take a— make a single category and then have the data from all the different platforms pull in. So if you're running a Black Friday campaign but you're running it on Google and Facebook and Amazon and Microsoft, that are you able to then create a single campaign where all of those flow into?

We are not able to do that. So what we do is— okay, what we do is we present the account-level data. So we would, we present the account-level data for those platforms that you mentioned, and so you can do optimizations in those platforms But as far as combining the data, we're not there yet. That is a long-term strategy that we're getting to. But as of today, yes, we are going to be able to look at the individual platforms and then optimize those.

Okay, so you can't combine it for reporting even at this stage?

We can combine it for reporting. We can't combine it for optimizations.

Oh, I see. Okay. All right. That distinction is important, I think, for people because, you know, a lot of people, I think, in addition to looking for just optimization, are also looking for a for a way to make it easier to present to clients and to their boss and, and to just have kind of a dashboard to, to view all of that stuff together. So outside of the optimization side though, we're able to look at it kind of a single— here's all the PPC I'm running in one, in one chunk to get like a blended ROAS and all those sorts of things.

We can do that. So what we're going to do here is we're going, we're going to list all of the accounts that you've connected to Optimizer will show the data at the account level. So you can hover over that data and, and be able to set alerts based on the different KPIs that are really important to you. So one of the things that has really transitioned in paid search is obviously a lot of things are being automated, but the PPC account manager's role has consistently been changing during this automation. And one of the things that we can still control is is being able to set alerts in our accounts and understand when a certain metric like conversions or ROAS or cost per conversion is getting out of control so we can better understand what's going on.

Okay. And so these numbers that we're seeing here are across all— can we go into that, into that test account and see what's inside there?

Sure, sure, absolutely. So what we're going to do here is present a dashboard And this will be the account-level data in our, in this particular Google account.

Mm-hmm.

So we're going to get a little deeper insight into how things are performing. We can graph data, we can understand why certain metrics are changing. We can track quality score and budgets, and then also give in-depth suggestions, which you can click into and go directly to that tool to do things like add search terms as keywords, change bids, do ad copy testing. So it gives you kind of an overview of how things are performing, including an account-level audit score.

Gotcha. So this is— so where's the optimization part of this then? Is it just the sort of like taking these suggestions and, and putting them there, or is there some automated machine learning that kicks in?

We don't have an automated machine learning system that kicks in because— and we purposely designed Optimizer not to be a black box solution. We consider it a white box solution where you're going to create optimizations and be and stay in full control of those optimizations. And so we don't want— we didn't want to build a system that would compete with Google Smart Bidding like some of our competitors have built. What we want to do is be able to still use Smart Bidding, but do things like bolt systems on top of it. And we call that automation layering to still stay in control and pull levers to help optimize the account while you're using Google Smart Bidding. But Todd, you had mentioned some of the optimizations. So if I kind of go into that area and look at the optimizations, we've got dozens of different types of optimizations. And how about we take a look at one of them? Yeah, I think this will give you a good example of some of the time savings and account improvements that we can do with Optimizer. So here's a really good example, and we call Keyword Lasso— that's our name for this tool— but we are looking at search terms from your Google account that are outperforming the keyword that it matched against, and it's not a keyword in the account. So this, this search term right here is not a keyword. It's performing very well. So we're filtering those search terms out and presenting the best of the best suggestions that you can then review. And this is where, this is where you stay in control. You can review these search terms and understand maybe you don't want to add that particular one. Maybe you want to change this search term to a negative. Maybe you want to change this match type to an exact match.

Oh, that's nice.

So you'll go through the list, you'll do your work, and then the efficiency comes with our one-click optimization button. And when I click this, the keywords that I've selected will be added to your Google account in real time.

And where's it pulling this data from? Search Console?

It's pulling directly from your Google Ads account. We connect via the API. All right, and we're going to pull that information in through the API and analyze it and filter it to make these types of suggestions, right?

Gotcha. I like that you can— I like that on one screen you can sort of adjust, you know, whether it's a phrase match or, or an exact match. Like, that's— that kind of stuff is sort of— is definitely nice. All right, what else is in here that we should know about?

So let's, let's touch on another optimization, and that one is A/B testing for ads. So here's another good example of saving time and improving account, uh, performance by doing something that every PPC account manager knows is a very time-consuming task, and that's ad copy testing, right? What we'll do in your Google Ads account is we'll analyze ad group by ad group, and with a 95% degree of confidence, we are going to show you— and here's our confidence level, which you can change up or down— But with a 95% degree of confidence, we're gonna, we're gonna check the ads that are losing based on the metric that you pick that's most important to you. And that can be CTR, ROAS, CPA, whatever the case may be. So we'll understand that that one is losing, and the action item here is to pause the losing ads. But before you do that, you can create a new ad with our Ads Editor. And we'll bring in the top performing ad copy from that particular campaign that you're working on to help you easily create a new A/B test. So you'll create your ad, you'll pause your losers, and then you are— have just created a new A/B test.

All right, interesting. Okay, and what does reporting look like? I'm always— I, I don't know why I'm obsessed with sort of grouped reporting, but I, I do like I do like, like the single view of, of things. Sure thing.

So here's what the reports look like. And we— and like you said at the very beginning, we can aggregate the data of the different platforms that we can connect to Optimizer, so we can create one report. If you've got a client using Google, Microsoft, Amazon, we can bring in Google Analytics and Facebook. We can create one report that shows all the different data in those different platforms. So if you want to white label this, you can bring in a particular logo and maybe your client's logo.

And is it fully white labelable? I see Powered by Optimizer on there. Is that where the logo would go or does that stay?

That would leave. So this is, if you sign up for a free trial account, you'll see this right here.

Of course.

But then if you upgrade to the paid account, this will disappear.

Yeah.

And then you can, yes, you can completely make it white labelable. And then you'll use the different data. We call them reporting widgets. So you can create these different widgets and understand or select the different types of data that you want to present. So you can graph things and chart things. And all this is interactive, by the way. So you can hover over it and then understand a little bit more about the data.

Oh, I thought— oh, isn't that interesting? I, I thought that I was looking at a PDF just because this is sort of very similar to the way that, um, uh, that Chrome presents a PDF. It's kind of in it with a black border. I thought this was a PDF we were looking at, and then when you hovered over the things, that kind of blew my mind for a second. So this is actually on the website?

This, this would be on the website, yep, inside our— inside of our app. So you can, um, this is our— basically our reporting suite. So I've just kind of created a demo report here that can bring in things like device-level information, network-level information, demographics. And if I scroll down here, you can see the different types of trends we can do.

So, and can we— yeah, sorry, and can users who are creating a report insert sort of text blocks or something to give context to what people are seeing?

You can, you can insert pictures, you can insert notes in here as well. So it's, it's very flexible to be able to add in information maybe that you're talking to a client about, or some insights, business insights about the data that you're presenting. So you can create all this different, all this different information, including ad copy, image ads, And then I think most importantly for, uh, people that are using Optimizer, you can then schedule that. So you create a template with all the information inside of it, and then you can schedule it to go out on a regular basis.

And does it go out as a link that a client can open or as a PDF?

You can do either way. You can create a link or you can create a PDF that would be attached to the email.

That's great. And then I presume the scheduling, of course, you, you would have to go in and update the notes each time though, unless the notes were consistent to, to each, correct, or each term.

Yeah, yeah.

What else should we know about in here?

So if we go down here to the insights, this isn't a really popular area of Optimizer because we're going to analyze the, the data that we're pulling in and present it in a different way. And so in that report that I just showed was a tool called PPC Investigator, and with PPC Investigator we're going to present that that information. And, um, I'm just going to change the date range here, but you can present that information in a way that an account manager can easily take a look at it and understand, in this particular case, why clicks are changing over a certain time period. Oh, so we'll bring in the top-level data here, which is clicks, and then the components, which on the second level are the components that make up clicks. CTR, CPC, impressions, those are going to make up clicks, and you can see why they're changing. Um, clicks dropped by 40%. Why did that happen? And so all we have to do is go down to the second level and understand that the biggest contributor here was actually impressions dropping by a very big margin, which would imply what, the ad auction itself, maybe more competition? Maybe we need to change bids. Maybe, yeah, maybe there is more competition. So this will point you in the right direction to go understand why, why these metrics are changing.

Whereas, whereas a decline in CTR might mean what, a problem with creative perhaps?

A problem with creative, maybe it needs to be refreshed. Absolutely, that could be a, that could be a big reason. And then we'll give you more context here, Tod, on our on our root cause analysis tool. So this, this is part of PPC Investigator, but it can understand— it can help you understand why things are changing positively and why things are changing negatively inside your account. So here's a good example: the clicks have, have decreased by a big margin, but actually YouTube has increased by almost 300%. And then if we go down to the negative top movers, you can see that the biggest contributor to clicks dropping was the Google Search Network. And if you click into it, you can get a lot more information about the campaigns and ad groups and devices that are contributing to this negative top movement of clicks.

Somebody needs to work on your campaign names, my friend.

Yeah, yeah. We're always doing some testing and—

I know, I know.

—tweaking. So yeah.

And then is it easy for me to, like, if I find, like, you know, I'm looking at Google Search Network in this particular demo example, it's down, you know, 67%. Can I— is there an easy way for me to just click in and pause that entire platform?

Not here in the— not here in the tool. We're working on— we're working on optimizations that you can click directly from this particular tool into Optimizer to help optimize. But for right now, it's just pointing you in the right direction, and you can go take a look at inside the engines to understand what needs to be done.

All right. Anything else that we should know about?

Sure. We've got a lot of different areas here and we'll touch into the really popular optimization that we've got for all of the platforms that we can connect to called Optimizer Express. And so in the keyword lasso and some of the different insights and optimizations that we've got, we can just analyze account by account. With Optimizer Express, we can have these preloaded suggestions over all of your accounts. This is kind of something close to what you asked at the very beginning. Can we kind of combine that data and look at it, uh, look at it together? Here is a similar tool that would do something like that, because now instead of just giving Google or Microsoft suggestions. We, we can give suggestions over all the different platforms that you've connected to Optimizer. So you can see this one's an Amazon suggestion to add new keywords, right? Really, the, the whole idea here is to make it very quick so you can get those quick wins, quick optimizations, but we're still going to leave you in complete control give you all the data that you need to, that you need to make, that you need to have to make the decision. And then with just a click here, we can add new keywords to our Amazon account. And then we're on to the different optimizations like pushing keywords to first page. So all these will be loaded for you to review and then decide if it's, if it makes sense to push those to the particular engine that we're working in.

Where are you guys in terms of adding sort of the, uh, secondary platforms, the up-and-coming platforms? I'm thinking the Pinterests of the world, the TikToks of the world, and so on.

Yeah, we really don't have any plans to add any tools for TikTok or Pinterest. What we're really concentrating on, um, are our platforms like Facebook. So we're, we're adding tools to Facebook, we're adding tools to Amazon. We've really focused in on the platforms that our clients spend the most of their ad spend in. So we're really focusing in on Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook to really go deep and detailed into those engines because we found that that's where most of the ad spend is happening.

And who would you say is sort of your best client in terms of that you provide the most value to? Is it a small business owner with 2 people? Is it a, uh, an agency person with 10 clients? Is it a brand marketing a manager at a Fortune 500 company? Like, who, who's kind of the avatar for who will get the, the most relief out of using Optimizer?

Sure. Um, so we've scaled the system to be useful for somebody spending a few thousand dollars up to people, enterprise-level advertisers and large agencies spending millions of dollars. So we have created the platform to be able to be efficient for all, all those different ad spends. And so we really don't have a target client in mind that, um, you know, we're, we're best suited for, because, um, really, um, the, the magic comes in, in optimizing. And it doesn't really matter if it's a couple thousand dollars or a couple million dollars, you can still save time and improve performance in all those different price ranges, right? Uh, how much does it cost? Well, we start out at $249 a month and we go up to, um, our Pro Plus plan is $799 a month. And so, and then we've got our enterprise level plans which are more of a custom quote depending on how much ad spend that you've got per month and how many accounts that you've got.

These are US dollars, I presume, not not pounds or anything like that?

They're US dollars, yes.

And what's the primary distinction between what you'd get at the $249 level and what you'd get at the $750 level?

So we, we don't hold anything back in any of our pricing plans. Um, so the, um, it's really based on the amount of ad spend that you've got and the number of accounts that you have. So we're not holding any of the automations or any of the insights or optimizations that we've looked at today back in any of the plans. We want to give all those to all advertisers, so there's really no distinction between the plans. The distinction happens when you do go to the Enterprise plan. You get things like more support and a dedicated account manager and some other features and benefits, but between the $799 and the $249, there's really no distinction. So what would be the price?

I'm just trying to think of like an average person. So this is, uh, this is one seat and, uh, they run a small number of ads, so I'm going to say $1,000 of ads in each of the platforms, so maybe $5,000 a month. Um, what are they looking at?

So that would be the $249 price. Okay. And, um, you can see the different, uh, the different ad spend levels that we offer here. And, uh, so yeah, it's, it's not contract-based. You can cancel at any time. But yeah, it's really dependent on the ad spend, and you can kind of click into here and see the different levels that we've got based on your ad spend and the number of accounts.

Tell me about your support. Uh, if it is 11 o'clock at night on a Tuesday, what are my support options?

Yeah, we've got support teams all across the world. We've got support teams in India, in Copenhagen, Denmark, in Chile, So we've tried to position these support teams over a lot of different types of time zones, a lot of different time zones, so they can best react to if you do send an email at midnight in the US, that it's still being looked at one of our teams depending on that particular time zone.

That's good. And do you know roughly kind of what your response time is on them?

Typically we'll respond over email. Within a couple hours. All right, that's—

hey, that's— I think, I think for those of us who are in this business and, uh, and have had to deal with Facebook support, a couple of hours to me is a dream, like an unachievable dream, that's a fantasy that is obviously inspired by various drugs. So I'm glad to hear it. Um, we— you, you are kindly extending your Black Friday offer. These videos of course tend to live forever on the internet, so We are recording this in early December of 2021, and you have kindly offered to extend your Black Friday deal for our viewers and listeners.

Yes, we, we are. So, uh, we had a Black Friday, uh, deal over, uh, over Black Friday week. And so, um, for everybody listening to this podcast through the end of 2021, we're going to offer an extra free month on our annual plan. And those, those of you that can see this Typically, we offer our annual plan with 2 months free, and so we're going to offer an additional month for those that respond before the end of 2021. And all you have to do is just email Black Friday to support@optimizer.com, and you can take advantage of that offer. Super.

And there is a free trial as well, is there?

There's a free trial. We offer a 14-day free trial, and so you can And that's our best salesperson, by the way, because you can connect your accounts, you can run through the tools, look at the suggestions and the insights, and understand if it's a good fit for you.

I should mention that, uh, there's no kickback here. This isn't an affiliate thing. We get $0 if you try, if you buy, or anything like that. Um, Jeff, thank you so much for this. I really appreciate it.

Thank you, Todd. It was great, uh, great being on. Thank you very much.