Google Ads, Ecom Strategy & the Future of AI Advertising with Austin Becker (Part 1)

0:00Introduction and Guest Welcome

0:00Crystal WaddellWelcome back to the Simple and Smart SEO show podcast. I'm back with another new friend that I met at Brighton SEO in San Diego. In 2024.

Austin Becker , Austin Becker e-Commerce Marketing. He owns an e-commerce focused digital marketing agency.

So Austin, thank you for coming on today to talk about SEO and PPC.

And just all things e-commerce.

I really appreciate you coming on this simple and smart SEO show podcast.

0:26Conference Highlights and Networking

0:26Austin BeckerYeah, thanks for having me, crystal. It was great to meet up at the conference. It was really a great experience and mostly because there's fun people like yourself. And knowledgeable people like yourself to. Learn from. So I was really happy to be there and, um, meet you and all the other conference attendees.

It was really fun.

0:42Crystal WaddellYeah, that's very kind because like I, I look at you the same way. I'm like, uh, this guy's way smarter than me. But still, it's fun.

And we had the great like hot chocolate summit of 2024. Yeah.

0:55Austin BeckerI remember someone got hot chocolate. I got ice cream.

I still think about that 'cause

1:00I don't buy Ghirardelli here.

I get like Ben and Jerry's, which is good. But there's something different about Ghirardelli.

1:05Crystal WaddellYeah.

Well I thought that was so fun.

1:07Marketing Summit Tradition

1:07We were talking marketing, um, in the after hours. And then I learned from you and your friend David. That you guys have kind of like a, a marketing summit of your own after the conference.

Yeah. And I thought that was so cool. I did mine on my own. But tell me about how you guys started that tradition.

1:25Austin BeckerYeah, so I, I was reaching out to a bunch of people on LinkedIn. People who do Google ads. 'cause it's a lonely business if you're by yourself. So I just was reaching out to people at random.

And I reached out to David and, David's in Toronto currently. He and his family.

We did a couple like Zoom meetings just to share ideas and thoughts on Google ads.

And then eventually, I'm not that far from Toronto.

So I flew up there. and we just booked a conference room.

And just.

Went through business plans for the next year.

And it was really helpful to do that with another person, just going over business plans and ideas.

1:58Crystal WaddellThat is awesome.

2:00And when you guys told me that's what you were doing, I thought, man, I wanna do that.

So I want you to know, I took your advice to heart.

And after the final day of the conference. I went to the waterfront. And I did a "brand interview" of questions.

I downloaded an app on my phone. I could read the questions, record my answers. And then I have a GPT that I created for this activity.

I put that transcript into the GPT.

And it helped me create a brand guide.

And then from the brand guide, I then went on to create my marketing plan for 2025.

And I spent that entire day working on that project.

And that was all from your guys' suggestion. And I planned out my 2025 before I left San Diego.

2:46Austin BeckerOkay. Really cool. I'm glad it was an inspiration. Well, next time if we're at the conference, together, we should do like a group, session like this, recording ideas. I think that'd be really cool.

2:55Crystal Waddellthat would be awesome. I'm totally down for that. tell me how you got started in digital marketing. And how

3:00you, became an agency owner.

3:01Early Ventures and Side Gigs

3:01Austin BeckerYeah, I've just always done side gigs on nights and weekends. Now I don't, 'cause this is my full-time thing.

But when I was working other jobs, I did a bunch of stuff. I sold t-shirts online like everybody else. That's such a popular thing to sell. I sold barbecue rubs.

I sold, these Turkey brines that I made.

I would buy and sell stuff from the discount rack at Big Lots or stores like that. I would just buy a bunch of stuff, send it in to Amazon. , And this was kind of for fun, to make extra cash, all these different things. And at some point I thought, I'm gonna try to get a job doing this.

So I got a job working at an Amazon analytics company. We would download data from Amazon.

And build market share reports. So, um, it was quite different than Jungle Scout or Helium 10.

But it was that kind of industry, like market intelligence on Amazon.

That was a good job, but I thought, I just wanna make more money and I think I could do this on my own.

And so I had a brief segue where I tried to sell my own product on Amazon.

But before I even

4:00bought inventory, I thought to myself.

This is too risky for me in my, like, financial situation at the time.

I just didn't have that much cash to burn on inventory. And so I, I scrapped that idea, but I had already left the job.

I thought, oh crap, I gotta make some money.

4:13Transition to Google Ads

4:13So I just started doing ads for people over Upwork. I'd find jobs on Upwork marketing.

Actually on Facebook first, but then I moved to Google ads. 'cause a lot of people really struggle with their Google shopping.

Especially the product feeds.

That you have to use to power Google shopping.

So I figured out how to set up Google Shopping product data feeds in Google Merchant Center.

And I found a lot of people needed that.

So I wasn't short on work doing that. The product feeds and the e-commerce shopping. Advertising.

4:40Finding Product-Market Fit

4:40Crystal WaddellYou found product market fit.

4:42Austin BeckerYeah. I remember when I had the t-shirt business, like I. Everybody in their dog sells t-shirts now. And everybody in their dog sold t-shirts back then. But I remember I, I had an okay t-shirt, Shopify store. And the first time I turned on Facebook ads, like within 30 minutes I got a sale. And I was so shocked that it was just

5:00an okay t-shirt store and with like $10 and within 30 minutes of turning on that first ad, I got a sale. And I was, that was like a one-off thing. Like I didn't keep getting sales. but just the fact that the first one came so fast, I thought, gosh, this is really amazing.

And Facebook. Like meta is amazing for advertising. I mostly work with Google and I have an employee that focuses on meta.

But it's just phenomenal that there's this app with like three something billion users.

Hundreds of millions of monthly active users just in the us. And like you can put up ads.

And they'll feed it to the right person.

And those people will give you money.

It's insane to me that's how it works. 'cause in the past you have to like, set up a little storefront.

Put like an ad in the newspaper, put up like a billboard.

And people would stroll in slowly and buy stuff. But, e-commerce is so different.

You can reach everybody really cheaply.

And if it's not working, you just turn it off.

You haven't signed a contract with like a magazine or a billboard marketing agency to carry your ads. Like you can just turn it off.

5:57Challenges and Strategies in E-commerce

5:57Crystal Waddellso that's how you got started and

6:00you made that first sale, but then you said you didn't get a whole bunch, right after that.

What continued to fuel your fire for advertising?

6:09Austin BeckerOh, I had a good job at the time, but. It was hard to get raises. And I just wanted to make more money 'cause I had to pay for college. So that kind of fueled the fire to keep learning.

But it was also fun. Like I, I thought it was cool to make sales on my own.

Like I didn't sell a ton of t-shirts.

But the money would come in and I got to keep somewhere around half of it. But I never could scale it.

So that's why I had moved on to different jobs. this is something that you probably know as a service provider. If you get a contract with a client. And the money's in the door, like you're set.

But if you're selling physical products, you have to load up on inventory and that's a big risk. And so, as much as I wanted to like start a business based on inventory and like turning over product, the advertising business was so accessible. And I wouldn't say it was easy, but. If you learn stuff that other people don't spend as much time learning, then suddenly you've got something unique to

7:00offer. And people need these services.

'cause if you're running a retail, like selling products. Like you don't have time to figure out SEO and Google product feeds and all that stuff.

7:09Crystal WaddellSo if you were starting your agency today.

Would you do anything differently and do you feel like it's still a good time to start? Or do you feel like the people who are in it they're at the top of the food chain and will stay there?

7:22Austin BeckerYeah. Our mutual friend David that we were talking about earlier. He and I have always said like, as long as you're a functioning adult and you can like, show up for a meeting. And you can do a little bit of research on like, how to set up an ad. Like you can probably make money doing this. especially as a freelancer.

Like if you're not paying anybody else's salary, it's just you. Um, oh yeah, you could definitely make money doing this. Still today I would, if I was doing this, starting from scratch in 2024. I probably would've gone all in on Amazon marketing.

And just done that. 'cause Amazon's grown more in their share of the shopping search market.

So like Google is losing some of their market share to Amazon, but

8:00Google's not losing market share for things like how to make chocolate chip cookies or how to change a tire.

Google's losing search share on shopping related searches. So more people start their shopping journey on Amazon now than they used to. Whereas people used to spend a lot start their shopping journey on Google.

More than they're right now. But yeah, that's 2024.

If I was gonna restart everything again in 2026, I'd probably choose to do some AI advertising.

That'll probably be a thing in 2025. 2026 for sure.

8:29Crystal WaddellI will say that as soon as I saw the Google AI overviews, I went to bed that night. And then I sat up in my bed and I was like, they're gonna put ads in that! I still have it on LinkedIn because I was like, this is an ads play.

Tell me what you think the future holds for AI ads and ads in ai.

8:47Austin BeckerYeah. You know, Google, I've seen Google do that a little bit in the generative search experience. Is that what it is?

8:53Crystal WaddellThat's what they started with and now they call it the AI overviews.

8:56Austin BeckerGotcha. Anthropic owns Perplexity. And Perplexity

9:00isn't half as popular as Chat GPT. But Perplexity has, with that ownership from Amazon, they have this impetus to do shopping.

And already there's a pilot program you can apply for. And this is January of 2025. So we'll see if this, maybe this won't be a pilot in a few months.

But the pilot program is, you can send perplexity a product feed of all your inventory.

And then like if someone does a search for, " headsets under a hundred dollars." Perplexity, in theory, would take all of the product feeds that it has, that contain headsets for under a hundred dollars.

And it would surface those in its generative AI results.

Furthermore, it won't be just a link to that website where the product is sold. It will be like an in app shopping experience where you can check out.

And make the purchase 100% within perplexity. Which is pretty fascinating. Haven't seen that. I, I need to spend some more time, in perplexity, but as of right now, that's a pilot program.

So some advertisers are probably submitting feeds. And then the rest of us are just waiting for permission to do the same.

9:59Crystal Waddell:

10:00So the submission of the feeds has to be in conjunction with advertising? It's not just like how Google has the free product feeds?

10:09Oh, that's a good question. And I don't know.

Okay. I wish I knew.

10:12Crystal WaddellI'm definitely going to check into that pilot program. And see if that's something that I can do.

If I can just submit my product feed without being an advertiser.

10:21Austin BeckerYeah, and I, I've applied for the pilot program. If I was in it, and I knew the answers, then I would definitely share. But they haven't accepted me to the pilot program yet. I'm on a wait list somewhere.

10:31Crystal Waddellit's cool just to know that it exists. That is "new news" to me, so very cool.

10:37SEO Strategies for 2025

10:37So, I know you're more on the PPC side. But all these changes that are happening right now with LLMs. And like you said perplexity, and just all of this competition in search. What do you think are the most effective SEO strategies in 2025?

10:56Austin BeckerYeah, for e-commerce stores, just having a product page that's

11:00better than an Amazon product page. Would probably be the first thing I would suggest to anybody.

If you're shopping for something on Amazon, usually there's seven pictures. Maybe one of the pictures is a video.

The pictures often have little call outs that show the dimensions.

Or maybe call out the material of the product if it's like an apparel product. And there's tons of reviews and links to other products.

It's just so easy to navigate and buy something on Amazon.

So if your e-commerce store has product pages that are just like one or two images. You're not as good as Amazon.

And so, I just don't know why someone would buy from you.

Unless you're the one and only person that produces that product you're selling. And they can't buy it anywhere else.

But otherwise. it should just be better than Amazon is like the first small step.

11:40Crystal WaddellThat's really interesting.

11:41Improving E-commerce Product Pages

11:41Is this something that you can recreate in Shopify? Like the Amazon experience? And are there any other elements that you'd recommend? 'cause you mentioned the lots of photos. Maybe a video. Reviews. Anything else that we should be making sure that we do better than Amazon?

11:57Austin BeckerYeah, so the reviews are definitely. Important.

12:00And then as far as like, we're talking about elements, like pictures, videos, description, bullet points. Shipping information. If there's something, if you're selling a product where dimensions matter.

Let's say like you're selling home goods.

So like a lantern is, it's one thing to see a picture.

But people probably need to see the dimensions of the lantern. 'cause you can't tell, is it six feet tall or, um, like three feet tall. Like, so anything that a shopper might, uh, question when they're looking at the product page, you've gotta find a way to put that there.

And then, for SEO specific.

Like those are all the components or elements that should be on the product page. I just listed off a flurry of ideas.

But, the SEO to back it up, too, would be all the metadata that's describing. For example, what are the sections of the page that are available?

And you can check this stuff on a tool called validator.schema.org. And so for example.

If your product page is missing something and you plug it in, you plug your product page into schema.org. You could see what SEO properties are there for search engines to see.

12:58Schema and SEO Tools for Shopify

12:58Crystal WaddellSo do you

13:00deal with Shopify stores still with e e-commerce ads?

13:03Austin BeckerYeah. Most, mostly Shopify.

13:06Crystal WaddellOkay. So with the schema, like most of the themes are prebuilt. So if there's an element missing. What do you recommend to your clients to do to fix it?

13:18Austin BeckerYeah, there's a Shopify app. I think it's called Schema App.

I think they had representatives at Hero Conf at Brighton.

But anyway, that app. if you had a WordPress site, you can change anything and everything. It's just really complicated.

But if you use that schema app on Shopify, like you can change anything and everything.

You just have to use that app.

If you have a theme change. From year to year. You might wipe out a lot of your SEO work.

So I, I would tell people to use that schema app. In my mind, it has like an orange logo.

Yeah, it's Schema app for Shopify.

13:48Crystal WaddellI see it now with the orange arrows.

13:50Austin BeckerYeah, that's it. Yeah. And I don't personally work in that app a lot.

But I work with people that do.

And they'll fill in anything.

If the in stock, out of

14:00stock metadata's wrong. They can fix it with that.

I wish I had time to work in that myself to know the ins and outs of it.

But that's what I, I understand people prefer to use for doing SEO work on Shopify stores. 'cause you won't lose everything with the theme updates.

14:15Crystal WaddellThat's very good to know. And there's one of the women in my group.

I have a small group, for entrepreneurs. And we talk a lot about Google Merchant Center and those product.

And I am horrible with anything Google Workspace email. Or Google Merchant Center.

It's like Google has my number. I took it for granted that Shopify had the connections that I needed.

And for some of the women in my group. We have a mixture of makers and creative entrepreneurs and resellers.

So there's some print on demand.

There's some custom items that are happening.

There's constantly errors in Google Merchant Center. Oh yeah. About, because we don't have those numbers.

Like if you are generating your own products. You don't have those like

15:00SKUs. And the other one, I forgot what it is.

15:03Austin BeckerLike the GTIN code? Yes. Or the code.

15:06Crystal WaddellYes. Those things. So it's like you get these errors. So I just feel like this app could help us a lot. In terms of maybe fixing some of those errors that come up.

So I'm kind of excited to play around with it.

15:19Austin BeckerYeah.

I find that sometimes Merchant Center will look at a product on your store and the product on the store says it's in stock.

But the data feed and merchant center says it's out of stock. And if they don't line up, Google will disapprove it.

And like, I've gone into websites where there's a mismatch.

And like the metadata on the product page is correct, but it's just not seeing the right thing. So then I've reached out to an SEO person that works with that Schema app.

And they just take care of it right away. Which is cool.

15:44Crystal WaddellThat is very cool.

Oh my gosh, I'm so excited to share that.