Happy Sunday!

If you’re reading this, I hope you’ve been enjoying Labor Day Weekend. If you work hard, which you most likely do if you read this newsletter, this weekend is a time to relax! That said, make sure your feet are up, your back feels supported, you have a beverage in your hand, and you’re ready to read through some unpublished holiday-adjacent insights from Google’s retail team.

I have an exciting announcement to share: A few partners and I are throwing a conference — The Ecom Founders Q4 Summit!

The goal of this conference is to bring together marketers, media buyers, founders, creatives, and anyone involved in a brand's success for one last event before we lock ourselves in for the rest of Q4. We will host the event in New York City on September 26th and have an incredible speaker line-up, with more to be announced.

If you want a ticket, submit your email on the event site, and we will get back to you with next steps within 24 hours. The event is already 1/3 sold, and we haven’t publicly announced it yet, so don’t miss your chance to get a ticket before we hit capacity!

Sign up for my conference on this link!

Also, if you haven’t gotten a chance to listen to this week’s Limited Supply, I brought on one of my close friends, Cody Plofker, the CMO and (IMO, co-founder) of Jones Road Beauty. He’s built this to a 9-figure business, bootstrapped, over the last few years and because of his growth, we talked about how to build a creative team, incrementality, and where we like to get ideas for good landing page angles. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Before we get into Google’s insights, though...

Vendor of the Week:

Superside — An ad design service that turned their insights and data points into a very helpful guide for (digital) ad design.

I’ve talked about Superside before. They are a plug-and-play solution for brands to generate more creative content. You hire them, they match you with designers, you submit briefs, and they complete projects within 12 or 24 hours. Speed is their superpower.

Now, they turned their insights into a guide that will take a solid 45-60 minutes to go through. Grab a cup of coffee or a big salad, print it out, and start highlighting the best parts (that’s how I learn best). It’s got 12 chapters, covering the frameworks that make good ads, how to design Pinterest-specific ad creative, programmatic ad design, and how to scale your internal ad design process. 

Click here to get the guide — it’s all readable in their online reader and it’s actually helpful. I’ll be sending this to anyone who asks me about ad creative 101. 

Unreleased Insights from Google’s Retail Team

So today is the Sunday of one of the biggest holidays in the states, so I want to keep today’s newsletter more fun and easy to read. This past week, I spoke at Google’s Think Retail event at the beautiful new $3B office that Google built in Tribeca. There were about 300 executives in the room, all massive Google clients (think Movado, ACE Hardware, etc), and then thousands of viewers who joined via livestream. It may have been you watching too! 

The sessions that Google went through gave marketers unique insights. They weren’t the typical “Black Friday sales expect to have a XX% growth period over last year.” No... they were a lot more helpful. For example, “1 in 3 shoppers start their holiday shopping in July,” or “Aligning your search with the word “deal” or building an SEO-ready page for the deals search can drive revenue by XX%.” Google’s research and insights team did great work on this.

I wasn’t able to get any recordings or slides, but I did take a ton of notes, and wanted to share a compilation of my notes below. If you have any questions or want something clarified, reply to this email!

  • The days between peak holidays are just as important as the holiday shopping days (Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Boxing day, etc). Merchandise your site daily, as if everyday is a big holiday.
  • 63% of US consumers agree that making the right purchase decisions requires more effort than it used to and 60% abandoned a purchase altogether because there were too many options and/or too much information. Be more direct with your education and make social proof louder.
  • The antidote to consumer uncertainty is confidence: Consumers who are highly confident at the point of purchase are 10x more likely to be very satisfied post-purchase and 6x more likely to say they would definitely buy again than those who have low confidence.
  • Consumers whose journeys included Google as a touchpoint were 1.7X more likely to find “very relevant” information. This includes YouTube, Search, and Maps. Having a strategy of what happens when a prospect searches your brand or product is very important. Eight Sleep does a fantastic job of this across Google properties.
  • Deliberate (October to November)
  • The trend of product research-related searches (such as 'review' and 'comparison' etc.) align with deal-related searches (like 'deal' and 'offer' etc.), as their search volumes trend in tandem.
  • Determined (December)
  • 75% say they want brands to demonstrate they understand my needs and more than half (61%) want that to be self-evident understanding to come through in branded communications to them.
  • December will be crucial. 2024 will bring 5 fewer days after Cyber, and a November election that could delay purchases. Be prepared to offer a frictionless experience in stores and online.
  • The better your Google Merchant Center is optimized and setup, the higher quality the shopping experience will be for your end consumer. Why? The better the inputs and starting point for Google, the better the experience can be for the customer.
  • Be descriptive in your product titles. If apparel products, for example, use information like Brand + Gender + Product Type + Attributes (color, size, etc.) to make it easier for customers searching.
  • Ensure your product images in catalog feeds are high quality shots (or, use something like Marpipe for optimized Google shopping feeds too).
  • Use additional feed attributes such as color, gender, material, length, width, etc. to provide additional product information and better surface your ads to the right queries.
  • Make sure that you add sale_price & sale_price_effective_date attributes to schedule price changes. This will enable you to automatically switch to sale prices when your holiday sales period actually starts.
  • Activate the Fast & Free and / or Same Day Delivery annotation to highlight faster shipping speeds vs. your competitors.
  • If you have physical stores, activate Pickup Today, Pickup Later, or Curbside Pickup to drive website visits and allow both online conversions and store visits. 
  • Utilize Merchant Promotions if you have coupon codes or special promos such as BOGO, free gifts, or % off discounts.
  • Add your Loyalty Program details within Merchant Center to highlight key loyalty benefits such as rewards programs, member-only discounts, and free shipping.
  • You can now add more than 2 email contacts for Merchant Center notifications, so add all the relevant contacts there for email notifications. I recommend having an email where you get a Slack notification when there’s an email there — great for notifications like this around billing, systems going down, etc.
  • Attention: Hook in the first five seconds, and sustain attention with a focused message.
  • Branding: Brand early, often and in-situation so people remember your brand and products.
  • Connection: Connect through context (conversational, joyful tone; shop with me, in-store shopping). Be specific about your brand differentiation.
  • Direction: Give a clear call to action (shop online, in-store, etc).

Like I promised, a quick email with insights from Google’s event. They have another one coming up on September 10th, specifically from Google Ads. Sign up here if you want to see more of that!

Okay, now, because I know you’re probably yearning to get back outside to the grill, I’ll get to the end here.

That's all for this week

I hope today’s newsletter was a quick read for you and packed with insights and value. From the Superside guide to Google’s retail insights, it’s all good information to share with your team so everyone has the more context.

My belief is the more context someone has, the better their decisions can be!

It’s Sunday night, so I hope you plan to get a full 9 hours of sleep tonight — you can sleep in too! If not tonight, then tomorrow, get those 9 hours before the start of an intense 4-day week.

Have a great upcoming week and happy Labor Day!