SMX West 2018: Interview with PPC Kirk

This interview is part of our SMX West expert interview series taking place between March 12th and 16th, 2018.

Possibly one of the most well-liked PPC faces on Twitter, Kirk Williams (aka PPC Kirk), founder of Zato Marketing, doesn’t disappoint when it comes to staying on top of industry trends.

It’s no surprise that he’s back at SMX for another year, playing a big part in the ‘Shopping Campaigns That Keep Paying Off’ session. As we heard in Aaron Levy’s interview, SMX (with the help of the legendary Brad Geddes) included an e-commerce specific track this year to help retail marketers make the most of their time at SMX West 2018. Obviously, PPC Kirk was another perfect fit!

Because we can’t get enough of his quick wit, we just had to get an interview with Kirk at SMX. Here’s what he had to say about the conference and the perfect Google Shopping set up:

Transcript:

Chandal: Hi everyone, this is Chandal, I’m back at SMX West 2018. I’m here with Kirk Williams, also known as PPC Kirk. He’s the owner of Zato Marketing. Thanks so much for joining us today. So, tell us about your role at SMX.

Kirk: I’m here because I like learning lots, I’m here to learn! I’m speaking tomorrow on Shopping ads.

Chandal: Shopping ads are particularly interesting for e-commerce marketers. Why is that?

Kirk: I’d say two primary reasons. The first is they are naturally more clickable. They have images, prices, really the information that shoppers want to see distilled in one little thing. So I think that’s part of it. Because of that, but also part of that, is that Google and Bing are actually increasing the amount of impressions they’re giving to Shopping too. I think because of both of those things, you just have to be on Shopping if you’re in e-commerce.

Chandal: You absolutely do. Random question: B2B SEM has come up a lot, is there any room for B2B in Google Shopping?

Kirk: Ya, there is. I actually have a couple of B2B shopping clients. It’s a little bit of the same thing, some of the same challenges with longer sales cycles, tracking and all of that as well. If you do sell a thousand dollar product through Shopping ads, just using that last click, directly linking that to ROI, is not really going to give you the whole picture, so you do need to make sure you are really understanding what’s happening in the buying cycle. But it does happen.

Chandal: If you could give our audience one tip, to improve their next Shopping campaign, what would it be?

Kirk: Try to organize your campaigns according to query intent. What I mean by that is, search queries have different levels of buying intent, so there are ways and it’s complicated, but there’s articles online. I wrote one for Search Engine Land that gives a step-by-step process. Basically it shows you how to segment your queries so if it’s a real general top of the funnel query, then you have ‘this campaign’ so you’re able to treat it differently than your bottom funnel queries. I think that’s probably the first place to start.

Chandal: Seriously good advice for anyone running Google Shopping campaigns! You can check out Kirk’s article on Search Engine Land (above). Thank you for taking a few minutes to talk with us today.

Kirk: Thanks so much.

Stay tuned for more coverage of SMX West to come!

Image Credits

Feature Image: Unsplash/Jakob Owens 

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