E17: Andrew Birkitt

Richard Hill:
Hi and welcome to another episode of eComOne, and today's guest is Andy Birkitt. Now, Andy I have known for pretty much on the nose 20 years and that's because we worked together for 20 years, give or take. I think we maybe had six months off for good behaviour between us, haven't we?
Andrew Birkitt:
Just about.
Richard Hill:
Andy is the lead technical engineer at eComOne and SEO Traffic Lab, which are both mine and our agencies. How you doing, Andy, you okay?
Andrew Birkitt:
I'm doing really well, thanks, yeah. It's nice to be here.
Richard Hill:
Good, good. So Andy is still in lockdown, looking to come back to the office in a couple of weeks with a bit of luck, so I've made it back to the office now, I'm sort of a couple of weeks in to my return. As are quite a lot of the team, but Andy is coming in in a couple of weeks. So I think what would be great, Andy, is just to say really kick off and ask you really what do you think is the one thing you wish you knew about digital marketing before we started this journey?
Andrew Birkitt:
Oh crikey. That's a tough one. One thing. I think not so much a thing that I knew, I think what I would have liked to have known before I started in this, bear in mind I didn't come to digital marketing. I was quite late to the game. I wish I'd understood more about how dynamic the role was, it's not a... A lot of people think it's a fixed point, you sort of come along you learn how to do this and that's what you do for the rest of your career. Well, if that's what you're thinking then you'll get a pretty big shock when you enter the world of digital marketing. It's an ever-changing dynamic role, you're always learning something new.
Andrew Birkitt:
I think if I'd have known that beforehand I might have a few less grey hairs than I've got now. But yeah, be prepared to be constantly learning, things are changing, the algorithms change all the time, things... even stuff with the feeds is changing constantly, things getting updated, there's always ways to improve things, there's always new things coming out. So I think if I'd have understood that a bit, I'd have been a bit more prepared for the role, really. I mean it's an enjoyable role, I love it.
Richard Hill:
I think we see it, obviously we have, obviously quite a few team members, staff members, and every year we're recruiting two, three, four people through our apprentice track, graduate track in our businesses. The one thing that stands out is that mindset piece is what you're saying, of the reality is when these people come in, you can see straight away the ones that you know are really going to do well, or the ones that... Most of them do, but the ones that are going to do well have an open mindset to going into something and just keep learning and learning and learning, and clearly they get to a point where they're incredible at it quite quickly. We can find within a year or two, people are super smart in their specific talent but it's more that mindset and that culture fit to the business where they're willing to keep learning, willing to keep taking advice.
Andrew Birkitt:
You've got to be willing to learn and it's not really a nine to five job either. You might get to half past four on a Friday and think yeah, your weekend's here, and then something goes wrong with the feed or you've got to be prepared to say well, this client pays us to look after that for them so I'm not going home until it's resolved. You need that... I don't know whether it's a mentality or what but I think you need to be a bit crazy to do this job as well.
Richard Hill:
That's the thing, I guess obviously it is all 24/7, isn't it? All of our clients are generating leads, selling products, all day every day.
Andrew Birkitt:
Yeah. You can't just switch off.
Richard Hill:
Yeah.
Andrew Birkitt:
It's not like the feed stops working when you leave work, like it's still going on in the background, and sometimes in the morning you come in and it's like oh Christ, what's happened there? Sort of thing. Well, you've got to be able to... I think you've got to be able to react, is what I'm saying. It's not a come and sit down and do, job, not like a lot of jobs where you'll come in and you'll do the same thing day in day out. You don't in this job, which is probably one of the things I like about it, to be fair. I'm a bit of a...
Richard Hill:
Obviously you're not always on digital marketing. As I haven't. But we've done it for a long, long time. But what would you say is your turning point in your career?
Andrew Birkitt:
Crikey. Like you say, it's not... I didn't come into... I think I was in my 40s, so I consider myself quite late coming to the game of digital marketing. I would say that when I did do that it was a turning point. I'm an engineer by trade, I'm a... I was a packaging engineer, that's where I learnt my trade.
Richard Hill:
You've always had that technical mindset.
Andrew Birkitt:
Yeah, I've always been, even when I first started working for you. When I first started working for you we was a retail business and I was a technician building and repairing computers.
Richard Hill:
For those guys listening to the podcast, so Andy and myself have worked together for 20 years, which is a crazy... I think in digital marketing years that's probably 100 years. I don't know if that's a thing. So we had a retail business, a distribution business, an ecommerce business, all under one umbrella but we had different routes to market. So Andy very much ran, or he ran very many different departments over the years, but they all had that technical slant to them, whether it was building thousands of computers a year or managing our network, because we had about 40 staff in the retail business, in the ecommerce business.
Richard Hill:
Then that led on to, we were an ecommerce store selling online about 11 years ago, we stopped, or we stopped part of it and we sold off part of it. Then this is where we transitioned into the agencies that we have now and then you obviously transitioned from doing our SEO to doing clients' SEO to doing feeds to doing... So we're very much, we have a very technical episode ahead of us here. So that's what I want to get stuck into.
Andrew Birkitt:
I think basically, I'm a problem solver. That's what I do, that's what I do in my job. So I like puzzles, I like challenges, it's not always conducive to my health and what hair I've got left. So the turning point really for me was when you made the decision to shut down the retail side of the business and saw enough in me to say come along on this journey with me, Andy, I think we're going to do something amazing. From the early days when there was just me and you.
Andrew Birkitt:
I've pretty much done... I think I'm probably, apart from yourself, the only person in the company who's done pretty much every role within the marketing side. So I've done the SEO, I've done client management, I've done all the technical stuff. The turning point for me is the technical stuff. That's where I'm happiest, it's where I'm comfortable. When you said to me, "Right, I want you to become lead technical engineer." That was the ambition achieved, if you like. Obviously there's still places for me to go and there's still stuff that I want to do, which like I say, you're forever learning in this job so you don't stand still. But like I say, I'm a problem solver, that's what I enjoy doing.
Richard Hill:
Well you certainly do day in, day out. So obviously most of our listeners are ecom stories, eComOne, and let's have a real focus on feeds and Merchant Center. Bit of a secretive but a bit of a mystery, I guess. Feed, oh yeah, we take a feed from Magento or Shopify, push it into this, that, and the other, and we do shopping. Well, as you know and as we know as an agency, there's a bit more to it than that.
Andrew Birkitt:
I wish it was that simple.
Richard Hill:
Obviously we have our whole business that is predominantly geared around feeds, that then feed into campaigns that set up hundreds plus million pounds a year. So we know feeds, well you know feeds, inside out. So I think for those that are listening that are maybe getting started, that are sort of on the start of their journey, what is a data feed and what is Merchant Center?
Andrew Birkitt:
So data feed, in its simplest form, is a way of sending large amounts of structured data. It's current data and up-to-date data, usually for use from a website or an app or some sort of online tool. There's generally two kinds, there's product feeds and in our industry there's a news feed as well, which if you see a blog or anything like that, like the old RSS feeds, that's that sort of thing.
Andrew Birkitt:
Generally for product feeds, which is mainly what we'll talk about, they are either in XML or CSV format, and they are generated by something within your ecommerce store. In most instances, that will be a plugin that goes straight into your back office system and generates a file by pulling certain fields from the product information that you've already got in the site.
Andrew Birkitt:
So the bulk of the work's done already because you've got all your product data there. It's a way of taking that product data out and giving it to a publisher. And by publishers I mean things like Amazon store or in our case Google Shopping or PLAs, so product listing ads.
Richard Hill:
So we've got that feed, we've got it either in one or two formats and it's got various data in it, and then we sync, link, point that to Merchant Center. So just explain that process and what the Merchant Center is for for the listeners.
Andrew Birkitt:
So Merchant Center is basically Google's management tool. To take a feed you have to have a Google account, obviously, to be able to do it. You upload the feed there in order for the products to be checked, basically, and verified that they're allowed to be. Because obviously Google have a set of rules that you must adhere to for those products to become visible on a shopping channel.
Andrew Birkitt:
So for example there's certain attributes that you must have within the feed, things like it has to be unique, every product has to have a unique ID, they have to have a title, a link to the product, price, and a link to an image product description.
Richard Hill:
So if you upload a feed and you haven't got some of these, Merchant Center will tell you you're missing X, Y, Z, and that's when you then look at going back in, adjusting the data set, adding stuff in, liaising with the client, liaising with the store owner to say right, we're missing these. If you've uploaded 2000 SKUs, you might find that so many are missing this, that and the other, and there's like 500 things that are missing maybe. Doing that piece of work to make sure that feed is full. Would that be right?
Andrew Birkitt:
Yeah. And as long as you've got those items in you can have a pretty basic feed up and running fairly quickly, and then it's a case of working, like you say, working with the client. Generally... It's an odd one because a lot of clients, they either don't have a dev and they're doing all the work themselves or they have devs and it costs money to do that. So sometimes it can be a bit of a battle getting them to add some of those bits in.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. So you've got to liaise with the client and make sure, ultimately it's in their interest if products are missing certain data, as products won't be allowed and won't be passed. So you end up with 80% of your SKUs going through or whatever it may be, and then that can affect other factors in your account, if you don't have a certain score, I believe, within your Merchant Center. Something that not a lot of people know about is something called high score, I believe?
Andrew Birkitt:
That's something that was introduced about the middle of last year, I believe, so it's relatively new still but like you say not a lot of people know about it. It does affect the way your products will perform on Google Shopping, it is a twofold thing now. So part of it's due to Merchant Center and part of it's in the AdWords account itself. But each section has a score, basically, and the higher the score the more likely your products are to share and perform better.
Richard Hill:
What would be the top three things you think or couple of things that you think that obviously people won't be familiar with the high score that are listening, it's quite a guarded thing. I think you and probably three of your guys went down that mid or second quarter last year, wasn't it?
Andrew Birkitt:
Yeah, it was.
Richard Hill:
Through to Google and they did a whole afternoon on high score. What are a couple of the key things? I think we maybe touched on one, obviously making sure that you've got all your variables in there. What would be a couple of other key areas?
Andrew Birkitt:
Yeah. One of the big things with it is trying to maintain what I call a clean feed or a green feed. So if you look in your Merchant Center, anything that's coming up as a warning will be in... So Google use a traffic light system, basically, so red means it won't get shown, amber is sort of yeah, we'll show it but you're not going to perform quite as well as you would if it would green, and then green obviously is everything's brilliant, let's crack on and sell some product.
Andrew Birkitt:
Obviously red will stop things appearing in the feed and the higher the percentage of those, so if you've got high percentage of... Say we've got 4000 products and 1000 of those are getting disapproved but 3000 are going through fine, so there's going to be a percentage of those products showing up with disapprovals in the Merchant Center. The lower that percentage, me personally, I like to see none of those areas above 1%.
Richard Hill:
So you look at 99% green is what we're aiming for as a minimum or as a target.
Andrew Birkitt:
That's a target we set ourselves. You can... I would say definitely no more than 2, 3 percent.
Richard Hill:
Okay.
Andrew Birkitt:
Obviously the better that score the better your feed... It's a performance factor, so you live with it yourself if you don't deal with it.
Richard Hill:
Great takeaway there guys, if you're using Merchant Center, you're using a feed already. Straight away, get in your Merchant Center, get in your Merchant Center, your Google Merchant Center, and look at your percentage. If it is low you might think to yourself, and we do get this, you might think to yourself well, okay, it's 20%, it's been disallowed, but it doesn't matter because they're not products you want to sell. But it does matter because you might not want to sell them but what you're saying to Google is I've got an 80% high score or that element of the high score is 80%. There's other elements. So you either want to take those products out of your feed, or you want to adjust them so they are in there correctly. There's no excuse.
Richard Hill:
I think quite often people just get busy, lazy, whatever you want to call it and they leave SKUs in there, don't they? And it's really making sure that it's clean, super clean.
Andrew Birkitt:
Yeah. Definitely, you just touched on that last bit, you said if you've got products you know you're not interested in selling, you have no wish to sell, take them out the feed. Don't just dump your entire product catalog in there and then hope for the best. You really have to think about it. And this is where a lot of people come unstuck, they don't... they think everything's in there, it's all... Oh yeah, I've got a few that...
Richard Hill:
Sure. So we've got our feed, we've created our feed, we put it in our Merchant Center, and we've adjusted some things in terms of the level of percentage that is allowed, but what would you say are some of the... how can we simplify, automate that process to speed things up using some technology automations to create a better feed, what would you say?
Andrew Birkitt:
I mean in Merchant Center itself, there's a few things that you can do. Obviously regardless of whether your catalogue changes regularly or not, I would say you should be pulling that feed at least once a week. You can pull it as many as... if your catalogue changes a lot, and regularly, you can change your feed and update your feed as much as four times a day.
Richard Hill:
That's a big one, isn't it, that you've got so many people out there, I think... I get asked that a lot. Oh we've got a lot of products that are out of stock, how are you going to cope with that? I don't want to be putting adverts out there for things we don't sell. Well, if you're updating the feed four times a day obviously that can alleviate the majority of those SKUs. Because if something's out of stock it's not there when the feed goes and grabs it again, or the Merchant Center goes and grabs it again, the product will show out of stock and then the ads will not show based on the criteria that you've set.
Andrew Birkitt:
That's a question we get asked a lot, even on the SEO side, if a product's out of stock what do I do about it sort of thing? If it's coming back into stock definitely, then don't remove it from the feed just update the feed, make sure that it shows, that it's an important criteria to show in the feed that it's out of stock and so... There are rules you can write if you want to temporarily remove items from a feed, you can do that in Merchant Center as well.
Andrew Birkitt:
We use a tool to do a lot of ours, just because it's easier and it's a much easier interface in Merchant Center. You can schedule regular updates, you do that right at the beginning, when you're doing a feed. That's probably one of the easiest automations. But I would say make sure, most of our feeds we update daily. Regardless of whether... It highlights other problems that may not be quite as noticeable.
Richard Hill:
Because I think I know we've seen, obviously I said at the beginning, we've been doing this a long time so we've seen people that have come to us, we'd look at their feed and it hasn't been updated for a year. Well, clearly, it doesn't matter who you are, some things are seriously out of stock. Some things are not been solved for years.
Richard Hill:
We have certain clients that only get small runoff products or they only get a small batch of high end sort of allocation from certain high end brands, they only get five of this product, five of this SKU. So it's really challenging to get volume because you haven't got volume to sell but you still want to push them through, sell them. Once they're sold the feed gets updated and shows it out of stock, those products then don't trigger in the Google index.
Richard Hill:
So how can an ecommerce business optimize its feed even more? So we've got this sort of standard feed, if you like, that can come through, and that's quite often what you see as a start point, you've got this feed that comes through from the store, goes to the Merchant Center, and then from the Merchant Center pushes through to the AdWords account and you run your ads.
Richard Hill:
That's sort of a start point for most ecom stores, but what we're saying is that's the start line but what are some of the things that we can really do, and people listening in can really do to that feed to optimize it to make sure that they get more bang for the buck with the Google Shopping, in the feed?
Andrew Birkitt:
That's a good question actually. In the old days you'd have had to make sure that your feed was as good as it could be at source, so within your ecommerce platform, but that's the real power now of Merchant Center, in its new iteration. So it depends how long you've been using Merchant Center, but Merchant Center interface is new. So there's a lot of new features been added into the current version of Merchant Center. It's been long overdue. I think it was the last platform that Google decided to really look at.
Andrew Birkitt:
They have a system to write customized rules now. So you can add things like custom labels, which we use all the time. They can all be added within Merchant Center. It is basically a if then do this sort of scenario.
Richard Hill:
Maybe give an example of what would be your go-to custom variable, custom label, what's your go-to custom label you would create for an account?
Andrew Birkitt:
Yeah, custom label. I mean for us we use things like what we call price breaks. So you don't want to be bidding the same price, if you've got a product that's £20 and a product that's £200, you don't want to be getting the same bid on those products because you're going to lose out on some of them massively. So we use a thing called product price break, it's a custom label, and we will look at an account and look at the price range of the products and then create price bands within... So generally we use custom label zero unless it's already being used. But there's other things you can do. And a lot of this you can do without interfering with the feed at source.
Andrew Birkitt:
So for example, if you're doing garments, so you're selling shirts and things like that that are different sizes, different colors, you'll quite often put that information in the title, but not necessarily within the feed itself. There are attributes for that within the product set for clothing, is quite comprehensive. They won't stop products being shown in Google ads. So they won't get disapproved if you leave them out but they will obviously perform better and you can extract that data using the new rules. So if you use, for example, I've got red check shirt size XL, red check shirt size L, et cetera, you can pull the color, you can extract that data from the title. So you can then populate the colour feed by saying look at the title and if you have to provide a list, basically, of colours.
Richard Hill:
And then populate the colour variable.
Andrew Birkitt:
Yeah. So it populates another part of the data that then ticks off a thing on your data to say no, actually, I've gone from 4000 products where that field wasn't being used. So it increases the performance of that product. Same with product size. Clothing is a good example, actually, because there's lots of variables with clothing. So you've got size, you've got colour.
Richard Hill:
Male, female.
Andrew Birkitt:
Yeah. And it's one that people tend not to... So they tend to put that stuff in the description, they don't tend to put it into fields, even though most CMS platforms-
Richard Hill:
You end up with literally 50 variables for one SKU, colour and size.
Andrew Birkitt:
Some of our products have got eight, nine, ten thousand product SKUs. If I go to that customer and say, "Oh, by the way, you've got to go add colour." They're going to go-
Richard Hill:
It's a bad day, yeah.
Andrew Birkitt:
... "How important is it, Andy? Are my products going to get disapproved if I don't put that?" At the minute, no, they're not, but they're not going to perform as well.
Richard Hill:
So what we're doing here then is we're taking this feed and rather than... the reality is most people may have spent some time doing some of their SEO on their site but they're now quite often, maybe they've done some work on the categorizations of categorization and pulled that through, but they're probably always quite often behind the curve with their SEO naming convention, things are changing. They might have gotten so far working with an agency for so long with their new sets of products coming in.
Richard Hill:
But what this means we can do is we can SEO the feed rather than SEOing the website and having to go oh, god, we've got to change everything on the website again, are you joking? Well you haven't. What you do, you work in the merchant feed and agree, as a team, and say right, well, actually we've got these products but we don't mention the fact, we're just saying it's a size 12 black Pegasus 37, well that's a Nike, but we don't mention Nike because it's a Nike store. You don't necessarily mention the brand on the description. Not always.
Richard Hill:
But that's a big mistake for a merchant because when you isolate it away from your website and push it into merchant feed, put it into an advert, put it on the Google first page as an ad, you're not on the website are you, anymore, you're on Google. So you need that naming convention, sort of SEO namings, the research.
Andrew Birkitt:
You've got to outperform, it's just the same as SEO. You're up against other competition within the shopping channel. So you've got to be smart, you've got to outperform those people, and the one way of doing that is by optimizing the feed, not using... even descriptions. We had a client where their description requirement for the website was that they had to put key ingredients of a product, but those key ingredients would get the products disapproved in Merchant Center. So we wrote rules to change some of the descriptions.
Richard Hill:
Remove, yeah.
Andrew Birkitt:
Yeah. And now it's a bit more complicated now because they've changed the guidance on that again. So if it's on page they'll still get disapprove now but we've done things like, there's nothing really that you can't edit or change within Merchant Center. So what I'm saying basically, you can do this work without having to go back to the client or say to the client, "I need this changing," and they've got to go to the dev and the dev comes back and say, "Yeah, we'll do that for you, that's another 500 quid." Or £1000 or whatever. So you can do those processes, a lot of the time anyway. Some of them are quite complicated to write unless you're using a third party tool.
Richard Hill:
So it's developed a lot, the Merchant Center.
Andrew Birkitt:
Oh yeah.
Richard Hill:
In its own right. And then obviously there are third party tools that layer on, and we're getting one of our third party tool partners. Well, I'm chatting with them at the moment. They may be on the podcast soon, I'm just sorting out a few things with them, we've got a few things in the pipeline with them so we'll keep that under wraps for now.
Richard Hill:
But obviously feeds, it's like well, you've got a website and that website for me, it's got to be on a side platform. You've got it on a Shopify, Magento, a solid foundation. And your Google Shopping ads is similar in that you need to get the foundation right with the Merchant Center and feed. It's no good. The amount of times that we see people saying, "Oh, we tried Google Shopping, it doesn't work." You can sort of say that insert any sort of marketing SEO, Facebook ads, into that conversation. I tried Facebook ads, it didn't work; I tried Google Shopping, it didn't work; tried shopping ads and it didn't work.
Richard Hill:
Usually the key ingredient of why it didn't work is because they took a feed, pushed it in, and went live with some basic ads. And that's the mistake. And what Andy's saying there is you can take that feed, you can then manipulate that data, add in extra variables. We can pull the data four times a day so your feed's fresh, up to date, whereas some of your competitors may be doing it once a day or once a week or once a month and advertising stuff that's out of stock and paying for clicks that when they get there it says out of stock, and then you're like oh why am I seeing an ad if it's out of stock? You're saving money there. You've got a high score. This sort of elusive high score that you're trying to get in the account. So this feed piece is a fundamental piece within the whole Google Shopping ecosphere where you need to get this right.
Richard Hill:
I think another one that I get asked, Andy, quite a lot, is... Well, our shipping rates and our shipping table, it's very complicated, Google Shopping just go and handle that. We ship all round the world, we ship the jersey, we ship to this, that, and the other. We've got different couriers. How does the Merchant Center deal with that? How can you set up quite complicated shipping tables? Is that something the Merchant Center can do?
Andrew Birkitt:
Yeah, that's another good question actually. Merchant Center itself, so you can pass shipping information either within the feed, so you can pass that directly from your CMS, your back office, or it's got its own shipping matrix so you can build a shipping matrix. They can be quite complicated if they need to be. A lot of people get put off by the fact that it can be... If your shipping's not majorly complicated then they're relatively easy to set up. So they use a table system or... Well, there's different ways you can do it actually. But people that have got complicated shipping systems, I think we see that a bit where some of the items can be quite heavy and you've got different zones to ship to and all this sort of thing.
Richard Hill:
You can put all that in the Merchant Center then no problem?
Andrew Birkitt:
Yeah, you can put all that in the Merchant Center, and of course another way of looking at it is to look at your... I think one of our colleagues, Henry, it's one of his favourite sayings, is the 80:20 approach and actually look at your products and say right, well actually, these products are easily shippable. They've got a fairly standard flat rate. So the smaller products that you ship I would say will all come under your normal Royal Mail shipping standards and all that sort of thing.
Andrew Birkitt:
So if you can ship those easily and create your feed with those products. So look at your products as a whole and say right, out of those products, what 20% of my products that have got a good value and I can ship on a good standard system, standard rate, let's take those and put those in the feed. Initially. Get a feed up and running, see if it's going to work for you. If it's going to work for you. Then you start scratching your head and saying, "Right, these are more complicated." You can set up separate shipping tables as well, by the way, so it's not just one.
Richard Hill:
You layer them.
Andrew Birkitt:
Yeah, you can layer them in. So you can say right, this is my normal Royal Mail shipping. So I've got all these products I can ship by Royal Mail, that's straightforward, it's either this much, this much, or this much. Yeah?
Richard Hill:
Yeah.
Andrew Birkitt:
And then you can look at couriers and say right, if I want to ship courier I've got to do it by weight. Sometimes that means adding extra fields into your feed so there are fields for shipping weight and you can do shipping labels as well, so you can say if it's got this label within the feed, this is the shipping rate that it goes at. So it's a really comprehensive system.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. So I think the big takeaway there is those that are listening in that are maybe holding off setting up shopping, sort out the 80/20, as we all know, you're going to have those core lines or those core weights as it may be or locations that are the bulk of your orders. So sort out that shipping matrix, get those products in, get those shipping, then layer in.
Richard Hill:
But while you're layering in your making money on the bulk. Don't let that be a hold up. And obviously if you get stuck, ping Andy, andy@ecomone.com. He'll more than jump on a call and give you a hand with that as well. Might regret saying that, but...
Andrew Birkitt:
I would say don't let anything... There's no blockers to you having a crack at Google Shopping. Especially now, now Google with the COVID-19 incident, they've given you an option to actually show your products for free within certain places. So there's no reason really for anybody that can produce a feed from their system not to have a crack at it. And if it proves to you that way, you'll never get rid of the paid option because the paid option, there is so much you can do to optimize that and outperform everybody else. So it gives you an opportunity to do it and see if it's viable.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. So what we're referring to there is Google announced about 10 weeks ago that they were bringing back free Google Shopping, but obviously in inverted commas because-
Andrew Birkitt:
Everybody thought it was great, didn't they mate? Yay, we're going back to frugal days.
Richard Hill:
That was the headline, that was the click bait sort of thing. Free Google Shopping, oh! But obviously all the have a go heroes jumped in, "It's not free!" Well, of course there is a free option but it's not the headline, it's not you go to Google and get free Google Shopping ads, the headline is you go to the Google Shopping tab and you push your products in there somewhere for free.
Richard Hill:
So we sort of had the analogy of well, you're not getting a shop, Google aren't giving you a shop on the high street, they're giving you a shop on one of the back streets but they're still giving you a shop, they're still giving you some passing trade but you're not getting 10,000 cars driving past every hour, you get a few people walking past on a one-way street maybe. So that's been rolled out in the US completely. My understanding, is it in the UK yet? I don't think it is.
Andrew Birkitt:
I've not seen it yet. I mean in Merchant Center it shows up as surfaces, what's the name of surfaces? So we are seeing that in all of our feeds now, and we have a couple of clients that obviously they do ship internationally as well, so they are getting... What you actually see in Merchant Center is paid clicks and what's known as non-paid. So you've got your normal Google Shopping that you're paying for and then you've got this other feed that is non-paid, so it's almost like organic clicks but within the shopping-
Richard Hill:
That's one too much guys, that's one we've got to keep an eye on. It's coming. So we'll keep an eye on the channels, keep an eye on the podcasts, keep an eye on the blog. We've got a block on eComOne regarding this free Google Shopping element, which Henry, the head of ads, has put on. We're going to update that as the UK has some more announcements. So that's quite a recent last couple of months. But what else, Andy, would you say... we've got people listening to the podcast that are more experienced, these guys might be spending tens of thousands a month, very experienced in terms of their account structure, their setup. What are some of the real recent updates within the Merchant Center that they might not be aware of? We've touched on quite a lot, to be fair, so I know I'm testing you a bit here, but a couple more things that are a bit more recent that are maybe less talked about or brand new. I know we talked about high score which not many people know about, we talked about free Google Shopping, and things like that, but what else is there in the Merchant Center side that maybe...
Andrew Birkitt:
So one thing a lot of people aren't aware of is... I mean we all know Google changes the algorithm, people are forever chasing it. I say don't chase the algorithm, beat your competitors. They're the people you should be trying to sort out. But Google also update the specification for product feeds, so obviously it will affect different things depending on what you're doing. They have recently announced... So there was a couple that came into play almost straight away. So I think it was June time when they made the announcements to this year's changes. So a couple of them, for example, I won't go through them all because there was quite a few of them but a couple that were quite interesting to us through some of the clients we deal with, is one known as instalment and subscription cost attributes. So these have been added into the product feed spec. If you're dealing with wireless products and services category.
Andrew Birkitt:
So a good example of that would be if you're selling mobile phones and you have an option to purchase the phone outright or via instalment.
Richard Hill:
That's a good one because I think more and more ecom stores are adding subscription. We've got clients who sell coffee, for example, and they are adding right now. They don't have subscription but by the time this podcast airs in about a week's time they will have subscription so we'll be able to put their subscription offer through their Google Shopping account.
Andrew Birkitt:
It'd be an interesting one to watch, that, because at the minute it looks as though they're only going to put it on certain product categories. But I think if it's successful there they'll roll it out elsewhere. So effectively it will allow you to show both prices. So the full price, buy at this price or you can buy it at this.
Richard Hill:
Very useful.
Andrew Birkitt:
Another one is changes to the product detail attribute, so this is a new... So this will allow you to provide technical specs that aren't covered by the normal attributes. So it has three required sub-attributes to do it, so section, name, attribute name, and attribute value. And again, using your mobile phone again, an example of this would be to include product detail on the capacity of the mobile phone's battery.
Andrew Birkitt:
So your section name could be battery, attribute name capacity, and value is 4000, whatever it is, the actual-
Richard Hill:
Whatever attribute you like.
Andrew Birkitt:
So again, it's another way of providing... I don't think they're going to put it as a required. If you use the attribute then there are those requirements, you must be able to show those three variables, but again there's quite a few products out there where I could see that being a really useful addition. Another one who's category specific requirement, so media and clothing, that require additional attributes.
Andrew Birkitt:
So again, we touched on that earlier with things like gender, age group, size, colour.
Richard Hill:
It's an important one, isn't it? Clothing, clothing's obviously a huge part of our business.
Andrew Birkitt:
Well, they're making those now. Currently, like I mentioned earlier, they are optional. So if you're selling clothing it is optional to add gender, age group, size, colour. We say to them extract that.
Richard Hill:
Like a lot of these things, though, isn't it? A lot of these things are optional. But if you're out there, you said having taken it back for three minutes, we're not trying to trace the algorithm, we're trying to beat their competitors. That's the reality. So all those other competitors that are doing shopping, and if you're in a niche 99% of niches are very competitive. There's a few exceptions but mainly, most things you buy you need that competitive edge. Now whether that's negotiating an extra 5% of the cost, better terms, better warehousing, better deals with your courier, all those things, okay. Great. But if everyone then is taking a feed, putting it into the Merchant Center, pushing it through, you can get a massive, massive competitive edge on your ad spend if you've got the best feed.
Richard Hill:
If you've got a 100/100 score on your feed, and some of these things you're saying there, if you sell clothing you need to be breaking the variables down. You need to be creating this custom variables, you need to be breaking everything down to a... every single variable that is in your account needs to be populated, and if it's not there needs to be a damn good discussion, reason why not. Because that gives you the competitive edge.
Richard Hill:
What that does, it means that when you're showing your ads, your ads are triggering correctly for the correct search terms more than your competitors are, because they've just gone and put, oh, I sell men's size 12 shoes. Well, what about is there a width, is there a brand, is there a colour? Of course you might have some of this stuff, but will you have it all? And these new variables gives you another level of exclusivity for a while, because quite often most people are busy, lazy, whichever one you want to go with. Busy usually or they're leaving another agency or they're experts who do it. So there are some great, great tips there.
Richard Hill:
So what we're going to do is move on.
Andrew Birkitt:
Just one thing on that last one really is a good heads up from Google because they have actually stated now within... if you don't use those attributes your products will still remain eligible to serve but the performance may be limited. So it's Google saying if you want to beat your competitors, yeah, do it.
Richard Hill:
And I think it is the one. It is the one where we just see, obviously we've been using shopping, it doesn't work. Straight away it's garbage in, garbage out. It's the analogy. You've got a basic nutrition going in, your overall long-term health is going to be substandard.
Richard Hill:
So, right, we're going to finish off with a couple of SEO bits because now not only does Andy head up our technical... Well, the umbrella of technical head of lead of all our technical services in the technical team. So that's kind of the ad side, but also the SEO side now. We wanted this to be focused primarily on feed but I thought it'd be good just to get your opinion on just the technical aspects of SEOs.
Richard Hill:
So I think when we say technical SEO it gets a bit oh, people get a bit like oh flipping heck, here we go. We're going to talk about metadata and site speed again for the next nine years or... There's a bit more to it obviously, than a couple of things, but where would you say... where's the best place to start for these guys? They're on the podcast, they're maybe starting out, or they're doing their million quid a month and everything in between. What would be a good go-to start point for someone to go and have a look at their technical elements of their SEO that could maybe just really find that one or two things that you quite often see that really might be able to move the needle if they're not right. What would be a couple of tips you could give us there?
Andrew Birkitt:
I mean a lot of the time people get confused by... If you're looking at SEO, really, there's a couple of elements. So you've got your on page, and then you've got everything else that you do that sort of drives stuff to the page. Technical SEO really is the behind the scenes elements that power the growth of your website, such as site architecture, mobile optimization, page speed.
Andrew Birkitt:
They're not the sexiest things to investigate and quite often they're difficult to investigate. But there's tools there. And if you're going to start doing any work on your site then I would say the first port of call really is to do an audit of the site. So you can't start to make changes unless you understand the way the site is built already.
Andrew Birkitt:
So look at your site maps for example, we quite often see sites that don't even have an XML site map, yet it's a key factor for pushing into Search Console or Google's crawlers will come along and one of the first things they will look at is the robots.txt file, and if your site map's in the robots.txt file then they'll go, "Oh, actually, they're providing us a map for the site, let's have a look there." And that is where they'll go next.
Andrew Birkitt:
That's a... It's a key technical area that a lot of people ignore. A lot of people also let those get too big. A good thing with site maps, and this is a relatively new thing with site maps as well, is there's always been limits to the size of a site map and people have always touted that as 50,000 URLs. People now are breaking that down to more finite manageable chunks. So we're seeing site maps now that are limiting to 10,000 URLs.
Richard Hill:
But multiple site maps.
Andrew Birkitt:
Yeah. So we're looking at... on big sites, breaking the navigation at the top level, so your top level categories, as a site map for. So if you've got a site that is shirts, trousers, boots, a site map for each of those components. Because what we're seeing is it's giving the robots... Most people think robots are crawling in their site all the time, they're actually not. They come very rarely and when they do come they've got a finite amount of time and then they're off again. So if we can break your site down into more bite-sized chunks.
Richard Hill:
That goes with the navigation as well.
Andrew Birkitt:
Yeah. Site speed is another big thing and it's going to be more so next year. Things are changing again. The algorithm's changing again and stuff like that.
Richard Hill:
So you say, okay, so technical SEO, we talked about crawlability there, architecture, speed. We always talk about speed. Let's not talk about speed again.
Andrew Birkitt:
Unfortunately that's one of the key elements.
Richard Hill:
I know, everyone tells me off for saying that because it's so important, it's so important, I need to go in with the web, you go on Search Console now it's all in there as well. Clearly they've been giving us a clue for about five years haven't they? But it's still the new thing. But it will always be. The reality is Google wants to deliver the right result. If you've got a good experience, which is fast, you find what you want quick, speed, bounce rate, it's going to be good.
Richard Hill:
So you set about doing an audit, some of those things you're going to find in an audit but for those guys that go where do I start? What's the start point? With a bit of software, what sort of software, what's the software go-to to start to do some audit pieces? Where would you go software wise to do an audit?
Andrew Birkitt:
Me, personally, the tool I use is a tool called Screaming Frog. You can get a free version of Screaming Frog, it will limit you to a certain number of URLs or there's a paid option. It's not a massive cost, it's not like the SEM rushes and AH refs where it's going to cost you several hundred pounds a month, I think it's about a hundred and something pound a year, Screaming Frog.
Andrew Birkitt:
But if you really want to do it, at the base level, then I would say Search Console. Both, actually. Not just Google Search Console. People ignore Bing and they ignore Bing at their peril. It has still not got anywhere near the market share that Google has and probably never will have, but they have developed a pretty impressive set of tools for looking at your site, and they've just done a major overhaul of their interface and put a built in audit system, which, that's something Search Console doesn't have. You need to understand Search Console to work with it.
Richard Hill:
You've got two very... they're too free. Obviously Search Console's free, it should always be free. Okay. So we've got Search Console, we've got Screaming Frog, dive in there, get stuck in, and I think it's one of those things or two things there that you need to get used to going into, you need to get used to using and getting some routines in there. I think we've written various blogs over the years on my SEO Traffic Lab.
Andrew Birkitt:
I think one of the teams actually working on a new... So watch out for that one. They are currently writing one on the new features of Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. So Bing's known of being Webmaster Tools, and it is very similar to Search... I actually think it's more powerful than Search Console.
Richard Hill:
Yeah. Not utilized, like you say.
Andrew Birkitt:
Yeah, it's very under-utilized.
Richard Hill:
It was my colleague actually, Henry did a talk on ads and a guy asked a question in the crowd and it was sort of a locally well-known businessman around here. He said, "What do you think of Bing?" He said. And he was sort of saying it jokingly as if we would say, "Ah, waste of time." And obviously what we said was, "Well, it's fantastic, for cheap leads. Especially on paid ads."
Andrew Birkitt:
Yeah, paid definitely.
Richard Hill:
And he's like, "Really? Well it's a waste of time, you don't get anything." But yeah, let everyone think that, while us and our clients are busy picking up the cheaper cost to conversions, the easier rankings. Because the reality is there isn't 1000 people trying to dominate that space, there's a few. So Bing, like I say, Bing Webmaster Tools is equivalent, great one.
Andrew Birkitt:
I can't remember what their share of search data is at the minute. It's still very low but if you think about the fact that there are billions of searches a day.
Richard Hill:
If you can get 4% of your leads at half price, why will you not be... it's just simple math, really.
Andrew Birkitt:
Yeah. And there are people that will only use Bing to search. They won't use Google.
Richard Hill:
I think on paid ads we've got clients that are doing 100 grand a month on shopping and they spend about 10 grand a month on Bing. So it's about 10% on the paid ads we find is normal and I think on the SEO side, organic, I think it's a bit less, personally.
Andrew Birkitt:
It's definitely a powerful tool.
Richard Hill:
So thanks Andy. We're going to draw this to an end, it's been a fantastic... God, time just flies by. I think we're scraping on the hour. So many great takeaways there. I think the big one for me is don't be scared of this technical element. It's so important to get in there, get in your Merchant Center, understand the basics, make sure you get a clean set of data, and then start, that's your 80/20, and then start layering in these more advanced features, these more advances sort of things around different pricing grids for your delivery, adding in product data to variables, making sure all the variables, you're filling them in, custom variables, custom labels. And then optimizing everywhere that you can, and then obviously looking at some of these SEO tips as well.
Richard Hill:
So I always like to end every episode, Andy, on a book recommendation. Now, I know for a fact that you are a huge, huge reader, so we could be here for some time. So I want you to give me one book recommendation. Not five.
Andrew Birkitt:
Right. So I'll go for the one that is permanently on my desk then, shall I?
Richard Hill:
You do that.
Andrew Birkitt:
This book never leaves my desk. It is a quite technical one but it's an important one as well, because it's another thing that we haven't really discussed today but another area I look after. And, I don't know if you can see that. So it's Google Analytics Breakthrough.
Richard Hill:
Yup. From Zero to Business Impact. Feras Alhlou.
Andrew Birkitt:
Yeah, I don't know how to pronounce her name.
Richard Hill:
Eric Fettman-
Andrew Birkitt:
Eric Fettman is well-known in the industry for stuff to do with... And the reason I like this book is, it's a fairly hefty book as you can see, and it'd probably scare most people if they picked it off a shelf and looked and gone, "God, that's a bit technical." It is, it covers a lot of technical aspects of Google Analytics, how to set it up, how to get the best out of it, how to understand the data that you're getting.
Andrew Birkitt:
But it's one of those books where you can go, "How do I do so-and-so?" Jump straight in. Read that bit, go and do it. You don't have to read the whole book, you don't have to become an expert. I'm not a believer in experts on things, to be fair, because you're always learning. You have got knowledgeable people-
Richard Hill:
Anybody that calls themselves an expert, that's not a great start.
Andrew Birkitt:
But yeah. Brilliant book.
Richard Hill:
Yeah.
Andrew Birkitt:
Absolutely cracking book. You can read it all if you're that way inclined.
Richard Hill:
I'm quite familiar with it and I would definitely endorse it. I know it breaks down specific scenarios for the business. Fred had a business that did X, Y, and Z, and he was concerned about how to track this. So he talks a B2B, an ecom, and different case study specifics where you can use ecom analytics and data, and that's very much what we, as an agency, stand for.
Richard Hill:
Our agency tagline for our SEO agency is performance driven digital marketing. And that can only be done if you know where you are with the numbers. So that bucket I know is Andy's bible. You've had that about five years I think, haven't you, that one?
Andrew Birkitt:
Yeah. I think analytics is a whole new podcast, I think.
Richard Hill:
Well I think you've just sorted that out then. So see Andy back on the podcast in a few weeks time or a couple of months time, I think maybe more than that. Maybe one for later in the year when we look at the analytics side of SEO or PPC as well, because I know that's one where a lot of people get things wrapped around their neck and there's nothing worse than not knowing your numbers in my mind, as a business editor.
Richard Hill:
Right, well thank you Andy. Now for the guys that are listening that would like to maybe reach out to you, connect with you, what's the best place and better way of connecting with you, Andy?
Andrew Birkitt:
Well, I'm on LinkedIn, I can't remember what my handle is If you search for Andy Birkitt, and you'll find me under eComOne, and SEO Traffic Lab. Or via email, so andy@seotrafficlab.com or andy@ecomone.com, and I'm always checking those. But yeah. I'm quite active on LinkedIn so it should be easy enough to find me.
Richard Hill:
Okay, guys, well thank you for listening in to this episode. Obviously a fantastic episode, lots of real nuggets there from Andy on the technical side of the Merchant Center and some of the SEO bits, obviously looking forward to getting Andy back on the podcast in a couple of months, I have a feeling Andy's going to become a regular guest, and thank you for listening, thank you, bye bye.
Andrew Birkitt:
Thank you. Bye.