Episode 17: The Halo Effect of Google Shopping
We know that internet traffic doesn't operate in silos. No matter what method you are using to drive traffic and sales, there's always going to be a halo effect. Today Jon and Ryan chat about Google Shopping, but more specifically the effect it has on other channels. TRANSCRIPT: Jon: Hey, thanks for listening to Drive and Convert. Before we jump into this episode, just wanted to take a quick second and let you know that during this episode we had some recording issues and the audio quality is nowhere near where we would normally like to see it. But because the content was solid, we decided to keep it as is and get it out to you. Hopefully you can see through this less than perfect audio, but a big shout out to our editor, Josh, for helping make us sound pretty solid, despite all of the technical shortcomings. We do have some improvements in audio quality on the way, so thank you for listening and on to the show. Jon: Ryan, we know that internet traffic doesn't operate in silos. No matter what method you are using to drive traffic and sales, there's always going to be a halo effect. We've all heard this famous quote from 120 years ago, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don't know which half." That is still true today, even with all of the attribution and digital advertising tracking we're able to do. But the good news is that with all of the data we have these days, it allows us to know that there is a halo effect and to know how much that halo effect is worth to each brand. I was recently checking out a presentation you gave [Aclavio 00:01:44] and you showed data for some real clients that blew my mind and I actually just found out one of them is a shared client of ours, which made me even more excited. Ryan: Yeah, maybe some of that's due to you. Jon: Hey, I'm not going to take credit for this, but the data was a comparison of revenue and performance before and after implementing Google Shopping. I'm talking 1800% increases in revenue in both of these cases. Tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars in newly found revenue. Now, it seems to me that Google Shopping itself didn't account for most of this revenue gain, but rather that it could be attributed to the halo effect of implementing Google Shopping correctly. Today I wanted to chat about Google Shopping, but more specifically the effect it has on other channels. Ryan: Oh, man. It is such a unique topic that doesn't get brought up enough. I'm exciting to really dive into this. I don't even necessarily know if halo effect is a technical term that anybody really uses. It's just kind of how we refer to it internally at Logical Position and what we're seeing. Jon: But I do think it makes sense though. You said halo effect originally when we started talking about the topic for today and I immediately got it. Here you are inventing another term, perhaps, that makes a lot of sense. Ryan, tell me. What is the benefit of understanding the halo effect of Google Shopping? Maybe we just start there. Ryan: As you're understanding conceptually, and most I think business owners, marketing teams understand that attribution paths generally look like bowls of spaghetti at this point in time, as people can really easily do research and understand what they want from a product as they're finding it and then coming back to business that they had maybe found it somewhere on. What I've learned, through the last decade plus in digital marketing and a lot of that in eCommerce, is that I'm weird in the eCommerce transaction space. I have a very linear conversion path. I see it. I click it. I buy it. Every company on the planet can track my conversion. It's just very simple. If I've bought from you, you know exactly how I found you. Maybe I don't do enough research or I do enough research before I actually go search for the product. I haven't done a lot of analysis on myself, but that's not normal. What's more normal is my wife buying something, where she'll do research over probably a week and a half and she's got a pretty low threshold for extensive research. If she's going to buy something for $25, she does a decent amount of research to make sure that that's the best deal. But she'll click on multiple shopping ads, multiple social ads, multiple things throughout the process as she goes back and forth between different sites to figure out where she should buy something. Through that process, what we've seen is that the Google Shopping click, for somebody that is more normal like my wife, is how people are originally going to find you, but it's not how they're, at the end of the day, going to buy from you. It's more of a discovery tool for a lot of people because Google is a research entity for most people in finding the product on eComm. They're very good at it. Google is just phenomenal at product discovery and helping people figure out what they need or want. Knowing that, most business owners still look at Google Shopping based o...