Startup To Scale

117. Building your Google Ads Strategy

June 02, 2023 Foodbevy Season 1 Episode 117
Startup To Scale
117. Building your Google Ads Strategy
Show Notes Transcript

Curious about how to build a Google Ads strategy for your brand? 

Join me for an insightful conversation with Andy Janaitis from PPC Pitbulls, as we discuss the strategies and tactics behind building a strong Google presence and running effective Google Ads campaigns. We use my other brand Joyful Co as an example.

Gain valuable insights into marketing plans, measuring success with Google Analytics, and implementing a winning Google Ads strategy. Whether you're a business owner or a marketing enthusiast, this podcast episode provides key takeaways for driving brand growth and optimizing your online advertising efforts.

Startup to Scale is a podcast by Foodbevy, an online community to connect emerging food, beverage, and CPG founders to great resources and partners to grow their business. Visit us at Foodbevy.com to learn about becoming a member or an industry partner today.

 Building your Google Ads Strategy 

Jordan Buckner: [00:00:00] Hey everyone. Jordan here, and I. Thought it would be really helpful to walk through a couple things on my approach to building Joyful Co so that you can see firsthand how I'm thinking about building the brand and growing our awareness and getting it out into the world. And so as part of this, I've been thinking a lot about.

How Joyful Co. Shows up on Google when people are searching for gifts and some of the content around there. And so as part of that, I've invited on Andy Janaitis from PPC Pitbulls to really talk through how I should be thinking about Google as part of that strategy. So Andy, welcome. 

Andy Janaitis: Thanks for having me here, Jordan.

I'm really excited to dive in , and talk a little bit about Joyful Co. 

Jordan Buckner: Perfect. So to give a little context to listeners as well, if you haven't seen everything we're, I'm rebranding Good Food Brands, which is our e-commerce and gifting platform into Joyful Co to focus on premium gifting. And as part of that, [00:01:00] during a whole new name website.

Product assortment. And so it's kind of like starting from zero a little bit because we're leveraging all new assets and all new names, and so wanting to make sure we can really push into making sure the brand shows up and that people are able to discover it. And so, you know, just a little background.

Good Joyful Co. We curate unique, memorable gifts focus on highlighting diverse founders and small businesses who are women and or minority owned. And we're putting together boxes around kind of key gifting moments. So birthdays, weddings welcome gifts, new home gifts. Thank you gifts.

To really kind of be a go-to place if you're looking for something nice for someone and don't have the time to do it. Something really personalized. It's a really great kind of assortment of food and non-food items like candles and other items like that. So they're all kind of preset gifts. We're launching with 12 [00:02:00] different items, and as part of that, wanting to make sure that we're doing the right things to kinda show up on search.

The other part of our business is actually working with corporate clients who are gifting things to their employees as well. Part of like welcome packages. And thank you gifts. You know, we work with companies like Yelp, Amazon Google, to create kind of these gift experiences for their employees.

And so we have a little bit of that double sighted customer approach. And then I will say as well, a lot of our corporate gifting clients are actually finding us through search and through Google as well. So with all that said, Andy, what other questions do you have that would help? 

Andy Janaitis: Awesome. So yeah, so I'd love to start out and kind of talk a little bit about the brand and figure out what your unique goals are.

It's typically gonna be very different for every business and especially where you're kind of sitting right at this precipice of a big rebrand. So I guess my first question would be, why are you doing a rebrand? What are you trying to get out of the new brand as opposed to what you have going with good food brands?

, what's the pivot [00:03:00] and what's your goals? 

Jordan Buckner: Yeah, so. As I mentioned, the good food brands has a marketplace where we were selling individual items, and then we also had curated boxes. And in the last year about. 95% of our sales were the curated boxes instead of the individual items. And when we surveyed our customers, they're really coming to us for gifts.

Either, you know, a nice gift for themselves to try something or a gift , to someone else. And a lot of our customers, including our corporate customers, were also looking for non-food items. And so as part of good food brands, it was kind of. You know, food was a very heavy focus and all of the items and assortment we had were based on food.

And so we've now expanded that we're only about 50% of the items are food items as well. Gotcha. And then it was, we also want to Make it more of an experience around the joy of gifting, and that's where Joyful came from because if someone's sending something as a gift, we wanna make sure that the packaging is really great, that it feels like a [00:04:00] special item that they're receiving, so that both the receiver and the sender.

Can really have that connection if you're like, oh wow, this is something really special and I appreciate this person thinking of me. And for good food brands, it was more heavily focused on just the food elements and the products itself versus the experience of receiving a great and memorable gift.

Andy Janaitis: Definitely. And now is good food brands going to go away and kind of redirect all the traffic to Joyful Co? Yes. Awesome. Cool. All right. Now, where are you kind of right now in this process? Are you up and running as Joyful Co or do you have you know, is there a launch date plan? 

Jordan Buckner: We're playing the launch in July or August and do the switch over there.

So we'll probably be shutting down the good food brand site in June or so as we're switching everything over. It's built on Shopify, we're leveraging the same backend. So we're gonna be updating the entire website to move over to the joyful co branding name listing and everything like that. Perfect.

Versus kinda starting from scratch on 

Andy Janaitis: there. Awesome. And I assume in that [00:05:00] process, the developer you're working with, you'll have everything kind of 3 0 1 redirected to kind of maintain all that organic link juice. Yes. 

Jordan Buckner: Perfect. Awesome. And that's something I learned recently as well. So I don't know if you have any thoughts on mentioning that to people if they are going through a rebrand.

Andy Janaitis: Yeah, that's always my biggest thing with a rebrand. So you've gotta be careful to, you know, basically from an SEO perspective, Google has figured out the level of authority that your particular brand has or your website has. So you wanna make sure that as you start up a new website, you're not just kind of starting a brand new business completely from scratch in the eyes of Google.

And one way to do that is to use what we would call 3 0 1 redirect. So, Taking at least the primary pages of good food brands. And ideally really all of the pages and making sure that each one maps to a very specific page on the new website. And basically what we'll be doing is just redirecting.

So if anybody goes to those old pages, they end up on Joyful Co. So they say, Hey, I was looking for good food brands. Now I end up there and in the same [00:06:00] way Google's crawlers will do the same. And we kind of translate the authority that good food brands had over to the new site. And you're starting from a leg up as opposed to kind of starting from scratch as if it was a brand new website.

Brand new brand. 

Jordan Buckner: Perfect. Yep. So that's something that we're working on to make sure that that transfers through so we don't lose any of that. 

Andy Janaitis: Awesome. And what else do you have in store or plan for marketing this and marketing the launch? Are you gonna be doing organic, social paid social, anything?

Anything else? 

Jordan Buckner: Yeah, so we're starting with our existing email list of a few thousand people to really roll it out and announce it to them. We're going to be doing organic social and some paid social and possibly influencer marketing to start gaining the word out and putting the so the plan together around that.

Andy Janaitis: That's awesome. Yeah, I always kind of recommend that, you know, all of these things, we primarily focus on Google ads, but it's kind of the, you know, rising tide lifts all boats kind of approach that having all these different channels working at the same time. You don't wanna split your focus too [00:07:00] much, but you certainly should have at least some organic social presence, some basic SEO going on, some content on the site.

And influencer marketing is great too. That's , just another great way. And then lastly, kind of leveraging your email list. That's probably gonna be, I would imagine at least at first, your strongest channel as far as driving initial customers. So I think that's gonna be really, really valuable.

And then kind of the last question before we get into some strategy stuff. Where are you at from a budgetary perspective? You know, really across all channels. What are you looking to spend in kind of the paid ad world? 

Jordan Buckner: Yeah, we're gonna be starting off a little lighter, I think probably in the, you know, one to $4,000 a month across all paid adss.

Andy Janaitis: Perfect. Yeah, I always kind of recommend that, you know, especially getting started out with a brand new site, there's no need to jump in and spend, you know, 10,000, 15,000 a month , in ads right off the bat. You're much better off to spend, you know, say from a Google perspective, you know, say 2000 or 3000 in ad spend.

Make sure it's profitable first, and then go ahead and [00:08:00] scale up from there. 

Jordan Buckner: Yeah, that's what we're thinking to Drive enough traffic to figure out, like with, we're doing a lot of changes in our messaging, in our brand to figure out what's resonating, how can we drive conversions and optimize for conversions on the site.

And kind the bottom, bottom and mid funnel of our marketing funnel before starting to drive too much traffic there. 

Andy Janaitis: Awesome. So the next thing I'd really focus on and hopefully your developers can help with this as you're getting the new site up, is just making sure that you're measuring everything that's coming out.

So you kind of referenced it there, making sure that you're understanding the conversions coming to the site. So when people come to the site, you want to know where they're coming from and ultimately, you know, from each channel who's converting and who isn't. And one of the easiest ways to do that is Google Analytic.

Especially kind of at that lower price point. It's a free tool. We just did the upgrade to GA4 so as you're going through that process, I'd really recommend making sure that you have that installed and that we're tracking the data coming in to the site. 

Jordan Buckner: Perfect. Nope, I think we have that set up, so making sure to, do those elements.[00:09:00] 

Andy Janaitis: Awesome. All right. And then now kind of getting more specific into the Google Ads perspective. So the biggest thing I focus on, especially early on, is consolidation. So , I wanna make sure we're using automated bidding approaches. We don't want to do any manual bidding where we're picking, you know, very specific individual keywords and setting a very specific, you know, cost per click bid target.

What we wanna be doing is using these automated approaches where, Essentially we're providing the budget that we're looking to run with. Then we have our website coded up. So we're passing that conversion data back into Google and we're telling Google, Hey, you can spend my budget however you need to in terms of cost per click or in terms of getting in front of these particular customers.

But I want you to maximize those results that I'm passing that data back into the model. And as a result, it's all a learning process, right? It's a model that's gonna optimize over time. So we don't want to have. 10, 15 campaigns going on at the same time, or 10 15 ad groups or, you know, even, you know, 20, 30 keywords.

We want to consolidate all of that down so that we're [00:10:00] passing the data back in and making sure that, you know, we don't split it too far if you're running, especially with a smaller budget as you're starting out. Every time you create a new campaign, you're kind of splitting that budget that many more ways and it takes that much longer for any one campaign to learn and to really optimize.

So for your given perspective, kind of , the goals that we talked about here, I would start out with a Performance Max campaign. Okay. Depending on, I did a search for the Joyful Co. And I noticed there is another brand looks like a smaller brand that does custom apparel. So there may be some concern with brand confusion.

So you may wanna run a brand search campaign as well. So that would be essentially when people are searching for Joyful Co. Once your customers know about you, making sure that you're always the top of the search listings. When somebody's down in the funnel and searching for your brand, But outside of that, really the primary driver is gonna be Performance Max.

So for that, you're essentially gonna put forth the product data off of your site. So we'll go [00:11:00] ahead and get that, all set up so that you're feeding that data into the Google ecosystem. It's called Merchant Center, is kind of where all that product data lives. And then additionally, you're going to have.

Titles descriptions of individual products and also just some general headlines and descriptions for your company in general. So, you know, kind of pointing out some of the features and benefits of your brand. And then beyond that, you'll also have hopefully some images and video creative.

That's always a big driver at this stage. So a lot of that you can repurpose from whatever you're doing on social. That's why it's one of the main reasons. I love to hear that you're kind of operating across multiple channels as well. But yeah, basically we'll go ahead and get that all set up inside of a Performance Max campaign and then Google is gonna kind of mix and match kind of optimize you know, which of those assets go together to create the best ads, and not only the best ads in general, but the best ads for a given person.

So they may, you know, deliver a different ad for different people in different, you know demographics and you know, buying points. 

Jordan Buckner: Now when we're doing something like a Performance [00:12:00] Max campaign, cause I know that Google kind of changed it a little bit, are we kind of putting in our assumptions of who our target audience would be?

 Or are we letting Google kind decide that? Or like, you know, keywords or kind of figuring out really where those like key search terms and SEO that are gonna drive kinda traffic back. 

Andy Janaitis: Yeah, so , it's less keyword based. They're gonna pull most of that data as far as keyword targeting is gonna be pulled from the data found on your website itself.

So the product descriptions, product titles but on the person targeting, what's really cool about this now, it used to be that you would say, Hey, if I wanna do retargeting, I'm gonna have this exact audience and I'm gonna go out and retarget to this audience of people that I know. Or if I want to target, you know, a particular you could do like gifts.

Would be a particular interest group and I wanna target people who are in market for particular types of gifts. But what's cool now is. We're not looking at it as a targeting that's going to limit us where we have to say, Hey, this is the exact audience I want to target. We're actually using what Google calls audience signals now, so we're still gonna provide those same [00:13:00] audiences and say, Hey, my best guess is that for instance, we can use your email list.

Take everybody who's ever made a purchase from good food brands, upload them. Use what Google Calls customer match and say, Hey, these are people who've made purchases from me before. People are in the market for the types of things that I'm selling. Go ahead and find their, you know, customer profiles in the Google, you know, ecosystem.

We're gonna believe that they're probably a good marker of who our best types of audiences are, but you don't have to limit yourself to that group or even to a group that looks like them. That's just our starting point. And then from there, you know, that's where you wanna start testing Google, and then Google will go ahead and start testing other things as well and kind of move out beyond that.

So it's no longer limiting down to one specific audience. And that's the only place we're targeting. It's more like we're giving Google kind of a hint and saying, Hey, Here's your starting point, and then you go off and do whatever you need to do as far as testing the right audiences to target. 

Jordan Buckner: Okay.

That's a really good point then. So is it important to [00:14:00] make sure that our site is SEO optimized, kinda the first before setting this up so Google's pulling the right keywords? 

Andy Janaitis: It's certainly helpful. Yeah. And that's something we would call feed management. It's. Different but related to SEO proper.

So your typical SEO on your site, you're gonna be focused on things that are gonna be Google is gonna be crawling those items and basically pulling that data out and showing up in your organic search results. What we're doing now is taking that data off of the site and Google will crawl your site as well as part of the Performance Max campaign.

But the primary source of the data is going to be the data feed that we set over to merchant Center. And this can be a little bit different than the titles and descriptions that are on your site, or even the titles and descriptions that are, your s e o titles and descriptions that you should probably have set up the metatags on the site as well.

So why that matters is you may have on a site you know, for instance, the title on a given product page will probably just be. You know, maybe this is the presidential gift or this is, [00:15:00] you know other things 

Jordan Buckner: they're called like the happy box or the relaxed box.

Andy Janaitis: Exactly. Yeah. And so at the end of the day, that's great for your site from a branding perspective, but it's not a great signal to Google of what's actually in the happy box.

So that's where you can set up, and Shopify does a really great job of this. They'll have a. SEO title, SEO description. That's never gonna show up on your site, but that's gonna get dropped into the metatags of the site. And what we can do is basically take those and we'll use an app in Shopify.

Say, Hey, your starting point is those SEO titles and descriptions. And then we're gonna tweak them just a little bit further as we talk about our ads. So for instance, we're probably gonna put in front of it your brand name. So it'll be the joyful co you know, gifts for Mom, happy box, or something like that.

And there's, you know, different strategies to try out and different experiments we can do, but. Ultimately, you are gonna wanna make sure that you are optimizing the titles and descriptions that you're sending over for your ads. You know, certainly beyond the items that show up directly on your site.

And then probably even beyond [00:16:00] what's, you know, the SEO titles and descriptions that you're using 

Jordan Buckner: now as part of performance Max. Like how should we think about the headlines and the content that we're putting in, in terms of the things that we, we talk about that typically work best for search.

Andy Janaitis: So what's great about it is you're gonna be providing five headlines, five descriptions, and I think five long headlines are long descriptions, so you've got plenty of options there. And then really, it's an experimental process. So we're gonna start out with a. There's a couple different ways you can do it or a couple different directions You can go and you should really use kind of a mix of a couple of these things.

But, you know, start out with great product descriptors. So if you were describing to me in one sentence, you know, what is it that joyful co sells? That should probably be one of your main headlines. Even just joyful co official website is probably a great headline to make sure is included in there.

And then beyond that, you're gonna start getting into, you know, what are some of the major pain points that customers may be feeling that you're solving, you know, so, and that can be seasonal too. [00:17:00] So right now you could have a headline that says, you know, get the perfect gift for Mom for Mother's Day, or something like that.

And then what's great about that is you're going to see performance ratings on how well each one of those headlines did later on once you've been running for a month or so. And we're gonna be able to reactively go in and say, Hey, strike those three headlines and add in, you know, three new ones that are kind of similar to the ones that performed best.

Jordan Buckner: Okay. Awesome. I think that makes sense.. I'll show a little preview just quickly of what our website will look like these are oh, awesome stock images here. But you know, really going after more of a premium luxurious feel, talking about our uniquely curated gifts that spread joy.

Here's a look at like one of our product pages. Beautiful. And these are the boxes that we're actually sending out. So they're kind of a thicker box with a nice design. And where you see gold here is actually a metallic gold color as well. 

Andy Janaitis: Oh, that's awesome. Oil, I should say. I feel like that's always, obviously, again, we're kind of focused on that marketing channel thing, but something like the packaging, that's one of those things that makes such a big difference across [00:18:00] all channels that, you know , I love to see that with any brand we would like to work with.

Jordan Buckner: Yeah, so that's kind of just like a look. And, you know, it's interesting we're kind of balancing you know, figuring out like what are those kinda key selling points that we really need to highlight for the brand and for each product that people are searching for as well to make sure that those are aligned and help with conversions.

So it's not just brand language, but it's actually aligned with what customers are looking for. 

Andy Janaitis: Definitely, and that's, you know, from a Google Ads perspective, I'm glad to hear that you're doing that type of research, cuz that's gonna be what you're feeding in. You wanna make sure that you're not stuck to, you know, this brand identity that you came up with in the first place.

It's very specifically getting to headlines and descriptions that are, you know, kind of targeting, you know, what type of customers are, , you're looking to serve and what their main pain points are. 

Jordan Buckner: All right, perfect. So we kinda have those basics of setting up. What else do we need to know in terms of how we should be best utilizing Google and Google ads?

Andy Janaitis: So I think we hit some of the , main points there. And what's important to know is it's not all, you know, set it and forget it. So from [00:19:00] there, I think we have enough that would probably get you started. We're gonna start with a Performance Max campaign, maybe a branded search campaign. We're gonna make sure that we have the data flowing back from the website so Google knows, you know, from people who made clicks, who did purchase, who didn't purchase, that type of thing.

And then we have some of the basic creative assets that we're gonna populate into the, you know, headlines, descriptions, images, video that we're gonna populate into the main Performance Max campaign. And then from there, it's really just a matter of setting a reasonable budget. So we want to start in probably the thousand to 2000, 3000 range, depending on where your budget is.

The big point that we're looking for there is just to make sure that we have enough purchases coming back in to allow the model to learn and optimize. So you don't wanna start with, you know, $5 a day or something like that because you're not gonna get enough data back in that you're really utilizing Google's machine learning.

But from there, kind of start with your starting budget. Go ahead and launch. And then a lot of this is gonna be based on taking a look at what's happening once we launched. So, Right away, we're gonna start seeing some [00:20:00] signals coming in as Google's running these ads. And as I mentioned before, you're gonna start to see what creative's working, what creative isn't working.

You'll have some data on which demographics is Google targeting you know, do we need to tweak that, change that. And then kind of from there, we can just make strategic decisions based on, you know, what's working and what isn't working, and start to kind of go down different rabbit holes until we kind of find , the perfect marketing mix for you.

Jordan Buckner: That sounds great. Yeah, I think the a couple main goals that I have in terms of launching one is to qualify who our target market is, who is most likely to convert into our customer. Cuz we have our idea of who that is based on previous customers, but because everything's changing that I think we're expecting that to shift and I think that's one thing we're looking to learn.

And then second, What information a consumer is looking for that's really driving them to one click on our site and then two, convert and actually turn the customers so we can optimize that language moving forward, both for like organic traffic and to really do that conversion rate optimization.

And then I think [00:21:00] third is, and you mentioned this, I think with gifting, it's very based around holidays and seasons and kind of key events, and so figuring out what are those key inflection moments around the year. I think we know some of the popular ones, like, you know the Christmas holidays, mother's Day.

Tend to be like the top, like whether those other events throughout the year that people are kind of searching for to really measure like what the traffic is kind of coming for those and which ones we should be focused on. Do those kind of sound like good goals? Are there too many? 

Andy Janaitis: No, I think that's right.

And it is, you know, broad and there's going to be, you know, especially when you're just starting out right now, that's probably why you have that kind of broader set of goals. And a lot of it is you just gotta get the data coming in. That's where I like the use of paid traffic for that, where you're gonna start getting people coming to the site.

In testing out different demographics, testing out, you know, different search terms, that type of thing, getting a feel for you know, really what is resonating with people, as you mentioned. Ultimately, that's always has to be your point of view is, okay, well, not just, what am I trying to put out there in terms of a brand, but, you know, what's [00:22:00] resonating with customers and how can we, how can we pivot and, and get in that direction?

Jordan Buckner: Is it best practice to test out different landing pages that we're sending traffic to, or is that too many moving and pieces at once? 

Andy Janaitis: I would say that's probably a little bit more on the advanced side. I wouldn't necessarily start right there if you're starting out completely from scratch. Especially because Performance Max is gonna drive primarily off of the product landing pages, so that's where you're gonna be dropping people onto in the long run.

You might even want to do some testing around those product landing pages and change the layout, change different things. But again, you probably want to get some data coming in first before you get too far into that. One thing I would think about would be your corporate gifting. So because it's a very specific kind of through line of, okay, it's gonna be probably some level of custom packaging, you're probably gonna work from, you know, their designs, their, their logos, that type of thing.

You may want to think about having at least one landing page that's kind of like, How does it work or corporate gifting, kind of going through some of the benefits of working with you for corporate gifting and then ultimately, you know, some [00:23:00] details on what it means to work with you or how you would work together.

And that's a great point that you can upload that we probably would do in, within either the same Performance Max campaign, it's called a different asset group, where you'd create kind of a new. Group of assets. So new headlines, descriptions, new videos, new images that all kind of ping directly on that corporate gifting point and drive to that corporate gifting landing page.

That kind of explains that, that process a little bit better. Or there's a couple different strategies we could take, but for that specifically, I think that's where would focus on a very specific landing page that describes your service offering 

Jordan Buckner: There. Yeah, I think that's great cause , we do have that page, but I didn't think about how that would be differentiated within our campaigns.

And so that's great to hear that we can kind of create two different sets because the individual who's purchasing may or may not overlap with the corporate gifting. And so you're saying definitely kinda create those as two different audiences essentially. 

Andy Janaitis: Definitely. Okay. And in the long run, once we have enough data [00:24:00] coming in and you're spending enough on ads, we can go ahead and split those into entirely separate campaigns.

The reason I might not do that right at first is again, kind of like consolidating the data down and we don't want to. If we only have X amount of budget or only have, you know, that translates to X amount of clicks and ultimately x amount of purchases, we don't wanna split that data over too many different campaign types.

So that's why I would kind of start out in a consolidated manner. And then as we grow up and we're spending more, we're getting results and really trying to scale into more specific audiences, that's where we can kind of create an entirely new campaign that just targets corporate. 

Jordan Buckner: Got it. No, that makes sense.

And then how long should we start running the campaign to develop a good set of based data off of a couple thousand dollars a month? Is it one month, three months? I 

Andy Janaitis: would say you should have a pretty good idea after the first month if you're spending, you know, say 2000 a month in the campaign. You know, ultimately the big touchpoint I, I look for is number of purchases.

So you're gonna want about 50 purchases in the first month or 50 [00:25:00] purchases per month for the giving campaign to really have. Enough data coming back that you can be pretty confident that Google's model is learning and, and optimizing. So, you know, it's gonna be different for every business when you first launch.

You know, it may be that, hey, it takes us a little while to find that, that right mix and get to that 50 purchases in a month. You know, maybe it, you know, takes, I don't know, say two months, something like that. But certainly by the end of the first month, we should either. Have kind of hit that number, especially if you have, you know, some of the, you, you have a lot of those kind of leg up points that I think is gonna put you in a, in a good direction that we should be able to hit that, you know, your email list, different things like that, that I, I think we should be able to get ourselves there.

But if you can't, we should certainly see. Improvements across other metrics. Pointing to, Hey, you know, if we didn't get to 50 purchases a month, how did we do in kind of weekly purchases? And are we starting to kind of improve there? Or, Hey, how many people began checkout or added items to their cart?

We should be starting to see improvements across those metrics. You know, by the end of, say, the first month or [00:26:00] so , to kind of, you know, make sure that we know that we're driving in the right direction and we're not just spending, you know, all this ad spend over. Yeah. You kind of hear horror stories of people say, oh, you know, I.

Did six months of Google ads and never got any purchases out of it. It was like, well, why, why didn't we stop after month three? Like, what happened there? 

Jordan Buckner: Yeah. I definitely don't want to get in that situation. You know, it's interesting, so in building this out as well, our price per box is ranging from $50 to $200 and then our margin.

After shipping and the fulfillment, everything's closer to around 40 to 50 percent kind of per box. But with some of our higher price items, it gives us a decent amount of margin to work with. And so I'm trying to figure out if it's reasonable to, that we might be able to get to a point of first order profitability with our ads or if.

If it might have to do like a second order profitability, especially since we're doing gifts for our individuals, the frequency might be a little bit fewer in between than a subscription product because I [00:27:00] think our gross margin might net us anywhere between $20 on the low end and close to a hundred dollars on the higher end.

Andy Janaitis: Yeah. So with that, the big metric we always look at is called roaz or return on ad spend. And. You know, we work with different clients that can kind of hit a number of different, we've worked with clients to, Hey, we have pretty tight margins. We've gotta hit a six x ros. So for every dollar I put an ad spend, I need six x in profit.

The downside of that though, is, or down six x of revenue, I should say. The downside of that is that the higher that target ROAS is, the harder it's gonna be to scale, right? Because that is really the main lever that you have to say how competitive you are, you know, outside of the quality of your site, the quality of your product, like all the.

You know, basic branding things as far as like a pure Google ads point, that target ROAZ is really your main, you know, kind of competitive lever with some of your different competitors. So that's where we say, okay, let's. Start from a point of what do you need to be profitable?

Right? So, and that might be first [00:28:00] order profitability. Let's make sure that we're at least breakeven and say, you know, if you said 40, 50% margins, maybe that's a two x ROAZ, or a three x ROAZ, and that's really a great area. I always tell people , if you can get to accepting a two or three x roaz.

We can probably scale up some good results for you we can work with you if you need a say a six x roaz, but it's just gonna be a lot harder to kind of scale from there. For a lot of businesses, everybody's a little bit different. But yeah, that's where I would say I. You know, especially starting out, it's a brand new brand.

You know, you're probably expecting that there's gonna be some level of investment upfront before you really start hitting, you know, kind of long-term scalable growth. You know, if we can say, Hey, let's really shoot to in the first couple months, hit a two x row as so for every dollar in ad spend, we're getting back $2 in revenue.

That's a really comfortable spot where I think we can go get a good foothold, optimize our campaigns, and kind of get you into a great place. As long as it's, you know, possible inside your margins that you're not losing money at that. And then the big thing, When we start to say, and you kind of reference this [00:29:00] with kind of second order profitability.

If you say, Hey, you know, we've been running Google ads and we just can't hit our target, or we can hit our target, but we can't scale at that target, that's where you really gotta start looking at, okay, well what are you doing in terms of upsells on the site on that initial purchase? Or what are you doing in terms of, you know, long-term email marketing where you might be looking to get a second purchase so that you can start to say, Hey, We're gonna increase the overall customer lifetime value, and that's gonna be enough where we can, you know, accept this slightly lower row as and still be profitable long term.

Jordan Buckner: Okay, great. And I think that's a great strategy to look at because yeah I know there will be a level of education and spinning and awareness kind of building at the beginning. And so just wanna get a good expectation of what that might look like, so that's helpful. 

Andy Janaitis: I love the idea too, of the brand.

 I'd imagine this is the type of brand where you will have some level of brand loyalty. You know, once people have said, Hey, it's pretty easy for me to make a really good gift out of this. You know, I can imagine people would probably come back for every occasion and kind of reuse this because, you know, isn't that [00:30:00] what we're all looking for?

 I was gonna say, I wish I kind of knew about this about a month ago before I did all my Mother's day shopping here , for all the different mothers in our lives. Well, we're giving all the 

Jordan Buckner: All the products in now we have two really great newborn boxes as well, and it would be Oh, that's awesome to send new one.

So once we get those together Perfect, perfect. Over. But I think that's good. Anything else that I should be thinking about in terms of Google and how to integrate into my why, their strategy around launch or things that Google might be able to do that most brands don't really think about. 

Andy Janaitis: No, , I think you've really kind of got a lot of the main points.

, I'm happy to hear that you've got, you know, a lot of the site design pieces, the brand design pieces, the social pieces, those are all things that we don't touch all the time. But, you know, really when I hear that you have all of that stuff lined up, it tells me that you're probably gonna be more successful with Google ads.

So you've got a lot of that lined up. The big thing is just, Hey, let's do a pretty basic setup. Make sure that we're passing the data back into Google so that we know, you know, what's working and what isn't. And then we'll, you know, see what [00:31:00] results we get and kind of pivot and grow from there.

Perfect. 

Jordan Buckner: I love that. Andy, thanks so much for jumping in and helping me with this process. I'm really excited and getting ready to launch and I am actually like excited about this. 

Andy Janaitis: Absolutely. Yeah. It's been a pleasure.