Google #101: The Google ecosystem for marketing

Heard of "Apple ecosystem" and "Google ecosystem" for smartphones? Same exists for consumer brands - Facebook, Google, TikTok. Google has Search console, merchant centre, Ads, YouTube, Maps and GA4.

👋 Hola! Welcome to Out of Singapore. I am Shan, and write this newsletter with pleasure each week. I write about new learnings, achievements and failures while building a new business.

Today is a hot day. Singapore HDB landlords generally do not install AC in the living rooms. That makes such days bit worse. I have writing from cafes or malls for last few months, today I chose to stay at home.

Last week I wrote about Google Maps - the post did not do well. One of the lowest open rates. I believe it could be one of three reasons.

1. The title was not catchy.

2. Readers are bored of “DTC series”.

3. It was just week where everyone was busy.

Let me know if you felt there could be other reasons.

DTC #110: Can Google Maps help online brands?

Now, coming to this week - let’s talk in depth about the ecosystems present in digital marketing. I will cover Google this week and expand to TikTok and Facebook over next few weeks. While I have talked about these before, I will put a ecosystem structure to these write ups.

Here is the Google ecosystem snapshot. Each of these expand further and leverage each other’s strength. For example - you can run ads from Google Merchant centre and host a shop on YouTube.

Today, we will talk about

1. What are the key parts of Google’s marketing ecosystem?

2. Why does the ecosystem matter?

3. What mistakes did we we make?

Let’s get started.

#1 The 10 pillars of Google’s marketing ecosystem

Let’s go through some of the tools I know of and have used (or planning to use).

1. Merchant Centre - This is Google shopping centre. The products are uploaded here. Reviews and product attributes like color, price and product images are uploaded to merchant centre. If you are selling any product online, it must be uploaded to Google merchant centre.
   Each market can have a separate Google shop, aka google merchant centre.

2. Search Console - Google gets to know about your website, blogs and products via indexing. The only way to request Google crawlers to index any website is via Google Search Console. If you don’t do this, maybe in a few months, your website will be indexed (maybe). You can define the sitemap and ask google to not index certain pages.
   Finally you can track your search metrics, keywords that your website got featured for in the search console.

3. Google maps - An unlikely tool, but it can helpful for digital brands. They could show the stores they are present in or provide location for their local office (which could also offer order collection service).
   You will get to know about who is searching for you brand, across which devices and how is this trending, has someone requested direction to your place or placed a phone call via google maps. Great info to track for a new brand to understand brand awareness.

4. YouTube - YT is Google’s social media. YT is strong on long form content. Now it is pushing short form content too. YT content stands as the most high quality content available on the internet (another disputed source is Reddit). YT content has high credibility (because the effort put into it). YT comments are also powerful.
   YT allows a brand to drive awareness and loyalty to their brand.

5. YouTube Shopping - This is new avenue for creators to make money. Brands can use this too. We are working towards this. Step 1 is to get a large enough YT following and then activate shops.

6. Google Analytics or GA4 - The mother of web tracking. If you need access to one analytics tool, it would be GA4. It does 85% of the analytics work for your online store. Traffic insights, page insights, shopping insights, engagement insights and much more. It comes across as a simple tool, but it is very advanced and needs a developer to set advanced tracking features.

7. Google Ads - The Google advertising platform - search ads, dynamic ads, PMAX, YT ads. It is more than just a advertising platform. You can do keyword research and it can be used to optimize ads, web pages and product development.

8. Google tag manager - The beast in the room. This tag allows GA4 and Google Ads to track customer behaviour on your website. Extremely critical. This allows you to collect minute customer behaviour such as - how many people clicked a custom button.
   Google tag can be used other analytics tools as well. It is built as a independent tracking tool. Only problem is that it just collects and sends data. You cannot visualize or see trends here.

9. Google Business Profile - I talked about this last week. You provide your business information - name, website, phone number, category, location, business hours and other information - important for you business. This is how your business gets shown on Google. Once you do this, customers can find you on Google maps, call you via phone number and provide reviews.

10. Google reviews - Not widely talked about, but very important is - Google product reviews and google site reviews. You can collect product reviews via Google and it will show up on product listings across the Google ecosystem. Further, the customer reviews on the google maps can also be show on your website.

Let me know if I missed any Google tool. If any, I will update this section. Thanks!

#2 Why is the ecosystem important?

Let me keep this quick

1. Google ecosystem is meant to work together. It is bad at fetching information from other platforms. It will never want to fetch information from competition like Facebook.

2. A proper Google set up improves your organic performance. Customers get high quality results on search (your website, blogs, location). This would mean more impressions and visits to your store.

3. Shopping friction goes down -The simplest way to reduce friction on Google is via Google Merchant Centre. Google does not have its own store like Facebook shops or Tiktok shop.

4. Google is high trust platform - Of all the platforms, shopping on Google is considered most trust worthy. No scams. (Supposedly) Organic results and reviews show up. Google is where consumers research before shopping. Hence it is important to show up in Google shop listings, google organic reviews and google maps.

#3 Google mistakes that we made

Google is unforgiving in compliance of its policies. They have no phone support or account manager support. Only email support. Which is mostly unhelpful. We spent 2 months of email back and forth with the same replies and evidence to get our merchant centre issues resolved.

1. Google Merchant Centre (GMC) - We were trying to sell to multiple markets via the same google merchant centre. This meant compliance requirements of USA were being applied to Singapore GMC as well. We finally saved ourself by making a Singapore only GMC. This back and forth in solving the issue took over 2 months.
   In fact, our GMC was finally 70% okay in Jan 2024, eight months after we started the brand.
   Our US GMC is still in shambles. This needs to be fixed.

2. Search Console - This is long story, however, we created two different websites for US and rest of the world and put a redirection popup for US traffic. The popup was causing drop offs, so I got auto redirection activated for US traffic. In a matter of few days, traffic to SG site dropped down to almost zero and all traffic went to US.
   Consumers in SG started seeing US website instead of SG website. Simple reason - because Google crawlers are based in US, they consider US website to be the main website. Or is my assumption incorrect here?

3. YouTube - Not a mistake but a miss. We did not start posting on YouTube. Being a supplements brand, we should have built out YT channel as well. Hoping in 2024, we can achieve this.

The mistakes seem less because we need to do lot more work on Google. It has started performing decently, not the best. Keeping fingers crossed!

That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading again. You are a superstar 😍

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I enjoyed my morning cup of coffee today. Instead of 90 days, I stopped at 30 days.

• I do not feel lethargic without coffee.

• I ate more in the morning without coffee - think I had peanut toast about 10 times in the last 30 days. Did coffee kill my hunger?

• My stomach makes embarrassing noise now. Most of the times they are loud. Can coffee preserve my dignity?

Beyond this, I am back to running often. Still need to get back to 10K runs. I am hoping to participate in the Singapore marathon later this year.

Jisoo News 💖

Introducing a new series from this week - i will cover the latest news on Jisoo here.

1. Jisoo, after deciding not renew her contract with YG entertainment, has started her own label. Guess the name? Yes, it is called “Blisoo”. Cute huh!

2. Jisoo is now the face of Self-Portrait. The brand seems like a luxury apparel brand based out of Seoul. This is celebrity marketing at its best.

3. Jisoo is an ambassador for Dyson. Dyson loves her (like I do). Look at this tagline from their website - “icon of effortless beauty”.

   

Jisoo gifs don’t go away, okay! hahaha

Okay that’s it for this edition! Have a great week ahead.