SavvyRevenue’s Andrew Lolk On Maximizing Your Paid Marketing ROI

Hear what winning in paid marketing will look like in 2023, plus get strategies for increasing your marketing ROI.

Paid acquisition remains one of the most popular ways to grow your business. However, as attribution challenges, automation, and limited transparency increase, it has become more difficult to generate meaningful ROI from these strategies. 

In this episode, Andrew and our host Adii Pienaar discuss how brands can rise above the challenges and scale their paid marketing strategies to greater heights. Tune in to learn:

  • How the landscape of paid acquisitions is changing for marketers 
  • How marketers can drive better results from paid ads in 2023
  • Why absolute attribution does not exist
  • How marketers can strike a balance between the art and science of marketing

Tune in on: Apple | Google | Spotify

“There's such a big difference running different channels. You need to think differently about the other channel. Everything that made it work for social is not gonna work for search."
Andrew Lolk, founder of SavvyRevenue

Meet Andrew Lolk

Andrew is the founder of SavvyRevenue and one of the top pay-per-click (PPC) experts in 2022. Previously, Andrew cofounded White Shark Media, an online marketing agency offering tailored PPC and search engine optimization (SEO) services to small businesses. There, he served as VP of PPC and CMO for 6 years. Now he uses his wealth of expertise to help savvy ecommerce stores profit with scalable PPC management. 

Connect with Andrew on: LinkedIn | Twitter

About SavvyRevenue

SavvyRevenue is a PPC agency focused on scaling paid search for DTC ecommerce stores across Europe. They have a solid track record of scaling paid search programs, finding the right balance between pro-automation and pro-human insights. As Andrew founded SavvyRevenue, his goal was to create a different type of agency, emphasizing quality over growth. 

Learn more about SavvyRevenue on: Linkedin | Website

The Checkout episode 53 unpacks:

In today’s episode, Adii Pienaar and Andrew Lolk discuss the emerging trends and challenges in paid ads. Throughout their conversation, they touch on how marketers can do better to scale ROI and achieve ecommerce success. Here are the highlights:

[3:00]

Paid ads is getting harder in 2023

  • During covid it was easier for marketers to make a lot of money because people couldn’t travel or eat out and had a lot of disposable income to spend on buying things online
  • Merchants tired of the supply chain overbought inventory only to sell it at a discount and all of a sudden there’s no profit margin left, this was hell for marketers
  • “It’s gonna get harder in 2023. It’s a good thing if you know what you’re doing because everybody went to this market and made money over the last couple years but it’s gonna be harder now.”
[6:33]

Point automation in the right direction

  • Google ads has moved towards automation but you lose so much today if you’re not on top of the data in the same way you were when you used to run it manual
  • “All the automation is amazing and everything, and it really is. But you don’t spend enough time actually looking at your data, correcting algorithms, telling it to run in this direction,  lower the ROAS here, increase the ROAS here, some of those manual overrides that Google has provided today.”
[14:12]

Take a specialized approach in your paid channels

  • To make the different channels work is to be really good at strategy, knowing how different businesses work and knowing the supporting mechanisms for every platform
  •  Pushing social becomes a branding play most of the time because one product doesn’t do more than 1-3% of your revenue, so you can’t really put a huge amount of spend behind it
  • “You need to create different landing pages, different product pages, different collection pages. You have to think about how do you educate your consumers?”
[18:50]

The way forward is a multi-channel approach

  • One of the biggest things that Andrew pushes a lot at SavvyRevenue is brands going beyond Google ads
  • “I still think once you reach a certain size, you need to branch out, but you need to tackle that new channel with the same vigor and the same tenacity as you originally did for your main channel.”
[23:54]

There is no such thing as perfect attribution

  • Whoever is in charge of marketing should figure out how much should go to each paid channel but nobody can tell you upfront “it should be this ratio”
  • “That’s where a skilled CMO goes and says like — This is how we do it. If we wanna run non-branded on search, then we attribute more to it. But there’s no tool that gives you a perfect answer.”
[26:08]

A good CMO knows attribution is not math

  • It’s a flaw to think of attribution as math because it’s not. Ad platforms don’t tell the whole story about the customer’s journey
  • “That’s where in my opinion a skilled CMO is worth their weight in gold because it’s no longer just math, it’s personal experience. It’s that framework to try things out and see what works and what potentially is not driving anything right now.”
[30:52]

Marketing is a blend of art and science

  • Marketing is still a creative endeavor that relies on both science and art, and the best marketers will always be able to find a balance between those two
  • “You can just scale something ridiculously high in a single channel with a first-order-profitable mindset on every single marketing endeavor. But over time, you need to do different things in order to get the next level.”