$1M Cannabis Marketing Return on Investment Case Study

{}Introduction and Welcome

Host: hello happy thursday everyone welcome to the MediaJel podcast where we cover the latest in marketing trends and strategies that are most effective in growing your cannabis store your delivery service or your cannabis brand here at MediaJel we have a compliant ad network of 75 000 plus publishers including mainstream news sites meme sites dating gaming music streaming and beyond and they all welcome cannabis ads compliantly so yes you can advertise on mainstream media and we at MediaJel we help do this through a combination of paid search google ads and bing ads seo so driving organic traffic through google and bing and beyond and then also programmatic display advertising and all this is meant to drive drive foot traffic ecommerce sales and increase awareness i'm your host and today we'll be discussing how cannabis businesses can set themselves up to see a one million dollar return on that spent you heard me right a million bucks we've we've done that time and time again for some of our partners here and uh at MediaJel and you know we're excited to share some of these case studies with you and i'm really excited to introduce our MediaJel expert sammer alkis who's the vp of search here at MediaJel welcome today's podcast uh sammer how are you

Sammer Alkis: good good how's everything down in sunny san diego

Host: oh everything's great i'm happy to be here we need to chat with you and um talk about some really cool case studies that that we've seen over the last year or so

Case Study: Haven and a $1.2M SEO Turnaround

Sammer Alkis: awesome awesome well the first one you know the first i guess first of all you know the goal of the call today is to showcase some of the successes that we've had at MediaJel and discuss what it takes to actually generate a million dollars in revenue from seo from paid search from programmatic and beyond um so let's take a look at case study one so i'll pull this up in a second here and this could all be found on the MediaJel website i'll post this link in the zoom chat as well for any of our attendees here so the first one we're going to look at is haven and they are out of they're out of california or actually this one's maryland sorry my apologies let me pull this up perfect so haven uh this is the case study on the website for the retail location out of maryland you know hey haven's problem was you know they really wanted to increase e-commerce sales uh haven's e-commerce sales were lagging and they knew that they could you know reach more people if they just had the support and being in maryland they were a medical dispensary right so they they have a limited number of patients they're not reaching the the full adult use market so their in-store team had been creating some fun new content for their blog in their videos uh in the form of like strain reviews uh but they needed more support to make sure that they were getting you know seen by the right people uh and then the solution was you know haven started to invest in a full seo strategy with MediaJel to get more people to their website and it paid off big so let's dive into some of the numbers here so in one year uh from q1 in 2020 to 2021 of q1 our seo services doubled the number of organic site visitors to their site and increased their revenue substantially so in that year they drove 1.2 million dollars in revenue and you know in this case study in particular is per you know pertinent as it occurred when you know companies were pulling back on their marketing spends they were kind of there's all the uncertainty with kova this was early 2020 right uh that marches when we got that notification of the shutdowns and then everyone panicked right so now with the recession and sales kind of slowing down to pre-covered numbers you know businesses are worried again but this case study really shows uh you you know you know that there is marketing channels if you stick with it and stay the course so from an seo perspective we know there are multiple stages of executing an seo sammer uh seo plans are never cookie cutter right like they they're always based on a lot of factors that we'll go into today but when you're building from the ground up in some of these cases and with haven this wasn't an overnight 1 million roi like they spent money on seo for over a year so sammer can you talk to us about you know where you started with haven um what did you assess in the in the initial audit and what seo tasks did you recommend tackling first

Building an SEO Foundation

Sammer Alkis: yeah with with i think before we jump into just haven seo in general uh it's a very common thought that it is something that's going to take a little bit longer to see results on because of how google operates and even they're a prime example of how the overall uh effort that's being put in starts compounding over time and then you're seeing results later on that are uh really uh a benefit from the work that you were doing a little bit earlier on in the in the campaign uh whether it's month three month four of the work and the results are showing up you'll start seeing incremental performance improvements early hopefully if you're doing the right things but it really is a longer plan i think that's really important to note for all of these case studies that will be going on uh that we'll be reviewing today on the seo side is that it's a real long term play so with haven in particular one of the things that we end up always seeing and having whenever we're working with a partner who they might be newer or even a partner that we've been working with for a long time is the the way that google's algorithm works is that it's constantly changing whether it's a big change um for example a few years back they were really targeting uh link farms so they didn't want you to have low quality links uh and so they let you know that but more commonly you'll start seeing small algorithm updates that google will just let you know there's been an update without any real information and the reason that's really important is that a static or cookie cutter seo plan that you might have done in you know let's say in 2019 you're going to need to really modify your approach to seo in 2020 because in that one year there's probably going to be three or four changes within google's algorithm so for haven in particular it wasn't necessarily that they were doing poorly in the past is that a lot of the old seo tactics were just not as heavily weighted with google in the uh in the start of this campaign once we start seeing a lot of the changes we started making and started seeing the performance improvements so that's something just to keep in the back of your mind is that your seo plan should constantly be evolving and modifying based off of a couple of things that we'll cover today first thing that you kind of want to do especially with haven we looked at where we were where we were from a foundational standpoint for the site and really auditing not only the technical aspects that we know are valuable to google but also where are we kind of stacking up in the search results page but more importantly who is above us and who's directly below us from a competitor set standpoint for the keywords or for the search phrases that we find to be of high value and the way that we approached haven wasn't necessarily just trying to hit a home run right away because there had to be this build process from a strategy standpoint and so the way we looked at it was bucket number one what kind of educational information can we present to google and to users that maybe isn't financially the goal isn't a financial return right so state level laws about buying cannabis uh information around how you actually go and purchase a product in store so more of that upper funnel informational uh content types that are not gonna generate a ton of revenue but what they give you is brand visibility and one of the big things within the cannabis space across all these different states that we are partners with is that you're going to be competing with not only legal dispensaries in your region but you're also going to be competing with some you know black market dispensaries and so the biggest area of how you can possibly maximize your visibility is to create some brand stickiness and that's where some of those educational pieces of content will give you a visibility improvement can get you to engage with a user and then get in front of them for the very first time so that was our first goal really expanding that haven visibility the in-store experience at haven is fantastic the ownership is amazing pricing is just in line with the rest of the market but it was really an issue of brand stickiness and so creating a lot of that information on the website that gives you a little bit more reach potential uh knowing that we're not really trying to get revenue right off the start but we're trying to create a little bit of brand equity to then compound into some sales in the back end um so that was goal number one really expanding the brand and creating a little bit of stickiness for the users so then that way when they're looking for a product to purchase if it's between us and a couple of other competitors and the results they have already some experience with us in some way or another and then they'll feel a little bit more inclined to go with us potentially so that was really goal number one is really creating a little bit more brand awareness and brand stickiness okay yeah in the short term

Google My Business Optimization

Host: awesome and i know that you know google my business is a top priority for for local seo can you expand on how a you know cannabis retailer can level up their their gmb profiles any advice there

Sammer Alkis: yeah absolutely your google my business profile whether you're a single store or a multi-store operator it's going to be the second most important thing in your portfolio besides your website uh when it comes to disability and google my business is even more vital when we're thinking about how do we get local revenue generating for your store um and so with google my business a lot of times whenever we're working with a newer partner that have a google my business setup um they we test we typically tend to see the same type of issues consistently uh it's a lot of our partners when we first work with them they'll have my business uh verified which is wonderful they'll have their brand name in there hours of operation and a couple of photos and that that tends to be it um in order to really take your google my business profile to that next level there's a lot of small and big tweaks you can make to the profile to give you visibility in the google local pack but what i would say as like probably my top three if i were going to give a recommendation to you know people who are listening in today is really leverage consistency in your nap really really basic stuff so your name address phone number um make sure that that's consistent across your website your gmb profile and if you're doing some sort of local citation development through yex or miles local um making sure all that information is consistent that's probably the most basic advice i can give because it does make a big difference when it comes to having uniform information for google to match up against and then display your listing for i think the other one is your classification of your business is really important about a couple years ago google rolled out a cannabis store classification which wasn't available in the past and so that's really important because when people do make that dispensary near me surge or um medical marijuana dispensary and then location that cannabis store classification is going to give you a leg up versus let's say somebody who's classifying their dispensary as a alternative medicine medicinal conditioner so like something small like that is a huge boost uh but i think also the last one is you want to have some sort of content on your gmb profile that's really helpful but the recommendation isn't just content i think it's keyword amplification with your within your google my business profile so you can amplify and target keywords within your description says that they don't really weight keywords within your uh business name but as long as you're not keyword stuffing it makes sense and it's actually part of your business having some sort of an insertion of dispensary or um cannabis store or something along those lines in your actual naming title of your gmb profile does carry weight and does shift visibility now the one caveat with that is that if you are targeting let's say cannabis in your brand name you're probably not going to have a lift on the term marijuana and vice versa so you kind of have to know that if you do target one of those keywords within your brand name in your gmb profile it's not going to be applicable across the other iterations of cannabis or marijuana keywords so it's really specific to a small silo but it is really helpful to know that you kind of want to look at your gmb profile in the same way that you would look at your website and keyword focus is a really important part of amplifying your gnb disability

Host: wonderful and we do have a question from the audience from steve mendes does this work for b2b like a cannabis compliance consultant

Sammer Alkis: it does gmb does like that that same type of optimization would work but your targeting would be different if you're going after b2b you're going to be going after a much smaller customer set really specific in the type of user you're going after and from my experience and this is going to be variable per business a lot of times those b2b consumers won't necessarily be engaging or be putting as much effort into looking at your gmb profile they're going to be really engaging with the results in google that are maybe more tied into your business so getting a little bit more information on your website is more vital i think on the b2b side than the enhanced optimization for gmb gmb still important but because not really targeting those local users as aggressively on b2b you're probably going to want to shift a lot more of your focus onto the physical website versus your gmb profile

Website Schema and Technical SEO

Host: okay well thank you for that sammer and we definitely leveraged this for our own b2b marketing so i can attest that this is an effective you know lead generation channel for your b2b business can you give us a little insight into website schema and you know why it's important for seo especially for local retailers

Sammer Alkis: absolutely so schema is the one of the first things that we'll do on a new partner engagement within the first 30 days or so and the reason you want to have schema and what schema is in essence is that when google comes to your website they'll look around and you have content you have all these other pieces of information on your site and to google it's all unstructured right so you'll have your brand name your logos your content your landing pages but it's kind of all in a jumble and google's trying to dissect the information and then present what's relevant to the user in the search results by having schema implemented whether it's organization schema local schema product schema there's millions of schema types and you can actually go to schema.org to look at the different schema types and the different formats that you can deploy schema but what that allows you to do is when you're deploying schema on your site google then will get onto all that unstructured information and then to google now structure and so it makes sense you call out logos you call out content you call out address information which makes the flow of google dissecting it and parsing that information so much simpler but another benefit to schema is that when you're in google and you're making a search a lot of times you'll see a few different results you'll have a regular search result but then you'll have a rich snippet and the rich snippets are only going to be available to you you have you have the ability to get google to display them if you have schema deployed on your website and what that is is that you'll be able to call out reviews you'll be able to call out your phone number or other really important information on your landing page that you won't get displayed by google without having that schema implemented so it helps google understand your website a little bit better and more importantly it gives you more ownership of google's front page because you take up more space you give the user more options to click on elements of your website and on mobile that's very important because like we know your mobile real estate is really small and so the more space you take up the more you knock your competitors down and you kind of own that entire phone screen space which is going to get you a higher click engagement rate

Host: wonderful thanks sammer that's i mean schema is key it's one of the most important elements for local seo and if you're doing if you have a self-hosted e-commerce menu uh it's really important for for seo for your products as well

Sammer Alkis: exactly and what i recommend um when you're on schema.org there's gonna be a number of different ways that you can create schema and deploy schema google does recommend using json and then they uh it's a schema type and then they recommend deploying it using google tag manager so then that way the tag manager script is what loads one time it doesn't slow down your site versus deploying json schema hard coded on your individual landing pages which could have a little bit of a load page issue so just something to consider use json schema um look at the type of schema that you're looking to deploy i would recommend local and organization at the bare minimum and then deploy via gtm which would make everyone's life including google's life easier

Case Study: Ethos SEO and $4.3M in Organic Revenue

Host: yeah awesome all right let's hop on to the next case study here we have ethos so you know at ethos we really wanted to ensure uh market dominance for all their search terms so you know they started a campaign with us in may of 2021 you know sales began to flatten after initial boost from covid uh and they wanted to really strengthen their online presence and ensure ranking dominance to continue to drive their organic traffic and in online sales so they began to invest 2 000 a month in an seo strategy that included on on-site and off-site optimization link building and guest posting so by ensuring that their site is user-friendly and optimized for their top keywords they're they were able to gross 4.3 million in online revenue from organic traffic uh with 34 000 plus sales and let's pull that up here for 34 000 online orders and the average order of 122 dollars so that was under that was over the course of one month that was actually march my apologies there uh but sammer let's dive into this campaign a little bit i know that you are really hands-on and working on this campaign you know what was the game plan for ethos and how long did it take to generate this kind of roi

Market-by-Market SEO Strategy

Sammer Alkis: yeah ethos was a really exciting project to work on for a couple of different reasons one they're a multi-state multi operator and the exciting part about working on a partnership like that is that you can test out different seo strategies in different markets maybe it's a strictly medical market maybe it's a hybrid market of rec and medical or maybe it's just wreck and different tactics work a little bit different for those markets and so we had a really great we have a really great relationship with the with the uh people at ethos and they really give us a lot of freedom to test things out and so one of the first things that we were really talking about was not necessarily looking at just top line revenue for ethos as a whole but how do we start really owning and carving out more market share in individual high priority locations and then by focusing on very specific locations at the start instead of trying to do everything all at once you're able to get really specific about where your deficiencies are in those markets so is your deficiency content is your deficiency something technical and when i say deficiency i don't mean that you're doing poorly in it you're just not maybe getting as much visibility as other people in the market that you're competing with and at the end of the day what we're trying to do is to conquest those competitors and then show up in the top position across all search engines so then that way we're able to get maximum exposure and maximum engagement so with ethos the entire plan was really market specific and we did start off in the hybrid markets with rec and medical being a focus and started really looking at where are really the areas of opportunity when it comes to education where are the areas of opportunity on the website for these pages to create a better ux for that user who comes onto the website so if they come through the homepage or a store location page how do we nurture them to get that checkout flow so that was also part of heat mapping was really important to really identify um the the engagement types and how much the time on individual pages look like on top of what we're seeing in google analytics so market by market strategy was really important and then once we were deploying whether it's new content technical changes cleaning up backlinks that were built in the past that were of lower quality and getting something a little bit more high quality into google's index from a backlink standpoint was really important but the thing that really made this successful was the ability to deploy changes on the seo side at a market by market level and then at that point starting to monitor progress without having to worry about needing to have progress showing up in a couple of weeks so that was really important and that's where that partnership is so vital being able to really have a honest conversation about hey this is looking great directionally the information maybe is not looking great so what can we tweak but really putting your finger on the pulse of consistent competitors that are in the market and then really being siloed in regards to your approach at individual dmas and then changing that approach depending on what you're seeing in market for different locations i think that's really important i think the cookie cutter approach might give you the ability to do work in scale but every market is so different and the interactions from google to the user is very different so you really should have a bit of a more of a custom strategy and look at every market with a lens of you haven't seen anything in that market yet and really approach it fresh and that's what we did with ethos and the with ethos we started seeing performance after maybe a couple of months and by hyper focusing our attention at individual dmas there was a compounding effect where once we started seeing incredible performance and ranking number one in the search results ranking number one in the google listings uh in the local pack we started seeing a compounding because our domain authority started to increase and then google was like oh this is a reputable site these are then show us up against some of the really big players in these local markets these these gigantic multi-store dispensaries that we're going head-to-head with uh at a fraction of the seo budget which was really really nice to see

Host: yeah it's amazing with uh with the limited budget we were able to really knock it out of the park and generate a substantial return on investment for for seo can you dive in a little bit more into the keyword and content plan that you built for ethos

Keyword and Content Buckets

Sammer Alkis: yeah absolutely so the way that we approached the keyword plan was in a few different buckets bucket number one was what our what are our local pack keyword targets so for example what keywords do we want to really target for the people that are within five or six miles of a store as an example and those are going to be really uh focused around geo modified dispensary terms so um dispensary in baltimore keywords like that uh identifying those keywords and matching them back to gmb and the location pages was keyword set identification number one but number two the really important thing in number two was what can we do on the website that was not a near me or a local geo modified keyword set that will allow us to have visibility for products or categories that are really top of mind in market so for example if you're in a market and what we did with ethos is that they had certain markets where certain product types like flour or certain types of strains or certain types of um edibles whatever it is not brand types but more like an effect type or a strain type really expanding on education around those and and it kind of goes back to a sales funnel that bucket number two is gonna be that top funnel of getting that at that with that user uh well who we're generally competing with when we're going after those longer tail broader match keywords that are more educational you're gonna be competing with leafly you're to be competing with weed maps you're going to probably also depending on the state be competing with some gov websites but the really exciting thing is that you're not going to see a lot of competition with other dispensaries a lot of other dispensaries are so hyper focused on immediate revenue that they completely miss three quarters of the sales funnel and so by jumping into that getting some exposure early on will give you a leg up because once you start getting visibility let's say you're in position three or four for something educational and you're competing with weedmaps the gov site and then it's you well then you have so much more leeway with google to rank for associated keywords or associated pages that might be tied into that educational piece so that bucket number two of education again going back to what we kind of approach it with haven that's vital because it's just missed so often within the industry because everyone just wants immediate revenue and then bucket number three is gonna be those ecom related non-local phrases so how do we start ranking not in the local pack but in the regular search results for our store pages for regions around our store that we want to maybe target that they don't have a dispensary near them so those geo modified uh local keywords that are not google my business focused those keywords would be more mid to bottom funnel and what we're trying to do there is drive the action of a conversion so what you want to do with your keyword sets and this is what we do ethos is really break up the keywords based off of the type of engagement that we want depending on the location and then really leaning into that strategy when it comes to content amplification correction on content development new content development link building so all of those tactics will fall into the direction of your keyword strategy

Host: yeah i mean it's pretty much endless what you can do on the keyword strategy it's there's so many opportunities especially if you're multiple cities states and beyond and then just thinking of all the evergreen content uh there's tons of content that you can get out put out there on consumption best practices on sativa versus indica you know terps whatever it might be there's there's so much information that customers need to know especially the cannabis curious people that don't they don't really know anything about cannabis maybe it's their first time engaging with the with the plant so you really want to keep that in mind that there's you have all these different customer segments that you need to to communicate with

Sammer Alkis: yeah and one thing that uh i just want to put out there is when you do go on a lot of dispensaries sites they have blogs and the topics are the same almost all they're all the same so our recommendation is to look at a different topic type or something that might be associated with that topic but is looking at it from a different lens and one really common one is sativa versus indica just talking to a lot of people in the in the industry that's a really outdated and antiquated way of looking at uh cannabis as a whole but it's still the way that the general public looks at it so it's more about how do we re-educate people on the sativa versus indica versus explaining what it is so it's more about looking at content types in a different way so you stand out more otherwise you're just gonna get buried in the same topics that everyone creates and i can tell you right now there's about 15 common topics that everyone has content on and it's a very common thing that we find so it's about really being a bit more creative and then also educating people and continuing to educate people on how to look at cannabis and making them a little bit more comfortable with the overall industry as a whole

Video SEO and YouTube Optimization

Host: and also like uh bringing in jackie's question here is you can also do videos right so jackie has a question how would you think about a seo strategy for ranking video search results we're trying to learn more about the trends towards video and how google is thinking about ranking those results

Sammer Alkis: yeah i think the biggest thing with video in general when you're thinking about how you want to amplify it is you want it to be tied into youtube so you can always have video content on your website right a couple of things about that that make it better uh for your website is make sure when you're deploying a video the video landing page page loads are not slow that's really important also having some sort of content or a transcript that is below the video as readable content would be really beneficial uh because with google they can get to your video but they're not going to be able to really digest the content within it on your site uh so what you want to do is you want to give google something that they can actually parse and read and then index because what you ideally would like to do is rank within google's search results page for your video page but also the second largest search engine in the entire world is youtube and youtube functions like seo did 15 years ago so developing a channel having groups in that channel of playlists optimizing your individual videos with keywords and descriptions and time stamps and then linking that to your landing page and vice versa to your youtube channel from your website i think is really important but also um what i found with youtube optimization is that the more info that you put in your description it's not going to be that beneficial it's really about summarizing getting content in there providing jump uh timestamps having timestamps in the video and then engaging with comments and that's going to be all huge because how youtube works versus google is that youtube a lot of times when you're getting video views it's all coming off of a recommendation video so you might do an initial search and you'll see the video but just natural behavior is if there's an associated video that you will recommend or youtube recommends you'll probably engage with that as well so by having all these additional elements on your youtube channel and your youtube video it gives google the opportunity and youtube the opportunity to recommend your video after associated video videos viewed to get you that engagement um so i think video is great just expand if you if the thought is maybe just publishing it on your website i think you absolutely should take into consideration load times and content but i think the amplification where you can get a lot more exposure will be on youtube but they can work hand in hand and you won't be cannibalizing yourself by doing that

Host: yeah make sure you optimize the youtube videos add insert keywords in the title in the description and make sure that you're following the best practices on seo absolutely and jackie actually has another question uh what resources would you recommend to identify the right keywords

Keyword Research Tools

Sammer Alkis: so there are a couple of different tools that i i personally use but everyone tends to use whatever's more comfortable for them probably the industry standard for a number of different reasons is probably sem rush it they have a keyword magic tool in there it gives you if you play pay for the premium package which is i think 100 bucks a month or something along those lines uh it is it gives you the result of the it gives you a overview of who's showing up for those keywords in google's front page it also gives you a lot of search volume information so i would say uh from an ease of use standpoint and and just a uh data collection standpoint of what data is available for you when you're selecting your keywords sem rush is super helpful uh also other tools you can use there's like bright edge you can also use uh google recommended keywords so let's say you're doing a search in google let's say it's like dispensary in nevada as an example there's associated keywords at the very bottom of google that they'll say hey these are some recommended key phrases that people are also searching for that are in relation to the keyword that you're searching so if you want to scroll to the very bottom um keep on going keep on going oh they're not there that's odd generally there's like a recommendation there it might just be because it's a local search but the the really important thing here is there you are there if you scroll the bottom gear keep on going right there so these are also related searches i think that's another area to really look at when you're identifying the uh keywords to go after but what i actually find to be the most helpful is if you scroll back up if you're sorry yeah if you scroll back up to that page um not only does it help with keyword identification but also topic identification can you scroll down just a little bit and it's going to be oh shoot they're not there it's a section called frequently asked questions and so it's questions that people tend to ask associated with that keyword and then landing pages that are associated with those questions there you go right there and so what this allows you to do that's super important is that it gives you an up-to-date list of general questions that people tend to ask or what radicals they go down by looking at these topics you can then look at the content and look at sem rush or bright edge or another keyword research tool that you might be using and really start digging into longer tail keywords that are associated with topics that you might want to grow into based off of your primary keyword that you're going after also look at google search console for your website to see what people are searching for um so there's a lot of different tools but i would say if you're jumping off anywhere start with sem rush i think that's an affordable option to use it's a very very intuitive tool and it gives you a lot of great information and then start looking at google itself and if you want to try different tools red edge is great hrefs is really great as well so it's really a a number of tools that you can use we just default to sem rush because it works really well but more importantly a ton of data that it collects where some other tools don't collect all that information

Case Study: Ethos Google Ads and a $1M Month

Host: thank you for that sammer yeah i prefer a ref so i've just been using it for a long time and then also bright local if you're if you're running a bunch of bunch of locations so a combination of those and jackie we'll answer the second part of the your question here in a second uh but let's uh let's dive into a google ads case study uh so let's kind of hop ahead and pull up uh ethos as well so same client same partner of ours ethos out of uh throughout maryland pennsylvania massachusetts so ethos you know we we we're running the seo campaign but we really wanted to see results fast and you know google ads was the the best uh platform for us to really kind of skip the line and start to drive revenue immediately so we started to do this in early 20 2020 actually before we started seo so ethos really wanted to build awareness drive sales you know the company purchased and rebranded some dispensaries and new markets and they had to to make sure that people recognized that ethos name is a high quality dispensary brand and they wanted to grow their presence and expand their reach expand the reach of their e-commerce operations so you know what we did as we we began to put together a google ads campaign to help grow and create more brand awareness we use the combination of our google ads as well as uh you know creating different types of ad types so dynamic text ads smart ads non-branded campaigns product campaigns and we did a ton of a b testing to really get to this one million dollar mark so for the month of march in 2021 that's when we really hit that one million dollar mark and we invested 89 000 in that month and we generated over a million dollars in last click revenue so just everyone knows last click revenue is when a user clicks on a google ad or any uh any session on the website so they click on that ad they browse through the website they add add something to their shopping cart and then they check out in the same session so that is a last-click attribution that i want to make sure everyone's aware of and it's really important because paid search and seo are really supportive in the bottom of the funnel so when you use a paid search campaign you're really you're paying for prime real estate while seo can help you improve organic search results page search you know it's advertising so you can get an instant boost to your traffic to your website traffic in in prominent positioning so sammer let's dive into this one a little bit can you walk us through the strategy for the google ads campaign and you know really like like what did you do to create you know to create the campaign and how did you like refine and scale their strategy

Scaling the Google Ads Strategy

Sammer Alkis: yeah so this was probably the most challenging uh paid search account that i had my hands in and the reason behind that is because we had really hard return goals to hit and to your point we didn't want to look at multi-touch uh conversions we didn't want to look at assisted conversions that really wanted to be last click which isn't necessarily ideal but still that was the kind of the goal and then scaling right scaling was a was the the biggest hurdle to get through because there are a number of locations across different states that have their own compliance and on top of that the the margins across the different locations were different from a profitability standpoint so we're kind of considering all of that and also brand awareness in certain markets was really poor other markets there was a lot of competitors so there was a absolutely um a really robust level of tactics that we had to deploy and to your point had to test a lot but i would say where we really found a lot of success ramping up was after we started to get away from just focusing in on that bottom funnel i know you hit on google ads is really about that mid to bottom funnel owning that front real estate and what we saw is that we were gaining well by having that strategy in place we were gaining a lot of impressions but it wasn't a lot of engagement there because there wasn't a lot of trust within that brain so we did launch a lot of look-alike display targeting so really getting in front of people that are previous purchasers that look like those purchasers that are in the same market so they haven't heard about ethos haven't been to the website but they match a customer profile of somebody who did purchase getting in front of those people through some display or discovery campaigns was really important because what we wanted to do is your return users are vital for your business every business has a core group of people they're going to come back but you're not going to grow by just relying on those return users so you have to find people that mirror those value users and get them into the market and get them down the sales funnel so the minute we started really targeting those local likes we're also started prospecting in certain audience segments and then re-engaging with previous purchasers that really solved some of our initial issues that we were having when it comes to engagement and once we started getting those campaigns humming we started then starting to roll out local campaigns and different markets so the local campaigns the great thing about those is that they are showing up right where google my business shows up and you show up in the number one search result and you pretty much are going to get a majority of those clicks so having campaigns that are localized campaigns that show up in google my business those are are in google maps that's huge and then we also started doing a lot of non-brand targeting we didn't really focus a lot of our attention on the ethos brand um because we figure if somebody's in a search for ethos cannabis in any way our site organically will show up and so there was a little bit of protection money so competitors can't bid on our brand but what we did is we started focusing on brands that we sell categories that we sell started looking at keywords that in search console that maybe have a lot of visibility and impressions but low clicks and then starting to target those keywords in in google search as well so then that way we know that there's a market for those keywords but our organic position is so low we're not getting the engagement our ads are able to fill that gap and we're able to actually maximize on on engagement there and then as of december of this last year we started rolling out um whenever google launches a beta the great thing about ethos is that they're like hey run it try it test it out and see if it's gonna perform what we're currently doing and so we were able to launch performance max campaigns and take advantage of a couple other betas that no one in the industry and the cannabis space was doing and it allows us to kind of have a little bit of a leg up even if those campaigns don't perform well at the time you're able to tweak learn and by the time everyone starts getting on board with them seven eight months down the line you have seven months of testing that you have a bunch of data on and then you cut in that learning curve now all the other competitors are now testing or trying out a new campaigning type that you have seven months of experience with and so it allows you to have a little bit of a leg up so for us it was really about expanding that upper funnel a little bit more when it comes to targeting getting some branding plays going looking at audiences that are high engagers that we can build off of and then really focusing in on the products and the brands that are having a little bit more profitability for us and then how do we take seo information and then use it for paid search i think that's that last piece that really helped us get over the hump and and just for the uh overall campaign that was a not a one month or two month thing that has been pretty consistent for about 17 18 consecutive months now where million dollars a month 10 plus return 90 to 100 000 spent and what we're now doing is rolling it into being and being is not having a similar result so it's really about looking at the campaigns in the market where your strengths are where your weaknesses are being honest with yourself and deploying a tactical breakout on your strategy that's going to allow you to maximize on your strengths and then improve your areas of opportunity that you might be a little bit weaker on

Host: awesome yeah i know this is a you know seo and paid search like they're long term plays right like it does you don't see these results overnight it takes a lot of kind of strategy and optimization to to get to this level in this scale

Keeping Marketing Budgets Intact

Sammer Alkis: yeah and and the one thing that's makes all these case studies if there's one aspect that ties them all together is communication with our partner having somebody on the other side of the table who is willing to give you honest feedback who's willing to really sit down with you and talk about what you're finding and then give the opportunity to test something out or really dig a little bit deeper or lean into something that's working a little bit more that's what really allows us to be successful and why a lot of these case studies have become case studies is because of that partnership and that relationship and that willingness to really work with us um the partners that are a little bit more hands-off it becomes a little bit tougher to get here because we do need some feedback and some insight to what's happening at the store level or at the business level that we can't really always see within google

Host: yeah exactly uh how can the marketing directors with cmos keep budgets intact and and ongoing is as many times when you know instant results aren't seen by the cfos and marketing budgets are the first to get cut like what can what can a cmo do to really uh keep that and improve their case

Sammer Alkis: that's a great question and a really difficult answer as it's so variable on the cmo cfo i you know i think we all know the ceo is the boss right but who really controls your marketing budgets it's gonna be that cfo they're the ones who will dictate the yes or no for your campaign so it's really about what kpis or what directional information especially if performance hasn't ramped up yet do we have any initial learnings that are valuable um the one thing that i kind of default back to is a lot of people a lot of our partners they really care about owning the space that their stores in and what i mean by that is having brand visibility making sure that competitors aren't outranking them uh and making sure that you own a lot of that real estate on google for your local market and so what i recommend a lot of times especially as we're ramping up or it's very early or maybe we're at a situation where it's been six months and performance is still slowly getting better but it's not crazy amazing at the moment is i like to run a lot of something called share voice reports and what that gives us is that you can start looking at your growth patterns for certain key phrases or certain key keyword topics compared to your competitors and how much of that real estate you own over time so what i mean by that is let's say you really want to really really want to rank for dispensary plus specific location keywords and you have have five competitors that are really your main competitors in that market what you can do is share a voice is that you can start tracking maybe out of 100 pi at the start maybe you had five percent ownership of those of that real estate and then what you can see over time is you might you might have started so low that it's really hard to get you into position one but maybe by month five so you're not getting the revenue in yet but now you went for those key phrases you own five percent of the market now you own fifteen percent of the market so you're seeing directional growth and then now that last step is how do you then start getting from directional growth and visibility to higher levels of engagement and then at the end of the day making sure that you're nurturing a sale but i think there's different ways to approach conversations with the cfos cfos a lot of times from my experience they want to just bottom line how much are we making what's the profitability i think profitability is also an important conversation to have in that market um but i think there's a couple of different conversations to have it just really depends on the cfo and then in cmo's relationship and how they're looking at what is the overall business objective and goals that we have

Case Study: Virio Display Ads

Host: yeah and it's pretty usually pretty straightforward so how much what's the investment what's the revenue generated they probably won't understand last click and multi-click or anything like that so keep it high level and you know some of these campaigns that we're doing a you know ten to one return and you know that's why you know the campaigns have been they've never been turned off because you're not going to get that return with weed maps or any of these other platforms all right let's dive on to the last case study here we're going to take a look at display ads so this is our partner up in new york so virio really wanted to engage both new and existing customers and drive additional traffic to their new york locations you know there was a lot more dispensaries kind of popping up in the area and they needed it to stay top of mind to ensure that people knew about their delivery service and their different locations so they have you know right now they have 16 locations across five states so they've scaled since since we ran this campaign so let me go down to the results here all right so in the month of april of 2021 virio grossed 108 000 in multi-click attribution revenue for the month of april and with an investment of just over 13 000 and i do want to talk a little bit more about multi-touch attribution because this is different than google ads um so what we're saying here is you know those those ads that you see on your phone you know if you're on um on the weather app or if you're on you know like a dating app or gaming or one of those apps and you you see those banners pop up when you're in the middle of your sudoku that's programmatic advertising that's a display ad so uh you know people we're reaching people on uh when they're playing games and doing other things on their phone so the way that we attribute that to a sale is we say that hey this person saw the ad when they're playing a game and then maybe a day later five days later 10 days later 30 days later whatever attribution window you choose they made a purchase in that time through their shopping your ecommerce menu and the way that we match this is through what we call a maid or a mobile advertising id so each of your phones has it's like a social security number for your phone and we connect that to the transaction on the shopping cart and that's how we attribute the sale so it's a little different than google ads the what the easiest way to explain it would be you know you're driving down the freeway and you see billboards you know you're not going to stop and go to that store right away like you're going to see you know abc dispensary barbary coast dispensary you know haven dispensary and then later down the line you'll get home and get on your phone be like hey i saw that i saw that ad for haven dispensary i want to go visit that so it's really interruptive uh and it people don't have the same intent to buy as you would with like a google ads or a seo campaign so when they're searching for product they're ready to buy uh when you're doing display advertising it's really top of funnel and you're really trying to make sure that you're top of line and that was the goal for this campaign

Sammer Alkis: that's a really uh that's an interesting point um and it kind of makes me think that it's very similar in how you maybe view ads on instagram or on facebook where you're not searching for something you're just you happen to be scrolling

Targeting and Geofencing

Host: yeah you're getting close to it question for you is when when we're thinking about how do we get in front of the right types of people how do we like what kind of audiences do we tend to go after is it is it something that we predefined early on is it guess work is it something that is very strategic in approach how do we really select the audiences so that way we're not just spending money um and getting in front of people that might not be necessarily the right type of consumer that might purchase from us

Sammer Alkis: yeah that's uh that's a great question yeah so the first thing is you know we were doing delivery service regions and retail locations so i'll start with the delivery service first first thing is our partner providers with zip codes so we knew what zip codes that we should actually target ads in and the one thing to keep in mind with display advertising is that you can do geofencing which is a popular buzzword nowadays you can draw a fence around the store i can just you know do a fence around a zip code or a region or a neighborhood so that's what we're doing we're driving uh we're drawing as a fence around a particular a set of let's say 50 zip codes so a customer has to walk in those zip codes or be in those zip codes on their device or on their desktop or on their tablet to even see the ads and then the second part of that is the targeting so since we can geofence companies or anything really let's geofence every cannabis dispensary in new york right so anyone who walks in those cannabis stores and has their location services on their phone using one of those free apps i mentioned that gets sent to an exchange and we can buy that uh consumer data and we can add that to our targeting so that's all done uh automatically and you know the the consumer list and the segment is refreshing every day because there's new people getting into that consumer and to that audience so that's two ways that we at least do the targeting zones and then also the audience we also have our own first party data at MediaJel where we've ran you know upwards of uh i think it was like 8 million people have seen our ads over the course of our business we've ran a half a billion dollars of transactions to our pixel 2 so we have some of that as well that we can leverage uh and then when you're thinking about a retail store you know it's really local focused i know that virio has i believe like five four or five stores in new york and you know one was in brooklyn or one one is in queens one was in other parts of new york outside of new york city so what we did is we did a anywhere from like a two mile radius up to a 20 mile radius in in rural areas for campaigns so anyone that is a cannabis consumer and walks within that certain radius of the store then we want them to see those uh ads that you those uh banners that you see on these uh mobile apps i think with this is that you get an opportunity to be really creative about how you in front of consumers and i think the the thing that stands out to me whenever i'm looking at display slash programmatic campaigns is that one you have no restrictive messaging right so you can literally call out cannabis you can have flour on there you can get really creative with your banners and the the assets that you're running but to your point what you mentioned is that if you really want to get um competitive with your competitors you can actively target their location pin drop them yeah and i think to me that's amazing it gives you an opportunity to actively take customers away from the businesses that are directly competing with you and it gives you an app back with them which is a lot tougher on seo and a lot tougher on paid search but it gives you that opt-in that passive opt-in on on display which is such a leg up in the industry it's it's hard to express how valuable it is

Comparing Channels and Closing Thoughts

Host: yeah and that's really the only channel you can leverage to directly target your competitors like anyone who walks in those stores you know they'd be put in that audience you can target them you know you can do it in paid search with bidding on their brand names but that could be quite expensive as well so you know there's you just have to be smart about it and you know the just keep in mind the purpose of programmatic display advertising right it's top of funnel you want to get people's attention it's really great for new stores new brands to really get brand awareness and then pair that with the google ads campaign or an seo campaign so that when someone sees the viral health brand they immediately go to google and then they want to buy so that we've seen a lift in performance for brand searches in seo and in paid search from running a display ads campaign so that's something to keep in mind and you know with this one we had a about an eight dollar return on ad spend so you know they spent you know just over thirteen thousand dollars and they generate over a hundred thousand and for us um you know the the scale as far as return on that spending reaching that million dollars wasn't as fast as seo and paid search and it did take us six to twelve months to reach that scale uh but that's i mean that's really up to you to kind of balance these three levers right like these three services are all impactful and they have a very high return on that spend or return on investment compared to a weed maps or billboards traditional billboards right so keep that in mind uh you know we've seen i've talked with three different partners this week and their return for weed maps was like three or four to one when you're doing seo paid search upwards of ten to one so you do the math you know you spend thirty thousand dollars of weed maps you get maybe a hundred and twenty thousand dollars you spend thirty thousand dollars on paid search you might get three hundred thousand or plus you know more in return on that so really just to put you know apples to apples and where you should actually prioritize your marketing mix for new customer acquisition uh and then another thing that you can do is you know when you're when we're running these campaigns not only can we track e-commerce sales but we can track walk-ins so once since we have the ability to geo-fence we can draw a fence around our own stores and anyone who sees our ad and then walks in to our our actual retail locations uh we count that as a you know pretty much a conversion as well so we had 278 walk-ins in addition to all the e-commerce revenue we generated so and that's heavily under-reported i would say so just depending on what point of sale system you have you know we may be able to integrate with your point of sale and then track true walk-ins uh so you know keep in mind uh when it comes to that for for these type of campaigns but you know overall you know to summarize this um you know this session today you know the moral of the story here is that your market strategy and efforts compound over time right you too can generate over a million dollars in return on ad spend if your business and your your store your brand and your your team really dedicates time and resources to your marketing efforts you know businesses that invest in a month or two or three and then pull out because they don't see results this is incredibly short-sighted and you're hurting your business overall because putting in the effort across your marketing channels only pays off with consistency so i just wanted to make sure that that was a point that i made here and you know thank you everyone for joining us today sammer thank thank you again for sharing all your insights we i can talk for hours with you about any of these things so i appreciate you spending the time with us today and going through these million dollar you know uh return on investment case studies

Sammer Alkis: happy to be here and hopefully i get another invite to come back

Closing Remarks

Host: oh yeah we know you know you will and just as a reminder uh MediaJel has a compliant ad network of 75 000 plus publishers including mainstream news sites the cnns the fox the gq salon.com you know meme sites uh dating gaming music streaming apps you know they all welcome cannabis ads and we really want to help you in that journey and reaching consumers through mainstream media so uh touch base touch base with us through mediagel.com and you know definitely uh subscribe to us so you can join the upcoming webinars and thank you everyone for joining today thank you everyone

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