Our Cannabis Data Secret: How Our MediaJel Google Ads AI Gathers Data

{}Introduction and Welcome

Eduardo Silva: Good morning everyone, good afternoon if you're joining us from the East Coast, we'll allow a couple more seconds here for our attendees to join us, and we'll be right back with you, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you once again for joining us for today's webinar, really exciting information we're going to be sharing with you, we're going to get underway right now — once again, if you're joining us from the West Coast, good morning, if you're joining us from the East Coast, good afternoon to you, thank you for your time today. In today's webinar we're going to be covering our data secret, how our Google Ads AI gathers its data to make educated business decisions for your advertising, we're also going to be demystifying this data-gathering process, as well as the analytic power of our machine learning. In our agenda for today, we're going to be covering the different places our AI finds this data, why those sources matter to you, and how you can maximize the data to create more effective campaigns.

Speaker and Company Introduction

Eduardo Silva: A little bit about myself, my name is Eduardo Silva, I am going to be your host for today's webinar, I bring with myself around 18 years of marketing and sales experience, and I'm really excited to be joining this fiery industry. A little bit about us, we have been in business for over five years now, solely focused in the cannabis space, we got our start as a humble single medicinal dispensary advertising agency in Southern California, and it just ballooned into helping so many other dispensaries across North America achieve their sales goals.

Housekeeping Items

Eduardo Silva: Before we get started and underway with a lot of this exciting content today, let's take a quick moment to touch on a couple housekeeping items. First and foremost, we love cell phones, after all they are the cornerstone of digital marketing, however, in order to get the most out of today's webinar, we ask you to put those facing down on your desk, or mute them. Also, take a moment to familiarize yourself with the Zoom interface, at the top of the screen you will see a Q&A button, find it, we do have panelists that will be answering questions live as we go through this webinar content, so also be sure to stick around, we do have a special offer for those attending here today, and we'll be sharing that at the end of the webinar.

Introducing Our Google Ads AI

Eduardo Silva: So, by now we hope that you have heard the news about our Google Ads AI, it's a machine learning software platform that helps us better optimize campaigns for our clients, so they see higher returns on their ad investment. We're the only ones doing this for the cannabis industry, and our clients are definitely benefiting. Today I want to take a deep dive into this service, to share where the data that our AI uses comes from — here's the thing, your AI is only as good as its data sources, so it's crucial that you understand what it's analyzing, to ensure that you are gathering the best results possible. First, let's do a quick recap of what our AI does, and then we'll focus on the many different data points it captures and analyzes.

Eduardo Silva: Our new AI software connects real-time trends to dispensaries' Google Ads campaigns, supercharging performance and increasing e-commerce sales and revenue by more than 25 percent. Using a combination of historical campaign data, real-time weather data, social media signals, and news sentiment through news aggregators such as Bing and Google News, our machine learning technology creates models around the variety of rich data sets. This extensive modeling produces dynamic bid strategies that respond to trends and shifts in demand, thus yielding greater returns for you. That means we can now create more high-converting Google Ads faster, to help our clients increase their bottom line while finding new customers, plus these campaigns will be more effective than they were before, which is really saying something. At the end of the day, our dispensary customers were already seeing great returns on their advertising investments, now we're able to actually improve upon our own performance, and take our clients' campaigns to even several notches higher — with our machine learning, we'll be able to create ads that lead to even more clicks, increasing our customers' return on ad spend, and creating a renewable pipeline of online revenue. When created as part of a larger dispensary advertising strategy, our Google Ads machine learning campaigns will help our clients become market leaders.

How APIs Power the Data Gathering Process

Eduardo Silva: Let's focus more on the data sources our software is pulling from, to get as much data as possible, our artificial intelligence looks at different APIs. If you have ever tried to get two different programs to talk to each other, like connecting your Gravity Forms to your Mailchimp account, you've already actually seen an API at work — if you have bought something from a website and paid with PayPal, you've used an API. What you may not know is that a lot of popular sites use APIs to show you a broad variety of information — for example, if you want to see what's happening today, you might check Google News. Now, Google doesn't have its own news service, instead of hiring journalists and photographers, they source stories from digital newspapers and news stations across the world, and give it all to you in a simple format — you don't have to look at different places to get your local, national, and international news, it's all conveniently located and available in one single interface. Our AI taps into a variety of data sources in a very similar way, it uses an API connection to follow weather predictions, news aggregators like Google and Bing, and even social media sites, to cluster this data and then subsequently sort it to identify patterns.

Weather Data and Bidding Strategy

Eduardo Silva: So, I've already clued you into some of the different types of data points our AI gathers, let's talk about them in a bit more detail. First up is weather — what does weather have to do with cannabis, you may be asking yourself. Well, cannabis is still a consumer good, right, and just like any other retailer, dispensaries experience ups and downs based on weather conditions — fewer people may actually brave a storm to go buy their own edibles, but weather predictions can also have a positive effect on sales. For example, because our AI is continuously collecting data, you will recognize that during the last predicted thunderstorm, your website visits increased a certain percentage on that specific day. So how would you use this data? Well, if a storm is predicted, and we know that more people will be searching for cannabis products at that time, we can increase your ad spend and bids to capture more of those sales. Maybe people are more likely to purchase certain types of products, such as flower, before a snowstorm — when data is fed into our AI, it notifies us to create campaigns centered around flower. By pinpointing those types of behaviors and patterns, our AI can help improve bidding strategies and increase spend efficiency, that means you will get more for your ad spend, and pay less for each click — it truly adds value to every single one of the campaigns.

News Aggregators and Brand Sentiment

Eduardo Silva: I mentioned Google News earlier, and that's actually one of the AI's sources, gathered in order to form educated campaign bidding. Cannabis is in the news, and there's a lot of talk about legalization in certain states, scheduling nationally, social programs, medical research, and so on — insert topic here. Sometimes certain products and brands show up in the news as well, and this can actually impact consumer behavior — so let's say there's a favorable story about Dixie Edibles, which your dispensary happens to carry, our AI can spot this article, which may have otherwise been overlooked, because there's just so much news content out there, especially now, during the pandemic as well as the election, and, knowing that positive press can lead to increased sales, we can use this data from our AI to create branded campaigns that mention Dixie, to get more people to click through to your website and order that specific brand from you. Because our AI software takes in more news pieces than a team of 10 people could possibly stay on top of, when it finds popular articles believed to lead to an increase in interest in certain products, we can create product-specific campaigns to get more clicks and drive more revenue. On the other hand, let's say there's a negative piece of news about vaping, our AI would clue us into this, and the correlation between previous negative pieces about vaping and a decline in sales — we can then change the copy to ensure that vape cartridges aren't mentioned, so that consumers looking to learn more about the news stories won't see your ads and create a negative correlation between your dispensary brand and vaping illness. Here's the thing, cannabis is in the news now more than ever before, and if you want to benefit from this free press, you need to implement a digital advertising strategy with us, a strategy that allows you to sort through all of that information quickly and identify patterns — that's what our AI does, it looks at Google News, Bing News, among other sites, to get the most up-to-date information, and these sites pull in news from hundreds of organizations, and you can benefit from all of that data.

Social Media Signals and Audience Insights

Eduardo Silva: Social media has a similar problem — a lot is happening on social media right now, and it can be pretty difficult to stay on top of brand sentiment, or be part of every conversation around cannabis. People are constantly chatting about the cannabis products they're trying, and the dispensaries they're visiting, sometimes they may even tag you, so you know they're talking about you, but not always. Now, just imagine that artificial intelligence can do that for you, in real time, sifting through all of this information, sorting through all the dimensions of your brand, and noting the sentiment associated with those mentions — our AI can help you spot consumer trends, so you can help shape them, and jump right in front of a trend, instead of writing the tail end of it, or missing out entirely. You can learn more about what your ideal audience is interested in, so you can create better ads to target them — by looking at social media sites like Facebook and Pinterest, our AI can learn more about your ideal audience and what matters to them, helping create bidding strategies for more suitable keywords that will encourage them to click on your ads and order from your dispensary.

Beyond Google's Native Historical Data

Eduardo Silva: You may know that Google offers the ability to see historical data for your own past Google Ads campaigns, as well as keyword trends — the idea is that, by knowing how well your campaigns have performed over time, you can optimize them to make them better, and similarly, by seeing how certain keywords have performed over time, you can decide whether to bid on them or not. While this can be really useful, it's not a robust solution for gathering and analyzing data — with our AI software, we're able to gather more information about past campaigns and keywords than a human could sift through and understand. Ultimately, it's not just about data gathering though, having a tool that can help recognize patterns and trends faster and more efficiently is invaluable, it's the difference between capitalizing on a trend or missing the boat altogether. With our AI, we can see which days of the week are best for what types of campaigns, what words are more effective for scoring clicks, and which keywords resonate the most with the people you want to target — it's like having a secret window into what makes your target audience tick. Our AI is constantly learning, and can provide you with insights into your target audience that would take a team of marketing experts weeks to determine.

Case Study: A $34 Return on Every Dollar Spent

Eduardo Silva: We began implementing our AI service for our current clients before announcing it to the general public, we wanted to confirm its effectiveness, and that it would benefit every dispensary in North America that partners with us. Because of that, we've been able to share the results of an AI campaign we've been running for the past three months — this case study reflects Q3 results from one of our clients that operates in the Northeast. Over three months, our AI software pulled in historical data from previous campaigns, trending information from news aggregators such as Google and Bing, social media, and historical weather patterns and future forecasts for that specific client's region. We used this vast amount of information to create a variety of ads, including dynamic text ads, smart campaigns, non-brand campaigns, and product campaigns. They saw an initial investment of eight thousand dollars into our Google Ads AI service, our clients saw over nineteen thousand website visitors, 1,814 of those visitors made a purchase, the total revenue on this particular campaign, 273 thousand dollars — now, that's a return on ad spend of $34.19 for every dollar spent, and, furthermore, this client was only paying four dollars and 41 cents to acquire a new customer. Talk about winning over your market audience, this is going to be certain that this customer is going to capture this market.

The Team Behind the AI

Eduardo Silva: I want to emphasize that it's not just our AI technology that's scoring these amazing results — yes, we have constant data gathering and analysis going on, powered by the world's first Google Ads AI for the cannabis industry, but we also have a knowledgeable team that knows how to make the most of it, after all, what's the point of a powerful tool if you don't know how to use it. That's why we have trained Google Ads specialists who participate in ongoing education, to maintain certification and stay on top of best practices, so we can continue to run high-performing ads for our clients — we invest in furthering their skill set because we know it will benefit everyone who works with us. We have skilled copywriters creating engaging content that converts, while remaining compliant with both state regulations and online rules — Google Ads are text ads, so what you say can have a big impact on whether or not people will click on your ad, succinct ads that are relevant to the keyword you're targeting are crucial. We run thousands of ads for dispensaries across North America, it's totally possible, you just need to know what is and isn't acceptable, and steer clear of problematic words and phrases, otherwise you run the risk of not just having your ads dropped from the Google Ads platform, but having your whole account shut down. Each of these pieces alone isn't enough, by connecting these components and applying them to each campaign we do, we're able to consistently create, run, and manage high-return campaigns for our clients, and, in fact, after running ads for one month, 98 percent of our clients choose to increase their ad spend to further fuel their revenue-generating advertising with us. We're seeing this even more right now, as retailers ramp up advertising for their upcoming holiday season. Our process for creating, managing, and optimizing ads helps our clients reach new customers and convert them into loyal customers, we handle all the heavy lifting and put our expertise to work to generate sales for you — this is a low-cost tool that truly pays off, and while your ROI will differ based on where you're located, it's still a no-brainer, especially during this current recession, many dispensaries have actually seen their advertising budgets slashed, and with our Google Ads AI, you can maximize the budget you actually have today, and also drive more revenue, and make the case to increase your marketing budget.

Why Now Is the Right Time to Advertise

Eduardo Silva: As I mentioned at the beginning of the webinar, we're always brainstorming to uncover new and better ways to serve the dispensaries that partner with us, your goals are our goals, your success is our success — and if you're debating whether this type of advertising is right for your dispensary, also think about timing. Currently, there's a lack of competition when it comes to dispensaries on Google Ads, this makes it easier to appear for those desirable keywords that are going to drive traffic to your website. We're also about to jump into the holiday shopping season, I've already started seeing holiday ads popping up left and right, and a lot of companies are starting their holiday advertising early, because of uncertainty brought to us by the pandemic, they don't know what restrictions may be in place come December, so they're launching ads to encourage early shopping. Every week it seems there's news that COVID cases are increasing, so it's smart to start your holiday advertising now, and we know that customer purchasing behavior has changed since March, people are visiting dispensaries less while making larger purchases — instead of stopping by weekly, they're stopping by every two or three weeks. The sooner you start your ads, the more people you can actually reach and convince to purchase online from you. Even if you aren't concerned with the holiday shopping season, it's still important to launch your ads so you can start gathering enough data, so our AI software can make sense of all of this and create even more effective campaigns for you — to maximize the potential of our software, we want at least a couple months' worth of data, this is really how your advertising campaigns get a boost to help you maximize your advertising budget.

Special Offer

Eduardo Silva: To get started with Google Ads, we're offering a special deal to today's attendees, so you can get one month's worth of Google Ads management for free — to get started with this deal, just go ahead and schedule a call with us, we're going to put a link here in the chat window for you, and this offer is only available until October 29th, for the attendees of this webinar only, so act fast, and let's get on a call and start talking about our Google Ads AI, and how we can actually help you boost your sales.

Live Q&A

Eduardo Silva: Let me stop here for any questions from our audience, if you wouldn't mind, please use the Q&A function to ask any questions, I'll give you a couple seconds to find that button. Great, first question here, how quickly will you see results? I get this question pretty much every single time we talk about Google Ads, this is a great question — Google Ads is actually an immediate-result tool, many of our customers, within the first week, start seeing great results, and that's just a baseline, normally it takes about one month for Google Ads' algorithm itself to become smarter, it takes us a couple weeks to really sift through that data to maximize it for you, and then yet one more month to really catapult your advertising campaigns into their maximum potential with our AI. So, all in all, when we see a campaign doing well in the beginning, that's a great indicator you're going to see tremendous returns, however, you're going to see returns regardless, fairly quickly.

Eduardo Silva: Great question here from one of our audience members — Google has strict guidelines around cannabis, what are you doing to enable keywords? One of the items I'll mention here is our team — we do have Google Ads certified specialists on staff, and we've been running Google Ads campaigns since we first got started, five years ago, so we have a track record already of knowing how to really maximize the use of the platform, without triggering their algorithm to pick up some of the keywords and targets being used in advertising copy that get you flagged. I also mentioned we have a team of staff writers, our chief writing officer is also responsible for curating specific keyword-to-copy matches, to ensure you're getting the best of it, and, at the end of the day, look, if you aren't following all the rules Google sets for you, they're going to turn a blind eye, because they don't want your spend — that's really what it comes down to, so it's skill, it's a lot of experience, and that's the magic that's already been defined here.

Eduardo Silva: How do we compare with Weedmaps? Good question — Weedmaps is a completely separate platform, so if you think of Google as its own engine that drives the world, 93 percent of the entire search traffic globally is going through Google, Weedmaps requires running on Google's platform, so Weedmaps is a subset of a search engine. So, let's put it this way — do you want to increase and boost and appear above Weedmaps, you need to invest in advertising with Google, that's really what it comes down to, because Google is the one also sending traffic to Weedmaps, Weedmaps cannot exist without Google, Google owns the entire search traffic world, so you're going to the source rather than a subset, which would be Weedmaps.

Eduardo Silva: Really great questions, I really appreciate it — one more question here, I think we have time for, how do we measure results? Amazing question — there's a variety of ways to measure results, we work with every single one of our customers to make sure we're targeting exactly the KPIs they want us to target, but, at the end of the day, everybody wants to measure revenue, so we go to the source, we go to your online menu, we embed a pixel on every single person who clicks on an ad, navigates to your website, navigates to your menu, and issues a purchase and completes that transaction, and we have all of that data — but we can track even more than that, and we share all of these results with every single one of our customers on a cadence call with them, reviewing performance day by day, so you have exactly what you need to engage internal stakeholders and make educated business decisions. So that one source of truth is revenue, that's what everybody goes for, but, more often than not, we can also track all sorts of other great information, such as site traffic, click-through rate, and return on ad spend.

Closing Remarks

Eduardo Silva: Thank you very much for your time today, you guys have been wonderful — if you have any additional questions, please click the link in the chat, and let's get speaking to one another, happy to address those questions and happy to get you started. Thank you once again for your time, look forward to speaking with you, have a great day.

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