Timothy Bachman, a Paid Media & Technology Strategist at Direct Agents has been instrumental in creating and implementing DA’s AI bidding tool, Konami, and shopping automation tool. Working at Direct Agents since June 2019, he continues to serve in a hybrid role within the Paid Search and Analytics teams. We reached out to Timothy to understand how he has become a beacon of thought leadership within the Paid Search team.
What does being a Visionary Leader mean to you? How did you become a Visionary within Paid Search?
“At any given point there are doubts and needs on a team, and knowing what those are is how you can start to become a visionary. For me, I was doing day-to-day tasks, so figuring out how to make those more efficient became a necessity for DA as we grew and then continued to expand upon solutions.”
Tell us about DA’s shopping feed automation. How is it different than what other agencies offer? What makes it unique?
“Wacoal has been the biggest account that we have been running this on consistently. We started the test around the Spring of 2021. In a lot of shopping feeds, especially if it consists of clothing, 200 products are really thousands of products as one product has variations of colors, materials, and sizes. Depending on how much you’re spending, Google isn’t adept at deciphering through 14,000 products. We found that Google was spending on the same 200 products and it didn’t matter what time of year it was, or which products were truly the best to show.
So, the idea was that we would create a system that would give all of the product variations a fair chance to cycle through. On the agency side, other agencies tend to do a more basic shopping campaign setup with the entire feed and manual exclusions. Most of the time, it is not a fully automated system that keeps track of filtering automatically. We set up all automated rules and we continuously expand upon these automated rules.
When we started launching this on other clients’ sites, we started to take a more agnostic approach to see what consumers were actually doing on the website (ex: what did they buy on the website rather than what did they click). This allowed us to focus on seasonality and consumer behavior more. ”
How does DA’s tool layer with smart shopping automation? Why not just use smart shopping?
“When it comes to shopping automation on Google, that means more bidding and placements. This doesn’t affect that. Instead, it allows Google to more easily filter through the best products to work with.”
What were the results of the implementation of the automated shopping feed?
“Within a client’s initial testing period, we saw a ROAS increase of +48% YoY, Revenue increase of +256% YoY, and most notably a +50% increase of CVR within the first 5 weeks of testing.”
Timothy is one amongst many visionaries at Direct Agents who are bringing groundbreaking results with efficient and creative problem-solving to our clients. Hear more from future visionaries at DA in our next edition.