Forget Google Ads! 4 Free Traffic Channels Making Sellers More Sales Transcript, AI Summary & Key Points

00:00 So, I pulled my Google Ads data last week and I found something that really pissed me off. Google Performance Max has been sending almost 16,000 clicks to one specific Google network, and that network converted at 0.35%. My search network on the same account converted at over 5%. But Google decided to flush my money down the toilet on waste inventory, and there was no button inside of Performance Max to turn it off.

00:28 So, I did the math on where to spend my marketing budget going forward, and I'm going to be focusing more of my time on the following four free traffic channels over Google Ads. And the best part is that they cost nothing to run. Now, I'm still keeping my Google campaigns alive for a reason that I'll tell you in just a little bit, but if you're a seller who feels like your ad spend is disappearing into a black box, this is the video I wish someone had made me 2 years ago.

00:51 Now, let me be clear about something before I go any further. I'm still running Google Performance Max ads in my store. I've not turned it off, but I'm running it for one very specific reason now, and everything else in my ad budget is moving somewhere else. Here's what my own data showed me. Performance Max runs a single budget across seven different Google networks: search, shopping, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, and two networks that are basically remnant inventory.

01:22 One is content, which is the display network. The other one is Discover, which is the Google app feed. Now, on my Bombas account over the last 12 months, my search network converted at 5.1% and returned over three times my ad spend. And that is a healthy campaign. My Discover network on the same budget converted at 0.35%, and that is roughly 1/16 of what search was doing.

01:47 15,800 clicks on Discover in a year, only 56 conversions. Total waste of money. And here's the part that I want every seller watching to understand. There is no way inside of Performance Max to turn to discover off. Google decides where to show your ads for your products and not you. Now, there are a few broad switches you can use to contain the wastage like changing the inventory type setting to limited.

02:12 But, I want to save you a week of frustration and tell you right now that it doesn't work. That setting controls brand safety placements and not which networks to run. I had inventory type set to limited the entire time discover was burning cash in my account. Now, excluding specific pages doesn't help either because Google discover is a feed like TikTok.

02:31 Not a list of websites and you cannot exclude a feed. Then, there's the content network. This is where Google displays your ads on random websites across the internet. On my account, content burned another 2,700 clicks last year at an under 2% conversion rate. Now, sure, you can exclude websites where you don't want Google to display your ads, but it's like playing whack-a-mole.

02:56 More and more spammy sites appear every day and it is impossible to keep track of. And then finally, there's the branded search problem. By default, Performance Max bids on your own brand name. And someone who is already searching for your store gets served your Performance Max ad, clicks it, buys, and then Google takes the credit. When you don't manually exclude your company name, Google will eat between 8 and 15% of your budget on branded terms.

03:19 And in plain English, it is closing sales that were going to close anyway. And then taking credit for them and inflating your reported return on ad spend. Now, the fix is obviously to exclude your brand, but guess where that setting lives. It is buried beneath a bunch of menus. So, in light of all this, why am I still running Google Ads? There's one job Performance Max does right now that nothing else can do.

03:44 If you want your ads to show up in Google's AI overviews and the AI-driven shopping services, Performance Max is currently the only way to do it. Now, today, I run a heavily locked down Performance Max campaign, but the bulk of my marketing efforts this year is moving elsewhere to four channels I'm not paying Google or Meta a cent to use. And the first one is the reason I'm not panicking about the AI shift the way most sellers are.

04:09 So, the first free channel is AI search. And I mean showing up in the answers and not paying for the placement. And here's what I mean. Look what happens when I type "What is the best place to buy wedding handkerchiefs in the ChatGPT?" On every major AI platform right now, if you type that in, we come up number one without paying for anything. There's no bidding war against my competitors.

04:29 The AI is just telling the shopper that we are the answer. And that is the difference between paying for AI placement through Performance Max and actually ranking in AI. Now, ranking in AI is not some new dark art, but it does work differently from ranking on Google. AI models are looking for concrete, verifiable facts they can pull directly into their answers.

04:50 So, we're talking numbers, dates, specific claims they can quote back to the user with confidence. So, what I did on Bumble Bee Linens is put the real facts about my business front and center in plain English on the pages the AI is scraping. We've sold over 1 million handkerchiefs. We served more than 120,000 weddings. We process personalized orders in an average of 3.1 business days.

05:11 We have over 5,000 five-star reviews. Those are raw stats about our company, and the AI treats numbers as evidence. So, when ChatGPT or Perplexity or Google is deciding who to name as the answer to what's the best place to buy wedding handkerchiefs, it is looking for a business that can back up that claim. A store with 1 million handkerchiefs sold and 120,000 weddings behind it looks like the answer because there are numbers attached that a human would trust.

05:40 Most sellers are not doing this. Their product pages are all adjectives and superlatives. If you want to show up in AI answers, put the real numbers about your business on your site in plain language on the pages that AI is scraping, and that is it. And the same site that ranks in AI answers is also going to rank in traditional Google search because Google's doing the exact same thing that the AI is doing.

06:04 Which is where I want to show you what happened when I ran a real experiment on my category pages. Now, before I get to that experiment, there's something you need to know about all that free traffic from AI search. Most of those shoppers will not buy on their first visit, and sending them email is the best way to close the sale. Now, earlier this year, I tripled the profitability of my email flows using AI.

06:26 I connected an SMTP server to my email setup and had it completely rewrite and optimize my automated email flows. Now, if you want to try that yourself, today's sponsor, Omnisend, has an SMTP server built-in and is one of the few email marketing providers specializing in e-commerce that allows you to use AI to automate everything. And it pays for itself since Omnisend customers get $79 back for every $1 they spend, which is one of the highest ROIs in marketing.

06:55 Now, all my buddies, including Ezra Firestone and Chase Diamond, are all moving to Omnisend because it literally costs 35% less for the exact same functionality, and their team handles all the migration for free in just 5 days. The link is in the description, or just scan the QR code and use code mywifequit, which will get you 35% off your first 3 months.

07:17 Now, back to the category page experiment. So, traditional Google search is not dead yet, no matter what the AI headlines are telling you, but it is evolving. Buyers still open Google when they know what they want and are looking for who to buy it from. I'm going to show you exactly what I did on my website bumblebeelinens.com this past year and what the numbers actually look like.

07:36 So, in November of last year, I ran a big content and FAQ schema audit across 26 of my category pages. 9 months later, I pulled up the search console data and compared before and after. 22 of those 26 pages improved their ranking position. That is an 85% hit rate on a very simple content playbook. Now, the one page that made the whole experiment worth doing was my bridal handkerchiefs category page.

08:04 Before the work, that page was sitting at position seven in Google. 9 months later, it was at position four, and the organic traffic to that single page more than quadrupled. Nothing else changed except for the content. All I did was answer the questions brides were actually asking about wedding handkerchiefs on the page with FAQ schema wrapped around it.

08:22 But, every ranked page still depends on Google deciding to keep showing you that page. This next free channel is one you actually own. Now, the most underrated free channel in e-commerce is not a platform. It is the customer list you've already built. Email, SMS, and physical direct mail are the only three channels that Google and Meta cannot take away from you.

08:46 And once your list exists, they act like an ATM machine. So, to be straight-up, these channels aren't technically free. There's a per send cost on email through whatever you use. There's a per send cost on SMS. And direct mail obviously has a hard cost per postcard. But, once the list is built, the marginal cost of reaching a customer you already own is just pennies compared to what you pay on Google to acquire a new one.

09:10 Now, you want to start with email because email is the backbone. Every e-commerce store that scales past seven figures runs on email flows. We're talking abandoned cart campaigns, post-purchase, win-back, browse abandonment. These are all required automated campaigns. And on Bumblebee Linens, 30% of our yearly revenue comes from email flows that we set up once and let it run in the background.

09:30 Meanwhile, SMS is our highest converting channel percentage-wise. Open rates are much higher than email because a text is a text and people always read them. Now, it costs more per send, so you do not use it the way you use email. Instead, you save it for the moments you definitely want someone to see. Like a time-sensitive promo, a back-in-stock alert, or a shipping update that you can turn into an upsell.

09:55 And then there's the channel that most people aren't using at all, which is snail mail. I've been running physical postcards through a service called PostPilot to my existing customer list. And response rates on direct mail sent to previous customers beats almost anything digital right now because snail mail is not saturated. Think about your own mailbox.

10:13 You might get four pieces of mail a day. And when one of them is a well-designed postcard from a brand you've already bought from, you actually take a look. Now, every one of those routes people to your store without a paid platform sitting in between. Google is not deciding whether to rank your email or deciding whether to approve your postcard. You own the audience, you own the send, and you own the conversion, which is the exact opposite what you get when you hand your budget over to Performance Max.

10:42 Now, the last free channel is the one two of my students used to build their seven-figure businesses from scratch. Short-form video on TikTok and Instagram Reels. And the reason it works is that the audience is enormous and the reach is free, especially if the content is engaging. TikTok Shop alone is on pace to do over $23 billion in the US this year, almost up 50% from the last year.

11:03 And on the Instagram side, the average reel is now getting more than double the organic reach of a static post. Which means that every video put up is running for free through an algorithm that is actively trying to hand you a brand new audience. But don't take my word for it. Let me tell you about two of my students. The first is Angela Wright. She runs a jewelry brand called Azura Jewelry over at azurajewelry.com.

11:29 And she has built it into a multiple seven-figure business without spending a dollar on Google Ads. Every customer she has ever acquired has come through short-form video. The second is Yulia, who runs an alternative jewelry brand called Studio Cult out of New York. And she has built an audience of over 500,000 followers on TikTok and another half million on Instagram, and the entire brand was built the same way Angela built hers.

11:55 Consistent short-form video, a clear point of view, and products that shoot well on camera. Now, what both of these students share is very straightforward. They post consistently, they have a clear brand point of view, and they sell products that look great on camera. And that's the entire formula, and neither one of them built their business by outbidding somebody on Google.

12:15 Now, what most sellers get wrong is they treat short-form video like an ad channel, where the goal is to close the sale on the first video. Short-form is an audience channel. The sale happens on the second video, or the third, or even the 20th. You are building an audience that trust you first, and then you sell to them over and over again. So, there are your four free channels.

12:34 Ranking organically in AI answers, ranking organically in Google search, building the audience you actually own through email, SMS, and Post Pilot, and then putting the reps on short-form video the way Angela and Yulia have. Every one of these channels keeps paying you consistently in the long run. Google Ads only pays you back the day you keep writing that check.

12:56 And now that you understand the better free alternatives to Google, make sure you watch this video next on exactly what I would do if I were to start an e-commerce store from complete scratch today.