Honest Marketing

Leo Ebbert: How to Create a Profitable Ads Campaign

November 29, 2022 Honest Podcasts Episode 12
Honest Marketing
Leo Ebbert: How to Create a Profitable Ads Campaign
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

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When it comes to running an ad campaign, there are two things you need: a good idea and a great execution. 

But how do you make sure that your ads are profitable?

We get some insights from Leo Ebbert, founder of Exact Click Digital, on creating highly effective ads. We discuss some of the best strategies for running your next ad campaign, what you need to consider when targeting your audience and how to measure success.

Leo Ebbert is the founder of Exact Click Digital, a company that runs paid ads for e-commerce brands on Google, Facebook, Bing, and Amazon.

If you haven't yet dipped your toe into the world of ads, this episode is a great place to start. Let’s get some advice from an expert and make sure that your ad campaigns are effective and profitable!

Specifically, this episode highlights the following themes:

  • The value of creative testing in business
  • How to track attribution & know which ads bring in converts
  • The best metrics to help you determine ads campaign success

Links from this episode:

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Leo Ebbert  0:00  
Portion of your budget should always be going for testing because you don't know what you don't know. And the only way to figure it out is you run experiments and you see a new creative or a new value proposition and what really gets people's attention, what gets them to engage come to the site, click around because creative can make a huge difference.

Travis Albritton  0:21  
Welcome back to the Honest Marketing Podcast where you learn proven strategies to grow your business without selling your soul. I'm your host, Travis Albritton. And in this interview with Leo Ebbert, we go through everything that you need to know, once you have a basic understanding of ads and paid traffic, in order to make sure that those campaigns are really set up for success. So we talk about how to determine what the best return on adspend or return on investment you should be looking for the breakdown of the different kinds of campaigns and, and how they help you create a well rounded ads campaign. And then also some things to be mindful of and to avoid to make sure you don't make the rookie mistakes that are going to sink your ads campaign before it starts. So if you are looking for, again, just an absolute masterclass, and how to run paid traffic online, you're gonna get a lot out of this interview. Now make sure that you stick around to the very end, where I lay out my number one takeaway from it's just an action packed episode that you'll definitely want to pay attention to, because this is the thing that I think ultimately will determine whether your ads are successful or not. Let's dive in. So Leo, right off the bat, what do you do? And what kinds of companies do you work with?

Leo Ebbert  1:28  
Yeah, we do paid ads management. So primarily Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Bing slash Microsoft, Amazon Ads. And primarily, we work with e-comm brands. And even within that niche of e-comm, a lot of our clients are kind of the higher AOV, higher average order value ecommerce brands. So a thing that say $300 plus of an average order value, doesn't mean we don't work with brands that don't have that. But that is kind of a niche within the niche that we've specialized in. And we do do a lot of work with.

Travis Albritton  2:03  
Sure, because that was going to be one of the first questions that I asked is what is a good average order value to aim for? Because in the world of ads, the more the more you can spend to get a customer, the easier a lot of things become not just with turning a profit, but also longevity of the campaign. Right? If you're right on the border, as you start, it's very hard to scale. And so have you found that to be not just like as a niche within a niche beneficial for you. But in general, like a good price point for if you really want to scale a large ads campaign to be trying to get into that triple digit cart value.

Leo Ebbert  2:43  
Yeah, in some sense, it is relative to your to your niche and your competitors. I mean, if you're all selling $40 or $50 item, you're trying to get up to that $300 plus AOV with that is going to be tough and probably probably unrealistic. And so in that sense, it's it is can be, you know, niche defined more than anything. But having said that, there are greater economies of scale once you are in that higher AOV. So if you're in a niche as that can naturally hit a higher AOV, or if within your niche you can be on the upper end of what's feasible and realistic. You are always going to come out in better shape than someone who can't. And it even even with margins being similar. You just have, you have more to play with because of those economies and what what Google charges and Facebook charges per click or per view, right. So yeah, you always want to be on that upper end of what's realistic, if you can.

Travis Albritton  3:44  
Sure, yeah, the realistic part or the keyword there is like, yeah, I'd love to sell my paperclip for $1,000. But if nobody's gonna buy it, then it doesn't matter how much I put on the website, right?

Leo Ebbert  3:54  
It's a really good paper clip, man. It's like that right now.

Travis Albritton  3:57  
It's like sell me this pin, right?

Leo Ebbert  4:00  
Yeah. Exactly.

Travis Albritton  4:02  
And then, especially, especially with e-commerce, but also with other industries, when you can bake in either like repeat customers or recurring personal purchases, and then you're looking not necessarily at the immediate return on adspend but maybe the lifetime value on average of a customer. How much does that factor in to, you know, decisions about when to scale? What's a good cost per acquisition, like those kinds of things?

Leo Ebbert  4:27  
Oh, it's huge. And that is something that most e-commerce brands, they really don't have a good sense of it. So I come from an accounting background. I used to be a CPA, I worked at Deloitte for a few years before transitioning into this a number numbers. I'm just kind of that's how my brain is wired to run numbers. So I always soon as I'm analyzing a brand or a client, that's one of my first questions is where are we on LTV, because that will change everything. And a lot of times a brand will come to me and they might say, hey, we need to hit this row as I say, Okay, why do we need to hit that row as well? We just figured it out, we want to hit 5x. Okay, let's figure out, do you need 5x? First of all, it could be 5x is too high or too low. And if it's either one of those, you're going to lose it. The ad game, or at least not go as far as you could. And there have been a lot of scenarios where I talk to a brand, we do the analysis. And because of my background, I can help them figure that out, right? analyzing the data, the historical numbers they have. And we might find out, hey, they thought they needed five. But really, in order to maximize their profit, they're better off at three and a half. Or the opposite. They might they might have been thinking they're making money at five, but because their repeat customers are just not there, like they thought they were there. They really need to be hitting six or seven, right in order to be to be viable, long term. So you know, if, if you have two brands, and one of them knows your LTV, and the other does not the one that knows it is going to beat you, you know, if you're if you're the one that doesn't know it, right?

Travis Albritton  6:01  
Yeah. Just real quick for anyone who's not like a digital ads manager, ROAS is an acronym for return on adspend. So like, ROI would be return on investment, that's a more generic term. Return On Adspend is much more specific to like a campaign, like we wrote Mark Zuckerberg a $100 check. How much do we make? Do we make $40 or $500? And that's where you get that multiple. Now, what you said, I know to be true from my own experience, but it's very counterintuitive to think, well, higher row ads is better, right? If I can trade somebody $1 and get seven, that's better than trading someone $1 for three, like why would I choose three? So so how does that work where the ROAS isn't necessarily the target isn't necessarily go as high as possible? But optimizing for profit, like break down how that actually works.

Leo Ebbert  6:52  
Yeah, so this would kind of be it. It's the question of scale. Or you might think of it as in terms of velocity of money, right? So that equation, you're just talking about making a trade one to seven. But you're only going to do that, you know, three times a week. But if I'm willing to trade you one for four, you know, you might be what the market might be willing to do that 20 times a week or 30 times a week, you know, it's it's a you end up with these these outsized, outsize volume compared to the the ROAS, right. And it's kind of like, you know, the extent to which you kind of squeeze row as you're trying to get every drop out of ROAS, you're really choking the scale. You know, you know, Star Wars when Princess Leia is like, the tighter you squeeze, the more star systems will slip through your your grasp, right?

Travis Albritton  7:42  
Yeah.

Leo Ebbert  7:42  
And Vader's like, wow, I'm gonna squeeze anyway, right. And we saw how that worked out. Right, he couldn't get the scale he really needed and it all fell apart. So yes, you know, you squeeze row as too hard, you're just you're hurting your skill, you can only push so hard, and you end up not being able to increase budgets, or you do increase budgets and the return declines because you're so set on getting, you know, whatever high row as you think you need, and it's really hurting your profit. So ROAS is not everything, you know, it's kind of a, it is a key metric, but only if you know what your ROAS was actually should be. Right. So if you have the right target, and you're hitting it, yeah, you want to hit the gas and hit that target as many times as you can. But really knowing that what the right target is, is the key.

Travis Albritton  8:30  
And keeping like a holistic mind about it, because it is very easy to just like look at a spreadsheet be like, this is green, or this is red, this one indicator, but especially like with the brands that you work with e-commerce brands, they're not selling digital products, a lot of times it's physical products. So it's not just what's the maximum velocity or quantity we can sell with this ad campaign. But is it is our warehouse capable of fulfilling all these orders, do we then have to go hire more people in order to fulfill all this additional traffic that we have. And so that changes your LTV equation that changes your overhead, it changes all the administrative costs associated with the company as well. And so if there's any kind of additional cost of fulfilling the product other than just like, here's the download or here's access to the course, then those are also things to factor in as far as how much velocity and acceleration is healthy for your company to be able to sustain it. So you don't like blow up a great ads campaign, which is what they're paying you to do. And then they have you know, 1000s of angry customers leaving in one star reviews on Google and the whole thing falls apart because you didn't take into account what can we actually deliver on all these new sales.

Leo Ebbert  9:37  
Right.

Travis Albritton  9:38  
And I imagine that's a converse or an ongoing conversation between you and the client to make sure you can continue to do a great job for them but then also they're set up for long term success as well.

Leo Ebbert  9:47  
Yeah. Oh yeah. None of this works if there's not a good product on the other end of it, you know, good customer service it'll all fall apart. You know, I can be the greatest ads marketer in history of the world, and if there's not a good product, I mean, it's just not going to work. Right? I mean, that's, that's just you got to have those things in place, you have good branding, a good product, you have a good, you know, support, then, then yeah, you can find, you just need to find the right ads techniques to make it work. Right?

Travis Albritton  10:17  
And I want to pivot to Ads techniques, ironically enough, because even though it's like you get these established best practices, and it's like, okay, here are the major players. And here are the basics. The landscape is always changing, not just at the technical level of how you put together a campaign, but also what people respond to. Right? And so like 2020, it was the year that everyone and their brother started an online business and could run a profitable ads campaign, because everyone's sitting at home looking for things to spend their stimulus check on everything about the United States, right?

Leo Ebbert  10:50  
Yeah.

Travis Albritton  10:51  
So now we're two years removed from that things are back to relatively normal, spending habits have not gone back to 2019, they've shifted. And so now not only is it the platform's themselves that have changed, but also spending patterns, what marketing people response to those kinds of things. So how have you seen that change kind of coming out of the pandemic coming out of 2020, in the the really the gold rush of that was for digital marketing? And so now, kind of like seeing everything settled down and establishing a new normal? What are some things that you're seeing there?

Leo Ebbert  11:24  
Yeah, you know definitely consumer behavior is shifting. And you're seeing brands respond to that. Well, for one thing you have you also had the iOS thing with Facebook, right? I mean, that was a huge shift in the landscape. And it's really more about attribution, that affects, that effect has such a, you know, it says loop this feedback loop with Facebook Ads, because if there's a question about attribution, suddenly brands are saying, is this working the way I thought it was? You know, or is it working as well as it was? We can't really tell. Right? So one major shift is a lot of ad dollars. And you've seen this in stock prices being reflected with Facebook, a lot of ad dollars have been shifting over from Facebook over to Google. I think, to a lesser extent, you know, something like TikTok, maybe it is not instant, but what's the other one?

Travis Albritton  12:17  
There's like LinkedIn, there's Pinterest, there's, you know, some of those other peripheral.

Leo Ebbert  12:21  
Snapchat. That's what I was trying to think of. Yeah. So have you seen ad dollars shift? I'm not sure. I mean, I think you've seen eyeballs shift. But I don't think I think it's kind of an outsized, you know, the shift in ad dollars, I think is more than the shift in eyeballs, to be honest. But it's just a question of, you know, are we seeing, you know, what are the true results in Facebook? It can be a little bit nebulous now. So that's definitely one change. I think consumers to your point, yeah, consumers are thinking twice, or three times about every spin now, instead of before, like when that money was flowing. Everybody had a little bit of extra share. I'd like one of those. Why not? So I don't know. Yeah. And we're coming into Q4, and everybody's kind of like hoping well, what's it going to be or wondering what's going to be like, right? Is it going to be as heavy as years passed? I don't think it's going to be just a total disaster by any means. But I'm sure you will see, you know, a little bit maybe it won't grow as much as as in years past, for example, right? Maybe, maybe doesn't contract, but maybe just the growth rate is slower.

Travis Albritton  13:26  
Yeah, well, I mean, holiday season is typically where a lot of brands will kind of save their year, right? You can kind of bank on it. Some brands is somewhere like 60 to 70% of their sales come in Q4. So that will be interesting to see with, you know, the way that the economy is right now, and just how people feel about it. That projects a lot of the buying behaviors. And you hit on iOS. And I remember that being like a huge shift. Because again, attribution when we talk about attribution, it's really just about confidence. Right? How confident are you that the numbers you're seeing reflects reality? And so if you know, Facebook sends says that we sent 500 link clicks to your website, and then you look at your website traffic, and it shows 300, then that gives you a reason to doubt that Facebook's giving you good information. Right? And so do you have, like how do you track attribution? Do you track it outside of Facebook now? Are you using it with third party data? Or how are you putting those numbers together those reports together?

Leo Ebbert  14:30  
Yeah, so we still do look at the pixel data, because there's you do have the conversions API, and that can that can fill some holes, some gaps. And I think you could also look at it and say, well, there are holes in the data, but it's kind of like it's a modeling software, essentially. Right? And so you're basically it's kind of like using percentages and saying, Here's what we have visibility on and what we can track. So let's kind of just up like, a kind of hourly project head across the greater traffic and data that's coming in. And I don't think that's a terrible approach. Honestly, I think it's, it's fairly accurate because you know, it's kind of like things averaged out. Right? But you don't want to just rely on it because it is a black box. We don't know exactly how Facebook does it. So another thing we do is we always track with UTM codes, we have UTM, UTM tags, I should say the fire with every click out of Facebook. And that's something we compare, we compare and contrast. Okay, well, Facebook saying this, let's see what the UTM is showing Google Analytics. Now you can only get that data for click conversions. That doesn't help you with impression conversions. But it will kind of give you a sense for, okay, if we're if we're if Facebook is saying we're driving this and last month, we drove this many UTM conversions. And Facebook now says our conversions are up, you know, 50%? Did we see that same bump in the UTM? Right? So you kind of get a sense for how accurate it is or not. But I still think there's value in and using that ROAS number is, especially when you're comparing prior months to you can say okay, it's similar. It's kind of a, you know, they're using the same system. And they're not just jazzing the numbers every month or something, right? It's like, like, you can kind of compare and use that as the metric for what it was three months ago and it's still the metric today. So let's see what it looks like.

Travis Albritton  16:17  
Are you seeing any shifts? So I know you mentioned a shift away from Facebook towards ad platforms that have a little bit better attribution. And kind of the specter on the horizon is, you know, Google and third-party cookies. Are you seeing any trends regarding that? Because Google's kind of the other big, you know, 1000 pound gorilla in the room when it comes to ads. Especially because it's less of an interruption based ad platform, and it's more of an intent. Right? So if somebody says, you know, what's the best new credit card, then, you know, they're basically like, looking to sign up for something. And so you have, you feel better about putting your money there, because they're in a buying position. But how has that conversation been affected, or really not, by, you know, third-party cookies kind of going away in the near future?

Leo Ebbert  17:03  
Yeah, I don't think I think it's one of those things, like until you see it happen and see what the, what the result is, I don't think people are reacting yet to it. And really, I'm still puzzled over this move by Google. I don't know. Like, like, it took me a little while to figure out why Apple did the iOS change. And I didn't come to the idea myself, I saw someone saying, yeah, they're, well, they're moving into ad space. And so I was like, Okay, I thought maybe just Tim Cook really hated marks. Zuckerberg, maybe like, or something they just really don't like, so he's like, I'm just gonna stick it to Facebook. But no, it's because it's because Apple wants they're shifting in the ad space. And they want to bring, you know, apps into their, into their, into their app store natively, so that they can advertise in charge to get that ad money out of Facebook's hands. Right? Is this is kind of a huge first shot to shifting the ad landscape. But Google's kind of doing this voluntarily. And I'm like, I'm not sure that I know. They have an endgame. Google does not just give away money, right. So they've got they've got to some kind of game they're playing. I just haven't figured it out yet. But I think we'll see. Yeah, it could be that we'll see another kind of shift when this happens, but I also know Google has kind of kicked that can a few times down the road. So I wonder if they're if it's maybe a little bit like, hey, the posturing you know, like little bit of virtue signaling, hey, we care about privacy, we're going to do this thing someday. Yeah, but it's kind of keep pushing it.

Travis Albritton  18:31  
That's what it seems like it because outside of maybe GDPR compliance, or something in the realm of like, in general, the internet is shifting towards more privacy, just as kind of like a cultural wave. And wanting to be on the right side of that. I mean, Apple, it definitely makes sense to get into the ad space, it's like you own all the devices. And now services make up a significant amount of your revenue, those services which are provided for free, great opportunities to allow people to pay for exposure. So it definitely makes sense for Apple. And if I was to put money on any of the companies being navel gazing, and not thinking about how it affects other companies, it would be Apple, because they live in their own universe, right? It's like, it begins and ends with them. It's like Microsoft's doing what we don't even know we're just focused on, you know, iPhone, you know, 24 and a half, whatever that is going to be down the road. So I would love to, to walk through some basic metrics, if you know somebody who's listening to this episode, and they're an entrepreneur or business owner, or, you know, the head of marketing, but not necessarily the person pushing the buttons on the ads campaign, just to get an idea of like, like a ballpark of what to expect, like if you have a really healthy ads campaign, and things are going well and you want to keep putting money into the pile. You know, like what's a ballpark row as we kind of touched on it, but like, what is the range that you encourage or want to see? And then how does that number shift as you scale and increase your budget because I know that you can have a really great number when you're spending $50 a day, but then if you want to go up to $50,000 a day, then that number shifts quite dramatically. So kind of like walk through some of those benchmarks, just so someone can have an idea of what to expect, and what to be aiming for.

Leo Ebbert  20:13  
Yeah, yeah. So it'll, it'll depend a little bit on how you're approaching it from what I mean, it's like, you need to know kind of what we talked about before, what's your LTV, what should you row as be you kind of figure out that number? If I, you know, if I had to pick the most common number people land on, it's usually 3 to 5X as an account life ROAS, as they say, hey, if our account sitting 4X, if it gets to five, great, if it's lower than three, we got a problem. But if it's sliding in and around 4, you know, we'll, we'll hit the gas pedal all day. But it also depends on the campaign type. So this is one thing where, you know, you have to kind of educate clients, as you say, hey, look, you know, we're always gonna get a higher. ROAS it's higher than your target low in the funnel, you know, you're talking about abandoned carts, you're talking about, you know, people who have shown high levels of engagement, or people who have bought from you three times before, you know, those people were, we're almost always going to convert them at a much higher rate than cold traffic, I mean, and in fact, if you're not seeing that in your ad account, it's actually a big red flag, because it means you've got audiences that are mixed up, you've got cold traffic mixed with warm traffic, and Facebook's favoring the warm traffic, because that's the traffic that converts, and it's making your cold traffic look better than it is. Right? So you want to pick a kind of a holistic Ad Account ROAS based on your LTV, and you say, okay, if I need to hit four, now, you got to start pulling the levers, right, you say, okay, if I want to have four overall, first you figure out your, your lower funnel budget and say, I'm going to spend this much on lower funnel and maybe lower funnel drives at 8x return right or higher, or something like that, you figure out, okay, if I'm hitting 8x, then that means I can give up this much on the top of the funnel, and maybe the top of the funnel, you can get by with one and a half x, because it's top of funnel. Right? It is cold traffic. And, you know, you might know that, hey, for every person that us that buys something from me today, I'm gonna get them to buy four times in the future. Because I've studied my, my historical data, I know my lifetime value, I know my customer lifecycle, and all those things. And if you have that information as power, you can really lean into that top of funnel traffic, right. So it's a yeah, those would be things to look for, and things to expect is for one. And also don't panic, if you see a low row as at the top of the funnel, that's normal. And so you can obviously optimize it and get higher. But your, traffic is always should always be lower than your average ROAS because you make it up in the funnel, and you make it up with your lifetime value.

Travis Albritton  22:53  
How much of, so it seems like there's kind of like weighted averages, like a certain percentage of the budget goes to targeting people at different places in the buying journey? And we talked about stages of ROAS earlier on the podcast. But you know, cold and warm traffic is a way of describing how much someone knows about you and your product and their inclination towards making a purchase. Right? So they can know who you are. But if they don't need a belt, it doesn't matter that you sell belts, right, versus someone who's actively trying to buy a new belt, and they know about you and you're in the consideration the last three, that would be like pretty warm traffic. So, so it seems like you put together like a weighted average of overall, we went 4x but here 8x is like what we want to see up here, one and a half is good. And then when you average it all out across the campaign, 4 is the target. I imagine that also gives you a lot of flexibility, because you can test things at different places and make up for it. If it it doesn't go the way that you expect it to with those other targeted audiences, right? So you want to try some new creative for cold audiences? If it goes from 1.5 to 1.25, that's okay. Because you have, you're not going to go out of business. If you keep spending money there to learn and adapt and experiment. Is that true?

Leo Ebbert  24:10  
Oh, definitely. And there should always be a portion of your budget, should always be going for testing because you don't know what you don't know. Right? It's like, the only way to figure it out is you run experiments and you see like what you just mentioned a new creative or a new value proposition or some other way of presenting to cold traffic and seeing what really gets people's attention what gets them to engage, come to the site, click around and make this creative can make obviously it's a huge it can be a huge difference, right? And that's something where, you know, it is one benefit of like, like someone like me, I see a lot of ad accounts. I see a lot of creative, I see the results. It's one thing to see it out in the wild, but it's another thing to see it in the back end and see what it drove, you know. So one thing that we do is we're experimenting with all of our client accounts to greater or lesser degrees depending on their needs and their budgets. But we'll take those learnings and we apply it to their clients, hey, this worked for client a and pretty sure it'll work for client B over there, right? And we started we moved those those, you know, tactics around. So it's going to be, you'd want to experiment with creative, you'd want to experiment with, with targeting, you'd want to experiment with campaign structure. And it's, it, you know, I've been amazed, I still am amazed from time to time, when we'll see an account and it's chugging along, it's doing okay, we're like, hey, what if we tried this, we just just revamped this whole thing, take a piece of the pie, you know, 10% or 15% of budget and just see how it does. And it can take, you know, take an ad account just to a completely different level. Right? And that's always very satisfying for someone like me and my seat, and like, hey, we found something really cool. Right? And clients even happier than they were before.

Travis Albritton  25:56  
Yeah, absolutely. And how much uh, so I imagine the amount of impact the creative has depends on the platform. So platform like Instagram, or Facebook, where it's very creative. It's like, you got an image or a video, you got text, you got headline, you got call to action button, like all these different levers to pull. Google, you got headline, sub headline, That's it. Like, that's, that's really all you got. So what kinds of creative are have been working? It seems like more platforms are favoring video for organic. Are you seeing that same trend with paid traffic as well, that videos pretending to perform better than just plain text or images?

Leo Ebbert  26:37  
Certainly, almost always. I mean, it's, you would, I wouldn't, I wouldn't ever run an account without images, because they have their place. But particularly with top of funnel, it's going to be the the reels in the stories, ads that are are the best at pulling people in. You know, think about TikTok. It's, it's successful for a reason. And it's because of video, right? And it's because of the format it works on your phone when you're scrolling, you know, fills up that it's that aspect ratio. And it's so you can pull people in within with a video a lot easier than you can with words and, and a still image, static image. So yeah, especially if it's kind of the more or usually the more organic, the better. Meaning you can make a super polished commercial style video, and put that up against something that looks like someone just whipped out their phone and recorded, you know, a video 32nd testimonial or user generated content unboxing video. And those will almost always win. I mean, it's it's because it comes across it is it's more organic, it comes across as more organic. And people tend to trust him more, because they relate to it. They see themselves in that video. Right? So yeah, that's the kind of content that you know, and you got to play with the angles, you got to play with the messaging a little bit. But that's generally what you're what you need to find success.

Travis Albritton  28:04  
It's so ironic, right? Like, as businesses, we think, okay, we need to like really establish the quality of our brand, across the entire board, including our ads videos, they need to be done by our video production team, take like four months to produce, and it's going to be the most beautiful video you've ever seen. And it doesn't perform well as like, you know, your middle school kid who just like was talking about the thing that they bought. It's, it's bizarre, but should also feel freeing once you kind of remove the stigma attached from like having less creative control. As far as like associating the quality of the video with the brand itself. It's like, no, you're creating videos for the internet. Like you're not creating a TV commercial. And so you need to make something that makes sense for the internet. And then that will then get you the results you're looking for.

Leo Ebbert  28:56  
Absolutely.

Travis Albritton  28:58  
So then, as you think about ad spend in the different buckets, how much of the, you know, thinking about your clients and the e-commerce brands you work with? How much of it is devoted to actually driving traffic to the website or particular product pages, and how much of it is building and cultivating audiences on the platform? So like with Facebook, you can do a video through play views campaign to say we just want to figure out who's interested in these topics by promoting this video and see who watches 50% of it. How much of it is building your own custom audiences on these platforms and how much of it is using that audience to then direct them to a product page?

Leo Ebbert  29:41  
Yeah, so yeah, I'd say it depends but it does depend you know, if it's if you're in the early stages, and you don't really have a lot of existing traffic that you can leverage and try to your font you're trying to build the funnel you're gonna be pretty much all cold traffic and but even then, you know, second year running cold traffic you need  an ads funnel, backing that up, because that's where you're going to get most of your conversions. And most people are not going to convert on that first click, they're going to need to see you four or five more times. And really and think about it before they come back. Right? Once you're established, you know, it's, it's because the row as is so high, usually on that established traffic, you max it out pretty quick meaning, you could say, hey, I'm getting 8x on my retargeting, let's quadruple a budget. Well, you can't, you know, there's only so many people in that pool. And you're just, if you just want to increase your frequency to 100 times a week, that's fine, but you're wasting your money, right? Because you're not going to really squeeze out much more profit. So it ends up being that, you know, when people are trying to scale, it almost always goes to the top of the funnel. Now there's kind of a middle ground. So short answer your question, I guess is like, you might think of it like 75% of your budget is going towards top of funnel, then you have the other 25% that can kind of efficiently handle the retargeting, right? There's kind of that middle, there's this middle section that some people call middle of funnel, and I think there's yeah, I like that too. But there's like this other. It's kind of like middle of funnel subset that I call re-engagement. And that's where, you know, you're taking people that are, they know who you are, but they're not actively in the funnel right now. You know, they aren't, they didn't abandon a car recently, they haven't been to the website. But there may be on your list, and possibly they don't open your emails anymore. And look, email, email isn't what it once was. We all know that in marketing, right? It used to be like, that was how you you got a lot of sales for very low cost. But people don't a lot of those emails end up in the promotions tab. They don't ever see them, they go straight to spam, or they're just kind of blind to them. And they just get swiped on their phone, they get archived, right? So there's a really powerful segment and a lot of people's funnel that they do not leverage called that I call re-engagement, and is people who are in your list and know who you are, they've probably bought from you in the past, we'd like to buy from you again, they just don't think about you anymore. No offense, they just don't think about you. Right? So you need to need to find a way to get in front of them. If they're not in your retargeting funnel, they're not going to show up in a retargeting audience. Right? So you go find people that haven't open an email in three months, you pull them into an audience, and let's give them an offer. Right? Especially in Q4, right now, this is a prime time to be trying to reengage people. So if yeah, if you have like this 75-25% budget, top of funnel 75, you know, middle bottom funnel 25, I'd carve out 10 15% for re-engagement and try to get people that have known you in the past and just to forgotten, and get them back into your funnel.

Travis Albritton  32:47  
Yeah, the more low hanging fruit you can take advantage of, the healthier your ads campaign will be overall, right? Because it's like, hey, this is right here, we just had a, we just have to know to set this up. And to have a strategy behind the content and the offers you're making, to then take advantage of that. So then give you more flexibility on the cold traffic to be able to stomach a lower row ads or to try things or, you know, throw money at experiments that may or may not work, because you know, you have these other things that are supplementing it and complementing.

Leo Ebbert  33:16  
Right.

Travis Albritton  33:19  
So, so we talked about audiences, we talked about, you know, how you divvy up the ad spend to kind of paint a holistic vision for a paid ads campaign? How do you choose which platforms make the most sense for brands? So e-commerce, I imagine there's a lot of social media. And, you know, kind of like intent based search. How do you decide like, of all the options, the suite of options that you have, which ones make the most sense for which brands? Do you look at demographics, or you'll get psychographics? Like, how do you make that determination?

Leo Ebbert  33:51  
Well, I, in the past, like two years ago, I would have almost always kind of defaulted towards Facebook, I wouldn't have always said it has to be Facebook, but that would have been kind of the natural default. And now it's natural default is Google. But what can, what sways that one way or the other would be is, is there existing demand for your product that you can tap into? If there is, then you go to Google, if you have to choose between, you go to Google first. At least experiment and try it first. Because you have you mentioned this earlier in the in the show, you've got intent, okay. And that's huge. It's all the difference when you're talking about you know, Facebook, no one went to Facebook looking for your product. They're there to scroll and, and argue and whatever, you know, click the like button.

Travis Albritton  34:39  
Or to fill time while they're in the public restroom. Yeah.

Leo Ebbert  34:42  
Totally. Yeah, well, yeah, exactly. So, so there, you've got to pull them away from an attempt that they had a different intent. You got to pull them away from it, right. Whereas Facebook, I'm sorry, Google, they are looking for you. You have to tap into it. You have to get in front of them. Okay. So if the intent is there, then get in front of that first levers at first. But not everybody has that luxury. Some people are selling a product that's newish or the ideas just, it hasn't caught on yet. There's not a big competitor out there, they can try to kind of kind of leverage demand for and pull people into their own products. If you don't have that, you don't have a choice, you've got to go the social route. Right? You need to have good creatives, you have strong branding. And you got to have a way to add a good product, of course, to get people's attention. Right?

Travis Albritton  35:30  
So, so this, this next line of questioning is very selfish, because I'm much more familiar with Facebook as an ads platform than Google. So three things, Google Search has always kind of been the main thing people think about with Google. But with product-based companies like e-commerce, Google Shopping, would be another option. As far as like having things pop up when someone goes through a shopping tab after a search, and then YouTube Ads, video ads would also be in that Google ecosystem. So how do you think about maybe underpriced or overpriced traffic from within that ecosystem, and even options that I don't even know about, that are out there that companies can be taking advantage of? So it's not just we're gonna pay top dollar for the first listing in a Google search. But here's some other placements we can take advantage of, today, you get similar traffic for for a better result, as far as like a profit or return on adspend.

Leo Ebbert  36:25  
Yeah, so for for Google, usually, the lowest hanging fruit is gonna be shopping. It's still it's still, you know, it's getting more expensive, but it's still cheap enough that if it's set up correctly, and it's done correctly, it's probably going to work for you. It's gotten, yes, it's getting more and more commoditized and shopping is. So it's, I think it's, you know, it's almost like Amazon, you know, it's like, there's everybody's, everybody has multiple options to choose from. And the consumers are multiple sellers of similar items, right? So it becomes commoditized a little bit.

Travis Albritton  37:02  
Commoditize, meaning they just look at, here's the six options, which one's the cheapest? Click on that one.

Leo Ebbert  37:07  
Basically, yeah, it's a race to the bottom, who's gonna give me the free shipping plus the lowest price. Right?

Travis Albritton  37:12  
Gotcha. Yeah.

Leo Ebbert  37:13  
So who's willing to to make the least amount to sell me this thing? And so yeah, so then you've got YouTube Ads, that was actually what, and their latest earnings report, Google kind of got tagged over that, because YouTube is had taken a hit. So I would say, if you have good creative, you've got a good video, it's, it's either funny, or it's informative, or it's in some way grabs people's attention, you could get that some traffic for cheap, because other advertisers are fleeing, right, and that means the costs go down. So that's an opportunity, but you got to have good creative, right, that's, that's the rub. Search is, you know, that was also a little bit commoditized. Because it's the most well known right up there, you know, everybody has been doing brands have been doing search forever and ever. So it's like, you know, we're all there, we're all you either have to find a way to stand out with text, which is hard, because people don't like to read text, right? They're gonna like, they're gonna choose between options, usually one in two, or two and three within a few seconds. So you gotta have ads that tie in very tightly to what they are searching, or else they're going to skip you. Right. So I'd say probably display retargeting is going to be a good option for people if they're not leveraging it. And in terms of lowest hanging fruit, I'd say it's usually its shopping, then it's going to be searched. And it's going to be display retargeting. Those are usually the first three campaigns we set up along with branded, branded, by the way should be totally separate between any of those other efforts, it needs to be like in its own firewall, no mixing of branded and non branded, that's how it should be set up, okay? And once you get once you get through those, then it's like, okay, well, then let's start kind of climbing the money tree, so to speak, and we're gonna have to reach harder, and that's going to be YouTube Ads. And that's going to be called display ads. It's tough. That is really tough to make work. So I would not try that until I had leveraged everything else as hard as I could. Right? So that's kind of the tearing, I would say in terms of campaigns within Google.

Travis Albritton  39:20  
Okay, two follow ups. First one, break down, branded versus non-branded, like what are the differences? And then second, when you talk about display, I mean, talking about like programmatic, Google has reserved space on websites to basically like, put in ads when somebody goes to somebody else's website, and Google happens to know that you're there and that you also search for those other things. So we're going to show you an image, but kind of break down those two things a little bit more, just for someone who maybe hasn't run a campaign before. This is new. Like how would you explain this to a five-year-old essentially? Yeah, I'm gonna play the muse of the five year old.

Leo Ebbert  39:57  
Okay. Sure. So branded is, you know, your your brand is what you know, Exact Click something, right? It's the name of your company. If people are searching for you, it's, it's really just, it's a few reasons. One, it's either they need help, and they're a customer and they need help, or they're a prospect, and they just either don't know your domain, or they're don't want to do research on you, and they've heard about you, or they saw you somewhere else, and they're looking you up, that's branded traffic, it tends to convert, obviously, way higher than non branded traffic, because people already know who you are, to some extent, and they're looking for you. Now, there's always a debate, Well, should I advertise those people because, you know, I'm gonna get that traffic anyway. First of all, not necessarily, I would go and check and see if people are parked on your brand and searches, if you've got competitors parked there. And almost always Amazon is going to show up, right, and depending on if you if you don't care if Amazon pulls them in, that's fine, let Amazon pull them in. But usually, it's worth it to have at least some presence in that branded space to kind of defend it. And that's where you would say, okay, on the keyword level, you have a firewall between that traffic and anything that's not branded. So any search that doesn't contain your business name, or a product name, that just you sell, that's considered non branded, right? So you wouldn't want to mix those results at all. Because branded traffic, like I said, converts a lot at a lot higher rate. And so it will pop up and make your non branded traffic look way better than it is. And that means you're, you know, all the optimizations are kind of pointless at that point, because you're really optimizing on bad data. So does that does that work for you and apart?

Travis Albritton  41:39  
Yeah. So you're, you're basically segmenting the intent or the search that's coming in to make sure that you can have the right strategy for approaching each other. I'm glad that you talked about defense, because that's really what it is. It's, you know, somebody typed in your company's name, because they remember you sell a widget, and then your competitors like, hey, before you buy this thing, did you know that we sell it to over here for $5 or Less? Why don't you, why don't you come over here? Like that's essentially what you're trying to get in front of. And say, no, we really do have the widget you want. Here's the link, boom, there you go. So you're playing defense from other people poaching your sales. It is essentially what you're talking about, right?

Leo Ebbert  42:16  
Yeah, and especially with Amazon, because if you're almost always you're gonna have 10 competitors selling the same thing, or something similar enough on Amazon, and a lot of it's going to be cheaper. So if Amazon's parked on your branded term. Yeah, I mean, people are programmed, oh, Amazon, Etsy, Prime Shipping. And remember, I'll just click in and I'm done, right? And that's like, give my credit card to another company and all that. So if Amazon's parked there, I would definitely be trying to defend that space. But yeah, and then the other question was about display right between retargeting. Yeah, so retargeting is just going to be people who have been to the site. And so you're going to try to, you know, people went to the site, and they didn't do exactly what you want them to do. We want them to spend money on our site, if they don't do that, we need to retarget to them, try to, try to get them to think about coming back. Now, that is different from just general display advertising, because you can say, hey Google, go find me people on these display websites with display ads and bring them to my website. But that traffic is usually very low quality, and particularly the app traffic. And Google has made it very, very hard to not get app traffic. And most of the app traffic is just garbage traffic. And it's going to be if you go through the list of apps, it's going to be a lot of them are like ket children's games. So it's, you know, mom handed Jr the phone and juniors here just clicking on stuff and accidentally clicked your ad 10 times, sorry. But you still owe us

Travis Albritton  43:50  
All those clicks. That's right.

Leo Ebbert  43:53  
Right. Or someone will be like, you know, it'll be some random app that's in, you know, a totally different language, probably from traffic that's in another country, right? It's like not at all who you're looking for. So you got to be really, really careful if you want to, like I said, I would not even think about doing cold display traffic unless I had really exhausted every other ads channel out there.

Travis Albritton  44:19  
Right. So it's like, do you really want to advertise to the person that said, I'll watch an ad for five gems in Candy Crush. And as soon as I can click the X in the top right corner, I will get back to my game. Is that really the impression that you want to pay for? Probably not. But that's like breaking it down. That's what it means when you're advertising an absolute display. So yeah, so hopefully that brings it home and makes it really practical.

Leo Ebbert  44:48  
And people get it now. 

Travis Albritton  44:52  
Yeah. And then the last, I guess, question that I have, as far as like constructing a well thought through paid ads campaign is how much, how much do you experiment with A and B test? The landing page or the product page of the website for the company versus the creative of the ads? And where do you kind of hold one study while testing the other and vice versa? Because you can drive a lot of really great traffic to a landing page. But if it doesn't deliver on what the ad creative said it did, or if it's not really clear how to take the next step, then it's gonna be hard to capture on that. So, so how do you maintain that balance? And how much do you actually experiment with the product pages and things like that?

Leo Ebbert  45:33  
Yeah, so that's where you have a little bit of crossover in what I do, which is ads optimization made me and my team, right. But they're connected, obviously, because you can't just completely separate the two, the website really matters. On the other hand, you know, UX is kind of a whole other animal, right? So we definitely will like if the clients say, hey, look, you know, we're seeing on this page metrics don't look as good as they do on other pages, right. So let's try to figure out what the reason is, let's experiment with the page. Yeah, of course, we can run A/B tests with ad traffic. But you can also run A/B tests with all the traffic. And that's actually better, usually, because you'd see a bigger sample sample size, you'll get to a conclusion faster than then you would just from the ads. So it's it's usually best to kind of say, okay, we're gonna yeah, we were gonna get some kind of A/B software here and just let it run for all of the traffic, figure out which which version of the page does better. And then you apply that you know, and that'll flow over to that we find a winner. And then that's our new, that's our landing page for the ads, right? So I don't usually recommend clients who say, hey, look, let's take all of your ad traffic and A/B test it for a specific landing page, do it on the site itself with all traffic? And then, but you can so but you can sometimes if it's like, it's not so much about UX, it's more about the offer, then it does make more sense to say, okay, we want to we're not sure which offers better here. You know, if we're trying to come up with a bundle, for example, we might say, well, we want to get our AOV up. So let's, let's try a bundle with these three product products or whatever and see if that converts well. Well, the best way to figure that out is with that case, because then you can like basically turn on the spigot and force traffic to where you want it because you maybe don't want everybody to see this offer. Right? You may not want your organic traffic to see it. You just want kind of this, this, this specific segment to see it. And let's see how it does maybe an email blast or write something like that is meant more sense, it makes more sense for an A/B test on a landing page, than if it's like a UX question where like, we're not sure that users are really making, you know, understanding this page, then that's less about ads, it's more about like, you just need to test your page on front of everybody. Right?

Travis Albritton  47:55  
So as someone is listening to this episode, they're thinking, okay, this is a lot of information, a lot of things to consider. I mean, so one, that's the benefit of using an agency like yours is you can tap into the wisdom of companies and experts that don't just know about your product, but they have experience in all kinds of industries and niches, and know the ins and outs of what's happening. But if somebody did want to get started on their own, because they're like, maybe their budgets too small to really invest in an agency like yours. What are some beginning mistakes, or rookie mistakes that you see often with people that are just getting started with paid traffic?

Leo Ebbert  48:31  
Yeah, beginning mistakes, I would say, probably the biggest one would be like, if it's Google, for example, they don't properly segment campaigns. So what we talked about a minute ago, between branded and non-branded, that's, that's a very common rookie mistake. You know, they just, they just say, oh, Google walks me through it, they'll tell me how to set this thing up, right? They've got the this. And you gotta remember, are these these these is like, called, I think a smart ad account is what they call it. And it's really just an extremely limited version of Google ads. And it's basically trying to make it so people can can can't commit as many mistakes, right? But it's just, it's not a good way to run ads. It's usually they're tailoring to the lowest common denominator to people that really just don't know anything about ads. And that's fine. But the downside is, you're trying to compete with someone like me who's running campaign campaigns for your competitors. Good luck, it's just not going to work, right. So you need to have at least some kind of basic understanding of how to set up a real true campaign not in a smart mode. And I would say, you know, segmenting between branded and non branded is a really good start, you know, figure out where your branded traffic is gonna be get that campaign going, and then figure out kind of your most basic non branded campaigns based on the products you're selling, and then set up a just a small limited limited campaign so you can get some sales going. And then look at the data and you start optimizing, right? Google, or Google does show you, hey, which keywords drove the traffic? Which ones are converted? Which ones did not? Okay, so that's your first thing, you lean into ones that work and you move away from the ones that don't, right? Then you can look at demographic data, you can look at it, is it our men buying more than women? Or is it age based? Or is it income based? Is it location based? Right? Is it device based? Do we do better on mobile? Do we do better on desktop? So all those things, those are like the segments within a specific campaign you look at, and you start just pulling the levers and trying to get a little bit better result from the campaign, you know, each week.

Travis Albritton  50:46  
Yeah, I think that's really great advice. And I'll even throw this into I think, the more patient you can be, the more likely you are to have long-term success, right? I think what I've seen is a lot of people get started, they throw money at something, and then it doesn't perform exactly the way they hoped that it would. Because guess what, you don't really know what you're doing. And then they decide Google Ads don't work for me, or Facebook Ads don't work for me, or Amazon Ads don't work for me, because see, I spent this money on this campaign, and it didn't work. But the more you know, runway you can give yourself, and the more you can afford to learn, because, really, the only way to learn with ads is to spend money. Unfortunately, I wish there was a free way to do it. But that's really the best best way to do it is you just got to put it in place and see what happens. If you can be patient, or give yourself time to figure things out and have money that's like, Okay, this is, you know, this isn't a $10,000 ads budget, this is a $10,000 investment in my education about Google Ads. If you can think about it like that, you're much more likely to see success, because then you'll kind of ride the waves a little bit better, because even a seasoned ads manager, not everything you do strikes gold the first time. It's actually you're trying lots of things until you discover. Oh, it's this age demographic, it's this location, it's this device. But until you actually get the data in front of you, you don't know what you don't know. And so if you abandon ship too quickly, you never get that learning, you never get that data to help inform the next campaign to be better than the last one.

Leo Ebbert  52:17  
Exactly. Yeah. And it's, you almost have to look at it. Like you're, you know, you mentioned, you're spending money on education, you're also buying the data, right. And that's it. That's the thing is, Google has all the data and they'd be glad to give it to you for a price, right? You got to spend the money, get that data into your account, and then you can start, you know, pushing the buttons and making the changes that will make it so it's not costing you money, it's making you money, right?

Travis Albritton  52:47  
Absolutely. So if someone wants to learn more about what you do in your company, where's the best place to go to see if you could potentially be a good fit to help them with their revenue and sales goals?

Leo Ebbert  53:00  
Yeah, I would start on my site, exactclickdigital.com. There are a few things that they could look at, if they're just looking for information. There are a couple of guides that I've published. One is how to audit your digital marketer. So if you have a digital marketer working on your account, right now, sometimes people wonder like, how do I know if this guy is doing a good job or not? Two series of videos are all fairly short, I think five to six minutes apiece. And it just gives you some very basic things. It's also the same kind of checklist I run through when I'm doing an audit of account, I see how I want to see how the accounts doing this is what I look at, right, so I walk you through that in the guide, or there's only one that's called the top five mistakes you're probably making with ads. So if you are running accounts on your, on your own for your own brand, and you want to see what those top five mistakes are and how to change it or not do them then that's a great free guide. Last option is if you want me to audit it, this is something I'll offer to your listeners, I'm willing to do a free audit of a Google or Facebook ad account. And they could just go to my website, exactclickdigital.com/freeaudit and there's a Calendly link there. We just sync up for 10 minutes so I understand what you're looking for some of your objectives, and then I'll send them back a free video audit of their account.

Travis Albritton  54:17  
Awesome. And we'll I'll leave links to all of those things that you just mentioned in the show notes. So you can go check those out. Thanks so much for your sharing your expertise and your time. I certainly hope you had as much fun as I did.

Leo Ebbert  54:27  
I did. Thank you, Travis.

Travis Albritton  54:29  
So I know that felt like drinking through a firehose, just all the incredible information that we have shared and all the things that that we can take and implement when you have a business selling a product or a service and you're ready to push into paid traffic. My number one takeaway for this episode, is make sure that you're willing to spend the money to learn, make sure that you're willing to spend the money to learn and to have the patience to get the data that you need to make educated decisions. You know, Leo was talking about how important it is to be always be experimenting, right, and to try things with cold traffic and try things with warm traffic, and always be looking for new ways to optimize or grow your ads platforms. And ultimately coming back to, it really helps to have that expertise, whether it's someone on your team and you're investing in them to make sure that they can be on top of what's working. So if you have a larger company, and you have a marketing team, and you have someone who's responsible for your ads, make sure you're getting them the education they need, in order to stay on top of things, the whole landscape shifts so quickly, what worked six months ago, isn't working today. And so make sure that you're giving them the resources, they need to stay on top of things, so you can continue to perform into the future. But if you are in a position where you want to scale, and you want to get better results from your ads, I definitely encourage you to look for an agency like Leo's if you're in the e-commerce space, I definitely encourage you to check out his website, which is linked in the description below. But if you're not in that industry, maybe you sell services, maybe you have a SaaS product. Look for a marketing agency, a digital marketing agency that specializes in your niche. So not a generalist, not someone that just does ad services for everyone in their brother. If you're a dental office, look for an ad agency that works with dentists, if you're a lawyer or have a law firm, look for ad agencies that specialize in injury law, you know, trademark law, all the other kinds of law. If you have an outdoor apparel brand, look for ad agencies that specialize in your industry. The reason being, they're going to have unique wisdom and knowledge when it comes to your products and services that a generalist will not. Okay, so if you're at the point where you want to invest in an outside agency to help accelerate your growth, make sure you choose one that's going to know exactly how to deliver results for you and your company and what your goals are. Alright, so this was a lot of information, a lot jam-packed in this episode, but I hope it was super helpful. And until next time, be honest.

Introduction
About Leo
What's a good average order value
Understanding return on ad spend
Advertising techniques in the new normal
Attribution Tracking
Key metrics to measure ads success
Ad campaign testing
Building custom audiences
Re-engaging customers
How to choose platforms for your brand
Difference between branded and non-branded
Costs and strategies of A/B testing
Paid ads mistakes
Learn more about Exact Click Digital
Takeaway