the topic of today's chat is how to get to a hundred bucks per day with Surgeharb. And here with me, I have Kirill, one of our campaign managers. You have been with us for, is it two years now or,
Kiril:almost, yeah, it's a one and a half
Martin:Yeah. And you came you came in without any prior knowledge about buying traffic, right?
Kiril:Absolutely zero. I was previously, I was as a photographer and then I worked in an insurance company for five
Martin:yeah,
Kiril:and then straight out of there came here.
Martin:yeah, you're like an olive oil, extra virgin when it comes to media buying.
Kiril:Yeah. Like every terminology was like complete. Nonsense to me,
Martin:Yeah. Yeah.
Kiril:we are.
Martin:Do you recall how long did it take until you made the profit back when you started?
Kiril:Oh, I think I could check that. I think it was like a few months probably until I started to make some kind of money. Absolutely.
Martin:a call before today where we talked about, when you have a new idea, Transcribed by https: otter. ai You're excited about it, you see all the potential with it, you're like, you have uninformed optimism about the project. And then later when you start to work with it, you reach a stage of informed pessimism, right? Because you then see oh, There's a couple of challenges here. It's not just that money will start raining over me immediately without me having to face some hardships or go through stress or learn new things. And that's, I bring it up because that's the same in any kind of business, in any kind of venture that you take. So just people hearing that it took you a couple of months to reach like a break even or profitability gives helps. like people to estimate the horizon. And especially since you were like without any prior knowledge, but then on the other hand, you had amazing coaches in the company,
Kiril:Yeah, I think that helped a lot because I'm now looking at the numbers from September and I start in, yeah, I started in September actually work
Martin:September, 2022. Huh?
Kiril:2022 exactly. And that month were already profitable. Like I started like the same month as I started, I became profitable at
Martin:Okay.
Kiril:closer to the end of the month, as I do remember how hard it was to start with the creatives because at that time we did everything like ourselves from the start, like creatives, research, keyword research, like you, you made up the text, the primary text headlines. Everything. Now it's much easier or like faster. I could say not easier,
Martin:Faster. Absolutely. Yeah. So you're buying on Metta exclusively, right?
Kiril:I'll have tested a little bit of tick talk, but man, that Medline is the way to go for me right now.
Martin:Okay. Yeah. There it also helps. Like, when you're in a group that you don't see oh, it is possible, right? If you're on your own, which I think many people are in this game when they start out, then you're not certain, does this even work? You heard stuff about it on the conference and so on. But You don't know for yourself. And I think like we're not really trained by the school system to deal with problems. So we have an uncertain outcome in school. You always know there is a right answer, but in real life, you might be working on something that doesn't lead to anything. And how do you keep yourself motivated and how do you keep the belief and so on? So that's
Kiril:Yeah, if they're like without you or without the company or without the group I would say probably quit on the second week because it was loss after loss. And then if you don't have any guidance, like if you don't have any guidelines to follow, or it's a goal to achieve if, For example, I would have been there just like a single entrepreneur and try this thing out. Probably on the second week I would just quit because it wasn't profitable at the start. It was in that if I would have just lost all my money there in a few first few weeks yeah, just, you just have to grind and you have to find your path and it's a beneficial to have a group of people that are doing the same thing that just, so you know that it's possible.
Martin:To have some form of mentors or
Kiril:Exactly.
Martin:or something. Yeah, for sure. Sure. Yeah the topic is how to make a hundred bucks a day. We start a job in today's environment, which if like up front is a tougher one than when you started out, it was easier.
Kiril:Yes. Yeah.
Martin:The field has changed in what sense has it changed,
Kiril:I think it's more expensive right now to advertise. Let's begin with that. And like on the Facebook side, I think the ads are much more expensive. And the other side, would say on the sell side, it's also the revenues have come a little bit down. So if we take from the both ends a little bit out, then you it's a, it could be crucial for you.
Martin:yeah, again, it is possible.
Kiril:It
Martin:We want
Kiril:Here we are here. Yeah, here we are still in this industry, still doing the campaign, still doing the ads. So it is possible, but it's just harder. It's it requires more work for you. It's possible.
Martin:Yeah. What kind of campaign are we going to look at today?
Kiril:So I chose for us health related campaign, which is knee arthritis, But this is perfect example of a successful
Martin:Yeah.
Kiril:This doesn't count many unsuccessful campaigns like that was previously,
Martin:What's your success ratio, roughly? Like how many campaigns do you have to launch to get a positive one?
Kiril:I would say from a 120 campaigns, probably 20 or 30 would be positive.
Martin:So like roughly like 20%, a little bit lower, something
Kiril:Yeah, I would. Yeah, exactly. Like this month or start from the beginning of this month, I could say it's a lower percent. Than
Martin:been tough.
Kiril:of the year.
Martin:Tougher.
Kiril:Yeah, let's say that Would you want me to screen share or just tell the numbers or what? What do you want?
Martin:But let's, before, before we jump into that, I find this interesting, the success rate of your launches. And I'm going to connect it with the viewer question because people write them every now and then would like help with their campaigns. And then someone wrote me the other day and was saying, yeah, I'm making I'm making like a 60 percent negative ROI. When will it turn around? Like how you're just laughing, not to laugh at our viewers. No, but it's what what do you, what signals do you look for to determine all this? How do you determine this campaign I toss away immediately and this one I work on?
Kiril:Definitely RPC like Revenue per click.
Martin:Okay. And is there a do you want it to be above a dollar or what kind of, it also depends on the geo and
Kiril:depends on, yeah, it depends a lot of the geo and the language as well. So for example, if that's an a US campaign that are targeting Spanish people or like Spanish speaking people, I would say then 60 cents is the right amount like to be above. If it's a below 60, I would probably see for three days. If the learning process of Facebook ads, if it doesn't go like significantly down, then I will cut the campaign.
Martin:Huh.
Kiril:The three days is usually, it's a good indicator, 20 bucks a day for three days. If the learning process is completed and you're still like minus 60 percent or higher, minus 50 or minus 40, I would cut the campaign at that point.
Martin:We're on the same
Kiril:sometimes, yeah. And sometimes. It's not about the vertical itself. It could be just the domain. It could be the setup. It could be the learning process that went wrong. There is a, like for this campaign that we will look today. That one this specifically, this campaign is fifth launch of the same vertical. So first, second, third failed. But then with the right angle and the right keywords and the fifth time it worked.
Martin:But here's, you say the right angle. So you changed something significantly versus the other campaigns. I assume
Kiril:No, I wouldn't say significantly. Like the small changes usually Like the small change of tinkering could be enough at that point. Yeah, so I didn't change anything significantly. It's it's just new creatives Fresh start and then something clicked.
Martin:this is going to be unsatisfying for the audience to hear because they want to hear something like, because then it sounds super, super random. That's all you just have to
Kiril:is
Martin:launch five times over.
Kiril:Alright.
Martin:If I would guide someone. someone, I would take a different approach. Okay. You're much closer to the like every day, like actually launching in today's environment. But I love simplicity in instructions. And if you like simplify it a lot, it could just be like, there are campaigns that you launch and they directly are positive ROI wise. Then there are campaigns that you launch and they are, yeah, that stick with mine is 60. And you like can work it up, but that's really rare. I find when you start out so far behind. So if you have two campaign managers, one that's just launching quickly, seeing like one, two days and then cutting it in order to do completely new tests, new angle, new creative, something like that, versus someone that's trying to like, squeeze a little bit here and there. I think the dude that, that will toss away the campaign and run fresh tests will do much better. Then someone that tries to optimize something that's so weak to begin with. So like.
Kiril:You'll, yeah. It will lose a lot of money if you'll start to tinker too much with the campaign. If you start with negative 60% RO, I. And if that continues to be on the third day then, or even on the second, I would just cut the
Martin:It's like a nice relationship, right? When it's like great, then you get you see the positive ROI straight away. That's how
Kiril:exactly.
Martin:look.
Kiril:Yeah. The winner works exactly
Martin:to date and then five things are super annoying and you try to work it out with your date, like it's low probability of success. Similar, it's like better to try it, try something new, but it's super difficult because then you need to know you might be doing something wrong. Maybe your copy sucks. So you don't put the messaging together in an appealing way. But then also I've been saying many other videos, make sure to do competitive research and have at least. that's very close to what you see out there and then try to iterate away. And then, like your reference, your benchmark creative, if all of your creatives perform worse than that then you get a signal. Are you probably not so good? At your messaging is not so good. You need to like change the messaging. You use the benchmark created to see Oh, my creatives better or worse. And of course they should be better. And then they should be in different, with different angles, different directions so that you then have options to then zoom in on what's working. Best. But yeah now we're going super far into detail there. You suggested that we look a little bit closer at at the campaign. Yeah, let's see. I hope I don't have to cut too much that you should give away too much to the, to people here.
Kiril:me see, allow to share windows. Yeah, I'll share.
Martin:Okay. So do we here see is, was 1st of March your first day with the campaign?
Kiril:Yeah, exactly. That was my first dev launch.
Martin:So here you pulled up the details about the campaign that we're going to zoom in on and we see the journey. We talked about that. If you have a winner, You see it directly. So you see on your first day, you made ROI of 95%. And also you start to spend at 45, 50, 50 bucks. That's also good. That ties back into another question that I get from people. They start testing at 10 bucks a day or something like that. No problem if you can't afford a higher budget, but if you can, you might as well start at 50 just to have speed because the tests will just take longer if you're, if you are at 10 bucks, you still will probably have to spend the same amount. You just cut the time until you have a significant amount of hits to know if something is good or bad. Yeah.
Kiril:With that kind of spend, you pretty much good to go in two days. Like you don't have to wait for a week to be determined whether you want to cut the campaign or just to continue like exploring it here watch the campaign on the 1st of this month, the March spend 45 bucks was set up with three ad sets and with three ads in each ad set.
Martin:And how did you find this campaign, or this angle and vertical combo?
Kiril:vertical was spied on like from external tools, like spying tools, like PP ads and like Facebook library and It was spied on. So a lot of creatives about this vertical and then just yeah, just requested the new creatives for that.
Martin:Yes. Okay. So you saw a bunch of different advertisers, I assume, for this vertical and took it then. Aha. Seems to be Something that works now. Did you record the keywords that they send the traffic to?
Kiril:Yes, I do.
Martin:Okay. We don't, you don't have to show them, but did you take, you just took them one to one?
Kiril:The keywords I took one to one. I didn't do any research on those from that time,
Martin:See there's a way to get started. Speed in the process, right? You can't like work on everything. If you see like a lot of people driving traffic to certain set of keywords, just take them to begin with it's too early to then also do a keyword optimization. You're just in the process of figuring out, does this here work for me? Can I do something with it? So you ordered three creatives. Were all of them inspired by the creatives you saw in the spy research?
Kiril:Like the first benchmark is that you find, like you, you make a close copy to the competitors just to see it, just to set it as a benchmark that, and then you start to create new creatives and see if they perform better or
Martin:Yes.
Kiril:Then the copy and yeah, exactly.
Martin:Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yes. So walk us through the different days, if you can remember. So you start with your test campaign, then it will take you only on, yeah, in the evening of the second of March, you get the results, that you are profitable. So I assume the first possible action you took is on the third afterwards, or How did your thinking go?
Kiril:that. So I saw the first positive that the that the first day was positive, probably on third morning.
Martin:Yeah.
Kiril:And then I like started to increase the budget. And my strategy here is to increase if that's a, if that's a 30 percent ROI increase by. Or that 30 or lower, I increase it by 20 bucks or 30 bucks. And then if it's above 50%, then I increase it by 50 bucks right away. So here is the first day I took action. I increased it by 50 bucks. It just didn't like didn't have enough time to spend it all. As we see the profits, like you asked, like how easy or like to make a hundred bucks a day on a positive campaign. If you have winning campaign or like winning vertical, you will see it straight away. You don't have to like I think spend weeks with that
Martin:Yes.
Kiril:Strong budget to begin with. If you can't afford then creative tests do three different tests. Then on that day probably requested new creatives and that they come in batch of nine creative. So nine videos were like requested on this day
Martin:And how, um, sorry for interrupting. Do you recall out of your first batch of creatives, how big were the differences? Was there like one that stood out by a lot or were they all about the same? How were the results?
Kiril:I do remember. So two of them were like completely negative and one was positive. Yeah.
Martin:that's nice. That's That's how it should look almost. Then you've take, then you've created very different created, they should be different in terms of messaging, angle look and feel and so on. So then you get these kind of results, right? And okay, so then you saw a winner, and then you ordered, you say, nine more. On that track.
Kiril:They do like we order, for example, if we see one video is performing really well we do copy it like three, three times. And then we start to look for a new angle as well. So you don't sit on like in one place only and just hope it will work forever. You just always have to like search for new angles.
Martin:Super good. And this example will show there's a lot of people very careful to scale and they overcomplicate or should I copy the campaign start a new one. And here you just see bam, you can scale a hundred percent straight away from 50 to a hundred. And your ROI even went up as you did.
Kiril:Yeah, like when I just started to do campaigns, scale campaigns and like work with the campaigns at all, I was super scared to scale because of the learning process. I was super scared of the learning process. Oh my God, if I increase budget too much, the Facebook goes to learning again. And what do I do? But. That, that goes away with the time when you see that you can really scale things up if they're really working.
Martin:And let's be real to Facebook, like even a campaign spending 50 bucks a day. That's nothing is absolutely nothing like such a small shrimp in this ocean. So
Kiril:exactly. Yeah. Like those verticals are like usually about some kind of medicine or health related campaigns. They have like billions and billions of budgets. So 50 bucks out of it's nothing, absolutely nothing.
Martin:Okay. So good. So we are at, you saw a campaign, you ordered a reference batch. You saw that it worked and which creative work best. Then you ordered new creatives in probably inspired by the winning formula or that you like went further down that hole of that, that messaging strategy.
Kiril:And
Martin:yeah,
Kiril:I was just about to say that in this point, when you have positive campaign, you just let it run, you scale it, you order more creatives or you just create more creatives and you scale it as long as it goes.
Martin:yeah. Good.
Kiril:we have these retracements.
Martin:Yes, you do. But I think you did it right. Our our purpose when we have a profitable campaign, when we're riding a wave of profits is to see like, how far can we push it? And you did. You did that, right? You saw, and then you calmed calm down a little bit. Are you kept on expanding? I'm looking at say the ninth. How did your thoughts go on the ninth
Kiril:So
Martin:percent and then you expanded a little bit more? How was the thinking process?
Kiril:That's a time zone difference. So I saw, yeah, I saw this number. I saw only like 11th morning. So as I saw, it's going down from a hundred, like right, 20, I felt okay the budget is a little bit too much right now. So let me cut it. The cut should be like at least one third of the budget. So the learning process goes back to zero and then you start to learn again. And if you have a negative campaign, that's definitely what you should do. So you like, you get, you probably would, will get a lower cost per click and like cost per action.
Martin:Awesome.
Kiril:Exactly what I did. 320 probably, the budget we're set up here. I saw that it's coming down, a big cut of 100, then followed by 50 cut. And then we see that, okay, the cost per action probably went down, so the campaign is profitable again. And I see, and now I know, yeah, now I know that the working budget is between 150 and probably 250. And that's where I will keep the this campaign.
Martin:I think you've chosen a really beautiful campaign because it shows your skill as a campaign manager. You work. Yeah, but you work with confidence, right? A lot of like campaign managers that start out and Oh, let's wait, let's do a little change here and there. You just in both directions when it works, push it hard when it doesn't work, Push it hard in the other direction and find an equilibrium. And it seems that if you look at the last few days, you found that more of a stability. I find like when you are at those levels that you've been the last few days. You are at a, you're at a good spot here, right? You've yeah. You have tested it out like there's so much that we, so many unknowns. As a media buyer, you just, you have to see where's the limit? Go to the limit and then find the level that you're comfortable at.
Kiril:Yeah.
Martin:How often do you order creatives or add new creatives? Mm-Hmm.
Kiril:I order twice a week vertical is new then the creatives are made a little bit like slower, so that would be once a week, but I would say a thumb rule of thumb that you should probably add three creatives. A week like at least three creative. So minimum, yeah. Minimum, like three creatives a
Martin:do you kill the do you kill the old ones or do you keep them that you just have a lot of creatives there?
Kiril:if they don't work, if they're, if the cost per action is more than the revenue, then of course, straight away, but pause the ad set if it works in a 20 ish percent ROI, then I just give it as long as they perform as well.
Martin:And in, in all these days. Have you done any keyword optimization?
Kiril:Absolutely zero.
Martin:I think that's also a good thing to know because a lot of people hope a lot from keyword optimization. And there are cases where you do, you can turn around the campaign, you can have dramatic impact on it, but you also have the other cases where you take this Chad style approach, you just say words and if they work, they Like from your comments, like you have a high output of new campaigns instead of spending time, like tinkering with an existing one.
Kiril:Exactly. I would say that the keyword change probably work one out of 20 campaigns.
Martin:Oh, it's on that low level.
Kiril:That's a super low level. I would say it's a, it doesn't change at all, but I have one success like this week where it was a hair loss campaign and I changed just one word in the keyword section that changed like the profitability from 20 percent to a hundred, I was just like, but that was a one in 20, probably even like lower. So
Martin:Dude. I think everybody has their own approach and like it's, you have had success without working much, maybe you don't give that much love to the keyword optimization, then you have a ratio than someone that maybe loves doing it. I think it's very individual.
Kiril:Could be.
Martin:what if you look at your journey and during these this time as a media buyer, what was the biggest, what lift what lifted your performance the most when you learned, was there a specific moment or a specific realization or skill?
Kiril:There was a teamwork and that you stopped tinkering on campaigns. So you just go for like volume. You request fast, like you create campaigns fast. You do creators fast and then you cut. Negative campaigns fast that changed a lot. And also what is super important is like scaling working campaign. Like without without that you, you can't success.
Martin:Yeah, as we saw in this in this little journey here for that campaign, they are to
Kiril:I think I think many would be scared to lose this 40 20 percent ROI profitable campaign because they are scared to scale and I can see that I can understand that but then you won't find your limits with that campaign because this our example is about 200 let's say like this positive campaign but some campaigns are positive at 600 you don't know if you don't try
Martin:Yeah, exactly.
Kiril:You're just losing potential there
Martin:Yeah. So look at the dollar amount, right? There's people like in these examples. Also, it's The cost of a coffee per day, it's like you're not in the game, you're not in the game to be able to buy a coffee, right? You need to make this Lambo money, right? And then I
Kiril:it?
Martin:that is in this industry has is motivated to make money and has dreams about something significant. So think about your aim, like what do you want to achieve? And then look at the campaign and think, does it bring me closer? To this target or not because a bunch of 10 buck a day, 70 percent ROI campaigns, they're a trap if you then take the time and slowly optimize them and you don't take the step up to the next level. So it needs to be. Something that's significant to you also.
Kiril:exactly yeah, do bigger moves if you want to.
Martin:Yeah. No, but I love this. This to dare to strive for speed. Basically is what you said. When you dare to embrace a speedy approach. That describes our general philosophy. Pretty well. I we believe that speed wins over deep analysis. The tricky part is sometimes you need to analyze, but there's so many, I think it's much more common to overanalyze for people in this game than under, underanalyze.
Kiril:And at the beginning you probably will do that. If I remember how I started, of course, I was like looking at every word, every primary text headlines. Making sure they're perfect, spotless and they look good. They like, it's easy to read, but right now, like some of the campaigns, they don't have primary text at all, or they have only headline. Click here for something like super simple. It's not about, it's not about that. You can, at some point, if you like ran out of work, you can start to look at those headlines, prime tech, like private texts and keywords. But, uh, the most success comes from the creatives and the good and the good vertical.
Martin:yeah. Hey, awesome. Thank you very much for describing this journey here, both your personal journey in the company, but also the journey with this campaign and and how you, which decisions you took, at what point. I think many people are gonna find it quite useful.
Kiril:Yeah.
Martin:Awesome.
Kiril:more in comments section.
Martin:Yes. Exactly. I'll post a link to your OnlyFans later on then.
Kiril:Yeah. You will see my campaign is there. Hugh
Martin:Thank you again.
Kiril:Thank you.