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SPEAKER_02Welcome to the Affiliate Insider Podcast with Mean Lee Ann Johnston. And today I'm super thrilled and excited to have my very dear guest and friend, Christopher Tompkins, who's the CEO and founder of the Go Agency, an internationally renowned expert on digital marketing. And he has more than two decades in social media and paid advertising. He runs one of the top 25 digital marketing agencies in Florida. And he also has an amazing podcast called the Social Marketing Academy, which has earned praise as one of the top 10 digital marketing podcasts airing today. Hi, Christopher. How are you?
SPEAKER_00I'm doing greatly, and thanks so much for having me.
SPEAKER_02Thanks so much for being on this podcast with me. It is uh going to be a really exciting conversation because we're going to be talking about quite a hot topic. So before any before we go any further, I want you to just say a little bit about your background, a little bit about your expertise, and get you warmed up before we start with the the QA. So over to you.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Thank you for that wonderful introduction. I'm a digital marketing expert. I've worked um internationally all over the world on different sorts of projects in the uh digital marketing space and found my comfy home in organic um social media marketing and digital with our agency. We've been around for 13 years now, and we started off as organic only, and then we've expanded to include other services that help clients out. Um we help clients from all over the world and all over in many different disciplines because we're mostly we're about 100% referral-based, basically, whatever we're approached with. We time we kind of problem solver, so I like to see how the puzzle fits together and take it as it comes. So I would say that my sweet spot is organic, but when stuff like we're talking about today comes up, I have a lot of opinions about it. So I love talking about because I don't always love talking about paid, but this conversation is a good one.
SPEAKER_02Okay. So thank you so much for being here. So I'm gonna get right, I'm gonna cut right to the chase. So there's been much debate in digital communities around the changes that Google and Facebook are doing in regards to privacy updates. And a lot of people have been asking me, what does this mean? Is it gonna affect my advertising? Is it gonna affect my traffic if you're an affiliate listening to this? So can you take us through why these changes are happening, what's so significant for brands and affiliates, and what we need to be taking note of?
SPEAKER_00Okay, first things first, don't panic. This is because if I'm gonna, I mean, something for nothing, if you're gonna be panicking about this, what's gonna happen in six to eight months that you're going to freak out about? So you need to understand that this is how things are going to change over time. And everything that made your life really easy is going to become a little bit more difficult as privacy becomes more of an issue. If we think about like maybe, was it 10 years ago when the GDP email marketing guidelines went in and everyone was like, I can't just spam everybody on. No, that's awful. Why don't we make why don't we be better?
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And I think that this is a similar type of thing. Um, it's being pushed through by Apple, so that's why a lot of people are sour on it, and the Android people are like picketing. But I think if we're looking at, because there's always like the level of anger in Android users, always very angry. Love you guys out there, but you're saying get your feelings. But but what I would say is when I looked at these, the first thing I saw was they're taking away all the nuances to retargeting and remarketing that are really people we're relying on. And a lot of the people that had just learned how to do that properly are going to have to relearn it. That's the pain in the butt right there.
SPEAKER_02So that's the cost, really, the re the restructuring, the reorganizing, the retraining of staff.
SPEAKER_00And precisely, because if you're looking at audiences, it's not gonna be it's gonna be pretty impossible to accurately track what the audiences are going to look like and also how to retarget your audiences. So the audiences that you had that you thought were really sizable are going to begin to shrink. And so you're gonna be hitting less people. I think it's this change is going to cut deeply into the ability to remarket and retarget on Facebook as well as Instagram because they're both the same property. The other thing that really this one I think bothered me more is that it's limiting the amount of, and this is Facebook, right? The amount of events that you can have associated with your pixel. So you were able to do scrolled on page, clicked on link, add it to a cart, do this. They're shrinking that down, and you're gonna have to choose eight for your entire website. So you used to be able to choose a lot more than that. And there were and but for some people, that smaller market's pretty good if you're just getting into it because you don't know what you had before. Yeah. Us that have been in there, and we sit down and have long meetings about what that and how we're going to spend that budget and all of that. So we had that and we set it up and we're like, wow, this is really performing. Turned it off. Yep, you have to go back in and rejig that.
SPEAKER_02And also that's going to impact how you make decisions in terms of what you track and how that impacts your decision-making process to optimize after the campaign is launched. So I think the planning and the strategy that sits behind these uh policy changes, that's the change. But then also the learning that comes with that change is a bit of an irritant as well. Because if you're running a campaign and you're doing great acquisition, you now need to relearn what's going to work and what's not going to work again. And that's really the frustration point. So, in terms of when these updates are going to be in place and how that's going to affect advertising campaigns for both brands or operators as we call them and affiliates or publishers, is there anything specific that people need to be doing right now? Or is it something that's gradually going to change over time?
SPEAKER_00Yes. I would say the first thing I would do is move off of Google Chrome immediately and find something else to use. And this is just like me, like my little soapbox moment. Like I would say that Chrome has now reduced the effectiveness and speed of my computer by about 70%. Wow. Um, because the changes that they've been making. Because they're removing all the keys from Chrome, which is going to which is going to affect all on not only speed of that and usability of that, but also it's going to completely change how you do your Google ads. Because again, targeting is going to be removed options that you used to have. But what can you do now? I think you need to shift your ad, you need to understand that your ad strategies are going to have to shift. Because here's the thing we all know this. Once you're experimenting with lots of different tactics and strategies, when you find one that really lands, you want to lean into that, you want to put more money into that, and you really want to use that as one of your pillars of your campaign. Those are going to not work as well anymore. So you're going to have to go in and rejig those and see what other strategies you have. So a lot of people that were putting a lot of money into Facebook or a lot of money into Instagram in particular should be looking at other options as well. You should be looking at other platforms, social platforms, maybe display ads or OTT or something else to fill out your repertoire. Because before you could really laser focus your approach with one site and master it.
SPEAKER_02I think that's a fantastic point, actually. And I just want to stop you there because I think a lot of smaller brands, they have in the past cottoned onto a paid Facebook to drive immediate results. And they've done that effectively, but they've never had a cohesive digital strategy behind their acquisition or customer engagement. So looking at things like pay-per-click and other social media channels like TikTok, YouTube, et cetera, and actually getting back into content marketing to drive engagement, affiliate marketing, we saw a massive increase over COVID with affiliate channels, performance marketing-based channels. And then we're moving into that whole microinfluencer space as well right now, which is incredibly important. And utilizing all of these different channels can actually diversify the risk of some of these changes that are happening, but also mitigate the learning process whilst you're getting the kind of new strategies right as all of these changes are happening at the same time. One digital marketer to another, and everybody that's listening to us, take heed of this point. Start looking at diversifying your acquisition channels in the meantime, whilst we're going through this learning process. So, what kind of tips can you give to our listeners in terms of managing their kind of paid media and social media budgets right now to get maximum ROI on the campaigns that they're going to be running?
SPEAKER_00I think they really have to understand. It really is got to figure out a new audience building strategy immediately. You have to do that. That's like the number one thing. Because let's think here's another good example of something that people slept on and they got screwed over a little bit with geofencing. People that found geofencing, I can draw a perimeter around a store and hit everyone that goes into that store to the pandemic. All of those people, no one was going through those doors. So none of their ads were firing. So that what happened is the geofencing companies had to go back to old data that wasn't accurate. And then those companies had to diversify immediately. They're like, what the heck am I gonna do? That was like that was my bread and butter. And now no one's I'm I on all of the different apps that like the navigation apps, they would have their ads popping up, but no one was going anywhere. So what did they do? They had to get scrappy, and I think that's what everyone needs to be doing with this. It's not the end of the world, it's just a new, I'm not gonna say a new norma, it's a new, it's a new era because you have to see that these changes are going to constantly be in place. It's not gonna be like, here's the platform, learn it. It's gonna be like that for away for 10 years. That's over, it's going to change all the time. I would say the audience strategy is really important because of one thing, and listen to this. If you hear the sound of my voice, they're going to reduce the retargeting audience from 28 days to seven days on Facebook. That is a massive change, especially if you're if you have a long lead time on sales and attribution, you really need to understand that's an issue. But very easily, why don't you look into the creating why don't you get all of your email subscribers or your email contacts and build an audience on Facebook and then create a look-alike audience based off of those? That's solid data. That's data that you can control. You can even do that through your Amazon orders if you want to, but I would create a lookalike audience. I wouldn't use those because that's not idea. But that's one of the things that you could really do. Because before you were just thinking, okay, I have all this stuff on the back end of my website, everything's gonna fire and it's gonna be perfect. I'm sorry, unfortunately, that doesn't work like that anymore. I think the audience was one of the big the big issues that I saw. Also, the uh second biggest issue is not my clients, I don't want to say they're my issue. I'm seeing how they're perceiving this. Yes. So if you were managing, if you're managing clients through an agency or a company or you're selling up, you need to get everybody on your page as to what's happening right now so that they understand why the reports look different, why the audience numbers are declining. It's not has nothing to do with you, but it will have to do with you if you don't tell them. And you pull in a report and they're just like, what's going on here? So setting expectations, I think, is something that's very important for the management of these campaigns.
SPEAKER_02And also setting expectations with you know your partners from the affiliate side, from the affiliate standpoint, if they're running campaigns and client um publishers or operators want to find out why the numbers are dipping, it's very important to have that open dialogue right now to actually explain how your traffic sources are changing due to some of these decisions that are being made and to also start pre-planning to and you know fill the gap. So if as an affiliate you have been responsible just for paid advertising to push traffic, what are you gonna do now to actually build up your complement? Because as and when these changes filter through, your numbers are gonna naturally decrease because you don't have such a big set of data anymore. 28 days to seven days is a huge difference. I think there's a lot of open dialogue that's gonna be happening in the next couple of months as these changes filter through. And hopefully we're gonna see new innovative ways to complement the drop in traffic that's gonna naturally happen from some of these campaigns. What about budgets? Like you mentioned earlier that we're not gonna see less spend, but we're gonna see spend being apportioned differently. Can you give us some indication of what's gonna change and how that's gonna change?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's going to it's not going to the data is not gonna be as rich as it was before. So you're going to have to be looking at data differently. That's why I like the idea of using data that you've actually earned yourself and then translate that into an audience that you marketed to rather than trying to grab. Well, because one of the things is going to be, I think interspace audiences is going to be one of the big trends rather than every like Okay, this person went to my website, so I'm gonna hit them on this day, and then they're we're gonna follow them all through the internet and uh okay. Every single time that I've ever talked about, remember when you saw that pair of shoes on Shoe Dazzle, and then you saw that on Amazon and you saw it on your browser, you're like, yeah, that's really creepy. That's usually the first thing that everybody says. They don't say convenient. So that's why that was a great thing for marketers because they could they could do something very inexpensively, they knew exactly how it worked, great. But the audience didn't love that, so they felt like it was a little creepy and thought it was a breach of their privacy, which is why Apple's kind of it feels part of that decision. I'm sure there's more to the story, but I think because we're dealing with a smaller market, the budgets are going to have to be a little bit larger. And I think that it in and if come on, let's be honest, we have to do testing again. So, what do you do with testing? You don't like, oh, I'm just gonna get 50 cents and throw it into the wind and see if I can turn it into a dollar. It's not gonna be like that. You need to have some A-B testing campaigns. Like, for example, for some of our clients, we had email subscription models that we're using on Facebook for Facebook, and they were all of a sudden they jumped for no reason from$1.24 to acquisition to$4.50 per acquisition. And that was because we went into the audience and the audience was totally different. And they're just moving the audience in the back end. So, one of the things, another tip to show you is that you have to pay close attention as to what's happening. I've actually had three clients that we were running advertisements for that they changed the ad category when the one that we were using closed.
SPEAKER_02Wow.
SPEAKER_00Shifted it over. And then my client will say, Hey, why did you change this ad? And I'd be like, Oh, I didn't do it with Facebook. And they're like, I thought you were Facebook. I'm like, Oh no, but but yeah, so you have to pay a lot of attention. The long answer, I think that I think you have to have a larger budget because you have to go back into testing with your audiences, and also it I think it's a really important idea to sit down and look through the events that you're using on your pixel for conversion to make sure you're using the ones that really are the most trackable because your tracking is gonna be much different.
SPEAKER_02What do you think are the most trackable ones, just off the top of your head, that you would recommend to people listening?
SPEAKER_00I I like ones where I have an actual piece of information to use. Okay. So I think that like a full conversion of an email address is something I really do feel is like the number one thing. Also, anything that indicates sales, I think it's a good factor. Now, if you're looking for, if you have a two-prong campaign where you're doing lead gen and you're trying to get engagement and visibility, then obviously the number of um comments I think outweighs the number of reactions. Yes. Um and because people were saying, I've like when and some of my peers were discussing this, because this is a really good, this is a good subject to bring everyone together if you're marketers. And I would highly suggest if you do have a peer group, ask people how they're dealing with this because everyone's rambling. But one of the things that they were saying is that they were looking into looking at impressions again and how they could justify impressions as a performance. Me are there's two sides of ROI. There's the return on investment, which I would suggest being more built around conversion of information or sale, and then the return on influence, and that is that impressions, comments, engagement, because they're both very important, just depends on where you are in the business. Because if I'm in the holiday season, I'm looking for the return on investment, and if I'm looking at just any time, I want to focus on that engagement metric and that influence.
SPEAKER_02Okay, that's very interesting. I'm gonna wrap up now quickly because um I want to get some of your thoughts on what you feel the big changes are gonna be in 2022 around kind of social media paid media. Talk a little bit about where we're going with cookie list tracking and the evolution of technology and data impacting the way that we plan our media and specifically around acquisition, because most of our audience listening here are either affiliates or affiliate managers, and they want to know where to plan and spend their money more effectively as we move into, and I hate this word, new norm or whatever that's gonna be. But you know, where do you see us changing the way that we plan our paid media spend or performance marketing spend in 2022?
SPEAKER_00I think we're gonna change from being the not the master of many and the master of none kind of thing. I think what we're going to do is I think people were okay, here's your model. Your model is you do a$500 Facebook ad that's gonna be running for two weeks, and then that's gonna push you to this. That's going to kick this in and then blah, blah, blah. You got to step back from your funnel and look at different feeders immediately. That's the that's the number one thing I would say. If you're looking at Facebook as a be all and end-all, you are playing a fool's game. There are, I can do an ad on YouTube, spend less and get more influence. I can go on to Snapchat and do absolute gangbusters. So look at different platforms. I would say if I was looking at trends, I think we're gonna see people be more familiar with more platforms rather than being masters of one. Because what's happening is this, which I think is good. I like this push because it just says it's annoying to constantly focus on one platform as the be all and end all. You know how that's turning out, Amazon. And Amazon is eating up all of those small God, yeah, go with God. They're do they're doing good good work, but still they're like stomping on stuff. So if we don't want everything to be like that, we have to flatten, flatten the playing field. And this change in iOS has pushed us. I don't even know if they we we noticed it, but they're pushing us in that direction. So I think that we're going to see marketers that are going to have a multi-pronged advertising planning. Yeah, um, and they're going to do there's gonna be more testing that's going to be in the advertisement rather than here's the off-the-shelf solution that you should be using. This is the event that you need to have on this page, and it's going to trigger this. This has a 60% chance of um effectiveness. That's gone. We were working on so much data, and we're going to be working on much less data. So we were all very granular for a while.
SPEAKER_02With that change, because because I think you're right, I think we are going to have to become masters of many instead of masters of one. With that change, what do you think the big channels are that marketers have probably disregarded for the last couple of years because Facebook was so convenient? What channels are up and coming? What do you think? TikTok, what what's the next big idea? Like where we clubhouse, what is it gonna be? What in your opinion do you think is gonna fill the void?
SPEAKER_00I think what's gonna happen is it's going the there's gonna be a chunk of market share that's going to be taken and it's gonna be split amongst multiple platforms. So I don't think it's gonna be like one dies and another one grows. I do feel that TikTok is going to be the big story of the second half of this year and early next year. Just because I've seen, I don't know if you've seen what they're doing in China with shopping on TikTok close Instagram and Facebook out of the water. And it is, it's going to be a game changer. And I think a lot of people are the only thing with TikTok that I have to say is that the advertising platform is not very user friendly and it's almost like moving from like driving an Automatically, but but it will get better. I do think that TikTok has a lot of value. I also feel that because people are thinking about TikTok, they're thinking about reels on Instagram, they're thinking about doing lives more often. I think video content and UGC is really important. So I do feel that any platform that uses video on the ad is going to be adopted more than it used to be. Because if I say YouTube advice my clients, like like two years ago, they'd say like I don't have time to like create a three-bird movie and believe that anymore. We just need something like for me. I find we work with a couple companies that have a whole household of talent that will do the videos if we send over the client's products and write the script. It's a different world. But I think things like that are going to be more uh picked up more often because I think a lot of the stops that marketers have is that they don't have the bandwidth or the skills to create video.
SPEAKER_02The other thing is in in our industry, videos and streaming is like second nature. People are happy to get, I'm not, I hate video, but I do it because I have to. But video content is becoming a lot easier to actually create, share. If you've got a mobile phone, you can do something. It might not be Hollywood style, whatever, but it's becoming much easier to put. We're all becoming publishers of content. So whether it's video, audio, you know, graphics, it's becoming incredibly easy to create this stuff with tools like Canva and all of these other apps that are on your phone that help you to create little short videos and binds and things. The thing that was interesting for me, just to round up, is YouTube's recent changes in terms of their policies with regards to ads and videos that you upload to your YouTube channel. That just ties in beautifully with what you've just said in terms of video becoming more of an advertising feature because it's becoming easier to actually create. You don't have to be a genius to do it. And then the channels themselves are actually wanting to monetize all of that content that you're creating for them. I think video is going to be really hot as we come into 2022. And I'm excited to see how channels like TikTok and other Twitch, all of these kind of streaming sites, actually up their game in terms of allowing marketers to place advertising at a more um you know targeted approach. Because I think we have to get more uh clever with the way that we spend our money. Budgets are tight at the moment across the board, but where you spend them is actually your choice as a digital marketer. So coming up with solutions and finding channels where you can spend that money effectively is going to be the key of your kind of role whether you're agency owner, working in-house, whatever the case may be. So totally agree with what you've said, and I really appreciate the nuggets that you've shared with our audience today in terms of some of these changes that are going to be happening and some of the things that we can do to mitigate and relearn our craft, basically, to drive more traffic. So it's been amazing having you on the podcast again. I really appreciate you being here with us and thank you for sharing all of your knowledge.
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