Episode Transcript
[00:00:11] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to episode 38 of the Cadence Beat podcast. Today we are going to be talking with Drew Griswold. Drew is the director of outbound marketing for StellarWp, which is our parent company at Cadence. And we're just going to have a nice little chat about advertising.
So welcome, Drew.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: Awesome. Hey, Katie.
[00:00:33] Speaker C: Hey, Ben.
[00:00:33] Speaker B: Thanks for having me.
[00:00:34] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. It's gonna be really fun. Drew, I'll say this about you. I've met you in person once, and you have to be one of the most fun people I've ever met in terms of just really, really someone you want at anything you're doing, because you're going to make it fun.
So I'm sure that today is going to be fun because it's so fun to actually hang out with you.
[00:01:01] Speaker B: Well, I appreciate that. That's extremely kind. And also far too high of a bar to live up to in a podcast. But challenge, accept it.
[00:01:10] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. This is going to be great. So we're talking about ads, because you spend a lot of money on ads and have been doing ads for a long time.
Why don't you give us your.
Your story?
[00:01:25] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Advertising has become my full time job, which is interesting. If you would have told me that ten years ago, I would have probably laughed at you. But the way that I got into online advertising and got into the position I'm at, that stellar WP actually stems from previous to my working in WordPress and working at GiveWP. I owned a retail business. It's called Wandering company. It's an e commerce company.
We do music festivals all over the country, and we have an online store. We got to a point with our business with Wanner and company, where we were having a lot of success with our online advertising. I had hired this kid out of Las Vegas. He was running our ads for us. It was when Facebook ads were kind of a money printing machine.
We were really, really doing well, but I had no idea how any of it worked. And I foolishly, in hindsight, foolishly decided that we were going to hire an agency to take over from this kid that we had hired to do our ads. And it's a really common story with lots of small businesses. There's a lot of really kind of scammy agencies out there that are just looking for people in this exact situation to kind of capitalize on. And we ended up. We got taken to the cleaners, like, I'll just be completely honest about it. We burned tens and tens and tens of thousands of dollars and perpetually in a testing phase and all of these things and all of the things that we had built up over those years. Building our e commerce business kind of got taken away in about three months by hiring this agency. And out of frustration, pure and utter frustration, I decided when I found out what was happening with this agency and how we were getting duped, that I was going to get Facebook blueprint certified and I was going to get to the bottom of this and get our progress back. So I spent a weekend in my rv because I was a full time rver, just kind of huddled over my keyboard learning everything that I could about Facebook ads and Google Ads and CPC advertising in general, became certified in those. You know, I had a little bit of experience up until that point, but I really didn't know what was going on. So really just kind of threw myself into the deep end and did everything that I could to learn all of the things that I could to get out from underneath this agency. And then I started doing our own ads and we found really great success with it. And I found out that I really enjoyed doing it, did that for a few years of my own business. And then when I got hired on at Givewp to be on their social media and events team, I kind of just mentioned, though, oh, yeah, I've done some of this paid advertising stuff, too. Like, I've been doing it for a few years. It's really, really effective. Started doing the ads for Givewp, had really, really great success with that. And then when we were acquired and joined Stellar, extrapolating out some of those insights to all the other brands. So now I'm managing all of the digital advertising for all of the stellar WP brands, which is awesome. And it all started because of being frustrated with an agency that was making false promises, which I have a feeling for a lot of cadence, customers will be a refrain that they can kind of relate to, unfortunately. So, yeah, so I think get into.
[00:04:39] Speaker C: That a little bit because I think now everyone's going to be like, oh, crap, am I getting burned by my agency? Or people are going to be like, scared to go and get an agent. What specifically should people be looking out for? Or like, how did that, how would you say you go about, if someone's like, I want to hire an agency to do this?
[00:04:55] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't want to. I don't want to disparage agencies across the board. Right? There's a lot of really effective, really smart, really wonderful agencies out there that genuinely have folks best interest in minds. But with the advent of the Internet and some of these, these agencies that are out there that don't necessarily have the expertise to know what they were doing, it's really easy to look like a professional. And with something like paid advertising, you're always going to be able to find one metric that makes it look like you're doing really good work when you're not necessarily doing any work at all. The one I always fall back to is impressions. Like impressions on the Internet don't necessarily mean anything. It's really easy. You could put a five dollar ad on Facebook, tens of thousands of impressions. Where did they go? Were they effective? It doesn't matter. You got a lot of impressions. Right.
But I think accountability is just the big thing. If you have an agency that's not willing to be transparent about what they are doing and they're not willing to give you access to the accounts for you to poke around in your own free time, that's a huge red flag for me right off the bat. Right. But if you have an agency that's willing to go through this process with you, they're willing to dig into the account with you, show you exactly the changes that they're making, things like that, then chances are that you have a good one. So don't let me disparage all agencies right off.
Yeah, there are some really great ones out there.
[00:06:21] Speaker C: Nice. And that also is really interesting about impressions. So do you want to go ahead and get into some of the, like, metrics?
[00:06:29] Speaker B: Yeah, let's do it. I dropped a big bomb in there right away.
[00:06:31] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:06:31] Speaker B: Like what are some of the golden metrics? This is what, something we're going to talk about a little bit later is like, what are some of the biggest tips that we could have for small businesses? And one of the biggest ones is picking your success metrics.
If you are really focused on being as efficient as possible with your advertising spend, you could use return on ad spend as a metric. If you're really focused on getting qualified traffic to your site, you could use clicks as a metric.
If you're really looking to take impressions away from your competitors, you could look at your lost impression share on Google. There are no shortage of really complex statistics out there that'll really specifically address whatever your felt need is. But defining those metrics as you go into the process is a really important part of making sure that you find success.
So for something like Givewp, for example, one of our stellar brands, we were really focused on lowering our customer acquisition cost. And one of the best things about advertising is you could see exactly how much you spent a and you could watch the entire customer journey of when they first clicked on an ad on Google and then they saw a Facebook ad, and then they went to your website, they went through the consideration phase. They became a purchaser. You know exactly how much money of that part of the process that you sent. So for me, advertising represents one of the most efficient, effective metrics that you could really track because you're seeing exactly what you're spending and exactly what the outcomes are.
I don't know if I danced around your question there, but there's no shortage of metrics. And it's really going to be specific to the small business of what they're looking to capture and what they're trying to accomplish with their paid program.
[00:08:10] Speaker C: Okay. And so generally, if you're, you know, I have a small business. My brother and I run pinnacle Foods, where we sell freeze dried foods for backpacking, gourmet style. And for that, if we wanted to get into paid ads, we're probably going to be most interested in how much money do we have to spend to get someone who's going to buy something on our website? And you quote that as what? Exactly what phrase did you use?
I want to know how much money I'm spending.
[00:08:44] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[00:08:45] Speaker C: How I get that customer to be a paying customer.
[00:08:48] Speaker B: Yeah. Your customer acquisition cost. The terminology. One thing about paid ads is we love abbreviations. So your Cac or your Cac, if you want to make sounding. It's also just fun to say CAC in meetings because it kind of confuses people.
But, yeah, so. But for someone like you with a small business, it's all a matter of what your appetite is. If you want to really make a focused effort on growing the e commerce portion of your business, yeah, you're going to have to spend a little bit of money, but you're going to want to monitor that. It doesn't have to be a lot of money. You could start at $5 a day. You could start at $2 a day if you want to.
But if you think it's a reasonable expectation that you're going to be able to acquire a customer for $2, it's probably going to be a longer learning curve and it's going to be a longer road to get the data that you'd need. So all the money does is get you more data, and it lets you adapt to that data quicker. So if you go in and spend $1,000 versus 100, you're going to have ten times more data in theory, if you did everything right to make effective decisions to make that money work well for you, if that makes sense.
[00:09:54] Speaker C: And then in my case, obviously, with pinnacle foods, you can come and spend $15, or you can come and spend $200. Does that all get tracked? And is that part of the thing where I could say, like, I'm spending ads and I'm justifying the spend because of what revenue I make versus the customer acquisition price and what's that term called?
[00:10:17] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. It will be tracked whether you're spending $0.50 or you're spending $500,000. And one thing I always caution people is before you get into advertising, it is really easy to accidentally spend a lot of money. You could burn $5,000 on YouTube in 30 minutes if you're not really specific about how you're setting things up and making sure that you have at least the baseline knowledge to be able to execute some of these things. So always make sure that you are knowledgeable with the platforms before you jump in too much. And what was the metric you were looking for? The customer acquisition cost again?
[00:10:53] Speaker C: Yeah. So different from customer acquisition. Like, one, I'm saying I want to pay attention to how much it costs me to get a customer. I don't care what they spend. The other is how much revenue I get for how much ad spend.
[00:11:06] Speaker B: So, yeah, lifetime value per. Yeah. Like, return on ad spend will be, you know, you could calculate lifetime customer value when you're determining your return on ad spend.
[00:11:16] Speaker C: A.
[00:11:16] Speaker B: If you know that they're going to renew or they're going to be repeat customers or something like that, or if they're on a subscription plan, you should absolutely calculate that with your return on ad spend. For sure. Roas is like the golden goose metric that a lot of advertisers have been chasing for lots of years. And that's just, I spend $1, I make $2, that's your return on ad spend. And hopefully, if you're spending a dollar, you're making at least a dollar, right?
[00:11:42] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:11:42] Speaker B: A lot of brands don't. A lot of brands think that if you're spending a dollar, you should be getting it back in impressions and brand awareness and things like that.
But we already kind of touched on impressions and why I don't think they actually mean anything. So it's like, the story I always tell is like a billboard on I 94 in Milwaukee where I'm from. Right. They'll say that they get 500,000 impressions a day. Well, there's only 600,000 people in Milwaukee. I don't think almost everybody's driving by that billboard every day. But if they get a car driving to work and back from work. Yeah. That's an impression. Just a car passing by. That's an impression. Doesn't matter if they looked at the billboard. You have no way of knowing. So impressions have been a flawed metric for a long time. So now I'm going to get agencies and billboard companies coming after me. Yeah. This is good.
[00:12:29] Speaker C: Exactly.
[00:12:30] Speaker B: Checking lots of boxes.
[00:12:32] Speaker C: Nice.
[00:12:33] Speaker A: So I have a question for you drew.
When should a small business decide to start a paid ad campaign?
[00:12:41] Speaker B: I think the answer to that is yesterday. I think every business. I mean a little bit biased here. Right? Because my entire career is based off of online advertising. But I don't think there is a business too small where advertising isn't a benefit for them. Whether you're your first day in business and you're just trying to get new followers or engagement on your social posts or something like that that could be supported with paid advertising. Or if you're trying to test your new website and seeing how people perform to do conversion rate optimization. There is no business too small for online advertising. And there aren't minimum spends with 99% of the relevant platforms out there. So if you want to start a Facebook ad for dollar two a day you absolutely can. And all that's going to do is give you more data to make informed decisions off of.
[00:13:28] Speaker A: Well then how do you know what is the right type of ad to run? Like even if you do have a small budget? Because you could. You could do boosts on Facebook. You could boost a post versus trying to, you know, optimize for conversions on, you know, sales pages or landing pages. So like how do you know which one is the best one so that you don't waste money if you're new.
[00:13:54] Speaker B: It's going to depend on your goals as an organization. If what where you're at in your business development is going to be a big part of it. Looking what your competitors are doing. One of the best things about Facebook ads is they have their ads library. So you can go and look at every single ad that your competitors are running and you could glean a lot of insights from that. Say, oh well, they're not doing any video images. They're doing all static images or they're doing only text based ads. You could glean a lot of best practices from that. But really having a clear idea of what your goals are from the beginning of the program is going to let you know what's going to be your effective next steps? If you know and you have reasonable goals, that's probably a good asterisk to put in there. It's like everybody's goal make $2 million. Right. But having reasonable goals and keeping those success metrics in mind as you're establishing your program that will dictate what direction you go. One of the difficulties of talking about something like this in such a short amount of time is it's so broad. There are so many different directions. There's so many different platforms, there's so many different types of advertising. We could spend 10 hours just talking about one specific little campaign type on Facebook ads. So talking about it in generalities, I'm sorry if I give you general answers, but it really is going to dictate be dependent on what your strategy is and where you're at as a business.
[00:15:14] Speaker C: Okay. So because I have a business and I can get free advice.
[00:15:18] Speaker B: Oh, that. Pinnaclefoods.com. pinnaclefoods.
[00:15:20] Speaker C: Yeah, co.
Yeah.
Like in this situation, would you go, because we're small, we don't do any ads right now. Would you go into Facebook first? Where's your first target of, like, if you're just getting into this, how do you determine that? How should we determine that?
[00:15:39] Speaker B: I would ask you, Ben, what is pinnacle food's goal right now? Is it to grow your e commerce business or is it to improve your, you know, organic website traction? Is it to just, you want cash right now? You want people to buy your product right now?
[00:15:55] Speaker C: Okay. Yes, I want people to buy my product right now, but that opens up a really big can of worms into like, organic traffic. Are you suggesting that paid ads can improve your organic traffic?
[00:16:08] Speaker B: Organic might not be the right word, but I am suggesting that we are in, we are living in an increasingly inorganic world.
Look at Google, type in freeze dried foods for hiking and see when the first organic search result comes up and see when, you know, you probably go through five ads before you get to that first organic search result. So organic is definitely not the right term there, but it depends what type of intent you're trying to capture. If you're looking for die hard hikers that want alternative food source and they know what they're looking for, search is going to be your option because they're going to have really specific intent when they are searching for the terms that you're going to bid on. If you're just trying to get people to make impulse purchases and you're like, I think people that hike would like this a lot they're not necessarily searching for it, but I think they'd really like it. Then Facebook display advertising TikTok some of those aspirational platforms where you could say, hey, here's the value that our brand provides. I think you'd like this. It's more interruptive, but the intent is going to be completely different on different platforms. So definitely, thank you for calling me out on my misspeaking. By saying the word organic. I think you get the idea of what I'm saying.
[00:17:21] Speaker C: Yes. Okay. But, yeah, so I think, like, in my case, there's one situation where I could say, you know what? I really want those die hard backpackers who go ten times a year and they're going to spend $1,000 on free shred food a year. Like, that's. That's my target. I'm going to try to get those customers, and I'm going to convince them on the fact that our quality is better, the. The taste is significantly better, and they're going to get way more nutrition out of the meals that they get from us versus our competitors. So I want that customer. I'm going for the, like, specific customer, whereas Facebook is going to be more like, I think I can hype this up enough that I'm going to get a lot of impulse buys from people that are even buying it as gifts for other people they know, like, hey, do you know someone who likes to hunt or backpack or whatever? This is going to make their day and make their experience so much better. Is that kind of how we're talking about this?
[00:18:19] Speaker B: Generally speaking, yes, specifically. Now, where Facebook, you know, Facebook used to be known for, like, lookalike audiences, and they're hyper targeting, and you could go in and select really specific interest groups that you want to target more and more lately, Facebook is favoring broad targeting and letting their algorithm do the work, whereas Google, you still have the opportunity to be really hyper targeted with keywords, and you could really capture specific intent, like people that, you know, lowest calorie, best tasting hiking foods.
So, yeah, generally speaking, you're exactly right. That's kind of what I'm implying.
[00:18:55] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:18:56] Speaker B: And that was what, Pinnaclefoods dot gov. Yeah, drop that in there one more time.
[00:19:01] Speaker C: Yeah, we. I mean, we've mentioned this on our podcast a lot, but I think it helps to give a real world example in terms of, like, how you would try to figure out.
[00:19:10] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And then, as you were. As you were saying that it's. I know one of your questions that you had mentioned was landing pages, if you do have search intent ads. You're creating search ads specifically make landing pages to show how much better you are than clif bars or not.
[00:19:28] Speaker C: Pinnaclefoods.com or whoever keep from naming our competition out loud.
[00:19:34] Speaker B: No, I think we should call them all out. If I'm going down with big billboard, you need to go down with big freeze dried foods. Just kidding. But yeah, I mean, that's a really good occasion for using specifically catered, targeted landing pages where you can show how your product differentiates itself from a really specific competitor.
[00:19:53] Speaker C: Okay. And you think it's good practice to put that competitor's nutrition facts right next to ours and call that brand out and all of that on that search intent page?
[00:20:05] Speaker B: I absolutely think so. As long as you're being truthful, there's nothing deceptive about listing nutritional facts. Hopefully, hopefully there's no funny business going on there. But yeah, I think as long as you're being truthful and you're following the letter of the law, using trademarks and things like that, then 100% it's a really effective way to get consumers the information they're looking for in an easily digestible manner. And that's what it comes down to is if you're just sharing information and allowing consumers to make their decision, then I think you're doing it in a way that isn't intrusive, it's not offensive or things like that. But I'm a big, big supporter of competitor landing pages. As long as they're educational. Yeah.
[00:20:51] Speaker C: And so that backing up that is, if I'm interested in search traffic, I should probably make a landing page. Is that right?
[00:20:59] Speaker B: Generally speaking, yeah. I think that you have the ability with search traffic to take really hyper focused intent. It would be silly to nothing. Let that intent land on a page that's specifically catered to them.
You're kind of just leaving a superpower on the table. If you have this really awesome keyword that you're bidding on that you know you're going to crush it on, and then you drop them on your homepage and just let them run wild.
Putting them on a landing page lets you specifically control the customer journey. You're giving them the exact information that you think that they're looking for and allowing them to make a purchase really quickly and easily without navigating through necessarily all of the facets of your website. Which brings me to my next comment, which is going to immediately contradict that, which is every page of your website should be optimized as a landing page. Right. If you're thinking of your homepage, not as a landing page. I personally think that you're doing something wrong. You should anticipate that likely customer is going to land on that homepage. And you want to make sure that you're steering that customer journey to purchase as well, even if it's your homepage or your pricing page or a product specific page. So if you're like, oh, I really don't want to. I really don't want to send ad traffic to this page, I think you should look at what that page's purpose is and make sure that you're optimizing it, because you should feel comfortable to send advertising traffic to any page on your website if it's optimized.
[00:22:26] Speaker A: Including blog posts?
[00:22:28] Speaker B: Including blog. Especially blog posts with stellar WP. You teed that one up for me. That was a softball.
One of our favorite prospecting tools is blog posts. We have this really incredible content across all of our brands. Adding some CTA's in there or adding some comparison. CTA's pricing CTA's and making those blog posts ready for people coming from advertisements so that they could easily become purchasers is one of our favorite tactics. Which is why you'll see a lot of cadence blog posts in our ads. Givewp uses a lot of blog posts in our ads. TeC, actually, I think every one of our brands uses our blog content as our primary source of prospecting advertising content. So it just takes a little bit of tweaking. You want to make sure that there are CTA's in there so that it's not just reading a post, but they're reading a post that gives them the option to become a purchaser really easily, or a demo or a free downloader. It doesn't necessarily have to be purchased.
[00:23:27] Speaker A: Yeah. And drew just used two acronyms, so I wanted to break those down. TEC is the events calendar. My body, we use that internal lingo sometimes. So the events calendar and then CTA is call to action for anyone who's like, watch CTA.
[00:23:41] Speaker B: Like I said, I speak in acronyms and it's really annoying for all my co workers.
Thank you for bringing me back to earth. Yes.
[00:23:48] Speaker C: Okay. And then you also brought up the idea of prospecting. How do you define prospecting as something when we're talking about ads?
[00:23:55] Speaker B: Yeah. So prospecting, cold audiences, top of funnel, these are all kind of, uh, parallel terms, right? Uh, prospecting is finding people that aren't aware of your business, making them aware of your business so that you could send them down the funnel, um, prospecting is at the top of the funnel. It's the widest audience. You want to make them aware. That's your awareness phase. Once you get people aware of your product, you could kind of funnel them down to the middle of funnel, which is your, uh.
Oh, my gosh, I totally lost my train of thought. Consideration phase. Middle of funnel will be the consideration phase. So they've heard of your product, they're considering it. They might not be ready to make a purchase. They need a nudge further down in the funnel, which is, you know, retargeting, making someone into a purchaser. So the funnel is a term that is thrown around a lot by digital advertisers and marketers in general. Prospecting is going to be that top source where you're looking for brand new people who have never heard of your site before and you want them to be aware of your offerings.
Yeah.
[00:24:57] Speaker C: And the strategy behind that is sometimes it's going to take more than one touch to get someone to convert. And so if your entire strategy is around first interaction to conversion, it's going to be a lot harder than first interaction to consideration phase. So you're just trying to move them along in that funnel. And that's the idea there is. You have a broad audience.
Does that broadness also cheapen, like make it easier to buy the ads?
[00:25:28] Speaker B: Sometimes? It depends. It depends. But it's kind of incredible at how effective broad audience targeting has become.
Specifically talking about Facebook and tic tac. I mean, everybody that uses Tic Tac could say, well, my algorithm has got me figured out to a freaky point. That's just the consumer side. So the backend that they're using for businesses is way freakier and way more effective. But, yeah, keeping it broad and letting the algorithm do the work. I mean, these companies have spent billions of dollars producing effective advertising machines. You'd be kind of silly to try to subvert that and not use some of that knowledge and expertise, for sure.
[00:26:08] Speaker C: Okay, so I'm convinced I need to go get onto TikTok or Facebook. And that would be Instagram and reels, right?
[00:26:17] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:26:17] Speaker C: How much do I need to spend and what do I need to come with? Is an image going to be okay or do I really need to show up there with a video?
[00:26:25] Speaker B: It's going to depend on your platform. If you're going on Facebook, we have found that static images outperform video most of the time when it comes to consideration. If you're going to be on Instagram, you're going to want motion. It doesn't necessarily have to be a video. It could be a gif or gif. If you're a monster, don't tell Chrome while I forget.
And then if you're going to be on TikTok, it has to be video. Static images just won't move the needle on TikTok, it has to be UGC, another abbreviation. User generated content. You want it to look not like an ad. You want it to look organic. You want it to look like with motion video.
[00:27:04] Speaker C: Is that all those videos I see of people doing, like, us holding a phone in front of them and, like, talking to it as if.
[00:27:11] Speaker B: Absolutely. And it works. That's the beauty of it is it is, it works. The reason that so many of these videos seem so formulaic is because that formula has been working. Another one of the really goofy ones that's really surprising is Facebook ads that look like the notes app on your phone. So it looks like you just wrote a note to yourself that says, like, the top five reasons I love cadence. And then you just list them out and you see the ad and you're like, man, that's really not compelling. And then you see how well they work and you're like, okay, that is compelling. Results are compelling. So it doesn't necessarily, but when you see those trends, it's because they generally work pretty well. And user generated content is one of the most high. Cause you're automatically starting with that level of trust that's really hard to establish just coming from a business that you're like, look at my ad. Look at my website. If you have a person telling you about a business, it's just a lot more impactful, and you immediately have those trust factors baked into it, even if it's a stranger on the Internet. That's how weird us human beings are.
[00:28:11] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:28:12] Speaker A: Drew, do you have any experience with Pinterest ads?
[00:28:15] Speaker B: I do have a little bit of experience with Pinterest ads. It's something that I've wanted to re approach when my retail business was at its peak of really crushing it and the online advertising, we started running Pinterest ads, and we always found that there are much higher CPC's or cost per click. I'm going to try to define all of my abbreviations.
[00:28:35] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:28:36] Speaker B: So the cost per click was a lot higher on Pinterest for us, but we were getting really qualified traffic, and we found that the conversion rate was really good. We just didn't really dive full on headfirst into it because we were so distracted by other things. I've done it a bit. I know some people who've had incredible success on Pinterest ads, and the beauty of Pinterest ads is like some of the ones that we ran a while ago are still out there gathering impressions. And every once in a while I'll see a sale come through from Pinterest, even though we've done nothing there for five or six years. So it's kind of interesting how Pinterest it just, things can take on a life of their own that run in this little ecosystem that is so unique to anything outside of it. So it's really interesting. I wish I had more insightful things to say about Pinterest. I have a little bit of experience there, but it's something I'm really interested in re approaching and trying again.
[00:29:31] Speaker A: Yeah, one of the reasons I asked that question, because, you know, I have my own business as well. DIY dream site and DIY dream site.com. diydreamsite.com. I was also wondering, like, when should I, if I want to do advertising, I want to pick one platform to start with because I sell child themes and all of those things that are so visually appealing. My initial inkling was to, if I was going to throw money at ads, either put it behind Pinterest ads or potentially like, Facebook ads versus, you know, like TikTok, I don't think is the right place for that. So, like, what's the, how do, how would you weigh out that decision?
[00:30:08] Speaker B: I think that touches on a really, really important and great question, which is knowing your audience, if you know that diydreamsite.com comma, you're just going to keep plugging everybody's website. If you know that your audience is on Pinterest and that they are visual and they are going to appreciate that visual aspect of it, then that's exactly where you should be. Another thing about this is every one of these platforms has experts that are trained on that platform that are more than happy to get people up and running, and it is in their best interest for you to have success. Like a lot of the times, yes, they're going to say, spend more money, spend more money. Of course they're going to say that. But it is in their best interest that you have success on their platform. Pinterest has a specific, a particularly helpful subset. I think their advertising experts were more than helpful, more so than the other platforms that I experienced with. So I would say absolutely reach out to them. And then all of these platforms have free tools for you to learn how to use them as well. So it's really zero risk to go on there. Start an account, talk to one of their experts, read the documentation, see how it's set up. And at the end of that process, you think that you could be effective there, then give it a try. But I think knowing your target audience and knowing where they live, if you know that your people are on Pinterest, then that's absolutely where you should be advertising. If you know they're on Reddit, you should absolutely be doing Reddit ads. If you know that they're on TikTok, then give it a try. Get Ben out there with the phone in front of them and get TikTok ads going.
[00:31:37] Speaker A: So what about the user who's like, I tried advertising, and it didn't work for me because they maybe threw $500 at it and said they blew through their budget. It's like going to the casino. You put one slot machine, you lose all your money. You're like, well, I hate casinos. This is ineffective. You know, it's kind of, sometimes it can feel like that. What would you say to that user who maybe has been burned by ads in the past and, yeah, what advice would you give them?
[00:32:04] Speaker B: Yeah, I think the piece of advice I'd give there, specific to that analogy, is advertising is not gambling. It shouldn't be. A lot of times, it does feel like rolling the dice and trying to go viral. And just because something doesn't go viral does not mean that it's not successful. Every dollar that you spend on there is going to give you so much information.
And if you've really failed on the advertising front and you've burned through money and you felt like you learned nothing, then I'd say, go re approach the data, and I bet you'll find something that will give you insights into your customers experience. Whether it's like, wow, when I really dig down, our Facebook pixel says that 100 people added the cart, but only two purchased. It's like, okay, what are your shipping costs? What's your checkout process like? Why are people getting to that point and then being turned off from the process, then go in and try to incentivize that, retarget people that have added the cart and not purchased with a 10% off coupon code. So if you've spent money on ads, you have not failed. You have gotten data. What you do with that data, that is going to be where the success comes, right? But there's always going to be insights that could be gleaned from the spend no matter what.
[00:33:17] Speaker A: I love that. That's actually really helpful. And then what about testing? I think some people are scared to continue to because it feels like burning money just to test and to get some data. So what's your philosophy on testing different ads?
[00:33:33] Speaker B: My philosophy is have a plan. Like have a budget, have a plan and stick to it. I was going to mention this later, but I'll bring it up. It's like monitor daily, analyze, or what was it? What was it I said earlier? It was monitor daily, tweak weekly. Right. So give your ads time to run, give them time to do their thing. But make sure that you're going in with a plan. Don't just say, well, I'm going to start this ad, I'll check in on it in a few weeks because that's the easiest way you could possibly burn money. Specifically said it. Say, I'm going to do a ten day test, I'm going to spend $100, I'm going to spend $50 of it on prospecting, 50 on retargeting, and then go in there, watch the ads, do their thing, adjust it after five, six, seven days when they've had time to go, and then make your decisions based off of data and not off knee jerk reactions. It's really easy to look at your dashboard and refresh it every five minutes and be like, oh, man, we've already spent dollar 20 and I'm not a millionaire yet, so this is a failure. I'm going to kill it. I'm going to stop, stick to your plan and know going into that, that at the end of your plan, you're going to have data that you could use to make decisions, whether it's going to continue to advertise, scale up or pull back. Those are all valid options that you should be considering when you're looking to establish your program.
[00:34:51] Speaker A: Yeah, that's probably a good stance to take as well when you're just looking at your own website analytics. If you have the same philosophy on both, then you can start making data driven decisions to move the needle in your business.
[00:35:02] Speaker B: Yeah, but data, yeah, yeah. I mean, on Facebook, they have what's called the learning phase. A lot of people are really freaked out by the learning phase.
It's not necess, it doesn't mean things aren't effective until they get out of the learning phase like some people might imply. But it does take time. It does take data for these algorithms to learn. You can't just go in and say, make me money, please. You do have to give it input, you have to collect that data. In a way, taking over the ads at GiveWp, we had already had multiple years of spending, were not necessarily the most effective spend. That wasn't as effective as it could have been. But I had the cheat code of starting off with a mountain of data. So being able to go in there and say, well, let's move this around, let's tweak this. Google already knew so much about our business at that point, and we had already spent x amount of dollars that it was relatively easy to go in there and steer it in the right direction once you have enough data. So the data is really like, that is, it's not a failure if you're learning, right? It's not a failure if you're collecting data and you can use that to make decisions.
[00:36:08] Speaker A: Nice. Okay. I also have one other thought, and it's somewhat related. So even if someone's not ready to spend ads yet, do you think that it's advantageous for them to put the Facebook pixel or the Pinterest tag on their website in order for them to start collecting, like, that user information so that when they are ready to run ads, they can do lookalike audiences? Like, is that a best practice that people should do on their website?
[00:36:36] Speaker B: I 100% think so. This is an unpopular thing. I know Facebook gets a lot of flack, especially Facebook ads and the Facebook pixel, but absolutely the easiest, lowest hanging fruit for a lot of businesses that have a pixel that want to start advertising is retargeting. Finding those people, like the example I said before, that have added the cart, but they haven't finished their purchase, that's your easiest, lowest hanging fruit audience that you're ever going to get with advertising. So that's a really good starting point. If you just want, like a lot of businesses just run $5 a day Facebook retargeting ads for people that visited their website, that didn't become a customer, and that could be a really effective advertising program. If that's what your appetite is and it's giving you the results that you're looking for, it doesn't have to be. Well, it's only successful if we scale to $5,000 a day and spend that $5 a day retargeting add to cart. No purchasers can be really profitable. Could be really effective if you're doing it right. So absolutely.
[00:37:35] Speaker A: That's great.
[00:37:36] Speaker C: Which we've said all this without the main thing. Like, a lot of people are setting their sites earliest. You do need to get analytics completely set up to where you can track this stuff. Don't run it without tracking because that's you're not going to learn.
[00:37:54] Speaker B: Absolutely. You definitely don't want to be flying blind. You want to have as much information as you possibly gather to make informed choices.
But there's so many resources out there to get you established with analytics to get you the Facebook pixel, make it really easy. A lot of our stellar products have Facebook integrations. Givewp has a free Facebook pixel integration. Givewp.com. if we're plugging URL's, might as well.
But yeah, so there, there are a ton of resources that make it relatively easy. There's not a single thing that any one of these listeners is going to do that hasn't been done and documented before on the Internet. So absolutely, don't be afraid to start and don't be afraid to ask questions too nice.
[00:38:38] Speaker A: Okay, I have a question for cadence, specifically, what's working now? Like, give us, give us a little behind the scenes of our ad strategy. Like, give us a tip?
[00:38:49] Speaker B: Yeah. One of the things that's working the best for cadence right now is how to build a link tree alternative. And I think when we wrote that blog post, I'm not going to speak on behalf of who wrote it, but I don't think it was necessarily a big blog post that got a ton of attention. But from an ads perspective, it's been one of our best hooking prospecting pieces that we have, just showing people like, hey, you could really easily spin up a Linktree alternative that's not on Linktree. Not to get in trouble with Linktree now, too, but that piece of prospecting has been really, really effective for us. And then we split. Most of our advertising budget is allocated for prospecting, and about 30% of it, I'd say, is for retargeting. Just from a Facebook perspective, on Google, it's a whole different monster, a whole different approach, for sure. But Google, we've had a lot of success with performance Max campaigns. Everybody has performance Max has been really great. And performance Max is essentially using Google's automated tools to you feed it a ton of assets and it'll decide placements for you and it'll decide the headlines that it wants for you and things like that. Sounds scary, but it's actually really, really cool and really effective.
[00:40:03] Speaker A: Wow, that's awesome.
[00:40:06] Speaker C: Is that how like periodically I'll search for a product and Amazon will come up as like, it has the product title and the headline and stuff, but it actually doesn't even take me to that product title. It takes me to like an Amazon search page. Is that the kind of thing that Amazon's doing where they're just grabbing, it's all like, Google's generating it for them?
[00:40:25] Speaker B: Possibly. Possibly. I mean, are you talking about like shopping ads where the product shows up at the top of your search feed?
[00:40:32] Speaker C: No, I'm talking about like ice. I like search for a product or something and am like, my daughter's not gonna listen to this. I'm buying my daughter a mountain bike for her birthday. So I was searching for a mountain bike for a eight year old and Amazon had an ad for a certain type of bike I was looking at. But when I clicked on that, it actually just took me to an Amazon search. And they don't sell that bike or no sellers on Amazon have that bike.
[00:41:01] Speaker B: I think you've stumped me with that question. It sounds like the audience network that's gotten a little bit funky in a Google audience network. It's on like 70% of the websites in the world or something like that. And sometimes audience network ads could get really bizarre. But no, that's interesting that it takes you just to a generic Amazon search and it doesn't even have the product that was in the ad.
[00:41:23] Speaker C: Yeah, the name. I mean, it had the name, but like, it implied that it would be there, but they didn't have it.
[00:41:30] Speaker B: Interesting.
I think we should send a complaint to Amazon.
I think Jeff should tackle this one.
[00:41:40] Speaker A: This has been so great of a conversation on ads. Do you have any other last minute tips that you want to share with our audience or pieces of advice?
[00:41:50] Speaker B: Yeah, I think the three biggest takeaways for tips would be know your audience. That's going to help you dictate where you want your placements to be, what platforms you should be on. If you know that your grandma's knitting group isn't going to be on TikTok, then don't do TikTok ads. Right. It seems basic, but knowing your audience is one of the most important things. When you're making decisions on planning for an advertising program, defining your goals is really important. If you know that impressions are a junk metric that you don't want to necessarily take into account as you're making your decisions, then don't use that as one of your navigating reference points. Right. So if you know it's going to be clicks and traffic, then optimize for clicks and traffic. If it's going to be purchases, make sure it's all set up properly. But track purchases. There are thousands of different metrics that you could be tracking, of which there are a ton in Google and all the resources that you need to learn about all these metrics are out there and free. Don't let anyone charge you to learn these things.
So define your goals and metrics and have a plan for them. And then again, monitor daily, tweak weekly, don't make knee jerk reaction decisions. You're never going to give your ads time to breathe, to learn, to grow if you're killing them right away. So let them run. Let some data come in and make decisions on a little bit more elongated basis if you want to really find success, those would probably be the big three. But also, don't be afraid to ask questions. There's so many resources out there for everybody to get started doing this for free. All of my training came from Facebook blueprint certification. Google has an online certification program that's completely free for their advertising platforms. You can become a Microsoft certified ad planner for free through Bing ads. All of these things are going to teach you more about different platforms, and all of them are going to have different things that you could extrapolate out about digital advertising in general. But all the best resources that exist out there are free. And I'll just keep saying that over and over again.
Co and diydreamstrike.com.
[00:44:04] Speaker A: Well, this has been great. Thank you so much for joining us. We're going to have to have you back on because you have other side projects that you built with cadence.
[00:44:11] Speaker C: Yeah, we haven't pinged all your, you know, set all your domains either, so.
[00:44:15] Speaker B: We have not scratched the surface quite yet, but I will be happily rejoining if big Billboard doesn't blacklist me from the cadence.
[00:44:25] Speaker A: Well, thanks again for joining us and we'll see you guys next. Next episode on the Cadence Beat.
[00:44:32] Speaker B: Thanks for having me.
