You are probably shutting down your best performing campaigns and don‘t even know it - Ep 007

Modern Marketers with Blake Beus and Greg Marshall

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Transcript

Greg Marshall 0:00 All right. So today a couple things we want to talk about. The first is delayed. Well, what would you call it? delayed data attribution? Yeah. And your ad account? Yeah, absolutely.

So you know, what I'm seeing currently right now, both in Facebook and Google is I'm seeing where you run a campaign for a few days, or whatever. And it's saying that you're not getting any leads or purchases or whatever event you're optimizing for, even though on your back end, you see leads coming in and you're seeing sales come in. But then the attribution is, at time showing up as late as 789 days later. So obviously, the challenge becomes shutting down campaigns that are actually working way too early. So right. What are some, I guess, ideas? tips are things to keep in mind from, from a tracking standpoint, in order we know, we're never gonna be 100%? No, but how do we have a habit to where at least it gives us 80 90%? accuracy? Yeah, to make the best decisions?

Blake Beus 1:09 Yeah. So I mean, we kind of have if, because when you're talking about that, it made me think of like two different sides of this, the first side of this is someone that's running ads for a client, right? Yeah, like, that's a problem you need to solve. Because if your client is looking at this, and saying, Hey, we're spending money, hundreds of dollars a day or whatever, and nothing's coming back, will, you know, now you're in the hot seat? Oh, yeah, to fix that. Whereas if you know, you're a business and everybody's running it in house, is a little bit of a different problem, because you have some responsibility. Whereas if it's your own business, you can, you can kind of play around with it, you you know, you're testing, whatever, but you're being paid to run. And so you're kind of on the hook of results right now. And so you've got to have that conversation that just surrounding what realistic expectations are what testing looks like. So that's the first thing I wanted to talk about. But the other thing is, is you always want to find some sort of a way you can kind of, I call it back your way into the data, again, and, and several different ways you can do that is the easiest, the easiest way. Easiest, this isn't as easy as it should be. But Google Analytics, Google Analytics will will track your UTM parameters, right? So whenever you set up a Google ad, or a Facebook ad, or anything, you have the ability to set up those UTM parameters and make them dynamic. So it actually pulls in the campaign name, or the ad set name or, or the ad ID or whatever. But that come up with a super simple methodology for naming those things and make sure those use UTM parameters are always set, then you can hop into Google and basically track track the flow, right? People landed on this page with these UTM parameters. And then how many of those people ended up on the you know, purchase conversion page or whatever, then you can at least show that data, because that that data has maybe a 24 hour delay. I mean, some of its real time, some of its not, there's a little bit of delay there. But it's, it's going to give you some high level data to say, Okay, these campaigns actually got, you know, some people to to the end goal, even though it's not getting reported back to the ads manager, we're seeing value from that. And if we turn these ads off, those are going to go away.

Greg Marshall 3:27 Got it? Well, here's here's a question I have. Yeah, based on that, because as a as being a business owner, myself, and having you know, we talked about last episode, the holistic marketing, I have the stomach to run, because I've just tracking overall revenue and azmin, right? Is there anything that could be harming you from an optimization standpoint, meaning, you know, Facebook, and Google, they say you have to have a certain number of events happening per week, in order for it to like, be fully optimized? Does that impact if the tracking is not coming back to the ads manager as effectively? Does that make your ad campaigns not as successful? Meaning can those ad campaigns not optimize?

Blake Beus 4:15 Yeah, I mean, we, we all want more data in there. And if that data is not getting reported back, of course, it's going to impact some things, though, if, if I were to make some guesses, I would make some guesses that both Facebook and Google, they've been at the ads game long enough that they know there's going to be some discrepancies there and there's going to be some delays there. And they're going to be kind of optimizing behind the scenes a little bit. But a lot of like a lot of the optimization happens with volume and honestly a lot of people in this position. They're they're not spending enough money to get 50 purchases a week. You have spending $100 a day or whatever. You're not going to see Realistically 50 purchases in a week anyway. So you might want to set your ads to optimize for an earlier funnel step, like as a cart or something like that. Anyhow,

Greg Marshall 5:11 yeah, yeah. So I think, you know, one thing that I've heard, you know, other kind of, I guess, attribution experts talk about is that the Facebook and Google, you can immediately optimize for purchase, or for lead with no data in your ad account? Because they say it's basing it off of other people's data. Is there any truth to that? I have no idea. I'd be honest to me, I think each ad account is technically like, unique in its own way, right?

Blake Beus 5:44 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's, I think the reality, and this is sheer gas, because I don't know, I've never worked at Google or Facebook. But I would say the reality is probably a little bit of a blend of you have your own ad account, unique data. But also, there's some larger data out there because they're collecting data on billions of people and their purchasing behaviors. So it's probably some sort of a blend. I don't know where that line is drawn

Greg Marshall 6:11 to. Could you imagine, you know, whoever writes these algorithms where they would be the greatest ad person of all time, because they would know exactly what to do?

Blake Beus 6:19 You wouldn't think so. However, being a software engineer for a long time, there's, Well, I'll tell you right now, everybody's code is garbage. Every honest. Microsoft's code is apples code is it's all absolute garbage. And the engineers, all of them behind the scenes are like, why is this? Garbage is terrible. So all of them think that way? And a lot of them would probably say, I don't know exactly how it works. Anyway, it's pretty big. Like it's a pretty big platform. But they would definitely have a lot more insight into key areas. But But let me ask you this. Are you seeing this more on like e commerce accounts or on simple funnels? Lead funnels? Like what are you seeing?

Greg Marshall 7:01 mostly on e commerce accounts? e commerce, mostly Shopify, mostly Shopify? What I'm also seeing, and here's kind of my thoughts is it could be also impacted because a lot of the users and a target markets that we're going after are iPhone users, right? And so that may be contributing to the delay, or lack of data coming in, right? And so looking for different ways and strategies to essentially manage the clients expectation of right, how not to essentially get freaked out, if things are working just fine, right? Like, if you're spending X amount of dollars, and you're getting a three, four or 5x on your shop, and your sales are kind of you know, consistent, and you keep growing that aspect and your sales keep growing with it. But the ads managers are showing that don't let the ads manager dictate your, your thoughts of should you shut things down and relaunch? Right, right. And for me as just like a business to me, I could easily see it and just go Yeah, I mean, this is obviously impacting, because if we turn them off, which I've done with some plans for just turn them off, to see if they are impacting the sales or not, and the sales like Dang, yeah, they know like, oh, okay, so although the ads manager is saying this results happen, it's actually not 100%. True. It's only part of the story.

Blake Beus 8:27 Right? Right. Well, and I mean, the reason I asked about platforms too, is it all kind of depends. But I've seen some platforms. So for example, I use a cart software for my membership called pay kickstart, and allows me to put custom fields in there, and then they can be hidden custom fields on the payment page. Okay. And so if I want to just get some basic data on which campaigns are working, I've actually done this before, I've created several fields that will have that are hidden, that have the UTM parameters for campaign source, you know, those different things so I could put, you know, the sources Facebook, the campaign, is this campaign, the, the ad set, I could put under medium or, or whatever I like, how can you use those, and I can dump those in there. And then that data is associated with that person. Well, with that purchase specifically, and then, you know, I can run a report against that and say, Hey, you know, even though the ads managers and pointing this, we captured manually these fields, and this report says that, you know, these 20 people purchased based on this campaign Got it. Got it, right. And so that data does not even get reported back into an ads manager from that card. But I've collected that data and you can do that with many CRM platforms, right? Like Yep, whether you're using you know, for your email platform like HubSpot, or you know, use drip, calm, ConvertKit, all of these, all of those allow you to put in custom fields got it. And so most payment platforms will They have an integration with those will allow you to send custom fields to them. Yeah. So there's a little bit of a technical aspect for me, that's no big deal. Yeah. But maybe it's worth finding a developer to help you connect some of those dots.

Greg Marshall 10:15 Well, what about? So my next question would be with tracking issues and whatnot? How does the iOS changes impact a Google Analytics?

Blake Beus 10:25 There's, there is definitely a decrease in the accuracy there. But Google, I don't know, I feel like Google's much better at gathering that stuff and got to be sure they're compliant than Facebook is at this point. But there's definitely a decrease in the precise data. But I would say the high level data is probably probably good enough. And I don't think I don't think iOS has said that they're blocking simple UTM parameters. I think what they're mostly blocking what they've announced they're blocking is, like, personally identifiable types.

Greg Marshall 11:02 Got it. Got it. So and I've also heard that as well. So I was just curious, on your opinion, because, you know, Google Analytics, I feel like it's pretty accurate. I mean, obviously, like, everything else is not 100 accurate, but it's accurate enough to at least give you some kind of direction, what you should do next.

Blake Beus 11:21 Right. Right. And and that's, you know, honestly, that's good enough. I feel like, I feel like a lot of marketers, myself included, got a little lazy with the level of data that we had, yeah, we could just rely on this, like, pretty precise data. And forget about all the other things, forget about the marketing message, get about the angle, forget about all of that stuff. Because we have the data, right, we just had to trick the algorithm and putting it in front of you have enough people cheap enough, and we would come out on top. Whereas we're we're kind of in the process of seeing, seeing us revert back to, to only being able to have some high level data. Yeah, I think I think of direct mailing. Yeah, back in the day, I mean, still happens right now, back in the day, like the 50s 60s, direct mailing was huge. And you didn't get that feedback very fast. In fact, you got it very slowly, very slowly.

So you had to put a lot of time and effort into your marketing angle and message, because you had to spend the money, send the letters all the way out. And how you did split testing back then is you would say, Okay, I'm gonna mail everybody in Detroit, and I'm gonna give like half of them this, this envelope style and the other half this envelope style, and I'm going to see which ones convert better. And that's and you just have to wait and, and you would have a different phone number for them to call and the ups of those, so you knew which, which envelope packaging style I got. So you know, for the next one,

Greg Marshall 12:47 you know, it's funny that you bring that up, because think about the imagine the people in the 50s and 60s direct mail markers. were complaining that this isn't, you know, precise, right? Imagine what they would think this is the greatest thing of all time. The amount of data we still have, yeah, so access to

Blake Beus 13:09 Yeah, and and, and we're just gonna keep getting better and better at you know, the platforms are gonna get better and better at making sure that this data is good enough. Yeah, while also respecting the privacy of people. Yep. Right. And if you if you really think about it, personally, I don't really need to know which specific person Yeah, made it from the ad, through the ads platforms really want that data. But me as an advertiser, I don't care quite so much about the specific person that made it from the ad all the way through purchase, as I do, the high level data of this campaign has worked many purchases, and therefore it's working. So I can, I can put my time and effort into that. And that that right, there is not too terribly hard to have, essentially two sources of data on the ads platform, and then an analytics platform. I do wish Google Analytics was just a little bit easier to use. Yeah, they just they just launched about a month ago, a month and a half ago, actually. Time flies. It's been like four months, they launched Google Google Analytics for the brand new property. I've been playing around with that some things a little easier. I mean, be super curious to see how that. Yeah, how that helps. But yeah,

Greg Marshall 14:18 well, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this. So you know, I'm asking a lot of kind of, because we've done this together, and you're the expert in this kind of tracking back and you don't I mean, yeah. What about audience overlap? So that's, that's something that I hear all the time about. You have to avoid it in order to get better results. But I don't know if I'm 100% sold on that. And I haven't heard a specific kind of number, or how that would actually how much does it impact it and I'll give you an example. I'm currently running a test for high end jewelry business. And I'm breaking all the rules when it comes to what they say you should be doing on the ads platform. And I have heavy overlap. In fact, I have a retargeting campaign that's hitting the same audience. But I got six campaigns going towards the same exact guy, obviously different messages. And I checked to see how much does that impact cpms, which is essentially the cost, you got to pay for that traffic. And then I checked historic cpms when we never had overlap, there's like literally almost no change. Yeah, so the CPM is almost exactly the same. So my question to you is, do you think audience overlap is really that detrimental? Because the value that I think that I see is I'm able to show, if I have a lot of products, I'm able to show that audience more to give myself more chances for them to buy something versus having to just rely on just like showing them a few and then open that, you know, if those don't work, let me swap it out again, but new ones in front of

Blake Beus 16:12 me. So let me ask you this, is each campaign for a different product group, or like grouping of products? Are they all the same?

Greg Marshall 16:18 different product grouping? So like one's earrings, another's necklaces? And others rings? And and Okay, and so that's, that's how I have it set up. And I thought we've had personally, you know, with you and I were running campaigns, we've had some successful campaigns where we have Yeah, technically a lot of overlap and tons. And I mean, it's at one point we had, I think the same like five or six. Yeah. Ad sets that were literally the exact same ads, and they were for the same offer. And it was a we barely even changed the mess. I think we even had the same message. I think we have the same. Yeah. Yo, what? Explain that, because I know a lot of people in the advertising space, and it feels like I don't know, if it's Facebook, or Google raps, or people who have influenced us to think this is their, like, how concerned should you really be about and if there was an audience overlap? What percentage would even guess? Like if let's say you're getting $10 per purchases? Well, if you have audience overlap, does that go to $12? I mean, because I wouldn't really care. Yeah, if it went from 10 to $100. Versus now that that's an issue. Yeah, but if it's very incremental, I think you can actually gain more than you can lose Yeah, I got to hear your thoughts

Blake Beus 17:39 Yeah, I think it's good so I have a lot of thoughts surrounding this and my first thought is I don't think any one person on this planet and I don't even think the ads reps you know those guys get the call with you? I don't think they know because I've gotten different answers from different people. Yep.

Greg Marshall 18:02 Those guys I call all of my customers in the fourth quarter to freak them out. But keigo

Blake Beus 18:10 side note Simon, I had a conversation with a LinkedIn advertiser, okay. You know free free the rep the rep rep call works for LinkedIn and it was it was a good call I liked it. It had some good information. But then I talked with someone that runs an agency in France that does very much just LinkedIn ads for people and he's like yeah most of the stuff that guy told you does not work yeah, so that's he's like places he was working and I trust that guy more because he's actually spending his serious his serious money his money on those ads and the advertiser some guy that probably got hired on LinkedIn to help people feel good about it maybe has been through a few courses but probably hasn't actually spent any hard Yeah, hard earned cash on ads. So so that's just this is the thing I will take every one of those calls I can because sometimes there's a nugget in there that I haven't thought about but I'll test but I wouldn't take anything they say for gospel truth you know,

Greg Marshall 19:12 yeah, I think you know, one of the things that's really funny because the reps I think I've only talked to one or two reps ever between Facebook and Google that have actually given me information that I was like, okay, maybe this this could help right but unfortunate I've also been given I think some I will call it just lower level Okay, we'll call it lower level advice. That is not that just didn't get the results that we were really hoping Yeah, cuz I don't want to you know, obviously trash these guys. These guys are doing a job. No, they are and and I think the services that we're getting are great. I just think some of the information that maybe they're sharing isn't always 100% applicable to every business? Right? That's where my question with the audience overlap. I know, I've heard that. I don't know how many times from advertising reps. But you don't want to have overlap. You don't want to have this. But some of my best results have come from having unbelievable overlap.

Blake Beus 20:21 Yeah. So. So this, this is where I get, you know, I said, No, I don't think anyone knows, for sure. So my actual theory is, it probably doesn't matter as much as it used to. Just looking at how algorithms work and everything, you you can write them in so many ways, but they probably wrote in ways where you have kind of buckets of data right bucket, you have this bucket of data surrounding the ad, bucket of data surrounding the ad group bucket of data surrounding the the campaign. And it's less sophisticated to kind of keep those isolated, right. But it's more powerful if you can blend that data in into an algorithm that works. And I feel like especially for Google, because they've been out for a long time. I feel like with Google, they probably have that down. Yeah. And and the reason it was probably an issue early on with Facebook, and probably early on with Google was it's how it your their ad exchanges, right. So if you think about like the stock exchange and everything, you're basically bidding for eyeballs, you're you're bidding against other advertisers, eyeballs, and a lot of people tend to forget that. Yeah. And so if you had two overlapping audiences, the theory was that you were bidding against yourself and driving up your own costs, because you're you're basically bidding against those exact same eyeballs. And that was probably true early on, I would hazard a guess that Facebook and Google have put significant effort and lots and lots of money into making sure that that's not a problem. Yeah. Because they want people to spend money with them. Yeah. And if if I'm trying to scale, and I'm not scaling in a way that fits the algorithm perfectly, and it ends up costing me a lot of money, I quit, I quit running ads, and so and so I'm confident that they have, if it's an issue in the past, it's less of an issue now, and it will probably be even less of an issue moving forward. Unless there's some sort of unintentional bug or something like that. But they want to keep their advertisers happy. I mean, Facebook, specifically, and both of them are Facebook and Google, their whole revenue model is, like 70 80% ad revenue. Yeah. So they want to keep people spending money. And to keep people spending money, they want to give them a good advertising experience that makes them money as well. And they don't want to have these weird things where you're bidding against yourself and driving up the cost. Yeah. And

Greg Marshall 22:48 that, you know, and that makes sense. Because one of my theories of, you know, kind of when you find an audience, you go deeper within that audience is because I know we're talking about algorithms and the internet and all that, but I like to mentally move things into like real life, right? Yeah. So if, let's let's break a town down for, for example, right? Let's, if I'm selling high end jewelry, or something very expensive. I obviously can't sell everyone in this town. But there's a section of the town that makes a lot of money. Yeah. And they're perfectly in the market for these types of products. So I want to invest as much money as possible. It's just that section right there. And I want to show them everything I got. Yeah, right. Because it makes no sense to talk to anyone else if they're not in the market, right. But if you want to scale and get more sales, then I want to show them more of these things. That's my theory of using an audience that works and showing them more and more different offers, but still targeting that same group, because it makes no sense to go like Well, I have these two products, so I'm not going to show them the rest of them until like I only show them these two, and those kind of burn through and then I'll bring in the next two, versus just show it to them all the time and just always be in their face. That's my theory on why I've had success and a lot of success with audience overlapping and essentially breaking that rule. So

Blake Beus 24:24 and I think, I think ecommerce is a perfect example of you can probably break a lot of rules because you have products that appeal to people in different ways. Yep. Right. So high end jewelry store, watches, earrings, whatever. If it's not gender based then then you have lots of ways you can overlap lap that household, right or, or anything like that. And it applies to just about anything you think about, say say I was running ads selling baseball supplies. We were talking about baseball earlier, right? You have a town. And not everybody in the town watches baseball. Not everybody in the town is ready to buy a bat. But they might be ready to buy a glove. Yep. Right? Yep, they might be they might last year or a couple months ago hadn't thought about this. But now they're the, the the coach for their daughter's t ball team or something like that. And they need, you know, a T ball stand and some practice equipment and one of those sticks with the ball on the end. Yeah. After run after the ball, you know, and but you don't know, you might know from an ads perspective that they're interested in baseball, but that doesn't mean they're interested in buying things, buying, you know, a bat or your love. You show them lots of stuff. Yeah. And then, you know, and then they have the opportunity.

Greg Marshall 25:46 The reason to I bring up the there's actually an aspect that I think I'm leaving out. So that also the thought process based on that, you know, when you have an ad set or an ad group, right? Facebook tends to show one of the offers or to the offers more than the other. Right? And so, it I've tested this as well, if you have an ad set with like 10 different products on, like, seven of them never even get seen. Yeah, right. And so what ends up happening is you make all these ads, but they're not being seen, right? And it just keeps running. Yeah. So instead, I broke it down to where the ad set or the ad group can only there's only two options. Yeah. So it's like essentially a be testing itself. But then I'm targeting the same audience multiple times, showing two different products, two different products, right. So that I'm essentially forcing these ads to be shown to this audience, and then I can start making decisions on this one's just not resonating at all right? And I'm only looking at CPM to really see if the cost of my traffic is going going up or not. Yeah. And as of right now has been gone for a few weeks. Once again, as I've tracked this between historical and now, there's been no change in cost.

Blake Beus 27:04 Yeah, yeah. And that's zero. The CPM is something that a lot of people ignore when they're running ads, especially at first. Yeah, right. Seasoned advertisers, they know what they're looking for. But a lot of people they're like CPM, its cost for 1000 impressions. Yeah, is what it stands for. Yeah. And but what don't people what what a lot of people don't realize is that is the core metric that shows how much you're getting charged, yes, your cost per purchase. And those things, that's not how much you're getting charged. That's what the numbers ended up being the math, what you're actually being charged is is cost per impression per 1000 impressions. And so and, and this varies from industry to industry. So with, with my conversation ad LinkedIn that I'm doing for one of my clients, the CPM for that, is I think we're $350 Okay. But it's a conversation ad that gets sent out to people, it's a messenger, it's like a bot, it's very bizarre, our our engagement rate on that is like 80%, yep. And we've only spent a total of $27 at this point, right. And so it because but it's a very targeted ad for very specific purpose for very specific group of people in the audience is only 1800 people there. So, you know, we don't care, the CPM is high. But if you're running, you know, ecommerce ads to things brought on to a broad audience, your CPM is what you're getting charged, you want to look at that. And you know, it could be $10 per 1000, or $50 per 1000, depending on your industry and cost of your product and all these different things, but you need to have that baseline, and then that baseline can help you judge you know, your other campaigns and effectiveness. Here's, in fact, the

Greg Marshall 28:52 way you're explaining you know, cuz you and I, we're in the digital marketplace, we know like, cost per 1000 impressions like that makes sense in our brains, because we're looking at all that, right? So the way I like to explain it to my clients, so that it's an easier I guess, understanding is I go imagine this, you're selling your shirt for $25. And the cost for you to purchase that shirt, or to sell it is 10. Now, if you can get that shirt for five, you'd be more profitable. Now if you have to automatically start buying that shirt at 20 or 25. Now you're no longer profit. Nothing changed about the product. Yeah, the only thing that changed was the cost right for you to get it and so sometimes I think you can get caught up in like, yeah, you know, the, you know, something's going on or whatnot. And you can realize, well, nothing's changed, your numbers are the same. Your conversion rates are the same. All these changes the cost of the actual product, and in this sense, in this case, it's to get your ad in front of eyeballs and so It's an interesting experience that I have with a seat, I could not figure out why this one client was getting a super high CPM for the same audience that she had gotten in the past. And it's a broad audience. So I was like, How is this even possible? And I even tested on other clients accounts, because they're kind of going after the same person and all of their cpms are way lower. Right? So I was like, this is very odd. And I'm talking six times more expensive, really, six times. So I was like, wow, either this is really competitive audience or something's going on here. So what I did was I actually went to Google Analytics, I looked into the site speed, okay. And I noticed Facebook truly does care how fast your website is, I always thought that was just theory, because I looked at the checkout time. 15 seconds. You want to know why, why they had all these plugins, they had too many plugins, slowed everything down. And so I looked at I was like, wow, 15, one time, 71 time choice. So we got rid of all of them. All right, and we reduced the time to five seconds, which is still slower, but that way better than 15. Our cpms drop, like, right back towards the supposed to be

Blake Beus 31:20 Yeah. Yeah. And I'm not surprised one bit by that just learning for me. Yeah, it's you again, you you want to you want to think about what you know, Facebook and Google are trying to achieve here. Yeah. And they want to make these experience good. And everyone knows, if you have a slow loading website, it's insanely frustrating. I mean, there's anecdotally, I heard this thing, if you want to know, you know, before you get in a long term relationship, or get married or whatever, you want to see someone kind of you have them use a little Wi Fi connection. Yeah. And see how that goes. Yes, that that will really bring out the worst in someone. Yeah. Right. And that's the same thing with people get so frustrated with with load times, and they're not happy with that experience. And so you're going to start seeing indicators, like a lot of people hitting the page and leaving. Yep. And, and so yeah, site speed is, is honestly one of the first things I always look for when we're not getting the results we want is his site speed. And a lot of people a lot of business owners don't think about that, because they're not technical, and I get it, but you need to, and honestly, I mean, I'll tell you right now, there's a couple of tools people can use, okay. One is called gt metrics. It's free, you just go there, you put in, you put in any any URL on your page, product, page homepage, whatever. And it will go through and analyze the page, give you a score, you know, A through F Yep. And then we'll give you some recommendations on how to make it faster. The other one is called Google PageSpeed. insights, again, a free tool, you put it in there, it will give you some different different answers and results. Now, don't get too hung up on the letter grade, both of them will kind of give you that because sites like Shopify and stuff, there's only so much you can do a lot of it's on Shopify side. But you can definitely make improvements on your side. If you're like me, and you like write your own code, everything, like I can do a lot of stuff, I host my own servers and everything. But most people don't do that I would never host my own e commerce server, it's gonna be Shopify. But, you know,

Greg Marshall 33:20 so basically, and in which it makes sense, on your end, right, one of the things I've picked up and learn from you. And trust me, I would have never even thought to look at that if it wasn't for working with you. Because honestly, I'm just looking at the ads part, right? So I'm looking at and here's the part I left out, the link, click through rates were the same, everything was the same, and but the cpms kept going higher and higher. And that's like you said, like, the first thing you think of is to look at sites view what's going on with the site. And that's the last thing actually, I was thinking home. And then I go and I go, Wow, who would have thought that the experience truly made that much of a difference. So much so that it was charging me six times more? Yeah, for the same audience that other people are going after including the same ad account, because the user experience was perceived as bad on Facebook. And so that was a huge learning experience for me, because now like, okay, so you do really have to make sure that your site speed is quick and that the user expect you have to think the user experience must be good, or you will get charged more from the app level. Yeah.

Blake Beus 34:31 And on that, in that same vein, we start talking about user experience. About 80% of traffic on most sites, today's mobile, yeah, so you have to have not only a good load speed on a desktop, but also on a mobile device. And you need to have any is to be mobile friendly and easy to navigate. And both Facebook and Google have a lot of information on how to determine automatically if your site is easy to use on mobile or not. And so that's that's the other thing to think about. You And you know for me that's second nature I think about that stuff all the time because I've been in this realm in that side of I approached marketing from a software engineer side and then and then moved over into the marketing technology side so for me that's very natural whereas my oftentimes the things that come unnatural for me oftentimes like marketing messaging angles and hooks yeah like I have to put a lot of effort into that because that does not come natural to me it comes natural to people like you that came from a sales background and and then moved over into the marketing and digital marketing side of things

Greg Marshall 35:33 this is why I think you know, we're doing this podcast I think the information to me is very valuable because you have any both right you can't you can't be too heavy on one or the other now or you'll be missing out on the true potential of what your business can do marketing wise and at the end of the day really profit was yeah because we're doing all this to make sure that we can maximize profits our our e commerce stores and our lead generation for our service based businesses. So I think all this is important and one thing that he talked to me about want to say was two or maybe three weeks ago that I thought was very interesting and maybe we might have to just dedicate another episode for this but you had mentioned that these ad platforms may have a bias towards certain platform I have actually and when I say bias both negative and positive Yeah, I have actually I don't know if I want to say the software name but I have seen a negative kind of performance from a certain brand when you send traffic there the cpms are much higher it appears that Google and Facebook not like this software very very much but maybe we have to go through that on another episode.

Blake Beus 36:58 Well, maybe maybe we just tease it and I'm okay saying the software in our next episode Yeah, but you'll have to you'll have to subscribe so you can hear that next one because I think you and I are probably thinking about the same software and and I've got a few ideas we got a few ideas of some other other software's platforms that are you know, maybe a little bit better Yes, and other things like that but yeah, let's uh you know, why don't we wrap it up here we'll wrap it up, wrap it up here Greg. How can people get in touch with you?

Greg Marshall 37:30 They could go to my website Greg marshall.co and if you want to follow me You can find me on Instagram or Facebook just type in Greg Marshall and then what are you what do you help people with I'm mostly help them out with their social media paid ads marketing strategy, and best practices everything that we've talked about today

Blake Beus 37:47 and I do know for a fact that oftentimes you loop in consulting and insights on surrounding email marketing and how to even text marketing those other things so how to how to how to make it a more holistic app we've talked about in the past so yeah, okay, cool.

Greg Marshall 38:06 How do they get in touch? In fact I have a quick question for Yeah, if someone needs your help specifically and I would recommend people reach out with tracking or making sure that their pixels or their anything that's necessary in the back end to help optimize their business how they get a hold and

Blake Beus 38:27 yeah so like these comm is the best place to kind of get a hold of me You can you can contact me on on that site there

Greg Marshall 38:35 and are you actually taking clients current I know you're busy so are you actually accepting new clients

Blake Beus 38:41 so I am in a limited capacity I'm being very picky about about who I love helping people which is why I can help a lot of people with this podcast Yeah, but I also am human and yeah so many hours a family like you and I've gotten you know, other priorities outside of work. But I will tell you this I have I'm wearing multiple hats at this moment. So the first thing is I have I have a group where I give I help people with social media marketing and it's like a group coaching consulting with some dumb few aspects called SM three you can find that at Blake Beus comm slash SM three and then I also just recently partnered with a company called aviation that helps people with WordPress website set making sure that it's hosted on a good platform, it's fast and you get the help you need over time it's not a it's not necessarily a will build your new website. It's uh, if you want a website that's always going to be maintained and you can't bring you know you can hire someone full time or whatever. I hope I help people with that guys. So those are kind of the two things I'm working on right now. The two parallels I'm working in that really play on my strengths in both areas. So yeah, well,

Greg Marshall 39:54 Fantastic episode. I think we we dropped a lot of gems in this one, I think All right.