How Not to Waste a Bunch of Money on Crappy Ad Campaigns

welcome to the ecommerce podcast with matt edmondson a show that brings you regular interviews tips and tools for building
your business online [Music]
well hello and welcome to the ecommerce podcast with me your host matt edmondson
a show all about how to grow your online business and every week i get to talk to some
amazing people uh from around the world around the world of e-commerce and i get to ask
them all kinds of weird and wonderful questions about what they know and how it's going
to help us uh develop our own online businesses now in today's show we are getting into
ads especially paid ads as we look at how not to waste a bunch of money
on crappy ad campaigns that's right that topics and shivers down my spine let me tell
you the murky word of paid media i don't know about you but i have made some right howlers
in this area with my own e-commerce companies so i am stoked let me tell you to be
talking today with jared spiwak now i'm going to be asking jared about the biggest mistakes uh
that we make with our marketing we're going to dig into conversion tracking and why i
should really care about it as well as you know what are some of the key areas we need to be
aware of when starting an ad campaign now jared is the founder and lead
strategist of blue dog media a boutique strategy first agency that
helps exceptional businesses run sophisticated roi positive marketing campaigns to fuel
long-term growth without he says and i think it's true from what i know of jared without all
the typical agency bs so it's going to be great to talk to him about all this now
before we get jared on let me tell you all of the notes from today's show
will be available as a free download on our website just head on over to
ecommercepodcast.net forward slash to download them this is episode number
and so if you go to ecommercepodcast.net forward slash you can get access to those now
uh without further ado we're going to bring jared on but before i do if you are watching this live
on facebook or youtube as we do the interview feel free to join in the comments uh ask your questions and say hi be
great to connect with you and understand where you're where you are in the world uh as we are now broadcasting this
uh interview recording when we do when we record the interviews for the podcast live on facebook and youtube that's right
we're trying this simulcasting thing and so when it works it's awesome uh so if you're on there come
join us now let's get jared onto the show let me click the button here on my
control pad and hopefully he is there hey hey jared how are we doing
yeah not too bad can't complain about yourself you know what i was it i have to say i
can't complain either i think considering the the world in which we live right now um i am i am i am grateful for health
uh and for business jeremy and it's it's that kind of thing um where where about i'm in liverpool
where abouts are you right now it's looking very different from the time zones yeah i'm in new hampshire so i live
about an hour north of boston okay and is it is it crazy weather there or are we doing all right
well i i don't know how to calculate it to celsius but in terms of fahrenheit in the winter we can get below uh negative in the summer it
can get like here so we have both ends of the spectrum depending on the day it's anywhere from freezing to
mild wow okay uh it looks like your videos oh there we go
your video froze for a little bit there it sort of is a bit intermittent but we can hear you uh that's the main thing even when
the video freezes now uh have you are you from new hampshire have you have you moved there how did that work
out uh yeah basically so i was born in massachusetts
and then we moved to new york when i was baby two or three years old
and then my sister was born and then we ended up moving to new hampshire so my dad's family is primarily from mass my mom certainly
moved to new york so then we moved there then once they had my sister moved to new hampshire when i was five and i've
been here ever since and i probably live like within like a stone's throw of
the first place we ever lived wow okay sort of stayed where you are you enjoy
the winters and enjoy the summers of new hampshire i have to admit it's one of the few places that i've not actually been to
um i've not been to boston i've not been to massachusetts i've been most of the states have not been to those particular parts but it is
definitely on my bucket list to to head there let me tell you yeah well if you head over here definitely do so
around august september best time of year to do so okay point taken sir i shall remember
that um so uh you run a company called blue dog media which is a sort of you
call it a boutique agency so how did you what's your journey been into the to this point so far how did we
you know not from birth but how did we get from from from where we are to where you're at now
well the the start of the story actually doesn't start too far off from it so when i was
i was in high school at the time and i needed to figure out how to make money online because i was going to start
going to college when i was and i had to figure out how to make money to pay for it so from there i got
kind of involved in the world of you know online money if you will between like e-commerce and marketing and all these
sort of terms i started to learn about and from there i went to went to school for marketing got a degree in marketing
i quickly moved to a corporate marketing job when i was i was there for about a year very
quickly learned that the corporate life just really isn't for me so kind of when i decided that that
wasn't gonna that wasn't gonna be what i was gonna do for long term i ended up signing up for a website called upwork which was
much smaller nowadays than it is today this was uh quite soon after their merger yeah
so sign up for the site i was working for about five dollars an hour kind of doing anything and marketing from media
basically anything that someone would pay me for in the marketing or digital side of things i was doing
after a bit of time i kind of narrowed down to for a while i was only worried about seo got a job offer from a
seo mark well for a marketing agency it was more full service to be on their seo team offering me
double what i was making at the corporate job in a work from home position so i was out of the corporate job within two
weeks get my notice i was out of there worked from home over time my freelancing that i was doing on the
side while also working for the agency grew and went from full time down to part-time to eventually no time that was
towards the end of and then from the end of to the first couple months of
i was freelancing full-time i had all these clients i was like what's the next step for me the next logical step was to form an
agency so that's primarily what i've done uh since then and you know like any kind of um
psychopathic entrepreneur i have a bunch of other ventures that i'm always building working on and
i love that phrase yeah i love that phrase psychopathic entrepreneur i'll be using that i'll i'll be using that that's brilliant
i find though um and i don't know if you find the same joy the story that you've told is not it's
not an uncommon one that actually i started here um earning very little money but enjoying what i
was doing and i kind of went from a to b a little bit started to freelance started to do this
side hustle eventually that became a big thing and now i have you know now i have my business
um and it's i don't know is it is it is it as common as i think it is i think
it's quite a common story but uh do you find that's quite a common story um it can be so i i know a lot more
people in this space than like the world of online business that has a similar story than i know in any other space
but one of the challenges with the online stuff between both on the and
i think this is also very similar in the e-commerce world is that on the agency side both in the e-commerce or drop shipping you know however you're kind of
you know amazon fba et cetera what's very common is there is also a lot of people who are
coming from a lot of different walks of life that were sold some sort of uh
internet gurus course and now they're you know starting their own things we also run into that a lot which makes
uh you know there's a lot of really interesting players in both of our spaces there's also a lot of really dodgy players in both of our spaces
yeah yeah yeah i know exactly what you mean uh i think
anyone listening actually to the show will know exactly what you mean too because that that i i i totally get an understand
so how for you is the world of agency you've been doing it a little while now it it you know it's um is it going well i
mean but before we came on on live you were talking about the fact you're in the middle of a rebrand so i assume it's
going well and you're moving onwards and upwards yeah so it's gone pretty well i think
every year since we started basically doubled revenue last year in i think we two and a half extra revenue and i think
we increased profit margins by about or so so it's it's been going
pretty well in my opinion yeah they're nice figures aren't they we're two and a half x that turnover
just everyone's going oh that's nice let's do that yeah yeah and we can increase our profit margins at the same time that's great
so let me i mean before we get into this whole ad thing um have you built your agency sort of using
your own medicine if you like have is it what we're going to talk about tonight is this how you've built it how you grew
two and a half x how you've increased productivity uh profitability
not yes and no so what a lot of so what we are are a boutique agency and what that
means is that we focus on having a very small client base a small team and we've spent a lot more
time working on improving what we do rather than just taking on the volume of people and so because of that a lot of
the time we're really only one or two clients off from being at max capacity so we don't
need to run you know super extensive uh marking campaigns for ourselves because a lot of the time what we're getting from
uh like the podcast that we're doing or the talks that we're giving or the youtube videos that we put out uh
you know that's bringing us more than we can handle as it is so it just hasn't made a lot of sense to
do uh too extensive stuff but on the side of uh you know seo what we're doing for a lot of clients is ranking them on google
where for what i'm also doing on our end which helps us quite a bit is ranking on youtube uh i we get i get a lot of stuff from
youtube uh even stuff that i've put out years ago that i didn't even know i did uh like like i recorded a video with someone
they just happen to put it on their youtube channel and then two years later it's ranking pretty well and then all of a sudden a couple people
are mentioning i'm like oh yeah i forgot i did that so youtube has been pretty good for that
a lot of the traffic that we get from our site just because the nature of the industry is other agencies which we don't work with
other agencies and so we'll get a lot of other agencies that'll reach out and be like hey that's why you labeled this which we just don't
do yeah yeah yeah don't don't like okay now you make an interesting statement about
youtube there because i've been having this debate a little bit with our guys back at hq and i've
um i've been on a few podcasts and we've had conversations about this and this is i find it's fascinating when people talk
about social media and youtube and for me um
my my observation is actually you can have a small number of subscribers on youtube
um and be more profitable than having subscribers on social media like
twitter or you know um instagram uh but we tend to go after the instagram followers rather
than the youtube subscribers and for me i think we've got it i don't know it just feels like we've got it a
little bit backwards because like you say i put out a video seven years ago and people still contact
me from a video that was seven years ago so it's a very similar story to yours
um and so yeah it's just been a really interesting conversation we've been having internally about do we
focus more on youtube when we look at these results and and what comes in as a result from where
i don't know if you've got any thoughts on this any wisdom yeah so social media certainly isn't my
um my main strength but i do youtube is massively underutilized by a
lot of businesses there's a lot of um i mean even when it comes to both the organic and the ad
side of things it's rare that we're working with a company that has any sort of video in the first place
and it's so easy to kind of maximize because that you on social media your content
lives and dies on that platform most of the time like if i post something on twitter unless it's something super there's a
very little chance that that's going to get shared around a lot of places outside of the twitter ecosystem where if i share something on youtube if
i post a video that might get embedded on other people's blog posts people might share that on
facebook or on twitter so it's actually sharing it on the other social media networks it's going to get a lot more engagement it's going to
last for a lot longer it's going to be a lot more uh discoverable where on social you're more so playing with
who are your followers right now and how can you get them to share your stuff so their followers can follow you
or on something like youtube anyone can search for that if they search on google search your youtube video could show up
if they search on youtube search your youtube video could show up um so and so forth so i think youtube is massively
underutilized especially for kind of showing the inner workings of of
a company so something that that i'll mention e-commerce businesses sometimes is they'll be like well
the reason why we're more expensive than our competitors is because our competitors
outsource all their manufacturing and they use companies that use child labor in a bunch of you know third world
countries and then that's because we do everything locally that's why we're more expensive but we
think that this is the better path for our company like okay great well if nobody knows that they can't value that all they're seeing
is that you're more expensive how about you create a video showing off you manufacturing your product and go huh
it's kind of funny that our competitors never do this because they can't they can't show you that yeah
you know the other side of the world and be like okay great here's the people that we hired that this you know the only reason that they
were able to produce our products for so cheap is because we exploit labor laws in other countries yeah
very very good very true very true well there's a lot of value just in that
in that opening statement about youtube isn't there i think um so let's talk about ads uh let's
let's jump straight into this um what are the biggest mistakes then that
businesses make with their marketing so let's let's look at that maybe from an ads point of view let's start digging
some of these mistakes straight away where would you start with that question sure so
i think the the biggest mistake that people make is that they start on step five rather
than step one and that is often that they go through their you know let's say
their google ads campaign and they start off with keywords they start off with placements
they start off with you know whatever it may be that is not that's not a strategy keywords are not a
strategy a placement is not a strategy a strategy is fundamentally why are you
advertising who are you advertising for what is the objective of what you're doing and most people don't start off there
most agencies don't either when they're working with their clients which is a a massive issue yeah and so what
happens is let's take a a fictitious e-commerce company that sells
running shoes and what they do most often is okay great we sell running shoes we're going to
run ads for people looking for running shoes okay great that's going to be really
expensive the conversion rates are going to be fairly low and you there's no segmentation there
there's no audiences there's no cohorts you're there's no real strategy there where what we focus on is before we even
come up with keywords we're probably two weeks into planning stuff and we're looking at okay
well who are you actually selling to okay well uh of your customers are
susan so we're going back to buyer personas so giving a name to a cohort okay great of your customers are
susan she's a white middle-class woman who has a good job she lives in a cul-de-sac and she gets together with all of her
girlfriends at the end of the week and they all talk about how they used to look so much better before in high
school when you know they were you know on the sports team or whatever it may be now that they're in their s they work all the time they don't have
the time to do whatever it may be and so she's sitting there two three glasses of wine and she's like you know what i'm gonna start running she buys
the shoes even though she never does so if you can get that detailed then you can create that specific person
detailed out that person into a specific campaign and then your ad copy your ad images uh
depending on how you're running your ads on your landing pages if not then you're not gonna mess with the actual product pages for
that you target susan and you can target ryan and you can target roger and betty and whatever it
may be and you can segment that so if you start there actually figuring out who you're advertising to
that's one thing that i don't think i've ever seen within an ad account legitimately i don't think i've ever seen it with
both companies that are just getting started as well as companies that are making tens of millions of dollars a year i
often go in there and it's and you know what is the strategy okay well we're promoting these five
products because they're our most profitable and we're promoting it uh on the east coast because that's where we have
our most brand recognition okay great that's that's not really a strategy so it's not really segmentation either
is it yeah no for sure and that's a that's a really big one in almost any account that you go into where the
business actually understands who they're selling to if you go in and do that you might see your conversion rates
you'll double or triple you might see your cost per click you know maybe your cost quickly won't change too much but you're going to be much
more willing to pay for somebody when you know that they're looking to
buy your running shoes because they want to look like they did in high school and so your ad image shows somebody that
looks like them you know years ago uh running with some sort of like inspirational
message that'll get them to buy and you might be willing to pay four times more per click for that person because you know
that uh you know basically that ad is looking at them and being like hey
are you this this and this and they're saying yes on this i'm that and this but this ad really speaks to me and they're going to convert really high and
then that's a big difference between uh ad accounts that convert at you know half a percent uh you know one
and a half percent compared to you know in some campaigns you might be able to find a three five you know depending on what you're selling maybe
even like a seven percent conversion rate yeah so is i mean for people that don't know um
with when if they're looking at google adwords you've just mentioned two figures though you know uh sort of a half a percent up
to sort of seven percent is that i mean i appreciate this is all
a bit like how long the piece string and tell me which industry you're in um but you talked about seven percent
being a good conversion rate and half a percent being you know maybe average is that about right
it really really depends uh so if you're selling something that is um fairly
like generic like running shoes like there's a million that people people who sell it there's a lot of big box retailers who sell it so you're
uh also competing against price with them and whatnot you're probably looking at maybe like one to two percent
yeah um maybe higher if you have a good branding you know if nike's running ads they're gonna have a pretty good conversion because everybody knows and
trusts nike uh where if you're selling something that's maybe a little bit more unique that there's not a whole lot of
people on the market for like if you think back to um like dollar shave club for example at one point in time they were really the only
company that offered that that had any sort of name recognition they probably found really high conversion rates early on and their
conversion rate is probably less than half of what it was when they started now that there's harry's and all these other competitors out there
yeah no that's fair enough so um so you you
you talked um about the segmentation understanding the customer persona
deep diving into that and then building ads based around that so the
the ad that you talked about um with the lady who you know as there's a photograph of
someone that looked like her years ago you know it's a bit retro um and you know you're aiming at that
person are you sending that person um directly to the product page or are you
sending that person to a landing page which has got the same photo and the same sort of language to that uh
that you've just shown the largest determinator there as to which way to go uh primarily depends on how many
products you're running ads against if you're running products against different ads at some point that becomes unviable and way too expensive
to be worth it if you're also selling something that is a fairly low
lifetime value or fairly low cost then it's usually just better to send it to the actual
product page itself now let's say you're selling some sort of um uh
you know what let's say you're going back and you're selling uh a running shoe that's like dollars
and it's also uh like a smart running shoe like it tracks how much you're running it's basically like a fitness
app in your shoe for whatever reason i'm sure it exists um so you know so for something like that that might be
something where you need to have a dedicated landing page because you need to break out the the you know the customer
education might not be there to just go to a product page and buy this you know three four hundred dollar shoe that isn't known by a big
name it's not like a new pinky drop or whatever so for something like that i would generally recommend like a like a landing page that explains what
the product is explains the pros and cons explains who this is for you know breaks it out into you would
have different uh styles of landing page where you make fairly minimal changes most of the time for the different cohorts
if you're targeting women with one campaign have all the images be women you're talking men with a different campaign how about the images be met
uh so pretty standard stuff there but yeah so there's a lack of consumer education on what you're selling and
you're selling something that has high value then a landing page can make a lot of sense if you're selling a bunch
of different things that are fairly on the lower value side of things it usually doesn't make sense to send somebody to a dedicated landing page
that's really helpful that's really really helpful and practical advice and so so okay so we're we're starting
out you said you know don't start but start at step five start at step one you know this is one of the biggest
mistakes that we have and step one is um you know take a step back who are you advertising to why you advertising this
so start segment and think about who your customers are what are some of the other mistakes that
people make in this in this arena sure um so before i go into that just one more
thing that i'll say on the the first point is that all the ad campaign will do for you is it'll transcribe
your knowledge about your business and the knowledge about your customers into the campaign so the more you know
about both the more sophisticated the more well built out your campaign be so that's one of the reasons
why you really want to start there is it shows just how much you actually know about both now the second thing there from there is
conversion tracking uh the re the reason why i put this is number two is because if you're not properly
tracking conversions then you might as well not be running ads at all now one of the good things about
e-commerce is that the basic conversion tracking such as purchases is basically out of the gate if you're
using something like google analytics and you're on something like shopify or woocommerce it's basically a flip of a switch and you're good to go the import into
google ads is basically you know two three clicks away and that's fairly straightforward so most people have that figured out which
is great beyond that uh what's also important to make sure is that internally you're tracking things like your
lifetime value or your retention rate if you're doing anything on a subscription basis so you can tie that back into your ad
campaign as well and hopefully you're also tagging customers as to where they found you so you can also see if there's a
lifetime value difference in different sources of where you're getting customers in from so maybe your social media maybe have a
really strong presence there and people are worth maybe more than they're coming in for man's well then you can't base
what you're willing to pay on ads based on what you're making on social media because it's just not worth the same amount of value so that's another thing
there now what a lot of people are missing on the conversion tracking side of thing is engagement tracking and this is
anything that somebody can do on the landing page or the website that gives you more details in how they're actually
interacting with the page now this can be anything from how many people are signing up for our email list
somebody might go to the product page this might be something that they're trying to figure out is this for them they might go to your faq page maybe
they go to a blog post and they sign up for your email list you should also be tracking that hopefully you're also tracking within
your email list how people are actually coming to sign up for your email list if you don't know within a form you can
set up a hidden form field and just have it automatically pull in a url parameter which will just fill in
where they actually came to you from and so you know developers should be able to help you set that up so
beyond that you should also be tracking things like if you yeah and what's great is that a lot of ecommerce platforms will track this out
of the box but if somebody has to go from your uh your product page to a cart page to a shipping page to a
billing page to then they purchase and then they get to a thank you page each step from there should also be
tracked so you can see where people fall off you can also be tracking things like how far down on the page should they
actually scroll well if only percent of people scroll below the fold then you need to make
sure that everything that they need to know in order to make a purchase as much as possible at least is above the fold so if you don't show
your star rating for your products or how many reviews it has until somebody scrolls down they get to the review section but if only five percent of people are
making it that far down it's basically making no difference at all to you yeah whereas from there you
can go okay great there's no room to add a bunch of reviews above a fold but we can add okay great five stars and we've had reviews on
this product or whatever it may be so you can see how far they're scrolling down as well you can also track things like if you
have a video on your page how many people are clicking on the video how many people are watching the video
you can also tie that into your remarketing to make much more sophisticated remarketing campaigns where you don't just target who's been
to my website but who's been to my website and has engaged with it i only want to show my ads again to
people who have actually engaged with my site so they're not an engaged user however you define that could be how long they're on the website for how long they
scroll down if they clicked on a video if they clicked on add to cart if they did a combination of those things etc
so they didn't do that then don't waste your money remarketing to them because they clearly weren't interested in the first place
so a lot of these things with tracking not just sales but also everything that can lead up to a sale or what people did on your website without
buying can also help you and then you can figure out things like okay well maybe only one to two percent of people are
buying but percent of people who make it to the cart are buying and you can break that down should we
increase the conversion rate of the cart to purchase or should we increase the conversion rate of product page to cart
you know what's gonna actually uh provide us the most benefit and you can basically run tests that way instead of just seeing a blanket okay
one percent conversion rate what do we do there yeah okay well there was lots there right i mean
lots and lots so i guess by if i can just peel it back a little bit in terms of um in terms of
uh monitoring and tracking that you talked about um google analytics will google
analytics do all of those things that you mentioned or are there other bits of kit that we
should um perhaps look at yeah so the other primary tool that you'll want to be
using is google tag manager there's pretty much nothing you can't do with google tag manager
but a lot of the stuff that i mentioned you can do fairly easily out of the box like scroll depth tracking etc
now the caveat there is with google analytics or gawhich they've only i think they launched like -months
ago some of that is done out of the box uh assuming you turn it on so google analytics natively can now track scroll
depth it can now track video views i don't know if it tracks out of the box how long people viewed the video for but some of that is automatically
tracked within google analytics four if you're still using universal analytics then you won't have that in there
but even with that being tracked i still want to double track everything through tag manager primarily because gais still new there
could be a lot of changes from google and i don't want to be too reliant on something that they've only released a couple months ago
wow okay so we can and google tag manager and google analytics so they they're free right so these aren't
things that we have to pay for they're free but if you go to the enterprise level where you're getting uh
google which is which i think is like a couple hundred thousand dollars a year so only if you're like a pretty sizable company
you have to worry about that but that's really for if you're in like a if you're like uber if you're like a
real like mega enterprise client that needs the most kind of sophisticated features
but yeah it's free unless you're you know like a four billion dollar company watching this if so stay around for my contact
information yeah that's great and so um i and i i'd google analytic
and you know i get people emailing me all the time use this software and this dashboard and that stuff but actually google analytics is such a
powerful piece of software that's free and it's google i mean they already know everything anyway so you know why not
why not why don't we use that software right just uh and just have at it listen i am we're just starting to
scratch the surface of this whole conversation we've got a whole lot more coming up but in the meantime we're just going to
take a few minutes here and connect with this week's show sponsor we'll be back joe and i'll be back after
this brief message let me give a big shout out to one of
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[Music]
okay we are back with jared and we're talking about you know all things google and how not
to waste a whole bunch of money on crappy ads and things like that which is just so we've got into some of the mistakes
that people make um and you know segmentation thinking about it right at the start
uh we've talked a little bit about conversion tracking and and jared you were you talked about conversion tracking
from all kinds of different ways from purchasers to engagement on page down to scroll downs to
you know filling in forms and all that sort of stuff the good news is if you're listening to this and you're thinking i didn't get all of that i need to
listen to it again well that's the beauty of a podcast you can just hit rewind but of course you can get
the notes from tonight's uh conversation at ecommercepodcast.net forward slash
and we'll put all that information on there for you well because that was a lot of stuff to think about so um
i guess that leads me nicely onto a question jared a lot of what you're talking about if i
it it almost sounds like you're talking we have this phrase in england talking double dutch in other words
we're not quite you you're using a language which we're not quite sure about and it it can sound a lot more
complicated um in our in our heads is this stuff
complicated or is it fairly straightforward to learn and get your head around
i think a lot of it is fairly straightforward i think what makes it complicated is just working with
technology that you're unfamiliar with i mean think of anything that you use on a daily basis i mean the first time you
looked at google analytics uh at least i remember one of the first times i looked at i mean there's they're
how can i make heads and tails of this i remember my first time behind the wordpress back end and you know i thought that was pretty scary
um so i think a lot of it there's i don't think a lot of it has a massive learning curve at least for at
least understanding what it is the implementation is going to be a little bit more technical but a lot of a lot of what i mentioned on
the conversion tracking side is a lot of it's built out of the box like if you go into tag manager you set up tag you just select scroll depth and
it'll tell you you know what percent and automatically you know someone's put there if someone scrolls down it'll fire the
tag so that's fairly straightforward when it comes to the buyer personas that's something that
i find a lot of businesses have never really thought too much about uh which is uh you know to me is honestly a a little
bit of a scary thing if you don't really understand who's buying from you and why uh but you know that's something that i
think does take a little bit of a kind of a of rethinking around because
even though that's kind of historically marketing i think it's something that has been
kind of lost in the digital marketing era where a lot of businesses don't start there but it's still such a fundamental
uh aspect but i think even then it's something that the concept is pretty straightforward but if you don't really
know who's buying from you figuring that information out can be a little complicated because then you're running uh studies and surveys or you're doing
market research you're hiring a market research company so that can be a little bit more complicated but i think the general
concept of it is you know something that you're only like a blog post or two away from getting yeah okay and so if i was starting out
like if someone's listening to the show and they're like well i'm just starting out i don't have an existing audience i could survey
um can they still find out who the best personas are that they're going to be targeting how would they
and if so how would they do that yeah so some of it can be a bit of guesswork the
less you know the more broad you're going to have to get so for example let's go back to running shoes let's say i'm
starting off and i'm starting off with a brand new running shoe uh e-commerce company now i i can look
up things like running statistics or like you know who's running you know when do people get into running or you know i can look
at running forms and blogs to figure out okay you know what are common trends that people are talking about
if you want to get if you're more on the technical side of things you want to get a little bit more sophisticated you can um you know maybe check the tos
of the form in question you can scrape the site run it through some sort of tool that analyzes or creates engrams and you can find common
words that people use in their posts and you can analyze it that way if you're not very technical don't worry about that you can
just read things manually so you can do market research around it that way you can find statistics and that's some of
the stuff that we do for clients because some of our clients don't know for example one of our clients works with um
real estate investors like a lot of their customers are real estate investors so what we had to do was we had to find
statistics around like what's the average income of real estate investors because we wanted to do income based targeting that's just a google
away so that was just a simple google search anyone could have done then once you actually have those people you can you know you can ask them and
you can figure that out and like oh the internet said it was to k a year turns out it's more so to or
whatever it may be so you're not going to be starting off in the dark other things where google has if you're talking about
google ads that is google has built in uh audience targeting and we use this as well with
in conjunction with this with the cohorts that we're creating but you can go in there and you can go okay people who are interested in health
and fitness people who are interested in running people who have been looking at health or exercise equipment or there
might even be a running affinity targeting or in-market targeting for you to look at i don't know off the top of my head
but there's tons of different targetings that you can go in there and you can go okay great i want to target men and women seven days a week hours
a day who are to you know maybe like because you're like probably not a
whole lot of people plus getting into running nowadays but you can look at that and go okay great you know it's a pretty safe guess
my audiences are this keep it fairly broad and then you get the clicks and you get the data in and you can start
narrowing down from there now you're only going to be getting the information from google's platform itself you're not necessarily going to
be getting the information directly from the source but you might find that uh for whatever reason
uh pm to a.m is when your conversion rate is higher
you can take some guesses as to there but until you kind of ask people you're not gonna know for sure but you might be able to take a guess of
okay well a lot of the people who are buying our products probably work like a nine to five a lot of people who are
buying our shoes also uh you know have kids and so they're putting their kids to bed and then once they actually have a couple
hours of free time that's why they're searching between p.m and a.m so you can make some educated guesses but basically
start broad you don't need to just have one keyword and just leave it open but you can start with a you know what
you sell set up audiences and google ads another thing that a lot of people are aren't using and
it's something that uh that you really should be using is going into the audience tab click click the little plus button just search
for things around your product or things that you would expect someone will see what's already yeah and there's a ton of this stuff out
of the box and you can basically narrow from there collect data once you actually start getting customers once you have enough traffic
invest in that or you can also do is if you know anybody else who's in the same space also ask them see if you can get any
information from them that can always be helpful that's that's fantastic and i think um i
think that just spending that little bit of time like you say i like that that concept that i did to spend that little bit of
time at the start even when you're starting up trying to figure out as much as you can about your
potential audience start with fairly broad strokes and then start to niche it down and
specialize as you start to get those sales in knowing you're only going to get better as the as the data comes in so
um okay so so here's a question um
if i'm starting out uh do i do it myself diy or is it best to um to contact an agency i
appreciate you know and be honest here you've got i appreciate you've got a little bit of advice because you you are an agency but
um i think this is a question that a lot of people ask actually uh do i do i need an agency right at the
start i think that comes down to your
background and your budget if you if you've just been funded for million dollars
it's probably not in your best interest to do it yourself right yeah yeah get into it if you're starting off this is your
first business and you're like well i need to keep the lights on then it makes sense to do it yourself
go to go to youtube um you know you can type in whatever you sell and you can probably find someone that's are walking
through how to create an ad in your exact industry not only that but i also recommend for most
people even if they work with an agency to do some of that because then you actually learn what it is that you're buying
something that's very frustrating on my end and from the agency perspective is that sometimes someone is looking to
hire us to do something that they don't understand themselves and so it creates a lot of tension where
uh you know we're trying to offer something to someone that they think they need because they've heard about it but they don't even know how it works fundamentally and
that creates a lot of frustration on both ends but then you as a business and wondering oh no we just lost
impression share things are going really bad you know this keep me up at night this is you know and i have to fire this up this email there's another thing i
have to worry about and turns out it's not that big a deal at all because you know there's this other metric that
you didn't look at so i do recommend for most people to be at least somewhat educated on what you are putting your money behind just makes
it a lot easier to be honest uh you know it's going to save you a lot of money in the long run too most people have worked with multiple
most people have a a bad agency experience story where they've started over they've lost
a bunch of money or you know whatever it may be so it kind of sum that up
it depends what it depends on is do you have the skills for it if you're like years old
you've you barely know how to turn on a computer but you're like hey i know that you know i know retail i'm moving into
e-commerce i know the logistics side of thing that's great probably you know hire a consultant
if you don't have the funds to hire an agency hire a consultant to set things up for you meet with them once a week once a month whatever um so it's not a
it's not a you have to hire an agency it's not you have to do it yourself um you know some i mean some of the
clients that we work with they're very old school they were we worked with some people that have been very successful retailers
and now they're just getting in a direct to consumer online and you know the online world the online marketing world
is very new to them it doesn't make sense for them to do stuff themselves where we have other clients that have
managed their own ads for years and now they've grown their own business to a point where they need to have somebody in
so i would say the very general of them at least try yourself first yeah and i i like what you said there
about educate yourself so even if you're thinking about getting an agency and just spend a little bit of time
understanding uh some of the principles and ideas of it and actually we're talking we started
off the show talking about youtube but um you you actually said just head to youtube you'll probably find something
on there uh which you can watch and and and that'll give you enough education uh right there and then so spending a
little bit of time to learn about it i like that that's great so um
if i go right back to the start of the show we talked about uh the you know the big mistakes people are making when it when it comes to ads and
we've we've talked about a whole bunch of stuff there is there anything else that you that immediately springs to mind that we need to sort of
uh chat about here to close that that section off yeah i would say another big thing is
your placement management which is just where your ads show up which on the search network
which is google search uh this is what you what you put in as your keywords is not what google shows your ads for google
interprets that into what search terms you should put that in for because people search for things in very specific ways that you'd never be able
to create keywords around so some mistakes that people do is they put in what's called a broad match term which is just they write in the word
running shoes and then they run that google takes a very liberal approach to how they interpret running shoes so they go okay shoes well
dress shoes or running shoes tennis shoes right and so you get a bunch of clicks for a bunch of stuff that doesn't make sense
so going into what's called your search term report and actually making sure that what you show up for is actually worth showing up for
is quite important on the shopping network it's the same thing except you don't have keywords all you have is your products and google
create the google decides what to show your ads based on your keywords and based on what you have on your page but you still have the search term
report where you can exclude things from there so you you can be a bit proactive on the search you
you're a bit more reactive on shopping with display and with video campaigns which is done through
youtube you have placements on other websites or youtube channels or youtube videos etc
making sure that where your ads are actually being shown are actually worth being shown so a very
big and common issue on the display network is showing your ads on a bunch of websites
that are just there to manipulate google adsense so that these websites aren't real websites nobody actually cares about these websites but your ads get
shown on them and they make money as well as parked domains uh so just domains that someone's looking for
someone to buy the domain you're you'll get a bunch of clicks for them you'll see a lot of like id apps kid websites etc you're like looking at
this website you're like hey this looks like it was built years ago who uses this website nobody they just managed to manipulate
google to get you know your budget on there so some people might be able to reduce their ad spend on their display network by to
and see no change in sales because that was just going to completely wasted websites
same thing with youtube there's plenty of youtube channels that aren't worth anything that your ads are showing for so
actually going in there and refining your placements in the first place by your audiences by refining
what types of content you want to show up in the first place but also any content that you do show up for actually looking at it uh the
programmatic side of of ad placements which is when these ad networks automatically decide where your
ads show up for can be quite dangerous uh there there's plenty of stories so yeah you were
saying that there was plenty of bad uh bad stories in uber and then it just
kind of it died so it finished the uber story yeah they don't want me to tell you so
so uber and back in and this is only recently coming out um they were spending about
million dollars in their marketing and about million of that was just being wasted uh chase bank
was spending money on twenty thousand different placements they reduced that down to five thousand
no change in performance procter and gamble reduced their marketing budget by about million dollars wow no change in performance now there
are various reasons that go into both deceptive ad networks but also
um you know bad ad practices and some a large from a lot of the stories that
i've read and what i've dug into a lot of it does go down to placements and a lot of it is based on programmatic
where there's a lot of really crappy sites that are worth nothing their ads are getting shown to all the time and a bunch of robots that are clicking on
some of these ads and so you need to be you can't just say okay i want to show up to runners and
then you know great and then never look at it you need to if you're taking a programmatic approach you're not manually choosing what websites you want
your ads to show up for you need to really be monitoring that and you really need to really cut out websites that are just
uh that just aren't worth anything and this is something that i don't see done very often primarily because the clicks
are so cheap that you if you're running you know a thousand dollars a month on display but you're getting clicks for
a penny or two that's a lot of clicks to have to figure out you know what sites are actually worth running or not but is it's really important so just
filter by what sites are getting the most clicks impressions et cetera and just kill off anything that just
take a quick look at it yourself visually look at this does this look like a legitimate site if not uh then get rid of it yeah that's that's
all good advice um this leads me on i mean what you're talking about here you
you're talking about pre-ad stuff as in spend the time doing the research on your um your target audience right um
and then you're talking about post ad stuff so make sure you check in the placements make sure the ads are showing up in the right place and and so on and
so forth are we are we if i'm listening to this
and i i i've not done this before i'm thinking man is this going to take hours a day to do or is this is this
um something that actually still gives me a life at the end of the at the end of the day i mean what sort
of time expectations are we talking about here one of the big things that is going to
determine that is what networks you're running on what your budget is and what your cost per click is if you're
you know running something that's you know a day and you're in a space that's going
to cost you five bucks a click well that's not a whole lot to worry about if you're running something where you're spending
five grand a month and you are getting clicks for a couple cents that's a whole lot of clicks you need to
manage so when it comes to the time um it can
i mean so when we're building out a campaign it can take anywhere from two to four weeks of you know fairly intensive work
before we're confident in being able to launch something and that's just our end where we take all this extra time to like worry about cohorts
etcetera etcetera uh when it comes to management uh which is where
you know if you're diying this where you need to be careful is just focus on the eighty percent so pareto's principle pretty much
applicable to anything of your of your campaigns is going to result in
of your spend so if you're worried about search term management look at what keyword look at what search
terms show up the most and filter down from there if you're worried about you know your keywords look at what keywords get the most
clicks you know if you have one keyword that gets clicks a month and you have another keyword that gets two clicks a
month you know don't worry don't stress too much about the you know the one that gets two clicks a month
even if it's getting nothing for you because it's going to be much more important to worry about the one that gets clicks a month if you know if it's only getting you
know quality clicks it's going to hurt you a lot more than the one that gets zero percent quality clicks but only gets two clicks a month
uh same thing with your with your uh placements look at what's showing up most and just work through there i mean if
you're diying this and you have you know an hour a week to go through this uh then you really need to make
sure you're spending your time where it matters most and a lot of that would be placement management
verifying that your conversion tracking is still set up because sometimes that can break especially if you're not using landing pages and you have all this
bunch of different codes and tags and whatnot on your site that can break pretty easily so are you still tracking conversions
are you showing up in the right places those are probably for people who are diying out those are
the two main places i would recommend that you look at because other than that we're starting to drill into um
much more technical things which uh you know if you manage your placements that can
save you a lot of money especially early on when your placements are going to be a lot more erratic because you don't have all
those negatives set up well okay um
that's very very helpful so uh so we've got so much advice here on how
to actually um how to get how to get about doing this and how to how to get after it
um one of the things that we've not talked about yet is the well there's a couple of things we've not talked about yet actually
one is um one is seo and the other is um paid media like with
facebook you've talked a lot about google adwords um let's talk about uh both of those uh which one do you
want to tackle first seo or facebook i'll let you choose um let's turn the seo side
okay so um so seo search engine optimization uh
obviously people finding your site organically now i appreciate if you're uh if you've got a new site a brand new site your seo
it's probably not your main strategy you need to go for um but how do you how do you manage
the the sort of the adwords versus organic seo how do you run those
campaigns at those campaigns how do you run that optimization side by side
yeah so there's a couple of ways that you can um uh combine the efforts of both so for
example on the seo side of things you're going to have what's called google search console and what google search console does is
it shows you what you're getting impressions and clicks for on google organic and what you can do is
you can use that information to then feed into your keywords for your google ads campaigns because you might
notice that there are topics that you never even thought about keywords or ideas uh for different topics to talk
about that aren't in any of your ad copy that isn't in any of your keywords et cetera that you
can then go okay great let's build out keywords for that on the to the same extent what you can do in google ads is you can find your
search term report what people actually search for and you can use that to then better optimize your site so okay great going back to running
shoes your keyword is running shoes but then you find that within your search term report people will also search for running
shoes for flat feet or whatever it may be maybe you never thought about that beforehand so if your product is good for people with that
then you can mention on your page if not then maybe you should make a distinction that hey you know this is what's good for this is what it
not so you can that's ways that you can combine those together now for advertisers who are
trying to limit their spend so if you don't have a lot of budget to scale your spend then what you can do is
you can run a different tests so for example if you
want to test an offer maybe you want to see if people are going to be interested
in your you know what's the conversion rate of your product going to be if you offer it for
uh less you know are you going to make more sales that it justifies you lowering your price where you overall
you make more revenue based on the increase in conversion rate well what you can do is you can run a test on
ads where you can say okay great there people click on the ad they're going to go to this version of the page you can
split test that and you can see okay what what is that equal to and then you can roll that test out live so as they're also
an amazing testing ground for search as well yeah so uh sorry
um the internet has been a bit funny so you you broke up a little bit so just to recap what i think you said in that section is
uh use ads to test your um your web copy so you
can put these two different versions of the page up split test run ads to both pages see which converts better or connects better
and you can roll that out on your website that's quite a a a pretty decent strategy isn't it to
um to to use ads to quick and easily test what's going to convert better long run on your on your website
exactly especially if you're not generating a whole lot of traffic it might take you you know months to run a test if you're
only getting a couple hundred visitors through organic but it might take you a week to get enough traffic
through paid to figure out what works better yeah no it's brilliant it's a it's such a top tip
and i think it's one of those things that people just don't use um for whatever reason i i whether it just
feels too complicated or what i don't know but actually it's a really straightforward thing to do just add two different pages um selling the
same thing or promoting the same thing or talking about the same thing see which converts better see which you know people engage more with all the
stuff that you talked about earlier on with um with measuring conversion and you can
you can do that pretty cheaply can't you you can do it pretty quickly and pretty cheaply and get some amazing data as a
result yeah it's you know i think a lot of the hesitation comes down to
uh seo is seen as this really you know sexy marketing channel that everyone wants to everyone wants to show up everyone wants
to put money into where ads are perceived as a lot more expensive but the reality is that in the
short term it's quite the opposite where in the short term seo is by far way more expensive and then
over time is to have a snowball effect where as your results start to increase the overall you know what you're getting out versus
what you're putting in you still get a but much better return there but depending on the industry depending on how old the website is depending on
yeah you know how the branding and you know basically what you've been able to do organically you know that could be six months away
it could be two years away before you really hit the ball rolling with search and so what you have on ads is
the ability to run quick tests the ability to generate sales very quickly as well you
have the ability to also pre-test everything that you want to do on the search front
a really big issue that i see is okay great i just started my business i mean probably every day like
different people reach out it's like hey brand new business i want to i want to start thinking about seo well my answer is no
because i know that it's not you're not going to be very happy at the end of the day you're going to invest a bunch of money and you're not going to see anything
we're the better route to go is to start with ads scale up ads and as it scales
then take the profit from the ads and invest reinvest that into the seo campaign and then your ad
campaign is funding your search campaign not only that but you've also pre-tested everything that you're doing
who wants to wait six eight months invest tens of thousands of dollars in a search
just to find out that your conversion rate is terrible or that lifetime value was terrible or you could
have figured that out and saved a whole bunch of money you know six to months ago yeah no that's very good
very good advice so i guess my final question then is around facebook uh because you've talked a lot about google
um ads um do you do you deal with facebook
advertising or do you just focus in on google ads and if so what's your reasoning behind that
sure so we do some of it it's more so on my business partners uh kind of agenda than it is mine i've
i've dabbled in facebook ads honestly i don't like facebook ads as a platform
the reason being is that as my business partner is constantly dealing with google likes to randomly ban ad accounts
google likes to i'm sorry facebook likes to randomly ban ad accounts uh facebook likes to completely change their interface and
now you can't find anything and all their help information is out of date and their customer service is terrible and so
just uh so many roundabout issues that run in on facebook that i'm just
not i don't get as excited about it but i do recommend that just about everybody be on facebook and instagram
for ads at the very least for remarketing yeah with e-commerce a lot of people don't buy on the first impression they
don't buy on the first um interaction with the site so the very least just uh remarking on most platforms is
usually worth it just so that you can keep people um you can stay top of mind with people you
can you know show them your you know say okay great they were on the product page but they didn't buy let's show them an
ad that is also shows a review or something like that that highlights overview so at the very least i would recommend
that but i have a lot of problems with facebook constantly changing their interface banning ad accounts and then re-enabling
them and then banning them for the same thing that support just said was fine so that's my kind of love-hate
relationship with uh facebook yeah it facebook you're right it does have its quirks doesn't it
let's be real it does have its quirks and and uh you've got to get your head around that having a fascinating conversation this
morning with someone about um how uh the changes in ios
you know that apple have made which have in effect screwed facebook over certainly from an advertising point of view a fair bit
um i wonder how how that's going to impact things and you know she was talking about the need to
um as a because they were a facebook ads company and how they're going to have to rethink things through and and develop
that out so that's going to be an interesting to watch as well isn't it this whole sort of um move where power goes back to
the people which is what apple's sort of trying to portray isn't it we're going to protect you from these ad companies
um yeah so i i think it's an interesting move so we have other technologies such
as i believe is called uh browser fingerprinting which can basically replace third-party cookies while still
getting the third effect the same effect so it's not um you know not everything has been lost
but i think there may also be a um you know
as much as um i don't know how do i how do i explain this without seeming like a bad person so as much as
people are like um you know we you know we want to protect our data we want to protect our privacy uh you know etc etc well at the same
time are people going to appreciate it when all the ads they see are completely irrelevant to them or when uh you know
are they going to get ignored with annoyed words like you know why am i seeing all this stuff that doesn't relate to me or yeah
it used to be so much easier to you know find good cool stuff to spend money on or or whatever it may be so
there's pros and cons with the technology itself like browser fingerprinting i believe is what it's called um it's kind of beyond me on a technical
level right now i'm still looking into it but it seems to fit effectively do some of the same stuff
that we've been able to have so it's not the end of the world for what we're doing it will make uh tracking more
difficult we'll make attribution more difficult and at the end of the day uh you know that that's going to be a
challenge specifically on the attribution side of things where you're spending money on google you're spending money on facebook
you're spending money on instagram you're spending money on other ad networks you're spending money on seo email etc but now
not everything is connected for you to know exactly what does or doesn't work so now you're spending more money on
these marketing channels and you have less insight as to how profitable it's actually going to be which is going to give more power to
bigger companies and less power to smaller companies because the smaller companies need much more data to know exactly where those
money is going because they're they're running with a one to two month runway before they're out of business that things go
poorly where you know walmart if they want to advertise they could waste a billion dollars tomorrow and they'd be like oops yeah
yeah no you're right and i think i think you're right the impact on the smaller business is going to be much because i'm
you know i'd call my e-commerce sites a smaller business and i kind of i want to know what's working and what's
not and if it's working awesome if it's not i want to switch it off um because i don't want to waste that money and so um
i i think you're right the changes and for those of you don't know apple made some big changes in the um most recent ios update which
is their their system so safari now um has stopped certain uh pieces of data going back to
the big companies from your web browser in the disguise of its personal privacy which i get and i
understand and i part of me applauds them for it but like jared said it's going to make it much more difficult i think
for smaller businesses to figure out which marketing is working better for them uh so like you say there are pros and
cons and swings and roundabouts jared listen i feel like we could go all night but we've definitely been going a
big chunk of the night that's for sure so uh how can how can people connect with you how can they
they reach out to you what's the best way to do that yeah so the best way to do that is to go to team
bluedog.com that's t-e-a-m blue dog.com and you know from there there's
content there there's contact information you know whatever you want to do send send a friendly message send a not so
friendly message yeah yeah just friendly messages are fine
the others just get filled out but no listen so that's team bluedog.com so if you want to reach
out to jared teambluedog.com we will of course put a link to jared in the show notes which you can get on the
website too so if you're driving or you can't jot that down just head over to ecommercepodcast.net forward
and you will find the notes from tonight's conversation with jared as well as links to him jared listen uh
it's been brilliant talking to you i've learned a lot uh i got lots of notes um and so i i really appreciate you
being with us thanks for taking the time to be here uh and uh i wish you all the best with
the rebrand and uh with with blue dog media awesome thanks for having me
thanks buddy ah wasn't jared fantastic and so generous and gracious with the
information that he gave us and uh if you are thinking about doing a uh ad campaigning you're going to
start in that whole thing of ads you are definitely going to want to re-listen to today's show
uh if you haven't subscribed yet to the audio version of the podcast you can get that wherever
you get your podcast from itunes stitcher spotify we're on there to search the ecommerce podcast with matt edmondson
and it will come up you can of course follow the links from ecommercepodcast.net and we'll take you
there no problem at all uh but a big huge thanks to jared for being so gracious for where with us and sharing the
information uh much appreciated now you know uh my aim whenever i speak to a guest
is to always find some real practical nuggets that i can use on my own e-commerce websites in my own e-commerce businesses i say that every
week and that's what happened with jared right there that's what we got i really really enjoyed that especially
the mistakes because i can tell you we have definitely made some of those including the stuff about segmentation
including the stuff about not tracking conversion better uh we it was almost like matt's failure
checklist you could have gone down so i hope you got some great stuff out of it as well if you did
then i would appreciate it if you could rate the show on itunes uh or even share it out so we can
connect with more amazing folks around the world uh we appreciate you spreading the word
as i said at the start and as i've said a number of times through the show you can get the notes the links uh and the transcript actually
from today's show they are online and you can get them free at ecommercepodcast.net forward
slash all that's left for me to say is thanks for listening make sure you come
back next week as we're going to carry on uh interviewing some great guests as i said
at the start we do interview people and we broadcast it live out on facebook and youtube
now because it's live sometimes that gets interrupted like tonight by some internet blips uh
but most of the time it works so if you're around go to our facebook page or go to our youtube page
uh make sure you sign up to those pages make sure you subscribe to him and who knows you know come and join
the live when we talk to future guests and get to ask your questions directly to them uh so yeah so why not do that
have a go uh so that's it from me have a great week i'll be back next week as i
said with some more e-commerce guests to chat to uh i will see you then have a fab week
stay safe and i'll be back soon
you've been listening to the ecommerce podcast with matt edmondson join us next time for more interviews
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