How We Got a 22% Drop in CPA & a 50% Increase in New Donors Using Content First
In this episode of Perpetual Traffic, Ralph and guest Kobi Topaz explore the strategies for optimizing conversions in blog posts by combining content and pitch effectively. They discuss the various objectives for meta platforms and the importance of high-quality content and long-term content strategies. The hosts also address challenges related to policy issues with Meta and Google. The episode offers valuable insights on integrating blog and platform campaigns, selecting the appropriate campaign objective for video content promotion on Facebook, and providing value to warm audiences to boost sales. It's a must-listen for marketers looking to enhance their conversion optimization strategies.
In This Episode, You'll Learn:
- 00:00:00 Perpetual Traffic Podcast: Insights with Ralph Burns and Kobi Topaz
- 00:01:12 Embracing Family Life: A New Perspective on Success
- 00:06:45 Content Marketing Success: Boosting Donations and Reducing CPA for Charities
- 00:10:56 Navigating the Customer Journey in E-commerce
- 00:12:03 Beyond Conversions: Unlocking Website Conversion Strategies
- 00:14:47 Content + Pitch: Maximizing Marketing Impact in Blog Posts
- 00:19:16 The Power of Persuasion: Inspiring Donations through Articles
- 00:22:56 Traffic Harmonization and Credit Repair: A Performance Max Case Study
- 00:27:44 Efficient Integration: Tips for Blog and Platform Campaigns
- 00:30:38 Scaling for Growth: Strategies for Brand Success and Customer Acquisition
Tool Mentioned:
LINKS AND RESOURCES:
- Perpetual Traffic on YouTube
- Tiereleven.com
- Solutions 8
- Perpetual Traffic Survey
- Perpetual Traffic Website
- Follow Perpetual Traffic on Twitter
- Connect with Kasim on Twitter and Connect with Ralph on LinkedIn
Thanks so much for joining us this week. Want to subscribe to Perpetual Traffic? Have some feedback you’d like to share? Connect with us on iTunes and leave us a review!
Mentioned in this episode:
Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Perpetual Traffic Podcast.
Speaker:This is your host, Ralph Burns and this is the show where we share cutting edge strategies and acquiring leads and sales to acquire more customers for your business through traffic, as well as conversion architecture.
Speaker:And after the click and we're gonna talk Facebook Google all kinds of stuff today because we are in a what's working now episode and it's been way way too long since we had boy band star, Kobe on Perpetual Traffic.
Speaker:You've been kind of preoccupied though.
Speaker:And people are, people are kind of, you know, wondering where has Kobe been?
Speaker:Where is the fabulous Israeli?
Speaker:Why isn't he on P T?
Speaker:So give us an update as to what's going on in your life these days?
Speaker:I just kind of had like a tiny creature join my life two months ago.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Kind of rock the boat a bit for everyone.
Speaker:No, no, no, not a baby.
Speaker:A baby.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Yeah, a baby.
Speaker:Like a pet.
Speaker:She's very rude compared to a pet.
Speaker:You know, pet really does what you want and they fairly, they want to sleep the baby.
Speaker:No, no, she's very rude, she cries, she gets food when she wants, she gets clothes.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:Like, what the hell.
Speaker:I know it's expanding.
Speaker:Now, you're dad, now you're dead.
Speaker:You're seeing the world through like a different set of lenses.
Speaker:It's no longer Kobe Topez boy band star touring the world.
Speaker:You know, free freestyle.
Speaker:Now you are a family man.
Speaker:Well, you've always been a family guy but I mean, now it's even more so, what, what's it been like?
Speaker:It's been good.
Speaker:I mean, honestly, you see the smile and that kind of covers everything, all the stress.
Speaker:But it's like you can describe it in walls.
Speaker:I would say like the labor was really, really tough.
Speaker:I honestly didn't think she's gonna make it.
Speaker:Which kind of gets you like to think of stuff, put things in perspective a bit.
Speaker:But yeah, overall it's been amazing so far.
Speaker:She looks exactly like me, which is exactly what I wanted and I wanted a daughter first.
Speaker:So like, yeah, so I got what I wanted made a good deal with the person above.
Speaker:So that's good.
Speaker:You're experiencing the little girl syndrome.
Speaker:I, I never got that experience.
Speaker:I had two boys so I wanted a, a girl first.
Speaker:Now.
Speaker:That's, I couldn't nothing else if it's a boy, send it back.
Speaker:Oh, well, I made up for it.
Speaker:I have lots of nieces.
Speaker:So I sort of saying that's, I'm still kind of, you know, working through that, but Yeah, this is amazing.
Speaker:And she's born into this world, which is an interesting world right now, for those of you who don't know where Kobe lives, he lives in Israel, he lives in Ashlan.
Speaker:I pronounce that correctly.
Speaker:I forgive you.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:Well, I'm just a stupid American but right now you've got changes in the personal life, but also there's some things going on.
Speaker:You're getting some gifts every single day from some foreign countries.
Speaker:Uh, tell us, tell us about that.
Speaker:One of the organizations in Gaza just been sending presents these past couple of days in the form of missile, which is always nice.
Speaker:Kind of puts you in shape to run to the show though, which is always great.
Speaker:This is like, no good luck.
Speaker:We are not kidding.
Speaker:Here, people are like, yeah, wait, you.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:No, like that actually happened on a call that you had with one of our creative people this past week.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:It's been interesting.
Speaker:There's a couple of explosions in the background.
Speaker:If you hear that on the show here today, it's not, you know, we're not manufacturing or maybe he will put it in post production just for a little dramatic effect.
Speaker:But if Kobe has to rudely leave, that means you have to go to the, it is called the bomb shelter, right?
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:Unbelievable.
Speaker:So these are the things and then you gotta have some action in life.
Speaker:One way you're running to a shelter and then the other way you manage ads, it is what it is.
Speaker:And then, you know, you're feeding the baby a bottle, like, like most men can't multitask.
Speaker:What's, that's fabulous.
Speaker:Well, well, we're gonna get into like your world of advertising here today.
Speaker:And, you know, we usually drop a nugget in this first section, but this is nugget filled the entire show and I'm pretty excited to get into some of these case studies, some of the experiences we've had, some of which we've talked a little bit about here on perpetual traffic in the past, but we're gonna get into real specific.
Speaker:So if you want what's working now, especially on the Facebook side, and we'll be doing a lot on the Google side as well as some of the other platforms that we serve today is your show.
Speaker:And we've got some counterintuitive strategies here that we've referred to.
Speaker:But now we're gonna get more specifics because I think people really love the specifics.
Speaker:And if you're running a marketing department or you're a marketing director, these are the kinds of things you should be asking your team about like, hey, are you doing the stuff that Kobe to is doing?
Speaker:Because I just heard this cool, you know, se he's dodging missiles and feeding babies and running ads like this guy is, I don't know, you're like a superhero man.
Speaker:So we're gonna get into some of your superhero tactics right after this quick break, you're listening to Perpetual Traffic.
Speaker:All right, we are here with a superhero, Koby Topez talking some ad stuff here on Perpetual Traffic.
Speaker:And I love today's first what's working now because it's just such a cool way of looking at things.
Speaker:And it's also, if you go back to episode like 12 and three of perpetual traffic, I love the fact that's the stuff that used to work like seven or eight years ago, probably never stopped working.
Speaker:But now we're all getting back to it.
Speaker:It's amazing how there's advertising is cyclical.
Speaker:And I think it's an example of, hey, if you had something that worked a year or two ago, try it again.
Speaker:Now, now we just sort of stumbled on this one, I believe.
Speaker:So let's get into this strategy here with one of the companies that we serve in the charity, Nitch.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:So the first thing I would say, don't disrespect your customers by not providing them content because you're only going to hurt yourself.
Speaker:So, what we have right now is we have a team, an awesome team will Simone and Amy working on one of the accounts.
Speaker:And what they did is they were able to drop the CPA by 22% while increased the number of new donors simply by using content first.
Speaker:So with this charity, we noticed that sending people directly to a landing page doesn't really close the deal.
Speaker:We experienced high CPA S, it didn't really work.
Speaker:So what the team decided to do is go with education first.
Speaker:So without even asking for a donation at the beginning, they just sent the potential donors to different pieces from the website, different blog post, the homepage, they wanted to get the potential new donors to get to know the charity because it's not easy.
Speaker:Like once you see an ad, OK, I'll do it right now.
Speaker:Unless you know, you have a business and you just wanna get rid of that money, then you can do your deals with the tax, like with the IRS.
Speaker:So what they did is the charity has a bunch of useful content like a bunch of case studies.
Speaker:So without even asking for a donation, what they did is they started rotating different blog posts, showcasing different case studies, different stories.
Speaker:And then once they started doing that, they started to build that big audience of people who became aware of the charity.
Speaker:And then they asked for the donation and what ended up happening is through the span of three months, they were able to drop the CPA by 22% and increase the number of new donors by 50%.
Speaker:And what they do now is just 50% 50.
Speaker:Yes, that's pretty, it's hugely significant because these guys were kind of stalled a bit as far as new donors are concerned.
Speaker:Like that's a major accomplishment.
Speaker:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker:The team has been working very hard on that account.
Speaker:It's just been amazing to see the results and it always comes from brainstorming.
Speaker:Like one team member says one thing and then the other one comes with it and another idea.
Speaker:The third one comes with another idea and then you start brainstorming, you put the plan together, then the plan wolves 100% of the time because we're so awesome.
Speaker:Works 100% of the time.
Speaker:There you go.
Speaker:There's a guarantee.
Speaker:It doesn't work 100% of the time.
Speaker:But if you're getting close to 100% that's pretty good.
Speaker:I mean, logically this makes sense, but I think a lot of folks don't want to do it because they're like, oh, I just want to go for the sale.
Speaker:I want to go for the donation.
Speaker:I want to go for the lead.
Speaker:I want to go for the conversion.
Speaker:I don't want all these other steps.
Speaker:I don't have time for that or I do think that a lot of businesses will start off with just straight website conversion campaigns.
Speaker:We've been running ads for these guys and doing their online marketing for quite some time, which most of it was website conversions.
Speaker:But this is a different kind of strategy.
Speaker:And I know we actually met with them at meta back in the fall and they talked about content first strategy.
Speaker:However, it actually is whether it's video content, whether it's blog content doesn't really matter.
Speaker:And I think we're actually gonna be talking about a case study here for blog content as well.
Speaker:But it's like this content first strategy, you have to be a little bit more patient and then you do have to roll that cost into your overall CPA.
Speaker:So I think people are reluctant to do it.
Speaker:They just want to kind of go for the say, hey, I'm a direct market.
Speaker:I'm just gonna go for the sale and that does work to an extent.
Speaker:But then you have to broaden it out and reach new people that aren't ready to contribute.
Speaker:Like right here now.
Speaker:Correct.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:And then if you take the long term approach, you'll end up having more raving customs because you were there first when they weren't aware, you educated them further than the other ones like you've been there with them other than straight going to the cell, I'm not saying you can go straight to the cell like you absolutely can.
Speaker:You will have a lot of accounts.
Speaker:Well, this is all they do and talks for them.
Speaker:But you got to think long term traffic costs are gonna always increase, especially on those audience segments that are ready to convert right now.
Speaker:It is what it is.
Speaker:We've seen it every year.
Speaker:So you gotta take a step back and look at everything.
Speaker:Long term, build your content strategy, build your lead magnet your follow up email sequence, focus on those stuff because you're here for the long term, not for the short term.
Speaker:So you gotta put focus on content.
Speaker:And I would say that this is very like uh in the trick here.
Speaker:But most people think, oh I'm gonna run a campaign optimizing four clicks on Facebook.
Speaker:I'm just gonna get clicks, you know, if you do that, you are.
Speaker:But what you can also do is you can set up soft conversion, meaning people that scroll like 50% of your article or people who clicked on a button on the blog post.
Speaker:So then you train the algorithm to look for those people that will accomplish those soft conversions and not just people who are here to click on the app.
Speaker:So you train the algorithm to behave differently and get you to the different segment of audience and that's something that could really benefit you.
Speaker:These are in essence video case studies and then click to learn more about the case study.
Speaker:Not necessarily click to contribute or click, click the donate.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:Just hear, hear us how to read nothing.
Speaker:We don't ask for any, just read the case study, watch the video, nothing else.
Speaker:We don't ask for a donation, we don't ask for anything.
Speaker:Yeah, which is so counterintuitive.
Speaker:If you're a V P of marketing, you're like, ah I'm not gonna do that and that's wasted money.
Speaker:Well, is it, it's not actually because if you think about consumer behavior, I mean, you're doing really, really good.
Speaker:I actually have a diagram behind me here.
Speaker:If you're watching the youtube of like a customer journey in the e-commerce space.
Speaker:And one of the things that I talk about is like, all right, if you're gonna send a Facebook ad to your, the landing page or your sales page off called traffic, basically interest targeting.
Speaker:You do some exclusions of your past purchasers or your leads or people who have visited your website.
Speaker:That kind of thing.
Speaker:If you're really, really good, you might get one out of 100 clicks to do what you want them to do unless it's an opt in for an email and an address, you know, that kind of thing, name an email, obviously 2030% conversion rate is more the norm.
Speaker:But for a purchase for an actual, I'm gonna buy something like 1% to 3% sort of depending on where you're at in the market is pretty good.
Speaker:But what are you gonna do with the other 99 or 97 people who didn't buy?
Speaker:Well, they're not ready to buy.
Speaker:So that tells you like, even when you're doing website conversion campaigns for a purchase, you're still leaving money on the table and then we'll retarget those people.
Speaker:Obviously in your website conversion campaigns for you'll watch a certain percentage of the video or maybe clicked onto a sales page or a landing page or retarget them with different types of messaging.
Speaker:But still you're in a website conversion mentality, which is great and you start that way.
Speaker:But when you do get to a certain point where you almost kind of saturate that market, is that safe to say?
Speaker:And then you have to look at these other sorts of strategies.
Speaker:How would you approach it if you're like a V P of marketing saying?
Speaker:All right, I know why people are doing X Y and Z but they could be doing so much more.
Speaker:Is this a next step strategy or is this is something that you should start with?
Speaker:I would say start definitely with conversion first to build that cash flow to get to that hot segment, you want to get traffic and you want to, you need to get money going even if you're not breaking even in the first round.
Speaker:So go to that top of the top audience that is in market to convert right now, start there and then slowly build out the content strategy.
Speaker:Now, this also comes down when you do your customer research, like you gotta understand what type of content your customers are engaging with and that will help you develop your content strategy.
Speaker:Now, let's think about it this way as well.
Speaker:Like if you're running ads on social, if you're running ads on Google search, the behavior there is very different right?
Speaker:On Google search primarily, it's intent based.
Speaker:Whereas if you're running traffic on Facebook, linkedin, Pinterest Tik Tok, you're basically interrupting people.
Speaker:Those are social platforms.
Speaker:They are there to consume content from their friends, their colleagues or whatever.
Speaker:But the point being they are there to consume content.
Speaker:So if you're coming straight from an ad and asking them buy my shit or do this or do that, yeah, people are gonna respond to that.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:But the majority of them are going to respond more to when you come to them with education content, educational content.
Speaker:So you need to adapt your content and your ads based on the platform, you're running traffic from now.
Speaker:It doesn't mean that the content that you put together is 100% content.
Speaker:You can do a blog post that starts with amount of content like five tips or three tips or whatever.
Speaker:And then you start taking people to the next step even if it's just to click on the URL to check the next page.
Speaker:But the point being is when we say content first, it doesn't mean that 100% of the blog post is all content and there's no pitch, nothing.
Speaker:You can definitely combine the two.
Speaker:So as far as objective like let's talk about meta platforms just specifically.
Speaker:So these three ads which you probably leave links in the show notes from this customer is what is your objective?
Speaker:Are you using website conversion still or are you using a different objective at the top like video view, like what's your, you also talked about not and the result conversion point but somewhere in between like what's the strategy around that?
Speaker:So I would say, first of all, you can start with conversions and optimize for that specific soft conversions like button click scroll de, you can definitely start with those.
Speaker:If for any technical reason, you're unable to do that, then go ahead and do a traffic.
Speaker:Obviously, at the end of the day, you can do a split test and see what is more beneficial to you.
Speaker:So you can have one campaign straight, optimize for traffic and page views.
Speaker:You can have another campaign optimizing for soft conversion.
Speaker:Then you can see which campaign group provides a better CPA.
Speaker:So you can separate your account and you have like one group of campaigns with traffic first and then the retargeting campaigns.
Speaker:And then you have another campaign group with optimizing those one of the soft conversions and then re targeting campaigns based on that soft conversion.
Speaker:And you can see, let's say you run this test for like 30 days, see which group converts below does not really right or wrong.
Speaker:He let the data do the talking.
Speaker:So one of the things that I noticed that you didn't mention, you didn't mention video view objective.
Speaker:Why is that?
Speaker:Because it would seem to me like that would be the logical choice for the campaign objective if you want to get people to watch more of the video and then you retard those people.
Speaker:But you're talking doing a split test, even with traffic landing page views or maybe even a split test for website conversions for some soft conversion, like button click, it depends on the content you put up front and the purpose of it.
Speaker:So in two examples, we want people to actually leave Facebook and consume the content on the blog.
Speaker:That's the main objective there.
Speaker:Like we want them outside of Facebook, they can watch certain video here.
Speaker:We'll target them later.
Speaker:But the main focus is to take them outside of Facebook, get them on the website and start consuming the content there.
Speaker:That's the main objective.
Speaker:You can definitely 100% build the custom audience of video views, but it really depends on what you wanna do.
Speaker:If for example, you want to focus on providing your content, not through blog posts, but just through videos, then you can definitely run a video views campaign straight with only videos and then re target those video viewers definitely depends on the piece of content that you have.
Speaker:So in this case, it's like a shorter video and like I said, we'll leave links in the show notes for a couple of the ads here.
Speaker:These are shorter videos that sort of give a high level overview of a particular case.
Speaker:Like twins with Cleft Palates, like this is their story but to learn more about this story, it's not a 10 minute video.
Speaker:It's like a minute video or so.
Speaker:But it's the real thing you want them to do is to click and to actually consume the entire blog post on the case study because that shows some intent.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:The more actions we can make the potential customer do the better.
Speaker:So not just sit down and watch the video, click, go there, scroll all those mini actions, the more the better.
Speaker:And then you're obviously taking some of these video view engagement audiences and you're probably throwing those into your retargeting campaigns as well.
Speaker:I have to assume.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Absolutely.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Very cool here.
Speaker:And so the next step after this, so you get the click that goes to the page, I consume the blog post about the twins with Cleft Palates.
Speaker:Then what ad do I see after that?
Speaker:Or are we getting conversions on this ad specifically or what's sort of step two here?
Speaker:So step two is for me to chase you till you die.
Speaker:That's basically it till you make the action I want you to make.
Speaker:That's the, that's the main thing.
Speaker:Chase you around the internet till you die.
Speaker:Yeah, until you pull out your credit card.
Speaker:Got it.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:Either way.
Speaker:So the next step would be to run a re targeting ad on some cases when you run those top of funnel campaigns, you would get conversions but don't judge the performance of that campaign based on the CPA because that would be a wrong decision because the purpose of that campaign is not to drive a conversion, not, not to drive your end conversion is to drive something else like that soft conversion or just that click.
Speaker:So measure the campaign based on those metrics.
Speaker:So once people land on your blog post and consume the content, then you can start running the targeting ads to them.
Speaker:Now it depends on what the customer needs to make the next step.
Speaker:So for example, in this case for charity, you want to show even more case studies, you wanna show actually where the money is going because people have doubts, like you hear all of these stories that people don't need to charities and then the money goes to the CEO or whatever and it doesn't really go to the people who actually need the money.
Speaker:The primary focus there is to overcome objection, show more proof, like show the customer that you're actually here.
Speaker:Like you're doing what you're telling you're doing.
Speaker:The highlight here is to overcome potential objections and lead them to the sale.
Speaker:You can also show different case studies like number stats work really well.
Speaker:They are more testimonials.
Speaker:So that's pretty much what you can chase them on the targeting ads.
Speaker:Super interesting.
Speaker:I feel like I said, we'll leave links to the show notes for these ads but there is also a section way at the bottom.
Speaker:The call to action is to donate now way at the bottom.
Speaker:But also there is a likelihood of you contributing or how likely are you to make a donation after reading this article?
Speaker:Which is interesting.
Speaker:Do you have any data on that little bar graph on the bottom?
Speaker:Because it's super interesting.
Speaker:And if you don't, that's fine.
Speaker:But I find this page, I've never actually, we've never actually talked about these sorts of things on the show before.
Speaker:So it's pretty cool.
Speaker:Do you have any data on that chart as to whether or not you're getting any meaningful data there?
Speaker:No, I'll have to ask the team.
Speaker:But the point is, is the idea is to consume it and then sort of the soft next step of more case studies, not necessarily just going right for the sale, but you probably have on that level two retargeting, which is all right.
Speaker:I've engaged with the article, I've linked end it on a specific page or maybe I've watched a percentage of videos like we refer to that as level two retargeting.
Speaker:You are giving them the option.
Speaker:You are running some straight to conversion ads on that or is it still mostly case studies?
Speaker:No, absolutely.
Speaker:You can combine case studies but you can combine them with more aggressive call to action.
Speaker:So if you can show, OK, look here are more results, more stories, you can run an ad that with a charity story and then you can be more aggressive with your copy call to action.
Speaker:So it can definitely be more aggressive at that stage.
Speaker:Absolutely.
Speaker:And those people are getting retargeted.
Speaker:I mean, it's a smaller audience.
Speaker:Obviously, somebody who's a clicker, either on, you know, the button or they're landing on the landing page.
Speaker:Those are smaller audiences.
Speaker:So they might see another case study and then the next day, they might see a conversion case study that's like donate now.
Speaker:So you are kind of getting a mix of both.
Speaker:You don't really know exactly what happens at that point.
Speaker:But you're getting people that are lightly interested, have some level of engagement and you're following this whole customer acquisition path to A T like this is how humans interact with brands.
Speaker:You don't, not everybody buys on the first click, there's the 99% or 97% or if you're really good, you get a 10% conversion rate, but that's probably a paper click, intent based keyword search ad or maybe a branded ad.
Speaker:You got to do something.
Speaker:You gotta have a strategy for all the other people that aren't ready to buy right now, aren't ready to take that action right now.
Speaker:You're sort of softly taking them down this path without twisting their arm.
Speaker:I mean, you will be retargeting them until they probably donate, which is fine.
Speaker:But you know, those people are at least somewhat interested in what you have to offer it.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:100 percent.
Speaker:This is, I don't know, this is not earth shattering stuff but it's so cool because it, it makes so much sense and people don't do this.
Speaker:I just did a strategic growth plan for a customer.
Speaker:He wasn't doing any of this.
Speaker:He's like, I have all the same ads straight to a product page, all the same message.
Speaker:I'm not altering my message, whether it's cold traffic, whether it's lightly engaged, level two traffic, somebody who's like, viewed a specific product or even added to cart, like every step of the way you need a little bit of different messaging because it is part of this whole pathway.
Speaker:And if you're not doing this in your marketing, you are certainly leaving money on the table.
Speaker:If your team isn't doing this in your marketing, it's certainly something for you to ask them about for damn sure.
Speaker:So we're gonna get into, uh, our next case study on what's working now with rock star superhero.
Speaker:We just keep adding to your resume here.
Speaker:Brand new dad.
Speaker:Rocket missile, Survivor, rocket missile, Survivor.
Speaker:Kobe to right after this quick break.
Speaker:All right, we're back with Kobe Topez and we just talked about a case study in the charity niche.
Speaker:But I think no matter if you're in the service niche, you're selling digital products, you're in the legion niche, you're in the e-commerce niche.
Speaker:I think you can take something from that.
Speaker:So let's talk about the next one, which is, it's a completely different space more in the credit repair space.
Speaker:And this is one we kind of stumbled on from the Google team.
Speaker:If I'm not mistaken, that then altered our meta strategy, which is the whole idea behind what we refer to as traffic harmonization, getting all the platforms to work together.
Speaker:So tell us about this case study.
Speaker:So the interesting thing in one of the spring calls that the team had that the Google media shared that the traffic that's coming from.
Speaker:The Performance Max campaign has been sent to different blog posts and different blog posts perform really well on the campaigns.
Speaker:The horse was good, the CPA was good.
Speaker:So what we thought about doing is based on that we saw that people are engaging with that content.
Speaker:On the Facebook side, we didn't really send anyone to the content.
Speaker:We just sent them straight to the sales pages and that's pretty much it.
Speaker:But from the Google side, the Google team ran a performance Max campaign with different ads and then because they had the final URL expansion option running, then Performance Max, what they did, it sent people to pages based on what it thought would be better for them.
Speaker:So what ended up happening is people will visit the multi different pages and then for that they consume their content and then they made conversions then they convert and then made a purchase.
Speaker:So when we saw that, we saw the people engaged with different blog posts, we thought, ok, well, there's clearly behavior going on there.
Speaker:There's clearly an intent going on there.
Speaker:Why can't we just run it on Facebook as well?
Speaker:So then we started creating ads around that and then we started running those to our audiences as well.
Speaker:The purpose of that campaign is not to make money.
Speaker:It's just to let people consume the content.
Speaker:But what ends up happening is that campaign covers our ad spend, which is massive win in itself.
Speaker:But then you break even on that preen engagement, content ad spend, we're more than breaking in.
Speaker:We're like a 1.15.
Speaker:So we're making some money.
Speaker:Some nothing crazy.
Speaker:You are a superhero at the end of the day, the team that are working on this account did amazing John credit goes to watch Landon Federico, Courtney and Simone.
Speaker:We took those blog posts and then we started creating ads on them for Facebook.
Speaker:And then what ended up happening is we started targeting our war audiences and we wanted them to consume the content because on those blog posts, the content there is very valuable for the target audience we after but also there are ct A there that drive people back to the finals.
Speaker:So what ended up happening is people consume the content WMO consume that content.
Speaker:They reengage with us and then they convert for the finals.
Speaker:So this company is running on a very low budget around like 203 $100.
Speaker:They on Facebook.
Speaker:Nothing too crazy.
Speaker:It's just for our warmer audiences and we're talking about website visitors, people who engage with our social pages.
Speaker:Nothing too crazy here.
Speaker:What ends up happening is people consume more content from us and then they also make purchase and we also been profitable on that.
Speaker:So that ties to what I said again previously is don't disrespect your customers by not showing them content by not providing them content.
Speaker:Even your warm audiences who haven't really converted yet.
Speaker:If you have blog posts that are valuable for them, slap a couple of ads, let them consume that content and see if you're able to see a lift in the number of sales that you're getting.
Speaker:So just to summarize here, once again, this is Google and Facebook working together, I wish was here.
Speaker:So I could say you got to run Facebook ads alongside Google.
Speaker:Really just a one trick pony is just if you can get both, you've covered like 80 to 90% of the paid traffic platforms, at least at that point.
Speaker:That's why we focus on these two platforms and we expand after that.
Speaker:But the point is is our Google team started running Google Performance Macs with URL expansion on didn't really know what we were gonna get, but then ran ads for about a month or so.
Speaker:And then Nick and Rachna started to say, hey, wait a second here.
Speaker:URL expansion is actually sending people to what URL expansion does.
Speaker:It says basically Google, send somebody on this performance match campaign to any page on the website and see what converts.
Speaker:So you're really putting the algorithm the 72 million data points on for a test for Google and saying, tell me what converts as opposed to thinking, you might have a blog post on your website.
Speaker:You're like, yeah, that's our best blog post, but it might be your best blog post.
Speaker:But is it the best converting?
Speaker:And that's what we found very quickly in this data?
Speaker:And that was just sort of a revelation unto itself.
Speaker:But then you took that knowledge and said, hey, why don't we do the same kind of now that we know what works in the general public for open targeting, you know, people who don't know who we are specific targeting on Google performance Macs.
Speaker:Let's take that same methodology over to the meta side of the equation and we started getting the same types of results.
Speaker:Yep, the art platforms definitely feed one and not do the insights you can get from one platform.
Speaker:You can definitely tweak them to the other a platform so they work together not against one another.
Speaker:And what's even cooler is that these blog post campaigns are backing out of the 1.15, which is, which is super nice.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:Absolutely.
Speaker:But once again, like on me, you're using, what's your website?
Speaker:What's your, I wanna say, website conversions.
Speaker:But I'm assuming that's the case, is it traffic objective?
Speaker:What objective are you using on those, on those ads?
Speaker:So, in this case, the team is using traffic, straight traffic.
Speaker:Nothing too crazy though.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:Ok.
Speaker:And getting people off Facebook obviously, and you will get what you ask for when you're setting up what your objective is exactly for me.
Speaker:And I think that's not to be lost on this whole thing.
Speaker:Some people are like, oh, well, it doesn't really matter what objective you use.
Speaker:It actually does matter.
Speaker:In our previous case study we were talking about, you know, some kind of signal, you know, for the charity that leads to a measure of intent and it might be a button click for a website conversion campaign, not a purchase or not an actual contribution, but some kind of middle ground, some soft conversion here.
Speaker:You just want them to go off Facebook and consume this blog post because you have data from your Google team that says if they consume this thing, they're gonna convert.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:And also one note on the soft conversions, even if you do decide to not optimize for them, they can still give you insights on what kind of blog posts are leaning towards those soft conversions.
Speaker:Like what work best you can even launch like a traffic campaign but still have those soft conversions running.
Speaker:And then you can simply use that for reporting purposes and see what's working.
Speaker:It doesn't mean like option A or point B. You can definitely see what's best for you, works for you, but you can definitely use those soft conversions again, not just to optimize but to also learn and see the behaviors on each blog post, which are huge insights, which just takes a little bit of time to go in and actually read the data and this is not to be lost.
Speaker:And I think that's one of the reasons why I asked the question to start off is what do you start off with?
Speaker:First, do you do this going in?
Speaker:Like if you're a brand new e-commerce company, you do this well, start with website conversion campaigns to start off with like get those people who are in market who are ready to buy.
Speaker:Maybe you maybe not like know your brand, get those easy conversions, but then that you reach a certain level of scale, you can certainly scale that through vertical scaling, which is just basically adding more money to the budget.
Speaker:You can do it with horizontal scaling, adding more look alikes or different interest targeting, changing up your messaging on your front end level one ads which is cold traffic ads to different avatars and different messaging for each one of those avatars.
Speaker:But at a certain point, there's people who are not in market for your stuff are not ready and you have to take them down this path.
Speaker:This customer acquisition path and content first is how we all consume.
Speaker:Like, think about the last thing that you just bought.
Speaker:I'm about to buy like a brand new gas powered blower here because I like our blower blows.
Speaker:Doesn't blow.
Speaker:What I'm finding is that like in my research, very few gas powered blowers now.
Speaker:And I'm doing research on electric blowers and which ones are the best one, which has the best battery life, which has the best battery.
Speaker:Should I get lithium?
Speaker:Should I get lithium ion?
Speaker:Should I?
Speaker:Like, I'm in that stage right now where I'm gathering information, you know, I haven't made the purchase yet, but I've already done like six or seven Google Searches.
Speaker:I'm in that, in between stage and I'm starting to get some retargeting ads.
Speaker:Every time I go into Amazon, I see, you know, ads for blowers.
Speaker:I'm seeing it when I do Google searches.
Speaker:I get it.
Speaker:I understand.
Speaker:But it's a natural progression.
Speaker:I'm not quite ready yet.
Speaker:Even if I'm in market, I still am doing research on it.
Speaker:So there is that too.
Speaker:It's like I am absolutely in market for, I don't even know if blower is the right word but lawns, I don't even know what it's called.
Speaker:But anyway, I'm gonna say it's a blower anyway.
Speaker:I'm in market for it.
Speaker:But I'm still doing research and I've already had like seven or eight or nine touch points.
Speaker:There is a great example of why this would work for even people who are in market to buy.
Speaker:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker:Content is king.
Speaker:It is what it is.
Speaker:No matter how much you want to deny it.
Speaker:It is what it is.
Speaker:That's the long term approach.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And I think this is, this is cool and these are ads I think we can leave in the show notes as well because these are image ads really cool images.
Speaker:Lots of calls to action on the blog post itself.
Speaker:It's supplemented with a video too.
Speaker:So it's chunky, really good content.
Speaker:We have plenty of people in here talking about the value of high value content on your site, 1000 plus words on this blog post.
Speaker:Like it's really helpful, useful information on the stuff that maybe is a precursor to them ultimately looking for a side gig or helping repair their own credit.
Speaker:And this is an area where Meta and Google like they have issues with from a policy standpoint.
Speaker:You guys are sort of navigating through that at the same time.
Speaker:Talk about that a bit more.
Speaker:We just gave Zuck some money.
Speaker:That's all we did.
Speaker:The important thing.
Speaker:We didn't need any money, we just gave him some love.
Speaker:That's it.
Speaker:He, he loved the important thing with this type of is to not make any exaggerated claims.
Speaker:Be soft though.
Speaker:Kind of go around the table a bit.
Speaker:I would say that's the biggest tip and be careful.
Speaker:This has nothing to do with affiliate marketing.
Speaker:I have no idea what it is and all the shady tactics.
Speaker:It's hard for guys like me and you who came from affiliate marketing to soften.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:And we always want to go for the juggler.
Speaker:You know, we have a place in hell, you know, like it is what it is.
Speaker:We have nothing to lose.
Speaker:I've come to terms.
Speaker:I'm at peace with my past, very poor decisions, selling scammy products.
Speaker:It's made me a better marketer.
Speaker:It's given me some perspective.
Speaker:See, and even you, like you're touring now and you've got, you got a daughter and all this.
Speaker:It's just a natural evolution.
Speaker:But I, yeah, it's just a stage in life.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:Oh my God.
Speaker:These are good.
Speaker:Well, this is awesome to have you back, man.
Speaker:Happy to be here.
Speaker:I super appreciate you taking time between uh dodging missiles, feeding babies and taking care of the family and running some Facebook ads and Google ads.
Speaker:In the meantime, the team that you have is pretty damn good.
Speaker:I think we're pretty proud of them.
Speaker:Absolutely.
Speaker:Some call outs here for them as well.
Speaker:And like I said, we'll leave some links in the show notes for this stuff because I think it's just really, really important and like I said before, I mean, if you're not doing this to get to that next level of scale, you really are missing out and it's counterintuitive, especially from two reformed affiliate marketing guys here.
Speaker:It's hard for us to say, don't go for the sale on the first click, but in actuality, that's exactly what you should do once you reach a certain level of scale.
Speaker:So super appreciate you coming on here And of course, you can find out more about tier 11 over at tier 11 dot com.
Speaker:And we are hiring right now, we are actively hiring again.
Speaker:So check us out on tier 11 dot com forward slash jobs.
Speaker:Make our hr guy Josh, very, very happy because I would say like 90% of the people that work at Tier 11 came from this podcast, which is pretty cool.
Speaker:So yeah, right now we're hiring for a customer success person, which is a super important part of all of what we do here.
Speaker:So definitely check that out at tier 11 dot com forward slash jobs.
Speaker:And of course, subscribe to the show here and leave a rating wherever you are listening.
Speaker:We are pretty much everywhere and fast climbing up the charts.
Speaker:Our goal is to be the number one marketing podcast in the universe.
Speaker:And I'm not sure how you measure that universe wise, but certainly does help for Apple itunes podcasts and everything else where we're at.
Speaker:So tell us what we can do better over at perpetual traffic dot com forward slash better.
Speaker:Follow me over on linkedin.
Speaker:I'm pretty active over there and you can probably follow Kassum at slam on Twitter even though he missed today's episode.
Speaker:Go back and listen to episodes and check out our youtube channel too.
Speaker:We'll leave a link to that.
Speaker:It's pretty cool.
Speaker:There's like there's a bunch of them.
Speaker:So it's the one with, there's the one with man smiling face.
Speaker:We'll leave a link to that in the show notes and like I said, all the show notes and all the stuff we mentioned here are over at perpetual traffic dot com.
Speaker:So on behalf of the, what's working now co-host for the week, Kobe Topez.
Speaker:Until next show.
Speaker:See you, boom.
