Nathan Wrigley: 00:01 Welcome to the WP Builds podcast, bringing you the latest news from the WordPress community. Now welcome your host, David Walmsley, Nathan Wrigley.
Nathan Wrigley: 00:22 Hello there and welcome to the WP Builds podcast. This is episode 135 and titled how to run successful ad campaigns to increase conversions with Daniel Daines-Hutt. It was published on Thursday the 4th of July, 2019 my name's Nathan Wrigley from Picture and Word .co. uk. UK, a small web development agency based in the north of England. And just before we begin, a couple of things, head over to the WP Builds.com websites and you'll be able to find a bunch of links in the menu at the top. The first one I want to draw your attention to is the subscribed blink and if you click on that, you're going to be able to find a whole heap of ways to keep in touch with us. We've got newsletters, we've got a thriving Facebook group of over 2000 people and it will enable you to sign up on things like apple podcasts or your favorite podcast player.
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Nathan Wrigley: 01:59 WP Builds.com / webinars and we've got a whole archive of webinars. We've probably got, I don't know, maybe 20 or more now that we've done and there might be something to do with a WordPress product that you're interested in and I would say the last one I want to mention is WP builds.com forward slash advertise if you would like to have your product or service mentioned on the WP Builds podcast. A little bit like David Vongries did from the page builder framework. Do you use a page builder to create your website's? The page builder framework is a mobile responsive and lightening fast WordPress theme that works with beaver builder, elemental breezy, and other page builders with its endless customization options in the WordPress customizer. It's the perfect fit for you or your agency. Go to WP dash page builder framework.com today and we thank them for their support of the WP Builds podcast.
Nathan Wrigley: 02:53 Right? Let's get stuck into it. This is a subject that I know virtually nothing about, so apologies if my questions are on the ignorant side, but it's all about driving paid traffic to your content or your shop or whatever it might be online. And Daniel Daines-Hutt is going to tell you how this can be done. As I said, this is no area of expertise of mine, so it was a really interesting topic to delve into all about how you can target and retarget and decrease your spend on adverts by just looking at the data. I hope you enjoy it. Hello there. Welcome to the WP Builds podcast. It's interview day today on the line all the way from New Zealand, albeit originally from the United Kingdom. We have Daniel now. Daniel, I didn't even ask you how to pronounce your name, so I'm going to go for it. I'm going to say Daniel Dane's hot, correct? Yeah.
Daniel: 03:46 I knew this was coming out before as you had done the intro. I was thinking, hang on a minute to say no, how to say it.
Nathan Wrigley: 03:52 Okay. Give it a go. Um, Daniel came to me. I think we hooked up via Dave to me, who is a person very much in the WordPress space. So thank you Dave for hooking us up because Daniel's specialism is something that I literally know next to zero about. So this is going to be an education for me. It might end up being a bit of a ramble from my part. You know, the questions might not be beautifully structured because I know so little because Daniel's area of expertise, um, that we're going to talk about today is paid advertising. But before we begin that done, you'll get in onto the paid advertising bit. Do you want to tell us, as I always ask, tell us a little bit about yourself, uh, so that we know who you are and you know, why you've got some authority in this space.
Daniel: 04:39 Yeah, no worries. Um, first off, thank you for having me on the show. I really appreciate it and thanks again yet Dave for introducing us. Um, as you said, Englishman living in New Zealand in my accent is all over the place now, uh, originally from the West Midlands. So that accent is not there, although I can do it. Um, if needed. Uh, it's a long story. I got into entrepreneurship selling t-shirts. I got into a lot of stores. I think I was in five retail stores in five weeks. Um, that was actually with paid ads as well. Funny Story. I would run paid ads to people to get them to go ask their retail store to see, um, um, if they could buy our stuff, knowing full well that I was targeting these people and we didn't have them in that store. And then the retail store came to us to ask if I could stock it.
Daniel: 05:27 Wow. Send them a story for another time. Yeah, sneaky like that. So, um, I have a background in paid ads and, and I write content about that. But ironically, my content is the thing I'm best known for. So I have a blog post that's in the top 10 of all time on inbound.org, which are no longer as, this is a forum for inbound marketers. Um, I've got the top content of 2017 on growth hackers, which is, um, another one. I say top, it's in the top 10. Um, I brought a lot of case studies on paid ads. We ran one where we did a 18,750 in sales for $114 an hour spending the weekend and just recently. So my main thing right now is we're talking about content writing and content promotion. It's a new blog. I started called amp my content and I'm, the big reason behind that is like a lot of people are writing content and creating content, but it's got no value to them.
Daniel: 06:26 It's not producing an ROI past what it took to make. Um, and so one of the things that you can do obviously is actually paid to get your content out in front of people. Now, a lot of people kind of slapdash that. And um, we've wrote this massive case study how for every dollar we spent now promoting a blog post, we make $22 back in return. So that's the kind of stuff I wanted to talk about today and kind of give any tips and hints I can about that. And Yeah, any questions that you have at any point, like to simplify, go wild, you know?
Nathan Wrigley: 07:01 Yeah, that's great. Okay, so my, my confession at the beginning was all about the fact that I know nothing about this now. I don't know what the strengths or weaknesses of of our audience are going to be in this area, but I'll, I'll lay it out fairly plain for you and everybody to understand is that I build websites, I know that Facebook and I know that Google have these platforms. I have dabbled in the past. I have never made judgements upon those adverts. I've never run ad campaigns for clients. I've done none of that. So the only time I've tried paid adverts is for my own business. And I found myself very, very unwilling. Not for, you know, I didn't mean to do it, but I just never found myself analyzing my spend. So, you know, I know that you can go in geo-fence things and target only the United Kingdom and you can make it so that when this pot of money runs out, it ceases to do adverts and you can present different ads to different people or not.
Nathan Wrigley: 07:58 But I never just, I never got into any of that. And so every month I would get a bill, in my case, this was all from Google because Facebook wasn't around when I was playing with this, that shows how long ago it was and it just felt like a black hole. And it wasn't a lot of money, but I just felt, okay, Google are taking, let's say a hundred pounds a month off me and I don't have anything to show for it. I have no idea. I never asked the questions. So it all seems like Voodoo to me, a bit of black magic and almost like, um, like a pot of gold. You know, the idea that you can spend money and make money seems that's very beguiling. So what are you first question, what are you primarily using these days? Are you, are you a Facebook ad person? Is that where it's all at these days?
Daniel: 08:44 At the moment, that's all I'm doing and is a specific reason for that? Um, I'm trying to reach a cold audience. So, uh, Google ads, you can target specific keywords and things. So if someone's searching for a particular keyword, your advert will show so much. Generally kind of a warm audience. They are already looking for a solution to something and you're trying to get in front of them, which is great. And it's, but it's competitive. Uh, with Facebook, it's a social platform obviously, and it's an entertainment platform. People are on there basically trying to find something to do. They're trying to kill time or whatever. Because of that, it makes it very easy to promote content to them rather than offers like it, you can sell them there, you know, here's the thing, do you want this thing by the thing? But by advertising content to them, you're entertaining them. So it's almost like the Netflix feed where it's like, do you want to click on this and check this out? And I'm like, yeah, okay. So it means that the cost is very low based around what we're trying to do, if that makes sense.
Nathan Wrigley: 09:47 Yeah, it does. I can totally sympathize. I understand this because I'm in Facebook all the time. And um, if you're a Facebook user, I use it primarily on the mobile device. And typically what I notice when I log into Facebook on my phone on the app is that the second thing, you know, there'll be a post that's relevant to me and, and my, the people that I'm friends with. And then the second post will be an advert and there'll be a couple more posts from people that I know in, in Facebook, and then there'll be another ad and, and so it goes, yeah, you're right. It generally tends to be based around content that I get. Yeah, very, very specifically around WordPress because I guess Facebook have figured that out about me.
Daniel: 10:25 Well, they've got the, they've got the machine learning running in the background and things like that. But it's also, um, what I was going to say, I totally forgot to say it, but warm audience and a cold audience of people who are, who could be a potential customer, the warm audience is far smaller and more competitive. Whereas the cold audience, if you can talk to someone who maybe doesn't even know about that problem yet, if you could write an ad that converts to them, then you can speak to exponentially more people. So that's another benefit of being on there. But yeah, the A, they are quite, it's quite smart how they can target certain things, specific interests and things like that. They're getting better so that they're actually pushing people like, um, agencies and things out of business because, well, not really that, but they make it so easy. It's just a couple of clicks of the button to target the right people.
Nathan Wrigley: 11:17 What kinds of things are you able to target? Um, like I'm presumed geography as one and you know, um, but what specific stuff do you look for when you're creating ads?
Daniel: 11:28 Okay, so a full disclaimer. It changes all the time they're laid to do. Okay. So, um, you know, if you're listening to this even a month from now, it may have changed ever so slightly. There was a whole thing with, um, the Russian campaign and stuff in America yeah. That, uh, was targeting specific people for certain reasons and things like that. And so by making it more difficult to target certain, um, certain issues. But I have a friend who's quite like Internet famous. He targeted his roommate with Facebook ads. If you've ever read the article, he would run adverts that were like really, really specific, um, and it would only have a show to him. So it would cost him nothing to show the cost, like 5 cents to show it. And um, and he was making his roommate really paranoid and they, for the FBI was listening into him and things like that.
Daniel: 12:20 He called, you can't get that granular nowadays, but you can to a certain point. So he was basically targeting one email address and so it would work from that. Whereas there's work arounds for all different kinds of things. If you wanted to, you're running an event, you could target people who are kind of like in a 500 meter entrance hall, you'd like, you could target people in the whole of the building, you know, if you know what you're doing. Um, wow. Based on, yeah, based on geography and then excluding specific areas and things like that. You can literally target people who are going like you could talk at ads if you are a, if you are a restaurant to people that are walking down that street at that time, at specific times a day as well. Um, wow. Well more importantly, uh, cause I know your audience or kind of B to B, a B to c kind of thing like that with services you can target particular interests or job roles and things. So that essentially something specific that we do later on when we're testing an ad is I will create a, um, a very focused focus group audience basically of the ideal people. I want to show my ad to.
Daniel: 13:29 here's a caveat. It's normally more expensive, the more niched down you'd go. And it's one of the reasons that people say, I should have sent us to the start. Almost every ad will lose money when it starts out. If you're very lucky, you might spend a dollar $4 and get a dollar back, something like that. No one ever tells you this because you have to get enough data for the ad to start running and things like that. And so most people quit before they even get enough, uh, statistical significance. They don't actually have enough data to know if an ad is working. I've done it before where I've had an advert that's running and it's five variations and I go away. And, uh, I went away for a weekend campaign of the Coromandel, which is up the coast here. And the one advert wasn't converting at all. And when I got back up Monday, it was something like six times better than the rest. And I was, I was umming and ahing with turning it off. And um, I'm just like, Hey, I'm so glad I didn't because it takes time and things to that. So that's the main thing to understand is that the start most ads lose money and what you're doing is your,
Daniel: 14:33 it's called bottom up testing. They use it in product design and they're basically trying to find things that don't work so that it can find the elements that deal work. Because as much as we know people, people are weird, you know, we don't always do the things that we're supposed to do or say that we do, which is why your algorithm suggests a Gilmore girls, when you tell people you don't watch it, but secretly you've watched 12 episodes and so it keeps recommending it to you. You know, cause we don't do what we say and we don't say what we do and vice versa. So it's, it's one of those things where we do bottom of testing where we're trying to find what fails to find what works. And so I'm trying not to jump too far ahead, but as I was saying with the focus group, what I will do is I will have a focus group of the ideal people who it is more expensive to show too, and I will test every element of an advert until I get the ad that gets the most clicks from these people.
Daniel: 15:29 Once I get that to happen, sometimes I will already be profitable at that point. The ad is just that good. What I'll do then is I will actually broaden the audience and not be so narrow. Maybe I'll just have one particular interest. Let's say it was a web development, you know, rather than just WordPress. And what would happen is Facebook starts to show it to all these people and, and drops a cost because it's far cheaper because you're not being so specific. Now you're not um, having to budget against it because your ad worked really well with that focus group. It goes to figure, but all of a sudden these WordPress developers start clicking on the ad. Facebook starts to learn who your ad proponents best with and then it starts to only show it to those people. So it's kind of a work around where we're getting to get to show it to those people again, but without having to narrow down and pay more to do that, if that makes sense.
Nathan Wrigley: 16:28 Yeah. Yeah. That does make perfect sense. Yeah. So you start broad, figure out what works then, then narrow it down and hopefully by that point you've got an ad which is
Daniel: 16:37 effective. Well, while the other way, this is the thing, we start really narrow so that it works with [inaudible], so it's effective. And then we go broad and Facebook, the machine learning starts to show it to them.
Nathan Wrigley: 16:50 Ah, okay. Yeah. Sorry, I misunderstood. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay. Um, with, with this kind of platform, the, everybody keeps talking about this retargeting, which I think is, that is the magic, the magic thing that Facebook and you know, other platforms I suppose now bring to the table. Uh, do you want to tell us a little bit about that and how that plays into the effectiveness of ads? What, what is retargeting perhaps for those of us that are, uh, you know, been living under a rock for a while.
Daniel: 17:18 Yeah. So, um, everyone's heard that of your audience who come to your website, maybe two to 4% will ever buy four to 5% is kind of like e-commerce, maybe as high as 8%. But that means that there's 92 people who didn't buy. Now the reason they didn't buy a lot of the time is they were checking their phone as I went across the street or they were looking for a precedent for their partner and then they came in the room so they closed it. Things like that. So retargeting allows you to track the people who visited specific pages or products or services and then run an advert. The only they see. Hmm. So at its basic, most basic, you can use it to remind people to come back and say, Hey, did you forget this thing? Here's this thing. And in all fairness, you can see a 10% lift in sales just by doing that. And even better because it's because it's usually only a small group of people who got there. It means the ad cost is very low also. Yes, yes. They convert quite easily. So you're right. Sorry. Go on. No, you go for it.
Nathan Wrigley: 18:29 well no, I was, yeah, I was just going to say, so the, the principle is that you, you have to, you can't just do this. You need to put something on your website which recognizes that they have been along and don something from Facebook. They've, they've clicked on something Facebook. Then, um, I guess we're talking about this, this Facebook pixel that I really don't know all that much about and that provides some data back to Facebook to say, look, they clicked on this, they went to this page on your website and so on. And, and you can be very specific about what you show them next. And it's not just a case of, well, they've been on your webpage, show them another ad. You can get really, really granular about where they visited and what time they visited and what to show them next and in what order. And all that stuff.
Daniel: 19:15 Yeah, you can really nerd out on it. There are few limitations. A, I will say up front, it's anonymous, so it's kind of like cached. Um, I guess that they use some kind of, um, crypto method so that they don't know who, who is, who kind of thing like that. So, um, you'll never know who that person is who visits the site, um, in reality, but you will know that, um, they visited that particular page and things like that. So yeah, you can remind them about the product. You can set up specific timers and things like that. You can set up, um, specific triggers and things. So, uh, I wrote an article recently about how we get up to like 82% of email opt-ins from blog posts. Um, it's, it, it's the one that was in the top, uh, top content on growth hackers and one of the methods, we call it the candy bar conundrum. So I don't want to get too nerdy into it, right?
Nathan Wrigley: 20:13 Oh, no, no, please. It's great. It's good fun. I love all the nerdy stuff.
Daniel: 20:17 So, um, we use a particular method to capture email, which works ridiculously well and you could use that and nothing else. But, um,
Speaker 4: 20:27 okay.
Daniel: 20:28 At one point we had about 50,000 visitors visit our website in a, in a couple of days and I didn't have any email capture in place, so I got a bit crazy about this. So what we set up was a system where someone reads an article, they opt in and as a huge amount of people opting in, but there's still a segment that didn't. And so we would retarget them with an ad for the same often. And what would happen is up to 20, 30, 40% more people would come back and opt in again, even though they didn't opt in the first time. That's counterintuitive. That's amazing. So we, we call it the candy bar conundrum because um, there's a lot of psych, uh, psychology behind it. You know, when you're walking around a supermarket and you're looking at all the things that you need to get and you're saying you're trying to be good and you're picking up, you put the biscuits down and you end up getting the, you know, the cheap coffee and whatever else and you're going around all the different aisles and you're constantly having to, um, use willpower all the time.
Daniel: 21:27 Yep. And you get to the very end and then they've got chocolate bars right there. You got to stare at these things. Or the person in front of you is, you know, doing this shopping and things and this is like a 50, 60% chance that you're going to give in and get one, especially if you've already said no to things on the way round. You know, if you weren't interested at all, you're not even gonna think about it. But if it had tempted you in some way, it, you only have like a finite amount of willpower, um, to keep going. And so what happens is w by retargeting them with that particular optin that they already wanted on some level, they were already interested cause they read the post. Yep. Here's the thing, when you're on Facebook, and this relates to your podcast, your last episode actually I listened to today, what you were talking about, it makes it very difficult.
Daniel: 22:19 You always want to log into Facebook, you always wanna check notifications and things like that. How that software is built as it actually changes your, um, kind of brain chemistry of how you react to dopamine and things like that and willpower. And so when you first check it out in the morning, you've got your maximum tolerance, your maximum willpower. And the more you check it out during the day, the more times you have to check it out to get another dopamine release. So you're checking it more and more frequently as you get more tired during the day. Oh Lord, I know, I know. So when you're retargeting someone with an offer that they already wanted and their willpower is always already really low, it means that the chances of them opting in is ridiculously high.
Speaker 5: 23:06 Huh?
Nathan Wrigley: 23:08 Right. Yeah. It's really, really cool. I mean, can this be used? So let's say for example, let's take a hypothetical case that I, um, obviously I'm a, I'm a web guy. Let's, let's move away from that altogether, but for what we're about to talk about, imagine it could be, um, a website business, but let's take the example of, I dunno shoes. I, I've decided that I'm going to ditch the website business and I'm going to start selling shoes, right? Um, yeah. How do you go about this? Because you see, the fear in me is that, God, I just want to get, I want to get a bricks and mortar shop. I want to get that safe. I want to know the unprofitable in that arena. Whereas you have a completely different approach. You're willing to spend a ton of money up front because you're good at this stuff. Um, how, how do we begin? What do we start doing to f let's say, let's go with shoes.
Daniel: 24:01 So it, any commerce is different emphasis, slightly different, especially if you're going to do retargeting and things because they way they set it up is different. You have to set up like skew numbers and things for every product and blah, blah, blah blah. Okay. Um, it, how about I give you the example of saying you're trying to sell a website.
Nathan Wrigley: 24:22 Well, all right, let's go with that then. If that's, if that's easier because there's less, I didn't realize that Facebook had problems with not problems, but you know, if there was certain limitations of brevity with e-commerce. Yeah, let's go with websites. Good.
Daniel: 24:34 It's when it comes to ecommerce, you might have, uh, four different colorways of issue and then you're like 28 years. Yes. Yes. So what happens is you have to, you have to like upload all these different spreadsheets and things. And what you can do is you can create an ad for one shoe that dynamically changes based on color and things like that based on what they looked at. Yeah. So like it pulls off it's different information and it creates the adverb based off of that. But that's overly complex if you're just doing freelancing or B2B or you're selling a service and it's actually quite easy to do. Um, the main thing, excuse me, the main thing to do is only have one, one product at first. If you've never done this before, just start with one product and start with a low daily budget. Facebook wants to spend your money, uh, as quickly and as fast as it can.
Daniel: 25:28 It wants to get, it wants you to get results cause he wants you to keep to keep doing it. But the way the machine learning is set up is if you give it a $500 budget today, it's going to spend that and it's just going to throw spaghetti at the wall to see what happens. Whereas if you tell it to spend just $5, it's gonna work really hard to try and find a result for you. And so you actually start to train the machine to work, uh, on a lower budget and be more effective. So a lot of people do that is what the eva, they don't spend any money on ads or they go, okay, I'm going to dive in. I've got $1,000 and they spend it all in a day and they've got nothing to show for it. That would be me. That's exactly what I would do.
Daniel: 26:10 I'm talking from like past experiences and I'm like, you know, that's how you say you learn these things as you make those mistakes. Right. Okay. Um, so you start small and you only have a small budget. Next thing to know, and no one likes doing this because it's maths, but basically you need to know how much you can afford to spend to get a customer. Because if you don't know that, you don't know if you're making money or losing money and you also, in theory, you don't know how much is should be spending to make that customer. So, um, it's quite simple the way we teach it. And in this blog post, it's a massive, massive guide because it is a big, Yup. Yup. It's like 28,000 words or something ridiculous. We could sell it as a book. We run an ad to a blog post, um, first because we know that we can talk to a cold audience doing that.
Daniel: 27:07 And also one, it means we're leveraging that content that we've already written so I don't have to do anything new. Um, but that content also converts people into subscribers. And now I know that for x amount of subscribers I will make a sale. So if I know, um, how much a sale is worth to a person and I know how much I can afford to spend per subscriber. Yep. Which means I know how much I can spend to get someone to the site. So by doing that, if your, if you know all those details for one, it makes it much easier because you can be more confident. Because for example, for me, I know that it's something like, um, one in 17 subscribers becomes a customer. Right now we're kind of outliers for certain data points. So I know that I need to get about 17 emails and our product costs, you know, $240 or whatever it is. So that gives me really good margins. I know that I can spend 240 divided by 17 per subscriber, so as long as I'm spending,
Speaker 4: 28:14 okay,
Daniel: 28:15 as long as I'm getting, you know, I can break even on that. Yup. And, and it will be fine. Ideally, obviously we want to make a profit, so I'm butchering this. It's really late at night. It makes perfect sense to me. Basically you want you, you want to find out those numbers of how much a a sale is worth. And you also want to find out how much a customer is worth over their lifetime because you never want to judge it off the first purchase because in reality, most people make more than one purchase. So they're worth far more than you would ever think. We give an example in the thing where you can buy surf racks for $5 but a surfboard is 2000 and every surfer I know has got about eight boards. So there were $16,000 to that Surf Shop, right? You see your budget for ads is not $5 for a block of wax or two 50 because you want to break even on it. It's actually farmable. That's it. You can afford to get a customer into your business.
Nathan Wrigley: 29:11 Yeah. That kind of stuff. I've always been really lousy at, you know, sitting down and working out what a customer is worth to me, because you know, a website is, in the case of my business that's, that's quite a high ticket item. You know, it's not $5 for wax or anything, but you're absolutely right. You know, usually they'll be, they'll be with me for several years, probably through two or three redesigns over a period of five or six, seven years. So it's worth more than X. It's their value. Getting them through the door is probably two or three of the times. The cost of the original
Daniel: 29:42 website. Exactly. So what we, what we recommend is 20% of their lifetime value be prepared to spend up to that much. Oh Wow. Yeah. Wow. I say it that high because you're never going to spend that high. But I say that because a lot of people will run ads and they'll offer a discount because they can't get the ad to convert fast enough as, but what that happens in is it actually costs you more money by discounting than it did if you actually ran the advert. Right. If that makes sense. And the value your service and everything else. Yep. Um, that's just like a rule of thumb up to 20%. Anything more than that, you are losing money. But if it's 20% of that, and again, that's not taken into account, that's not the initial money they pay. If it was 10 grand or whatever for the website, you're taking out labor costs, um, ongoing fees, you know, digital costs, all that kind of stuff. So it ends up being about, um, you know, you take that 10 grand, he tended to 6:00 AM and you'd say, okay, I can afford to spend 20% of six. Right. If that makes sense. Yeah. So that way, even if you spend that much money, you're still covering your costs, your labor, everything else.
Nathan Wrigley: 30:55 It's quite a pumped, isn't it? I'm on a high ticket item that that's, that's where I fall down with this whole system is I'm terrified of spending that money to begin with because I've never done it. And I've never had that Aha moment of, Oh, oh, it worked. It made me some money. Um, that's, that's what I need. I need that moment.
Daniel: 31:13 Well, the, the next thing to figure out after that is out of most sales cycles are quite long. So ours is 30 to 45 days, something like that. So if someone visits our website from a paid ad, I won't see a sale for about 45 days right now. And that's going to make you super anxious because you're spending money for 45 days and you don't know if an ad is working. That's why, again, we recommend pushing from con to content to a subscriber because the feedback loop on how much your subscriber cost is, is almost instantaneous. So the next thing to figure out is out of m, how many leads do you need to have to make one sale? Because then if you know that, so you've got your 20% of 6,000 or what it is, uh, so that's 1200 bucks isn't going crazy. Yeah, that's about right. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's right. Yep. You know, so that's as much as the maximum that you'd be prepared to pay all out. Um, if it takes you 10 leads to make one sale, and then all of a sudden it's like, okay, well I can afford to spend $120 per subscriber. So if you start running an ad and it's getting content and the subscribers are less than that, you're like, well, statistically I'm gonna make money. You know, it's going to happen. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Nathan Wrigley: 32:32 That all makes sense. So now we're on $120 per, um, per, what's the word per [inaudible] conversion, I'm going to say, and yeah, you see, this is the point where I start to be, get really nervous.
Daniel: 32:47 It's almost always going to be less than that 15 cents per subscriber right now.
Nathan Wrigley: 32:52 Yes. Yeah. We're sort of exaggerating the numbers, but this is the point where I get scared because you know, having spent all this money, you don't see the tree, you don't see the return on it. In your case, as you've said in your industry, you don't see anything for 45 days, that's going to worry me. The amount of money is worrying me. The fact that, um, you know, you've got to do all these calculations that is worrying me, um, uh, it, it but, this stuff works. So I need to, I need to get over that Hump and just start doing this kind of stuff.
Daniel: 33:22 It's very scary the first time you do it and it's very scary the next time you do a new advert and things like that, even though you've got ads that make money, um, a major part to understand as well is if it takes you 10 leads to get one sale, then you need to do $1,200 in ads. Right. You know, cause if, because so if you ran an ad and you spent 120 bucks and you've got that one lead and you didn't make a sale, we were not going to, we know, but it's one in 10 but you normally convert. So a lot of people stopped too soon so that they haven't ran the ad for long enough to reach enough people to statistically get a customer based on what their current conversions and things are. Nothing to do with the ad or anything else. It's just as a business, you convert 10 a one out of every 10 into a sale. So if you haven't got enough people through the door, you're not going to make your sales mark figures. I you how?
Nathan Wrigley: 34:17 How long does it take somebody like me who was coming in absolutely cold to the Facebook ad platform? How long would it take me, do you think if I, if I literally took all my time off and devoted myself nine to five to getting ads running and learning this stuff, how long do you think it would take me to get up to speed? Right. I understood the interface, the UI, where all the options were and so on and so forth.
Daniel: 34:43 Not very long at all. You could learn it all in, you know, you could learn more than enough in a week. This is the thing. The actual tool itself is very simple. It's uh, understanding important elements. I know how much you can spend, uh, tracking to make sure you're profitable, setting up, uh, you know, certain systems so you don't overspend and things like that. Um, we're all easier. They just like flick of a button. The beauty is when we teach people, like in the guide how to test an ad, we do ab testing of certain elements. Um, so there's two types of testing. There's AB testing and multivariate in an effort. We normally, in the guide we show just one at a newsfeed ad ministry that has the introduction at the top, the image, the headline, the subhead. Yep. So those are the five elements that you've got and the call to action as well, which is normally in the text.
Daniel: 35:40 So those are the five elements that you need to test. There's a specific order that people will consume an advert. They never consume it as you would think they would. So we test particular things in a particular order based on what's the most important thing in reality images, the first thing that gets them to pay attention because they're just scrolling through and it's not until the image stops them, but they pay attention. I'm totally with you. I completely concur. That's me 100% right. And so what happens is we, we have this tight focus group and we test maybe just four images to find which image gets the most clicks. See, if you were to do multivariate testing, you would test for images with four headlines, with four called actions. So you'd have something like 250 ads running. Yup. The thing that's great if you've got a budget and you can afford to spend it, like I'm not posting it at all.
Daniel: 36:33 It's the fastest way to get a result to find a winning ad. But if you are a small business, I've, you know, never run ads before or anything like that, your ad needs to be seen about 10,000 times before you've got enough statistical data to know that you actually have a winning variation to know, like with confidence that you have a winner. So if you've got 250 ads running and you've got to show him 10,000 times, all of a sudden it costs you a small fortune. Whereas if you're doing ab testing, we say, okay, well you've written all your ad, everything's there. Let's just test four image variations and we turn it on and we leave it for three days and we come back after three days. And by that time it takes a kind of two to three days for the algorithm to kind of balance out.
Daniel: 37:19 And by the third day we can look at it and say, okay, well, which is the, the winning ad? If you do that, what do you mean by the winning out? Is there like a chart or a graph that you're looking at there? Um, we actually use a three Ab testing tool. Um, uh, it's on Neil Patel's website. And so, um, again, that's in the guide as well. So basically you would take, when we're testing originally we're testing for impressions. So eyeballs, we want to show the ad as much as possible to this focus group of people. And we're measuring, uh, click through rate, which ad, which image it or which part of this test is getting the most clicks. And unless there's a massive, massive, massive lead, you probably don't have a winner just then. Because like I said before, you can go away for a weekend and then all of a sudden the one that was losing suddenly becomes a winner by five times.
Daniel: 38:10 So that is the beauty of setting up an ad like this. As you set it up, you leave it for three days, you come back, you put the data into this thing, and it says this one is winning by 10%, but it's only had so many views. And if the margin isn't big enough, then we just let it run for another day and then we'll let it run for another day until we've got enough data that statistically, um, if we ran it to then a million people, it should perform the same. So we're just trying to get enough views on, it's about weed, making sure it's not a fluke or anything like that. It sounds complex and it is like there's some, some maps and confidence ratings and things, but all it really is is you're plugging for numbers and then the software says this is the winner so far does it have, um, does it have enough views so far for us to be confident that this will stay the same? And it'll say yes or no. And so if it's a no, we let him in front of a day and if it's yes, brilliant, we turn it off and then we test the next thing.
Nathan Wrigley: 39:10 So the, the image is always the first thing to do. Give it a few days, check the image. And W so what do you, what are you optimizing next? What comes after that?
Daniel: 39:19 Okay. So this is the way that people consume a newsfeed ad anyway. Um, first thing they see is the image, which gets their attention. Next thing is they're looking for some kind of context. So they read the headline underneath the image and they see if it's relevant to them because people are always trying to save time and energy. We're quite lazy creatures in that the logical part of our brain where we're pretty much on autopilot all the time. It's how we drive home. It's how we, you know, pick up the candy bar or realizing and things like that. So we re we see the image and then we read the headline and if it is relevant to us, we go, Huh. And then we've read the subhead to get more context again. So usually the headline is some kind of pain based thing that you have this struggle. And then the subhead is more, I'm talking about the goal. Cause if you lead with pain, people pay attention. But if you lead with the thing that they want, they kind of go, Eh, I'll do it later. Huh. As I, there's a whole like, um, there's books and books on the subject, but it's why copywriters kind of lead with that.
Nathan Wrigley: 40:24 So, um, so you, you've optimized the image, you run that for a few days, then do you, do you then do exactly the same process for a few days with the headline and sort of work out? Okay, so this process takes, you know, a like, well over a week. Um, yeah, yeah. And then eventually you pop up,
Daniel: 40:45 oh, sorry, sorry. Yeah. Yep. The thing is you're only spending very little, maybe $20 a day, but this is the thing, by the time you've got a winning image, we take that winning images of control and we put it into the new tests with dealt with different headlines and then we have a winning headline. So every time that we have a new test, the baseline is already higher performing than the previous test. Just [inaudible]
Nathan Wrigley: 41:09 with these, with these little tests. So going back to the f, the four images, do you pick four images which are broadly the same or do you pick for wildly different images that are utterly no way bear any relationship to each other?
Daniel: 41:24 Wildly different. Um, y'all only testing for small variations once you have a winner. So you could run this entire and have an ad that performs and he wanted to get an even better, you know, if you, if you're spending like million dollar budgets and things, then yes, you could say, okay, well we'll, we'll change the person from a blonde to a Brunette and see if that affects it. Why it's the same image change.
Nathan Wrigley: 41:48 Okay. Do do the images on, do the images you have to bear relationship to the stuff that you're trying to sell. So obviously, you know, if it was socks or shoes, I guess images of socks or shoes would be where it's at. But for something like websites, I mean, I can imagine, you know, pictures of all sorts of things that have got nothing to do with websites. Is there, is that some tea? Yeah. Cat's exactly. I was just thinking, let's put a load of cats on, get their attention and then go down to that. Or do people react against that and feel that they've been duped?
Daniel: 42:22 It depends. Interesting. So there, or I want to say seven, a emotional factors that drive people now everyone, it's, I don't have to let my cat in because it gets bang in the door. You've got to have cats bang at the door. Cause I'm in the uh, in the Home Office right now. So there's different emotional triggers that motivate everyone and they change based on specific things. Like some people want to move towards pleasure, but a lot of people are not motivated by it. But a lot of people are motivated of moving away from pain. It can be the exact same goal, but they're more motivated to not have a bad website than they are to have a great website and with good other people are motivated by status. Other people are motivated by needing to give and things like that. And it's really weird. Like there's these different factors and they're all segments of your audience who you can appeal to with the exact same product. But by basing it on something else, because we buy based on emotion and then we come up with some kind of excuse afterwards, some kind of logic. I'm sorry to why you're here.
Nathan Wrigley: 43:35 Just Facebook give you any group like this is gonna sound weird. Um, but does Facebook make judgments about your predilection to, to be a, I react to pain or I react, you know, the things that you've just described, these seven things that you, which I didn't let you finish, I'm sorry. Um, does it allow you to do that kind of thing or is that just all on you and you've got to run it and hope that it works?
Daniel: 44:00 You run it and hope that it works. But here's the thing. Facebook on a lot of trouble recently because they actually tested this out as a human Guinea pig test where they were tests showing in the newsfeed there was showing particular happy ads to a subset of people and they were showing sad adverts to another group. And then measuring the response and reactions that people took a, okay, so it's on there, right? Right. Oh yeah. You're talking like psychological testing and stuff. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: 44:30 Well yeah cause then presumably make a judgment based upon what you, you know, your habits and so on that you are, you are this person that reacts to sad things or you react better to, to happy things and so on and so forth. And that would make it, I'd get it. It starts to sound a bit creepy at that point, doesn't it? Whether it is or not is up to you, but it sounds creepy.
Daniel: 44:49 I don't want to get all political, but that's um, so the Russian collusion and the whole kind of Trump administration and Brexit as well was all based on this particular thing. So they had something like 4,000 data sets on people who are prone to be motivated by fear and fear of missing out and a societal aggression and things like this. Um, and they use that as a targeting demographic and then they would show them particular campaigns that, um, would cause them to vote in this particular way. Yeah. So that's why like Facebook had this whole thing recently where they changed a lot of the targeting.
Nathan Wrigley: 45:33 Yeah. If you're an advertiser, like Facebook or you want to shift a load of product, I can see that that's really genuinely very interesting data to have. But as a, as an endorsed, as somebody like me, it kind of smacks of like get off, you know, too much already. That's too weird. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting to know that. Yes. Well Google, I mean I've given up on even hiding anything from Google. It kind of knows absolutely everything. You know, my phone is constantly phoning home telling it all sorts of interesting stuff. Yeah, that fascinating. Sorry, you were talking about these seven things.
Daniel: 46:05 Yeah, you're totally fine. But basically, so when you are testing images and things like that, you could literally run one to each different emotional area and you would find that you would get sales from each of them, but when you're starting out, one of them is going to be more beneficial. And so you're probably going to ignore the others because you don't have a huge budget right away. And, um, you know, it may, it might be that yes, you do make sales from people who are sad but they end up being difficult clients and things like that. So you don't want to announce to them, you know, like there's all this stuff like down the line that you can, you can find out in test. Um, I, it's funny, I found when we actually dropped our lead cost and we would get a lot of customers who would buy, but there would also be people who would refund. Whereas when the leads cross more, we had a lower churn rate.
Nathan Wrigley: 46:58 Uh, maybe people were giving it some more thought and so on. Interesting thought before we were talking, um, on the recording we were having a chat. And one of the things that always fascinates me is that people literally make a living out of, they don't have any relationship necessarily with the product itself or the thing that they're advertising. But then there are people who make very successful careers just out of running Facebook ads for other people's stuff.
Daniel: 47:26 Yeah. Cause affiliate marketers, um, if I would say affiliate advertise is really because it fit it mocked in, could be, you know, meet a male, you, we might write a blog post and recommend tools and then we might get like a small kickback for that.
Nathan Wrigley: 47:40 Yes. And the Bradley, the thing that that's very familiar isn't it? You know, because you create content, you create value around it, whereas this is a completely different, like completely different approach to it. You don't create any value, just spend your way in.
Daniel: 47:53 It's a profit. And they are literally paying to, again, that vert to get someone to a page. And it's the exact same way the things I'm talking about right now. It's the same way these guys have normally got huge budgets, so they'll test thousands of ads per week with specific margins and they've got software and stuff to turn things off and turn them on. And they normally work in a lot of dodgy kind of industries because there's high margins and stuff. Uh, you know, like selling gum, healthcare supplements or via, you know, stuff like that. Um, but yeah, they make an absolute fortune. Like I was saying, I've got a friend who did $1 million in a day before, but he also spent like $300,000 up front and he's got to wait a month for these people to pay him and things like that, you know?
Nathan Wrigley: 48:37 Okay. So it's not as pleasurable as it seems and maybe don't go out there unless you've got a ton of cash and you've also got the, the, the tenacity to stick with it and be prepared to lose a bit.
Daniel: 48:50 This is the crazy thing. I've got a friend who is a web developer who's doing really well. Actually, I was going to recommend him. Uh, he listened to your show. He just started out building, uh, divvy kind of Shopify sites and it, he's done 45 sites in the, in the air that has been running just like he's built more sites, but like, he's had a really good year is getting into it. But the thing is, before he was doing that freelance, he was actually doing affiliate marketing for a particular agency and they were spending, you know, they were spending $22 and getting 600 back. And I was like, well why don't you just do that? Then you've got the money. Why didn't you just do that for yourself? And he's like, I just like building websites and you know, he genuinely just does that thing. Like I think a lot of people do those to fill out ads. Um, they're motivated by seeing like the numbers go up and down, you know, but it can get, it can get quite boring. Like looking at your ads and stuff all the time.
Nathan Wrigley: 49:44 No. Yeah, it's not something that would ever interest. I'm just fascinated that that's a career, you know, that you could literally go out there and find any kind of like you could do dog food or you could do computer hardware or like you say, health supplements or anything. Just randomly pick something. And so long as you've got the presumably the correct software that helps you out and enables you to turn things off and turn things on so that you lose as little as possible. There is actually a very lucrative career if you're good at this side. It astonishes me because in effect it's a bit like the stock market isn't it? You know, you're not actually, you're not doing anything ostensibly, but you are.
Daniel: 50:23 Yeah, you're just reacting to specific platforms and um, but it is, it's just media buying really bear saying that I can buy x amount on this platform for less than it costs about, I can get this back and see a return. But that's the process that I've been describing. It's exactly the same. They know how much a sale is worth, but I know how much they are prepared to pay a, they know on average for x amount of traffic, how many subscribers, how many sales they'll get. And so they can offer these margins to these guys. And these guys would just run ads all day, you know, fire money at it. Yeah. There's a guy called Charles, no NGO is a, he's probably one of the only guys who just really good content marketing around it and he's one of those success stories where he made like a million in his first year and he kind of had two credit cards to pay for the ads and stuff. A lot of people don't get to that point. You know, you're better off having your own product and learning to market your own ads to your products than anything else. But yeah,
Nathan Wrigley: 51:25 please nobody go out there and try this on the strength of, on the strength of me talking about, um, you know, people make a lot. Yeah. I like, I much prefer the idea of having a product that's your own market. It, you know, work out the, um, as Daniel's been saying, work out the most specific out, then hone it down, retarget it and uh, and hopefully you'll have success. Daniel, just, just because it's been a bit of a rambly conversation from my point of view, because I don't really understand this. I said at the outset it was going to be like that. You've got a, you've got a genuinely, like you said, it's like a book size piece of content. Do you want to, do you want to just tell us where that lives on the Internet, what the URL is and what it's, what it's going to teach you if you manage to get from top to bottom?
Daniel: 52:09 Yeah, totally. So, um, that guide, it's at uh, www dot amp, my content.com forward slash promoted dash content. Um, and you'll, you'll see it on there. It is literally it's eight chapters and it walks you through. The beauty of it is it's actionable. So as you start to read through it, there's certain steps that you'll take. So by the end of chapter two, you'll know your business numbers before you even run ads. Cause then you know it's feasible to actually run ads. Then the next two chapters are teaching your research of your audience so you know how to write for them. Then it shows you how to design an ad and it talks about all we talked about there, about the emotional triggers and things and it even shows you how to go into Canva. And actually design an ad and we show you one that we created the converse for us and we show you how to replicate that so you can learn. Obviously we can't teach you everything about it cause I can't teach you Photoshop and stuff like that. But every, every part of it is in there. How to test it, how to set it up, how to start running, um, how to start, uh, measuring and start getting to a profit and all that. All of that. It's in there.
Nathan Wrigley: 53:14 Speed in eight chapters in each of the chapters is one of these pages. Um, you've got chapter one, your paid ad strategy number two, know your business numbers, which you talk, talked about quite a lot. Number three, know your audience. Again, number four, write a killer ad copy that I would fail at that. I'd need help with that. Number five. Yeah. Oh Gosh. Yeah you say so. Templated structure, however,
Daniel: 53:39 works on how we consume information. Like I was saying with like how we consume an advert. Same thing. Yeah. As long as you hit on certain points when you're writing it,
Nathan Wrigley: 53:47 you're fine. If that's your, if that's like me, your pain point chapter four is what you'd be looking for there. Then chapter five, design your ad creatives. Yep. I could, I can, I can, I can warm to that one. I'm all right. I could probably do that one. Number six, add tracking and reporting. That's where I would probably spend my time cause I don't know anything about that. Number seven laser target your audience. I'm presuming that's like retargeting what have you and number eight, um, test until profitable. So yeah, go to www dot amp, my content.com forward slash. Now I've moved on to a different URL now. It was promoted hyphen content. Yeah. Yeah. Perfect. Yeah, that's all right. Um, so thank you for coming on. I realized that not only were my questions a bit sort of misguided because I don't really understand it, but you've had to cope with that. So apologies. But hopefully, hopefully some, somebody will, you know, realize that you're a bit of an expert in this and reach out to you. Go and download the pdf off the, the webpage at the end of the podcast. I always give everybody a fair bit of time, as much as you like to tell us about, you know, your Twitter handle and your email address, whatever. Um, so Daniel, it's over to you
Daniel: 54:59 yet. So we actually have two blogs. I have a retargeting in blog, which is inbound ascension.com although in fairness, it's on hiatus right now because I'm, my main focus is getting amp up to 100,000 visitors a month because we teach people how to promote content. I kind of have to get a lot of traffic to that site to show it works. Yes. So yeah. Yeah, that's it. So that's, that's one of the major things like we, that case study that we'd created, it took nine weeks to write and it, we spent about a $3,000 testing and running ads and things and you know, getting it to that point, it was profitable way before then, but I like to run these things so we literally, everything we write is all in depth how to guides and case studies and things like that. But my Twitter handle is at inbound ascend because the retargeting site came first.
Daniel: 55:51 you can find us to amp my content.com and there's three of her posts on there as well cause it's quite a new site. But it's basically our manifesto of why we, um, why people, especially small businesses need to be writing less often and actually focusing on promotion. We teach people how to actually create killer content by taking an old post and how to improve it. And we show you the method that we use, um, to get up to 80% email tins. So that's basically it. It's just I have a Twitter handle. I'm going to be totally honest. It's photos of my cat and it's whatever music I'm first into on Youtube, yet people following us all the time. And I find it so funny. We've got like I'm the head of wordstream and someone else followed me and someone else and when I'm like, okay, well here's a bit of David Bowie cats and music.
Nathan Wrigley: 56:41 Thank you for coming on. Um, what I would say is, you know, if you're, if like me, you are ignorant of how to do ads, go check this out. The, the guide is long and impressive and substantial. Um, you know, maybe reach out to Daniel and see if you can leverage his expertise, but maybe it's also something that you could offer to clients of yours. You know, once you've got this expertise, there's no point in keeping it to yourself. This could be a very profitable little niche on your own, in your own part of the world. So, thanks for coming on, Daniel. I appreciate you, uh, in, you know, coming on the WP Builds podcast.
Daniel: 57:16 No, thank you very much for having me. It's a lot of fun and like I said at the start, um, you know, there's like, and there's no silly questions because your understanding of is probably similar to your audience. So that's perfect because it means that I'm not, you know, jumping over the top of anyone's heads and they can follow along and understand the things, but it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you. Sorry, I sort of kept jumping around. Yeah,
Nathan Wrigley: 57:37 no, no, no. We liked the cat. See you later. Bye. Bye. Well, I hope you found that useful. It was really useful for me. As I said, right at the beginning of the show, I am very ignorant of all things paid ads and so this was a real, a real one oh one for me, a real illustration of what's possible with paid ads and maybe if that was the case for you too and you were not an expert in this, you'll be encouraged to go and explore paid ads a little bit more. The WP Builds podcast was brought to you today by WP&UP. One in four of us will be directly affected by mental health related illness, WP and up supports and promotes positive mental health within the WordPress community. This is achieved through mentorship, events, training and counseling. Please help enable WP&UP by visiting WPandup .org forward slash Give. Okay. Thank you so much. Your participation in the WP Builds podcast and all that we do is very much appreciated. Join us next Monday when we'll be giving you a roundup of the news. Not only did we do that via a post that we put on the website with an audio of all the WordPress news from the previous week, but at 2:00 PM UK time, I will be joined by some special guests and we will discuss that WordPress news. You can find that live in the WP Builds Facebook group. That's WP Builds.com forward slash. Facebook. If we don't get you for that, then perhaps we'll catch you next Thursday for the podcast, right? I'm going to fade in what can only be described as incredibly cheesy music, and I'll say bye bye for now.
