But before we begin I want to give a shout out to Klaviyo who is also a sponsor of the show. Now I’m always excited to talk about Klaviyo because they are the email marketing platform that I personally use for my ecommerce store, and I actually depend on them for over 20% of my revenues. Now Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for ecommerce stores and here is why it’s so powerful.

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Now I also wanted to give a shout out to my other sponsor Seller Labs, and specifically I want to talk about their awesome Amazon tool, Scope. Now if you know me I get really excited about tools that I like and use, and Scope is actually a tool that increased my Amazon sales on several listings by 39% within the first week of use, crazy, right?

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Intro: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. We will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle, so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here is your host, Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit her Job Podcast. Today I’m lucky to have Rick Mulready on the show. Now Rick is someone who I met at Social Media Marketing World, and it’s actually pretty funny how it happened. We were both standing around waiting for this gigantic mob of people surrounding Amy Porterfield to disappear so we could actually just say hi to her. And while this huge crowd was mobbing Amy, Rick and I we just kind of met and started chatting, and I’m really glad that we did.

Rick is Facebook ad specialist, and he helps small businesses run profitable Facebook campaigns. He also runs a popular podcast called The Art of Paid Traffic and a training class called the FB Advantage. And yeah, Rick is very knowledgeable about Facebook ads, and he actually also spoke at the conference. And with that welcome show Rick, how are you doing today man?

Rick: I’m doing great Steve, thanks for having me on man.

Steve: Yeah, wasn’t it crazy like we were waiting like 30, 40 minutes [inaudible 00:03:50].

Rick: I’d love to give her; I’d love to give her a crap about that. She always has a big mob of people and you described it really well, that’s exactly how it happened.

Steve: So Rick give us the quick background story, and tell us kind of how you got started with Facebook ads.

Rick: Yes I’ve been doing online advertising for about 17 and a half years now, actually a long time.

Steve: Wow

Rick: And started back in a while back when the dial up days were going strong and AOL was sending CDs out in the mail to get you online, and that was my first sort of exposure if you will to online advertising on a big scale. I spent five years in well back in starting in 2000, and then came out here to the west coast. So at AOL I was on the operations side, so I ran some of the operations teams who were — we were implementing all the online advertising deals that were being sold.

So I got to see a really unique side starting out on that end of online advertising. I got to see it from the back end if you will, and then came out here to the west coast and I spent a couple years at Yahoo where I moved more to the client facing side. So I did campaign management, and worked with the clients in the ads, the campaigns that they were doing, and then also got into sales at that point. And then I was in online ad sales for the rest of my time in the corporate world.

So I was at Yahoo for a couple of years, spent time at Funny or Die doing video and stuff like that, yeah and then also worked for a company called Vibrant Media which is a textual advertising platform. And sort of during this time there was a kind of a shift going on where all these big brands, all these companies had like these minimum advertising spends that companies needed to hit in order to work with them. And it makes sense because there’s a lot of resources that go into working with an account, the Yahoo or AOL or whatever company it is.

And that minimum spend is often too tight, too often too high for many small businesses, you know it makes sense. And so I saw this going on and this is right around the time, right on 2010, a little over seven years ago. This was at a time when Facebook was starting its meteoric rise, and really started to gain traction and you know small businesses — this is back when you could post something on Facebook and all your fans were able to see it.

Steve: Oh yeah.

Rick: And so the good old days.

Steve: Good old days, yeah.

Rick: Yeah and so I started seeing what was happening here for the opportunity that small businesses had on there on the platform, and not only to build a community of fans and people who like the business, but also the opportunity to advertise in a very targeted way because all these people were on the platform, and Facebook was getting — was starting to get really — starting to get sophisticated with the data that it had available. Not like today of course, but it was starting to get more sophisticated. And because of my background in online advertising, I naturally gravitated towards that side of Facebook.

So I was like you know what I’m kind of thinking about leaving the corporate world at some point, I’d like to start doing my own thing. I didn’t know what that was, but because I was so interested in the Facebook ad side, I kind of dive — I dove in at that point and started teaching myself as much as I possibly could about Facebook ads, this is seven and a half years ago. There was not a whole lot out there of learning about Facebook ads and how you do this.

So it was kind of like find what you could and then just dive in and start doing it. So that’s what I did, and I started managing ads for some friends who had online businesses and so forth just to kind of get more and more experience with that. And I was really the star. I left the corporate world at the end of 2012 to focus full time on doing this as a business, and it really — it took me a good year and a half after I left the corporate world to gain traction as a “Online entrepreneur.”

Steve: So you were making any money when you quit?

Rick: Very little bit, very little bit.

Steve: Oh wow, okay.

Rick: Yeah and so when I quit it was one of those — I look at that as if you’re in the corporate world and you’re looking to leave the corporate world, or leave your day job if you will to do something else, I kind of look at it as you’re going to fall in one of a couple of categories. You’re either going to be your side gig or whatever you’re doing is going to equal your day job income. And so I was doing really well, I was making a few hundred thousand dollars a year doing that, so I wasn’t necessarily coming out of the gates making or equaling that.

The second, I was in the second phase of that would be if you have that side gig and you are bringing in some money, and it’s not equal to your day job but it is looking pretty consistent, and you’re growing that. Or you just make the jump, you just like you know what, I’m going to go for it and this is going to work out. I kind of fell into sort of that second and third way if you will where I was like you know what a couple things I need to have happened is I need to have a big safety net, and I also want to be out of debt.

And so I at the time I was $75,000 in debt and — not at the time I left, but I was $75,000 in debt those last few years in the corporate world. So I got out of debt, I built up a big savings and it was like you know what, let’s do this. And so that was in the end of September 2012, and for the next year and a half it was a really, I fumbled around really trying to make this work on a consistent basis. And you know [inaudible 00:09:32] you know this whole thing.

I was doing it myself and things weren’t really working. And it wasn’t until really January 2014 that things really started to take off when I created a Facebook ads training program, and I used Facebook ads to sell that that training program I did webinars and stuff like that. That was supposed to be a short answer; it turned out to be a long answer.

Steve: No, no, no, and the reason why I’m always curious is it took me 17 years to quit my job, and I still kind of on the fence on whether it was the right decision believe it or not. It was never because of the money, it was always because of like the people that I was working with, and the nature of the fact that I studied, microprocessors, that was my thing for so long, and I gave it up. And like that whole side of my intelligence and career is now over with, so I’m still trying to get over that, but…

Rick: It makes sense.

Steve: So Rick what I was hoping to do today is actually run through a complete example of how you use Facebook ads to kind of build up an audience, and so this is your product. And we were talking earlier about your clients who are doing this and this is kind of how you got started with webinars and selling your stuff?

Rick: Yeah.

Steve: So on a personal level at least; I’m sure that I’m not doing everything correctly. And so I’m curious to see how a seasoned pro runs things. So let’s start from the top, shall we?

Rick: Sure.

Steve: Where do you begin? So let’s say I go up to you and say, hey Rick I got this course, I got a small audience, I got a little bit of content, maybe a blog, what are the first steps?

Rick: First thing that I’m going to ask you is you said you have this course, I’m going to want to know what you’re trying to achieve, like I have — always the first question I ask people is why? Why are you doing what you’re coming to me talking about? And a lot of that unfortunately a lot of the time people say, well I keep hearing how great Facebook ads are, I have friends who are using them in their business, so I just figured I’d start using them as. Well I applaud you for that, but that’s not a good enough reason because you got to go into Facebook ads with a strategy, what is the goal I’m trying to achieve.

So if you’ve got an online course, so let me ask you Steve is that course in this hypothetical situation is already created, or do you have a course sort of in mind that you’d like to create?

Steve: Let’s say it’s already created.

Rick: Okay cool. So you have this course now, and like all right how can I promote this course? The next question I’m going to ask you is who is your target audience, who is the ideal audience that you want to target? And you’ve got to have a very, very specific knowledge of who that person is. And I say have a specific knowledge; just know that that’s going to be evolving. Like you know I have been doing this a long time now, my ideal audience is always evolving, I’m always looking at, okay I understand who it is, but there’s always iterations if you will of that audience that I can understand more, or create a better “avatar” of who that person is that I’m trying to reach, and who I’m trying to reach might be different from product to product that I have.

Steve: Sure.

Rick: And so I want to make sure that I understand that so that I can speak to specifically those people in my marketing, in my advertising. And when I say advertising and marketing, I’m talking not only Facebook ads, but also the emails that I’m writing or on my landing pages, on my sales pages, that sort of thing. And so if you’ve got the course, all right cool, you’ve got a very clear understanding of who your target audience is…

Steve: Let’s say I don’t know who my target audience is, like how do I figure it out?

Rick: Yeah, I would at that point look at, okay what is the problem that you are solving with that course, what is it that — what business or what niche are you specifically in that you can help somebody with? And then once you understand that look at, okay, who are these people, what’s their demographic, what’s their age range, are they men or women, what are they interested in? This is one of those things where people get really sort of tunnel visioned if you will, and I like to use the example of if I’m in the yoga niche. And so I know that I probably want to be reaching women between let’s just say I don’t know 25 and 45, let’s just say.

That’s my primary people — women between 25 and 45 who have an interest in yoga. That’s kind of the obvious one. So most people would kind of stop there, maybe they’re interested like in maybe Pilates or something like that. You’ve got to take a step back and think about, all right what are they also interested in, what are they reading, where they shopping, what are they watching? Those types of things. So for example, if I’m trying to reach those women who are inside yoga, yes I do want to target people who target women who have an interest in yoga. But also they might be reading Yoga Journal magazine, maybe they’re shopping at Lululemon for their clothing or Lorna Jane or something like that.

Maybe they’re shopping at Whole Foods, you know taking a step back and looking at the big picture of what your target audience, who their target audience is and what they’re interested in on all different types of levels. Again where they’re shopping, what they’re reading, what they’re watching, that sort of thing.

Steve: And where they’re hanging out and that sort of thing?

Rick: Absolutely.

Steve: Okay, got it.

Rick: Or it could be yeah it could be are they attending conferences, are there associations that they might be a part of, that sort of thing. And this is where I say getting a really clear picture of who your target audience is and who you want to be reaching. And so once you have an understanding of that, then we want to look at, oaky what is the strategy that we’re going to use? Remember we haven’t even set our Facebook ads up at this point.

Steve: Right yeah right.

Rick: We haven’t even guided the system yet, and most people are just like, all right I want to do Facebook ads, let’s jump in and start setting stuff up. All well and good but you’ve got to do this sort of pre-work upfront if you will, and this is the hard work I like to say that no one really wants to do. But yet when you do this work, this is what sets you up for success with your Facebook ads, you know having a clear understanding of why you’re trying to achieve what you want to do, who your target audience is, how you’re going to be serving them, and then what’s the strategy there to start selling that course. Okay so what’s the initial offer going to be?

And so let’s just say that if you have an online course, let’s just say in our example here that we’re going to do a webinar. And so we’re going to do a webinar, so we in the very most simplistic sake, let’s say one strategy could be we’re going to run Facebook ad to a webinar. So we’re going to do a live training and then on that live training we’re going to offer our program to people, and then we’re going to have – let’s just say we’re going to have a close date after that. So we’re only going to offer our course for a certain period of time. Okay cool, that’s one strategy.

Well another strategy that we could do is we could run a Facebook ad to a free piece of content, and that could be a blog post. You mentioned Steve that this person, this hypothetical situation has — they have a blog and they’ve got some content there. Well we could send people from the Facebook ad to that piece of content, and on that blog post, on that video or whatever, that may be there is an opportunity to register for a webinar. And for those people who land on that page, consume the content but don’t actually register, they don’t opt in, we can retarget them to get them to opt in to that webinar.

So our goal here is to get them on that webinar, and we’re doing that a couple of different ways. And so having that clear picture of, okay what is the strategy going to look like beginning with what’s the offer that I’m going to be doing? In this case here in our hypothetical is our offer is going to be that webinar. And so from there, then it’s really like, okay what are we going to be teaching people?

Steve: So let’s back up a little bit. So you mentioned a bunch of different strategies, or two different strategies right there. Like how do you know where to start, or you do actually try to implement both and see what works well, like the content play versus just direct webinar sign up?

Rick: I mean ideally you do you want to be doing both, but that can be really overwhelming for people to say, oh I have to do all this in order to get going. I mean the easiest thing that you can do, and it’s going to be most likely a little bit more expensive these days is to run an ad directly to a webinar registration. And so like, all right, maybe I do — I know I want to test both of these things, but let’s start with this first.

So we’ll get this final set up, we’ll get this strategy in place, and then we can look at, okay, maybe we send Facebook ads then to that free piece of content to try to get them eventually over to the webinar. But let’s just start with the first thing, getting that done.

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Can we set some expectations also, like I know this is going to be too broad of a question, but like how do you calculate what you should be spending per lead on the webinar and that sort of thing, and what you should expect?

Rick: Great question. So everybody wants to know like, well what should my cost per lead be, how much should I spend on my Facebook ads, right? So allow me start with the how much should I spend on my Facebook ads. The first one, like I look at that as sort of a two ways to answer that question. Number one is what can you afford? Like the easiest is like if you’re just starting out, what kind of budget can you afford? You can be getting results on as little as say five to ten dollars a day. So you really don’t need to be spending a whole lot of money in order to get some results going.

And the idea with Facebook ads and really with any kind of paid traffic is start off. I mean if you’re just starting out, start off small and then sort of snowball. So as you start making money and getting some results, putting it right back into your ads. So maybe start off spending $10 a day, you’re spending $300 a month. But then once you get into it, you start making some more money and you put it back in. Before you know you’re spending $500 a month and $700, $1,000, just kind of snowballing that and letting that build.

So I’d start there, is what can you afford, what will your budget allow. And in the longer term answer there Steve as far as like how much should you spend on your ads, it’s really doing this for a little while, and starting and really tracking everything that you’re doing. So how much money that you’re spending on your ads, what’s the revenue that you’re making coming out on the back end, figuring out what your ROI is so that you can eventually get to a point, and you can get there pretty quickly is by watching the numbers, you can know, okay for every dollar that I put into my Facebook ads, I’m getting two or three or five dollars back.

And so then it becomes very easy to figure out how much you want to spend, because you’re like, all right well I know pretty much from what I’ve been seeing in my campaigns, I know that for every dollar I put in, I’m going to get two dollars out, so let’s just start spending on that. And of course that does align with what your budget is as well, but you do need some obviously historical numbers there, you need some experience doing this for a little while before you can say, okay, I know exactly – I know roughly, I never want to say exactly, but I know roughly how much money I can put in and get back out.

Steve: So at the beginning, there’s just too many variables, right? Like the effective – so the webinar, the product also comes into play. So from what I gather what you’re saying at the beginning is just spend a little bit of money, get some leads, actually run your webinar and get some data and then over time with enough webinars, you’ll get an idea of what your ad spend is.

Rick: Absolutely and you bring up a great point there Steve is that you can’t go into this stuff thinking with the mindset of, this is going to work tomorrow, like this is going to work overnight. You have to go into it with knowing that it could work, like right out of the gate, so you could be seeing success right out of the gate. I was very fortunate, now granted it took me 15 months to get there. But I started running my first webinars in January 2014.

I did $30,000 in 45 days, and so things were successful very quickly. But you know this is all testing, this is all figuring like trying different things out to see where the sweet spot is, and also or where the sweet spots are I should say, and then also again figuring out your numbers so that you can start making more educated decisions. But that’s a big thing that people sort of get hung up on.

And I would say easily what separates people who are successful with Facebook ads and really any kind of paid traffic is those people who have the mindset of, well I’m going to go into it, I’m going to start testing different things out, I’m going to spend a little bit of money to see what works and what doesn’t, and I’m just going to be flexible here. I’m going to try different things until I find what works, and I’m not going to give up after the first 30 days if things don’t go my way.

And I see that all too often when in fact it’s those people who are getting to that point, and they’re like you know what things are not working, I’m trying different things. It’s the people who stick with it just past that point where they feel like giving up. Oftentimes that is when things really start to click for them.

Steve: Okay, so far we’ve talked about an audience; we’ve kind of made an educated on the audience. And then we decided we’re going to do a webinar. Let’s talk about the creative a little bit, like how do you structure that?

Rick: Well that really goes — so when you’re putting your ad together, whether it’s the image or if you’re doing a video and the ad copy, so when you’re putting your ad together, it really goes back to who is that target audience that you’re trying to reach. And so let’s just say that you are trying to reach your – I’ll go back to the yoga example, and let’s just say that you have a product that is you’re teaching I don’t know — I don’t know how much…

Steve: I don’t do Yoga either, but…

Rick: Terrible example for you that I’m bringing up here. But let’s say there’s different levels okay, but I’m teaching all this in here. And so I need to be able to speak to the people who are at different levels. And so the conversation I’m going to have with a beginner is very different than what I’m going to have with the more advanced type of person. And so that’s why it really comes down to understanding who your target audience I,s and then are there sub-segments of people within that target audience, so that I’m going to have different conversations with those people, right?

Likewise, if I’m targeting people who have an interest in Yoga Journal magazine versus people who shop at Whole Foods, that’s probably going to be a little bit of a different conversation there. And so when you’re putting together the ad, whether it’s the image of the video and the ad copy, you need to make sure that you’re speaking directly to that person within your target audience. And so you know people get hung up on the images and so forth, or a video. Right next to me right now I’m actually just picked it up is my iPhone.

One of the best things and one of the easiest things that you can do is just start taking pictures that you find that might be relevant to your specific niche and your specific business. Same thing goes for video. If you’re doing video that you want to do a video ad on Facebook, you don’t need to hire this big production crew in order to do it. You could be doing Facebook live, or you can be just getting in front of your Smartphone and start taking video.

But you do want to make sure that whatever image that you’re using or video that you’re doing is relevant to the audience that you’re speaking to, and obviously you can try to convey the message that you are trying to get across with that. Now…

Steve: Do you recommend videos now over images? At least in my experience, videos just tend to have a lot more engagement than just images these days. So I was just curious what your experience has been there.

Rick: Yeah video does really great. I would never say only do this over this, I’m always going to say test both. But there’s a few different benefits of video, actually lots of different benefits. Number one, the kind of connection that you can make with your target audience is I mean with a video, I mean they get to see you, they get to hear you, they get to watch you. So you can create a connection with your ideal audience that you can’t necessarily with a standard image ad. Video gets higher play with on Facebook because Facebook has really put an emphasis on video in the newsfeed, on the platform in general.

The other thing that you can do is you have an amazing opportunity to create what they call engagement audiences based on how long people are engaging with your video. So you can say, well if I have people who are watching 75% of my video, that’s a pretty engaged person, versus somebody who’s only watching say 25% of my video. And so we can go down a big rabbit hole here, but so you can build these audiences, you can build look like audiences out of these people who are watching these videos. So video is a really, really powerful tool to be to be using.

Steve: So let me ask you this, so assuming we have the creative and then we have the audience, like our best guess audience, and we’re driving to a webinar landing page. So let’s say we hit go and it’s running, like how long do you let it run before making a determination? How do you decide which creative is working and what is not working, like what are some of the metrics involved that you use?

Rick: Great question. So one of the biggest mistakes I see people make is that they make a determination on their ad far too soon, and you really got to give it at least, let’s just say at least three days. I mean we’re talking 72 hours from when you start your ad before you make any kind of determination. And it’s the hardest thing for people to do. So like if you start your ad — let’s just say you start your ad at six o’clock in the morning, you know people you’re there watching it at ten o’clock. You’re like what’s the ad doing, like what are the numbers really, what’s going on here? And it’s the hardest thing.

So what I like to say is when you schedule your ad, let’s just say you started the next morning, just check in with it when you get up to make sure that it is running, and that it’s active, and then the hardest thing you have to do is just leave it alone. You got to let your ad get into Facebook’s algorithm if you will, and let the algorithm do its thing for you, and so at least three days before you start making any kind of changes to your ad. I like to try and get the reach if I can depending on what kind of budget I’m amusing to about 1,000 again before I start making any determinations there, and generally that will happen over — and again it depends on what your budget is, but generally that will happen over those three days.

Then you can take a look and go in and start to diagnose what’s going on with the ad. And the first number I like to say that you look at is whatever your objective is. So in this case here in our hypothetical, we’re trying to get people to register for a webinar. So I want to see what is my cost per registration, what’s my cost per lead? And everyone always wants to know what’s a good cost per lead here? That’s always going to depend on — it just depends on what niche that you’re in, what your offer is. Going from an ad to a webinar registration is likely going to be more expensive than if you go from an ad to a PDF, a free cheat sheet download sort of thing.

Steve: Sure.

Rick: So it really depends. People are saying, well Rick just give me a number. For most people who are doing the online course, I would say try. If you’re under $8ish, you’re doing pretty well.

Steve: Interesting, I think it depends on the course or class too, like I remember when I was doing this for my class, I made an estimate of how many registrants would show up and estimated the conversion rate. And I determined that my breakeven point was like twelve and a half bucks.

Rick: Yes and that, again that goes back to figuring out how much you should spend on your ads because what they have this number called earnings per lead that you can figure out. So it’s like okay I brought in this many leads, and then I did this much in sales. So that will help you determine what your earnings per lead is so you just divide the amount of revenue that you made divided by the number of leads that you brought in, and that will give you like you said Steve that twelve dollars and fifty cents let’s just say.

So then you can start to say, okay, well for the next one, based on this last campaign that ran, I can probably spend up to twelve dollars and fifty cents per lead before I’m losing money on that. And again that just means that you need data in order to make those decisions. So once I looked at that metric that most aligns with my objective here, so in this case here it’s we’ve figured out what our cost per conversion is, then I’m looking at what I like to call troubleshooting numbers.

And so then we’re looking at what’s the conversion rate on the landing page? What is the click through rate on the ad? What’s the relevance score which is at the ads level by the way, what’s the relevance score of this? And if your ads have been running a little while, what’s the frequency? So like you’re using these other numbers to help you diagnose what’s going on with your Facebook ads campaign.

Steve: Interesting, so what relevancy score do you typically recommend?

Rick: Well it’s a one to ten scale, and basically we don’t know everything that goes into the relevance score. But it’s safe to say that Facebook is looking at how relevant is this ad that you put together that you’re showing to the target audience that you have, that you set up? So how relevant is this ad? Facebook wants good content on the platform, and so this relevance score is a scale of one to ten, ten being the highest. So the higher the relevant score, the lower cost you’re going to have, and the more of a higher delivery reach that you’re going to have with that ad, because again Facebook sees that as, oh this is a good ad, I’m going to show this to more people, because it’s a higher relevance score there.

So if you’re in that seven –now this is going to be again some general generally issues that we’ll make here.

Steve: Of course, yes.

Rick: If you’re in that seven to ten range, you’re doing really well on the relevance score. If you’re in that four to six range, sort of obviously middle of the road there, I’d keep an eye on it, and then generally if you’re in that one to three range, again probably need to look at changing things up. Now relevance score is one of those stats that it’s really hard to pinpoint, okay go do this, because the relevance score has to do with the ad that you put together and the target audience that you are targeting.

So it could be things with the ad, it could be things with the audience that you have set up there. So it’s just a matter of starting to look at each of those different things to figure out, okay what are some changes that I might be able to make to improve this relevance score. Now I see a generality with that on the one to ten there. If you’re in that four to six, I’ve actually seen lots of ads that are doing quite well with a really good cost per lead that are like a three relevance score.

Steve: Interesting okay.

Rick: Yeah. So in that case there I would probably say, okay well my ad looks like it’s doing pretty well, I’m pretty happy with it, the cost per lead is I’m not too unhappy with it there, I’m going to let this run for a while, and just keep a close eye on it.

Steve: Do you have any click through rate guidelines?

Rick: Yeah, I like to see at least above one percent or above, and if you’re in that maybe like let’s just say 0.85 to 1%, you’re not — and here I am saying 1%, but if you’re right around that, again I would say look at the rest of the stats just to try to diagnose what if any changes that you might want to make to that. But I would say try and be at least 1% and above. Likewise on the conversion rate on the landing page, now this is not a sale by the way, so different from a sale. If you’re sending people to an opt-in page or registration page, I’d like to see that conversion rate at least 20% on that landing page.

Steve: Okay, any special guidelines on the landing page that you recommend or tools that? Do you just have people use Lead Pages or Instapages?

Rick: Yeah exactly. I use Lead Pages every day in the business, and so Lead Pages is great, ClickFunnels, Instapage. Use a tool that makes it super simple to create a landing page. They run all these tests, all these tools like Lead Pages or ClickFunnels for example, they run all kinds of tests, they know what’s working and what’s not, and so they’ll just give you these templates, they’ll make it available to you, that you can go in and quickly create a landing page that you can use.

Now I will say, you said as far as I got any special things to be thinking about, make sure there is consistency between the ad that you’re running and the landing page that you’re sending people to. There’s nothing worse than — think about how you would react if clicked on an ad, and you go this landing page and it looks nothing like the ad that you just clicked on. You’re like, am I on the right place here? Make sure there’s consistency there. That can greatly affect the conversion rate on that landing page.

So if you’re using an image in your ad for example, try and have that same image on your landing page. Or if there’s a headline that you’re using or words that you’re using copy you’re using in the ad, make sure that that copy and that headline is the same on the landing page as well. Or a color scheme, that sort of thing. Make sure there’s consistency between the two things.

Steve: Okay, can we talk about the campaign structure real quick. Like do you separate out each audience in different ad sets, and then how many creatives do you use like when you’re doing split testing?

Rick: Yes, so I’ll start with the audience question, and this is something that has shifted over the past let’s just say eight to ten months for me, because it used to be that we only put one target audience per ad set. And the reason for that is because Facebook in its reporting doesn’t break — if I put multiple targets within multiple target audiences within one ad set, Facebook isn’t going to break out which of those target audiences is performing the best for you, or performing the worst. So there is limited visibility there.

Now what we’re doing now, and we’ve been testing this is that we are now combining multiple interests, so cold audiences meaning other Facebook pages for example into one inch, into one ad set. And the reason for that is we’re trying to get that potential audience size up between say 500,000 and 2 millionish people. And the reason for that is we’re trying to give more data to Facebook’s algorithm. That algorithm has gotten very, very smart, and so this algorithm is sort of what’s sort of running in the background on your Facebook ads, and it’s what’s trying to get your results.

Facebook wants us to succeed, because what happens when we succeed is we’re going to spend more money. So Facebook does want us to succeed, and so the more data that we can give to Facebook to work with, the better. So that’s why we’re trying to get that audience size a little bit larger, and thus we’re combining interests within one ad set. Now when I say we do that, really think about combining similar interests. So let’s just say for example, I don’t want to target — I wouldn’t target Whole Foods and Yogurt Journal in the same ad set necessarily, because those are two different types of things.

Or if I’m targeting newspapers, I’m going to target Wall Street Journal and New York Times and whatever in the same ad set, because those are similar interests. So try to combine similar interests within one ad set. Then when we’re talking about warm traffic or warm audiences like our email list or our website visitors and stuff like that, we will look to combine those into one ad set. Again depending on — it all depends on how big that is for you, but we will combine those into one ad set again to try to increase that potential audience size.

Steve: Interesting, how did you come to that determination?

Rick: Just testing, it’s because the longest time is that for the longest time we were just putting one interests or one target group within the ad set. Let’s just say, okay now our audience size is like 60,000 people, let’s just say in this one ad set. Okay great, but we can kind of tap through that audience pretty quickly because it’s not that large. But then if we start combining it with two or three or four other interest there, maybe now we have like a million and a half people in the audience. We’re never going to reach all those people, but we’re getting data, we’re getting more data for Facebook’s algorithm to work with.

And when we’re using the Facebook pixel and we’re looking for these conversions and stuff like that, the algorithm is learning. So it’s learning the type of conversions that you’re getting, and then once it’s learning, it’s looking for more people like those people who are converting, and will show your ad to those people. So again it’s all about giving more data to the algorithm. And then to answer the question about split testing, the biggest thing I see that — the biggest mistake I see people make is that they get started and they start, they’re like okay I know I need to split test, I’m going to have ten different ads running.

And it’s like they don’t know what’s working and what’s not working. And so it can be very overwhelming if you kind of — you can lose track of that really quickly. Now the other thing that we don’t like to do, and again this is over, we’ve been testing this for about two years now. We just don’t get the results that we would hope that we get is we don’t put multiple ads within one ad set, and the reason for that – let’s just say I put three ads within an ad set, Facebook’s algorithm is set up to rotate those ads through and find out which of those ads performs the best for you, and sort of do that testing for you.

But what we’ve found is that it “declares a winner,” way too soon. So for example if I start my ads let’s say like six o’clock in the morning, within a few hours it has identified one of those ads that is performing the best, and it gives all of its like I’ll just say delivery love to that one ad, and then very little love to the other ones. When in fact like it happened too fast, when in fact those other couple of ads that you have running in there, they really could be actually good ads, but they just didn’t give –Facebook’s algorithm just didn’t give it a chance to run to actually truly see if they’re doing pretty well.

And so what we’ll do instead is we’ll actually break those up. So we’ll do one ad set with one ad, and then identical ads set we’ve had and we’ll split test another ad. And again it’s not a true 100% split test, but it’s more we’re trying to run it more evenly to now we can see which ad is performing better.

Steve: I just want to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I’ve put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in e-commerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell, all the way to getting your first sales online.

Now this course is free and can be obtained at mywifequitherjob.com/free. Just sign up right there on the front page via email, and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again that’s mywifequitherjob.com/free. Now back to the show.

Okay that’s a great tip. And then in terms of — so you wait three days and then do you immediately cancel the ones that aren’t doing as well, and just try to narrow down to one high performing ad?

Rick: Well I mean it really depends on how many we’re running here. So let’s just say that I have 25 different ad sets running. So I’m doing 25 different groups of targeting and I’m trying to see which of these is performing the best, I’m trying to figure out which ads are performing the best. We might end up with six ad sets that are better performing the best, and that’s what we run with, and we’re always trying to beat that best performing ad.

But it really depends on how many ad sets that you’re running and that sort of thing, but it goes into, all right after three days jump in your campaign, start to see what’s going on there and looking at what’s performing and what’s not performing, and really try to start to see like you’re going to have definite outliers, like you’re going to have things that just are not performing well at all for you. In that case there, okay cool, maybe we shut those off. Well while other ones they’re performing really well for you, then we start to scale those ads, and we want more of those good results.

And then you’re going to have sort of those sort of the middle tier if you will of ads that are — they’re not terrible, but they’re not really good either as good as your good ones. Well, what kind of changes can we make to those in order to try to improve those results? And then that goes back to looking at the stats that we talked about before.

Steve: Okay, so everything we’ve been talking about has been top of funnel so far. Can you talk about your middle of the funnel and bottom of the funnel, what that looks like?

Rick: Yeah so for sure. I mean the cool thing about Facebook is unfortunately too many people, and here we are actually talking about a webinar campaign which is you’re looking to get quick results. You’ve got to look at Facebook ads as a long term play. It’s you’re building — because Facebook is not like Google where people are physically searching on something, and you can just show an ad and then it’s relevant to what they just searched on, Facebook is more of an interrupted experience. Like they’re on there to share with their friends and family, look at a cat photos and stuff like that.

So whatever kind of ad that you’re showing needs to get their attention, always needs to be relevant to them, and really need to be focused on how you can be helping those people. And so if you think about it from that perspective, like all right, you know what, I’m going to come on to Facebook here, I’m going to play the long game, I’m going to provide value to attract my ideal audience. Then at the top of the funnel there, we could be going like providing free content and sending people to free downloads and free content videos and stuff like that.

Then we can move people further in that middle of the funnel there like we just talked about with the webinar and that sort of thing. Again we can start right there with the webinar if we want to, but again thinking about what is the long term play here? And then as we move further down the funnel, then we get into the more sort of advanced stuff with retargeting, and we can use — Messenger ads are all the rage right now on Facebook, and how can we use Facebook ads to have a more deliberate conversation with people to move them from, you know what I’m really not sure about buying this or enrolling in this or signing up with this service or whatever it is, to how to actually moving them to the sale.

So how can we use Facebook’s retargeting, how can we use Facebook’s engagement retargeting, how can we use Facebook’s Messenger ads to have actual conversations with people, to move them from maybe up there on the fence to having an actual purchase?

Steve: Yes, so Rick in my experience, and I don’t have a whole lot of clients, I just run the ads for myself. I discovered that running ads is just like content, and then retargeting them to like a webinar or landing page or a email sign up form has been dramatically cheaper than just going for the sale right away. Do you find that with your students and your clients?

Rick: Yeah absolutely. I mean we do quite a bit of running ad directly to webinars ourselves, but again going back to what we were just talking about is looking at Facebook as a long term play, and really starting to nurture that relationship with people. The example that gets thrown around there out so much, we were talking about this sort of stuff and it’s very relevant, it’s like you don’t walk up to somebody that you just met and ask them to get married. In this you get to build a relationship and then you go on a few dates and that sort of thing.

Well it’s the same thing here where if you are showing your ad to somebody who doesn’t have any idea who you are, you’ve got to build that relationship first. It’s not like, all right, I’m going to sign up for a webinar, and although this does happen, but you spend an hour with somebody, and then you’re pitching them $1,000 course let’s just say. I’m just, okay cool, I’m going to whip up my credit card and give you that money. Yes, and that does happen, but for the most part you’ve got to build that relationship, you got to what they call warm people up.

And that’s what you’re talking about Steve is or what we’re talking about here too is sending people from our ad to that free piece of content. You’re building goodwill if you will, you’re positioning yourself as an expert, they’re getting value out of it because your — it’s whatever a blog post or a podcast episode or a video, and they are able to take and implement that hopefully right in their business and get help. That starts to position you as the expert, and the more or the better the relationship that you can build, the further that you can take that person giving them free content and so forth, then you can move them through your funnel as we’ve been talking about here, closer to a sale.

Steve: Okay, and then I’m just curious like how often do you rotate your ads, like what frequency do you look at before that ad gets fatigued so to speak?

Rick: Yes so the frequency, great question — the frequency is a numbered score of — it’s the average number of times that one person is seeing your ad. And so the higher that number — we get in to what we call banner blindness, meaning like how many times have we seen the same ad over and over and over. What’s going to happen is you’re just going to tune it out. When you’re on Facebook, you’re just going to tune that ad out.

So I like to say if you’re in that one to four range for frequency, you’re doing pretty well, like you’re okay there. I would be looking at that, I’d be looking at, okay my frequency is getting a little bit high, and obviously the smaller the audience that you’re targeting, that frequency is going to increase more quickly because the audience size is smaller. But I try to stay in that one to four range.

Steve: Okay, interesting. For me at least I tend to just look when my conversion rates start plummeting and then it’s time to rotate.

Rick: Yeah I look at that frequency again is what I like when I’m troubleshooting numbers. It’s like all right what’s my cost per lead doing, okay is it starting to go up a little bit? Okay what’s going on with that? And then frequency number is one of those things that I’m going to look at to try to help determine why my cost per lead might be going up.

Steve: Okay and final question here since we’re running out of time. When you’re choosing your targeting, do you always go for conversions, or do you sometimes do website clicks or video use when you’re first starting out?

Rick: Yeah great question. So if our goal is to, okay this is why from the very beginning of our conversation we said it’s very important to understand what’s our strategy going to be, what are we going to kind of come out of the gates with here? And so if our goal here is to get people from ad to webinar, then I’m probably going to do website conversions as our objective. But if our goal here is to get people over, we’re going to send people from our ad to a free piece of content, and then retarget them; well then traffic would be our objective.

And why we’re choosing objective in very simplistic terms, you want to choose an objective that most aligns with what you’re trying to achieve. So if I choose traffic, essentially and there’s other different factors here, but you’re telling Facebook, show my ad to as many people in my target audience who are most likely to take this action, meaning click on my ad. All we want them to do is click on our ad over to the landing page, versus conversions is like we want people to convert.

And if we’re using say like video views, well video views is, okay I have this video here, and all I care about is just getting people to watch the video. I don’t necessarily care if they click or convert on the landing page; I just want people to see this video. And so it’s more of like an awareness type of play, but you’re using video to do that, and so that would be good. Again if all you want to do is just get people to watch your video, you can also use that to get people to watch your video, but also with the strategy of I want to build engagement audiences based on how long people are watching that video, so that I can turn around to retarget them.

Steve: Right cool. And I don’t know if you can sing the same thing, but like if I’m trying to drive traffic to an article, but indirectly I want to get an email sign up because there’s email sign up forms within our article. I found that paying for clicks is generally cheaper than paying for website conversions, at least in my experience, I don’t know if that’s true in your case?

Rick: Yeah, 100% because the experience when they land on your landing page isn’t an opt-in page, it’s actual piece of content. So we’re just trying to get people there because once they are on that page, the goal, yes you do you really truly want them to opt-in? Yes it is, but when they get to that, it’s a content experience; it’s not an opt-in experience. So if they opt in, it’s just sort of an added bonus there.

What you’re really trying to do is give them free content, warm them up, if they opt in great, if they don’t that’s okay, because we’re building those retargeting audiences, the people who are coming to that piece of content to try to get them onto our list after that. So yeah traffic is your objective to drive people over to that content.

Steve: Hey Rick we’ve been chatting for quite a while now, and I want to be respectful of your time. Lots of knowledge that you dropped on the audience today. Where can they find you online, what’s the name your podcast again, and what’s the name of your class?

Rick: Yeah its The Art of Paid Traffic is the podcast, and we talk a lot about Facebook ads on there, but also other forms of paid traffic and copywriting and stats and all that fun type of stuff. So that’s The Art of Paid Traffic. RickMulready.com is the website, and the FB Advantage is my training course for online programs, and I also have the FB Ad Manager for people who want to manage Facebook ads for other businesses, and the FB Advantage local for local business.

Steve: Cool, and then Rick also does a live event also where it’s like really hands on and it actually helps you launch your campaigns during the event, right?

Rick: Yeah absolutely, we call it FB Live, and it’s a multi-day live — I call it a workshop here in San Diego where it’s a lot of teaching. I get guest speakers to come in. I’m teaching a lot, but it’s also as you mentioned Steve, it’s very implementation focused. And so it’s very hands on, like I want you leaving there with stuff set up, whatever you’re trying to achieve like let’s get it set up for you by the time you leave.

Steve: Which is very cool, and I’ll link all these resources up in the show notes, so you guys don’t have to jot all that stuff down. But Rick, thanks a lot for coming on the show, I really learned a lot, thanks a lot.

Rick: Absolutely, thanks Steve.

Steve: Take care.

Hope you enjoyed that episode. Rick is actually one of my go to guys when it comes to Facebook ads for digital products, and you can find him at Social Media Marketing World in San Diego every single year. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitherjob.com/episode179.

And once again I want to thank SellerLabs.com. Their tool Scope has completely changed the way I choose keywords for both my Amazon listings and my Amazon advertising campaigns. Instead of making random guesses, Scope tells me exactly which keywords are generating sales, and within the first week of use I saw a 39% increase in sales. It is a no brainer. So head on over to Sellerlabs.com/wife and receive $50 off. Once again that’s sellerlabs.com/wife.

Now I also want to thank Klaviyo which is my email marketing platform of choice for ecommerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on auto pilot. So head on over to mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O, once again that’s mywifequitherjob.com/ K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.

Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog, and if you’re interested in starting your own ecommerce store, head on over to mywifequitherjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email, and I’ll send you the course right away, thanks for listening.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast, where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information, visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com.

Now today I’m thrilled to have Brett Curry on the show, and we are going to talk about a cool ad platform that is very effective that very few merchants are using today. Brett has spoken at various conferences, and I know you’ll learn a lot.

But before we begin I want to give a quick shout out to Klaviyo who is a sponsor of the show. Now I’m always excited to talk about Klaviyo because they are the email marketing platform that I personally use for my ecommerce store, and I actually depend on them for over 20% of my revenues. Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not a different provider. Well Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for ecommerce stores and here is why it’s so powerful.

Klaviyo can track every single customer who has shopped in your store and exactly what they bought which allows you to do many things. So let’s say I want to send an email to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week, easy. Let’s say I want to set up a special auto-responder sequence to my customers depending on what they purchased, piece of cake, and there is full revenue tracking on every single email.

Now Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used and you can try them for free at mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Once again that’s Klaviyo, mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.

Now I also wanted to give a shout out to my other sponsor, Seller Labs, and specifically I want to talk about their awesome new tool, Scope. Now if you know me I get really excited about tools that I like and use and Scope is a tool that actually increased my Amazon sales on several listings by 39% within the first week of use, crazy, right?

Now what does this tool do that can possibly boost my sales so quickly? Well, quite simply Scope tells you what keywords are driving sales on Amazon. So here is what I did, I searched Amazon and found the bestselling product listings in my niche, then I used Scope to tell me exactly what keywords that bestselling listing was using to generate sales. I then added these keywords to my Amazon listing and my sales picked up immediately.

So today I use Scope for all of my Amazon products to find high converting keywords in the backend as well as for my Amazon advertising campaigns. So I’m sure Scope can boost your Amazon sales almost immediately like they did for mine and 39% is nothing to sneeze at. So right now if you go to Sellerlabs.com/wife, you can check out Scope and save $50 off of any plan plus your first three keywords are free. Once again that’s Sellerlabs.com/wife. Now on to the show.

Intro: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. We will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle, so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here is your host, Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Brett Curry on the show. Now Brett is someone who I met through Drew Sanocki at the Traffic and Conversion Summit in San Diego and we hit it off right away. Now Brett runs OMG Commerce, which is a seven figure ecommerce agency that has helped over 125 companies with their pay per click advertising.

Now not only does Brett speak at major conference events across the country, but he also writes for a variety of sites like Digital marketing and Search Engine Journal. He is also the author of the Ultimate Guide to Google Shopping published by Shopify, and the host of the Ecommerce Evolution Podcast.

Now, today what I’m going to do is I’m going to pick Brett’s brain and talk about some of the PPC platforms that not a lot of the little guys are using yet such as shoppable TrueView ads. And with that, welcome to the show Brett. How are you doing today man?

Brett: Hey Steve, I’m doing fantastic, really excited to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Steve: Yeah, really happy to have you. Let’s start by having you give us a quick background on how you got into ecommerce and why did you decide to create an agency of all things?

Brett: Yeah, so I kind of fell in love with marketing. I started working for a radio station in college. So I was kind of trying to pay my way through college, I was selling ads to business owners. I fell in love with marketing; I fell in love with ads, just kind of kind of a psychology behind it, what causes people to take action and buy things, and so changed my major to marketing surely after college.

I don’t know if this was divine providence or just youthful ignorance, but I started an agency right out of college, probably not the best idea, and but just grew it and it started working mainly with companies doing traditional marketing, so TV, radio. TV was my passion and so helped that, and then I guess in 2004 I had a client coming to me and say, hey do you know SEO? They were an ecommerce company and I said no, I know nothing of it and he said, we will pay you to learn it.

Steve: Wait, why you?

Brett: And I said great that sounds fun; that sounds awesome. So I learned SEO, I get them actually ranked on page one for the search term brochures. And I was using like article directory and stuff that does not work anymore, but I was hooked man. I was hooked as I mean the search engine stuff is awesome. And so really started digging in and then a business partner and I started OMG, Online Marketing Giant is what that stands for but started OMG…

Steve: I’m sorry, what does that stand for?

Brett: Online Marketing Giant.

Steve: Oh, okay, I was thinking of it, oh my gosh!

Brett: That’s what everybody thinks, but it’s one of those things where we kind of started the business as more of a project. We didn’t even put like time and energy into the name. So Online Marketing Giant is what came out.

Steve: Okay.

Brett: But then everybody started calling us OMG, so that’s what we stuck with. But yeah, started doing — tried everything in the beginning like a lot of agencies do and that was a mistake. We were doing development and design and all kind of stuff. And we realized, we are good at search, like we do search really well. And so that’s kind of where we’ve been focusing since about 2010.

Steve: How has that evolved into like Google Shopping and some of the other search campaigns that you have done? Like it sounds like before you started out with SEO, right?

Brett: Yeah, and we still offer SEO and I’m still a believer in SEO, but it’s changed so much. Like I think now one of the best things you can do with SEO is just to make sure your data is correct, and make sure your site is crawlable and structure it, and then make sure you are putting on great content as there are no shortcuts, no secrets, tricks to SEO any more in my opinion. So we still do a little bit of that, but the thing that forced us to do more on the page search site is Google start changing the SERPs, the search engine results pages.

Ads are now dominating the top, you know often the top four spots, and you got Google Shopping which is very prominent. And so we started doing more and more paid because we love the math there, future campaigns down, then you spend more, you make more. Everything is measurable and trackable, and you have a lot more control which is great. And then I guess it was about, I was getting my — I’m bad with dates, but I think around 2012 is when Frugal which was the old Google Shopping right it used to be free.

Steve: Yeah.

Brett: It transitioned, yeah so transitioned into product listing ads. I had a friend of mine who owns an ecommerce store who pulled me aside one day and he is like, dude, I’m getting ten to 12X on my product listing ads. I was like whoa, so I kind of dug in then with both feet because we had some ecommerce clients, and I just felt like man, this is going to be huge. And so we really tried to establish ourselves as experts there.

Steve: Okay.

Brett: And so yeah, so it’s worked well, so I get to speak at Traffic and Conversion which is where I met you and speak at RCE in June on Google Shopping. So it’s phenomenal but then it also relates to what our topic is today of shoppable TrueView which is pretty cool.

Steve: Yeah, so before we actually get into that I’m just curious and I want the listeners to hear this because I always get questions on how to rank organically in search. And I just wanted quickly your take on you know, if you are just starting out going after organic versus PPC traffic, and I know my answer to this question, I’m just curious what yours is.

Brett: Yeah, I would definitely go — I would focus more, well, I would do both, but I would, I would put more emphasis on the paid search in the beginning because you can control it. And also if you’ve got a site that has no traffic, so nobody is visiting the site, nobody is clicking around or anything, Google is going to be pretty hesitant to rank that. That’s what we’ve seen anyway.

Not the traffic itself is a huge signal but zero traffic can cause some hesitation, recently what we’ve seen. So I would definitely work on getting your structure correct, your title tags and good content, but I would put a little more emphasis on paid searches, did you ever thought that Steve?

Steve: Yeah, my answer I always give is SEO is always kind of a slog, like you might not even see results until like a year, a year and half later.

Brett: Exactly, exactly.

Steve: And so you need to get some traffic there. And then Google actually needs that traffic to determine whether your content is actually any good because they have a lot of measures for like time on page and user metrics and that sort of thing so.

Brett: Exactly, and I think that’s fantastic right, like I know a lot of SEOs complain about that. But I think Google looking at those on site metrics and using that to influence the ranking out rhythm makes sense, like they want to rank sites that people consume, and that they are actually good. So the other thing I think you can do is you can start to use some of your copy, your headlines and some of your hard copy that work to potentially influence your meta description, which is mainly — it’s not a ranking signal, it mainly just helps to get the clicks, so you can use that.

You can maybe use some of your headlines and ads that work to influence your title tags which I think can work. And then and one thing that’s weird is about the hierarchy of your ecommerce sites. So home page is most important, then category pages, and then product detail pages. And if you can spend time on these categories pages, try to build the authority, try to share them, try to make sure they are structured right, that can kind of pass through the authority to the other pages.

Usually for new sites though it’s those product details pages that will rank first because they will rank for long tail product specific queries. So yeah, fully grip. SEO it is a marathon for sure, months and months usually in the works.

Steve: Okay, it’s good have that it’s coming from someone who does this for a living. I’m just curious also before we begin like how do you kind of differentiate you agency from like the thousands of other PPC agencies out there?

Brett: I know, I know it’s tough. There is a lot us, that’s for sure. I think it comes down to a couple of things. One, we think — we try to think more like business owners than just technicians when it comes to AdWords. So of course we are geeks when it comes to the numbers and we have formulas we use for Google Shopping and AdWords, and then so we all about the performance. We try to think strategically and try to think like business owners because my business partner and I, we are all business owners.

We try to instill that in our people as well. We’ve had the good fortune of becoming a Google premiere partner, so in the top 3% of Google partners. I just found out a few weeks ago we are one of the fastest growing in season North America from Google’s numbers which is cool, but we will try and emphasis results and reporting, right?

Steve: Okay.

Brett: So we want to be keyed in on what your goals are, but then how do we show you what we are doing? And that’s really I don’t know if you’ve talked to many other agencies, but the act of reporting, like getting the showing clients what you’ve done and how it works and all that, it’s just tricky. We have a lot of clients come to us saying, I don’t know that my previous agency was terrible, but I never got any reports, I never knew what was going on, so reporting is huge as well.

Steve: Okay, so Brett one of the reasons why I want to have you on the podcast is because you work with a variety of ecommerce companies, and you have a lot of data and experience with a bunch of different types of products, right? Specifically I want to talk about shoppable TrueView because it’s actually one of the few ad platforms that I’ve actually not tried myself. And so let’s start out for the benefit of the listeners, first of all what is it and how does it work?

Brett: Sure, so let’s talk about TrueView first, just in case anybody doesn’t know what TrueView ads are. You’ve all experienced some, so if you go to YouTube, watching your favorite cat video or whatever. And before your video starts you see the ad that pops up and about five seconds in you see the skip ad button pop up.

And what’s always amazing to me is and I’ve had this happen before where the ad will pop up and I’ll get angry, I’ll be like no, I want to watch the barbecue video or whatever it is that I’m looking at. But then something in the video hooks me, and I end up watching the whole thing. It seems to be like the Red Bull videos for me, for whatever reason they are mesmerizing.

Steve: Okay.

Brett: Yeah people jumping out of spaceships and back flips on motorcycles and stuff. But anyway I’m planning on skipping but then I don’t skip, and that’s kind of the idea there is you want to hook the person so they do watch all the way through. But the beauty of TrueView ad is if someone hits the skip ad button, the advertiser does not pay for that. So it’s called the TrueView, you have to watch at least 30 seconds of the video or the whole video, whichever comes first.

So if it’s less than 30 seconds, yeah, watch the whole thing or the advertiser is not charged. If it’s longer than 30 seconds then the viewer has to watch at least 30 seconds before the advertiser is charged. And one of the things I mentioned briefly that I did some work in TV and radio. TV was always my favorite. I love the video component. I never created, I mean videos, but I worked on the campaign side of things structuring buys and where the video would run and things like that.

But there is just something kind of magical about video I think. There is like almost a celebrity status if someone sees you or your product on a video especially if it’s on TV. But I think you get some of that with YouTube as well. Like seeing that video ad, just it can bring credibility, it’s just pretty powerful. But with TV, we were doing TV all the time with my small agency back in the early 2000s.

We didn’t know if people were engaging with the video, if they were watching all of it or if they are changing the channel or is if they T bailing it, or if they are getting up and going to the bathroom, we have not idea on any of that. With YouTube you can see, you know you don’t pay if someone skips, you also can see how much they are viewing, to what percentage are they viewing. So it’s pretty cool, so the viewer has to at least watch 30 seconds of the whole video or they have to interact with the video. So…

Steve: Let me ask you about YouTube Videos in general.

Brett: Yeah, go ahead.

Steve: So I noticed some of them force you to watch like the full 30 seconds and some of them are the TrueView ads. So do you recommend using the TrueView type of ads?

Brett: I do recommend TrueView. So the ones where you have to watch all 15 seconds or whatever, now they got some six seconds and eight second ads. We are actually experimenting with some of those six second and eight second bumpers is what they are called for a shoe client of ours, online retail that sells shoes. But it’s kind of a different purpose there, and usually you will see larger advertisers will do that just because all they care about is the branding.

Steve: Okay.

Brett: But if you are looking for someone to take action which we usually are looking for someone to click through, to visit the site, to click on the product listing ad, whatever the case may be, then we want a little more time and we also want people to self-select. So if they are not interested at all, then we don’t want to pay for that person.

Steve: Okay.

Brett: So yeah, usually it’s the TrueView that we are recommending.

Steve: I’m just kind of curious what some of the metrics that you see are, because I actually, like when I’m on YouTube, I want to watch the video, right? It’s very rare and I don’t think I have ever actually clicked on an ad to actually get taken off the site to go somewhere else. I’m just curious what are some of like the click through rates that are good for like a YouTube ad?

Brett: Yeah, so that’s kind of very pretty, pretty wild layer. There is a couple of metrics that we’d want to look at. One is the view through rate, right? So that’s kind of the first metric we want to look, and that’s the percentage of people that see the video, that actually complete a view. So again that will be the 30 seconds or whole video, whichever is first.

So with that I mean ultimately it doesn’t matter I guess if you are making money on the back end what your view through rate is. But we see anywhere from on the really low end like nine to 12% on up to 20 to 30% if the video is compelling and if it’s highly targeted.

Google will also show you your cost per click as well. So they don’t charge you for the click just to be clear there. So let’s say you are running an ad for your product and you get some kind of offer that overlays on the video, someone clicks on that to go to your site, basically you are charged your view rate.

Steve: Okay.

Brett: So if you are biding like nine cents to 12 cents is often kind of what we are looking at on a CPV or cost per view bid. Sometimes it’s low as a penny, we’ve done as low as a penny in certain cases. If someone then clicks you are actually charged your view, your CPV, your cost per view

Steve: Okay.

Brett: But what Google does is they’ll calculate a true cost per click, so they will look at all of your expense divided by clicks and give you a true CPC but that’s often a few dollars. Like if you are just looking at the CPC, you’d say, oh this is terrible compared to AdWords to look at click through rate. So the other metric we want to look at is view through rate as well which lets someone — I’m sorry, view through conversions so that someone who views the ad does not click on anything but then they purchase within a certain window.

Steve: Okay.

Brett: And to me that’s valuable because like you said, okay if I’m on YouTube it’s because I want to watch the sports highlight, or I want to watch this how to video, how to fix my mower, my dishwasher, whatever. But seeing that message, seeing that offer maybe I’m going to come back later to the site. So looking at the view through conversion rate as well is also important.

Steve: And so Google can tell like if you switch devices and still consider that a conversion?

Brett: There are — I mean Google is getting better and better at cross device conversions which we had our reps come in right from Mountain View a couple of weeks ago, and we were talking about that specifically. They are getting better at that, I mean it is not perfect in that Google kind of needs someone to be signed in on their desktops and on their mobile device to be able to be really connected, but Google is getting better and better at that.

So yes, so someone can see, Google can see if maybe I convert on the desktop so I view the TrueView ad, I don’t click on anything, but then later I visit the site and Google can track that that person actually did convert later.

Steve: Okay, and so you mentioned like a good ad that you’ve seen can get like a 20 to 30% view through rate?

Brett: Yup, yup.

Steve: Wow, okay that’s really high, okay.

Brett: It’s really high. Now I’m looking at some of the — I’ve got one campaign up now so the skin care products. It’s actually Boom by Cindy Joseph just a good friend of mine. We partnered on some deals, but this is one of his videos. It’s actually done very well; its view through rate is more like 11.78%. So again like you can’t take your view rate to the bank.

Steve: Of course.

Brett: You take conversations and sales to the bank of course, but it can at least indicate, okay how engaging is this video, and then we want to dig in a little further and see, okay when are people bailing, at what percentage? It could be that they are bailing when they see our offer pop up, and if so, great. Like we want them to take the click through and take the offer, but we do want to pay attention to that. This particular video that I’m looking at now that had the 11% view through rate, it’s a long form video, it’s like a four minute video.

Steve: Wow! Okay.

Brett: But their view through rate is based on the 30 second minimum though, so yeah, it’s going to vary.

Steve: Okay, and in terms of targeting then, is this more like top of funnel stuff or is it more like retargeting? Like what do you recommend? Like if I was just starting out with my store for example and trying the YouTube ads, what would you recommend?

Brett: Yeah, it’s good question. So yeah, for Bumblebee Linens as an example or any site, the first thing I would is start with remarketing list.

Steve: Okay.

Brett: And that’s where this has the most predictable wins. You know I think probably most people that are listening are learning some form of remarketing, I would anticipate that they are. And yes it’s pretty easy in AdWords to set up your dynamic remarketing where the products someone looked at, that’s a product that’s going to be in the ad provided that you get your feed set up and everything. But I would look at — for shoppable TrueView I would look at a couple of different remarketing lists first, and I’ll kind of break these down from least likely to convert to most likely to convert.

So you can start with just all site visitors, and typically the more recent that visitor was the more likely they are to convert. So you may have all site visitors from 180 days, 90 days, 30 days, and then the most recent are going to convert the best. Usually we break up those audiences into different ad groups at least to manage different campaigns.

Steve: Okay.

Brett: But all side visitors, so obviously that anybody who has visited the site that they didn’t convert, let’s consider remarketing to them kind along the next step up they will be more likely to convert, would be product page visitors. That’s where you are saying, okay target people that visited a product detail page or PP viewer and maybe will bid a little more on that view.

And then one step up of that would be then cart visitors, so people that have visited cart but abandoned. And again I would at the recency of 30 days, 15 days, seven day. Usually the 15 day or 14 day, seven day is what’s best, and then the step up from that and this one is kind of interesting. This takes a little custom work with your audiences, but the bought X but not Y list is a very powerful one.

Steve: Okay.

Brett: So back to Boom by Cindy Joseph, and Ezra actually had a case study that will be released maybe here in I don’t know, a month or two, but one of their more popular products is BoomSilk. So it’s a moisturizer, a skin care product for females over the age of 45, is kind of his target demo. But basically we get this list of all these buyers who have purchased from Boom but did not buy Silk. And so the beauty of that is then we can run a video targeting them that features BoomSilk, and then with that video then we have the product listing ad that runs next to it.

So that’s kind of the beauty of shoppable TrueView. I guess I didn’t really explain what shoppable TrueView is, but that’s where you get your TrueView ad that’s based on a- you are only if someone views or clicks through to your site, but then right next to that, either under it on a mobile device or next to it or top of it on a desktop, you get your product listing ads. So picture priced title, those ads are right there by your video. So it really encourages shopping, pulls someone through to click on your products. So that bought X but not Y, I mean that’s a killer list right there that works very well.

Steve: I just want to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you’re interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both a video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online.
Now this course is free and can be obtained at mywifequitherjob.com/free. Just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again that’s mywifequitherjob.com/free, now back to the show.
Okay, and yeah, I would imagine that works well because someone has already purchased from you and it’s a related product to what you have already purchased, right? So-

Brett: Yup, yup, exactly.

Steve: Just curious and maybe we can just use as an example since you are already doing a case study on it. So what do the conversions — what do the ROIs look like kind of going up that tree of audiences that you specified?

Brett: Yeah, so we are having the most luck with cart visitors and then the bought X but not Y. The bought X but not Y that’s smaller list, so total conversions are a little bit less. I don’t have the actual numbers of that one — yes I mean we are looking at their cost per conversion goals. These are right under it. So we are kind of maintaining or coming a little bit under the cost per conversion goals for that particular list. Now actually for this one, for Boom, the cart visitors has actually worked a little bit better. It’s well below; it’s almost like a third of their CPA goal.

Steve: Okay.

Brett: They were getting on cost per conversions for that audience. A little bit different video, the one is just targeted just for Silk is that for specific product video, so it can be part of it. But yeah, I mean typically if you are looking at, hey what is my CPA? If you are doing, if you are running this as a remarketing vehicle and you got your lists set up properly, you got your products and your products listing ads are running next to the video, you can usually hit that CPA target or come in a little bit below it.

We got a jewelry client, so they sell earrings, body jewelry, things like that. We are coming in at about 30% under their CPA target with this platform, and then getting some nice volume as well.

Steve: I know for me I haven’t tried these YouTube ads yet but just my regular retargeting on Google, like the all website visitors tends not to return my investments that well. So I switched over to just cart ads and then all of a sudden it’s — and I’m just curious whereas you know on Facebook I’ll do visitors and it works pretty well or product views I should say, and it works significantly better than Google. Would you expect like the display ads to perform similarly to the YouTube ads with the retargeting?

Brett: Yeah, I would think so, I mean I don’t know that I have ever done a comparison of the two to see how comparable they are. But we definitely see the same thing, so with all of our clients we recommend remarketing and typically dynamic remarketing because we are already running Google shopping; we got the feed there so we can do the dynamic remarketing. It is a little hit or miss when it comes to the all visitors. You are absolutely right, sometimes for certain clients that does really well, for others not that as much. But yeah, the cart visitor or even per detail page viewer is much more likely to convert, that’s for sure.

Steve: I guess what I’m asking is should I be using these YouTube ads, the shoppable TrueView like if I’m successful with shopping and my display ads, like is this shoppable TrueView like the next step for me? Like should everyone be doing this basically?

Brett: You know it’s kind of hard to say that everybody should be doing it, and I’m all just a little bit skeptical I guess as far as that goes. But I mean one, you do with that video assets and your product has to lend itself well to video. I think most physical products do, but there may be some exceptions. So if your product, you know probably demonstration, testimonial, having a good video that really shows the feature benefits of the product, it’s got a good call to action, you got your viewer rated products right there next to it, it can work very well.

So in most cases I would say absolutely through running. If you got some success with Google Shopping, your remarketing ads are working pretty well, your display ads are working well, I think this is a great next step because a little bit different ad format, it’s interactive, you got sight, sound, motion. You can see the product in action; it’s a little bit different as well. It’s also the combination of; hey this is like it’s my shopping ad all over again. It’s my shopping ad but with this commentary, this video running right next to it which is pretty cool. So yeah, I think for most people it can be great. You do have to work on the video content, we had a…

Steve: Yeah, can we talk about that for a little bit, like what makes great video content? Like you have five seconds to get them to watch, right?

Brett: Exactly, exactly, so yeah, that’s one of the first steps is you got to hook them in the first five seconds because that’s all you have. So we had a — we got a client that sells barbeque grills and pellet grills and camping stoves and things like that. And so they brought us this one video they wanted us to advertise, we do a lot of video work for them. But they brought us this one video and it was like six seconds of the logo flying in and doing stuff and we were like guys, this is not going to work.

Your logo is cool, we like it, but not six seconds worth of logo animation. So you got to catch within the first five seconds. You are one of my favorite examples and I mistakenly showed this video to my kinds and then paid for it because they were quoting it all the time, but the Potpourri video, where you got the…

Steve: Oh yes, yes, yeah.

Brett: Yeah, it’s a great video, so there is this young attractive British girl in a toilet in a dress, yes so it’s very appropriate. She is on a toilet in a dress and something to the effect of- hopefully this is too inappropriate, but she says you will not believe the mother load I just dropped, right. So that’s the opening of the video and you are like what is this you know. So obviously that’s the humor play, and that can work for some businesses, obviously it wouldn’t work for others, but it at least hooks you in the first five seconds and makes you think.

So back to the barbeque grill place like we said, hey, show the food, like show the food sizzling. I want to see a rack of ribs on a grill or some music behind it, the steam coming up, something like that. So hook them in the first five seconds, right? You also want to lead with the strongest benefits. So what am I getting from this? What is this ultimately doing for me? Is it a time saver? Is it money saver? Is it changing my life in some way? Is it allowing me to cook the best barbeque I have ever cooked? Is it allowing my bathroom in office to no longer sting? Whatever it is, lead with that, the strongest benefit.

I think one of the things that people don’t do with videos, they don’t use it to its full strengths right so show me, don’t just tell me. Don’t give like just the bullet list, just flash like a bullet point up on the screen. Like show the product in action, show the video working and cutting through this really thick underbrush or whatever. Like show the product in action [overlapping conversation] [00:31:55].

Steve: Can you talk about production quality? Because I know probably a lot of listeners don’t have like the budget to create like a professional video, is that required or?

Brett: Not at all, I’m really glad you asked that. Yes, I’ve mentioned some kind of well known ones that are high production quality, but no I do not believe it has to be high production quality at all. Shooting even with an iPhone, but as long as it’s to the point. I think it should look clean and it shouldn’t look sloppy, but it doesn’t have to have like a high finish quality right. If it was making via testimonial based thing, right? So it could be even a customer saying, hey, use this skin care product, I absolutely love it, he’s been using it for 30 days, these are the results that I saw or whatever. So it could be even more like a customer testimonial type approach.

So there is not one right or wrong way to do it. I wouldn’t say, hey, let’s invest $5,000 worth of video production company to test this, like that’s kind of silly. I would look at how can we — the minimum viable product type approach. How can we get a video that speaks to our customers, that highlights the product, that has a good call to action, and how can we do that really affordably?

Steve: Okay, so let’s assume that I have my shopping list or the feed, my product feed set up and let’s say I have a creative set up and I’ve run some ads into my retargeting list, so what do I do? Like what am I looking for in terms of metrics? So you mentioned the number, the percentage of people that actually view the video to completion, what are some good percentages? Like how do I know it’s a dud, and what are some of the next steps after I’ve let the video run for a little bit?

Brett: Yes, so I would look at the view through rate in a couple of different ways. If it’s really low, like if its sub 10% then you may either want to think about two things; either the video is pretty bad. You know it’s not capturing someone, it’s not picking their interest, there is no benefit whatsoever. So it’s not causing them to want to watch.

Or something is wrong with the targeting right, which probably shouldn’t happen if you are doing a remarketing list. Like that should be a pretty good list. But maybe, consider this has happened where someone thinks that their marketing to a remarketing list but they just have that in addition to a general audience or something.

So if it’s sub 10% I would look at those two things; like either we are not targeting the right person or this video is really bad. So that’s something to look at for sure. The thing that we always do, this is not like your bread and butter campaign, right? If I were to say okay, your foundational campaigns that you are going to build your business on are your text campaigns and your shopping campaigns.

Like those are your bread and butter, those are your real money makers. This is something you run in addition, like this is something that you help get more total conversions, because they didn’t convert initially and it’s your remarketing vehicle. We can talk maybe a little bit about top of funnel stuff in a minute if you want to.

Steve: Sure.

Brett: But this is not going to be your bread and butter, how I make millions of dollars you know with this campaign, but it can be very powerful. So then I want to look at your conversion rates, so how many direct conversions and the default there is those are conversions where someone clicks through the video and buys right then, right? Because the default is always last click attribution. So someone clicks through the video, they buy right way.

So I would look at that, but then I would also combine your view through conversions and then calculate your total CPA, or total return on ad spend whichever metric you prefer to see okay, is this within my goal? So for remarketing campaigns I’ve got a $15 CPA, that’s my goal. Well, if I combine those view through conversions and the last click conversions, am I getting there or not?

So ultimately for me that’s the biggest number is looking at my total conversions and view through conversions, and am I meeting my target, but you can also look at it at a couple of different ways. We have a few — they are not large clients like fortune 500 or anything but people with pretty good size budgets. They also view this as I just want to make sure people remember my name you know.

Steve: I see.

Brett: And so then we’ll look at audience building as well. So one of the beauties of running anything on YouTube is you can build YouTube remarketing list. So as you run these videos, as people engage with them, they get dropped into a YouTube remarketing list. So that’s a list you can use in other purposes as well which that’s kind of cool. So you can say okay, people who have seen this video now I want to remarket to them with this other video.

Steve: Okay.

Brett: And almost create like a funnel with your YouTube targeting. There are also there a few YouTube lists. You can even remarket with your text ads, or you use like a remarketing list for search ads.

Steve: Interesting, okay.

Brett: Yeah so that’s growing and it’s only — I don’t even remember which list it is. It is limited so not all your YouTube lists can you use to target on search, but I do anticipate that will expand over time. Google is doing a pretty good job about making, allowing more and more audience layering, audience targeting even on the search platform.

So that’s another thought, like the outdoor cooking company we work with. A lot of what want to do is like they just want; they want people to know their grill, right. And then they want those people to come to the site, so it’s kind of an audience component with a few of our advertisers, but ultimately I’m looking at CPA.

Steve: Here is a random question, like let’s say someone watches one of these YouTube ads and clicks on it, but later on clicks on one of my AdWords and makes the purchase. Does Google double count that as a conversion?

Brett: So right, so they would count that if it was in the view through window, then yeah, it would be conted as a view through conversion for that YouTube video, right? But the last click conversion, assuming you got a last click as your attribution which most people do, that’s the default, then it would also be attributed to that text campaign as well.

Steve: Okay, so that makes ROI calculation confusing, doesn’t it?

Brett: It can, it really can. Yeah, I mean one of my favorite quotes when it comes to analytics is by a guy named Avinash Kaushik. Have you ever read any of his stuff yet?

Steve: Aha, I know who he is, yeah.

Brett: Yeah former Googgler and Occam’s Razor is his blog, all that analytics, supper smart guy, but he says your goal with analytics and attributions is be less wrong. So you are never going to be right, you are never going to be 100%, so just continually try to be less wrong. We are experimenting with different attribution models now, so there is last click is what almost everybody uses so that’s the default.

That’s where, say someone clicks on a YouTube ad and then they click on one of your text ads and then they come back through an organic search, with last click all the credit is going to go to that organic click, because that was the last click before conversion.

We are looking at you know linear, we know some of these linear, there is time decay where you can maybe get a little more credit to the first click, a little more credit to the last click and a tiny bit of credit to those in between. We are also playing around with the data drone which is kind of interesting is where Google begins to look at all the attribution models, and they begin to assign different weights based on the numbers to first click, last click, middle click. But anyway yeah, that long winded answer, but yes it does make it tricky.

Steve: Okay.

Brett: So one of the things we recommend people do is let’s consider what that view through conversion actually means right. So and let’s make sure that we are building an audience and that we have other goals in place as well. So if you are looking at your click through conversions and you are just like barely meeting your CPA targets, then maybe you need to do some adjusting because likely it’s possible that that view through conversation is being attributed to something else as well.

Steve: How do I come up with a good CPA target?

Brett: Yeah, so I keep saying CPA because a few of the examples that I’ve used here that those clients prefer CPA. To me it’s either going to be — it kind of comes back to are you building a customer or are you are making a sale, right. So if you are making a sale and that’s all that matters, then is that am I profitable on that first sale. So I’m looking at AOV and my margin, and then I’m calculating okay, what percentage of my margin can I give up as a cost of advertising.

Steve: Okay.

Brett: Other people and Boom would be this way and we’ve got a few other where they look at, okay, we know people are going to purchase maybe a couple of times for the first year, so our CPA target is going to be based on that.

Steve: Okay.

Brett: But we actually use, we use return on ad spend a little bit more. And so that’s where — but it’s basics you get to either number it kind of the same way, but we try on ad spend as revenue divided by cost.

Steve: Right, right, that’s what I use too. I actually tend not to use CPA but yeah.

Brett: Because then, because a lot of our — we have some merchants that are like Boom where AOV is very consistent, so CPA makes sense. But we got clients that have over 100,000 products, so did someone buy the $10 product or did they buy the $1,500 product that makes a difference. So that’s why we usually favor return on ad spend.

So that’s where again you are looking at okay, here is our margins so quick math, you have 25% as our margins. If you want to break even on that first order, we need a four X return — for return on ad spend. So you kind of get into the numbers either way, but yeah preferable 80% of our clients will look on return on ad spend, but CPA works as well.

Steve: Can we talk about top of the funnel a little bit; I mean it sounds like you would use up a lot of money on top of funnel.

Brett: Yeah, yeah. So this is something I just want to be totally transparent, we are experimenting a lot with this, so we got a couple of clients where they know, we know, hey this is experimental so we are not going to use a big budget, we are just going to start testing some things.

So if you are just starting out, if the majority of businesses on Amazon let’s say you are just building your store, don’t go top of the funnel with video. They’re like — it’s kind of like getting a half-court shot at the buzzer, you know when it happens it’s awesome and not supper likely. Go for the lay-up, go for the remarketing list first.

Steve: Okay.

Brett: But what — so what we are doing though, I’ll just give you a little bit insight here. We are looking at similar audiences, so you can take your purchase list, all those that are, all converters and then just like in Facebook you get the look alike audience, you can do a similar audience with Google. And so that’s a pretty good audience to test.

Steve: What does the landing page look like, just curious for those ads?

Brett: Well, if you do shoppable TrueView, your landing page is probably your detail page because that’s the way that item, that’s how that platform works.

Steve: But for top of funnel, like, they won’t have visited your site yet right? So are you just showing them random products then or related products to the video?

Brett: Yeah, so usually you try to relate the products to the video. So it depends, like if you are going top of the funnel and you more want to get them into like a sequence, a presale sequence where you just get them plugged in, then it’s probably not going to be shoppable TrueView. It’s just going to be TrueView with click through to the site, and then your page is informational.

You want to definitely try to grab their contact info in some way. I love how you guys are doing the spinning wheel on your site. Some of the clients same end working pretty well, but yeah, it’s top of the funnel purely then, then maybe you don’t do shoppable TrueView. But we are still testing shoppable TrueView even with top of the funnel because we are looking at a similar audience. Sometimes we will refine that a little bit more.

What seems to be the most promising audience right now is looking at a combination of in market audiences and keyword targeting. So if you look at in marketing audiences, those are people that identify themselves through their behavior or something else for this that I’m in the market for skin care, or I’m in the market for an automobile, I’m in the market for hair care, something like that.

So you get this audience you can pick in and YouTubers saying, okay, these people have indicated they are in the market for this product, and then want to layer in keyword targeting. So now I’m saying, okay and this person has recently searched for organic skin care where they recently searched for barbecue recipes or best pallet grill or something like that.

So now you are saying, okay I’ve got this audience that they have identified they want to buy something and they are searching on YouTube for keywords that also cause them to be more qualified. So that audience seems to be the most promising and the most exciting. But it’s still, we are still testing a lot of things and I would not start with top of the funnel.

Steve: That’s interesting; I didn’t know you could do that. So you can target people based on what they’ve searched in the past recently?

Brett: Yeah, yeah, what they’ve searched for on YouTube, so you do your keyword targeting.

Steve: On YouTube, okay, okay got it, got it.

Brett: Yeah.

Steve: Uh okay interesting, so I cut you off, yeah.

Brett: Yeah, so that’s what I’m most excited about, so I mean so then what I would look at let’s say we are promoting pallet grills which we’ve done this a lot with their huge portion on holidays. So I’ve got my pallet grill video, in that case, I’m going to go ahead and put the pallet grill PLA. So I’m going to make that shoppable TrueView because why not, I want to show the price, I want to maybe get some people clicking and shopping.

So I’ll run the pellet grill video. I have the pellet grill PLAs right there with, it’s going to be Shoppable TrueView, and then I’ll go after that audience, so if in market plus keywords. But again, it’s going to be nowhere near what your remarking list is and in some cases you’ll get nothing in terms of [inaudible] [00:46:07].

Steve: Okay, I mean this sounds like a lot like Facebook top of funnel also right, I mean like whenever I run top of funnel Facebook, I’m just trying to get their email for the most part.

Brett: Exactly, trying to get their email, trying to get them on a list so you can remarket them in a slightly different way exactly, yeah. It’s definitely the long play. Like if you are just looking at, okay, I’m running top of funnel to get some direct conversions, good luck. That’s probably not going to happen right away. You need to push them into your funnel.

Steve: Okay, okay. I’m just curious like what is like the minimum budget you would recommend to even start running these types of ads like the shoppable TrueView ads?

Brett: Yeah, if you are doing remarketing, then I wouldn’t really put that much of a minimum on there, you may as well set it up and start testing. I guess the one variable though is like the effort or the expense to create the video right. So you a want pretty decent size remarketing list. The minimum I think is 1,000 people on the list as your absolute minimum, but if that’s all you have you are going to be pretty limited in your visibility there. But I would look at, do I have 1,000 people on my marketing list or hopefully more.

And then really whatever budget you want to put out there, a lot of times we are looking at $500 so a month budget for shoppable TrueView just because we kind of calculating, okay that’s going got get us X number of views, and will that give us any meaningful data? But if you are going after remarketing list, as long as you’ve got enough people to target then go for it. If you are a smaller store with smaller amounts of traffic, and you are only doing remarketing, then likely whatever budget you have you are not going to quite hit.

Steve: I guess what I’m trying to ask is like how do I know, like in Facebook like there is this, there is frequency right, and so how do I know whether I’m saturating these people, is it just adjustment based on like the return on ad spend when it comes to ranking these ads?

Brett: I mean that is definitely the most important metric in my opinion is to look at the return on ad spend and CPA. But we do often look at frequency capping when we are setting up these campaigns, we just kind of did that for one of our retail clients recently. And it depends, I mean it all goes back to testing in my opinion, but maybe three views within a week or something like that and that’s going to be your cap on frequency. But just kind of look, dig into the numbers.

But to me it’s like would it be a worthy effort in starting; probably need to have a remarketing list of minimum 1,000 to 5,000 and hopefully more before we kind of dig in you know.

Steve: Okay, okay yeah, I mean of course you have to look at your numbers. I was just looking for like some general guidelines since you run this for so many different companies.

Brett: Yeah I got you; it’s all over the board on some of that, so I’m having a hard time getting an exact number there.

Steve: Okay and I know you specialize in shopping. I’ve actually, we spend a lot of time talking about TrueView, but I was wondering if you had some — like when someone comes to you with their shopping campaign and let’s say it’s not performing well, what are just, like the first three things that you might do to try to see what they are doing wrong or how to fix one of their Google Shopping campaign?

Brett: Yeah, yeah it’s a great question and actually it’s very related because when you start working on your feed as an example to optimize your feed that’s going help with shoppable TrueView as well, because shoppable TrueView uses the same feed, the same product feed you use for Google Shopping and it’s used for shoppable TrueView. But usually the first three things we look at, the first is going to be the feed, we want to look at the actual product. So how optimized is your title, description, product type, you got the correct Google product category.

A lot of times we see miss matches there which can throw Google off just a little bit and kind of to go back to the SEO days you know back — it’s kind of where I got my start was optimizing titles and descriptions and things like that. So we look at that first, and it’s very common to either find clients that have lots of products that are disapproved, or very weak tittles that are not very descriptive without keywords in the title.

So look at the feed first and then you want to look at the structure of the campaign itself. So I’m a big believer in even looking at full funnel for Shopping. And Shopping by nature is kind of lower in the funnel anyway, so I mean there is not a true top of funnel for Google Shopping, but relatively speaking there is.

So like if some just typing in, going back to the barbeque example, I’m kind of stuck on that I guess. But if I just type in just pallet grill, I’m probably higher in the funnel on the search there because I don’t know brand, I don’t know details, I’m just pallet grills is what I’m typing it.

Steve: Okay.

Brett: But I have someone to target that person most likely, so we like to have kind of a top middle and bottom of funnel campaign in Shopping. Now as you know and I don’t want to get into all the details because I know you got another episode all about Google Shopping. You don’t pick your keywords; you influence keywords with your feed and with your negatives and with your bids and things.

So we typically just try to pull out top products, push those into the top of the funnel campaign. So what are our top converters? That’s what we are going to bid higher on, we are going to structure that campaign where someone who is typing in that really broad general term, that’s the product you want to lead with.

Then we look at — we like skew level biding, so kind of on the middle of funnel, bottom of the funnel where we at least want to look at skew level performance. And this is another one of first things we look at is, okay if it’s underperforming, there is probably some winners and some losers in there. What are the products that are doing well, what are the products that are not doing well? And we like to separate those out on separate bids. There is some disagreements on that, I think at a minimum you have to look at reporting at the skew level, but I like to bid at the skew level as well.

Steve: Interesting, okay.

Brett: And so what we’ll look at is okay this product is really underperforming, then why is it underperforming because we are at price competitive, is it an image issue, is it something else? And so we will try to trouble shoot that product so that basically you are trying to prune the campaign and feed the winners and starve the looser.

But then also one of the things that’s just fascinating, we try to run a bottom of funnel campaign that is super low bid, put everything in it and occasionally those do really well. But we like to look at yeah feed and then structure and then bid, and then those are typically the areas where you win.

Steve: I notice in my feed there is always like a handful of products that just don’t get any impressions, but in terms of what the merchant center is telling me everything is set up properly, is there a reason for that do you think?

Brett: It could be a number of things; I mean it could be that just there is not much search volume for that product. It could be that your title that you don’t have enough detail in the title description product type for Google to say, ahh, this is exactly what this is. It could be, so if you haven’t double checked that everything is approved, then one of the other things we’ve seen is that sometimes people think it’s okay, but it’s actually listed as out of stock when it’s actually in stock.

Steve: I see, okay.

Brett: But typically like one of the things we do is we’ll take things with zero impressions and make sure that they are actually eligible to be served, and then we’ll bid up on it. It could just be that you are not competitive; there are some, some areas where even the competition is really fierce for that particular product and those particular keywords. So you need to push the bid a little bit more.

Steve: Okay.

Brett: So that’s another place to look.

Steve: Okay, hey Brian, we’ve been chatting for 50 minutes.

Brett: Yeah, yeah, all right.

Steve: I know, yeah I can’t believe it actually. I do want to be respectful of your time. Really learned a lot about shoppable TrueView today because I’m not using it and it’s only been up for about a year or so, has it been a year?

Brett: Yeah, I think it’s been about a year, so it’s new for us to. I mean we knew Shopping forever but yeah, it’s still newer and not a lot of people are using it, at least I don’t encounter that much so I’ll talk to a lot of people using it. But I think it’s pretty exciting and I think it’s getting continued to improve, and I think it could be a good little addition for most commerce stores.

Steve: Yeah, absolutely, I mean the conversion rates for someone who comes to your site is what? The average conversion rate is like 2%, right? So the more ability of view to bring people back like the more sales you’ll make, right?

Brett: Absolutely, absolutely.

Steve: Brett, where can people find you online if they need help with their shopping campaigns?

Brett: Yeah, absolutely so check us out at omgcommerce.com, I’m also on twitter occasionally @BrettCurry, get me on LinkedIn or Facebook whatever you prefer, but at omgcommerce.com is probably the best.

Steve: Cool. We’ll Brett thanks a lot for coming on the show man, I learned a lot.

Brett: Yeah, really enjoyed it, thanks Steve, we’ll have to do it again.

Steve: All right, it sounds good, take care.

Brett: All right, you too thanks.

Steve: Hope you enjoyed that episode. Brett is an expert when it comes to Google advertising, and we are actually working on a joint case study right now where he has taken over a couple of my Google ads and I will report on the results. This post will come out in the next few months, so stay tuned. For more information about this episode, go to MyWifeQuitHerjob.com/episode173.

And once again I want to thank Seller Labs. Their tool Scope has completely changed the way I choose keywords for both my Amazon listings and my Amazon advertising campaigns. And instead of making random guesses, Scope tells me exactly which keywords are generating sales, and within the first week of use I actually saw a 39% increase in sales. It is a no brainer. So head on over to Sellerlabs.com/wife and receive $50 off. Once again that’s sellerlabs.com/wife.

I also want to thank Klaviyo which is my email marketing platform of choice for ecommerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on auto pilot. So head on over to mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O, once again that’s mywifequitherjob.com/ K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.

Now I talk about how I use all these tools on my blogs, and if you’re interested in starting your own ecommerce store, head on over to mywifequitherjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away, thanks for listening.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast, where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com.