Two Facebook Ad Experts and a Rockstar radio host walk into a room...

Key Takeaways

so welcome Charlie to let's run Facebook ads how you doing I am doing fantastic I'm slightly recovering I went and saw Judith Priest last night and the right side of my face is still just a little melted so I'm I'm doing the best I can heavy metal is it oh yeah heavy metal 50 years of heavy metal Rob hord uh it was a beautiful thing it was at one point he came out on a Harley-Davidson in leather daddy Gear with a riding crop and saying about I'm yeah like like it was amazing uh I love it I'm big big music fan headache ah music headache today yeah late night little bit a little bit but I'm here I'm here you know at the end of the day I get to talk to you about the thing that I love honestly more than anything other than rock and roll so I could do this any day of the week I love it brilliant okay so well I've come across you through my team because my team have been watching your videos and I what I love about your stuff is how you're you you've you've definitely picking up the reals and the fact that Instagram are pushing people out there your reals are they're funny they're entertaining they're informative it's not just boring things see when I start doing these reals I'm just a bit boring I haven't got like you know we have to do that's why I've set up a podcast I can sit here I can talk and our listeners love it and we're growing that way you're growing you know we all find our little um way of getting ourselves out there which is brilliant and you know you'll really I love the way you do it which is great but if we talk about if we start with talking about you so guys who are listening we're going to be going right into the things that Charlie finds working on Facebook Charlie has been working with Facebook on Facebook for 10 years he even remembers the day when Facebook came to his offices so why don't we start with where it all started talk about that minutes or so and then we can get really in depth and see what's working yeah yeah the as my buddy robber my old buddy who's now CMO of triple wh as he was say the TLD drr of how we got here uh that too long didn't read um I was a touring musician in radio personality uh I've been on the road for 10 years to playing rock and roll and I was had a career in satellite radio I got really good at promoting myself promoting bands promoting events yeah then there was a um sex tape scandal with Hulk Hogan and somebody else and long story short they pulled the funding from a radio station because the woman of that sex tape was the wife of the owner of the radio station and I FL flid yeah Hulk Hogan had an affair with the wife of the radio station a sex tape with the owner of the owner of the radio station's wife he and Howard Stern were funding the radio station then Docker came out sued him pulled the funding and I was no longer on SiriusXM every day and I got out of Central Florida moved to LA and got a job uh got an apartment on a Monday got a job interview on a Friday started that next Monday doing organic growth basically hacking at an bucks an hour obviously we're in I'm in the UK we have we have loads of American listen St but Sirus FM you see them on YouTube that's like a that's a big thing oh yeah no we had 1.4 million listeners on a daily basis wow and you yeah I mean I I was on that show I was the third person so I had my own radio show on FM yeah I started at like College radio and answering phones and AM radio stations and very quickly I got my own show and I built those up over the years and eventually I got attached to somebody else so there was the host there was the producer so if you know like I don't know I can make a reference some people might get it might not but like Howard Stern him yeah so there's Howard Stern and then there's like Robin right the the producer news lady that works with him and then there's like back in the day was Jackie jokan Martling then it was like Ry Lang but there was this like third person that came in occasionally to interject right I was that third person in serious accent and then I had my own show on FM with you know where I was was uh constantly putting together playlists and taking phone calls and kind of had to run in the mill there um long story short with all of that aside I had to get out of Florida awfully quick completely unrelated I I assure you uh and I ended up in Los Angeles and uh got a job working at an ad Agency for 10 bucks an hour um and it was basically doing a a growth hacking uh for at the time um Disney stars basically taking boys and girls that have been on the Mickey Mouse Club and getting them a ton of YouTube views and followers right okay and I had been I got that job basically because I had organically growth hacked my band on MySpace my radio shows from college like there's a College radio show you get 100 listeners I had one that had 100, to do it and it was right it yeah exactly so when I moved it was like well I I didn't realize this was a job I didn't realize this was like a thing people did and to be fair at the time it was new like it was 20 2012 like it wasn't like a thing that people did really um and then their biggest client got rid of them uh and then was last hired first fired so I ended up taking one of their people with me started my own agency see and my biggest client accidentally I was just hiring people I was just taking on clients my biggest client fired me one day and he said I just used this thing Facebook I dropped a hundred bucks into it it got me more than what I pay you 2,000 a month for yeah and I swallowed my pride ate very poorly I call it carbohydrate therapy that day and then dropped my credit card into Facebook the next day and started running ads um at the same time also um there's this TV show in America called Madmen yeah and then after Madmen there was this show called the pitch which is a reality TV show where agencies would compete to be the AO the agency of record for big businesses well anyway the very last episode of that show um they canceled it after after I was on the show they were like we can't do this ever again this Charlie gu's on camera done you were pulling the plug uh 1-800 Flowers came and basically they had this inovative idea you have to spend $100,000 you can't do print radio or television has to be all on social which at the time was crazy this is like new this is new and it's like knows what they're supposed to be doing you post yeah you can't do email you can't do Google none of that stuff has to all be Facebook right and we won so at one time my client fired me for running because he was running ads and then 100 flowers basically love loved my growth hacking and paid ad strategy for them which was they have a $5 cookie and so for the 100 Grand we basically said we'll give 20,000 of those roughly 20,000 of those away I give you a cookie you give one to somebody else you get one and you get a voucher right and then we just did this pay it forward just because gifting where basically they got everybody's CRM list and we got a custom audience to using Facebook ads for every single person that touched that cookie yeah um and then I mean that's 20,000 email addresses uh they did exceptionally well off of that investment uh and even still to this day the email address and creating a list is still so important which is what we're always talking to our clients about it's just like make that list guys yeah you know because you own that information that's one of the very few things renting from Facebook and Linkedin and everywhere else we're just renting that yeah I mean honestly like those other channels Facebook LinkedIn social media um you are in a in an arrangement yeah they have a business model right their business model is eyeballs or profit right they are trying to retain attention as much as possible yeah so when you make an ad a lot of advertisers think of it as I'm gonna put money in and I'm gonna try to get money out yeah Facebook sees it as we're going to offer you some of our organic inventory we're going to charge you for it now if you give the users a positive experience yeah we're going to give you a discount and if that user has a bad experience we're going to charge you extra love the way you've done that that's a great analogy of it and that's that's all it is Facebook ads is paying for organic reach and that's all that it is after that like everything else is completely like we're going to disrupt someone at the right time that we think they want to see that piece of jewelry and buy it make it good and make that experience brilliant even post click on your website how it per oh please yeah make it all a star and we'll bring your cost down yeah absolutely and because then you were seen as a good partner yeah right in any relationship if your partner says this is what I need from you like I'm married I don't know about you but like if if my wife comes to me and says I need X Y and Z and my response is basically to give her the middle finger and try to take all of her money it's not going to work out yeah yeah and people complain all the time that they disrespect end users and the Facebook business relationship ship and it doesn't work out for them yeah um so yeah like that's that's kind of where I come from with a lot of this stuff and so ultimately I got a job as the supervisor at Omnicom for the Southwest stuff I walked in I had nine months six months of Facebook ad experience um which basically made me one of the most qualified people around and at the time Facebook was uh payperclick platform it's funny my buddy Dennis U we we were talking once and like he remembers and Facebook cpms were 25 cents I came in when it was about a buck 50 wow so like he's got a couple years on me but so I got to see the innovation of a lot of this stuff and and you know what we were kind of leading up to for instance with Omnicom and Resolution Media was my clients were like CBS Nissan working with the Activision team Levis you know all all those folks apple and I was managing you million dollars and more a day easy and direct consumer um and brand awareness and you know all sorts of that fun stuff yeah so I mean and that was 2013 14 15 like this is still Facebook was edited in Excel and didn't have a pixel yeah like as we know it today there wasn't a conversion pixel like if you wanted to pix around anymore as well yeah H like if you wanted to pixel your site to track what happened after the click it would take a week of Dev work to literally drop a code on every button on every page on everything yeah and um yeah so I mean I've been around since then and we were doing a million dollars a day in direct consumer um back you know when when you couldn't even track a conversion yeah uh so I've been around a little bit you know to say which is really interesting so you seeing like if we if we're talking about like first and third party cookies obviously iOS has happened 96% of people are dropping out have opted out you know every platform is being hit so people are like Facebook Facebook Facebook it's like no it's everyone this is like every oh yeah so we're talking now you know there's going to be companies out there who are who are going to be trying to create first party cookies that can go on your website and all this sort of stuff and you know all these other things out there that people are saying oh this is the new thing it's like well Facebook or someone else would have bought those companies out yet if they' figured it they would have been acquired because Facebook is pretty all these platforms are desperate to sort this thing out how do you see from what you saw 10 years ago to where you see it going now are you seeing that we're are because the pixels just having problems the the tracking getting that information back to Facebook You' seen that we're having to go back to how it kind of was with custom you you know building custom audiences Building C you know custom conversions and things like that yeah I I I actually lean the other way um and and here's why more than anything um iOS 14 the part of the journey that the pixel is blocked or has struggled with is the last five you know is the last yard right it's the last meter in 100 meter dash yeah I'll put it like this one the average user in a first world country UK United States whatever has had a Facebook account if adults right for at least 10 years now on average at least 10 years Facebook has seen the millions of websites Pages pixel vent fired engagements messages on messenger DMS that you've sent content you've seen likes that you've given comments you've dropped the pages that you've clicked on the things that You' joined and they've used a lot of that over the years to deliver you in an optimized CPM environment the content that you like right like when you go on reals it's all stuff that you enjoy right like when you go on somebody else's Facebook you might be following the exact same people it's very different yeah same with Instagram right there's these cheer rated feeds so Facebook has gotten really really good at that right and they've been doing that now for seven years something like that since around 2014 2015 with the implementation of of the ocpm environment optimize CPM because Facebook used to be paperclick there's a whole bunch of other stuff you can Google that later or ask one of us afterwards that's a whole other conversation but basically there's a curated feed so with that curated feed Facebook knows what content you like it knows what content you want to engage with it also knows over those years what it takes to get you to take the desired action yeah because you've been telling Facebook for five 10 years now around beginning of February I'm going to start looking at FL hour stuff these are the types of things that I look at this is the type of content when when I see this ad around this time I tend to click out on it and take this action and it's known what seeds that concept and what primes and conditions you to take that action because you've taught it for years and years and years right we know something happens around I again Facebook is just a machine it's just an algorithm but it understands around late October early November people start to click on what do you click on what kind of content do you see so Facebook is extraordinarily aware based on literally trillions of data points because remember there's billions of users millions of websites how to condition people to take certain actions so from where I'm standing we've got a decade of experience on millions of actions taken a data set of billions of users um you know the average Pur is on three to four platforms that Facebook owns a data stream on it might have messenger it might have Facebook Facebook app you might have Instagram you might have WhatsApp Etc yeah and you've also given it at least half a dozen or more cycles of testing on you to understand your flow as an individual so that being said the last part of that that oh one other point let's not pretend like Facebook doesn't see credit card data yeah doesn't see transaction data because everybody's selling this information right from the data house is why it's why an app's free yeah and to be fair back in the day you used to be able to select these credit card company custom audiences and Facebook and it was a premium Facebook used to tell you how much extra every audience cost you like this audience cost you 50 cents more this audience cost you 30 cents more they eventually got rid of it but every interest group every custom audience every customization is extra guac is extra you know what I'm saying like it's GNA it's it's an extra pound right like it's an it's an extra Buck it's a little so all of that being said Facebook knows what you've done Facebook knows what you like it knows what content you are it knows how to prime you for and and condition you to take an action it knows what actions you want it knows what pages you're clicking on for instance like when I was running New Balance their ad account not the brand I was not CEO of New Balance let's not uh if you've clicked on an ad say you have ad blocking but you've clicked on an ad from Nike you wait for five 10 minutes you come back you click on an ad from Reebok you wa for five or 10 minutes you come back you click on an ad for Puma you're gone for five or 10 minutes you come back odds are you want to see my new balance ad also I know that around this time before you know late spring every year you end up making a transaction for some sort of trainers and I know exactly which ones you've bought the skew the credit card number all of this stuff all of that is information that Facebook has before we get to tracking you on a pixel yeah so that pixel is just the last little bit of that journey and so my whole point with that is I lean into and I've been teaching this for for five years now I lean into broad audiences because I basically have this Theory every ad effectively makes its own lookalike audience right every post like when you make a real Facebook or Instagram they see who responds positively to that content and they show it to other people right that's why some of them get a hundred views and some of them get like 3,000 right and you see content from people you didn't know existed yeah so Facebook knows who to show this to for particular reasons now when you say show this to people that are like it but I'm also trying to condition people to take this action uh conversion objective that I might be optimizing towards but then a certain window my optimization and attribution now it's just one window it used to be two right um um every ad effectively makes its own I try to think of it is it makes it own look like audience it makes its own little circle of people and confidence really good people and expanding out y now when you go broad you're saying hey I'm gonna let you touch anybody in the universe you want when you start to use audiences like interest groups or local likes or something what you're doing is you're paying extra to make a circle of only the people you wanted to show to now the problem is Facebook the the really good impressions are only going to be where those two circles overlap where they make a v diagram right those are going to be the really good ones problem is that's very limited and ultimately when you tap out of that Facebook then has to start showing Impressions to other people that that ads look Alik audience doesn't really overlap you said you have to serve this inventory and you've already burned through all the good people so now I'm G to start giving people a bad experience yeah so you're paying extra to force a bad experience on users within the platform which inherently raises your cost of advertising now maybe you get conversions for a good price but your cpms might creep up to the 30s the 40s the 50s the 60s because you're representing yourself as a bad bussiness partner to Facebook and if you do that over and over and over again you're going to get priced out of even being able to do business because you might have found a cost-effective way of abusing the end user and disrespecting their relationship with the platform but eventually you're going to be seen as too much of a liability because there's somebody else that's going to do it well at the end of the day there's no shortage of advertisers nobody has a completely uh discret product that is them right every ad every impression is basically retargeting impression anyway so somebody else is going to sell more or less the exact same thing that you are or provide more or less the same service you are but if they have more respect for the end user they're going to win that impression because it's americ ocracy of experience yeah and I think that's the biggest Gap so for me I'm broad all day and I used to not be like that but you would stack you would narrow or stack big you know to get oh yeah so when you say how describe to me a broad audience to you is Broad just I want females a 30 plus us or you like they're into jewelry on one audience and or the other one they're into gifts or whatever is that what you mean by yeah so we're using broad as a noun not as an adjective so we think of broad as an adjective it's a very broad audience it's very big Facebook sees broad when Facebook uses the term broad they're using it as a noun it is basically age gender and location any additional piece you put on top of that costs extra now again back in the day you used to literally be able to see oh my CPM is going to be this I'm going to tackle on this thing now went from a buck 50 to a buck 75 or went from you know whatever like you started to stack on yeah so a broad Audience by definition age gender location um outside of that you really start to pay a premium to effectively make it harder for an ad to see a good impression and make it more difficult for Facebook to deliver positive experiences and condition users to take an action so basically you're paying extra to make it harder to be successful right so would you then so with with your clients then are you are you just going broad no you you putting it down to Facebook knows its users unbelievably well they now know you've put the pixel and so they now know that you sell jewelry they now know through what's going on in your website through that pixel it's it's you may have not even turned an ad on but it knows enough about what's going on on that whole funnel to say men and women 25 years old UK wide run the ad yep and it's not just a pixel Facebook's crawled your website they've seen your catalog they've compared your metadata to every single other person doing the exact same thing so now you're a hashed member of a giant data set and when it comes time for Facebook to decide whose impression should we give there is the auction of how much you're going to bid to get it but Facebook's also like well you might be willing to pay more but this user for whatever reason should be delivered content they want to see and what really happens is also if you start thinking about that the more you're willing to pay the higher your cpms are the more for lack ofed word disrespectful you might be to this business relationship I'm trying to be hyperbolic to make the point like yeah I'm not literally this hyperbolic I'm just trying to like really make it you know uh right and left up and down black and white like very you know binary you're not going to get the good impression you're not going to get the impression that drives the action you're trying to do you're going to get the impression because you told Facebook look I'll pay $50 $60 to reach a thousand people great well somebody else is giving a much better user experience so we're GNA make sure that person reaches all the really good people yeah so we've always said this we've said it's not it's you it's an open it's a open playing field because just because the big the big companies got the big plc's got or re retail plc's got all the money and they sell jewelry but if you're a little jewelry company and you're doing amazing ads and your engagement is great and you're doing some amazing reels and blah blah Facebook seeing that engagement and going the guys with a big money I'm gonna get this this these people deserve it yeah and also when you're talking about scale economies of scale you have to also understand that success is defined differently you know a lot of my students in the MBA program or a lot of the clients I work with success for them might be 20 sales a day it might be 200 Sales a day it might be 2,000 but the point is if success for you is say 10 sales a day how many Impressions do you really need to deliver on a daily basis to reach that point of business success for yourself maybe it's 10 sales a day today next month is 12 the month after that is 15 maybe the month after that is 20 maybe you take a step back whatever by the end of the year you're like 30 40 a day phenomenal job you've 3x your business right I mean a 2% change on like a weekly basis is a 300% change in your business yeah I was trying to remember people you don't need to do you don't need to move mountains steady growth is way easier to maintain so if you have a bunch of people that are just doing good work they're going to be able to steal all the all the really great impressions all the really great inventory um and that's one of the advantages of direct consumer advertising over retail brands that are trying to Port their strategies into social yeah and while they are raising the cost of advertising for everyone like when I would dump a million dollars into an interest group to do market research for CBS you're going to pay higher but like remember those interest groups basically only exist because when Facebook was a payperclick platform they wanted to make it comfortable and familiar for Google advertisers but their developers stopped supporting that technology seven years ago so you're using seveny old Tech imagine if you were still using your iPhone from seven years ago yeah and then you're like oh this is clearly gonna be the thing that I'm gonna make I'm gonna Revolution you know my my kids are never gonna have to work I'm gonna hire a whole bunch of like it's never going to work like that that's an unrealistic expectation yeah so going from that then these broad audiences this what I'm really interested in because obviously everyone's testing audiences and how do you you've got a client and then you they've got let's say they're not brand new they've got data they may have given you some lists of email addresses and stuff like that so you really feeding up Ys manager or whatever how do you go about testing audiences do you test audiences or would you just because we no I mean what do what I will say this I I do test audiences but not in the way that people think broad is my environment now remember we said every ad makes effectively its own lookalike audience right every ad based Facebook sees who responds positively who responds negatively they're going to go out and find more people to respond positively because hey they don't want to show an ad to somebody that's not going to like it there's a meritocracy of user experience Facebook then constructs an environment around each ad to show that to the right person yeah so really this is a creative issue and what I'm getting to that is every creative concept when you're doing a creative test should be designed to ultimately solve a problem either you are trying to get more efficient at a specific sales pitch you have a car dealership you're selling sports cars minivans and sedans you need to sell the minivan for a little bit better well why don't we work on our sales script for selling that minivan now when somebody comes in and ask for a sports car you're not appealing to them but you're going to get that minivan more and more efficient now let's say you have only ads for minivans and people keep coming to you wanting uh you know sports cars or now a lot of Brands make the mistake of saying well I have a good ad I'm just going to make 20 more like it and try to scale well you saturated that audience Those ads are basically the the VIN diagram of the lookalike audiences of all of your winning ads is basically a circle yeah that represents some infinitesimal piece of the overall environment yeah if you want to start scaling increasing spend because remember that's efficiency that's lowering CPA increasing customer quality and volume excellent thing to do totally a valuable piece if you want to instead scale spend then you need to create content that specifically appeals to a different person so again in this environment if every ad you have as a minivan you're doing really good you're scaling your business and at some point you hit a threshold if I want to buy a sports car if I want one of those beautiful 911 taras that are behind you and you say awesome here's my Grand Caravan from Dodge I but but I want the oh great I'm glad it see seven people it's super sick like all you have is a sales pitch is sell me that minivan you're losing me so if you want to scale your audience to the 911 Target people that beautiful sports car make an ad that appeals to that person and now you have an ad that appeals to this audience and an ad that appeals to this audience and one that appeals to this one and to this one and ultimately you start to be able to appeal to different types of individuals yeah and when you have ads that appeal to different types of people you can start to also let those ads create a customer Journey cuz in Broad I'm also not doing retargeting because in my opinion every impression is retargeting because if you're the first ad you've seen from my brand Facebook has decided Well based on your previous Behavior you want to see this remember like you went to Nike you went to Reebok you went to Puma well my new balance ad might be cold traffic but you've also spent $20 30 minutes on all of my competitors today so you're I'm retargeting you and advanced matching which is part of the power five um we be in the disrup group to help put that together um that that's what that does so you can really start basically retargeting end users traffic from other websites and other content so my point with that is when I'm testing audiences what I'm doing is I'm testing types of content because each one of those pieces of content effectively creates its own Focus so you'll be the same in the audience the adset page it would be the same audience yeah so massively broad us audience people age 25 plus they see the poor sports car because Facebook knows that you're creatively putting out a sports car and your copy is talking about a sports car so it's going to show the sports car to the people who are interested in a sports car you could use exactly same audience for any other product you're leaving it entirely for Facebook to find the people that pocket of people in there yeah now the one exception to this rule where my analogy Falls a little bit short and I'll call myself out on it is I organize my campaigns by business objective so in this case I might have a campaign specifically for minivans I might have a campaign specifically for sports cars I might have a campaign specifically for sedans I would also make a custom conversion event so that Facebook knows I'm not optimizing towards a purchase I'm optimizing towards a sale of a minivan because ultimately what we're trying trying to do is lower our CPA there's a lot of wonderful metrics that make people sound really smart like me and Raz and all of this other stuff that doesn't matter it's it's it's outof context vanity metrics as far as I'm concerned yeah we agree and and I'll say that for really quick the only equation that matters in direct consumer advertising is CPA plus cogs cost per acquisition Plus cost of goods that number divided by LTV what is the margin on user experience every transaction you drive is either pushing somebody further towards that LTV or starting a new Journey revenue is volume of PE uh is basically total volume of opportunity how many people do you get in the opportunity of going to that LTV that's that's the entire business is distraction everyone's focusing on the acquisition put1 pounds in get 50 pounds out and it's like but how much how much returning business are you getting to your company lifetime value how many times does 30% of your does 30% of the people if you're only using Facebook to drive acquisition and you're not doing anything else but your business is still growing because those people are coming back all the time and 30% are buying again on your average order value of $55 then you can't go off the row out of the beginning ad of the first ad can you to go off the return at the end of the day too you can control row as no I might come to the store and drop 50 bucks now you got Deep Pockets you're buying for 20 people you spend a thousand your row as might be 20 on that transaction mine might be three does it really mean yeah that your Advertiser can take any action on that data no there's there's no way to control for that so if you can't take action on it then the data is effectively useless I I I I'm only interested in actionable data that allows me to take high confidence binary decisions everything else is a report card to I can show home to my parents I got a sticker and like fantastic great it doesn't mean anything though yeah um but when you're talking about separate campaign so sorry you got you wouldn't you got campaign let's let's call it Mercedes okay Mercedes campaign and in that you wouldn't have an an ad set for their AMG Sports you wouldn't alongside an ad set for their SUV along with their minivan or whatever because in that campaign you're using even that you're using the same audience but it's within the same campaign so you'll have a Mercedes AMG campaign a Mercedes minivan campaign you'll try then you'll try out different copy different creative within that campaign for that particular car yeah and what I'm trying to do is you know let's say it's a sprinter right this thing is safe that's one concept marketing angle another one is it can load all of this stuff another marketing angle another concept you have price we have quality there's also sorts of these different things now one of the other things is when you get a bunch of ads that all work in that what they do is Facebook knows what's going to Prime and condition you for an action so that broad audience is actually doing a lot of retargeting to make sure that you see the right thing and we know that this happens because the frequency is more than one right like you no adet ever has a frequency of one unless you're doing daily unique reach like it's always 1.1 1.4 something like that yeah and there's this other Just For What It's Worth there's this other metric called firsttime impression ratio which as far as I'm concerned is totally useless information because am I controlling that is my bottom line is like there's these report cards and these like grades on info but if it's not actionable it doesn't really matter and the reason I bring that up is I don't care about today versus tomorrow versus is yesterday on how many how much retargeting is happening if Facebook is conditioning the experience to get you to take that action then I'm happy with that also Facebook is the fuel for the fire of your overall business model Facebook is amplifying a successful business model um I have to give respect and quot quote my my buddy Cody uh of Jones Road um Jones Road Beauty Cody pler um he said something and I've been quoting him ever since so I want to give him credit whereas a good business will scale a Facebook ad account and he's 100% correct it's it's so much more elegant than the paragraph I used to have to describe with that and the point is maybe Facebook gets you one sale how many users came to your website that then searched you later or signed up for your email list or did any other action and the real trick to face to to acquisition media growth marketing and my prediction is this is going to be the measured dour in 202 24 2025 because we still have everybody ad agencies trying to prove their value because of Raz which I think is a dying model it has to be a relationship on business growth is incremental lift when you spend more money on Facebook what happens to the rest of your channels right or when don't you spend more money like we all know inherently if you if you double your Facebook spend your search volume is going to go up your CRM list is going to grow so what's your margin knowing that you lift all these other channels what is your allowable CPA yeah on Facebook how much spend can you drive yeah on one channel and eventually when you get to that you stop caring about attribution because it doesn't matter who gets credit it matters in these are this is my mixture when I add more of this I get more of that right yeah and it's like using sports cars if you make a high performance gasoline when you're adding in the oxygen and you're getting all the stuff is it one molecule that does all the work no it's like it's the combination of everything and I know because I used to have a hot rod like if I put that like octane boost stuff in there it's not the thing that makes the car go but when I do that um it goes a lot faster right the the engine is louder I get I get more you know it's more rapid right I get more velocity and power and so we have to think of Facebook is is serving that function in our business and I think ultimately if you can measure for that you're going to be wildly successful because it eliminates you from having to have this conversation of who gets credit because credit and this is just one thing the idea of attribution on digital marketing first off it's people love it it's been around forever it was a sales pitch attribution started because digital marketing companies wanted to prove that they deserved spend that they did something so you know programmatic advertising in the late 90s early 2000s salespeople came up with this idea and the technology had to prove its efficacy of showing attribution we get credit for this thing and that just basically became indoctrinated after decades and generations of media buyers is something that was important when it really is isn't because before that happened plenty of businesses ran on television Billboards you know print ads radio there's no attribution they just did it they grew yeah and they understood what happened and I had to learn this because I was a big attribution Haw right like I when I I used to be at this other Ad Agency called hyphen it was an FMP I was a senior there and my job is basically bring me bring in a client that's working with five agencies I'm going to measure everybody down to a one day click and I'm going to steal the ad spend from every other agency because we also do Google we also do Dev we also do creative work you don't need to work these five other people give us the money so I went out there and I just got the money from everybody it was a fun job and I learned a lot and then I went in client side with this brand called 310 Nutrition and I started to do that and the president of that company was the former vice president of guthy ranker uh hundred million dollar a year on television right her attribution model was 15 minutes after the infomercial aired that was it she could manage a $100 million a year growing gin knives and proactive and like all of these huge brands on time of a television commercial and so when she taught me how she measures that it was six months of me telling her I was right telling her I was right telling her I was right and her kicking me out of her office until I figured it out like we had a very contentious Rel relationship but was out of respect right and I still say her name is Marina she's one of the smartest people I ever worked with one of the greatest bosses I've ever had I could not be half of the man I am today Professional without working with her smart women run this industry and I don't think they get nearly enough credit um so Marina when I finally came to her and said well for every $5 every $10 I spent on Facebook we generate uh 1% lift in direct traffic we're getting three EMA email addresses the value per email is X and the search volume is y and our direct traffic direct but we're driving higher volume because we're promoting over here and measuring the shapes of the curves she loved me and you know who else loved me was Facebook and Google and Snapchat so they all did like we did a bunch of these combined case studies of seeing what happens like I got a million dollars in Google a million dollars on Facebook to just spend on brand awareness to see what happened to search volume yeah and we could legitimately measure an efficacy curve over what you're doing between the two of them now ultimately what end up happening is if you're not optimizing towards a conversion objective uh you're getting a whole bunch of awareness to people that are never going to buy so that was a fun lesson well that's was the thing now great you've broughten that because you know traffic campaigns you know you're bringing and I came up a call yesterday consultancy call yesterday with a lad who said oh I've had a Facebook marketing expert and I was okay here we go and uh I said what did they tell you awareness at the top followed by traffic and then put some conversions at the bottom of funny went yeah that's exactly it and I said yeah they've been saying it for five years yeah and it's and it's been wrong for for what it's worth by the way Facebook marketing experts Facebook had so many advertisers that they couldn't hire in a house for good reps so they farmed it out to thirdparty agencies that are basically just trying to get money um but those marketing experts are great opportunities if you reach out to them and you say thank you for this I'd love to get get a powerlift study now that's something that you need Facebook's measurement and engineering team to deliver to you but what that does is it raises the visibility of your rep and so it starts making relationships that rep has to work to their counterpart that's actually a Facebook employee to get two other departments together to come back now you do that a few times and and eventually you're a good lead and you get picked up by the person that actually cares about you you know the person that's you know in London the person that's in Chicago the person that's in Austin instead of the person that's you know not I'll put it that way I don't know what the London version of it is but in America they're all in Phoenix for some reason um I I don't know I would say Manchester but that's probably pretty big city have they're in irand okay fair enough nothing against the Irish but that's where the marketing experts are right I was I was on with LinkedIn yesterday and amazing chalk and cheese like you can see how they're trying these other platforms are trying to catch we see with t Tik Tok the amount of stuff that Tik Tok bring out it is like super helpful we want you on our platform and we're going to help you spend money whereas Facebook's just gone I'll tell him to run a traffic campaign yeah and to be fair so to get back to your point about traffic and brand awareness and video views and then retargeting with conversions and all of that I'm I'm inspired by the Porsche in the back again love that picture man that is great it made me so happy soon as we talked about before we even hopped on we had a f minute conversation come to the UK we drive it I so bad um I was just in the UK and it was beautiful I I spent uh I had a 10day European Vacation we can talk about it later where were you were you in the UK I went to London my wife went to school at Goldsmith so she was there for a year or so so we went to uh we were in I guess was it West Chapel somewhere in zone one but like the last tube spot in the in the east in zone one um but I got to walk to the tower bridge and yeah I spent I spent half my time down there yeah and it's amazing I love it it it was beautiful it was beautiful and then we went to the Italian Alps did some snowboarding went to Paris came back went to Camden Town bought some like we need to well if if you're into snowboarding as well I just came back two weeks ago so this is another conversation now yeah yeah anyway getting back to it by the way I went to Chalet alas beautiful in the Alps just to go snowboarding and I had Chalet alos in what resort is that that's that's its it's its own thing all right okay it's in the city of Trenton or outside of it okay either way um it was beautiful made yeah I made a reel by the way of us like they have this heated seat that's sort of like an Instagram moment where they serve you this giant thing we made an Instagram reel of like sneezing into your shoulder whatever 480,000 views later on my personal on my personal Instagram I was like I tried to posted on my business one and I got like 2,000 views nobody cared uh but anyway back to conversions and traffic yeah back to where we were uh I'm add I could have five conversations I love it I love it this is fun um so traffic and con and conversions I will make this analogy because again inspired by The Cars if I'm a car dealership I might look at my numbers and say one out of three out of four people that test drive a car buy one it's a pretty decent number let's say half let's be let's be conservative half the people that test drive a car buy one now let's say I've got a uh you know a BMW Merc you said Mercedes right or a Porsche let's say we got a Porsche dealership half people the test drive a Porsche buy a Porsche awesome so you could look at it and say that's my retargeting audience I just need to get more volume of people so I just need to get more test drives totally makes sense we're on the logic train is is making sense so how do you get more test drives well the easiest way of doing a test drive is put that por next to like a college campus in a homeless shelter and tell everybody they get a free meal if they take a test drive you're going to get 10,000 test drives and sell nothing yeah that's basically the same thing that you're doing when you're running a traffic or video view campaign because these people have no signal to Facebook that they're interested in actually taking an action so you're heavily uing your data set um with people that basically don't care and that is that can [ __ ] the bottom line to a business um a conversion campaign is specifically designed to have that journey of condition and Prime to take an action yeah so every impression in that journey is trying to get people along the way to take that action and to be fair you can retarget people that are doing stuff to other people and you might Prime somebody to buy from your competitor that's going to happen but if you're running traffic in video view maybe that's effective and here's the other side maybe that end row as I see screenshots of the retargeting ad set it like a crazy row as again row as is a nonsense number but you're not taking into account the investment to get that retargeting audience to go so if it cost you 2,000 pounds to build an audience that you can spend 300 bucks a day on or 100 bucks a day like the unit economics you're still losing money yeah but somebody on Twitter or Instagram or you know somebody on stage at some Summit gets to point to a giant number on the screen and say like this is working for us but it's an out of context number this is the hardest thing about that funnel isn't it because logic would say if you're going to do a a tough a m and a buff get loads of people video views at the top or traffic at the top that's all going to come in and then we're going to create some great we're g to we're going to create an audience of website visitors and then we're going to retarget the weite visitors that have just been brought in from traffic which is students buying a Porsche it's not going to happen and they retir them on people I think where my students and probably yours as well finding it hard then is okay well if I'm but if I'm using conversion at the top it's going to take so much longer or so much more money to build those audiences as you go through do you see what I mean so be harder to bre you're GNA get you're not going to get a million clicks a day for 10 quid on traffic you might get 25 clicks for for £10 instead of 250 clicks for10 so it's going to take longer to build that audience but this is the so do you agree with that this is where the creative comes more in because those clicks are so much now so much more important oh yeah oh yeah it's the same thing for like lead gen like I can get you leads for I see people all the time I can lower your cost per lead great you give me five cent leads my call center can't handle calling 4,000 people that don't give a damn I don't even have the I don't even have the capacity of handling that volume of terrible traffic yeah my point what I try to tell people and teach folks is we're not in the business you shouldn't be in the business of trying to be profitable on day one no business if you went to a bank and said I'm gonna open a shop and here's my business model and in 45 days I'm gonna be printing money they're going to laugh you out of the business yeah because that is a completely unrealistic thing what we should be focusing on and I always tell people like when you're starting a brand think of it like this you have one product your product is your brand most business owners don't think of the exit strategy for their business when they're starting to make first and second steps so if you're trying on every single day to make money what that ultimately means is over time you're going to be making far less because if I can work on consistently improving the volume and quality of my customer it's not a question of if I can make things work it's a question of how long until my business is so strong and successful that I can not have to do it anymore and some people want to run a business to work at it every day but if you're starting a business to give yourself a day job great I get it maybe this isn't the conversation for you if you're starting a business to create jobs and ultimately wealth for yourself and Independence then there should be an idea of are you going to do this every single day for the rest of your life and if the answer is know at what point are you okay leaving and maybe that's just getting investors maybe that's selling more and more of your company whatever it is or selling the whole thing peace meal all the way out the door whatever that looks like but i