Beyond Ad Spend - Optimizing Conversions and the Future of AI in Media Buying
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Transcript
So, hey everyone.
Jim Banks:Welcome to the first ever episode of the Media Buying Podcast.
Jim Banks:I'm Jim Banks, and this is my host, Rob Adler, my co-host.
Jim Banks:How are you, Rob?
Rob Adler:Doing good.
Rob Adler:How about you, buddy?
Jim Banks:I'm doing excellent.
Jim Banks:Mind for the benefits of those, like listening in, watching
Jim Banks:in, where are you based, Rob?
Rob Adler:So I'm on the east coast in the us I'm in a state Pennsylvania.
Rob Adler:I like to tell people that I am in the middle of nowhere surrounded
Rob Adler:by cows, basically in a field that they decided to put houses on.
Rob Adler:but yeah, so I, I grew up in the east coast, kind of went out Midwest, went
Rob Adler:central, came back to the east and we kind of settled here in pa, but it's definitely
Rob Adler:not like hustle and Bustle city.
Rob Adler:It's literally like.
Rob Adler:15 minutes to a grocery store, 30 to Walmart.
Rob Adler:So it's country.
Jim Banks:Nice.
Jim Banks:Yeah.
Jim Banks:'cause I think, I think, um, I remember one of the, the kind
Jim Banks:of times I met you in the past.
Jim Banks:You, you were living in, uh, Vegas at the time and you threw party and
Jim Banks:we all kind of came over and, and we had a really good time at your,
Rob Adler:Oh, those are, that was a great event.
Rob Adler:That was fun.
Jim Banks:I think I was obviously there for affiliate summit.
Jim Banks:um, I.
Rob Adler:yep.
Jim Banks:So talk, talk to me a little bit about your, your origin story, kind
Jim Banks:of how did you get into this industry
Rob Adler:My villain arc. So basically, started messing around doing, you know,
Rob Adler:the normal like testing, working on the side, messing with stuff, trying to figure
Rob Adler:stuff out when I was pretty much in high school, usually I, I wanna say around
Rob Adler:sophomore and, um, started with SEO.
Rob Adler:That's how I kind of got into it.
Rob Adler:I love figuring out how stuff works and then how to modify
Rob Adler:how it works, especially if I'm not supposed to be able to.
Rob Adler:so when I did stuff like SEO started to look into, oh look, these backlink
Rob Adler:things, they help things rank more and when you have certain keywords laid out
Rob Adler:in this way, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Rob Adler:so I started doing a lot of testing and then I started leaning into automation,
Rob Adler:which kind of set the foundation for a lot of what I did after that.
Rob Adler:but link building was my thing for a good.
Rob Adler:Pretty much decade, almost 10 years.
Rob Adler:and ran an agency.
Rob Adler:Got on the corporate side of that.
Rob Adler:Also did, on the affiliate side of that, we ranked our own sites.
Rob Adler:We monetized our own sites, we built site networks, stuff like that.
Rob Adler:and then at a certain point I was like, Ooh, email marketing.
Rob Adler:It's kind of like SEO, but doesn't take three months.
Rob Adler:So we started messing with that and figured out that.
Rob Adler:The algorithms are pretty much the same kind of thing to mess with or figure
Rob Adler:out how they work in the same way.
Rob Adler:So we started troubleshooting that, and then I got into deliverability
Rob Adler:and that's really what led to me becoming first an affiliate mailer.
Rob Adler:then I started my own affiliate offers.
Rob Adler:I ran a network for a while.
Rob Adler:I've been, I've, I've dabbled in.
Rob Adler:Most of the sides in the industry.
Rob Adler:but where I kind of settled was either A, as a consultant, or b as
Rob Adler:a managerial implementation person that helps you implement a high level
Rob Adler:schematic with like your company.
Rob Adler:So like, if you don't have internal email for your company, you want internal email.
Rob Adler:It's not like just going to AWeber.
Rob Adler:Paying 20 bucks and then loading it in and going, we're gonna make a million dollars.
Rob Adler:So sometimes people need guidance.
Rob Adler:We give them the guidance and then help their people implement it.
Rob Adler:and part of that is the quote, unquote day job, I guess you would
Rob Adler:call it, that I have right now, which is I'm CRO, chief Revenue
Rob Adler:Officer over at Boardwalk Marketing.
Rob Adler:and our whole goal is, is we help companies make money off the traffic.
Rob Adler:That's not their core business.
Rob Adler:So if they're a decline, they're a denial.
Rob Adler:It ends up helping you monetize through affiliate offers, cross
Rob Adler:selling, all that kind of stuff.
Rob Adler:So everything I've done in some way, shape, or form has either been in
Rob Adler:traffic generation, regardless of channel, or it's been on the backend.
Rob Adler:So it's either how do I get someone to go to the lander, or how do I
Rob Adler:get the guy that came to the lander to actually make me some money?
Rob Adler:Or complete whatever the action is.
Rob Adler:but that's usually what I do now, is I help advertisers optimize
Rob Adler:their flows, their intake, help them make more money off their traffic
Rob Adler:flows and their people and their prospects, all that kind of stuff.
Rob Adler:All the way through implementation on channel marketing specifically,
Rob Adler:whether it's, you know, search or whatever it's going to be all the way
Rob Adler:through email and everything else.
Rob Adler:touched a lot of stuff.
Rob Adler:I suck at direct mail, like completely horrible at it.
Rob Adler:There are some people that crush at it, but I am not good at direct mail, but like
Rob Adler:email is definitely my primary channel.
Rob Adler:secondary would probably be paid in general.
Rob Adler:but I like using 'em together.
Rob Adler:I like using the email to be able to come up with more filtered demographics and
Rob Adler:targeting and retargeting audiences based on that, and then leverage that unpaid to
Rob Adler:follow and close the loop on prospecting.
Rob Adler:but yeah, so TLDR lots of experience on a lot of other things.
Rob Adler:but it's all somehow based around taking a current situation and
Rob Adler:being able to scale it and or make more money off of it without.
Rob Adler:Causing any detriment to the consumer or the prospect or like basically
Rob Adler:screwing the prospect over, right?
Rob Adler:Like, I'm not gonna make five bucks if I'm gonna ruin someone's life.
Rob Adler:It's not worth it.
Rob Adler:but the goal is to do that while maintaining lead quality.
Rob Adler:So taking all of those permissions, all of those aspects, front end,
Rob Adler:back of the house, the whole nine, and making sense of it to make
Rob Adler:it work for the entire workflow.
Jim Banks:So I think, I think you, and you and I first met, I mean, again, we
Jim Banks:talked about this on the, uh, the intro, but we, we, we first met, I don't know,
Jim Banks:probably 2000 7, 6 7, something like that.
Jim Banks:and I remember kind of, I think we met kind of primarily
Jim Banks:through Wicked Fire, right?
Jim Banks:I think that was where I kind of first, I.
Jim Banks:First heard of you.
Jim Banks:Right.
Jim Banks:and then I happened to be, uh, affiliate summit.
Jim Banks:I think at that particular time the affiliate summit was in, um, the Rio.
Jim Banks:Right.
Jim Banks:And I kind of
Rob Adler:Oh yeah.
Jim Banks:I think I put a message on what, uh, wicked Fire and basically
Jim Banks:said, Hey, I'm just going down for, for kind of breakfast is in want to join me.
Jim Banks:And the only person that.
Jim Banks:I guess was up at that time was you, so you turned out We had breakfast
Jim Banks:and we'd been friends ever since.
Jim Banks:So it's be, again, for, for me, I, I think, you know, the one,
Jim Banks:the one thing I would say as, as a person who's been in the industry
Jim Banks:for a long time, both of us, right?
Jim Banks:You and I both know that this whole industry thrives and, and grows on
Jim Banks:the strength of the relationships that you built up in it, right?
Jim Banks:Everyone talks about it by traffic.
Jim Banks:It's this, it's that, but ultimately it's about, just, just again.
Jim Banks:The, the relationships that you have with people.
Jim Banks:I always remember one of the first sort of success stories I had.
Jim Banks:I was, I was, um, working with, uh, a ringtone company.
Jim Banks:The ringtone at the time right?
Jim Banks:Was, um, the, the company was based in Hong Kong, right?
Jim Banks:And, um, and I was running some ringtones and, and doing pretty well with it.
Jim Banks:Uh, but I, I thought I could do more with it.
Jim Banks:So, I, I took, A colleague of mine and we, we kind of flew out to Hong Kong and we
Jim Banks:sat down with the guy who ran the company.
Jim Banks:Uh, we went out for a Chinese meal, and I basically said, look,
Jim Banks:I could, I think I could really blow up this campaign for you.
Jim Banks:but I, I think, there's, there's just a few things that I need.
Jim Banks:And he said, well, what do you need?
Jim Banks:And I said, well, you know why?
Jim Banks:I want you to kind of pay me more, right?
Jim Banks:He said, yeah, okay, I can do that.
Jim Banks:Um, and he said, what else do you want?
Jim Banks:I said, well, I'd like to be paid a bit quicker, right?
Jim Banks:Because obviously I'm turning around money pretty quickly.
Jim Banks:I think at the time I was, I was running, I don't if you've ever heard
Jim Banks:of them, a company called Kuo a Sonar.
Jim Banks:Right.
Jim Banks:So, and they ti I think ultimately they got bought by a OL and a OL
Jim Banks:completely trashed the business, right?
Jim Banks:I think a OL paid $800 million for this business.
Jim Banks:And I think probably 40% of the revenue from query ad signer came from Ringtones.
Jim Banks:And as soon as a OL bought it, they basically said, we're
Jim Banks:not doing ringtones anymore.
Jim Banks:Right.
Jim Banks:And it's just like.
Jim Banks:Okay, fair enough.
Jim Banks:but, you know, but I said, you know, so I want to be paid quicker.
Jim Banks:Right?
Jim Banks:And um, and he said, well, how quickly do you wanna be paid?
Jim Banks:And I said, well, how about you pay me every day?
Jim Banks:Right.
Jim Banks:So that's the arrangement that we had.
Jim Banks:So he paid me, I. Today for, for what we delivered in terms
Jim Banks:of volume the previous day.
Jim Banks:Right.
Jim Banks:And I think at that particular time we were spending, again, we're probably
Jim Banks:talking 2000 7 0 8, something like that.
Jim Banks:We were spending about maybe two or $300,000 a month on traffic and
Jim Banks:generating about $500,000 in commissions.
Jim Banks:Right.
Jim Banks:Which was phenomenal.
Jim Banks:but again, I, I think, you know, the way, the way I, I think if, if you kind
Jim Banks:of go and troll through the, the kind of the archives, you'll find all the
Jim Banks:stories of, Like Scott Richter getting sued by the Attorney General in Florida.
Jim Banks:'cause it, none of this was done on a credit card.
Jim Banks:It was all done on, on the basis of, you know, it was charged to the mobile phone.
Jim Banks:Right.
Jim Banks:The cell phone bill.
Jim Banks:So all these parents were complaining because people wanted to, Justin
Jim Banks:Bieber kind of wallpaper and paying 9 99 for a subscription.
Jim Banks:Right.
Jim Banks:So it's, it's, at the time it, it.
Jim Banks:With the benefits of hindsight, it looked exploitative.
Jim Banks:Right?
Jim Banks:But at the time it was perfectly acceptable.
Jim Banks:You were making
Rob Adler:Oh yeah.
Jim Banks:the kids cool in school.
Jim Banks:Make, I mean, I, I kind of, uh, landed on something.
Jim Banks:like all, all the, uh, colleges in the States have got,
Jim Banks:their own fight song, right?
Jim Banks:And what we found that there was this fight song ringtone every single.
Jim Banks:College football team had their own fight song ringtone.
Jim Banks:and what became really apparent to me was that, um, you know, whoever
Jim Banks:ranked on the, the AP 25 as number one, we'd probably do a thousand ringtones
Jim Banks:on the Saturday before the game.
Jim Banks:Right?
Jim Banks:So they would all have their, their ringtone set up and they would all be
Jim Banks:able to kind of, Hey, look how cool I am.
Jim Banks:Right?
Jim Banks:And I think whoever's number two, we do about 600 and then
Jim Banks:number three bit, maybe 300.
Jim Banks:And there'd be just dribs and drabs from the rest.
Jim Banks:Right.
Jim Banks:But you.
Jim Banks:Ultimately it became, we kept maxing out credit cards, maxing out credit cards.
Jim Banks:So in the end I kind of phoned up Ger, I had Sonar and basically said,
Jim Banks:look, you guys need to kind of run me a bit of a line of credit here because
Jim Banks:I'm going to do a lot more with you.
Jim Banks:But I just, I couldn't get credit cards quick enough.
Jim Banks:I got them for my wife, my children, my grandchildren.
Jim Banks:It was just like whoever I could kind of get a credit card for.
Jim Banks:I got, um.
Jim Banks:But it's interesting, you, you kind of, like, you, you've landed yourself
Jim Banks:in a position where now where you're, you're doing primarily email, right?
Jim Banks:What is it about email that, that, media buys kind of really need to understand
Jim Banks:that kind of makes it such a kind of a popular platform and successful platform.
Rob Adler:So there's.
Rob Adler:My answer changes depending on which perspective I want to give you.
Rob Adler:So if I'm trying to sell you services, I would bring up like the ROI difference
Rob Adler:of email compared to other channels.
Rob Adler:'cause like there's all those like public studies, I think it's like 34
Rob Adler:to one or something along those lines.
Rob Adler:Like there's, there's something like that.
Rob Adler:Right?
Rob Adler:But that's not why I like email.
Rob Adler:Well, I like email.
Rob Adler:Is that you can get granular.
Rob Adler:And normally when you talk to media buyers, they're like,
Rob Adler:I can also get granular.
Rob Adler:And I'm like, that's correct.
Rob Adler:You can, but not to this level.
Rob Adler:When you're able to, and you can get somewhat, but you
Rob Adler:can't get to the same level.
Rob Adler:So if you're doing a media buy and you buy a thousand clicks,
Rob Adler:then you can retarget them.
Rob Adler:You can put them into an audience.
Rob Adler:If you collect their email, you can do an email.
Rob Adler:If you collect phone, you can do phone, right?
Rob Adler:But you also have like remarketing pixel that can go back.
Rob Adler:Email technically doesn't have a remarketing pixel.
Rob Adler:There are services that make like a. Reverse consumer identification
Rob Adler:to reverse append, to email to an email, send service.
Rob Adler:Like there are services that do that.
Rob Adler:But what I really like is, is that if I sit there and I get, like, let's say
Rob Adler:I'm buying on search and I'm like, I wanna buy for this intent, or I'm buying
Rob Adler:on social, and I, I'm like, I wanna buy between these ages and this state, and I
Rob Adler:wanna try to get these people using this creative, I can tell you that that bucket.
Rob Adler:Produces results on that origination, but what I cannot tell you is, is why
Rob Adler:each or any of the specific people actually converted on the offer and
Rob Adler:on email you can do that because on email you can say, did you know
Rob Adler:this guy opened nine times before he actually clicked on the ad itself?
Rob Adler:And then when he clicked it, he looked at the lander four times before he
Rob Adler:converted, and then he went back and looked at it again after he converted.
Rob Adler:Why?
Rob Adler:And from that kind of information, you can start to get a lot more.
Rob Adler:A lot more customization on your follow-ups, your triggers,
Rob Adler:and like everything else.
Rob Adler:I just, I love that aspect.
Rob Adler:I love the ability to design one before and one after, and then have
Rob Adler:that join a web of before and afters.
Rob Adler:So if that's like triggers that could be like, you go through my website,
Rob Adler:you indicate you're a homeowner.
Rob Adler:Now if I know you're a homeowner, you are now applicable for HVAC services, roofing,
Rob Adler:siding, like all that kind of stuff.
Rob Adler:Right?
Rob Adler:But if you, if you say you're not a homeowner.
Rob Adler:People look at the, the, the original, they don't look at the inverse, right?
Rob Adler:If you're not a homeowner, why am I showing you a DT?
Rob Adler:Like, you can't get it because you're a renter.
Rob Adler:Like, or you don't own or live in a place where you're on the paperwork, right?
Rob Adler:So you can't get it.
Rob Adler:But what you can get.
Rob Adler:At least back then Protect America.
Rob Adler:And now I believe they got bought by Brinks.
Rob Adler:So like the aspect of those and knowing the differences, I would've never known
Rob Adler:that one of them might've converted on another offer because I never would've
Rob Adler:been able to link that other than pixels between the first click I bought and the
Rob Adler:second click I bought the second part.
Rob Adler:Is that the cost of acquiring the user after acquisition is drastically
Rob Adler:different between paid and email.
Rob Adler:Because if you pay a dollar to get an opt-in, but then you send an email
Rob Adler:and you're paying, let's call it even a dollar per thousand emails.
Rob Adler:There you go.
Rob Adler:But.
Rob Adler:Now you're paying to send, you're not paying for eyeballs.
Rob Adler:And when you're paying for the actual media buying, you're paying on actions.
Rob Adler:And that's usually clicks, unless you're doing impressions somewhere, but whatever.
Rob Adler:So the whole goal is, is that with email, it's a lot more granular, it's a lot
Rob Adler:easier, and I like to be able to take.
Rob Adler:Action on the specifics that I can find out instead of just
Rob Adler:knowing them after the fact.
Rob Adler:Anyone can look at it and be like, the majority of our opt-ins are 25 to
Rob Adler:35, but then you go back and you're like, how do I target that on search?
Rob Adler:How do I say only this segment?
Rob Adler:I wanna send them this upsell to see if it works with these demographics.
Rob Adler:You can't do that unless you're doing retargeting or you have another
Rob Adler:channel that you've already opted them into to do it, but email, you
Rob Adler:always have email until they unop.
Rob Adler:So it's a different workflow and a different style, and you're
Rob Adler:paying to send it like direct mail.
Rob Adler:You're not paying on, they're coming back.
Rob Adler:But in that spread of you paying to send and what it would've cost
Rob Adler:to get the result is so much money if you can actually set it up.
Rob Adler:Right.
Rob Adler:So that's why I like a lot of email.
Rob Adler:It's a lot of, you determine the price, you determine the pace, and
Rob Adler:you determine when someone sees something on search, you're just like.
Rob Adler:I'm here to help you with home security.
Rob Adler:And then you go, this guy's looking right now home security with mine.
Rob Adler:I'm like, did you know that you really should look at home security
Rob Adler:because of the uptake of stuff in your environment or in your neighborhood
Rob Adler:or in your state, or blah, blah, blah.
Rob Adler:They might not be thinking about it, but they still might convert.
Rob Adler:So it's a different sales cycle and a different intent profile.
Rob Adler:But I like how it's more granular on the email side 'cause you can get a lot
Rob Adler:more and use a lot more, if that makes
Jim Banks:Yeah.
Jim Banks:Yeah, it does.
Jim Banks:I mean, like, so again, way back in sort of 2007 ish, um, I was, I caught
Jim Banks:myself a high volume emailer, right?
Jim Banks:I would think, I think I was probably sending about a million emails a
Jim Banks:day or something like that, which probably in the scheme of things
Jim Banks:is not that many like competitors, what some people are sending now.
Jim Banks:Right?
Jim Banks:But at the time.
Jim Banks:I considered that to be sort of a reasonable amount of emails to be sent.
Jim Banks:And as you say, like, you know, we would do all the segmentation, we'd
Jim Banks:set it separate, the sort of the Yahoo emails, the, the, uh, a OL emails.
Jim Banks:'cause that was a big thing at the time.
Jim Banks:Microsoft emails.
Jim Banks:That was a big thing at the time.
Jim Banks:and then you had what they called gennet.
Jim Banks:So ev everything kind of, other than that, all the baby bells and whatever else.
Jim Banks:what, what became really apparent to me was that they,
Jim Banks:they're the root to the inbox.
Jim Banks:Was different for each one of those providers.
Jim Banks:And I think a lot of people that, they, again, if they have
Jim Banks:a kit or Ayo or whatever it is, and they send emails from that.
Jim Banks:You know, you, one, you can't send the volume to kind of, to justify it.
Jim Banks:And two, it's very difficult to kind of get into the inbox with one email
Jim Banks:sent to a, a whole general list, right?
Jim Banks:So in addition to obviously segmenting by, as you say, actions, openers,
Jim Banks:clickers, you know, if they've opened every single email you've sent them,
Jim Banks:you know that they're gonna open the one that you send them next.
Jim Banks:Right?
Jim Banks:and as you say, all the, all of the, implied.
Jim Banks:Interest.
Jim Banks:So they may not kind of directly say, yes, I'm, I'm in market for this, but
Jim Banks:all the other actions would tell you that they're in market for something.
Jim Banks:Right.
Jim Banks:And you kind of like identify on the basis of that, what sort of offers
Jim Banks:should be put in front of them.
Jim Banks:Right.
Jim Banks:As you say, if somebody's, if somebody is, again, let's say they,
Jim Banks:they kind of go for an HVAC offer.
Jim Banks:There's every likelihood there probably.
Jim Banks:redoing the house, modeling it, or you know, cleaning it up.
Jim Banks:So they want putting guttering cleaned, gardens done all sorts of different
Jim Banks:things that, you know, I think when, when you look at it from the point
Jim Banks:of view of just having one offer to put in front of people, you can have
Jim Banks:a sequence of things that follow up.
Jim Banks:Right.
Jim Banks:And that's, that's always blown my mind how.
Jim Banks:Inefficient.
Jim Banks:Some people are with, I mean, what you called it, but I call
Jim Banks:it ancillary monetization.
Jim Banks:So in other words, as you say, making money from things that
Jim Banks:are not your core business.
Jim Banks:Right.
Jim Banks:But you are leaving money on the table by not acting on it.
Rob Adler:My favorite part about that is that if you go and ask 10 people
Rob Adler:in the industry that you respect, and they have a really good understanding
Rob Adler:of the industry and everything, eight to nine of them will majorly, majorly,
Rob Adler:majorly under guess what they think?
Rob Adler:The percentage of revenue comes from non-core business.
Rob Adler:In that context, a lot of people think it's just like an extra 5%
Rob Adler:or like 10% or something like that.
Rob Adler:I have literally set up clients where it's 50, 55, 60, like you can like, and
Rob Adler:this is not an example of like an actual client, but for context, that would be
Rob Adler:like you have an auto insurance offer.
Rob Adler:What if your quotes suck?
Rob Adler:Like what if your pricing is horrible?
Rob Adler:What if they, they're not, but they already went through, right?
Rob Adler:They gave you everything to run the price, run the lead.
Rob Adler:But what else do you now know?
Rob Adler:You know that they're doing something, they're being responsible as much as
Rob Adler:they have to be, or they're being held accountable, but they're getting quotes,
Rob Adler:they're price shopping, they're looking at this, but also, you know, they own a car.
Rob Adler:And they own a car, and they're financially conscious to a point, right?
Rob Adler:They want to at least get value.
Rob Adler:So the question is, at that point, most people would be like, the first question
Rob Adler:is like, what kind of car do you have?
Rob Adler:And then an option is like, I don't have a car.
Rob Adler:And then literally from there, they're like, they just show,
Rob Adler:sorry, we can't help you.
Rob Adler:And I'm just like, just put.
Rob Adler:Ads.
Rob Adler:Right?
Rob Adler:Right there.
Rob Adler:You don't have a car.
Rob Adler:Why are you here?
Rob Adler:Why?
Rob Adler:What would cause you to click on the ad and come here but not have
Rob Adler:a car after seeing that with a car?
Rob Adler:Right?
Rob Adler:But then also you do the same thing downstream.
Rob Adler:So if you are auto insurance and they don't say, oh, well I actually
Rob Adler:don't need that, da da, da, da.
Rob Adler:It's not that big of a deal.
Rob Adler:I don't really like the quote, whatever.
Rob Adler:If you also know that the year make and model is within the
Rob Adler:vendor list for your auto warranty offer, maybe you want to go listen.
Rob Adler:I don't know if it's really applicable, but like we do have warranties and you're
Rob Adler:actually in the window, so not sure if it's something you'd like, but if you
Rob Adler:do, here's some guys that we trust.
Rob Adler:And again, that's one email that costs you like less than a penny.
Rob Adler:If not a 10th of a penny.
Rob Adler:But with that, you have all of these marketing points and you have all the
Rob Adler:different stuff that can come down, and that's why the majority of traffic that
Rob Adler:I've usually seen that perform on those, it doesn't matter whether they're core
Rob Adler:business or not, if they're hereafter two years or so of steady traffic, if
Rob Adler:they're not monetizing the core business.
Rob Adler:Either there's a lot of profit in that core business.
Rob Adler:They've done something to make sure they only buy people they
Rob Adler:know are gonna convert or they're gonna have some subsidiary doing
Rob Adler:something else on the side.
Rob Adler:And if you know what that is, guess what?
Rob Adler:Now you have an upsell for your own traffic.
Rob Adler:So a lot of those, like you said with hvac, right?
Rob Adler:How many go look up your local HVAC companies and you see that most of
Rob Adler:the time it's like we do HVAC and we do plumbing, and we do this.
Rob Adler:Those are perfect questions to throw on an HVAC path.
Rob Adler:Oh, you, you need hvac?
Rob Adler:Do you also need any of the following?
Rob Adler:We'll make sure we give you a vendor that has all of them.
Rob Adler:Do you need HVAC and siding, review and installation, check and basement
Rob Adler:waterproofing and this, and then every single one of those, if you don't have
Rob Adler:one vendor, every one of those is a lead
Jim Banks:Yeah.
Rob Adler:And it is just, it's easy to go
Jim Banks:Yeah, I mean, I, again, I don't, I don't like, I'm sure, I'm
Jim Banks:sure that the same thing goes on now.
Jim Banks:Right?
Jim Banks:Back in the day, we used to call it co-reg, co-registration, right.
Jim Banks:So we would do host and post.
Jim Banks:So we would capture the information.
Jim Banks:And again, if you look at some of the offers, if you go to Offer Vault
Jim Banks:now, you'll still see that there are loads of offers for, you know, zip
Jim Banks:submit, zip submits, and email submits.
Rob Adler:emails.
Rob Adler:Yep.
Jim Banks:Phone submits, all that sort of stuff and, and people go,
Jim Banks:well, that's kind of weird, right?
Jim Banks:I mean, I remember back in the day, we would, would be with an
Jim Banks:iPhone, we'd run a competition every month or win an iPhone, right?
Jim Banks:So people would kind of just give us their name and their email address.
Jim Banks:They'd click submit and they would just basically go to, I'm guessing
Jim Banks:in your case, an offer wall, right?
Jim Banks:Where there'd be all this sort of a quiz.
Jim Banks:Of questions like, are you interested in this, this, how many people in the house?
Jim Banks:All that sort of, and you'd be building up a profile of all of the people that
Jim Banks:went through that path right through.
Jim Banks:And every single one of them.
Jim Banks:I mean, quite often as people were filling in, clicking the boxes, right?
Jim Banks:Emails would start hitting their inbox because all the other offers
Jim Banks:was kind of lined up on the backend.
Jim Banks:So if you are paying, let, again, let's say I've paid five, five bucks to kind
Jim Banks:of acquire an email address or a buck 50 or whatever, whatever the number is,
Jim Banks:once you've kind of put it through that, that path, you've probably had 15 bytes
Jim Banks:at the cherry for offers that might range between five bucks and a hundred bucks.
Jim Banks:Right.
Jim Banks:And
Rob Adler:Is more than 15, it's more than five.
Rob Adler:Like, uh, when I ran mine, I think I had 80 some steps.
Rob Adler:Like no one ever got to the end really.
Rob Adler:I mean, we were still legally compliant.
Rob Adler:Everyone still got their entries in the sweeps, like the whole
Rob Adler:nine, like everything was legit.
Rob Adler:But like at a certain point you realize that legally you have to.
Rob Adler:Play by the rules.
Rob Adler:And the rules are, is that you can't require them to do anything
Rob Adler:based on an entry into your sweeps.
Rob Adler:Right?
Rob Adler:So I just give them their entry as soon as they hit page one
Rob Adler:and there's no conditionals.
Rob Adler:And then it doesn't matter how far they go.
Rob Adler:But the, the thing is, is that, and especially media buyers that do like.
Rob Adler:Like, like, display network, like back in the day, like
Rob Adler:GDN, like that kind of stuff.
Rob Adler:You'd always be like, all right, here's my daily budget, here's my budget per source.
Rob Adler:And then whenever something goes over that and I don't have this, it turns off.
Rob Adler:Sweeps is the same thing, but on both sides.
Rob Adler:And that's why it's hard because you have dedupes on the front, but
Rob Adler:then you also have the majority of people buying path traffic from
Rob Adler:other paths to send to their path.
Rob Adler:And then everyone is basically sharing a good.
Rob Adler:Majority of the same advertisers when you get to a certain level.
Rob Adler:So at that point, you buy from a path and you go, I don't
Rob Adler:understand why this is not working.
Rob Adler:It's because all your buyers are duping out because they already bought the lead
Rob Adler:from the first one before you bought it.
Rob Adler:So a lot of people test that.
Rob Adler:They don't look at that and then they go, why am I not making money?
Rob Adler:These guys are making money, but.
Rob Adler:If you find an industry that is not even call center heavy, but they're call
Rob Adler:center based on like outbound and trying to qualify and all that, and they're
Rob Adler:okay, they actually have a dialer, right?
Rob Adler:They're not just like hand bombing stuff, but they actually have a dialer buy that.
Rob Adler:From Co-Reg because if they're not buying from Co-Reg and everyone else
Rob Adler:in their industry is, I guarantee you, they're not used to the lead price that
Rob Adler:you're gonna give to them and they're gonna think it's a sweetheart deal.
Rob Adler:And when you get it, you can overbid close the gap between the two and then
Rob Adler:put them more front bidding on the path.
Rob Adler:And if you bid high enough, there's now no more dedupes because you
Rob Adler:got them to click out before they de-duped on the other offers.
Rob Adler:So there are strategic ways to do media buying even, even more than just search,
Rob Adler:or even more than just like path buying.
Rob Adler:But it's all the same concept, right?
Rob Adler:You target people on something, whether it's a network or a site or whatever,
Rob Adler:and then you optimize based on X, Y, and Z. The biggest difference with those
Rob Adler:though, and what changes that up is that.
Rob Adler:Normally every other factor combined is maybe like 10% of an influence, but that
Rob Adler:de-dupe on those offers when that's your primary monetization, that's not 10%.
Rob Adler:That's like 70.
Rob Adler:Like you'll have one guy that you should make $4 on and you make 10 cents.
Rob Adler:You'll have another guy that you should make $3 on and you make nothing, and
Rob Adler:then you have one that you should make nothing on and you make 50 bucks.
Rob Adler:So like, it just, it makes no sense, but the law of averages is what
Rob Adler:carries a lot of those through.
Rob Adler:And then the cost of acquisition being cut after that, if only search
Rob Adler:existed, sweeps would be so hard to run because the cost of acquisition for
Rob Adler:their own users would be astronomical by comparison to SMS and email.
Rob Adler:So that's what they always do after it comes in.
Rob Adler:It's just all internal.
Rob Adler:but yeah, it's.
Rob Adler:The, the game behind sweeps is crazy.
Rob Adler:There's a lot of other stuff on the backend too of, of how
Rob Adler:the metrics are presented and how they work and what they do.
Rob Adler:But like if you ever wanna look at something that is a very high
Rob Adler:volume and very low monetary aspect per record, but high overall
Rob Adler:revenue sweeps is a great example.
Rob Adler:And by sweeps, I mean co-reg.
Jim Banks:so you could probably answer this, be far better
Jim Banks:than I would ever be able to.
Jim Banks:Does it still exist?
Jim Banks:Because.
Jim Banks:Again, we used, we used to kind of approach people who
Jim Banks:had lots of data, right?
Jim Banks:And we would say, look, let us use your data we'll, we'll kind of, we'll, we'll
Jim Banks:run email offers and everything else.
Jim Banks:And whatever money we make net of any cost of running the
Jim Banks:platform, we'll split it 50 50.
Jim Banks:Right?
Jim Banks:And that was the model that we used to kind work on.
Jim Banks:It worked incredibly well for us, and we were cutting checks left, right,
Jim Banks:and center to people for basically just saying, here's our database.
Jim Banks:And, you know, we would get all the fresh, fresh emails that would come in
Jim Banks:every day from, from, from whatever.
Jim Banks:Again, you know, like if, if they were a, let's say they were a
Jim Banks:newspaper publication and they, somebody was putting in a classified
Jim Banks:ad in the newspaper, they captured name, phone number, email address.
Jim Banks:And I said, well, what happens after the classifi is done?
Jim Banks:Nothing.
Jim Banks:Right?
Jim Banks:It's like, well, why aren't you monetizing that?
Jim Banks:Right?
Jim Banks:I mean, there's so many ancillary opportunities, as you say, if
Jim Banks:they, if they're advertising that they've got a room to rent
Jim Banks:or something like that, right?
Jim Banks:There'd be so many other things that they could have, like, you know, landlord
Jim Banks:insurance or whatever it be, right?
Jim Banks:That you can kind of like, again, I, I think the.
Jim Banks:The secret to being a good media buyer is to be able to think laterally.
Jim Banks:I mean, I'm sure if you, if you put 10 media buyers in a room, right,
Jim Banks:and ask them to define what a media buyer is, you would get 10 answers.
Rob Adler:Oh, hands down.
Rob Adler:Like no, like literally no que because here, let me give you
Rob Adler:an example that I always trick people with is I say question,
Rob Adler:are you a mailer or a media buyer?
Rob Adler:If you're buying email placements from an email, brokerage, like if you're buying
Rob Adler:from like a. The live intent type stuff or like those places where you can buy
Rob Adler:like a native ad inside of an email.
Rob Adler:Are you technically a media buyer 'cause you're managing a placement, or
Rob Adler:are you technically a mailer because of the channel of distribution.
Rob Adler:And that's where there's a lot more hybrids of those now than there ever was
Rob Adler:five years ago that didn't really exist.
Jim Banks:that I've always struggled with, I mean, again, I remember
Jim Banks:standing in the chandelier bar, my kind of home away from home, or as I
Jim Banks:like to call it, my American office.
Jim Banks:and I was standing with Mike Carney, who runs performance marketing jobs and
Jim Banks:Carrie Ner who, uh, had had just at that time, she just kind of got into, um,
Jim Banks:you know, she just got into to kind of.
Jim Banks:Media buying at a sort of low level.
Jim Banks:And she's obviously gone on to do phenomenal things in there.
Jim Banks:But, you know, but we were talking to some guy who came up and he was sort
Jim Banks:of saying, we, we said, what do you do?
Jim Banks:And he goes, I'm a media buyer.
Jim Banks:And then he sort of, we said, what does, what does that entail?
Jim Banks:And he, he started talking and we all kind of, all three of us went.
Jim Banks:So basically you're an affiliate manager, right?
Jim Banks:Because he wasn't, like, again, I think the whole definition of the media buying
Jim Banks:is something where it is, it's a, it's a bit of a subjective thing, right?
Jim Banks:Um.
Jim Banks:It's a big ecosystem.
Jim Banks:There's plenty of opportunity to say people do SEO are media.
Jim Banks:Buy people that are doing PPC and media, buy people doing paid social
Jim Banks:media, buy, email, media, buy.
Jim Banks:Right?
Jim Banks:So many different kind of strings to the bow, right?
Jim Banks:The one thing I'm, I'm kind of always, always struggle with is when people
Jim Banks:say I'm a media buyer, but all they're doing is buying ads using Advantage
Jim Banks:Plus on Facebook and everything, and they're just sitting back and
Jim Banks:letting Facebook do everything right.
Jim Banks:To me, I don't really consider that to be, I mean, yes, I know it is.
Jim Banks:You're technically buying media, but it's sort of, you're not,
Rob Adler:but here's the thing, but here's
Jim Banks:control of, of the outcome, right?
Jim Banks:You can't kind of dictate where you want it to go, how you want it to
Jim Banks:go, how much you wanna pay for it.
Rob Adler:Oh, of course.
Rob Adler:But, but, but here's the thing.
Rob Adler:The question is, is were they able to do it because it was luck or
Rob Adler:were they able to do it because they happened to put it in the algorithm
Rob Adler:actually covered for, let's call it.
Rob Adler:Shortcomings they had or knowledge gaps they had.
Rob Adler:Right.
Rob Adler:But the difference also is, is like that's the same dude that's gonna
Rob Adler:try to do it again in three months and he's no longer your competitor.
Rob Adler:'cause he bankrupted his company on ad spend.
Rob Adler:Like it's the, the I I deal with occasionally I see people like that.
Rob Adler:They're like, oh, we do P max and we do this and we set this up and
Rob Adler:we let it route ride and do this.
Rob Adler:And I was like, cool.
Rob Adler:So you guys are really data centric.
Rob Adler:Like you understand all your metrics, all your stuff.
Rob Adler:I'm like, yeah, I do an audit.
Rob Adler:They didn't update their CPA for nine months, so every single
Rob Adler:acquisition, they were losing $20 where they thought they were making 50
Jim Banks:Yeah, I find it, I find it mind blowing.
Jim Banks:I mean in, in obviously in addition to being a media buyer, I also, um.
Jim Banks:I run an agency, right?
Jim Banks:And um, and quite often when I'm doing audits on people's, like Google Ads or
Jim Banks:Facebook Ads or whatever else, and I look and I see just how few changes.
Jim Banks:I mean, the people spending, you know, 3, 4, 5 grand a day, right?
Jim Banks:And they don't make any changes at all on anything, right?
Jim Banks:So they never and analyze new entrants into the marketplace.
Jim Banks:People kind of, again, maybe running outta money, so kind of
Jim Banks:dropping out of the auctions.
Jim Banks:Maybe they're right, dropped out because they just couldn't get
Jim Banks:it to kind of back out for them.
Jim Banks:Right.
Jim Banks:And it, it sort of, it blows my mind that people are not, putting their foot down
Jim Banks:as hard as they can when they should be, and taking their foot off and kind of.
Jim Banks:Taken a back seat when they shouldn't be.
Jim Banks:Right?
Jim Banks:I mean, again, like I, I work with some clients who don't run promos for things
Jim Banks:like Black Friday, cyber Monday, right?
Jim Banks:So generally speaking, what we tend to do is we'll just go, right, you know what,
Jim Banks:like maybe three or four days before it.
Jim Banks:I mean, it used to be like just a couple of days before, but now
Jim Banks:it's like people run Black Friday, cyber Monday deals in July, right?
Jim Banks:but, you know, but, but we, we used to say to people, look.
Jim Banks:I'll tell you what we'll do.
Jim Banks:We'll, we'll just let every, every other advertiser beat the
Jim Banks:shit out of each other, right?
Jim Banks:And we'll just pause our ads.
Jim Banks:You know, if you, if you pause them for less than seven days on
Jim Banks:Facebook, you still can kind of get back into the auction where you were.
Jim Banks:If, if you do it after seven days, then you're gonna go back to
Jim Banks:learning and you gotta go back to the beginning and start again, right?
Jim Banks:So.
Jim Banks:So I, I've always kind of said like, just let's, let's take a pause.
Jim Banks:3, 3, 4, 5 days, right?
Jim Banks:Let everyone beat the crap out of each other.
Jim Banks:We'll switch everything back on and we'll hoover up everything that's kind
Jim Banks:of left because they've run outta money and, or, or run outta product, right?
Jim Banks:So.
Rob Adler:So Google search now in the top industries reminds me of a
Rob Adler:lot of the legal system in the us.
Rob Adler:If you are in a civil case, it does not really matter if you or them are right.
Rob Adler:What matters is is can you drag it out long enough so that they lose the ability
Rob Adler:to have their attorney keep fighting?
Rob Adler:There are some pubs that do that in search now where they look for keywords
Rob Adler:and then they prop up in number two and they make your bids go all the way up.
Rob Adler:And then once you cap out, they lower their bid depending on who else
Rob Adler:is bidding, and they just ramp up all of the volume you miss out on.
Rob Adler:So for a lot of these guys, it's not a big deal because like Fortune five hundreds,
Rob Adler:they'll notice this like in minutes and then they'll just be like, oh, adjust
Rob Adler:the cap, like adjust the budget right.
Rob Adler:Imagine bidding on a term that brings in like 500 clients for a Fortune 500, and
Rob Adler:then they stop bidding for three hours and you're the only one bidding and you're
Rob Adler:the top of the SERPs paying 20 cents.
Rob Adler:Like, that's the scary part is that, and I know you, you might
Rob Adler:remember who I'm talking about.
Rob Adler:They were on Wicked Fire and with them, I, I actually looked at like
Rob Adler:the total scale that they were running across with some of my scrapers.
Rob Adler:They were on like 30,000 keywords.
Rob Adler:They were like, that's all the ones I found them on, which means
Rob Adler:that they were well over that in terms of what they were monitoring.
Rob Adler:But dude, they were monitoring every 20 minutes, every keyword using scrapers
Rob Adler:and then resuming or pausing the AdWords ads on it, and then just running it
Rob Adler:through the affiliate program to it.
Rob Adler:And, and it wasn't all brand bids either, but that is a good example because when
Rob Adler:they do that, when I watch them do it to Fortune five hundreds, the Fortune
Rob Adler:five hundreds would never see it.
Rob Adler:They would never understand that someone was doing that.
Rob Adler:They'd be like, it's weird today.
Rob Adler:We had a little extra competition.
Rob Adler:Like that's all they saw.
Rob Adler:They didn't notice the CPC like doubled.
Rob Adler:And then they definitely didn't notice that when they got capped out.
Rob Adler:The same guy showed up every time.
Rob Adler:So this guy was doing this for years over a whole bunch of affiliate stuff.
Rob Adler:All within the terms.
Rob Adler:All within everything else.
Rob Adler:But like if those are the guys doing that years ago, and there are still
Rob Adler:people on the agency side manually optimizing stuff now without any tooling.
Rob Adler:I can only imagine how big the gap is going to be in the next two or three
Rob Adler:years with the latest advancements of
Jim Banks:Yeah, because.
Jim Banks:Because the thing with, with agency models, so again, I, I
Jim Banks:started my first agency, right?
Jim Banks:Not because I wanted to run an agency, but I just wanted to have a line of
Jim Banks:credit that was given to me by, at the time it was Google and Yahoo, right?
Jim Banks:So I think with Google, I got a 30 day line of credit and with
Jim Banks:Yahoo got a 90 day line of credit to run whatever I wanted, right?
Jim Banks:So I would, I could fire up a new ad account.
Jim Banks:I didn't have to pay for the traffic until, pretty much like.
Jim Banks:50 days after I'd spent the tra, the money on the traffic, know, so I could
Jim Banks:kind of run, run the ads, kind of make sure it kind of, it backed out okay.
Jim Banks:Right.
Jim Banks:Pocket the money and then pay the bill at the end of the, uh, the month.
Jim Banks:And, and at this time we were getting a, an agent's discount.
Jim Banks:And, and I, I know a lot of other agency owners did the same thing.
Jim Banks:Right?
Jim Banks:They kind of set up an agency as a bit of a smokescreen.
Jim Banks:I think at one point in time it was about 50% of my business.
Jim Banks:My clients were internal projects and 50% were actual clients Right
Jim Banks:At, you know, and then that way there was a good different differentiation.
Jim Banks:We would push the boundaries as far as we could all the time.
Jim Banks:Right.
Jim Banks:So they would all, I, I used to kind of have this, uh, I. This funny
Jim Banks:phrase where I'd say to people, if you're not receiving cease and desist,
Jim Banks:you're not trying hard enough, right?
Jim Banks:So, um, you know, you just need to push the boundaries as far as you can.
Jim Banks:And, uh, you know, and again, I I used to, to kind of do the same thing.
Jim Banks:You're talking about the, the whole, the good old days of, um,
Jim Banks:you know, bid jamming, right?
Jim Banks:So if, if you were bidding on.
Rob Adler:Oh,
Jim Banks:Sort of Yahoo's platform.
Jim Banks:you, you know, whatever the, the, the kind of, the person with the lots of
Jim Banks:money, they'd bid, say $12 a click.
Jim Banks:You could bid 11 50, 11 99, but if the next bid down was like, 10 cents,
Jim Banks:then you would pay basically 11 cents.
Jim Banks:Right?
Jim Banks:So, so it was, you'd jam them in place and they would kind of run outta
Jim Banks:money pretty quickly, and then you could, you could kind of, uh, mop up.
Jim Banks:Once they ran outta money, you could kind of go back because your bid would
Jim Banks:become the number one at that time.
Jim Banks:again, it.
Rob Adler:It's, it's crazy.
Rob Adler:Because like, because I, I know, I know the number one thing that
Rob Adler:these guys triggered on was whether or not a 5 cent increase got
Rob Adler:them placement above the default.
Rob Adler:And since they weren't branding, there wasn't a lot of CTR enforcement
Rob Adler:on the cert, on the specific ones.
Rob Adler:But with those, it was always funny just to see it.
Rob Adler:'cause you'd see it move up.
Rob Adler:It'd be like number seven, the number five, the number three,
Rob Adler:the number two, and then it would go to number one and then stay.
Rob Adler:There for like two refreshes and then it would go to two, and then as soon as it
Rob Adler:was at number two, it would stay there.
Rob Adler:And then as soon as number one would disappear, it would lower until it
Rob Adler:was number two, then it would go right back up to stay at number one and
Rob Adler:it would do this all the way down.
Rob Adler:So it's like, it's interesting, like great use of scrapers.
Rob Adler:but like outside of affiliate or outside of like big brands with crap, tons of
Rob Adler:terms that they're trying to go on.
Rob Adler:Like it's just simply not logical to run.
Jim Banks:Because I think, I think eBay used to kind of bid on everything, right?
Jim Banks:So it would be whatever,
Rob Adler:Oh,
Jim Banks:whatever, whatever you wanted.
Jim Banks:You could find it at eBay.
Jim Banks:Right?
Jim Banks:And, uh, you know, I think, I think one of the, uh, the classics was,
Jim Banks:uh, find suicide at eBay, right?
Jim Banks:It's just like, whoa, hang on a minute.
Jim Banks:I'm not sure I want, I wanna find that at all.
Jim Banks:Right?
Rob Adler:What was it?
Rob Adler:It was, um, they did that and then when Google brought up their, uh,
Rob Adler:what was it, the keyword in the ad through a token, then Amazon did it.
Rob Adler:And like people, dude, there were some bad ones on that they forgot
Rob Adler:to put on their negative list.
Rob Adler:Like find how to buy people on Amazon.
Rob Adler:Like I think I remember that being one of them.
Rob Adler:But yeah, no, it's, it's always interesting to see how these guys play.
Rob Adler:And then once you figure out that no one has the same cost because of a
Rob Adler:lot of variable factors, you start to really consider whether or not certain
Rob Adler:people are profitable if they've been running a certain amount of time.
Rob Adler:So that's also another aspect of this too, is you can always edge 'em out, but
Rob Adler:if doing it for one day isn't enough, do you have the budget to do it for a month?
Rob Adler:That's where a lot of it
Jim Banks:I, I always like, like look at sort of new, new affiliates
Jim Banks:just sort of starting out.
Jim Banks:And one of the biggest mistakes I see them make is they're trying
Jim Banks:to spread themselves like so thin.
Jim Banks:They're trying to run 25 different offers and they're putting in, you know, like.
Jim Banks:You know, let, let's say that the kind of, the payout is 50 bucks or
Jim Banks:a hundred bucks or something like that, you know, and they're, they're
Jim Banks:setting up a test campaign on Facebook and they've got 10 of them going, and
Jim Banks:they've all got like a $5 budget, right?
Jim Banks:And you, there's just no, like, you, you just need to give it.
Jim Banks:A bit of a chance, right?
Jim Banks:Because if you don't give it a chance, then you know, I've always kind of
Jim Banks:maintained whenever you run something new for the very first time, right?
Jim Banks:You need to be prepared to lose every single penny you throw into it.
Jim Banks:And you probably need to commit to maybe a thousand, $2,000 just to kind of like,
Jim Banks:you know, get some, some, you know, some hard learn, hard learn lessons as to kind
Jim Banks:of what to do and what not to do, right?
Jim Banks:And then, you know, you just keep, keep working, keep working, keep working.
Jim Banks:And some of it'll be landing page, landing page speed ad copy.
Jim Banks:again, people keep going on about creative angles.
Jim Banks:I mean, some of the best campaigns I've had running, they've got
Jim Banks:an ad running on Facebook that's been running for, 2, 3, 4 years.
Jim Banks:Right?
Jim Banks:It's not, it's the same,
Jim Banks:you know, because even though the ad might be sort of the
Jim Banks:same, the audience refreshes.
Jim Banks:Every single day, right?
Jim Banks:Because people come into, into it and then people go out of it, right?
Jim Banks:If, if, if you've got your exclusions and you know, again, if it's a
Jim Banks:one and done, so if somebody is a somebody that you will exclude
Jim Banks:from ever seeing that again, right?
Jim Banks:Then you can exclude them.
Jim Banks:And then that way the audience is just a fresh audience all the time, right?
Jim Banks:So they've never seen the ad. All they see is huge amounts of social proof, right?
Jim Banks:It's got tens of thousands of likes, comments, and shares, right?
Jim Banks:And it's.
Jim Banks:Well, it must be good then, right?
Jim Banks:Whatever it is that they're promoting.
Jim Banks:Right?
Jim Banks:And that's always the thing that, that's blown my mind, that people kind
Jim Banks:of go, they've run an ad for an hour, they spend $5 and go, it didn't work.
Jim Banks:What am I, what am I doing wrong?
Jim Banks:Like, you're not spending enough time, effort, money on it.
Rob Adler:so I will tell you this, there is only one model I have seen.
Rob Adler:At least in my head that makes sense for that kind of testing
Rob Adler:with the like epic crap.
Rob Adler:Tons of uh, terms, but then like real low budget per day and then
Rob Adler:like after three days, if it doesn't make anything, you kill it.
Rob Adler:And that surcharge search ar search arbitrage.
Rob Adler:Like they'll do that.
Rob Adler:And I remember looking at them once and I was like, so here's how I test stuff.
Rob Adler:And I looked at them and they're like, here's how I test stuff.
Rob Adler:And I was just like, how do you make any money?
Rob Adler:Like it doesn't make any sense that like your test budget's 50 bucks and
Rob Adler:then you're like, oh, this won't work.
Rob Adler:I'm like, what?
Rob Adler:Like that makes absolutely no sense.
Rob Adler:I'm over here testing shit for like a thousand, 1500, like
Rob Adler:stuff like that, and they're just like, oh, $17, not enough margin.
Rob Adler:So it's, but the other thing is the targeting.
Rob Adler:And I really don't think that this is explained to people like I. Because media
Rob Adler:buying doesn't have a lot of standards.
Rob Adler:Like there's no like go to school and learn media buying.
Rob Adler:Right?
Rob Adler:Like not, not really, not a good way.
Rob Adler:and if you do, those are the people that didn't make enough actually buying, so
Rob Adler:you're just gonna follow their direction.
Rob Adler:But the whole thing about this that I usually see, especially when I
Rob Adler:help people get into affiliate or into media buying or into whatever,
Rob Adler:is they always look at the scenario the way they've always been taught.
Rob Adler:They go, how does this apply?
Rob Adler:And then how do I make it work?
Rob Adler:So they look at an offer and they go, how do I find people that need this offer
Rob Adler:instead of going, what are the types of people that would use this offer?
Rob Adler:And then how do I target them where they will also need other offers like this one.
Rob Adler:And if you're targeting the offer and reversing it to demos or intent, unless
Rob Adler:it's intent, it will almost always crash and burn unless it has a mass appeal.
Rob Adler:Like it applies to like at least one in five people that see it.
Rob Adler:But on the other, if you don't go through that, then you end
Rob Adler:up with a much bigger issue.
Rob Adler:With the majority of the traffic you're gonna bring in and how it's
Rob Adler:going to work and where it's going to convert and what, like it's just.
Rob Adler:They get pigeonholed without thinking.
Rob Adler:They're getting pigeonholed because they think by targeting the demos, they can
Rob Adler:now pitch other things to the demos.
Rob Adler:And that's not the same as targeting the demo to prevent or present options.
Rob Adler:And that's where almost everyone that I've seen that starts out with
Rob Adler:like, let's try this one campaign, and then they crash and burn.
Rob Adler:Let's try another one.
Rob Adler:The crash and burn, they finally get their success.
Rob Adler:It's usually on that.
Rob Adler:If they go again and do it again.
Rob Adler:I usually don't see those guys in a year.
Rob Adler:If they go back and they do the same targeting in the same way and they're
Rob Adler:like, if it works or not, they, I usually don't see them again in a year.
Rob Adler:If I see the other guys and they go, well, I started running this and these
Rob Adler:guys also need this, so I thought about maybe running that ad to them as well.
Rob Adler:That guy not only will be here in a year, but he'll be in five industries.
Rob Adler:Potentially with five different brands.
Rob Adler:That all lead to one internal aspect, and now you own the asset.
Rob Adler:Now you own everything else.
Rob Adler:You control the language, the legal exposure, the marketing channels.
Rob Adler:You control everything, but you also control the liability.
Rob Adler:So the question is, is, is that your model or not?
Rob Adler:But once you switch up how they do the workflow, it's not about smarts.
Rob Adler:It's about the right stuff in the right order to make a proper evaluation.
Rob Adler:If you prep this any question in the right way, any level of intelligence
Rob Adler:almost will answer it in the right way if you give them enough stuff.
Rob Adler:So you make that work on these and you start to be, you just
Rob Adler:have to be honest with yourself.
Rob Adler:No one wants to admit they just wasted two months and five grand of testing.
Rob Adler:But the reality is, is that that's why so many people that are entrepreneurs always
Rob Adler:do that whole, like, I didn't lose money.
Rob Adler:I learned something.
Rob Adler:And I'm like, but did you though?
Rob Adler:Because if you went and did it again, you didn't
Jim Banks:two exits.
Jim Banks:I've sold two businesses, but I've had so many complete fuckups, right?
Jim Banks:Where I've completely pooch and like, it's been horrible, right?
Jim Banks:I've lost a ton of money, right?
Jim Banks:Uh, on the back of, again, like one of, but.
Jim Banks:I learned a lot from the, from the process of doing it right.
Jim Banks:I mean, I, I abdicated some of the responsibility.
Jim Banks:I was running a travel site and I abdicated some of the responsibilities
Jim Banks:to some of my internal team at my agency.
Jim Banks:Um, this again, we're going back a few years and, um, you know, we
Jim Banks:were spending about, I think we were spending maybe 50 grand a month on.
Jim Banks:Traffic for hotels.
Jim Banks:Right.
Jim Banks:And, uh, and again, hotels was, was a very phenomenal, vertical for me.
Jim Banks:Did really well on the back of it.
Jim Banks:and a lot of it was, was misspelling brand terms Right.
Jim Banks:At the time, because that's, that's what, what worked.
Jim Banks:You know, but, but we had, um, I think we, we had sort of one month where I think
Jim Banks:we spent like a hundred grand on traffic and we generated 50,000 in commissions.
Jim Banks:Right.
Jim Banks:So I, I remember kind of talking to the two or three people I'd
Jim Banks:asked to kind of look after this.
Jim Banks:I said, I. In what scenario is basically pissing 50 grand up the wall, right?
Jim Banks:A good sort of outcome, right?
Jim Banks:Because we don't own the client ever, right?
Jim Banks:All we're doing is we're ultimately selling the traffic.
Jim Banks:We buy the traffic on search, we're selling it to, to um, to a hotel
Jim Banks:chain in the hope that that person kind of converts and becomes a,
Jim Banks:a kind of hotel booking, right?
Jim Banks:And I think when you look at it, right, again, hotels is
Jim Banks:one of those classic cases.
Jim Banks:As a, as an affiliate, you get paid right on the consumed bookings, right?
Jim Banks:So most people are bookings again, like it, I dunno if you're going
Jim Banks:to, um, affiliate summit in in
Jim Banks:Yeah, And then the following affiliate summit in January, right?
Jim Banks:So a lot of people are, again, I I know, like I'm looking at flights and hotels
Jim Banks:for basically next, next year, right?
Jim Banks:January of next year.
Jim Banks:So if I, if I bought some traffic today right?
Jim Banks:To kind of promote.
Jim Banks:That particular hotel.
Jim Banks:Right.
Jim Banks:And let's say it was me.
Jim Banks:I saw that the ad, I clicked on the ad, made a booking, and my booking was
Jim Banks:for the middle of January next year.
Jim Banks:Right.
Jim Banks:I wouldn't get any money on that booking until probably of March, something
Jim Banks:like that, that that'll be around about the timeframe I'm thinking.
Jim Banks:I. Jesus.
Jim Banks:That's an awful of cash flow to kind of, to float, right?
Jim Banks:Because I pay for the traffic now, right?
Jim Banks:In a lot of cases, even with credit, I'm still kind of best case
Jim Banks:scenario might, I might pay for the ads in a month's time, right?
Jim Banks:But then I'm going, what I do between, you know, July and February or March, right?
Rob Adler:See, and like that right there is the easiest justification
Rob Adler:I've ever had in my life to be like, you should look at email.
Rob Adler:Because the difference between that time to you get paid and not is emailing
Rob Adler:like three or four other offers to every person, and it wouldn't even cost a lot.
Rob Adler:And then, like, this is, I, I just did one of these videos for Boardwalk specifically
Rob Adler:on this, is that by using like declines and by monetizing your offer walls and
Rob Adler:stuff, you're not just making more money.
Rob Adler:You're also changing where that money comes from, which completely
Rob Adler:modifies your risk profile.
Rob Adler:You can have your core business and get paid on and, and get completely
Rob Adler:screwed on all commissions, but if half your revenue is from a whole bunch of
Rob Adler:different stuff in different industries, you've now hedged your risk and
Rob Adler:you're not gonna take a complete loss.
Rob Adler:So like, but without that, you're talking about what money layout of
Rob Adler:seven, eight months potentially.
Rob Adler:And like the, what's the comp gonna be?
Rob Adler:Like 30 bucks?
Rob Adler:Potentially 50.
Rob Adler:A hundred.
Rob Adler:So like, at that point.
Rob Adler:No level of factoring is ever gonna get you to your ROI positive
Rob Adler:on that, on that conversation.
Rob Adler:It's just not,
Jim Banks:Yeah.
Jim Banks:But again, I, I, I'm, I'm amazed at how many affiliates are quite happy to kind of
Jim Banks:like abdicate all responsibility for the.
Jim Banks:The end user Right to the person that they're ultimately gonna be paid by.
Jim Banks:Right.
Jim Banks:And really, you need, again, I've, I, I used to, when we, we used to run a
Jim Banks:lot of host and post offers, and it would be, can we do host and post?
Jim Banks:And if people said no, we'd be well, then it's a pass from us
Jim Banks:if we can't do it, if we can't.
Jim Banks:Capture the data and then send it to you right In, in an API then we're just
Jim Banks:not interested in running that offer.
Jim Banks:Right.
Jim Banks:Because we need to own them.
Jim Banks:Because as you say, like if, if I have a, a kind of page where they're
Jim Banks:filling in one of my forms, right.
Jim Banks:Once they fill that information in on that basis, again, if
Jim Banks:it was a hotel, you go, right.
Jim Banks:Okay.
Jim Banks:If I know, if I know somebody's in the UK and they're going to the,
Jim Banks:to stay in Vegas at a hotel, right.
Jim Banks:They're going to need, like, they're gonna need probably, Car.
Jim Banks:Car kind of taken to the airport.
Jim Banks:Maybe a show for car, maybe flight, maybe insurance, right?
Jim Banks:There's so many upsells that you can kind of make on the back of that, right?
Jim Banks:Because people don't just do that.
Jim Banks:And I think that's probably where, I know we're gonna talk a lot about
Jim Banks:AI over the course of this, this.
Jim Banks:Podcast, not this particular episode, but certainly in future, I'm sure the, the
Jim Banks:word AI will come up all the time, right?
Jim Banks:But what, what, what, what you're finding now is that so many of the kind of
Jim Banks:tools like Claude and Perplexity, right?
Jim Banks:They're now, you can just type something in and they'll give you
Jim Banks:all the suggestions and I can just see at some point in time, right?
Jim Banks:Those suggestions are, are gonna be, you know, dripped in between the suggestions
Jim Banks:and the citations will be ads, right?
Jim Banks:For all of the different things that are kind of relevant to that.
Jim Banks:Yeah.
Rob Adler:That's already being tested.
Jim Banks:so there we go.
Jim Banks:I mean, I, I didn't think it was, but if it is, then yeah, absolutely.
Jim Banks:Makes.
Rob Adler:I'm, I'm the one testing it, but Yeah.
Rob Adler:yeah, it's, but no, you're a hundred percent right.
Rob Adler:And that's, and that's the, that's the, the kind of like future proofing that,
Rob Adler:like if I look at the future right now, I'm not gonna say a lot because it could
Rob Adler:really go 50 different ways and it.
Rob Adler:For one of the main reasons, it's not just based on the tech right
Rob Adler:now, it's also based on like politics and economy and all sort of shit
Rob Adler:for like growth potential and shit.
Rob Adler:But the stuff that I've been able to do, and I won't go into it deep
Rob Adler:here, but I'll just say this to set up for the next time we talk about it.
Rob Adler:I had a friend look at the workload that I currently do, like a day in terms
Rob Adler:of like what I'm doing among, 'cause you know, I have Boardwalk, I have
Rob Adler:like my own SaaS that I do other stuff
Rob Adler:with and
Jim Banks:a father recently, right?
Rob Adler:And I'm also a father.
Rob Adler:I'm, I'm also a recent dad.
Rob Adler:So with all of that together, oh, thank you.
Rob Adler:When I, when I am able to sleep, I will make sure that I say thank you
Rob Adler:and actually can maintain eye contact.
Rob Adler:But with the, uh, the setup this has right now is like.
Rob Adler:When you have the traffic coming into certain landers, and then you have
Rob Adler:the ability to have AI do, let's call it more traditional jobs, like maybe
Rob Adler:they audit something, maybe they just make sense of your data, right?
Rob Adler:Like, like how many people now take the last 30 days of their lead sale,
Rob Adler:lead sales, put it into chat, DPT, and go find where the top state is.
Rob Adler:Like that's a basic level, right?
Rob Adler:Then they don't think to put in all the denials and go, why do we find
Rob Adler:patterns in all of our declines?
Rob Adler:Right?
Rob Adler:Like find patterns for that.
Rob Adler:The difference now is, is people are actually replacing like full jobs.
Rob Adler:So I work on a lot of auto autonomous agent type stuff.
Rob Adler:I think my workload right now for one of my projects is the equivalent
Rob Adler:of about 20 senior engineers, and I pay $300 a month to do.
Jim Banks:Yeah.
Rob Adler:So it's like it, but I'm not random Joe Schmo, like I've
Rob Adler:put in a lot of time to understand this and it's my background.
Rob Adler:But the, the thing is, is like if me in my office at home can do this,
Rob Adler:like while sitting here with a Papa John's pizza, then I can only imagine
Rob Adler:what 200 PhDs extremely well paid can do with this if they were focused on
Jim Banks:Other brands of pizza are also available.
Rob Adler:Yep.
Rob Adler:It's like, it, it is.
Rob Adler:And it's funny 'cause like we have some of these guys that are like,
Rob Adler:we need a year of compliance for reasoning to make sure we can trust it.
Rob Adler:And I got other guys that are just like, I've been having chat GPT write
Rob Adler:my email bodies for four weeks now.
Rob Adler:And I'm like, oh.
Rob Adler:So it's like there's a, there's a lot here and there that it can go.
Rob Adler:It, the problem is, is people get too wrapped up into it and then the
Rob Adler:guardrails don't go on and then it does something stupid like, forget a
Rob Adler:disclaimer and then you get screwed.
Rob Adler:The consolidation of this has led to a very, very, very large aspect of data
Rob Adler:consolidation and data interpretation, because now you can actually set something
Rob Adler:up where you just send a CSV with yesterday's leads, information to that,
Rob Adler:and then it compiles a report and just emails it to you so that when you walk
Rob Adler:into the office, you have what normally would've been five analysts, entire job.
Rob Adler:And then you literally have that, and then you go back and you
Rob Adler:go, now how would we address or optimize this to make more money?
Rob Adler:You take the response and give it to your other
Jim Banks:I mean,
Rob Adler:like now that's
Jim Banks:point there, I mean we used to do that back in the day.
Jim Banks:I mean, we used to run like lead gen offers, and we would have, every single
Jim Banks:day we would get a CSV file to basically say, these leads could not be processed.
Jim Banks:Right.
Jim Banks:Invariably it was because somebody had mistyped their email address or
Jim Banks:mistyped their phone number, right?
Jim Banks:So if, if they mistyped their email address right, then somebody, we,
Jim Banks:we would send this file as a batch file to the Philippines, right?
Jim Banks:Let's say we were getting paid $40 for the offer, right?
Jim Banks:We did, we had a kind of rev share with the people in the Philippines.
Jim Banks:We would give them the file, they would phone the people that that.
Jim Banks:We, you know, that couldn't, um, you know, that the email wasn't working and
Jim Banks:asked them to kind of correct the email and tell us what it was, and we put it in
Jim Banks:the file and then we could process that.
Jim Banks:And similarly, if we had the email address correct, but the phone number
Jim Banks:was missing, we would email 'em and say, you're missing your phone number.
Jim Banks:Right?
Jim Banks:But so much of that now can, when all of it now can be done through ai.
Jim Banks:And at some form of GBT, right, where you don't need to kind
Jim Banks:of like rely on a person at the other end to kind of do that work.
Jim Banks:You can kind of do it auto automated.
Jim Banks:Um, and again, I, I think we were probably making probably an extra 1500 to two grand
Jim Banks:a day right on that batch file because, everything else apart from the lead was
Jim Banks:perfect, apart from some clumsy kind of big, fat fingered person typed in.
Jim Banks:An extra at in the email address.
Jim Banks:Right, and that's, that's a one, it's a ones and zeros.
Jim Banks:Is it a valid email address?
Jim Banks:No.
Jim Banks:Right.
Jim Banks:Rather than kind of going, okay, well if we can't process the lead,
Jim Banks:it's like, well, if, if you look at the closely, you'll see that it's
Jim Banks:actually one digit that's wrong.
Jim Banks:And, and that's it.
Jim Banks:That's the only difference.
Rob Adler:And that's, dude, if I had a way.
Rob Adler:Of being able to attribute how much money I've lost because I never did
Rob Adler:a string replace in email addresses for a comma into a period, and then
Rob Adler:reverified, I would probably jump out my first floor window right now, like,
Rob Adler:because that alone is the easiest.
Rob Adler:It's one line in almost any programming language, and literally commas
Rob Adler:cannot exist in emails per the RFC.
Rob Adler:So by doing that, there's no downside to doing it, and there's only an
Rob Adler:upside to correcting the data.
Rob Adler:It's like doing that with the phones.
Rob Adler:Like if someone forces the dashes in, but you don't support the dashes if
Rob Adler:you still have the last two numbers.
Rob Adler:'cause you didn't truncate them because of the dashes.
Rob Adler:You just removed the dashes and you're fine.
Rob Adler:I'd rather let the consumer convert how he wants to convert.
Rob Adler:If he wants to do parentheses and dashes, do parentheses and dashes.
Rob Adler:As long as my final version is just numbers, I don't care, but.
Rob Adler:That right there is also a huge disconnect for a lot of these guys.
Rob Adler:And then because one is missing, they go, it's not a valid lead, so I don't wanna
Rob Adler:buy it, therefore it doesn't make sense.
Rob Adler:And they, they're happy to lose the money.
Rob Adler:And I'm like, I don't understand.
Rob Adler:That doesn't make any sense.
Rob Adler:Like it, it just, a lot of media buyers that I come across.
Rob Adler:Their involvement starts when the click clicks an ad and their involvement ends
Rob Adler:when it gets to whatever page they're running to or clicks off their lander to
Rob Adler:go to wherever the monetization point is.
Rob Adler:That's pretty much where they live.
Rob Adler:The problem is, is they don't think about what happens prior to that or what happens
Rob Adler:after that, and that can change if you don't get the conversion on first hit.
Rob Adler:That is usually a good amount of people.
Rob Adler:So it really comes down to just understanding your audience and
Rob Adler:understanding how to do it properly and set it up the same way.
Rob Adler:but yeah, the, the next couple months especially are going to be very, very
Rob Adler:interesting to see how this goes.
Rob Adler:but for those of you that do mess with the AI at all, I will leave
Rob Adler:you with this as an example to try, if you can load up your.
Rob Adler:History per day from your traffic source, and it all goes to one offer or one
Rob Adler:lander or one place or whatever it is.
Rob Adler:And you can also load up your conversions and your click-throughs from your
Rob Adler:lander and put all of them into GPT.
Rob Adler:It can identify which of yours not only gets lower click-through, but
Rob Adler:higher EPC, but also the inverse.
Rob Adler:And that will help you refine your actual monetization.
Rob Adler:You'd be surprised how many times.
Rob Adler:An offer that crushes for everyone sucks for you.
Rob Adler:And that was the difference between losing 40% and making a hundred percent.
Rob Adler:Those offers make a huge difference 'cause you don't know why they're not converting.
Rob Adler:Are they really not liking the lander or are they not converting
Rob Adler:because maybe they're a duplicate.
Rob Adler:Maybe they got D qed, or maybe the advertiser decided not to
Rob Adler:give you attribution for it.
Rob Adler:All of those are logical and all of those get taken care of
Rob Adler:when you host your own stuff.
Rob Adler:So that's why internalization is so important with a lot
Jim Banks:Rob, I'm so excited to have the opportunity to kind of
Jim Banks:like, shoot the breeze with you.
Jim Banks:Every week, Tuesday at two o'clock.
Jim Banks:I think we'll kind of leave it here.
Jim Banks:We've got so much stuff to talk about.
Jim Banks:I've got no doubt in my mind we'll kind of cover so, so many
Jim Banks:more things in, in great detail.
Jim Banks:and again, we've, we've already talked about at some point in time in the
Jim Banks:not too distant future, we're gonna have some great guests coming on to
Jim Banks:kind of share their stories and their.
Jim Banks:Tips, some tricks on how to do things in in the media buying world.
Jim Banks:It just remains for me to say.
Jim Banks:If you haven't already subscribed to the channel, make sure you do.
Jim Banks:If you are listening to us on a podcast rather than watching us on YouTube,
Jim Banks:then just follow us wherever you kind of get your podcast from, uh, and just
Jim Banks:look for the media buying podcast.
Jim Banks:So thanks a lot everyone, and we'll see you on the next episode.
Rob Adler:And make sure you follow.
Rob Adler:I need dopamine.
Jim Banks:Peace out baby.
Rob Adler:See you.
