Beyond Ad Spend - Optimizing Conversions and the Future of AI in Media Buying
Welcome to the premiere episode of The Media Buying Podcast.
Join hosts Jim Banks and Rob Adler as they kick things off with an in-depth conversation about their backgrounds in the digital marketing and media buying world.
Rob shares his journey, from tinkering with SEO and link building as a high schooler to running agencies, diving into email marketing, and eventually becoming Chief Revenue Officer at Boardwalk Marketing.
He peels back the curtain on everything from scaling traffic flows to the nuances of lead quality and optimization—plus some hard lessons learned along the way.
Jim reminisces about the wild west days of ringtone affiliate marketing and the power of relationships in the industry.
Jim talks about flying out to pitch deals in person, wrangling with early PPC networks, and the importance of being able to pivot quickly—whether that’s switching from ringtones to email, or wringing every drop of value from non-core business monetization.
Together, Jim and Rob dig into why email marketing remains such an undervalued channel, how granular targeting gives a serious edge, and why the smart play is always to think several steps beyond the first conversion.
They touch on co-registration, the evolution (and survival) of sweepstakes and lead gen arbitrage, and the ways AI is already reshaping the landscape—from automating analytics reports to mining profit from scrappy, overlooked data.
It’s an episode packed with stories, strategy, and a no-BS look at what separates media buying amateurs from the pros. Whether you’re a grizzled veteran or just dipping your toes in, you’re going to walk away with insights you can use right away—and a few laughs besides.
Make sure to subscribe for future episodes featuring candid advice, advanced tactics, and guests from every corner of the online media buying world.
We hope you enjoy listening to this first episode of the Media Buying Podcast.
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Important Notes
This is the Media Buying Podcast, the weekly podcast for media buyers who are looking for the missing pieces in their campaign strategy.
New episodes are released every Tuesday at 2PM EST where you'll get media buying strategies, tips, stories and anecdotes from media buyers who've been at the sharp end in many of the disciplines that make up the discipline of media buying.
The podcast is powered by Captivate and all the ums, and ers have been removed using Descript to make your listening more enjoyable.
Some of the snappy titles, introductions, transcripts were created using AI Magic via Castmagic
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00:00 - Introduction
Introduction
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[00:00:00]
Jim Banks: So, hey everyone. Welcome to the first ever episode of the Media Buying Podcast. I'm Jim Banks, and this is my host, Rob Adler, my co-host. How are you, Rob?
Rob Adler: Doing good. How about you, buddy?
Jim Banks: I'm doing excellent. Mind for the benefits of those, like listening in, watching in, where are you based, Rob?
Rob Adler: So I'm on the east coast in the us I'm in a state Pennsylvania. I like to tell people that I am in the middle of nowhere surrounded by cows, basically in a field that they decided to put houses on. but yeah, so I, I grew up in the east coast, kind of went out Midwest, went central, came back to the east and we kind of settled here in pa, but it's definitely not like hustle and Bustle city.
It's literally like. 15 minutes to a grocery store, 30 to Walmart. So it's country.
Jim Banks: Nice. Yeah. 'cause I think, I think, um, I remember one of the, the kind of times I met you in the past. You, you were living in, uh, Vegas at the time and you threw party and 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. That was fun.
Jim Banks: I think I was obviously there for affiliate summit. um, I.
Rob Adler: yep.
[00:01:00] So talk, talk to me a little bit about your, your origin story, kind of how did you get into this industryMy villain arc. So basically, started messing around doing, you know, the normal like testing, working on the side, messing with stuff, trying to figure stuff out when I was pretty much in high school, usually I, I wanna say around sophomore and, um, started with SEO. That's how I kind of got into it. I love figuring out how stuff works and then how to modify how it works, especially if I'm not supposed to be able to.
so when I did stuff like SEO started to look into, oh look, these backlink things, they help things rank more and when you have certain keywords laid out in this way, blah, blah, blah, blah. so I started doing a lot of testing and then I started leaning into automation, which kind of set the foundation for a lot of what I did after that.
but link building was my thing for a good. Pretty much decade, almost 10 years. and ran an agency. Got on the corporate side of that. Also did, on the affiliate side of that, we ranked our own sites. We monetized our own sites, we built site networks, stuff like [00:02:00] that. and then at a certain point I was like, Ooh, email marketing.
It's kind of like SEO, but doesn't take three months. So we started messing with that and figured out that. The algorithms are pretty much the same kind of thing to mess with or figure out how they work in the same way. So we started troubleshooting that, and then I got into deliverability and that's really what led to me becoming first an affiliate mailer.
then I started my own affiliate offers. I ran a network for a while. I've been, I've, I've dabbled in. Most of the sides in the industry. but where I kind of settled was either A, as a consultant, or b as a managerial implementation person that helps you implement a high level schematic with like your company.
So like, if you don't have internal email for your company, you want internal email. It's not like just going to AWeber. Paying 20 bucks and then loading it in and going, we're gonna make a million dollars. So sometimes people need guidance. We give them the guidance and then help their people implement it.
and part of that is the [00:03:00] quote, unquote day job, I guess you would call it, that I have right now, which is I'm CRO, chief Revenue Officer over at Boardwalk Marketing. and our whole goal is, is we help companies make money off the traffic. That's not their core business. So if they're a decline, they're a denial.
It ends up helping you monetize through affiliate offers, cross selling, all that kind of stuff. So everything I've done in some way, shape, or form has either been in traffic generation, regardless of channel, or it's been on the backend. So it's either how do I get someone to go to the lander, or how do I get the guy that came to the lander to actually make me some money?
Or complete whatever the action is. but that's usually what I do now, is I help advertisers optimize their flows, their intake, help them make more money off their traffic flows and their people and their prospects, all that kind of stuff. All the way through implementation on channel marketing specifically, whether it's, you know, search or whatever it's going to be all the way through email and everything else.
touched a lot of stuff. I suck at direct mail, like completely horrible at it. There are some people that crush at it, but I am not good at direct mail, but [00:04:00] like email is definitely my primary channel. secondary would probably be paid in general. but I like using 'em together. I like using the email to be able to come up with more filtered demographics and targeting and retargeting audiences based on that, and then leverage that unpaid to follow and close the loop on prospecting.
but yeah, so TLDR lots of experience on a lot of other things. but it's all somehow based around taking a current situation and being able to scale it and or make more money off of it without. Causing any detriment to the consumer or the prospect or like basically screwing the prospect over, right?
Like, I'm not gonna make five bucks if I'm gonna ruin someone's life. It's not worth it. but the goal is to do that while maintaining lead quality. So taking all of those permissions, all of those aspects, front end, back of the house, the whole nine, and making sense of it to make it work for the entire workflow.
Jim Banks: So I think, I think you, and you and I first met, I mean, again, we talked about this on the, uh, the intro, but we, we, we first met, I don't know, probably 2000 7, 6 7, something like that. and I remember kind of, I think we met kind of [00:05:00] primarily through Wicked Fire, right? I think that was where I kind of first, I.
First heard of you. Right. and then I happened to be, uh, affiliate summit. I think at that particular time the affiliate summit was in, um, the Rio. Right. And I kind of
Rob Adler: Oh yeah.
Jim Banks: I think I put a message on what, uh, wicked Fire and basically said, Hey, I'm just going down for, for kind of breakfast is in want to join me.
And the only person that. I guess was up at that time was you, so you turned out We had breakfast and we'd been friends ever since. So it's be, again, for, for me, I, I think, you know, the one, the one thing I would say as, as a person who's been in the industry for a long time, both of us, right? You and I both know that this whole industry thrives and, and grows on the strength of the relationships that you built up in it, right?
Everyone talks about it by traffic. It's this, it's that, but ultimately it's about, just, just again. The, the relationships that you have with people. I always remember one of the first sort of success stories I had. I was, I was, um, working with, uh, a ringtone company. The ringtone at the time [00:06:00] right?
Was, um, the, the company was based in Hong Kong, right? And, um, and I was running some ringtones and, and doing pretty well with it. Uh, but I, I thought I could do more with it. So, I, I took, A colleague of mine and we, we kind of flew out to Hong Kong and we sat down with the guy who ran the company. Uh, we went out for a Chinese meal, and I basically said, look, I could, I think I could really blow up this campaign for you.
but I, I think, there's, there's just a few things that I need. And he said, well, what do you need? And I said, well, you know why? I want you to kind of pay me more, right? He said, yeah, okay, I can do that. Um, and he said, what else do you want? I said, well, I'd like to be paid a bit quicker, right?
Because obviously I'm turning around money pretty quickly. I think at the time I was, I was running, I don't if you've ever heard of them, a company called Kuo a Sonar. Right. So, and they ti I think ultimately they got bought by a OL and a OL completely trashed the business, right? I think a OL paid $800 million for this business.
And I think probably 40% of the revenue from query ad signer came from Ringtones. And as soon as a OL bought it, they basically said, we're not doing ringtones anymore. Right. And it's [00:07:00] just like. Okay, fair enough. but, you know, but I said,you know, so I want to be paid quicker. Right? And um, and he said, well, how quickly do you wanna be paid?
And I said, well, how about you pay me every day? Right. So that's the arrangement that we had. So he paid me, I. Today for, for what we delivered in terms of volume the previous day. Right. And I think at that particular time we were spending, again, we're probably talking 2000 7 0 8, something like that. We were spending about maybe two or $300,000 a month on traffic and generating about $500,000 in commissions.
Right. Which was phenomenal. but again, I, I think, you know, the way, the way I, I think if, if you kind of go and troll through the, the kind of the archives, you'll find all the stories of, Like Scott Richter getting sued by the Attorney General in Florida. 'cause it, none of this was done on a credit card.
It was all done on, on the basis of, you know, it was charged to the mobile phone. Right. The cell phone bill. So all these parents were complaining because people wanted to, Justin Bieber kind of wallpaper and paying 9 99 for a subscription. Right. So it's, it's, at the time [00:08:00] it, it. With the benefits of hindsight, it looked exploitative.
Right? But at the time it was perfectly acceptable. You were making
Rob Adler: Oh yeah.
Jim Banks: the kids cool in school. Make, I mean, I, I kind of, uh, landed on something. like all, all the, uh, colleges in the States have got, their own fight song, right? And what we found that there was this fight song ringtone every single.
College football team had their own fight song ringtone. and what became really apparent to me was that, um, you know, whoever ranked on the, the AP 25 as number one, we'd probably do a thousand ringtones on the Saturday before the game. Right? So they would all have their, their ringtone set up and they would all be able to kind of, Hey, look how cool I am.
Right? And I think whoever's number two, we do about 600 and then number three bit, maybe 300. And there'd be just dribs and drabs from the rest. Right. But you. Ultimately it became, we kept maxing out credit cards, maxing out credit cards. So in the end I kind of phoned up Ger, I had Sonar and basically said, look, you guys need to kind of run me a bit of a [00:09:00] line of credit here because I'm going to do a lot more with you.
But I just, I couldn't get credit cards quick enough. I got them for my wife, my children, my grandchildren. It was just like whoever I could kind of get a credit card for. I got, um. But it's interesting, you, you kind of, like, you, you've landed yourself in a position where now where you're, you're doing primarily email, right?
What is it about email that, that, media buys kind of really need to understand that kind of makes it such a kind of a popular platform and successful platform.
Rob Adler: So there's. My answer changes depending on which perspective I want to give you. So if I'm trying to sell you services, I would bring up like the ROI difference of email compared to other channels. 'cause like there's all those like public studies, I think it's like 34 to one or something along those lines.
Like there's, there's something like that. Right? But that's not why I like email. Well, I like email. Is that you can get granular. And normally when you talk to media buyers, they're like, I [00:10:00] can also get granular. And I'm like, that's correct. You can, but not to this level. When you're able to, and you can get somewhat, but you can't get to the same level.
So if you're doing a media buy and you buy a thousand clicks, then you can retarget them. You can put them into an audience. If you collect their email, you can do an email. If you collect phone, you can do phone, right? But you also have like remarketing pixel that can go back. Email technically doesn't have a remarketing pixel.
There are services that make like a. Reverse consumer identification to reverse append, to email to an email, send service. Like there are services that do that. But what I really like is, is that if I sit there and I get, like, let's say I'm buying on search and I'm like, I wanna buy for this intent, or I'm buying on social, and I, I'm like, I wanna buy between these ages and this state, and I wanna try to get these people using this creative, I can tell you that that bucket.
Produces results on that origination, but what I cannot tell you is, is why each or any of the specific people actually [00:11:00] converted on the offer and on email you can do that because on email you can say, did you know this guy opened nine times before he actually clicked on the ad itself? And then when he clicked it, he looked at the lander four times before he converted, and then he went back and looked at it again after he converted.
Why? And from that kind of information, you can start to get a lot more. A lot more customization on your follow-ups, your triggers, and like everything else. I just, I love that aspect. I love the ability to design one before and one after, and then have that join a web of before and afters. So if that's like triggers that could be like, you go through my website, you indicate you're a homeowner.
Now if I know you're a homeowner, you are now applicable for HVAC services, roofing, siding, like all that kind of stuff. Right? But if you, if you say you're not a homeowner. People look at the, the, the original, they don't look at the inverse, right? If you're not a homeowner, why am I showing you a DT? Like, you can't get it because you're a renter. Like, or you don't [00:12:00] own or live in a place where you're on the paperwork, right? So you can't get it. But what you can get. At least back then Protect America. And now I believe they got bought by Brinks. So like the aspect of those and knowing the differences, I would've never known that one of them might've converted on another offer because I never would've been able to link that other than pixels between the first click I bought and the second click I bought the second part.
Is that the cost of acquiring the user after acquisition is drastically different between paid and email. Because if you pay a dollar to get an opt-in, but then you send an email and you're paying, let's call it even a dollar per thousand emails. There you go. But. Now you're paying to send, you're not paying for eyeballs.
And when you're paying for the actual media buying, you're paying on actions. And that's usually clicks, unless you're doing impressions somewhere, but whatever. So the whole goal is, is that with email, it's a lot more granular, it's a lot easier, and I like to be able to take. [00:13:00] Action on the specifics that I can find out instead of just knowing them after the fact.
Anyone can look at it and be like, the majority of our opt-ins are 25 to 35, but then you go back and you're like, how do I target that on search? How do I say only this segment? I wanna send them this upsell to see if it works with these demographics. You can't do that unless you're doing retargeting or you have another channel that you've already opted them into to do it, but email, you always have email until they unop.
So it's a different workflow and a different style, and you're paying to send it like direct mail. You're not paying on, they're coming back. But in that spread of you paying to send and what it would've cost to get the result is so much money if you can actually set it up. Right. So that's why I like a lot of email.
It's a lot of, you determine the price, you determine the pace, and you determine when someone sees something on search, you're just like. I'm here to help you with home security. And then you go, this guy's looking right now home security with mine. I'm like, did you know that you really should look at home security because of the uptake [00:14:00] of stuff in your environment or in your neighborhood or in your state, or blah, blah, blah.
They might not be thinking about it, but they still might convert. So it's a different sales cycle and a different intent profile. But I like how it's more granular on the email side 'cause you can get a lot more and use a lot more, if that makes
Jim Banks: Yeah. Yeah, it does. I mean, like, so again, way back in sort of 2007 ish, um, I was, I caught myself a high volume emailer, right? I would think, I think I was probably sending about a million emails a day or something like that, which probably in the scheme of things is not that many like competitors, what some people are sending now.
Right? But at the time. I considered that to be sort of a reasonable amount of emails to be sent. And as you say, like, you know, we would do all the segmentation, we'd set it separate, the sort of the Yahoo emails, the, the, uh, a OL emails. 'cause that was a big thing at the time. Microsoft emails. That was a big thing at the time.
and then you had what they called gennet. So ev everything kind of, other than that, all the baby bells and whatever else. what, what became really apparent to me was that they, they're the root to the inbox. [00:15:00] Was different for each one of those providers. And I think a lot of people that, they, again, if they have a kit or Ayo or whatever it is, and they send emails from that.
You know, you, one, you can't send the volume to kind of, to justify it. And two, it's very difficult to kind of get into the inbox with one email sent to a, a whole general list, right? So in addition to obviously segmenting by, as you say, actions, openers, clickers, you know, if they've opened every single email you've sent them, you know that they're gonna open the one that you send them next.
Right? and as you say, all the, all of the, implied. Interest. So they may not kind of directly say, yes, I'm, I'm in market for this, but all the other actions would tell you that they're in market for something. Right. And you kind of like identify on the basis of that, what sort of offers should be put in front of them.
Right. As you say, if somebody's, if somebody is,again, let's say they, they kind of go for an HVAC offer. There's every likelihood there probably. redoing the house, modeling it, or you know, cleaning it up. So they want putting guttering [00:16:00] cleaned,gardens done all sorts of different things that, you know, I think when, when you look at it from the point of view of just having one offer to put in front of people, you can have a sequence of things that follow up.
Right. And that's, that's always blown my mind how. Inefficient. Some people are with, I mean, what you called it, but I call it ancillary monetization. So in other words, as you say, making money from things that are not your core business. Right. 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 in the industry that you respect, and they have a really good understanding of the industry and everything, eight to nine of them will majorly, majorly, majorly under guess what they think? The percentage of revenue comes from non-core business.
In that context, a lot of people think it's just like an extra 5% or like 10% or something like that. I have literally set up clients where it's 50, 55, 60, like you can like, and [00:17:00] this is not an example of like an actual client, but for context, that would be like you have an auto insurance offer. What if your quotes suck?
Like what if your pricing is horrible? What if they, they're not, but they already went through, right? They gave you everything to run the price, run the lead. But what else do you now know? You know that they're doing something, they're being responsible as much as they have to be, or they're being held accountable, but they're getting quotes, they're price shopping, they're looking at this, but also, you know, they own a car.
And they own a car, and they're financially conscious to a point, right? They want to at least get value. So the question is, at that point, most people would be like, the first question is like, what kind of car do you have? And then an option is like, I don't have a car. And then literally from there, they're like, they just show, sorry, we can't help you.
And I'm just like, just put. Ads. Right? Right there. You don't have a car. Why are you here? Why? What would cause you to click on the ad and come here but not have a car after seeing that with a car? Right? But then also you do the same thing downstream. So if you are auto insurance and they don't [00:18:00] say, oh, well I actually don't need that, da da, da, da.
It's not that big of a deal. I don't really like the quote, whatever. If you also know that the year make and model is within the vendor list for your auto warranty offer, maybe you want to go listen. I don't know if it's really applicable, but like we do have warranties and you're actually in the window, so not sure if it's something you'd like, but if you do, here's some guys that we trust.
And again, that's one email that costs you like less than a penny. If not a 10th of a penny. But with that, you have all of these marketing points and you have all the different stuff that can come down, and that's why the majority of traffic that I've usually seen that perform on those, it doesn't matter whether they're core business or not, if they're hereafter two years or so of steady traffic, if they're not monetizing the core business.
Either there's a lot of profit in that core business. They've done something to make sure they only buy people they know are gonna convert or they're gonna have some subsidiary doing something else on the side. And if you know what that is, guess what? Now you have an upsell for your own traffic. So [00:19:00] a lot of those, like you said with hvac, right?
How many go look up your local HVAC companies and you see that most of the time it's like we do HVAC and we do plumbing, and we do this. Those are perfect questions to throw on an HVAC path. Oh, you, you need hvac? Do you also need any of the following? We'll make sure we give you a vendor that has all of them.
Do you need HVAC and siding, review and installation, check and basement waterproofing and this, and then every single one of those, if you don't have 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 sure that the same thing goes on now. Right? Back in the day, we used to call it co-reg, co-registration, right. So we would do host and post. So we would capture the information. And again, if you look at some of the offers, if you go to Offer Vault now, you'll still see that there are loads of offers for, you know, zip submit, zip submits, and email submits.
Rob Adler: emails. Yep.
Jim Banks: Phone submits, all that sort of stuff and, and people go, well, that's kind of [00:20:00] weird, right? I mean, I remember back in the day, we would, would be with an iPhone, we'd run a competition every month or win an iPhone, right? So people would kind of just give us their name and their email address. They'd click submit and they would just basically go to, I'm guessing in your case, an offer wall, right?
Where there'd be all this sort of a quiz. Of questions like, are you interested in this, this, how many people in the house? All that sort of, and you'd be building up a profile of all of the people that went through that path right through. And every single one of them. I mean, quite often as people were filling in, clicking the boxes, right?
Emails would start hitting their inbox because all the other offers was kind of lined up on the backend. So if you are paying, let, again, let's say I've paid five, five bucks to kind of acquire an email address or a buck 50 or whatever, whatever the number is, once you've kind of put it through that, that path, you've probably had 15 bytes at the cherry for offers that might range between five bucks and a hundred bucks.
Right. And
Rob Adler: Is more than 15, it's more than five. Like, uh, when I ran mine, I think I had 80 some [00:21:00] steps. Like no one ever got to the end really. I mean, we were still legally compliant. Everyone still got their entries in the sweeps, like the whole nine, like everything was legit. But like at a certain point you realize that legally you have to.
Play by the rules. And the rules are, is that you can't require them to do anything based on an entry into your sweeps. Right? So I just give them their entry as soon as they hit page one and there's no conditionals. And then it doesn't matter how far they go. But the, the thing is, is that, and especially media buyers that do like.
Like, like, display network, like back in the day, like GDN, like that kind of stuff. You'd always be like, all right, here's my daily budget, here's my budget per source. And then whenever something goes over that and I don't have this, it turns off. Sweeps is the same thing, but on both sides. And that's why it's hard because you have dedupes on the front, but then you also have the majority of people buying path traffic from other paths to send to their path.
And then everyone is basically sharing a good. Majority of the same advertisers when you get to a certain level. So at that point, [00:22:00] you buy from a path and you go, I don't understand why this is not working. It's because all your buyers are duping out because they already bought the lead from the first one before you bought it.
So a lot of people test that. They don't look at that and then they go, why am I not making money? These guys are making money, but. If you find an industry that is not even call center heavy, but they're call center based on like outbound and trying to qualify and all that, and they're okay, they actually have a dialer, right?
They're not just like hand bombing stuff, but they actually have a dialer buy that. From Co-Reg because if they're not buying from Co-Reg and everyone else in their industry is, I guarantee you, they're not used to the lead price that you're gonna give to them and they're gonna think it's a sweetheart deal.
And when you get it, you can overbid close the gap between the two and then put them more front bidding on the path. And if you bid high enough, there's now no more dedupes because you got them to click out before they de-duped on the other offers. So there are strategic ways to do media buying even, even more than just search, or even more than just like path buying.
But it's all the same concept, right? You target [00:23:00] people on something, whether it's a network or a site or whatever, and then you optimize based on X, Y, and Z. The biggest difference with those though, and what changes that up is that. Normally every other factor combined is maybe like 10% of an influence, but that de-dupe on those offers when that's your primary monetization, that's not 10%.
That's like 70. Like you'll have one guy that you should make $4 on and you make 10 cents. You'll have another guy that you should make $3 on and you make nothing, and then you have one that you should make nothing on and you make 50 bucks. So like, it just, it makes no sense, but the law of averages is what carries a lot of those through.
And then the cost of acquisition being cut after that, if only search existed, sweeps would be so hard to run because the cost of acquisition for their own users would be astronomical by comparison to SMS and email. So that's what they always do after it comes in. It's just all internal. but yeah, it's.
The, the game behind sweeps is crazy. [00:24:00] There's a lot of other stuff on the backend too of, of how the metrics are presented and how they work and what they do. But like if you ever wanna look at something that is a very high volume and very low monetary aspect per record, but high overall revenue sweeps is a great example.
And by sweeps, I mean co-reg.
Jim Banks: so you could probably answer this, be far better than I would ever be able to. Does it still exist? Because. Again, we used, we used to kind of approach people who had lots of data, right? And we would say, look, let us use your data we'll, we'll kind of, we'll, we'll run email offers and everything else. And whatever money we make net of any cost of running the platform, we'll split it 50 50.
Right? And that was the model that we used to kind work on. It worked incredibly well for us, and we were cutting checks left, right, and center to people for basically just saying, here's our database. And, you know, we would get all the fresh, fresh emails that would come in every day from, from, from whatever.
Again, you know, like if, if they were a, let's say they were a newspaper publication and they, somebody was putting in a classified ad in the newspaper, they captured [00:25:00] name, phone number, email address. And I said, well, what happens after the classifi is done? Nothing. Right? It's like, well, why aren't you monetizing that?
Right? I mean, there's so many ancillary opportunities, as you say, if they, if they're advertising that they've got a room to rent or something like that, right? There'd be so many other things that they could have, like, you know, landlord insurance or whatever it be, right? That you can kind of like, again, I, I think the.
The secret to being a good media buyer is to be able to think laterally. I mean, I'm sure if you, if you put 10 media buyers in a room, right, and ask them to define what a media buyer is, you would get 10 answers.
Rob Adler: Oh, hands down. Like no, like literally no que because here, let me give you an example that I always trick people with is I say question, are you a mailer or a media buyer? If you're buying email placements from an email, brokerage, like if you're buying from like a. The live intent type stuff or like those places where you can buy like a native ad inside of an email.
Are you technically a media buyer 'cause you're managing a placement, or are you technically a mailer because of the [00:26:00] channel of distribution. And that's where there's a lot more hybrids of those now than there ever was five years ago that didn't really exist.
Jim Banks: that I've always struggled with, I mean, again, I remember standing in the chandelier bar, my kind of home away from home, or as I like to call it, my American office. and I was standing with Mike Carney, who runs performance marketing jobs and Carrie Ner who, uh, had had just at that time, she just kind of got into, um, you know, she just got into to kind of.
Media buying at a sort of low level. And she's obviously gone on to do phenomenal things in there. But, you know, but we were talking to some guy who came up and he was sort of saying, we, we said, what do you do? And he goes, I'm a media buyer. And then he sort of, we said, what does, what does that entail? And he, he started talking and we all kind of, all three of us went.
So basically you're an affiliate manager, right? Because he wasn't, like, again, I think the whole definition of the media buying is something where it is, it's a, it's a bit of a subjective thing, right? Um. It's a big ecosystem. There's plenty of opportunity to say [00:27:00] people do SEO are media. Buy people that are doing PPC and media, buy people doing paid social media, buy, email, media, buy.
Right? So many different kind of strings to the bow, right? The one thing I'm, I'm kind of always, always struggle with is when people say I'm a media buyer, but all they're doing is buying ads using Advantage Plus on Facebook and everything, and they're just sitting back and letting Facebook do everything right.
To me, I don't really consider that to be, I mean, yes, I know it is. 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? You can't kind of dictate where you want it to go, how you want it to go, how much you wanna pay for it.
Rob Adler: Oh, of course. But, but, but here's the thing. The question is, is were they able to do it because it was luck or were they able to do it because they happened to put it in the algorithm actually covered for, let's call it. Shortcomings they had or knowledge gaps they had. Right. But the difference also is, is like that's the same [00:28:00] dude that's gonna try to do it again in three months and he's no longer your competitor.
'cause he bankrupted his company on ad spend. Like it's the, the I I deal with occasionally I see people like that. They're like, oh, we do P max and we do this and we set this up and we let it route ride and do this. And I was like, cool. So you guys are really data centric. Like you understand all your metrics, all your stuff.
I'm like, yeah, I do an audit. They didn't update their CPA for nine months, so every single acquisition, they were losing $20 where they thought they were making 50
Jim Banks: Yeah, I find it, I find it mind blowing. I mean in, in obviously in addition to being a media buyer, I also, um. I run an agency, right? And um, and quite often when I'm doing audits on people's, like Google Ads or Facebook Ads or whatever else, and I look and I see just how few changes. I mean, the people spending, you know, 3, 4, 5 grand a day, right?
And they don't make any changes at all on anything, right? So they never and analyze new entrants into the marketplace. People kind of, [00:29:00] again, maybe running outta money, so kind of dropping out of the auctions. Maybe they're right, dropped out because they just couldn't get it to kind of back out for them.
Right. And it, it sort of, it blows my mind that people are not, putting their foot down as hard as they can when they should be, and taking their foot off and kind of. Taken a back seat when they shouldn't be. Right? I mean, again, like I, I work with some clients who don't run promos for things like Black Friday, cyber Monday, right?
So generally speaking, what we tend to do is we'll just go, right, you know what, like maybe three or four days before it. I mean, it used to be like just a couple of days before, but now it's like people run Black Friday, cyber Monday deals in July, right? but, you know, but, but we, we used to say to people, look.
I'll tell you what we'll do. We'll, we'll just let every, every other advertiser beat the shit out of each other, right? And we'll just pause our ads. You know, if you, if you pause them for less than seven days on Facebook, you still can kind of get back into the auction where you were. If, if you do it after seven days, then you're gonna go back to learning and you gotta go back to the beginning and start again, right?
So. So I, I've always kind of said [00:30:00] like, just let's, let's take a pause. 3, 3, 4, 5 days, right? Let everyone beat the crap out of each other. We'll switch everything back on and we'll hoover up everything that's kind of left because they've run outta money and, or, or run outta product, right? So.
Rob Adler: So Google search now in the top industries reminds me of a lot of the legal system in the us. If you are in a civil case, it does not really matter if you or them are right. What matters is is can you drag it out long enough so that they lose the ability to have their attorney keep fighting? There are some pubs that do that in search now where they look for keywords and then they prop up in number two and they make your bids go all the way up.
And then once you cap out, they lower their bid depending on who else is bidding, and they just ramp up all of the volume you miss out on. So for a lot of these guys, it's not a big deal because like [00:31:00] Fortune five hundreds, they'll notice this like in minutes and then they'll just be like, oh, adjust the cap, like adjust the budget right.
Imagine bidding on a term that brings in like 500 clients for a Fortune 500, and then they stop bidding for three hours and you're the only one bidding and you're the top of the SERPs paying 20 cents. Like, that's the scary part is that, and I know you, you might remember who I'm talking about. They were on Wicked Fire and with them, I, I actually looked at like the total scale that they were running across with some of my scrapers.
They were on like 30,000 keywords. They were like, that's all the ones I found them on, which means that they were well over that in terms of what they were monitoring. But dude, they were monitoring every 20 minutes, every keyword using scrapers and then resuming or pausing the AdWords ads on it, and then just running it through the affiliate program to it.
And, and it wasn't all brand bids either, but that is a good example because when they do that, when I watch them do it to Fortune five hundreds, the Fortune five hundreds would never see it. They would never [00:32:00] understand that someone was doing that. They'd be like, it's weird today. We had a little extra competition.
Like that's all they saw. They didn't notice the CPC like doubled. And then they definitely didn't notice that when they got capped out. The same guy showed up every time. So this guy was doing this for years over a whole bunch of affiliate stuff. All within the terms. All within everything else. But like if those are the guys doing that years ago, and there are still people on the agency side manually optimizing stuff now without any tooling.
I can only imagine how big the gap is going to be in the next two or three years with the latest advancements of
Jim Banks: Yeah, because. Because the thing with, with agency models, so again, I, I started my first agency, right? Not because I wanted to run an agency, but I just wanted to have a line of credit that was given to me by, at the time it was Google and Yahoo, right? So I think with Google, I got a 30 day line of credit and with Yahoo got a 90 day line of credit to run whatever I wanted, right?
So I would, I could fire up a new ad account. I didn't have to pay for the traffic until, pretty much like. [00:33:00] 50 days after I'd spent the tra, the money on the traffic, know, so I could kind of run, run the ads, kind of make sure it kind of, it backed out okay. Right. Pocket the money and then pay the bill at the end of the, uh, the month.
And, and at this time we were getting a, an agent's discount. And, and I, I know a lot of other agency owners did the same thing. Right? They kind of set up an agency as a bit of a smokescreen. I think at one point in time it was about 50% of my business. My clients were internal projects and 50% were actual clients Right At, you know, and then that way there was a good different differentiation.
We would push the boundaries as far as we could all the time. Right. So they would all, I, I used to kind of have this, uh, I. This funny phrase where I'd say to people, if you're not receiving cease and desist, you're not trying hard enough, right? So, um, you know, you just need to push the boundaries as far as you can.
And, uh, you know, and again, I I used to, to kind of do the same thing. You're talking about the, the whole, the good old days of, um, you know, bid jamming, right? So if, if you were bidding on.
Rob Adler: Oh,
Jim Banks: [00:34:00] Sort of Yahoo's platform. you, you know, whatever the, the, the kind of, the person with the lots of money, they'd bid, say $12 a click.
You could bid 11 50, 11 99, but if the next bid down was like, 10 cents, then you would pay basically 11 cents. Right? So, so it was, you'd jam them in place and they would kind of run outta money pretty quickly, and then you could, you could kind of, uh, mop up. Once they ran outta money, you could kind of go back because your bid would become the number one at that time.
again, it.
Rob Adler: It's, it's crazy. Because like, because I, I know, I know the number one thing that these guys triggered on was whether or not a 5 cent increase got them placement above the default. And since they weren't branding, there wasn't a lot of CTR enforcement on the cert, on the specific ones. But with those, it was always funny just to see it.
'cause you'd see it move up. It'd be like number seven, the number five, the number three, the number two, and then it would go to number one and then stay. There for like two refreshes and then it would go to two, and then as soon as it was at [00:35:00] number two, it would stay there. And then as soon as number one would disappear, it would lower until it was number two, then it would go right back up to stay at number one and it would do this all the way down.
So it's like, it's interesting, like great use of scrapers. but like outside of affiliate or outside of like big brands with crap, tons of terms that they're trying to go on. 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? So it would be whatever,
Rob Adler: Oh, whatever, whatever you wanted. You could find it at eBay. Right? And, uh, you know, I think, I think one of the, uh, the classics was, uh, find suicide at eBay, right? It's just like, whoa, hang on a minute. I'm not sure I want, I wanna find that at all.
Jim Banks: Right?
Rob Adler: What was it? It was, um, they did that and then when Google brought up their, uh, what was it, the keyword in the ad through a token, then Amazon did it. And like people, dude, there were some bad ones on that they forgot to put on their negative list. Like find how to buy people on Amazon.
Like I think I remember that being one of them. But yeah, no, it's, it's always interesting to see how these guys play. [00:36:00] And then once you figure out that no one has the same cost because of a lot of variable factors, you start to really consider whether or not certain people are profitable if they've been running a certain amount of time.
So that's also another aspect of this too, is you can always edge 'em out, but if doing it for one day isn't enough, do you have the budget to do it for a month? That's where a lot of it
Jim Banks: I, I always like, like look at sort of new, new affiliates just sort of starting out. And one of the biggest mistakes I see them make is they're trying to spread themselves like so thin. They're trying to run 25 different offers and they're putting in, you know, like. You know, let, let's say that the kind of, the payout is 50 bucks or a hundred bucks or something like that, you know, and they're, they're setting up a test campaign on Facebook and they've got 10 of them going, and they've all got like a $5 budget, right?
And you, there's just no, like, you, you just need to give it. A bit of a chance, right? Because if you don't give it a chance, then you know, I've always kind of maintained whenever you run something new for the very first time, right? You need to [00:37:00] be prepared to lose every single penny you throw into it. And you probably need to commit to maybe a thousand, $2,000 just to kind of like, you know, get some, some, you know, some hard learn, hard learn lessons as to kind of what to do and what not to do, right? And then, you know, you just keep, keep working, keep working, keep working. And some of it'll be landing page, landing page speed ad copy. again, people keep going on about creative angles. I mean, some of the best campaigns I've had running, they've got an ad running on Facebook that's been running for, 2, 3, 4 years.
Right? It's not, it's the same,
you know, because even though the ad might be sort of the same, the audience refreshes. Every single day, right? Because people come into, into it and then people go out of it, right? If, if, if you've got your exclusions and you know, again, if it's a one and done, so if somebody is a somebody that you will exclude from ever seeing that again, right?
Then you can exclude them. And then that way the audience is just a fresh audience all the time, right? So they've never seen the ad. All they see is huge amounts of social proof, [00:38:00] right? It's got tens of thousands of likes, comments, and shares, right? And it's. Well, it must be good then, right? Whatever it is that they're promoting.
Right? And that's always the thing that, that's blown my mind, that people kind of go, they've run an ad for an hour, they spend $5 and go, it didn't work. What am I, what am I doing wrong? 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. At least in my head that makes sense for that kind of testing with the like epic crap. Tons of uh, terms, but then like real low budget per day and then like after three days, if it doesn't make anything, you kill it. And that surcharge search ar search arbitrage.
Like they'll do that. And I remember looking at them once and I was like, so here's how I test stuff. And I looked at them and they're like, here's how I test stuff. And I was just like, how do you make any money? Like it doesn't make any sense that like your test budget's 50 bucks and then you're like, oh, this won't work.
I'm like, what? Like that makes absolutely no sense. I'm over here testing shit for like a thousand, 1500, like stuff like that, and they're just like, [00:39:00] oh, $17, not enough margin. So it's, but the other thing is the targeting. And I really don't think that this is explained to people like I. Because media buying doesn't have a lot of standards.
Like there's no like go to school and learn media buying. Right? Like not, not really, not a good way. and if you do, those are the people that didn't make enough actually buying, so you're just gonna follow their direction. But the whole thing about this that I usually see, especially when I help people get into affiliate or into media buying or into whatever, is they always look at the scenario the way they've always been taught.
They go, how does this apply? And then how do I make it work? So they look at an offer and they go, how do I find people that need this offer instead of going, what are the types of people that would use this offer? And then how do I target them where they will also need other offers like this one. And if you're targeting the offer and reversing it to demos or intent, unless it's intent, it will almost always crash and burn unless it has a mass [00:40:00] appeal.
Like it applies to like at least one in five people that see it. But on the other, if you don't go through that, then you end up with a much bigger issue. With the majority of the traffic you're gonna bring in and how it's going to work and where it's going to convert and what, like it's just. They get pigeonholed without thinking.
They're getting pigeonholed because they think by targeting the demos, they can now pitch other things to the demos. And that's not the same as targeting the demo to prevent or present options. And that's where almost everyone that I've seen that starts out with like, let's try this one campaign, and then they crash and burn.
Let's try another one. The crash and burn, they finally get their success. It's usually on that. If they go again and do it again. I usually don't see those guys in a year. If they go back and they do the same targeting in the same way and they're like, if it works or not, they, I usually don't see them again in a year.
If I see the other guys and they go, well, I started running this and these [00:41:00] guys also need this, so I thought about maybe running that ad to them as well. That guy not only will be here in a year, but he'll be in five industries. Potentially with five different brands. That all lead to one internal aspect, and now you own the asset.
Now you own everything else. You control the language, the legal exposure, the marketing channels. You control everything, but you also control the liability. So the question is, is, is that your model or not? But once you switch up how they do the workflow, it's not about smarts. It's about the right stuff in the right order to make a proper evaluation.
If you prep this any question in the right way, any level of intelligence almost will answer it in the right way if you give them enough stuff. So you make that work on these and you start to be, you just have to be honest with yourself. No one wants to admit they just wasted two months and five grand of testing.
But the reality is, is that that's why so many people that are entrepreneurs always do that whole, like, I didn't lose money. I learned something. And I'm like, but did you though?
Because if you went and did it again, you didn't
Jim Banks: two [00:42:00] exits. I've sold two businesses, but I've had so many complete fuckups, right? Where I've completely pooch and like, it's been horrible, right? I've lost a ton of money, right? Uh, on the back of, again, like one of, but. I learned a lot from the, from the process of doing it right.
I mean, I, I abdicated some of the responsibility. I was running a travel site and I abdicated some of the responsibilities to some of my internal team at my agency. Um, this again, we're going back a few years and, um, you know, we were spending about, I think we were spending maybe 50 grand a month on.
Traffic for hotels. Right. And, uh, and again, hotels was, was a very phenomenal, vertical for me. Did really well on the back of it. and a lot of it was, was misspelling brand terms Right. At the time, because that's, that's what, what worked. You know, but, but we had, um, I think we, we had sort of one month where I think we spent like a hundred grand on traffic and we generated 50,000 in commissions.
Right. So I, I remember kind of talking to the two or [00:43:00] three people I'd asked to kind of look after this. I said, I. In what scenario is basically pissing 50 grand up the wall, right? A good sort of outcome, right? Because we don't own the client ever, right? All we're doing is we're ultimately selling the traffic.
We buy the traffic on search, we're selling it to, to um, to a hotel chain in the hope that that person kind of converts and becomes a, a kind of hotel booking, right? And I think when you look at it, right, again, hotels is one of those classic cases. As a, as an affiliate, you get paid right on the consumed bookings, right?
So most people are bookings again, like it, I dunno if you're going to, um, affiliate summit in in
Yeah, And then the following affiliate summit in January, right? So a lot of people are, again, I I know, like I'm looking at flights and hotels for basically next, next year, right? January of next year.
So if I, if I bought some traffic today right? To kind of promote. That particular hotel. Right. And let's say it was me. I saw that the ad, I clicked on the [00:44:00] ad, made a booking, and my booking was for the middle of January next year. Right. I wouldn't get any money on that booking until probably of March, something like that, that that'll be around about the timeframe I'm thinking.
I. Jesus. That's an awful of cash flow to kind of, to float, right? Because I pay for the traffic now, right? In a lot of cases, even with credit, I'm still kind of best case scenario might, I might pay for the ads in a month's time, right? 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 I've ever had in my life to be like, you should look at email. Because the difference between that time to you get paid and not is emailing like three or four other offers to every person, and it wouldn't even cost a lot. And then, like, this is, I, I just did one of these videos for Boardwalk specifically on this, is that by using like declines and by monetizing your offer walls and stuff, you're not just making more money.
You're [00:45:00] also changing where that money comes from, which completely modifies your risk profile. You can have your core business and get paid on and, and get completely screwed on all commissions, but if half your revenue is from a whole bunch of different stuff in different industries, you've now hedged your risk and you're not gonna take a complete loss.
So like, but without that, you're talking about what money layout of seven, eight months potentially. And like the, what's the comp gonna be? Like 30 bucks? Potentially 50. A hundred. So like, at that point. No level of factoring is ever gonna get you to your ROI positive on that, on that conversation. It's just not,
Jim Banks: Yeah. But again, I, I, I'm, I'm amazed at how many affiliates are quite happy to kind of like abdicate all responsibility for the. The end user Right to the person that they're ultimately gonna be paid by. Right. And really, you need, again, I've, I, I used to, when we, we used to run a lot of host and post offers, and it would be, can we do host and post?
And if people said no, we'd be well, then it's a pass from us if we can't do it, if we can't. Capture the data [00:46:00] and then send it to you right In, in an API then we're just not interested in running that offer. Right. Because we need to own them. Because as you say, like if, if I have a, a kind of page where they're filling in one of my forms, right.
Once they fill that information in on that basis, again, if it was a hotel, you go, right. Okay. If I know, if I know somebody's in the UK and they're going to the, to stay in Vegas at a hotel, right. They're going to need, like, they're gonna need probably, Car. Car kind of taken to the airport. Maybe a show for car, maybe flight, maybe insurance, right?
There's so many upsells that you can kind of make on the back of that, right? Because people don't just do that. And I think that's probably where, I know we're gonna talk a lot about AI over the course of this, this. Podcast, not this particular episode, but certainly in future, I'm sure the, the word AI will come up all the time, right?
But what, what, what, what you're finding now is that so many of the kind of tools like Claude and Perplexity, right? They're now, you can just type something in and they'll give you all the suggestions and I can just see at some point in time, [00:47:00] right? Those suggestions are, are gonna be, you know, dripped in between the suggestions and the citations will be ads, right?
For all of the different things that are kind of relevant to that. Yeah.
Rob Adler: That's already being tested.
Jim Banks: so there we go. I mean, I, I didn't think it was, but if it is, then yeah, absolutely. Makes.
Rob Adler: I'm, I'm the one testing it, but Yeah. yeah, it's, but no, you're a hundred percent right. And that's, and that's the, that's the, the kind of like future proofing that, like if I look at the future right now, I'm not gonna say a lot because it could really go 50 different ways and it. For one of the main reasons, it's not just based on the tech right now, it's also based on like politics and economy and all sort of shit for like growth potential and shit.
But the stuff that I've been able to do, and I won't go into it deep here, but I'll just say this to set up for the next time we talk about it. I had a friend look at the workload that I currently do, like a day in terms of like what I'm doing among, 'cause you know, I have Boardwalk, I have like my own SaaS that I do other stuff
with and
Jim Banks: a father [00:48:00] recently, right?
Rob Adler: And I'm also a father. I'm, I'm also a recent dad. So with all of that together, oh, thank you. When I, when I am able to sleep, I will make sure that I say thank you and actually can maintain eye contact. But with the, uh, the setup this has right now is like. When you have the traffic coming into certain landers, and then you have the ability to have AI do, let's call it more traditional jobs, like maybe they audit something, maybe they just make sense of your data, right?
Like, like how many people now take the last 30 days of their lead sale, lead sales, put it into chat, DPT, and go find where the top state is. Like that's a basic level, right? Then they don't think to put in all the denials and go, why do we find patterns in all of our declines? Right? Like find patterns for that.
The difference now is, is people are actually replacing like full jobs. So I work on a lot of auto autonomous agent type stuff. I think my workload right [00:49:00] now for one of my projects is the equivalent 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 put in a lot of time to understand this and it's my background.
But the, the thing is, is like if me in my office at home can do this, like while sitting here with a Papa John's pizza, then I can only imagine 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. It's like, it, it is. And it's funny 'cause like we have some of these guys that are like, we need a year of compliance for reasoning to make sure we can trust it.
And I got other guys that are just like, I've been having chat GPT write my email bodies for four weeks now. And I'm like, oh. So it's like there's a, there's a lot here and there that it can go. It, the problem is, is people get too wrapped up into it and then the guardrails don't go on and then it does something [00:50:00] stupid like, forget a disclaimer and then you get screwed. The consolidation of this has led to a very, very, very large aspect of data consolidation and data interpretation, because now you can actually set something up where you just send a CSV with yesterday's leads, information to that, and then it compiles a report and just emails it to you so that when you walk into the office, you have what normally would've been five analysts, entire job.
And then you literally have that, and then you go back and you go, now how would we address or optimize this to make more money? 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. I mean, we used to run like lead gen offers, and we would have, every single day we would get a CSV file to basically say, these leads could not be processed. Right. Invariably it was because somebody had mistyped their email address or mistyped their phone number, right?
So if, if they mistyped their email address right, then somebody, we, we would send this file as a batch file to the Philippines, right? Let's say we were getting paid $40 [00:51:00] for the offer, right? We did, we had a kind of rev share with the people in the Philippines. We would give them the file, they would phone the people that that.
We, you know, that couldn't, um, you know, that the email wasn't working and asked them to kind of correct the email and tell us what it was, and we put it in the file and then we could process that. And similarly, if we had the email address correct, but the phone number was missing, we would email 'em and say, you're missing your phone number.
Right? But so much of that now can, when all of it now can be done through ai. And at some form of GBT, right, where you don't need to kind of like rely on a person at the other end to kind of do that work. You can kind of do it auto automated. Um, and again, I, I think we were probably making probably an extra 1500 to two grand a day right on that batch file because, everything else apart from the lead was perfect, apart from some clumsy kind of big, fat fingered person typed in.
An extra at in the email address. Right, and that's, that's a one, it's a ones and zeros. Is it a valid email address? No. Right. [00:52:00] Rather than kind of going, okay, well if we can't process the lead, it's like, well, if, if you look at the closely, you'll see that it's actually one digit that's wrong. And, and that's it.
That's the only difference.
Rob Adler: And that's, dude, if I had a way. Of being able to attribute how much money I've lost because I never did a string replace in email addresses for a comma into a period, and then reverified, I would probably jump out my first floor window right now, like, because that alone is the easiest. It's one line in almost any programming language, and literally commas cannot exist in emails per the RFC.
So by doing that, there's no downside to doing it, and there's only an upside to correcting the data. It's like doing that with the phones. Like if someone forces the dashes in, but you don't support the dashes if you still have the last two numbers. 'cause you didn't truncate them because of the dashes.
You just removed the dashes and you're fine. I'd rather let the consumer convert how he wants to convert. If he wants to do parentheses and dashes, do parentheses and dashes. As long as [00:53:00] my final version is just numbers, I don't care, but. That right there is also a huge disconnect for a lot of these guys.
And then because one is missing, they go, it's not a valid lead, so I don't wanna buy it, therefore it doesn't make sense. And they, they're happy to lose the money. And I'm like, I don't understand. That doesn't make any sense. Like it, it just, a lot of media buyers that I come across. Their involvement starts when the click clicks an ad and their involvement ends when it gets to whatever page they're running to or clicks off their lander to go to wherever the monetization point is.
That's pretty much where they live. The problem is, is they don't think about what happens prior to that or what happens after that, and that can change if you don't get the conversion on first hit. That is usually a good amount of people. So it really comes down to just understanding your audience and understanding how to do it properly and set it up the same way.
but yeah, the, the next couple months especially are going to be very, very [00:54:00] interesting to see how this goes. but for those of you that do mess with the AI at all, I will leave you with this as an example to try, if you can load up your. History per day from your traffic source, and it all goes to one offer or one lander or one place or whatever it is.
And you can also load up your conversions and your click-throughs from your lander and put all of them into GPT. It can identify which of yours not only gets lower click-through, but higher EPC, but also the inverse. And that will help you refine your actual monetization. You'd be surprised how many times.
An offer that crushes for everyone sucks for you. And that was the difference between losing 40% and making a hundred percent. Those offers make a huge difference 'cause you don't know why they're not converting. Are they really not liking the lander or are they not converting because maybe they're a duplicate.
Maybe they got D qed, or maybe the advertiser decided not to give you attribution for it. All [00:55:00] of those are logical and all of those get taken care of when you host your own stuff. 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 like, shoot the breeze with you. Every week, Tuesday at two o'clock. I think we'll kind of leave it here. We've got so much stuff to talk about. I've got no doubt in my mind we'll kind of cover so, so many more things in, in great detail.
and again, we've, we've already talked about at some point in time in the not too distant future, we're gonna have some great guests coming on to kind of share their stories and their. Tips, some tricks on how to do things in in the media buying world. It just remains for me to say. If you haven't already subscribed to the channel, make sure you do.
If you are listening to us on a podcast rather than watching us on YouTube, then just follow us wherever you kind of get your podcast from, uh, and just look for the media buying podcast. So thanks a lot everyone, and we'll see you on the next episode.
Rob Adler: And make sure you follow. I need dopamine.
Jim Banks: Peace out baby.
Rob Adler: See you.

Jim Banks
CEO | Podcast Host
Jim is the CEO of performance-based digital marketing agency Spades Media.
He is the founder of Elite Media Buyers a 5000 person Facebook Group of Elite Media Buyers.
He is the host of the leading digital marketing podcast Digital Marketing Stories and co-host of this podcast the Media Buying Podcast.
Jim is joined by great guests and shares some great stories of business success and failure and some solid life and business lessons.

Rob Adler
CRO
Robert Adler is the Chief Revenue Officer at Boardwalk Marketing, where he leads growth strategy and revenue operations.
With over 25 years in Affiliate & Digital Marketing, Robert is known for turning data into strategy and strategy into results.
He specializes in scaling high-performance teams, aligning sales and marketing, and driving predictable growth.