Expert Tips on AI, Data Management, and the Media Buying Revolution

[00:00:00] 

Introduction and Catching Up
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So welcome to the media buying podcast. I'm here with Rob, Rob, the co-host. How are you, my friend?

I am doing pretty good, man. Now, now that I know what podcast I'm on, I, I definitely, I'm doing a little bit better. I, I thought I was in the wrong room or something. but no, it's good. 

Affiliate Summit and Mailcon Insights
---

just got back from Affiliate Summit. Just got back from Mailcon, presented at Mailcon and then, stood outside Affiliate Summit because that's just how I do affiliate summits now.

So you did, you did Lobby Con? 

yeah, pretty dude. So here's a big change. I don't know if you saw, or heard of rather, 'cause I know you didn't go this time.

they actually, and I don't know if it's the event or not, but I'm pretty sure it was. But they had, they actually put security down by, remember Smoker's alley,

like right there on the outside? They, that escalator right there, they had security checking badges.

Wow.

Yeah. So instead of me going in and actually seeing the, everyone else there, I just pulled people out of the conference to come have meetings, and it's just much easier that way. But yeah, they, they really set that up this time, which I mean, props to [00:01:00] them, it's not gonna affect anything. But there's, there's a lot of, it was interesting to see the priorities change and how a lot of stuff is changing, especially with, the changes in the industry and AI and all the good stuff. And it's, it was a very eye-opening experience for, a lot of different reasons. But yeah, I, I can go into that later.

But yeah, I would go into a lot right now if I play.

So have you managed to catch up? I mean, it's, it's funny, so just, just, just before you answer that question, I, I was chuckling all the time. I, I kept seeing. Photos of you. 

Weight Loss Journey
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And first off, I mean like, I know you've lost a lot of weight, but it was like even more apparent.

I dunno if it was because you'd gone back to your red shirt. 

I was just used to seeing the red, under Armour shirts busting at the seams, and 

now they're literally hanging off you. So you need to go and get some new, new kind of gear that fits more appropriately, right? 

Yeah, if only that wasn't the already smaller shirt. [00:02:00] That's the problem.

So that actually was the downsize. Yeah. Uh, yeah, 85 pounds is a lot of weight.

Yeah. It's funny, I, I, I, I, I've had a bit of a gastric problem the early part of this week, right? So Monday through, like today, I've had no food. So consequently I've lost five pounds just in this four day period, right? So I'm now down, down 80 pounds from my peak. so between us, we've lost probably most affiliates, right?

1 65 is, that is like.

I was about to say a A full person. 

full person. Yeah. 

much. 

but yeah, but this, obviously this isn't about weight loss or what have you. It's again, I just think for 

me it was like, it was all about the health, taking the strain off my knees and hips and blah, blah, blah. exactly.

but I, again, I, I was obviously really interested.

I mean, there was so many meme worthy photos of you, right? Where you and Scott were presenting at, 

Mailcon, Yep, 

we'll talk about that in a second as to how that went. 

but yeah, but I, I'm, I'm, I was like, it, it seemed, seemed every single time I saw a post, you were in it in [00:03:00] one way, shape, or form, right?

I dunno if you've just got good PR or, you've got some sort of voodoo stuff or whatever, I, I don't know. But, I'm good at photo bombing and especially when you have these people with extremely expensive cameras and you're just like, you're seeing 'em line it up. you lean back a little bit and you point at the camera and they're like, that's not natural. And you're like, it's cool, but just send it to me after. so there may or may not be between six and 15 photos of me randomly pointing from up to 80 feet away from the camera.

But yeah, I'm gonna wait for this to come out.

so you you presented at Mailcon, so how did that 

go? 

It was good. 

AI in Media Buying
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Um, so I did my session on basically leveraging ai, not replacing people with it, but basically, let's say augmenting, augmenting your workflows with ai. and most people, you know, in the presentations I normally see are like, you know, use chat GPT to write copy and all that. Those are basic examples.

I didn't want to do that. So what I did instead is, is, uh, I gave away an example of like how to use [00:04:00] classification based on what is performed in the previous, campaigns you've had with that consumer. you know, sales psych principles, right? Fear missing out. Is it low quantity? You know, like whatever it is gonna be and it looks at what they've had.

You know, obviously you have to feed your data into it, but it looks at what you had for like on the subject line, what prompted the open on the body, what prompted the click, and then it takes your new creative, you're about to send. Always check with your attorney because this might change compliance, but it takes your new one that you wanna send and uses those psych principles to adapt it around those.

So it'll be like, I think the example I used was like Gold's Gym and Gold's Gym is like lose weight this, before the summer. And it was like, this guy reacts a lot better to fear of missing out. So it's it's almost too late to lose the weight for summer. And I was like, oh, that's a pretty good subject line.

I'm like, we can look at that. and then I did the same thing to the body, and the body started using a lot more salesy lines, but not ones that sounded salesy, but I was like, that's, that's a good example. So that'll be my example. so [00:05:00] I'm giving away those scripts, the prompts, all that kind of stuff to the people that were there, as well as the slides so that they can take it home and look at it. but basically. Did a broad stroke view of this is what LLMs really are in terms of like how they work and what it is. And then the next one was that example. Then the next one was how to do that example using code instead of manually. So if you did wanna automate a little bit, you could. And then the next example was how I orchestrate that and 60 other different pieces of a pipeline completely automated. So everything from, optimizing and figuring out demographics of what performs for users to the point where maybe that user when they go to the lander, sees a version of the landing page specific to their psych principles that'll force them or have them convert higher. or it talks about complaints that they've had in the past. The, the kind of stuff like that is, it was always possible, but it was not logical with the cost to do prior to a lot of this. Now it's, and it can be done a lot more easy.

Because it always used to be 

so that 

when I was.

Email Marketing Strategies
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mailing, it was like you would do a a [00:06:00] mail blast, right? So literally you would send everyone the same email. At the same time, And it 

it landed or it didn't land. I mean we, we used to do, we, we would obviously check to make sure it got into the inbox first by sending a small sample, make sure it got round the whole compliancy things on the, the ESP side of things.

but you know, but once we got into the inbox, we're like, we can press send bang. But I think now if you look at it sort of today, I mean, again, so much of that would be, well this person always opens the emails first thing in the morning, or this person opens them lasting at night.

So it would make a lot more sense to try and get it so that it lands on the top of the, the kind of the inbox round about the same sort of time that they're actually opening the inbox is if it's 

buried on page two right of, of the emails they have in their inbox. They may not get to see it until a little bit later on.

Then it may just kind go, swipe left and it's gone. Whereas, if you can Oh yeah.

Plan, plan accordingly. And I know that some of the, the, the kind of the, the junkie ESPs have this, oh we'll, we'll choose [00:07:00] the right time to send. It's I bet you don't, I bet you don't really know for that individual person It's, it's one of those things where ESPs do whatever they can to help you on, let's say, higher end engagement. Because the higher end engagement is what allows them to sell, send more mail off their resources without having an issue, right? Like that's why, that's why you have, like, if you're under this open rate, we need to look at what's happening with your list.

Maybe it's not properly targeted if you're under this, click through or, or over this complaint, whatever. It's, but the interesting part is you can relate this to so much more now. Like with, with the speed being a limiting factor before, right? I could do it if I had enough compute, I could do it on email and like, you know, write a custom, piece of copy around like a demographic, right?

Like, like you are 25 to 30 5-year-old male from this state or whatever. So let's infer some stuff from that, but with the speed and cost now. You can have them hit a landing page and inline, literally write completely different copy around the pain [00:08:00] points that they're experiencing in their state right now. So it's like, oh, auto insurance. Like we have auto insurance right now and we want to help you get auto insurance. By the way, you're from Florida, did you know Florida doesn't have the same laws on auto insurance as the others because of X, Y, and Z? Is that gonna help with the sale? I don't know. Maybe the person is the kind that needs to research in which maybe they don't need to research now.

'cause you just gave all of

it. So we've had somewhere we've tested, like with LLMs, right? You give them a lot of information and you see whether or not does it contribute to more accuracy or less? Is it confusing them or helping them? Same thing with users, if you're giving them too many choices. What are they being distracted from? It's not, what are they going to, it's where, oh, you're distracted from the thing that makes me money. That's a problem. So it's about figuring out really how they work together and how they kind of, play into like the overall life cycle. Um, but like low hanging fruit, right? Is you just figure out what the user will respond to and then you just have the email match that, and the lander match that. [00:09:00] So if the person's passive and a researcher or something, like the average hits before they submit a form is like four or five times, or they like click the email four or five times, but never convert. Maybe you need more aggressiveness, maybe you need more proof and more sighted sources or whatever it is. But if it's the opposite, maybe you don't need at all. Like maybe if it's a viral product, they're just like, it's the new thing. Oh my God, right now delivery two days nuts. some people will convert on that,

TikTok probably would. always look at the aspect of what they can apply it to, but they always scope it into what they know and they don't think about that. And this is an equalizer.

This allows someone that's really good at

Ad Targeting and Optimization
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We used to do that a lot with, like with, with Google Ads. I mean, again, like they've, they've had these things called add customizers for a long time, 

right? You can basically insert a token, and you can do a countdown, right? if, if people think that, that, they're likely to miss out, right?

it, it creates that element of scarcity. So we, we would have this sort of thing, we would have a countdown timer 

that, for, for, for a particular campaign, we'd have [00:10:00] a countdown timer that we would reset every month. That it would start on the, the 20th of the month. 'cause most, most day, most months would have at least 30 days in them.

So it would out start 10 days from the end of the month. And count down. And it would say something like, say, say dog owners in Phoenix get, 20% off offer ends in 10 days, nine days, eight 

days, seven days, So I didn't have to go and change the ads. The, the ad customizer would go, this is when it's due to start, this is when it's due to finish.

And we could, we could, like I said, we could, we could do it either Arizona or if we wanted to, we could actually go even more granular and more specific, the specific, city that they live in or, or 

Oh yeah. It, it's, and, and that's the thing is like we've never, and I know this is gonna

be cliche as hell, but we've never been at a point where someone, or anyone has the level of an equalizer right now that people have with ai. Like you can literally understand how to do media buying. And by using guidance, let's call it, I'm not gonna say they're gonna do it for you, but let's, if you're using [00:11:00] guidance, you can actually have it explained to you how to understand email marketing from the perspective of what you already know from ads or from social. and that's been one of my fun little tricks when I'm trying to learn something is I'm like, look at my conversation history. Tell me what you believe I have a good grasp on and relate this to that. And then all of a sudden I completely get it and I understand everything there. But more importantly, that's just so I can understand what it thinks it understands, right?

if I just wanted to do the copy, it can just do the copy. If I want it to do it with creatives, it can do a creative, but if I don't know what to tell it to do, it's gonna do exactly what I tell it to do. So like you can't put in high converting ad copy home home security. it'll literally just be like a house and it's gonna be like a big shield on it, and then the shield's gonna look like glowing and you're gonna be like, this is it. But with proper information and proper setup, you can do it even on ads,

Yeah. 

like even on, 

used to be [00:12:00] if, if I was gonna go into a vertical that I clearly wasn't the demo target demographic, right? So if it, if it was, make up beauty stuff, cosmetics for 22-year-old females, then I'm not the right person to necessarily be writing ad copy.

what I would always look at is, well, you've gone outta a focus role, but I've, don't worry, I've got you off. There we go. There we go. 

I got it. 

Cool. yeah, so it's I would always. Enlist the help of somebody who was that target demographic to write the ad copy and give me advice on what to do.

I don't even 

mean to do that anymore. I can just go, you are a 22-year-old, beauty influencer, blah, blah, blah. And, and that way I can get all the information that I used to get right by having to hire somebody by using an LLM, right? in that respect, it's 

been so much easier to do that.

And that's, that's the thing that kind of grinds my gears a little bit. When you see some of these kind of groups that people are in and they're sort of saying, well, this is kinda what's working for me. This is what working for me. It's like that, that that's not really how you should be tackling this.

You [00:13:00] shouldn't be 'cause if somebody says.

Same ad copy, same this, same that, same that. Then you've got 10 of the same things. People saying the same things, doing the same things, targeting the same thing, same campaign, same ad group, same ads, right? Whatever it is, it's all the same, right? So in the see of sameness, you're just never gonna win.

You need to be 

zigging when everyone else is zagging. So what? What can you do that's different than everyone else? Do that

Yep.

Challenges in Traffic Acquisition
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And that's so here's, here's an example actually specific to, Facebook, but specifically, I, I, I have a friend, he's learning social. I'm guiding him a little bit. He's doing some other stuff and learning from someone else. But the one thing I told 'em is I was like, you gotta, you gotta think about it, obviously from your perspective, which is obviously your core, you know your core product, you're trying to get leads, you're trying to get sales, whatever it is. But you also have to think about it from their perspective and their perspective. I don't mean the consumer, I mean the ad network that you're buying through. Because when you, for example, say you want to bid on the same demographic and there's overlay, the [00:14:00] question is, is depending on the place you're at, right?

Are you bidding against yourself? Are you getting bidding against other people? Does it only say before it leaves your account, this is the only one that we're gonna accept from him right now? Or is it literally just all of your bids are thrown into the queue and it decides what it is? And if you know which one that is, you can actually start to make sense out of. Optimization at a whole new

level because then you can actually figure out what the differences are, but they don't allow that. So like with mine, for example, is I had him screenshot the demographic targeting and I had him just, just the screenshot itself, like literally just these people with this intent and this, and he had some interests, affinities and stuff like that.

And I just had 'em put it into, chat GBT five. And I was like, just paste this and paste your other one and say, identify the demographics and gimme an estimate on the percentage of overlap or whatever it was. And then the follow up was like, how would you change these to eliminate the most overlap without impacting my ability to target the right [00:15:00] consumer?

And it was like, well, add this, add this, add this. And of course half the shit was. Not real. half the stuff I told it to do was not a

feature, but the other half was very, very logical. And it was looking at the fact of once he passed in, like uh, the MCP so he could pull in his stats from his actual clicks. He was like, did you ever notice that this niche only gets West Coast people and this one only gets East Coast? And I'm like, so this whole time you've been driving up potentially your own cost and throwing off your attribution and your pixel is now seasoned across two completely different demographics based on where they live.

And you didn't think that that might cross pollinate in a bad way.

but that's, you don't know what you don't

know. So it's, that kind of stuff in the level of insight. Imagine if I wasn't guiding him and he just went, does this make sense? Is this possible that this does it? And a lot of times it has the tooling to actually look up the FAQ or look up something where someone wrote about a test and it'll have some kind of information.

I, it's like I wa. 

a good equalizer.

mean, I worked for a company that, that was [00:16:00] based in, North Carolina. So it was in sort of, eastern time zone. And and they had I think they had 55 salespeople working there, like real physical salespeople that got paid between 35 grand and 250 grand base. And then 

commissions on top, they got exactly the same money for renewals as they did for new business. And, and I walked in there, I'm like, this is just crazy. so I said, so what's the, what's the kind of the, the process for distributing leads? Well, whoever answers the phone gets the lead, right?

And I'm like, really? so they said, yeah, so. And, And, like at five o'clock, right? Well, actually 4 55 on the dot, there was a guy in the office who sort of sat in the middle, it's a big 26,000 square foot office. He sat in the middle, you know the song, the House of Pain jump around, 

right? It starts with a duh 

duh. He would play that song at 4 55 and by the time the song finished, everyone in the office had left at five o'clock. So I sort of, I'm sort of 

sitting there [00:17:00] thinking, I said, so I, I foolishly said, so can I ask a question? If I'm in la right? And I'm working for a big company and I want somebody to do SEO, and I've seen one of your ads, and I pick up the phone and phone the office, who answers the phone?

Well, nobody does. And I'm like. Why? Why don't you 

have like key account managers that look after big accounts, people that look after a particular vertical. So maybe people that look after retail or lead gener, like whatever it might be, right? People that look after geographies. East coast, west coast, right?

So if the West Coast people would probably start later, finish later the East coast people, start, do, do normal work hours. 

but you know, but there'll be times when everyone's in the office if you had to have a meeting. That might may be when you do that, but you always make sure you've got enough people to cover the phones and whatever.

I mean, I see loads of people complaining that they're getting a lot of no pickups on there. paper call. It's like I'm 

sending in the calls, they say they're open between nine and six, right? But I get calls and they're not answering. I'm like, have you looked to see specifically what time the no [00:18:00] answers are?

Is it between eight o'clock and nine o'clock? Even though they say they're there, right? How many people are there? Is 

it one person? If it's one person and they're on the phone talking to somebody and it takes 20 minutes to do a call, right? There's no chance of them picking up anymore. Right?

So as much as, as they're saying, they have availability, your data tells you they don't. So you should be 

looking at that data. And even if you need to carve off 90 minutes at the front, 90 minutes at the end, you know, this is, this is your business, not their business. You are not 

there to indulge their business.

You are, you are there to look after your bottom line. You are spending money 

on calls that are not backing out. Not validating, right? So 

just, just be smart about it. I mean, and, and there's so much, so much data to have to be able to kind of make those decisions. You can kinda look at it and go, this is what this, this problem is.

That's what I should be doing to kind of rectify that.

The, the vast majority of people that are on, and I'm gonna generalize and say the traffic acquisition side, [00:19:00] right? The guys that are really, really good, like really good, if you talk to them, they usually have three or four different levers they can pull on targeting with whatever topic you pick, right?

you'll be like, I wanna do debt. They'll be like, okay, so subprime debt. Then there's also decent credit, but also still let's call it liquid, has a problem debt. Then that goes into, people that don't have jobs, people that are unemployed, credit repair, da, da, da, right? There's that, and then there's the majority of people. Who don't even think about the most logical, like flags like for example, timeframe. They don't look at like the amount of affiliate managers at networks that could catch fraud so easily by just looking at the clicks versus conversions on an hourly basis. Grouped by publisher is insane. that was, 

little pivot table. Quick report. And it just jumps out at you, right? You can even like 

color 

right 

if it's above this kind of color code it, and we'll put a kind of like flag in that and, and [00:20:00] keep a, keep an eye on it, right? 

'cause 'cause ultimately that's the quality that could jeopardize your entire quota with the advertiser.

They could 

go, you know what, we don't want any traffic from you, but all these guys are 

good. I'll just switch off the bad ones. It's no, because my buyers hate the quality of the traffic. And you've diluted it by sort of sending some, some rubbish in with some some good stuff.

See? That's, and that's the secret, right? Is that that's what a lot of people outside of the industry don't understand about what's in the industry is that even when you pause someone, there is a decent chance, I'm not gonna say good, I'm not gonna say amazing or guaranteed, but there's a decent chance you are gonna see that dude's traffic anyway in

about 48 hours from

a different id.

But guess what? Now you're overpaying for it. 'cause now you don't have the right ID to look at the quality. So you should have just kept it, you know, logical and transparent.

but, but the question is, is who's technically in the wrong there? 'cause I could argue both sides and that's where the disconnect

[00:21:00] is.

and that was also the thing, so when I ran my affiliate network, I used to say, my job is to protect the advertisers from the affiliates and the affiliates from the advertisers, right? And I was 

just there to act as the middleman and take a bit of margin, right? To facilitate ensuring that what was sent to the advertisers was legit good quality.

And, 

at the, at the appropriate level that I said we would deliver, right? So if we get a 

quota, we would deliver the quota. and in most cases, if we were not gonna hit the quota, we would either. Panic like shit, and find ways to make it right. Because if we 

didn't hit it one month, then we wouldn't get it the following month.

Because if you say you can do a 

thousand needs a day and you only deliver 50, right? You, you're 950 in the hole. So they're gonna go, well, I'm not gonna give you like, a thousand needs next month. I'm gonna give you 50, right? 'cause that's what you did this month, 

right? So you are, you are, you are, you are in deep trouble as a result of that.

so it's, again, it's, it's really important that you actually sort of model out what you're able to do. And it's, so [00:22:00] again, I think sometimes you need to look at your traffic mix, right? Because, if you're, 

if you're, if you are taking traffic just from, say people say, I'm doing SEO, right? And it's kind of like, yeah, but is it like really dodgy black hat SEO kind of that, that's driven driving that.

Oh yeah. 

and if it is, like what, what sort of steps are you taking to mitigate for, the potential implications of that, right? But it again, it's like you could end up with a quota of a thousand and you could get a thousand in 20 minutes, right? And you're like, well, 

we've blown, we've done a thousand leads in in 20 minutes, but we've got a thousand 

for the month.

And what are we gonna do? We, we, we've given some to other people and they're not gonna be able to get anything in because this person's just taking it all. And,

And God, God forbid their quality's bad. 'cause then a hundred percent of your test budget just went to shit. Like you, you don't have a test budget anymore, it's gone. Oh yeah. No, that kind of stuff is, is always bad. And there is a lot right now that, let me, let me think about how I can phrase this. [00:23:00] There's, there's a lot of the aspect right now where networks are, let's say. Filling or changing quality as a business model instead of doing it. You know what I'm saying? Like it's, it's interesting to me because like one of my personal pet peeves for the affiliate side is buckets. Bucketed offers. For those of you that don't know what bucketed offers are, the whole concept is, is that you're running traffic based on whatever, right?

So like auto insurance, auto warranty, debt doesn't matter. But the buyers are all a different price point, right? Someone might buy at $8, someone buys at 15, someone buys at 30, but you want the payout of 30, right? So you say 30. This is why I always tell people, go off EPC. Don't go off payout because it's irrelevant. But with the 30, what'll happen is, is that if you sell that lead to someone that pays them, let's call it 20, and then you sell a lead to someone that they pay, let's say nine. And [00:24:00] then you sell one that does two. Now you've tipped the bucket, but now you're gonna get told you got a conversion on the lead that was $1 or $2.

But they're gonna tell you that that lead was worth $30. So have fun with your segmentation and your Facebook pixel is now completely useless. And that's why, like I always tell people, if there is a rev share versus a flat rate, I will always take the rev share. Because if it's only worth 20 cents to you, I wanna know that Unless I have another way of making money, I shouldn't be sending that at all,

like at all.

But you don't know that if it's all bucketed or grouped or whatever it

Yeah, I mean, I, I work with a, an e-commerce merchant that are doing like crazy amounts of sales on a monthly basis. crazy. it's, it's sort of like close to seven figures a month That they're doing, 

which is just insane. but I keep looking at it and they're, they're running a lot of Google Ads.

They're running sort of mainly Google shopping ads, Predominantly sort of Performance Max, which is again, [00:25:00] it's sort of like, it's, I think Performance Max exists to help struggling advertise. They load the playing field to that level rather than raising it to the level that people like me were running it 

at.

so they made it a kind of mediocre product for everyone, rather a good product for everyone. 

but, but what what I found was they were ru running towards a sort of target sort of, ROAS target return on ad spend. But they had products that were selling for, two bucks, three bucks.

And they had products that were selling for 2000, 3000. Right. But they were having, they had them sort of in the same campaign and asset group and everything else. And I'm thinking this is just insane. Like, so the ones that were 

coming in at sort of, $2, like, so the $2 product, they were spending maybe $40 to acquire a $2.

But the ones that were coming at $2,000, they might be spending say, 500 to kind of acquire that one. So they look at it and go, it blends out. It looks good. Right? But you know, you think, well, 

again, if, but if you think of all that money that you spent on the lower [00:26:00] products, if you'd put that in a separate bucket, right?

And taken everything under five bucks, neither said, let's not even bother bidding on anything like that. Or put it in a 

campaign and put a penny, like, we'll bid a penny. Put it in a, in a sort of a, a standard shopping campaign. All those products bid a bid a penny, and if we get a single sale, great.

It's probably,

it'll absolutely, I mean, I, I've got campaigns now with clients where they've got like 10,000, 20,000 SKUs, right? We've got campaigns. We, we've gone like maybe 1 cent, 2 cents, and we are picking up loads of sales because 

Google wants somebody to buy the traffic. Right. And if we are the only people there to buy it because it's a niche product and what have you, then they type it in.

We are the only ad 

they show, and we'll, we'll, we'll take the, the, the kind of conversions all day long, right? So, 

you know, but, but, but equally, we kind of, most people just put it in and put the, the, in the asset group, they put the sort of. Product category or the whatever I put every single product Id in.

'cause in that way I, I've effectively got each one in a separate auction 

completely. [00:27:00] So I can then start saying, well, 'cause again, Google are, are notorious for having the money gravitate very quickly, right? So, again, let's say you have a, a daily budget of 500 bucks, right? If they can spend 495 bucks on one product, that could be complete junk, right?

They're gonna 

spend that 4 95 and the other thousand products that you've got in that asset group are gonna get nothing, right? So you need to be looking at how you can kind of mitigate for that. So again, it could be you, you like, either put that in a completely separate, asset group by using custom labels to say that was a, lots of traffic, but poor seller.

I mean, look, you, I've never, I'm always amazed at how many people don't really understand the use of custom labels. It's the ability, I mean, when, when I used to kind of look at people and they had a. a product, uh, that, that, let's say they had a, a custom label that said best sellers, right? And then you look at the historical sales for the last month and like eight out of the 10 products in the best sellers had sold nothing.

Right? And [00:28:00] I'm thinking,

well, I don't really think they're best sellers anymore. They may have been at one point, right? As in, you know,

they may have been the best sellers back in 2000, 2021, something like that. But they're definitely not your best sellers now. So the whole thing of a custom label, rather than having to kind 

of reset the, the kind of the, the asset groups and ad groups and, and everything else, you can just change the labels and that will move them from one group to another.

You can move other, other products in. And then that way the, the kind of the force behind your best sellers campaign can get the value of it being the best sellers that 

you have at that particular point in time. But again, people just 

don't seem to be able to get their head around that whole concept.

Well, that's, and you gotta think about it. That's the model that Google's going for and the model that Facebook is going for, right?

they want, they want the guy that owns an HVAC company to use Facebook Ads without knowing what a Facebook ad is. So they just want you to be able to say, what's your monthly budget?

Here's my budget. Okay, cool. Let's make it work. But then no one ever [00:29:00] thinks about, we, we've been doing that in affiliate for years. I mean, a lot of industries have always done this, right? And the same thing that always happens is they go, so how much are you making? And you're like, why would I tell you that?

And they're like, 'cause I need to know what I can charge you minus 10%.

And it's oh, okay, cool. So no matter what I'm making, you're just gonna keep increasing. Yes. That's how it works. But everyone thinks, what I mean by that is they're gonna change like the CPC cost and increase it. What I really mean is, is they're gonna loosen the filters and they're literally gonna do exactly what we're talking about right now, where they're like, listen, this one took a loss.

But like in order to maintain your bid position for the demographic that we just got the slot from, we need to be able to take a loss on this one. But you'll make it up on the next

one. But it's still governed by the top, which is don't let you take losses. 'cause then you'll pause. So as long as it's optimized, it's, it's not optimized, but it's optimized.

So

it's just, yeah, there's a lot of that.

Google Ads and Budget Management
---

and the thing I find funny is that there, there's always this sort of,so again, I I I, I've started to use Reddit more, right? Both for [00:30:00] ads, but 

also for just Reddit itself, right? Because there's a lot of, again, I find there's some really fascinating sub Reddits on, on there, all sorts of 

different conspiracy theories about all sorts of different things, right?

Which again, I think sometimes is just good fun. You put, pull up a, pull up a drink, sit down and just scroll through and, and they call it banana scrolling, right? So you scroll through your page and 

that counts as a banana scroll. I'm like, God, honestly, if they literally measured how long a banana is and they.

They kinda do that, and you get, you get like stickers for how, how many bananas sort of scrolls you've got, right? So it's like doom scrolling, but with bananas.

oh. God.

But the thing I, I found amazing. so some guys put in a, this one called R slash PPC, right? And this guy's 

posted basically saying, I, I've had a daily budget of $10 and I increased the daily budget after seven days, right?

To $20. And, and basically Google charged me $34 for a click, right? [00:31:00] He says, how, how can that, how can that happen, right? And I'm like, well, it can happen because in a Google Ads campaign, they're allowed, they have the kind of the leeway to be able to spend up to 200% of your daily budget, right? If they think that there's likelihood that they're gonna get conversion, say the REIT again, they've done a great job of, of.

Like making their marketing speak sound great. But really it's 

just like we can, instead of spending $20, we can spend $40 and if we, we could spend $40 for a whole week 

With impunity and um, but in a 30 day period where it's actually 30.2 days, I don't quite know where the 0.2 of a day comes in.

But, you know, I'm hoping I can get that 0.2 of a day to myself at some point. But, so in 30.2 days, if you don't change anything, they will not spend more than 30.2 times your daily budgets. If your daily budget was 20 bucks Then they won't spend more than 610 bucks or whatever it is, right.

For the [00:32:00] month. But it does mean if they spend $40 for six days or seven days Then they're gonna have to find other days where they spend. $2 or nothing, right? So people say, 

I'm getting no traffic. It's like, because they dramatically overspent, but they, usually what happens is people go in, they start freaking out and they start changing things.

And as soon as you do that, all bets are off, right? You're back to the 

beginning, you're back to, you know, having to kind of, basically you've, you've reset the, the kind of 

30.2 day window, right? At whatever you've sort of said it to that point, right? And the guy says, so how, how should I have mitigated for this?

Right? And I'm like, well, what you should have done, I mean, for starters, right? They need 15 conversions. I mean, it used to be 30, it's now 15, right? But even fifteen's a bit of a stretch, right? But you know, and again, if you're a big business, you could probably get 30 conversions in like an hour, 15 minutes or 

whatever, right? But if you're a small, service-based business, right? Thir 30 sales or 30 leads in a month could completely toast you, right? You, you might go, I [00:33:00] don't have the capacity to deal 

with 30 leads in a month, right? So if you are, if that's the case, then some of these maximized conversions and maximize, conversion value should never be things that are on the table for you because, it's, it's just, again, it's suicide to kinda run campaigns on that basis, right?

So I've always said if you're gonna do anything right. Then you probably should run like, enhance like a, a manual CPC campaign, right? Choose a figure that you're comfortable doing, work out like how much the clicks cost. So again, if you, if you say, I can spend 50, you know, the second say I can spend $50 to acquire a kind of a lead for my business, right?

And I'll make, 200 bucks or whatever on, on a call out or whatever. So if that's the case, then what you need to do is to say, well, how, if I, if I, what's my conversion rate? If my conversion rate is 2%, right? I'll convert two out of every a hundred calls I get. So what you need to then do is to say, okay, if I'm getting two conversions at 50 bucks, that's a hundred bucks.

[00:34:00] If it's a hundred clicks, that's basically I can bid a dollar a click, right? So even 

though you may be aspirationally going. Google will throw all these things saying, your bids are too low. You need a automated bid solution. They throw all these red and yellow alerts up at you, right? I'm just like, fuck you guys, I don't care about your alerts.

I know what I, 

I know what I can afford. I know what I can pay, right? I am going to 

go with what I want, not what you want. And you know, and if you do that, then quite often what you'll find is that the success that you get with that is more in line with what you want it to be. I mean, 

most of the clients I work with, if, if I take over their account, I always say, pretty much, before I've even taken my coat off, or before I've sat down and had a cup of tea, I can guarantee you that we will turn your campaign on its head.

And it's usually just stuff like 

that, like switching a, a maximize, conversions campaign into a manual CPC, because it's all bidding on the brand and they should be paying, again, if, if somebody's looking for your brand, [00:35:00] right? Your brand search term, they're looking for you.

They're not looking for anyone else. 

Manual CPC vs. Maximized Conversion Campaigns
---

So your quality score will be high, right? You shouldn't be paying $15 a click for your brand, right? But some people 

are, because they've set a maximized conversion campaign up and Google are like, great, let's get into this one. And they, and they really go to town.

It's just, it's just crazy, right? So I just go, 

we're gonna switch it to manual CBC, and they go, but, but you know, won't we lose all conversion? I'm like. I guarantee you we'll not lose the conversions. And we don't, and and obviously the money drops dramatically on the branded stuff, which then means

they can go into battle on some of the generic stuff that is expensive.

They've got budget to go into, to, to, to the generic, auctions that they may potentially wanna win on a generic basis. 'cause 

people don't know who the 

And not, well, not only that, but also you gotta remember the, the quality score aspect. the, if, if it's a related industry, it's gonna at least carry a little bit. And when you already have the aspect of your success on one, it's gonna do all rising tides. Like it's

just gonna help [00:36:00] everything. but yeah, no, that's. 

Google Ads Call and P Max Campaigns
---

every week I have someone that, is usually in like my SEO groups or something like that. Is just oh look, I got the monthly Google Ads, call from the person that works there. And I'm like, great. And they're like, I scheduled the call. And I'm like, why? All they're gonna tell you is literally they're gonna pick up and go, you should do P max and then you're gonna do P max.

You're gonna lose money and go, it didn't work. And they're gonna be like, oh, that sucks. Better luck this

Try demand gen or try, 

this sort of max a max AI or whatever. I mean, again, if they come out with some stuff at, Google Marketing Live at the end of the year. And again, every single thing, every single bullet Was ai, ai, ai. 

Affiliate Summit Vibes and AI Trends
---

So I want to bring it back to affiliate Summit, right?

'cause I feel we've gone 

off on a bit of a tangent, which we are known to do. It's fine. but 

yeah, so, so, we were talking before we kind of came on air about like your experience with, with obviously AI and.

And whatever else. so what, so again, like you told me about your presentation at Mailcon Sounds great.

I'm sure that 

that the people that were in attendance will be, head, head blowing, 

which, which is fine. That's what you [00:37:00] want. 

but, but talk, talk to me a little bit about, affiliate summit in, in terms of the vibe and,

and everything else.

so definitely, I know everyone always says like, it, it's either one of two camps. It's either like, this is the best summit ever, but every summit is the best summit ever to them. So it's always the same. Um, or the other is like, you know, it's a little grim. you know, the industry's a little bad right now or whatever.

It's, this one was neither of those. This one was definitely, the people doing well are doing very well and the people doing bad are doing very bad. But normally that's like a 50 50 or like 70 30 split. This is like a 90 10. Like it's, it's bad. the aspect of. 

Email Deliverability Issues
---

The majority of the people I talk to is, and, and granted, remember with the channels I talk to, obviously I'm getting a, a very small subset of information, but like an email for example, Yahoo and Gmail have had some deliverability issues the last couple months, stuff like that. like our guys haven't really had an issue, but we [00:38:00] did a lot of work to make sure that they wouldn't. but there are other people that are just dead in the water, like completely and utterly dead in the water. that was very apparent. and, and there's always that, but not at this scale, not at this level of impact.

Like there, it's normal to lose like 20% of deliverability or 30% of some of these people were losing like all of it. and that's email.

the other thing you'd never see is email people. Oh, there, it, it's, it's more than that.

Because 

I stopped mailing. I stopped mailing. 'cause I used to get almost physically sick whenever I got a spam house complaint. I'm like, 

I'm, I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be sick. And I'm, I kept thinking like. Again, I think the, the complaint rate was something like one in a million, right? If you had one complaint in a million emails right?

Ding you IP and probably the whole class C was bl was shut down. Again, we had a sort of good relationships. I mean, we spent most of our time at summits going around going, do you have any class C? Do you have class? So we, we would register a whole bunch of domains, do 256 sub-domains [00:39:00] and all sorts of stuff like that, like all these wacky things to get to the 

point where we could just carry on mailing, right?

And sometimes you would go, I'm gonna buy these domains. So you would have to check to see whether other people had used them before. 'cause if somebody else had used them and then put them back into the pool and you took them out, 

right? And they had the history of, Getting it dinged in the past.

Soon as you like press the first send bang, you'd get dinged as well. Which is where some, again, some of the,

some of the people that exist in the ecosystem to help validate the, again, the, the kind of deal with the screamers and deal with, 

email verification verifications and all that sort of stuff.

I mean, if, if you 

don't, if you don't look at it from a hygiene perspective, I mean, everyone looks at it just from making money and you need to look at it from hygiene and compliance and everything 

else. It's really 

Or, they, or they just look at bounces like that. that was a huge thing, that flipped me on my head for a while, is I'm talking to people and they're like, yeah, we scrub it. And I'm like, all right, cool. and I, I'd literally just stop and I'd look at 'em and be like, lying [00:40:00] to me is only going to hurt you, right?

if I don't have the right information, I can't guide you properly. And they're like, no, really, no, no, no. We

did, we scrubbed it. And then they list like never bounce or and, and don't get me wrong, good company, but like verifier, right? They might do some slight scrubbing or something like that, but they're not email oversight.

They are not. Very, very good intricate actual technicians living and breathing this industry daily into a data set of detection like that is email oversight. And I probably should have charged them for that endorsement, but literally, like email oversight knows their stuff, but everyone thinks that's what they have with everyone.

They're like, oh, if the email's not good, as in it's not good for me, I shouldn't mail it. I shouldn't do this. They'll tell me I shouldn't mail it. It's no, they're just telling you whether or not it exists. They're not telling you whether or not it's a spam trap, whether or not it's this, whether or not it's that.

Which by the way, if we're at that point where we're discussing the fact that whether or not you or do or do not understand that something is a spam trap, then most likely we're at the [00:41:00] point where your data is already shit, or you don't really know how to expand from it. the number one aspect of a lot of the mailers now is they're starting to realize that it's not volume, it's accuracy, and that does not work with the scale and the setup of mail that they've set up over the past 10, 15, 20

Yeah, 

It's, it's a fundamental framework change. so a lot 

Understanding Demographics in Marketing
---

I used to mail, I mean, again, I'm going back a long time that I was mailing, but if I mailed, I mean I probably had a 10th as many AOL addresses as I did every other kind of,And it made the

majority of your money, didn't it? 

and tons of money because again, the people that had, AOL were probably people that had just gone down to Target, bought a new computer, fired it up, set up an AOL email address.

'cause they got the, the, the, sort of CD through the door, stuck it in. to get on 

the internet, they ended up with an AOL account, right? Andand they were like, oh, I can buy thing. I mean, again, like they would, they would be excited [00:42:00] to see an email in their inbox. Oh, I'm, I've never seen one of these before.

Click on it. Oh, they're 

offering me this. Buy it. It was just great. But to, but again, it was sort of, 

as you say, it was about knowing the demographic, understanding 

who, what the demographic of an AOL typical AOL user was. So some, somebody older, somebody 

with a bit more money, a bit bit less savvy, right?

So anyone that uses Gmail, you're going, well, they're clearly more savvy. They know what kind of, what's what the, the.

There was, there was, there was one company that I went in and I was dealing with their internal mail, but I walked through the media buyers like desks and cubes to get to where they were. And the funniest thing, yet also some of the most accurate I've ever seen in my life was a little piece of paper.

One of the buyers had up and it literally just said, overall demographics by source. And it was like, Google, more tech savvy, da da da da, yahoo, more like this. And literally for Bing, all it said was people that are physically unable to change their [00:43:00] start page. And I went, but what are you targeting?

And he went that. And I'm like, but that's not a demographic. And he goes, is it though? You know exactly who I'm talking about. And you literally had a mental picture as soon as I said it and I went, I can't disagree. Like it, it, but it's, but it's accurate. But that's a good way to target based on ancillary information that you didn't even think

But it's, it's funny. I like, 

so when, when Yahoo used to be like the big sort of search engine of the time and Google would just, the up and coming fledgling startup, 

there, there there was a company called Overture, right? That ultimately Yahoo bought. 

And, And it was, it was really funny. So they, they had, this thing where every single keyword, they had a database where you could see how many searches had been made for a particular search term.

And it was always one of those things like, we, we, we used to play this game in our office where we would always look to see what was better than sex, right? So it was like we would look at how many searches had been made for sex on, on, overture and what terms had [00:44:00] more searches for sex than, than that, right?

And one 

of the ones that kind of almost always came, came up, was the term Google, right? And 30 

million people a, a month went to Yahoo looking for Google. And you're 

yep. 

like, honestly, if I was Yahoo, I would've completely not done, I would've gone, sorry, we can't find that at all. But they did.

They showed them the Google and, and they were gone. And that was that, right? And um, and I don't think 

Yahoo's ever really recovered.

no, definitely not. And, and that's, and so here's another example actually the same lines as that, and I, and I don't know if this is true or not, it makes sense in my head, but like the other aspect of that too is I'd be willing to bet if you sat a hundred people down with fresh computers and they installed it, they opened up windows and then they brought up their browser, the first thing they would type is Google Chrome. Into Microsoft Edge to search on MSN [00:45:00] to download, go Google Chrome.

Yeah.

And I've watched people do you know how there, there are actual companies that like set up a camera and watch people do stuff like eye tracking, all that. The amount of people that do that is insane. The amount of people that go to Google and type in Google is also insane. Like it is. It's a whole new thing. It's a whole new level of realization when you realize that it's not that people don't understand the terms to search, they don't even understand the boxes for searching.

They don't even understand that that's what it is. And that's what we've done on mobile now, is we have the little thing at the top and we say, type in a search or a website. But now people are doing that on desktop

and they're doing it even if the browser doesn't support it, which thankfully most of them do now. But yeah, it's that kind of stuff is people just, you're not recognizing the full picture

I mean, going back to again, like showing my, showing my age here in longevity in the industry, I used to go and lit. Literally. I would go in and hang out in internet [00:46:00] cafes and sort of. Sort of casually glance all over it, watching what people were doing to see how they interacted with things. And it was, it was amazing how many people would go to google.com type in a search term, right?

And they would just literally go, click, click, click, click, click, click, click on. so it used to be, there would be sort of two, two ads on the top and sort of seven or eight down the side, all, all paid ads, right? And people would just literally go click, click, click. Like they would do the first two, which would be the paid ads.

They would go 

and they wouldn't go, click the first one, go to that tab, look at that, go, oh, that's not really for me. I'll go back and try and find another one. They would click on all of them, 

right? So you'd see people going, you can imagine these, these kind of companies in their, in their office game.

Our time on site is amazing. We've had people on the site for 10 minutes. I'm like, yeah, but if they're on another tab or they've gone to 

get a coffee, right? Or they're talking to the person on the cube next to them, right? Their time on site isn't really relevant, [00:47:00] right? So what should be is the engagement, like how many, how much, how much scrolling did they do?

I mean, I've always kind 

of said 

What actions,

what do they 

so for, so for me, I've always maintained, like one of the first things I try and do is make sure that whenever we do that, we can look at user engagement. 'cause those are signals of intent that you can, you can understand now you can put them into your analytics and you can create audiences based on that, right?

So you can say, 

I want to build an audience of people who have been to my site, been to this page, scroll down most of it, spent five minutes on it, clicked on my social, whatever it might be. You can create audiences on that basis and then you can say. Go and find me more people like that, right?

Because those, you 

know, they have all those sort of signals, but if you are not capturing them, I mean, I'm, I'm amazed how many people I get into their Google Analytics and I go to audiences and it's got all users. That's it. There's, that's the only audience they have in their entire account. I'm like, holy crap.

But again, to me, I love it [00:48:00] because it means that in terms of adding value, I can add value. Like immediately, 

like I said before I've even taken my jacket off or before I've had a cup of coffee, I can automatically right, be adding immense value. And data with which to make decent decisions. Right?

And I've always said as a media buyer, it's having access to as much data as you can, right? That can inform your decision making about that. So like to go back to that example with the East coast, west coast, and, salespeople and everything else, that was a, that was a logical thing for me to think through, right?

But they had 

50, again, they had, I ended up going to that office and they had 55 salespeople. I said to them, so how many new clients are you? Are you landing a month? And they said, about 80, right? And I said, okay, and how many clients are you losing a month? And they said, 

about 80. 

So I said, so basically you got the, the overhead of 55 salespeople and the lunches and all that sort of stuff.

And you break, you break even in terms of the number of clients that [00:49:00] you've got. Right. I said, that's just not a sustainable model. I said, think things need to change. And, and you know, and they kinda, oh yeah. But so, so we did four rounds of layoffs and we took the 80 people or the 55 people down to I think five.

And even at five it was still, you know, probably three too many. For the, for the number of leads coming in. And I mean, it's just, it was, it was brutal because the whole definition of insanity doing the same thing over and expecting to get different results. 

The guy, the guy who played the sort of song, the jump around one, right?

He was in the last tranche of people to let go and they used to we would lay all the people off, right? Then we'd all go to the pub on a Friday. 'cause we all used to do layoffs on Fridays. And, and they used to think that we ch sort of chose the people because we didn't like them. It had nothing to do with whether we liked them, whether they got paid a lot more money than anyone else.

It's just we just worked, worked through it in a sort of systematic way. And, and I'd be sort of at the pub. I mean, again, I, I thought I could take the wimpy way and not go to the pub to face everyone. And I thought, no, I'm gonna go to the pub. And I used to sort of [00:50:00] stand there going, guys, you need to do things differently.

You want to make this work. You need to change the 

way in which things are done in order to do that, right? Because if you don't change, you're just gonna continue to keep getting layoffs. And they kept saying, oh yeah, but that person was a really good guy, drink, drink.

drink. 

don't,

And it's doesn't matter.

It's not what it about wasn't, it wasn't, were they a good guy? It's if you are bleeding 

red ink on, on the balance sheet, like that's not a sustainable business. 

dude, it's, it's just, it's literally, that is the experience. that's the difference between someone coming in that understands the concepts, but also hasn't had the experience to see the difference.

And even, and, and by the way, remember also you can box in people's perspectives based on what they've done, right?

media buyers are really good, but media buyers might not know like, how a call floor works or like how agents take calls. so good example is my buddy works for a law firm over in California. he runs their internal, he just got half of his, ad spend cut from the budget from the CEO [00:51:00] because they weren't getting enough going into your example, new business. or I'm, I'm sorry. They weren't, they weren't, they were only getting new business they couldn't retain, and that was, that was the main issue. And they never actually looked into it to figure out that all the salespeople were getting triple commission on new deals instead of re review reviewing old ones. So they were hiding all of their, uh, losses in their CRM under X employees names, but forgot to change the dates. And then they would, um, the, they were doing it, their floor manager was in on it. All of them were doing it. And literally they're still doing it because my buddy is the one that got blamed for some reason. This is what I mean about it goes all the way up sometimes, and literally some people are sitting there this is the easiest thing in the world to see.

You would've had this anyway. It's just if you wanna call it redemption, call it redemption, right? Like you lost a client, go get them. But like you said, when you're losing 73 and you're gaining [00:52:00] 73 and

it's every month, come on.

that's not how business happens.

But 

And, 

need to understand a little more about the lifecycle.

to go back to that whole example I, I gave you about the Google Ads and brand bidding and everything else, right? 

Effective Customer Retention Strategies
---

So again, like to to to the point of that, so I've said to, to all the clients I work with, I said not only should we be bidding on the brand, we should be segmenting people to who know about the brand, as in they are existing customers, 

right?

And give them a completely different experience, than people that don't know the brand, right? So again, most people will maybe start the journey on Facebook. They see one of your ads on Facebook and they go, I've never heard of that company before. And they go to Google and they type in the 

brand name and they click on the ad, right?

And they should be seeing the, the, the new business, new customer. Never know, don't know who you are, experience. But if you have some something from, you've got them in an audience, you know that their existing customers, as soon as they become an existing customer, where they buy, buy a product from you, fill in a [00:53:00] form wherever, add them to a list, that then becomes an exclusion list, right?

And also an inclusion list. So what you can do is you can run an ad specifically to the inclusions of people that are your existing customers. And those are the people that you can say, here's how you can log into the account. If you have an app, here's where you can download the app if you like The services, I mean, again, I've always maintained the best way of getting great reviews from customers.

If you have a customer that has bought from, you say five times, every single person that buys from you five times. is guaranteed. I can a hundred percent say they are going to give you a five star review. If you ask them to give you a review, right? You can't ask them to give you a five star review, but you know that they will and they'll, they'll be gushy with it.

'cause they're gushy in Facebook comments of how great the company 

is, how great the customer service services, blah, blah, blah, right? So again, the ads for existing customers should say leave as a review, right? Because you know

that the people that [00:54:00] are going to see those ads are only gonna be people that are in that inclusion list.

So they're only people that are existing customers, 

right? 

oh, yeah, no,

And you could probably spend for, for that whole, that whole campaign probably for the entire month, right? You might be looking at a couple of hundred bucks in ad spend, right? To just 

sweep up and hoover up all the, the kind of opportunity that there is in that particular audience.

It's just mind blowing how many people just don't do that.

Oh, it's, it's nuts. Or they don't relate it to, let's call it their intake. Like if it's, if it's a, if it's a lead gen brand, right? so good example, last two years I got married as a part of that. I bought my, my wedding band from a company called Manly Bands. Manly Bands is a good company. They had some nice stuff, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But more importantly. I got the retargeting like normal until I placed the order. Once I placed the order, my ads did not disappear. They changed and they changed to fulfillment [00:55:00] and education ads. And as a result of the fulfillment and education, I almost bought like three upsells,

like legitimately. They were just like, so here's what's happening today.

You're on day four after your order we're doing this, you're on day seven, we're doing this. And it's not actually with their tracker, but like 90% of people fall under

that. The entire time I'm looking at that, I'm going, well, at least it's keeping me up to date. All this. But then I was like, it probably only cost if I clicked on everything, it would've cost them what?

Maybe a dollar.

And then I went and I looked at their refunds and they have the 30 day, no question, blah, blah, blah. Even on custom. And I was like, interesting. I bet you they don't have fricking returns

because of how good this

is. And that's. Marketing is more than just getting it. It's also retaining

and getting more,

Yeah. I mean, and, 

but 

but, again, I'm just blown away by how many people just don't get it, don't realize the huge potential that that presents to you. [00:56:00] In, in, just in terms 

of as you say, and, and then it's Tell a friend. Refer a friend, right? Again, you think about people setting up an affiliate program.

I mean, the best people that become your affiliates are people that are existing customers of yours that are bought from you five times, right? Go and tell 

your friends about kind of like this product and here's $25 that you can give to them for their first order, and here's $25 that you can have for yourself, right?

Either for your next purchase or we'll just give you a gift card done. 

honestly, it's just so, so easy. I mean, you know, how, how, how people make it so difficult to do these sorts of things, right? But it is really 

incredibly easy. it's like, it's like, so I, I worked with a startup that was, um, a meal delivery service, right?

And they were, clearly, obviously they'd raised a couple of rounds of funding and they wanted to take their sort of ad spend. Or they wanted to kind of grow their customer base. Right? So at the time I worked working with them, they were spending 25 grand a month on Google. They needed to hit a certain volume of, of sort of sales by the time [00:57:00] they got to, to, you know, a particular point in time.

'cause they were gonna raise their next round of funding and they needed to be

hitting the run rate. So if they weren't hitting the run rate, then they would kind of lose out on the, the funding for the next round. So it was really imperative that we kind of got to that point. But the, the, the, the problem that you had was that they, they had previously, when they were working with this, the agency before we came in, they were working on the basis of everything that they did was dramatically discounting the first order, right?

To get the order right of let's say it was like, $40 off your first box of whatever. so they would deliver the box and then that would be the end of the communication with them and then be onto the next customer. And I said, so what are you actually doing? for the people that have bought from you.

Right. So what, again, I said like, what is 

your, what is your return rate like in, in terms of how many times do people come back? Right? I mean, um, I went to, I helped a company that was based in Florida that kind of sold smoothies, right? Which is probably the worst thing to have, right? Because like it's a frozen [00:58:00] packet that goes in your freezer, right?

So if you, if you, and it's on, they used to do it on an auto ship, so it would kind of like, they'd send you one 

every month and we would get so many people that go, you need to cancel it. My freezer's full of this stuff. And I, and I said, well, so I said, what you need to have is you need to have a bonding sequence.

So when you, when you send the box out, you know that they've got the box that should sort of start the stopwatch on a 

series of emails that kind of go out. Day one, they get this email right? And it might be, Hey, you've probably got your smoothie now here's how you can do it. If you want to get, I mean, again, we said what you probably want to do is a lot of people would say, oh, the, the smoothie wasn't, it was too grainy and everything.

That's probably 'cause they got a really cheap. 

blender, right? So I said, you should have your own blender. So they did. They kind of, they, they bought a, a, a blender that they kind of branded and everything. Um, so that became the upsell, right? Became something that could really 

automatically add significant value on the, the first sale that came through, right?

Because if people are serious about doing it to kind of do smoothie, sort as a part of a healthy [00:59:00] lifestyle, then it, it would be good for that purpose. But, but what would then happen is, so day one it would be, do you know, here's how you can kind of do the blender. Make sure you kind of cook it, not cook it, but blend it for long 

enough, right?

Day three, here's some recipes that you can kind of try day four, by the way, you've still got those smoothies in the freezer. Don't forget about them. It's important that you try and get muscle memory. Just remember you gotta go and 

do it. Do one every day before you go to work. Put it in kind of like a cup like this and get a decent straw so you can kind of get a decent suck on it and everything.

And, um. You know, and then that way you ensured that they were actually consuming the product that you'd sent them 

so that when you sent the next one, they weren't going cancel the order. I don't, I've got too many of them. 

And that dramatically made a difference. And it was the same with the, um, with the company that did the sort of meal delivery service.

Right? So when we started 

focusing on, yes, we wanted to kinda get new people, but we also wanted to kind of like do this bonding sequence in through email, primarily with, um, with existing people, [01:00:00] right? 

And then once people kinda got to their second, third box or what have you, that's when you would start saying, Hey, you know, you've, you've had three boxes from it.

You probably really benefiting from it immensely. Are there other people 

that you can kinda refer us to? Because then that automatically adds an an extra line of, of revenue to your, to your business without you necessarily incurring a dramatic over. So I've always kind of said it's if I give you a $50 coupon and newer $50 coupon, if you buy it.

It's cost me nothing if you don't take action. Right. If you don't give it to 

them and you don't, they don't take use it, right? It's cost me zero, right? Whereas if I'm gonna give away a $40, you know, discount on the first one, and I'm spending $120 to acquire a new customer, 'cause I know if they save, stay for three months, I'll make my money.

Then I'm, I'm mean in the black right? I can, I can kind of make money right out the gates at that level, right? If they do take the $50, $50, and you may, you may end up with somebody who's a prolific influencer that's got loads of friends and kind of talk about this on their [01:01:00] social media and before, 

you know, you've got like hundreds of people that are coming through from their leads, right?

So from your experience, and I think this'll probably be my last question for your, from your experience, how many people that are giving that discount on the product are actually factoring in the unrealized revenue from that as a cost on advertising?

Probably hardly any, and that, that's 

all that was all that for, for me, that's always been the thing. People do this Black Friday, cyber Monday and what have you, and I'm like, so you're basically going to treble the amount of money you're spending on ads right. At a point in time that you are reducing your revenue right.

By 50 to 75%. It's just the, the math just doesn't add up for me. 

And fair enough. If, if, again, if it was a, somebody that becomes a new customer will buy from you five more times that year before the next Black Friday, and then they might buy from you again. 

yeah, yeah, yeah.

always said with Black Friday, it's if [01:02:00] somebody has bought from you for the last four Black Fridays, you should be able to drop a list of those people and give them something completely different than.

Just a normal Black Friday Cyber Monday offer. This is 

just for our V super super VIPs that have bought four times from us. You have, thank you. You being so loyal, here's a special promotion. Or you can get in before everyone else. 

Just, just, again, there's so many ways in which you can chop this whole thing up.

But again, 

ultimately it all comes down to you having access to data. So 

The Importance of Data in Marketing
---

again, that's, that's where I think to go back to, to affiliate Summit ai. That's where AI, I think will really help the people that understand the value of data and the capturing of data and the processing of 

data and the storing of data.

Again, I, I've for years I've been storing every single client I work with, I store. Google Ads data in BigQuery, I store GA four data in BigQuery, 

right? 'cause at some point in time, I'm gonna go, you know what? I'm gonna spend some time [01:03:00] learning. I, I, I've spent basic sql, I can just about get, get my head around it,

right? But I've got access to the data and I know how to do a couple of queries that give me information that I can act upon immediately, right? So if I, again, if I'm 

working, talking to a prospective new client and I've worked with somebody five years ago that used to be, a client that's gone outta business or whatever, then I can pull that data down and see all the keywords and all the ad copy and all that sort.

I can find it all right because I've got 

Oh yeah. 

And again, I think, I've been doing it for so many years. I've got hundreds and hundreds of clients that, that I've got in the database in BigQuery. I think my bill is something like $12 a month. It's insanely cheap, 

It's, yeah, It's insanely like I have all my engagement data from my mail stuff going back probably a little over 20 years. So I've got billions and billions and billions of data points.

But the question is, is what is still worth it? What It's not yours. Yes. Your, your ads will, unless they're like around something time-based.

But my stuff [01:04:00] probably wouldn't be as useful

But again, you think about it, I, I can I can extract that data, I can extract the ad copy, right? The 

clicks, the impressions, the click through rate, the conversion rate, the, 

the, the, the revenue, right? And I can send that to chat, GPT or whatever, and say, here's all my historical data from, 

for whatever. Can you suggest how I can write ad copy under the new format, right? I mean, obviously you've got different formats now completely than you had back in the day. But you know, this, the, the principles will still be the same, right? It's still, titles, descriptions, calls to action, 

Oh yeah, that, that, that's, yeah. The frameworks will never change.

Closing Remarks and Subscription Request
---

So Rob, we've been on for like probably an hour and a bit, so I think 

it's probably time to kinda like tap out and, 

Yeah. Let's cut it.

thank everyone for coming on and if you, I'm gonna put this up here again. I'm gonna keep putting up every single time we do an episode, I'm gonna go right. You guys better need to, you better need to subscribe, right?

And then that way I won't have to show this kind of thank you for [01:05:00] subscribing anymore. So make sure that you do subscribe to the channel and Rob and I would appreciate it. We love you and if there's anything we can do, leave comments, let us know how we can help, because we are just guys that we, we like helping everyone that's involved in this industry 'cause we want the industry to do well.

Yep.

Everything he said. And also, if you like, negative reinforcement instead, we will make this final slide more ridiculous by the episode. Until you do subscribe.

we can definitely do 

Just FYI I'm fine with that.

yeah, so I, I, like I said, I'm gonna leave it like, I think that's probably been up there long enough that people, oh God, for God's sake, I'm gonna just subscribe, just so I don't have to see 

You, you know what? No, no, no, no. Give, give 'em another 10 seconds. They can wait. They can wait.

Yeah. The algorithm will be like, if you leave it up for 30 seconds as, but, whatever. I dunno. 

I,

see a 10 hour version of this coming soon.

I, I don't have you ever again, I'm, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna come back to us. Right. But have you ever watched any of the 10 hour videos 

where they just loop, loop something over and [01:06:00] over again.

watched is a very subjective term in this question.

Have I had it on the background and listened to it? Yes.

there was definitely Epic Sax Man, 10 hours, and that worked for programming for me for a week.

So the one, the one that always gets me, so there's, there's one with Russell Crow, crowing Gladiator, right? And it's, a 10 hour YouTube video where it's,when he gets asked to turn around, who is he? who 

are you, who? And he goes. I am Maximus, Deemus, Meridius, whatever. And it just loops that for 10 hours.

It is just 

so great. And I think I think the, the person that kind of came up with I, that idea came up with it originally because right one, he wants to increase his, his view hour. So like having a 10 hour video was good, but what he did was he created one, 'cause his neighbor was pissing him off by playing loud music all night.

So he would put the, the sort of the video on 

first thing in the morning, go to work for the whole day, have it dialed up completely full [01:07:00] blast, And then come home later on, and you could see the 

person banging on the wall. And it's the same song over and 

over and over, but just a small snippet of the song for 10 

the worst part.

At least if it's the regular song, there's some differences. If it's the same five second, you're like, here we go again, and it just keeps going.

But some of them are just pheno phenomenal. But yeah. So on that point, I'm gonna, I'm gonna end the stream. Thank you so 

much, Rob. Good to see you as always. And we'll see everyone on the next episode of the Media Buying podcast. I got it right this time.

Oh, that's what it's called. Damn. I gotta update my blackboard. Hold on.

You're such a 

All right. 

Love 

Yeah. That's the goal.

Bye for now.

That was Good.

Good. 

like it.

Good.