How to Monetize Every Lead, Even Your Failing Campaigns

Jim Banks: welcome to episode three of the Media Buying podcast. I'm here with Rob. How you doing, Rob?

Rob Adler: Doing Good as always buddy. How

Jim Banks: I'm doing all right. Yeah, I mean, I, I've, we were just, funny enough, couple of things. So first off, like Rob and I realized when we had our breakfast meeting in Vegas all those years ago when we first met, that we are actually born a year apart.

Oh, not a year, a day apart.

Rob Adler: a year

Jim Banks: I, I was gonna say, we are never a, never a year apart, about 40 years apart, but, yeah, I mean, I think I, so, so, yeah, so, so Rob's birthday is the day before mine, so we do this exchange of, Hey, happy birthday. I, I say happy birthday to Rob. He says, happy to birthday to me the next day, and we're done.

yeah, and, and also, we, we were talking in the green room before coming on, and we were like, so Rob, what are we gonna talk about today on this episode, episode three, So we've, we've made it, we've made it to episode three, which is the, the kind of borderline of, you've made it as a podcaster that once you've cutting out three in the can.

So once we kind of finish recording [00:01:00] this one, get it uploaded, we've got three in the can. We are, we can kind of put on our resume on LinkedIn podcaster. So crossed. but, but we, we were talking and we said. we were looking in the news, looking in LinkedIn, looking all over the place, trying to find some, like really juicy stuff to talk about.

And like we realized there was nothing. And I, I dunno about you, Rob, but I've certainly been in the business long enough to know that there, the, the business is cyclical, there tends to go up and down all the time. And you need to, to make sure that you are ready for when. You have the ups, but also you're ready for when you have the downs and you plan accordingly.

So how do you organize and plan your own workload or the workload that you're doing for, for Boardwalk, to kinda make sure that you've got sort of continuity.

Rob Adler: yeah, yeah. So seasonality is a huge thing. but obviously seasonality can be a huge thing for any industry. It just. It comes down to, are you directly affected or are you indirectly affected? [00:02:00] So, the one industry I always think of when I think like restrictions or seasonality or time or investment or, or whatever it might be, is usually like, at least an affiliate.

weight loss is usually extremely easy when it comes down to seasonality, because if you target January 1st, like. And summer and blah, blah, blah. same thing. It all depends on the, the channel and where you're breaking it down. Timewise or timewise, right? So if it's, seasonality per year, that counts.

in my mind I also kind of count certain things that may not work on weekends. It's not seasonality, but it's still time-based and it can affect it. and at a certain point people will get to, running a campaign or a business where they have. call it their stream of traffic. And if you pause your stream of traffic, you might end up paying more because of your optimizations.

So sometimes it's worth it to even run at a loss at certain points just to keep your bids. But that's just media buying. Like there's a much, there's a much, much, much bigger aspect of this too, which is some sectors like almost [00:03:00] die, like completely like the, the volume drops, you know, 80, 90%. And it becomes something where if you targeted just the offer, you're.

Kind of up the creek, you don't really have much that you can really do unless you have something else that could pivot over. But most of the people, they copy each other one's off, the other one's most likely off. but also if you can target the demographic and you target the actual target of, of the type of person that you bring in, there are always.

Other things that you can monetize that way, right? So then you've, your first campaign, you're like, oh, this actually makes money. We're great. And then you're like, I need to reward myself and I need to make sure that I appreciate all of the work that I did. And then most people, when they do, at least. I've met most people when they're affiliates, they get their first big break, first big campaign, they're like, yay.

And they don't understand that even the successful still have failing campaigns. They just magically think everything is profitable at all times for the rest of the future. but most of them will spend it on. Dumb stuff, or [00:04:00] they'll spend it on stuff that, let's just say doesn't have longevity, but outside of the night or the week or the month.

so especially an affiliate, if you are, you just started a network and you're doing well, there's a big difference between sponsoring a party where other affiliates will be that you can talk to and try to recruit and work with, and like going out on your own and getting bottle service on a Friday just to celebrate. Personal care is important, like enjoy it, but at a certain point, is it personal care or is it personal waste of money? So it really comes down to what you do, but beyond that first time. That's when a lot of recognition comes into the, oh, if I blew this money here, I would be screwed right now. Because right now my campaign is down.

I'm waiting for to, my payments to come in on a monthly net 45. My Google Ads bill is due. My Facebook Ads is due, my mailing stuff is due. And what do you have left? You have. This IOU, that's through an invoice in the mail. [00:05:00] So the number one thing is, is always reward yourself for the stuff you're doing.

We are in a non-standard industry. This is not standard work. This is not the kind of stuff you're gonna get taught at a school. And if you do, I wouldn't

Jim Banks: Shame. It's a shame they

Rob Adler: at a school anyway.

should. They should teach you this school. It's, they should, but the problem is, is you can't do that with the requirements we have. 'cause it takes like three years to get a book into a school, and by that point, you're what, 93 versions behind on the advice.

It's just, it, it adjusts way too fast. And that's why everyone always talks about your net is your net worth and all that kind of stuff. Just be very conscious of, is your network people that talk about doing it or is your network people of actually people doing it because doing it are the ones you wanna know talking about.

It could be a manager that just is on sales calls all. If you don't plan, I mean, we always go with the school quote, right? If you don't plan, what is it? If you fail to plan, then plan to fail. So if you don't actually save any of your money, if you don't forecast what you might need for [00:06:00] next month's ad spend, if you don't get paid or it comes in later, or if you're a corporate person, what if they cancel?

What if? What if you're just ramping up and you're like, listen, I know the numbers really suck right now on the CPLs, but we're dialing it in and we should be right. We're we'll be good next month. And they're like, we. What are you gonna do like, 'cause with all of that stuff, that's stuff that you're not accounting for, you're not planning for, but at least in paid you can at least like pause on something like email.

You might have done 90 days of setup and warming and prepping, and then all of a sudden they cancel and you're sitting there literally with your assets in your hands at a complete loss. So.

Jim Banks: that's always one of the challenges I, I've always found, like if you are running a particular offer with, let's say you went running one offer with one advertiser, that advertiser may internally decide to do certain things. They may go, Hey, we have a new site, and.

And, and everything else they say, so stop things. And if you are generating your traffic, I've obviously been a paid media buyer for forever. Forever. and, you are kind of [00:07:00] primarily mailing. but, you know, but it's sort of like a, I always, I always feel if you, if you are an, an affiliate and you've, and you get SEO traffic right, then that's very difficult to turn it off, right?

So once you kind of have it working. Assuming that you own the property yourself, you, you've got your own sort of suite of, of websites and everything, you know, is very difficult. If you, if you are generating say, three, 500 leads a day or something like that, and somebody goes, Hey, you need to switch it off.

It's like, what do you do? Where do you send them? So how, how do you kind of get around that? I mean, how, how would you deal with that?

Rob Adler: So, so there are, if, if you're doing over a hundred or 200 leads a day and you don't have a backup buyer and you're actually selling to a buyer, then for the love of God, pause the video right now and go find one and then come back and resume. But when it comes down to stuff like that. The first thing you need to figure out is, is, is your marketing siloed into this one buyer?

Is there very specific stuff on your intake or your lander that only applies to them, right? Like certain promotions or whatever. It's, if [00:08:00] so, are you willing to change that and make it more generic, and would it still convert at the same level? Then the second question is, is if you are willing to change it.

Do you know anyone else that would still want these leads? And the easiest way that I've always done this to still maintain, let's call it the quality and the loyalty and the relationship with the buyer, but at the same time also expand is I will find who their competitor is. I. And then I will find a company that's much like their competitor in a different state if they are geospecific, and then I know I can replicate it on the industry.

And then if I can do it on the industry three times, I can do it five times. And if I can do it five times, I can do it 20 times. So if you can do it that way, it's a lot easier to kind of manage, but at that point, you're still gonna run into it, right? What if you only have one buyer for HVAC calls in Maryland, and then all of a sudden you're optimized, everything's good, and then they pause. Are you gonna pause and lose your good CPC? Are you gonna lose your good metrics? Are you gonna lose that? Or do you [00:09:00] maybe find another buyer that at least takes you to break even while the other buyer is down? Just to preserve the volume? What if they make money, though? What if they make more than the original buyer?

At that point, would you even really care about the original buyer? Like it, it's, you know, relationship of course, but monetarily. If he left you high and dry with no notice, which by the way, if you're doing iOS, put a cancellation or pause notice in there and make it logical, like make it at least 48 to 72 hours like on receipt.

But with those, you need to understand more about what the consumers are seeing and what the consumers are open to. And as a media buyer, you should know that you should know what you're pitching them and what they're supposed to see and what hopefully they have in common when they come to the lander.

So then the question is, is what else does that apply to? Remove just the offer and keep everything else. What else do people like this respond to? Don't even take into account what we're doing. So if we're, if we are doing health insurance, you shouldn't be like, well, maybe they want life. I'm thinking [00:10:00] completely different.

Why do they want health insurance? What kind of health insurance? Is it U 65? Is it ACA? If it's ACA, are they in the income bracket to get subsidies if they are in the income bracket to get subsidies? This is a whole other demographic now that I can target with about 20 other industries. So with stuff like, and it's not like I'm trying to make money off them, screw them type of thing.

Like these are things that would actually benefit them. It would actually help them. So I'm not talking mail, payday loans. I'm talking help them with if they have above a 640 debt consolidation. If they have under a 640, debt settlement. If they don't know their credit score, credit score, like there's a lot of aspects of that.

But you basically said that on my demographic, I can monetize this, but really what I'm monetizing is these types of users. That's what it is because a lot of media buyers go into it, especially the ones I've worked with, and they go, here's our offer. We need people for these offers. [00:11:00] Go and then they're like, where do we go find people for these offers?

To this day, I think out of a hundred that I might talk to, maybe three of them will go, well, what's the actual targeting, demographic profile of our ideal audience? They're like, no, we sell washers. This dude needs a washer washers, and then that's the entire thing. So they just, because search has gotten so many people comfortable to intent that they only go after intent, and that's it.

They don't think, yeah, you need a washer, but you have $7 to your name. I might not wanna buy this click. Or like, we don't have financing, so I might not wanna buy people that don't have disposable income at X. So like all of these now become, if you ask that question first. Now the question is, is, oh cool, so it does work.

But if they don't have the money and we don't have financing, I wonder how many of them would take financing. And guess what, you now have. A little checkbox that you can have as an upsell, as your little [00:12:00] qualifier. And if they don't take it, nothing changes. And if they do take it, you can give that lead to a partner to evaluate if they wanna underwrite all of your stuff.

And if that works out, now you have underwriting and you just in completely isolated, or you took an isolated channel or segment and now rolled it into your broad acquisition strategy. So if you imagine that. But now you take off the restrictions of, it doesn't have to be our core offer, but only when I know they don't really need or apply to our core offer anymore. All you're telling me is, is so question, do you wanna potentially make some money on this guy or are we gonna guarantee just let him roll and we don't care and he'll leave. I'd rather take a potential of making some money and also get the data point to know. All my users are subprime whenever I buy from this channel, but not when I buy from this channel.

So that will tell me how to refine my audiences more. So every single decline or downsell portion is now a trigger point. They clicked on [00:13:00] LendingTree. Now I know they clicked on LendingTree. They're interested in mortgage. Why would they be interested in mortgage if they need a loan for $500? And now you have more information about your targeting.

Now you can refine better, target better, and monetize better. Then you're gonna go buy bottle service, lose all your money, and then you're not gonna have the money to test the next campaign. Just to route all that back to the

Jim Banks: I must admit, maybe on this particular episode, we need to have a glossary at the bottom of all the, acronyms throwing at people for

Rob Adler: sorry. My bad.

Jim Banks: always eat. Funny you mentioned like an io, right? So for the benefits of those who may not know what an IO is, it's actually an insertion order, which was probably used back in the sixties and whatnot by advertising agencies to get a commitment from an advertiser to spend a certain amount of money over a certain period of time.

and it used to be that they would. Be faxed into the office. So we had, like in our office, we had a fax machine and we would get an insertion order in it. And we had one of those sort of, the heat seat, [00:14:00] heat, I call them heat seeking, but they, the, he heated paper print material that would fade after a really short period of time.

That was our fax machine. And, and then we invested in a more UpToDate, robust matrix one, and then we eventually got a laser, laser fax machine to. Print out the, the faxes. But, it's, it's amazing how many people still have on an insertion order. They say over to people, your fax number.

And I'm like, who? Who has a fax? I have no

Rob Adler: I don't know why I ask every time. And literally, and this is my favorite part, is the only response I've ever gotten. Multiple companies, multiple industries, multiple. Everything is, I always get, I have no idea, but we do. And I'm just like, does your attorney require it? And they're like, no. I'm like. But that's like the main reason, like that's literally the main reason we would have this right now.

Like DocuSign is acceptable and they're like, ah, they don't wanna do it. And it's some industries too, some of 'em just don't want it. It's kind of like, doctors with the blue and black ink, [00:15:00] if they ever use the wrong ink, they will literally toss the paper and restart because it is not valid with the wrong coloring.

It's probably just that and the fact of especially the US system with like court documents. Even if I can get a reply from opposing counsel that they saw my document, it doesn't count like as far as I know, unless I actually like get the USPS to say that someone signed for it. So it's like, it's not just what happens, it's how you can confirm it.

And that's

Jim Banks: Known yet, you need to say somebody signed for it and actually know who. The person is that signed for it. I mean, that's why a lot of these delivery drivers now, they'll kind of come along and they want to take a picture of you. So a number of times I've been stood on my doorstep with an Amazon box and I'm smiling and I'm thinking, should I be smiling?

I don't, I dunno.

Rob Adler: Yep. It's like you never know if it's an Amazon. Well, I mean, I hope a lot of the people watching this don't have this feeling or thought. But every now and again, you just look at it and you're like, is it Amazon or a process server? They look identical right now. 'cause they're both standing right there waiting for you to open the door and then they snap a picture and then they're just like, oh, blue [00:16:00] vest.

We're good. Okay, cool. but yeah, no, it's. A lot of the iOS now, it, it's, it has definitely come a long way, thank God. But it is a lot of like DocuSign and all of that now, and it's, the process other than Red Lines is now like 10 minutes. I don't even wanna go into

Jim Banks: Two things as a media buy that really bugg me a lot. the first one is.

Rob Adler: pay terms.

Jim Banks: Well, okay. Three things that

Rob Adler: Yeah.

Jim Banks: pay terms for sure. Again, i, I, I would immediately, every, every time I would talk to a, a, a net network or an advertiser about an offer. And they'd say, we're gonna pay $20 for, you know, this and it's gonna be on net 45.

and I'd be like, well, okay. So. What bump are you gonna give me? 'cause clearly I can do this in volume. What bump are you gonna give me? And how much sooner can you pay me than net 45? 'cause net 45 is no good to me at all. I need to be paid quicker. and at least then you are having a conversation, right?

You may end up in a situation where it's a [00:17:00] advertiser or a network that you really wanna work with, in which case you just have to kind of swallow it and, and just suck it up.

Rob Adler: Oh

Jim Banks: reality is yet you don't ask, you don't get. So there is a street rate. The street rate is whatever the advertiser feels they can afford.

I've always kind of maintained like, you need to look at things in a realistic way if you, if you can't make it work for you, I. I mean, like in a lot of cases, the advertiser potentially could be one of your biggest competitors in paid media auctions. So, and again, I've been, I've been stunned at how many affiliates are prepared to kind of run when they say, you can't bid on these terms, these terms, these terms, and you can't bid more than this amount, you can't outrank the advertiser.

I'm like, well, how, how am I gonna tell Google that their algorithm needs to kind of always make this person.

Rob Adler: I. I literally responded with that once because I got so sick of people telling me like, if you rank for our term in Google, and I literally copied it and then after that I put dot, dot, dot. Then you're gonna have to take that up with [00:18:00] Google. 'cause if I could guarantee where I ranked for your name, we wouldn't be working together.

'cause I'd be ranking number one for weight loss and I'd retire. So if I knew that, don't you think I'd be able to do it and control it? We wouldn't be talking right now. But yeah, it's, that drives me nuts. It's, you don't control it.

Jim Banks: And, and you know, like, again, I'm, I'm stunned at how many sort of advertisers try to impose these really ridiculous restrictions on. affiliates, Again, I, I think because most departments work in silos, So they've got their own commitment to achieve a certain amount of performance, 

So the paid channel have a certain commitment in terms of the number of visitors they get and number of conversions they get and all that sort of stuff. And they see affiliates competing with them as you know. As bad. And I think the reality, I mean, I've always kind of maintained if, if, if it's the advertiser, right?

I would, if I'm the advertise, I would much rather have myself and maybe five [00:19:00] or six of my affiliates showing for my brand term than myself and six of my competitors showing for the brand term. At least with the, with the brand terms for, you know, the advertiser they can control. Again, they may, they may choose three or four affiliates to kind of agree and sanction brand terms.

As long as they deliver a certain volume of leads or a certain volume of sales or whatever it is. You know, you, you need to make sure that there is something that, that you are giving them in return for them, allowing you to kind of bid on the brands. Otherwise, all affiliates would just go, I'll just bid on the brands.

Right? And that's it. And they wouldn't do anything else other than that, right? Because. I feel it's quite often lazy, so you know it, that, that, that would be unfair to the advertiser, but you know Yeah, sure. Do that, do that. And then from there we can kind of do more with it.

Rob Adler: The, the one thing that I always found funny, especially when I look at these terms, and it, it broadly changes. Like if they are, you know, an e-com, like, like brandable [00:20:00] company, like if they're Sears, right? Like that's different than if they're like a, b, C weight loss, but. The interesting thing is, is I worked with one vendor who of course we're running, they have the trademark, restrictions.

Completely cool. Like, you know, not bidding on your term, whatever competitors are bidding on their term coupon, their term, all that stuff. We're not allowed to bid on it. All good, whatever. And then they send out a update on their. Branded term bidding restrictions, and inside of their branded term bidding restrictions, they put generic nont trademark terms because their internal buyers were buying on those terms. These were the terms that they found out were attributable to about 40% of all their affiliate sales. So they decided just to compete and then drown out all their pups. So all the pubs that were with me, we dropped [00:21:00] the offer, took their competitor, and kept bidding on it. Now they're not in business anymore because they were idiots.

So it's like when you do this stuff, you gotta remember when I don't control where I am. That means I can't move it when you ask me to, but if I control what's on my page, I can change that at any time. I might not remain where I am if I'm like SEO ranked or whatever it is, but if you're gonna tell me I can't do business the way I can, then I'll just do business with your competitor who will let me do that?

Because they're not taking food off my family's table. So we can do that. To be clear, the problem is generic terms, not the trademarks. Trademarks are cool. You worked hard for that. You protect it completely fine, but when you say, I can't bid on like how to lose weight,

Jim Banks: Yeah.

Rob Adler: come on. Second is that I've also caught email advertisers doing this by putting their client list into their suppression file [00:22:00] so that all the mailers don't mail their client list. Not thinking that people like me don't just mail to one debt offer. So when someone hits my suppression for advertiser A, I send them to advertiser B. So slowly that debt company just lost all their enrollments because they thought they were getting ahead and not letting them capitalize on people that were already a part of it.

But in reality, it made all of us just pitch their current clients only. And then they lost it all,

Jim Banks: Because that, that was always one of the, the, again, if you're, if you're a mailer, this is something I would give as a tip, right? If you have like the unsubscribe links at the bottom of your email, right? Make sure that there is the. Unsubscribe just from this offer versus unsubscribe from everything. Because that way if they hit the unsubscribe from everything, then you basically can't mail them. If you say unsubscribe from the offer, then you just won't see that offer. [00:23:00] And, and as you say, like if, if they unsubscribe from that, that becomes a white list for another kind of advertiser. 'cause they're not on that list.

I mean, it, it. It always amazed me how, you know, like some of the, again, some of the credit score, offers that were back around a while back, you know, they had a suppression file of something like 10 or 12 million records. And,

Rob Adler: oh, Jim, it's so much more

Jim Banks: I'm sure it

Rob Adler: Last time I downloaded it was like 78 million. It's like insane.

Jim Banks: you know, and, and again, I've, I've always maintained that, you know, sometimes the, the, the.

The length of time from when they last did anything with them should be a factor. I mean, like, like a lot of my clients, they kind of want to exclude existing customers, but I've said, look, let's put a soff point because there must come a point in time when they would be treated like as a new customer.

Certainly I know that from a cookie perspective, there'll be a certain period of time before they, they can come back and it's a brand new visit if you like. But you know, it's, it's always amazed me that [00:24:00] the, If you, if you put in some, some parameters and say, okay, if it's more than 90 days old, just treat them like a new customer they've never bought from you before.

And then that way they get to see all the ads that you may have suppressed from them seeing, For, for one of, you know, basically paying for the same buyer twice. I've always maintained if, if you spend another $2 to require another $150 sale, like why should that be an issue? So.

Rob Adler: Oh yeah. And that's, and especially with like the monetization of these kind of leads and stuff, but especially on like email, right? So I do a lot of audits for people that are like offer owners, but then they also run internal email to monetize, and most of 'em monetize, like internally, but also third party offers, right? The amount of people that are technical set all this up, they understand like these are not like the tech guy. Like they actually understand tech, like my definition of understanding tech. These same guys do not understand that when they do their affinities inside of the [00:25:00] actual platform for male, they do something like, you know, opener, clicker last 30 days or active last 30 days, right?

But then at a certain point there's that cutoff and that cutoff is inactive or whatever. Do you have any idea how many people don't delete the record from their email so that when the media buying team gets the same one again, it doesn't get mailed? 'cause now it's a duplicate and they never catch that in the logs. And then the more intake you get of fresh records, the more duplicates there are, depending on the size of the industry. So the more money you start losing as you keep going, and then the more you keep buying the same users and doing absolutely nothing with them, and then people go, there's a ghost in the machine.

I don't understand where all of this revenue loss is coming from. And they never look at. Integrations because it's all internal. They don't think they have to, but when you're on media buying frequency, capping is a very common thing. When you're on email, we usually cap on conversion or whatever [00:26:00] the actual process.

It could be an open. But most likely not, and it's most likely a click or an actual conversion. But the amount of people that now do multi-channel and don't understand that they are literally throwing data away for no reason. Like the people that have internal mail and don't use a remarketing pixel for Google Ads on the thank you page or vice versa, like it's nuts.

But the other thing is it's also attribution based. They also don't track this attribution. So when they buy a lead, they look at the lead and they might go like, Google, we paid this much, we got this much, we paid this much, we got this much. 95% of the places I look don't even track revenue life cycles.

They just track on their original goal of bringing them in over the life cycle that they, let's say, prospect or do their sales process, chase process, whatever. But then after that, they do nothing. Nothing at all. They don't try to give it to someone else who might be a [00:27:00] better lead for them. They don't try to do it for this.

They don't try, like one of the best ways that I pitched credit score and credit repair was I bought mortgage declines, but when I talked to a mortgage guy, they went, those are worthless for credit score. And I went, then you're not doing it right. Because I know that you guys actually have a decline reason, not just a decline.

And I know that you can filter that on financial, and I know you're willing to gimme that lead. So gimme those. And they go, well, these are literally worthless to us. And I went, and they're literally gold to me. So I will take it because guess what, that $20 lead was 10 cents. And do you know what it converted at?

About 10% cold?

Jim Banks: Yeah. 'cause I mean, I, I mean ultimately if somebody has a problem with credit score and they can't get a mortgage right, then a credit repair. Company is going to be something that they will need. Otherwise they'll never be able to get a mortgage.

Rob Adler: And how do they verify that the credit repair company is doing their job? Usually they give you credit score [00:28:00] monitoring, but if they don't or you don't trust it 'cause it's theirs, maybe you should go get Credit Karma and maybe you should send that through your affiliate link to get the, I think it's like a dollar 30 or $2 for a free signup.

And then you get to be known as the brand that helped them by not taking advantage of them. So there's a lot of upside to this, and there's a lot of other things that you can assume based on user journey. If you have a good understanding of the mind frame that people are in when they click on your ad, and that's why a lot like the mortgage one, right?

They go to mortgage, they become a decline. I know that if they decline on mortgage for a financial reason, I don't care where they came from, it's still applicable. For my use, but for someone else, they might be in a case where their industry, like under five 80 is completely unworkable, but under 6 42, 5 80 and above is fine.

They're cool, but they might not be able to buy it all. So it comes down to knowing your demos and knowing your targets. Some of you probably target on credit already through other means. You might target through zip codes, or you might target through like square footage of house or [00:29:00] job title or something along those lines to get around requirements like HUD or whatever it is to be able to target certain demographics or ages or whatever.

You're still assuming you're, it's an educated, it's an educated assumption in what you're doing, but enough of those is accurate enough that it's pretty much like targeting

Jim Banks: I mean, it's, it's like with the, the conversions now with, you know, with, with a lot of the platforms because of things like, you know, apple iOS 14.5, right? That took away a lot of the tracking capabilities. So now a lot of the data that, Facebook, Google, Microsoft are all modeling on is this probabilistic and deterministic, right?

So they, they can look at everything that happened and. With a fairly good degree of confidence, say that person probably converted, right? Because all of the steps up to that were just like bang, bang, bang. And just the final step over of actually what do they buy, how do they buy and all that sort of stuff.

Just don't have that. And you know, and, and then obviously the deterministic is just, it's less of a kind of confidence [00:30:00] level, right? But again, it's. Broadly speaking, they might say, well, 25% of those people will probably have converted as well, and that's how they come up with this number. So it's always amazed me when people are trying to get the numbers to kind of marry up.

So, exactly. It's just they don't, I mean, you're just never gonna get that comparison.

Rob Adler: and that's the problem, is that media buyers always go as granular as they can mentally in order to try to optimize everything to the last point, not realizing that they're optimizing themselves out of revenue because they're too tunnel visioned. That's be because that's what you're supposed to do.

Get the cheapest acquisition possible for your core business. But at the same time, I can tell you a couple companies that do advertising for their leads and the leads are worth like $3 to them and they're profitable. But at me with a different industry, same exact person would be worth 10.

Jim Banks: Yeah,

Rob Adler: But you know, the best part is, is that them converting for both of us doesn't impact either.

So the upsell potential is

Jim Banks: and you're not stealing [00:31:00] from

Rob Adler: in.

Jim Banks: $3 lead from, it's a three plus a 10, right?

Rob Adler: Here's how it's proven is because if anyone knows a realtor or a loan officer, ask them if they've ever tried doing leads with the opposite. And you will find out that realtors usually have one, two, or three loan officers they work with. And depending on where the house is, they'll give it to a certain loan officer.

'cause they'll work better with certain banks in certain ways. But what they're really doing is they're getting the loan officer with walk-ins going, we wanna go look for a new house. And then they go, awesome. Do you have a realtor yet? Because I actually know a good one. And if they go to the realtor first, they're like, do tell me you have a pre-approval.

We need a pre-approval in this market right now. And they're like, well, we don't. He is like, I got a really good loan officer, let me hook you up. But both of them require someone in the other position to complete the deal. So it's like having your own back office, except it's not under your umbrella. And since you're doing this, a lot of them.

Also because of some legalities, they give the [00:32:00] leads to each other, not sell it, right? So then it becomes is the value I get versus the value I give, blah, blah, blah. This is a way to not worry about that because you're now getting monetary value from someone that if they can't make money on it, they just stop buying and someone else will start buying.

It's the difference of running a CPA offer versus a search feed. If a buyer doesn't like my traffic and they pause, I only have 39,000 more bidding on that keyword through Google. But. If my one buyer bit pauses, either I'm going to a less, better or let, let's say, let's say I'm going to a lower quality buyer in which maybe they don't monetize better or they pay less or they don't convert as well and they're gonna turn me off anyway, but also.

Who's to say that the traffic's gonna convert the same? Who's to say that their agents on the phone are trained as well as these guys' agents on the phone? And maybe my very high converting traffic is only very high converting for that client. And that is the number one mentality aspect that I usually run across with media buyers is they go from, we need to get acquisition for this, [00:33:00] and then they go.

Now we need to get as much acquisition as possible for this. And then they tunnel vision in on the intent only. And then they go, I don't know how to scale. And it's like, of course you don't because you've saturated the intent and you're not in something like it's 110 degrees outside and I need air conditioning.

I. You're in something that doesn't require two hours of urgency. You're in B2B, you're in something else. So it's a huge lifecycle difference and it's a huge, difference in the, these statistics. But the truly good media buyers, whether it's in-house affiliates, standalone work for themselves, clients, whatever, they all target based on the fact that they know if they need to.

They could pivot the traffic into something else, whether it's another client or another buyer or another property, whatever, it's, they have at least something that is logical that could make money off the traffic flow as long as it that is

Jim Banks: It's always amazed me how many [00:34:00] people like spend their time. I mean, like you talk to some, some really sort of high volume, media buyers that are running in, in industries that are sketchy, I'll just call them. And they're, they're, they have people that are going out and setting up multiple Facebook business managers, multiple ad accounts, right?

'cause they keep getting shut down and, you know, blocked and everything else, right? So one business manag manager gets blown up. They far up another one. The problem with that is that they're running things that kind of are count, counter to what sort of Facebook say is acceptable business use. Because they're running, you know, it could be that they're, they're running a CBD offer or cannabis or something like that, which is obviously very legal in, in virtually every single state in America, right? But clearly not something that Facebook wants to have.

Rob Adler: Federal

Jim Banks: On their, on their site. But, but again, I've never understood why affiliates don't use like a Trojan horse approach.

I mean, that's the way I used to, to kind of do it. I would frame it in, in the way that if, if somebody [00:35:00] wanted to kind of run a CBD offer or whatever it might be, right? You would, you offer them a, offer people a quiz. They would ask answer questions, and the end product of the quiz could be some sort of like a PDF with, with all the various sort of sources and whatnot.

All clickable links. All affiliate links, right? So instead of it being, you know, you get one bite to get one conversion, you might get five conversions from that. And I know that that's the sort of thing that you are doing with your offer walls, right? So you have multiple things on the backend or on the co-reg path that's, you know, it's same sort of

Rob Adler: it's, it's amazing to see someone's face when they realize that they've been buying traffic directly to one offer of some type. E-comm, lead gen doesn't matter, but they buy to a lander, and then when the lander gets filled out and they press a button, the job is done. It's amazing to watch those people test something on the thank you page and go, I've been missing this profit all along.

Or they're like, they [00:36:00] sit there and they go and there's no additional cost because I already paid for the use. Like it's that. And once you start to figure that out and you start to see that, that's when the demo points start coming in a lot faster. And you start to realize it's not just the intent for our product, it's also why is the intent there?

Is it just 'cause they want it? Is it because they need it? Is it 'cause something happened? And that's where the whole marketing personas go in, but like in a much deeper level, much deeper level. We don't give credit where it is due for the very, very, very big marketing firms that do the very, very, very big branding campaigns because like, like Coke, Pepsi, like, stuff like that.

Because they have been able to get to a point through pure marketing that their branding now is the fact that you still see them. That's it. If you don't, if I don't see Coke during Christmas, I go, what happened to Coke? That's what it is. If I don't see the polar bear, I'm like, what happened there?

[00:37:00] But think about the fact of it's not intent bidding. It's not going after like, you need to buy Coke. It's literally a freaking polar bear drinking a thing of coke. And then they're like, did you see that 18% jump in sales? That is a whole different level of branding based on decades of intent based and status

Jim Banks: It was funny. I was, I was working with a company that was selling supplements, right? And and we were sort of like running ads to, to. Various, campaigns that we had running and, we were, we were their internal media buyer for, for PPC, right? So we were running Google and, and everything else. And, and one, one day we saw this sort of fairly significant spike for one of the supplements they were selling.

And we were like, we could, we, we were trying to work out where this demand had come from. What had happened was there was a kind of glossy. Women's magazine and there was a sort of, probably a middle aged woman, 40 ish or whatever, Talking about the mind [00:38:00] blowing sex you had with a younger man. Because she had taken this product called Horny Goat Weed, and

Rob Adler: Yep.

Jim Banks: like literally the supplement company sold out of horny goat weed in literally about five minutes. Be, and, and it was only because we found that sort of, that magazine that had talked about it, that we were able to kind of capitalize on it and scramble to kind of get new campaigns and ads and, everything up to be able to sell that.

Rob Adler: Let me, here, I'll give you a couple more that you might find interesting. So that's a good one. Remember the old tea weight loss products, the Rebills, that was another one. For those of you not familiar, they literally took regular tea, put like two or three things, like modified, like green tea or whatever it is, turned it into one, and then basically made up.

An acronym or made up like a hyphenated name, put it right before the word T, and then that was their entire branding [00:39:00] and these guys were in sync. Like they were great targeting, great scale, unlimited cap almost, but they just dreamt this up on like a Wednesday and just turned it into a brand and then just

Jim Banks: The thing I love, the thing I

Rob Adler: they were selling

Jim Banks: people that sold those sort of supplements is they also, they had an opt out upsell of insurance for the product and it said if it doesn't arrive, we'll send another one out with. And it was like genius, you, 'cause every single upsell was probably 12, $13.

So if it was a $40 sale, all of a sudden that became like 53, 62, whatever it might be. And you know, and it was opt out. So people would invariably not untick the box to say, I don't want it.

Rob Adler: Do you know, do you know even why people took it and why they did it, even when the box was unchecked by default and why people still took it?

Jim Banks: No.

Rob Adler: Because the tax amount that The tax amount, the insurance fee covers the [00:40:00] raw cost of the bottle. So most of the insurance stuff you'll see now is anywhere between like 4 95 and like 7 95 or whatever the old style rebuilds, like I'm talking like goji berry, like all that kind of stuff.

Those old style that was shipped under $10, it was mainly around like six or $7. So, and I remember that as going up because I was one of the ones that ran that math is. With our normal customer service complaint rate about people not receiving packages combined against the upsell and then the price of replacing it, it actually increased our profit 13%.

Jim Banks: Wow.

Rob Adler: By offering insurance and taking, quote, unquote, a loss on the replacement because with the flat, and again, specific, but with most of those things, back then, we didn't even do boxes. They were using bubble mailers. So we were playing, we were paying the flat rate, but it was bottled labeled, put together, put in the box, and shipped all same [00:41:00] day from one place.

So with all of this stuff, they could scale as much as they wanted. It didn't really matter. but yeah, the, the. The one check for the insurance stuff, I always recommend that to all of my friends that do it because you make it basically about 60% of the product replacement cost. And if you do that, I'm talking about bigger product, right?

Small ones are easy, just do five bucks. But if you do that, unless you have really bad shipping or like really bad issues, you actually will make money by doing it, even if, call it twice the amount of people that normally lose packages, lose the packages. Because also forget, I haven't even gone into the fact that you can also insure it with USPS and then you get some back too, so you actually make more money.

But yeah, there's, there's a lot of that on the backend that I like to optimize that stuff. Like we optimize media buys. 'cause there's a lot you can do for just ancillary revenue.

Jim Banks: It's funny, like the, the, but to, to go back to what the, the thing we talked about right at the very beginning about that kind of like the [00:42:00] downtime and everything. Had nothing to talk about. I mean, we've been on for 40 odd minutes, so clearly we, we know how to kind of, keep talking just for the sake of,

Rob Adler: Oh.

Jim Banks: but, what, what I'd like to know, Rob, is like, so again, I, my, my business is very.

I say it's seasonal. It's seasonal on purpose. I used to kind of only work, with e-commerce businesses, so it meant that it was crazy busy in Q4 because of Black Friday, cyber Monday, Christmas, Thanksgiving, you know, and then it would be slightly busier in kind of Q ones for Valentine's Day, that sort of thing.

Gifting. but then sort of Q2, you know, we'd maybe have Mother's Day, father's Day, and then there'd be like. I mean, I called it the summer lull, right? But, you know, deliberately, I would sort of have downtime in that, in that period, because why wouldn't you? I mean, if it's nice and sunny and you gotta go out, go to the beach with your grandkids and so, so on, why not do that, right?

Rather than being tied to an office. So I.

Rob Adler: We, I was, I was gonna say real quick, we actually did that once. If you haven't looked [00:43:00] up, like the start of summer versus your geotargeting for beach towns versus regular, look that up and look at your drop in performance on those specifically. It'll be very interesting, but please

Jim Banks: And, and it, yeah. You know, it is again, I mean, like, some people go, oh, the, the, the kind of numbers are down and, and, and everything else. And you know, when you, when you kind of layer in things like, you know, when do the kids go back to school? When do the kids break up from school? There'll be that sort of period when, you know, people that have kids are not gonna go, you know, I'm gonna sit down, I'm gonna do some serious research into buying this stuff because the kids are screaming and, you know,

Rob Adler: Oh

Jim Banks: so.

Rob Adler: So, yeah, like, like one of my guys hit me up, I wanna say. Two days ago, maybe three, like it was like Monday or Tuesday. And he was like, Hey, do you have any idea why this sector might be down? And I went, what are you targeting? And he's like, well, I'm going after mainly like, you know, smaller families, parents, dah, dah, dah, dah.

And I was like, NGO. And they're like, we're targeting us. And I went, what are you pitching? And he was like, in [00:44:00] educational product to help with the, the kids. basically like, you know, that they could do it at home, like kinda like a tutoring thing like that. And I went, so. I was like, let me guess. Your mentality was is they're gonna be home for the summer, so now they have time to do the tutoring so that they'll wanna do this.

And he was like, yeah, exactly. And I went, no. Because now they're gonna have no time to do the tutoring. 'cause now the kids are also home the entire day in the majority of states you're targeting. But now also the kids are screaming, wanting to do other stuff, which may, if they work from home, especially co post COVID will kill some productivity, which depending on jobs, may actually kill some of their revenue.

So now they might not have disposable income. And he is like, that's a long stretch. And I was like, correct. The problem is I can think of 10 more. That's the issue. If it was just that, I wouldn't care, I'd still say test it, but I can think of that with a lot of other stuff too. So once he started doing that and saying, well, I figured this, this summer would be good.

And I went, yeah, yeah, but you're forgetting the sales cycle. You're, you're thinking you're gonna get someone [00:45:00] that's right now ready to go and they're gonna get on. 'cause that's the dream, right? I only want 'em when they're ready. And the credit card's already out on the desk and right by the keyboard and Good.

No. So all he did was. I told him, I was like, you know when you do this, try targeting the same thing, but like a month earlier and just slide all your stuff a month. And he's like, oh, we did that last year. Let me look. What do you think he found? 35% revenue increase. So it's literally like he just, it's, you know, your people.

And this goes back to the media buying part. You know your people so much. That you think you know the right pieces and you've tunnel visioned in to the only part that's applicable to help you do your job with them, which is the

Jim Banks: And the thing is, the lead time into the purchase can be driven by how much of a considered purchase it is. If it's just like, you know, well, you go and buy, you know, four rolls of toilet paper for the the bathroom, versus I'm gonna take my family on a summer vacation to [00:46:00] five destinations across Europe, right?

And I need hotels and flights and you know, car rental and airport transfers. It's like there's a lot more to it than just. One simple, simple sale, right? So.

Rob Adler: Do you know? Do you know how hard it was to have that conversation with him while on the left? 'cause I have an ultra wide, right? So I normally have two regular screens up. I've got him and a Google meet on the right on the left I have my Facebook, and on my Facebook is one of my friends literally posting the picture of them all going to Disney.

And it's like. It was expensive but worth it and I was just, I PMed him. I'm like, okay, so my kid's a little young for me to even consider this right now, but like, how expensive are we talking? He's like, I think we dropped about 14,000. And I was like, how long are you there for? He's like, about a week. And I was like,

Jim Banks: Wow.

Rob Adler: he's like, yeah, we had to cut back and I just screenshotted that we had to cut back right there.

And I went, this is what you're targeting based on seeing, this is what is [00:47:00] happening based on what's actually happening. They're going here and dropping a lot of money, so you think disposable income, they go, that was our disposable income. That's the issue and that's the disconnect, is you don't have that level of integration.

Jim Banks: I mean, I,

Rob Adler: So it's.

Jim Banks: I used to do that sort of modeling where, quite often it would be recency frequency and monetary. So that's, that's my sort of, some of my segmentations would be. How, how recent did they buy? How often do they buy and how much money do they typically spend? Because, you know, if you're trying to model things out, I mean, again, if, if you are a, an affiliate, right?

And you are doing, say, auto insurance, right? There's every likelihood that somebody who gets a quote for, a car order, order insurance, quote. Today, we'll probably at the same time next year, come back to get another quote for auto insurance. And also, if you ask the question of how many cars are in the house, right?

Three when's the other one due for renewal? Bang, you've got a kind of, so you should have a steady [00:48:00] list of all the people that you know who's, who's here. So rather than before you go start chasing cold people that you know nothing about, you have a whole raft of people that you know a lot about just based on, you know.

Rob Adler: just, just act like you know your industry. You're an insurance broker. You know they're renewing because you're doing it. You're literally sitting there going, Hey guys, do you wanna renew? You already know this. I cannot tell you how many people I have that don't even look at data that's older than two months like that used to be.

My entire business is just buying ready 11 month old leads for cheap as dirt just for the email. And people were like, he's never gonna make any money with this. And then like two months later they're like, why does he keep rebuying? And I'm like, and then, 'cause all I'm doing is going, you have a renewal coming up.

Just make sure you're not getting screwed. That's it.

Jim Banks: It's funny, I used to sell, I used to sell insurance for a living door to door. So, I was working for a [00:49:00] company that was ridiculously expensive for, for, for car insurance. And I used to go around this, this is in the days when everything was like in pads with like. Paper that you could kinda write through and you'd have to swap it out.

So I, I kind of, one particular year I sold about four times as many car insurances than anyone else in the company, and they said, Jim, how did you do it? I said, I just quoted everyone I said, when's your, when's your car insurance due the other day? Say, well, it's whatever. And I'm like, lemme give you a quote.

So I'd give 'em the quote and they go, wow, that's really, really expensive. I'm like, well, you know, compared to what? And they say, well, I've had a quote for this. Yeah, but we have much more premium cover, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So that, but if you don't give the quote, there's absolutely no chance of you closing the deal.

So I think I, again, I think I quoted something like 650 people in the year. Which is a lot over the kind of course of a year. And, and I, I probably sold. 180, 200 kind of policies in the year, right? I got paid really good [00:50:00] money on the back of it 'cause it was a percentage of the insurance premium.

So it was, it was definitely worth my time and investment. And I, I had sitting on the side all these old books of quotes that I'd given people, right? So again, that, that became my, once I knew what, what, when it was due, I'd go back and do exactly the same thing, same, same time next year. Go back, give 'em another quote.

Right.

Rob Adler: See, and the, and the funny, the other aspect of that is, is you don't even realize that you glossed over something that most people wouldn't even put together. And it's the biggest deciding factor in how you do targeting. You didn't say, how many cars do you have as an example, and you didn't say, are you a homeowner?

You said, how many cars do you have in your garage? And if you do that, that's two to three data points on a single question. That is how your competitors are out spending you is because every single question on a path must make [00:51:00] money. If you are a homeowner, someone will buy that. If you own a car, someone will buy that.

If you do it something else, someone will buy that, but you don't know what you don't know, so start asking the

Jim Banks: I mean, I used to do that. I'd, I'd stand at the door, knock on the door. People would open the door, they would invite me in, and as soon as I walked through the door, right? So I, I'd take a look at what was going on outside the, the house, see what the garden was like, see how they kind of kept things, if the grass was nicely cut and the lawns were nicely.

Kind of put together beds with nice flowers, right? They obviously have pride in, in where they live. So they're probably a home buyer rather than a renter. then, you know, you get into the house, you'd see like golf clubs in the corner. You'd see pictures of exotic places that they'd been away to vacation on the walls, right?

Rob Adler: You'd see school bags. School shoes, right? So you can deduce so much from that even without asking the questions, right? So, you know. You don't have to say how many kids you have, you probably see like there's three pairs of shoes for children. Every likelihood they've got three children, right? So, Yeah. [00:52:00] So it like, like how many kids do you have? Part right. That's a great example. 'cause you can actually get like eight or nine data points outta that. One is you can go, how much does your schooling cost for, or, or how much does your family pay in education a year? And then from the education, you say what type?

And then from the what type you go like, graduate school, undergrad, high school. And then you let them put the number of, of people in those. So it's like grad two, undergrad, one high school one. Now, you know. Household family size, you can estimate income based on the other stuff. With that, you can now also estimate their costs because you can actually estimate.

'cause at this point, you know, with like four kids. Two of ' em aren't in the house. They don't necessarily need a big house, but if they're all in lower school and they are, yeah, like that kind of stuff is very good to be able to show you that. And the hilarious part is, is that half the vendors collect this, like either one step removed or they don't even know they're [00:53:00] collecting it. Mortgage. People do it every time when they ask if you already own a home, right? But realtors also do it because they're not allowed to ask you certain things. So they ask you other things like, are schools important to you? Does it matter if we need to be in an area that's more city or suburb? Do you need a bigger yard?

Like if you put those answers together, I can infer a decent amount about you. But if I ask three more. I can most likely gauge your demographic down to

Jim Banks: you, if you could hack into somebody's phone, so let's say you kind of, you, you went to, you saw somebody and you said, can I just borrow you a phone for a second? And you opened up the phone and you just flipped through all of the apps that they had installed on their phone. You could tell so much about that person from the apps that they have installed.

Installed, You could, you know if,

Rob Adler: Home screen. Just the home screen. I can tell what someone does for a living just from the home screen,

Jim Banks: You know, so if they have,

Rob Adler: like it's insane.

Jim Banks: they have the New York Times or Washington Post or CNN [00:54:00] or you know, the BBC or, you know, they have, you know, all sorts of different things. Like they could have a, a link to zero accounting software, so they're probably running their own business, right?

There's so many things you can kind of deduce just from that simple thing. And those are the sorts of things that I think if you know, if you're a good. Smart media buyer, right? And you run quizzes, which a lot of people do, and, and they're, they're good with them. You could get so much information just from asking sort of these questions with a kind of, an al if you're like an ulterior motive and an ulterior response that they kind of give you, right?

So I, I used to be, I'd have certain things and if they said, answered one way or they answered another, I had a solution for both of those. So I didn't care whether they answered yes they do, or no, they don't. It's like, are you in a company pension scheme at work? They go, yes. And they assume that they're, they're kind of off the hook there and it's like, fantastic.

I've got a solution that'd be perfect for you. And then, you know, if they said no, it's like, great, I've got a solution that would be perfect for you. So it didn't matter what they said, they would [00:55:00] always be kind of something that needed me to wear it where it needed to be.

Rob Adler: And that's, and I'll, and I'll, I wanna close out with this one. 'cause this is, this is a good thing, but it's so overlooked that it never gets brought up. And some people are gonna hear this and be like, I talk about that all the time. You're the exception, trust me. But if you don't do any sort of heat mapping, specifically screen recording and heat mapping on your traffic, like Hotjar, any of those, if you.

I'm not saying just the heat mapping with like 80% of people click here. I'm talking the actual, where you can see the mouse and you can see the typing. Wait until you find out how many people you would've had their lead, but they stopped typing halfway through the form 'cause they saw something.

And that recording will show you what it's,

Jim Banks: It's funny, I had a client that they had the, the, the. Image, I think it was a JPEG or something like that. The image of all of the credit cards. So they had like Visa, MasterCard, American Express, diners, whatever. And I was watching sort of [00:56:00] screen recordings and I saw so many people come trying to click on the.

The visa symbol, assuming that that was going to open up and tell them it was a visa, right? That, that they had, right? They click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, and then go, site's broken leave. And you're thinking just for something simple, like take that whole image away, right?

Don't have it there. I mean, look, the, the technology is good enough now. You just type in the first four digits of the, the number and they'll tell you whether it's a Visa or an Amex or whatever. It's right. So you know that that's kind of all you need to do. You don't need to kind of piss around with images that really ought not to be there at all.

Rob Adler: exactly.

Jim Banks: So, Rob, this has been a great conversation. I appreciate we're kind of coming up on an hour. You've probably got other stuff to do. I've got other stuff to do. so yeah, if you haven't kind of like listened to other episodes there, they'll be linked somewhere below somewhere. Just find us way where, wherever you listen to your podcasts or watch your podcasts on YouTube, we are planning, we, we got some, had some discussions about having [00:57:00] some guests on the show.

if you have a parti, a great guest that you wanna see us have, pull apart on the show. Leave, leave, leave their name in the comments below, or leave your own name in the comments below. And, we'll, we'll love to kind of, get people on and, just see what we can do to, to kind of, yeah, rip them apart or as we used to call it the ugly

Rob Adler: We will be gentle. Sorry, I, I believe the, the, the proper term is a live audit, so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But let us know. I

sure how that will work with audio podcast, but we'll do our best. I mean, clearly if it's we'll figure it

Jim Banks: video, we'll just do it for video. But yeah, it just remains for me to say. Rob, hope you have a fantastic week. Talk to you next week and to everyone else, peace out love, love you all and we'll speak soon.

I.

Rob Adler: See you guys.