WP Product Talk
WP Product Talk
Paid Advertising for WordPress Products: the Why and the How
Loading
/

This was a great conversation that covers some of the basics of why product owners need to leverage paid advertising. Drew is a real pro and knows the in’s and out’s really well. Matt adds helpful perspective on how advertising fits into the broader marketing strategies, and Zack raised important questions related to how advertising platforms use and gather their targeted information and the ethical implications of them.

An important and valueable watch for any WordPress product owner.

Introduction
0:21
[Music]
0:30
thank you
0:39
hey everyone this is WP product talk the place where every week we interview an experience WordPress product owner on
0:46
the strategies and tips and experiences failures and successes of running successful and thriving WordPress
0:52
product businesses I'm Matt crumwell co-founder of give WP and senior director of customer experience at
0:59
Stellar WP and I'm Zach Katz founder of gravitykit and trusted login
1:05
and today's topic is paid advertising for WordPress products the why and the
1:11
how and this is a great topic because paid advertising is a part of any holistic
1:16
marketing plan so uh if you don't have paid advertising in there uh this is the
1:21
talk for you yeah we might do the why and the how and the problematic aspects
1:28
we might throw a little curveball in there so we'll see but to talk about it with us today is a colleague and good
1:36
friend of mine um Drew Griswold this is true true thanks for being here thanks for having
Meet Drew Griswold
1:41
me Matt and Zach happy to be here absolutely Drew tell the world a little bit about yourself what do you do why do
1:48
you do it where do you do it from all that kind of fun stuff for sure I'm Drew Griswold I'm the
1:54
director of outbound marketing for Stellar WP so I came up through give WP
1:59
so me and Matt worked closely together there uh now I oversee the advertising and events for all of the Stellar WP
2:05
Brands um so I am based in Milwaukee Wisconsin currently talking to you from Iowa City
2:13
Iowa and really happy to be here and lend some insights into the world of paid
2:18
advertising awesome thanks so much
2:24
um and um for anybody who's watching the live stream uh feel free to comment uh
2:30
hello Amber hello Michelle uh anybody else hop on the uh comments and and ask
2:35
questions uh Drew's here to answer your questions as well absolutely and if you're on Twitter or I
2:42
don't even want to call it if you're acting on X yeah X we do use the hashtag
2:49
WP product talk and I'll be watching there as well so um I'm just pulling it up the whole
2:55
experience of like dealing with uh this weird Rebrand that they did just makes
3:01
me feel weird uh cool so jumping in um first thing we always like to talk
3:07
about is why is this subject so important um to uh WordPress product owners in
3:14
particular um I was really excited to to for us to discuss this because as I have just
3:21
talked about uh different marketing tactics that we've employed at give and that Stellar proudly speaking I have
3:27
often heard um product owners say I tried ads and they sucked so I stopped doing it
3:35
um and it resonated a lot with my own experience in some ways uh before
3:41
um I brought on Drew actually um and I think in many ways that's the the case is that a lot of times we don't
3:47
know what we don't know as product owners um and we're definitely we're not born and bred in the paid advertising World
3:55
um and so because we're not good at it we just quit um and in at the end of the day it just
4:00
ends up kind of being a missed opportunity so um I think it's a great one to talk about because it's definitely a funnel
4:07
uh and an area that when you Excel and you do it well it's it's super helpful and beneficial it rounds out the whole
4:14
experience of of your sales tactics so that's my take
4:19
um Drew um you're the expert though uh honestly so what's your take why is this
4:25
so important to talk about for WordPress product owners yeah I think there's a lot of different ways to look at it I think paid
4:31
advertising can be a successful tactic for multiple different phases of the
4:38
customer Journey multiple different phases of your business's Journey um you know for a lot of folks it might
4:44
be your growth has kind of plateaued a little bit and you're looking for ways to scale beyond x amount of active
4:50
installs or something like that for some folks it might be just getting your name out there and making sure that your
4:57
brand recognition is higher but advertising is a really effective way to make sure that you have control over
5:03
what people are receiving about your product and not just your organic audience so I think there's a place for
5:09
advertising in every type of business and there's a place for advertising in every part of the business's Journey
5:16
forward and with their growth if that made sense
5:21
absolutely absolutely that's really true Zach what's your take well I my take is
5:27
that ads are a great complement to SEO like we've we talked last week about SC or two weeks ago about SEO and how
Paid Advertising and SEO
5:35
important that how important that is to your business but SEO takes a while organic traffic takes a while to build
5:41
up so Drew was saying that it takes a pay-per-click and advertising is good
5:46
when you've reached a SEO Plateau but it's also good before you even start climbing that Hill
5:51
um it's a great way to get traffic it's a great way to get eyeballs on a
5:57
specific product that you've just released or a specific feature you want to bring attention to it's a great way
6:02
to get traffic to your site without needing to work on it Beyond setting up the ads
6:10
so I think it's a a really important complement to SEO for uh for any
6:15
business I like that that's a really important um aspect too for sure I I kind of wanna
6:23
maybe um do a little bit of layer the land a little bit for for folks who might not
6:28
be tons really experienced here um there's two big caveats or not caveats aspects of paid advertising that
6:36
Drew I'd love if you might elucidate it for us a little bit um when we talk about like sometimes
6:44
people talk about paid ads in the terms of like you just spend and you get conversions and if you just start
6:50
spending more you'll get more conversions um that's true right that's basically
6:55
how it works can you talk a little bit about that um and then the next one just
7:00
so you know is going to be more about like different types of paid spent so yeah I wish that it was creating a
7:08
machine that prints more money the the more money you feed into it but that's not always the case
7:14
um I think that ads can accelerate something that is already effective or
7:19
like like Zach said it could you know shed more light on to certain things we use paid ads to test landing pages we
7:25
have a new page and we want to make sure we get a lot of traffic there quickly to see how it's performing things like that
7:31
but there is definitely a point where you get diminishing returns it doesn't mean if you spend a million dollars
7:38
you're gonna make two million dollars just because when you spend fifty dollars you made a hundred dollars I
7:43
think part of understanding that balance between where you want your spend to be and what you could expect your return to
7:48
be is just experimenting having a plan making sure that you're monitoring your
7:54
spend and everything like that but it's definitely not something that I would anticipate is an unlimited growth
8:00
mechanism um right off the bat necessarily yeah absolutely so then the other one that um
8:07
you know when we're talking about paid advertising I think most folks think immediately about
8:13
um Google ads uh that show up at the top of search but um there's a wide variety of ways to do paid advertising um can
8:20
you talk about that a little bit talk about the different avenues that we've talked about internally yeah just within the Google ecosystem
8:27
there's a ton of different types of ads just between display ads search ads
8:32
video ads and it goes way further down the rabbit hole you have Gmail inbox ads
8:38
things like that it's the internet so any available real estate has been monetized apologies for the
8:45
lawnmower that just went by if you could hear that um but essentially I think a really easy
8:51
way to think of it is you have search ads which can be based off of intent someone is actively searching something
8:57
and you could choose to interject your product based off of the intent they've expressed through their search and then
9:02
there's display ads will be a little bit more interruptive I guess is not the not
9:07
the coolest way to say it but it's you're putting your ad in front of someone on their feed that you think is
9:12
going to be interested in that um for Stellar we really focus quite a
9:18
bit on Google and Facebook Google being that search intent based advertising and
9:23
Facebook being that display Interruption based advertising where you're placing a
9:29
visual on their feed I think that's a pretty easy way to think about it but it's a very generalized way of thinking
9:35
about it because just with Google you have display ads you have as I mentioned a whole different variety of options
9:42
just within their ecosystem yeah absolutely we've also experimented a little bit with like paid placements and
9:49
other types of Publications um I feel like we've been a little bit less successful on that front but it's
9:55
also can be an interesting opportunity um yeah sponsorships
10:01
so things like that I think that it it depends where your goals lie where you
10:06
want to reach people um but there's different there's unlimited
10:11
different ways to spend money to get placements that is for sure Zach do you have some like creative interesting uh
10:18
paid placements that you've done yeah you know it's so hard to know what your
10:24
audience so part of part of what Facebook does automatically for example is say like and use look-alike groups
10:31
and they say Okay somebody who's purchased your product uh they also like like this this and
10:37
this and there are some people that kind of look like your customer from an activity standpoint and you can say I
10:42
want to Market to them I want to look like group I want to advertise to this group but if you're just going off of
10:47
instinct I think that's also kind of okay uh with gravity view uh for example
10:53
we put a PL um we did a paid advertisement on a an apple industry uh
10:59
blog called appleworld.today and I did this in 2014 or 2015 or something and uh
11:06
I did some fun graphic with the Apple campus that they were building at the time that Johnny Ive had designed and I
11:11
had a mascot like popping out of there and it was a throwaway ad that I didn't know that it would actually work it cost
11:17
like 150 bucks and over the course of uh years it brought in like 1500 bucks
11:25
so you never know and that was just me saying like I like this Vlog I see this Vlog every day I want to see my own
11:31
product on there so sometimes you just gotta try things and see how they work and I think that that's the most fun for
11:38
me for paid advertising is being like well this is a kooky idea let's try it
11:43
and see if it works and making sure that you have the tracking and stuff is important but just see what works uh
11:49
there's also there's a creative aspect to advertising that I don't think people
11:54
should let go of yeah it's interesting and one thing I'll interject about the lookalike audiences like that is um
12:00
something that Facebook definitely will push very aggressively and it could be incredibly effective if you have a large
12:07
amount of input data to inform Their audience building if you're a smaller
12:12
brand that doesn't have a ton of conversion data particularly on Facebook it's not going to necessarily give the
12:19
signals that you want um and it can't it's not always going to be the most effective if you're not a larger brand
12:24
that has a lot of customer customer history on the Facebook platform
12:29
and so much of Facebook is uh waiting for them to train their models so that
12:35
they can get the right target so that you'll hear on Facebook they'll you'll pay a lot of money and then they'll say
12:41
we need to keep on training this uh so keep on paying us because we're not really dialed in yet so your pay your
12:47
cost per click is still higher than we expect it to be and you just keep on paying and at some point it's Gotta just
12:54
be trained right but uh yeah the the dreaded the dreaded learning phase I think they typically say that they need
13:00
50 conversions for the ad to get out of the learning phase and into the active
13:05
um distribution phase my experience with Facebook is that we've had some incredibly effective ads that have never
13:12
exited the learning phase um it does seem I mean Matt and I have talked quite a bit some of these
13:17
platforms can be quite mafioso and they're yeah mafia-esque in
13:22
their tactics to get you to spend more like oh you're doing really well it's gonna stop if you don't spend more
13:28
um and things kind of like that but the learning phase thing I'm never really afraid of the learning phase we've had
13:33
ads that have performed so well in the learning phase for the entire duration of their uh display life
13:40
yeah same here we have a nice comment from one of our co-hosts uh amber Hines
Email Newsletters
13:46
is here we've had so much better luck sponsoring email newsletters and paying for ads in those
13:53
um I think that's an interesting take for sure I guess it depends a lot on the product and the um audience of those
14:00
newsletters in particular um but have you done any uh paid sponsorships and newsletters uh Zach
14:07
I have sponsored in the past um I sponsored a podcast feed on daring
14:13
Fireball another Apple industry uh blog but that wasn't successful and it
14:19
was very expensive I haven't done uh email newsletter sponsorship as much but I have done it yeah
14:26
I think it's always interesting um especially because you think about the reach that email newsletters can
14:33
have potentially um but they also seem to be a bit of like a
14:38
um you know a really quick uh hit um and that you know then diminish
14:44
really quickly whereas with uh search ads or whatnot they can kind of be there all the time and things like that
14:50
um to that Mafia aspect like even like I have such a hard time still constantly
14:55
having to pay for Branded search ads and that Drew's heard me complain about this so much it's definitely like I have to
15:01
pay for um I'll give WP to show up at the top of the search for a give WP branded term
15:09
because if I don't then classy does or somebody else does I just hate that but it's literally the
15:15
way it works um I don't know Zach Have you had experiences like that too yeah it's always hard to uh to justify
15:24
their it's the question of like what would you pay to be at the top of the search result for your own name and
15:30
apparently the answer is like a buck 50 a click because and it's it's galling but it
15:37
also is nice to know that they landed exactly where we hoped that they would um yeah and if you design when for
15:44
product owners out there if you are designing a campaign that is targeted toward your own brand name uh I heard
15:50
this from our uh pay-per-click Specialists they said to create a separate Google uh campaign for your
15:57
branded keywords and that that can help reduce the cost per click uh as opposed
16:03
to mixing it in with your other keywords um so if you have a separate campaign they have seen better performance for uh
16:09
costs and that's an undergrade piece of advice um for Budget control as well so you can
16:15
make sure that you're not spending a hundred percent of your PPC budget just on your branded terms which is really
16:22
easy to happen if you're letting Google's algorithm do the deciding for you like oh we're going to funnel it all
16:27
to this really well performing campaign of people that might have clicked on it anyways um we try to never spend more
16:33
than about 15 of our budgets on branded traffic but
16:39
particularly for the Stellar WP Brands we do have a really alarming amount of other brands that are bidding on our
16:45
brand term so if you search give WP there's going to be four or five other competitors that are trying to get that
16:51
traffic so there's a ton of value in bidding on your branded terms but definitely spin it off into its own
16:57
campaign so you could monitor it much more closely another thing is
17:10
can you repeat that sentence please nope do you have me back yep you're back
17:16
great I was mentioning broad match keywords is something that you really want to watch as much as possible to
17:22
Google is going to tell you you know switch everything to Broad match and there's a lot of times where it regresses back to your brand terms so
17:29
you want to make sure that you're really keeping an eye on what their broad matches are doing to make sure that you're not just bidding on branded
17:34
traffic one of the things that is really important when you're just getting started is to keep a very close look at
17:42
all the keywords that people are clicking on and start building your negative keyword list fast because
17:48
you're going to find a lot of keywords that you're like oh this is absolutely not related this is uh you want to
17:54
exclude words like free or nulled or like cracked like things that obviously
17:59
people are just trying to get your product for free you're going to find all sorts of things including areas of
18:06
the world which has ethical um question marks around it like but I found southeast Asia I had to exclude it
18:13
because I was getting so much spam clicks no conversions thousands of
18:18
clicks and I found that to be really spammy so I I disabled that zone in
18:23
Google uh but build up build up your negative keywords fast because otherwise you're
18:29
going to pay a lot more money than you would otherwise that's good insights uh we have another Stellar right here in
Facebook Ads
18:36
the comment section and a former guest of the show actually Michelle frechette uh monitor your ads especially on
18:43
Facebook uh watch those replies uh people who will comment negatively or with nasty photos because they don't
18:49
want ads on Facebook or they don't want to see non-white people in ads oh that's a good and terrible call out
18:57
um yeah I mean people get really gripy when they have uh advertisements in their free social media platforms
19:04
um it's it's really fascinating to me how entitled and Opera and like
19:09
affronted people will feel when uh an AG gets served into their news feed
19:15
um Drew what's your take on uh on comments on uh Facebook ads one thing I
19:21
always try to remember is these comments that could seem overwhelmingly negative still a lot of times do help your
19:28
delivery um you know hate comments are still interact obviously you want to hide them to make
19:34
sure that you don't have these terrible things associated with your brand but you don't want to just go through and
19:40
delete anything that's potentially if it's terrible obviously delete it but if it's just someone saying like oh I
19:47
hate Facebook ads or something like that you could always hide it and kind of ignore it and thank them for the
19:52
contribution to the interaction score that will raise it in people's feeds we had an occasion back in a former life
19:59
running my e-commerce business where we had one ad that went ridiculously viral where it had you know
20:05
I think 80 000 shares you know about 400 000 likes on this one ad and the amount
20:11
of comments that were negative were just overwhelming and it was just because it was a guy with long hair and all the
20:17
girls loved him and all the guys hated him but it got really aggressive really quickly
20:23
um but we just kind of keep reminding ourselves like hey these are these are interactions which the algorithm doesn't
20:29
necessarily discern if they're positive or negative but it's a it's a great call out Michelle does an amazing job with
20:35
the Stellar WP ads making sure that we are filtering out the terrible comments but it if you're getting hate comments
20:42
on your ads it doesn't mean that you're doing something wrong it just means that Facebook ad commenters are typically
20:48
some of the worst uh worst folks on the internet yeah that's it's a unique
20:54
aspect of ads both on Facebook and on formerly known as Twitter I think that's
20:59
what I'm going to call them formerly known as Twitter like that'll be yeah the the dumpster fire formerly nice
21:05
Twitter yeah um but I I do find myself often not
21:11
often sometimes looking into the comments of ads because I'll see an ad that I'm like oh that's a dumb ad and
21:18
then there'll be like 500 comments I'm like oh this is going to be fun um but being on the other side of that
21:24
is a different story and Drew how do you approach creating an ad like when it comes to tone and like
21:32
what's your take on uh different ads for different spaces like social media versus pay-per-click like how do you
21:40
sculpt a ad campaign for Facebook versus for Google I think it depends a lot on the product
21:46
one of the first things that I do if I'm looking for ideas for a campaign particularly on Facebook is go to their
21:52
ad Library something that people don't realize is all of the ads that run on Facebook are on an ad Library where you
22:01
could look at every single piece of creative that every one of your competitors is running as part of their
22:06
transparency efforts so if we have a company where we really admire the the
22:11
way that they present themselves in their paid advertising it's really easy to type that company in and look at what types of ads they're running it's a
22:18
great source of motivation information but I think it really depends on what your goals are what the brand ideals are
22:25
a number of things but that's kind of my first step is is looking with our
22:30
competitors that we respect are doing out there and that could inform a lot of the ways that you want to move forward
22:37
absolutely it's a good point um let's jump into I think we've already
22:43
been doing this a bit but talking about our personal experiences um in general we we've been highlighting
Drews Experience
22:49
them a few times already but I'd love to hear more detailed accounts Drew looks
22:55
like you have a couple interesting stories here um tell us about your experience here
23:00
yeah I'm in instead of telling you about my past five years of buying and selling
23:06
ads and on doing all these things I'll tell you how I got into paid advertising and that was I was running an e-commerce
23:12
brand that was doing remarkably well um and you know the first thing that you do when you start doing well is you want
23:18
to do really well and then you want to do really really well and you just want to keep adding zeros to the end of your your sales months and keep breaking
23:25
records so I um enthusiastically Enlisted the help of an agency to help
23:31
me scale my my paid advertising budgets to a point where I thought that I would be satisfied
23:37
um it ended up being a horrific failure um what amounted to be a sales scam
23:44
essentially where we spent about eighty thousand dollars on an agency that did absolutely nothing except for testing
23:51
and testing and testing and I didn't know any better and unfortunately this is a really common story with small
23:56
businesses where they hire someone you know paid advertising is such an easy thing for people to make big promises
24:02
and it's really easy to obfuscate the successes and the failures and just say well we're learning but but that thing I
24:10
promised you is just just around the corner just keep doing it um the beauty of having these
24:15
conversations like this is I'm not trying to sell anybody anything but definitely approach anybody that's
24:20
promising you big results with a healthy dose of skepticism the agency that we had hired essentially burned about eighty thousand
24:27
dollars in ad spend not including their agency fees to get everything set up and I was so frustrated with realizing how
24:35
how foolish that I had been that I kind of locked myself in my RV which was my home at the time
24:42
by choice not by necessity I always like to point that out and and guys are
24:48
downstairs yeah yeah I've never never heard that one that's for sure
24:54
um yeah so I locked myself in and I I kind of just got every certification that I possibly could in one weekend and
25:00
I learned everything there was that I could theoretically learn about ads
25:06
um and I started running the ads myself that Monday you know there's free resources out there to teach you how to
25:11
do all of these things you don't need to buy some guru's course you don't need to hire a big expensive agency all of the
25:17
resources that have success are out there and it was a really great feeling that Monday after just getting burned
25:25
for what our business was a lot of money um to go out there and have success doing it myself and realizing that this
25:32
isn't unattainable there's a lot of abbreviations there's a lot of big words there's a lot of confusion it's a fast
25:38
evolving Marketplace so it could be really hard to keep keep a tab and everything that's happening but that's
25:45
kind of how I got into ads as I got burned by an agency that was being dishonest about what their efforts were
25:51
I learned as much as I could and then I started doing I did not realize that that was going to lead me down a path of
25:58
doing paid advertising for the next six seven years and eventually doing paid advertising for Stellar WP
26:04
um but that's life so happy to be here and you know it's something that I
26:11
taught myself and I always encourage people before you think about hiring someone to do your ads learn as much as
26:17
you can and try them yourself because it's it's not as insurmountable as it
26:22
might seem at face value that's awesome I mean that mirrors a lot of uh
26:27
WordPress stories for entrepreneurs who build products like they were like I want to build something for my church or
26:33
whatever and it sucked and I hired somebody and they were terrible and so I just decided I'm gonna figure this out
26:39
on my own lock myself in my RV down by the river and make it happen
26:44
um sorry um and yeah I I I I think it's amazing
26:49
that you can do to learn that because I see a lot of snake oil when I go and I look around for advertising uh help and
26:57
resources and whatnot I find a lot of snake oil but you found a lot of really good resources which I think is amazing
27:02
and another thing I'll just add to that really quickly is with paid advertising there's always going to be a metric that
27:09
could look make it look really good you know the big one that I always default to Impressions if they say well look at
27:16
how many Impressions we got it's like Impressions on the internet really don't mean anything and that's probably that'll be I'll try
27:23
to make that the most unpopular thing that I say over the next half hour but it's really easy when you're spending
27:29
especially medium to large amounts of money to find metrics that make it look like a success when it's still not
27:35
moving the needle so it's just something to look out for absolutely
27:41
there it's interesting drew that uh you you you said you know anybody can go out
27:46
there and learn and all it took was a whole weekend and a lot of brain space and now you know and I'm here to tell
27:53
the other people who are like I cannot do that I have no brain space I'm here to tell you just hire somebody if you
27:59
don't have the brain space like yes you can learn it like you can learn anything and there's a lot to learn and there's a
28:06
lot your brain will get saturated with it and it'll take up a lot of your brain space so if that's a blocker for you
28:11
reach out to an agency find somebody to do it for you um and learn what you can learn enough
28:18
to know what they're doing but I it was for me I I had set up a
28:23
um a pay-per-click advertising campaign I hired uh I hired somebody else to manage it because it became too much I
28:30
knew that it was just taking too much of my space and uh so both sides are true
28:35
uh regardless of how you're doing it look into it uh it's an important thing I mean in many ways it depends highly on
28:42
your priority uh in terms of your business and your marketing tactics like
28:47
how the same thing like how important is your email list to you um are you gonna like spend a ton of
28:54
time working on gaining subscribers and generating email content and doing automations you could do that as a
29:01
product owner um or are you going to spend a lot more time on the product in particular
29:07
um you know it's all a matter of balancing things uh between uh where you see the most
29:13
um uh return on your time into your business um so but I do think the uh when it
29:22
comes to like hiring or Contracting I I mean like Drew said I think that the
29:27
potential for um actually hiring somebody who might
29:33
not deliver a whole lot of great results is very high from what I've seen you
29:39
know you could go of somewhere and I'm just throwing out there like Fiverr and hire somebody to set up a really Bare
29:45
Bones uh campaign for you and then you can go in there and edit it it's kind of the equivalent of having chat GPT create
29:51
a rough draft of something for you and then actually going in there and reworking it to be sounding like what you want so getting anything on uh in a
30:00
campaign and basic Target keywords uh and cost per click setup is a huge win
30:06
and I so getting started is the key I think for sure and I not everybody has
30:13
the luxury to be able to lock themselves in an RV for a weekend as I mentioned I do recommend it yeah some of the free
30:19
tools that are out there I think are still valuable even if you plan on hiring someone just so you know that
30:25
you're asking the right questions and you know what red flags to look out for and if you hire someone that gets
30:30
frustrated by you asking too many questions I think that's a really good signal that you should pivot who you hired to do your paid ads because
30:36
absolutely you should have a lot of questions just on the abbreviations alone absolutely yeah Zach I'd love to hear
Zachs Personal Experience
30:43
about your uh personal experiences on this front yeah so at gravity view we had been
30:50
doing pay-per-click uh from the very beginning because I started with pay-per-click before that I created
30:56
gravity view um to send traffic to gravity forms as an affiliate before they had a rule that
31:03
prevented that so I I had been making money on pay-per-click I knew it was effective and I was like okay I'm going
31:09
to implement this at gravity view so we used pay-per-click a lot early on and uh we were making a dollar for every 70
31:16
cents that we spent so I just kept on pouring money onto a pay-per-click and it kept on giving us
31:22
more money but over time Google just milked us uh in the the
31:31
return on investment became less and less and it became harder and harder to find months where pay-per-click was
31:38
really making a difference moving that dial and I turned it off and I didn't really
31:43
notice a difference so that was my Google experience of when
31:49
I when Google started going downhill I started trying Facebook campaigns and doing remarketing pixels where you embed
31:56
a pixel on your website and Google connects it to the traffic that goes through their own ads so you can track
32:03
conversions and stuff um but then uh some changes happened in
32:09
the industry where uh Apple especially made it more difficult to track those
32:14
conversions and to identify where those conversions were coming from and so uh
32:19
in our analytics it just said like that it was unassigned traffic resulting in
32:25
the conversions and my uh pay-per-click people that I was hiring at the time said oh yeah that's probably Facebook I
32:31
was like yeah well that's probably a question isn't it like who knows where these are coming from
32:38
um but then when January 6 happened in the United States I uh and it was clear
32:44
that Facebook really uh had fed the flames and throughout the Trump Administration uh regardless of
32:51
your political affiliation uh Facebook was not putting out uh some extreme
32:56
language uh and it became clear to me that ethically I could no longer
33:02
uh support Facebook through advertising so we turned off our Google ads we turned
33:08
off our Facebook Facebook ads and it's been fine um I do miss it sometimes when I see
33:14
some amazing seller ads and I do see some amazing Stellar ads uh and I'm like
33:19
oh I wish I could run a gravity kit ad like that but it's okay I'm standing my ground and it's uh you know the our SEO
33:27
investment has helped and that's why it's part of a a larger picture of like
33:32
how do you want to communicate your brand to the world yeah there and we talked about this like
33:38
pre-show kind of thing that we might that Zach might uh throw in the the moral dilemma a little bit and I thought
The Moral Dilemma
33:44
it was worth spending a little bit of time on because I mean a lot of folks especially in the WordPress space
33:50
WordPress folks are really Savvy uh to how technology works and how these things work and like
33:56
um but sometimes also they're also very I would say what's the best word they just said thin skinned about certain
34:02
stuff um and I think just advertising sometimes like um affiliate marketing is just like a
34:09
four letter word in the WordPress space sometimes um and paid advertising sometimes is as
34:15
well um and I I can say from our perspective
34:21
um it is like I don't know I've also had a bit of a a weird curve with my feelings about how
34:28
advertising is even done like there's a whole dilemma the uh uh of like folks
34:34
don't like getting targeted advertising and I keep saying but I promise you that
34:40
you like untargeted advertising even less um and so there's a way in which like if
34:48
if you want to just get like random ads that are definitely not for you then definitely turn off all your cookies and
34:53
block all your things and then you'll have a horrible horrible experience on all the social media platforms
35:00
um and I do yeah exactly um and that's a choice that you make you
35:05
know um but if you want to like actually get uh ads that might actually be somewhat
35:11
interesting to you in one way or another then you have to understand that that is done with targeted advertising which
35:17
does involve cookies and things like that um and uh but the extent to which
35:23
Facebook and Google in particular are willing and able and um and even like
35:28
pushing to grab that data in every single Nook of the internet that they possibly can has been a bit like mind
35:37
staggering I would say um and um like where people draw the
35:42
line on whether or not to advertise on a certain platform is also highly
35:47
contentious like honestly we haven't spent on the give side we haven't spent on Twitter in a couple years now I think
35:54
true right or actually I think we have done a few um like um job posting uh related spend
36:01
there because there is a ton of Wordpress folks there um but um it is a contentious one Drew
36:08
what's your take like how do you balance like the evilness of the platforms versus the benefit of the platforms
Ethical Platforms
36:15
yeah I mean it's a great question I think the important thing to remember is anything that I say is going to be
36:20
horrendously biased because I'm the guy that watches the Super Bowl for the commercials
36:25
um genuinely and I I don't think you can I don't want to speak in definitives but
36:32
I I you'd be hard-pressed to find a platform that doesn't have some sort of ethical question about if it's using
36:40
your data in an appropriate way I could probably be corrected by that but Twitter is a perfect example of that it
36:47
is Twitter a ethical place to place advertising in its current state it
36:52
might be it might be you know it depends on your business it depends on your views on everything I think it's just up
36:58
to each individual business to decide where they do draw the line when the
37:03
Facebook one of the things with Facebook it was I was alarmed at how much
37:09
blowback Facebook got in particular compared to a Google because from my
37:15
perspective Google is so much more powerful and so much scarier in a lot of
37:20
ways than what Facebook was doing um but to me personally I prefer a highly
37:27
customized advertising experience I don't mind if my email address is is shared with certain advertisers that are
37:34
sharing relevant information with me but I completely understand why people wouldn't want to be targeted by ads and
37:40
wouldn't want their personal data to be the product that Facebook is selling yeah I think it it just lies with each
37:47
individual person in each individual brand to decide with what they're comfortable with for sure
Creating Echo Chambers
37:53
slippery slope argument of like if everyone bails from the platform then all that's left there is the vile things
38:00
that nobody wants to put up with which maybe that's one way of like getting
38:06
folks off the platform but that's also a great way to like create Echo chambers of like potentially harmful dangerous
38:13
things um so I don't know and that's a consideration for Brands if
38:19
if x is a safe haven for Nazis do you want your brand on x
38:24
and that is both the variable and the platform um yeah if if Facebook is uh if you're
38:33
if you're finding that your the comments are angry uh maybe I also internalize
38:39
that if the proportion of comments are angry is hi maybe I should change my ad or maybe I should like how people enter
38:46
interface with my brand is important to me so paying attention to how people
38:52
react to it you're you're paying for their attention so pay attention to how they react to it um and if they aren't
38:59
having a good reaction to it maybe something is off with your campaign whether it be the the platform or the
39:04
marketing angle itself absolutely yep I actually have a interesting little back Channel combo
39:11
here about um uh ad advisors in these platforms as well I wanted to I thought that was
Reps
39:17
worth highlighting um because it is another source of potential source of help
39:23
um it can be um so Drew in particular has told me
39:28
um often that he does the calls with the Reps and they're usually usually a waste of time but then the time I hear about
39:35
the most is when he has a conversation with somebody who's amazing um Drew do you want to talk a little bit
39:40
about these folks uh Facebook will send you folks who want to talk about ads Google will send you folks who want to
39:46
talk about your ads um is that a resource for folks it absolutely can be
39:51
I think if you approach every conversation with a healthy dose of skepticism it could be a really
39:57
effective way to learn about new tools that you didn't realize they had or different tactics that they suggest that
40:03
work but largely the purpose of those reps is to make sure that you're maximizing your spend on their platform
40:10
and it would be amazing to me if you ever meet with a rep for the first time and they told you that your budget was
40:15
sufficient and you shouldn't increase it so I like to approach those conversations with a healthy amount of
40:20
skepticism and most of the time I've found not a ton of value in in the
40:26
things that they're suggesting and then I think one of the big frustrations if people are keeping track of their reps is Google I think switches every quarter
40:33
and you'll have one rep tell you to do one thing and then a quarter later they'll tell you to do the exact opposite thing and a quarter later
40:40
they'll tell you to do something completely out of left field there's not a whole lot of consensus just amongst
40:45
their reps which to me doesn't lend a whole lot of confidence to the directions they choose
40:51
so approach it with a healthy dose of skepticism I think they could be really effective resources to learn about the
40:56
product but they are going to try to get you to spend more money is my my experience
41:03
Zach what about you have you had success talking with those folks I've had good success uh one or two times and then
41:09
really not great success uh probably three or four times and I they they will pester you if you sign up for any of
41:16
these ad platforms you will get a lot of email uh so um at some point I recommend getting on
41:22
a call just to experience what like Drew was saying what they have to say about their own platform because it's
41:28
interesting what they're pushing and they'll want you to let them handle the payments uh just like trust us uh we'll
41:35
set the prices it'll work out for you the best uh it'll be way better it's like an automatic transmission instead
41:41
of a manual transmission just it's so much easier we'll do it more efficiently anyway just leave it to us and uh lo and
41:48
behold my ad uh spend went way up and the conversions did not so uh there's
41:53
not always good advice there but uh either way you will learn the platform better because they'll be on the phone
41:59
they'll guide you through it they'll help you set up you know Advanced keyword lists that you they'll help you
42:06
uh discover the platform in ways you hadn't before yeah one other kind of tactic convo I'd like
Conversion vs Impressions
42:14
to do before we wrap up um Drew and I have also talked a lot about the difference between ads that
42:22
are designed for conversion and other ads that are actually designed just for
42:27
traffic um not really for Impressions we we really have steered away from impression only type of stuff but like traffic
42:34
driving stuff uh maybe lead generation type stuff versus conversion oriented
42:40
stuff Drew do you want to lean into that I know that Drew loves the conversion oriented stuff and he would spend
42:45
everything there if he could um but can he needle that out a little bit yeah I think there's different
42:53
there's different roles that advertising plays in each part of the customer journey and it doesn't have to stop with
42:58
purchase you could have a really effective strong post purchase advertising campaign that does any
43:04
number of things and designing Those ads for different things
43:10
it's just important to keep in mind as you approach it if your goal is to get traffic then you want to make it eye
43:16
grabbing if your goal is to do a post purchase cross-sell or something or an upsell post purchase then you should
43:21
have that in mind as you're designing the ad um but I do think that you you need to
43:27
consider where the customer is in the journey when you're designing the ads and if they don't know about your
43:33
business at all then you don't want to ask them to buy it if you're approaching a cold audience and saying hey buy this
43:39
it's most likely especially with a high consideration product like most WordPress plugins it's most likely not
43:45
going to work super well in your favor so you want to consider where people are at in the buying Journey when you're designing your ads for sure
43:53
excellent yeah um yeah there's nothing difference there's a big difference between
43:59
um branding campaigns and uh conversion campaigns where you might want to just
44:05
let have people get your brand in their head just there's that saying that it
44:10
takes like seven times of seeing something before you remember it so uh just getting in getting those
44:16
Impressions it's getting in somebody's Noggin somehow it's getting in there uh
44:21
when they see gravity kit maybe they will think of us uh more easily next
44:26
time when they're trying to remember gravity forms add-ons like that Association is something you can build on social media quite easily
44:34
um but the pricing for a branding campaign and the the return on investment is going to be very different
44:39
and you're not going to be happy with the uh the cost that you're spending until months down the line when that
44:45
person may or may not have been impressed by the impression that they had on your uh ad absolutely yeah
Traffic vs Retargeting
44:54
um Drew you also earlier talked about that we do like 15 of branded search
44:59
um are there other percentages that are important to think about is like is there a percentage about traffic versus
45:04
conversion or middle of funnel or retargeting or any of those types of things that are helpful guidelines for
45:11
folks yeah I think you know I still oftentimes will revert to the idea of an
45:17
advertising program as a funnel where you have the prospecting up top retargeting
45:24
um and then purchase ads at the bottom and then having even beyond that post purchase ads it's a heated conversation
45:30
that I've had with lots of different folks just within Stellar how much money do we want to be spending on retargeting
45:36
versus prospecting again I'll give the political answer of it depends on the brand it depends on where you are in
45:43
your advertising program if you're just getting started I think I would recommend that you spend the bulk of
45:50
maybe 60 plus percent of your advertising Budget on prospecting and then spend you know 40 percent on
45:57
retargeting or something like that and as you move along you could kind of tweak those numbers and increase the
46:03
retargeting as you get more traffic or something like that I definitely suggest you spend more on prospecting off the
46:10
bat than retargeting and unless you're in a situation where you do have an alarming amount of organic traffic and
46:16
you're just trying to recapture some of that intent then that's a different different story but the equation is
46:22
different for every situation for sure and there's no magic answer it's going to be a different thing that works for
46:28
everybody absolutely nice well this was actually really helpful
Best Advice
46:33
um I I like the way that we kneeled out a lot of the kind of aspects of it even
46:38
the moral dilemma of some of it um a lot of tips along the way the way we always wrap up every episode though
46:44
is by giving our best advice uh to new product folks so these are small shops
46:49
that are just getting started maybe you've never done paid advertising before ever what's our best advice to
46:55
them uh me personally uh I have a like a one marketing Mantra I have is success
47:02
by a Thousand Cuts um which is that I want to make sure that I am doing all the things across
47:09
all the opportunities available um so and paid advertising is definitely one of the things that you have to do
47:16
um you know I anytime that somebody is jumping into marketing uh their product and they're focusing only exclusively on
47:23
email um I I'm always saying that's a great start just start getting into content a
47:28
lot better start getting into SEO start getting into paid advertising start getting into video all kinds of stuff
47:35
because in order to really have a big pile of accumulated momentum and success
47:42
you really got to do all the things in that big pile of things I have seen way too often that paid advertising just
47:48
gets completely ignored so don't ignore it jump straight into it uh head first I
47:54
would start personally with traffic ads and make sure that you go into them with
48:00
specific goals in mind like you have a piece of content that you really want people to to learn about like something
48:07
that might be a really great introdu introduction to your brand and make sure that you're using good strong utms on
48:14
those links so you could track the success of that and that there's some sort of Engagement aspect in that
48:20
content like maybe there's an email opt-in or maybe there's a link that goes somewhere else in through in your site
48:27
and that when you do that spend you're evaluating the effectiveness of your
48:32
targeting based on whether or not they opted in or whether or not they click to the next link or any of those types of
48:38
things that to me is a nice clean uh easy way to start seeing if you can
48:45
actually do targeted advertising in a way that's effective and then grow from there
48:50
um that's me Zach you got a bunch here that I think are great yeah I think that one thing that it's
48:57
easy to do is set up these campaigns and have it uh have your ads linked to your homepage or a product page and say well
49:04
uh that's my home page that's my product page it's good enough uh I recommend setting up landing pages that are
49:10
targeted specifically for the type of ad that you're running and make sure that you are talking to the customer in the
49:17
way that they expect your the way that their attention is like Drew was saying um not everything is equal uh when it
49:24
comes to the purpose of an ad um so if you if the ad is
49:30
learn about this uh learn about this specific product then
49:35
you you better have it about this product and not have it point to the home page but uh the landing pages are
49:41
really important split tests uh you do a b tests Google optimize is going away I
49:46
think it's getting rolled into ga4 or something like that um but Google optimize has been really
49:53
easy to set up like surprisingly easy so uh point the traffic at that page split
49:59
tests try different things um you never know what's going to work some kooky ideas might be the right one
50:05
uh even uh like YouTube ads some strange YouTube
50:11
ad might be the right solution for your brand uh and YouTube ad for us was a
50:17
pile of cash that we set on fire so uh find out what it works for you get a
50:24
have a budget and experiment because that's for me the fun part as a creative act uh that has a possibility of making
50:31
you money I did not see that ad you're gonna have to post a link to that somewhere we we
50:36
had at some point been known for our music videos and uh our music videos
50:41
we're not overly informative and they were not conversion machines on I just
50:47
was like well I want to have those as ads on YouTube uh it was more branding exercise and I don't know that it was a
50:52
good fit yeah uh the the WordPress wiggle Madeline's
50:58
that one's going down and request infamy so that's a good one wiggle.fun is the domain name by the way
51:05
oh fun I did not know that that's awesome Drew wrap us up what is your best advice
51:10
for new folks getting into paid advertising I I think it boils down to having a plan
51:16
and measuring everything and underneath those as two other things is you know
51:21
part of having a plan is having a budget don't go into it did I lose you guys no you're still oh
51:29
sorry I think I froze so uh part of that is having a budget making sure that you're not going into it with a bucket
51:34
with a hole in the bottom and you're just dumping more and more water into it um so making sure that you have a budget
51:40
and you have a calculated approach and then measuring everything a big part of that is making sure that you have all of
51:46
your tracking technology settled making sure that your Facebook pixel is installed correctly make sure your
51:52
Universal Event tracking tag is installed correctly making sure that you know your way around tag manager and you
51:58
have all your variables set up correctly one of the biggest mistakes that's really really easy to make is having
52:03
your tracking setup improperly and then burning a ton of money pointing the algorithm in the wrong direction any
52:10
platform and then a big part of both of those is learn as much as you can the free resources that are out there even
52:17
if you're not intending on advertising on Facebook Facebook's blueprint class is a really great way to learn about
52:22
different advertising platforms and that information is going to extrapolate out to a lot of different platforms that
52:28
aren't just Facebook and then Google grow is another one grow with Google there's a whole different you know
52:35
section of resources become a really good digital marketer some of them pertaining to their platform and some of
52:41
them that aren't pertaining to their platform so use the resources that are out there to establish the plans and
52:47
make sure you're measuring everything and and testing as much as you possibly can
52:52
awesome all right so next week thank you drew uh next week on WP product talk we're going
52:58
to be discussing how acquiring products can boost your business with special guests Keenan copenhaver so uh tune in
53:06
for that episode absolutely and thanks again so much Drew um director of outbound marketing I
53:12
think I posted your title wrong what I'm terrible geez it's okay just apologize to my boss whose title you gave me in
53:18
your Facebook post yeah probably yeah uh thanks so much again to post status
53:24
for being our green room where we organize all these things in general uh this time it was actually uh the
53:30
WordPress slack actually um and uh hit like hit subscribe share stuff with your friends
53:36
um and everybody we'll see you all next week thanks so much thanks so much for having me guys have a good one thanks

Related Episodes

Ep1 of WP Product Talk only available at The WP Minute

How do you Monetize “Free”?

Aired on
Our very first episode of WP Product Talk covers the topic central to what it means to be a WordPress product entrepreneur: How do you Monetize “Free”?