Introduction
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[Music]
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thank you
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hey everyone this is WP product talk the place where every week we interview an experience WordPress product owner on
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the strategies and tips and experiences failures and successes of running successful and thriving WordPress
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product businesses I'm Matt crumwell co-founder of give WP and senior director of customer experience at
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Stellar WP and I'm Zach Katz founder of gravitykit and trusted login
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and today's topic is paid advertising for WordPress products the why and the
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how and this is a great topic because paid advertising is a part of any holistic
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marketing plan so uh if you don't have paid advertising in there uh this is the
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talk for you yeah we might do the why and the how and the problematic aspects
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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
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friend of mine um Drew Griswold this is true true thanks for being here thanks for having
Meet Drew Griswold
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me Matt and Zach happy to be here absolutely Drew tell the world a little bit about yourself what do you do why do
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you do it where do you do it from all that kind of fun stuff for sure I'm Drew Griswold I'm the
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director of outbound marketing for Stellar WP so I came up through give WP
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so me and Matt worked closely together there uh now I oversee the advertising and events for all of the Stellar WP
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Brands um so I am based in Milwaukee Wisconsin currently talking to you from Iowa City
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Iowa and really happy to be here and lend some insights into the world of paid
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advertising awesome thanks so much
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um and um for anybody who's watching the live stream uh feel free to comment uh
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hello Amber hello Michelle uh anybody else hop on the uh comments and and ask
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questions uh Drew's here to answer your questions as well absolutely and if you're on Twitter or I
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don't even want to call it if you're acting on X yeah X we do use the hashtag
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WP product talk and I'll be watching there as well so um I'm just pulling it up the whole
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experience of like dealing with uh this weird Rebrand that they did just makes
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me feel weird uh cool so jumping in um first thing we always like to talk
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about is why is this subject so important um to uh WordPress product owners in
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particular um I was really excited to to for us to discuss this because as I have just
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talked about uh different marketing tactics that we've employed at give and that Stellar proudly speaking I have
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often heard um product owners say I tried ads and they sucked so I stopped doing it
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um and it resonated a lot with my own experience in some ways uh before
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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
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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
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um and so because we're not good at it we just quit um and in at the end of the day it just
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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
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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
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experience of of your sales tactics so that's my take
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um Drew um you're the expert though uh honestly so what's your take why is this
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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
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advertising can be a successful tactic for multiple different phases of the
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customer Journey multiple different phases of your business's Journey um you know for a lot of folks it might
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be your growth has kind of plateaued a little bit and you're looking for ways to scale beyond x amount of active
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installs or something like that for some folks it might be just getting your name out there and making sure that your
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brand recognition is higher but advertising is a really effective way to make sure that you have control over
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what people are receiving about your product and not just your organic audience so I think there's a place for
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advertising in every type of business and there's a place for advertising in every part of the business's Journey
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forward and with their growth if that made sense
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absolutely absolutely that's really true Zach what's your take well I my take is
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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
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important that how important that is to your business but SEO takes a while organic traffic takes a while to build
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up so Drew was saying that it takes a pay-per-click and advertising is good
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when you've reached a SEO Plateau but it's also good before you even start climbing that Hill
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um it's a great way to get traffic it's a great way to get eyeballs on a
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specific product that you've just released or a specific feature you want to bring attention to it's a great way
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to get traffic to your site without needing to work on it Beyond setting up the ads
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so I think it's a a really important complement to SEO for uh for any
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business I like that that's a really important um aspect too for sure I I kind of wanna
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maybe um do a little bit of layer the land a little bit for for folks who might not
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be tons really experienced here um there's two big caveats or not caveats aspects of paid advertising that
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Drew I'd love if you might elucidate it for us a little bit um when we talk about like sometimes
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people talk about paid ads in the terms of like you just spend and you get conversions and if you just start
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spending more you'll get more conversions um that's true right that's basically
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how it works can you talk a little bit about that um and then the next one just
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so you know is going to be more about like different types of paid spent so yeah I wish that it was creating a
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machine that prints more money the the more money you feed into it but that's not always the case
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um I think that ads can accelerate something that is already effective or
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like like Zach said it could you know shed more light on to certain things we use paid ads to test landing pages we
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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
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but there is definitely a point where you get diminishing returns it doesn't mean if you spend a million dollars
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you're gonna make two million dollars just because when you spend fifty dollars you made a hundred dollars I
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think part of understanding that balance between where you want your spend to be and what you could expect your return to
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be is just experimenting having a plan making sure that you're monitoring your
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spend and everything like that but it's definitely not something that I would anticipate is an unlimited growth
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mechanism um right off the bat necessarily yeah absolutely so then the other one that um
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you know when we're talking about paid advertising I think most folks think immediately about
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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
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you talk about that a little bit talk about the different avenues that we've talked about internally yeah just within the Google ecosystem
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there's a ton of different types of ads just between display ads search ads
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video ads and it goes way further down the rabbit hole you have Gmail inbox ads
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things like that it's the internet so any available real estate has been monetized apologies for the
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lawnmower that just went by if you could hear that um but essentially I think a really easy
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way to think of it is you have search ads which can be based off of intent someone is actively searching something
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and you could choose to interject your product based off of the intent they've expressed through their search and then
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there's display ads will be a little bit more interruptive I guess is not the not
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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
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going to be interested in that um for Stellar we really focus quite a
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bit on Google and Facebook Google being that search intent based advertising and
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Facebook being that display Interruption based advertising where you're placing a
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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
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about it because just with Google you have display ads you have as I mentioned a whole different variety of options
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just within their ecosystem yeah absolutely we've also experimented a little bit with like paid placements and
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other types of Publications um I feel like we've been a little bit less successful on that front but it's
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also can be an interesting opportunity um yeah sponsorships
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so things like that I think that it it depends where your goals lie where you
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want to reach people um but there's different there's unlimited
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different ways to spend money to get placements that is for sure Zach do you have some like creative interesting uh
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paid placements that you've done yeah you know it's so hard to know what your
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audience so part of part of what Facebook does automatically for example is say like and use look-alike groups
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and they say Okay somebody who's purchased your product uh they also like like this this and
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this and there are some people that kind of look like your customer from an activity standpoint and you can say I
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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
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instinct I think that's also kind of okay uh with gravity view uh for example
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we put a PL um we did a paid advertisement on a an apple industry uh
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blog called appleworld.today and I did this in 2014 or 2015 or something and uh
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I did some fun graphic with the Apple campus that they were building at the time that Johnny Ive had designed and I
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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
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like 150 bucks and over the course of uh years it brought in like 1500 bucks
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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
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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
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me for paid advertising is being like well this is a kooky idea let's try it
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and see if it works and making sure that you have the tracking and stuff is important but just see what works uh
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there's also there's a creative aspect to advertising that I don't think people
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should let go of yeah it's interesting and one thing I'll interject about the lookalike audiences like that is um
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something that Facebook definitely will push very aggressively and it could be incredibly effective if you have a large
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amount of input data to inform Their audience building if you're a smaller
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brand that doesn't have a ton of conversion data particularly on Facebook it's not going to necessarily give the
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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
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that has a lot of customer customer history on the Facebook platform
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and so much of Facebook is uh waiting for them to train their models so that
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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
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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
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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
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be trained right but uh yeah the the dreaded the dreaded learning phase I think they typically say that they need
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50 conversions for the ad to get out of the learning phase and into the active
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um distribution phase my experience with Facebook is that we've had some incredibly effective ads that have never
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exited the learning phase um it does seem I mean Matt and I have talked quite a bit some of these
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platforms can be quite mafioso and they're yeah mafia-esque in
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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
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um and things kind of like that but the learning phase thing I'm never really afraid of the learning phase we've had
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ads that have performed so well in the learning phase for the entire duration of their uh display life
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yeah same here we have a nice comment from one of our co-hosts uh amber Hines
Email Newsletters
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is here we've had so much better luck sponsoring email newsletters and paying for ads in those
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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
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newsletters in particular um but have you done any uh paid sponsorships and newsletters uh Zach
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I have sponsored in the past um I sponsored a podcast feed on daring
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Fireball another Apple industry uh blog but that wasn't successful and it
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was very expensive I haven't done uh email newsletter sponsorship as much but I have done it yeah
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I think it's always interesting um especially because you think about the reach that email newsletters can
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have potentially um but they also seem to be a bit of like a
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um you know a really quick uh hit um and that you know then diminish
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really quickly whereas with uh search ads or whatnot they can kind of be there all the time and things like that
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um to that Mafia aspect like even like I have such a hard time still constantly
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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
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pay for um I'll give WP to show up at the top of the search for a give WP branded term
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because if I don't then classy does or somebody else does I just hate that but it's literally the
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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
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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
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apparently the answer is like a buck 50 a click because and it's it's galling but it
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also is nice to know that they landed exactly where we hoped that they would um yeah and if you design when for
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product owners out there if you are designing a campaign that is targeted toward your own brand name uh I heard
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this from our uh pay-per-click Specialists they said to create a separate Google uh campaign for your
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branded keywords and that that can help reduce the cost per click uh as opposed
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to mixing it in with your other keywords um so if you have a separate campaign they have seen better performance for uh
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costs and that's an undergrade piece of advice um for Budget control as well so you can
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make sure that you're not spending a hundred percent of your PPC budget just on your branded terms which is really
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easy to happen if you're letting Google's algorithm do the deciding for you like oh we're going to funnel it all
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to this really well performing campaign of people that might have clicked on it anyways um we try to never spend more
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than about 15 of our budgets on branded traffic but
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particularly for the Stellar WP Brands we do have a really alarming amount of other brands that are bidding on our
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brand term so if you search give WP there's going to be four or five other competitors that are trying to get that
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traffic so there's a ton of value in bidding on your branded terms but definitely spin it off into its own
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campaign so you could monitor it much more closely another thing is
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can you repeat that sentence please nope do you have me back yep you're back
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great I was mentioning broad match keywords is something that you really want to watch as much as possible to
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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
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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
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traffic one of the things that is really important when you're just getting started is to keep a very close look at
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all the keywords that people are clicking on and start building your negative keyword list fast because
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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
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exclude words like free or nulled or like cracked like things that obviously
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people are just trying to get your product for free you're going to find all sorts of things including areas of
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the world which has ethical um question marks around it like but I found southeast Asia I had to exclude it
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because I was getting so much spam clicks no conversions thousands of
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clicks and I found that to be really spammy so I I disabled that zone in
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Google uh but build up build up your negative keywords fast because otherwise you're
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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
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the comment section and a former guest of the show actually Michelle frechette uh monitor your ads especially on
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Facebook uh watch those replies uh people who will comment negatively or with nasty photos because they don't
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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
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um yeah I mean people get really gripy when they have uh advertisements in their free social media platforms
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um it's it's really fascinating to me how entitled and Opera and like
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affronted people will feel when uh an AG gets served into their news feed
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um Drew what's your take on uh on comments on uh Facebook ads one thing I
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always try to remember is these comments that could seem overwhelmingly negative still a lot of times do help your
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delivery um you know hate comments are still interact obviously you want to hide them to make
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sure that you don't have these terrible things associated with your brand but you don't want to just go through and
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delete anything that's potentially if it's terrible obviously delete it but if it's just someone saying like oh I
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hate Facebook ads or something like that you could always hide it and kind of ignore it and thank them for the
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contribution to the interaction score that will raise it in people's feeds we had an occasion back in a former life
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running my e-commerce business where we had one ad that went ridiculously viral where it had you know
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I think 80 000 shares you know about 400 000 likes on this one ad and the amount
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of comments that were negative were just overwhelming and it was just because it was a guy with long hair and all the
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girls loved him and all the guys hated him but it got really aggressive really quickly
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um but we just kind of keep reminding ourselves like hey these are these are interactions which the algorithm doesn't
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necessarily discern if they're positive or negative but it's a it's a great call out Michelle does an amazing job with
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the Stellar WP ads making sure that we are filtering out the terrible comments but it if you're getting hate comments
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on your ads it doesn't mean that you're doing something wrong it just means that Facebook ad commenters are typically
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some of the worst uh worst folks on the internet yeah that's it's a unique
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aspect of ads both on Facebook and on formerly known as Twitter I think that's
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what I'm going to call them formerly known as Twitter like that'll be yeah the the dumpster fire formerly nice
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Twitter yeah um but I I do find myself often not
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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
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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
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is a different story and Drew how do you approach creating an ad like when it comes to tone and like
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what's your take on uh different ads for different spaces like social media versus pay-per-click like how do you
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sculpt a ad campaign for Facebook versus for Google I think it depends a lot on the product
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one of the first things that I do if I'm looking for ideas for a campaign particularly on Facebook is go to their
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ad Library something that people don't realize is all of the ads that run on Facebook are on an ad Library where you
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could look at every single piece of creative that every one of your competitors is running as part of their
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transparency efforts so if we have a company where we really admire the the
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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
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great source of motivation information but I think it really depends on what your goals are what the brand ideals are
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a number of things but that's kind of my first step is is looking with our
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competitors that we respect are doing out there and that could inform a lot of the ways that you want to move forward
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absolutely it's a good point um let's jump into I think we've already
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been doing this a bit but talking about our personal experiences um in general we we've been highlighting
Drews Experience
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them a few times already but I'd love to hear more detailed accounts Drew looks
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like you have a couple interesting stories here um tell us about your experience here
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yeah I'm in instead of telling you about my past five years of buying and selling
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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
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brand that was doing remarkably well um and you know the first thing that you do when you start doing well is you want
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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
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records so I um enthusiastically Enlisted the help of an agency to help
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me scale my my paid advertising budgets to a point where I thought that I would be satisfied
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um it ended up being a horrific failure um what amounted to be a sales scam
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essentially where we spent about eighty thousand dollars on an agency that did absolutely nothing except for testing
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and testing and testing and I didn't know any better and unfortunately this is a really common story with small
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businesses where they hire someone you know paid advertising is such an easy thing for people to make big promises
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and it's really easy to obfuscate the successes and the failures and just say well we're learning but but that thing I
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promised you is just just around the corner just keep doing it um the beauty of having these
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conversations like this is I'm not trying to sell anybody anything but definitely approach anybody that's
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promising you big results with a healthy dose of skepticism the agency that we had hired essentially burned about eighty thousand
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dollars in ad spend not including their agency fees to get everything set up and I was so frustrated with realizing how
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how foolish that I had been that I kind of locked myself in my RV which was my home at the time
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by choice not by necessity I always like to point that out and and guys are
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downstairs yeah yeah I've never never heard that one that's for sure
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um yeah so I locked myself in and I I kind of just got every certification that I possibly could in one weekend and
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I learned everything there was that I could theoretically learn about ads
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um and I started running the ads myself that Monday you know there's free resources out there to teach you how to
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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
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resources that have success are out there and it was a really great feeling that Monday after just getting burned
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for what our business was a lot of money um to go out there and have success doing it myself and realizing that this
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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
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evolving Marketplace so it could be really hard to keep keep a tab and everything that's happening but that's
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kind of how I got into ads as I got burned by an agency that was being dishonest about what their efforts were
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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
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doing paid advertising for the next six seven years and eventually doing paid advertising for Stellar WP
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um but that's life so happy to be here and you know it's something that I
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taught myself and I always encourage people before you think about hiring someone to do your ads learn as much as
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you can and try them yourself because it's it's not as insurmountable as it
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might seem at face value that's awesome I mean that mirrors a lot of uh
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WordPress stories for entrepreneurs who build products like they were like I want to build something for my church or
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whatever and it sucked and I hired somebody and they were terrible and so I just decided I'm gonna figure this out
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on my own lock myself in my RV down by the river and make it happen
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um sorry um and yeah I I I I think it's amazing
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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
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resources and whatnot I find a lot of snake oil but you found a lot of really good resources which I think is amazing
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and another thing I'll just add to that really quickly is with paid advertising there's always going to be a metric that
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could look make it look really good you know the big one that I always default to Impressions if they say well look at
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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
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to make that the most unpopular thing that I say over the next half hour but it's really easy when you're spending
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especially medium to large amounts of money to find metrics that make it look like a success when it's still not
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moving the needle so it's just something to look out for absolutely
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there it's interesting drew that uh you you you said you know anybody can go out
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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
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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
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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
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reach out to an agency find somebody to do it for you um and learn what you can learn enough
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to know what they're doing but I it was for me I I had set up a
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um a pay-per-click advertising campaign I hired uh I hired somebody else to manage it because it became too much I
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knew that it was just taking too much of my space and uh so both sides are true
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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
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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
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um you know it's all a matter of balancing things uh between uh where you see the most
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um uh return on your time into your business um so but I do think the uh when it
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comes to like hiring or Contracting I I mean like Drew said I think that the
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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
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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
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and I so getting started is the key I think for sure and I not everybody has
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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
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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
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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
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doing pay-per-click uh from the very beginning because I started with pay-per-click before that I created
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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