Episode 38: Unpacking Digital Advertising Strategies with Drew Griswold

In episode 38 of the Kadence Beat podcast, Katy and Ben chat with Drew Griswold, Director of Outbound Marketing for Stellar WP. Drew shares his journey from running a retail business to mastering digital ads. He discusses key tips for online advertising, setting effective goals, and choosing the right platforms like Facebook and Google. Drew also offers practical advice for small businesses looking to start and optimize their ad campaigns while emphasizing the importance of data and testing. If you’re running a small business, you definitely want to tune in!

Timestamps

• 00:00 Introduction to the Kadence Beat Podcast
• 00:15 Meet Drew Griswold: Director of Outbound Marketing
• 01:13 Drew’s Journey into Advertising
• 02:25 The Pitfalls of Hiring an Agency
• 06:24 Understanding Advertising Metrics
• 12:35 When to Start a Paid Ad Campaign
• 15:33 Choosing the Right Ad Platform
• 19:11 Optimizing Landing Pages for Ads
• 22:28 The Importance of Blog Posts in Advertising
• 23:51 Defining Prospecting in Advertising
• 24:26 Understanding the Consideration Phase
• 24:41 The Power of Broad Audience Targeting
• 26:09 Choosing the Right Platform for Your Ads
• 26:52 The Importance of User-Generated Content
• 28:13 Exploring Pinterest Ads
• 30:08 Knowing Your Audience and Platform
• 32:04 The Value of Data in Advertising
• 33:22 Effective Ad Testing Strategies
• 38:40 Kadence’s Successful Ad Strategies
• 41:44 Final Tips and Resources for Advertising

Transcript

Katy: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to episode 38 of the Kadence Beat podcast. Today we are going to be talking with Drew Griswold. Drew is the director of outbound marketing for Stellar WP, which is our parent company at Kadence. And we’re just going to have a nice little chat about advertising. Um, so welcome Drew.

Drew: Awesome. Hey Katy. Hey Ben. Thanks for having me.

Ben: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a, it’s going to be really fun. Drew, I’ll say this about you. I’ve met you in person once and You have to be one of the most fun people I’ve ever met in terms of like, just like really, really someone you want at anything you’re doing because you’re going to make it fun.

Uh, so I’m sure that today is going to be fun because It’s uh, so [00:01:00] fun to actually hang out with you.

Drew: Well, I appreciate that. That’s extremely kind. And also far too high of a bar to live up to in a podcast. But, uh, challenge accepted.

Ben: Yeah. Yeah. This is going to be great. So So we’re talking about ads because you spend a lot of money on ads and have been doing ads for a long time.

Uh, why don’t you give us your, your story?

Drew: Yeah, absolutely. Um, advertising has become my full time job, which is interesting. If you would have told me that 10 years ago, I would have probably laughed at you. Uh, but the way that I got into online advertising and got into the position I’m at, that Stuller WP actually stems from, um, Previous to my working in WordPress and working at GiveWP, I owned a retail business.

It’s called Wander and Company. It’s an e commerce company. We did, we do music festivals all over the country and we’re not have an online store. We got to a point with our business, with Wander and Co where we were having a lot of success [00:02:00] with our online advertising. Um, I had hired this kid out of Las Vegas.

He was running our ads for us. It was when Facebook ads were kind of a money printing machine. Um, We were really, really doing well, but I had no idea how any of it worked. Um, and I foolishly, uh, in hindsight, foolishly decided that we were going to hire an agency to take over from this kid that we had hired to do our ads.

And it’s a really common story with lots of small businesses. There’s a lot of really kind of Scammy agencies out there that are just looking for people in this exact situation to kind of capitalize on and we ended up got We got taken to the cleaners like i’ll just be completely honest about it We burned tens and tens and tens of thousands of dollars and Perpetually in a testing phase and all of these things and all of the things that we had built up over those years Building our e commerce business kind of got taken away in About three months by hiring this agency And out of frustration, pure and utter [00:03:00] frustration, I decided, uh, when I found out what was happening with this agency and how we were getting duped, that I was going to get Facebook Blueprint certified, and I was going to get to the bottom of this and get our progress back.

So I spent a weekend in my RV, because I was a full time RVer, just kind of huddled over my keyboard, learning everything that I could about, Facebook ads and Google ads and CPC advertising in general, um, became certified in those, you know, I had a little bit of experience up in that point, but I really didn’t know what was going on.

Um, so really just kind of threw myself into the deep end and did everything that I could to learn all of the things that I could to get out from underneath this agency, um, and then I started doing our own ads and we found really great success with it and I found out that I really enjoyed doing it. Um, Did that for a few years of my own business, and then when I got hired on it, give WP to be on their social media and events team.

Um, kind of just mentioned, though. Well, yeah, I’ve done some of this paid advertising stuff to like I’ve been doing [00:04:00] it for a few years. It’s really, really effective. Started doing the ads for give WP had really. Uh, really great success with that. And then when we were acquired and joined stellar, uh, extrapolating out some of those insights to all the other brands, uh, so now I’m managing all of the digital advertising for all of the stellar WP brands, which is awesome.

And it all started because of, uh, being frustrated with an agency that was making false promises, uh, which I have a feeling. For a lot of Kadence customers will be a refrain that they can kind of relate to, unfortunately.

Ben: So yeah, so I think getting into that a little bit because I think now everyone’s going to be like, Oh crap, am I getting burned by my agency?

Or people are going to be scared to go and get an agency. What specifically should people be looking out for? Or like, how did that How would you say you go about if someone’s like, I want to hire an agency to do this?

Drew: Yeah, yeah, I don’t want to, I don’t want to disparage agencies across the board, right?[00:05:00]

There’s a lot of really effective, really smart, really wonderful agencies out there that genuinely have folks best interest in minds but with the advent of the internet and some of these These agencies that are out there that don’t necessarily have the expertise to know what they were doing um, I think It’s really easy to look like a professional and with something like paid advertising, you’re always going to be able to find one metric that makes it look like you’re doing really good work when you’re not necessarily doing any work at all.

Um, the one I always fall back to his impressions, like impressions on the Internet don’t necessarily mean anything. It’s really easy. You could put a 5 ad on Facebook and get tens of thousands of impressions. Where did they go? Were they effective? It doesn’t matter. You got a lot of impressions, right? Um, but I think accountability is just a big thing.

If you have an agency that’s not willing to be transparent about what they are are doing, and they’re not willing to give you access to the accounts for you to poke around in your own free time, [00:06:00] that’s a huge red flag for me right off the bat. Right. Uh, but if you have an agency that’s willing to go through this process with you, they’re willing to dig into the account with you, show you exactly the changes that they’re making, uh, things like that.

Then. Chances are that you have a good one. So don’t let me disparage all agencies. Yeah, there are some really great ones out there.

Ben: Nice. And that also is really interesting about impressions. So do you want to go ahead and get into some of the like metrics?

Drew: Yeah, let’s do it. I dropped a big bomb in there right away.

Yeah. Like, uh, what are some of the golden metrics? This is something we’re going to talk about a little bit later. It’s like, what are some of the biggest tips that we could have for small businesses? And one of the biggest ones is picking, picking your success metrics. If you are really focused on being as efficient as possible with your advertising spend, you could use return on ad spend as a metric.

If you’re really focused on getting qualified traffic to your site, you could use clicks as a metric. Um, you could use, if you’re really looking to take [00:07:00] impressions away from your competitors, you could look at your lost impression share on Google. Um, there are no shortage of. Really complex statistics out there that’ll really specifically address whatever your felt need is But defining those metrics as you go into the process is a really important part of making sure that you find success Um, you know, so for something like givewp, for example, one of our stellar brands We’re really focused on lowering our customer acquisition cost And one of the best things about advertising is you could see exactly how much you spent and you could watch the entire customer journey of when they first clicked on an ad on Google and then they saw a Facebook ad and then they went to your website, they went through the consideration phase, they became a purchaser and you know exactly how much money of that part of the process that you sent.

Um, so for me, advertising represents one of the most efficient, effective metrics that you could really track is you’re seeing exactly what you’re spending and exactly what the outcomes are. I don’t know if I danced around your question there, [00:08:00] but there’s no shortage of metrics and it’s really going to be specific to the small business of what they’re looking to capture and what they’re trying to accomplish with their paid program.

Ben: And so generally if you’re, you know, I have a small business, my brother and I run, um, pinnacle foods where we sell freeze dried foods for backpacking gourmet style. And for that, if we wanted to get into paid ads, we’re probably going to be most interested in how much money do we have to spend to get someone who’s going to buy something on our website?

And. You quote that as, what exactly? What phrase did you use? I want to, I want to know how much money I’m spending. Oh, yeah. How I get that customer to be a paying customer.

Drew: Your customer acquisition cost. Terminology. One thing about paid ads is we love abbreviations. So your C A C or your CAC if you want to make it sounding.[00:09:00]

It’s also just fun to say CAC in meetings because it kind of confuses people, but uh, yeah So so but for someone like you with a small business It’s it’s all a matter of what your appetite is if you want to really make a focused effort on growing the e commerce portion of Your business. Yeah, you’re gonna have to spend a little bit of money But you’re gonna want to monitor that it doesn’t have to be a lot of money You can start at 5 a day.

You can start at 2 a day if you want to but But if you think it’s a reasonable expectation that you’re going to be able to acquire a customer for two dollars It’s probably going to be a longer learning curve and it’s going to be a longer road to get the data that you’d need So all the money does is get you more data and it lets you adapt to that data quicker So if you go in and spend a thousand dollars versus a hundred you’re gonna have ten times more data In theory, if you did everything right to make effective decisions, to make that money work well for you, if that makes sense.

Ben: And then in my case, obviously with Pinnacle Foods, you can come and spend, [00:10:00] uh, 15, or you can come and spend 200. Does that all get tracked? And is that part of the thing where I could say, like, I’m spending ads and I’m justifying the spend because of what revenue I make versus the customer acquisition price and what’s the, what’s that term called?

Drew: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. It will be tracked whether you’re spending 50 cents or you’re spending 500, 000 And one thing I always caution people is before you get in advertising. It is really easy to accidentally spend a lot of money You could burn 5, 000 on youtube in 30 minutes if you’re not Really specific about how you’re setting things up and making sure that you have at least the baseline knowledge To be able to execute some of these things so always make sure that you You are knowledgeable with the platforms before you jump in too much.

And what was the metric you were looking for? The customer acquisition cost again?

Ben: yeah, so different from customer acquisition, like one, I’m saying I want to pay attention to how much it costs me to get a [00:11:00] customer. I don’t care what they spend. The other is how much revenue I get for how much ad spend.

So yeah,

Drew: lifetime value per yeah, like return on ad spend will be, you know, you could calculate lifetime customer value when you’re determining your return on ad spend. If you know that they’re going to renew, or they’re going to be repeat customers, or something like that, or if they’re on a subscription plan, you should absolutely calculate that with your return on ad spend, for sure.

Uh, ROAS is like the golden goose metric that a lot of advertisers have been chasing for, for lots of years, and that’s just, I spend one dollar, I make two dollars. That’s your return on ad spend. Um, and hopefully if you’re spending a dollar, you’re making at least a dollar. Right. Um, yeah, a lot of brands don’t, a lot of brands think that if you’re spending a dollar, you should be getting it back in impressions and brand awareness and things like that.

Um, but we already kind of touched on impressions and why I don’t think they actually mean anything. So, um, it’s like the, the story I always tell is like if a billboard on [00:12:00] I 94 in Milwaukee, where I’m from, right. Um, they’ll say that they get 500, 000 impressions a day. Right.

Well, there’s only 600, 000 people in Milwaukee.

I don’t think almost everybody’s driving by that billboard every day. But if they get a car driving to work and back from work, yeah, that’s an impression. Just a car passing by, that’s an impression. Doesn’t matter if they looked at the billboard. You have no way of knowing. So impressions have been a flawed metric for a long time.

So now I’m going to get agencies and billboard companies coming after me. Yeah, this is good. Exactly. Checking lots of boxes.

Ben: Nice.

Katy: So I have a question for you, Drew. Um, when should a small business decide to start a paid ad campaign?

Drew: I think the answer to that is yesterday. I think every business, I mean, a little bit biased here, right?

Because my entire career is based off of online advertising. But I don’t think there’s a business too small where advertising isn’t a benefit for them. Whether you’re your first day in business and you’re just trying to get [00:13:00] Uh, new followers or engagement on your social posts or something like that, that could be supported with paid advertising.

Or if you’re trying to test your new website and seeing how people perform to do conversion rate optimization, there is no business too small for online advertising. And there aren’t minimum spends with 99 percent of the relevant platforms out there. So if you want to start a Facebook ad for 2 a day, you absolutely can.

And all that’s going to do is give you more data to make informed decisions.

Katy: Well, then how do you know? What is the right type of ad to run? Like, even if you do have a small budget, cause you could. You could do a boost on Facebook. You could boost a post versus trying to, you know, optimize for conversions on, you know, sales pages or landing pages.

So like, how do you know which one is the best one so that you don’t waste money?

Drew: If you’re brand new. It’s going to depend on your goals as an organization. Um, if what, where you’re at in [00:14:00] your business development is going to be a big part of it, looking what your competitors are doing. One of the best things about Facebook ads is they have their ads library.

So you can go and look at every single ad that your competitors are running. Um, and you could glean a lot of insights from that. Say, oh, well, they’re not doing any video images. They’re doing all static images. Or they’re doing only text based ads. Um, you could glean a lot of best practices from that. Um, but really having a clear idea of what your goals are from the beginning of the program is going to let you know what’s going to be Your effective next steps.

If you know, and you have reasonable goals, that’s probably a good asterisk to put in there. It’s like everybody’s goal make 2 million. Right? Um, but having reasonable goals and keeping those success metrics in mind as you’re establishing your program. Um, that will dictate what direction you go. Uh, one of the difficulties of talking about something like this in such a short amount of time is it’s so broad.

There’s so many different directions. There’s so many different platforms. There’s so many different types of advertising. Uh, we can spend 10 hours just talking about one [00:15:00] specific little campaign type on Facebook ads. Um, so talking about it in generalities, I’m sorry if I give you general answers, but, um, it really is going to dictate, be dependent on what your strategy is and where you’re at as a business.

Ben: Okay, so because I have a business and I can get free advice. Oh, is that

Drew: pinnaclefoods. com? Pinnaclefoods,

Ben: yeah, dot co. So, yeah, how, like, in this situation, would you go, because we’re small, we don’t do any ads right now, would you go onto Facebook first? Where’s your first target of like, if you’re just getting into this, how do you determine that?

How should we determine that?

Drew: I would ask you, Ben, what is Pinnacle Foods goal right now? Is it to grow your e commerce business? Or is it to improve your, you know, organic website traction? Is it to just, you want cash right now? You want people to buy your product right now.

Ben: Okay. Yes, I want people to buy my product right now.

But that opens up a really big can of worms into like, [00:16:00] organic traffic. Are you suggesting that paid ads can improve Your organic traffic.

Drew: I, organic might not be the right word, but I am suggesting that we are in, we are living in an increasingly inorganic world. Uh, look at Google, type in, uh, freeze dried foods for hiking and see.

When the first organic search result comes up and see when, you know, you probably go through five ads before you get to that first organic search result. So organic is definitely not the right term there. Um, but it depends what type of intent you’re trying to capture. If you’re looking for diehard hikers that want an alternative food source and they know what they’re looking for, search is going to be your option.

Because they’re going to have really specific intent when they are searching for the terms that you’re going to bid on. If you’re just trying to get people to make impulse purchases and you’re like, I think people that hike would like this a lot. They’re not necessarily searching for it, but I think they’d really like it.

Then Facebook display, [00:17:00] advertising, uh, tick tock, some of those aspirational platforms where you could say, Hey, here’s the value that, that our brand provides, I think you’d like this. It’s more interruptive, uh, but the intent is going to be completely different on different platforms. So. Definitely, thank you for calling me out on my misspeaking by saying the word organic.

But I think you get the idea of what I’m saying.

Ben: Yes, okay, but yeah, so I think, like, in my case, there’s one situation where I could say, you know what, I really want those diehard backpackers who go ten times a year and they’re gonna spend a thousand bucks on freeze dried food a year, like, That’s, that’s my target.

I’m going to try to get those customers and I’m going to convince them on the fact that our quality is better. The, the, the taste is significantly better and they’re going to get way more nutrition out of the meals that they get from us versus our competitors. So I want that customer. I’m going for the like specific customer.

Whereas Facebook is going to [00:18:00] be more like, I think. I can hype this up enough that I’m going to get a lot of impulse buys from people that are even buying it as gifts for other people they know. Like, hey, do you know someone who likes to hunt or backpack or whatever? This is going to make their day and make their experience so much better.

Is that kind of how we’re talking about this?

Drew: Generally speaking, yes. Um, specifically now where Facebook, you know, Facebook used to be known for like lookalike audiences and they’re hyper targeting and you could go in and select really specific interest groups that you want to target. Uh, more and more lately, Facebook is favoring broad targeting and letting their algorithm do the work.

Whereas Google, you still have the opportunity to be really hyper targeted with keywords, and you could really capture specific intent, like people that, you know, lowest calorie, best tasting hiking foods. Um, so yeah, generally speaking, you’re exactly right. That’s kind of what I’m implying. And that was what?

Pinnaclefoods. co? Yeah, okay. You have to drop that in there one more time. [00:19:00]

Ben: Yeah, we, I mean, we’ve mentioned this on our podcast a lot, but I think it helps to give a real world example in terms of like how you would try to figure out

Drew: Yeah, absolutely. And then, you know, as you’re, as you were saying that it’s, um, I know one of your questions that you had mentioned was, uh, landing pages.

If you do have search intent ads, you’re creating search ads, specifically make landing pages to show how much better you are than cliff bars or. Uh, not pinnaclefoods. com, um,

Ben: or whoever it is. Keep from naming our competition out loud. No, I think

Drew: we should call them all out. If I’m going down with big billboard, you need to go down with big freeze dried foods.

So, um, yeah, just kidding. Uh, but, but yeah, I mean, that’s a really good occasion for using specifically catered targeted landing pages where you can show how your product differentiates itself from a really specific competitor.

Ben: And you think it’s good practice to put that competitor’s nutrition [00:20:00] facts right next to ours and call that brand out and all of that on that search intent page?

Drew: I absolutely think so. As long as you’re being truthful, there’s nothing deceptive about listing nutritional facts. Hopefully. Hopefully there’s no funny business going on there, but, uh, yeah, I think as long as you’re being truthful and you’re following. You know, the letter of the law is using trademarks and things like that.

Um, then a hundred percent, it’s a really effective way to get consumers the information they’re looking for in an easily digestible manner. And that’s what it comes down to is if you’re just sharing information, Um, and allowing consumers to make their decision, then I think you’re doing it in a way that isn’t obtrusive, intrusive, it’s not offensive or things like that.

But I’m a big, big supporter of competitor landing pages, as long as they’re educational.

Ben: And so that backing up that is if I’m interested in search traffic. I should probably make a landing page. Is that right?

Drew: Generally [00:21:00] speaking. Yeah. I think that you have the ability with search traffic to take really, you know, hyper focused intent.

It would be silly to not let that intent land on a page that’s specifically catered to them. Um, you’re kind of just leaving a superpower on the table if you have this really Awesome keyword that you’re bidding on that, you know, you’re going to crush it on and then you drop them on your homepage and just let them run wild, um, putting them on a landing page lets you specifically control the customer journey.

You’re you’re giving them the exact information that you think that they’re looking for. Um, and allowing them to make a purchase really quickly and easily without navigating through, uh, necessarily all of the facets of your website, which brings me to my next comment, which is going to immediately contradict that, which is every page of your website should be optimized as a landing page, right?

If you’re thinking of your homepage, not as a landing page, uh, I personally think that you’re doing something wrong. You should [00:22:00] anticipate that a likely customer is going to land on that homepage and you want to make sure that you’re steering that customer journey to purchase as well. Um, even if it’s your homepage or your pricing page or a product specific page.

Um, so if you’re like, Oh, I really don’t want to, I really don’t want to send ad traffic to this page. I think you should look at what that page’s purpose is and make sure that you’re optimizing it. Because you should feel comfortable to send advertising traffic to any page on your website if it’s optimized.

Katy: Including blog posts?

Drew: including blog, especially blog posts, uh, with stellar WP, you know, you teed that one up for me. That was a softball WP. One of our favorite prospecting tools is blog posts. You have this really incredible content across all of our brands, um, adding some CTAs in there or adding some comparison CTAs pricing CTAs and making those blog posts ready for people.

Coming from advertisements so that they could easily become purchasers is one of our favorite tactics Which is why you’ll see a lot of you know Kadence blog posts in our [00:23:00] ads givewp uses a lot of blog posts in their ads tec Actually, I think every one of our brands uses our blog content as our primary source of prospecting Uh, advertising content.

So it just takes a little bit of tweaking. You want to make sure that there are CTAs in there so that it’s not just reading a post, but they’re reading a post that gives them the option to become a purchaser really easily or a demo or a free downloader. It doesn’t necessarily have to be purchased.

Katy: Yeah, and Drew just used two acronyms.

So I wanted to break those down. TEC is the events calendar. You know, we use that internal lingo sometimes. So the events calendar and then CTA is call to action for anyone who is like,

what’s a CTA? Like

Drew: I said, I speak in acronyms and it’s really annoying for all my co workers. Thank you for bringing me back to earth.

Yes.

Ben: Okay, and then you also brought up the idea of prospecting. How do you define prospecting as something when we’re talking about ads?

Drew: Yeah, so prospecting, uh, cold audiences, top of funnel. These are [00:24:00] all kind of, uh, parallel terms, right? Uh, prospecting is finding people that aren’t aware of your business, making them aware of your business so that you could send them down the funnel.

Um, prospecting is at the top of the funnel. It’s the widest audience. You want to make them aware. That’s your awareness phase. Once you get people aware of your product, you could kind of funnel them down to the middle of funnel, which is your, uh, Oh my gosh, I totally lost my train of thought.

Consideration phase, middle of funnel will be the consideration phase. So they’ve heard of your product. They’re considering it. They might not be ready to make a purchase. They need a nudge further down in the funnel, which is, you know, retargeting, making someone into a purchaser. So. The funnel is a term that is thrown around a lot by digital advertisers and marketers in general.

Prospecting is going to be that top source where you’re looking for brand new people who have never heard of your site before and you want them to be aware of your offerings.

Ben: Yeah, and the strategy behind that is [00:25:00] sometimes It’s going to take more than one touch to get someone to convert. And so if your entire strategy is around first interaction to conversion, it’s going to be a lot harder than first interaction to consideration phase.

So you’re just trying to move them along in that funnel. And that’s the idea there is you have a broad audience. Does, does that broadness also cheapen, like make it easier to buy the ads?

Drew: Sometimes. It depends. It depends. But it’s kind of an incredible at how effective broad audience targeting has become, uh, specifically talking about Facebook.

And tic tac. I mean, everybody that uses tic tac could say, well, my algorithm has got me figured out to a freaky point. Um, that’s just the consumer side. So the back end that they’re using for businesses is way freakier and way more effective. Um, but yeah, keeping it broad and letting the algorithm do the work.

I mean, these companies have spent billions of dollars producing effective advertising [00:26:00] machines. Um, you’d be kind of silly to try to subvert that. And not use some of that knowledge and expertise for sure.

Ben: Okay. So I’m convinced I need to go get onto to TikTok or Facebook and that would be Instagram and reels, right?

How much do I need to spend? And what do I need to come with? Is an image going to be okay? Or do I really need to show up there with a video?

Drew: It’s going to depend on your platform. If you’re going on Facebook, uh, we have found that static images outperform video most of the time when it comes to consideration.

Um, if you’re going to be on Instagram, you’re going to want motion. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a video. It could be a GIF or GIF if you’re a monster. Um, don’t tell Cromwell I said that. Hello. And then if you’re going to be on TikTok, it has to be video. Static images just won’t move the needle on TikTok.

It has to be, uh, UGC, another abbreviation, user generated content. You want it to look not like an ad. You want [00:27:00] it to look organic. Um, you want it to look like with motion video.

Ben: Is that all those videos I see of people doing like a, holding a phone in front of them and like, Talking to it as if Absolutely.

Drew: And it works. That’s the beauty of it, is it works. The reason that so many of these videos seem so formulaic is because that formula has been working. Uh, another one of the really goofy ones that’s really surprising is Facebook ads that look like the Notes app on your phone. So it looks like you just wrote a note to yourself that says like the top five reasons I love Kadence.

And then you just list them out and you see the ad and you’re like, man, that’s really not compelling. And then you see how well they work. Um, and you’re like, oh, okay, that is compelling. Results are compelling. So it doesn’t necessarily, but when you see those trends, it’s, it’s because they, they generally work pretty well.

And user generated content is. Is one of the most high because you’re automatically starting with that level of trust. That’s really hard to establish. Um, just coming from a business that you’re like, Look at my ad. Look at my website. If you have a person telling [00:28:00] you about a business, it’s just a lot more impactful.

And you immediately have those trust factors baked into it. Even if it’s a stranger on the internet, that’s how weird us human beings are.

Katy: Drew, do you have any.

Drew: I do have a little bit of experience with Pinterest ads. It’s something that I’ve wanted to re approach. Um, when my retail business was at its peak of really crushing it and the online advertising, we started running Pinterest ads, and we always found that there were much higher CPCs or cost per click.

I’m going to try to define all of my abbreviations. The cost per click was a lot higher on Pinterest for us. But we were getting really qualified traffic and we found that the conversion rate was really good. We just didn’t really dive full on head first into it because we were so distracted by other things.

Uh, I’ve done it a bit. I know some people who’ve had incredible success on Pinterest ads. Uh, and the beauty of Pinterest ads is like some of the ones that we ran a while [00:29:00] ago are still out there gathering impressions. And every once in a while I’ll see, you know, Uh, a sale come through from Pinterest, even though we’ve done nothing there for five or six years.

Um, so it’s kind of interesting how Pinterest, it just, things can take on a life of their own that run in this little ecosystem that, that is so unique to anything outside of it. Um, so it’s really interesting. I wish I had more insightful things to say about Pinterest. I have a little bit of experience there, but it’s something I’m really interested in, in re approaching and trying again.

Katy: Yeah. One of the reasons I asked that question, because, you know, I have my own business as well. DIY dream site and DIYDreamSite.

Speaker 4: com DIYDreamSite.

Katy: com. I was also wondering like when should I, if I want to do advertising, I want to pick one platform to start with because I sell child themes and in all of those things that Are so visually appealing.

My initial inkling was to, if I was going to throw money at ads, either put it behind Pinterest ads or potentially like Facebook ads [00:30:00] versus. TikTok, I don’t think is, is the right place for that. So like, what’s the, how do you, how would you weigh out that decision?

Drew: I think that touches on a really, really important and great question, which is knowing your audience.

Um, if you know that diydreamsite. com, uh, you’re just going to keep plugging everybody’s websites. Um, if you know that your audience is on Pinterest and that they are visual and they are going to appreciate that visual aspect of it, And that’s exactly where you should be. Um, another thing about this is every one of these platforms has experts that are trained on that platform that are more than happy to get people up and running.

And it is in their best interest for you to have success. Like a lot of the times, yes, they’re going to say, spend more money, spend more money. Uh, of course they’re going to say that, but it is in their best interest that you have success on their platform. Pinterest has a specific, a particularly helpful subset.

I think they’re advertising experts were. More than helpful, uh, more so than the other platforms that I experience with. So I [00:31:00] would say absolutely reach out to them, and then all of these platforms have free tools for you to learn how to use them as well. So it’s really zero risk to go on there, start an account, talk to one of their experts, read the documentation, see how it’s set up, and if at the end of that process you think that you can be effective there, then give it a try.

Um, but I think knowing your target audience and knowing where they live, if you know that your people are on Pinterest, then that’s absolutely where you should be advertising. If you know they’re on Reddit, you should absolutely be doing Reddit ads. Um, if you know that they’re on TikTok, then give it a try.

Get Ben out there with the phone in front of them and get the TikTok ads going.

Katy: So what about The user who’s like, I tried advertising and it didn’t work for me because they maybe threw 500 at it and said they blew through their budget. It’s like going to the casino. You pull one slot machine, you lose all your money.

You’re like, well, I hate casinos. That’s where this is ineffective. You know, it’s kind of, kind of, sometimes it can feel like that. What would you say to that user? Who maybe has been burned [00:32:00] by ads in the past and um, yeah, what advice would you give them?

Drew: Yeah, I think the piece of advice i’d give there specific to that analogy is advertising is not gambling It shouldn’t be a lot of times It does feel like rolling the dice and trying to go viral and just because something doesn’t go viral does not mean that it’s not successful Every dollar that you spend on there is going to give you So much information.

Um, and if you’ve really failed on the advertising front and you’ve burned through money and you felt like you learned nothing, then I’d say, go re approach the data. And I bet you’ll find something that will give you insights into your customers experience, whether it’s like, wow, When I really dig down, our Facebook pixel says that 100 people added to cart, but only two purchased.

It’s like, okay, what are your shipping costs? What are you, what’s your checkout process like? Like, why are people getting to that point and then being turned off from the process? Then go in and try to incentivize that. retarget people that have added the cart and not purchased with the 10 percent off coupon [00:33:00] code.

Um, so if you’ve spent money on ads, you have not failed, you have gotten data. Um, what you do with that data, that is, that is going to be where the success comes. Right. Um, but there’s always going to be insights that could be gleaned from the spend no matter what. I love

Katy: that. That’s actually really helpful.

And then what about Um, testing. I think some people are scared to continue to, because it feels like burning money just to test and to get some data. So what’s your philosophy on testing different ads?

Drew: My philosophy is have a plan, like have a budget, have a plan and stick to it. Um, I was going to mention this later, but I’ll bring it up.

It’s like. Monitor daily, analyze, uh, or what was it? What was it I said earlier? It was monitor daily, uh, tweak weekly, right? So give, give your ads time to run, give them time to do their thing, but make sure that you’re going in with a plan. Don’t just say, well, I’m going to start this ad. I’ll check in on it in a few weeks because that’s [00:34:00] the easiest way you could possibly burn money.

Specifically set it, say I’m going to do a 10 day test. I’m going to spend 100. I’m going to spend 50 of it on prospecting, 50 on retargeting. Um, and then go in there, watch the ads do their thing, adjust it after 5, 6, 7 days when they’ve had time to go. Um, and then make your decisions based off of data and not off knee jerk reactions.

It’s really easy to look at your dashboard and refresh it every 5 minutes and be like, Oh man, we’ve already spent 20 and I’m not a millionaire yet. So this is a failure. I’m going to kill it. I’m going to stop. Stick to your plan. Um, and no going into that, that at the end of your plan, you’re going to have data that you could use to make decisions.

Uh, whether it’s kind of continue to advertise, scale up or pull back. Um, those are all valid options that you should be considering when you’re, when you’re looking to establish your program.

Katy: Yeah, that’s probably a good stance to take as well. When you’re just looking at your own website analytics. Like if you have the same philosophy on both, then you can start making data [00:35:00] driven decisions to move the needle in your business.

Drew: Yeah, but they don’t website

Katy: ads.

Drew: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I’m on Facebook. They have what’s called the learning phase. A lot of people are really freaked out by the learning phase. Um, it’s not necessary. It doesn’t mean things aren’t effective until they get out of the learning phase. Like some people might imply.

Um, but it does take time. It does take data. For these algorithms to learn. You can’t just go in and say, make me money, please. Uh, you do have to give it input. You have to collect that data, you know, in a way, taking over the ads at give WP, we had already had multiple years of spending, um, where not necessarily the most effective spend.

That wasn’t as effective as it could have been, but I had the cheat code of starting off with a mountain of data. So being able to go in there and say, you know, well, let’s move this around. Let’s tweak this. Google already knew so much about our business at that point, and we had already spent X amount of dollars that it was relatively easy to go in there and steer it in the right direction once you have enough data.

So the data is really [00:36:00] like, that is, it’s not a failure if you’re learning, right? It’s not a failure if you’re collecting data and you can use that to make decisions.

Katy: Nice. Okay, I also have one other thought, and it’s, Somewhat related. So even if someone’s not ready to spend ads yet, do you think that it’s advantageous for them to put the Facebook pixel or the Pinterest tag on their website?

in order for them to start collecting like that user information so that when they are ready to run ads, they can do lookalike audiences. Like, is that a best practice that people should do on their website?

Drew: I a hundred percent of things. So, um, this is an unpopular thing. I know Facebook gets a lot of flack, especially Facebook ads and the Facebook pixel.

Uh, but absolutely the easiest, lowest hanging fruit for a lot of businesses that have a pixel that want to start advertising. Is retargeting finding those people like the example I said before that have added the cart, but they haven’t finished their purchase. That’s your easiest, lowest hanging fruit audience [00:37:00] that you’re ever going to get with advertising.

So that’s a really good starting point. If you just want like a lot of businesses just run 5 a day, Facebook. retargeting ads for people that visited their website that didn’t become a customer. And that could be a really effective advertising program if that’s what your appetite is, and it’s giving you the results that you’re looking for.

It doesn’t have to be, well, it’s only successful if we scale to 5, 000 a day and spend. That 5 a day retargeting, add to cart, no purchasers, can be really profitable. It could be really effective if you’re doing it right. Um, so absolutely.

Katy: That’s great.

Ben: Which we’ve, we’ve said all this without the, the main thing.

Like a lot of people are setting their sites earlier, you do need to get analytics completely set up to where you can track this stuff. Don’t run it without tracking, because that’s, uh, you’re not going to learn.

Drew: Absolutely. You definitely don’t want to be flying blind. You want to have as much information as you can [00:38:00] possibly gather, um, to make informed choices.

Uh, but there’s so many resources out there to get you established with analytics, to get you, The Facebook pixel make it really easy. A lot of our stellar products have Facebook integrations. Give WP has a free Facebook pixel integration, give WP. com. If we’re plugging URLs, might as well. But yeah, so there, there are a ton of resources that make it relatively easy.

There’s not a single thing that any one of these listeners is going to do that hasn’t been done and documented before on the internet. Um, so absolutely don’t be afraid to start and don’t be afraid to ask questions too.

Katy: Nice. Cool. Okay. I have a question. For Kadence specifically, what’s working now? Like give us, give us a little behind the scenes of our ad strategy.

Like give us a tip.

Drew: Yeah, I one of the things that’s working the best for Kadence right now is how to build a link tree alternative And I think when we wrote that blog post I’m not gonna speak on behalf of who [00:39:00] wrote it But I don’t think it was necessarily a big blog post that got a ton of attention but from an ads perspective It’s been one of our best hooking prospecting pieces that we have just showing people like hey You could really easily spin up a link tree alternative.

That’s not Um, not to get in trouble with Linktree now too, but, uh, that piece of prospecting has been really, really effective for us. Um, and then we split most of our advertising budget is allocated for prospecting and about 30 percent of it I’d say is for retargeting, uh, just from a Facebook perspective on Google.

It’s a whole different monster, a whole different approach for sure. Um, but Google, we’ve had a lot of success with performance max campaigns. Everybody has, um, performance max has been a really great and performance max, uh, is essentially using Google’s automated, uh, tools to, uh, you feed it a ton of assets and it’ll decide placements for you and it’ll decide the headlines that it wants for you and things like that.

Sounds scary, but it’s actually [00:40:00] really, really cool and really effective.

Katy: That’s awesome.

Ben: Is that how like periodically I’ll search for a product and Amazon will come up as like, it has the product title and the headline and stuff, but it actually doesn’t even take me to that product title. It takes me to like an Amazon search page.

Is that the kind of thing that Amazon’s doing where they’re just grabbing, it’s all like Google’s generating it for them.

Drew: Possibly, possibly. I mean, are you talking about like shopping ads where the product shows up at the top of your search feed?

Ben: No, I’m talking about like I, I like search for a product or something and am like My daughter’s not gonna listen to this.

I’m buying my daughter a mountain bike for her birthday. So I was searching for a mountain bike for a eight year old and Amazon had an ad for a certain type of bike I was looking at. But when I clicked on that, it actually just took me to an Amazon search and they don’t sell that bike or no sellers on Amazon have that bike.[00:41:00]

Drew: I think you’ve stumped me with that question. It sounds like the audience network that’s gotten a little bit funky. Um, Like 70 percent of the websites in the world or something like that. And sometimes audience network ads can get really bizarre. Um, but no, that’s interesting. That it takes you just to a generic Amazon search, and it doesn’t even have the product that was in the ad?

Ben: Yeah, the name. I mean, it had the name, but like, it implied that it would be there, but it didn’t have it.

Drew: Interesting. I think we should, uh, send a complaint to Amazon. Yeah. I think Jeff should tackle this one.

Katy: This has been so great of a conversation on ads. Do you have any other last minute tips that you want to share with our audience or pieces of advice?

Drew: Yeah, I think the three biggest takeaways for tips would be, you know, know your audience. That’s going to help you dictate what, where you want your placements to be, what platforms you should be on. Um, if [00:42:00] you know that you’re, You know, grandma’s knitting group isn’t going to be on TikTok, then don’t do TikTok ads, right?

It seems basic, but knowing your audience is one of the most important things when you’re making decisions on planning for an advertising program. Defining your goals is really important. If you know that impressions are a junk metric that you don’t want to necessarily take into account as you’re making your decisions, then don’t use that as one of your navigating reference points, right?

Um, so if you know it’s going to be clicks and traffic, then optimize for clicks and traffic. If it’s going to be purchases, make sure it’s all set up properly, but track purchases. Uh, there are thousands of different metrics that you could be tracking. Um, Of which there are a ton in Google and all the resources that you need to learn about all of these metrics are out there and free.

Uh, don’t let anyone charge you to learn these things. Um, so define your goals and metrics and have a plan for them. And then again, monitor daily, tweak weekly. Don’t make knee [00:43:00] jerk reaction decisions. You’re never going to give your ads time to breathe, to learn, to grow, if you’re killing them right away.

So let them run, let some data come in and make decisions on a little bit more elongated basis. If you want to really find success, those would probably be the big three, but also don’t be afraid to ask questions. There’s so many resources out there for everybody to get started doing this for free. All of my training came from Facebook Blueprint Certification.

Uh, Google has an online certification program that’s completely free for their advertising platforms. You can become a Microsoft Certified Ad Planner for free through, uh, Bing Ads. All of these things are gonna teach you more about different platforms, and all of them are gonna have different things that you could extrapolate out about digital advertising in general.

Um, but all the best resources that exist out there are free, and I’ll just keep saying that over and over again.

Speaker 4: Wow, that’s really cool. Foods

Drew: CO and diy. Dreams Strike Do com. . Uh, wandering. [00:44:00] Give

Katy: wp.

Drew: Yeah, give WP .

Katy: Well, this has been great. Thank you so much for joining us. We’re gonna have to have you back on, ’cause you have other side projects that you built with Kadence and Yeah.

We haven’t,

Ben: uh, pinged all your. You know, said all your domains either. So we have not scratched

Drew: the surface quite yet, but I will be happily rejoining if big billboard doesn’t blacklist me from.

Yeah.

Katy: Well, thanks again for joining us. And, um, we’ll see you guys next, next episode on the Kadence beat.

Drew: Thanks for having me.