Paid Advertising: Thoughts So Far
Sometime within the last year, I started playing around with paid advertising. Now, I’m not an expert on it, but I had a chat with Kyle the other day on Twitter about what I’ve learned and people occasionally ask me about pay-per-click advertising and the like.
Here’s a quick rundown of some of the major things I’ve learned so far.
Start Small
There’s a tendency amongst certain segments of the internet to assume that one online marketing strategy is the king of all of them.
In paid advertising and affiliate marketing circles, this translates to “here, newbie, promote this offer that everyone else is promoting. Throw your inheritance from grandma and you’re $5k in life savings into running these ads and you’ll be making 10k a day in no time.”
Look… this isn’t the optimal strategy if you’re being smart.
In reality, unless you’re a rich kid of Instagram with money to burn, you shouldn’t start by throwing thousands into paid marketing. Because that’s what you’ll be doing; burning money.
Advertising Is A Complex System
Success in paid advertising comes from several things, which I’ll talk about in the next section. Those “things” form a complex system. Now, getting to the point where you can understand that complex system is possible and likely if you stick at it long enough.
But just like any other complex system, it looks easy because you don’t know how it works and the fact it’s an efficient system makes it look straightforward.
Think about the average guy who sits and watches the news or reads political Twitter accounts and stuff. He immediately knows the answer to every problem, and by god, if he were in charge he’d get rid of poverty, terrorists and the budget deficit in about five minutes flat.
In reality, that guy is an idiot. He thinks in binary terms and other low-level intellectual ways because he can’t comprehend that there’s a complex system at work.
Now, paid advertising is the same. Guru’s will tell you “simply create a landing page and send loads of traffic to it and you’ll make money.”
That’s the simple system.
The complicated system is where each variable comes into play, and each variable has a learning curve. A certain headline will get you one audience, and a different image will get you another.
The way to learn how these elements interplay is to test them all and learn about them.
This means starting small unless you have an unlimited budget. Spending $1000 a day when you have $5000 in all of the world is stupid, because you’ll test a few variables and then run out of money.
Spending $10 a day and putting a little into each variable means that the dead-ends aren’t going to cost you everything… and there will be dead ends.
Split Test EVERYTHING – One Variable At A Time
Like I mentioned above… start small and learn about the different variables and how much they affect the outcome.
Now, when people learn about split-testing and multi-variate testing, they instantly jump to “I’ll test A against B against C and A will have elements 1, 2, 3 and B will have 4,5, 6 and C will have 7, 8,9 and then I’ll learn everything in three ads!”
In reality… this will give you no usable data whatsoever. The key to successful split-testing in the learning stage is to treat it as a learning stage. You’re not going to be profitable immediately and the only way to get profitable is to learn what works and what doesn’t. Conclusively.
Test one variable at a time, and make everything about your ads the same apart from that one variable. Does a particular image kill your click-throughs? You won’t know if you change the image, the headline and the content at the same time.
Test one variable at a time until you know conclusively what works and what doesn’t. Then move forward.
Note: This doesn’t necessarily mean in chronological time. You can obviously test numerous variables at the same time, but you need to test the specific variable against a single control.
So if you have a Facebook ad that consists of Image/Headline/Body Text then you have to test the image variable like this:
- Image 1/Headline 1/Body 1
- Image 2/Headline 1/Body 1
- And Image 3/Headline 1/Body 1
Now, you can run tests for the body and the headlines as well, but you’re only learning about image effectiveness in the above split-tests. Any test for the other two variables can’t give you data about the image test.
Start With “Easier” Sells
Phil Hawksworth did a better job of explaining this than I did on Twitter: Essentially though, as the copywriters among you will know, converting traffic from cold to buyer in one sales letter is hard.
Now, you can cut your teeth trying to do this, but you’ll get low conversions and there are a lot of things that can mess up those conversions along the way.
It’s much easier to sell your readers on something easier. Free opt-ins, retargeting and abandoned cart retargets are much easier to convert (and at less cost) because your ads and copy can target people who are already interested. Or, in the case of free opt-ins, you can convert people who are minimally or theoretically interested and give them the goods over a longer period of time.
Essentially, starting further down the funnel than “uninterested visitor” will cut that stage out of your testing. This will help you get a handle on paid advertising at a lower cost than burning through money trying to get people to spend money as well as warm up their interests.
Final Thoughts
This will do for the paid advertising updates. Now, to reiterate, I’m no expert. PPC is pretty great as far as that goes, because the only way to become proficient and learn how things work is to do them and get direct experience. There isn’t really a place for “theory” and there’s only so much you can read on the topic before jumping in and getting your hands dirty.
Still, hopefully the above has assured some of you who were on the fence and given you some usable advice.
For those of you who know what you’re talking about or are otherwise experimenting, please feel free to drop your own observations in the comments!