12 Oct The secret underworld of online advertising and the one tool they use to kick ass
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Every morning I’d wake up hoping this ad was the one that worked.
Every morning I’d feel bad because it wasn’t. I felt like I was throwing money out the window.
After a while, I noticed that whether I felt good or bad that day depended on the performance of my ads. I knew the opportunity that would open up if it worked.
So I decided to study people who successfully run ads for a living and to discovered their secret.
I’ve tried a bunch of ways to deal with the ups and downs of ads. At first, I ran a couple of ad campaigns and didn’t think much further about the results, except whether it was profitable or not.
Something that was the norm in a couple of different jobs I’ve had, and what seems to be the norm in most standard companies, unfortunately.
Most often they did not do well, so I started to take notice of how other people were dealing with that feeling. I realized how big of a negative impact it had on my ability to make good decisions on how to turn my ads around.
I decided to study people who run ads for a living. People like Charles Ngo and Malan Darras who depend on it to bring food to the table, how they’re doing it and particularly how they’re dealing with the pressure.
The most interesting thing I learned was that those weren’t in fact companies with lots of cash and big departments.
No, they were one-man armies or small independent teams and they were, in fact, outperforming huge corporations and big teams on a daily basis.
I immediately knew that these were the guys I needed to study. What did they do that was different? Could this really be true? After all, they were fewer people with smaller budgets – quite the underdog, so it should not be possible. Or could it?
The two keys I discovered
To my amazement, it turned out to be very true.
The first thing I learned was that I needed to figure out what my ad reports meant – what were people actually telling me through their views, clicks, and behavior (and lack thereof)?
The second thing I learned was that to make up for the lack of manpower. They used systems to work faster and more efficiently, meaning that they actually were able to get more work done in less time.
I quickly became fascinated with the efficiency that these guys were bringing to the table. They would make insane ROIs and often work half the hours that an average office worker does in a week. At first, I was skeptical yet curious as to how they were so different from me. After diving in and trying to get them to spill the beans I realized I had even more shortcomings than ever before.
These guys were using systems for everything and they were so efficient they could easily outsource the work to virtual assistants in foreign countries if they wanted to. And many did.
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For every process, they went through they had a specific system. Some had step by step documentation with screenshots while others had a very clear vision of what they needed to do and just did it – sort of like a routine at the gym.
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They didn’t need to think, they just did the tasks like they’ve always done because they knew what it took to make it work. And work well.
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I realized that, basically, for them it was just a numbers game, many didn’t have a formal education, yet they let basic math and statistics make the decisions for them.
I’ve never been good in school and math isn’t something I find particularly fun, but I was excited when I learned that the principles they use are so basic that anyone can learn them.
How to do it
From studying your audience you’ll know several things they like but you can’t be sure which of them they prefer. So you test it using math to determine what the most likely outcome will be.
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When you do a simple test and make it about the numbers instead of about creating the perfect ad, you’ll quickly discover that the returns from setting most of your budget into the best performing ad will be far greater than the cost of testing lots of ads that don’t perform.
Once you’re at that point, there’s no going back.
The game gets all about figuring out how you can get to the best performing ad as quickly and efficiently as possible because the money is not in finding the right ad but rather in upscaling it.
And for this, you are in the right place.
Facebook is perhaps the best platform out there to scale up as it has an insane amount of traffic and aggressive growth strategies to bring in even more users.
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Trust me, there’s nothing worse than working hard to find the best ad, only to be limited by how much traffic you can buy.
What you’ll quickly discover is that often out of 10 ads only 1-2 will perform well but you won’t know which one.
The key, I discovered, is to methodically test each element of your ad until you have the best performing combo.
Focusing on this moved my thinking away from how much I was losing on ads, what to do next and so on, and it almost completely removed my feeling of whether things would going well or not depending on the performance of my ads. It made me feel much calmer and I quickly found myself getting the same amount of work done in half the time because it was always clear to me what to do next no matter how my ads performed.
What made the biggest difference, however, was that the performance of my ads increased A LOT.
I went from breaking even on my best campaigns to an ROI of more than 100% on some campaigns – I quite literally turned every dollar I put in into two.
This happened because I started to plan for failure. Whenever I tested say 10 different images I knew that statistically 1-2 would perform vastly better than the rest as long as the images I tested were different enough from each other.
I quickly stopped caring about the performance of the 8-9 other images – they were just dead weight. All I needed was to find that one image that I could take with me to the next test.
I even stopped caring which of the images performed better. A pro tip I figured out is to name them something boring so you can’t distinguish them from each other when looking at your data – i.e. image 1, image 2…
Creating a system yourself
It’s easy to get overwhelmed planning the perfect system that takes all possible outcomes into account. You don’t need to do that.
A good idea is to start small and create a basic system for one thing first and then build on top of that as you go. That could be optimizing ads or which tasks you do in what order during your day to get the most work done in the shortest amount of time.
If you’re creating a system for optimizing ads, start by figuring out which element is the most important part of your ad, which one is the second most important and so on and create a system for which element to test and in what order.
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As you get more advanced you can add details such as if the CTR is X you need to do Y. As you get more data you can optimize your system and extend it to figure out in what order your tasks will be more efficient for you to do. It could go like this:
- Check the ad data from yesterday
- Start the campaign you prepared from yesterday
- Source 10 new images for a new test tomorrow
- Prepare new campaign for tomorrow based on possible outcomes
- Plan ahead or update system with new data
This is just a super basic example to give you an idea. As you become better and better you’ll find yourself spending less and less time on your campaigns themselves and more time on your business as with the right system you’re getting close to full automation of your ads while actually getting results you want.
As you become better and better you’ll find yourself spending less and less time on your campaigns and more time on your business, because with the right system you’re getting close to full automation of your ads while actually getting results you want.
Key takeaways
- It’s a numbers game so a system is necessary to get results
- Focus on your system rather than the result
- Start small
- Add more details as you go
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