Zach (01:39):

Today's guests spends upwards of 40 or 50 million on native and I'm excited for man. It's going to be a breath of fresh air. Everyone's a little anti-Facebook uh, this week, uh, today's guest was introduced to us of a former guests, um, Carter, one of the top affiliates. It, uh, did you store, it was on a previous episode and uh, he said, you gotta talk to my boy, Mr. Joe, uh, Burton's managing a ton of budgets, uh, in the Dr. Space direct response. Uh, do you see some, some pretty aggressive advertisers, uh, and founder of ROI marketplace, welcome to the rich ed. Pour it podcast, Joe.

Joe (02:25):

Thanks for having me on guys. I really appreciate the opportunity.

Zach (02:28):

Yeah, man. Thanks for just being amazing and having like an epic, a amount of ad spend that you're, you're managing this will make it for a really fun show. So tell everybody a little bit about ROI marketplace and you know, what your guys' sweet spot is, uh, as an ad agency.

Joe (02:48):

Yeah, and so I launched ROI, I think it's seven or eight years ago now, um, as, you know, a full service ad agency and our goal at the time was to work with brands and D clients to handle, you know, Facebook and Google and native and some other stuff. Um, I had, uh, a big back on a native, you know, kind of going back to my whole career. Um, and quickly I understood that there was a million people doing Facebook agencies out there. Many people are going Google agencies. And we kind of realized that no one separated from the pack on native specifically. So, um, we launched our ally or sorry, we kind of made that our business model where, you know, native was our specialty in the market. And once we did that, things really took off for us. So we focus heavily on Dr. Clients. So think about your typical lead generations. We do a ton of insurance-based whole improvements. Uh, we do a lot with, you know, health clients, the VSLs that you guys probably see everywhere. And then of course, some, you know, some high end financial products as well. So, um, it's stuff all across the board, um, and can get, most of our clients do have some kind of success metric in mind, and they were able to hit those, you know, more often than not.

Zach (03:59):

That is awesome. So let's talk about a rich ad. What's working now, Joe,

Speaker 2 (04:09):

[inaudible],

Joe (04:10):

We're having a good year, so we've seen a lot of, uh, you know, stuff migrate away from Facebook and towards us. And, you know, particularly we've seen a lot of things that are news dependent and really good, you know, great examples are, you know, right after the election, when Biden took inauguration, you know, a lot of people that had major portfolios and the financial world became very nervous about their retirement income and their portfolios and their stocks and things like that. So we just saw a ton of high-end financial products go through the roof, you know, basically copy and content built around that, you know, here's your retirement income and say, is your portfolio safe, you know, and offering alternative investments behind that. Um, those were some of our biggest spenders so far. Are you today by fire? Wow.

Zach (04:55):

Nice. That's awesome. So what, what would you, uh, what would you advise for somebody that maybe spending a couple hundred grand a month on, on, on Facebook or social? And they're kind of wanting to jump over into the native world. The wild wild west would be kind of the top one or two, three things you'd recommend

Joe (05:16):

It's. So the first thing is don't just copy your funnel from Facebook and trap it into the talk of the work. I've seen a hundred people try it and it almost never works. Right? So you got to think kind of how native is built out, right? And native is a first touch for most clients, first active, engaging with their consumers. So you really just introducing your product or service to them. Now, some things like lead gen kind of are what they are, right. You're either going to submit your information and you're not probably now if you're selling a physical product, you have to educate them about your stuff. So number one, most important thing is make sure you have good content behind it. You know, this, the story and the content is everything that comes with a strong leader campaign. Yeah. So we got in-house copywriters. Um, we have in-house designers, so we designed the pages, we write the content and then we of course, you know, get client approval and push it out. Um, like anything else, we always ask our clients to help us with that process because they are an expert on, we do at this point, you know, but yeah, we do offer everything from a to Z.

Speaker 5 (06:17):

Yeah, that's powerful. So, so definitely things that work across other platforms, the whole native side has to have its own kind of custom storytelling system and back. And it looks like

Joe (06:28):

Exactly, because again, think about how it works, you know, I'm on MSN or I'm on a Fox news or I'm checking a sports and ESPN. And I see something that pops up in the silos, like a news article, right? So we have to take people to a page it's going to, of course sell your product to them. Um, there's been no trust built at this point. Facebook's a bit different because people, I think had an active trust level of the network already. This is obviously a little bit different of a scenario. So, you know, the key is to educate your consumers, teach them about why your product or service is a good idea, but don't, you know, don't jerk them around and mislead them. You know, if you make a bunch of false claims about how your product is going to make them a million dollars a day or, you know, make them lose 40 pounds overnight, you're going to lose trust super quick with people.

Speaker 5 (07:08):

I simply sense there now you're kind of tying it back to the election and how good those kinds of campaigns are doing in the financial realm. Do y'all do a lot of, I guess, seasonal or kind of more, I guess, world events kind of campaigns there, some kind of curious how that differentiates from your more evergreen side of campaigns.

Joe (07:25):

Yeah. I mean, there's absolutely a seasonality behind these things, right? So Q1 tends to be, everyone wants to get healthy. You want to get their finances in order and write their resolution, dieters. Things like that are, are super big. Um, you know, the summer months tend to be a little bit different. We see a lot in the improvement space, lead generation, things like that. And then Q4 is like shopping season. So everyone is selling, you know, Christmas gifts or gadgets or things like that. So we have enough, you know, or enough clients in house where we can kind of roll with the punches. Whereas some months client a has had mathematical mind and they're taken off and they slow down the next month and something else. And they kind of creep up and take its place.

Speaker 5 (08:02):

And that makes Stephanie says, may it makes it nice, especially in 20 20, 20, 21, there's it feels like everything's going ham. So I feel like you got a lot of options for content.

Joe (08:11):

It is, you know, and obviously the, the point is to stay topical. You know, the more topical the content you can put out the better you're going to perform. You know, people do see your ads, you know, and they do engage with your ads and maybe you can sell your product to them or not. Um, one of my favorite stories was, you know, we had a client in, uh, in the health space that started to sell masks, you know, during really early on for COVID. Um, these guys came to us later on, but they were managing some of their Taboola stuff in house, right. So they went from doing no business to spending over $200,000 a day on native marketing, selling frickin masks, um, just being topical. It was a right time. Obviously those masks would have sold six months before that for anything. But you know, when they, at the right time in the right season, things took off for him or they not as much the bubbles kind of over, you know, this was back when you couldn't get out of your house, you couldn't go anywhere. You couldn't really buy them online because they were sold out everywhere. So these guys had a huge surplus and they were able to actually monetize it. People are still spending on them now, but it's not like it used to be.

Speaker 5 (09:18):

Yeah. Yeah. I've definitely noticed our mass sales declining heavily week over week. It seems like some of the, in the states man with all these doors opening, um, no one needs mask anymore. It seems like

Joe (09:29):

Scott I'm now, you know, and those that don't, aren't going to buy them. I mean, do you have a cool custom mass? Maybe you can still put a good campaign out for it, but again, it's all about staying topical, right? What's the next thing is going to be, you know, in high demand.

Speaker 5 (09:39):

Oh, definitely not. Now. Quick question. When it comes to Q4 and the kind of shopping season, what's some of the largest budgets you've played with, whether it's like cyber Monday black Friday, I would imagine when it's really hot, y'all kind of scale to them. Then with these native campaigns,

Joe (09:50):

It is, we do a lot with like the gadgets, you know, kind of something that people can engage with quickly and purchase rent a whole lot of money. Um, those are big for us. So we had a lot of, I can think back to like personal fitness trackers, personal devices, um, energy saving devices, all the stuff that you can buy someone for a cheap amount. So, um, you know, we don't do it nearly enough e-com and a goal of mine is to bring on more brands and we can space the season, but, you know, we had a couple million dollar budgets for sure. And Q4,

Speaker 5 (10:19):

Oh man, that's sick. Yeah. It's definitely interesting now kind of off topic more than the scaling side, but I mean, how do you ramp up, what's working on the native side, you just have the budgets come up with new angles funnels. I'm kind of curious how once you find of that to work and how do you kind of flip that switch to just make it really scale to the moon there?

Joe (10:36):

Yeah, that's a, that's a great question. So, um, one of my clients kind of coined this phrase and I've used it over a sentence, you know, once you find the GoDaddy as they call it, which is basically a combination of headline and image and landing page things scale really, really quickly. And it's hard to kind of replicate that with the new ad down the road. So we always start our campaigns up really slow kind of dial in the best creatives, the best angles, the best images we're seeing, who's engaging with the content and kind of what devices are working the best. And once you figure all those things out for a new client, then we start to scale them pretty aggressively. Um, one thing I'm really big on is diversifying our ad spend by different networks, you know, so to blow the Outbrain Gemini and so on down the pipeline, we try to break our spend pretty easily across all of those because it's very cyclical and sometimes to bull is having a bad day or a bad week, you know, but if you're having a bad day over here, maybe you're picking up on Outbrain or picking up on Gemini or picking up on a different platform.

Joe (11:34):

And by doing that, we see a lot less of the major market swings that people kind of deal with.

Zach (11:39):

This episode is brought to you by funnel Nash's ad card, the only charge card exclusively for your digital ad spend. And if you're an ad agency that manages seven or even eight figures a year in media and ad spend for your clients, and you're looking to double your profits over the next six to 12 months, then check out, add card, see the typical agency model is this. You charge 10% of your spend. You make 10 to 20% margin at the end of the day. So that's really one to 2% of your clients spend that is profit in your business. The easiest way to double that is a really find a way to earn in that one to 2% cash back of the card that is on file of your clients has ad account. And before add card we had to do was invoice all your clients for their ad spend up front. She's really difficult on a cash flow basis and very difficult ASP. And then you had to put the card on your own Amex or whatever card of choice to get that level of value back into your business with add card it's entirely different in streamline. You simply get your clients on add card and make yourself the agency of record and you'll get the cash back. As long as you're managing the ad spend, it's a great way to double your profit without doing any additional work. Check it out@funneldash.com

Speaker 5 (13:02):

Man. So with these Winnie ads, how long did they last? What'd you kind of find that sweet spot. Is it something that's monetary based or is a kind of more time-based

Joe (13:10):

I've had ads that I haven't touched in a year plus by that ends up burnout in 30 days. So it really varies, but there's some ads I don't see. I haven't touched in a year more two years because it was work every single day, no matter what.

Speaker 5 (13:23):

Oh, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, man. So that's, that's the nice sunshine side of native. Give us some nightmares, man. What's some kind of water cross in this native world here,

Joe (13:40):

The natives, lot more volatile than Facebook, right? It's frustrating. You know, there's days I log in and I see all my campaigns and then green I'm like this job is easy and the smartest media buyer in the world, right. I might log in the following morning and everything I have is red and I haven't changed anything, no ideas what's going on and, and whatnot. So, and sometimes you'll have a week or two where just nothing works and you can't find a reason nothing's broken nothing's in your funnels, looks off. Everything is the same. It was two weeks ago. And then they're just not converting as well. So you gotta be patient and kind of ride with the time. So, you know, and when things are working well, you know, as hard as you can and when they're not working well then of course, you know, don't blow your whole budget on it.

Speaker 5 (14:20):

Have you had that scenario? It would be actually blown a pretty massive part of the budget on something that just wasn't functional or something that you maybe misread there.

Joe (14:28):

Oh God, I probably lost more money. It's in the work marketplace on it, right back, tons of money over my career. You know, sometimes it's stubbornness, like I'm going to figure this thing out and we're going to make it work. And sometimes it's just bad management rates. Um, one of the things I tell people all the time, I new, my different speaking is, you know, if something is working, leave it the hell alone. You know, I don't know how many times in my career I've had a campaign cranking and I'm like, well, I'm going to, I'm going to add two new ads to the next and see what happens. Right? The campaign has totally falls apart. So when something is working there, leave it the hell alone. Don't touch it, change your bids. And that's about it,

Speaker 5 (15:03):

Man. That makes complete sense. So nightmares, they happen everywhere. It seems like

Joe (15:08):

It was easy. Everybody could do it, right?

Speaker 5 (15:10):

Oh gosh. Yeah. We'd all be on fricking owning our own islands. You know, that's the, so I mean, something you kind of brought up and of course I'm going off topic again, is how y'all kind of split it by device type. Do y'all anticipate having to do this more with Android versus iOS with some of the newer upcoming changes at all, or is that going to impact you that much?

Joe (15:29):

So we've always done that, you know, so we use, you know, like volume as our ad tracker, for example. So since day one, we've been analyzing devices and browsers and operating systems and what's doing the best in words. And in most cases you can set up campaigns to target only those. Um, we're not too worried about all the changes cause quite honestly, native isn't built as heavy on demo targeting as Facebook as you know. So we've been demo targeting more by site since we, before demo targeting was cool. So, you know, we know about targeting conservative lists versus, you know, let this list versus whatever lives based on this, a sites we're targeting and it's a little bit different than of course letting the pixel do it for you. Um, there's a reason Facebook is so scalable because your pixel was so intelligent, but they're obviously now dealing with, um, a lot of headaches that's that's going to go away from,

Speaker 5 (16:18):

Oh yeah. I've been seeing in the last couple of weeks, it seems like Facebook's pushing a lot of Android budgets out where it usually didn't, but I mean, have you ever noticed trends when it comes to this iOS LTV of a customer versus Android or even average order values? That's one thing I've actually noticed on the Facebook Roman, I'm kind of curious if you ever see something similar than the native side to where the iOS just may have, you know, a higher LTV and AOV to where Android is. Isn't that high up there.

Joe (16:43):

We absolutely see that, you know, we see iOS be a little bit better from a conversion standpoint than go Android. Does VC edge browser converting higher than Chrome browser. I mean, you look at those numbers every single day. Um, and there's definitely trends that develop there for sure.

Speaker 5 (16:59):

hell yeah, love the. So let's go ahead and side step this bad boy. So of course we love to kind of dive into some sort of financial tips and principles based off the name of the podcast here. So, I mean, based off your expertise and experience, what kind of financial tips or principles can you kind of share with the audience based off what you're getting into?

Joe (17:16):

Yeah, so I mean, I would say, I think personally, and I'm big on this. I think every budget, whether you're a brand owner or an affiliate or, you know, a market, you know, a big marketing firm should have some kind of budget set aside for that native campaigns. And the reason being is it really does push up what you're doing on Facebook and on your branded search campaigns and your Amazon sales and all that. So, um, I would say carve out a budget. It doesn't need to be a lot, you can start campaigns off for a hundred bucks a day, you know, and kind of get your feet wet in the market. Right. Um, but I think every campaign should have some kind of budget set aside for it. For sure.

Speaker 5 (17:50):

That makes definite sense. So, you know, if you're just getting started a hundred bucks a day sufficient to say we're spending 300 K a month on Facebook, we're getting really good traction. We want to hit a hard, would you recommend for the more established brands that are looking to get traction a little bit with?

Joe (18:02):

Yeah. I mean you can step in and you can spend a lot of money very quickly, but it's all about what you're making back. Right. So I guess it depends on your threshold for loss. Like if you've never bought native before and you sign up for, to Bula and you drop in $20,000 and you up your bids to a dollar and you turn it on, you're gonna spend a lot of money pretty quickly. Right. Um, but I think it's always better to be a little more intelligent about how you're spending. And so, you know, you can definitely, definitely they'll get campaigns testing for a couple of grand per month, you know, and if you want to spend a lot more by all means the traffic is out there.

Speaker 5 (18:32):

That's not bad. People always think you got to spend a crap load to kind of gauge whether a platform works for you. But just goes to show you a hundred bucks a day is sufficient.

Joe (18:40):

You'd be surprised we launch all of our new clients, right? And again, we're spending, you know, three, four or 5 million bucks a month on native. And I launched a new client at like 50 bucks a day, a hundred bucks a day, just kind of figuring out what's working and working out the dials, find the best campaigns, the best ads, the best presale pages and all that. And once you find all that stuff and we scale and spend the money,

Speaker 5 (19:00):

How much do prep in advance just to kind of stay more proactive. Maybe this funnels, this Lena Lander's not working, or maybe this creative is an Oregon or this headline, how proactive y'all stay on, Hey, here's our archive of headlines that test or copy maybe the back end system. How do you all kind of incorporate that out of curiosity?

Joe (19:15):

It's every single day, you know, so sometimes a client will come to us and let's say they own a product or service. They have affiliates running pretty massive volume, but they don't like that because they wanna be able to control some of that budget in house. Those ones are easy. They already got pages. They have ads, they got their controls in place. We turn that on. It's pretty much profitable on day one. Some clients come to us and everybody made a click before in their life. So those guys are obviously a lot more work on that. We're constantly swapping out new things. When every single week we are testing new variations of headlines, do variations of images, do variations of presale pages for every single client we have. So it's a constant evolutionary process.

Speaker 5 (19:53):

Yeah. That makes complete sense. So you all kind of being along the Legion realm when it comes to, you know, ranking up against other platforms, how do you see on performance side you'll have a kind of benchmark CPLs conversion rates or is it just completely different, you know, versus what you see on other channels?

Joe (20:08):

Yeah. So we tend to see a quality be much higher on native for the actual end product. You know, it's like if you were to drive, let's say a thousand leads for, you know, like insurance from Facebook verses for native native is almost always a higher quality lead. So we can tend to get better payouts and price bumps and all that. You know, so typical conversion rates range anywhere between, you know, one to 5%, depending on the offer, obviously how invasive it is, whether they want just a short form versus a long form with a lot of questions behind it. Um, but we see CPAs, you know, anywhere between a couple of bucks for an email submit up to maybe 30 or 40 for, you know, full form stuff

Speaker 5 (20:48):

And exciting. So a whole new world out there, and no one really thinks about, and I feel like native is one of the more of those quieter, quieter realms. You don't see much of that. We, at least in my case,

Joe (20:57):

It's getting bigger though. You know, and quite honestly, three years ago, you know, the bids were way lower than they are now where I'm, where people are kind of, you know, trying to diversify their spend or they're sick of losing Facebook accounts or they're sick of being on the policies over there. So they're finding new ways to spend their money. So the good news is, has helped my company to explode in terms of like the amount of buying we take on. But the bad news is it checks that bids up where we might have.

Speaker 5 (21:21):

And that makes complete sense. We'll Snapchat, this has been exciting, man. You know, anything cool on the horizon you'd like to share with the audience and it kind of what's the best way for people to kind of get in touch with y'all.

Joe (21:31):

Yeah. I mean, you can reach out a couple of different ways, you know, um, one courses through our site, our way marketplace.com. Um, we also have a native group that I manage called native advertising gurus, which is just a group where it's a free group to join on Facebook. We just kind of share ideas, people ask questions and kind of, you know, pass it around. So, um, landscape wise, you know, I think there's a lot of cool things happening, you know, I think with the bull and Outbrain, continuing to kind of carve off their market share, you know, lots of changes through the happening there. I don't know if you happen to catch the article, but it came out yesterday that Outbrain's going public. So what does that do for the marketplace and next, you know, 12 to 24 months who knows?

Speaker 5 (22:10):

Oh, that's nuts. Well, I'll snap Joseph, an absolute pleasure. Y'all heard a first native advertising gurus. Take that group out. Lots of goodies in there. Well, Joe man, thanks for jumping on. Would love having you.

Joe (22:22):

Yeah, it's a real pleasure guys. Thanks. And if I can ever help you guys out, let me know.

Zach (22:29):

Thanks so much for listening to another episode of the rich add more ed podcast. If you're like me and listen to podcasts on the go, go ahead and subscribe on apple podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and rich ed [inaudible] dot com slash podcast. And if you absolutely love the show, go ahead and leave a review and a comment share with a friend. If you do take a copy screenshot of it, email me zach@funneldash.com. Show me you left a review and I'll give you a free copy of the rich ad or add book to learn more about the book, go to rich ed a.com to leave a review that a rich head or at.com/review. Thanks again.

‍