Targeting Your Customers Online via Profiling Technology
Eric Cook of WSI Digital covers the full digital targeting lifecycle: from situation analysis and audience building using data from Nielsen and Oracle, to paid search, display, social, and video ads. He explains targeting mechanisms like geographic, demographic, and look-alike audiences, plus tracking tools like cookies and call-tracking, while warning about privacy compliance.
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Greetings everybody, welcome to the Wednesday, July 17th, 2019 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook with WSI Digital. I'm going to throw a new tagline at you today. I usually use the tagline where we work with businesses and organizations and helping them better understand the internet as a strategic business tool. That's a bit of a mouthful, and during some strategic planning initiatives that I was involved with up in Toronto last week with my fellow WSI colleagues, we came up with a new tagline. I want to run it by you here on Free Webinar Wednesdays and see what you think. We're here at WSI, we help you connect with your customers online. Shorter, a little bit more succinct, talking about drawing connections with your customers using online technology. Whether that's a website, whether that's social media, whether that's digital advertising, email, you name it, but really focused on bringing folks together. So we help you connect with your customers online. Let me know what you think in the chat. I'll be curious to get your thoughts and feedback. Anyway, with, with that out of the way, I'm very excited to join you today live 2 weeks in a row, and shocker, I might even make it 3 weeks. 3 weeks in a row next week. But I'm really excited to share today's discussion. As always, those of you that are joining live, if you've got thoughts, comments, or questions, please by all means feel free to use the chat functionality for GoToWebinar. Let me know. Would love to hear back from you as to what you think about our new tagline. If you've got questions regarding anything that we're going to talk about today, or you just want to say hello. And then we're recording today's session and all sessions, and I will tell you, we are diligently working on getting all of our past episodes up to freewebinarwednesdays.com and excited about putting a breath of fresh air. Things have just been so freaking crazy around here, we just haven't had time, but we've got a little bit better process and moving that forward. So it's pretty Pretty cool. Let's see, connect and engage with your customers online. Ooh, there we go. I like that too. Help you connect and engage with your customers online. I might even, might throw that in my little whiteboard there. I admittedly had to write it on my whiteboard in my office because it doesn't roll off my tongue as easily as my other tagline that I've been using for years and years. But yeah, I appreciate that feedback. Thank you very much. What I wanna talk about today is a conversation we've been having with a couple of clients and prospects. And sometimes I refer to this as the creepy factor because we all probably know it in the back of our minds. Certainly if you participated in the last couple of days worth of Amazon's Prime Day, which now is Prime Days, they decided they needed not just one day for Amazon's little shopping holiday, but they extended it to 2 days. Amazon certainly leverages this type of technology to profile and target you as a customer. And I'm pretty sure I can use the word customer for almost everybody because very few people are prospects to Amazon because you probably are either a Prime member, you've bought something, you use their video service, you're downloading books on Kindle, you use Audible for audio. We probably all have a portion of our paycheck that goes to Jeff Bezos and the Amazon ecosystem, which is totally fine with me because they provide me a lot of value and I get a lot of cool stuff from them. So no problem on my end. But what I want to talk about today is just to kind of pull back the curtain a little bit to share with you some of the targeting options that you have as a business. And we all know I do a lot of work in the banking space, but this really works for any business that wants to target their customers to get a message in front of them. Oftentimes when we talk to customers and folks, they, they come in and they talk about search engine marketing, or SEM if you will. And in my opinion, SEM is really more about generating visibility online through search, and that can be done 2 different ways. That can be done through Organic visibility, which we're really not going to talk about today, but that's leveraging tools and tactics such as search engine optimization, or SEO as it's referred to, where you're producing content that's worthy of Google's attention. You're doing it on a regular basis. Your pages are structured correctly. You're using the appropriate H1s and H2s and title tags and descriptions. You've got a linking strategy. So there's a whole lot of different things that you do from an organic visibility perspective. So when somebody goes online and they're doing a search, whether it's for mortgage loans or accountants or business consultants, that Google increases the likelihood that people are going to find you without having to pay for it. That's a long process. We liken that to much more of a marathon training where what we're going to talk about today with some advertising and spending some budget can be much more of a sprint where you can pay money, you can strategically develop your ads and your audience, and you can get right in front of them very, very quickly. Without having to convince the Google algorithm that, hey, we're worthy of being shown on page 1 and list us as one of the top 10 results that shows in a search engine results page. So what we're really talking about is the other part of SEM, or search engine marketing, which is really focused on advertising, where you're buying advertisements. And there's a lot of different places that you can buy advertisements. There's a lot of different forms of advertisements today. And we'll talk about those just so that if you are thinking about generating more exposure, if you're a traditional business and you've been spending money on newspapers and billboards and radio and you want to make the shift, but you're not exactly sure how to make that shift or what questions to ask, the nice part about what I hope to share with you today is it's going to maybe reveal some things that you might not know. It's going to show you that you've got the ability to have much better tracking capability. You know, one of the old adages that a lot of people have paraphrased is, half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted, I just don't know which half. John Wanamaker, one of the fathers of modern merchandising many, many moons ago, kind of coined that statement. And it's one that rings true, especially for me back in the day when I was in banking and was responsible for our marketing and advertising. We would often have the conversations You know, does an advertisement in this magazine really work? I'm not really sure, but I don't really want to not do it. And so we figured if half of the money that we were spending had an impact, that was okay with us. And but we just weren't to the point where we were comfortable in knowing what half that was. So we always spent all of it, and the thought was half of it's working for us, so that's okay. In the digital world, because we've got tracking and conversion metrics and, you know, other sorts of signals that can be collected through that process, we can be much more strategic and much more accurate in our prediction and our ability to say, this is working, let's do more of it, this isn't working, let's fix it, or this isn't going to work at all, let's stop this entirely and try something different. So with that as the preamble, Let's go ahead and we'll get rolling. So I'm going to make sure that my screen is active here. There we go. So the first thing that you should expect from anybody that's going to do work for you, or maybe you do this on your own before you even get started, is produce some sort of a situation analysis, a business overview and expected outcomes, whatever you want to call it, and really spell out what the desire is for the campaign, what you want to accomplish, who do you want to see, What's the expected goal? How do you measure success? So you put together a couple of sentences that really kind of spells out, you know, talking with a CPA recently, they're starting to get into other services such as business consulting and other elements. So, you know, the goal of that campaign could be expand the awareness and visibility of our accounting firm beyond traditional CPA and financial-related services to ensure that all of our customers in the communities that we're in know about all the other things that we're now able to do. And so I'm gonna try really hard to speak generically because I of course don't want to violate privacy and divulge any secrets from folks that we've been talking to, but something along those lines that kind of sets the stage of what you want to accomplish. Do that internally first to make sure that everybody within your organization is on the same page. But then when you— if you decide to work with an agency, the agency is going to appreciate that tremendously because it'll show them that you put some thought in. They likely will have some additional questions for you to further refine things. Oftentimes, even as business owners, there is a certain element of we don't know what we don't know. In the 4 stages of acceptance, that's basically unconscious incompetence. And so you may think that you've got everything documented, but then you'll bring in an expert similar to what you find here at WSI, of course. But you'll bring in some sort of an expert that specializes in digital ads and building online awareness, and then they'll provide an overview and ask some additional questions just to get some things clarified. But a few of the things that you're going to want to make sure you talk about is defining your geographic coverage area. So if you're a small mom-and-pop shop and you only want to cover a certain number of counties, if you want to cover an entire state, or maybe this is something that's large enough where you feel it could have a regional or even a national at some point down the road, you don't have to jump out of the gate right away and decide you're going to go countrywide. But who is it that you really wanna focus on? And is there the ability to refine that market area? Because within all the advertising strategies and the targeting capabilities, you have a lot of flexibility in picking those market areas. One of the things that I would throw out there for any of my banker friends that are listening, particularly in the area of mortgage and home loans, and if you have any other similar restrictions in your industry, you're gonna wanna make sure that you're very careful about this. But in the banking world, there are requirements that are placed upon banks as it relates to what's referred to as fair lending and ensuring that advertisements and promotions are reaching a good cross-section, not just all the quote-unquote wealthy people that live north of the tracks. Banks have to, by law, provide advertising and awareness for mortgage-related products in all different areas. And so you want to be really careful that you don't unintentionally select select what might seem on the onset as a very lucrative demographic target because of their geographic location and exclude others that could very quickly get you in trouble. Again, if you've got an industry that you're a part of that also has some requirements like that, you just want to make sure that compliance or your lawyer, attorney, whoever helps keep you from being in trouble looks at where you're planning on doing that advertising, because you can break that down even to the zip code level in many instances if you want. Next, think about the demographic profile, and we'll show you some examples as we get into some of these slides later on. But the demographic profile of what the ideal customer looks like— so how old are they? What's their education level? What products and services do they use now that complement yours? Where do you find them? Are they active on social media? If so, are they the younger millennials that are spending time on sites like Instagram and Snapchat, or Or is it business professionals that are spending time cultivating relationships on LinkedIn? You're going to want to make sure you define who that demographic is and what your perfect customer looks like. If you're not sure, take a look inside of your own organization and say, you know, who are our top 15 or top 20 or top 50 customers and profile them. There's a process that's referred to in the industry as building a persona where you can actually identify common characteristics and say, you know, it looks like all of our really good customers, married with 2 kids, they've got college education, one person works, the other one stays at home, whatever the case might be, coming up with some sort of a demographic layout of what that looks like. Again, when your ad partner gets ready to do campaigns for you, that demographic analysis on your part is gonna help the company or the partner pick what type of network to go after. Some positioning statements as to how do you want your business to be perceived. Do you want to be educational? Do you want to be informational? Do you want to be cutting-edge and technology-driven? You know, so, so what do you want to be known as or perceived? And then when somebody comes back to you, what sorts of technologies in place? How are you going to be able to position yourself to take advantage of that opportunity? If you don't have any way of selling a product or a service online because you don't have an e-commerce system with a shopping cart and a checkout, but yet you're advertising for products and services that people would likely want to buy online, you're going to need to figure out how to close that gap and maybe bring in some technology, or it's going to be difficult to take those people that you've gained their attention and they're interested in what you're doing to being able to actually take advantage of that, give you money, and buy your product or your service. So look at that entire process of how are you positioned to be able to produce your message, influence the right people, and then quote-unquote seal the deal and make sure they'll do business with you. And then look at other items that are also out there. So a landing page, those sorts of things would also be kind of important. A lot of times when we put together a proposal for a client, and this could be the same or maybe different depending on who you pick, we'll sometimes put together 3 options and we'll give them kind of a good, better, best strategy. Normally you're gonna find that you'll have some sort of a setup fee and you may have some sort of a management fee, which may very well be a percentage of the ad budget that you're spending. You know, you could include specific ad creatives, how long it's gonna take for things to get updated, just a lot of different things that you just want to figure out. And then you may see that your advertising options are broken down based off of visibility. So one of the things that we're starting to do now is we're creating kind of 3 stages where we implement search and display, which is basically banner ads and using retargeting or remarketing in the display networks. Search is more of your pay-per-click where I go online and I specifically type it into Google. The next tier up, we include some social advertising, which could be Facebook, Facebook and Instagram, maybe some LinkedIn. And then the last item, which is now starting to become very popular, and you should be giving this consideration in your organization as well, is looking at how do you incorporate video to tell your message as an organization. Video is very powerful in grabbing people's attention. It's very powerful in building a relationship and making sure people can see you, hear you, or conveying a message. And so we're starting to actually incorporate things You can see there YouTube pre-roll. I'll explain what that means here right, right in just a second. And connected TV, 2 options. So YouTube pre-roll. YouTube, in case you're not aware, is owned by Google. Google pretty much owns search. Google also owns a little platform called Google Analytics, which is installed on just about every website on the planet. So Google knows a lot about you, and this is why sometimes I refer to this as the creepy presentation, because at the end of it I've had folks that have joked and said, well, I'm, I'm going to turn my phone off and I'm going to, you know, not check my email anymore and I'm not going to visit any more websites. We certainly don't want that to happen, but because Google owns a lot of that data about you, if you happen to go out to YouTube like a lot of people do and decide you want to consume some video content, it might be funny cat videos, you might be looking up a recipe, you might want to know You know, how do I change the brakes on my 2001 Volvo station wagon? That's a little homage to our Volvo we sold this past evening yesterday. Had that car for for a long time, 2001, 213,000 miles, and and it's gone, and I'm very sad about that, but I'm getting over it. Anyway, I digress. But if you go online to watch a video. YouTube, thanks to its integration within Google and Google's integration in Google Analytics, is going to know— and let's go, oh, crazy, use a banking example— if you are somebody that's been actively visiting sites like LendingTree and, you know, checking mortgage rates and doing Google searches about homes, and Google is going to communicate to YouTube and say, hey, this, this individual, this computer, this browser might be somebody that would be interested in mortgage loans. And if you happen to be a financial institution that's interested in getting your advertisement about your online lending capability or your first-time homeowner program in front of people, you can restrict your geography and you can present a quick little, you know, 5 or 10-second pre-roll video before their funny cat video even starts that gives them the ability to see what it is that you have to offer And they may have that déjà vu effect, like, and I think most people know why they're getting those now, but years ago it was like, wow, how do they know I was looking at houses? How do they know I'm interested in getting a mortgage? All that information basically rolls in. Connected TV is very similar in the sense that now instead of just going to YouTube to watch video content, there's a lot of people that are, quote, cutting the cord. They're leaving traditional cable satellite TV services and they're using Roku devices and Fire TVs and they're using platforms like Sling and Hulu. Those all have ad-supported capabilities within them as well that can get very granular based off of your IP address and your geographic location, and you can put advertisements into those platforms. I remember back in the day when I was at the bank and I was doing advertising, we used to work with our local cable company that would give us the ability to put our message in front of cable subscribers much less expensively than going to the big networks. The downside to that was if I'm in Marshall, Michigan, and the cable network expanded all the way up to Lansing, Michigan, I really didn't want people in Lansing to see my advertisement because it was a waste of dollars and we wouldn't do business with those folks anyway because it just didn't make sense. Yet I had to show my ad across their entire network, which meant there was a lot of advertisements that we sent into the cable platform that weren't being seen by relevant customers. We have much greater control over those regions now with the advent of digital to be able to push that information out and make sure that we're very targeted with who sees that information. So background there, hopefully that was helpful. Again, if what I'm saying sparks a question or, or a comment or a thought, or you need some clarification, feel free to throw it into the chat and let me know. But when we talk about the advertising activities and what would constitute the program that you would use, I've broken down 3 categories here basically. So when we think about the channels that we're going into, you've got the display networks and I've got TTD, which stands for the Trading Desk, which is a very large aggregated— I mentioned programmatic earlier. But it's a programmatic display platform that allows for people to purchase excess capacity advertisements, almost like a Trivago and Hotels.com does for hotel and lodging. A display network that leverages programmatic strategies will go into a lot of the destination sites and it'll buy up the excess inventory that's not being directly purchased by them and allow for individuals to advertise advertise on a much lower cost but still really good frequency. And it allows for your message to be distributed across multiple channels. And then based off of signals that come back to you, you're able to determine, or the ad company is able to determine, exactly what platforms seem to be getting better clicks and conversions and engagement and what platforms may be not so good. We've talked about Facebook and Instagram as well as other social channels, obviously Google Search. As well as Yahoo Search, maybe even some Bing Search as well. Interestingly, even though Bing, which is Google's search engine, doesn't get nearly the amount of activity that Google does, there is a certain profile associated with individuals that go to Bing that tends to be a little bit more professional, a little higher income, a little bit more senior within the organization because These are individuals that may have a computer. Their default browser is what? Internet Explorer or Edge, and the default search engine within that happens to be Bing. So they don't really force themselves to download Chrome and go to Google. They're just kind of using the computer. They may be not actively using computers, but when they do go online, Bing just happens to be the path of least resistance. And so that, depending on who you're going after, might actually be a pretty attractive demographic for you. We've talked about YouTube and connected TV already, so I'm not going to go into those. Some other services that are also part of that— so we've talked about the platforms where it can go, but what do we put on those platforms? The very first item there is another one of the creepy elements that you want to understand very carefully, but it's called a lookalike audience. So what I mean by that is if you take Facebook, for example, you have an email address that you use to log into Facebook. And if you're a business and you've collected email addresses from your customers, or you're communicating to them through a newsletter, or maybe in a banking world you've got them logging into online banking, so you've captured their email address that way, what you can do is go back into your own customer system and say, what are the customers that we want To attract more customers that look like these customers, and do we have email addresses for them? So again, using banking, if we decide that we want to go after more mortgage business, then we would go into our system and we would say, "Well, who is it that's currently doing business with us now that has a mortgage?" If there's a particular balance that you're looking for, you want to make sure that they've never gone past due because you don't want people that can't pay their bills on time. If you're looking for a particular home value, any of those variables, you could generate a list and maybe that kicks out a really good list of 500 individuals. You can grab those email addresses. You don't have to include first name, last name, no account number info, but you can grab those emails. And that could be if you're a heating and cooling company, the people that have just bought furnaces from you. If you're a CPA firm, so it doesn't really matter what industry you're in. If you can get email addresses that are part of or come from desired customers, you take that file of emails and you can upload those into these various platforms such as Facebook and the display networks and say, find me more people that look like this. And so using the Facebook analogy, what it would do is it would grab my email address. It would look for, well, what other characteristics does Eric have in Facebook that I know about Eric? It knows that I do digital marketing. It knows that I've got a college degree and my master's. It knows maybe even be able to approximate my income level, my marital status. It knows that I like dogs and cycling. So it grabs all that information that it knows about me, and then you can say, go find more people That have a master's, that like to bike, that enjoy golden retrievers, that like to travel, that have, you know, all the different variables. And now you've got an audience of people that have not done business with you, or if they have, you don't have their email address, that is an audience that looks very much like the desirable customer segment that you're already taking care of. So the relevancy, the likelihood of interest, your ability to serve them well, are all going to be amplified significantly because you're going after people that look like people you're already taking really good care of. Hopefully that makes sense. If you are concerned about compliance and privacy, this certainly is something that you're going to want to make sure to use very carefully. But again, it's just the email, and then you're really not marketing to those people. You're just using those email addresses to help you build an audience that looks very similar to them. And then expand your net to try to find customers that look like customers you're already taking care of. Image and text ads, pretty self-explanatory, as well as video. Um, so I don't know as if really a whole lot of that. We talked about the ability to track, you know, so if we're seeing that we're getting a lot of visits, is it coming from our Facebook video? Is it coming from an Instagram story? Are we seeing things coming from paid search? So you want to make sure that wherever you're going to be doing your ads and however you're going to be driving them back. You've got that tracking capability so you understand what's going on, and then you need to ask for and make sure that you get an easy-to-understand reporting system. We provide our clients with access to a platform that gives daily updates, as well as we migrate content over into a system called Google Data Studio, which gives us the ability to graphically represent that data in charts and histograms and bar graphs and all sorts of other things so you can see trends over time and other sorts of indicators as to performance. And then lastly, these are all things that need to be in place, but what are your key performance indicators? Are you looking to just grow awareness and get visibility? Do you want to get clicks? Are you looking for sales? Do you want to generate leads for conversations with your sales team? All of that really is going to be an important thing And that's going to have an impact on your budget, how much you're going to need to spend, what, uh, what type of audience you're going to go after. Um, so those are important. And then of course, not just web form submissions and, and clicks on buttons to go into applications, but there's also capabilities to swap out dynamic phone numbers. So let's say somebody clicks on your ad, they visit your website, and then they're interested in scheduling an appointment. Maybe you're a landscaper and somebody schedules, they, they give you a phone call, they send you a text message. And we want to make sure that that conversation can still be tracked back to your advertising. And so the call attribution model gives you the ability to then say this phone call was made because somebody saw our ad, because the only way somebody would know of this number is if they visited our landing page that was part of our advertising campaign. So those are all elements to help you in that tracking process to further go back and knock down that 50% of the advertising that I spend, uh, you know, 100, whatever the, whatever the half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted. I just don't know which half. That's what I meant to say. That way, when you know all that data, you can get that down to maybe, you know, 20% or even 10% you feel is being wasted, but your effectiveness for your budget is much, much better. So let's walk through some example audience profiles. We're talking with a financial institution now that's looking at savers. So there's a lot of different places where we can go in and we can acquire lists. So Nielsen, for example, is probably one of the names on this list that you're familiar with if you've not really been in here before. Oracle is another one. But, you know, Nielsen Ratings, they do the television shows and who's popular and who's watching what. All of these platforms are gathering data that exists on the internet through activity and cookies and and just other sorts of tracking mechanisms that advertising companies can acquire and then use as part of your promotional material. So you can kind of get an idea of some of the, the options that are available as it relates to, for example, this is certificates of deposit and money markets, but then you could also go into, well, maybe personal finance or financial planning or wealth management. Play around with a bunch of different demographics that may actually result, and then determine if it's working or it's not. The Nielsen example there, you know, savvy savers, maybe individuals that are interested in things like robo investing and technology because they consider themselves pretty good. They like to do their own stock trading. Maybe for a bank that's doing something more traditional, that's maybe not a really good demographic to go at. Maybe you go up a level and you look at the axiom traditional savers. Those might be people that are more interested in a nice stable FDIC insured savings account, checking account, certificate of deposit, money market. But you won't really know that until you get in and actually do some advertising and do some testing to determine if that even works or not. So a lot of different ways that you can get access to pre-populated information, even if you don't go through that lookalike audience process. To build your own market. So we'll just kind of go through a few of these other ones. There's also ways beyond that lookalike audience. Certainly you can upload that contact list through emails. You can also leverage cookies on your website. So individuals that browse your website— this is kind of akin to that YouTube example that I gave you earlier— if a number of people are visiting your specific product page on your website, those browsers can be cookied, and then the network can go back and look at those browsers, who owns those browsers, and what other variables surround that browser individual, and then find other people that look like it. There's even the ability to target specific apps on your mobile device. So if you are selling services for, you know, car detailing, for example, You could actually target through mobile devices anybody that's got like AutoTrader or Kelley Blue Book or any of the other auto buying apps, because that may be an indication of those individuals using their phones also being interested in autos and cars. And so that could give you some creative targeting opportunities there right through the mobile device. This is the point in the previous meeting where people basically put their phones down and got really weirded out. So I just want to be really careful that, you know, we know that this is going on, but, you know, it's just the reality in which we live whether we like it or not. There's really no way around that. The last area that I want to talk about, and then we'll wrap for the day, is if you've not seen it before, this allows you to go into Facebook and you can do some profiling and some segmentation. I've actually blurred out the geographic areas to protect you know, who we've been speaking with. But you can get an idea of when you pick specific areas, you can get breakdowns of how they compare to others. You can see the market that we've selected is overwhelmingly in the 45 to 54 range, much greater than the typical Facebook audience, which is in gray, primarily 95% women. So you can kind of get an idea of of how that all breaks down. So now you can get a better perspective of what that individual looks like on Facebook. It'll give you some ideas of what other pages they've liked. So if it's somebody that, you know, follows other pages, this gives you some profiling information about where they're spending time. There could be some co-marketing or potential branding opportunities there. It also provides you with a list of the cities in which those individuals live compared to where those people typically live. As it relates to just Facebook in general. So if you're picking more of a rural area, you can see the blue line much, much more prominent than what Facebook in general is. So you're comparing it to the Facebook population. So this would be much more of a smaller campaign going after rural areas, whereas most people from Facebook in the United States are populated in the larger, bigger metropolitan areas. So these are all metrics that you should be able to have access to, that you should have dialogue and discussion about. To determine if what the ad agency is suggesting really resonates with you. If they're coming in and saying, well, the population is, you know, 55 and better and this and this and this, and you're thinking that it's a much younger population, then you really want to have some dialogue before you start spending your monthly budget on advertising because you could very well be wasting your money and using that spend very ineffectively. So just continuing, a handful of other little screenshots there that really just kind of walk through all of the different options that just give you the ability of seeing where people are at, what they look like. The last thing that we typically will provide as part of our— we normally like to run programs 6 months. We could do it as short as 3, but we provide a performance promise as part of what we do, and any vendor that you select should be willing to do this as well. Well, there's There's certainly no guarantees. I mean, you can't say, well, we know exactly how much money you're going to generate, or we can guarantee we're going to get you on the first page of Google, because there's a lot of variables beyond our control that we just simply don't have the ability to influence, regardless of how much money you would like to spend. But there needs to be an understanding between both parties of how you're going to measure performance and what sort of expectations there are. And normally from an ad agency perspective, what our typical focus is, one, to make sure that your message is seen, 2, to make sure that the message is on target with the right audience so that they're interested in clicking or engaging or visiting or learning more. And once that information is on your website, they visited, some of that will be dependent on if we're doing lead generation and we're funneling leads to your sales team, If your sales team's not picking up the phone or responding to emails or making the calls, and you're not generating any sales, is it your digital agency's fault, or does it fall back on the actual salespeople? And that's not a question that you can answer 100% black and white, because you may find that your sales team is making those phone calls and they come back and say, "You know, I made 30 calls today, and every single one of the phone calls was somebody that totally wasn't interested in our service," or They couldn't afford it. That goes back into the agency's lap as you're doing a good job driving traffic, but you've picked the wrong demographic. You've— you need to adjust where you're spending your ads. You know, we're fishing and we're bringing fish into the boat, but they're not very tasty fish. So we need to figure out, is it the lure? Is it the place in the lake that we're sitting? What needs to change? But if they're not making phone calls and the leads are coming in, then that may fall more on the business. And without getting into finger-pointing or accusation or blaming, you need to have a partner that is interested in having those conversations to ensure that they have a clear understanding of what they can produce and how they can deliver those opportunities to you as the business owner, and then what you need to do to then take that to the next level and turn it into income. So you're going to see some expectations for click-through rates, just to get people to visit, 2% from a paid search perspective, because those are actively looking for products and services, much, much lower on display because you're kind of— nobody's going into Facebook to hire a new landscaper. But if you do your targeting right, you can maybe get in front of people that may be interested, but you're not going to nearly get the number of clicks as you would if it was somebody that was typing in landscape Lawn mowing, whatever sorts of things are there. So I, I'm gonna go to the last item here. I'm gonna see questions. I'm gonna check my little list and define the term cookies. Those are either chocolate chip, Oreo Double Stuf. I like the vanilla kind myself. No, in all seriousness, cookies— that's a really good question, and I use terminology oftentimes assuming that everybody knows what I'm talking about. Besides being my nickname in elementary school, cookies are little programs and snippets of code that exist on websites that get loaded into your browser that then tell your browser, like Chrome or Internet Explorer or Firefox, where you've been, what you've done, what you've searched, what pages you've looked at. And as you visit other websites on the internet, those cookies communicate information and can say, welcome back, Eric, or it can personalize info, or much like when you browse around the internet and you maybe have been on Amazon looking at drones and you visit another website and all of a sudden Amazon is advertising drones to you. That's as a result of a tracking cookie that's being placed in your browser that says, hey, Eric Cook is interested in buying a drone. So when he visits websites, if we've got a partnership with Amazon, we're gonna let Amazon show their drone advertisement to increase the likelihood that Eric's gonna pull the trigger and buy that drone. So hopefully that makes sense. There was also a question as it relates to CPM. In the world of advertising, you have a cost per click or a CPC, which is what happens in paid search. So when I go in, I do a Google search for landscaping services and I see the ad and I click on it, That's going to charge me $2.95. That's a cost per click. And the more clicks I generate, the more money I spend. CPM stands for cost per 1,000 impressions, M being the Roman numeral for 1,000. And so in a display campaign, when you're doing banner ads on the internet in general, you're basically buying the number of impressions regardless of whether or not anybody clicks on those ads, like in a paid search. You're going to be generating impressions and your cost per 1,000 impressions is going to largely drive. So if you want to reach 100,000 people, your cost per 1,000 impressions might be $3. So then you're going to do the numbers and that's going to be how much it's going to cost you. If you want to increase that to 500,000, you're just going to take that and multiply it times 5, because now instead of 100,000 impressions, you want 500,000 impressions. And it's really just about generating visibility. And that's one of the nice parts about the, the display network is if you go directly to like a newspaper or a website, for example, they might charge you a $15 CPM, $15 per 1,000 impressions. If you can pick it up through a programmatic display network, such as the trading desk, they might be able to buy that inventory for $6 CPM. It's just like, do I go directly to Hilton.com and book through them at a $375 rack rate for the room, or do I go to Hotels.com and maybe pick it up for $250 because Hotels.com has been sold a block of 5 additional rooms or 10 additional rooms that didn't get sold? And the hotel is willing to fill those rooms at $250 because it knows it can't sell it at $375. So CPM, cost per 1,000 impressions, those are both numbers that you should know what they are and how they compare to industry. And, you know, that's a number that over time you should see go down as your campaign becomes more efficient. And those are also numbers that go back into your return on investment calculation to determine we've spent $3,000 in advertising, we've generated $12,000 in revenue, how can we make that better? Looking at those numbers, certainly a way to do that. We'll give it just another 30 seconds or so to see if there's any other questions. If not, I certainly appreciate everybody's questions. So that was, that was great. I love getting feedback and interactivity. That's when I'm traveling and I don't have the opportunity to do a live show, which means there isn't a show. I miss that back and forth. So this has been really great. Appreciate everybody's interaction. Looks like we are good in the queue, so I am gonna say adieu. I didn't even mean for that to rhyme, but did, and it sounded kind of cool. So I'm gonna close today's session. Enjoy the rest of your week. Thanks for joining me here on Free Webinar Wednesdays. Very shortly, we will have some new posts and some archives of past shows out on freewebinarwednesdays.com. So hop out there, check it out, and until next week, make it a great week, and we'll look forward to seeing everybody online. We'll talk to you later. Bye-bye.
