John Belcher — YouTube Ad Strategies From An Ex-Google Employee

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast with your boys, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear. Hey, what's up, everyone? Welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. My name is Matt Wolf. I'm here with my business partner, Joe Fear. We are the co founders of evergreenprofits.com we have a new traffic course that's out. It's really, really good. You should check it out.

It's very good. You're gonna love it.

But speaking of traffic, we have an absolute traffic ninja who we're gonna talk about YouTube ads, which is a world that Joe and I have actually not. Dove. Dived. Dove in.

Dove, yeah.

Dove in into yet I believe it. We have not really experimented with YouTube, guys. I mean, we'll talk about it on the show a little bit, but we've experimented with it unprofitably. And we basically got John to tell us what we were doing wrong.

John Belcher's the man when it comes to YouTube, paid ads. All that stuff he works right there alongside Justin with at AdSkills. And these guys are amazing. I mean, absolutely amazing. They're amazing team. But what John, he's an ex Googler. Or are you a Googler for life? I don't know how the.

It's not the Marines.

It's not like that. Okay. But he's. He's actually literally taking stuff from his time there and applying it in his own unique way to what he's teaching and also serving to his clients. And he shares he went down some deep veins here and how you can start using YouTube ads and Google Ads actually in the way explained. But if you just want to stick with YouTube, cool. He literally gives you the step by step process to do so. There's even some cool templates, a little worksheet that he gave us so you can definitely access that on the show. Notes@evergreenprofits.com Just check up or look up John, John Belcher or just click on his thingamajigger.

You're gonna get that. But also cool little cheat sheet. You know, we do that for every episode. So, you know, if you listen to this, it's going to be probably pretty deep during certain parts, but it's very actionable. So you're going to check out that cheat sheet and you're going to literally have like an instruction manual to follow along.

Yeah, I mean, it was just. It's really fascinating to hear from somebody that worked at Google in the. In the department, you know, in the ads department, actually giving advice based on experience from working at Google. And that's exactly what we get from John. He's going to tell us, you know, what sort of things Google doesn't want to see, what sort of things Google does want to see, what he learned from working at Google. And then we're going to translate it all into how do we run YouTube ads profitably? And that's the arc of this show. And you're going to learn so much. And we had so much fun talking to John, and let's just go ahead and let them hear for themselves instead of. Let's stop talking about how good the episode is and let them listen to how good the episode is.

Why don't we, huh?

Enjoy.

Hey, John, thanks for coming on the show today.

Hey, guys. Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here.

For sure, dude. Yeah, we. Let's see. We've followed, you know, your. Your boy Justin, Brooke for a long time. You guys are working together.

And I think we. Yeah, we. Well, we went through one of your courses.

Oh, I mean, I've heard John's voice a lot because I've gone through, I think, the YouTube course, the Google Ads course, the tracking course. That's.

That's right.

So quite a few courses that you were teaching.

Yeah. There's a lot of nerd in my brain, so I'm excited I get to share some of it with you. We love what we do. Justin and Shawna were kind enough to bring me on board of business partners at AdSkills, and we've been able to grow it helped over 8,000 students, so we're really excited about it and I'm glad to hear that it's benefiting you guys being one of the beneficiaries.

Yeah. And hopefully we'll spread the knowledge more to these folks listening and. Yeah.

What?

We met at a party in San Diego. Just like the wildest, like, the craziest house I've ever seen.

Well, we were all calling it the Compound.

It was definitely the Compound. It was like, kind of in the shady part of town up on the hill. Our Uber driver actually wouldn't even let us out of the car and play till we could get in, so it's always exciting. Kurt Malley always picks the best spots legitimately.

We lived in San Diego our entire life. We still do. And that was one part of town. I think I saw the address and I was like, no, this is not right.

Literally, we got lost. We got lost on the way there and went down like a dirt road.

I'm like. So me and Joe and a mutual friend, Dan Ryan. Dan Ryan loves it when we give him shout outs on the podcast because he's our biggest fan lurker. But. So me, Joe and Dan Ryan, we were all headed over to this party for Kurt Molly, and the whole time we're like, kurt's playing a prank on us. Kurt is totally screwing with us. Like, this address can't be right.

He wants us killed.

So we honestly, the entire drive down there, when we were in our Uber, we thought that this was just a giant prank to get us to go to the bad part of town.

It was definitely one of those things you roll up. And I've never been in a place before. You know, I grew up in the middle of nowhere, Wyoming, so there are no bad parts of town. And so it was really funny, you know, being in big cities and knowing kind of the areas not to go. The guy's just like, you need to make sure. He's like, call and make sure that gate's open, because I'm not letting you out without seeing that you have a clear shot inside. So anyways, it was a. It was an exciting night, and I'm really glad I got to meet you guys in person for sure.

It was totally worth it, man. Well, yeah, so give us a little bit of your background. It's very interesting. I think you're the first Googler who has been on our show, at least that I know of. But take us back a little bit.

Happy to do that. So my background.

Started. I went to school at University of Notre Dame, studying pre medicine. And so I didn't intend to get into this industry. I really was looking at going the orthopedic or neurosurgeon route. Right. As I was getting done with school, though, I realized I didn't want to be in school anymore. So I really started getting into sales. I really enjoyed sales. So I sold medical equipment at Stryker for three years, working on spinal fractures and facial trauma, which was a really cool thing to get exposure to. And it really helped me understand how to communicate your value very clearly. And so that's kind of why I really appreciate the teacher side is, I think, always just having to teach hospital staff and doctors how to use a particular product, things like that, it really gave me a lot of enjoyment of that. But I decided I really want to get in the tech realm because tech was where everything was growing. And so got the opportunity to get a sales role at Google on the AdWords team and came in there, and my role was really to help new advertisers, people spending less than $150 a day, really start to understand and grasp the power of AdWords. And so, so cool to move into this and see what was possible. And so I was there and, you know, I really loved what I was doing, but I realized very quickly that I wasn't built for the big corporation. It's just something I didn't really enjoy with the structure and the limited amount of time and ability to help customers. And so I decided to take exactly what I was doing with AdWords, and I was like, I can go do this on my own and spend more time helping people understand. Kind of our motto at AdSkills is we actually will help you turn paid traffic into paying traffic. And that's something that it's super easy just to swipe your credit card. Whether it be Google or Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or Snapchat or Pinterest, any of these platforms, buying ads is very simple. Getting clicks to your site is not hard, but turning them into cash is a lot more difficult. And so that's why we always talk about there's seven things Justin and I have spent a combined 17 years and $20 million the last time we counted. But we spend a lot more than that now on paid traffic. And we've really boiled this down, that there's seven things that you have to avoid if you want to turn clicks into cash. And so that's the biggest thing is just taking both of our experiences, mine at Google. Justin's running ads for some really big clients like Snuggie. And I've done a lot of clients on my own and, and just boiling that down to really help people understand that it is possible to make paid traffic work. You just have to learn how to navigate around all these potholes. And that that's really kind of where we come from and how our journey has led us to this place we're at now.

Very cool. So how did. How did you and Justin get connected? So when. When you left Google, when you decided that big corporation wasn't for you, how did. How did you get to know Justin? Because I think so. We know Justin from probably, I don't know, 2009, 2010, long time. And he was teaching how to flip websites. He was teaching people to go build websites and go to Flippa and then, you know, sell them for a profit. So what he's doing now is quite different from what we remember him doing. So I'm Just curious about how, how you guys got connected in that whole story there too.

Absolutely. Yeah. So I always love the stories of Site fling. He always jokes around with his kids and makes that noise. I think it's like sight bling.

Oh, yep, I remember that in all of his videos.

Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, it's so cool seeing what Justin and I have to make sure. I mentioned Shauna, his wife. She's an absolute beast and is a huge part of this business and doesn't get mentioned enough. But between the two of those, they've just accomplished so much. And when I left Google, I didn't have any connection with Justin or Shawna. You know, what I was doing was trying to figure out how I can really go out and help people better use paid traffic. And so was just kind of moving through everything to continue to teach myself how to do things better. I knew Google AdWords really well. I had a pretty good in depth understanding of Google Analytics, was starting to understand tag manager and then looking at things like Facebook advertising. But I just wanted to become a better media buyer. And that's when I ran across Justin. Adskills was initially called DMBI Digital Media Buying Institute. I ran across one of his courses about kind of the customer research side of things and what I loved about Justin. Once I got in and saw the content, I saw how good it was. That was a huge attraction. But one thing I love that they were doing was they were using pay what you want pricing. And I just think that's such a cool thing that they've stumbled on that works really well is over delivering on value and you get to decide what the price is. That's the hardest thing right now is a lot of times businesses are forcing you up front to say, hey, it's 249 and we have to charge you that in order to make back any money. And something that I thought was really cool was Justin and Shawn said, we'll show you that we're good. You can choose to pay whatever you want for it. So I think I paid 10 bucks the first time I bought something from them and got in, understood how good it was, really started to implement it in my business and continue to get better and better, reach out to them, just express how you know how great the content was. And I said, you know, if you guys need someone to do YouTube ads, that's kind of what I've specialized in. And I used to work at Google. I think it's a pretty unique perspective. So we talked about that and went through and built that course, launched it. It actually became and is still the number one selling course at Adskills, and then decided along the way to pair up and be business partners. So I now have taken over the course library. We have 15 courses, and I've remade 12 of them. There's a couple that Justin's better at teaching, but overall, I'm pretty much the voice. As Matt said earlier, you know, kind of I'm inside of everything. And that's just, you know, we got to that point and we've been able to build this to a standpoint of having over 8,000 customers, and we call them students. And it's been really exciting to see what people can accomplish on their own with paid traffic, because it doesn't matter if we can do it if you can't do it too.

See, I love everything you guys put out is absolute gold. And Justin's been doing it a long time and as have you. And it's great that you're kind of spearheading all this stuff because we do a ton of media buying. Not actually the one thing that we're not doing a lot of is YouTube, so hopefully that'll change. But everything else is our whole motto kind of internally, and it's starting to get more in all of our messages is, hey, you don't have to go to an agency. You're actually capable to do this yourself. You don't need to be a rocket scientist when it comes to traffic. But just understand enough to be dangerous and get where you want to go. And you guys are definitely part of that crew there doing that. Well.

First of all, thank you. We appreciate that, and I really agree with you. It's really unfortunate how many agencies are out there that really just don't know what they're talking about. They know just enough to make the average business owner feel uncomfortable. We start talking about impressions and conversion pixels. It kind of makes people's eyes glaze over. And that's the one thing that we really try and push hard is say, you know what, we don't charge a ton for our courses. We just want to make sure that people are very well prepared. And what we've been amazed at is a lot of people come into our community, they get a course to teach themselves kind of how to swap the bs and then they'll actually go out and hire somebody to do it for them. But they now have enough of they're dangerous enough to be able to ask the right questions and make sure they're working with someone who knows what they're talking about or tap into our network. And that's what's really, really cool, is seeing people that are no longer going to be taken advantage of because they actually know what they're talking about. That's actually one of my favorite byproducts of what we do at Adskills. So it's been exciting. And yes, I'm more than happy to chat about YouTube traffic. This is an exciting time and something that is very close to my heart. But overall, I'm glad that you guys are getting what we really try and set out, which is helping people understand that it's possible with paid traffic. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to make it work.

Yeah, no, I love that. And, you know, the whole idea is the more of this stuff you learn, the less sort of subjective advertising becomes. Because that was always my biggest problem when I first got into advertising or when I first started doing media buys and stuff was there was like so much subjectivity to it, so much to figure out, like, what. What type of image works, what type of copy works, what what targets do I need to do? And there were so many elements and courses, like what yours, what you guys put out, that's kind of what it helped me do. It took some of the subjectivity out. And you kind of start to get little, like, frameworks and things that you could use. And just for an example, like Justin, I mean, both of you guys, you have this style of an ad that you use for Google Display Network. I'm actually drawing a blank on what they call it, the workhorse. The workhorse ad. And like, that's our template for all of our ads now. And it just took that subjectivity of creating new creatives out of it.

For me, totally simple ad, little white box down below, headline, text, logo or name over in the corner, and little call to action. Just like having something, I call them skeletons that you can go through and put the meat on. It makes life so much simpler when you can go through and do that. And that's actually. People ask me sometimes why it takes a little bit longer for me to put out courses than other people. It's because we're going through and building workbooks and templates and worksheets for people to be able to utilize, because we really want you to have that. And that requires a lot of time to prepare. My number one thing that I say at the beginning of every course is fail to prepare, prepare to fail. It's really important to do that, especially with media buying all your Profit is created before you ever spend a cent, and if you're not willing to go through and plan everything out, you're going to struggle with it. But I'm really glad to hear that you're leveraging those frameworks and having so much success with it.

Yeah, for sure.

Well, I'm kind of curious now that people, you know, if you folks are kind of at a point where they're trying to figure out, okay, what are the pitfalls that comes with paid traffic in general, maybe YouTube as well. Do you want to cover those seven things that you and Justin commonly talk about?

Yeah, I think the biggest thing we talk at the very beginning, expectations, is, number one, just understanding. I think sometimes people get under the fallacy of, like, well, I'm doing fine in my business right now by itself, and if I just add paid traffic to this, you know, it's gonna double, triple, quadruple in size. You have to be prepared. You have to understand that paid traffic is not like organic referrals. Right. It's not someone who's warmed them up and said, hey, you should try these people. You're talking to a cold audience that doesn't know you and they don't trust you. And so just having the expectation that it's your job to turn those clicks into cash is so important because you have to understand you own the process. And then we really talk about working through and doing your customer research. One of the things I'm really focused on right now is helping people understand that they need to build what I call a profitable population density. So when we say that, I'm pretty sure every training talks about building a customer Persona. That's great. Building a customer Persona is really important, but something that Justin talked about a lot, that really caught my ear, and it's something that's really helped me improve my campaigns. Is your anti Persona. Who do you not want to target? And when you go through and you get very clear on that, you actually cut out a huge portion of your market. And so your ad spend then can go from trying to spread it across the entire pie. You can look at it over half or a third. You can get the same amount of coverage with your dollars. You're getting more impressions, more opportunities to get in front of those people, and the profitability is much higher there. And so if you don't do that research beforehand, the chances of building a profitable campaign are a lot more difficult. And so that's something that's really, really important there. And then we just simply walk through the campaign planning process. Do you have, you know, have you gone through and thought out your structure? Have you thought about the stages of awareness, which is a really big construct a lot of people don't haven't thought about. They think that every ad network is kind of a Swiss army knife. They say, I want to be using Facebook ads or Instagram or YouTube or Google AdWords or display. And they haven't thought about where a person is at in the process of understanding, even if they have a problem, all the way down to why their solution is better than their competitions. There's five stages of awareness that were developed by Eugene Schwartz in the 1960s as a copywriter. And what we really made an effort to do is go through and match those up, help people understand how their messages need to really appeal to people at that stage, and then which ad networks and types of targeting can help them reach those people. And so we kind of work through there. Then we go into tracking and then making sure we're set up optimizing your campaigns. The rules we talk about, don't touch your campaigns for 72 hours when you start spending money. It's so hard to do that. Right. We all want to go in and make tweaks in the first 10 minutes. And so it's letting your campaigns run. And then really we're getting to now is we're in what I call the machine learning age, or a nickname I have for it is called the zero targeting age. And what we're seeing now with really successful campaigns is once you get enough conversion data in there, we're actually removing all of our targeting and just letting the ad networks go find more customers for us. And so I didn't give you the exact seven steps there, but what was important is just to see, like, it's a process, and it's a very clear process you go through every single time. Now, the one absolute thing that I want to hit on from a traffic trap, number seven, and this is the one I always talk about, because if I hadn't worked at Google, I really wouldn't have realized this. But there are actually these little potholes built into ad networks. That was what I initially called traffic traps. Now I kind of refer to them as growth hacking holes to make sure that we can differentiate. But, you know, ad networks employ some of the smartest people in the world, particularly on the engineering side. And so the goal of ad networks is to produce more revenue every quarter so they can hit their quarterly numbers so their stockholders are happy. Right. And Facebook didn't do that. Last quarter, you saw their stock just tanked, you know, had a huge dip. And so, you know, making sure that it's always going up into the right is very important. Well, one of the things that's difficult with any ad network is they have so they only have so much inventory.

Google AdWords is a good example. Like, there's only so many spots and search results from the advertising side. And then Facebook, we've hit what's called the max ad load era. So, like, there's only so many ads they can serve. That's why we start to see prices rise. And so what these ad networks are doing is they're constantly looking for ways to increase the amount of inventory they have where they can serve your ads to potential customers. And while it sounds like that's great and, you know, more inventory is better, all inventory is not created equal. If you've ever advertised on Google, you know, the Google display network is not the same type of inventory as Google search ads. On Facebook, if you've ever done the audience network, you know that's not the same as the news feed. Well, what these ad networks do is they actually automatically check boxes for you now. So on Facebook, your placements are automatically checked now to advertise in every single placement. And you, if you, if you've never spent a dollar before, how are you supposed to know that you don't know to click on everything and go uncheck certain boxes? Same way on Google, you know, inside of the Google display network, I know advertising inside of mobile apps on park domains on what's called sensitive concept, you know, sensitive content on porn sites. That's all default as. Yes, that's fine.

Wow.

You're the person that has to go in and actually make sure that you turn those things off. And those are the traffic traps. To me that it really bothers me when I go into someone's account and I see either they didn't take the time to learn that, or their agency is not doing those things. It's not giving them a chance to actually turn a profit because they're not spending the money in the places their customers are actually at. And so that's what's so important. That's the one thing we really hit on, is traffic trap number seven. Don't let the ad network spend your money in the places you don't want to be spending.

I love that.

Now, just out of curiosity, you mentioned some of the things that you learned while you were at Google that that sort of helped. And those traffic traps was kind of One of those things you learned during that process. Are there any other sort of big takeaways that, that you gained while you were working there that you were able to bring over to what you're doing now?

I can't. Yeah. Yes, absolutely. And I would say that the two big ones are. Having your tracking in place makes such a big difference. And I'm actually working on a new thing right now that's called Bloody Pixels. I gave this a speech. I gave it an Internet marketing party. But tracking is really boring to talk about. And I know you guys have probably been through it. I know you said you've been through the tracking course. I made a really big effort to try and boil it down for people who are not technical to understand why put investing the time and energy into tracking is so important. And so what I did is I took tracking and I said, hey, let's look at this through the lens of murder investigations. How can we do a better job of explaining why this stuff is important into a topic that someone would actually pay attention to? And so that's kind of something we've really worked on. And I'm going to turn that into a little YouTube playlist that people can go through and watch and really understand the different phases of tracking. You don't just buy a product and put it on your site and your tracking is perfect. You have to have the habits of placing UTM tags and setting up your cross domain tracking and building goals and doing your E commerce tracking and all these little pieces that require time and effort, but they build upon each other. You don't have to have them done in a day. And I think that's something that everyone just wants to buy a plugin for tracking and that just doesn't exist. So that's number one. And then number two is just how important the quality of the offer is. Like, I can't tell you. There's a scene. Have you guys seen Ocean's Eleven?

Oh, yeah.

So Don Cheadle is, you know, the guy that does the explosives. And they're, you know, they're showing what the crew is doing right at the beginning of the movie. And he's working with some guys that are kind of rookies. And so he blows the vault door and steps in and the alarm goes off. And it's just like, man, just working with a bunch of amateurs out here who've never done this. And then, you know, Brad Pitt shows up and rescues him from the cops and he says it's nice to be working with some proper villains again. And so that's kind of what I think about when we get into this with paid traffic is there's a big difference for people that understand like the offer is everything. And the offer we talk about, and this is one of the things we talk about from the traffic trap side is there's three parts to an offer. The pitch, which I think of as like the on ramp. Your product and your pricing are going to be the same regardless of which stage of awareness you're marketing to. You don't want to go create a new product all the time, but the way that you message it to people based on where they're at in the process of understanding their problem, the fact that there are solutions, what the different solutions are and why yours is the best, there's different messages for all of those. And so crafting those in a way that you're really delivering the message to the right stages of awareness is so important. But just like the ability to go through and understand that media buying when you have a great offer is so much easier. I can't even like it's night and day. It's one of those things where it's like, it's the difference between just focusing on dialing in the numbers, finding the right placements, finding the right ads and scaling things up versus sitting there and just thinking day after day, why is paid traffic not working for me? It comes down to how you're messaging things. Are you speaking to your customer? Are you talking to the right customer? Did you do your customer research? And if you put a product and a price in front of them that they're actually interested in, and price doesn't just mean dollars, price can also mean what are you including as bonuses and other extra opportunities or things that they can leverage inside their business. When you have a great offer, people will gladly pull out their credit cards and pay for. And so that's why I really like that pay what you want. Pricing we talked about earlier is we've got a great course put together and at the end it's like, hey, you can pay whatever you want for it. It's a really hard thing to turn down. That's what a great offer looks like.

I love that. What's the typical use for those? Pay, pay what you want. Like are they upsells? Are they kind of like a smaller product maybe? Obviously. Probably not a big YouTube training course or maybe.

No, but yeah. So we've always used them for the entry kind of our intro courses into our business. So traffic traps, tracking one customer research. Those are Kind of the fundamental courses. And I spent more time on traffic traps than I did on my YouTube course. And that's saying something because I spent a lot of time on my YouTube course.

Right, I remember that.

Yeah. It's just something where it's like taking so much time and care to make sure people really understand the mindset. You know, basically what we use traffic traps for is a mindset filter. If someone comes in, they pay $2, and they don't spend any time going through the course, and. And they're not willing to accept the things we put in front of them. They weren't the right fit for our community anyway because they're not going to invest what it takes to be successful with paid traffic. But what's really cool is you start to see this level where it's like, hey, the minimum you can pay is $2. But then you see people that evaluate at $10 and $25 and $50 and $99 and $297. We've seen people just out of their own accord, see the value in what we talked about on the product page and pick their own price. And it's amazing to see that you filter out. You say, these people are very interested in really succeeding, and these people want free information. It's really cool to kind of see how those different layers filter themselves out.

That's super cool. It goes back to the whole stages of awareness, like you said. It was actually really interesting because right before we chatted with you, we chatted with Kevin Rogers and copywriter. Amazing.

Definitely.

If you're listening to it now, you know, listeners go check out that podcast, too. But he mentioned the exact same thing. Then he kind of framed it as like a, you know, a red, yellow, and green, these stages. And those are like the buckets. And you got to understand, you know, kind of like where these people are at. It's exactly what you just said. It just relates to everything Copy.

It makes a huge difference. Yeah, it's huge. And I think most people are just like, I want to build one landing page and that's it.

Do you ever focus on organic at all? Like SEO or YouTube organic or social media organic, Any of that?

If you want to talk from an expert perspective. No. I do love with YouTube, the ability to get video SEO is incredible. Google really prioritizes pulling video into the search results. So I don't know if you guys are in front of your computer right now. I'm guessing you are, because we're on this. If you type in custom, intent audiences into Google Search.

Okay, got it up.

Usually I have a thumbnail here that pulls into this. I'm not seeing it right now in mine, but if you go to videos, you'll see custom intent audiences and ADWords. And that's an ad skills thing. And so we just go through and we really focus on getting our SEO in the right place, making sure we're looking at what people are actually searching for, and then going through and building videos. You can get great search traffic very quickly by doing those things. But that's really the extent on my end of the SEO. Justin has a huge background and SEO is great at it, so he'd be the better person to talk about that one.

Cool. Okay, well, let's. Matt, do you have any other questions before maybe Transitioning more into YouTube stuff?

No, I think we just dive in on the YouTube stuff now.

Yeah. So I'm just curious, so where would you recommend folks to really focus their time if they want to start dabbling? And this is kind of selfishly us too, you know, like paid traffic. There's a lot of options on YouTube. Where should people start and kind of why?

So that answer falls into two buckets. There's kind of two pieces, two gears to YouTube advertising. So if you're working in a niche market or if you've got a service that you're providing to people looking for something specifically, your ability to leverage YouTube ads is great. But it's not what you hear about when we talk about the Dollar Shave Club, you know, SodaStream, Poo Pourri, opportunities like those are business to consumer. And I think that's one thing that a lot of people kind of get mixed up in their head is like, if you have a B2B SaaS product, can you reach your customer, your audience on YouTube? Absolutely can. You know, I met with one of my campaigns right now for a B2C group. We're spending $18,000 a day. There's no way you can do that in a B2B business. You're going to be much more targeted, much more segmented. You're going to have to put in some more work and you're not going to have any of the sexy I heard you say in the background, wow, like, that's cool. $18,000 a day is great, but if that's not the right size for your business, you don't need to look at those numbers and say, man, could I make that happen. And I think that's the biggest thing is like, understanding the size of your audience and really thinking about I've seen people be super effective spending 50 to $100 a day on YouTube just because they were very targeted and what they were actually going after. And so that's the biggest thing around the mindset is thinking about where am I at, how much opportunity is there here? YouTube's the number two search engine in the world. And so you have the ability, you can do the pre roll ads that everybody knows that they like to skip on YouTube. That's what we spend. I do 99.9% of my advertising there. But you also have the ability to put basically search ads at the top of search results. And so if your audience is searching for very specific things we can put in YouTube, those are called discovery ads. For something like Facebook conversion Pixel, we could build clickable, I'm gonna call them search ads on YouTube that can drive people. We can go through our tutorial on what those are and how you set them up. And then, you know, with a call to action to check out our Facebook course, we could probably spend 15 to $20 a day there. And if we make a course sale out of it, we're crushing it. Right? There's a ton of upside there. And so I think that's the biggest thing is when we talk about YouTube, a lot of what I'm gonna talk about as we continue this conversation is massive dollars, massive opportunity, because it's where I spend my time. I like working with companies that have a B2C product, an audience of over 30 million people, and a target CPA of $50 above. That's just like my market. That's where I found specialty and what I really like to spend my time on. If that's not your market, don't think that you can't do this. It's really important to understand just the different little dinks and dunks of where you're going to spend your time. You may try and advertise on a specific channel or placement. You may look at very small niche opportunities and you can do something that I really love. Those custom intent audiences that we just talked about.

One of the types of targeting on Google in the past has been called in market audiences. So if someone is searching for car insurance or health insurance, you have the ability to put your video ads in front of people searching for those things. If you have a very niche topic that people are searching for, like realtor, lead phone, opt ins, like that's not a huge search category. But if someone's looking for that and you can get your YouTube ad in front of them, even if you're only spending $5 a day, as long as you're talking the right audience, you have a huge amount of opportunity. So I think that's the most important thing to start with is think in the right size bubble and then after that we'll move into kind of the details of how this actually works. So is all of that clear?

Yeah, no, that's exactly how we run our other traffic is it's not, it's not a spray and pray it's not a massive budget type thing, but it's just, you know, very extremely targeted on all these different platforms. Just with the right audience right there.

Exactly. And you guys know, you know, if you. Anyone who's done Facebook advertising, video is incredible. The amount of consumption is amazing. And YouTube in my experience, you know, Facebook has cheaper cost per views than YouTube does. But that's because they're not apples to apples. Facebook's gonna charge on 3 or 10 cent views. YouTube only charges on the pre roll ads if you watch 30 seconds or the end of the ad, whichever one comes first, if you choose not to skip. So that's really where we see our cost per view, cost per click, cost per visit from YouTube is almost always more expensive than Facebook, but our quality is also higher. Our LTV of customers from YouTube because they've spent time engaging with our full video content and are very well prepared, they're ready to take action. And so that's something that's super important that I like to talk about. Don't compare your Facebook and your YouTube metrics. Apples to apples. Look at your cost per acquisition and the lifetime value of your customers. If you can compare those two numbers most of the time you'll be extremely happy with your YouTube traffic.

Got it? Yeah. So I guess should we does this probably seems like a good place to dig into those in stream type of ads and maybe talk about those a bit.

Yeah. So we just to sort of pre qualify, we have tested a little bit with YouTube ads and for ourselves we've actually never managed to make them profitable. To be honest, a lot of our ads I've just kept on running because the per view cost was so cheap that we never really ran up a big budget. So I just kept them running as like a branding thing. But I've never actually managed to make YouTube ads profitable. The two things that we've tried have been we've tried retargeting visitors so people that have viewed our sales page. We put sort of like a second chance offer retargeted video in front of them. And then the other thing that we've tested is going and picking a handful of videos and saying, I want our ad to show in front of these videos and kind of trying to find niche videos and getting our ad in front of those. And we've pretty much failed to ROI on any of those. But obviously there's a lot of nuances and things there. I just figured I would give you where we're at with YouTube ads.

Yeah, absolutely. So it's not the first time I've ever heard that. And so I don't want you to feel like you're alone. That's number one where, where we really see. And this is something. Jake Larson is one of my good friends that we talk a lot about YouTube advertising. Tom Breeze is the other guy that I know you guys are having on here soon. And so one of the things I want to talk about is I'm very much on the tactical side on setting up targeting and those types of pieces. We'll talk a little bit about creative, but Tom Brees is a master of creative. So if you are interested in being successful with YouTube advertising, listen to what I have to say. But also make sure you tune in for Tom Breeze's episode because Tom is such an amazing talent when it comes to the creative side. He'll help you take your video creative to the next level. So just as a preface there, but Jake and I, Jake Larson and I were chatting recently and we talked about the fact that we really don't do what you're talking about, advertising on specific videos. That's called placement advertising. We've gotten to the point where we don't do that a lot anymore. And because Google changed the rules on which channels can have advertising on them, you have to have at least 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of content consumed every year in order to even qualify for advertising. And then usually a lot of the good channels that have that don't want to advertise because they don't want you to advertise on their channel because they're selling their own products. And so it's kind of one of those things where we talk about it. It's an option. Placement advertising is definitely something that you can do. But we really got to move more into the realm of if you're doing niche targeting, either target topics, if you have a fairly big audience, or building those custom intent audiences that I just talked about, where you can take what people are searching for on either YouTube or Google, building an audience, and if they're actively looking for a solution or a question. Kind of the stages of awareness that we talked about, the keywords they're searching for show what stage of awareness they're at. So if it's something like check engine lights on, that's a totally unaware stage of awareness. They have no idea what the problem is. They're looking for an answer where if they're looking something like for OBD2 scanner, which is a tool that you can plug in, that's going to tell you what's wrong. They already understand what the problem is. Now they're looking at solutions, the different solutions. They could go to a mechanic, they could get this on the device. They're actually in the niche, aware of their looking for products like an OBD2 scanner to help them figure out that problem. And so what we do is go through and do our keyword research and break it down to those stages of awareness, build those custom intent audiences and then we want to serve our ads to people who have been searching for that recently. But we really don't care what video they're watching as long as we can serve them an ad. Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Yeah. So basically what you're saying is, so does is this based on what they search in the normal Google search engine or is it based on what they search on YouTube? Because what I'm basically hearing is they'll do, basically Google is looking at what they've recently searched for and then you can put these ads in front of them based on what they've searched for in the past, right?

Yes, Yep. And what it's looking at is across Both Google and YouTube, since it owns both, it's now combined that data set to allow you to anyone who's searching for those things, you can take all of that data and now you can actually utilize it to serve your ads on YouTube.

Got it, got it. That makes perfect sense now. Yeah, you're creating that audience, your custom intent audience and you're essentially building that up. You figured out the keywords you really want to target. Like Matt and I already do this with Google AdWords. We just haven't cracked it with YouTube yet. And then you serve those in stream ads to them.

Yeah, I mean that honestly, that's what we do. I mean, I'm sure there's actually an easier way to do this with Google Display Network, but that's what we kind of do with Google Display Network is we run search ads for topics that we're looking that people are looking for and then we have content that they click on and Based on what content they click on. We're putting Google display network ads in front of them.

Yep, exactly. So it's the same, same type of idea now just on YouTube. It's a really nice advantage they've given us across the entire display network, which includes blogs and YouTube. So it's really nice to be able to do that across GDN and the YouTube advertising platforms. That's a really good place to begin when you're talking about something that's more niche. That's really kind of where we've moved to. We've moved away from the placements and more to those for the micro opportunities. But at the end of the day, what this really boils down to me is, and what I would like to look at if I were to help you guys with this is the offer making sure that that offer is fitting those stages of awareness that you're at. And I think that can be tough sometimes with placements is if someone's talking about Facebook advertising and that's what you're trying to help them with. It's one of those things. It's like, okay, well what level are they at? And that's why I love what Tom does so well. Tom Brees, you should talk with him about Tony Pocastro, one of his clients that he does guitars, guitar ads. And they've absolutely crushed it. And what he does so well is Tony at the beginning has a great intro. The first five seconds you have to catch their attention or they're going to skip your ad. So, you know, having a good introduction. And what I love about this ad is that at the end of it, Tony asks, so are you just getting into, you know, are you just beginning playing guitar or are you like getting back into things that haven't, haven't done it in a while? And it allows you to choose the journey that you're going to take with your video creative. And so that's something that could be really cool for an audience like yours is allowing people to segment themselves based on where they're at. With adskills, we are either catering to people who are agency owners or people who own their own business. And I think sometimes that can be. I'm not saying that people who are an agency owner don't own their own business, but they don't have a product that they're selling in the same way as the individual business owner. And so that's kind of what we allow to separate that audience and allow them to choose what's the most relevant content for them next so they can continue down to the funnel into the ultimate. Right, cta. Did all that make sense?

Yeah. So essentially, during that pre roll ad or that in stream ad, you'll have a couple options come up at a certain period of time. Once you pose that question, hey, where are you? Obviously, you know, they're interested in a bank of keywords, but now let's dial it in further.

Yep. And Tom has done that and has been so successful with that type of ad, so I would definitely chat with him about that one. But for starters, that's really where I would begin with YouTube. And there's two things that I really want to cover. How much time do we have left?

As much as you want.

You're good right now.

Cool. So the first thing is we talk about the types of ads and I talked about there's kind of two stages. So something that's recently changed in the YouTube ecosphere is up until recently, it was really hard to drive clicks from YouTube. Basically what we were looking to do is get in front of somebody. When people come to YouTube, when you're on Facebook, you're scrolling through a feed, you're looking for a distraction. When you're on YouTube, you're there for a reason. As I said, it's the number two search engine in the world. So people have come there looking for something. And what they're looking for is either to be educated, the how to videos, or to be entertained. Up until recently, YouTube was the number one music streaming platform in the world. It was bigger than all of the other ones combined. So, like, people that are coming there, they're watching shows, they're watching highlights, they're watching blooper reels, they're watching whatever they're watching. They're either being entertained or educated. So while you're serving an ad, you are standing between them and getting what they want. And so even if they really like your ad, the chances they click away from the video they were there to watch isn't that great. What they typically do is they open up a new tab and they search for it. And so a lot of times when people say they can't make YouTube work from a profitability perspective, I asked them, have they been tracking their organic Traffic when their YouTube ads are on? I imagine you guys have done that because that was something I talked about in the course. But that's something that's really, really important as people don't realize they'll go back and they'll be like, oh, yeah, we had this huge organic Spike while our YouTube ads are on. Like that's where your profit went, went right into there. And so that's good.

So just a quick question on that now, doesn't you when you're in the back end of the AdWords dashboard, which is, you know, the same place you're going to run your YouTube ads from, they do have an option to see the view through conversions. Wouldn't those be shown up in the view through conversions? This is getting a little technical. Probably.

Absolutely. They will show up there. And that's why it's really important that something I talk about is combining standard and view through conversions. But it's not a perfect science, it's an impression pixel. So it does a good job. A lot of people though don't know to even combine their conversions together. Yes, you're absolutely correct, that does happen. But if it's not a direct click through or people, the more common thing is they don't even give it enough time because they're like, man, my cost per clicks are $8 a piece and they're 75 cents a dollar or $2 on Facebook. Why would I pay four times the price? And it's like, well, while your cost per click of people actually clicking on the ad is high, your cost per visit, you probably had three or four people who search for it organically. So your cost per visit is about the same. It's really important to get those things to really understand that you need to be looking in different places. It's not just the standard click through attribution that we're used to. That's how every YouTube campaign has to start, is by generating those ads, making sure that you're getting the conversions that you're looking for, whether through direct clicks or view throughs. But once you have some nice conversion data, now there's an opportunity inside of YouTube to use what's called the TrueView for Action ad. And these are beautiful. It's someone like me who does YouTube for my whole life. It's so nice to be able to have these little blue buttons that really pop off the screen that you can click on. Now from ads, our click through rate usually increases 5 to 6x because of it. And so we're getting really great cost per clicks. But once again you have to have a conversion that you're generating and because you're having to pick what's called a target CPA. So you're saying, I want these conversions at $20 a piece. And it's using machine learning to try and help you find people that are going to convert that dollar amount. And so it's really important to have a quantity of conversion data. I typically tell people you want to be seeing a minimum of 50 conversions a week, ideally 50 conversions a day. That's kind of the level that you really start to tap into the full power of target cpa. But this is really kind of this next phase of YouTube where you can turn things up and you can actually use it as a clickable ad source. And so that's a big shift though in mindset is having to kind of take on this ability to account for organic traffic at the beginning so you can build up your conversion data and understand what's working and then transferring it over to this click through. It's hard for people to go through that process. And so that's why I spent a lot of time talking about that. So is all that clear?

Yeah, makes total sense.

And it kind of seems like that's where you have that zero targeting, I think, is what you guys kind of go for. That machine learning is kind of doing all the legwork for you.

Absolutely. In the long run. You know, this is something that Mike Rhodes at Traffic and Conversion talked about, machine learning. He said in 2016, his team beat machine learning 80% of the time and only lost 20%. 2017, they only won 20% of the time. 2018, I'm sure it's, it's, you know, even less in Mike's. Mike was just awarded a web savvy. If you guys don't know who Mike Rhodes is, he's kind of the guy that wrote the book on Google AdWords with Perry Marshall. He's got a top 20 agency in the world, and so he's firmly under the impression that our jobs as media buyers is changing. We've historically been control freaks that had to battle the networks. Now our job is to feed data the networks and let them do their thing. Tom Brees has seen the same thing. He's used machine learning to scale a campaign that on his manual management, he was only able to spend about $3,000 a day. Within one week of using machine learning, he was able to spend $18,000 a day. So 6x ad spend in one week at the same amount of profit. I mean, that's a really big deal. And then I've seen the same thing just being able to accelerate. I had a client that we were tapped out at about $3,000 a day on YouTube with the traditional campaigns, we turn on these target CPA campaigns for the same ad spend. We doubled our conversions just because it's more tailored and really focusing on driving people with that specific cost per acquisition. So the power of machine learning is incredible. It's something that we as media buyers have to get better at feeding really good, clean conversion data back to the ad networks because what they can do with it is absolutely incredible.

Yeah, no, that's. That's really interesting. I've definitely noticed the same thing a lot of, especially inside of Facebook. I've used a lot of their, sort of let them optimize it for me kind of stuff. I used to try to. In Facebook specifically. I know we're not talking about Facebook, but in Facebook specifically, I would always create a different ad set for every single targeting. And then I got to employ point where I learned that if I just loaded a ton of targets in Facebook would figure it out for me and I'd get way cheaper cost per clicks. So. But you know, in Google it's been. It's been a little bit different of a story. In Google, I always try to set up everything manually. I always try to. I almost never use the Google recommendation stuff. I go through and set up everything manually. Do you, when you're using Google and the YouTube ads and stuff like that, do you. Do you follow a lot of Google's recommendations on. On what you should be optimizing? They got the little, you know, the bell in the corner and it's constantly telling you, hey, you should bump your CPA or your.

Bid on this one and you should do this and try this. And it's constantly giving me recommendations and I almost always ignore them. So I'm curious if you know what you think about that.

Yeah, so it's definitely one of those things that I try and utilize. That's where we really focus on doing our research at the beginning of everything is focusing on the data that exists that's showing us with customer research. And this is something I talk about inside the YouTube course. And I really focus on this and at every lesson possible is leveraging the data that you've got available to you to help you figure out which targeting is going to be the best options and then really focusing and riding that through. And I'm with you. I'm actually sitting in AdWords right now looking at the bell and dismissing notifications. So I ignore it most of the time, but sometimes it does have good ideas. And what I think the biggest difference what you talked about Facebook is you loaded in a bunch of targeting and just let it do its thing to figure out which one's working best. Once you Hit a certain point with the number of conversions we went in and we start a brand new campaign. We know the creative that's working. We don't set any targeting at all. We just say, you go figure it out.

Conversion, right?

Yeah. But it's really, really difficult. And this is something that I'll tell you, right. You know, the Jake, Tom, some of the really, really big YouTube advertisers, Bryant Garvin, who spent $100 million on YouTube at Purple Mattress, we've got our own little Facebook group where we kind of talk about the challenges that we're seeing and the opportunities. And Jake kind of had to talk me off the ledge the first time I was doing zero targeting because I was so like, I just, I don't trust Google to make the best decisions for me. And I just have never had, you know, it's just not something that I'm wired to do well. And it's made a really, really big difference in the amount of scale and the cost per acquisition. When you can get to that stage where you are trusting the networks to use their machine learning, there is, there does come a point in time. I agree with you that I've been really, what is it? I'm not. I'm bearish on an ad networks recommendations, but this is the first time I feel like I've finally come around and said, okay, I feel pretty comfortable with this. I'm just going to let it ride.

I feel like right now we are in a transition point where a lot of people are having to trust certain aspects of the system or of these platforms. Obviously there's certain things like the placements don't always do that. They might lead you down a little trap there.

Yeah, it's made a really big difference. And I think that's the thing. Once again, we have to be really good at providing data. That data has to be clean because, you know, with the Cambridge Analytica thing, the ad networks are not going to share data with us any longer. We're going to have to share our data with them. They're going to keep it in their black box and they're going to use their magic because they need us to spend more money so they can make their shareholders happy. So at the end of the day, it's something, it's like if we can just do a good job of not only building great assets that are assets and products that are going to cater to our customers, but also helping the ad networks do what they. I always talk about with value when we're talking about presenting Our value to people. How can you explain your value in their words? And for us, with Facebook and Google, they want good offers that they can just feel comfortable just going and sending to as many people as possible, because that's gonna help them increase their amount of revenues. They want those great offers. I just had a Google rep reach out to me. Cause we jacked up some spend in a couple of these YouTube accounts. And their team's so happy because we're just cranking away and helping them look good. And it's just like, well, we have a good offer. We've got the right targeting in place. We're just gonna let it do its thing. And that's. Ad networks are dying for offers like this, so they can allow you to spend more money and make more profit. And so I think it's just a. It's a cool opportunity with where we're at. But I always tell people we're at the base of a tsunami right now. You're either gonna get on the data curve and you're gonna be up, up on top, riding high. And if you don't, you're gonna get absolutely crushed. So that's kind of what's. What's possible with the technology on YouTube. But I do want to cover the creative here real quick. If we. If you guys have a couple minutes.

Oh, definitely. That's where I was gonna take it next. Anyway.

Okay, so once again, I can send a link over. I've got a little formula that I use. It's kind of the five pieces. Pieces of a YouTube ad that really talk about the first five seconds. I call it the punch. It's really important to get those in front of people, make sure that they're paying attention those first five seconds and listening to your entire message, it makes a really big difference. And then you kind of work through the storytelling process. And so there's talking about the problem or the opportunity.

The product or the solution, the answer to their problems. Just like there's a very clear way you're working through the ad itself. While I can definitely send that over and you can have as a resource. This is where Tom Brees is so great. He can just talk you through how he utilizes storytelling to make it a very compelling ad. And Tom's worked on some of the best performing ads of all times. So I would just highly recommend. It's one of those things where, like, I love talking about this stuff. I'm going to talk with you more about how to get an ad produced at a good cost than I will about what actually should go in it. There is a new program that YouTube just came out with. It's called YouTube Director on Site and I'll send you a link for this. But it's amazing because Google has said, you know what, we know that the biggest hurdle for people advertising on YouTube is building a good YouTube ad. If people commit to spending $350 on YouTube advertising, we will have a professional videographer come out and shoot a 30 second commercial for you for free.

Holy moly.

That is awesome.

Okay, now we're talking.

Yeah, it's pretty sweet. Yeah.

So $350 total or like per day? Per month?

No, just total.

Wow.

Yeah. And so it's an absolutely incredible opportunity to go through and get someone. You know, making video creative is not easy. The people who are good at it have a system in place and they just crush it. But it's not something that most of us do well. And so getting someone that has the equipment, the technology to go through and make this happen makes a really, really big difference. And so I think that's the biggest thing right now is having access to this has done a really nice job making this program available. And so now we really have the opportunity to go through and understand how to make a better video ad and perform, you know, doing the things that we really care about, to tell these stories in a way that makes sense. And I think that's what's so awesome. I'm not always thrilled with Google's choices in the way it does things, but this is something I've been very excited about.

Yeah, this doesn't even seem like something I've ever heard of from them or really anyone.

It really does make sense though because if they can help you produce a good video that converts, you're going to spend more money on advertising with them.

Oh yeah.

And it also, since you're they're sending out professionals, it also boosts sort of the quality of their platform and the quality of what people are seeing. So yeah, really smart.

Nothing else to be said. You just covered it all.

I love it. Well, is that cool if we share the stuff you send us with everybody else on the show notes here?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And so in that resource for YouTube director on site, what I did is I laid out for a 30 second ad. While the people coming out to you are video professionals, they're also not salespeople. And so what I did is laid out for, from my perspective, a good 30 second AD, the different pieces you need to have. And I gave you an example of how I might go through and do that. And then I gave you a blank document so you can go through and write that stuff out for yourself. So once again, going back to the frameworks, those things are in place. And so that's really. I'll share that link with you guys. And so that way people have it. And it's a program to me that if you're looking at doing YouTube advertising, having those resources available just are going to make a very big difference.

I love it, man. Appreciate that. That's super cool.

I have a quick question. Well, hopefully a quick question. I don't know if it'll be quick or not, but from a, from a branding standpoint, you've got these guys like, you know, Tai Lopez and Billie Jean and, you know, a handful of others where for a period of time they were just everywhere. You know, on YouTube specifically, I would just see one of those two videos in front of every single YouTube video. If somebody's goal was branding and just getting their video as many views as possible for as cheap as possible, does the. Obviously the strategy would change a little bit. What kind of advice would you give somebody on that?

Yeah, if you've got branding dollars, YouTube is an amazing place to spend them. If you have a Google rep hit them up, they will love to take your money on that. Because there's so much inventory available on YouTube that you can buy on a CPM, a low cost per view basis. You can also do what are called like homepage takeovers. So you can actually take over the homepage of YouTube with your video and your brand and take that over. That's a really, really big price tag. But like, from that perspective, if you're spending money on branding, I would really just dial in on the targeting you want and do some awareness or consideration ads where you're really just driving people. What you're looking for is a cost per view bid, or like I said, a CPM bid. Usually with cpm, you have to do that through a Google rep to do a direct buy, but it makes a really, really big difference. And so just getting your ads in front of people, like there's so much inventory. When I've done brand campaigns rarely, but when I've done them, we can spend 10 or $20,000 in an hour. So there's so much inventory out there. There's 300 hours of YouTube videos uploaded every minute. So the amount of inventory is just, you know, it's, it's, it's never ending. It's huge.

Wow. Yeah. Well, it's probably not the best place to start for most people.

That was just more of a curiosity question because I've seen there's been a lot of people, not a lot, but there's been a handful of people lately where I'm just like, wow, this person has really managed to just be everywhere. They must be spending massive marketing budgets then. You know, I mean, Tai Lopez is probably like the most obvious one that probably everybody listening has seen. His video at some point is here in my garage video. Right. So I was just kind of more curious about how something like that is achieved.

Yeah, it's what he did is he went through and built a massive audience, spent a lot of money to get that video in front of his target market and then retargeted people everywhere. And I think that's kind of the beauty and that's something. If you haven't seen Justin's book, Retargeting Recipes, we just put that out and it's really a nice way of breaking down the different messages you can use to follow up. And Ty did this very well. He built a video, he built an audience off of people watching that video so you can do it based on people consuming your video content or visiting your website. And so he just built a massive audience of people who had watched that video, retarded them, got them to one of his web pages and then did Facebook retargeting native ads, GDN, YouTube. He was absolutely everywhere. But he was, you know, the majority of the money went onto that first cold traffic ad and then he spent a lot less inside of those different retargeting funnels across all the networks to make it look like he was everywhere. And I think that's that biggest thing is if, if you really go through and plan out. This is why planning is so important. Planning out where your first touch is going to be and how you're going to do that in a big way. And then really thinking about what are my follow up messages going to be? Do I have my audiences and my exclusion audiences in place that I can go through and retarget people across all these different networks. That's where the beauty of paid traffic comes in. And you have to work with people who really have all their ducks in a row if you're going to make that happen on a big scale. So the planning is very important, but it's amazing what you can accomplish if you put your ad, a good ad with a good offer in front of people. There's just a huge amount of opportunity on that retargeting front to look like you are truly everywhere.

I love that man. Because that's exactly what we do on a very smaller scale. I don't think we have the wide net on the very top right now. It's more targeted. But it's exactly what you said. It's retargeting like crazy. And we actually both read the retargeting recipes book and it's solid and it's extremely actionable. So thanks for, for putting that out. And thanks to Justin too.

I was gonna say Justin's the man on that one.

Yeah, I figured. Well, we've actually. What? We changed a lot of stuff, Matt, from that book. I know, yeah.

No, I mean one of the things that was great about that book, I'll just mention it real quick, was it's not necessarily just about like here is one ad that you should go put out and try. It's. There's a lot of stuff in there about sequencing ads together. They see this and then if they take this action then this adds together starts to show. And so we basically after reading that book started doing more like sequencing of ads. So after they've seen your website for the first seven days they see this ad and then seven days to 14 days they see this ad and then 14 days and on they're seeing this ad.

Absolutely.

So that was my big takeaway from that book.

Yeah, it makes such a big difference to do that. And that's what's cool about YouTube is I call them waterfalls where someone watches a cold traffic ad. Then we go through and we have a, you know, what is a follow up series of follow ups of what is the product? How does it work? Objection. Handling and proof. And you just kind of continue to push people down through this funnel. And what's amazing is you see your consumption rate just goes up and up and up and up. I actually have one that's running right now. Let me just tell you what these numbers are.

Waterfall. So the first retargeting ad has a 32% view rate, average is about 20%. Our cold traffic is about 20%. So first retargeting touch is 32%. Second retargeting touch is about 40%. Third retargeting touch is about 40 percent. Fourth retargeting touch is about 60%.

Oh man.

And so you just see the consumption continue to go up and up and up and up and up. And it's really cool. As you see these things happen. Our click through rate on our first retargeting, our cold traffic is about 1% on our fourth retargeting touch, our click through rate is 4.4%. So just seeing the amount of opportunity, our cost per views go down, our cost per clicks go down, our click through rates go up. Like just seeing how you go through and you build these out in a way that continues to get engagement. That retargeting campaign Today we spent $5,000 on cold traffic, we spent $40 on retargeting.

The power retargeting right there for sure.

Yeah, it's massive. And I think that's the biggest thing is just having people understand like you don't have to have a billion dollar budget. You have to have one good ad that's going to go out and find people and then you have to have, you know, just really plan out and think about how you can continue to stay in front of people. Because we're in a pay to play game. That's where we're at these days and that's just what's required to be successful.

I love it.

You said it right there.

Yeah. No, I feel like, I feel like just after this conversation I've got a better grasp of how I would go and set up a YouTube ad. I think you know the main, the main, the, the main thing for me is I really want to go test the more of the. I'm already drawn a blank on the name but the like the interest, the search based targeting the search audiences. Yeah. Custom intent. And there you go, the custom intent audience. So that's something we've never experimented with but we're doing it right now with Google search ads. We're just not doing the YouTube version of it where if they search for it then they start seeing these videos. So I think that's kind of the big thing there.

That's where we're headed next.

And what's really cool about that is you can leverage that once again with both banners and video. And so that's something that Justin and I have talked with a lot of our friends about is the people that are kind of used to like the AdWords game are like, yeah, you know we live in a market where our cost per clicks are 8, $10 a piece and they're just kind of have this, they kind of get tired, tired of it because they just continue to see these costs per clicks go up and up and up is up as more people come in the market. Well now they're leveraging these custom intent audiences and they're getting 50 cent dollar clicks in the days just leveraging the same technology because they're taking their message off of search and putting it onto YouTube, onto the display network to get in front of people. And all of a sudden they've cut their cost per acquisition by, you know, seven eighths. That's a really big deal.

Oh yeah, it's massive. No, that is so cool.

No, I'm looking forward to playing with that.

We're diving in on this and listeners, you definitely should be doing the same.

Anything else on that stuff? I know we went down a deep, but it was extremely helpful.

No, I think the biggest thing is just making sure YouTube is one of those networks that if you've got a product and an offer that really is.

It's got a good take rate, you're gonna be able to really succeed on YouTube as long as you tell a clear story. And so I know I'm leaving you a little bit hanging there. I've given you some resources on telling good stories, but I'm kind of the techie, the nerdy guy, the analytics guy that knows on the back end of like how to make a campaign successful and help it scale. I really, really recommend listening to Tom Breeze's episode that's coming up here in the next next couple weeks because he is so great at storytelling and he just. I can't do it justice the same way he does. I've actually been on a. Yeah, I've actually been on a call with him when we went through and he kind of teased out the message that a client could use. And I was just kind of sitting there in awe like listening to these two guys talk about marketing. Because I was like, man, I'm totally the techie guy that loves to help get things set up correctly and make sure we can track them. But you guys are off in your own world and as far as your ability to tell really clear stories, I thought I was good at it. And I listened to that conversation. I was like, nope, these guys are in the world. So.

Yeah, no, we're looking forward to that. We're fortunate enough to get his pre release copy of his book coming out too. All about this stuff. So we're going to be gorging through that pretty fast here.

He's a beast from Britain. He's a good guy and definitely will be able to help out.

Yeah. Thank you, man. So any other questions, Matt, or you want to wrap her up here?

Just our normal.

Cool. Yeah. Any books that kind of come to mind often for you that you'd recommend that have really kind of moved you further in life here? Life or Business.

Same thing.

Yeah.

So I'm really kind of an old school type of guy. And when I say that, that's because I read old books. There's some awesome books that, you know, I think are amazing right now. But outside of. I really like Malcolm Gladwell. I love Blink because it talks about while we live in a data driven world and needing statistical significance, Blink is something that's like, you can pretty much tell if you've got a dud. You can tell fairly quickly. And sometimes you can break your own rules and say, this just clearly isn't working. Let's try something else. So I really have enjoyed Blink, but kind of my core set of books are how to Win Friends and Influence. Influence People, the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. And then my newest favorite is John Wooden, the head basketball coach from UCLA that won all the national championships, wrote a book called Wooden on Leadership. His last name On Leadership. And those are really, really great books. And then Pete Carroll, which is funny because I went to Notre Dame, I played football at Notre Dame, and I just can't stand usc. No offense to anybody out there, but.

Pete Carroll actually wrote a really good book that I enjoyed. Just talking about competition and how competitive spirit just breeds really great environments. And so those are kind of the ones that I spent. I recommend to people most of the time. But that wouldn't. On Leadership. I tell you what, if you're involved at all with helping build a team or grow a company, that what my number one favorite thing that he talks about is. He never talked about winning. You just talk about doing your job well. And I think it's so incredible when you talk, you hear people talk about like, all right, we need to do this to win or to grow. We need to hit this number. It's like if you just come in every day and you put in your efforts, any goal that you set, you should be able to smash. At the end of day, you should be able to come home with a winning, you know, winning whatever you're doing. And I think changing the focus of getting profitable on paid traffic, that's the goal that everybody looks at. But if you do a better job of serving your customer and helping really speak to them, you're going to be profitable because you did such a good job with those types of things. That's something that's really helped me kind of revolutionize the way I look at challenges and the opportunity to really overcome that.

That's amazing, man. I know John Wooden, I know a lot of his stuff. But that book, I think it was recommended once before on our show, but definitely I've heard it before. And I find it ironic that you have a UCLA guy and a USC guy.

My wife went to ucla, so I shared the USC feeling with you.

All right.

But I like him with the Seahawks. I mean, now that's my teen. How the Chargers Went. So still like pk. There you go. But great books, man. I'm gonna definitely pick up probably a couple of those. Matt, you're more the Blink style. Yeah, I've already got Blink. Actually do. Yeah. I thought I saw it up there.

Another really interesting Malcolm Gladwell book that's not quite as famous is called what the Dog Saw. If you don't have that one, I would check that one out. It's really interesting. I had that one as a book on tape. And he talks about Ron Popeil, the guy that was like the infomercial specialist that did the.

Quicktime Showtime. I think it was called the Showtime. It was a rotisserie. Like, you put the chicken in, you slide up the window, you set it, and forget it.

Yeah.

And you talk about paid ads. They ran that infomercial ran for 23 years straight profitably. And if you know anything about infomercials, those things are really expensive to buy. Holy cow. That must be some serious profit they crank through there. So that's an amazing book to listen to as well.

What the Dog Saw. Cool. We'll get on that. Now, where should people go? Check you out, obviously. Ad skills, all the stuff you guys are doing, where's the best place to point them?

Yep. Adskills.com I don't do really consulting anymore. This is really where we focus is I run traffic for a couple very select individuals, and I teach that skills. And so Justin's the same way. He's not running traffic for anybody. We just. This is where we focus is teaching this and building this up. And we're excited. If we can help you turn paid traffic into paying traffic. We're doing our job.

Right on. Love what you guys are doing. Keep doing it, please. I know you will. And we'll definitely share the love with as much as we can here and appreciate your time, man. Extra time.

Absolutely. And. And I sent you guys the link for that YouTube director on site worksheet. Well, I know you guys will put it in the show notes, but that should definitely help you from the perspective of building an ad. And then take what is in here and combine it with what Tom's going to talk about and create something incredible.

YouTube magic conversions. Awesome. Man. Thank you, John. Appreciate everything.

Absolutely. Talk soon, guys.

All right. All right. Thank you. And I hope you just enjoyed this episode you just listened to. Now, right now, before we sign off, I have a few things I would love for you to do. So the very first thing is to go find our guest on Facebook and tell them that you loved their episode with us.

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