Modern Marketers with Blake Beus and Greg Marshall

Performance Max is going to say, well, Blake’s in market for a new camera, right? Because he’s in market for a new camera. He’s showing up on this website. So we’ll show him some display, then we’ll show him some content from a website, then we’ll show him a YouTube video, though. So it’s kind of like it chooses individuals, and then uses the placements as it thinks it’s best necessary to get you to convert.

Lifetime value is probably the most important metric in a business, in my opinion. Because if you don’t kind of constantly work at trying to increase it, you’re just not going to be able to get the business growth results that you want.

We do this every time we talk about stuff, we just start nerding out before we even turn the camera on and start recording the podcast. And so today you were just talking about you've been testing eight or nine different accounts. Yes. With an old school strategy. Yes. It and it's not new. No, it's, it's, it needs to happen. Yeah, right. Off offline events, specifically for Facebook, Google does this a little bit different, but what we're gonna be talking about Facebook today, uploading offline events to tell, you know, tell everyone out there what that means.

Greg Marshall  0:33  Yeah, essentially what you're doing especially like if you have a Shopify store, but you can do it for WooCommerce, or whatever is any whenever you you have your your buyers on your website, you would download your buyer list or export your orders. And then you would upload that information back into the offline events manager, which can be found in the Events Manager, you just have to create a new offline events account, super easy, and then attach it to your ad account. But what you do is you upload that information, and you just map the data, which is a fancy way of saying, just make sure each column is named correctly. So that when you upload the CSV file, or the Excel sheet, or whatever, it can then understand what it is it should be looking for. Okay. And with this, this has helped tremendously on getting better information and data back into the ad accounts. Because on the ads manager, if you don't upload, it seems like it misses a lot of the purchases, right. And I have a specific account that essentially only does runs ads to sell their product. So this is how I'm using it to measure to make sure that it's accurate. Basically, it's like its own case study, right. And so far, so good. It seems like it does catch all the purchases, where as before he was the challenge that I would run into, we would run the ads. And we know this is the only source of traffic. And you would look into the ad account. But it would say like, you only got a few purchases off this ad, even though we may have had 10 or 15 of this exact product. And we're like, and we know it's not organic traffic, right? Because this is a brand new shirt, we haven't even promoted it anywhere yet. Right? So the only way they could have purchased it was through the

Blake Beus  2:20  app, right? So it's a brand new, this particular thing and brand new product, whatever, there's no SEO no zero for that, for that product, no email campaigns going after that product, no organic social media, whatever, for that product, it's a new product, you run ads for it. And in the back system, you're seeing, you know, 1020 purchases, but um, ads, you're seeing three for purchases, and you know, those purchases had to come from the ad because that's the only source of traffic for that page. Exactly. And so you start uploading off yeah, conversion, we start

Greg Marshall  2:51  uploading off offline conversions. And what happens is, all that data gets fed back into the account. And it starts to show and match up with the amount of sales we actually have. And it breaks down per ad, which ad was doing it. Now the challenge that we had before uploading this was you will look at the cost for purchases if you had 10 sales. But Facebook Ads Manager on the front end is only showing like three, right? Well, your cost of purchase seems like it's outrageous, right? Even though your ad spend to revenue match what you need, right. And the challenge with that is you become tempted to turn off the the campaigns just because the front end numbers are like oh, man, those I mean cost per purchase $48. That doesn't make any sense.

Blake Beus  3:36  So you're ending up turning off an ad that's actually working? Correct. Facebook's reporting? Yep. That is, is inaccurate. Exactly. Right. And it's tough to scale. Because

Greg Marshall  3:46  if no, even though your gut is telling you that this is happening, it's

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Blake Beus  0:00  All right, yeah. Okay. All right. Greg, you were telling me about this time you were working with a client. And you, you let them convince you to make changes, you knew we're not good changes. Yeah. And it didn't, then well. So yes, I wanted to ask you kind of about when you should put your foot down, when you're working with clients, when you should put your foot down and say, No, you're not making these changes, we are not making these changes, and like, how to how to handle that.

Greg Marshall  0:32  Yeah. So I think what I've learned over, you know, I don't know how many clients I've worked with at this point. But it's very similar to even personal training. Clients are, you know, they become influenced by things they're seeing and hearing and, or maybe a conviction that they suddenly have. And when, in the past, what would happen is, I'm thinking of it as one particular client. Yeah, where I'm like, man, you know, they really had huge momentum. And they, because I allowed them to convince me that they should do a different thing. They completely have, like, gone the wrong direction. And so I think the correct time is, immediately, when, when, like, when I look back at because, you know, you make mistakes, even even when it's like indirect, right? Like, it wasn't actually my advice to do what they were doing, but I did it to satisfy the client. There's, there's a slight danger in that. Yeah. Because sometimes you can actually not get the client the results that they actually are desiring by allowing them to dictate what's happening, right. And kind of the situation was, we were talking, we had the way I structured everything, actually not I think this happens twice. The way we structure everything was a way that they felt they personally just fell out of their comfort zone and out of control. Okay. And because of that they made decisions based on that versus the result.

Blake Beus  2:02  Okay, what was was, was this the business owner, like the founder, the founder, owner owner role times both times, okay, okay. Because I think that's relevant sometimes, because they're used to having control over everything. And as a business scales, this happens in more areas than just advertising and media buying. But they need to start letting go of control and delegating and dictating. And this is probably, you know, an instance of that as well. Right? Well, and they were both solopreneurs. Okay, right. And so they didn't even have a team. They don't have any other contractors other than you.

Greg Marshall  2:39  Maybe, but I don't think so. Okay, if they did, it was to two or three. Okay. And so one of the, one of the things that I learned, though, is because I can, in my mind, I can remember exactly what I would do differently, which is, I would have said, You should follow this system, regardless of how you feel. Just look at the numbers. Right? Right. And we were talking about how a lot of times we're making decisions off of emotion. And that's usually the times where you make the worst, right? Because your fears is taken into account, or stress, and then you just start making these these decisions that they don't really make any sense. Yeah, right. And the situation was the way that I had the campaign structured, I had a whole bunch of ad sets, a whole bunch of different targeting a whole bunch, just a lot of stuff visually, when they looked at it, they couldn't fully understand it. Right. And so because of that, they felt like, oh, I don't like I don't like how this looks okay. versus how much am I spent? How much time?

Blake Beus  3:49  Right? And was this? Was this recent, or years ago? Or what is

Unknown Speaker  3:53  two years

Blake Beus  3:54  ago? Two years ago? Okay.

Greg Marshall  3:55  So it's been two years, because I know,

Blake Beus  3:57  we've tal

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Greg Marshall  0:00  Well,

Blake Beus  0:01  you're gonna start off.

Greg Marshall  0:02  Let's do this three times get moving. So we were talking right before we started and we had a, we had a situation. What was this two years ago? Or is it three years? Yeah, I can't remember.

Blake Beus  0:14  I do remember it was January 2020. Because it like kicked off the year. From Hell yes. For me, my business and millions and billions of other people, but it's what started 2020 For me,

Greg Marshall  0:33  we shouldn't know.

Blake Beus  0:34  We shouldn't know. It was a bad. Yeah,

Greg Marshall  0:37  something was gonna throw

Blake Beus  0:38  in the towel move out in the middle of nowhere for two years, and then finally come back to it and start over.

Greg Marshall  0:44  Well, basically, what happened was, Blake and I have been running ads successfully for the whole year. 2019. Yeah,

Blake Beus  0:52  well, actually, we started in May of 2019. Yeah. And we started so this was only from May to December. That's right. And,

Greg Marshall  1:01  yeah, but we were having a good amount of success with our ads. They were pretty consistent. There were some times I'm up and down, of course, like, like, there always is with Facebook. But there was a particular time that we still refer to now. Yeah, that was like, I still remember. Because wasn't it? If it wasn't New Year's Eve, it was

Blake Beus  1:24  around that time, it was New Year's Eve. New Year's Eve was the biggest single revenue day. I remember the specific numbers because we texted each other right after New Year, like the date. Oh, no, it was might have been right after midnight. Because I think,

Greg Marshall  1:42  yeah, we I know for a fact we have both been drinking some champagne. Together. But at some point, because i That's why I think it wasn't a year, it was the

Blake Beus  1:51  first day we were we were $5 Short of hitting us $5,000 in a single day. But here's a kick in sales. This is the kick on one product, this one digital product that spend a fortune that no worries, what was our ad spend 1500 bucks, I'd have to go back it was.

Greg Marshall  2:11  I don't think we hit that for that day. I don't think we hit even maybe it came in higher than 1000.

Blake Beus  2:18  Yeah, it was I mean, it gets a gap was I remember one day, I was like, wow, this is it was a huge thing. The return

Greg Marshall  2:24  was was a mess. You know, we should go back and take a look. It might have been under $1,000. Because I remember the return on asthma was unbelievable, unreal, binary. I didn't actually believe it. I actually I remember reaching out to them saying like, Did you do a bunch of test purchases or something like because the revenue was really high. And then the infamous and I'm sure this half a lot of you guys out there especially ones that are getting great results. Yeah, our Ad Account got what banned, banned. And what?

Blake Beus  3:00  They gave us the biggest generic reason whatsoever. They said there was my not their words, it was basically fishy activity. Like we've noticed some unusual activity on your account and banned us and then wouldn't unbanned us never. We had the we had to launch a brand new ad account and everything. And, and they banned us that first week. So it was the week of the January the first week of January is, is when we got banned, I got banned and then like got put back in and then banned and then permanently banned. And they said there's nothing you can do. We are never going to put this on ban your accounts, you just need to start a new account. And it was absolutely insane.

Greg Marshall  3:47  I remember just kind of thinking, what kind of I guess response that was from Facebook saying, because I remember speaking with Blake and actually asking, like, did we put anything that's against Terms of

So what we tend to do is overthink. It’s like overselling, you think that you have to sound massively complicated for the person to take you serious.

I ran a test the other day. And I bid for video views, but this is on Facebook, okay. And I measured it against a traffic campaign, where one objective you say, I’m looking for video views....

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Greg Marshall  0:00  I don't know, where do we where do we start? Where to? Well, you know, yesterday, we're sending our text messages talking about tracking, right, and the importance of tracking. And you know, how tracking causes a lot of issues? Yeah, with knowing what's working and what's not. And you actually discover something as you were implementing, and you're a seasoned veteran, which, which tells me if a seasoned veteran runs into this, the rest of us people, yeah, are definitely not doing this. So why don't you share a little bit about what you read?

Blake Beus  0:31  Oh, absolutely. So I had this question for a long, long, long time as to what's the best way to actually track conversions. From like a technical standpoint, whenever you set up a new campaign, or a new conversion pixel pixel, specifically with Google, it says, Hey, here's three different ways you can set up this conversion, it could be an imported goal from Google Analytics, you can set it up with Google Tag Manager, or the third option is you can set it to your developer and they will add the code directly on the page with what's called a global site tag. But they don't tell you which one of those is best. Now, I've noticed over the years, that specifically the Google Analytics, importing of the goals, never gave me as many conversions as the other ways of doing it. And it always seemed like the conversions got dropped there. And you were saying you've noticed the same? I did, right? I've actually

Greg Marshall  1:28  tried all three of those. Yes. And the one without a doubt, global site tag works. Yeah. And I just, luckily, or accidentally plugged this in a website correctly. And notice that there was there was more conversions recording. Yeah, then the other two options. And so I just thought, and to give you full disclosure, I also had the other two versions uploaded as well. So I can't compare. Okay, so those numbers are completely different. Yeah. So as I spoke with the client, they would look into the, into the ads manager, and they would notice, how come these they're all tracking the same thing purchases, but how come there's three or four numbers? Yeah. And my thought was, well, this is the Google, you know, pixel on the page. This is the uploaded analytics. And then this is the Google time. And the problem is, it seems like there's some level of drop off right? Where, yeah, and so that actually helped my case to show you can always trust Yeah, the attribution 100% Yes, I'd be 100%. Accurate? Well,

Blake Beus  2:34  absolutely. And the thing is, is like every Google Ads tutorial out there, I've ever seen paid or free on YouTube, or even like provided and made by Google never talks about which one of these is most accurate, they oftentimes will talk about implementing whichever one is easiest for you, based on your setup, whatever. But there's clearly some accuracy differences. So I was diving into some of the Google documentation for something completely different. And I was reading one of their documentation pages on setting up conversion events going through and there's this small little section that says outright, the Google site, global, the Global Site tag with conversion event, is the most accurate way to track any of your events, whether that's a lead conversion, or say a sale or anything like that. And it's only on this one page kind of buried in the documentation, whatever. But it there it is, like, there's there's the evidence, that's the proof. And that's even more accurate than Google Tag Manager, which a lot of people will say, well, it's it's easier when

Greg Marshall  3:49  it's Yeah, tracks as well. I have found just from experience, that the global site is the most Yeah, accurate. And the other thing that I've noticed is, I don't know the documentation that said this, but the

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