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Boost Your Sales with Problem-Centric Ads

Discover why addressing specific problems rather than focusing on products or qualifications can be a game-changer for your marketing strategy.

Kasim and Ralph sit down with Ryan Deiss, founder and CEO of Scalable.co and DigitalMarketer.com, to discuss a powerful strategy to boost your sales: Problem-Centric Ads. Learn how to create these ads, their recent experience using this approach, and how these ads can revolutionize your marketing game.


Furthermore, they reflect on the evolution of marketing strategies and the importance of returning to tried-and-true methods. Listen to this episode now.


This clip is from The Perpetual Traffic Podcast, watch the entire episode here:

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0:00 Boost Your Sales with Problem-Centric Ads

2:46 Isolating the Problem Statement

6:51 Returning to proven strategies before advertisers got impatient and greedy


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Transcript
Ryan:

We did something really cool lately on the scalable side of the house.

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So digital marketers, sister companies,

the scalable company, digital marketer

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focuses on digital marketing and growth.

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The scalable company focuses more on

kind of scale, operational efficiency,

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the two sides of the entrepreneurial

coin and at scalable, we actually have

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an event coming up in a few weeks.

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And so we're doing a lot of testing to

promote that particular event, running

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a bunch of ads and things like that.

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And somebody gave us the idea.

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of running these problem centric ads.

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I was like, what are you talking about?

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And then when he explained it to

me, I was like, Oh yeah, this is

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the most obvious thing in the world.

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We used to do a variation of

it, seven, eight years ago.

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It worked so well, we stopped doing it.

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It was one of those kinds of things.

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But the idea is really simple,

but it's really powerful.

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What you do is you essentially come up

with a list of 30 problem statements.

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That your customer or client would have

like, how would they stay, say their

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problem if you got a sales team, you can

specifically just ask yourself, Hey, what

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are some of the problems that you hear?

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What are the things that people would say?

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In their own words you can also look

at doing searches for like oftentimes

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these will come up in Amazon reviews

for related products and things like

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that, but if you can come up with

brainstorm or you can also use chat

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GPT, hey, ask as a researcher and come

up with X number of problem statements,

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they're using to sound like I wish

I want I need, so there's going to

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be some kind of a problem statement.

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Brainstorm 30 of them and then we created

ad campaigns with an ad where the only

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thing on the ad, it was just a ugly

ad, like a goofy greenish background.

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It was designed to just stick

out and not look nice, right?

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That classic old school.

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Remember when every Facebook ad had

like a hot pink border around it?

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every Facebook ad had cleavage and

or a hot pink border around it.

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Like in the early days of Facebook ads.

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It works like a charm.

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This is hearkening back to the dark pink

or the hot pink back border, ugly color.

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And the only other thing is

just the text of the problem

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statement in a quote, right?

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So one of them for our business,

cause this again is for entrepreneurs.

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It's, if my business is growing,

then why am I making less money?

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Would be an example of a problem

statement that we hear from entrepreneurs.

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You already want to double

click on that right now.

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Like you, you having said, yeah, it's

just, there's this visceral reaction

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in me that goes, I need whatever

contents on the other end of this gate.

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That was one of the ones that won.

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So what we did is we ran

an impression campaign.

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don't remember how many impressions

that we ran, but we weren't really

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interested in conversions or anything

like that, but it was just the image.

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And then the title and description in the

ad was just like, Scale your business.

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It was intentionally generic because the

only thing we wanted to test for when it

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isolate for the problem statement, but

I isolate for the problem statement and

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we just ran some impression campaigns.

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Across it and ran it for, I think, like

400 impressions just took the top 10 in

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terms of click through rate and cost per

click, looking at those as a ratio, what

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were the top 10 ran it again, got it

down to the top five, ran it again, and

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then use that to inform headline tests

on landing pages, but everything else.

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And it was just one of the coolest,

simplest things in the world.

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I think marketers overcomplicate this.

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We need to be speaking into

the problems that we solve for.

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We need to stop talking

about our freaking products.

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Stop talking about even the

category that we're in, how we're

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the best in this particular space.

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Speak to the specific problem.

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The sweet spot is problem

aware people anyway.

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So just speak out to the problem, read

their minds, engage in the conversation

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they're having in their own brains.

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They're likely to click and

what do you know, it worked.

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And so we got some really cool, not just

New ad sets out of that because then we

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decided, okay, let's take this ad copy and

create a bunch of different ad variations

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based on this that looked prettier.

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That was more quote unquote on brand.

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But let's keep the ugly ones in tune.

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See which wins.

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But informing the ads, informing the

landing pages, informing email copy.

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It's just a phenomenal

way to get real data.

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That I just I'm not seeing a lot

of people do, and it was cheap.

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It was like hundreds, maybe a couple

thousand dollars to run that test

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over a period of about 10 to 14 days.

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Makes so much sense.

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And the type of ad was the question or the

statement, was it in the image or was it

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in the copy itself in the image itself?

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Okay.

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In the image itself, there was

almost nothing in the copy.

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Again, like the headline of the

ad was like, scale your business.

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And the other one was.

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Attend this event on how

to scale your business.

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It was intentionally generic.

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We wanted to isolate just

the problem statement itself.

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In the ad, boom, there you go.

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That's a nugget within a nugget,

too, which is split testing.

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The ad is a standalone element

without worrying about the

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entire rest of the funnel.

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We used to do that way back in the

day, but I swear it's been five years.

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Yeah.

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We used to do that approach.

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Yep.

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All the time.

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We do it.

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We got too smart for that.

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Now we test different ad sets and

we don't isolate anything anymore.

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We're just too smart for that, yeah, it

worked so well, we stopped doing it or so.

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I think that's a common problem with a

lot of marketers actually, no matter what

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level you're at Oh, I used to do that

thing and now I don't do that anymore.

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Like one of the things that we are now,

it's like a new strategy is awareness.

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Which is create like a blog post or

a healthy, like a nice educational

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piece of content, which is a gateway

into ultimately the solution that

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you're trying to sell on the backend.

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Just run that and then use all

that data to figure out what your.

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Potential messaging could be for

your conversion ads or the very

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least just at the very top of the

funnel and then just retarget them

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with an actual call to action.

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A conversion ad.

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this is like a new strategy.

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I remember talking about

this seven years ago.

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Yeah, that was the strategy when

retargeting first came to Facebook.

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It was buy ads to content.

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To build your pixeled audience to then

ask to then make the ask and I remember

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back in the day the net cost per lead

was lower if we basically had them click

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on what was the equivalent of two ads

to it because the initial ad cost was

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so inexpensive that because it was good

content and it got shared and all that

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stuff that when it was an ad going to

good content, it actually got shared,

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then it could be, what if we just put

the content in the ad itself, Oh, we can

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actually put videos in these things now,

then we all just got impatient and greedy.

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And so I think so much of this

is discovering what were the

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things that used to work before

we all got impatient and greedy.

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Yeah, we got impatient,

greedy, and spoiled.

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It started to work so well, that

you just, it just money came.

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Like, why would I get in the way of money?

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And so we started running these ads

that were converting like crazy, and

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then when that stopped working for

all the various reasons that we, Talk

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about then now it's back to basics.

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I think so many direct response or

performance marketers Just wanted

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to go for that first touch sale or

first touch opt in first touch level

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of consideration, name email address

without putting anything in front of it

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and there was a time Let's not forget.

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Between let's say 2014 and 2020 or

add costs, they were still relatively

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cheap and you could do that.

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But add costs and C.

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P.

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M.

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S.

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Although I just saw a stat for meta

from our partner manager that actually

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shows that the CPMs for Meta is actually

decreased in the last few weeks.

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I don't trust any of those numbers.

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Let's double check that one.

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Yeah.

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But it just doesn't seem to make sense.

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But anything, whenever you bring

We just got a transmission from the

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Death Star and they told us that Yeah.

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Yeah.

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Somebody intercepted it.

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You're fine.

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Have a picnic.

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It's going to be a bright sunny day.

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Everything's great.

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Everything's great here.

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Just keep running this.

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Usage is up.

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New users are up.

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That's right.

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New babies are being born.

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They're all on Facebook automatically.

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Look at our stock price since

the beginning of the year.

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You didn't realize it actually cratered

at the end of last year, everything

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can have its own individual spin.

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But the point is like that ocean

for website conversions, I don't

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care what niche you're in, is an

expensive bloody red ocean right now.

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So you have to start thinking

about different ways in

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which to approach the market.

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I think this is a

brilliant way of doing it.

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Image with, interview your sales team,

interview your customer service team,

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find out what the real problems are and

just test this strategy super smart.

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I'm curious, and this is a long

nugget by the way, but it's a

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really good one that when they did

actually click, where did they go?

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Did they go to a call to action

page or was it more content?

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Cause you weren't necessarily.

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Looking at that as your success metrics,

you were looking at CPC, you were

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looking at CTR, but where did they go?

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I'm just curious on that, what that next

click in this case, they went over to

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the event an abbreviated event sales

page to, to buy a ticket and it was cool.

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We did actually sell some tickets.

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I didn't necessarily think we would

and we did two step it where the first

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step was to ask for name and email

address, cause I, didn't think that

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we'd have a lot of conversions and

I wanted our sales team to follow up

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with them to actually sell the tickets.

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during this whole test, think we sold a

handful of tickets and, but those handful

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of tickets pretty much offset for the cost

of travel pretty much paid for the test.

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It's not enough that I would have

just kept running that as is, but.

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The data was hugely valuable.

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That's awesome.

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If you can test for free,

that's a really big deal.

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Yeah.

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And I think this can

a friendlier position.

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This can also be done in a

couple hundred dollar budget too.

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Like you guys went a couple thousand

dollars, which the grand scheme of

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things is really is obviously small,

but this can be done and we tell this.

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to even to customers of ours, like

you can test this strategy for like 1

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percent of your total ad budget just

to see if we get any play out of it.

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I think it can be done at a very small

scale and you're going to see to like.

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Those impressions that you get are going

to be at a fraction of the CPM of the

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website conversion ones that you would

run where you're actually asking for a

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name or an email or a registration or

a small purchase, that kind of thing.

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Yeah, you're right.

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And it's a good point.

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What I would have preferred to do is

just what you said, which is test for

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less over a longer period of time.

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We, because the event is coming

up quickly, we needed speed.

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And so we were willing

to pay more for speed.

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But yeah, you can lower your per

day because it's hard, right?

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You run tests like that and you're

pulling all your data over two days.

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It's probably right, but the reality

is some stuff could happen in those

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two days, like who you get shown to

could be different than the normal.

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So I'd rather spend less, have it spread

out over a again, in this case, the

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event is You know, at the time was I

think six weeks away, less time now.

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So we needed to get the data quickly.

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