Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 0:18

Happy Wednesday, everyone. I am Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson digital strategist with BWG Connect. And we are a network and knowledge sharing group. We stay on top of the latest trends, challenges, whatever shaping the digital landscape we want to know and talk about it. We will do at least 500 of these virtual events this year due to the increase in demand to better understand the digital space. And we'll also do at least 100 in person, small format dinner. So if you happen to live in a tier one city in the US, feel free to check out our website, BWGconnect.com, or send us an email. We'd love to send you an invite. The dinners are typically 15 to 20 people having a discussion on a certain digital topic, and it's always a fantastic time. We spend the majority of our time talking to brands. That's how we stay on top the latest trends. I'd love to have a conversation with you, so feel free to drop me a line at Tiffany@BWGconnect.com, and we can get some time on the calendar. It's from these conversations we generate the topic ideas we know people want to learn about. And it's also where we gain our resident, experts such as Blue Wheel, who's with us today? Anybody that we ask to teach the collective community has come highly recommended for multiple brands within the network. So if you're ever in need of any recommendations within the digital space, please don't hesitate to reach out. We have a short list of the best of the best, and we would love to provide that information to you a few housekeeping items before we get rolling. So we started here a few minutes after the hour. Rest assured, we will wrap up at least five to 10 minutes before the end of the hour, to give you ample time to get to your next meeting or wherever you need to go. And we want this to be fun, educational, conversational, so put as many questions comments you have into the chat or the Q and A, or you can always email me at Tiffany@BWGconnect.com and we will get to them as we go through the presentation. So with that, let's rock and roll and start to talk about the shift to a broader audience and what it means for ad and creative. The team at Blue Wheel have been awesome, long term partners, friends of the BWG community. So I'm going to kick it over to you, Nick, if you can give a brief introduction on yourself, that would be lovely, and then we can dive into the presentation. Thanks so

Nick Bond 2:21

much. Perfect. Thanks, Tiffany, Hi everyone. I'm Nick Bond. I'm the VP of brand strategy at Blue Wheel. I oversee our strategic teams advising our clients on the best way to grow their brands digitally. Little background on myself. I've been in digital for over a decade now. My background primarily came from the VC funded tech startup space, acquiring users on SaaS tools, growing that and securing more VC funding. I've moved into E comm for the last six years, and at Blue wheel, I specifically specialize with our CPG eCommerce brands and growing those in in their digital environments. Little bit about Blue wheel as a whole, just so you can have an idea of our perspective as well as my perspective that I that I'm coming to you with. We as a full service omnicommerce agency handle everything from click to ship so omni channel advertising, Google, Facebook, Amazon, you name it. We're advertising there. Influencer Marketing, lifecycle, SEO, so driving demand from click all the way to catalog management, customer service, brand expansion across marketplaces. So the ship component, so this gives us a really well rounded view of growing businesses digitally. So we have a very good idea of how to drive the demand, but also the key things that brands need to shift to capture that demand and grow that on the back end of their business. Awesome. I'm going to take this over to our agenda for the call today. So Tiffany teed me up really well here the push to broad audiences, and the impacts on ads and creative, as I'm sure a lot of you have seen, we've seen a huge shift in the market, particularly in advertising on more and more ad platforms, prompting towards broad audiences, that's led to a lot of differences in the way that we advertise today from where we were at three four years ago. So something that you know, we've kind of got our eyes on, the prize here is, what does this mean? Needs to shift from our perspective on advertising as well as you know how brands are adapting to these new environments. Today, we'll cover why the platforms are pushing for this, to give you an understanding of the benefit to the platform, as well as the benefit to the advertiser. We'll talk through budget consolidation, campaign learning specific tactics within certain ad platforms, like Meta’s advantage, plus google performance, Max TikTok, pushing for open targeting. And then primarily the focus is, how can you use that to your. Advantage. So how can you adapt your creatives to open targeting, and how can you use the first party data from your website to improve the way that your algorithm learns for your own purposes running your own advertising?

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 5:14

Awesome, friendly reminder, questions, comments put into the chat or the Q and A as we move along? Thanks.

Nick Bond 5:24

All right, so diving in here, why are platforms pushing for broader targeting? There's several reasons, and pretty much every platform that you could advertise on is pushing in this direction. They want what they would refer to as audience signals. So give them an idea of who your target customer is, but from there, let them target anyone they think will do the action you're looking for. So there's a few reasons why this is happening. One is platform algorithms are getting smarter at optimizing towards events that are happening. So finding people who will take a certain action that you're asking them to take. The other thing is, algorithms learn faster if they have more budget and more time behind fewer campaigns and fewer audiences. So that's a key consideration from a technical perspective. Consolidating spend into fewer audience segments also improves the learning phase. So getting your campaigns optimized faster is kind of the name of the game, so that you can make educated decisions on whether or not your content or your target audiences are impactful. And then simplified ads management, kind of pulling back from the ad platform itself and talking a little bit on the advertiser side. Simplified ads management. If you have fewer campaigns you're managing, you can make quicker insights on content and creative that is or is not working. Channel budget allocation that is or is not working. The more campaigns you're running, and the more you're diversifying your budgets, the harder it is to tell which piece you're moving that's impacting your top line and subsequently your bottom line on the advertising space. And then the last kind of point here is it's less about defining your audience through targeting and more about targeting your audience through your creative so that's going to be a key trend that we'll talk through on this. But it's more about say what you want to say to who you want to say it to, and rely on the platform to find those people and get them to take the action you're asking them to take. We have, you know, some some key platforms here on the right, and they're kind of tactic that they're tying to this exact topic. So I'm sure most of you are familiar with Google Performance Max. This was something Google had switched to a couple years back, moving away from things like just search or just shopping campaigns and really consolidating the entire customer journey into one campaign. Similarly Meta, subsequently, has come out with advantage plus, which removes a lot of your targeting segmentation and abilities to micro target specific audience segments because they want you to lean into the fact that they're more equipped at finding the right customer than you would be able to do manually. And then there isn't a specific tactic that TikTok has that's kind of branded at this point, but I will say through all of our conversations with our TikTok reps and our work on the brands that we've had, TikTok has pushed for broad audiences, open targeting, let the algorithm find your customer, not define your customer, because it increases those platforms costs. So those are just some examples we'll kind of talk through in practice a lot of those.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 8:42

Would you say that one platform is pushing for broad audiences more than another?

Nick Bond 8:48

At this point, it kind of seems like a swell from from every platform. I will say, I think that Meta in general is probably the furthest along with how to use this and showing results behind it. I think in general, in addition to advantage plus Meta, has several other offerings, like advantage plus audiences, which is different than an advantage plus campaign. And in general, Meta, prior to rolling these tactics out, has been pushing for broader audiences for the last four to five years and saying that that makes the campaigns more efficient and lowers your cost to serve advertising. I think performance Max was following that suit on Google. And TikTok is the newest player to this game, so I think they're starting off by making that be their baseline recommendation, which wouldn't have been where, you know, Meta or Google would have been five years ago.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 9:47

Super interesting.

Nick Bond 9:51

So diving into kind of the first part of this is campaign learning. So this is going to be for your technical advert. Advisor, the person that's actually buying your media. They're the ones controlling where your budgets are going. This is really crucial for their piece of what they're managing. There's kind of two charts here. You'll see, one is the challenge that advertising platforms were seeing before. So if you're looking at the top chart, this would have been the typical way that media was purchased before. So you have different audience segments all with their own budget, and one of those segments might be hitting your target cost per action, while these others are places that are still spending and using the same pot of budget you have for your media, but only one of them is hitting the exact thing that you want to see happen. And so what would happen here is advertisers would move budget out of the underperforming ad sets into the best performing ad set. And then when that stops scaling, they don't have a solution as to where to put their budgets. So then they start other ad sets that they're testing. And when I say ad set, I'm referring to a campaign or an audience segment. So basically, each one of these is their own group of people you're targeting. In some cases, these overlap, if you have overlap and you're targeting, and in other cases, they might be completely different people, but only one of them is getting you the results that you want to see. And so the solution for this is through budget consolidation, so in the new format that these platforms are using, and I'll reference Meta a lot, because I think they're probably the most advanced in this at this moment, Meta advantage, plus campaigns, for example, would look more like the chart you see below. So by consolidating your budget into one giant audience and saying, I want to get my lowest cost per purchase for everyone that could get this ad, what that essentially allows this to do is serve it to different people over time. And you might have some moments where your CPA is higher and some moments where your CPA is lower, but the concept is over time, you're reaching more people more frequently that hit the goal you want to have. You know a quick pro quo stad, does you know status on how that works, both TikTok and Meta require about 50 conversion events in a seven day period to consider the campaign optimized and out of the learning phase. If you're thinking about this in terms of how much you're paying for someone to do something from your ads, and I'll use cost per purchase as an example. Let's say we're optimizing for purchases on a eCommerce website. If I'm paying $100 to get somebody to buy something on the website, that means that I need to spend 50 times that in a seven day period in one audience for that to have enough conversions for the algorithm to know what to do with that information. So if I'm looking at it that way, you can see how in this first chart, by running three separate audiences, I need to have a $5,000 budget behind each of those, versus a $5,000 budget behind one audience to get the same CPA effect and to get each of these out of their own learning phase. And not all of these audiences would have the same performance. So this causes a huge inefficient inefficiency with budgets. And so from a media buying perspective, this is actually less for the advertiser to manage, but manage in a smarter way. And if something isn't working, let's say you know you're in this consolidated view with one audience, and you're not hitting your target. CPA, the only lever you really need to adjust is your creative and your budget. Um, versus your creative, your budget, your target audiences, who you include, who you exclude, and all the other levers that were available previously

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 14:08

very interesting and levers that are in your control when it comes to content and creative and as opposed to not knowing exactly What levers are out there, exactly why, not working

Nick Bond 14:22

exactly. And I say this in a bittersweet way, advertisers have a very hard time with this, and so do brands, mostly because it removes the control of being able to change something if you don't like what you're seeing. So that said, this is also backed with pretty stellar performance metrics behind advantage plus and some of the other tactics that Meta has come out with to showcase that it actually is more efficient than a manual advertiser, changing where your budgets are being spent,

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 14:56

absolutely, very cool questions, comments put into the chat. Page or the Q and A. So applying demographic filters, does that affect this type of setup when you're consolidating?

Nick Bond 15:09

Yes, so this is where you'd get a little more technical. So it kind of depends on what campaign you're looking at. So let's say Meta advantage, plus, you really can't apply any type of demographic filters to that campaign. All you can do is adjust how much of your budget goes towards your existing customer segment or a new customer segment. And that's like a don't spend more than 10% of my budget on my existing customers. That's about the extent of the control that you have with that campaign. For other campaigns, though, if we're talking about, you know, TikTok, broad audiences, or, let's say, like Meta acquisition campaign with a with a broad audience, you can apply filters to those. So you could say, I just want to target women in the US, or you could say, I want to target 18 to 35 in the US. What I will say happens, though, is the more limitations you put on who you can serve ads to, the higher your cost to serve them is, so higher CPMs, higher CPCs, and that leads to higher cost per action. So if we're talking about purchases, that's higher cost per purchase because you're spending more to reach a smaller amount of people in the market. So if we're applying that to this kind of budget consolidation chart, here you your target demographic that is your core buyer might be that 18 to 35 year old woman in the US, in which case you're seeing these lower costs to serve here with that audience, however, you can still reach other customers and maintain the CPA you want to see by letting the algorithm reach out to those people if it thinks that they're going to buy. So they might not be your core customer, but it's someone who it's cheap enough to serve them and get them to purchase that. It makes sense for the campaign to do that. You won't get that if you're excluding those people. And over time, what we found is even when we do apply exclusions, the ad costs go up when we don't apply exclusions. Most of the time, I'm talking 90 to 95% of the time, if you look at where your budgets were actually spent in these broad campaigns, it is your target demographic and your target consumer, and it will just reach people outside of that when they're most likely to take the action you're optimizing for.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 17:35

So brands can prioritize who they spend their budget on, even though it is consolidated

Nick Bond 17:42

exactly, so you can do like I would consider targeting all women in the US broad. Still, it's not completely open targeting, but that makes sense if your product is something that only women would buy as an example. If you're, you know, and I'll speak to my skincare background. I've, you know, a lot of extensive background in beauty. Skincare is a primarily women based purchasing community. And if I'm thinking of like traditional, you know, female skincare brands, that would their core consumer is that like 25 to 45 year old female, they could just target women because, you know, I'm assuming the conversion rates there are better however, they're missing out on being able to convert the men that would purchase if they're not including them in the targeting.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 18:36

That's a really good example. Super interesting. So how does testing come in. So how can you test, say, one audience segment against another in a consolidated form?

Nick Bond 18:48

Yeah, so if you wanted to test one audience segment against another, I guess my question would be, do you need to know something to inform what your brand is doing? Because you would need to do a traditional this audience or that audience set up across campaigns in order to test that. But most of the time, when we're speaking with brands, a lot of them think that that is a solution to improve their ad efficiency. I don't think that's how that should be used. If you want the cheapest cost per purchase, let the platform optimize for the cheapest cost per purchase. If you want to test. I'm trying to think of a good example here. But let's say you're a brand, and you're kind of tiering between like you have a product, and you're not sure who's using it or why, and you think that it's a travel segment, or you think that it's this core Sephora skincare buying segment, and you need to know which route to go to make a business decision, it would make sense to dedicate like an AB test budget, to test two audiences against each other. Care and report back the subsequent results, but that shouldn't be a long term strategy to drive sales. And I think that's the misconception we run into with brands a lot, is brands think that it's a solution to increase their sales and improve efficiency, when, in fact, like most of the time, we wouldn't recommend just targeting skincare consumers, because that's a very narrow audience in a segment where anyone could buy

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 20:28

fascinating, very cool questions Thomas put into the chat, it makes so much sense. I mean, it really does, but it's a bit it's a change. It's a big change and a shift in mindset. Yeah,

Nick Bond 20:41

I can't tell you. I you know, everyone loves a good persona like Sally, sells a lot, buys my products every day. We all are used to that format. But what I find is, like, the more niche you try to make your target consumer, you're not necessarily increasing your conversion rate as much as you're increasing your cost to reach those people.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 21:06

Sally sells a lot like that one. I

Nick Bond 21:09

just threw something

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 21:13

a question here. This is a good one. How long does it take you to create trust and algorithm and the new targeting features.

Nick Bond 21:23

So if you're a brand who's never advertised, that's a tough question to answer, because you would need to start spending some dollars to understand how much you're paying to get someone to do something. So for the sake of these examples, I'll pretty much stick to like an eCommerce model, cost per purchase, but you can apply this to any thing you're optimizing towards, leads, traffic, etc. If I'm optimizing for purchases, and let's say you're already running advertising, you should know what you're paying per purchase from the platforms you're running on. So let's say you're spending $30 a purchase on Meta to convert someone on your website, you should be spending enough that you can get 50 purchases in a seven day period behind that one campaign. So the trust the algorithm conversation one make sure you have solid content, which we'll talk through in this deck. You know content approaches. But if you if you feel really good about the creative and content you have in your advertising and that it represents the product well, and it should sell it to the person that would benefit from it, I would spend enough budget that you're hitting 50 conversion events in a seven day period, and then look back at the campaign and say, during the last part of that seven days. How was the campaign doing most of the time? I'm looking at running things for 14 days before even examining the data to see if it improved. Because if you're thinking about it this way, you know, I put the example here on the left. If your CPA is $100 spend 5000 in a seven day period behind one broad audience. Let that get the conversions. If you've gotten 50 in a seven day period, great. If you haven't, you need to spend more, which I know is not like a great solution for growing brands. A lot of them are hesitant to spend that kind of money, but we have seen time and time again that your CPA the subsequent week will be significantly improved from when you launch the campaign. So it's a time and money thing. And so the formula here for success really is spend enough to get those 50 conversions in seven days, but then give it another week and look at that second week and say, how much did my efficiency improve from the first week I launched the campaign? And if it wasn't enough for you to see life in it, then you need to go back to the drawing board on content and come back to it.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 23:46

Got it cool. Another question here. How many segmentations do you recommend, especially if you have, let's say your B2B and B2C, and you have multiple Do you lump them together and let the algorithm figure it out? Or do tee it up or

Nick Bond 24:01

so? That's a great question. You can't lump them together if you have different goals for the segments. Okay, so in that example, it sounds like you'd be optimizing for cost per purchase and cost per lead. Those have to be two different segments, because you're asking them to do two different things. You're asking one segment to fill out a form. You're asking another segment to commit to buying something. Your CPAs are going to be different. And in a technical perspective, the advertising platform only lets you select one event to optimize toward, so you would need to choose what you want that segment to do and run a campaign to them. And also, the ads you're running are different. You wouldn't run an ad telling someone to go fill out a form for a B2B, SaaS tool and serve that to somebody you're asking to go buy a product.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 24:47

So you can really have as many segmentations as whatever your objectives are. There's no magic number. There is

Nick Bond 24:55

not a magic number. But the main premise here is, let's say you. Have those two that means you have to apply this process to both of them separately, and have the budgets to support both of them separately.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 25:09

Got it? Great questions. Awesome. Well, I'm

Nick Bond 25:14

going to move to the next slide, because I think this will address a lot of the questions that are probably coming up about Okay, so if creatives the formula here, how do we use creative? So since targeting is everyone, what you need to do is have diverse creative that reaches the customers you want to reach. If you're a brand that has, let's say, three different primary segments of people buying your product. Let's say it's like travel, skin care and Salon hair care, fluent people. You would need content that speaks to the all three of those people differently and run that so that the algorithm can find each of those and pair the creative with that person. So looking at the creative testing model, if we look at the, you know, we talked about budget consolidation, this is the creative piece of that. The old model was you had a segment for your new customers. You had this segment for your we'll call them warm audience, so people who've engaged with you, and then your past purchasers. So you would previously have prospecting ads that speak to someone who doesn't know who you are, ads that speak to someone who's already aware of who you are, but hasn't committed to buying from you, and then ads speaking to people who've already bought from you, and you're asking them to do something else you still want that content mix. The difference is now, instead of you manually separating those campaigns out and subsequently increasing your budget because you have to support them, you can now have that in one campaign, which would be tactics like advantage plus and performance Max, where it's not just for new customers, it's not just existing customers, and what it's doing is pairing the content you have in that campaign with the person that it thinks it's going to get the best results from. So previously, if you had just your prospecting ads in one campaign, just your retargeting ads in another that's great. But do you know if that retargeting customer got enough information from seeing the prospecting ad the first time to still commit to buying from the brand? Probably not. So what the algorithm does is it periodically serves different creative to those audiences to see is your existing audience, your engaged audience, or your new audience, interacting with each of those creatives differently and which one's best suited for where those people are at in the funnel,

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 27:52

that is fascinating. So old model manually deciding which creative is used for different audiences, make with your own assumptions that you don't know could be right or wrong. And now in the new model, you're putting that together, but you're letting the system algorithm actually decide for you. Basically, wow, and a lot of

Nick Bond 28:17

Yeah, it i Well, from an advertise, ad buying perspective, this is genius because it removes manual budget adjustments like significantly, and allows you to focus more on like creative and content, which is where most paid social platforms are driving. And it's becoming increasingly important across Google as well. But I think the larger takeaway for me from this is the platform is optimizing toward what you're asking someone to do. So if you're optimizing for purchases, in theory, the things that should be getting budget and serving to people are the things most likely to get a purchase. If I think about this in terms of, let's say, a reach awareness campaign or a traffic campaign. So optimizing for impressions or optimizing for clicks, anybody can be served an ad. I don't know that this model works for CPM based bidding. So like, if I'm optimizing for just getting impressions, I can serve anyone an ad. They don't need to do anything to get served an ad. They just have to scroll past it if I'm asking for someone to click my ad. So traffic, there's a lot of people who would click an ad. That doesn't mean that they're a customer that's going to buy your product. So a lot of these campaigns are very driven by an ROI Focused bid strategy, where you're optimizing for purchases or leads or something that gets you a consumer, and that's how these work. I wouldn't necessarily think this is like the best fit for driving traffic to your website. You could spend a lot less on traffic campaigns, but what you'll typically find is the conversion rate. Or lower your bounce rates higher. You're not seeing a high quality audience. You're seeing a high quantity audience. This is focused on Audience Quality and making sure that the people that do get served your ads are the most likely to take the action you're asking them to, which in this case would be purchase or filling out a form, something like that.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 30:20

Do fascinating, very cool. Bring out more questions comments as we move along. Again. Makes so much sense, but such a major shift in what's been done historically,

Nick Bond 30:36

definitely, and I have some examples we can go through now about how to use different creative in these smart tactics to reach different people. So funnel stage, we now have your existing audience, your engaged audience, and your new people, new to brand people, all in the same bucket. Who gets what the name of the game here is content diversification and having different pieces of content that speak to different things about your business and meet people at different stages of the information that they need to commit to doing what you're asking them to do. So this is an example of a brand who has a few different ways that they need to explain their product. So it's a premium price point hair tool, and you can't expect someone to buy $140 tool the first time they see an ad. So in order to generate the demand, we have one message. In order to convince somebody it's worth their time to look into it, we have a different message. And in order to convince somebody that they should go buy it, we have a different message. So the idea here is, your content should say different things in order to reach different people, if all of your content says the same thing. And this is where I find brands get into an optimization hole, as we'd like to call it, like at one time you saw your highest return on ad spend was behind an ad that said this product will give you huge volume. The only people you're going to convert are the people that interact with that content and don't need any other information. So to take your best performing creative and make all your other creative look like that actually hurts you, because you already have a piece of content that's doing that well, and what you don't have is content that's convincing different people to buy your product. So in this case, and I can play a couple of these examples. We have a concept here on the left that's talking about generating demand. So people who tease their hair for volume aren't aware that t like, aren't aware or are aware and don't have a better solution for the fact that teasing damages your hair. So by education, we're telling people, Hey, teasing isn't the best way to get the volume you want. We have a better solution on these other two pieces. Saves time, saves money is the name of the game with most products. So how does, how quickly does the tool work and the saving money piece, comparing it to salon blowouts like these, are all different concepts that speak to different people, or they could speak to the same person in different ways, depending on where they're at. So I'll play a couple of these as an example,

Guest Speaker 33:30

not having to tease your hair ever again. I like the fact that you can.

Nick Bond 33:33

Are you getting the audio on this? Yes,

Guest Speaker 33:38

he is blood without having to tease your hair, because teeth and connection costs. Thin hair, quite a bit of damage. I have no products in my hair, no damaging teasing, just the blue. It's honestly so much more volumized than it was before. My hair is still super soft. I can run my hands through it. Gone are the days of teasing your hair.

Nick Bond 33:55

You get the gist. And then from there, you know, time saving, it's

Guest Speaker 34:00

to add volume to any hairstyle gives you instant volume, instant volume, volume. I like how it's so quick it's also fast.

Nick Bond 34:07

So UGC, bunch of people talking about the same value proposition of the product, really showcasing that it works for multiple people, and they're all saying the same thing about it. And then same for the salon. Blowout pool is an absolute

Guest Speaker 34:21

game changer. So if you're going to take it, you clamp it down, and it only buys the shirt, and it's that easy. Wow, wow, you're kidding. Are you seeing what I so that is on

Nick Bond 34:40

where people are at and explaining the product in different ways. So like, what are all the values of your product? And make content around all of them, and run that all together, because it'll reach different people. Another is segmenting your audience by, you know, your audience. It. So we, you know, we talked about creative with where people are at in consideration for the product. You can also do this in different ways for the type of person you're trying to reach. So here, you know, this skincare brand, we're trying to reach the travel segment, a skincare segment and the makeup segment, and reach them in different ways,

Guest Speaker 35:22

using this great skincare lately, and I've been obsessed with it,

Nick Bond 35:28

so leaning into, you know, the Greek roots of the product, the brand really appealing to that travel segments

Guest Speaker 35:37

on my nose, which I've been so self conscious of for years have just disappeared. I use my porous Greek yogurt foaming and then makeup, move your makeup and leave your skin feeling refreshed and revitalized and gently lose all of it. So all three

Nick Bond 35:51

pieces of content are talking about the same product. They're talking to different people. And that's basically the premise of content diversification, is, if you have this broad audience, have solid content that sells the product to a specific person, and run a lot of that in different ways.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 36:12

Very cool. I love the examples, great examples.

Nick Bond 36:16

And then the third and kind of last part of this is the more different kinds of media you're running, the lower your ad costs are. So we've shown a lot of video content, I would say video is king at this point in paid social everyone knows the importance of video content. However, that is not to say you should only be running video content, because if I think about media buying from a placement and cost perspective, different content costs, different amounts to serve to different people at different times. The best way to do this is, you know, we talked about where they're at in the funnel. We talked about the different customer you're trying to talk to. The other thing is, the different ways you're reaching them, video content, carousels, static content as examples here. These are all different media formats. The more media formats you have, the lower your cost to serve advertising is. So you might get very effective CPMs from video content, but more effective clicks from a static asset, and more effective average order value from something like this carousel ad that's showing multiple products, they work together to get you the best results out of the campaign. So if these were all running for the same brand and the same campaign optimizing for purchases, I could expect this is going to lean towards new customers getting impressions. I need to show people the brand, this is going to lean into people considering multiple products and increase my average order value. And this is going to lead to high conversion rates on one product that I'm highlighting. And I love this ilmakyosh example here, they've pretty much perfected thumbstop rate, which I'll talk

Guest Speaker 37:58

about in just a second, if you have to do this, you need a new foundation. Never bake again, never over apply again, never over complicate again. With this foundation, you don't have to this quiz is so scarily accurate. Answered a few questions, and this is literally my perfect shade. Am I even wearing foundation? This foundation covers everything, but it still looks like skin insane. Looks so natural. I took that 92nd quiz on their website to match me perfectly. It feels like I have nothing on my face.

Nick Bond 38:43

So I could keep running through this. But there's kind of a few important pieces with video. Specifically, the first three seconds are highly important. So when we when we talk about something like thumb stop rate, that's the rate of people watching more than three seconds of your video out of the total number of people watching your video. So if I'm thinking about impressions, anybody can scroll past an ad, and in fact, most people, on average, scroll the length of the empire state building every day. So it's an extreme amount of content people are consuming. You need to make sure that people are stopping and interested in what you're showing them, and you can measure that through thumbstop rate on video content. From there, it's really about watch time. So in this content, you'll notice they do something very engaging to capture your attention. They then move into different information throughout the course of the video, and different issues people are having to keep people watching to find out more about what they're talking about. The longer your watch time, and the more people stopping to watch your video, the lower your cost to serve ad is, and subsequently, typically see better results as far as like cost per. Purchase or cost per what you're optimizing for. So video content has a few layers of of optimization complication to it that other asset types don't, but a well rounded asset grouping will help you get the best results. Very cool. I I'll stop there and just see if there's any questions coming in from the group before I move on.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 40:26

Comments. Looks like we are caught up. We're good, but definitely keep them coming in our last like 510 minutes here,

Nick Bond 40:33

perfect. So moving on, making the most out of broad targeting. So we've talked about why. We've talked about the creative to make that happen. So now we're talking about, like, how do we get the most out of it? So audience signals, and I'm gonna say like, as a brand, if you have your own website, or if you have a customer list, like, you have information that is helpful for these platforms to reach better people in these broad audience environments. So I've attached a few examples here of different platforms in the way that they use this information. So for example, in Meta, you can use your customer audience to create a look alike of the US population that looks the most like your customer. From there, I could say I want to reach, you know, most people, most brands, don't have a budget to reach everyone in the US. If you do, maybe you're like Coca Cola or something, and you know, you've saturated the market, and everyone knows who you are. Most brands don't have that level of budget and are trying to stand out in a sea of people advertising on these platforms. So if you can use your information you have IE or customer list to say, find more people that look like this customer, you can actually apply a one through 10% filter to the US population to say, find me 10% of the US population that looks the most like my customer already, and only spend towards those people. So this is a way to still have a broad audience with out necessarily paying to serve everyone for the platform to figure it out. It gives it a jump start on who to go for first and allows it to expand beyond that if it thinks it's going to find other people that can do what you're asking it to do. Similarly, Google Ads has audience signals. This works in a very similar manner. Who are people that you care about reaching more and what should the platform know about your customer to make better decisions on who to target, and then targeting, you know, with TikTok is very similar in that regard. So look alike. Audiences are something you can use here as well as exclusion audiences. So let's say you want to make sure you let's say you're a brand that's very acquisition focused. Most most brands are, but let's say your goal is not retention or nurturing your existing customers. So the hair tool brand I spoke of before is a really good example. You buy the tool once, you're not really going to be a valuable customer after that first purchase. Being able to exclude your purchasers is also very crucial, so understanding who like you never want to serve ads to, and being able to remove those people from your campaigns.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 43:25

Very cool. How challenging is it to technically set up something like this for a brand?

Nick Bond 43:32

It depends on your infrastructure. So I know you know your marketing stack impacts this quite a bit. So we love brands that work on Shopify and Klaviyo, we think that that is like the sweet spot of platforms to work with. Klaviyo as an example, can dynamically sync all of your existing audience segments and use your Shopify information to push all of that into Meta Google TikTok, so that those audiences are dynamically updated. That's the best way to do it. You can also manually Import Export spreadsheets. There's a lot of ways this could be set up, but if you can make it a dynamic system where every time you acquire a customer, they're automatically moved into those audiences, that would be like ideal case.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 44:16

That sounds beautiful. It usually is. Hi Leah, efficient, no friction, awesome, right?

Nick Bond 44:28

And did we see a question come through?

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 44:30

Yeah? Regarding videos, yeah, so is it best to have a speaking video or esthetically pleasing video?

Nick Bond 44:41

Both? Or neither. I'm being cryptic on purpose, so you might want to run both. I mean, you might not see the same performance from both, but the campaign's not going to spend behind something that isn't getting you conversions. So that's the. Beauty of those campaigns. If you are a customer, you know, speaking as me, as an individual, if I get served an ad where someone's speaking at me about something, I might stop and listen to what they have to say, and I could care about it, or it might not resonate with me, and I'd move on. I might see a really beautiful asset running as an ad and just stop to look at it, and I'm consuming content that way, so you're likely reaching different people or the same person in different ways. So I wouldn't say that one's a priority over the other. It's use both. Use them together. Use them separately. But if you're mixing the content in that way and running it all together, the platform should be able to tell you what's getting you the best results.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 45:45

So we're testing great example. That's good, yeah, for sure.

Nick Bond 45:52

Um. And then finally, you know, we've talked about using the the information you have to improve your audience targeting. The other piece of this is, you know, a lot of brands will use this information to improve reach or quality of their audiences for other tactics. So, you know, we just talked about this, but data sources, you can get this information from your website, pixels, so your your Meta pixel, your Google Pixel, your analytics pixel, your TikTok pixel, those are all tracking users on your website. They're tracking that information, and can share that information your CRM or email tool I provided the Klaviyo Shopify example, and your social handles, who's interacting with your social content organically, like those people are also doing something with your brand, and you can track all of that. You can track it. You can target it, you can exclude it. And so examples of own data would be the people engaging with you on social media, the people visiting your website, your email subscribers, your past purchasers. And you can use that to make sure that you're reaching new people, and you can also use that to make sure you're reaching more new people that look more like the people you want. And so something that I typically always advise brands on is when you think about the concept of a look alike audience, think about what you want that person to do. Most eCommerce brands, I would argue, want somebody to purchase something. It doesn't necessarily make sense to use your social engagers or people who just went to your website and didn't buy, or people who subscribed your email and didn't buy to make a look alike of the US that looks like someone who would subscribe to your email and not purchase, or would go to your website and not purchase, or would go to your social media and engage and not purchase. That's not what you want them to do. So for us, a lot of times, the most valuable forms of these are purchaser audiences, because that's what we want people to do. So we want more people that look like the people that actually commit to buying the

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 48:01

product, totally makes sense. So could you apply this to non direct to consumer efforts like marketplace growth, retail sales

Nick Bond 48:10

an amazing question, and it's actually the premise of a lot of what we do. So we work with omnicommerce brands, right? Like we usually work with brands that are in multiple distribution channels, that are not just selling on direct to consumer websites, and they are generally running these like very broad segments of people, and sending traffic to Amazon, sending traffic to their retail partners. And because you can't optimize yet, I'll say, I'll tease this out, you can't optimize yet for sales on Amazon, you can't optimize yet for sales at Sephora or Target or Walmart or these partners. Because of that, what we can actually do is use this information to make the people we send there a higher quality person with a higher conversion rate when they get there. So kind of opposite and counterintuitive to the conversation we had about broad audiences and broad targeting, for optimizing for goals, I would not necessarily say that that's the best tactic for traffic campaigns to support retail or Amazon, because, like we said earlier, a lot of people would get served an impression. A lot of people would get served a click. And you can't optimize for a purchase, so these broad audiences aren't really an option for that, but what you can do is use these broad audiences optimizing for conversions on your website, and then take that information on who bought and filter down to a more specific audience that you then can use to send traffic to retail or marketplace that look more like your customer. And

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 49:47

so awesome, and it is no matter what we're doing, dinners, events, webinars, everybody wants more. First party data. Help me utilize it, maximize it for our whole ecosystem. And

Nick Bond 49:57

name of the game there is, oh. Been targeting to drive it to your website, and then from there, close targeting to make sure that you're targeting the right people to get people engaging with your brand on different distribution channels.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 50:10

Very cool. This was great content. Thank you so much. Nick, you guys always bring the best of the best. Appreciate it. Yeah,

Nick Bond 50:20

appreciate it, definitely. So key takeaways here, yeah, we we pretty much hit on all of these. But if you have hyper segmented audiences, I would highly consider consolidation there with your top performing creatives to start and then start putting in different kinds of creatives you hadn't thought to use yet diversifying creative super important design your creatives, both for your existing customer and also for people that are not your existing customer, and see if that works to get you more purchasers, and then using your first party data that you're getting from that effort to to supplement information to the other parts of your business.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 50:59

Awesome, awesome. Nick, thank you so much for the time the expertise all you do for the community and the Blue Wheel team, we definitely encourage follow up conversations with the Blue Wheel team. They are great and amazing at what they do. Obviously, we'd love to have a conversation with you. That's how we get the content ideas for our future webinar and in person events. So feel free to reach out to me at Tiffany@BWGconnect.com but that is a wrap. Thank you all for joining. Have a lovely Wednesday and see you on our next events. Take care. Take care.