Paid Advertising That Actually Works With John Horn

Andy Splichal 0:02

Welcome to The Make Each Click Count Podcast. This is your host, Andy Splichal. We are happy to welcome this week's guest to discuss today's topic, which is Paid Advertising That Actually Works. This week's guest is the CEO of StubGroup, a digital advertising agency and a premier Google Ads partner here to discuss how to convert more leads, get more ecommerce sales and grow your revenue is John Horn. Hi, John.

John Horn 1:12

Hi, Andy. So glad to be here. I've been looking forward to speaking with you.

Andy Splichal 1:15

Well, fantastic. We are glad to have you today. Now StubHub, you are a search engine marketing agency, and your tagline is advertising that actually works. So that implies that most advertising does not work. Is that what you're saying?

John Horn 1:31

Yes, I think that's a pretty fair statement to make. I like to go back to

Andy Splichal 1:36

Love that honesty. All right.

John Horn 1:38

Yeah, I always go back to that quote from John Wanamaker, who supposedly said, you know, I think half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. Trouble is I don't know which half. And I think most of the businesses reaching out to us feel feel that way. Because the reality is, you can spend so much money in so many ways right now, with any kind of advertising you want. But if you're not spending it with the right people, or with the right messaging at the right time, those dollars are going to go back to your bottom line.

Andy Splichal 2:05

Okay, great. Now, the half you are working on is you guys are managing the Google ads, Facebook, Instagram ads. Are there any other services are those the main two?

John Horn 2:19

So Google, Facebook, Instagram, those are definitely the big ones. We also work with clients, and Amazon and Microsoft, and pretty much any pay per click channel out there, Pinterest, Twitter, you name it.

Andy Splichal 2:31

So if a client comes to you, and they, let's say they've never used any form of paid advertising, are you going to put them into all those different marketing channels? Or are there certain ones you pick right away? Does it depend on the product? How does that work?

John Horn 2:50

Yeah, it totally is going to depend on the product and the company and what they're selling where they're at. So we'll have a conversation to understand that, you know, some, some products are gonna be a great fit, for example, for Google, because maybe people are searching for that type of product. And so we just need to put the client in front of those people. Whereas if it's a brand new product that people aren't aware of, and we need to create awareness, well, Google is not going to be the best place because people aren't searching for it. So we might go with Facebook and Instagram to actually create that awareness, ad for the client and and get people back to their website to purchase that product.

Andy Splichal 3:25

Now, you mentioned that you guys also handle Amazon, advertising as well?

John Horn 3:30

Yeah.

Andy Splichal 3:30

Is there ever a point where you would say to somebody, let's put you on Amazon and not put you on Google or Facebook?

John Horn 3:39

That's a great question. There definitely are scenarios that come up. One example would be, if you've got a product that is in a very competitive space, let's say maybe you're selling hats, and there's nothing super distinctive about your hats in terms of they're going to show up on on Google search. People are, there's a billion things that have come up, perhaps people search on Google, okay, but with Amazon, people are going to Amazon to make purchases. So already, you're in front of the right people and audience that is going to be to be placing orders because that's where they're on Amazon. Whereas with Google, you've got some people who want to place orders, some people are doing research, you got a billion different things going on. So at Amazon, we would be able to create really focused campaigns both on the advertising side as well as in the organic side of just looking to help that client rank on longtail keywords and show up profitably, they're on Amazon. And so there there could be a scenario like that where Hey, Amazon, the conversion rate makes sense. But Google, there's just too much competition and maybe we should stay stay clear to that.

Andy Splichal 4:46

What about Facebook, in that scenario?

John Horn 4:49

Yeah, and that scenario, part of its going to depend so Facebook does really well for brands that have some kind of brand store and messaging that we can put out there and create a fan base, create awareness, get people onto the website and returning remarket to them and so forth. So it's great for clients like that, where you've got lots of say, lifestyle images and videos, and you can kind of create your tribe. It's not as great for products where they're more of a commodity, and you're just trying to get that product in front of someone at the exact moment that they're looking to buy that product. So it's really about what the product is and and where you're trying to reach the customer in their purchase lifecycle.

Andy Splichal 5:31

For those your clients that advertise on both Google and Amazon, how do you find the CPC? The cost per click compares between the two?

John Horn 5:44

Yeah, great question. I would say on average, we typically see a higher cost per click from Google than we do on Amazon. Now, I'll caveat that to say Amazon is still a little bit of the Wild West, and that they're still developing their systems, which Google has had decades long headstart on. So I think as we see more adoption of Amazon advertising, and as they continue to build out their their platform, CPCs are likely going to increase with Amazon. But right now, we'll typically see lower cost per click there than on Google.

Andy Splichal 6:15

Sure, sure, and I guess before people run out, they should realize, too, that Amazon's taking a percentage of the sale beyond the CPC.

John Horn 6:22

The 100%, you've got to factor in that reality that hit a cost per click might be cheaper, but Amazon's taken whatever 20, 30% Cut depending on what what type of product you're selling. And that has to be factored into your overall margins.

Andy Splichal 6:36

So conversion, conversion is always important. How do you work with clients to increase their conversion, and how important is this process when determining what the success is going to be of using paid ads?

John Horn 6:51

But it's incredibly important. And our ideal client is someone who views us really as a partner with them as an extension almost of their marketing department. And who is open to taking insight from us, not just in the marketing campaigns we're responsible for, but holistically on how they're positioning themselves in the marketplace, what their website looks like, what their conversion funnel looks like, even what their promotions and sales and some extent price points and how they compare to competitors, how that's all put together. Because all of that, obviously plays into successful marketing campaigns. And we can run the best ads possible. But if we're sending people to a terrible website that doesn't, you know, write a compelling story of why someone should purchase that product, then you get your back to wasting all that all that wasted advertising. So we work with them, you know, think through the conversion rate, how to optimize it, we're able to share insights from what we see work well for other businesses in their space, or Ecommerce or lead gen or whatever, and try and work in tandem with them in that way.

Andy Splichal 7:56

Now, put you on the spot for a moment. What are those insights? Can you share a couple of those with the listeners on on what are some of the things that can help increase the conversion rate?

John Horn 8:06

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's, there's all kinds of things, but especially a focus in the Ecommerce space, since I know a large amount of your audience is really focused on that. So with Ecommerce, first of all, you got to make it really easy for people to purchase the product, you do not want lots of steps between someone getting to your website, and being able to add a product to your cart and checkout. You also obviously want to be leveraging customer reviews and ratings on your website. That's a fit. It's a massive credibility aspect. People are looking to see hey, have other people purchased this, do these reviews look legit, I would never recommend to a client to use fake or made up reviews because that's that's not a it's not a good thing, not going to work out well in the long end. But if they can get their customers leaving real reviews, and even image reviews, video reviews, those are five to 10 acts even more useful than text reviews and establishing credibility. So that's one thing. Just making the website easy to use, both on mobile as well as on computers is crucial. And more than half of the traffic these days, it's from people who are on their phones. And you need to make sure the website is mobile optimized mobile responsive so that it works perfectly. And also loads quickly. Load time is something that people hate. I'm a consumer, I hate it when I'm on websites do I leave if the if the website doesn't load quickly, so you got to make sure that things are optimized so that it's loading lightning fast, and people are not exiting prior to actually seeing the content you're looking to show them.

Andy Splichal 9:39

You know, speaking of reviews, have you heard of an app an Elfsight ? If you use that before heard of them?

John Horn 9:47

I have not heard of that one specifically, no.

Andy Splichal 9:50

They are I've just started playing with them. And it might be interesting to listeners. I have a client who has used Amazon a lot but are just launching their website and it allows you to bring in your reviews from Amazon onto your own website. And so I was like, Uh, ya know,

I was integration thing in there?

I was we, you know, it's just a little bit of a script that you put on. So that's not really an API integration. But I was just curious if you have had any experience or, or use that at all?

Not specifically there. But I think that that concept is, is awesome, been able to leverage that credibility on their own website and take advantage of what they've already collected by Amazon. That's, that's fantastic.

Yeah, no, I'm excited to see the results. Now, behind conversion, the next I find for success for the with a paid advertising campaign. Usually his is just proper tracking. How are you guys going about ensuring proper tracking for both Google and Facebook?

That's an excellent question. And we spend a lot of time as an agency working on that, especially early on when we start working with a client and getting everything set up making sure that that all our tracking is working properly. So typically, we'll use tracking code and directly from the interfaces that we're managing for a client. So if we're running Google ads for them, we'll use conversion tracking code for Google, Facebook pexel, etc. And we'll we'll get things up, we want to track any valuable action that a customer or a potential customer is taking on their website. So if it's ecommerce, the main one obviously is and actually placing an order, and as capturing not just an order to place, but the exact revenue of that order, and so forth. If we're trying to drive, we'd form submissions, or downloads or something like that, we want to track those things as well. And so we usually use the code from the interfaces, we use Google Tag Manager a lot, because that just makes it really easy to place code and update code on a client's website. And then we'll use Google Analytics to get a comprehensive view, not just from the marketing channels that we're managing, but from everything SEO, email, marketing, organic, etc. What the client state of business looks like, and how are people navigating to through all the different channels because people may may reach the site originally, from an ad that we showed them, but they might come back tomorrow or the next day and click on organic results, and actually placed that order. And we want to see that that entire journey. And then lastly, too, we also use call tracking. So we have the call tracking system where if someone clicks through to a client's website after after clicking through one of our ads, we're able to track when they call the client and we're able to record the audio of that call. And know if there are problems or if they're a great thing, if they're placing orders over the phone, we can track that and then actually import information back into the platforms to capture value that maybe isn't going through the website because it's taking place over a phone call.

Is that a third party solution you're using for that?

Exactly? Yeah, we work with one of the one of the big, no top industry leading call tracking providers, and then customize that for each of our clients.

As a ballpark figure, how many clients would you say have tracking properly configured when they come to your agency?

That is a good question. Maybe 20% have it properly configured and 80% need something or everything changed.

Yeah, that's that's a big number, given how important it is for sure. Speaking of tracking, have you ever had the scenario of running Google ads to an Amazon listening?

I have? Yes, yes, we've done that for a number of our clients. And from a tracking perspective, there's definitely limitations there because Amazon won't let you install tracking code from Google or anywhere onto your Amazon page. So there's certainly a gap where you don't it's hard to tie back to specific keywords or campaigns or ads in Google exactly what's working on Amazon and you have to look at it more of a from our experience looking at little more holistically of okay, the products we're advertising, are we seeing a bump? What kind of conversion rates are we seeing on those pages we're sending traffic to and those types of things.

Just curious what what kind of scenarios do you recall? Was that that people wanted to pay to Google ads go into either Amazon on business?

Yeah, see, think it through some examples. So we actually have a client. So one example we did recently, they sell a supplement product. And they're wet website, they have a website, but you know, it's kind of bare bones. They're still working on improving it building that out. But they already have the product listed on Amazon. They've got some traction there with reviews, they've already collected credibility they've already created through Amazon. And of course, there's also the credibility that just comes with it being Amazon and so people not having to trust some some random website that sells supplements, but having a measure of competence that Amazon's already already vetted them and they're it's a legit thing. So in that case, we've tested sending traffic from Google to Amazon with the the hypothesis that the conversion rate for the traffic on Amazon is going to be significantly higher than if we were sending it just to their own website.

And were those search ads?

Those were search ads, yes, shopping ads, you cannot send to Amazon. Because there's no way to claim Amazon's website in Google Merchant Center. But yeah, for text ads. That's what we were doing primarily there.

And how did you find the results of that was that a success?

We've had mixed results for that particular client. So far, we have not seen as high of a conversion rate as we would like. And we're testing some, some new strategies right now, in terms of the keywords we're going after, and exactly how we structure those text ads and in which product pages we send, we send them to. So I'd say that one's a little bit of a of an unknown steal, we're kind of right in the middle of doing that. Other times in the past that I can think off the top of my head, we have seen we have seen some good results, especially the more established the product is and the more reviews there are so forth. We have seen some campaigns work well, where that traffic was just going straight to Amazon.

So have there ever been any struggles you've gone through with a new client and being able to deliver on your promise of advertising that really works?

I would be lying to you if I said no. Definitely. You know, when you bring on a new a new client, you're kind of getting married to them a little bit, it's there's a lot of trepidation usual in their mind to be trusting a company with their marketing and with driving sales for them and driving the money they need to make payroll and all their things. So yeah, there's definitely that, that process of building trust with a new client who comes on board. And we try to be very upfront and open with them to set expectations, even before they become a client during the sales process, which is that, hey, we're not going to lock you into a long term contract. Because we want to stay hungry each month, we want to justify our work for you each month with the actual performance we're driving. But at the same time, things aren't going to happen overnight. And, you know, Month Number one, you might not even be profitable, as we're figuring out collecting data, hey, what works, what doesn't work, you know, optimizing that website, and those pages for conversions and so forth. And so typically, we ask clients to be willing to commit to at least three months, even if they're not constrained, contractually obligated that we want by and that they're going to give us opportunity to test and let the data dictate what is working well, and what's not. And the clients who come in with that, that perspective and are able to trust us and let those results build over time. Those are typically what turned into our long term happy clients, the ones who just can't can't get there. Sometimes you have to have a hard conversation, say, hey, maybe we're not the right fit for each other, because we need that buy in on their part.

Now, on the flip side of that, do you have a favorite success story of one of your clients that you would you'd like to share?

I do, actually, we have a client that came on board earlier this year, I think it was in February, their name, the name of their business is it's Juliet. And they're in the woman's clothing, a women's apparel category. And they came to us actually, the reason they came to us initially was because Google had suspended their Google ads and Google Merchant Center accounts. And as an agency, we have a lot of experience with understanding Google's policies, how to abide by them, how to fix those types of issues. So they came to us, we were able to help them fix, fix the issues that led to those suspensions, and then successfully appeal those suspensions and get them back online. And then we're gonna be working with them moving forward to manage their Google advertising. And along with that, we were taking a look at their brand saying, Hey, this is a fantastic fit for Facebook. Have you guys done Facebook before? And they're still a relatively new brand. And they had tested Facebook a little bit early on, hadn't seen great results. And so they paused it for the time being to focus on Google and other marketing platforms. But they were willing to let us give it a shot. And let us run that, put some budget in there, run some Facebook advertising. And it just blew up. It was awesome. We, in the first 30 days after launching our ads, they went from $0 from Facebook, ad sales because they weren't running it to $180,000 in revenue and those

Wow!

At a very profitable ROAS. Yeah. So I'm not going to pretend we do that for every single claim that comes on board. So that's definitely an anomaly. But I love I love talking about that.

How did they do in Google at that time?

They were doing well, the ROAS see, trying to think I believe we're actually seeing a better ROAS that point from Facebook than Google with the exception of brand ad campaigns on Google people who are already looking for them by name. But they were doing they were doing well on Google and driving significant volume of traffic which is also important because it enabled us to to remarket to that traffic via Facebook and also create audience look alikes. And, and leverage all the activity on the website that the Facebook pixel was capturing, to identify to Facebook what the right audience was for us to be targeting with our hands.

Let me ask you another question. As an industry expert, where do you see Ecommerce going over the next few years?

Up, up and up, I think we're only going to see more and more revenue flowing through Ecommerce more and more customers placing their orders through Ecommerce, I don't think that physical retail is going anywhere, I think it's always going to have a massive place. But we've already seen for a long time, year over year, strong growth with Ecommerce and of course, last year with the pandemic, like five or 10 years worth of growth in a single year with user behavior is changing. And I think that's only going to increase in terms of just just the raw, the raw numbers. I think one thing I'm seeing right now happening a lot, and it's not new, but I think it's going to continue to increase as well is just the whole concept of private label brands, and the Ecommerce space. And people finding a product finding a manufacturer, and then people who are really good at that, that branding that story side of things, creating a story around a product, figuring out how to emotionally connect that product to target audience. And then being able to to make that happen through Facebook or TikTok or Amazon or you know, all the all the methods that are out there to make those connections. And I think I think we're gonna see private label continue to increase in terms of market share.

So the next question I have here is very near and dear to my heart is I have Make Each Click Count University and I continue to grow out the content is, listeners, I'm sure are more than aware of. But I see that you have an online class and digital marketing where you've had over 85,000 students. Tell us about those classes, where are they available? We need to tape them all all that kind of good stuff.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So that's some content that I created via via Udemy, the the online website course website, and I'll be honest, I created a couple of years ago. So I probably need to do a refresher of that content to bring it up to speed with the most, the latest way that Google interface looks and so forth. But there's still a lot of the foundational elements of Google advertising, there is what I focused on that apply. So yeah, really just create it through that platform. And then people are able to define it, it's free on there so people can, can jump in. I think, like you mentioned, we've had over 85,000 students that have registered and jumped into that content and gone through that, which is kind of mind blowing to me, but has been a lot of fun to watch.

How has that, has that gotten you any business on the agency side? New clients? How has that worked?

That's a really good question. One of the reasons I initially I created it was to test and see whether that could get our name out there as an agency in additional ways and bring people back when we have had some people reach out to us for help with their marketing after having gotten that that taste of my work there. Honestly, not a ton haven't been a lot of a lot of people who've reached out I think it's more than people who are looking to get jobs in the industry or small businesses looking to manage things in house and get some some tips from an expert. And I've been grateful to be able to share those. And hopefully they've been helpful in getting people into the into the world of Google.

How would somebody find that on Udemy? If they were if they were interested?

Go in there and just search my name, John Horn. That should bring it up. I think it's called Secrets of a Google Ads Pro, something like that.

Okay, great. I'll put that in the show notes as well. Now, personally, are there any business books out there that you can attribute to your own journey as an entrepreneur?

I'm a I'm a big reader. I love reading books about everything. Definitely including business I like would say more of the you know, the self help books as well as just biographies of business leaders, whether that be people from the past, such as well, not the it's still fairly recent fast but Shoe Dog about the creator of Nike. That's a fantastic book, just learning about how the Nike brand came to be and their manufacturing processes early on how they went from using waffle irons and they choose to to where they are today. But more of the educational side of things. Lean Startup by Eric, I think Ries is I pronounce his last name. That has been a helpful book and thinking through organizational structure and the speed at which you can iterate within an organization and make things happen. Another favorite of mine has been Tim Ferriss 4-Hour Workweek, especially when it comes to thinking through delegating and backing and and concepts like that. And then lastly, I'd say to the the Harvard Business Review resources, so many articles and pragmatic books that they put out there have been super helpful and just thinking through very specific situations as a business executive.

Now, as far as StubGroup, what are some of the problems that you guys are solving for your clients? In other words, how are you standing out from your competition?

Yeah, ultimately, the problem is that the business come to us with is how do we generate sales. And so a big, big picture, we're looking to solve that problem. But there's so much that goes into that. And I often go back to that whole conversion tracking side of things that we already talked about, which is, you can't just spend money and throw spaghetti at the wall and hope something sticks if you're not, if you don't have processes in place to see and measure what is working, what isn't working, and then learn and grow from that. And so that's why we're constantly trying to educate our clients, especially when we start working with them about why we need to get these things installed and make sure they're working and work with their dev teams, or we'll jump in and help them out. And sometimes they don't want to do it because it's work and they don't see the value. But we've got to make them understand that the only way we're going to help you is by doing these things, tracking every order every phone call every form, submission, so forth, and so on. And then actually using that information to make their campaigns more successful, and then solve that problem, which is want to make more money.

Now tell me with your agency name StubGroup, have you ever run into confusion with StubHub

All the time, actually, every other day leader, somebody's talking to us or a client, maybe one of them were will have worked with for years, and then be like, yep, StubHub they're Great. Now I just have to say, No, we don't sell tickets. I get it. They're way bigger than us. But but we're the group.

How long have you guys been in business? When did you? How did you get your name? StubGroup?

Yes, I think it's been about seven or eight years at this point. And one of the one of the founders of the business, his last name is Stubblefield. So the first part of his name Stub, threw that into a group and we became Stub.

Okay. Yeah, I can see where that confusion, you know, I, I made the mistake of naming my son after myself. And there has been all sorts of confusion that I wish I could have read on that. Anyway. So when people do come to you, what what are some of the common mistakes that you've seen companies make when hiring an agency, such as yours to run their paid marketing campaigns?

Yeah, I would say probably the biggest mistake that I see businesses making is focusing exclusively on what does it cost to hire an agency and looking for the cheapest option out there. We have lots of lots of businesses who reach out and they're they're basically they're, they're price shopping. And totally, you want to get the best value for your money. But value is not just the cheapest cost out there, because there's plenty of agencies out there that will charge your pennies. Typically, what that means is they're outsourcing their labor to somebody in India or Pakistan. And they're using templated campaigns that are not customized to you specifically, and that are just going to waste so much more of your actual ad spend than the difference and that agencies fees versus fees for subgroup or someone like that. So I just I see a lot of short sighted perspective when it comes to, to those management fees and businesses who reached out to us.

And what should a company be looking for when hiring an agency?

Good question, they should be looking for a number of things. First of all, kind of going back to what I mentioned about templates, you do not want to be working with a cookie cutter agency, where they're just going to kind of throw your stuff into a blender they've used for 10 other businesses throw it out there and hope it works. We spend a lot of time seeking to really understand the unique just aspects and what what makes each client unique, and their product or service unique, their audience unique and how they connect to that audience. And all of that then needs to translate into customized marketing campaigns where yes, we'll totally use best practices that we've learned for other clients as well. But they have to be customized to that that particular client so you want to you want to look for somebody who seems to really get where you guys are coming from and not just the view you as another another cog in the wheel. You want to understand what what people are you're working with, is it people who again are just you know, kind of random people out sourced another in another country that you can ever speak with or you actually gonna be working with people who understand the campaigns that they're running and also understand how to turn marketing speak into business speak and you know, To be an expert in Google, but not expect you as a business owner to understand what CTR and CPC, and every single metric abbreviation means necessarily see those things and then also, contract length is just something to look at. And I don't think there's a right or wrong approach to contract length. The approach we typically take is shorter. Like I mentioned earlier on, we want to be hungry and providing value every single month. So we're not locking people in, in most cases, to long contracts. But if you are going to get into a long contract with an agency, then we just want to really make sure that you've got milestones and things in place so that they're not going to forget about you month number six, while they're still taking your money, but that they're going to be incentivized to continue growing your performance and making each month better than than the last.

And lastly, how can an interested listener learn more about working with you or StubGroup?

Yeah, it's super easy. Yes, go to our website stubgroup.com. And you'll see all the info you need there about who we are clients, we work with how we could potentially help you. And if you'd love to, if you'd like to get a conversation going, you can reach out through our website, give us a call and fill out a form. And we'd love to do a free evaluation of any advertising you're currently running. We can take a look at your Google or Facebook or Amazon whatever and give you the good bad and the ugly that we see. Or if you're just getting off the ground just getting started. We can help you with some market research and thinking through what channels might be a good fit for you and and see if we can partner with you to make that successful.

Alright, well that is it for today. Remember, if you liked this episode, please go to Apple podcasts and leave an honest review. And if you are looking for more information regarding John or Stub Group, I will add the links into the show notes below. In addition, if you're looking for more information on growing your business using Google My Business, SEO, Facebook or even Yelp, check out this month's featured course inside Make Each Click Count University not only can you purchase it for 4999 but you also get two months free to Make Each Click Count University promotions for a limited time, so don't delay. In the meantime, remember to stay safe, keep