The Science of Predictable Advertising with Skip Wilson

Andy Splichal:

Welcome to another episode of the Make Each Click Count podcast, where we dive deep into the world of e commerce and online marketing strategies. I'm your host, Andy Splichal, and today we're honored to have an innovator in the advertising industry with us. Skip Wilson is the founder of DRAFT Media Partners and has transformed a teenage passion for copywriting into a remarkable career spanning digital platforms like CNN, special projects, and iHeartMedia's digital division. Skip is not only a pioneer in digital advertising, but also a recognized leader, earning acrolead such as most innovative software developer and best marketing software developer. Through his experience, Skip empowers businesses to navigate and excel in ever evolving marketing landscape. Today, we'll be discussing the science behind effective advertising, how to turn around underperforming campaigns. All right, welcome to the show, Skip.

Skip Wilson:

Yeah, thank you for having me.

Andy Splichal:

So, from a teenage passion, from copywriting to digital marketing platforms, can you share a bit about your journey? I mean, I was doing different things as a teenager, so I'm curious how you developed that passion and how it led to what you're doing now.

Skip Wilson:

Well, I mean, so it started like most things do at that age, right. With me just trying to impress a girl. Right? Like I had said, oh, yeah, I'm a writer. And then I tried to make good on that. And basically the only jobs that were available for writing around me were ad agencies. So I started hitting up ad agencies around here that, and there was quite a few in town. And the idea of a 16 year old copywriter is something that most ad agencies are like, oh, that's, that's appealing and different. Yeah, let's do it.

Skip Wilson:

Let's hire them. So it's actually a pretty, it's actually pretty easy to get freelancing work at that time, at that age. Shout out to any teenagers listening, like, that's, it's easy to set yourself apart. But then that quickly led to, essentially, that's when WordPress was starting to become a thing, and I was asked, can I do website design? And I was like, no, I've never really done that before. And then I found out I paid $5,000, which was like the most money I'd ever heard of in my life at that time. And so I bought a book on WordPress, learned WordPress, started doing web design, and then it just sort of took off from there.

Andy Splichal:

So your company now, it's evolved, of course, as everything does, but you believe in predictable science rather than a guessing game when it comes to advertising, I guess. Can you elaborate on that approach and how it really is different than the traditional methods?

Skip Wilson:

Yeah. So we started as draft ad technology. The idea originally was, let's build this planning tool, this software tool, and, like our own little DSP to be able to give predictive results. So if somebody's a roofer in Ohio and they want to know how many, what their budget needs to be to get 30 leads a month or something like that, what that media mix needs to be, we built that. That's the tool we built. And the original idea was, we build that and sell that as a software, as a service to other ad agencies. And then we started getting all these requests for, hey, this is great. Can you guys also just do the campaign? And so we realized that that was actually the need.

Skip Wilson:

And so that's. But we still have very much that same methodology, treating it almost like a, like, it's like a software type design problem where it's like there's an objective answer to what the best media mix is. There's. We, we know clearly what the click through rates should be on a certain platform, even in broadcast, we know what the response rate is based on Kum and those things. So there's like these very hard metrics, and then you just judge the campaign against that. So if something's not getting the right response rate, whether it's a radio ad, direct mail, or whatever, something's not getting the right response rate. It's like, okay, we're either got the wrong audience or the wrong message, or if it's getting the right response rate, but it's not converting, then it's a maybe wrong audience, or maybe that thing we're sending them to isn't compelling enough. So we treat very much, we treat each ad campaign very much, almost like trying to, like, solve an engine problem or a computer problem.

Skip Wilson:

It's like the electricity is getting from here to here, but it's dying here. So this is the thing that we need to fix.

Andy Splichal:

So are you still offer the software?

Skip Wilson:

We do now. We did. Now we do that now. We give that away for free. Like the planning and all that stuff is the free things that we give away and hopes that. And then we make money now from people being like, hey, now just do the ads.

Andy Splichal:

And what platforms are you running ads on? Where are you managing those for companies?

Skip Wilson:

So we have a seat on trade desk. We have of course, adwords, meta, but then we also have several out of home networks. We have draft direct, which is our direct mail arm. We have draft broadcast, which is our traditional media buyer buyers. And so we try to be platform agnostic, which is part of the whole thing. We wanted our tool to be able to make the best recommendation. So we just sort of structured ourselves to be able to fulfill a wide number of things.

Andy Splichal:

And when you take over a campaign for a company, they've been having issues with their, with their campaigns not performing, you know, regardless of a platform. But what are some of the common mistakes that you need to fix or adjust to get better results right away?

Skip Wilson:

If someone's been doing their own ads or even had just like a b list approach to it, the most common mistake is that they're asking for the ad to do the selling and that's just too much of a lift for the ad. In other words, if I'm an accountant and I'm running an ad that says schedule a free consultation, thats a pretty big ask. The only person thats going to appeal to is a business owner thats currently in market for an accountant. So thats going to be a very, very, very small percentage of the population. It would be much better to run an ad that is, heres a free two month audit or something like that much. It's a much better lift because that now appeals to almost any business owner to be like, oh, I'd love to know what my last quarter was or whatever. So you try to think a little bit more up funnel. The framework that I always use is every ad should have one specific thing you're trying to do.

Skip Wilson:

And so one result. So a specific result. And then you just are trying to figure out what's the specific audience and what's the specific message to that audience. So it's those three things, specific audience, specific message to them to get them to do that one specific thing. Usually it's a mismatch of that. That's the biggest problem.

Andy Splichal:

Do you deal mostly with professional service clients?

Skip Wilson:

No, I mean, because we, I mean, most of our business is behind the scenes of other factional cmos, ad agencies, web design folks. So we kind of run multiple different niche. Uh, Nisha's e commerce, I would say, is our, is our weakest. That's probably only about a third of our campaigns are e commerce. But we, we have to sort of run the gamut. But, um, we, because we have some referral partners that are specialized in real estate. We have some that specialize in B. Two B.

Skip Wilson:

We have some that specialize in others. So, no, we have to be, we have to sort of run in all categories.

Andy Splichal:

Yeah. No, I mean, I ask that because what you were describing definitely seem more professional service ads than then, of course, selling a t shirt.

Skip Wilson:

Correct.

Andy Splichal:

Where that doesn't really have to lift. It just has to kind of pop off the page and be something that somebody wants.

Skip Wilson:

But even with that, even with, like, we've got a client that sells concentrated coffee and even that, it's a dollar 25 ask, so it's a fairly low sale price point. But the, yes, we've got the ads that are very, almost like ASMR of seeing the cream go into the coffee and the ice clinking and all of that stuff, which does a lot of the selling and lyft for you. And it's coffee, something that everyone knows about. You don't have to do any education on this is what this thing is. But even that type of campaign, you want to structure it so that you've got part of the money going towards just cold traffic, getting people to the site. But then vast majority of that traffic is still not going to convert. So you need to think of some sort of follow up option, some sort of follow up remarketing message as well. Because even at a low price point, with a clear, obvious product, most likely that first ad, just very few people are going to see an ad and buy something right away.

Andy Splichal:

I'm curious about your direct mail arm. And most businesses, if they're advertising, I mean, they're using your Google Ads, they're using meta facebook. Most don't, especially e commerce, aren't using direct mail professional services, I think most probably are not as well. But what do you, how do you pitch that piece of the marketing, the direct mail and what type of clients?

Skip Wilson:

Yeah, that's a great question. So we bought that. We added our direct mail arm through an acquisition last August, actually. So it's been a year. And I originally cared most about the data. I really wanted the data sources and all those things. I didn't care that much about the direct mail piece at first, but then I got to say, now I'm a full convert. We've been using it for recruitment campaigns.

Skip Wilson:

We've, which have been, have worked out really well.

Andy Splichal:

What are, what are recruitment campaigns like?

Skip Wilson:

So hiring, you know, hiring staffing positions because you can target specific job titles, specific competitors and those things, the obviously anything big ticket, it makes sense. So heating and air conditioning, roofing, all those things, those categories, it makes sense because you can sort of, you can handle an $80 customer acquisition cost if you're selling a $5,000 roof. Right.

Andy Splichal:

But even, yeah, no, for sure.

Skip Wilson:

That's a, that's the, you know, that's a, that's a, that's a fine margin. Right. Um, but even in the e commerce space, what we've done, uh, is we just used a ip de anonymizer and then paired that with an auto mailer. So if someone comes to the website and they say yes to location, then we can find out what that the, their location and then fire off a direct mail piece to them at that place. And especially, it's not a great fit for a few if, like for the $25 coffee. Right. Because you're now paying, it's about a dollar because you don't get any bulk discounts because they're all single males. But if you're selling something, let's say a, well, for example, we've got a client that's doing a $300 essentially like very smart sleep mask.

Skip Wilson:

It's like a smart AI powered sleep mask type product. And I, its $300 for them. It makes absolute sense because theyre going to see it, theyre going to forget about it. And it just adds one more layer of retargeting to be like, oh, I just heard about this company and now heres a 10% off discount or whatever.

Andy Splichal:

What kind of conversion does that get?

Skip Wilson:

So youre getting because its a warm audience, its cheating a little bit. So youre getting as much as a two or 3% conversion off of it on average, um, which is, you know, not bad.

Andy Splichal:

So we talked about this a little bit. But if somebody is advertising now and they aren't very profitable with their campaigns, what should they look at to try to turn the boat around, try to fix it?

Skip Wilson:

The first thing to look at is, is the ad getting people to your site. I mean, that's the, that's the first, that's the first thing. Is it driving traffic and more importantly, quality traffic? So the number one metric, the first two metrics, metrics I would look at is click through rate for obviously for a digital thing is click through rate and then time on site. Those are my first two metrics. Because if I'm getting a decent, if I'm getting above average click through rate, which is different by platform and by industry, but if you're just using cocktail napkin type math, if it's above a 1% click through rate, then it's like, okay, it's doing okay. So it's not necessarily an ad issue. Then I'm looking at time on site, is it around a minute or more? And if it is, then I'm getting at a decent rate. Quality traffic to my whatever it is, landing page, site, et cetera.

Skip Wilson:

So then now it's like, all right, well, if it's doing that, and if it's not doing that, then that means that I've got an ad issue, right? Like my ad isn't compelling, it's not getting people there. Or maybe I'm getting a bunch of junk traffic. If my time on site's like 10 seconds, 15 seconds, then I know, all right, this is a crap audience, so maybe it's a platform issue. You have to be careful. Even with Google performance Max and things, sometimes you can be like, wow, we're getting five or six cent cost per click. But then you look and it's all like four or five second time on site, and it's like, oh, okay, well, this is all crap traffic. So then you try to figure out, okay, do we need to exclude certain geographies? Do we need to tighten that up a little bit to try to make it a better or maybe even move it, move platforms to try to get a better audience, those things. But then once you figure that out, once you've got a good click through rate and good time on site, and it's the site that's not converting, then that's when you want to start testing headlines, start testing things, making sure you have social proof on the landing page, making sure that you have a very easy, user friendly, fast loading site.

Skip Wilson:

Those are the things to make sure that your site's converting. Again, every industry is a little different, but around 5% or so on the landing page, and especially for e commerce, then if it's doing that, but it's like a lead quality issue or you're getting a bunch of add to carts without checkouts, then you start looking at like, all right, well, what's the, maybe we asked for the appointment or add to cart too early. What sort of, you know, making sure that you have, if it's e commerce, making sure you have a good sort of dead cart funnel or like, you know, email follow ups, those types of things. So that's, and then at that point, you've got a good campaign. Once you fix those things, it's, it's, it's a winning campaign.

Andy Splichal:

So that really is a scientific approach. I mean, you're, you're looking at every aspect and what do you do? So, I guess, do you have a success story of where you've been able to implement this for a client and what it's done for their business?

Skip Wilson:

Yeah, I mean, so that's most of, I mean, most of what we do is exactly that. So, you know, we've got a 92% retention rate all. But, which is all month to month. We don't charge contract anyway, all that stuff. But, yeah, I mean, one of the biggest, I think one of the biggest turnarounds since I've already mentioned them, I'll just mention, you know, Estate 98, that concentrated coffee is one where they had essentially had no real online sales. It was sort of a new venture for them. They had just come out of Kickstarter and were starting to run ads themselves, getting a decent amount of traffic, but just nothing was converting. That's the most heartbreaking thing, I think, when you're running your own ads and you start getting excited because you're seeing, okay, well, now I'm getting a couple hundred people to my site every day, but now they're not converting, then you start to question, like, the whole business, right? Then you're like, oh, is like my, is, are we just wrong about everything? Like, is maybe our branding off, is the product off, all those different things.

Skip Wilson:

And that's when we're, then we look at the time on site and it's all, you sub 15 seconds, and I'm like, no, no, let's not change the brand just yet. I think it's actually that you're getting horrible traffic. So we're using.

Andy Splichal:

What channel were they using?

Skip Wilson:

They, so they were using, they were using all, it was all Google. It was all Google performance Max, which is not always the case. I don't want to sound like I'm anti Google performance Max. Google performance Max is great, but you just have to be careful with it. Like all tools in marketing, everybody runs to what I call nothing buttery, which is, oh, nothing but this or nothing but that. But it really, it's sort of usually a case by case basis.

Andy Splichal:

Yeah. I mean, for people who don't know, I mean, Google Performance Max, it's sending traffic from the search network, from the display network, which is the big one, as well as the shopping network. And it's, it's really what Google's been pushing. So I mean you, you do see a lot of, a lot of junk in there from you know, depending on the product.

Skip Wilson:

Exactly. The good and bad of it is it's a great place to start if you, you know, if you don't know which platform is best, you know, it's a good sort of almost how like Quickbooks is like a great place to start with the account, with your accounting journey. Right? Like if you, if you don't know what to use, but then eventually you're going to want something that's more in depth. Google performance methods like that same sort of way. It's good at first, but then eventually you're going to want to tweak and make more changes.

Andy Splichal:

So what did you do to fix the coffee company?

Skip Wilson:

So in that case I realized well really any food item is very much a visual sort of immediate response type thing. So we have immediately moved it to paid social, specifically paid meta. At first we didn't originally use the checkout, the, on meta checkout where you are running actual shopping ads because we just wanted to get more traffic to their site first. But we uh, but that, that was, that was the sort of saving grace and then good creative, they had some great video actually already. Uh, they just weren't using it anywhere. And so we pulled the great video into the, into the ad and then we're able to drive uh, really get a less traffic. So they went from an average of say forty cents, fifty cents per click to more of an average of $2 per click. But now they're actual real human beings that were going through and converting at around 6%.

Andy Splichal:

Did you end up going back to Google or did you just meta ads?

Skip Wilson:

Yeah, they haven't yet. I mean the next stage, the next phase we added on for them uh, was actually on platform sales for TikTok. And then uh, just because it is such a visual like emotional thing, I do see someday eventually working like Google shopping or something like that back into the mix, uh, for those folks. But probably the next step I would later on would be Amazon prime, you know, being able to, to target.

Andy Splichal:

You know, I was just going to ask you about that. I just did an, ask me anything serious on my YouTube channel about the pros and cons of taking your products from Shopify or whatever platform theyre on into Amazon. And I wanted to hear your feedback on what you thought about that.

Skip Wilson:

Its not a great place in my opinion, to start cold, but once youve proven a conversion and a market for your product, I think its a great place to then scale to that next level because yes, youre taking the hit on the margins and those things, but youre also reaching, I mean you're getting shelf space on the largest retailer, right. So I mean it's worth it.

Andy Splichal:

And I've had some clients that think they put their stuff on Amazon and people go to their website but then they're increasing their sales on Amazon. People are looking at their website, they're going over and seeing if it's available on Amazon and making the purchase there. So as a retailer, you're giving up 15% there with the Amazon commission. But do you still see it worth it then?

Skip Wilson:

I do. I think of even my own, which I know there's always dangers in judging the way you personally shop, but even the way I personally shop, I will often be like, oh, that's really cool. Let me see if that's available on Amazon because I can buy it in 2 seconds without having to give somebody else my credit card or something else new. And if it's there, a lot of times I'll buy it without really even thinking. Right. And there's so many people in that boat. Yeah, it stinks that you're giving up margin but you already have the trust factor established with the, it's almost, it reminds me of the sort of debate that used to happen like ten ish years ago when it was like, oh, do I add PayPal like as a checkout method on my website? And it would be like, wow, I hate that they're taking 3% or whatever and it's like, well right, but having that little PayPal badge or having that little checkout thing right there gives people the confidence to give you their credit card number. And it's almost this, you know, this sort of this decade's version of that where it's like, you know, people just would rather buy it from Amazon because it can arrive in a couple of days.

Andy Splichal:

Yeah, yeah. And you know, I mean for listeners, don't get me wrong, I'm not anti Amazon. We actually, my agency works on getting people up on Amazon, so I don't want to go there. I just wanted to hear your thoughts on it. So you had mentioned an AI sleeping mask, but I'm curious with AI because that's really the big disruptor. Have you guys used it in your marketing, in your agency?

Skip Wilson:

Yeah, we do. I mean we're a team of essentially ten and we have right now 170 different active client brands, and some of those are multi location. So for us, we use AI quite a bit. We use it both in terms of the planning. We took what our original product was, which was a machine learning simulator tool, and basically just put AI on top of that. So that instead of used to, we would have to plug in all the numbers and pull in all those things and then it would do the math for us. Now we can just simply say we've got a roofer in Omaha that needs this many leads or whatever, and it pulls from that existing database. We use it both internally on the planning side.

Skip Wilson:

We use it to automate a lot of our own internal processes of creative requests and those things. Because a lot of times you get a request from a client that's like, ads need to change for next month and you don't know what client they're talking about necessarily. For us, we'll get that type of thing. I'll get a text message from an ad agency that's like, hey, the ads for next month need to be updated. And I'm like, okay, well, I don't know which client you're talking about, and I don't know this or that. So we now have automated a lot of that back and forth, the sort of standard questions. Yeah, which I find that our customers tend to prefer responding that way than saying, fill out this form, which was the older or the way we were doing it. So we're using it for more customer relation management.

Skip Wilson:

We're using it for planning, and then of course we're using it for optimization once campaigns start too. But that's, I mean, a lot of that technically is more machine learning once the campaign starts than AI, but still, next iteration will be the reporting we are working on, essentially an interactive report rather than it just being numbers to where it will actually give feedback and things. Very much like one of the campaign managers would do.

Andy Splichal:

Yeah. So I guess walk me through what you guys are doing. You're working for agency like white labeling some stuff, but you're also working with, directly with clients or how's that set up with you?

Skip Wilson:

Yeah, only about 10% of our business is direct clients. About half of our, about half of our clients are white label, which means that they don't, you know, they don't know that we existed, which is fine. And then there's, then the other sort of 30% to 40% are clients that came through a referral partner or came through an agency. But it was more, they know that it's powered by draft media partners, which is sort of our other model.

Andy Splichal:

Now, why do the white label stuff at all?

Skip Wilson:

Well, so we don't, like, our focus is purely on and paid ad execution. So it allows us to. So we don't do, like, brand stories or coming up with logos or really much creative. Got it.

Andy Splichal:

Okay. So an agency is doing that all for them.

Skip Wilson:

Correct. Our creative is purely what we call performance creative, which means we'll take something and build an ad out of it. But that's essentially the extent of our creative.

Andy Splichal:

Got it. And so the clients that you do work with, is there a particular vertical or. I mean, if somebody's out there listening now and they wanted to work with you, I mean, what kind of client is that?

Skip Wilson:

Yeah, so, I mean, like I said, we kind of. We kind of run the gamut for the most part. Most of our direct clients are multi location, so we work with a lot of franchisors because it's set up very much like an ad agency where they have franchisees underneath them. The. So there's that piece of it that we're working directly with clients. We have a lot in the medical space, especially that can. And I think especially even for, like, in e commerce world, even if what you're doing is even somewhat medical, it makes doing your own ads very difficult. And so that's another vertical that we tend to work with folks a lot on the direct side.

Andy Splichal:

And you had mentioned that you don't do contracts. You're strictly month to month.

Skip Wilson:

Yep, exactly. Yeah. We operate off a tech week because our pricing model is kind of based like as if we were a DSP. So we just take a percentage of the spend, and it's always. It's strictly month to month because we have to match whatever our agency partners are.

Andy Splichal:

Got it. Well, very cool. Well, this has been a lot of fun today. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap it up?

Skip Wilson:

No, I don't think so. I think the only thing that I would say overall is think less. Like, this campaign was a failure or pass fail of campaigns, and think more in terms of which parts of this worked, which parts didn't. If something's running for longer than six weeks, then it should be able to be made working, because if, as long as you're staying active and paying attention to what the data is saying, you can make any campaign work.

Andy Splichal:

Great. Well, hey, thanks for joining us today, Skip.

Skip Wilson:

Thank you for having me.

Andy Splichal:

All right. For listeners, remember, if you like this episode, please go to Apple Podcasts and leave us an honest review. And if you're looking for more information on connecting with Skip or draft media partners, you will find links in the show notes below. In addition, if you're looking at more information on growing a business, check out our all new podcast resource center, available at podcast dot make eachclickcount.com we have compiled all of our different past guests by show topic and included each of their contact information. In case you would like more information discussed during previous episodes. Well, that's it for today. Remember to stay safe, keep healthy, and happy marketing I'll talk to you in the next episode.