Todd Laire (00:01.309)
Welcome everyone. Today's episode is on “Mastering Paid Digital Advertising: Strategies and Insights.” And I've got two wonderful guests joining me today. First is Emily Nash. She's a marketing strategist at LAIRE Digital. So she works alongside me and is one of my amazing coworkers. And then we're also joined by Max Damaris, who's Director of Strategy at Vital Design, which is a nationally recognized marketing agency.
So, to first introduce Emily, she's an accomplished digital marketer with over a decade of experience in demand gen, paid media, and customer-centric strategy. Emily has built a reputation for transforming underperforming campaigns into high-performing, scalable growth engines. She has managed strategic campaigns across channels like Google, LinkedIn, Meta, programmatic platforms, and consistently driven measurable results for B2B, SaaS, hospitality, and mission-driven brands. Throughout her career, she's led customer success, creative and technical teams within dynamic agency environments, empowering cross-functional teams to deliver strategic, high-impact marketing campaigns, and her deep understanding of customer needs combined with her analytical mindset has enabled her to shape full funnel strategies from brand awareness and acquisition to retargeting and conversion of leads that drive real business outcomes.
And then Max, he is an experienced digital marketer with an outstanding track record for creating and executing marketing strategies that consistently deliver exceptional results, including a measured return on investment, exceeding 1000% for over a dozen of their clients. And Max's extensive career has worked across an array of industries, including manufacturing, higher ed, real estate, building materials, financial tech, various sectors, B2B service, e-commerce, consumer products, printed circuit boards, education, technology, healthcare, and many others.
This diverse background has equipped him with a versatile skill set and deep understanding of the distinct challenges and opportunities that each sector presents, and Max's ability to adapt, rapidly learn, and execute effective marketing strategies in new and unfamiliar industries is a testament to his versatility and dedication to delivering results. As a leader, Max sets high standards for, by example, cultivating a culture of passion and excellence within his teams. He currently leads the SEO department, the digital strategy department, and oversees the paid ads team at Vital Design, one of the top marketing agencies in the U.S.
What's also interesting about Max outside of work is that he's the proud founder of My Outdoor Basecamp, or MOB, a platform that merges his passion for marketing with his love for the outdoors. MOB is on a mission to make outdoor activities more accessible to everyone while providing impactful gear and expert advice for both intermediate and advanced outdoor enthusiasts. Notably, MOB has grown rapidly, attracting over 120,000 monthly visitors to the site. So welcome, Max and Emily, to the Married 2 Marketing podcast.
Max DesMarais (03:13.218)
Hey there, thanks so much for having us.
Emily Nash (03:15.555)
Yeah, good to be here.
Todd Laire (03:15.694)
Absolutely. So we'll dive in. We've got a lot to talk about with paid media. I think a lot of companies are trying to understand how to get the most out of their spend. I know all three of us encounter client conversations, and they might be running paid media, but they want a second set of eyes. And so commonly do we find wasteful spend, overspend, underserved targeting, bad targeting … kind of like we have to perform some type of triage to get them on the right track and use their spend effectively. But not only that, get them results, right? And so I would love to have both of you dive into this ever-so-important and ever-changing topic.
Emily Nash (04:02.128)
Yeah, well, I think we have several things to go through basics of just initially what our clients are looking for. I'm going to get a quick view here, but just defining paid digital advertising, what that means for our clients. Max, it sounds like we have some overlap, B2B, SaaS, and some other opportunity areas where we're working with paid ads. Maybe just to get started with an intro to paid ads, how do you approach it with your clients right away, right at the beginning?
Max DesMarais (04:35.446)
Yeah, sure. So, paid advertising can be defined in a bunch of different ways, but I think more traditionally, as digital marketers, we understand it as the most common paid digital channel. So Google ads, Meta ads, LinkedIn ads, all the other social channels, and then video-based ad platforms, which encompass YouTube, OTT platforms, and streaming services.
So, all of these digital style ads are incorporated into the overarching ad bucket of potential opportunities for organizations to explore. And I think almost everyone knows what paid searches are through Google. Almost everyone knows what remarketing is through Google or the display channel. And they all know YouTube ads, but there's also, you know, lots of additional opportunities out there, of course, with Meta, LinkedIn, and then insert the dozens of other channels that are currently coming into play.
And I'd also add that we're in this new timeframe where we've got ChatGPT and Perplexity and these other LLMs that are starting to launch advertising programs of themselves, which is opening up new opportunities for organizations and advertisers to explore to get clients results or to get your own business results.
Emily Nash (05:47.864)
What are some wins we're seeing so far this year? Just kind of diving into that space. There's definitely ChatGPT, the LLMs we’re working with, but what are some things we're telling clients this year for advertising?
Max DesMarais (06:01.068)
Yeah, like we're entering — the whole digital landscape has changed a ton over the last 12 months. We're entering a timeframe where, whether you like it or not, it seems to be more of a pay-to-play landscape than ever before, particularly when it comes to Google or search engines. We see organic listings that, you know, if you're at the top of Google for whatever query you may be looking for, you're seeing oftentimes a 15% to 30% reduction in the organic traffic that you're driving. And that's been replaced in a few ways. It's being replaced through more advertising placements, number one. And number two, it's being replaced by LLMs and AI Overviews on search engine result pages that are eating up that real estate, that digital real estate, in order to show up. So that's creating a few opportunities for advertisers.
It's like, if you have a dialed paid search approach or Google approach, there's a lot of opportunity to continue to find lower cost per clicks to drive high-quality search intent traffic to your website or to your landing pages to drive conversions. But it's also creating opportunities on these new platforms and also really opening up the door towards more video-based opportunities. And we're particularly this year seeing lots of opportunities for our clients in the OTT advertising space, creating high quality video based content that we're actually displaying on streaming devices and streaming services and smart TVs at home that enables us to get in front of the right people at the right time that match our ideal customer profiles and at much lower costs than we've been getting over the last few years on other display type platforms.
This increased pay-to-play space means there's a lot of additional inventory to buy ads at and a lot of additional ways that we can target people, which creates a lot of opportunity for businesses to get in front of their ideal customer profiles.
Emily Nash (07:55.898)
So, more on video, we've been hearing that for ages, organic video, streaming video paid behind it, not just on YouTube. When are you hearing the signs from clients that they would be the right candidate to go after that?
Max DesMarais (08:11.51)
Yeah, I think it's tough because we generally still don't love to start with, like, video-based ads as the first ad platform. In my opinion, it's generally still a second or third step beyond other platforms. So, for example, we almost always are pushing for paid search campaigns first. And that's because there’s intent-based marketing. We can say your ideal customer profile is searching for this specific thing or this specific problem … this specific solution. We can get in front of them at the right time with the right ads. And if we can learn to convert those people, it's going to teach us a lot about how to create other ads and other platforms that are going to have hopefully just as much or even more success.
So, I would say like not everyone … OTT and video isn't perfect for everyone. But I will say if you have an existing paid search strategy or an existing organic-based content marketing strategy that is working already, and you're looking to scale up your lead counts or increase your brand exposure or do more demand generation for your product or service offering, that's when it's a great time to consider expanding into the video-based solutions.
Emily Nash (09:25.136)
Yeah, it's easier with search, with keywords, landing pages. We know that video is going to be the hardest one to nail in a quality way and be authentic.
Max DesMarais (09:35.884)
Yeah, I think so. Fortunately, there are some pretty awesome targeting capabilities of these video-based platforms, whether it's YouTube and Google's platforms or even the video-based technology that we have on Meta or TikTok, or even Snapchat and Instagram. We can get in front of the right people. It's just a matter of getting in front of the right people at the right time with the right assets. And there's also this barrier for a lot of organizations to create high-quality video content that's going to resonate, and that barrier can stop people. Creating those assets can be difficult.
Emily Nash (10:11.376)
I don’t think it's today's topic to talk about the scalability of video, but there are tons of tools I'm seeing for creating video with AI and having scripts, and being able to multiply them for different personas. I think that's a different topic for a different day, but something that's out there, unless you have anything that you've played with.
Max DesMarais (10:29.184)
No, yeah, I think you hit upon the point which I wanted to touch on, which is like, we're also in a time where content creation is continuing to get easier and easier and more automated. And you can leverage existing assets with AI-based tools to generate really high-quality pieces of content, video-based or image-based, or text-based, that can resonate really well and allow advertisers and marketers in general to scale up.
So, while there is a greater barrier to entry when it comes to creating video-based content, it's never been easier to create video-based content than it is today. And we're watching all of these tools continue to adapt and make it easier for non-technical people, even sometimes non-creative people, to create assets in a much more efficient manner to have success via these video-based platforms.
Emily Nash (11:16.336)
Yeah, it's a lot to explore. Yeah, let's bring it down a little bit more to folks that are just starting out, and maybe a little more one-on-one in the one-on-one advertising space. So, talk about defining different paid digital advertising, talk about all the channels and opportunities out there. How have paid ads evolved? We talked about in the last five years, we talked about AI a little bit, but is there anything else we didn't touch on?
Max DesMarais (11:41.154)
Yeah, I think one thing that's been happening is that it's becoming harder to measure success. So, the attribution of your marketing dollars to the revenue that it's generating is getting more challenging. It's been a hot topic for digital marketers for a long period of time. It's harder for us to say this ad resulted in this click, which gave us this many leads or this many e-commerce purchases, and resulted in this much revenue. That still can happen. Paid search is a great example where that like one-to-one connection becomes really easy.
But especially as you start diversifying your advertising channels, say to video-based platforms or more things that are less click-to-purchase and more, hey, like I'm making you aware of my brand or my product, or even making you aware of the problem that you didn't even know that you had that demand generation based strategy. It's becoming more and more difficult to attribute how those campaigns are resulting in increased revenue over time.
So, we're watching this shift of: How do we balance budgets? How do we make proper marketing decisions knowing we have this type of strategy that is working really well and we can prove ROI, but this other strategy that we can put dollars behind and we know this naturally makes sense to do this, but we're not going to necessarily be able to measure our return on investment from this activity? And how do we balance those two key things there?
Emily Nash (13:01.008)
I have an example, but I was curious if you had one, too, of an area that is like an ace, or maybe not an ace, in your back pocket. It's more like we feel this is the right channel. We don't know if we could do attribution right away, but we are recommending this to clients. Do you have anything like that that you could point to?
Max DesMarais (13:17.004)
Yeah, I think we do this with like streaming services. So we'll take like Disney as an example. You can run ads on their streaming services, and you can get in front of the right people with reasonable targeting, depending upon your business, assuming you can get in front of the right people on that platform. You can get them with some great video ads. The problem is you're going to have a really hard time measuring how successful this is.
One of the ways that we're combating that with video-based ads on streaming services, for example, is putting in QR codes on those videos because it enables us to see, actually some percentages of people actually picking up their phone, know, looking at the QR code, scanning it and visiting a landing page associated with it, which gives us some really great insights. So, we can measure some success that way.
And we're also able to measure success in terms of brand lift or increased search volume for our organization or our specific product. And we measure that through keyword tracking tools. So we're actually able to go into Google and see how many more people per month in general are searching for our brand or our product. And so we kind of can measure in a few ways. One being the impressions and the views that our ads are getting, to being QR code opportunities and clicks to landing pages, and even conversions off of that. And then three being how much is this affecting our brand lift? How many more people are searching for our brand or our product? And those three data analytics points allow us to get a pretty good understanding of how things are doing in terms of effectiveness.
Emily Nash (14:45.07)
All right, so I want to say that back if I can. So we're doing the trends for keywords to understand a lift on a brand and or the terms that you're going after. And then obviously, you have the analytics within the streaming service. And then maybe there's one more that you bring it all together in the CRM, maybe.
Max DesMarais (14:59.128)
Yeah, yeah. The next thing would be like clicks on the landing page that we've created for that campaign. So, in the example of a streaming ad on Disney's platform, that would be a QR code. So we know how many people scan that QR code and visited the page that that QR code is driving to.
Emily Nash (15:22.056)
What vertical client, what type of client would you recommend to go on to a streaming service like Disney?
Max DesMarais (15:29.526)
Yeah, that's a great question. So I think a lot of the B2B organizations will be hesitant to do that type of activity. But the no-brainer types of organizations, things like higher education, where you want to get in front of, like, parents and students at the same time or separately, or like even graduate level education, where you want to get in front of people of specific income levels, geographic areas, income brackets and job titles and things like that, represents a huge opportunity in the education space.
I think there's a lot of opportunity as well when it comes to e-commerce and brand awareness building for e-commerce channels that can satisfy a specific type of individual. For an example for us, one of our e-commerce clients, Massage Chair Store. They sell high-end massage chairs to individuals. They tend to be high-income individuals in order to afford these high-ticket-priced items.
We have a pretty broad target audience, meaning it can be generally people of a younger age, 25 plus, all the way up to senior-level individuals. They tend to need to have high incomes. It could be anywhere in the country. These types of organizations that have large target audiences, but have similar problems, allows us to get in front of the right people at the right time. But there are really tons of different types of organizations that can benefit from these types of ads.
Emily Nash (16:53.2)
It does open up your eyes. I think the elusive high-income market is probably the most targeted. E-commerce makes sense on something like Disney or streaming in general. I know one area that seems to be newer, at least for me, in the last year is Reddit, exploring communities on there. And these are for B2B clients. Their conversations, their brand is coming up, but a way to show authentically there, maybe with video. Seeing it be more of a brand play, kind of like what you're talking about with streaming services.
Max DesMarais (16:58.465)
Yeah, couldn't agree more. Reddit is such a cool opportunity. Um, if you've been following the digital marketing landscape, which most of the general public doesn't, but all the SEOs the digital marketers do, you'll notice that Reddit has something like tripled in traffic since Google made some updates about a year and a half ago, meaning they've got more eyeballs than ever.
And people are ending up on Reddit searching for specific things on search engines. So they're searching for how to solve product problems, how to solve specific problems, how to do X, Y, and Z on products. And that represents a huge opportunity to get in front of the right people who are trying to solve very specific problems. And so Reddit is a great example where, if you can take advantage of that increased usage across the country on that platform, when maybe the rest of the world or advertisers haven't necessarily caught up to the fact that Reddit has this huge opportunity for us as advertisers.
Emily Nash (18:19.408)
Yeah, I think it was posed that marketers have been scared of Reddit in a way that we've been so focused on Google. It's our go-to. It's like a comfort zone. And then my last research was Reddit was like 3 billion searches per month or something, which sounds insane. When you compare it to Google, it's like 80 billion searches. So it's still niche, but it's quite large and there's a huge audience they're talking about. And you said it really well. Like their problems, their pain points, and a way to show they're up there authentically. I think there's research that needs to happen because there are some risks, right? Like not getting into nitty gritty stories or things that can be shared. You want to hit your ICP or your persona well in their subreddit.
Max DesMarais (19:02.124)
Yeah, totally. And there are risks. Like you're talking about a community that's able to say pretty much whatever they want. So you'll find, you know, community members, you know, maybe potentially talking poorly about your product or company in some cases. And that's where I think some people see the risks in platforms like Reddit. But at the same time, I'd rather be the one trying to control that narrative than letting the population control that narrative.
Emily Nash (19:31.586)
So, follow-up questions on both. We talked about streaming and Reddit, which is probably newer for a lot of clients that are just so focused, maybe on Google, maybe on LinkedIn, maybe on Meta. What would you say the prices are for, well, sort of streaming, like the cost per click or cost per impression?
Max DesMarais (19:49.836)
Yeah, that's a great question. So we have been seeing that the CPMs, which is generally how these things are priced, meaning cost per thousand impressions of your ads, are pretty substantially lower on some of these streaming services than you're way, way lower than you're getting on Meta, way, way lower than you're getting on LinkedIn. We're talking, depending upon the industry or your specific audience, a five to 10 times lower cost per thousand impressions, meaning you can get in front of way more people, way cheaper on these streaming services than you can via LinkedIn targeting.
And even on a lot of your segments in Google, you're seeing comparative cost per thousand impressions or reduced cost per thousand impressions. I think over the next few years, that's probably going to change. But right now we're seeing it to the tune of 10 to 80 or 90% less expensive than other channels. It's very dependent upon your specific use case.
Emily Nash (20:49.134)
Interesting. So it sounds like we're in a pocket of time where you can jump in that area, spend a little bit less, maybe get a little bit more, even though it's still pretty hard to attribute some of that back to new sales.
Max DesMarais (21:01.132)
Yeah, exactly. I would equate it to like, if you're lucky enough to be one of the early adopters of Meta ads back in the day or Instagram ads back in the day, like there's these opportunities that come up and they eventually disappear, but they're opportunities and you should take advantage of them while you can.
Emily Nash (21:07.28)
Good, I saw the same on Reddit. Reddit, I'm spending like 50 cents for a click and cost per thousand impressions. Some are just much more palatable than what we're seeing now on Google, Meta, LinkedIn, for that matter.
Max DesMarais (21:31.8)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Especially if you compare Reddit clicks, cost per clicks to Google cost per clicks right now, it's pretty crazy. Google has done a very good job as a business to increase their competition and cost per click. And there are a lot of things that advertisers have to do in order to continuously bring down that cost per click and fight against the increased competition that's created there with it. You just don't have to do as much of that if you're operating on a platform that doesn't quite have that competition. Reddit being a great example, the OTT services being great examples.
Emily Nash (22:08.88)
This is good to serve with these opportunities. I'm sure you've seen it too, then with Google Ads. Costs are going up. You're a little bit less with your budget. I think it's just inflation and also more competition in the market, in the auction that's going on.
Max DesMarais (22:24.672)
Yeah, it's partially that. And I think it's partially how they've designed their tools, too. I'm sure if you're a tactical digital marketer, you've seen what they've done with, you know, everything's automated bid strategies, let the AI decide your bids, and so forth. The problem is if you let every organization do that, it's self-creating this extra competition, inflating cost per clicks. And that's where, like us as an agency, you know, we're trying to find ways to combat that.
We love automated bidding to help us be more efficient and leverage the data that Google gives us. But at the same time, it can kill us in certain industries. You talk a lot of software as a service companies or higher education where, or even some manufacturing, where you're cost per click in the literally 50 to a hundred dollar range that are just eating up your budgets, and you have to eliminate those from happening. Otherwise, you're going to just burn through hundreds and thousands of dollars of inefficient ad spend.
And so, so like, it's, it's, it can be challenging, and you have to do some sneaky things on those platforms to win.
Emily Nash (23:28.72)
Yeah.
Todd Laire (23:28.841)
Max, what are some common, like, one, two, three, like, mistakes that you see, you know, kind of along those lines with some of the campaigns that you start to take over or at least audit, you know, in the auditing stage? What are you kind of like, I bet you they've got this going on? And then you're like, yep.
Max DesMarais (23:46.284)
Sure, yeah. So first thing is just like, the number one thing we always see is just 100% focus is on bottom of funnel. ‘Need to buy now’ keywords, which are the most competitive, most obvious things that exist for anyone.
So if you're a, we'll go with the higher education as an example. If you're a university that offers MBA programs, you might be going for MBA programs near me, right? Super obvious, insinuates it's the right person. The problem is every single MBA program is bidding on that keyword, which means that the cost per click is 50 to 100 dollars in many cases.
Where we start to see huge opportunities still, and this goes for every industry, is you just move up that buyer's funnel a little bit. So we'll continue on the MBA program as the example. MBA versus MPA would be an example of someone who's not quite ready to invest in an MBA program, but they're considering their options between: should I actually progress my career with an MBA or go to an MPA-style degree?
And we can actually service them content that helps them answer that question. And we can see legitimate 95% decreases in cost per click to get in front of those people that are not going to buy next month, but they might buy in three or four months. But if we can reduce our costs by 90%, tell the story that we want to tell them, and help them through their problems, then we're able to get in front of people earlier. It can help us convert them into customers at higher rates further down the line and avoid us spending $50 per click, which allows us to just basically reduce our competition.
And you can take that example for MBA programs and put it across every industry imaginable. It's that everyone's going after those bottom-of-funnel things. And we want to try to move up the funnel where we can. That doesn't mean you should not run bottom-of-funnel keywords. It just means you need to explore those options and be cognizant that you might be, you know, going after the most expensive, most competitive things in the world. So you'd better have dialed landing pages, dialed conversion strategy, perfect keywords and search terms, and you'd better have a good compelling value proposition that positions you better over your competitors, or you're going to really struggle to have profitable ads in that thing. So, that's like the number one most common thing that we see.
Number two, it's very common for us to just not have like targeted landing pages and targeted pages that are servicing what people are searching for. So if you're going to spend the time to run that meta ad or run that Instagram ad or run that paid search ad, you better be driving to a page that's satisfying that person's intent. We want to add value to them. We want to get them to convert into a lead. And we want to do that through conversion rate optimization best practices. And so even today, we're still seeing tons of areas where we take on an account and they don't have custom landing pages. And you can legitimately improve conversion rates in some cases, three times, four times, when they're bad.
Or even if it's 10% or 20% when they're pretty good before, that's immediate improvements onto your existing campaign performance to the tune of 10% to 50% more efficient ad spend. So, those are the kind of like the two most common things that we're still seeing every single day. And there's lots more things that I could go on about if we want to.
Emily Nash (27:02.544)
So you want results fast. That's what we hear from clients. And can you just send them to my webpage, my website, just send them to my website.
Todd Laire (27:08.744)
Homepage. Send it to my homepage.
Max DesMarais (27:13.55)
Yeah, would, it's, in some cases, you can get away with the homepage, but even if you're getting away with it, I promise you, you can do 10, 15% better for sure.
Emily Nash (27:28.528)
I stand by the sentiments, too. Having no navigation, a clear form, one CTA. Music to our ears. Yeah.
Max DesMarais (27:36.642)
For sure. Yeah. I guess I'll just add a third to it's just like improper targeting. Whether it's on the Meta platform, or any platform, or we'll take Google as keywords as an example. They're just bidding on the wrong keywords. This isn't the person that they want to go after.
And you need to put yourself behind … if I'm the person searching this query, what is my intent behind that query? And make sure you really, truly understand that. It's integral to your campaign success. It's integral to not wasting ad spend. It's integral to create good pages, to understand what they're searching and why they're searching for it. And there's still just almost always some type of disconnect there where you can cut back spend by 20% on terms or an audience that just isn't performing. And those are three basic things that you can improve on almost every single account.
Emily Nash (28:35.962)
Let's talk about our goals. Have we talked about that yet? Getting with clients, yes, if they want sales immediately bottom of the funnel. But what are some instances and the key KPIs you’ll track for clients most times, or differing scenarios?
Max DesMarais (28:54.38)
Yeah, we try to, sometimes clients come in asking for something that probably they shouldn't be asking for. And so what we really want to do is we want to drive business value in almost every case.
And business value can mean various things for different organizations. For e-commerce organizations, it becomes very clear. We want to drive revenue, e-commerce purchases, net new customers, or potentially increased average order value would be examples of great goals for e-commerce clients for B2B services or B2B products. It's some type of lead. Generally, it's a, you know, a business, a call with your business development rep, or a quote being sent, or a proposal being sent. We want to increase the number of proposals or quotes that are going out to customers.
And so we really want to push our goals as advertisers as far down the funnel as we possibly can so that we're making decisions based off of the right data. We don't want to be talking about CPMs. We don't really want to be talking about cost per clicks. We don't even really want to be talking about conversion rates, meaning a click to a lead or a form submit. What we really want to be talking about down the line is our cost per customer acquisition, our return on ad spend based off of e-commerce revenue, our cost per new customer.
And those types of metrics, and it can be very hard to do that at first. So you have to start with leading metrics, which are generally leads. So you want to start there, and you want to start to integrate that data into your advertising platform as much as you possibly can. So ideally you start with, you know, conversions or e-commerce purchases, and eventually down the line, you get to my ads are driving this many clicks, which are resulting in this many leads, which is resulting in this much pipeline value generation or this many booked consultation calls or this many requests to quote form submissions, which is then resulting in these specific customers and this much revenue.
We really want to tie it down to the business value that we're generating. Cause what we always see when we take over clients is some campaigns might appear to be more efficient than others, but they actually aren't. If you go look at their CRM and find out that, you know, this campaign that appears to be super efficient has actually only driven one customer in the last year, when this other campaign that has a five times higher cost per conversion has actually driven 10 customers in the last year. And therefore like we're much more willing to pay the extra amount for this campaign because it creates much more business value. And that's why it's super important to, you know, get as far down the funnel as you can. So you don't make those improper decisions based off of the wrong data.
Emily Nash (31:38.202)
That would be full revenue operations, pulling in sales, getting that information, that enablement, and alignment. Sometimes, at least in my agency experience, I get the marketing people in the room, and it's reminding them, we have to have the salespeople in the room and get their sentiment. I'm constantly asking, “We brought you these leads. What's on the other side of that?” If we're not necessarily in the CRM that's available, you know, maybe they're diving into like their own database, for able to, maybe in this case HubSpot, understand all the way through, all the way to the revenue is perfect.
Max DesMarais (32:12.042)
Yeah, totally. It is challenging, too. Like you do have to, like, if you don't have the technical stack to tie those all together, you have to do some of this manually. You have to find your leads. You want to have conversations with the sales team. If you have a sales team, in this case, and talk about which leads are good leads, which leads are bad leads, why are they good? Why are they bad? Making sure that following up on those leads and then also just taking the customer data and tying it back in. If you're not having those conversations, it's going to become very difficult to continuously improve over time.
Emily Nash (32:41.55)
I think it, yeah, I think it's always, we're all, I'm always running these calls as curious and an advocate. And then the client is saying, okay, we got leads, move on to the next thing. It's like, wait, no, we need to dive in. I'd like to learn a little bit more so that we can go back informed in how we optimize these ads.
Max DesMarais (32:41.698)
But it's worth the effort.
Max DesMarais (32:57.558)
Yeah, absolutely.
Emily Nash (32:59.788)
All right, anything else on, I don't know if we talked about this, underused tactics for boosting ad performance.
Max DesMarais (33:10.894)
Underused tactics for boosting ad performance. I'm gonna get too tactical if I do that, I think.
Emily Nash (33:20.762)
We're up against almost time, so we should … I'm gonna give you a time block of a minute to give us an answer.
Max DesMarais (33:27.692)
Okay, I'm gonna give one tip for an underutilized tactic currently. And I think it's gonna be effective for most organizations, because most organizations who care about ads or running ads are running Google search ads. And we talked about earlier the problem of increased cost per clicks that are happening, which is reducing ad effectiveness
One of the huge things that we've been doing over the past six months with our ad accounts to combat those automated bid strategies, which are increasing our cost per clicks is a simple tactic. It's called portfolio bid strategy, which allows us to basically set a maximum cost per click of a specific campaign or a set of campaigns, even though we might be using automated bid strategy for those campaigns, which enables us to basically prevent those $30, $40, $60 clicks for certain clients. And since we've implemented this across a large portion of our clients that are experiencing the high cost per click issue.
It's resulted in somewhere between 10% and 40% reduction in cost per click and that same level of reduction of cost per conversion, meaning our efficiency of the ad account has gone up 10% to 40% in that time period. It's just a simple tactic that not enough agencies or advertisers are using within paid search campaigns to reduce their cost per click. I'm a little nervous about saying it right now because eventually, Google is going to get rid of it by talking about it.
That's one simple tactical thing that we're doing to improve cost per click and efficiency.
Todd Laire (34:58.493)
I've got one, Max, what about industry-specific? If you were like, they got to try this. If you mentioned higher ed, maybe some others specific to that industry, like this would be a good idea to run a campaign towards, like, you know, kind of some of those evergreen ideas or…
Max DesMarais (35:14.08)
Yeah, I think that's great. Yeah. One thing is finding content creators that are naturally creating content. So universities have this all the time. Some influencers on their campus that's talking about how awesome something is about their campus or their student life, or their program. You find that influencer or piece of content online, you reach out to them, you get ownership of that piece of content, and you use that customer-generated piece of content in your ad strategy and push that out via Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, et cetera.
And you can see some really great performance boosts by using this content that you didn't even create, you just sourced it from someone else that created it, because you get all this like benefit of, you know, trust building from someone else naturally doing this. That's just a hack that I think is hugely impactful. We're watching our higher education institutions just kill it with that tactic.
Todd Laire (36:08.425)
That's great. Well, we're at time. I want to thank you, Max, for joining us. And of course, Emily, thank you for being more or less a co-host with me today. And look forward to having you on the Married 2 Marketing podcast in the future, Max. I'm sure we could get into so many more areas as it relates to this, but this is a great first one-part episode, and more to come.
Max DesMarais (36:35.198)
It was super fun. As you can tell, I nerd out about this stuff, so I love it. Happy to keep going. Thank you so much.
Todd Laire (36:42.617)
Awesome. Thanks again.
