Ad HustlerConfessions Of A Serial Internet Entrepreneur

This is a guest post by Internet Gangsta Kris Trujillo From CashTactics.net

The Holy Grail of Local Offline Advertising

About a year ago I got into advertising in local classified ads.  When I first started out I was quite surprised by the return on investment that I could make in certain niches.  However… my ultimate goal was to advertise on a Billboard!

Now, you may think that Billboard advertising is expensive… But I will be the first to tell you that it really isn’t. Often times I could pick up advertising spots in local areas for cheaper than the cost of adwords in the same geotargeted location.

I got an idea a few months back when I saw a “Single in McKinney” sign. I had recognized the little black and white message in several other suburbs.  So I figured to myself… If they are successful enough to have these signs on every major intersection than how profitable would it be to purchase a spot on a Billboard.

I did some digging around.  On average you can get a Billboard spot for $500 for 30 days. Talk about CHEAP.  While on the phone with some of these Billboard companies I asked questions like “how many people pass the sign in a given month” (impressions) and they would give me their best guess.  See, companies that place Billboards have to know their numbers.  And if they don’t… Then their no good.

Anyways… After some more research I thought I would start out advertising on a bus… So I jumped in with $1000.

The bus company I went with was “trimet”.  They are the mass transportation providers in the Portland Oregon area.  I used to work for Trimet when I was in highschool.  So I contacted a few people that I know still worked there and I got in contact with their marketing department.  Sure enough… Trimet offered many different marketing plans.  I just had to pay for the banner creation and placement for a 30 day period.

I found that my $1000 could grab 3 banners roughly 6′ wide by 2′ high for 30 days.  That didn’t include the actual banner design. So I had my banner created and placed on 3 different buses.

The trimet marketing department estimated that a banner placed on the right side of the bus would be seen about 300,000 times in 30 days.  That means that my banner would would receive 300,000 impressions in any given month. Now, I had 3 banners placed.  Thats a total of 900,000 impressions combined.

For my $1000 spent and my 900,000 impressions received I spent a total of $0.001 per impression.  If I had continued to use the banners then the cost would go down as I would not need to pay for more banners.

Okay so we’ve figured out the cost of my advertising… Now let me give you some hints on promoting other people’s offers. You have to be careful how you promote when it comes to billboards or other mobile advertising.  If I was to promote a netflix offer I couldn’t just put up a netflix ad.  Instead I had to tailor the advertisement in such a way that people would want to go to my landing page instead of the traditional netflix page.  To combat this you can create your advertisement with the city in mind.  For example, Portland is known for rain. So… every one of of my advertisements played on the rainy portland days.

My banners looked like they were washing away from the rain AND the URL was memorable to Portlanders. I won’t give you the exact URL but here is an idea of what I used… “StuckInsideWithNetflix.com”.  Do you get it?  People are stuck inside because of the rain… and they have netflix to watch videos!

Anytime you can humor your audience you will grab their trust!

My landing page had quite a few hits. In the 30 days that I had the advertisements running I had approximately 10,000 hits which equated to roughly 1.1% clickthrough rate. And my actual landing page was just a HUGE banner… And honestly… I had it stuff the netflix cookie onto the visitor incase they decided to leave and visit netflix direct.

So let me talk to you a little about what I made that first month.  I spent a total of about $1000 so in order for me to make a profit I had to convert roughly 45 people to break even.  To be honest with you… I didn’t make my goal… I was short of my original spend by $100. BUT … that was ok and here is why…

If you remember we spent $500 to create the actual ads.  This was a cost that I didn’t have to spend month after month.  Instead I just have to spend about $500 each month that I want the advertisements to continue running. So in two months if my profit remains the same I would have spent a total of $1500 and made $1800… That is only $300 profit for two months… But what about three months?  Or 4? $2000 spend for 3 months with roughly $2700 profit! $2500 spend for 4 months with roughly $3600 profit.

Do you see how you can benefit from this?? It may take a while but that is only because you have initial costs to create the actual ads.  You don’t have to pay for new ads every month… You can re-use ads month after month until you want to change up your campaign.

So… If you haven’t looked into advertising on a Billboard or some sort of Mobile advertisement I would highly suggest you give it a shot… Just remember… If you don’t risk it you won’t make it.

Kris Trujillo is an internet marketing veteran and writes CashTactics.net

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So by this point we all know that I handle some local clients.  This is a case study of how I generated $1,700,000 in auto sales for one of these clients despite a weak economy.  Let’s set the stage:

“ABC Motors (fictitious name to protect the innocent) has a significant overstock of a particular model vehicle.  Let’s call the vehicle the ABCmobile.  All of these vehicles are brand new, same options but they do have a variety of colors in stock.  ABC Motors picked these cars up dirt cheap from other dealers around the country.  Here’s the catch.  The ABCmobile is a niche vehicle that does not sell well.  ABC Motors was baffled about how they should sell all of these ABCmobiles that were sitting in their lots collecting dust.  Newspaper Ads, Direct Mail, Billboards, Cable, Radio would all be a waste of money since these cars do not appeal to most anyone.  These cars needed to be moved fast and when you need to move inventory fast, you call Ad Hustler!”

This case study is about the steps I took to generate highly qualified leads and move these vehicles.

After speaking with the owner of ABC Motors I found out that there was some demographics data that I could use to my advantage.  The majority of the prospects who would be interested in purchasing an ABCmobile lived in about 10 states in the U.S..  ABC Motors had a hookup that made it possible to ship these cars affordably to any of these states, meaning that a deal could be closed over the phone.  I proposed that to get the most highly qualified traffic we do some Search Engine Marketing in conjunction with a landing page designed for this campaign.  Since Google Adwords has by far the most advanced regional targeting capabilities, I decided we would concentrate our effort there.

Step 1: I bought a domain.  I wanted something that would make it appear that we were associated with the manufacturer.  Since ABC Motors is a licensed franchisee of the manufacturer this isn’t a huge stretch.  I got lucky and picked up the domain name 08ABCmobile.com as the vehicle we are selling is a 2008 ABC mobile.  I liked this domain and felt it would be great for quality score considering the relevancy.

Step 2: I setup wordpress on the main domain 08ABCmobile.com.  I created a simple blog about the vehicle.  It had 10 posts with vehicle information and details as well as a few articles I found and spun.  I also used wordpress to setup a simple contact page and privacy policy.  At the bottom of each post I linked to 08ABCmobile.com/offer which was the page the offer/actual landing page will reside on.  I link spammed this blog a bit to get it indexed into Google before going live with the campaign.

Step 3: 08ABCmobile.com/offer needed to be created.  We’ll go into what I did with the landing page a little later.

Step 4: I setup a Google Adwords campaign targeting the geographic areas that I was told were particularly good.  I made 1 ad group and within that ad group bid on a few broad keywords.  Heres the general concept of what I did

08 ABC mobile
ABC mobile
ABCmobile
etc.

My goal here was to be bidding on only a few very relevant keywords and use negative keywords to get rid of the junk that would be searched for.  I started with the obvious negative keywords and then added to the list as I watched the sitelogs of what searches were leading to the site.  Here are some obvious negative keywords I used:

-parts
-service
-free
-used
-insurance
etc.

What this keyword method accomplished was generating large volume traffic that was still relevanct, and increasingly relevant as I got more data of what keywords paired with my main keywords converted.

The ads used in the campaign were pretty straight forward.  Since we were enticing people with a rather large discount off of MSRP, that was mentioned in the text ad.  We split test a bunch of ads to see what got the best click through rates.  Overall the campaign had 5%+ CTRs.

The landing page being used was a “thin” data collection page which is why we setup the wordpress blog earlier.  When I set the ads up, I directed all of the ads to 08ABCmobile.com.  I then set all the keywords at the keyword level to 08ABCmobile.com/offer – This resulted in a stellar quality score.

Those are the 5 main steps used to create this campaign.

Let’s talk a little bit about the landing page.  I can’t show you the landing pages due to an agreement with the client but that doesnt keep me from drawing you a rough diagram of what we did.

Landing Page 1:

My original thought was just to let the visitors get a quote on ABcmobile.  This would leave negotiation leeway between the dealership and prospect.  Here is a rough sketch of the original landing page

We found that a lot of the prospects were not as qualified as we may have hoped.  ie. virtual tire kickers.  The new idea was to just lay all of the information out there and if someone responded, they would surely be qualified:

Landing Page 2:

This was the winning landing page:

The above page is the one that generated the most leads and ran for the majority of the campaign.  Leads were tracked through the form as well as the tracking 800#.

Below are the stats of the campaign:

Total Ad Dollars Spent: $32,133
Clicks: 19,537
Email Leads: 852
Phone Calls: 647
Vehicles Sold: 68
Approximate Vehicle Sale Price: $25,000
Total Revenue: $1,700,000

After all of the negative things I told you guys about local, I wanted to show you a campaign that actually worked out for the client.  Online Advertising is going to be huge for local small to medium sized business in the years to come.  Print is dying and dollars are shifting.  Will you be a part of the action?

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If your dealing with local clients sometimes you have an agency type relationship with them where you buy all of their media for a percentage of spend.

I happen to have had access to an offline to online media buy recently and wanted to share the results with you guys.  The media purchased was cable TV.  The media buy cost roughly $25,000 spread over 2 weeks of cable TV advertising.  This cost represented 200 cable spots which breaks down to about $125 per commercial.  I did not place this buy or create the commercial, but was responsible for landing page design and tracking.  Also keep in mind that cable TV is a branding medium and branding was a large goal in this campaign.  Direct response results were an additional advantage

Results over a 2 Week Period
Absolute Unique Visitors: 132
Unique Email Leads: 40
Total Phone Calls: 6
Landing Page Conversion Rate: 35%

If you were measuring the campaigns success solely on leads generated through the landing page this campaign would be a bomb however that was not the sole basis of success or failure.  The average cost per lead was $543 yet the campaign has been running 3 months past this original buy and the client is thrilled with the results.  The landing page converted a huge amount of the visitors to leads however if the client were only trying to generate leads, I would have suggested internet advertising before dropping this kind of cash on cable TV.

I thought you guys would find an offline to online case study interesting so I hope you did.  Do you have any questions about this?

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When I decided to do this local online marketing series I asked my good friend Dennis Yu of BlitzLocal to write a guest post.  Since you people love case studies, I asked for it to be a case study.  He obliged.  Below is a case study on Facebook vs. Google Adwords traffic on a local level.

—————————————————————————————————————

For our case study we sent traffic from both Facebook ads and Google Adwords to MyEstateManager.com. Below we’ll compare the data from each source and discuss the unique advantages of Facebook, as compared to Search Engine ad networks.

• Below are graphs of Impressions vs CPM for both Google and Facebook paid traffic over a six day period. Note: Impressions are the vertical axis, and CPM is the horizontal one.
• Google traffic is represented by an “Estate” ad group that contained keywords closely related to estate management.
• Facebook traffic is represented by advertisements that were directed at the demographics we had identified as being the most common customer of MyEstateManager.

• What we found was that Google Adwords has far more competition between advertisers than Facebook Ads. On the low end of Google’s price spectrum for our targeted keywords, we were able to get 7000 impressions in a day at a $1.6CPM. Compare that to Facebook, and we were able to get targeted traffic at equal volume for under $.15CPM – that’s less than 1/10^th the CPM on Google! +1 Facebook
• The bounce rates between the networks varied a bit as well. Google Adwords maintained a bounce rate of 48.38%, while Facebook’s was 41.54%. +1 Facebook
• Elasticity of both curves is important to note as well. Facebook’s curve is exponential, while Google’s is basically linear.
• Key Factors: One reason for that is the difference between network ad space and placement. Google has 10 ad placements on the first page, while Facebook advertisements only have the chance to appear in about 3 different spots. You can steadily bid up on Google to increase your ad position, while all the inventory on Facebook is divided amongst a few placements—if you aren’t showing up in these, you aren’t showing up at all. Another factor is competition; Facebook doesn’t have nearly as many publishers competing for the ad space, so a small change in Facebook CPM will make a greater difference than the same change in Google CPM.

Facebook Targeting as an Alternative to Search Engine Targeting

• There is other value in expanding advertising campaigns to Facebook that separates it from other Search Engine ad networks. In Facebook, users self-identify (gender, age, vocation, interests, etc) and can be targeted by who they are. Search Engines, such as Google restrict you to primarily targeting keywords, which means you target people based off of what they are looking for. That can lead to some difficulties depending on what your strategy is; for example, if you are a company that does primarily B2B marketing you may have keywords that show up in both B2B oriented searches and in consumer searches—take the keyword ‘cell phone cases,’ for example, a business that makes cell phone cases that are sold through other stores (Best Buy, Radio Shack, etc) wants to get business from people who will buy from them in bulk. They’re not interested in Joe Teenager who wants a shiny new case for his iPhone. On Google, it’s difficult to to screen out Joe Teenager and get John Executive Purchaser. On Facebook, because of the self-identification data, it may be a bit easier.
• Target your viewers effectively: Below are several targeting tips to apply to your Facebook campaigns.
  • Separate your ads to target males and females separately: men and women will almost always click at different patterns.
  • Tighten your age groups: instead of targeting all males or all females, narrow it down to 4 or 5 years apart max. Different ages require varying ad copy as well.
  • Make your users feel like your product is up to date. A good way of doing this is mentioning the month in your ad copy, or even related current events.

  

The main difference between these two ads is the picture, but that makes a significant difference. The ad on the left maintained a CTR of 0.08% vs 0.03% for the one on the right. Lesson: Users are more likely to click on an image that includes a person’s face.

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I run offers in a variety of niches.  Lately, one of the niches that i’ve been running took a serious decline in conversion rates.  This niche is a product sale requiring 2 pages of information.  Page 1 is contact information and page 2 is credit card information.  Offers that converted at 9-14% were all of a sudden converting at 2% if I was lucky.  Needless to say this irritated me.  I have a lot of contacts and reached out to quite a few to see if they were running this niche as well.  Some were and I heard mixed reviews about the kind of conversion rates they were still seeing.  Since some affiliates were claiming high conversion rates and some were claiming low conversion rates this exercise didn’t prove to be fruitful.  Here are a few thoughts/theorys that were going through my head at the time (here is a peak into the mind of Ad Hustler):

• My traffic source was burning out, hence the lower conversion rates. However, this made no sense to me as the users were still clicking through the landing page to the offer.  There was really no decline in landing page to offer click through rate so this theory didn’t make a lot of sense to me.
• Some of the other affiliates I spoke to were lying. In the affiliate industry, you really never know who is telling the truth and who is lying.  People sometimes have vested interests in leading you down a certain path so I don’t believe everything I hear.  One thing that stuck with me though is that certain people in this industry who I really trust, were telling me that there were still good conversion rates in this niche.
• The advertisers are blindly scrubbing and shaving the offers. Since I saw such a rapid decrease in conversion rates I figured that the advertisers were scrubbing and shaving the profitability out of the offers.  This still didn’t exactly make sense to me as some people (that I trust) were still claiming high conversion rates.
• The advertisers are targeting affiliate ID’s or refferer URL’s to shave/scrub CERTAIN affiliates. You see this in the email submit niche quite a bit, so I was thinking this could be possible as well.  It also could explain why some people say conversion rates are still strong and others say they are weak.

To start off, I tested the last theory (that scrubbing is occurring on the affiliate id/referrer level).  I put my landing page on a new domain and sent traffic to an offer that I knew converted a few days prior but at a fresh affiliate network.  This way, I knew that my affiliate id/referrer were not on record with the advertiser.  The results were no better then previously with the old referring URL/network/offer.  This helped me shy away from this theory being the cause of my problems.

———————————————————————

I then decided to use the You Can’t Hustle A Hustler – Testing Method.   I ripped the advertisers landing page and recreated the offer on a domain that I own and am in complete control of.  I took out the advertisers forms and replaced them with my own.  Here are 2 good form tools you can use to do the same and replicate any form:

Coffeecup Form Builder
Logiforms

Since I was down to a 2% conversion rate, I figured this would prove once and for all if I was being shaved/scrubbed by the advertisers.  If this test proved an insanely high conversion rate I would be relatively sure that the problem was not on my end, but rather on the advertisers end.  (Please Note: I know that there are variables unaccounted for here such as merchant account declines, prepaid credit cards and fraud prevention tactics.  That’s not the point.  The point is to get a baseline of how this offer converts when I control the page and the forms)

Next Step: Drive Traffic & See How It Converts

Some Stats

Landing Page —> “Offer” Clicks: 200
Completed “Sales”: 8
Conversion Rate: 4%

So, the conversion rate proved to be slightly higher when I owned all of the offer elements but still not a great conversion rate and fairly inconclusive due to the unaccounted for variables.

BUT WAIT…..THERE’S MORE!

I purposely left out a statistic above.  Since this offer is a Page 1/Page 2 offer aren’t you curious about how many people complete Page 1 vs. Page 2?  I was and this proved most interesting.

Landing Page —> “Offer” Clicks: 200
Page 1 Contact Info Leads: 55
Page 2 Completed “Sales”: 8
Page 1 Lead Conversion Rate: 27.5%
Page 2 Sale Conversion Rate: 4%

Do you notice a HUGE problem here?  I do and it caused me to take some action.

Only 14.5% of the users who filled out page 1 actually filled out page 2.  That’s pretty pathetic.  85% of the users are bailing on the conversion funnel on page 2 where they need to enter their credit card information.  In a live situation, the affiliate never controls the conversion/sales funnel so what’s a Hustler to do?

I decided to better presell the fact that after page 1, the user would be taken to a credit card form that accepts all major credit cards to pay.  It seems stupid to have to tell the people that to pay for the item, they will need to use a credit card but apparently spelling it out helped the conversion rate.  I made the changes and set them live on the real offer.  All of a sudden I was back to 8%-10% conversion rates.

This testing in no way figured out WHY my conversion rate decreased.  It did however provide me with information to get it back to where it needed to be.  With more tweaks/testing I expect to see even higher conversion rates.  Unfortunately affiliates are never provided with sales funnel information.  Without that information I would have never seen this problem and hence never realized how to fix it.

Case Study Testing Funds Contributed By Tatto Media

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