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Building a Video Ad Service

A detailed account of a Fastlane process...

Nicoknowsbest

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I moved away from my initial progress thread here, because the title is not relevant anymore and I wanted a clean cut.

Status Quo:
I think I just stopped a huge downward spiral, mentally as well as in reality. If you are interested in how it came to that, here's the story that went down last autumn. It affected me more than I thought, because my "business" was actually wiped away from under my feet. I put business in brackets, because if I had a real business at that time, nobody could take it away from me. While I learned crucial lessons, my bills had to be paid. Furthermore, I lost my sense of direction, my motivation, my passion, etc.

I simply hated it.

It feels like I managed to move many things into the right direction now. Most importantly, I can see some direction again. Boy, if you don't know where you are going, it gets hard. So, where are we at right now? I started looking at productising services, because I was on my way to building a local marketing agency. I know I don't necessarily want that anymore - for various reasons. It took me a while until I found something that meets most of my personal criteria.

A few of them are:
  • MRR based
  • big market potential
  • solves a real problem
  • potential to scale
  • enjoyable daily task
  • product founder fit
  • piggybacking demonstrated cashflows
  • location independent
  • etc.
Recent developments:
  • I decided to wrap my offer around video in general, combined with YouTube advertising
  • I managed to sell a few smaller MRR packages to clients of an agency I have been working with over the last 3 years
  • It's a great testing ground to dial in my offer, because I get real market feedback quickly
  • Around 60% of my monthly expenses are covered by MRR right now
Next Steps:
  • Update my LinkedIn profile
  • Get into a rhythm of creating regular content
  • Keep current clients happy
  • Get MRR to 1x (= the amount I need to cover monthly expenses)
  • Find a route to market
 
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Last edited:

Kid

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Good one, video ads seems to be underutilized right now so you can sell people on better ROI compared to Google Ads or Facebook Ads. Keep us posted.
 

Nicoknowsbest

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My Business Filters

In order to make good decisions, it is valuable to create some sort of personal decision matrix for yourself. This matrix might have various areas, such as personal, business model, market size, etc. It is crucial to know what you are aiming for before you start. Here are a few questions I asked myself before getting started.

Please NOTE: this might lead to overthinking. Don't overdo it. Take a few that resonate and answer them. Take action. Come back. Iterate. Change. Adapt. Modify. But only with real market feedback and experience - no navel gazing allowed. :)


Personal
  • Is it focused around my strengths?
  • Is it something I am passionate about?
  • Does it depend on me personally?
  • Does it fit a passion?
  • Is it an enjoyable daily task?
  • Do I love it?
  • Is there a product/founder fit?
  • Does it operate profitably without the founder?
  • Can it be run with a minimum amount of time investment?
  • Can I be an expert from day one?
  • Is it easy (not little work, easy)?
  • What is my zone of magic?
    • What can I do better than others?
    • Remember when you were a kid!
    • What education do you have?
    • What hobbies do you have?
    • What am I an expert in?
    • Which special talents do I have?
    • Which of these means having the most fun?

Business Model
  • Can a monthly recurring revenue model be applied?
  • Can it be scaled indefinitely?
  • Can it be passive and completely automated?
  • Is the business model simple?
  • Is it built for profitability?
  • Is it detached from my time?
  • Do I have all control?
  • Can I be #1 or #2 in the marketplace right away?
  • Does it have a unique twist?
  • Is it a new business model in an underserved market?

Potential Success
  • Is it sellable?
  • How big is the potential upside?
  • Does it leave a dent in the universe?
  • Can it work with/for big industry names?

Operations
  • Does it offer the ability to execute remotely?
  • Does it work with virtual teams?

Offer
  • Is it easy to sell to customers/clients
  • Is it a real painful problem?
  • Can it be standardised?
  • Are people already spending money in that area?
  • Does it lower the business’s cost?
  • Does it help the business sell more?
  • Does it tap into pain or pleasure differentiators?
  • Can I protect it from competitors or can it be replicated quickly?
    • Selling services in very deep niches is the way to go (expert level products)?
    • It’s hard to get super expert knowledge in super deep niches (e.g. marketing for pediatricians)
  • Will customers bite your hand off like when buying an AC in 45°C?
  • Is selling it EASY?
  • Am I 10x better than my closest competitor?
  • Is the problem already solved?
  • Is it a major problem?
    • Might be solved at the top of the industry, but not on an expert level or in a deep niche level (e.g. funnel builders vs funnel builders for pediatricians)
  • Do I have a huge traffic advantage?
  • Do I have a marketing or copywriting advantage?
  • Can it be launched quickly?
  • Does it have the advantage of an unsolved problem?
  • Does it have mass market potential?
  • How painful is the problem?

Market
  • Is the market growing?
  • How big is the market?
  • Is there demand?
  • Can you access the customers?
  • Will the customer be better off?
  • Does it have a unique lead generation advantage?
  • What results are potential customers after?
  • Does the market have deep pockets?
  • Is it hyper-niched down?
  • What of my zone of magic serves a real market need?
  • What of my zone of magic solves a real market problem?
 
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Nicoknowsbest

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This is how I structured my initial business this week.

# Business Type
Define what sort of business you have. Is it a service business? Print on demand? Consulting?

# Business Name
Find a business name to go with for now. Don't worry about this too much.

# Tagline
Inspired by an elevator pitch, what's the benefit you provide in one sentence.

# What problem do you solve?
Write down what the big problem you solve is.

# What services do you provide?
How do you solve that problem? What exactly are you offering?

# Market
Define who your market is. Consider saying no to everything else.

# Niche
Is there a niche within your market that you can target?

# Demonstrated Cashflows
What are people in your target market already spending money on?

# Growth
How do you want to grow week by week, month by month? Put down some initial goals.

# Pricing
How much do you ask for your solution?

# Guarantees
Which guarantee can you offer?

# Sales Channels
Which sales channel will you initially pick? Consider staying with this choice until you nailed it.

# Competition
Who are your 3 top competitors?

# Fulfillment
How do you fulfill services/solutions sold?

# Team
Do you want /need to have a team? If yes, how would that look?
 

Andy Black

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Nicoknowsbest

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How are you getting on with these?

Keeping current clients happy:
  • In order to be able to do retargeting of video viewers, we need to connect clients' YouTube accounts to their Google Ads accounts. This seems to be an issue for most clients. I now made a few Loom videos to guide them through the process.
  • I am experimenting with which campaign types work best for certain clients. I am testing keywords, placements and audiences against each other.
  • Most of them are pleased with seeing how much reach you can quickly get with a YouTube campaign. Getting hard cold conversions is a bit of a challenge right now though. This is due to various factors, such as the clients' landing pages for instance.
  • Here's an example of comparing impressions of a search campaign vs a video campaign with a small budget. This is the data of only last week:30563
    (Columns are arranged to better understand video data in this screenshot)

    An average cost per view of €0.01 is amazing. Clicks cost almost double compared to the search campaign though.
  • Some of them are on a small monthly package. I am trying to find a sweet spot where I can get them results for the money they spend and show them that if it pays off, investing more would reap even bigger benefits. It's challenging because if you give too much for a small retainer, increasing prices later on might cause confusion.

Getting MRR to 1x (= the amount I need to cover monthly expenses):
  • I am struggling with this one at the moment. In between making things work for existing clients, there's a bit of time left to do sales. I emailed all my contacts from my previous ventures letting them know that I changed my offer. So far, this hasn't brought any more clients.
  • I started being more active in a few Facebook groups that are connected to my target market. I am just present, chiming in and helping here and there.
  • I am currently thinking about throwing up a quick landing page to summarise my offer. Alternatively, I could start with only a Facebook page.
  • A few of my clients have access to a big number of potential clients themselves - think coaches. If I nail it for them and they recommend me, then this would be a very quick way to scale it up beyond 1x.

There are quite a few tools online that you can produce videos with quickly. I am an Adobe guy and was used to building most of my videos, animations etc. by hand from scratch. I was amazed at how quickly you can create videos with these tools nowadays.

This one for instance took me under 5 minutes I think and served as a small commercial video ad to test the market with:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbw0-cvbqUg&feature=youtu.be


Here are the results of running a campaign for a few days with this video:
30565

While it didn't drive any conversions - the client has an email list - it definitely did create social proof and made her YouTube channel grow significantly:

30566

I used Lumen5 to create this video. It has a free version that you get pretty far with. Here are a few other browser based video tools:
  • Adobe Creative Cloud ($59/mth)
    • Expensive, only for professionals, takes quite some effort to get results
  • Clipman ($37/mth)
    • Easy, can pull images from websites and integrate them in videos, was buggy when testing
  • Promo ($29/mth)
    • Slickest tool so far, charges $320/mth if you want to have reseller's rights
  • EasyVSL ($197/yr)
    • Looks cool, haven't tried it yet
  • AdLaunch ($29/mth)
    • Looks interesting, haven't tried it yet

My biggest learnings so far:
  • I come from an agency background where we used to produce and edit videos for clients such as Volkswagen and Audi, among other things. Everything had to be super slick always. This is why I never touched video until now - way too much effort for the end result. Or so I thought. It amazes me how powerful video is. And it doesn't have to be super professional. It just needs to bring the message across.
  • Many clients are afraid of video, saying they don't feel ready yet. When asking them what they mean, they answer similar things like I thought - everything has to be polished, I don't look good enough, oh my god this will be on YouTube, etc. Like with everything, you have to get over yourself. Also, only because you are a coach and we run YouTube campaigns doesn't mean that you yourself have to be in the video.
  • While working with stock footage is not always ideal, it helps knock out videos super quick. If I had to wait for clients to send videos that they feel are "good enough", we wouldn't be able to collect results that quickly.
  • Many of freelancers/entrepreneurs in creative fields such as graphic design or video think they need a hyper portfolio to get clients. They waste tons of time and money to create something beautiful, while they could have been engaging the market all this time. I suffered from this myself. When somebody wants to see a portfolio, it either is a red flag for me or, if I have a good feeling, I'll knock out a quick free demo to show what I can do.
  • I don't have a YouTube channel myself yet, but I am thinking of just starting one. This will multiply my learnings and I can also get better insights into strategic content planning and actual YouTube SEO. Let's see - I prefer to get paid to learn if possible.
  • Looking back, I could have been much faster with knocking this out. I got distracted by many things instead of looking at what is right in front of me. When you are focused, good things happen.
 
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Nicoknowsbest

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Learning of this week:

We have a client who owns a B&B in South Africa. We started running YouTube campaigns a few weeks ago. First locally, then worldwide. We had search campaigns running locally as well. Once we saw that the video got many impressions and views, we cloned the local search campaign to be targeting the whole world.

See what happened...

Last Week's Stats:
Yellow = Worldwide YouTube campaign
Red = Worldwide Search Campaign
30634

This Week's Stats:
Yellow = Worldwide YouTube campaign
Red = Worldwide Search Campaign
30635

The worldwide YouTube campaign spiked interest so that the worldwide search campaign started picking up searchers as well. The YouTube campaign seems to be working as some sort of branding campaign that "creates demand", while the matching local search campaign then "fulfills this demand".

Very interesting observation.

Going forward, we'll always link these two together from now on.
 

Nicoknowsbest

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Random productivity hack I am trying right now: no smartphone. I ditched my smartphone over the weekend because I caught myself wasting time during work and leisure on my phone regularly. What I was doing on my smartphone also didn't help my overall state of mind - Instagram, news, etc.

I did a little research and found lots of stuff that I can confirm. Basically, your smartphone is like a slot machine. Only that the payout is not money, but dopamine. That's the short story. The long story is that our brains started changing due to smartphones. We can hardly focus longer than 20 minutes without interruption for instance.

In the beginning, I was thinking. Oh man, I am already anti-social as an entrepreneur. If I kick WhatsApp now too, I lose contact completely. But yeah, f*ck it. The ones that are worth keeping in my life won't budge away from a simple call. Yep, phones can still do that, LOL.

So, here it is, my new beauty:
30667

40 bucks on Amazon, compared to 1250€ I paid for my iPhone XS Max. If this goes well, I'll sell my iPhone. I'll run this for a week for now and see how it goes. I'll follow up with my learnings.

If you want to do some research, here are good starting points:
(NOTE: I am aware that Alex Becker is controversial for some. I personally like his style and his messages most of the time.)

I Wish I Stopped This Sooner
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hMPi4IFUmk


Why I Smashed My Iphone
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lyEyr0e_Ac


How Smartphones Change The Way You Think | Jeff Butler | TEDxHilliard
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWvSwX-jq7o&t=5s
 

Nicoknowsbest

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This week, we are optimizing YouTube campaigns for existing clients. Here's an example of a Malaysian client - you can see 5 different ad groups. They all contain the same video ad and copy, just the targeting varies. This way, we are figuring out which targeting works best for this with minimal spend. Once we noticed a trend, we'll drill down and boost what is working while switching off what is not.

30723
  • We only made this change yesterday, so it is minimal data
  • The trend started evolving already
  • Check out the difference in % of the CTR
  • Notice the difference in CPC - this is tremendous (8x higher)
  • Imagine the effects of such actions with a 100x bigger budget
 
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Nicoknowsbest

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Here's another interesting thing...

I am working on an account for the B&B owner in South Africa today. Here's what I found today:
30759
(data for this week only)

Red = these two search campaigns are capturing local searchers
Yellow = this video campaign is running worldwide

Look at the difference in Avg. CPC, despite the search campaigns competing for clicks "only" on a local level and the video targeting the whole world.

If we take an average of the two Avg. CPCs of the search campaigns and round it to roughly ZAR29 and compare that to Avg. CPC of ZAR1.60 of the video campaign, we can see that the video campaign produces roughly 18x cheaper clicks.

This is crazy.

The next step is to determine the quality of these video clicks. We are working on getting conversion tracking setup properly so we can better judge what's going on.

The client said he noticed an increase in enquiries and is pleased for now.
 

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Here's another interesting thing...

I am working on an account for the B&B owner in South Africa today. Here's what I found today:
View attachment 30759
(data for this week only)

Red = these two search campaigns are capturing local searchers
Yellow = this video campaign is running worldwide

Look at the difference in Avg. CPC, despite the search campaigns competing for clicks "only" on a local level and the video targeting the whole world.

If we take an average of the two Avg. CPCs of the search campaigns and round it to roughly ZAR29 and compare that to Avg. CPC of ZAR1.60 of the video campaign, we can see that the video campaign produces roughly 18x cheaper clicks.

This is crazy.

The next step is to determine the quality of these video clicks. We are working on getting conversion tracking setup properly so we can better judge what's going on.

The client said he noticed an increase in enquiries and is pleased for now.
This has the making of an interesting presentation for Summit 2021...just saying.
 
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Nicoknowsbest

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Here's another interesting thing...

I am working on an account for the B&B owner in South Africa today. Here's what I found today:
30759
30759

(data for this week only)

Red = these two search campaigns are capturing local searchers
Yellow = this video campaign is running worldwide

Look at the difference in Avg. CPC, despite the search campaigns competing for clicks "only" on a local level and the video targeting the whole world.

If we take an average of the two Avg. CPCs of the search campaigns and round it to roughly ZAR29 and compare that to Avg. CPC of ZAR1.60 of the video campaign, we can see that the video campaign produces roughly 18x cheaper clicks.

This is crazy.

The next step is to determine the quality of these video clicks. We are working on getting conversion tracking setup properly so we can better judge what's going on.

The client said he noticed an increase in enquiries and is pleased for now.

Digging deeper into this, I found out that we had roughly 150k views since January 22nd:
30771

These views cost us ZAR590, which are roughly 35€ today (including clicks):
30772

This is pretty incredible!
 

Nicoknowsbest

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Random productivity hack I am trying right now: no smartphone. I ditched my smartphone over the weekend because I caught myself wasting time during work and leisure on my phone regularly. What I was doing on my smartphone also didn't help my overall state of mind - Instagram, news, etc.

I did a little research and found lots of stuff that I can confirm. Basically, your smartphone is like a slot machine. Only that the payout is not money, but dopamine. That's the short story. The long story is that our brains started changing due to smartphones. We can hardly focus longer than 20 minutes without interruption for instance.

In the beginning, I was thinking. Oh man, I am already anti-social as an entrepreneur. If I kick WhatsApp now too, I lose contact completely. But yeah, f*ck it. The ones that are worth keeping in my life won't budge away from a simple call. Yep, phones can still do that, LOL.

So, here it is, my new beauty:
View attachment 30667

40 bucks on Amazon, compared to 1250€ I paid for my iPhone XS Max. If this goes well, I'll sell my iPhone. I'll run this for a week for now and see how it goes. I'll follow up with my learnings.

If you want to do some research, here are good starting points:
(NOTE: I am aware that Alex Becker is controversial for some. I personally like his style and his messages most of the time.)

I Wish I Stopped This Sooner
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hMPi4IFUmk


Why I Smashed My Iphone
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lyEyr0e_Ac


How Smartphones Change The Way You Think | Jeff Butler | TEDxHilliard
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWvSwX-jq7o&t=5s
So, it's been more than a week and I am guilty. I used my smartphone meanwhile, but I am back to my flip phone now.

It went kind of sneaky... I had an appointment and my car's GPS is a bit outdated compared to Google Maps, so I just swapped SIM cards and went ahead. A few days later I realised I was still using my smartphone in all ways possible.

I didn't like it although I deleted all apps and blocked loads of websites. I kept looking for that dopamine hit. So back to the flip phone!
 
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Nicoknowsbest

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Here's a thought about CPA...

If you buy media, you tend to think in metrics when talking to new prospects. It happened that I ditched clients because they couldn't afford an acceptable monthly rate in my view.

But here's the deal.

Let's put CPA, hourly rates and CLTV into perspective.

Let's say it takes you a one hour call to sign up a new prospect that came in via a referral. This prospect pays you 100€/mth to run video ad campaigns. It takes you around 10 hours of work to dial in campaigns and get results. If you had an hourly rate of 100€ and insisted on that, you would never have taken on that client.

But here's the deal.

After the initial investment of 10 hours, your campaigns drive results consistently, month by month. You spend a minimal amount per month maintaining the performance and updating the client.

Let's say the client stays around 18 months on average. And refers you to more clients that stay 18 months each.

Now your initial investment of 10 hours looks laughably small compared to the result. Remember, this is almost passive income, consistently. On top of that, you helped a "smaller" guy stay in business and live his dream.

At the end of the day, it is about results. How you get these for a client doesn't matter. If he wanted to pay somebody by the hour, he would have hired an employee. So don't think like an employee, think like a business owner.
 

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Here's a thought about CPA...

If you buy media, you tend to think in metrics when talking to new prospects. It happened that I ditched clients because they couldn't afford an acceptable monthly rate in my view.

But here's the deal.

Let's put CPA, hourly rates and CLTV into perspective.

Let's say it takes you a one hour call to sign up a new prospect that came in via a referral. This prospect pays you 100€/mth to run video ad campaigns. It takes you around 10 hours of work to dial in campaigns and get results. If you had an hourly rate of 100€ and insisted on that, you would never have taken on that client.

But here's the deal.

After the initial investment of 10 hours, your campaigns drive results consistently, month by month. You spend a minimal amount per month maintaining the performance and updating the client.

Let's say the client stays around 18 months on average. And refers you to more clients that stay 18 months each.

Now your initial investment of 10 hours looks laughably small compared to the result. Remember, this is almost passive income, consistently. On top of that, you helped a "smaller" guy stay in business and live his dream.

At the end of the day, it is about results. How you get these for a client doesn't matter. If he wanted to pay somebody by the hour, he would have hired an employee. So don't think like an employee, think like a business owner.

Don't forget to factor in the numerous questions/requests clients will give you. Either get them to pay a certain amount p/m based on your estimates or get clients to pay separately for any support/requests/questions.
 

maverick

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Don't forget to factor in the numerous questions/requests clients will give you. Either get them to pay a certain amount p/m based on your estimates or get clients to pay separately for any support/requests/questions.
Easy way to keep track of this is to use Basecamp or Asana and to give your clients access.
 
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Nicoknowsbest

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@maverick thanks! Definitely agree. We are using Basecamp at the minute. I find Asana way too complex for what we need right now.

I think of it more as a productised service - get results for $X/mth including ABC. The rest would be an upsell.

@Sharron Zoss definitely.
 

Nicoknowsbest

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This week, we went deeper into the rabbit hole. Right now, we have 5 paying clients on a MRR model for video ads + YouTube campaigns. They come from 4 different verticals. While we could generate loads of responses with our campaigns quickly for little money, we are not working on really dialing in all parts of the campaigns.

We did some digging this week and found a new campaign structure that we tested. The goal was to further narrow down visitor quality and catching the right buyers at the right stage of their journeys.

When we are changing things up, we usually decide for a case study client we rebuild campaigns for, dial them in and as soon as we (and the client!) are happy, we replicate our learnings to other clients. This way, we minimise the overhead and can really focus on dialing new campaigns in. It doesn't necessarily have to be the client with the biggest budget, although that helps for collecting loads of data quickly.

We have been thinking a lot about the following: there is loads of talk about how you cannot get Google Ads and YouTube campaigns profitable anymore, if we don't plan the full funnel from before you start. Common talk (from authorities) online is that we need to control and develop the whole funnel behind the traffic for a client. If we do so, things get complicated really quickly and the manpower required as well as the costs involved skyrocket. This is not really an ideal scenario for a client.

So we'd like to challenge this assumption. While we agree that a few basic conversion elements and variables have to be in place on the landing page and in the funnel, our thoughts are this:

If we send relevant visitors to a landing page, that shows them what they are looking for and how to get it, and they DON'T convert, it is not a funnel problem, but a visitor problem. This means that we believe it is essential to first dial in your traffic that it converts relevant visitors on the most simple landing page. Then we can think about further building out the funnel. We also have a case study and proven results to justify additional investments for our client. We then start building out a full funnel step by step.

But, profitability first.

If we cannot convert the easiest visitors, then it's really not worth building a whole funnel.

Here's an example:
We are working with a beautician in a specific location. Next to search and branded campaigns, we are working with display and video campaigns. If we cannot dial campaigns in so that visitors already looking for a beautician in this location convert on a landing page that follows a basic structure with a specific CTA, then our campaigns suck, not the landing page.

Once this step is completed, we then optimize the landing page for the traffic that is ALREADY working. Only then we'd start building out other parts of the funnel and casting the net wider.

Here's a concrete learning of this week for the beautician client:
30878

Learnings:
This is a generic display campaign targeting relevant audiences on the Google Display Network. Let's ignore the fact that Google overspend our daily budget by 100% :) This is the data for only TODAY and I am writing this at 12:04 pm local time, so basically half a day.
  • We could generate loads of impressions quickly
  • We had an incredible amount of clicks
  • A CTR of 6.35% for a generic GDN campaign is quite surprising to be honest
  • The Avg. CPC of 0.06 is also very surprising
  • The problem so far is that there were no conversions
  • Furthermore, this GDN campaign bit into our search campaigns' budgets, which are really dialed in already
Next steps:
  • We will split out ad budgets to avoid generic campaigns biting into dialed in ones
  • We will analyze where clicks came from
  • We will test out different ad budgets
  • We will narrow down audiences to get more relevant clicks

Very interesting stuff going on!
Happy Friday guys :)
 

Nicoknowsbest

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Here's something I posted in our private Mastermind chat today:

Guys, what a ride.

I decided to focus 100% of my time on YouTube ads in combination with Google Display Network ads. This is my new high-ground. While I can build and manage search campaigns too, I'd rather focus on the two mentioned above. Each one is a separate beast to handle and I want to go real deep.

I feel since I have a focus now, I am not trying to chop trees with a pocket knife anymore. I have now an axe that gets sharper by the day. My attention is undivided and I haven't made that much progress in something ever I think.

I was fiddling with my calendar this week and somehow arrived at a rough 3 way split of my time:

33% of client work
33% of research and learning (for concrete clients' cases)
33% of my time talking about it

I created a YouTube channel:
30880

I'll create weekly videos that I'll then slice up and publish on all sorts of platforms. YouTube will be my main focus though.

I took on a one day per week job meanwhile because my back is against the wall. As soon as the situation loosens up, I'll quit again. I just realised that if money is tight, I might not behave as I'd like. The client comes first, not my revenue. So I solved this and I am now ready to go really deep with YouTube. My MRR basically more or less covers my 1x now, which is phenomenal. I reduced my monthly costs a bit more.

I finally shifted from being a consumer to being a producer. I manage to focus everything around action at the moment, which feels great. When I am moving, my brain kicks into gear and the magic starts happening.

All in all, despite money being low and me taking on a temporary job for a day per week, I am happier than ever during my time as a business owner. I have clarity of purpose now. And this changes everything.

Happy Friday!
I hope everybody is doing okay.
 
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Nicoknowsbest

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Learnings:
This is a generic display campaign targeting relevant audiences on the Google Display Network. Let's ignore the fact that Google overspend our daily budget by 100% :) This is the data for only TODAY and I am writing this at 12:04 pm local time, so basically half a day.
  • We could generate loads of impressions quickly
  • We had an incredible amount of clicks
  • A CTR of 6.35% for a generic GDN campaign is quite surprising to be honest
  • The Avg. CPC of 0.06 is also very surprising
  • The problem so far is that there were no conversions
  • Furthermore, this GDN campaign bit into our search campaigns' budgets, which are really dialed in already
Next steps:
  • We will split out ad budgets to avoid generic campaigns biting into dialed in ones
  • We will analyze where clicks came from
  • We will test out different ad budgets
  • We will narrow down audiences to get more relevant clicks

While we were waiting for a bit of data to trickle in to define our next actions, our first conversion from the new campaign came through. We are very pleased with this result. Now we are off to dig deeper into this:

30954
 

Nicoknowsbest

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Read Fastlane!
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Mar 31, 2014
460
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I created a YouTube channel:
30880
30880


I'll create weekly videos that I'll then slice up and publish on all sorts of platforms. YouTube will be my main focus though.

Hmm... I think I'll move that to be a low priority. I watched a video yesterday that really resonated:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qe59Sr_MTic


My key take-away from this video is: focus. Do one thing, and do it right. Have I seen many videos of Shopify's CEO? No? There's a reason for that. Focus on my "product" (or service) and be the best I can be. Instead of splitting up my time and attention to invest 20% here, 10% there and 30% over there, I dedicate 100% of my time and effort to one thing. Then it will be very hard to beat me and push me out of the market place.

Interesting! I like it. Let's see where this takes me.
 

Nicoknowsbest

Gold Contributor
Read Fastlane!
Speedway Pass
User Power
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Mar 31, 2014
460
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Learnings:
This is a generic display campaign targeting relevant audiences on the Google Display Network. Let's ignore the fact that Google overspend our daily budget by 100% :) This is the data for only TODAY and I am writing this at 12:04 pm local time, so basically half a day.
  • We could generate loads of impressions quickly
  • We had an incredible amount of clicks
  • A CTR of 6.35% for a generic GDN campaign is quite surprising to be honest
  • The Avg. CPC of 0.06 is also very surprising
  • The problem so far is that there were no conversions
  • Furthermore, this GDN campaign bit into our search campaigns' budgets, which are really dialed in already

Sooo... We have been testing a new campaign structure for various clients. Here is some data for this week - which is only around half way through - for the B&B owner in South Africa:

31004

Learnings:

  • While visitor intent is not comparable to dialed in search campaigns, generic display campaigns are a great way to "generate/inspire demand".
  • With a minimal budget we were able to get loads of impressions and a ton of clicks
  • If we compare the Avg. CPC of this campaign with the one from the search campaign, there is a massive difference - the search CPCs are roughly 53x (!) higher
  • Was it worth it? We don't know. Conversion tracking is not in place, so we have to rely on the business owner's impression. We have been trying to sort tracking for a while now. We are hesitant to touch websites we don't run to avoid breaking things. We might need to come up with a better and more efficient way to take care of tracking.
 
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