TTE Q&A Call #2, Modules 3-4

There’s a list of questions and answers with time stamps, as well as a full transcript below.

Questions & Answers

1. Question: So one big question that seems to be coming up a lot is, how do I start, right? What’s sort of the minimum viable? Do I need a full multi-page presale site and everything built out, and then from there we move forward?

Question (5:05-5:15) | Answer (5:15-8:45)

2. Question: What’s the definition of Google ad success right now where you are in the program?

Question (8:47-8:55) | Answer (8:58-11:38)

3. Question: There’ve been some questions about scaling. And I think the questions are coming partly from looking through the lens of the world through the Facebook lens of the world. And we’ll talk about scaling on Facebook later. Facebook has some weird issue. I think they’re weird. They have some sort of strange issues with scaling. You can’t scale too much, too fast. And Lauren will speak to that far better than I do about what those parameters look like. Google’s not that way at all. And the questions have sort of raised a little bit of concern with me that I didn’t explain myself well. How do you scale on Google?

Question (11:40-12:10) | Answer (12:11-16:00)

4. Question: So if you’ve got the one ad group with the one keyword, presumably ideally it’s an exact match phrase you’d want inside there, or?

Question (16:04-16:19) | Answer (16:19-18:12)

5. Question: What if there isn’t much search volume on Google ads?

Question (18:25-18:29) | Answer (18:29-22:00)

6. Question: Audience and offer masterclass, how do we link the results of the exercise, jobs, pains and gains with our actual Google and Facebook ads?

Question (23:03-23:09) | Answer (23:10-27:13)

7. Question: Sometime ago all classes about Google ads always started with all these minimum quality aspects that you needed on your webpage in order to get approved. Having an about us page, having a page about your data policy, et cetera. Is that still the case or did they relax?

Question (27:22-27:35) | Answer (27:35-28:39)

8. Question: In the past it was pretty much prohibited to send traffic to a squeeze page. Does that still apply?

Question (28:40-28:45) | Answer (28:45-30:40)

9. Question: I didn’t quite understand your recommendation for timing for the initial run, so we would switch out 12:00 AM to 5:00 AM and test performance on weekends versus weekdays?

Question (30:43-30:53) | Answer (30:53-32:40)

10. Question: You mentioned that for your ad for the university in ad copy, adding a sense of urgency made all the difference. Is that a specific example of how studying your competitors can help you find relevant elements and structure that you should include into your ads or do you in general recommend adding a sense of urgency in your ads?

Question (32:42-32:56) | Answer (32:56-35:08)

11. Question: You say to turn off mobile tablet traffic and focus on desktop traffic. I just checked my stats from 1st April until today and 75% of my website visitors are on mobile and tablet and most buy on mobile devices. I just need some clarity double-checking. Even though I say this is not always true and your results may vary. However, initially we want to control as many factors as possible. Later we can incrementally add mobile and tablet traffic and measure those results separately. Should I be preparing to only focus on desktop as it seems I will be missing a huge chunk of traffic?

Question (35:24-35:58) | Answer (35:58-39:03)

12. Question: (re: the situation of the previous questioner) So at the campaign level for his particular user case where his data is suggesting that he do something which is not the default play that you would suggest. So would you suggest in that user case that at the campaign level he has two campaigns for the exact same keyword phrases and just one’s turned on for mobile one turned on for desktop?

Question (39:04-39:35) | Answer (39:36-42:58)

13. Question: I don’t have a website yet. It’s a landing page to gather email addresses. I usually do this for Facebook lead generation to an email series to a sales page. Will Google Ads work with directing traffic this way or should I spend the time building a manifesto, for example a multi-page presell site plus about a contact pages on the website? What’s the leanest version I can get away with to get started?”

Question (43:03-43:43) | Answer (43:43-47:35)

14. Question: And the second part of the question, “Am I better trying to sell the idea like a lead magnet via the advertisement or the product itself?

Question (47:37-47:39) | Answer (47:49-50:13)

15. Question: And the second part of the question, “Am I better trying to sell the idea like a lead magnet via the advertisement or the product itself?

Question (47:37-47:39) | Answer (47:49-56:26)

16. Question: I have a conversion tracking problem. I sell on a partner site and I have no pixel there. I have tried offline conversions on Facebook and they’re poor. If there are workarounds, I am keen to hear about them for Facebook or Google.

Question (56:28-56:44) | Answer (56:44-1:04:33)

17. Question: Why does a desktop laptop seem to convert best? If I look at my email content, mobile wins by a mile. I’m building most things mobile, first for this reason. Do I need to make a semi about turn for Google?

Question (1:04:31-1:05:08) | Answer (1:05:10-1:09:07)

18. Question: Geography tiers make sense, if for example, the UK is my biggest market, I could bid $10, and then France, let’s say France converted half as well, would you then bid $5? So proportional bids based on results. I can see that UK is tier one, big European countries tier two, and then the rest of the US tier three.

Question (1:09:09-1:09:28) | Answer (1:09:28-1:13:59)

19. Question: With the time of day as I am only targeting Europe right now, should I turn Ads off overnight?

Question (1:13:59-1:14:05) | Answer (1:13:06-1:13:49)

20. Question: You mentioned adding a date to show urgency, is there something similar we could use for Evergreen?

Question (1:15:22-1:15:27) | Answer (1:15:27-1:17:35)

21. Question: I understand that the best way to test an idea is to use Facebook Ads instead of Google Ads? Is it because Facebook allows us to reach a virtually infinite audience? Or because Facebook allows us to filter among hundreds of user preferences, while in Google we just rely on a specific search query the user inputs in the search bar?

Question (1:17:40-1:17:50) | Answer (1:17:50-1:23:15)

22. Question: Google Ads certification program, Google certified advertising professional, is it worth taking? Is Facebook blueprint worth taking?

Question (1:23:42-1:23:52) | Answer (1:23:52-1:25:35)

23. Question: Is there any real advantage of using Google tag manager to track Ads or is Google analytics in search console just fine?

Question (1:25:38-1:25:44) | Answer (1:25:44-1:26:33)

24. Question: I’ve got some keyword campaigns currently set up in a way that looks far from optimal when measured against the guidelines in module three. Lots of keywords up together in an Ad group, Broad Match rather than anything more targeted, but they’re currently working well for me. They get people to opt in to my emails and I’m getting between 1.5X and two times return on Ads spend after 14 days. What are your thoughts and the benefits of changing the search terms to a better approach versus the risk of messing things up if I make changes to something that’s already working? There is actually a YouTube Ads campaign, but I’m guessing the principals here will be saying for both Google search and YouTube

Question (1:26:40-1:27:09) | Answer (1:27:09-1:33:45)

25. Question: I have set up two campaigns for my eCommerce business. Keywords around benefits of widget discovering intent, and the keywords around buy widget buyer intent. What do you think about this approach, and how do you think I should go about the buyer intent campaigns, landing page straight to the product page? Or collections page, or something else?

Question (1:33:47-1:34:00) | Answer (1:34:04-1:37:56)

26. Question: I love the differentiation between account metrics and business metrics. Do you know of any good resources to help clients calculate their max CPA? We help dentists sell high ticket treatments, and it can be a two year sales cycle, so we need to work on cost per lead, but we can track conversion rates through each stage of the journey and forecast CPA.

Question (1:38:00-1:38:32) | Answer (1:38:32-1:47:33)

27. Question: What if you have a high ticket offer and it’s been very successful but through word of mouth, not paid traffic. How would you then test it online?

Question (1:47:33-1:47:41) | Answer (1:47:41-1:51:33)

28. Question: I’m having a hard time thinking about the jobs to be done for my offer. It’s for a course on helping people get over grief because of the loss of a loved one, feel better, and get better back to normal and quotes be happy again. Seems to surface level. Any recommendations on questions to get me thinking better about this?

Question (1:51:33-1:51:48) | Answer (1:51:48-1:55:25)

29. Question: In the screencast you mentioned how the $5000 is a terrible overspend, and some of the other ads should be switched off because they hadn’t converted under the $800 target CPA. What percentage are you looking at to know when you should switch an ad off? How much more than a target CPA?

Question (1:55:27-1:55:43) | Answer (1:55:43-1:58:34)

30. Question: With what you said about one page manifesto plus a buy button, or plus button at the bottom of page to lead to sales. Is that button where you capture their email too?

Question (1:59:11-1:59:19) | Answer (1:59:20-2:02:30)

31. Question: When do you suggest implementing something like heroes or Wicked Reports to help with attribution and tracking, given that you can track and it’s all on your own site?

Question (2:02:48-2:02:59) | Answer (2:03:00-2:07:38)

32. Question: When will you start creating sharing your specific test example? And will you include how you go through the same audience offer mapping process with jobs, pains and gains? I’ve offered different services to experts in the online marketing space and my goal is to transition more to selling info products to the same or different audience. My challenge is I’ve done everything from building webinar funnels, lead gen funnels, email promo campaigns, retargeting ads and light video editing. Having a hard time narrowing down a specific enough audience and the related jobs. Starting from the jobs to be done makes more sense to me. Would you just test different audiences and offers? Also would a potential job be “get webinar leads” or “sell product fire webinar”, wondering about the scope?

Question (2:07:41-2:08:34) | Answer (2:08:34-2:14:53)

33. Question: In terms of attribution not being possible if you get leads in one location and sell in another, is that still true for a physical sale like dentists? I would have thought tracking was possible through a CRM.

Question (2:15:28-2:15:43) | Answer (2:15:43-2:16:47)

34. Question: Slightly confused by the curriculum instructions. What to implement first and do, are you recommending starting with Google Ads first to get feedback or gain pain job to be done before thinking about Facebook Ads or what’s the interplay? Are we going through this with you in real time?

Question (2:16:59-2:17:19) | Answer (2:17:21-2:20:43)

35. Question: If the customers are not searching for specific problem, key phrases enough, does that mean the key phrase should be optimized or is that to be taken that demand is less, so that we can use awareness type ads?

Question (2:22:51-2:23:05) | Answer (2:23:05-2:26:16)

36. Question: Are you going to show us how to configure, to measure for CPA and ROAS and Google Analytics or worksheet?

Question (2:26:20-2:26:28) | Answer (2:26:28-2:27:23)

Transcript

Shawn (00:00:00):
All right, so I will start. I’ve got a list of sort of initial things I want to cover, some housekeeping stuff, just a few things that we’ll go through quickly. There is a client services call next Thursday. So many of you sent in questions that are related to the client services module, those will all get discussed next Thursday. I’m not going to discuss that on this call. There might’ve been something that snuck through into the questions that were submitted that seems broadly useful for everybody. But when I’m looking at questions as they came in, what I’m trying to choose first are the questions that I think are as broadly useful as possible or things that clearly need to be clarified.

Shawn (00:00:41):
Okay, let’s move on here. This call, the focus primarily of this call will be modules three and four in the two parts of the audience and offer masterclass. If we have time to sort of go backwards for any other questions, happy to do that. But I want to make sure that we prioritize those two modules and the masterclass. Quick note to let everybody know that there is an unbelievable volume of comments and questions and other things that are sort of coming my way as I am creating content.

Shawn (00:01:18):
So I’m sort of driving the bus down the road and trying to change the tires at the same time. So for those of you who have been patient, thank you very much. Please be patient, I will answer every single question that has been asked. I just probably won’t answer those questions today, but I will get to everything. And when I see themes and particularly in the comments, what I’m doing is taking those themes and then going back to the original content and finding out where the answers best belong. And then I will put them there with screencast and other things. So I just want everyone to know that you are being heard, and you will be responded to and we’ll get there as fast as we can. All right, let’s jump into some questions.

André (00:02:07):
Before you do …

Shawn (00:02:07):
Yeah.

André (00:02:09):
Just click on the … If anybody has a question, just click on the Q&A and ask it inside of the Q&A box and not the chat box. The chat box is just [inaudible 00:02:18] and the Q&A box we can then to go through that list as soon as Shawn’s done on this main doc.

Shawn (00:02:28):
Cool. I want to jump past a couple of questions. There’s a few more housekeeping things that I just want to throw out. I haven’t made a decision about this yet, but I just want everyone to know what I’m thinking about. So I created the outline for the traffic engine in advance. And I’ve mentioned repeatedly, no plan survives contact with reality. So overall, that format still makes it a lot of sense to me and I don’t want the timing to slip in general. The last module will be released. The last sort of official module, not all the stuff I backfill will be released on May 29th. I am staying within those parameters. However, based on the comments and some other things, I am contemplating releasing both Facebook modules together next Friday instead of one this week and one next Friday. The reason for that is, I think I need to backfill a lot of questions for modules three and four. Some of the things that … And I don’t … We’ll probably cover some of this today, so I’m not making this decision yet, but it’s something I’m thinking about that I want to go back and do some narration. I want to do a start to finish narrations or screencast that goes through the whole … There’s just the comments are suggesting to me some of the things didn’t quite land. And that may be only because I’m seeing one or two questions in that 80% of you are sort of working your way through it.

Shawn (00:03:58):
If that’s the case, we can adjust, but I think I’ll have a sense by the end of this call. So the main point here is the overall schedule is not going to be compromised. I may just release things in a little bit different batches. And there’s really, the two Facebook modules can be released together. Those are going to be fun. Lauren and I are doing those together. For those of you who have seen Lauren’s comments in the modules, you know how sharp Lauren is. I’m fortunate to have Lauren on my team. And so he and I are doing sort of a dialogue format. So those two things can happen together. If it does, then I’ll sort of send out an email about that. Anyway, enough of that nonsense. Okay, let’s start with some questions. I’m starting with it looks like four or so questions that … These were things I thought about and respond … These are sort of broad questions that were not asked specifically.

Shawn (00:04:55):
And then I’m going to get into the list of questions that were asked specifically. These are sort of compiling questions together. So one big question that seems to be coming up a lot is, how do I start, right? What’s sort of the minimum viable? Do I need a full multi-page presale site and everything built out, and then from there we move forward? And the reality is, this is a hard question to answer because if you have an offer that has never converted, meaning no one’s ever bought it, then you have to … Have to is the wrong phrase. You really should figure out if you can sell that in the minimum viable way to sell that. So whatever that is … And you should sell it online.

Shawn (00:05:40):
So if you can sell it to your 10 best friends, that’s different than if you can put up something that allows people to buy it and get them to buy it. Now, I would not in that circumstance say … I’m just going to think out loud for a second here. Minimum viable for whatever you’re doing is going to be different. If it’s a membership, then there’s sort of a lot of moving parts. If it’s a one-off, then there are fewer moving parts. If you already have a … I just don’t know your situation. But what I don’t want anybody to do, and this is so easy to do, but I don’t want people to spend weeks, months, years building out an entire structure of an offer with zero validation. You have no idea if anybody’s going to buy it. So what we want to try to figure out how to do … And I can’t tell you how to do this specifically for your situation, there are just too many variables.

Shawn (00:06:36):
So you have to really … You have to hear sort of the framework that I’m talking about, which is what is minimum viable for you, right? So if it is, you have 197 … You have something you want to sell for $197. It’s reasonably complete, and you can throw up a sales page, well throw up a sales page and see if anybody buys it, right? Send some traffic to it. Send really specific traffic, particularly search traffic that is the bullseye search terms. It’s clear that it’s a perfect match. And if nobody buys it, don’t build out an enormous amount of infrastructure to try to figure out why no one bought it in the first place, right? We want minimum infrastructure. And you can use a landing page service like an Unbounce, or you can use … I know blasphemy, I use it. You can use ClickFunnels if you need to.

Shawn (00:07:35):
Whatever you need to use to get something up to test if somebody will buy it, you need to answer the will people buy it question before you build out a tremendous amount of assets. Now, if you don’t have that yet, and I’m going to talk a little … I’m trying to avoid talking about Facebook until we get to Facebook, but there is some Facebook conversation we need to have. And there’s a question about this later, which is, if you don’t have the offer dialed in yet, what do you do? There is a testing framework, that’s module … I sort of call it module 6.5 instead of calling it another masterclass. But there is a way to test with Facebook. But when we do that, we’re not testing the most sophisticated system possible with four-page, multi-page presale site and seven emails and an offer with eight modules.

Shawn (00:08:25):
We’re not doing that. We’re testing an idea because we need a signal early. So long answer, but I see a lot of these questions about well, how do I know this is going to be successful? We don’t. Most things fail. So if we’re going to fail, we need to fail fast and fail forward. Okay. All right, that leads me to this. What’s the definition of Google ad success right now where you are in the program? This has been … There have been a lot of questions around this. The definition of success right now, meaning today or between before you actually start anything with Facebook, assuming you have something that you can send traffic to, if that’s true for you, success right now is one bulls-eye keyword phrase that’s getting 10 clicks a day. That’s success. Don’t make it more complicated than that. I see a lot of people in the comments and a lot of the emails I’m getting that’s taking something that’s simple and making it 25 times more complex. Don’t do that. Make it simple. Keep it simple. And we will build on the success of simplicity, we’re not going to try to figure out how to unwind the problems of complexity. It’s too hard. If you throw a hundred keywords into an ad group and push the button, you’re going to be spending so much money so fast, and you will never get a clear signal. One bulls-eye keyword phrase, 10 clicks a day. That’s the goal. Now, as many of you have said, well, I might not get 10 clicks a day. What about the … That’s okay. Five clicks a day if that’s what you need. But what I’m trying to get you to focus on is this minimum viable idea to dip your toe into the Google ads pool, and in a way that you will understand how it works. And all it takes to do that is one really good highly-focused keyword phrase that’s getting some traffic. And once you have that, that is the kernel that will allow you to learn everything you need to know about ad words.

Shawn (00:10:38):
Google ads. I think I mentioned earlier, I’m going to say ad words the whole time. So, okay. Anything to add to these things, André? I know you have some thoughts on minimum viable too.

André (00:10:50):
Yeah, I don’t really have much to add to what you’ve already said. I think if somebody doesn’t have an offer, there’s a lot of different ways they can test. And one of the easiest ways I guess in the beginning would just be to see if they can get an action, any action. If they can’t get opt-ins or somebody to fill out an application form or some survey thingy, then you’re not going to be able to sell anything. So sticking a bar button on there is probably going to be less useful. So I think it’s just figure out what that action is that you want to test, and then test that. Obviously if you already have a proven offer then it’s a different game. But yeah, I think that’s all really.

Shawn (00:11:38):
Cool. All right, so there’ve been some questions about scaling. And I think the questions are coming partly from looking through the lens of the world through the Facebook lens of the world. And we’ll talk about scaling on Facebook later. Facebook has some weird issue. I think they’re weird. They have some sort of strange issues with scaling. You can’t scale too much, too fast. And Lauren will speak to that far better than I do about what those parameters look like. Google’s not that way at all. And the questions have sort of raised a little bit of concern with me that I didn’t explain myself well. When you have one … Let’s kind of go back to the goal here. If you have one keyword phrase and you are tracking conversions, and you know the results and you’re spending let’s just say for the sake of argument, you’re spending $50 a day. And you can see that when you spend $50 a day on that keyword phrase, you’re getting $100 in sales, right?

Shawn (00:12:46):
And then in Google says it its estimator, you could spend $1000 a day because there’s enough search traffic for this term. How much should you spend per day? Well, nothing’s going to change. There’s nothing to suggest that when you get 10 people or whatever it is, 20 people searching for the exact same thing that the next 100 people searching for the exact same thing are going to be different. So nothing should make you believe that if you scale results, if you’ve structured your account the right way and you scale results, that your results are somehow going to go sideways because the results are the results. The search term is the search term.

Shawn (00:13:36):
Now my concern in the question though is that my explanation didn’t land the way I intended it, which is, if you have an ad group or ad groups that have one or two keyword phrases that are actually ROI positive, you’re making money on those. And then you have several others that aren’t. And you scale that, well now you have a problem because you just scaled things that are not working at the same. And now we don’t know what’s going to happen because it may very well be that the thing that’s driving results, that’s getting what you want, that has only a certain amount of volume and all of the things that you don’t want have far greater volume in terms of search terms. So then when you crank the dial from $50 a day to $1000 a day, you only turned up the good by a factor of two. And you turned up the bad by a factor of 20. And now everything goes sideways.

Shawn (00:14:39):
And I think that’s what’s happening with these questions. So I want to go back to the very beginning and say, your ad group should have a single keyword phrase in it. Any time you scale, you’re only scaling that single keyword phrase because then you know the extent. So put one keyword phrase per ad group for now so that when you scale that you know exactly what you’re scaling. You’re getting all signal, no noise. Okay. And we’ll … Someone who asked this question volunteered to have me do an actual analysis of an account.

Shawn (00:15:19):
And I’m going to do that and I’m going to share that with everybody. It will be in the Academy where I will go through and see … This person who asked the question and as offered to share the account has a profitable account with Google ads at a low volume. And in the past when they’ve scaled it, it has gone off the rails financially. And I suspect it’s gone off the rails because there’s a lot of noise with the signal and both are being scaled. And that’s a hypothesis. So everybody will see that. Once I’ve confirmed with the person that they’re okay with me sharing this with everybody, I’ll thank that person by name. I don’t want to mention his or her name right now. Okay.

André (00:16:00):
Question. I had a question.

Shawn (00:16:03):
Yeah.

André (00:16:03):
Let me raise my hand. Jump the queue. So if you’ve got the one ad group with the one keyword, presumably ideally it’s an exact match phrase you’d want inside there, or …

Shawn (00:16:19):
Modified broad. I would do modified broad with negatives.

André (00:16:23):
So you potentially do have or you could have the misspellings in the same ad group?

Shawn (00:16:29):
Yeah. Google manages misspellings pretty well now.

André (00:16:32):
Okay.

Shawn (00:16:33):
Synonyms, misspelled … In the past, even exact match now Google is a little looser about its interpretation. And generally okay. Broad match, not so much. Modified broad match, exact phrase. The search terms you’re getting, they tend to match. They match with intent.

André (00:16:54):
Gotcha. Okay.

Shawn (00:16:55):
So just taking that question further, even though you have one specific keyword search phrase, you really don’t. You have more. You have the ingredients of one. And when you use the search terms report you’ll see that there is some nuance in here. But the underlying message is that we have to have this super focus because the moment we lose that focus, it’s so easy to have the things that are actually causing drag scale up way faster than the things that are producing the result that we want.

Shawn (00:17:37):
And we just have to be able to see how that happens because it may happen for a day, right? We may go from 50 to $1000 a day and see a performance drop, but we need to be able to go in and say, well why? Oh okay, here’s this thing that happened. Let me turn that off with negatives or whatever it is. And that’s just part of the game. But my hope in answering this question is that we should design the system so it doesn’t produce that result. Or if it does produce that result, it doesn’t produce that result for very long and we know how to remedy it. That’s the goal.

André (00:18:12):
Yeah.

Shawn (00:18:12):
Okay. Next question, this is a question I’ve heard for 20 years. It’s a question I’ve dealt with for 20 years. It’s probably the most difficult part of Google ads. What if there isn’t much search volume, right? Facebook’s advertising platform kind of exists because of this question. This has always been the challenge with Google ads. There’s only so much there, there, right? There only so many profitable keyword phrases. And you start with sort of concentric circles. You get the first group, and those are profitable. And you think, oh, this is excellent.

Shawn (00:18:50):
And then the next group, they’re a little farther away sort of conceptually, and they’re either less profitable or it’s harder to make them profitable. And at some point you just run out. And that’s just the reality of it. There’s a third party tool I’ve mentioned, it’s called SpyFu. SpyFu has this really interesting function called Kombat spelled with a K, where you can take three competitors and it will … SpyFu goes out and grabs all three competitors, lists of keywords they’re bidding on. And then it puts them in a Venn diagram. Where do the individuals overlap with each other, and where do all three overlap. And the middle where they overlap, those are the keyword phrases that they’re all bidding on.

Shawn (00:19:31):
And one of the most shocking things you learn when you do that is that there aren’t generally 50 to 100 keywords that established advertisers are all bidding on, which generally means that there’s money to be made there. That’s where the profit ability is. The rest is sort of just maybe unique to each one in some individual way. But that core overlap, there just isn’t a lot there. And there’s just no more to get. That’s the challenge with search volume is, there’s a certain size audience actively looking for what you have to offer. And there’s no real way to make that bigger. So we start with at Google ads because we want to get that initial active intense search volume.

Shawn (00:20:17):
But we do that knowing it will run out unfortunately. Some businesses are built entirely on search. Some businesses can be built on search if you have that sort of a need-based business that there’s always a volume of search. The beauty of search though is that it’s a … The pool tends to refresh a lot, right? So there’s sort of a daily or weekly or however you want to think about it, volume. And it’s sort of new and refreshed every day. So every day we sort of reset the counter and we have another opportunity, and off we go. And that’s a little different than Facebook conceptually. Facebook’s audiences are generally bound by the number of individuals in the audience. So you can go to that audience and really sort of exhaust an audience in a way with Facebook that you don’t with Google because Google refreshes every day.

Shawn (00:21:09):
So each has their own thing. That’s why the traffic engine has both, because the two of them together do things that are so different yet complimentary, that if you use both you can capture such a broad spectrum of intent in interest in other things. So there’s sort of in many ways a perfect combination. And in a small stroke of irony I have a much greater appreciation for Facebook now having worked through all the challenges of Google ads. So yeah, that was not expected by any stretch. And I’m so in love with Google ads again because it’s excellent. Okay. I think those were the questions. Those were the initial questions that I sort of compiled. André, anything you want to throw in before I jump into some of the specific questions that individuals asked?

André (00:22:01):
No. All good.

Shawn (00:22:03):
All right. Making it easy today. Just letting me hang myself. Okay. So this was a … I’m not going to name people just for privacy reasons and I’m certain I would mispronounce more names than I would pronounce correctly, and I don’t want to do that. So here was a question. This is about the audience and offer masterclass. And just one quick note, if you sent me 75 questions and I only answer one, that doesn’t mean I’m not going to answer your other questions. I’m just trying to find broadly useful questions for everybody so we don’t get too specific to individuals. And if you did send me 75 questions, that’s a very slight exaggeration. Know that you will get replies from me. I will work through those. Some of the time those replies will be … I will realize they need to be added back to the module someplace or need be included somewhere. And I will just sort of reference that. And if it’s a very specific question to you, then I’ll answer that directly.

Shawn (00:22:58):
Either way, I’ll let you know where the answers can be found. Okay, first question, audience and offer masterclass, how do we link the results of the exercise, jobs, pains and gains with our actual Google and Facebook ads? So, if you look back in the module … Or I’m sorry, part two of the masterclass where you go through the value proposition design canvas exercise. I mention toward the end of that, that you should create this document where you compile that, sort of this creative brief, a messaging brief. So go back to the module and reread that section because what we’re doing … At the end of the value proposition design canvas exercise, we want to have a document that says, here’s my audience, here’s what I believe the top one to three jobs, one to three pains, and one to three gains are. And you can mix and match those.

Shawn (00:23:49):
You may have an audience that is all focused on jobs. And there are three of them. It might be all pains and there are three of them. Or it could be a pain, a gain and a job. And you just sort of think about this conceptually. But that should be the core to inform your messaging. So it is the phrase I’m borrowing from Donald Miller, the author and marketer. He calls it a controlling idea. So those are your controlling ideas. So if you have, let’s say you have two jobs, two pains, two gains that you have determined matter most to your audience. When you write your ad copy whether it’s for Facebook or Google, those are the only things that you’re writing about. That’s all the messaging is around that. Those are the controlling ideas. So, if you have … If you find yourself writing ad copy and it’s not about one of those jobs or one of those pains or one of those gains, it doesn’t belong.

Shawn (00:24:45):
It does not matter how important it is. If it’s not important to that particular audience, it does not belong in that ad for that audience, period. That becomes your … Those become your controlling ideas. This is the … And the best way to do that is just have a document where you put those things and then ask yourself … You can ask questions like, what is about my product that addresses that particular job? Or what is it about my offer that deals with that gain or pain? Or speak to the pain or the gain and reinforce it, and hint at a solution. But those are the only things that you talk about. And you can have a single document that has this by audience. So it’ll say, here’s the audience, and then here are the jobs, pains and gains for that audience.

Shawn (00:25:32):
And then here’s the next audience. And here is a slightly different remix of those. I don’t know if I mentioned this specifically in … I’m trying to remember if I included this or not, but I did this once with a client where we really thought they had one audience. And the challenge came from, we couldn’t narrow the list down. There were 10 jobs and six pains and six … And some of them, there were some that were shared. But what we finally figured out is that there were three audiences, and they all looked very similar. But what made them different is the job. I did include this as an example actually. Now I remember. What made them different is the jobs that were most important.

Shawn (00:26:25):
So who they reported to for example. Did they have to report to somebody? That became such a differentiator that, that’s what we had to speak to. And that’s really what you’re getting when you create this messaging brief. It’s, who am I speaking to and what matters most to her? That’s really what you’re trying to have. And sometimes you can do that at the audience level, and sometimes the audience is just a search term. And you don’t know really as much about the person but you know implied in the search term is a pain or a gain or a job to be done. And then you just speak to that. So that’s sort of a long answer to the question but I hope … And we can, if there is additional clarification, just drop it into Q&A and we’ll jump back on that.

Shawn (00:27:14):
All right, let’s see. All right, next group. This is a group of questions from someone. First, question one, sometime ago all classes about Google ads always started with all these minimum quality aspects that you needed on your webpage in order to get approved. Having an about us page, having a page about your data policy, et cetera. Is that still the case or did they relax? Yes, that is still the case. Yes you should. I will include a link if I haven’t already to Google sort of page standards, but you need to have contact information, privacy policy, terms of service. And think less about what’s the least I need to do to get past Google’s needs, and what should I do to make my audience feel more comfortable with my content?

Shawn (00:28:05):
So if you visit a page and there’s no about us, there’s no contact info, there’s no privacy policy, there’s nothing other than the content on the page, how likely are you to believe that page is credible? Less likely, I believe is the answer. So forget about Google. Think about your user. Do what’s best for the user. And what’s best for the user is some transparency around who you are, what you do, how you do it, and how it relates to them. So, that’s the lens through which I would look.

Shawn (00:28:39):
Second part of this question is also at that time it was pretty much prohibited to send traffic to a squeeze page. Does that still apply? Yeah, Google doesn’t like thin content. And Google doesn’t love gated content either. Go back to module three, I covered that in a few sections where if you’re optimizing for the user experience and thin content pages where it’s just, “Hey, there’s this thing and give me your email and I’ll tell you what it is.” Those days are gone, long gone. Regardless of what Google likes, users hate them. Put content that is relevant. And you’ll get … And so this is an everybody loses situation. The user doesn’t like it, Google doesn’t like it, and your results will suffer. So all three things point in the wrong direction. Send people to content that answers the question that they asked in their search query, right?

Shawn (00:29:28):
That’s the starting point. It’s almost like a conversation where someone has said to you, “I am really interested in X.” Whatever X is. You would not say, “Oh, you know what? I’ve spent a long time thinking about question too. But before I tell you what I’ve discovered, could you please give me your email address?” That’s not how human beings communicate. Those days are gone. What you need to think about instead is when that person says, “Here’s something that I’m looking for.” Establish empathy and credibility first. Let them know that you’ve heard the search term. You’re giving them sort of some amount of content related to that, to let them know you are in the right place. And at that point, after you’ve given them enough information to confirm that you have empathy with their search, that you understand it, and that you have authority and credibility to show them a way to find the answer that they’re looking for, then you can ask for them to take the next step.

Shawn (00:30:24):
And you can say, “This is something that’s better covered over several days. I do that by email. You can do this thing and just sign up here.” That’s perfectly okay. But the thin squeeze, thin content squeeze page days are over. And trying to do that will make you crazy. All right, let’s move on. Question two, I did not quite understand on your recommendation for timing for the initial run, so we would switch out 12:00 AM to 5:00 AM and test performance on weekends versus weekdays. Okay just to clarify, there was a lot of confusion around that. Those were examples of what you can do, not suggestions for what you should do. I have no …

Shawn (00:31:03):
… not suggestions for what you should do. I have no idea if your offer converts better or worse overnight, during the day, during the weekdays, during weekends. I don’t know. I can’t know that. You have to figure that out. What my intent was in sharing that is to let you know that it is figureoutable and it is a factor. So geography, keywords and time of day, day of week are factors that increase or decrease the probability of success for you. So I have clients that are business to business, for example. They sell things to other businesses. They do not advertise on the weekends because they just know historically from their data that any traffic they get on the weekend is far less likely to convert. That may be true for you, it may not be true for you. What I want you to think about is stacking the deck in your favor.

Shawn (00:31:59):
So if you initially do that with a good focus keyword search phrase and then do it with the geography, most definitely. And beyond that I would be less… I would concern myself less with date of week, time of day, but later go back and know that those are factors that you can use to make things a little more profitable. You’re probably not going to change the economics a hundred percent but you might change the economics 20% so that there are other factors that you can start looking at. Don’t feel like you need to do this right out of the gate. Just know that it is something that you can do.

Shawn (00:32:40):
Question three from the same person. You mentioned that for your ad for the university in ad copy, adding a sense of urgency made all the difference. “Is that a specific example of how studying your competitors can help you find relevant elements and structure that you should include into your ads or do you in general recommend adding a sense of urgency?” First part, that was just an example of something that I found common to high performance ads in that very specific narrow field. That is not suggesting to add urgency to everything that you do, but it’s the idea in that section of the module was that we can begin our ads and we can create our ads. Our starting point can be representative of the best that somebody else has figured out for the last two years.

Shawn (00:33:27):
Like we can start where they are instead of starting where they were and then spending two years to get to our best performing ad. Somebody else has done the work for testing already. Go figure out what they did, infer what you can infer from it and start there. Don’t copy their ads. That’s not what we’re trying to do. But what we’re trying to look and see is like what is it about this ad that is making it so valuable to the audience? Why is this ad working or why did they settle on this as a control if it’s been around for a long time? Because we know that we can find that out, we should find that out and we should use that information to improve our ads instead of trying to reinvent the wheel and start from a completely blank slate. Which is what it feels like a lot when you’re writing ad copy.

Shawn (00:34:19):
You sit down in Google Ads and have no idea even where to start. Well, let’s go look and see what the best performing ad is right now. Let’s start there. Let’s see what that structure looks like. If that’s available. Sometimes it’s just someone’s running with the same ad for a long period of time and it’s not a sophisticated advertiser and there’s nothing other than the fact that they’re in the number one position to tell us that that ad is valuable. And not just the ad, the landing page as well, that the whole thing is valuable. Let’s go figure out something an audience has raised their hand and said, “This combination of ad and landing page is valuable.” We know that they’re the number one spot. Let’s go extract some wisdom from that and see where that leads. Okay. André, anything? Just jump in here when I’m running my yap. I tend to go fast so anything before I jump into the next set of questions?

André (00:35:08):
Loving this. You’re on a roll.

Shawn (00:35:10):
All right. Too much coffee this morning. All right, this is a question I think I got this in like 12 places and I’m psyched the person who asked it is on the call so I get to finally answer it. Here’s the question. “You say to turn off mobile tablet traffic and focus on desktop traffic. I just checked my stats from 1st April until today and 75% of my website visitors are on mobile and tablet and most buy on mobile devices. I just need some clarity double-checking. Even though I say this is not always true and your results may vary. However, initially we want to control as many factors as possible. Later we can incrementally add mobile and tablet traffic and measure those results separately. Should I be preparing to only focus on desktop as it seems I will be missing a huge chunk of traffic?”

Shawn (00:35:58):
So your first paragraph, there are two parts to the paragraph and I want to answer them separately in case other people… I want to make sure that everybody hears the nuance in this. So the first part says, “I just checked my stats from 1st April until today and 75% of my website visitors are on mobile on traffic.” If that’s true for you, just that, which is very common, if that’s true for you, do not assume that you should advertise for mobile and tablet just because that’s where your traffic comes from. Now the second part of the question, “And most buy on mobile devices.” That’s actually the key phrase. If you have data that says people buy from you on mobile, then ignore what I said about filtering out mobile because you already know that you’re getting buyers from mobile.

Shawn (00:36:57):
However, pay attention to it. See where your buyers are coming from to see if this holds true when you’re using Google Ads as well. Some markets people buy and increasingly people buy with mobile, but in general, from a probabilistic standpoint, if you look broadly at a hundred different products chosen at random. A hundred different offers chosen at random, put them all in a box and say, “Let’s look at the data for all of these desktop versus mobile versus tablet.” Desktop will outperform the others by factors of eight or nine to one just because it’s… some of it’s simple. Just mashing the buttons to put payment information in with your thumbs isn’t always easy. I suspect this is less true outside of the United States, particularly any place where mobile… Mobile is certainly a part of life in the United States.

Shawn (00:37:52):
I don’t want to suggest it’s not, but mobile and buying, a little less in the U.S. I don’t know why that is. So if you’re in a country and people buy stuff using their mobile device at some higher rate or normal rate versus desktop, that’s going to change everything that I said. What I’m hoping to get to in there is a little bit of nuance where let’s turn off the things that in general can drag down our results, unless you have data that suggests otherwise, in which case your data always is the source of the best insight.

Shawn (00:38:29):
So long answer to a very, very important question, be guided by your data but check all the time. You may have a phenomenon where organic traffic performs one way and you can’t replicate how that works with paid. That happens. Just be aware that you should be checking it to see where the sales are coming from when you’re paying for traffic. And it may be as simple matter of just you’re dropping the mobile bid pricing down by a factor, like down to 60% or so. You’ll find your level in there.

André (00:39:03):
I’ve got.

André (00:39:04):
a question about that. So at the campaign level for his particular use case where his data is suggesting that he do something which is not the default play that you would suggest. So would you suggest in that use case that at the campaign level he has two campaigns for the exact same keyword phrases and just one’s turned on for mobile one turned on for desktop? Because-

Shawn (00:39:36):
Yeah we used to have to do that. Now Google sort of change the way they do things. You can’t turn it. You can effectively turn it off but you can’t… The way we used to do it, and I know what you’re thinking about because I know you did this too is we would have a campaign that was such and such search dash mobile tablet and then you would turn off desktop traffic and then you would have the same campaign but then it would be desktop and you turn off mobile and tablet.

Shawn (00:40:02):
What Google has done instead is they’ve put everything in the same campaign and that you have, for mobile and desktop, you have a multiplier plus or minus by percentage. And then the data is shown, the data is broken out that way. You can see it. So you don’t have to do it that way anymore. He can have one campaign that has both where he just adjust the pricing multiplier for mobile and for desktop and then looks at those results to find that sweet spot. And he may find that mobile outperforms, it’s worth paying more for. I mean [inaudible 00:40:39] 140% did. So, did I explain that well?

André (00:40:45):
Yeah, that’s good. So you can essentially pay different prices even for the same keywords based on the platform that they’re using or the device that they’re using.

Shawn (00:40:55):
Exactly.

André (00:40:55):
So even though desktop is 25% of the traffic, it might still in relation produce more sales relatively even though-

Shawn (00:41:07):
And the economics will be different too. And that’s what you’ll see is like… And this is where we get this weird nuance of Google Ads. It’s beautiful when you understand it. And for those of you who are… And this is just a quick interjection, right? So if you’re not understanding it at the level at which I’m explaining it right now and that is bothering you, don’t worry. You’re on the road to understand it. But keep in mind, I have a two decade headstart, so when I’m just throwing these things out the way I see the world and how I can look at it 12 different ways, 20 years is a long time, and it’s in tens of millions of dollars of ads so it’s a lot.

Shawn (00:41:44):
So what I’ve given in module three in particular and in module four as well is if you want to see the world the way I see the world within relationship to Google Ads, that’s the framework. That is how I see the world. As you practice that framework specific to your business or if you work with clients, you’ll be begin to make the second and third order conclusions that I make naturally on the fly. It’s just a matter of practice.

Shawn (00:42:16):
And as you practice it, and that’s why I structured that module to be so disfluent, like we do everything manually. We go in and we monkey around with all these different settings manually. Even though many of them are managed very well by Google, but I still want you to know where the settings are and what it does when you marsh the buttons because that is teaching you… Everything I suggested teaches you something that’s critically important about how Google Ads work. So you are by the virtue of doing a following that outline, you’re learning ad words in a really interesting way that’s going to pay huge dividends over time.

Shawn (00:42:58):
Okay, next question. Same person. ” Am I better trying to sell the idea, for example a lead magnet via the advertisement or the product itself?” Let me see. No, wait. No, sorry. There was a question before this. Okay, I don’t know. This person says, “I don’t have a website yet. It’s a landing page to gather email addresses. I usually do this for Facebook lead generation to an email series to a sales page. Will Google Ads work with directing traffic this way or should I spend the time building a manifesto, for example a multi-page presell site plus about a contact pages on the website? What’s the leanest version I can get away with to get started?” And the second part of the question, “Am I better trying to sell the idea like a lead magnet via the advertisement of the product itself?”

Shawn (00:43:43):
So I don’t know. That’s the honest answer because I don’t know the product, I don’t know the audience. I don’t know any of the details that I could have an informed opinion so let me try to answer the question in the absence of specific knowledge. Sending Google traffic to a page to get their email addresses, I covered that a little bit earlier. It really depends on how much content is on the page. I do not think you need to spend it. Well, let me take a step back. If this is something that you have that is an offer that is generating customers, it’s proven, then is it worth the time building out a multi-page presell site? I think it is. Again, depending on your specific situation, I don’t know. And now if you have somebody… This is a Perry Marshall term. If you have somebody with a search and they have a bleeding neck, right? That’s Perry Marshall’s term. I think it was Perry where he quoted somebody where they need to… If your roof is leaking, I use the roof leaking when all the time. It’s a bleeding neck. If you are standing in your living room at 4:00 AM with water pouring into your house and you have just searched for “roofing contractor near me,” you have a bleeding neck problem and you do not need a four-page multi-page presell site to solve it. You need a phone number and you need to know that it’s 24 hour service and they’re going to be there in a half an hour. That’s all you care about.

Shawn (00:45:10):
So then the texture of the search term, the texture of the product that you have and that the problems that you solve dramatically affects how much content needs to be on the landing page. Most things are not like that. Most things are not leaky roofs, or they’re things that are like you’re interested in garden design and you’re thinking about maybe spending the money to have landscapers come in and design a backyard for you. Well, in that case you could do… In that case I don’t know that I would do a manifesto per se, but I might do three or four pages about all of the things somebody needs to know or many of the things somebody needs to know to ask really good questions before they… and to really have a high desire to get on a design consultation call.

Shawn (00:46:06):
That’s what I would build into that sort of front end because I know they have a need, they want to talk to somebody about garden design, but I also know that it would be helpful to them, and to me if I changed their worldview a little bit and let them know, “These are the four or five things to consider, and before you get on a call, this is what we would cover.” That’s beneficial. So really hard to answer this question without knowing the exact context, but the underlying answer to the question is you don’t want to build out every conceivable asset without knowing that the thing that you are doing works. If you know the thing that you are doing works, then I would begin to layer on things to make it work better. The first thing that you can layer on to something that works to make it work better is high quality traffic. So if you’ve got an offer that converts and you have a sense of who bought it and why they bought it, go find those people and sell it more to them. Pay to sell to them. That’s really the… And then it’s just you add a little bit, add a little bit, add a little bit until… And yes there are some minimums, yes you need to have a landing page that has contact information, that has some identity of who you are, that has terms of service, has privacy. Yes, you need those things because those are the right things to do. And so that’s the leanest version, I think.

Shawn (00:47:37):
And then this corollary question is, are you better to sell the idea like a lead magnet or the product itself? This is a really, really good question. There are methodologies and there are… Well, yeah. So there are methodologies and there are ways to think about selling things that I understand intellectually why the lead happens first. But if you don’t know that you can sell the thing, to me it’s a really scary high risk position to put yourself in to do a lead magnet and spend a bunch of money on traffic to that lead magnet. So the example I’m thinking about of course is product launch formula, Jeff Walker’s approach. I have nothing against PLF if anyone loves it or Jeff’s your best friend. I’m not speaking ill at all about Jeff Walker PLF, but there is a fundamental assumption in product launch formula, which is that gathering leads is going to lead to sales. And I have seen launches gather lots of leads and have few or no sales.

Shawn (00:48:57):
So there is not, even though it seems like there’s a causal connection, like you can’t buy if you didn’t become a lead. I’ve seen far too many examples where becoming a lead had no relationship to buy. So I don’t love lead magnets if they’re a way to distract from proving the thing that actually matters. So I would rather see all things being equal. I would rather see somebody put together a sales page and sell the thing and prove that they can sell the thing to a subset of an audience that is most responsive.

Shawn (00:49:34):
And if you can sell the thing, then figure out other ways to move your audience closer to the buying of the thing through email, Siri, do all of that. And there’s a sensible order to do that, but don’t convince yourself that you’re not sure if you can sell the thing, so let’s then let’s go do, let’s generate leads instead and then we’ll figure out how to sell the thing. That’s a dangerous game. I’ve seen that game lead to really horrible results for people, like spending lots of money to find out that the thing they wanted to sell doesn’t sell. That’s no fun.

Shawn (00:50:13):
All right, I’m going to take a drink of water here before the next one. André, anything to throw in there?

André (00:50:18):
No, I’m-

Shawn (00:50:21):
You’re so laid back and quiet today. You’re like, “Let me give him some rope and see if he hangs himself. It’ll be fun.”

André (00:50:28):
I think if your market supports… if you’re not trying to solve the bleeding neck and the market supports long-form content and you want to test quickly because the whole thing isn’t get proven, having a button there where somebody can buy is a great signal early on. And you test that relatively quickly if after however many hundreds of clicks you get, no sales, well that you have your answer. But I think there’s value in that, but at the same time is if you don’t get the sale, you’re still left scratching your head because there’s no signals that happen before that. It’s kind of binary. They click the ad, no sale. And so I think there’s also value in creating some sort of mechanism that filters people that doesn’t need to be difficult.

André (00:51:37):
You could spend a few hours writing a short manifesto or a few days and it doesn’t need to be long. You know, 500 words, 1,000 words. And there’s a lot of benefits in writing a manifesto because it creates clarity in your own mind and it really focuses in on the thesis of what you’re trying to say. And if you do it well, it’s going to pull the right people and push away the people that aren’t necessarily a good fit. And then you could just have a button at the bottom of the manifesto so it’s just a single short page and a button that says “continue” or “next,” whatever.

André (00:52:20):
And then you have the buy button or the ability for somebody to buy. So no different than the first scenario. You’ve just now stuck a manifestory thing on the front because now you’ve got an extra piece of data that you can… Now you’ve got an ad and there’s something that somebody has to read, and then they need to kick the button before they get to the button and then say no. So if nobody’s clicking on the button on the manifesto, which is really an easy read compared to making a purchase. So it’s just more data. So you’ll have kicks from the ad, nobody clicks on the button to go to the second page. Well, now you know what the problem is. It’s got nothing to do with your offer. It’s something further upstream.

André (00:53:12):
You’re talking to the wrong audience or you’re talking to them in a way that doesn’t matter to them. So you can have a different lead and go completely different, try your avatar number two and see if you can get more clicks on that button that goes to page two. And then on page two, there’s the button and people buy and now at least you know a bit more information. So I think if the market supports it, it’s probably worth doing something like that or some version of that anyway. It doesn’t need to be a full multi-page presell because that’s a lot more challenging to create.

Shawn (00:53:51):
And what you’ve just said is I think the thing that I love most about sphere of influence. Don’t get a big head because I’m going to say this. So what I think is interesting for everybody to hear is like, so your description of how you would do it, it’s an extension of the underlying framework of a multi-page presell site. We’ve introduced a little friction and that friction having to click next gives us really important information. So that in and of itself, it’s not the four-page multi-page presell site entirely built out. It’s like sphere of influence light, but it’s the underlying, it’s the intellectual scaffolding of sphere of influence that makes that… It’s like the toolkit you can use to get the piece of information that you need.

Shawn (00:54:48):
Because I would actually come at that question, how you just answered the question, I would come at it differently, but I would come at it from the exact same framework, which is I might do something very similar to what you described because I might just think out loud on the page and say… Let’s just say somebody searched whatever they searched for. I might start with this idea of that, “This is something I’ve been thinking about too, and here’s what I think the critical issues are and I’ve spent a lot of time really finding the answers. And I don’t have something to sell you right now, but if you’re interested in this problem too,” then there’s the opt-in. And it’s basically, “I’d love to hear from you. So here’s what you can expect.”

Shawn (00:55:35):
And then when somebody opts in, it’s a very strong signal. And then if I email them and they reply or they don’t, that’s also a strong signal. But what I’ve just described as built entirely on the same framework of what you just described, and it may not be a perfect analog, but I think about like Ruby on Rails as a development platform where you can use this platform to build all kinds of really neat things. Sphere of influence is kind of like that but from a thinking perspective, is that we can build out lots of different ways to get answers to questions that we have, but it’s all being built on this same framework. So all right, there’s your big head moment from the morning. I hope there aren’t others. That’s not true. It’s fun.

Shawn (00:56:26):
All right, so next question. I have this as a very common issue. “I have a conversion tracking problem.” Don’t we all, brother? “I sell on a partner site and I have no pixel there. I have tried offline conversions on Facebook and they’re poor. If there are workarounds, I am keen to hear about them for Facebook or Google.” This is incredibly… This problem is so common. There is no… I mean there are some times that are like crazy and depending on your specific situations there, maybe. I don’t want to rule it out, but when you sell somewhere else and you are sending traffic somewhere in between and you don’t have… It’s like we run into a million different problems.

Shawn (00:57:09):
First, there are attribution problems. Right? So, and I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of attribution because I’m certain that there are many of you on the call who are smarter about attribution than I am and I will say something and you’ll tell me how wrong I was. But conceptually speaking, here’s a challenge with attribution. Somebody goes from Google or Facebook to whatever landing page you have control over that you have tracking on, on a certain domain or sub domain. And Google Analytics sees where they came from. They can attribute the source. Then someone clicks from that to a partner site, you’ve just broken attribution so now there’s no connection between what they originally clicked on and then the click in between. So you can see that you got a hundred people from Google click to your website and then a hundred people from Facebook click to your website, and then you can see 60 people total went to the partner site if you have any tracking there, but you have no idea if they were from Google or if they were from Facebook, you’ve lost that attribution. It’s a miserable problem, and there are tools that try to solve this problem and if you own all of the pieces of a puzzle, you can do cross domain tracking. And it is potentially solvable, but the way you’ve described the problem is really the extreme of what I think is essentially an unsolvable problem.

Shawn (00:58:40):
If you pay for traffic to one location that you can track and you sell in another location, another digital location that you can’t track, there really is no way to know what’s working and it becomes exceptionally difficult to track that, to infer anything from that. So I don’t have a great answer for this. I think a lot of it comes down to like how does the partner site work? That’s a big challenge. Could you drop a GTM container on there and maybe do some tracking? I mean that’s where I would look, at GTM, Google Tag Manager. I mean there might be, you might be able to drop your container on that site and find a… There might be something in there. It’s just something that it’s… I can’t answer it in a 10 minute answer.

Shawn (00:59:37):
If you want to, this came from email, if you want to send me an email with a little more nuance in there, like where’s your landing page, what are you using for tracking? How do people go from your landing page to the partner site? A link to the partner site so I can see what that looks like, and whether or not the partner site would let you add your own Google Tag Manager container, that might give me enough. There might be an answer here and if there is an answer here, it’s a beautiful thing to share with others because this is one of those things that it’s very hard to describe and it’s very hard to do. But if you spend enough time in the world of tracking and Google Tag Manager and all this nonsense, sometimes answers reveal themselves in strange ways.

Shawn (01:00:24):
I’ve tracked things that I would have said categorically upfront were untrackable, so I’ve sort of contradicted myself in my answer here, which is always endlessly entertaining for myself. It may be possible, just send me the details. And if it is possible I’ll include how I think about that. That’s a hard one. Attribution is a really… and breaking attribution is a really big problem. There are tools that try to solve it. None of them do it a hundred percent. But this a big problem.

André (01:00:55):
What do you think the definition in his context is of a partner site? Would that be an affiliate site, or just what do you think?

Shawn (01:01:09):
You know, it’s a good question. I would define that as a site that’s not owned by the person asking the question. Like the sales happened somewhere else like on a third party platform. And if it’s a third party platform where you can use your own tracking code then that’s solvable. It’s very solvable. Assuming it works. I mean, there are third party tools, like the all-in-one tools, there are a couple of them that just tracking just doesn’t work. And a couple of them they say on there, “Oh, we support X, Y, Z,” and it just plain does not work. And I’ve seen that happen a lot. And oftentimes you don’t discover that until you’re way deep in the setup. And that’s no fun. But I’m assuming partner site here means somebody else owns the mechanism that makes sales, which could be an affiliate setup, it could be, who knows?

André (01:02:01):
Well, some of the things that I used to do-

André (01:02:03):
Well, some of the things that I used to do when I used to be an affiliate for the places… If he’s already generating sales, you could certainly reach out to the partner site and say, “I really need tracking because I want to do a better job of producing even more sales for you. So this is a win-win for both of us.” Every time I did that, it almost always worked because there’s no reason why they wouldn’t do that. That’s one thing you could do. The other thing I’ve done when that fails, you can always look for another partner site or affiliate site that sells something almost identical, pretty much, and they do offer tracking. So you could always figure across and see if you can get better data from there. You can always go back to partner site number one, but now you at least have an idea of what keywords are functioning the best and which ones are not. Those are two things you could try.

Shawn (01:03:22):
I’m a little concerned making this recommendation. I don’t want it to be fuzzy for anybody, but it’s also possible if you sell in an environment that you can track, and also sell the same thing in an environment that you can’t, which would be unusual, or if you have sold and you get some data about keywords that you can track, I’m okay making the assumption those convert reasonably the same in another location. Not identical, but reasonably the same. Tracking is tough. Tracking is one of the hardest things there is. And it gets ignored, and if you don’t do tracking well you can’t do paid traffic well, plain and simple. This is an environment that requires good data, because costs are high, and when costs were low, you could do all kinds of stuff and the net result was fine, but we are not in a net result business anymore, we are most definitely in a decimal place, what works business. Maybe not decimal place but close. Let me jump to the next one. Of course I just lost my place right in my mouth, so that’s perfect. Next question was about desktop laptop. Answered before, I’ll just this again, if I look at my email content, mobile wins by a mile. Actually, this is a good nuance. The question; why does desktop laptop seem to convert best? If I look at my email content, mobile wins by a mile. I’m building most things mobile, first for this reason. Do I need to make a semi about turn for Google? This isn’t so much about Google. Here’s the phrase in here that concerns me; when I look at my email content, mobile wins by a mile. Reading email is not an analog to buying products. There’s no causal. Even if there’s no causal, some clicks on links and buys, there is a cause. I do this all the time. I read on my mobile device. I read and I’m in the grocery.

Shawn (01:05:34):
Back before quarantine, I might be standing in line at the grocery store reading somebodies email. I’m not buying on my phone. If I buy, I buy it from a desktop. Now did the email influence me? Yes, but email content and consumption of email content is not an analog to buying behavior, so don’t confuse those two things. Now, at the same time, don’t take what I’ve said to dis-confirm the possibility that you are absolutely right. If the majority of your email content is consumed on a mobile device, and your site is optimized for mobile, and everything for you lines up that prioritizes mobile, you’re probably right. Mobile probably is a better option for you, but make sure you test mobile against desktop and laptop, and tablet. Just be aware that they’re a set of variables over which you have control, and a set of variables over which you should analyze relative to the behavior that you care about most, which I suspect is buying. That’s a great nuance, I appreciate that nuance in that question. Next question.

André (01:06:51):
I think it’s worth stating as well though that if the buying process requires address over multiple lines and email address, and you’ve got to put the credit card in, and all these things that are pretty much consistent with what you would need to put in on an order page. That is very challenging to do on most mobile devices, certainly if they don’t have a password manager, but if you’re buying on a mobile device from Amazon for example, and you click one button and the purchase has done, well, that’s very different. So your site may have some sort of mechanism to do one click ordering, and then you can have mobile all day long because it doesn’t really affect or it shouldn’t really affect people’s ability to check out quickly and securely. We don’t do it on mobile devices because it’s such a pain in the ass. I think that’s probably the biggest reason why.

Shawn (01:07:52):
[crosstalk 00:01:07:51]. Lizzie’s last comment there is perfect. See, this is why knowing your audience is such a great thing.

André (01:08:03):
Good to see you, man.

Shawn (01:08:06):
Thinking about a very narrow lens and making a mistake which… I want to say we all make this, but I’ll personalize it. I make this mistake and I make it consistently, which is assuming that a lot of the world behaves the same way that I do. Now, I’ve fortunately built into my thinking, the habit of always testing my thinking. So if I think mobile is going to underperform, I at least check it. And that’s really what I want to instill in all of you. That again, all things being equal, 100 businesses, you’re going to find that mobile under-performs, but all things aren’t equal. Your business is a unique little flower, and you need to figure this out for yourself, but again, you need to know it’s figure outtable, and that’s where I want you to focus. I want you to understand why I think this way, but I don’t want you to think what I think, I want you to think how I think, and then your results will be terrible to your specific situation.

Shawn (01:09:07):
All right, next question. Same person. Geography tiers make sense, if for example, the UK is my biggest market, I could bid $10, and then France, let’s say France converted half as well, would you then bid $5? So proportional bids based on results. I can see that UK is tier one, big European countries tier two, and then the rest of the US tier three. That’s not really what I’m getting at. Adjusting the bid isn’t really what I’m getting at, I don’t think. Maybe it is and when I finish describing it I’ll realize that’s exactly what I was saying. What I’m trying to get at here is not so much how much can you bid, but if you have a finite amount of advertising dollars, where’s the highest return on investment going to come from? If in the example that you gave the UK as your biggest market, I don’t know that that necessarily matters, unless the UK is your market where you are most likely to produce a sale. In that case, that should be tier one.

Shawn (01:10:11):
If you’re a little less likely to produce a sale on France, Spain or Germany, then that should be tier two, and then the rest will be tier three, but the factor that matters isn’t the size of the market, it is the likelihood of the market to buy. So in the examples that I gave, like the writing retreat that I mentioned, what made tier one tier one, was that we believed people were more likely to buy because of geographic proximity. That was it. That factor mattered. Tier two, we believe they were less likely to buy than tier one, more likely buy than tier three. When we were looking at spending Ad money, we wanted to spend all the money we could on tier one because we believe that that audience had the highest likelihood of buying, and they were worth more, that every dollar we put into spend there was worth more, and we can keep mispronouncing the same word, was worth more than dollars that we would spend on on tier two.

Shawn (01:11:20):
So for your example, the filter you need to ask yourself is not where is the market by size? It is where am I most likely to get a customer? And if it’s the UK, then that should be your tier one, and then after that, look where are you next most likely to get a customer. You may need to do it by country, to really answer those questions, then at that point you can start adjusting your budgets. I tend to think of budget like an investment portfolio. Like I’ve got this much amount of money to spend, and where am I likely to invest this money and get the highest rate of return? That’s your tier one, but tier one has a certain size and you’ve exhausted it in Google Ads. Let’s just say that you can only spend $90 a day on the average in your tier one market, but you have $200 a day to spend. Well, that’s when you go from tier one to tier two, and you say, “Okay, how much could I spend of the remaining $110 in tier two?”

Shawn (01:12:28):
And maybe you can spend another 90 there. Is it profitable to spend the remaining $20 into your three? That’s the reason we’re breaking these things up by geography, if it matters. For some of you geography won’t matter, but in my experience, geography often matters in funny ways. Sometimes it’s obvious, E-commerce, it’s obvious. I use the phrase geographic affinity. There is a weird geographic affinity effect, where knowing somebody is near you… For whatever reason, I’ve seen this happen over and over; the likelihood to buy goes up a little bit. I’m just thinking of a client I had for a while who was a coach and she lived in Toronto. She did not do one on one coaching. It was all remote, yet when she advertised broadly in English speaking Canada, she converted more people. Nothing spoke to geography in any of her content, but North of 60% of her customers were in Toronto. This is representative. I’ve seen this phenomenon happen a lot. There was something about the fact that she was from Toronto, I don’t know what, but it happens over and over again. So geography is your friend.

Shawn (01:13:49):
Just know it’s a lever that you can pull, and then be creative in how you think about pulling that lever. All right, next question. With the time of day as I am only targeting Europe right now, turn Ads off overnight. Again, in the beginning run ads 24/7 and then just see if performance drops overnight, and see if your conversions go wonky. If you look at a time of day report, are their appearance of time? It’s not always true. The 12 to five example that I use, that’s a broad observation across hundreds of AdWords accounts over time that the person eating Cheetos on the couch at 2:00 AM is less likely to have been such an awful generalization, and I said Cheetos remember you’re fasting André. So sorry. Broadly speaking, there seems the late at night audiences is probabilistically less valuable. So it’s a thing you can use to toggle off but don’t get wound up about it. Do 24/7 for a while and see what happens. Day of week is more of a factor if there’s B to C versus B to B.

Shawn (01:15:04):
If you have a very clear business to business in a low quality traffic on the weekends where it takes 10 times the number of visitors to get the same conversion, just turn weekends off. Just use broad swings for now and then get much more focused and nuanced over time. Last question from the same person. You mentioned adding date to show urgency, is there something similar we could use for Evergreen? That was an example of pulling out something from somebody else’s Ad, I’m not suggesting using urgency in Ads unless it makes sense. If there’s a way that urgency authentically matters in what you offer, then test it. If there is no urgency and you have to manufacture it, I’m not actually going to render an opinion on that one. I will say that I generally don’t like manufactured urgency. At the same time one of my good friends is Jack Bourne of Deadline Funnel. One of the things Jack will say, is that you need to give people a reason to buy. Jack is a very sharp guy, and he has lots of data that confirms that.

Shawn (01:16:21):
Don’t mistake something that I do because I like to do it, and I feel more comfortable not having false urgency with a directive that you should not use false urgency. You should make the decisions about what’s best for your business and what you’re optimizing for. That’s just not my thing, but I know urgency. Jack, I’ve had conversations with him, makes a very good point that sometimes urgency is doing the customer a favor, that they’re not making a decision that they really want to make, and by adding some urgency, you’re getting them to make a decision that is in their best interest if it’s a high quality product, and you’re doing well, but there are lots of reasons to do this. I would do a search for Jack Bourne podcast or Jack Bourne interview. I’m sure Jack has spoken about this publicly. He’s a super sharp thinker and a wonderful human being, and I go listen to what Jack has to say about urgency because he probably has forgotten more about that today, that I’ve learned in my lifetime, and he’s a great resource not to do that.

Shawn (01:17:35):
Last couple of questions; I understand that the best way to test an idea is to use Facebook Ads instead of Google Ads. That’s not what I meant, so sorry. Is it because Facebook allows us to reach a virtually infinite audience? No. While Google limits the audience according to the specific keyword searches we decide to work on. No, sort of. I will answer this after I’m not being full up here. Or because Facebook allows us to filter among hundreds of user preferences, while in Google we just rely on a specific search query the user inputs in the search bar. Okay, lots of things here. The best way to test an idea is not necessarily Facebook Ads instead of Google Ads. I like to use Facebook Ads to cut to test concepts in the expression of ideas, because we have a lot more space to do that. You can not write 1000 word Google Ad. You can write a 1000 word Facebook Ad. That is the primary answer to the question.

Shawn (01:18:40):
Now, Google and Facebook are not the same thing, so when we test something on Facebook, there is absolutely no analog to Google, and so if you get an incredible result with an offer on Facebook, and you think, “I’m going to do exactly what I did on Facebook, and I’m going to do it on Google.” Number one, It’s not possible. Number two, the thinking there is wrong, the intent is entirely different. Facebook, passive potential interests, enormous audiences, where within those audiences at any given time, somewhere in the neighborhood of three to seven-ish, maybe 10% of that audience might possibly be receptive to your idea. Those are sort of the broad strokes. There is a small fraction of a big audience that is not actively looking for what you have to offer, but when they see it, might be interested in it. That’s the beauty of Facebook. And you can go to that audience with a very long description of what you’re thinking. We’ll cover how to do this in module 6.5, where you can have a different lead, something that grabs their attention.

Shawn (01:19:51):
You can have a different sort of hook, which is the first three or four paragraphs, whatever, the expression of the idea, and you can have a different… I say Angle, Lauren says, theme. Theme’s better. I’m trying to retrain myself to say themes, so you have sort of a theme to the whole thing. And you can then test different themes in different hooks and different angles and you can test different leads. You can test those things on Facebook because there’s room to test them. You can do 650 words, 1000 words. You can really describe something, and you can get lots of nuanced understanding because the platform allows for it, but recognizing that the audience isn’t looking for it. You can also test ideas on Google Ads. Famously Tim Ferriss’s book, The 4-Hour Workweek, the title came from testing he did before the book was titled on Google AdWords. He just tested all these different variations and The 4-Hour Workweek was the one that ended up being the winner, that got more clicks or whatever.

Shawn (01:20:56):
There’s lots that you can test with Google Ads, but you’re testing active intent. Somebody wants something, they’ve raised their hand and said, “I am interested in X.” Knowing the nature of the test, it’s very different. You can test the intent of a search phrase, you think somebody is searching for X, is a perfect match, and you find out that in fact they aren’t, or that they are. Or you can test two different expressions, an AZ test, where you can have two wildly different Ads that are really about the same thing, but one of them is focused on what you’ve identified as the most important pain the audience has, and the other is focused on the most important gain. Just for fun, let’s do a three part test. The third one is focused, the language is about the most important job you think they have to do. That will then tell you which of these three things based on response motivates them the largest section or segment of the audience. Are they primarily motivated by this job, by this pain or by this gain.

Shawn (01:22:08):
Or if you have three pains and you think these three pains are the big drivers, test them against each other and AdWords, have three different Ads. Each one speaks specifically to one of the pains that you believe is most relevant to your audience, because then you’re going to learn a few things. You’re going to learn which of the three that you’ve chosen resonates most and you’re going to have a pretty clear idea if the ones that you’ve chosen are the right ones based on the aggregate of how much attention that you’re getting.

Shawn (01:22:42):
And you may find that you were right. All three are great, and they convert about equally, and that between them, you get a big chunk of the audience, then you know you’ve nailed it, you’ve nailed the pains, or the gains, or the jobs, whatever. There’s so many ways that you can use Google as a test. Don’t consider this binary; we only test on Facebook because or we only test on Google because. We always test. It’s just how we test and what we test that is a little bit different based on the intent of the audience. That’s all the questions that I had. Thanks. Now we can get other Q and A questions. Okay.

André (01:23:19):
[inaudible 01:23:19] top?

Shawn (01:23:20):
Yeah, let’s pop open the Q and A thing here. Anything you want to throw out there? [inaudible 01:23:27] my own voice kind of thing.

André (01:23:29):
No. You’re rocking it.

Shawn (01:23:32):
Good times. All right. First question I’m not sure I understand; is a Google Ads test… Oh, gotcha. All right. Google Ads certification program, Google certified advertising professional, is it worth taking? Is Facebook blueprint worth taking? My answer to both of these is yes. The thing you have to be aware of when you do any of these trainings, is that you’re getting the perspective from the advertiser, from the platform, of how they think you should do it, knowing essentially nothing about your business. Don’t take these classes and don’t go through these programs from the perspective of you’re going to learn exactly how to do things. They’re a way to learn about the platforms and how the platforms work and how they think about them, but at the end of the day, Google and Facebook’s interest is that you spend lots of money on Facebook, that you give their audiences something that they want, but they are optimizing primarily for their economic interests. That’s as true as it gets.

Shawn (01:24:52):
Yes, you should take these things, like Google will tell you to use Broad Match and it’s a really, really bad idea, particularly for a new advertiser to use Broad Match. Don’t do it. Compare those things, compare what you learned to the frameworks that you’re learning for Google and Facebook. I think both of those programs are outstanding from learning how to do the things, but they’re not as good about what you should do, great about how to do it, not so great about how you should use the platforms. All right. Done. Great. Next question, is there any real advantage of using Google tag manager to track Ads or is Google analytics in search console just fine? Yes, use tag manager please. Lots of things you can do with tag manager that are either harder to do or impossible to do with just dropping code on pages. If you can use tag manager, use tag manager. There’s lots of great info about it, I’ll drop some links where appropriate.

Shawn (01:26:06):
I think I’m going to add a resources link or have resources document that we can have things like stuff that’s not specific to individual modules. We’ll just capture stuff in there and I’ll put sort of how to set up tag manager. Once you get a hang of tag manager and understand how it works, it’s very powerful, and you can do some really interesting stuff with tag manager that you can’t do just with native tracking dropping code on page. Okay. Answered. Next question. All right. I’ve got some keyword campaigns currently set up in a way that looks far from optimal when measured against the guidelines in module three. Lots of keywords up together in an Ad group, Broad Match rather than anything more targeted, but they’re currently working well for me. They get people to opt in to my emails and I’m getting between 1.5X and two times return on Ads spend after 14 days. What are your thoughts and the benefits of changing the search terms to a better approach versus the risk of messing things up if I make changes to something that’s already working?

Shawn (01:27:09):
There is actually a YouTube Ads campaign, but I’m guessing the principals here will be saying for both Google search and YouTube. Maybe. This is a common question. Things are working. I don’t want to break what’s working, so what do I do? It’s a great question. Thank you Mark. The way that I would approach this is; less about module three and more about module four. There’s sort of two answers to your question. If you don’t mind people seeing your account, then let me go in and optimize it and we’ll do a screen cast and we’ll share with everybody and I’ll redo the whole thing, or at least tell you what to do. That’s my favorite thing.

Shawn (01:27:55):
That’s one option, but I totally understand if you don’t want somebody to see you inside your account. I would do search only, I’m not going to monkey around with the YouTube stuff. What you really are trying to do though is find the signal in the noise. If you’re using Broad Match, if you go in and look at your search term report, you’re going to find that there is a minority of course creating the majority of effect. At a minimum, there’s sort of two ways to approach it; you can pull out the stuff that’s working and make it work better, or you can just turn off all the stuff that’s not working.

Shawn (01:28:29):
If you go in and find out that you’ve got three terms in Broad Match and you think it’s producing a set of search terms and in fact it’s not, then go find the search terms that are converting, make them phrase match, put them in the same Ad group as phrase match, and then go turn off Broad Match. And then you’ve turned off all the noise, and you’ve kept the signal, and you’ve now just probably gone from 1.5 and 2X ROAS to five or six immediately. That’s just the nature of every account I ever look at, there’s a tiny minority of signal. You’re trying to find it and amplify it. The two ways to do that are to focus on the bright spot of what’s working, and pull that out and put it someplace else and really concentrate on it with better Ad Copy and other things, or to just take something that’s already working if you’re nervous and just turn off all the stuff in it that’s not working. Those are really the two paths. I do them in… I want to be cautious how I say this because it will sound absolute and it’s not. In general, if I do a fly by account optimization where someone just wants to make it 50% better in 10 minutes, then I will look at an account like that and I will just go in and just like; these 10 things don’t work and they’re not working egregiously bad, turn them off. You can do that by going into the search terms report, filter by clicks, and then look at conversions. And what you’re looking for are lots of clicks, lower or no conversions. You’ll find that there’s some percentage of search terms in there that generate a lot of traffic and they don’t get conversions, and whatever it takes to make those stop is putting out the fire, and you should put that fire out first. You’re not changing anything else, you’re just getting rid of the boat anchor around the neck of your Ad account. Your ROAS will probably double, triple, immediately, just by doing that one thing, and you haven’t changed anything else. That’s a really low risk way to do it.

Shawn (01:30:49):
Beyond that, here’s the phased approach. If I end up convincing you enough that there is a better way and you want to dip your toe in it, what I would do is take the… Very simple terms assume you have like three campaigns that are working, I would create campaign number four that you intend to replace one of your campaigns with, gradually. I would then go into a campaign that was working, I would structure the campaigns exactly the same, same geography, same time of day. Everything’s the same, your mobile adjustments, your tab, all that stuff is the same between the two. And then I would go to the campaign that’s working… Perry Marshall invented this idea. It’s brilliant. He called it peel and stick, you’re appealing the high performers out, you’re taking them out of a campaign or an Ad group, and you’re sticking them into a new one where you can put more attention on it.

Shawn (01:31:57):
I would go into your… First, the campaign that’s working, and I would find the thing that’s converting most. Go to search term report, find the keyword phrase that generates the single largest number of conversions. And I would take that phrase, and I would go into my new campaign, which you will have paused in the beginning. Go into that campaign, set that up, create an ad specifically for that phrase, go through the exact process in module three for that high performing phrase. And then once that’s set up, nothing else is different, same landing pages, but different copy, same thing. Soon as that’s set up, turn it on, turn it off in the first account. You’ll have few hours while you’re getting traction, but now you’ve pulled out a high performer, and you’ve put it in another account. I would just keep doing that. What you’ll probably find is you have… I don’t know how big your account is. Five, six, 10 search phrases or…

Shawn (01:33:03):
Five, six, 10 phrase search phrases, or search, combination of terms that are producing the overwhelming majority of your results. And in a day you can rebuild them as a high performing campaign. And then just go turn that first campaign off, and now you have a really well structured campaign, and nobody got hurt in the process. That’s how you go from one to two times ROAS to like 15, 20 times ROAS. That’s the magic without, anyone getting too scared. But if you really, if you want to volunteer then volunteer and let me do this for your account because this would be fun. All right, next one.

Shawn (01:33:45):
All right. I have set up two campaigns for my eCommerce business. Nice job taking action. Keywords around benefits of widget discovering intent, and the keywords around buy widget buyer intent. What do I think about this approach? Let me just go through the whole question. What do I think about that approach, and how do you think I should go about the buyer intent campaigns, landing page straight to the product page? Or collections page, or something else? Okay, so let me answer all the questions in order.

Shawn (01:34:15):
I don’t like that you’ve mixed these two things together. And I know you didn’t mix them together in the same, you’ve got two different campaigns. I get that. But that you’re doing these two things at the same time. Stop doing the first thing. Do the second thing. Get people who are looking to buy to buy, spend all your money on that, until you can’t spend more money on that. Spend all of your time and your attention on that until you know that’s working. Then layer on the next thing, the benefits of widget. Then do the exact same process. Can you make that work because they’re not the same thing. If you think about a spectrum of buying intent, the people who have buy language, that have shown buying intent, are far more likely to actually buy.

Shawn (01:35:06):
They’re far closer on the spectrum to the act of buying than the benefits crowd. You’re having to move the benefits crowd from conceptually further away, closer to buying. And that’s hard work. That’s more work. So having those two things happening at the same time in general, all things being equal, that concerns me. So that’s how I think about the approach. To answer your question.

Shawn (01:35:31):
So then how do you think about the buyer’s intent campaign? You know, straight to the… It’s an easy answer for this one. When there’s buying intent, go straight to the product page. If someone says, “I want to buy X,” trust them. They want to buy X. Show them X, and with a place to buy it. Just trust what they say.

Shawn (01:35:51):
If the thing that they want to buy is in a family of things with options, I’m thinking of I had a client in the golf space for a long time. Someone might be searching for a particular Callaway driver, but there are actually five variants. Well in that case, send them to the page with five variants if they don’t specify the variant because then you have to kind of show them that this thing that you’ve searched for, that you think is one thing, is actually one thing with five variations.

Shawn (01:36:20):
It’s five things, and here are all five. That’s a service to the customer, to the searcher. But if it’s not that, if it’s, “I’m searching for X,” and you’re like, “Well we have X and Y, Z and Q.” “I searched for X, show me X.” It is as simple as that, I think. Again, your result might be a little bit different because the nuances of your product, but from a framework thinking perspective, I trust when people tell me what they’re looking for, and I try to give them that and not try to get too crafty in my thinking. Unless there’s a really good reason why I might want to show them something else. This was not asked as a question, but this is also the answer to why I generally don’t love this idea of bidding on competitor terms. I haven’t worked with either of these companies, but when somebody’s like, “Hey, I own Convert Kit. When people search for Drip, should I advertise?” A lot of people are like, “Yeah, absolutely.”

Shawn (01:37:21):
You know, it’s kind of the same thing. People search for Drip, they’re looking for Drip, right? It’s like let them… I see this happen with a lot of my clients like, “well this other company offers very similar to what we do in the same area, so when someone searches for them, shouldn’t we bid on their terms?”

Shawn (01:37:35):
I’m like, “I get it. I understand it. Yes. There’s some times where it does work.” But I tend to lean more toward trusting that the searcher is telling you what they’re looking for and it is a service to give them that, and only that or not give them anything if what we have is not that. Your mileage may vary.

Shawn (01:37:56):
Okay. Next question. This is… Hi Lizzie. I’m still laughing about earlier. All right. Loved in all caps, thank you, I think. I haven’t finished reading the sentence. I love the differentiation between account metrics and business metrics. Do you know of any good resources to help clients calculate their max CPA? I’m not sure I understand the question. Well now you’re explaining it so maybe I should read that. We help dentists sell high ticket treatments, and it can be a two year sales cycle, so we need to work on cost per lead, but we can track conversion rates through each stage of the journey and forecast CPA.

Shawn (01:38:32):
It’s just not something I’ve looked into extremely extensively and I’d really appreciate… Yeah, this is a great question. Long sales cycles are challenging, so if you calculate cost per lead, we have to, so to calculate CPA, to truly calculate CPA on a long sales cycle, we just have to make sure that associated with the original, the person in some way, we have a sense of all the expense that was involved. If we really want to be thorough and honest, including a management fee. I’ll just make numbers up and we can sort of see how this works.

Shawn (01:39:20):
If you are pay, just for the sake of argument, say you’re paid $1000 a month. And they spend $ 5000 a month to generate leads, and they’re doing that over time, and then it is leading to in a couple of years… That’s a long time for him, wow. In a couple of years to a high ticket treatment, or whatever service that they’re selling.

Shawn (01:39:51):
We have to somehow have a spreadsheet. I don’t even know how you would capture this, but we need to have a real sense of what is the true cost to acquire that customer. So let’s use some numbers. Let’s say they pay 6000 total, a thousand for you and say 5000 for ad spend. And that gets them, just because I want easy math, 600 customers, or 600 leads per month. Now we know their cost per lead is $10.

Shawn (01:40:22):
That becomes the basis. Then we need to know the conversion rate of their leads. We need to know when, the velocity, when over time leads are converting, and then the rate at which those leads are converting. And when we know that we can calculate CPA. Even if it takes a really long time. Let’s just assume for the sake of argument that those 600 leads turn into 60 customers two years later. We know their CPA is 60 bucks. Those are the pieces of the puzzle. The way to do what you’re trying to do is to work backwards from the purchase, to find every inflection point where money is spent, and have a way to calculate that. And it sounds, I’m guessing you do a lot of email in between, so that sounds like what you need to calculate are just the initial cost to acquire the lead and then the rate at which the leads turn into customers. And if that’s all you need to calculate, it’s actually a pretty straightforward calculation, and it’s just the way that I described it.

Shawn (01:41:37):
If it’s not that, then reach out to me by email with the specifics, and I will answer, I’ll give you a better answer about that. But I think just for broadly speaking, for most people’s purposes, it can be that simple. Even if it’s a long period of time in between, we just, we need to know how much did it cost to get their attention, and however we sustain that attention. I think it’s worth putting those costs in, too. If you’re paying somebody to send out emails every month for two years to get a customer, then I would include that in there as well. Absolutely.

Shawn (01:42:10):
That just has to be amortized a little bit differently. I hope that answers your question. I don’t feel like I really caught your question.

André (01:42:17):
Lizzie’s just added an extra little piece in the normal chat.

Shawn (01:42:21):
Okay, we do get some people converting upfront, so that’s an easy one to calculate. Then it’s just a matter of cost to acquire that person. And then as soon as you can track that all the way through, if not, just use CPL calculation as well. But we know from tracking the conversions double within two months, and more keep coming through over two years. I think if you know that, if you know your window… If you think about what CPA is, if you strip away all the nuance of cost per acquisition, it’s really a purchase in a timeframe. And the timeframe just happens to be really short because if you’ve shown them an ad, you hope they did something. What you’re talking about is a CPA with a 700 plus days, 730 day timeframe where any time within the 730 days when that sale is triggered, it actually tells you your cost to acquire that customer.

Shawn (01:43:29):
So you have a very straightforward CPA calculation. It’s just over a much longer period of time. The cost, you know the cost early because you got the cost for them to become a lead. So you know the cost data early, but you don’t actually know the full picture of the revenue data for two years, which is scary, which means it’s hard to budget. How much can they pay to acquire a customer? How much can they float for two years is really the answer, because your sales velocity is so slow that it’s… Now some, again, it’s a spectrum. Some may immediately purchase, and some may in six months. But what I’m hearing is that your true sales picture happens in a two year timeframe, so you need to calculate cost to acquire a batch of customers, a batch of leads today. The calculation on the value of that leads is not known for two years.

Shawn (01:44:36):
That’s probably the most extreme CPA calculation I’ve ever heard. But reach out to me by email. Lindsay and I, Lizzie, I’m sorry. I have a friend named Lindsey, Lizzie, and we can sort of walk the work through this, a little more specific answers to your questions. I think yours is a a pretty sophisticated question.

André (01:44:55):
Is it a case just to cap it at a lower number? So say six months, so long as it’s ROI positive, and then just ignore the rest?

Shawn (01:45:07):
That’s switch to LTV. I mean, there’s that. You could also just use ROAS, and just a really long timeframe for ROAS, and that’s another. And that’s usually what happens with a high ticket thing like this is you’re not really calculating CPA and LTV on a single… That’s actually a good point. You’re not, you’re not calculate… When a single high dollar purchase, you’re not calculating CPA and LTV. You’re calculating return on ad spend. I do think it’s valuable for you, Lizzie, to calculate a cost to acquire a customer, just so they have a sense of the order of magnitude of even though it happens over a long period of time.

Shawn (01:45:50):
Let’s just for the sake of argument, say that they make a thousand dollars on what they’re selling, and it costs them a hundred dollars to get a customer. Well that that return on ad spend, that’s 10 to one ROAS. You go, “Okay, I’m okay with that. If it’s plus or minus 20% we’re good.” But if they were spending a hundred and they were getting back 150 in two years, that’s a lot scarier proposition.

Shawn (01:46:22):
Then you go, “Oh man, I don’t know.” So there’s so much nuance in this, but it’s such a great example of how we think about this from a metrics perspective. To André’s point earlier, which I think is a really critical distinction is you go, “Okay, well maybe what we do is we say this business has a CPA and AOV calculation in a certain window of time. And that time is six months. And that gives us a six month picture of our business, knowing that the next 18 months change the picture fundamentally. But we’re going to look at those separately.” So it’s just how you look at it. It’s a really fascinating question. Let’s talk about it, Lizzie. We’ll jump on a… Email me and maybe we’ll jump on a call or something. We’ll have fun with this. This is good.

Shawn (01:47:12):
And for those of you who are listening, they’re like, “Hey, that’s not cool. We’re not going to know.” I’m sure Lizzie and I are going to come up with something that’s broadly useful for everybody, and we’ll figure out a way to get it back for everybody. Privacy kept of course. But this is a fascinating question. That’s a puzzler. Okay, next question.

Shawn (01:47:33):
What if you have a high ticket offer and it’s been very successful but through word of mouth, not paid traffic. How would you then test it online? Same thing. Look for early signals, minimum viable product. If you have an offer, sell it. So you don’t need an MVP because you’ve got offer. So I guess the question is do you have the infrastructure of an offer that you can sell online? If you don’t, if you’ve just sold something offline… And I’m a perfect example of this, on the agency side of my business. I have a very successful high ticket offer that I’ve sold through entirely word of mouth, and referrals for a very long period of time that I don’t sell with paid traffic. And I don’t have the infrastructure to sell it online. So how would I go about doing that?

Shawn (01:48:27):
If that’s the case, if the infrastructure doesn’t exist, but you’ve sold the offer, then I think it’s worth your time not to do an MVP, to do it right. Figure out why people who’ve purchased it, purchased it. If you need to talk to people, if they’re your customers or whatever, you can infer lots of things, but now spend the time to do it right. Because you know that it’s converted. People have bought this thing. That’s what matters. That’s what really we’re trying to figure out. The first thing we’re trying to figure out with an MVP, minimum viable funnel, a minimum viable product, minimum viable offer, whatever, you pick your poison. What we’re trying to figure out first and foremost is will people buy the thing? You’ve answered that question. So now you’re at that next year, which is will they buy the thing if I try to sell it this way? That’s a different question.

Shawn (01:49:21):
But you’ve answered the big question, which is people will hand you dollars for your idea. So now you just need to know will they hand you dollars online for your idea? And what’s the best way to do that? So a way to approach this, which is kind of the MVP thought, is you see this a lot with agencies and other service providers, is you do the strategy call funnel kind of approach where you don’t build out all of the infrastructure to sell what you do online. What you build out instead is some measure of credibility and authority, and you highlight your experience and you talk about what you’ve done for others and solved it. And then the next action is that you get people on consultative call where they’re raising your hand and you’re then trying to sell them the way that you’ve sold it in the past already, which is by talking with people.

Shawn (01:50:09):
And you may find if the volume is low enough that that’s the Alpha and the Omega, that’s all you need to do. You also might find that it’s a different texture of visitors who come, and that that model doesn’t work nearly as well and you have to tweak the model and you need to make. Especially if you have a high ticket, you may find that what you need to do instead is put a webinar in front of your funnel, and make it clear that the service that you’re offering is at a certain price point so that you don’t get on the phone with people who can’t afford it.

Shawn (01:50:38):
There are lots of variations but you’ve solved the biggest problem, which is you’ve sold it. So now you just have to figure out, what you need to test is, how do you sell that same thing in a different environment. And then yes, an MVP approach, which I think is probably if it’s a service, it’s probably either some sort of content on the front end, and then consultation call. Or it is content on the front end to an informational, either video or webinar, and then consultative call or do they can buy it from the web.

Shawn (01:51:18):
High ticket offers generally are sold by a webinar. That’s just sort of the thing that’s proven itself. So that’s sort of how I would approach that question. Right. Next question.

Shawn (01:51:33):
I’m having a hard time thinking about the jobs to be done for my offer. It’s for a course on helping people get over grief because of the loss of a loved one, feel better, and get better back to normal and quotes be happy again. Seems to surface level. Any recommendations on questions to get me thinking better about this? Yeah, focus on the pain. Now, I’ve got to be cautious, Facebook in particular does not like pain focused ads.

Shawn (01:51:58):
So when I say focus on the pain, recognize that jobs, pains and gains are all texture of messaging, and you are probably in your, I’m guessing that you’re in a place where people are motivated primarily by wanting the absence of the pain that they feel. I think back, I lost my father in 1999 to cancer. I was not hoping, like, when I was thinking about things, I was not imagining myself in the future feeling better. I was just wanting the pain to go away. That was my focus.

Shawn (01:52:42):
So I suspect your audience, that’s the driver, that’s the language around it is meeting them where they are, which involves saying, but recognizing that they’re in a place that hurts, and that what they want most is not to hurt. I suspect that’s it. There is the possibility depending on the nuances of your market, there’s the possibility that depending on when this is happening, they are looking to the future in some capacity, and they’re starting to think about what it will feel like to feel good again.

Shawn (01:53:22):
But knowing what I know just from what’s inferred in the question, I would be less focused on jobs, and far more focused on the thing that’s right in front of us which is, you are in pain and we can show you a way out of that pain. And if the reality is, which in my experience it was, the only way out is through then part of it is being honest on that with that up front. Saying, “This is not a magical solution. This is a way to start toward feeling better, or not feeling horrible.” So that’s how I would approach that one. Don’t feel, and for everybody, don’t feel like you have to, you’re checking three boxes. You have to have jobs or whatever.

Shawn (01:54:07):
The beauty of jobs to be done theory, when you strip away all the goofy intellectual arguments about it and everybody trying to rewrite it and figure out what Clayton Christianson really meant and how he was wrong. But you get rid of all of that, that, the beauty of jobs to be done is just that we, there are lots of reasons we buy stuff, right? And they’re not all functional. There are functional things that we buy. But they are also things that we buy for emotion, and with a social component, and others. And not to offend anybody on the call if you are a Prius owner, but there is a different… I drive a full size, four full door crew cab, Toyota, Tundra. People buy Tundras for different reasons than people buy a Prius. Yet both of them go from A to B, right? They get us to A and back and yes, maybe there’s a little nuance in that about ride quality, sure. But same manufacturer, same function, wildly different emotional and social needs fulfilled by that. That’s what we really think about when we think about jobs to be done. Okay. Next question.

Shawn (01:55:25):
Hi Lizzie again. In the screencast you mentioned how the $5000 is a terrible overspend, and some of the other ads should be switched off because they hadn’t converted under the $800 target CPA. What percentage are you looking at to know when you should switch an ad off? How much more than a target CPA? Oh, okay. There is no finite answer to this because, especially at that amount, one more conversion can make a big difference. So I think the example I used in there, it may have been toward the end where I said, “One of them was at, I can’t remember what it was, it was too high and there wasn’t a lot of search volume for it. It was only one conversion, not a lot of volume, not a lot of upside.”

Shawn (01:56:15):
But if there were one more conversion before that, hit the next increment, the next increment being double CPA. If there were one more conversion that was going to work. It was just a low traffic environment. So a rule of thumb that we could, we could probably use here, which I don’t know that I’ve ever thought about before, so thank you Lizzie, is double CPA probably is the max threshold. And here’s why.

Shawn (01:56:48):
If we double CPA, and we get another conversion right after, I think the math doesn’t get us back to CPA quite right. But if we haven’t doubled CPA, we get another conversion, then our CPA is below our target. That’s the math of it. I always say five out of four people are bad at math, but I think that math is correct. But once we’ve doubled it, we’re not going to get back to feeling good about it. We’re going to get kind of back to a not so good CPA.

Shawn (01:57:19):
So I think my new rule of thumb, 21 years in the making apparently, is that double target CPA is the maximum allowable before I’m going to say that one’s not working. And I might have to retest that under different circumstances or some nuance. But the 5000 was just such an aberration, who let that spend that much money, when there was no sign it was going to be profitable?

Shawn (01:57:46):
That to me just looked like, and I see this all the time, an account that’s running, it’s not being looked at nearly frequently enough. There is a keyword in there that’s expensive, and it’s driving a lot of traffic, terrible combination. And it just, someone was asleep at the wheel. They just didn’t, they weren’t watching that thing and it went, instead of going to 1600 it went to 5700. That’s a huge waste of money, and never should have happened. That’s the nuance. The new heuristic rule of thumb that I like that I will call the Lizzie method from now on, is double target CPA. No conversion, turn it off because you’re not mathematically going to get back to where do you want it to be without some miracle. So that’s my final answer for today at least. I like that too. That’s a good rule of thumb. Okay, Robyn, thanks guys on the test, blah blah blah. Cool. Awesome. Yeah. Let us know what the results are. Let me know, Robin, I’m curious.

André (01:58:44):
Yeah, and we can always update the show notes with your answer just to help everybody else out. We weren’t… Your market stall, invisible, we don’t have to reveal that.

Shawn (01:59:00):
Okay. Anonymous attendee. I’m always hoping an anonymous question is like something way over the top, that someone didn’t want to be associated with asking. Okay. Quick question. With what you said about one page manifesto plus a buy button, or plus button at the bottom of page to lead to sales. Is that button where you capture their email too? Maybe, when they buy, you’re going to get their email, but I think you could also do the same thing for opt in.

Shawn (01:59:29):
Again, this is where we get, I said I wasn’t going to give André a big head twice, but I’m about to. So this is the beauty of Sphere of Influence. It’s an architecture that supports really good thinking. The thinking it’s supporting here is we want to have enough content that a person has to spend time with it, and then we either want them to click through to more content so we get a signal, and then take an action like opt in or buy because now we’ve got some real texture to the data that we’re looking at.

Shawn (02:00:01):
Or if we just want quick and dirty, let’s get a result. We can do a long page of content and at the end ask them to buy something, or to give us their email for some further interaction about the thing that we’re talking about. And we’re not offering a bribe when we do that. That’s another of the nuances of Sphere of Influence that I think is brilliant, is that we pollute our signal when we offer a bribe. And so that if we did the exact same thing that we talked about earlier that André articulated and I came at it slightly differently, but at the end of that page we said, “And as our way of saying thank you, you’ll get this free report about XYZ.” Now we have no idea if we were on the right track, unless the free report about XYZ is the logical next step from the content that we’ve put on that page.

Shawn (02:00:57):
But we want the signal that’s clearer, even knowing it will be less of a signal. It’s still comparatively more powerful because we’ve said to people in the buy example, we’ve done the ultimate. Here’s what I’m thinking about. I’m not going to spend 20 hours trying every persuasion technique to tell you why this is great. This is what I’ve done. This is what you get. This is how much it is, yes or no. That gives a really clean signal. The corollary that this one step removed is, “Here’s what I’m thinking about. This is why it matters. Here’s some context for it. Here’s what I intend to do next. If you’re interested in this, then if you give me your email, I’m going to keep having this conversation about this.”

Shawn (02:01:45):
That’s a strong signal, too. That’s someone saying, “I am interested in this.” And then if you get that email and you send them a personal email and say, “I’m trying to really figure this out. Here are three questions I’d love to know. I’d love your answers to these three questions.” And nobody answers those questions, that’s a really good signal that the interest isn’t strong.

Shawn (02:02:04):
If 80% of the people answer those questions, that’s a really good signal that the interest is strong. So much nuance in all of that, but it’s all on the same architecture of making things a little bit harder, and going contrary to trying to make it so easy that everybody just says yes. We’re making it harder for people to say yes. We’re breaking every rule of persuasion to make it harder to say yes so that the yes is a really strong signal.

Shawn (02:02:33):
I just realize how weird it is to be talking about Sphere of Influence with André on the call who created Sphere of Influence. That’s interesting. Okay. What do you suggest implementing? When do you suggest implementing something like heroes or Wicked Reports to help with attribution and tracking, given that you can track and it’s all on your own site? So full disclosure, I’ve mentioned before, I am good friends with Scott and Mike Wicked Reports. I’ve worked with Wicked Reports in the fast in the past. I love those guys, they’re just good people. I love Wicked Reports as a product. I know Scott, and the whole team are pouring their heart and soul into a challenge that is very difficult. And I’ve also used Wicked Reports with many clients, and have found incredible insights from that makes a lot of things easier.

Shawn (02:03:29):
I think the way I would answer, and just caveat, I have no financial interest in Wicked Reports, just a FYI. I think the way I would answer this question is, make it harder on yourself first so that you understand. You have to understand how to do things. The harder you make it on yourself to get the insights, the more durable the insights are, and the better questions you’ll start asking. The beauty and the curse of-

Shawn (02:04:03):
Better questions, you’ll start asking. The beauty and the curse of Wicked Reports is it gives you really good answers, really good answers. You can have, for example, thinking of some ways I’ve used it in the past, you can have a lead acquisition campaign to a multi-party email series to a purchase in the future and it will show the contributions of all of those things to the ultimate goal.

Shawn (02:04:26):
And you can have, it will show your contributions of retargeting. It’s a really, really powerful tool. At the same time, if you haven’t forced yourself to understand how your system works and what drives results, I think you get less benefit to be using a tool like that because it becomes a crutch in that sense. And that may not be entirely true. I think there are people who learn a tool, like Wicked Reports and really dive into it and understand how it works and extract brilliant insights from it. So you can do that, just make it harder first. It sounds crazy, but the harder you make it on yourself within reason in the beginning, the better you are at it.

Shawn (02:05:20):
You start asking really good questions because you realize you don’t know how to answer a question, and it becomes very visible and once you understand that you can’t answer a question, then that ripples out everything that you’re doing because now you want to be able to answer the question. And when you have a tool that answers so many questions for you I think it dumbs down our motivation and our ability to ask really good questions. I think. So having said that, at some point tools like Wicked Reports become really valuable. My advice for that tool and any tool really in SegMetrics, Wicked Reports, any third party tool like this, my advice if you do decide to go down that road, is to spend a little extra time on the front end making sure it will work for your system.

Shawn (02:06:14):
That old quote that I’m sure is missed attributed to Abraham Lincoln where he said, “If I had an hour to cut down a tree, I would spend 45 minutes sharpening my ax.” I’ve seen a lot of people see the promise of Wicked Reports or SegMetrics or other things and just jump into the promise, not knowing that there’s work on their part to learn how to use the system and that it has to match up well with how their system works. So if you have things, the entire front of your business is online, but the purchase happens with a phone call. You need to have that conversation with whatever tool, with whoever does the setup at whatever tool you’re using, so that they can come back to you and say, “Yes, all of the benefits that you read that make you want to buy the tool will work in your specific situation.” Because they don’t always do that. Wait, they don’t always, that was a weird sentence. That’s not always true. I’ll try that instead.

Shawn (02:07:09):
And that’s very disappointing when you find out you’re or that they’re… I worked with a client for a period of time who use Wicked Reports and he had an enormous leak in his system that he refused to fix and it basically made Wicked Reports worthless. And the refusal to fix, I still don’t understand, but the refusal to fix the leak made everything problematic. So long answer, but yeah, that’s how I would think about it.

Shawn (02:07:38):
Okay. And this is a long one. Let’s see. When will you start creating, oh this is a question I hoped nobody asks me. When will you start creating and sharing… I’ll read the whole question, then I’ll go back and answer them. When will you start creating sharing your specific test example? And will you include how you go through the same audience offer mapping process with jobs, pains and gains? I’ve offered different services to experts in the online marketing space and my goal is to transition more to selling info products to the same or different audience. My challenge is I’ve done everything from building webinar funnels, lead gen funnels, email promo campaigns, retargeting ads and light video editing. Having a hard time narrowing down a specific enough audience and the related jobs. Starting from the jobs to be done makes more sense to me. Would you just test different audiences and offers? Also would a potential job be get webinar leads or sell product fire webinar, wondering about the scope?

Shawn (02:08:34):
Okay, so lots of questions in here. I am going to start sharing my examples I’m guessing within the next couple of weeks. I will show you my process because it has been miserable and I want you to see just how miserable it is in case your process is miserable too and you think you’re the only one. It is hard. It is hard for many of the reasons many of you have raised in comments and questions. Many of the things that that Ricardo has mentioned in here, although because I narrowed my scope to not include my professional background. I wouldn’t normally have very similar problems because I do a lot of different things.

Shawn (02:09:16):
But my experience has been, I am going through the exact process that is in part one and part two of the Audience and Offer Masterclass, in the exact order, exactly as I described it without filling in. If I catch myself, which I haven’t yet, but if I were to catch myself filling in with a little something different, I’m going to go back to the content and change it because the whole point of creating the Audience and Offer Masterclass the way I did, it was that it is a true representation of what I actually do, not what I hope somebody could do.

Shawn (02:09:53):
So it is very much a call and response to myself where I go through the process, I’ve done all of the parts of the process and I’ve done start to finish to the process several times, but what I wasn’t as sure about is are there places where it’s outside my conscious awareness that I’m filling in between things? And so far I haven’t. So you’ll see as, and I’m not sure if this will probably, André and I haven’t talked about how we’ll put this in the Academy.

Shawn (02:10:23):
I suspect that it’s just going to be a separate container of some sort where it will just be screen cast one, here’s what I go over. Screen cast two, it’ll just be an addendum to that. I will tell you that has been one of the hardest things I’ve done in years. Partly because I stacked the deck so thoroughly, not in my favor that it’s just hard, and partly because I’m super interested in a lot of different things. But it has led to a lot of really interesting, not say revelations, but yeah revelations, where I’m like, “Oh, here’s a way that this could be a lot better.” And I think there’ll be a lot of value in that. But for all of you who are struggling with this part, welcome, it is hard. It is really hard.

Shawn (02:11:09):
Okay, so getting into the rest of the questions, you’ve done lots of different things, so how do you narrow it down? A couple of thoughts on this. It is easier to sell narrow, yet it’s more valuable to have range. There’s actually a book by the name Range, which makes a very compelling case for this, excellent book. However, I think that the challenge is you’re probably not going to, some examples you might get hired because you have a breadth of experience, but it’s unlikely that you’ll get somebody to consume the content of an offer based on breadth of experience. So I think what you’re starting to move toward here, as I understand your question is the right approach, which is pick something that you know your audience needs. I like this idea of getting webinar leads. I wouldn’t focus on getting webinar leads, I would focus on, the biggest problem people have with webinars is getting people to stay to the end, that and show up. Those are the two big ones.

Shawn (02:12:09):
So I would approach it more from the perspective of a holistic webinar service where you say, “Okay,” first of all what you’re going to do is either acknowledge what they already know or tell them something that they don’t know, which is that getting leads is only one part of the challenge. What’s really challenging with the webinars is you not only need to get a lead, you need to get them excited about attending the webinar. You need to get them to attend the webinar, and then you need to get them to stay to the end of the webinar where there’s an offer and get them to go to the offer page.

Shawn (02:12:40):
So what we think our job is, get webinar leads is really many other things. This is a perfect opportunity to do a multi page presale site format, which you could do by video, you could do written, lots of ways you could do this. It’s the conceptual structure of the multi page presale site. It doesn’t have to be bunch of single pages, but you’re taking them through, you’re building a new world for them. And the world is either they’ve started to inhabit the world, which is, “Hey, I’m doing a webinar and this is hard and I’m not getting the results that I thought.”

Shawn (02:13:15):
So what you’re doing then is you’re saying, “Here’s, you think you’re in this world where you getting the lead is the thing that matters. But the reality is, it’s this is what really matters.” You need to get people to stay to the end of a webinar and there are a series of actions that you can take to overcome each of the biggest challenges. And here’s what the challenges are. But you’re not, you’re emphasizing all of the challenges they have, but you don’t until the end, sell the thing that is the solution to all of those challenges.

Shawn (02:13:49):
I think that you’ve got a brilliant offer here. If you want to do this, this is the big problem. There are lots of people selling by a webinar. If you can do this or if you can learn how to do this, the information is all out there. Piecemeal, how to get leads, how to get webinar leads, pretty straightforward, intensification campaigns after the webinar, if you have to lead and some tech stuff with sending text messages, all the pieces are there. If you put all the pieces together and package it as a solution to the actual problem, which is that they need more sales from their webinar, I think that’s an outstanding place to start. And then because you’re broadly skilled, once you’ve solved that problem for them and are solving it and have a relationship with them, sell other stuff to them, get the customer with that thing. I think that’s a super powerful offer. And if you ended up doing that email me because everybody needs this. And I’d be happy to, if you can do it I’d be happy to pass your name around. Okay.

Shawn (02:14:53):
All right. This might be a question for next week. Yes. This is a question about client stuff. This is next week’s call. So just a reminder for everybody the client services call number one is this same time next Thursday. So I will cover this then. If this is an emergency, I know you emailed about this Alexander, so if you need an answer, just shoot me another message and just let me know this is really pressing and I’ll send you a quick email answer but we’re going to go deeper on this next week’s Q and A call.

Shawn (02:15:28):
All right Lizzie, in terms of attribution not being possible if you get leads in one location and sell in another, is that still true for a physical sale like dentists? I would have thought tracking was possible through a CRM. Yeah, the thing that I was mentioning before about attribution, you can include attribution in the CRM, so yes you can do that but my comment on attribution was more when you go from digital place to digital place, the transition from one domain to another, you lose that initial attribution.

Shawn (02:16:02):
So the example I use, I have a client and we finally solved this, but I have a client in the resort space. Their traffic comes in to their domain, but then there’s a third party utility where they book rooms. And in the past we would see how everybody came into the site, but all of the conversions and the reservations engine were associated with their website as the refer. That’s how attribution breaks from digital footprint to digital footprint. When you have a CRM and you know the attribution of the lead, you just put the attribution to the lead in the CRM and then it tracks it through the entirety of the life cycle.

Shawn (02:16:47):
Okay, you’re being awfully quiet André, I don’t know. Let’s see, anonymous. Okay. Slightly confused by the curriculum instructions. What to implement first and do, are you recommending starting with Google Ads first to get feedback or gain pain job to be done before thinking about Facebook Ads or what’s the interplay? Are we going through this with me in real time? So let me answer these questions separately.

Shawn (02:17:21):
This is the no good plan survives contact with reality. In general terms, the structure of the traffic engine is really meant to be the structure of how I would approach an offer or a business when it exists, so when an offer exists. What I realize by a lot of the comments and emails and feedback was that there were a lot of people who don’t have an offer yet. So I’ve tried to do two things in parallel, which may not, it may confuse things and I think as we iterate towards success with a traffic engine, we may make two paths so people know. If you have an offer that exists, a proven offer that you’ve sold online, the best thing to do is to start with Google Ads modules and learn the principles. Go through module zero one and two understand AdWords and run traffic because it has an active intent.

Shawn (02:18:18):
That’s the reason the course is structured that way is I think in general you should start with active intent because it’s the most likely to convert. If you don’t get good conversion or if there’s something wrong, if you’re not quite sure then I do think it’s helpful to go through the Audience and Offer Masterclass and to go through the exercise of jobs pains and gains to dial in your messaging, both on the landing pages and where you’re selling, and in your ads. I think there’s value in that. If your ads are converting then that’s less of an issue, that’s just an add-on. However, if you don’t have an offer, and what my concern was if you get all the way, you get to this point of, “Okay, we’re about to run traffic with Google Ads but I don’t even have an offer. I have an idea but I haven’t really dialed it in.” Well, the Audience and Offer Masterclass was really put there to say, “Let’s get your offer dialed in first. Let’s make sure that we can solve that problem. And you can always come back to Google Ads later.”

Shawn (02:19:17):
And I think in that situation, the way to do it is to go module zero, one, and two, understand the field of play that we’re on, you can participate in, you can go through module three and four or you can just not look at those yet. Do Audience and Offer Masterclass both parts, start working on that, modules five and six you can pay attention to those if you want to. You don’t have to. I would probably pay attention to five and six because 6.5 is how to test ideas with Facebook.

Shawn (02:19:53):
So what I would like to see you do is from the 30,000 foot perspective is, understand the principles that we’re talking about for paid traffic, get your offer dialed in, understand how to test it better on Facebook to really dial it in. And once you have get some results from your testing, let’s go back to AdWords and run you through AdWords and Facebook and then retargeting and then come together. So there really are three ish paths through here. And I think as we get there and as we get to the end and then what’s next, phase two for this first cohort of the traffic engine will be a lot of those nuances about how to go through it depending on the scenario work that you have. So I appreciate that question.

Shawn (02:20:43):
As far as going through this with me real time, I don’t want to be the constraint for everybody else who has offers, what you’re going to get to see from my offer and the whole, the two reasons I did an offer myself what you’ll see, the number one reason is I wanted you to be able to see every single bit of data at every level of detail. And I can’t do that with anybody else’s data. So it has to be something that I can give you access to as an example and see real numbers. These are real numbers, I’m spending my own money, this is a real thing.

Shawn (02:21:18):
The second part is I wanted you to see what is most likely to happen if you do this, which is you are most likely to have a suboptimal result initially. And I wanted you to know that, that’s not you and your fault, you didn’t do something wrong, it’s the name of the game and what to do next. So that offer is going to live in the traffic engine over a long period of time. So if you get to the 29th you’re like, “I thought we were going to see all these other things about this. What happened?” Just because module eight is released on May 29th ish, that’s not the end of the traffic engine. You all have this, you own it for the life of the traffic engine and you own all of it for the life of the traffic engine. So as I go back and I refine, your part of being the first cohort is there’s going to be some refinements. So as I go back and I add stuff to it, and add nuance and all that happens, your understanding will evolve as I make the make it easier to understand really.

Shawn (02:22:25):
So your participation has been incredibly helpful. The comments are helpful, the questions are helpful because I’m looking at all of these to rethink everything that I’ve done or to augment what I’ve done and gone go back to it to polish, polish, polish. So thank you all, ask the questions. Okay. Next question. We’re getting close to the end. Two more questions. Wow. We’re going to do it. We you’re going to do it. All right. If the customers are not searching for specific problem, key phrases enough, does that mean the key phrase to be optimized… Does that mean the key phrase to be optimize or is that to be taken that demand is less, so that we can use awareness type ads?

Shawn (02:23:08):
That’s a good question but a hard question. If customers aren’t searching, if you don’t have a lot of search volume, that just tells you there’s not a lot of search volume. And that sounds like the dumbest answer possible, let me unpack the answer. It doesn’t mean there’s not a lot of interest. It just means there’s not a lot of active interest. And that’s common. It’s common that you could be, people buy stuff all the time that they weren’t actively looking for. It showed up and this looks great. So the only thing it tells you, don’t get demoralized, first of all, if you have an offer and it’s good and it contributes value to the world and you know there’s an audience that can benefit from it, that you can reach online. You’re okay. That’s okay. If you don’t find, for me and my offer, one of the biggest challenges has been there’s not a lot of active, intense search for it.

Shawn (02:24:09):
People don’t know how to search for it. It’s a yearning more than it is a search. They want it, but they don’t even know how to look for it. It’s hard, so I could very easily abandon an idea because there’s just not a lot of active intent for, or the way people look forward is weird. So don’t worry about that. Now when you say use awareness type ads, I want to just be very cautious here, I would if your search volume, your very specific search volume is low, then what I would do is I would shift over to Facebook. And when you say awareness type ads, I would move over to Facebook next and that would be my next step. I would not then try to move farther away from specificity on Google Ads and say, “Well if people are searching for,” if they’re not really searching for the very specific thing I offer, I’ll go farther away from it and try to take them from what they are searching for to my thing. Don’t do that. Go to Facebook instead, identify an audience, test the stuff you learned in module 6.5, test there. Then maybe go back to Google. Google is just too expensive to try to convert low quality traffic. If you can get lower quality traffic for cheap and there’s, it’s possible, it’s rare, but it’s possible. If you can do that, we’ll do that later. Absolutely. But that’s not the next best choice. The first best choice is active intent, specific search terms that your offer fulfills. That’s the best choice dollar for dollar. Second best choice is to go find a potentially responsive audience on Facebook and show them your offer even though they’re not looking. Third best choice is to go back to Google and move a little farther away from specificity. That’s the order that I would recommend that you work in.

Shawn (02:26:17):
Last question. Last question is an easy yes, no. So the question is, anonymous question, my favorite, are you going to show us how to configure, to measure for CPA and ROAS and Google Analytics or worksheet? Yes, yes, I am. You can do it in Analytics with goal tracking, you can do it an Analytics with eCommerce tracking. So we’ll do both of those. And that’s great for ROAS in particular. We’ll also learn how to calculate CPL, cost per lead, and some other fun stuff. And those will be screen casts for GA, Google Analytics, and for the individual platforms. One comment on screen cast, André and I have been talking about standardizing on a format method. I’ve been working on also using some screen capture on the iPad so I can draw stuff. I’ve even, as terrifying as it is to say out loud, started putting together a way to do some video too. So yikes, that one’s a little more scary, but you’ll have lots of stuff. That is the last question. You did it. It’s only what, two hours and 35 minutes. This is easy. Not a problem at all.

André (02:27:25):
Yeah it was 35 and 90% of the people are still here.

Shawn (02:27:28):
Nice. It’s your melodious voice that they’re waiting to hear on bated breath. Any wrap up at all André? You’ve been quiet this time. For all of you that don’t know, André is deep into a fast, so he’s coming towards the promised land.

André (02:27:46):
My stomach is rumbling.

Shawn (02:27:47):
That’s right. You probably had to move your mic because you’re so hungry. But at least you have bone broth to look forward to or something tomorrow for breakfast. So there is that.

André (02:27:58):
Yeah. I’m going to have that chocolate shake that you had with, that you bought-

Shawn (02:28:04):
[Ka’Chava 02:28:04] stuff yeah.

André (02:28:05):
Yeah. Ka’Chava, I’m going to have some of that tomorrow.

Shawn (02:28:07):
Nice. I got a new thing, I’ll send you the link too. Oh, so one quick thing for everybody to look forward to. I don’t think I saw any comments about whether or not… Maybe we did, but as far as combining, so I got to the end of the conversation today one of the things I said in the beginning, is I’m still trying to figure out if I’m wanting to combine modules five and six next week, I just want everybody to know I’m leaning toward that. We will send out an email probably tomorrow with that decision. If that happens, just be aware, and I will explain this in the email that we’re moving five and six together next week. Maintaining the overall timeline, only because I want to use the time between now and then to augment what’s already in Google Ads to make sure everybody has a clear understanding.

Shawn (02:28:56):
It’s not a delay in the program, it’s just jamming things together. I’m 86.7% confident I’m going to make that decision and then just one last plug for modules five and six, Lauren, who I’ve mentioned several times before has been, he’s a significant contributor to that. Lauren is a far more skilled Facebook tactician and in the weeds doing the work, actually making Facebook happen. So all of you are in for a real treat. I’m going to focus on the higher level strategies, how I think about Facebook, and then it is interwoven with Lauren who is a big thinker, in the trenches and it’s just a really wonderful, I’ve just loved reading his input on it. It’s sharp and it’s focused. And Lauren’s been very active in the comments.

Shawn (02:29:44):
It’s just so much to look forward to with the upcoming modules. So I think you’re all going to be very excited. No pressure Lauren you’re going to be very excited about that.

André (02:29:55):
Yeah, I’m excited as well. Thanks everybody for-

Shawn (02:29:58):
There’s a question that, oh, someone just posted in the questions that they had fast on water for 21 days. [crosstalk 02:30:03].

André (02:30:03):
That’s nuts.

Shawn (02:30:04):
We’re five days, max.

André (02:30:06):
We’re amateurs.

Shawn (02:30:07):
That’s true. Now I feel like I can just do five hours in my sleep, right, or five days in my sleep. All right. Thank you everybody. André, always a pleasure.

André (02:30:16):
Yeah, man. Thanks everyone.

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