What's Working in Paid Ads and Our Hot Take on Reality TV with Tony Rulli of Intentional Spark
Episode 571: Show Notes
If you’ve been dipping your toe into the ad space lately, you would have been hearing that a lot has changed. Although people say that every year and the changes are usually not so significant, this year is different; because of some really big Apple changes, the game kind of did change, and we now have to think about a whole lot of new things when it comes to paid advertising. In this episode, we are joined by Tony Rulli, co-founder of the digital marketing agency, Intentional Spark. We had Tony on the show once before, during the peak of the pandemic (Episode 414 for anyone who wants to go back and listen)!
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Today, Tony is going to be going over what those changes actually mean for marketers and advertisers, and he’s going to share his best recommendations for how to not necessarily combat those changes (because you can’t really) but how to still get the information that you need to sell your product or service. We also have a TV segment near the end of this episode, where we’re going to be discussing some reality TV shows, and our hot takes!
Changes That Have Been Taking Place in the Ad World
The biggest change that’s been happening is that Apple has become a leader on privacy. They are taking a stance on privacy and owning your own data, and because they are such a huge company and so many people use their products, this means that a lot less data is now going to come back into Facebook for advertisers. Everyone at this point has probably had the latest iOS update; you would have noticed that after doing this update, when you open an App, it will ask you if you want this App to allow you to be tracked. A significant number of people responded “no” which means that you can no longer send them targeted ads. It also means we’re getting less data back into Facebook. If people opt-out with the new iOS privacy tracking, it doesn’t mean we don’t get any data, but we only get what we rank as the highest priority event.
How the Apple Privacy Changes are Impacting Small Businesses
While it is understandable what Apple is doing, a lot of people don’t fully understand how these ad platforms work. What they are actually doing is allowing us, as advertisers, to target people based on general characteristics. It lets the ads be tailored so you see the kind of content that is relevant to you and then business owners get feedback on what’s working and what’s not working. Sometimes when you want to hit a certain goal, using the pay-to-play strategy is the most effective, but now if you have less data to work with, it’s a lot more difficult to understand if you’re doing the right thing when it comes to your ads. According to Tony, small e-commerce businesses have been the worst affected by the privacy changes, but all businesses have been impacted in some way. It’s not entirely clear how much of this impact is tied to the iOS changes, and how much is related to larger global trends, like the COVID-19 pandemic, so time will tell on that one!
How to use Google Analytics to Make Marketing Decisions
Tony has always been a big believer in getting all of the data you can. This can be a massive undertaking but with all the shifts that are taking place in the ad space he is recommending it to more and more clients. Even just using simple analytics and UTM tracking, you’ll get a lot more data which will let you compare what you’re seeing in one account to another. You can just start with anything new, put a UTM in there, see what it looks like in analytics and if you like it you can start adding to all your email funnels and things like that. Google Tag Manager allows you to do a lot more complicated tracking and stitch a lot of things together; it’s a really powerful tool, and it’s also free! The most time intensive activity for our team has been adding the tagging to all our existing links because we’re cross-sharing so much of our content.
Recommendations for Service Providers Dipping Their Toe in the Ad World
A Marketing Efficiency Ratio is a very high-level measure of marketing health. It’s basically your total revenue divided by your total marketing spend. If you hadn’t heard of this concept before, don’t worry, we hadn’t either! But it’s certainly something we have to rely on occasionally, especially when we work with affiliate partners. You’re never going to have perfect information from analytics, so it’s good to have all these different “sanity checks,” as Tony likes to call them! For anyone who is just starting out in the ad world, don’t worry too much about the privacy changes, the basics of Facebook ads haven’t really changed. If you are selling organically, if people are opting-in to what you’re offering and buying from you and you have your numbers, you can do some math to figure out how much leads are worth to you and how much you can pay. If that’s happening, ads will still work for you!
Quote This
It’s much easier to scale something that’s always on and you can monitor it and make tweaks and test creative, instead of doing one big promotion.
Highlights
Changes That Have Been Taking Place in the Ad World. [0:05:08]
How the Apple privacy changes are impacting small businesses. [0:08:33]
How to use Google Analytics to make marketing decisions. [0:19:08]
Recommendations for service providers dipping their toe in the ad world. [0:23:34]
#TalkStrategyToMe [0:42:05]
If you can put evergreen marketing strategies in place, do it.
Don’t be afraid to do video marketing; it’s harder but it’s worth giving it a try.
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Tony Rulli
Intentional Spark
Website | Instagram | Facebook | LinkedIn
Tony Rulli is the co-founder of Intentional Spark, a digital marketing agency with a focus on Facebook and Instagram ads. Intentional Spark has worked with clients across many industries, including us! He has a deep knowledge and is definitely working in the trenches.
KEY TOPICS
Privacy, Advertising, Marketing, Data Tracking, Google Analytics, Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER)
