The Exchanges

Q of forward thinking? Cause like, is like, in a sense, everyone will be like, I want to be on every platform. I guess like, what are other things that people think about when they're like the forward thing is like, oh, we want to go, we want to win Google on goal search. Is that, is that an example of forward thinking? What else, what else should people be thinking?

A Yeah, exactly. What are those, what are those goals you want to hit? Uh, one of the things that, uh, we look at is what, you know, Emerging channels to performant. So what is it going to take for us to consider this channel a performant channel that is an always on, we're, we're adopting it as BAU. So that's going to take You know, a thousand conversions a month at this much spend with this much lift associated with it. So, okay. We know what that looks like. So we're going to backwards plan where we're going to start. We're going to start with this one ad creative. Okay. That works. Then we're going to go to this next because which in each platform, they all have multiple types of ad units you can use. Say in LinkedIn, there's feed. There's conversation. There's video. There's carousel. So it's what are the milestones along the way that you're going to do to ultimately get it from, um, you know, testing emerging channel to performant. So that would be an example of something more micro than macro.

AI assessment note: “one of the things that we look at is what Emerging channels to performant”

Q case you wonder why I sound a little weird, but the show must go on. I want to start with just setting a little context for folks that aren't super familiar with performance marketing paid growth. When we talk about performance marketing slash paid growth, first of all, are those two terms interchangeable to you? And second of all, what falls under the umbrella of performance marketing slash paid growth?

A Paid can be a lot of things. It can be online. It can be offline. It can also even be affiliates. Typically when I talk about performance marketing, it's about online only, but you could argue it's like offline could be performing and affiliates could be performing and stuff like that. Uh, they can be interchangeable, but I would recommend if you are talking about it to Kind of specify which one you're talking about, because when you do say paid, Because I'm in the industry. I would just, oh, they do Google search and they do meta and they do things like that. But if you do offline and you just say paid, we may be talking about things, but missing each other on two, two ships passing in the night. So I, I think historically, uh, people when they have said paid growth have been fully focused on just online.

AI assessment note: “they can be interchangeable, but I would recommend if you are talking about it”

Q Amazing. Okay. Back, going back to the report you just showed, is that, is that a report you developed custom that gives you like, here's the most important stuff to pay attention to, or is it basically an export from Google ad manager?

A And so these are all exports. So this is just the visualization of the data that's available. So this all data is available in every account. This data available in the account. This is data available in the account. Now in saying that, There are more reports that we get into, like impression share and frequency. This is something I tend to look at that not a lot of other people do. It's not about showing as often as possible, because that's what impression share tells you. And that's kind of like ego marketing. I want to be number one. I want to be there all the time. It's about showing to the right person as often as possible. Instead of thinking about being on top of the page, you should think about serving the right user, which can be measured with our click share. And then Google will put us on top of the page, which we can see through our top impression share. That's what this whole visualization is here for, where I feel like a lot of people don't do this type of visualization, and this can be done by leveraging all the user data available in Google, such as, you know, demographics, locations, affinity audiences, in-market audiences, testing different bid strategies and more. So the data is readily available, but it's just making the visualization a little bit more digestible. And the reason that I actually have two here to show is because this is an example of when I wa…

AI assessment note: “these are all exports. So this is just the visualization of the data”

Q In terms of the creative person, is that like a graphic designer? Is it like a marketing person? What's like the actual skill set there?

A It would be more Uh, graphic design slash branding. Uh, the reason for that is because there you're, if you have a good marketing mix, you're going to have, if we keep it to a three-step funnel of awareness, consideration, purchase, you're going to need to build some brand equity in a specific direction. You're going to need to, uh, make sure you're communicating value, which now you're not being as. Creative. You are being more directional. And then ultimately the purchase is like, Hey, click here, convert now. So you do want to give them the ability to still be creative. Hey, I hired you because you have a good creative eye and you're good at what you do, but now we need to focus on getting that person to convert. So give them a little free reign to be creative, but then you also need them to be able to execute against that creative. You need to get those users to convert.

AI assessment note: “It would be more Uh, graphic design slash branding.”

Q That makes a lot of sense. How long do you recommend these tests run for these signs of life tests? And I like this term, by the way, I've heard this before.

A Ideally in a perfect world, you're going to hear the word statistical relevance. Um, mathematicians will, will tell you exactly what that number is. And I'm not going to pretend like a mathematician, but a lot of times it's a budget constraint. So there could be a VP finance. Anyone like that could just come to you and just say, Hey, You have 25,000 dollars for this test. You only have 5000. Uh, you know, just get that information, get that data. You can then also build an op size off of that. Hey guys, we worked with our meta partners. We worked with our Google partners. Uh, we put a thousand dollars behind this test. We know that our impression share was this, our reach was this. If we were to put 10,000 dollars into it, this is the expected return we can get from it, uh, based on the Based on the click-through rate, the conversion rate that we got from the test that we ran.

AI assessment note: “a lot of times it's a budget constraint.”

Q Some people use paid ads to drive early growth, to bring customers, to help them figure out what to build kind of pre-product market fit growth. Is that something you recommend? Is that something you advise against? Is that strategy that you've seen work?

A Yeah. Product market fit is a huge thing. Um, we've run into some of this at, uh, Shopify and we definitely ran into this at, um, IBM. So for the longest time, you know, IBM is we're a global company. We should be everywhere. Uh, but when we started looking at the data, it was, should we be everywhere? For example, Africa, we were in the whole continent. We weren't just in say South Africa or Egypt or something like that. And the more we dug into it, the more we realized the biggest issue wasn't necessarily that users weren't interested in our product and weren't able to, and weren't purchasing it. It was because we didn't have a product market fit, mainly from an operation standpoint. In Africa, there are Multitudes of different types of, uh, currency. There's the fronk, there's the ran, there's the shill. And we, we were just, Hey, USD. Thank you. So of course they weren't converting unless they were going out of their way to make a way to, uh, convert that. So when we took a step back and we said, okay, where do we want to start? It was South Africa. That's really where we were trying to get Quote unquote stronghold in. Uh, so we had to make sure we had the RAND available. Once we did that, we were, uh, we started doing tremendously better because we had a product market fit. They, they had demand for our product, and now we were able to serve them, meet them where they were…

AI assessment note: “Product market fit is a huge thing. Um, we've run into some of this”