How to Save 20% of your Ad Spend, without Lowering Sales

Chase Barmore [00:00:00]:
I would say before even running ads, you wanna make sure that your profit is in line, that you have all your cost of goods in line, and you know that, okay. If if I can acquire this customer for $100 and I still make x, then we’re good to go. 

Jeffro [00:00:23]:
Welcome back to Digital Dominance. One of the best features of digital marketing is also something that most businesses don’t take advantage of. The ability to track any and every activity from your customers is such a powerful tool. It’s something that you just can’t do as thoroughly when you’re putting up billboards or running radio ads. But with online ads, you can track pretty much everything. Yet most of us stop at the very basic setup and don’t even time take the time to understand the reports. So, today, we’re going to talk about the importance of tracking your campaigns and diving deep into the data. To help me do that, my guest today is Chase Barmore.

Jeffro [00:00:58]:
Chase is the cohost of the Sales Players podcast and a strategic account executive at Hyros, one of the top ad tracking and attribution platforms. He has a deep understanding of campaign tracking and optimization and a wealth of experience from launching 2 companies plus helping his company grow from 0 to 1,000,000 in annual recurring revenue, not once, but twice. So welcome to the show, Chase. Good to have you here.

Chase Barmore [00:01:20]:
Thanks for having me, Jethro. Really appreciate you inviting me on.

Jeffro [00:01:24]:
Yeah. Of course. And, you know, Chase, this is a very fundamental piece of digital marketing campaigns, which is why I’m glad we’re gonna dive into this. Having good information can be so helpful in making decisions. And whether you’re on the sales side or the marketing side, those insights can make you much more effective.

Chase Barmore [00:01:40]:
Totally and one of the things that I like to preface with all my clients at Hyros is I call myself, randomly enough, a a recovering entrepreneur turned SaaS sales executive. And the reason for this is because, I burned through a lot of cash in ads of, with my my company Life Bar and just learn the hard way of what to do, what not to do, and having bad tracking or no tracking and really just flying blind.

Jeffro [00:02:09]:
Yeah. So you’ve been on both sides of this, and so you really get it, you know, inside and out. So let’s start with the philosophy behind all this tracking. Why should a business owner care to know that a person clicked their ad 4 times before finally scheduling an appointment?

Chase Barmore [00:02:23]:
It’s a great question, and the first thing that I would refer this to is just like when you’re in the gym, it’s, January, and and you wanna be sure to track your results. So small changes can make big changes in the in the long run. And, also, I think a lot of people going into, let’s say, Facebook, TikTok, Google Ads think instantly you’re gonna put money into that machine and it’s instantly gonna spit out money, you get a lot of ads that already are coming to you. You have a lot of people that are saying, oh, just give us $1, we’ll get five, and that’s really not the case, sometimes it takes a lot longer for people to be nurtured and then purchased, and you wanna be able to track that to see your results. Yes. So in attribution, basically, is there’s 2 different models of what most people will look at as people running Facebook Ads or Google Ads, and they will be looking at Google, let’s say, GA 4, which is a free tool. Their attribution is basically the amount of clicks or the amount of purchases, just the tracking of the actual ads even through organic sources as well. So so, a lot of people are just using native tools to understand who are coming in through these ads.

Jeffro [00:04:00]:
Right. And the term itself attribution, you’re attributing that visitor to this client or you’re trying to match up as much information as possible so to make sense of it.

Chase Barmore [00:04:10]:
Right? Exactly. And and taking a visitor a click to a visitor to a lead to an actual conversion and understanding that whole journey. And for different types of businesses like a d two c e commerce, that could be very quick of, like, under 7 days. But for a b to b lead generation company, it could be, you know, 3 months, 6 months, a year, year and a half to actually get that full journey and that conversion. And that’s very important to see that whole journey.

Jeffro [00:04:41]:
Yeah. It definitely depends on what you’re selling, who the customer is, what stage they’re at, and all of that. So, I mean, really, once you have that and you’re able to understand this data and give it meaning, these insights are more than just numbers. Right? They they’re a representation of your buyer behavior and, in some cases, the associated psychology that drives them. So to best make use of this information, you can’t just look at a statistic and say, oh, that’s weird. Why would they do that? You should look at it and apply it to your next move or optimization. You know? So maybe saying instead, Oh, that’s interesting. Let’s run a split test on that landing page copy to see if we can reduce the number of impressions before they schedule with us.

Chase Barmore [00:05:19]:
Exactly. Exactly. And, also, you can see which maybe email campaign is making them raise their hand, or is there are they doing a branded keyword search on Google after they’ve seen a retargeting ad from Facebook and just understanding, like, what is making your client really reach their hand, get into the funnel, and become a lead to conversion sale.

Jeffro [00:05:43]:
Right. And and it gets you away from just hoping and and guessing. Right? Because now you know, hey. People don’t seem to respond to our video ads. You know, we’ve tried 400 of them. Let’s just stick with the text ones because they seem to convert or whatever it is. Right? Can you share a time where having this accurate detailed data directly help you save money?

Chase Barmore [00:06:05]:
Yes. This was actually at my 1st AE job in an attribution company, which is called WhatConverts, and it was an attribution software, so, basically, one of the issues that I had as a business owner was understanding where is my audience and how are they actually getting to the website, and are they raising their hands. So I went on to reddit.com, looked at one of our competitors, which was CallRail, and then I went under PPC, Subreddit and I typed in CallRail, and I saw people were doing a rant on that. So I actually DM these people and said, hey, have you checked out this product? And what happened is somebody actually clicked the link that I dropped from that Reddit post, came to our website, then a week later they made a phone call directly to us and I answered that phone call, and within our system I was able to see that whole journey, and it validated that, okay, I do need to be putting effort into this content. This is where my audience is, and it’s worth it. So, having that feeling, then I can double down on my efforts instead of just shooting in the dark.

Jeffro [00:07:16]:
Exactly. And and that’s a great feeling. Right? Because it gives you a sense of control. I’m like, okay. Now I know what to focus on because you can feel helpless if you don’t know what’s working, and you’re just trying to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.

Chase Barmore [00:07:28]:
So, in the case of Hiros, we recently had a client that was, doing a high ticket, low low ticket entry offer to a high ticket offer. So, basically, they have a landing page where somebody fills out a form for 7, Dominance, and then they’re gonna sell, like, a 5,000 or $10,000 coaching on the back end. The issue that this client was having is they after the person signed up for the low ticket offer, they were not able to associate who the people were and which ads the people actually came in through that purchased the high ticket offer. When they implemented Hyros, they were able to see that over a period of 90 days, they had a certain segment of people from a certain ad that would raise their hand for the high ticket offer, this then allowed them to scale up that offer and, cut out waste from other ads that they were running.

Jeffro [00:08:20]:
Right. So the there’s a missing piece in the puzzle. And with the Hyro solution, they were able to connect those dots and figure it out. Exactly. So then here’s that leads us to another question. You know, there’s plenty of ad tracking platforms out there, but most small businesses only know about Google Analytics. It’s been around for a long time, it’s pretty robust, it’s free, and it’s the default choice for a lot of people. But what are some of the limitations of Google Analytics, and when does it make sense to look at an alternative platform like Hyros?

Chase Barmore [00:08:47]:
We keep seeing more privacy issues coming into play with the Ios 14 update for Apple, also the GA 4 update with Google. And I think both of these big updates for Apple and Google have taken privacy has been really the biggest thing at the forefront of these. So we’re going from a third party cookie we’re getting rid of third party cookies. And what that means is, basically, you have to have direct server side tracking to track your individual clients, we’re no longer gonna be able to pull data from third party, cookie data. And we are a server side tracking tool, so, basically, when somebody clicks an ad or goes through an organic source, our servers are actually starting to collect, session IDs, user IDs, IP addresses on those people, and as they move through the funnel, then we’re able to stitch back all that data together. Currently, in in Google, Analytics, it’s very difficult to do that, and also you’re not able to pinpoint exactly who these users are. You can see that a person from Louisville, Kentucky clicked on your ad, but you cannot see who that person actually is or was.

Jeffro [00:10:01]:
When it comes to tracking clicks from an ad to a landing page, I think for a lot of people, it makes intuitive sense for how that can be done, but it’s also possible to track things like phone calls as well, which might need a little more explanation. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Chase Barmore [00:10:17]:
Yes. So, you can actually at the beginning of the show, you were talking about how, people were needing to understand, like, billboards, print marketing so marketing digital marketing doesn’t just mean, actual physical, like, online ads, browser ads. You can track phone numbers, you can track, actually using dynamic number insertion. So, basically, you can use static phone numbers, which would be a static phone number would be like a number on a billboard, so you could actually have that number route to show, okay, somebody called from this billboard or this, mailer. But on websites, you can use dynamic number insertion that actually swaps out the phone number for each visitor and shows the source medium campaign of that person, so then you can pinpoint, okay, this person saw this ad, then they made a phone call, which for a lot of businesses, people aren’t going to pay, a lot of money just directly on your website. They wanna talk to a human, they wanna know you’re real, they wanna know everything is, you’re you’re a real person, and I would say that understanding the value of that phone call is very important in being able to track that.

Jeffro [00:11:26]:
Right. And and like you’ve mentioned with the billboards, it did you didn’t used to be able to do that, so this gives you a whole New world of possibilities of connecting the dots and understanding where your money’s, your ad spend is going, how it’s working, and where you should be putting more of it. And and kind of along with those lines, as you’re running campaigns, you know, you should be looking at your tracking data on a regular basis. That should be obvious, but different campaigns have data coming in at different speeds depending on the ad spend and the effectiveness of that channel or that creative. So how many data points should we look for before we’re deciding that something is or isn’t working?

Chase Barmore [00:12:04]:
It’s a great question, and and really understanding the baseline of how long is it taking, the user to become a visitor to a lead to a conversion, and that could be that’s gonna be different for every business, but knowing that data of our average users are taking x amount of time, then you can start to look at the ads and start to extrapolate, okay, we are running this ad for 3 months and we got x amount of leads and then 3 months later, we are able to convert x amount of those leads. So, there’s a lot of different data points that I would suggest to take a look at.

Jeffro [00:12:37]:
Because I think what happens a lot is that business owners, they’re on a tight budget, maybe they haven’t run ads before, And they’re just focused on, I need this to work quickly. Right? But maybe they’re not sticking around long enough to have that baseline understanding. So what would you recommend for someone if they’re going to start ads? How how long should they commit to this before they even know if it’s working or not? It’s a great

Chase Barmore [00:13:01]:
question, I would say and our minimum threshold is $5,000 a month in ad spend, in generating at least $10,000 a month in sales, but starting with ads, start small and then grow into seeing what’s working and what’s not, and you can use those free tools like Google Analytics. But once you start to spend more, you really need to start looking at different, data points, and that’s where our tool, our service side tracking tool at Hyros can help you.

Jeffro [00:13:32]:
Right. So do the best you can. Start with a smaller budget and just ramp up. I think, retail and ecommerce businesses automatically tend to lean more heavily into tracking, because they kind of know that’s what they need to do to get in front of people. But service businesses obviously can benefit from this as well. So can you talk a little bit about the difference Between a campaign for a $40 widget versus a campaign for a $3,000 service.

Chase Barmore [00:13:59]:
Yes. And I would actually say the the harder, a campaign to run is gonna be for the $40 widget because you’re gonna be able to put more cost per acquisition, behind if you know that you can acquire that $3,000 lead for $200 versus the person who’s selling the $440 item can only spend, you know, 10 to $15 to acquire that customer, you have a lot more of room to test and nurture your clients. So we deal with a lot of a trades businesses so that could be roofing HVAC agencies, and they really are trying to figure out that cost per acquisition, what is it what is it to acquire a customer at x rate? Right.

Jeffro [00:14:49]:
Because you need to understand how much you can spend and still stay profitable. Exactly.

Chase Barmore [00:14:53]:
And that’s that’s something that you really wanna have. I would say before even running ads, you wanna make sure that your profit is in line, that you have all your cost of goods in line and you know that okay. If if I can acquire this customer for $100 and I still make x, then we’re good to go, but you don’t wanna be losing. But then there’s also other ways of scaling up ads of where you might lose money on the front end of gaining a customer, but you have a subscription product or they’re gonna buy again, so you that’s another way to get people into the funnel.

Jeffro [00:15:29]:
Right. So back end offers and upsells in the checkout, like, I think that’s an, topic for a whole other episode, But that can get a lot more interesting, especially if you are selling $40 widgets because, like you mentioned, like, it’s it’s a lot less forgiving when ad costs start going up and you’re like,

Chase Barmore [00:15:47]:
I don’t know if this is gonna work. And and your ROAS, so return on ad spend, in it increases each time that that person purchases again. So then that would even if you’re looking at from a week to 2 weeks to a month, it could really take that ad ROAS up a lot, and then you would be like, okay. If you were just looking at it in a 7 day window, you could say, yeah, we’re at negative ROAS, but then if after 14 day days they purchased another time and that initial purchase has 2 purchases, then you’re like, okay. We can put some more money behind this ad.

Jeffro [00:16:23]:
Right. And that’s a great, point that you just made too. If you’re not tracking well enough to know that this was the same person who came through and bought that 2nd time, your, assumptions and your numbers are gonna be all off Because you’re gonna think that you you won’t know your customer lifetime value or your proper cost of acquisition.

Chase Barmore [00:16:41]:
And this this goes back to one of my first experiences with an agency, and I I I really love agencies. I had some really I’ve I’ve I’ve gone with some really poor agencies in the past. I’ve gone with some really great But I call this the Debbie Ballard story. So, basically, what was happening is within Facebook, business manager, you’re able to see conversions. In Shopify, you’re able to see conversions as well. And we had this for Life Bar. This is our company. We had this customer, Debbie, who every ad that she would see on Facebook, she would purchase from.

Chase Barmore [00:17:18]:
So the agency would see, oh, we had 10 conversions this week, and in my Shopify, I would see that Debbie Ballard had bought 10 times. So the agency thought they were doing a great job, I already had Debbie as a customer. So I was upset that they were spending money on ads to attract that same customer. So that’s also another way that you really need to be keeping an eye on what’s going on because in the side of Facebook business manager, you’re not able to see the actual customers of who’s purchasing. And so the agency could be like, we’re doing great, but it’s really could be targeting that same person.

Jeffro [00:17:59]:
So I I love that story, and it makes me think That probably happens more than people realize, especially for, you know, the smaller, lower ticket items. Right? Because if if someone’s not as tech savvy, maybe they don’t understand how to go to the address bar and type in your website. They just wait till they see the the picture and they click on it to go buy the thing because they know it’ll be there. Right? And that happens with older clients. Sometimes they’re just people who aren’t you know, they just don’t know technology. So what about for the business owner who’s not as tech savvy? Like, do you just have to spend a little time to Understand your basic reports or hire someone who does. What’s the best way to approach this so you’re not getting in that spot and then screwed over by an agency?

Chase Barmore [00:18:45]:
It’s a great question. So first off, I would always go with an agency that’s transparent, that’s gonna give you these reports, that’s using a, hopefully, a server side tracking tool that they’re giving you more than just what Facebook or Google Ads is giving you. And, I mean, you can get really lost in the sauce with running your own ads. So it do you wanna become an ad expert, or do you wanna work with somebody that is trusted and can give you just real trust you know, real real data? In this data, sometimes it’s not good.

Jeffro [00:19:21]:
Mhmm.

Chase Barmore [00:19:21]:
And you just wanna have somebody that’s honest with you, and I think working with an agency that provides these results and is able to look into your Shopify account or whatever account you’re using, to match back, okay, how are we getting this customer? Is it the same customer that’s purchasing? And then you can even segment out, I only want new customers. I don’t wanna look at reoccurring customers. So it really is the goals of of your business, and these are questions you need to ask yourself before starting to run ads, are you trying to run ads to your already existing customer base, trying to get new customers, trying to, you know, increase brand awareness, there’s just so many different avenues that you’re going down.

Jeffro [00:20:04]:
Yeah. And now I’m seeing a lot more, pay for performance models with agencies, are what are the pros and cons of doing that when working with an agency? Because I see if with the old ways, if the agency says, oh, look. Like like you mentioned, we’re getting this percentage conversions on our ads. We’ve done our job. And you sit back and thinking, well, how come I’m not seeing this on the other end? Right? I’m not seeing this huge increase that you’re talking about. So what’s what’s the best approach there?

Chase Barmore [00:20:34]:
And I get I get asked this all the time. I I had a agency on a call the other day. We work with a lot of performance based marketers, but you have to have some sort of reporting that is telling the truth. And if you look at like, there there is misattribution within Google Ads, Facebook Ads of where you’ll have ad sets that’ll show this had 10 conversions, but it truly only had 5, or it had 1 conversion and truly had 10. And that is difficult, especially with a performance based model of being able to say, look. I actually brought in this person. I brought the sale in, besides having somebody that actually raise their hand to the you know? And so you wanna have that reporting to where both you as the business owner and the agency can show, okay, where did these leads come in from? I think that a lot of these agencies will just take your email list and basically just try to revive these people and show that they were able to get those customers to make a purchase. And that could be good, that could be bad, or, you know, it just is what it is, but you wanna be able to see how did they get these customers.

Jeffro [00:21:55]:
Right. That makes sense. So what what’s one of the biggest mistakes that you see business owners making when they’re setting up tracking for their ads?

Chase Barmore [00:22:04]:
Not understanding all the different audience, types that you can put in, and then just the baseline of actually adding the pixel the correct way, making sure that your DNS, making sure the back end of the website is set up, and that you’re adding, like, the correct ad copy that you are using the ad correct, ad copy to where you’re not gonna get your ad ads turned off or shut down, and just putting a budget of they’re like, okay. $100 a day. Where did you come up with that number? You need to really justify what you’re gonna be spending.

Jeffro [00:22:41]:
Right. And understanding how much you can spend to acquire that customer like we talked about.

Chase Barmore [00:22:46]:
Mhmm. And and I would I would definitely recommend having a CRM. That was one thing that I didn’t have in the past. So definitely have a CRM to where all I I can see all my customers’ data in 1 place. And if you don’t know the answers, like, re reach out to Jeffro or vetted agencies and one of the things that I would suggest is if you’re in a certain niche, your ever whatever business you’re in, there is an agency that specializes in that vertical and go with them, because somebody that knows how to sell roofing probably doesn’t know how to sell, like, a d to c product and vice versa. And there’s just you can learn a lot from their already existing customer base.

Jeffro [00:23:30]:
Yeah. That’s good advice. And, Chase, we’re at the end of our time here, so I just wanna say thanks for answering all my questions. Hopefully, people found it helpful. I appreciate all of your insights, and I hope people can apply these tips to their own campaigns. Guys, go check out the links in the show notes. Connect with Chase on LinkedIn. And if you’re not happy with your current tracking solution or if you’re ready to move on from Google Analytics, go sign up for a a demo of Hyros.

Jeffro [00:23:54]:
And, Chase, do you have any closing thoughts for us?

Chase Barmore [00:23:56]:
No. Just, connect with me on LinkedIn, and you’re not alone. If you’re if you don’t know if your ads are working, you’re not alone, and we’re here to help. Awesome. Well, thanks again for being here, Chase, and thanks to everybody for listening. So keep on dominating, and I’ll

Jeffro [00:24:10]:
see you in the next episode.