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Episode 8

Driving the First Click with Creatives

Illustration of Denis Melnik, Head of Growth at JC+CO Growth Accelerants Inc.

About This Episode

December 1, 2021

We discuss innovative ways marketers can drive the first click on their creatives, from engagement tactics to creative strategy.

Denis Melnik | Head of Growth, JC+CO Growth Accelerants Inc.

00:00

Transcript

Episode Introduction (00:00:00)

And then diving into measuring from first click standpoint and elite ROI standpoint, to understand which campaigns are the best and driving that initial click that we talked about. And then which ones are driving a better lead form submits that then become buyers. What is really the relationship between the clicks to leads to sales to repeat sales, and knowing what your conversion rates are, what your optimal costs are, and that’s super important to know your metrics.

How Agencies Thrive Introduction (00:00:37)

Curious to know what industry-leading marketers are looking to achieve and the ever-evolving digital landscape to how agencies Thrive podcast by StackAdapt is dedicated to helping the new breed of forward-thinking savvy, lean and mean marketers win in the rapidly evolving digital landscape. Time to thrive.

Matt (00:01:05)

Hey everyone, welcome to today’s episode. My name is Matt Evered. I’m the host of the How Agencies Thrive podcast, and I’m also the Education and Development Manager at StackAdapt. Today, I’m joined by Denis Melnick, from JC+CO Growth Accelerants to talk about the very exciting topic of how marketers can more effectively drive the first click with their creatives. Denis, you’ve been a longtime friend of StackAdapt. And it’s great to have you on the episode today. Before we get started with the bulk of the content, though, I’m wondering if you’d help our listeners get a little bit of background on you. And, you know, get an understanding of your experience and areas of expertise within the digital advertising space.

Denis (00:01:45)

Hey, Matt. Sure, thank you for having me. It’s my first ever podcast. So I should say I’m a bit nervous. But let’s try it out. So a few things on me, I like to say that I’ve started. I’ve started from the right-hand side, back in 2011. So, myself and Vitaly, who is a co-founder of StackAdapt, we’re actually colleagues from an agency called Ad Parlor. And this was my first gig out of university. I knew nothing about Facebook. I don’t think I even used it. But I knew there was something going on on Facebook where people advertise on the right-hand side with those little, I think it was 100 by 100 pixel, little images. So I joined the agency, knowing very little about the the metrics and how to run ads. But they basically taught me everything. And so the tally was more one of my colleagues, as I said, and few years later, he he left and he said he was going to do something else. And I think I heard about the word programmatic from him. He was the first person that I’ve heard the word programmatic from. But anyways, back to just things that I that I do. And currently, I’m at JC and I’m the head of performance and analytics. We work with D2C, e-commerce brands, primarily who use Shopify platform, but not necessarily, but most of them are. We’re Shopify Plus, partner, we’re also Klaviyo Gold partner. And we basically help companies with three main pillars of execution and growth. So we work on a platform site, so we help them with the website, the setup, the configurations of all the different apps, make sure the site is great on mobile, that it works well. It’s fast, responsive, and so on. And then the second pillar is email, lead gen, SMS. And then third one is paid media. And so those are the three main pillars that we focus on. And we kind of serve as an agency arm slash consultants in the space. So it’s very partnership-based relationship that we have with our clients. So we’re not very traditional agency model. In that sense. We take on a lot of execution, not only consulting, advising by actually executing and so I lead all the paid side of things plus a bit of creative.

Matt (00:04:21)

Yeah, it’s definitely interesting to that’s actually a new piece of information on the, I guess the history of StackAdapt. And where, you know, Vitale was before, and it’s, it’s cool to hear about that, but it’s also, you said 2011, I mean, jeez, that’s, that’s been, what, 10 years to see kind of the progression of programmatic to being this, you know, media giant that it is now. So it’s probably been kind of interesting to watch, watch play out in the last 10 years. So, but yeah, you know, we’re really happy to have you on the episode and you and I were talking a couple of weeks ago, and I think we landed on the fact that you had come to the StackAdapt office, you know, pre-pandemic and 2019. And I got a chance to meet you in person then. But you know, here we are on today’s episode. And with today’s topic, you know, we’re going to be talking about what it takes to drive that first click for advertisers and sort of in sequence of the podcast, we, in our, in our previous episode that we did on cannabis advertising, this actually came up quite a bit to talk about, you know, how do we build creatives that are eye-catching, and you know, ones that are compelling speak to your larger brand. And this really gets me thinking about, you know, what that psychology is behind building an impactful creative, that not only speaks to your brand, but causes users to really opt into the service or product that you’re offering, and then inevitably convert, because most of the time, that’s the goal that a lot of advertisers are going off, too. So with that said, you know, I do have a number of questions I’ve prepared for today, but I can already tell the conversations going to gonna get really interesting, and I’m very excited to get into it. And with the focus being on, you know, talking about things like measurement, attribution, best practices, and as always unlocking as many insights as possible to help our listeners on the podcast, take away key strategies that they can apply to their upcoming campaigns and truly thrive. So, you know, again, very excited to have you on the episode. And I think a great starting place here would be the the first question that I had prepared was this notion of pain points, I think that’s always a starting point. And, you know, there’s two sides of the coin, when we talk about pain points, we talk about, you know, number one, the pain points that are experienced by the advertisers themselves, when they’re, you know, trying to figure out the best way to build these creatives that are going to be eye-catching. But further to that. And number two is, you know, how advertisers once they don’t want to crack the code, how they can best address the pain points of the audience, and that creative to start to get some clients. So I’d love to get your initial thoughts on this. And then we can take the conversation from there.

Denis (00:07:13)

Yeah, sounds good. So I’ll start with the first one. pain points by advertisers. So I think there are at least three major ones, which I think a lot of listeners could probably attest to. And, I think first one is speed, speed in terms of how fast can we move from the idea sparked by other somebody’s gut feeling or somebody is looking at data, and they think that we need to move quicker with this type of creative with this type of approach with this type of concept. So speed is number one. The second one is the need to have variety of messaging angles, probably done towards to the three main customer segments that are identified by the brand or advertiser. And there’s also a multiplication of consumer journey stages that you want to appropriately funnel those messages to. And third one is, you also want to test variety of formats, and platforms and channels. So maybe the platforms and channels is also like another, you know, a multiplier that gets added to the complexity of this. But I think the speed, the variety of messages and variety of variety of Journey stages, and then a variety of formats are the three main ones. But Let’s also not forget about just the general objectives of what those creatives should be doing, because I feel like this is a main, you know, complication, sort of with creatives is that I see that a lot more brands and people when they, when they create something, they try to squeeze so many things into one. And they try to really make sure that this creative, works as effectively as possible, meaning like yields positive return on adspend, or, you know, it not only drives the clicks, and not only drives the views, but also drives the sales and lead form, you know, fill out. And so it’s it’s also that come to complexity of not only identifying the objectives, the stages, the formats, but also, you know, the different angles of messaging and that something that we can kind of talk about in a few moments, I think, because that’s addressing the question number two, which is, what do you what like, I think you asked like how, you know, advertisers can best address the pain point Have their audience. So, like, how did they actually do it? I always think of it as like, I tried to simplify things. And I always, you know, try to draw stuff on paper or using some kind of like mind mapping. So it wasn’t I always think of it as a matrix. I think you start with two or three key segments, in by segments, I mean, not only your just general concept of these other people in certain age group, they have a certain household and like income, and they have like kids or no kids, but you kind of think of segments as, what are those people’s main pain points? And how can you maybe put them together and bundle them. And then the pain points are also can be explained as, you know, their pain point can be functional, but they’re also other pain points can be emotional, there can be status related pain points that you’re trying to solve? You can. A lot of it is lifestyle-specific. And a lot of brands say, Well, we’re like a lifestyle brand. But what really is the lifestyle brand, like we’re real pain point is solving is status, prestige, you know, feelings off something, I like to think of pain points is also like, what do you want, you know, your segment to feel at the end of the day, when they use the product? Like, what is it feeling that you want to elicit. And then for, for the pains, you also have some like things that are gonna like drive the game for them, like you cannot solve the pain, but you also have to, you know, generate certain gain for them, when they use a product service, whatever it is, and you want to be able to communicate that somehow. And then finally, you move on to a segment-specific, ideal state of solution or like, you know, what are the current blockers for them to have the outcome that they want, they cannot get with the other alternatives, because there’s probably millions of other alternatives, some are cheaper, some are costlier. But there’s no lack of options in the world today. So you also have to keep in mind, like what is really preventing them from obtaining this ideal state of outcome with other solutions. So that’s like what I started the matrix with these two, three key segments, and you really flush out them by pain points, the gain drivers and like the some ideal state of solution plus blockers, because you’re going to need to be addressing all of these buckets, in either your creative, but most likely, in your creative and also in your offering. And what you’re going to show on the landing page is what you’re going to talk about in emails, because without that, I don’t think you can, you know, convert people into buyers and convert them into loyal buyers and commitment to somebody who will be referring your business do somebody else? Once you complete the list of things that you know, need to be shown to people, you then start thinking of, well, how you’re going to route them through all those things. What are the more important ones to show first, to talk about first, what are the least important ones to show first? What is the most important one in the consideration stage when they choosing something? versus what is it that you really need to show to close them off? Like to get them into a trial stage, you know, or to retain them after? So if you talk about retention problem, and then yeah, like that is the matrix at this start. But there’s always another one that’s up top, which a lot of performance brands and smaller brands, I think always have, as a cloud have been thinking about, well, how do we also generate awareness if we’re not as well known? And what is that real brand intro going to look like? What is that emotional connection. However, from just purely tactical standpoint, most of the brands like we work with, and JC+Co. And most of the brands that have worked in the past, the old one can a jump straight to performance element to conversion, they don’t want to have their dollars going to work, reach objectives, or like even video view objectives or anything like super shallow, super high up top, like they want to jump right into measurable outcomes. And basically, they want to have their typical path link to conversion be really strong down to as little touch points as possible, if that makes sense.

Matt (00:14:21)

Yeah, absolutely. And there’s there’s a lot that was said there. And I think that one of the big things you touched upon was the idea of really knowing your audience and having that kind of inform what your strategy is because, like with anything that we do in marketing, it’s not random. It’s it’s very calculated. And the more we know about the audience, the more we know about what their pain points are, the easier it becomes for a brand to sort of have their message resonate with that audience. And this kind of brings us to the second question that I had for you today was really talking about that relationship between the audiences that we’re targeting and the creatives that we produce? And, you know, is it kind of this symbiotic relationship between the two, where one sort of informs the other where, you know, without our audiences, our creatives don’t have a strong message and vice versa? You know, which one would you say kind of impacts that relationship in greater ways that are the audiences or the creatives that need to kind of come first?

Denis (00:15:29)

Yeah, that’s a good one. I would say the main aspect here is that, can you actually properly assign and sort of reward the creative for the function it’s supposed to perform in the first place? Because as I said, there’s an I’m purely talking from my observations, and actually working with very creative minds and creative directors, I’m not talking about all this, pretending that I know a lot about, you know, creative direction, or creativity in general. This, I’m purely in a different function. But what I always try to think is like, well, we can manipulate what people see how they see it, what do we buy media, you know, in order to have what kind of response and we kind of know how to measure it. But knowing what, what and how we’re going to reward the creative for, again, for the outcome, that is the most important one is fundamental. So that’s, that should be done in the first place. And then give you an example like, should we expect, let’s say, an intro hero video, or a carousel or a GIF, to drive massive sales? Have a positive return on ad spend? Should we validate those on how well they drive click to site? Or, you know, how, as we call some stuffing, they are like, how do you put a value towards that? And how do you actually measure that properly. Because the journey really starts there, from them seeing these things and clicking on them. And then later on, we need to be able to accurately measure how things fall into place after such as you know, somebody becoming a lead subscribing to a newsletter, they often into a contest. And then in after certain amount of touch points and other interactions with some other content and messages that we probably get them within different channels. How do we drive the sale, but like, we need to know where they started from. And we also need to know how well how much we paid for that starting position for the starting event for the starting response. But then also be able to measure across all the other touch points that are going to happen and measure it accurately in order to say, Yeah, you know, like this, this creative that we just made for this audience did work. But it didn’t work for this, it may be work for them getting to a lead stage. And we’re going to reward them by maybe doing more of the similar creative, but optimizing toward lead form submit or something. But it didn’t work for us closing sales. So maybe we have to rethink something. Or maybe we just have to, you know, appropriately change the creative and messaging in order to get more sales. But maybe that’s not even the goal. Maybe the goal is to drive them to an opt in stage. And then from that point, emails take off in like retargeting at stake off. The other part, want to touch on this? The problems that many scrappy businesses and in startups and those or on a short budget, they do really try to shorten those paths to conversion. And that’s the challenge, Jim, it’s kind of too much into one piece of content, usually. And the idea is that it performs produces instant results. Yes, it’s, it’s kind of evident to anybody can check it on there. And like, what’s the sale velocities for many brands like 60 to 70% of transactions occur, you know, between probably one to two days, but sometimes we kind of think of like, okay, most of them are going to close within a week. It all really depends, but I’m just really like, making it just the case for most of the Econ brands. So you know, things that are fairly understandable. It doesn’t take a long time to educate a client, a customer on all the benefits and also the, you know, the price tag is not high enough for them to be thinking for months, whether they want to buy this or not. But it also doesn’t mean that if we’re converting everybody within two days, it doesn’t mean there’s only one touch point and that Everybody converted for one click. And that’s why it’s important to understand that your creative, like you are creating a pass to conversions, and therefore you need to show different aspects of it, you need to show different aspects of it your proposition at different stages. And then you probably going to have to do it multiple times and pay for that click to have people return to the site again, or maybe opt in on the second click into a form after they saw a video that you introduced the brand with. But you cannot really squeeze all of those expectations and performance objectives into a single creative, which I think kind of happens a lot.

Matt (00:20:45)

Yeah, yeah. No, that’s, that’s all. That’s all really good. And I mean, one thing that that I did want to touch upon, and I think we, we kind of had a little bit of it in some of the earlier questions. But you know, before when you and I chatted leading up to the podcast, you talked about the value of experimentation. And you know, kind of once we’ve cracked the code on the creatives at first, you know, experimenting and figuring out which ones are going to work, which ones are going to resonate, that’s a very important part of the process. And one thing that you did say to me before that really resonated was the notion of kind of what a good AB test looks like. And often, the ABX test that we see with creatives, it’s, it’s really just an aesthetic thing. Okay, do we change the color of this button? Do we add a slide or whatever, it’s, you know, what’s going to resonate more, but it kind of goes a little bit deeper than that. And I’d like to know, from you with, you know, with your experience with creatives, you know, how do we test variable messaging? And moreover, how do we prioritize the messaging that’s going to drive that initial click in the best way possible?

Denis (00:21:56)

Yeah, like, the notion of A/B tests and experimentation, and like, what really makes up an experiment like what makes up but true experiment. I think it’s a bit misinterpreted, or maybe misunderstood by a lot. Yeah, like putting a white background versus black background images in the single like asset and showing it to kind of the same audience or audience that gets split. And if you do, like a proper AV testing, really want to do in a scientific lift on it. I don’t think that was what really what people should be focusing on, like their efforts. I think the a, like, the angles have to be really different. And I think there’s like at least seven buckets of content, which I can kind of identify, that makes sense to experiment with and like to absolutely to just create in the first place, like, there’s like big creative buckets of you know, you need have a spokesperson video, like, you know, treat it as you like, but like what is going to be the spokesperson video you can have like, you know, a celebrity talking about you know, your product, you can also have a founder talking and introducing a brand. You can also have one of the you know, maybe best customers talking about your product or showing but like when they get on the camera, and they talk about it and they say these are the reasons this is why this is you know, why I partnered, this is why I chose it. This is why I tried to that’s kind of Council’s like spokesperson videos and in our view, the second one is a lifestyle you know, demo so you want to appeal to you know, having some affinity to people’s lifestyles and be like okay, I can kind of recognize that this model or this person using this product in a certain setting in a certain use case like that is what I also do, so I can relate to it. So that’s number two. The third one is product in use like a demo. Like actually simplifying it and showing how do you actually use it like what do you actually do with it? What does it actually make, you know, make you better with like, do you run faster by using these shoes do you are you able to like I don’t know fix your like health problems are you able to make you know food faster, eat better like just actual product in use demo. And then again, I also think the video is the best way to do it because motion is kind of emotion. So that motion will drive the emotion and I think that’s key unboxing super popular piece in the reason why I’m boxing has to be done I think is like it builds the trust that hey, like in fact you we are a legit company you can order from us. You will get At the actual product, and in your house, and this is what it’s going to look like. And a lot of times, a lot of the, you know, DTC brands these days, they actually put a lot of effort into making unboxing very special, they throw in all these cool goodies. And there’s been a lot of experiences recently that I’ve had with brands that sell, you know, sportswear that is non-Nike, but they do a much better job than the Nikes of the world do. And they put a lot of effort in unboxing, I think recording that and showing it to a potential audience when you advertise is very important, because it takes off that, okay, confidence done, okay, I’m confident and I’m excited to be in that position. Because there’s also packed to the notions when you unbox case study. So a lot of products have a lot of, like, you know, they claim a lot of outcomes that are going to, you know, be that you’re going to be able to experience by using it. And I think a lot of the times, it’s it’s just a claim, you know, written as a caption in AD, which is, which is fine. But I think anytime you can show it, the proof, and you show the functional benefit, you can show the actual solution. And you can show how it fixes something, you can show how it removes something, how it protects something, and you actually find a very, maybe simple way to do it. And you don’t have to be super creative, but you actually show it to people that it can be done. And you know that it actually works a certain way that you claim it to work. I think it builds trust again, and so about that trust, social proof. And I think, finally, is the reasons why that social proof is common. Like, you know, there’s many ways to build a social proof, the five-star reviews like you know, populating the content from people putting in your feed, you know, you can tag, you know, content creators and say like, Can we use your stuff. So like social proof is more of like, you know, when they’re just ready to convert, and they need to be sure that you’re not going to take their money and run away, and they want to see other people who’ve done similar behavior, which is they bought from you, we kind of rely on social proof is more of a conversion element at the bottom funnel of our consumer journey. And the reasons why content pieces like super simplify way of here’s my elevator pitch, here’s the three reasons why buy in, I think, a lot of brands that go in this creative distances of hey, we’re doing it this way, we didn’t this way, but like nobody just does it in like a simple way of like a 15-second video, or like a Karass Union be like, here are the three reasons why you need to buy from us and like reason why reason to reasonably.

Matt (00:27:53)

Yeah, doing a lot of video content, I think about that a lot, because you really don’t have that much time as a brand to make a first impression. And as you said, Yeah, and it’s very hard. I mean, even if you have like 15 seconds, you have to say everything that needs to be said, and with video, especially I always say to people, you know, you can say everything that you need to say, in 10 seconds. And you can say absolutely nothing in 10 minutes. And a lot of a lot of companies, what they do is they really kind of focus on on the flash of it all and say, Oh, we’re gonna go on and on about how great we are. But we’re going to kind of ignore that important messaging to the customer. Because at the end of the day, the only thing you have to do, well, maybe not the only thing that you have to do, but one of the most important things you have to do is you’ve got to resonate, you have to tap into something with your audience that they said, Yeah, I’m interested, I want to learn a little bit more, and then you can continue to give them information and get them down the funnel. But it’s very hard. But I mean, there are brands out there that definitely do it. Right. And they understand that, as you said, you know, with with something like an unboxing. You know, they consumers want proof that they’re gonna get what they’re paying for. They don’t want to feel like they’re being scammed online or anything like that. So it’s very important to just be transparent as a brand. I do have before we head to the break, I had two kinds of sub-questions to this, but the one I’ll ask you about is kind of return on spend because I know that’s one of the number one things that’s on the minds of agencies is are we making the most effective use of our budgets with experimentation in your creatives? Is that part of the equation for a favourable return on ad spend and making the most out of your budget?

Denis (00:29:50)

It is if the experimentation is done on the own, not level where If you are experimenting with something that is intended to convert people in the first place, and you can say, and you are applying, let’s say, last touch of full-funnel like impact, you know, return on ad spend model, like if you’re measuring it properly, then yeah, you can definitely go in and say, Well, I have these warm audiences, or these people who opted in my list, and I’m going to show them. And I’m going to try to figure out what will really make them convert at the stage. Because you can do a social proof ad, you can have an offer, you can do on offering million ways you can have a, you know, a gift with purchase versus, you know, a discount code, versus, you know, buy one get one free or something like that. So you have so many different ways of how you’re going to convert people and what you actually meant to generate as far as the revenue because the conversion rate will be different, and the ARV will be different if you just simply do a social proof, but you don’t give a code that you know if a percentage is 1%, or not, probably not 1% Because it’s retargeting. If 4% of people clicking on this ad convert at an AO V, that doesn’t require you to discount, then you got to have a, you know, a return on ad spend measured as one like, you know, one number. But if you are testing heavily, the discount codes or the offers or you know, gifting with purchase, your return on ad spend will be different, your cost per acquisition probably going to be different, and your expected conversion rate will probably going to be different. So it all comes down to what are you measuring for that specific create what that security is supposed to do? If it were moving up funnel, and we’re testing all of these seven categories, or some of the seven categories of content that I that I mentioned, you need to ask yourself like, is it what I need to really measure here? Is the return on ad spend that I need to measure? Or is it that I need to measure how far people going to go in, you know, in a conversion funnel? And how many of them will reach Add to Cart stage? How many of them will reach an opt in stage where they’re going to have to submit their email? Because I think it will be more interesting in measuring that for those creatives that are more upper funnel, versus really trying to figure out which ones of them convert people into us the sale right away.

Matt (00:32:31)

Yeah, absolutely. I think on that note, I think this might be the perfect time for us to take a quick break. But you know, Denis, when we come back, I’d love to hear from you more about kind of these tangible strategies related to building creatives, as well as how you think that we can best measure and attribute success in this area of the funnel. So we’ll take a quick break, and then we will be right back.

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Matt (00:33:34)

Denis, in this half of the episode with everything mentioned before about audiences targeting experimentation. What do you think are some key strategies that marketers should be focusing on when it comes to achieving desirable campaign results? So talk about creative best practices, optimization, best practices, etc?

Denis (00:33:55)

Sure. Yeah, I think I’ll run through some of the main elements of what we’re doing at GCM Cole right now. And then I’ll touch on some of the areas that I’ve just experimented with in the past. I think the first one is starting with a model that projects desired business outcomes, when it relates to DTC brands or like e-commerce brands. So a model could look as simple as projections on Traffic Conversion rates, costs, you pay for media and average order values, and then also not forgetting about how much of it will be paid, how much of it will be organic and how much of it will be through email. Email is pretty big for us. Not sure if it applies to everyone but for most of the brands that we work with in the fashion industry. Rolling a subscription-based businesses in the food, food and drinks industry, email is a big chunk of revenue. And so we we try to make our model work in a way that at some points, we don’t have to be continuously buying girls, we want to unlock the girls through other methods and email is one of them. So start with the model is number one. Second one is be ready to measure properly. And I’m not talking about just setting up and queuing up pixels or, you know, connecting lead forms to clay vo or setting up conversion goals. And you know, GA, I’m talking about your attribution and just the measurement practices and philosophies that you’re going to have for your company. I don’t know if I’m a lab, but I would love to shout out wicked reports and say that we use them as a holistic measurement tool for many of our clients, they added tremendous value to us being able to see things differently than what platforms are reporting. So they’re really independent tool for attribution and measurement. And they have a very distinct way of measuring things based on the first click the opt-in, and the sale. So with that, I think the second one is you need to find a solution that goes beyond just trusting in platform measurements, you know, attribution models and stuff. Third, which we touched on is building segments and knowing who your customers are, and defining them from, you know, Pain Gain, sort of like they’re accustomed, like, they’re just day-to-day jobs that those people perform, and desired outcomes they would have, versus, you know, defining people by just demo income and household type. So segmentation exercise is pretty important. So you kind of know where to get those people where, where, where do they exist? What are they use. Fourth one is filling in the creative package with those seven key creative buckets that are kind of mentioned, spokesperson lifestyle demo product and use unboxing case studies, social proof, and reasons why, or reasons why to try us. The first, as you know, don’t be married to a typical Google Facebook combo, when you start costs are rising on those platforms, tracking is becoming a bit of a mess. Unless, again, you use an independent measurement solution, which you know, then opens your eyes to measuring Facebook and Google and any other number of channels differently and in the more I’d say, more accurate way, but I’d say you need to be prepared to just have, you know, things move quickly between channels, platforms, you know, campaigns, ad sets, and even creatives. So my advice would be to have your programmatic setup with stack it up as one of the solutions that you can add easily activate on it and you know, have it in the mix, Pinterest, Snap, TikTok, any anything that we’re you can drive it and do a bit of testing on without any limitations, I’d say it’s good to have it on. And in case of if you all recall what happened with Facebook, when they were like pretty much down for a day. Like you know, if you have to move a certain amount of traffic and you have a projection for the day, a certain amount of volume needs to happen in need hit certain revenue from, you know, the targets that hey, you can’t allow yourself to just sit without Facebook for a day. So you have to shift quickly to other sources. So diversifying the platforms that you play on is important and I think programmatic is definitely have to be in it. Because of how performance oriented it also is these days. This sixth one is a notion of just optimizing for what you really care about. I have never been a fan of optimizing for clicks traffic objectives and or you know using like, not even using awareness and reach. For most of the brands that we work with, it’s too far out of what you know, they count as a desirable outcome by investing in lead gen as your top of funnel layer, something that we do a lot. But then everything after that moves down to website conversion events, you know, making sure we we know which ones we pay for and make sure we know what the conversion expected conversion rates are But then again, like, you know, you get what you, you get what you like, basically ask the platform’s to deliver to you. So if you optimizing things for landing page views, you’re gonna get a bunch of landing page views, but don’t really expect cards or initiate checkouts or sales from those campaigns and from those audiences, and then go back to measuring things holistically. So you know, determining which channels work from, we use as a full-funnel impact attribution model that’s available, and we can reports and then diving into measuring from first click standpoint and elite ROI standpoint, to understand which campaigns are as the best and driving that initial click that we talked about. And then which ones are driving a better lead form submits that then become buyers. And you know, what is really the relationship between the clicks to leads to sales to repeat sales, in knowing what your conversion rates are, what your optimal costs are, and that’s very, super important to know, your metrics. And I think the final one that I will just close on on this list is like, you know, following the creative best practices, so all I would know, is to say, I think shifting their attention to video and animated assets, rather than pumping out a million of polished images of product and model, I think that will be a smart way to go these days. And then also keeping the goals of your ads in mind at all time. And what am I really trying to achieve here? Like what you know, make, how do I make people pay attention and click through? Or do I want them just to admire my great photography, and maybe remember the name of my brand, but do nothing really, with it? So like, you need to weigh in on your expectations and like, really decide what do you want the response to be? And what do you really want? Are you really building the creative for not forgetting about the emotional connection, because I think we’re still humans, despite the fact that we maybe don’t go to the offices often. But we still are driven by emotion. And so building for sound off environment. But keeping in mind, the full plethora of senses that we can appeal to was, you know, sight, sound and motion. And it’s really difficult to achieve, oh, there was still that’s why I think I always try to deprioritize statics and you know, photography, that’s just like showing beautiful imagery, stills a good to send reminders to keep you’re focused on the offer, when you’re really already aware or interested and showing desire and intent to convert, but not when you’re really starting to engage with someone new. As I said before, I think motion is emotion. So those are probably going to be my eight points.

Matt (00:42:59)

Absolutely. Yeah, I think there’s a lot there definitely for the listeners to take away. And, you know, as you mentioned, you gave us eight, eight points. So I think there’s, there’s a lot there. And I did kind of want to end on this note. And this one’s a little bit more speculative, because, as far as I understand, and as far as you and I had chatted before about this, actually measuring what it takes to drive the first click. That’s, that’s a challenge in and of itself, because that involves a ton of experimentation, a ton of insights, information you may not necessarily have at the beginning of the campaign. And, you know, you find that out later on. But, you know, what do you think the future looks like for measurement and attribution at this stage? You know, before your users click, you know, what does that measurement and attribution look like for the successful creatives? And how can you know, advertisers get there even sooner to drive the first click more effectively?

Denis (00:44:05)

Yeah, that’s probably one of the most difficult questions to answer. Because what I think the world where I play is, it all kind of starts with a clip. And I know that there’s lots of schools of thought on, you know, how do you build the brand and then do impressions even matter? Like how do you build things, just buying billboards on the road matter? Like, you know, this advertising, different places matter? So I don’t think I’m educated enough for an expert on that front to you know, say it matters or it doesn’t. But I do think that at the end of the day, if we are not I’m trying to win creative contests here or to win, you know, prizes that we can say that we made the most creative thing in the world. And if we really strictly talking about performance advertising, I would say, the only thing that matters is what creative or a combination of them drove the initial visit, to the site, where at that point, all of the data is 1st-party data. And then I think that thick, I want to make clear that like it is, if we’re talking strictly about, like, the performance elements of the journey, because there’s, there’s a lot of elements that happened before that journey starts with how you build awareness, PR, you know, like, a lot of different activations and like, partnerships influence through work. Like, I don’t want to discredit any of that, I just want to simply say that, from a true measurement standpoint, and like true validation of like, what is my return on ad spend? For performance brands, I think your journey and your measurement really starts with a click, and how much of creative thought gets put into initial batch of ads that people will see and gonna start responding on? That? That is a question for the creative, folks. But as far as I see and observe, and what we’ve had on when I worked on the abacus agency side, and what we do at JC+CO, the creative teams that are performance-oriented, and not winning the prizes of the creative, world-oriented type, they do listen to media people to analytics people. And they sit with them closely, and they do invent creative packages that are primarily driven to, you know, do performance work, and not that the beautiful photography that you know, you know, everybody admires, but nobody clicks on. So this is also changing. And I think the whole measurement of creative will change as well. Because the two teams are now becoming one day, they work in tandem, rather than one side buys the media and they look at data and they see horrible things, or they see great things about creative and the creative team just lives in a bubble, and they just output creative things that don’t measure well. I think that’s changing, I think that’s the most important part. And there could be a lot of education on one side, and it could be a lot of education and sharing of best practices on the other side. And so I don’t know if it answers your question.

Matt (00:47:52)

It definitely did. I think on on that note, I mean, that’s the perfect stopping place for the episode. So, on behalf of myself, on behalf of our listeners, Denis, thank you so much for joining us today. I think this was the perfect way to close out the 2021 episodes on a strong note, and to any marketers who are focusing on their creative strategy. We hope that you took away some key insights from this episode that are going to help you succeed in your upcoming campaign. So until then, this has been the How Agencies Thrive podcast. Thanks so much for listening.

Outro (00:48:32)

Thank you very much for tuning into this episode today. If you like what you heard, it would mean the world to us. If you do these three things, subscribe to the show and leave us a review. If you’re listening to this and know someone who would find this episode valuable. Please share it with them. And finally, please share it on LinkedIn. If you have questions or feedback, we’d love to learn how agencies or brands work with StackAdapt, find us at www.stackadapt.com. Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next time.

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