Tuesday morning — Perfect time for Marketing stories in 2016.
So, it’s Tuesday morning, and as always I start my day with fresh cup of coffee while reading emails from affiliate networks (which offers are down, paused or active again, what is happening in the advertising world etc.) and reading few new blog posts written by my currently favorite author Ryan Holiday (he was AWESOME speaker at Bangkok affiliate conference few months ago).
The headline of that particular post was “31 Ways To Get More ‘Deep Work’ Accomplished”. And I would like to take his advice and start with my “deep work” and actually do something useful, but I am still waiting for my affiliate manager and I’ve been waiting for him for 2 days and still nothing…
Typical affiliate morning :) And then it happened.
Email from one “potential client” from a while ago just landed in my inbox. I was like okay, you again….
- Good day Igor, please msg me back when you will have some free time.
And for that person, my time will never be free, not again.
Let’s jump back a little bit. In spring 2015. a lady contacted me for a consulting in her marketing campaign for her client. She was promoting lead gen offer for a client (some big bank in Australia) and her conversion was, of course, a lead. The visitor had to input his first name, last name, phone number, and/or email. And that’s it. Then she asked me how could I help her with that campaign, how could she optimize her campaign, how could she achieve better results with a smaller budget, and of course, how could she get those leads… :)
So the conversation started. I asked her where she is buying the traffic, if she is promoting her landing pages on Facebook, on Adwords or maybe on some other DSP network (which I usually do).
Her first answer was — „Landing pages? No, no… I am sending them directly to the bank, to the lead gen form. “. Okkkkay!
My response was “Great that is the first problem. I guess you didn’t split test direct vs. landing page, right? “. She didn’t.
And then I went to that bank website to check how the conversion funnel looks like. And guess what… After 5 minutes of clicking around, searching and exploring, I couldn’t find the lead gen form.
Impossible! God knows where those clients landed.
Her second answer was — “DSP? No, no… I am using programmatic advertising network… Programmatic networks are the best new thing that every agency is currently using”. My response was “Great… So you are using DSP networks, which one?” And again, her answer was “No, we used programmatic networks, not DPSs, I don’t even know what that is…” In short, DSP (demand-side-platform) is a piece of technology that allows buyers of advertising inventory to trade, manage, and bid in real-time for the cost of display ads. So, you can buy and sell your impressions via DSP. And programmatic media buying typically refers to the use of software to purchase digital advertising, so it’s a DSP. And by their words, Real Time Bidding is a stone-age method of media buying, but in reality, RTB is a type of programmatic ad buying.
Nothing more, nothing less. Same, same, but different :)
So after all this rant, we come to a punch line that caused uncontrollable laughter on my end.
When I asked her how much of a budget did she spent already and what are her results, her answer was “After $10k we managed to get 1 client (conversion)…” I thought, okay, maybe that client did convert for some high ticket item like a huge bank loan or something, but no. By 1 client she meant 1submitted lead (name and phone number/email) :)
So, after all that talk about how programmatic advertising is the coolest thing ever, and how DSP’s are crap, you hear that “well-known marketing agency in Australia” managed to barely get ONE email of a potential customer after $10k spent in advertising.
But hey, they got paid :)
And that’s where our “marketing agencies” are going, nowhere… And the only reason is that they never pushed their own campaigns in performance marketing world… And probably they never will.
And now my coffee is cold.
Until next time,
~ Igor
