Welcome back to the Marketing Freaks podcast! In this week’s episode Jon is joined by our Head of Paid Social, Abi Carey to discuss how and why we have reworked our service offering at Overdrive Digital to focus on the entire user journey, not just the click..
Jon and Abi run through why changing our service offering is the best thing we can be doing for our clients right now, the ever changing industries we work in and the changing way in which you can achieve real success in your digital marketing platforms.
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So why are we changing it up? Well basically, if you aren’t considering what happens after your paid clicks, you are missing the bigger picture and leaving revenue on the table.
Don’t get us wrong, there’s always room for enhancing campaign structures or switching up your audiences, ads and ad copy. However, have you ever really delved into the performance that unfolds after someone clicks on your ad? Have you explored how to improve your conversion rate? Have you delved into the checkout and shopping behaviour reports to unravel the user journey and why someone drops off?
Since having this mindshift change, we’ve been able to see and understand what alterations can be made within accounts not only before but after the click to improve performance. Even if those changes are something as small as altering where a CTA appears on a landing page, or resolving issues with a checkout code – all of these things can have a drastic impact on conversion rate and they have nothing to do with the ads themselves.
So if you’re wondering how to gain more out of your digital marketing, take a listen to this week’s episodes and obtain a better understanding of what our agency can do to help!
Enjoy!
TRANSCRIPT
Jon: Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Marketing Freaks Podcast. In this week’s episode, I’m joined by Abi. We’re talking about something a little bit different. We’re talking about a complete rework on our service offering, why we’re doing it, why we’re really excited about it, but more importantly, why we believe this is needed to drive performance for our clients and their accounts. So, really hope you find this insightful. There’s a ton of interesting and useful examples within this. If you do find it helpful, please do come and subscribe as always, on all the usual podcast places. And let’s get started with the episode. So today we’re gonna be talking about why we’ve reassessed and I guess re-engineered our service offering. Yeah. What that means, and yeah, a big thing about like why we’ve done it and why we thought this is the right thing to do at this point in time for this business and what ultimately what we offer our clients and
Abi: Why we’re passionate about it,
Jon: And why we really revved up about it. <laugh>,
Abi: It’s not just the coffee.
Jon: It’s not just the coffee. So first thing is like, what, what’s brought all of this about? And then we’ll go into Yeah. What we’ve actually done. Um, I think there’s three key things that have triggered this. Yeah. Um, so I go through my list and then we can talk about them in Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go for it in detail. So, um, first one is I think if you’re not thinking about the bigger picture and the entire user journey, I e taking off the blinkers and thinking outside the platform themselves. Yeah. You are leaving money on the table.
Abi: I know we’ve done quite a few podcasts about this already, but it is just like, it’s so crucial.
Jon: It’s a big thing. Yeah. Second platforms are changing. Yeah. There’s a lot more automation. Yeah. Which is a, you know, if, if you can get it working for your business, that is a good thing. But it means your levers of control are different to what they were before. And the biggest ones are now in landing pages, check out optimization, creative, that type of stuff.
Abi: Yeah, definitely. And
Jon: The third one is we see the most success with our clients, the campaigns that we work on, when, when, when clients get the full user journey, right. So the right creative, the right audience targeting the right campaign structure, but also the right landing pages. Yeah. The right checkout process, the right email flows that you have to get everything right and everything working together. That is when we see the best performance.
Abi: And it’s been the clients that we have a collaborative approach with that, with where we have somebody who’s working on the landing pages and we feed back and we all work together on things. Yeah. And like, for example, where it’s worked the best, but actually what we saw that there was big gaps in like staffing where people didn’t have the capacity to be doing that on their side. So we saw that money was being left on the table because they, our client didn’t have capacity to work on the landing pages or didn’t have somebody that could work on email journeys and things like that. So that was a big thing. We were like, oh, there’s this big gap there Yeah. Where money’s being left on the table because there’s just not somebody who’s able to think about the user journey and action those elements.
Jon: Yep. Yeah, exactly. The, you know, the, the resource or experience isn’t there. Yeah. The budget might not be there. Yeah. There’s so many reasons why it doesn’t happen saying out loud. It’s like, these things are so obvious.
Abi: Yeah.
Jon: But it’s amazing how often they get missed.
Abi: They’re obvious, but they’re not easy. I think that’s the thing. Yep.
Jon: And ultimately, our job as a, as an agency and a business is to do a great job of driving revenue and scale for our clients. That’s what we’re here for.
Abi: Absolutely.
Jon: And our job is to find the best way of doing that and the most effective levers to pull for doing that. You know, that’s
Abi: Job. And sometimes, sometimes that means it’s not the ads. Yeah. It’s not the ads. And also not just saying yes to everything uhhuh, because we see a lot of different clients across lots of different businesses, so we Yep. Have a different viewpoint on things, which is why it’s good to have an agency. It
Jon: Definitely, and it’s also, um, you might need to tilt that microphone up just, um, just like
Abi: This. Oh, I just kicked it.
Jon: <laugh>. There we go. We might invest in some new microphones down soon. Um, we’ve got a couple of examples of accounts and clients where it hasn’t gone so well.
Abi: Yeah.
Jon: And kind of why they haven’t gone so well, and the good examples of not getting this quite right. Yeah. I think a lot of, again, a lot of a, um, agencies or podcasts will bring out, just roll out all the case studies that where things have gone really, really well. Yeah. And if, if an agency’s out there saying, well, every, every client we’ve ever worked with on has been absolutely perfect,
Abi: We tripled their ROAS
Jon: On every client <laugh>, they’re probably lying. Probably. Definitely. So a couple of examples. So one, one client where, but I would, how on Hart say the ads weren’t the issue?
Abi: No, they definitely weren’t.
Jon: So the the site conversion rate was 0.5%. Yes. Not so great. And, um, the ads I think were doing quite well. Like the ROAS, even though the conversion rate was so low, the ROAS is still kind of 3, 4, 4 and a half. Right. Um, obviously they wanted more and they wanted to scale, um, the reasons behind that poor conversion rate. You think if that conversion rate was one and a half percent, 2%, what would the ROAS have been then? And the scalability would’ve been massive. Yeah. And the reason why that wasn’t happening were things like, well, the product, they didn’t have a good returns policy.
Abi: No.
Jon: But their competitors did. Um, they had quite long lead time, whereas their competitors had a shorter lead time.
Abi: They had a long lead time on something that had a date where it needed to arrive by
Jon: Yeah. <laugh>, which is not ideal and no returns policy on a very high ticket price item. Yeah. And you, you could have the best ads in the world, but if those things are in place, you are never gonna be able to realize your potential. Yeah. Now, as a paid media or performance marketing agency, we might not have, um, influence over stock and supply. However, we would have, we, we should be able to have conversations around, look, competitor B is offering this. Yeah. And competitor, competitor A is offering that. And here’s how you stack up in between. If we don’t fix the returns policy, this isn’t gonna happen.
Abi: Yeah. I mean, that was a, that was obviously a mass effect, but it was also loads of things like when you selected a particular color of a product, it wouldn’t come up with that color. You couldn’t preview things. Like there was a lot of website issues that then rolled into us having issues with our conversion rate from the ads. Because actually, like you said, the ads were really strong. We saw loads of clicks come through. Yeah. But we ha we saw any how the, any ad to carts and therefore hardly the any
Jon: Conversions. I think if you step back and in and in hindsight, um, maybe you know, wasn’t the right match anyway. But if, if you’d been able to, or if they’d been able to work with whoever it was, ask another performance marketing agency on Yep. Getting the ads right. Getting all the shopping feeds right. Everything like that. But also, okay, why is our conversion rate so low? What do we need to do to improve that? Let’s prioritize some of these UX issues. Let’s really work hard on understanding the user journey getting that conversion rate up and therefore seeing, uh, incremental gain across performance marketing and all your other channels at the same time.
Abi: Yeah. It, it felt like you’ve seen those, those videos online where there’s like a, um, a pipe of water and it’s like gushing out and people are trying to like put duct tape on it. Yeah. That’s what it felt like. Ugh. Stop.
Jon: Like it’s just
Abi: Fix fixing the bigger problem would’ve made much more of an impact.
Jon: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And there’s been, I think over time there’s been examples of that type of thing or clients where the product’s really good and the price point’s great. And, um, the air creative’s quite good as well. And all the, on the surface of it, everything’s there, but then the landing pages aren’t quite detailed enough or the messaging’s just a bit off
Abi: And payment options aren’t there. Yeah. The email flow and we get leads through isn’t quite right.
Jon: Yeah. And you, you look back on that and you go, well, have we been able to influence some other things outside of our, what is sometimes quite a tight scope? The results have been better for everybody. Yeah. And I think that is why we’ve really stepped back and looked at what we’re offering gone. No, we can’t, we can’t just offer like, we’ll run your Facebook ads. Yeah. We’ll run your Google. Like, we have to be able to offer a broader set of services so that if the client, if the client’s future performance and scalability is relying on a change, like the things we’ve just discussed, that we’re able to help influence those things and make improvements on them rather than just trying a new ad out.
Abi: Because I guess the thing is, is that we genuinely get excited when we see good results from our clients. Like Yeah. Big time. I do, I say this to people when I talk about my job, like I care about businesses that I didn’t even know about before and I get excited about industries I didn’t really understand before I started working here, but we get really invested in our clients. So actually it’s painful for our clients and it’s painful for us when we are seeing these barriers where we can’t see no one, no conversions coming through. No. It’s like we, we want to be like, your success is our success basically. Yeah. And therefore when we’re feeling like we’re just hitting like blockers Yeah. It’s painful both ways. We felt really inspired to like, how can we get rid of those blockers? Yep.
Jon: Absolutely. So what, what are we now doing is the question Yeah. What we’re doing about it. And it’s a complete kind of rework of our service offering. Um, so historically the service offering has been, we’ll run your Facebook ads, meta ads, we’ll run your Google ads, whatever it is, right? Yeah. It’s quite tactical now. It’s a much broader thing. Yeah. So sure, we can run your PPC ads or we can run your, um, meta ads. That’s totally fine. But we need to be involved in conversations on creative production, landing page production and landing page testing. Yeah. Um, going through analytics and finding blockers and working on plans to help remove them. Um, testing the email flows out, testing subject lines to get more engagement on those email flows. The whole kind of end to end thing from cold customer, click on an ad, get to a landing page, get nurtured through purchase.
Abi: Yeah.
Jon: Because the paved media is actually one small part of a much bigger jigsaw puzzle where the, all the pieces need to be together to get the most performance. Yeah. So that’s what we’re offering and I’m massively excited about it.
Abi: Same.
Jon: It’s so cool. We’ve
Abi: Already been like leaning towards this and doing this with our current clients, but we just wanted to come up with a, a strong framework and structure around what we would be offering. Yep. Because we saw it going that direction anyway. We saw the blockers and we felt really inspired to
Jon: Yeah, absolutely. Change it up. There’s already some really good examples. So, um, one B2B example. Mm. This isn’t just e-comm, like it’s, you know, it’s lead generation and it’s, um, eComm so both sides of the, that coin. Um, so one B2B example was with a client we’ve been, we’ve been working with for quite a long time. Yeah.
Abi: Yeah. Longstanding, got a really
Jon: Good playbook in place for these types of ads work, these types of audiences. Um, so the, the, the fundamental basics are properly pinned down. Yeah. Um, launched a campaign with a new content asset and it was the worst CPA they’ve, they’ve ever seen. It was painful. It was mental. Yeah. It was really bad. So obviously first, right. Let’s just Right. Stop, stop spending money on this thing. Let’s take a look at it and, and just come up with a couple of theories Yeah. As to why this is happening, what we can do about it. So it’s like, right. Let’s just, we know the audiences work, we know the, the structure of these campaigns works and have proven themselves over time. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, so chances are it’s, unless something mental has happened, that’s not it. So took the content asset, um, new creative, new title, new subheading, just repackaged it. Yeah. Popped it live best CPA they’ve ever had.
Abi: Right. Continues to be
Jon: <laugh> and continues to be. So, and that was from, uh, re kind of redressing and retitling the content asset updates, the landing page to reflect that Yeah. Updates the creative to reflect that. It had nothing to do with automated bidding or manual bidding or this type of audience or that type of audience. Yeah. It, it wasn’t the ads, it was the, it was the offer. Yeah. And it’s just such a great example of well, if you are, if you’re not letting your agency influence these decisions, or if your agency aren’t willing to get involved in conversations like that, that brilliant CPA would never have happened.
Abi: No. And it only happened because as well, they’re a longstanding client who want to work with us in that collaborative way and have those conversations. Yep. They’re open to it. So us working together and figuring that out, again, brought in the best CPA we’ve head for ages. Yeah.
Jon: Really, really cool example of that. Um, there’s one that you were working on recently as well, where it was a lead, another lead gen campaign. Yeah. Things kind of rolling, but the CPA wasn’t great. And then you worked on
Abi: Yeah, we, we worked on the landing page. So one of the team put together like a wire framework of how the landing page could be better, because while obviously we wanted like high quality leads, there was a lot of questions. So we were seeing that people were dropping out of the form like quite early on. So we just, we reframed where the questions were. We made sure that the critical questions were still in there. Yeah. But we saw a way, way higher, um, amount of leads and lower cost per lead as well when we changed it up.
Jon: That’s fantastic. Yeah. And again, that’s the landing page. It’s a form restructure. It’s not,
Abi: We didn’t change the ads
Jon: 2% lookalike, 4% lookalike.
Abi: No. And I think,
Jon: Which is all good stuff.
Abi: Yeah. It’s important to test that, but we felt like there was so many other things we could be doing in testing that will help like conversion rate on whatever business we’re working on. Yeah. Outside of that, like, yeah.
Jon: Yeah. Yeah. I think again, to recap a little bit, like, we’re not saying we’re not dissing media buying as a discipline. It’s what we do. We do it, we love it. Um, and there’s, all of that stuff is really important in terms of testing different audiences. Yeah. And, uh, lookalike percentages. And it’s so important we’re, we’re not not doing that, but it’s the Okay. Our aim is to get the best performance possible for a client. Yeah. That might be by testing different audience structures, but it might also be by testing a different form layout. Yeah. And, and if it’s that we still, we need to do that and we need to focus on that. And if it’s that great, we’ll, we’ll continue to do that and test it, but yeah, it’s about being able to pull the biggest levers possible for our clients to get the best performance possible.
Abi: Absolutely. I think this whole thing is underpinned by the fact that we, that you’ve, that we are still experts in what we do in terms of Google ads, meta ads, so Yeah. It’s underpinned by the fact that we would have tested all of those things and continue to test things within the platforms that are always within our scope. Yeah. But it’s, it’s looking beyond that kind of testing. Yeah. So you’ve done, say you’ve tested all the lookalikes, you can, you’ve tested different bidding strategies, you’ve done all of that, and you’re still coming up short. It’s not, it’s not sitting there and going, ah, yeah. What can we be doing? It’s like, okay, well let’s look outside the box.
Jon: Yep. Yeah, exactly. And it’s like you said before, this is all stuff that, um, we’ve kind of been doing and it’s been happening and the conversations have been happening. Yeah. But it’s really formalizing this so that when clients come on board, they know that this is there and they know that these conversations can and should be happening. Yeah. And it avoids the situation of, um, I think a client putting us in a particular box and not opening up those conversations when actually those conversations would be massively, massively beneficial to their performance.
Abi: But it’s like, it’s like, say like a weekly catch up call that you have with a client, how much more beneficial is it to take a look at results, take a look at the bigger, wider business results and think about what’s the missing piece there? Yeah. Rather than saying, oh, you know, on meta ads this week we had a row as of two because this a did better, which is it’s still, it’s still really relevant information that we will be doing anyway. Yeah. But then opening it up to look at the bigger business and what else is going on and understand other elements that we could be influencing. Totally. Like totally. It’s not, it’s not ignoring the box that we are in, but it’s coming out of it as
Jon: Well. Absolutely. Yeah. And it’s just such a better, broader approach that will just be more beneficial for our clients. And if someone just wants to with us on ppc, fine. But we need to be able to have those conversations, um, about the bigger picture to be able to influence Yeah. And get the best performance from that. So. Absolutely. Yeah. And if anyone has any questions or wants to get in touch or talk to us about the campaigns would absolutely love to do. So I’ve
Abi: Got a question.
Jon: Go, what’s it called? <laugh>, what’s it called? So we are calling it Amplify. So we have e-com amplify, we have Lead Amplify. Yeah. Um, so E-com Amplify is like a packaged approach to help drive more sales and profitable sales from your eComm business. Yeah. Through your eComm business. Lead amplifiers, the lead generation B2B equivalent. So like an end-to-end package for getting more leads, more qualified leads from your performance marketing.
Abi: Nice. And it kind of leans into like the
Jon: Overdrive, overdrive, amplify. Yeah. Yeah. Love that. Yeah. Perfect. <laugh>. Alright. Thanks Abi.
Abi: No, you’re welcome. Super excited.
Jon: Yeah. Let’s, let’s, let’s smash it. <laugh>.
Abi: Alright, thanks John.
Jon: Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed that episode, please do come and subscribe. Join us for future episodes where we talk about the ins and outs of running paid media and driving improved conversions of revenue for your business. See you next time.
