5 Things THEY have that YOU (probably) don’t.

Controversial as it may be, the difference between someone making $5,000/month and $500,000/month from paid advertising is actually very small.

It has almost everything to do with mindset. 

You might be saying “not true, experience plays a big role”, or “it takes a long time to learn top performing strategies” – and I’d agree… to a certain extent.

But the biggest thing that comes from having experience is attaining the right mindset. Mainly, maintaining logical decision making when dealing with an emotional topic (money).

Take a financial advisor or top performing Wall Street investor for example. People that manage other people’s funds. The stakes are high, especially in times of economic turmoil. To excel in that position you have to be able to make BIG moves, and make them quick. There’s no time to get caught up in a loop of self doubt and indecision.

Does that mean that these people are 100% confident that they’re making the right decision 100% of the time? Of course not… that’s why it’s called speculation. But there are methods, systems and tests to ensure that risk is mitigated and the chances of success are pretty good.

It’s the same with media buying.

The issue when it comes to courses and education involving media buying is that there’s A LOT of moving parts. The industry as a whole is constantly evolving, new platforms come and go, old platforms change and become more competitive, algorithms update and existing strategies that worked in the past become outdated.

But here’s a fun fact I’ve come to realize through the years… 

Focusing on tactics vs. strategy will hold you back more than anything else ever will as a media buyer.

Let me explain using an example.

Tactics:

• Ad Set Budget vs. CBO
• Duplicating to scale vs editing budget
• Duplicating “Winning” Adsets 5 times vs. consolidating and spending more on one ad set.
• Increasing Budgets every 3 days vs ‘surfing’ budgets multiple times per day
• Using Automated Rules vs. not using them
• etc.

The list goes on and on. Don’t get it confused, these things DO make a difference. I know this because we run split tests for a living. But there is no one trend that works across the board on every account. You have to use trial and error to figure out what’s going to work for YOU. Almost every single top performing marketer uses a slightly different strategy than the next. 

Now compare those “tactics” with the strategy examples.

Strategy:

• Running interactive quiz funnels to gain insights into your target demo to make better decisions. 
• Planning out A/B tests with a purpose (ie. start with a 3-way angle split test to find out what resonates best. Once information is gathered move on to a creative test)
• Driving traffic to a presell article talking about the benefits of a product/service, then designing a retargeting funnel around each stage of the funnel. 
• Breaking even on the front end to acquire customers that will give you their money for months/years. 
• Doing a joint-venture agreement with a similar (but non-direct competing) brand.

I know there lacks context but the point is that the tactics are USELESS without a good strategy, yet the tactics are all people talk about in FB groups and courses. 

Here are 5 things that top-performing ad buyers do that beginners get wrong. 

1. Profit over ROAS

We’ve run ads for brands that wanted us to shut off ads that weren’t hitting a 3x return on ad spend, while their break-even return on ad spend was 1.55x spend. Their thought process was that at their CURRENT ad spend (probably around 4k/month at the time on onboarding), unless they hit a 3x return, they couldn’t afford to pay our fees and make profit. 

If we were to do that we would literally be turning off ads that are not only bringing in a positive ROI, but also getting them exposure and paying customers (who will likely buy again in the future). Here’s where this logic is flawed… For this particular brand these are a couple scenarios based on ad spend, ROAS, and profit (for context this brand has a 69% profit margin):

Scenario 1 – $4k Monthly Ad Spend, 4x ROAS

Revenue = $4,000 * 4 = $16,000 

Profit = ($16,000 * 0.69) – $4,000 = $7,040

Scenario 2 – $10k Monthly Ad Spend, 3x ROAS

Revenue = $10,000 * 3 = $30,000 

Profit = ($30,000 * 0.69) – $10,000 = $10,700

Scenario 3 – $25k Monthly Spend, 2x ROAS

Revenue = $25,000 * 2 = $50,000 

Profit = ($50,000 * 0.69) – $25,000 = $24,500

If you’re basing your decisions on ROAS and not profit, you’re going to have skewed logic. ROAS on it’s own can’t help you grow, profit can. Furthermore, maintaining a 3-4x ROAS at scale is HARD.

If someone is telling you they’re consistently bringing in a 4+ return on ad spend at scale (100k+ per month in spend) there’s one of 3 things going on:

A. They’re full of shit.

B. Their margins are god awful.

C. They’re selling a cure for cancer.

D. They’re a media buying god and you should pay whatever they ask to work with them.

2. Running ads with a purpose

Simply put, the top brands and top marketers spend a lot more time planning strategy than those with less experience. Every campaign has a purpose. If you’re responsible for the advertising on an ad account, you should not need to open the ad account to know what’s running and why.

Your campaigns should be used for one of two things:

1. Learning/Gathering Intelligence

2. Pushing prospects closer to giving you money. 

3. Leave Emotion Out of It. 

This one is ironic… We know as advertisers, people make decisions based on emotion, not logic. The reason is because it’s human nature. So pulling back and trying to take emotion out of decision making is HARD. It takes practice, but a good media buyer should be able to call shots without any indecision and close their laptop and sleep like a baby. This is because they know that they will be able to resolve any issues that might arise in the future. 

4. Think Like a Consumer

Good media buyers understand consumer psychology. They understand that trust isn’t automatic, it’s earned. 

Desire isn’t binary, there are many different levels to how badly people want to buy a product. The stronger the desire, the quicker they will pay.

It’s like being in line at the supermarket about to pay and realizing you forgot one thing you wanted to get. If you have to leave the checkout line to grab it, you’ll lose your spot in line. 

If it’s something you just kinda want but isn’t necessary, you’ll likely make a different decision than if it’s an essential ingredient to a meal. Furthermore, if the store had a “runner” whose sole job was to go grab things that people “kinda wanted”, but not willing to leave the checkout line for, they’d probably make a lot of money.

How does this relate to media buying?

Good media buyers understand that consumers are all different, and that if you only care about the people who are willing to buy the second you ask for their money (ie. the people with the most desire at any one time), you’re operating at 50% capacity. 

It takes time to develop a relationship with consumers.

5. Always Learning and ALWAYS Testing.
   
   This is probably the single biggest thing that separates good media buyers from great media buyers. The greats not only understand, but they own the fact that performance could ALWAYS be better. Always.
   
   It’s a personal mission to outperform the current best. It’s what separates the pros from the amateurs in any field. Good is not good enough.
   
   The path to becoming a great media buyer (and thus achieving great results), is by continuously thinking, and coming up with new ideas, angles, messaging, knowing full well that most new concepts will fail. 

It should be a relief to know that all these skills can be learned. Here are a few tips that can help you when planning, launching and analyzing campaigns:

1. Close your computer and pull out a good old fashioned piece of paper. Start drawing the flow of the customer journey from one point to another in your funnel. Think about any objections they may have (and add this to a list of things to be handled in your retargeting campaigns). It’s ok to have more than one funnel strategies running simultaneously, although I’ll caution that it can be easy to get overwhelmed with information from within the ad account. Whenever possible, simplify the account until you have a clear understanding of what you are doing and why. 

2. Know your numbers, and know them well. This is a big one. You should have a KPI calculator that you use to get an understanding of your front end (short-term) and long term break-even analysis. If you don’t have a solid grasp on your numbers, you’ve lost before you’ve even begun.

3. Consolidate your data using Supermetrics (or something similar). Looking at ads manager, it can be easy to get lost in the numbers. There’s too much available to you and you don’t get a holistic overview of what’s going on with the big picture.

For example you can see what the top ad is for a specific campaign/ad set, but if you want to see what’s performing best across the whole account (let alone multiple platforms), it starts to get messy. We recommend using Supermetrics to pull quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily metrics into one place and have it laid out in a way that’s easy to understand for YOU. 

Thanks for taking the time to read this, hopefully you’ve got some takeaways you can put to work. If you have any questions or want more information like this, joining our free facebook group here. That’s all for now, and happy scaling.

Sincerely,

Ryan