#31 Media Buying Strategies with Michael Colella Founder of AdBeat

Biography:

Mike Colella is the Founder of AdBeat, a digital advertising service platform.

He founded the firm in 2010 and has worked in a major IT company prior to that.

He also founded another company called Milo Marketin which is also involved in Internet advertising.

Currently based in San Francisco Bay Area, California, he holds a degree in Physics and Mechanical Engineering.

Topics of Conversation:

[0:00:14.5] – Introduction
[0:00:35.9] – Company Background
[0:01:59.4] – Different Uses of AdBeat
[0:04:04.8] – Data Compiling Process
[0:06:01.1] – Prior Experience Before AdBeat
[0:08:33.6] – Other Business Ventures Outside of AdBeat
[0:11:36.2] – Levels of Revenue in Affiliate Marketing
[0:13:30.6] – Media Buying Tools
[0:17:16.5] – Landing Page Strategies
[0:25:50.1] – Sales Page Strategies
[0:28:05.3] – Lead Generation Strategies
[0:30:59.3] – Conclusion

Reach Out To Michael Colella:

• Twitter
• LinkedIn

Tweetables:

Transcription:

[00:14] Stephen: Hey guys.

Stephen Esketzis here from Marketing on the Move.

And I’ve got Mike Colella with me. Is that right?

Did I pronounce it right, Mike?

Mike: That’s it exactly.

Stephen: How are you doing today?

Mike: Everything’s great. Yeah, glad to be here.

Stephen: I know. Thank you for coming on board.

So Mike’s the Founder of AdBeat.

So do you want to give our audience a little bit of an introduction to what AdBeat is?

[00:35] Mike: Sure.

So AdBeat is a software platform that tracks what’s happening with online advertising, specifically with online display advertising.

So media-buying banner ad-type of advertisements to show up all over the web.And it basically gives you an idea of what an advertiser is doing.

That could be anything from what ads they’re running, so you can see the actual creative that they’re using, where they’re placing those ads, like what publishers they’re showing on, what ad networks they’re running the ads through, so whether it’s Google or some other ad network.

And then, a feel for how long the ads have been running and a whole bunch of other things.

But the basic idea provides a way to see kind of competitive intelligence about any advertiser that you may be interested in that’s using display advertising.

Stephen: Yeah, you summed it up perfectly. AdBeat is a phenomenal tool.

Some of the metrics in there are absolutely crazy. And I know that, especially for marketers out there.

It’s just marketers, some really big clients as well. You can get there and see what’s working.

Have you seen that the most success from AdBeat people using it to sort of see what’s working in a new industry and replicate that to users there sort of base or they control?

[01:59.4] Mike: There’s a lot of different uses for AdBeat related depending on the type of customer.

So, say, someone who has a product of their own, a business owner, who’s running their own advertising.

They might use it to get a feel for what else is going in their market, or are there other advertisers in the same market that are having success already with banner ads?

And if they are, then they may want to look and see where they’re advertising, what ad networks they’re using and get a feel for the type of ad copy that’s working as well as the landing pages that are working.

Because the copying and the landing pages that work for media buying is often very different than what might work for some other traffic source, like for your internal list or warn list that’s coming from a partner, for instance.

Stephen: Yeah. And I think that’s one of the massive ones that when I first AdBeat, that you can actually see which ads go to which landing pages and how long they’ve been running for.

I think when I first saw that, my eyes just lit up because you can see that there’s so much potential with the program.

You can instantly go into other people’s wholesales funnel and just see it from start to finish.

Mike: Yeah, it’s really powerful being able to see that someone is spending money and sending traffic to a particular page on their site.

A lot of people will talk about you need to model what’s working, look and see what’s working. But it’s really hard to know actually what’s working if you’re just looking at a business from the outside.

But when you can see that they’re actually spending money with a specific ad going to a specific landing page, that’s a pretty clear cut indication of what’s really making the money at that time.

Stephen: Of course, I think it’s definitely a tool that you need to have in your arsenal.

So with AdBeat, there’s a lot of data in there and there’s a lot of metrics? How do you compile all this data?

I mean, it sounds like a huge project data that comes in there every single day?

[04:04] Mike: Yeah, so it’s a pretty massive undertaking.

We crawl the web to build an index of links. We’re crawling the web every day, well over a hundred thousand websites in 20 different countries.

Stephen: Wow, that’s incredible.

Mike: And basically, every time—thanks—and so every time that we land on a page with our crawler, there are ads that are show, right?

So we’re basically taking those ads and recording everything we know about them, what day was it we found and what site did we find them on, where does the ad point to.

And then, building basically a bunch of analytics around that huge data set that we collect every day, and presenting it in a dashboard that allows you to kind of gain insight and do searches and find information that’s valuable.

Stephen: Yeah. And I love that you’ve conceptualized that data into really things that our marketers and media buyers and all these people can use and actually take action on, and then go out and build their own ads. Is there any way to hide yourself from this?

Because obviously, now that also means competitors are looking at your own ads and obviously that could be a bit tricky as well.

Mike: Yeah, there really isn’t because this is just the open web.

And if the ad is out there, then we’re going to find it. So there really isn’t anything you can do to avoid that.

Stephen: Obviously, I’m probably asking the wrong person as well.

Definitely, you guys would want to be able to see every single page on the web so you can really present the most open and transparent data to all your users.

No, I just thought I’d ask you and then hopefully I can get around it somehow, but obviously not.

So with AdBeat, obviously, this is a huge undertaking.

What were you doing before AdBeat? Where you into media buying quite heavily yourself?

[06:01] Mike: I was, yeah. That’s what gave me the idea to create the service.

I had started out in the fitness space and basically as an affiliate marketer.

And I found some offers that were performing well and I started learning about media buying and started having success that way.

And I realized that there were a lot of other businesses that were having success with buying ads the same way I was.

And I was curious as to what else was out there and then kind of got the idea to create this service.

And so, shortly after that, started building it. So it really kind of came out of my own need.

And I knew that a lot of other people would get value out of it as well.

Stephen: Yeah, I love that, scratching your own itch.

Mike: Yeah, exactly.

Stephen: It’s a great way to start a business. And a few other people we’ve interviewed have also had the same story.

So that’s great. And with your affiliate marketing, I know affiliate marketing is absolutely huge. You can make some ridiculous money if you’re doing it well.

And I think now, with AdBeat around as well, I can imagine the number of zeros you’ve added to people’s income just through that tool.

But was that a big jump from obviously affiliate marketing which you’re actually in there doing all the media buying to AdBeat now?

You’re actually sort of building it as software-as-a-service? Is that what you call it or obviously, they’re two very different roles?

Mike: Yeah, it’s totally different, kind of night-and-day-type of business. There was definitely a transition. But like anything, I just started small.

I hired my first developer and started seeing how I could work with him, and how that was going to work out.

And once I kind of felt comfortable that I was making progress that way. And things were moving along.

I hired another developer and things just grew slowly like that.

I don’t have a background in software developments. I’ve never done that professionally any other time before this, but just slowly figured out how it all works, and just kind of trial and error.

Stephen: Yeah, and that’s definitely a challenge. Affiliate marketing is a great source of income and I’m sure you’re quite a veteran in it as well to be able to pinpoint that and then move to AdBeat.

It’s just jumping in another pool. So it’s great to see, are you still doing any affiliate marketing as well or are you solely focusing on AdBeat at the moment?

[08:33] Mike: Not really in the same way that I used to.

I have another business that we buy media for. But it’s not really just straight affiliate marketing the same way. It’s great if you can make it work.

But longer-term, it really makes more sense to try to build your own business at some sort of an asset. It’s hard to build an asset as you’re doing affiliate marketing.

Stephen: Yeah, and you think then that affiliate marketing route, obviously people build their own products and have affiliates promote them.

Is that a better way to go long-term to rather have your own product and then have affiliates promote for you? Or do you still think its better just to have your own business outside of that industry in the long-term?

Mike: There’s still plenty of businesses that do extremely well with affiliate channels.

Although I will say that I think the best thing you can do is learn how to buy your own traffic and then create your own product and handle the traffic as well.

And I know that a lot of the guys that used to do really well with affiliates have brought things in house and are handling their own traffic.

Just because with an affiliate model, you can be doing really well if everything is working right.

But then, say, if something—who knows what happens—the affiliate decides they’re more interested in another offer, they get interested in a different market, and then all of a sudden your traffic source is gone.

Stephen: Yeah.

Mike: So it pays to basically learn how to do that stuff yourself as well.

Stephen: Yeah, 100%. And I guess it works both ways too. If you’re an affiliate and then something happens to do the offer or something like that, or the network or whatever it is, it can change as well.

Mike: Yeah, exactly.

Stephen: So a lot of changes can be made there. I think if you’re spending—I know some affiliates, and I’m sure you can probably show some insight into this—but some of the high-end affiliates that are in there are making like hundreds of thousands a day in affiliate income.

Surely, they’ve been looking at making their own product and then promoting it themselves. You’d be silly not to. Would that be right?

Mike: Well, I think you’d be silly not to. But it’s a problem where if things are going really well and you’re making a lot of money doing something; it’s very difficult to try to start focusing on something else.

Stephen: If you got your system in place as well. I mean, it’s a big undertaking to have a new product and roll it out.

Mike: Yeah, but I do think that in the end, if you’ve made a lot of money in some way and you start running into problems with that, then it makes sense to start looking at how you can build something more substantial.

Stephen: Yeah, and you mentioned you’re in affiliate marketing earlier. What do some of the guys on the higher end doing?

Are you able to share some of the numbers that they probably use their platform as well? So what are the super affiliates up to?

What are the levels of revenue and income you can make in that high-end affiliate marketing?

[11:36] Mike: Well, so I don’t know what people that use our service specifically do, but I do know in general what high-end affiliates do or high-end media buyers of any type, whether they own the product or they’re an affiliate.

It’s not unheard of to spend $50,000 to $100,000 a day in media cost alone.

So whatever the revenue is on top of that is going to be substantial because you’re not spending the money if it’s not working.

Stephen: Yeah, you’re exactly right. So with affiliate marketing, the only big costs are your ad spent, and then everything else is really revenue.

There’s obviously the small cost with other tools that you need, but you’re looking at super-high profit margins.

Mike: It can be, yeah. So it definitely can be a very profitable business. It can also be run with practically one person in some cases, if you’re just doing media buying.

Whereas other types of businesses, you start getting into managing people, and there’s overhead involved. So if things go south, then it’s a little tricky.

There’s more to managing a real business, but just doing well with media buying, whether you’re an affiliate or just a small agency.

You can do really well if you get good in media buying without having to build a huge company.

Stephen: Yeah, 100%. And what are some other tools that you made use in the past or that these media buyers are using? AdBeat’s obviously a great spy tool for competitive intelligence.

Are there any other tools that you could share with our audience that come in handy when you’re looking into media buying?

[13:30] Mike: Gee, that’s a good question. As an affiliate, there’s other competitive intelligence tools that can be interesting like Compete for instance or SimilarWeb to see what traffic the site is getting.

Because that’s one thing with AdBeat, we’ll show you approximate spins for media and volume of media spins. But it doesn’t tell you the overall traffic of the site.

And so, having a look at the overall traffic of the site can be interesting because if a site is doing a lot of traffic, that’s a good sign that a lot of what they’re doing is working.

So that’s always one indicator you want to look at as far as competitive intelligence goes.

Outside of that, this doesn’t play so much into an affiliate model, but if you’re a site owner, if you’re running traffic, you need to be testing that traffic.

And so, there’s all sorts of really interesting tools that have popped up in the last couple of years that make split testing a lot easier, tools like Optimizely, a visual website optimizer.

Stephen: Yeah, I noticed I think you guys have Hotjar on there.

And we actually interviewed the Founder of Hotjar recently as well. So Hotjar’s another little great tool.

Mike: Yeah, I was going to mention that as well. I don’t know the full functionality of Hotjar. I know they have several different things, but the thing I really like that they do, and there’s some other services out there that do this, but you can pop a little survey question in the lower-right hand corner of the site.

You can pop it on exit. So if someone is leading your landing page, you can pop that survey and maybe you want to ask them why they’re leaving and why they’re not opting into your e-mail list or you’re buying your products or whatever.

And you can get a lot of really good information from that. The response rate on those surveys is incredibly high.

I’ve seen response rates as high as 30% of the people that hit the page will answer the survey, which is just-

Stephen: Wow, that I really high.

Mike: It’s incredible, yeah. So you don’t have to spend a lot of money in order to get a lot of data back because clicks can be had for sometimes.

Pennies are dimes depending on where you’re buying. And if 30% of the people are answering the questions, you get a lot of data quickly. That can be pretty valuable.

Stephen: Yeah, 100%. I’m looking at the one and the ones that you guys have set up on your blog right now. And it says, “What do you want us to write about?”

And so, I’m definitely going to respond with more of your blog posts and more landing page reviews and things like that.

So it’s a great, nifty tool. I use it on my blog as well.

I literally have that exact same question, “What do you want us to write about?” and the only difference is I’ve got three—it’s like an a) b), or c). So I ask ‘do you want reviews’ or ‘do you want more podcasts or media buying’, what do you want, whatever.

And it’s a great tool. It gives you some really good insights. So that’s what I’d definitely recommended.

So another thing is you’re right on the blog. It comes up; you’ve discussed a lot of the landing page styles which are working in paid advertising.

Obviously, you guys have a wealth of information that you can see every day, see what’s working.

And there’s a whole mix. Like for media, you’ve got your surveys, you’ve got your free plus shipping, you’ve got this and that.

Where do you see this going in 2015?

Do you see more interactivity?

Do you think more surveys are going to be working, converting higher?

Every industry is different. So I don’t want to put it all in one bag, but could you shed any light on where you think these landing page strategies are going?

[17:16] Mike: That’s tough to answer without maybe looking at a specific market. But I guess I would say that I do see more and more quiz survey-style landing pages doing well on display.

Maybe five years ago or so, I don’t think there was hardly anywhere near what they are now.

And now, some of the most successful advertisers on display are using some sort of a survey or quiz on the landing page as a frontend to a sales funnel on the site.

So I think that’s probably going to continue. That’s been pretty interesting to watch. This has been ongoing for the last few years.

But it’s just more and more important; it’s just the mobile experience because there’s just an incredible amount of mobile traffic out there for media buying.

So the mobile experience is huge. You can often do multiples of what’s possible on desktop on mobile traffic.

Stephen: I think it gets massively underrated. People don’t really realize that unless you’re into the media buying industry, people just don’t realize how much is going on, on mobile these days.

Mike: Yeah, and it really takes a dedicated look at what the mobile experience is like.

And in order to be able to bid high enough for that traffic to do well, you really have to just completely think about it as almost like its own landing page and run separate tests on it alongside whatever you’re doing for desktop.

You really have to break it out and give it the focus it needs.

Stephen: Yeah, 110% agree. But I heard—who was it?—we had Rand Fishkin not too long ago discussing about SEO. A little bit different to media buying, but he was also saying that the rankings on mobile in Google are going to be changing as well from what they see on desktop based on what’s actually coming out. So I think-

Mike: It’s just changed that actually. I think that change that went through that I’m sure he was referring to I think just a few days ago, that officially now, your rankings in as far as search results are affected by whether your site is mobile optimized.

Stephen: Yeah, and the amount of—I’m sure you would have said it as well—the amount of ads also on my newsfeed, people are saying, “Oh, update your website to make it mobile responsive for $3.99.” and it will be done in two days.

So definitely, people were jumping on that as a trend. So it’s interesting to see how all the mobile responsiveness and mobile ads, and making that experience so much better for the user.

I think there’s massive money to be made in mobile if you capitalize on it. Yeah, for sure.

Now, there’s a lot of mixture with obviously landing pages in this and that. Where do you start with the landing page?

If you’ve got a funnel built up and you want to tweak it, you want to make it better, obviously there’s a lot of stages you look at.

Which one do you think is probably the most important? Is it the landing page most often that needs the work or is it the ad, the copy, or is the creative?

Where in that funnel do you usually see people slip up?

Mike: Well, you have to look at basically everything. But I guess if you’re starting out, then you want to test from a few different kinds of concepts.

The worst thing you can do is start testing something that’s just really, really similar. You change one word in the headline and you think you’re going to get a result from that.

You may get a result. It’s going to be small versus if you just come up with a completely separate idea for a headline that’s drastically different and test that against the one that you’re currently running.

So that’s the biggest piece of advice is just a test needs to be significant. And I think most people test things that are too small.

Stephen: So you think you going the exact opposite on what you’ve got just to see how it goes?

Mike: Well, I don’t know if I’ll call it opposite, but just a different hook, right?

You need to come up with a different hook.

For instance, like if you’re going to say, “Lose weight in 30 days” is your headline, right? Then something like “Fat lost in 30 days” would be a terrible test.

It’s basically saying the same thing, slightly different.

Maybe you want to test a more specific headline.

So you write something that’s much more specific, give a hint of the method and say it’s for women over 40 or something like that.

So that might be a good test, right?It’s hard to come up with-

Stephen: That’s one way of doing it, yeah. I think and definitely like you said, there’s different ways.

Obviously, there’s different copywriting techniques in this and that.

But rather than I think—where did I hear it? It must have been off another podcast, converging cast or something—one of their guest said like rather than split-testing button color, split test the whole page, so maybe change the copy on the top, change the content.

Change the images. Really give it; still keep it within the targeting. But don’t look for the little changes, because they’ll never going to get you the big results.

Mike: that’s exactly right. And if you try to test everything, like one little thing at a time, you’re probably never going to get to an optimal result fast enough.

So you need to make big changes, so totally redesign the page in a completely different layout. That thing is the right way to be testing.

And then once you start getting some big results that way and you can’t seem to get anything significant, then you might start really fin-tuning the template that won, right?

Stephen: You use obviously the one that’s converting up there that is the control. And then keep jumping that to the next one.

Mike: Sure.

Stephen: Yeah, and one of your best blog post I love, and that was I’m sure you get a lot of feedback from it, is the seven landing page styles that work with paid advertising.

I bet you hear about it all the time because it’s a great post.

And what I was looking at is you’ve got a few of the different ones. You’ve got your advertorial one which is obviously; it looks like the blog post in pre-frames.

It might be an affiliate sale or whatever. And you’ve got the lead gen and you’ve got surveys, and you’ve got a whole lot—I know some of the posts, and I’ll mention we link this in the shown ads as well, so people can come and have a look—but what do you think?

Are they some of the top-performing ones that are working in paid advertising, because there’s obviously a lot going in there in different industries. Do you see these as some of the high-converting ones?

Mike: Yeah, the ones that are specifically in that blog post, those literally are the landing page-types that we see across all advertisers in our database. Those are the ones that are most likely to work.

And you named off a couple of the different types and it just kind of depends on the market or what you’re trying to see, which one might be best. Video sales letter still work really well.

Stephen: Yeah, sorry to interrupt, but that really surprises me. But they’re still doing so well. and I guess people aren’t sick of them.

Mike: They still work much better than a tech space sales page. And from what I see and from the people that I know that run things, what they tell me, not to say that you can’t create a static text-based sales page that works. But a good video is probably going to be more likely to work a lot of times.

Stephen: Yeah, I was actually having a listen to Justin Brook’s podcast and we’ve got him coming on the show in a little while as well. So I’m sure some of the information we talk about will cross over. But I was having a listen and he was talking about an interactive video sale.

So if someone invented a way where you can go through and open a small, two-minute video based on your decisions, so it sorts of meets up maybe a survey in a video sale, what do you think of that?

[25:50] Mike: So I’ve seen those they seem really cool. And the potential seems it’s amazing. In practice, I don’t know how easy it is to actually make it work.

And I can’t say that I see that being used on a large scale for any large advertisers right now.

Stephen: Maybe someone has to come up with a software that will it easier, I guess. Maybe something that’ll be able to help it convert or help construct them?

Mike: Maybe, it’s a promising idea. But I’ll tell you that the reality is that it’s difficult to create a sales letter, a sales video that works really, really well.

And so once you create one that works extremely well for like a general case, to try to now improve that by breaking that video up and, say, asking questions and trying to branch off different segments based on those questions, now, you’re having to basically write those sections again in a different way and how it also be really, really excellent, right?

So that it converts really well. Again, it’s challenging. I think it’s a promising technology, but I don’t know. I don’t know how well it will work.

Stephen: It might need a bit of optimization on that before it can come to life and something that will work really well.

Mike: Yup.

Stephen: And one more I want to touch on before we wrap it up is the lead generation industry.

I think that goes under the radar a little bit with everything else that’s going on with affiliate marketing and this and that.

But lead generation’s huge and I was just having a look at the website earlier and you could see that some of the ways that this lead generation’s—a lot is obviously car insurance, health insurance, all those big ones that need to work a lot.

What type of designs are they using?

Are they trying to do it so it’s sort of you click a button, looks easy on the frontend, and then that put them through a process that’s easy to fill out?

Is there anything in the lead generation industry like “lower my bills” is probably one of the big ones that you were talking about?

Are they sort of doing anything significant that you can chat about?

Is it, maybe, easy on the frontend? What type of designs?

[28:05] Mike: “Lower my bills” in particular uses really sort of approachable design, like some cartoon imagery usually on the landing page.

Their ads are extremely—I don’t know how you’d describe them—they’re crazy and aggressive.

For instance, they’re doing refinancing, home loans and insurance. And so that sounds pretty boring, right?

Then you would think they may be showing pictures of a home or whatever, but they show anything and everything you can think of on their ads that have nothing to do with refinancing insurance, anything to capture attention.

They’re just looking to capture that attention and overcome the bannered one that basically affects everyone who browses the web constantly.

Stephen: And it’s funny that works so well because in so many other industries, even with my own experience, putting an ad out there, you really want to have that next step via similar to the previous one.

And having something like this like you’re explaining, where it’s all crazy on the frontend of the banner and then they get to the landing page, and it’s just like sitting on a coach.

It’s just the regular, really inviting easy-going sort of page. I’m amazed that it works so well. But at the end of the day, it’s not the design that matters, it’s the conversion.

Mike: Definitely. And the other thing for lead generation, I think the survey-style going for just an e-mail lead for instance works really well. And I see that operating well in a number of different markets.

Stephen: Yeah, so you mean just asking it like three, four or five whatever questions, and then asking for their information, so taking those mini-steps.

Mike: Yeah, and basically promising something that is customized to the prospect.

So basically, they answer these questions and the promise now is that when you opt in instead of just getting some generic gift or whatever, you’re going to get something that’s customized based on what you just told the site. So that works pretty well.

Stephen: Yeah, and I’m sure you’re familiar with Ron Vesk, who recently launched his book and talked about surveys and all that. Revolution Golf, huge one. They’re killing it as well with their surveys.

And I actually haven’t had a look at it on AdBeat, though I definitely do now. But they’ve been killing it with all their survey, and giving you custom solution for your golf power league.

So I think that’s really good example. I don’t know if I consider that lead gen, but it definitely would work in the lead gen industry, whatever niche you’re in.

So look, thank you so much, Mike, for coming on. I really appreciate you taking your time to come out the AdBeat headquarters and having a chat with us about the convergent strategies and what’s going on with AdBeat.

So yeah, I really appreciate your jumping on with us today.

[30:59] Mike: Well, thanks for having me on. I enjoyed it. And I hope everyone who listened got some value on what we discussed.

Stephen: Definitely. I think everyone’s going to jump on and have a snoop around at all their competitors and what they’re doing, so definitely a lot of value.

I’ll let you go and I’ll speak to you soon.

Mike: Okay, thanks.

 

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