TJ60 – Media Buying 101: How To Maximise Your ROI From Paid Traffic with Charles Kirkland

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Since banner ads are largely ignored by consumers, you might assume that you, the marketer, should ignore them too.

Whilst this is largely true, due to developments in technology giving us better insights in to our audience and more precise ways to target them, online ads in the right hands are perhaps more effective than ever before.

In this media buying 101, Charles Kirkland opens up and discloses some of his best paid traffic tips acquired from years testing in a multitude of markets, across many networks and for both B-to-B and B-to-C products and services.

If you are new to media buying and worried about getting your fingers burned, this podcast will teach you how to set things up right from the start and get the maximum ROI from paid traffic.

FREE BONUS: Download the Paid Traffic Calculator. Pre-populated spreadsheet that ensures your media buys always turn out profitable.

OUR GUEST:

Charles Kirkland is the founder of the Media Buyer Association. He is fully committed to helping entrepreneurs and small businesses build successful media campaigns by providing advanced training and resources from real world experiences.

Charles used to work for an engineering company but had to quit his job when he was diagnosed with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome in his late 20’s. He took different kinds of jobs including teaching and selling products but continued to educate himself in online marketing.

After years of learning, Charles took a risk on a media buy and saw his traffic and sales rise in just 30 days. Stunned by these results, he made further studies and realized how powerful media buys can be. With all the ups and downs that he experienced, Charles wants to make things easier for other businesses by giving them training and real world advice.

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A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST:

Here are some of the highlights from episode 60 of the Traffic Jam Podcast…

• PPV: Who Should Use It?
• CPA: Why It Works.
• Why Yahoo Stream Ads Work.
• YouTube Ads.
• Getting Started.
• How To Choose The Right Model.
• Charles’ Greatest Successes.
• Testing and Tracking Ads.

TWEETABLE MOMENTS:

If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet this Charles Kirkland quote from the show:

You can also get Charles’ quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download.

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Hey what’s up there listeners? Welcome back to Traffic Jam! This is episode#60 and of course it’s the podcast show that teaches you how to get more traffic and build a profitable audience online.

I am your host, as always, James Reynolds, and I want to start this show just by giving a quick thank you to Jimmy Daly who left a five-star iTunes review for the show, and he said, “I would describe this podcast as action-packed. James brings on really smart guests and asks really smart questions. The result is a high-energy podcast with tons and tons of information.” Thank you to you Jimmy. I really appreciate that glowing endorsement for Traffic Jam. I also want to thank Ferds, Sef and Thomas Dylan who stopped by the episode page for episode#58 and joined in on the discussion there. Thank you to you guys. And that is the place that you too, the listener, should be heading off to each time you listen to Traffic Jam. The location for this show’s episode page is TrafficJamCast.com/60 and there you’ll find a full transcript of today’s show, you’ll find a downloadable MP3, you’ll find episode artwork, plus a special bonus that accompanies the show, which in this case is a paid traffic calculator. You’ll find out why that is important in just a moment but right now I need you to head on over there, download your bonuses and then listen on to the show.

So today we are going to be talking paid traffic with Charles Kirkland and he’s the founder of the media buyer’s association and according to Charles’ bio, he is fully committed to empowering media buyers to create successful campaigns through real world education and hands-on training. Charles is a walking, talking, networking blend of credibility and know-how. Me and Charles, we have been connected for some time and I know he is a regular listener to the show also so I thought it was about time we brought Charles on to the show to share his paid traffic wisdom and a lot of that wisdom he has got! I am sure you are going to love this interview, Charles is hugely passionate about paid traffic and I hope his brought some of his passion in you too.

I guess that is enough of an intro today, let’s invite on to Traffic Jam, Charles Kirkland from the Media Buyers Association.

James: Hey listeners! Welcome back to episode#60 of Traffic Jam and you’re right here with me and Charles Kirkland today. Charles how are you doing?

Charles: Doing good! How is it going?

James: It is great! I am super excited for today’s session. Let’s jump right in to some jargon because there seem to be a lot of terminologies swimming around the media buying arena and you too have coined some of your own interesting terms in the past. Let’s do a quick-fire round to get this media buying 101 started. For each of the following strategies, I’d like you to explain what they are and who should be using them. First one out the hat is PPV, what is it and who should be using it?

Charles: PPV is pop ups so if you’ve been to a site, you’re just browsing around and all of a sudden this pop up, usually 600×800 pixels, and what happens is PPV is basically pop ups. People install adware, people confuse it with spyware, and there is a difference, adware you’ll say hey I’ll get a free weather report because it’s raining but they get a free weather bug, free coupons, free shopping and free video games and because of that they install this little piece of adware and you’ll see a handful of pop ups a day. And then when they visit these sites, the people that control the pop ups will allow people like me and you to bid on it so let’s just say we want a pop up on top of weightwatchers.com because people who are at weight watchers are there for a very specific reason. They are not there because they need whiter teeth, prettier hair or longer lashes. They are there to lose weight. Because of that, it is called contextual priority wherein we are going to target people on a particular site knowing they are only there to interest so really the power of that is massive. If you are an affiliate and you want to promote a weight loss product, or a fitness product, you can target literally a weight loss site. And the more contextually relevant your ad is, your pop up to the landing page and the more that your ad looks like the landing page, the higher the opt in rate. So it is a great way to build a list from affiliate marketing. You can make a lot of sales with CPA. The problem that you get with this is the quality of your prospects aren’t exactly the highest. Let’s just say that if you just go to traffic events and look that the people who are winning these cards. Most of them aren’t exactly sitting there, you’re dealing with typically a very different demographic so they like free gas cards, free games. They have a free mentality, if that makes sense. So if you go if you want to build a high end $20,000 culture program PPV, it would be an epic disaster. Typically, these people, they work like general types of things, like weight loss, sex, regrowing hair, make money online and that kind of stuff. It also falls apart if you want to do things like hey, I am going to show you how to build your own bow cabinet with scrap wood made from pallets would be a disaster like all grooming would be a disaster. So that’s the path but I tell you from the standpoint if you need a hundred thousand visitors a day, you can go to PPV and you can get it.

James: Got it! So we’ve laid the ground work there, it’s a volume market and it’s probably not going to be best positioned if you’re selling high priced products, Charles the next one out of the Traffic Jam hat is CPA. What’s that and who should be using it?

Charles: CPA really is cost per action and you have a variety of CPA networks. And the reality of this, let’s just say that you’ve got a product, let’s say that we’ve got a product of how to lose weight. What we can do, we can do to the CPA networks and say you know what, you’ve got a product and you can say I will give you $47 of every sale you make of a $2.95 track, 9 days in, you’re screwed up, you have too many hits on the ad, too many hits on those numbers and it doesn’t work out. But just trust me for a minute. So the CPA network says, okay, we’ve got a product we will put it in our network, and we can also distribute it to other CPA companies, so you have what’s called agent of record which is the main CPA company that is basically getting out your product. The beauty of that is that it’s not for beginners and if you’ll tell me Charles I need to figure out how to make my house payment or I need to like sell on internet marketing, it’s not for you. Basically it’s for people that have an advanced system because of the power of this and I know you’d say you’re mad, you’re dumb as ever, I hope you’re not an accountant, don’t ever try to do accounting but what happens, let’s just say we’re paying $47 to the CPA network and we’re selling at $2.95 trial, the reality of this, is you are getting a sale for $2.95. There is a huge issue with the money that we are paying out with what we’re about to make but the reality is, once we can get them to purchase the product, we can run them through which we’re talking literally $400 – $600 upsells potentially, typically it’s not that high. So we’ve got upsells, we can push them to continuity. Once we’ve got a buyer we can have a rep call them on the phone, hey Janet, it looks like you’re trying to lose weight, have you tried the African green mango chai berry, would you also like to get personalized coaching for $97 per month? Yes of course, that sounds like a winner! Or, you can find out that Janet’s recently divorced and bankrupt, you can take that data and sell that data to somebody else who will give you a call about bankrupt problems. The reality is once you’ve got that data, there is so much stuff you can do with it, if she just bought a weight loss product, maybe you can sell her a teeth whitening product, and maybe instead of one month supply we can sell her a six month supply of that for $200. The reality of that is that you obviously paid the money to get you a buyer. It is your business to maximize the revenue from that buyer and they can do this on a scale of thousands of buyers per day.

James: Yeah so again perhaps more of an advanced strategy and we certainly need to know our advanced numbers when we dive in with CPA. Good round up Charles. Next one out of the hat is Yahoo Stream Ads. What are they?

Charles: That’s beautiful. This is like the greatest thing since Facebook! The reality of this thing is that the truth of the matter, yahoo used to be the dominant player and google kept them in the tail end and took the number one spot. The reality of this is that Yahoo still has got a massive amount of traffic and the most important thing to me is that they’re not the traffic Google has. Typically we say google this, google that it’s like Kleenex, Xerox. The reality is that people who go to the Yahoo homepage, most of them re your average everyday users and there is nothing wrong with that! And Yahoo has this particular scenario where they say, hey, we will take what we call a native ad and we will put it on the Yahoo homepage or the Yahoo pages so you’re on Yahoo and you’re like strolling down and there’s this big list of stuff coming up and you call see this strange stuff but the reality of this is using Yahoo we can now with the native ad formats, we can get our ads in to in Yahoo and I am just going to tell you is that the average person in Yahoo seem to be a better buyer while the google buyer are like I know what I want, I want a clean screen and go from there, the Yahoo prospects are typically a better quality prospect. And truth matters, they’re there, they’re browsing through, they see the content, at that point, they’re reading it, they click on the link which appears to be an article. They’re reading a link with a minimum of 50 words about how simple it is and how the product that can help them, and how it was discovered and how it is made, and clicking on the link by the way they go to get a free trial of Super Testosterone Booster 2000. Plus they have the ability to get it in to their mobile network. The big thing that a lot of people are not really understanding mobile and desktop are two totally different environments. It is also two different buying paths. When you are in the desktop environment, you don’t mind filling out 4-6 to 15 fields, name, email address etc., but when you are in a mobile environment that’s a massive turn off. I don’t know about you but my fingers aren’t all that big and I have like a big sized apple, a big iPhone and it is bigger than the normal thing, and my finger still like hit everything under the sun. So you need to make sure you have a different path. Make sure that especially if you’re using a mobile friendly page, a lot of people end up with desktop native ads building content on the left hand side and ads on the right. What’s interesting is when it goes in to a mobile format, all that you’ll see are the stuff on the right on top of the article which will kill your conversions. So definitely keep that in place. And from a standpoint, if you are doing mobile, make sure you understand that the user who has an android is different from the user who has an apple and even the operating systems that they are going to use are going to be completely different. You are going to have some people who are like if something comes out, they buy it. We also have the people I meet at yahoo, those are two different buying habits or two different buying cycles. You need to make sure you are catering to that group. Also, apple users spend more money than android users just as a side note so make sure all users know that even the device that they’ve got, whether you’ve got the latest Samsung or the old Nokia, it doesn’t make a difference. All that makes a difference when it comes down to when you target them they will give you a different moolah.

James: Nice! Well we’ve touched on different few topics which I think I will come back to in a moment or two but I want to pull out the last term from the Traffic Jam hat and I believe this might be a Charles Kirkland term, correct me if I am wrong, but the term’s the traffic death wheel, what’s that all about?

Charles: That’s a good one and it is really weird because I started thinking about this, one of the biggest issues that people run in to is only having one traffic source. And I have taught people they have to get Facebook but no they say they know what they are doing on Facebook so therefore I don’t need anything else. The reality of this, at the end of the day if your prospect is using Facebook, okay great, maybe you can communicate with them via the email. Okay, if you’ve got them on Facebook or email could you communicate with them via SMS text message? Yet if you’ve got email or Facebook then it becomes another method of communicating with them. Can you get them to purchase? Do you have their full name, their buying data, their home address, their zipe code? Yes! Have somebody, we have a girl from our office who gives them a call and say hey, I’m calling from Charles’s office, welcome! People freak out over that! We’ve got automated posts going out to our buyers going out to just say thank you and not enough people ever say thank you and they get a post card and they get a call and they get a postcard, you are going above and beyond what everybody else is doing in this space becomes a huge factor because now even if email blows up and let’s just say also you can’t deliver email because everything has been triple opt in and spam compliant. As much as we would like to thank people on our list, if you’re willing to do that, I guarantee it would be to your advantage. So also you have the ability to do direct mail which has the least competition. SMS messaging, lead pages roll out – huge opportunity. Email, Facebook, we then start looking in ad roll, there is a huge opportunity and most people end up using one traffic source and that traffic source eventually will die no matter how you slice it, no matter how you dice it. I know people who thought that the days of Google cache would never end and the guys who are really working the 9-5 job because they made half a million dollars a year with Google cache when it blew up, they had nothing else going and anything else out.

James: Yeah. And this is a topic that we do touch on in Traffic Jam and there certainly is a school of people who would say, find one traffic source that works and then maximize it. Just ramp it up as much as possible. But you’re not giving yourself too much insurance if you are single source dependent and as you said, it will soon become a time where it dries up or the rules will get changed and you’ll leave yourself high and dry. Certainly worthy advice Charles. Let’s move on from there. I want to talk to you a little bit about native ads because it is something that you have mentioned already and it is something that people have been literally waxing about for this whole past year. What’s the scoop on native ads? First of all, what are they? And secondly, do they actually work?

Charles: Yes and yes. Native ads, people think they are something new. Unfortunately they are something that the old school guys look up to and use let’s just call it an ad camouflage, that’s the easiest way to put it. if you walk up to a store and a guy walks up to you and say just stand back I’m going to make a private space, I don’t want you I just want some private space. Their stuff is like buy my stuff, buy my stuff, buy my stuff. What’s wrong why are you not buying my stuff? Native ads are completely different. Native ads basically fit in to the format wherever you’re at so if you’re reading a blog, you’re reading content and you see native ads at the bottom and on the side, and native ads are designed to blend in to the content and appear to be content! The magic part of this is when we see ads, immediately our defenses go up like some marketer is trying to sell me something. There are people who leave really nasty comments on Facebook calling me everything but a sanctified child of god. People just send hate emails, I just can’t believe that people hate marketers. We’re not as low as a used car salesman but people don’t really like marketers and when they see marketing their defenses go up, but when they see native ad content that appears to be just more content, they are more inclined to read the content, their defenses are up and it means basically being stabbed and pouring salt in the wound and then the wonderful thing about the native ad is that it also loads you up in the ambulance, gets you to the doctor and gets you fixed at the same time because a native ad will lead you to buy your product that you probably did not even know you needed 10 minutes ago and a good example of that is advertorials. Also tool advertorials work great if you are looking some of the original advertorials, they were in magazines. Nobody reads the word advertorial at the top if they do, they don’t pay any attention. They read the content and they create sales. Give me an example, even Ink magazine, a fast company, you go through it and you see it says advertisement at the top and it will be laid out as an ad. The reality of this, people consume ads and they go it’s an ad. Native ads, they are reading it, it is so much easier to sell and if you want to look at even just more proof positive here, not I would ever recommend you doing it, fake blogs or whatever you want to call them, why they work so well is you read the story of a stay at home mom making $700 per week, whatever, it is because it was presented in a story format. These advertorials and the native ads, typically it’s a story format and people will read stories. People can read stories and recite stories where they could not recite an ad.

James: It’s pretty interesting that even this far there’s plenty of places where we can buy media and lots of ways we can go about it. For someone who’s kind of browsing new and getting started I am sure this can be quite overwhelming and I know you’ve got experience teaching others how to do it, where do you suggest that someone doing paid traffic and doing media buys get started for the very first time?

Charles: It’s really going to depend on your niche because there are some niches that are more family friendly and they’re just more family friendly than others, if you are just going to say, hey, I am wanting to get started, if you try to come home to Facebook and speak about weight loss, especially before and after weight loss, when they place your ad, they will pretty much keep you to the curb, blacklist your account and tell you I don’t want your money regardless of what. Or if you came in to adwords and say I have to make money online on my business opportunity, with affiliate marketing thing the problem with saying is that the key is really going to depend on your niche. Every niche is different. Like if you are in to finance, you can do great with Facebook. If you are in to weight loss, Facebook is probably not going to be the answer. Fitness, weight loss, business opportunity, make money online, internet marketing, that type of stuff generally, as a general rule, will be better off using PPV to do your first media buy. Somewhere like media traffic because leader pack has probably a thousand dollar buying end to get started with so I would say media traffic. if you are doing something like hey, I have a product, I own a business and I am trying to promote it, then I would say start with adwords. It gives me the best quality traffic you are going to find because they are searching the solution to their problem. The issue that you would have to fight with, adwords is a very mature traffic source so you pay a lot of money per click so you better have a deep funnel, a deep backend and know your numbers. Facebook still has plenty of traffic and has definitely got a lot more expensive. But they have got plenty of traffic and they are very easy to use as long as you are neither some of their banned or un-family type niches. So if you can’t start with Facebook, if you can’t go to adwords, from there PPV. Also keep in mind that once you get started the magic really is in the numbers. What does your tracking tell you? Or the people converting? Because a lot of people make mistake use Facebook. They’ve got a leadpage landing page, they’ve got a leadpage sales page and then they’ve got a thank you page. A lot of times people say it is not working! Did you get any clicks on your Facebook ad? No? Well you can’t tell if it is working or not. Did you get clicks on the Facebook ad? Okay then at least it tells you your Facebook ads are working. Did they land in to your opt in page? Let’s just say that we’re using a squeeze page, well no. then that means there is a disconnect between them clicking the ad because apparently they clicked the ad on Facebook. It had to appeal to them in some way, shape or form. If they are not opting in, we need to sit down and say, okay, what is wrong with our opt in page? Maybe the opt in page is hideous, maybe it doesn’t work, maybe it’s worse than buying mobile traffic on Facebook and the page doesn’t look right. Maybe you’ve done something to the page. Maybe the best thing that you have to do is have the headline match the headline that is on the landing page like the ad. So it follows so consistently. Headline matches the landing page? Okay, so if they click the ad, they opted in but they are not buying, we have to look at did we get enough clicks to determine, if you have a 1% conversion, it takes hundreds of clicks to make one sale. So if you’ve got 50 clicks and you’re saying it’s not working, you don’t have enough data yet. So the next thing you want to look at is maybe the landing page and the sales page or those headlines congruent? Is the offer congruent? If it is, you should be getting sales. And a lot of people don’t really sit down and try to backtrack. If they look at it, they say, o it’s not working. They don’t have the data to determine if it is working or not and that is one of the big things. The big thing especially with beginners is like I got 50 clicks and I did not make a $1000 sale, what is the problem with this? It’s all a scam! I hate to say that but the bigger issue is people.

James: Yeah, well hold that thought for just a moment, because we will come back and talk about testing and tracking in just a little bit but for now I want to throw a little bit more jargon out there and discuss how we can essentially buy or pay for traffic because there are several models. These things like pay per click, pay per view, pay per thousand impression, pay for acquisition as we spoke about and many others. What are some of the key considerations to look out for when choosing which model of buying traffic is right?

Charles: It really will depend on what you got. I know it is kind of a vague thing but let’s just go from the standpoint of I want to buy traffic. The first thing you need to look at is – is the offer acceptable to the network? If it is acceptable, okay, then go with it. The reality of it is for a CPA basis, you are really looking at needing a bigger budget. You go to a network, you had a thousand dollars, give me some CPA sales. It is going to be crickets. And this is the thing, a lot of people when they are getting started, you don’t know the commercial rate of your landing page, your sales page, your upsells. You don’t even know how much you can truly pay per click. You don’t even know how much money you are going to make from the offer to begin with. So the easiest thing to do is to go in and do pay per click cost per click and say okay, and I am just going to use round numbers here, if I make a dollar per click with a conversion rate of 40% on my squeeze page, with a 2% conversion on my sales page, could I make money? The easiest thing to do what is called predictive modeling. My wife is in accounting, she can do this wonderfully, if your wife is an accountant you’re probably are as lucky as me but what you need to have to do is sit down with any kind of spreadsheet and go how much are you paying per click? What would be the best conversion rate of your squeeze page? What would be the worst case scenario, what would be the average? What is the best case scenario for your sales page? What do you think the average would be and model that up and when you start looking at that you’d be like – a lot of people would be in shock because if you look at the average and the average across the board, you may discover you can’t make money in a dollar per click. You need to get them at least under $0.50 per click. And let’s just say that all of a sudden our numbers are horrible across the board, we can’t pay any more $0.50 per click. Once you look at that, that is going to really limit where you could buy traffic at. That would immediately rule out Google. At $0.30 per click you are probably going to get a lot of stuff. So that may also say if I can’t do Google’s search network, maybe I can do Google’s display network. So then that kind of looks like from a totally different scenario. Can you do display network? If you are looking at Facebook and you realize I can only pay so much per click, I probably can’t advertise on some of this more popular terms. If you are truly limited to PPV, what have you been doing pay per click. If you can do more pay per click then you need to set up a whole new world because then I can say I can go in to Google and I can go in to Facebook and it gives you so much more opportunity but the reality of this is, what can you pay per click? Once you figured that out, the easiest way is to just build a spreadsheet and model it. Start with pay per click. Once you’ve got your numbers tuned in, once you’ve got it optimized, then maybe go to calls per thousand. You can say you know what, looking at what we are at, we would be cheaper if, let’s say we are paying $10 per cost per thousand. So what happens, you say, okay, $10 CPM we know we can make sales, or 1 sale and those numbers begin to work out. But it is hard to do CPM where you are paying per impression to start with unless you know your numbers are ready. So to get started with, go cost per click, then go to CPM.

James: I can almost imagine people’s clicking over trying to do some of those numbers in their heads so perhaps we can actually make available a resource or a spreadsheet where people can track. Perhaps you and I will have a conversation about that after we finish recording but for now let’ turn the conversation to the media itself because there are a lot more options available now than just the old static banners of the past. There are things like videos, interactive banners and a bunch of others too. What are some of the most innovative media types now available to advertisers and what are you finding most success with yourself?

Charles: I tell you, as much as banners have been around, people have discarded banner ads. Truth of the matter is, banner ads are still converting like crazy. And from a marketing aspect of it, it is a huge opportunity. Another thing to look at is okay, I went to your site, I opted in, didn’t buy your product, retarget those people with banners across the web using Gooogle adroll, using perfect audience, retarget them inside Facebook because they’ve been to your site, they’ve clicked, they’ve opted in, but maybe they didn’t buy. Maybe they’ll just come back and finish the check out. Maybe you need a coupon for a free shipping. You’d be amazed at what that can do. Another thing that a lot of people don’t realize is the power of YouTube. When you go there and you watch that, and we all like a lot of people complain, I have to watch a 5 second commercial before and hit skip on YouTube, that’s some crazy traffic because the typical YouTube person is there searching for something. It’s like in Adwords when they’re searching how do you cure XYZ, when they’re on YouTube, they’re doing reviews on products, how to fix something, how to do something, and how to learn something. How to remove some sort of pain in their life, such a huge opportunity so take advantage of YouTube and basically have an adwords compliant account and an adwords compliant landing page and everything needs to be adwords compliant. But having that adwords compliant really open up to get brand new opportunity for you to get traffic you never could have even imagined. Another thing that a lot of people just overlook the internet marketing is solo emails are basically beat to death and it is not bad because the problem is, most people go in to the same people and buy the same low quality pieces of traffic they can find and go, this is just not working for me. Go to some place like Archemax, contact Bill Archemax, contact Richard, he’s the CEO and they can sell you solo email which are not beat to death and are not double opted in and that people will buy the first time we use archemax. Me and my buddy a number of years ago made like a thousand dollars for the solo drop. We made about $12000 promoting something called FAP robot, it was a forex product. In click bank, we didn’t even have a list in that. We just went bar solo and tested it out to their financial section and sold that Avril Lavigne album Cest’ La vie it was a quick sell of the product and we did not even opt in so I tested it, it proved positive so you know that is another opportunity that people are looking for solo emails. If you buy from same old solo email sellers that are like sending five emails a day to their list saying please click this because it’s a free resource and you are not going to get great result. Go to a place like Archemax or newsmax. They will sell you high quality traffic and yet it costs more than the internet marketing business opportunity but guess what, it is a huge opportunity to get quality traffic. another opportunity, look at degas smith, he’s got a solo ad agency and those guys have quality traffic. I mean, it is out there but I think a lot of people are looking at banners, overlooking native ads, totally overlooking solos and not taking advantage of YouTube traffic. It’s just massive!

James: Yeah! Well we’ve touched on several topics and I think for the benefit of our listener we’ll include some links to other Traffic Jam episodes where we explore these topics a bit more and also off to any other relevant training that you’ve got Charles because it is a broad, broad subject. I want to ask you though about testing and tracking because you did touch on it very briefly a moment ago, I’m sure you agree it is critical especially for paid traffic campaigns where we’ve got money in the game. What are the key metrics that are important to track and what tools do you use to monitor then analyze those numbers?

Charles: I think the tools you want to look out are like excel, almost everybody have got it on their computer anyway. When you use some kind of traffic something called improve.ly, I absolutely love it. I wish it did more but I absolutely love it because one of the big things that we are looking at from the standpoint of did somebody click? Using improvely you can start to see how many times did they come to the site before they opted in? and when they opted in did they complete the funnel going down? Okay, they opted in, did they buy? If they bought, how much are they worth? Did they take upsell? Were you able to actually monitor that back down to where we can break down, let’s just say in Facebook you were advertising for Ryan Dikes. Let’s just say he’s our target. We are able to come back to that traffic and we are able to say, you know what? There are a lot on the Ryan Dikes keyword and newsfeed. Through the roof! Wonderful! Ryan Dikes newsfeed, checked it out, it is good! The Ryan Dikes right hand side ads did not do as well, Ryan Dike’s mobile devices for apple did great! Mobile devices for android, not so good. Using an approval we can actually break it down to that level and then you can go to – was it a tablet? Was it a mobile device? And one thing to look at you can go now, AT&T job placement, you use smart phone and that’s about it, you just need the polls. A tablet is still a luxury for a lot of people, we’re talking $300 – $400, we’re targeting people who have tablets is more akin to laptops. You’re talking a 10.5 inch screen as probably 11-12 on a laptop. The people that have a tablet are typically a higher end buyer. They want to spend $400 – $500 for a tablet and it acts very similar to a laptop and from a mobility standpoint, it is big, and because of that we have discovered those are very high end, very high quality buyers. And using something like improvely we can come down and say, laptop, phone, desktop, newsfeed, right hand side, you have a way to break it down to that level which is huge. Also from a standpoint of testament tracking, the biggest issue is when you are buying traffic make sure you need to have enough data to make sure that your stuff is actually accurate. A lot of people think we only need a hundred clicks, yeah in a perfect world, in a perfect theory you only need a hundred clicks to determine everything like is the opt in page working? Is the landing page working? Is the sales app working? Is the checkout page working? What we do with like improvely is something called website visual optimizer. I absolutely love it simply because it is easy to use and I like it. What we are going to do is start looking at the key points. What are the key points that can have a huge impact on your business? When you see your check out page, your checkout page can double your income. You don’t even have to double your traffic. All you need to do is double your conversions through your checkout page to go from 1% to 2% conversion is huge. A lot of people think conversion is totally dependent on the sales letter. It is dependent on your sales page and it is dependent on your checkout page. Have security seals, have testimonials. Make sure that paid traffic works, you would be amazed at the easy way sitting down and literally just sitting there waiting for people to optimize those pages. If you are using the default mannequin test page, there is nothing wrong with that? Nanacast is an extremely powerful program. You can actually have custom landing pages, custom check out pages. Make sure those custom check out pages work. Infusion, nanacast, you can actually create all those and create custom check out pages. Another thing to look at and using split testing, you can determine does the recap of the offer help people make a buying decision? Does the security seal above the fold help. Start looking at the value of that. If you say, Charles, I am using click bank, well you can use custom CSS in click bank, optimize it, make the page look good, you can’t really split test a click bank checkout page but guess what, you can. That’s what a lot of people don’t realize. You can actually if you really want to get down and dirty and really make some money, you can have a single product in click bank, we can have product A and product B and product C. Each one can have a product style on the checkout page. They are all selling the exact same thing. Maybe we are selling the James Reynolds Traffic Jam value pack for $97. You can have it listed as multiple products, you can use multiple checkout pages, maybe if you wanted to go even a step further, add them on different accounts but you can actually split test those check out pages. If you will split test your check out pages, you will be amazed by the amount of money sitting there waiting to be taken. Another thing to look at is when you’re saying, okay, the problem that a lot of people have with their split test is they are testing the word free product versus new product. Who really cares about free versus new? Those things are very minor. I see people say hey, we’ve tested the green button versus the red button and next week the red button will outperform the green button. The truth of the matter is, start testing the things that really make a difference. Offer the price points in the headlines. Those are the things that make a big difference from squeeze page, sales page, checkout pages, also with your upsells. A lot of people I find are doing no upsell test. Well, they bought now. You make your money on your upsells. You seldom make money on the front end product. Lord forbid, split testing, does this upsell do better? Did the $97 upsell do better than the $79 upsell? Which one of those converts better? Which one is all about conversions? I see people fall in love with a 2.3% conversion. I don’t care about that. What is the ROI? At the end of the day, all I want to know is ROI. Look at ROI. At the end of the day, your business doesn’t work on clicks, it doesn’t work on opt ins, your business works on what is your ROI generating. We have a 3.8% conversion rate because we’ve discovered our highest converting landing page we have gives us the least ROI. The landing page we have that gets some of the lowest opt in rates has an insane ROI. Because in this page, they know exactly what they are opting in for, they are in the right mindset to be shown a special onetime offer upgrade and it makes a big difference so I think a lot of people make the mistake of going it’s all about CTR. No! At the end of the day, it’s all about ROI. That’s the only thing you pay your bills with. And you look at it from the standpoint of the average user. The little money things I can’t seem to get any bigger gains. Split test different style of landing pages, different headlines and you’d be absolutely amazed. The same headline on two different style landing pages can make a big difference. When we’re spit testing out the gates we’re testing like five different landing pages, same headline on all of these pages. Which landing page style is going to work best for this particular traffic source and the problem people have is because ti works great in Google, it does not mean that it works on Facebook. If it works on Facebook, doesn’t mean it is going to work on mobile. If it works on mobile, doesn’t mean necessarily mean it is going to work for PPV. You have to understand all these traffic sources. You have to keep in mind users have a different mindset for every single traffic source you are using. When they are searching for something on YouTube, it is a how do I. when they are in Google, they are trying to solve their problem. When they’re in Yahoo, they’re reading content. Totally different scenarios. So, with that said, excel I can use it, visual website optimizer, use improvely. And the reality of this, get started. At the end of the day, I have people asking Charles a traffic display test. You’re right and if you are going to do a split test if you don’t start buying some traffic, split testing can make it better. That’s my little testing your tracking rant.

James: Awesome Charles! I think that is probably an appropriate point to wrap things up and because we have covered so much on this session I am sure our listeners are going to want to go and explore some of these topics a little further and I am sure you will find a place for people to do that. So let’s share where people can go and find a little bit more about Charles Kirkland. What’s that address on the web?

Charles: The easiest thing to do is go to mediabuyerassociation.com. Once you’re there you’ll see a free course, you can click on that and we provide a seven day traffic boot camp, and that landing page by the way is Google compliant, and Facebook compliant may I add, go ahead and optin to that and I promise you, we are not going to spam you or anything. You are not going to get emails from me offering you to buy anything. But we will send you information on how to make money using paid media and how to actually get better at what you do.

James: Good! Well I am sure that is going to be a great place for people also to absorb what you are up to so the link to Charles’s website will be included in the show notes along with a whole bunch of other resources mentioned in today’s show and the address for that is TrafficJamCast.com/60. That’s it Charles. All that remains for me is to thank you for coming in today. Thoroughly enjoyed today’s session. I can also tell you’re super passionate about what you do as it certainly comes through in the interview so thanks for coming on the show!

Charles: Thank you for having me I appreciate it.

So there you go, that was Charles Kirkland from the mediabuyersassociation.com. Thank you for listening in to this episode of Traffic Jam. This was episode#60 of course. We’ll be back again next week for another episode and to make sure that you don’t miss out on that show, ensure your subscription so subscribe via iTunes or Stitcher radio by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher. For a direct link to all of the bonuses that come with this episode including downloadable MP3, full transcript of today’s show plus a special paid traffic calculator that will help you make better decisions around your traffic sources and campaigns, go to TrafficJamCast.com/60 where you can also join in on the discussion for this episode.

We end the show this week with a Traffic Jam of course chosen by Charles Kirkland. He’s gone for a track by Jimmy Buffet and it is called Margaritaville. So enjoy the track and I will see you back here again as always real soon!

RESOURCES:

• MediaBuyersAssociation.com
• Get The Free Training from Charles Kirkland

MENTIONS:

• Improvely
• Nanacast
• LeadPages

THE TRAFFIC JAM:

Charles Kirkland, our guest on Traffic Jam 60, has chosen the track Margaritaville by Jimmy Buffett.

The track is the hit single from Buffett’s 1978 album You Had to Be There. Margaritaville also became the name of a fast-food restaurant chain owned by Buffett.

HERE’S WHAT TO DO NOW:

Go ahead and download the Paid Traffic Calculator that accompanies this episode.

This pre-populated spreadsheet in .xls and .numbers format helps you quickly and easily asses the profitability of your online media campaigns.

Simply enter your data in the fields and the calculator will tell you whether you can expect to lose or win with your planned campaign.

The calculator removes 99% of the guess work so that you can pick a winning media campaign with certainty.

You can get instant access to The Paid Traffic Calculator by clicking download below.